literature
Poet Elke Erb dies at the age of 85
Elke Erb is dead. The writer died in Berlin at the age of 85. photo
© Frank Rumpenhorst/dpa
Her work includes poetry and prose; during the GDR era she campaigned for civil rights activists. In 2020 she received the most prestigious German literary prize. Now the poet Elke Erb has died.
Her linguistic wit and legendary stubbornness earned her numerous prizes. With her work she influenced generations of poets in East and West. Now the poet and Büchner Prize winner Elke Erb (“Kastanienallee”) died on Monday evening in Berlin at the age of 85, as a spokeswoman for Suhrkamp Verlag said on Tuesday, citing Erb’s environment.
The writer, who was born in the Eifel, is considered one of the most important contemporary poets in the German language. Most recently she lived in Berlin. She would have been 86 years old on February 18th. In 2018, “Die Zeit” once described her as the “queen of poetic stubbornness.”
In 2020, Erb received the most important literary award in Germany, the Georg Büchner Prize. “For the undaunted enlightener, poetry is a political and highly vital form of knowledge,” the German Academy for Language and Poetry said about Erb at the time. Like no other, she succeeds in “realizing the freedom and agility of thoughts in language by challenging them, loosening them up, making them more precise and even correcting them.”
Federal President condoles
Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier praised her as a “very special voice in recent German literature.” Steinmeier said on Tuesday that she always enjoyed her own amazement and the thinking it triggered. At first it was a poetic and then also a political attitude to be resistant. “Precisely because Elke Erb pursued her literary path in a cautious, tentative and quiet way, cautiously and skeptically, that is precisely why she has opened up the secrets of the world and the hidden beauties of language to many readers with her words.”
Moved to the GDR in 1949
Erb was born in 1938 in small Scherbach in the Eifel. As early as 1949, her father, the Marxist literary historian Ewald Erb, had the family come to Halle in the GDR. She studied German, Slavic studies and pedagogy and worked as an editor at Mitteldeutscher Verlag in the 1960s.
Her work includes poetry, short prose and translations. Her first books were “Expert Reports, Poetry and Prose” (1975) and “The Thread of Patience” (1978), and selected texts also appeared in the West. “I react like a wind harp and register its sounds faithfully like a research report,” Erb once described her work.
Erb in the focus of the Stasi
She was part of the GDR’s literary subculture. Her texts often appeared in unofficial literary magazines. Her support of civil rights activists also made the author the focus of GDR state security in the 1980s. Over the course of her career, Erb received, among others, the Peter Huchel Prize (1988), the Rahel Varnhagen von Ense Medal (1994), the Literature House Prize (2011) and the Mörike Prize of the City of Fellbach (2018). . In 2019 she was also honored with the Federal Cross of Merit.