Years ago, a woman from Berlin announced after a reading by the writer Margret Hölle: “You know, I didn’t understand a word, but I felt a lot.” The audience did not always fully understand what Margret Hölle was saying. The poet, who was born in Neumarkt in 1927, wrote many of her poems in the old language of the Upper Palatinate. Nevertheless, their texts had a strong poetic power. Furthermore, Margret Hölle knew how to inimitably combine human warmth, modesty and intellectuality and thus give her fellow human beings great moments of happiness.
As an author, she never succumbed to the temptations of hometownism. Anyone who listened to her lecture might have felt as if archaic, primal sounds were breaking over them. But if you listened more closely, you would hear a fascinating timbre, which also applies to her High German texts:
Treetops creaking forestland
Dark /
Rough hill country, humpbacked /
Windswept Stonefield Land /
Burgenland whispers of legends …
Margret Hölle has earned a place of honor in the Olympus of German dialect literature. The fact that success came only hesitantly was also due to the fact that she drew her experiences from a rural, poor country with archaic language images and harsh idioms.
As a teenager, she fled her homeland and this language, only to write decades later: “Childhood stayed on my heels.” The old world of language and experiences caught up with her long after she was out and about in the wide world:
My child’s brouch is still beautiful, it’s like a dog, she doesn’t have anything to do with it…
Married to the children’s book illustrator Erich Hölle (1925-1993), she published her first poems in the mid-1950s. Their “hard and edgy language was the expression of a battered, disadvantaged region and breed of people. I had to bring to light what had long been closed off.”
From then on, she masterfully brought a lost language back into the present with current content. In the volume “Bloiht a Dornbusch” (Lichtung Verlag, 1997) she wrote unforgettable lines:
My saying /
is my house /
do Tir aaf /
Wern d Finga woam /
flatters a Gschmooch /
vu Salwei Öpfö and Nüss /
a thorn bush blooms by the stove…
“In this volume, Upper Palatinate blossomed into wonderful, powerful poetry,” says her publisher at the time, Hubert Ettl from Lichtung Verlag, in which Hölle’s most recent High German poems (“Distelsamen”, 1999) and again some in the Upper Palatinate idiom (“Zeit aaffanga” , 2005).
Margret Hölle received, among other things, the Friedrich Bauer Prize for Literature from the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, the Culture Prize of the City of Neumarkt and the Bavarian Order of Merit. She died in Munich on Monday. She was 96 years old. This great Bavarian poet wrote about life:
“Oh Leem /
Fear and Juwlschroa /
fir jen unta da Sunn /
Min Vastand niad zan deidn.”