The poet of the century, after whom no street is named, the enabler of literary Berlin with the irresistible laugh: on the 100th birthday of Walter Höllerer.
In analogy to the surrealist joke of the Strasbourg artist Jean Arp: “Can you please tell me how not to get to the Strasbourg Cathedral from here?” one could ask today: “Do you know a German writer who does not live in Berlin?” That was different once. When I went to school in West Berlin in the 1960s, apart from the echo of Gottfried Benn, who died in 1956, there was no writer and certainly no writer that one knew; there were no publishers for German literature, no public, no forums – all this took place under the familiar conditions in East Berlin. Berlin had a great literary history but no present.