Now that everyone is traveling, possibly even to Thuringia, is a good opportunity to commemorate Goethe again. There, on a little mountain called Kickelhahn, he scrawled a few verses in the wood of a refuge, then took his smartphone out of his doublet, shot a small video of the forest, spoke the poem “Wanderers Nachtlied” to it and sent everything as WhatsApp his group.
It must have been something like that, and that’s pretty much how you get an idea of Wolfram Hirche’s process. Of the Munich author takes on a more and less obvious topic from literature in his glosses, alienates it, turns it further or into completely different areas – as befits good glosses.
The columns he wrote for the “Literaturseiten München” from 2010 to 2021 can now be read in a book entitled “Spotlichter”. They show Hirche as a literary and historically well-informed and beautifully irreverent author who sometimes triggers nostalgic feelings and sometimes a smile. Hirche incorporates the casual and the casual (e.g. the stroller Peter Handke), wanders from the current “Münchgrant” to the futuristic “Book drone”, suggests novel titles such as “Grass’ trouser button” and recommends the herb-loving poet Jan Wagner as a “compromise oracle”.
Nature, especially in the growth form of the forest, also appreciates deer. We need his stillness, he formulates with Goethe, “to avoid the incorrigible confusion of people”. If we don’t bump into Handke there, it could be added.
Wolfram Hirche: spot lights. Verlag P. Machinery, 2022, 200 pages, 16.90 euros