Shock and Ore

When the poet Lutz Seiler was a child, he lived in uranium country. His family was from Culmitzsch, a small town in the hilly mid-German state of Thuringia. During the Cold War, the East German state (GDR) ravaged the place in order to excavate uranium on behalf of their Soviet allies. These towns, as Seiler remembers them, were fatigued and contaminated. Playing in front of his house, he looked out not on rolling pastures or a city skyline but at grimy uranium dumps and slag heaps. In the mornings, his family listened to the radio together, clustered around an East German set called Stern (Star) 111. His grandfather, Gerhard, worked in the mines. Upon returning home from the night shift, he sometimes waved his arm above the box, causing the music broadcast to crackle and hiss. After he took his arm away, the signal would resume. Then he would laugh and gently lay his hand upon his grandson's head.

As far as I know, Seiler has not suffered adverse medical effects from being exposed to radioactivity. Yet, exposure to that radio seems to have been a defining childhood experience. The anecdote appears in the essay collection In Case of Loss (And Other Stories, 2023), recently translated from the German by Martyn Crucefix, and rather more codedly in both his poetry and fiction. (Like all great authors, Seiler returns to certain notes; also reappearing throughout Seiler’s books is the Paul Bowles line, “Everyone has only one song.”) It is an appropriate image for Seiler, a sound-obsessed author whose work investigates the lingering effects of a proletarian youth that straddled the late GDR’s moral-cum-ecological ruination and the sudden, disorienting experience of witnessing the total dissolution of the East German system. The central question of his literary life has been how a lyrical voice might make sense—or, indeed, song—from the unordered and unmanageable trace elements of the past, even across a vast historical caesura.

Born in 1963, Seiler moved to East Berlin in 1990 and initially lived in the city’s anarchic, countercultural squat scene as he sought to establish himself as a poet. He proved immensely successful at the task. He has won almost every major literary prize for his poetry, his two bestselling novels, and his several essays. Currently he runs the Peter Huchel Haus, a literary institute and event center just outside of Berlin whose namesake—a former resident of the house—was a major poet and editor in the GDR before the regime marginalized him in the 1960s. (Seiler writes excellently about him in the title essay of In Case of Loss.) Seiler’s first collection, berührt / geführt, was published in 1995, but widespread critical esteem (and a move to the prestigious publishing house Suhrkamp Verlag) came with the release of his second book pech & blende (2000), which appeared in Stefan Tobler’s fine English translation as Pitch & Glint (And Other Stories, 2023). (The original title subatomically splits the German word for uraninite, a radioactive ore, into a word that means either “tar” or “bad luck,” plus a word that means something like “dazzle,” “glare,” or “blind.”)

With more or less local specificity, the poems in this collection play out among the radioactive “tired villages” of Seiler’s youth in the Thuringian uranium belt. Traces of Culmitzsch abound, from voices and coughs, to bodies and subterranean deposits—as in the end of the title poem, which describes a working father:

    as we said to ourselves, he smells the ore, it's the bone, yes 
  
he'd climbed the spoilheaps 
known the mines, the caterpillar tracks, the water, the schnapps 
and so slid homewards, discoverer of the overburden, 
we hear it ticking, it's the clock, it's 
            his Geiger counter heart

Over the collection’s six sequences, Seiler registers this lost world through a parade of images, sounds, objects, and associations. His speakers are preoccupied with memory and voice. They dig around in the contaminated dirt, making themselves receptive to the connotations and rhythm-driven impulses that arise. What results is a lyric voice that constitutes itself as it goes—or, rather, a set of poems whose central theme is what it takes to build (or repair) a speaking self. These poems take measurements, examine objects, lurch into address, retreat into memory. They are a fusion—or is it fission?—of heterogenous parts. A geologist might call them conglomerate rocks, apparently whole but made of fragments, streaks, and traces. Registers, tones, and timing all slip into each other. Italicized phrases come and go, unexplained. Seiler eschews capitalization, formal meter, consistent line length, and regular syntax; his sentences start and stop, run on and merge.

This all seems impossible to translate or read out of context, but Seiler’s work is strange even in its original German, so it doesn’t matter if you don’t understand every reference. (Even the West Germans, who have long celebrated Seiler’s work, don’t know much about Gera, or Thuringia, or the specific people and objects that shimmy in and out of his poetry.) Indeed, his poems profit from a restless interplay between an urge toward clarity and the constant appearance of jaggedly obscure phrases or scenes. Reading his poetry can feel both tender and alienating—not because of hermetic refusal but because we are being spoken to of things we simply do not know about. One might borrow Stephanie Burt’s phrase “close calls with nonsense.” As a consequence, and perhaps counterintuitively, Seiler’s poems translate well. Both Tobler and Alexander Booth, who translated the collection in field latin (2010; translation 2016), succeed in conjuring English versions that follow Seiler’s abrupt musicality and strange noun-ishness, while retaining their own internal, sonic sense.

What guides us through the thicket of this poetry is voice. One poem’s speaker announces in its title that “poetry is my gun dog” zigzagging in chase of a hare, and then notes: “but little / leads through the poem, something perhaps // in utter tiredness, rich / omens, leftovers, and / a tinge as the leaves unfurl on trees . . .” Omens and leftovers, autumn and momentum: this is the intimately disorienting experience of reading Seiler’s poems. “If // we had not existed,” his speaker says of his disillusioned generation in the poem “Gera”:

                 we would've had to 
invent ourselves in the morning before leaving 
               & paper 
posted daily for stiffness 
in the peaks of our caps: inside 
a dreaming in the feet & outside if we didn't
  
            exist 
the ebb would rise in the rain the waters 
            would rise would blacken 
the bogs the wild boar in the evening 
the black of cinders would stand on the streets & 
black elderberries of the various 
blacks piled on umbels, on ulcers 
            sought & the findings state: that around 
  
time's neck we would have bound a weight

Seiler’s poems are often grounded in the small city of Gera and the rural-turned-industrial Thuringian landscapes that surround it. in field latin (2016) lingers more attentively on the post-bucolic landscapes of Seiler’s homeland. These poems repeatedly speak of breath, both that of the speaker and that outside him. They are heavy with buried things, dangerous afterlives, and a pained kind of restlessness. The “tired villages” of Seiler’s youth are marked by fatigue, but still resonant. The poem “culmitzsch” begins:

     in the evening the sheep go rusty 
  
 over the wasted land, birds 
 as if snowed therein & darkened . . . 

    only under the rubble 
the farmyards still are warm.

Another poem, “in the pipes,” strikes a note reminiscent of T.S. Eliot’s “Gerontion,” beginning with an atypically hurried enjambment: “when water rushes in the pipes / the house stands / still from listening. the / breath still comes, moves out & / bit by bit / fatigue drags you back / by your feet; you // must underpin the weight / of every word.” As in many poems from Pitch & Glint, this landscape is pregnant with an uneasy past: strange signs, as well as human and material remains—what the title poem calls an “archive of slippery tradition.” Melancholy and mystery are both carefully conveyed in Booth’s precisely-rhythmed translation. In the poem “what i possessed,” the “rippling script” of the speaker’s fields is said to contain “the glimmer / of a few glass bricks, some tufts of grass & the small / rests of bones: how // it all lies together in the end.” The poem ends with the speaker going “back, back & over” in retreat to his own quarter: “the going slow was softer & / standing still just once / i almost died.”

Amid the instability of all these elements, there is both energy and danger. Seiler’s poems are busted by history and fractured by time. The past doesn’t stay in the earth where it belongs, and when you dig up a piece, it holds anything but neat archaeological layers. Often in Pitch & Glint Seiler’s speakers find themselves dancing with the dead, or sitting dimly indoors with a recorder, or craning to hear the "murmured / language” of the roads. They put themselves at risk to listen. The poem "grassland” speaks of the "sleepy anniversaries / of the deaths of the villages” in a haunted, post-Romantic natural landscape:

               the ticking debris breathes 
in the treetops, the leaves in the gravel 
on the move in the shafts breathe, only 
  
            those down there, who lie 
just under, suck and hold 
their breath, little & stiff: and only then 
  
you look like grass, bent hard 
to earth, your gaze 
the vacant blink of lashes . . .

Just like a “Geiger counter heart,” the ticking debris lets radiation set the measure. And radioactivity lurks everywhere in the collection. One poem describes a “radio-child,” attuned to now-lost frequencies, whose father makes the set crackle and hiss like Gerhard Seiler did. Breath is in the trees or in the mineshafts; even those underground are full of breath and potential speech. Contamination is ambient, and immanent too. The speaker in Pitch & Glint regularly seems to have less agency than whatever is dead and buried. A man in an early poem, “scissors knives and matches,” walks knee-deep in a rushing stream filled with corpses that overtake him in the current. As they go by, he gets hit, sways and stumbles, then finds himself “dancing.” Many of Seiler’s speakers stand still or face back—or else pick up melodies and register sounds, make little soundings into the depths. In an essay titled “The Tired Territory,” Seiler writes of “homeland as a direction of motion,” including in poems that move from above to below

towards the raw material, the ore, towards what in age-old miners’ lore is called the bones of the earth. Invisible, lost in the depths, down there, lay a region that was unearthed before our very eyes to form that landscape of piled slag, or it was pumped away as slurry.

The underground is where it’s really happening.

***

Home as destination is also the central theme of Seiler’s novel Star 111 (New York Review Books, 2024), recently translated into English by Tess Lewis. It’s about the birth of a poet and self-determination: the lure of absolute freedom, but also the difficulty of navigating between a hand-me-down past and the vertiginous emptiness of a discontinuous future. The protagonist, Carl, has much in common with the young Seiler: both are trained bricklayers from Thuringia dreaming of becoming poets. As the novel opens, Carl’s parents have suddenly left for the West in pursuit of a long-held, secret dream. In their apartment, Carl has sworn himself to secrecy about their departure, which means he must live alone among the family’s possessions for days—a castaway in his own home.

Suffocated by an obsolete past he never chose, and driven by the sense that the GDR’s collapse was demanding some “new truthfulness,” Carl packs his father’s tools into the car and drives listlessly to Berlin, where he offers black-market taxi rides and waits for something to happen. Eventually, he falls in with a larger-than-life crowd of young squatters centered around a charismatic firebrand with a pet goat. Carl joins them as they crack open apartments to squat in, care for the nice old lady next door, begin an underground bar named the Assel, and develop increasingly manic plans for resisting the onslaught of capitalist speculators. Still, he does not quite fit in, and not just because of his working-class background. What he wants, above all, is space to think and write. Along the way, he works on his poems, crosses paths with his childhood sweetheart, and spends a lot of time walking around, listening to his footsteps on the capital city streets once traversed by poets. (The tremendous, yet sadly under-translated, East Berlin poet Elke Erb makes an indirect appearance here.) As in his earlier novel Kruso (2014; translation 2018), Seiler is interested in the limits of utopia, and the pitfalls of striving after absolute freedom. Only after reconciling himself to his historical “rearguard” mission and fundamental solitude—“the strangeness between everything and oneself”—can Carl navigate his way beyond the novel’s dramatic events, toward a poet’s voice (and life).

Indeed, for all its thoughtful rendering of post-Wall Berlin and the radical experiments that briefly flourished there, Star 111 is primarily a Künstlerroman: a novel about a boy who becomes a poet. The anarchist collective, the love interest, and even the city itself drift in and out of focus, sometimes sharply apparent in Carl’s close-third narration and then at times as mythic archetypes in the backdrop. What feel most urgent are Carl’s travels through soundscapes, and his lyrical investigation of sound itself. The young man is constantly muttering, murmuring, and monologuing; he bangs on his things then riffs on the noise. And the world, for its part, answers back. When Carl walks through the museum district, the echo of his feet on storied stone penetrates him deeply. We hear the murmuration of leaves, cars, neighbors. Some sounds, like East German phrases and words, or the family’s blue-collar Thuringian accent, are heavy with the past; other sounds appear to come from nowhere. The translator Tess Lewis excellently captures the associative sound-led wandering of Seiler’s lyrical prose. When his beloved is off in Crete with someone else, Carl has the following vision:

So I made my rounds as a roaring came from under the cobblestones, and suddenly there was the smell of fish and fish scales glittered on the stones. I followed their trace to the gray steel gate on Belforter Strasse, which promised an entrance to the center of the island. I pressed my ear to the gate and there it was: the roar. The underground ocean.

Sous les pavés, la plage, Berlin style.

As Carl begins to find his own poetic voice, he learns to negotiate with the sound-world around him. He lights up when a poem seems “greater and smarter than he was”; he boasts of abandoning conscious thinking to ruminate instead on “words that held short, magical melodies, around which everything in his world revolved.” Sounds have their own life here, and objects do too, leading Carl into the fertile realm of what he can’t quite understand. For easterners of Carl’s generation—he is in his 20s when the Wall falls—1989 was a sudden explosion of possibility married with the shock of discontinuity. It also involved inheriting a whole load of stuff: tools, books, apartments, jackets, cars, electronics, and radio sets, not all of which is entirely useless or obsolete. (In his paean to the early 1990s in Berlin, the cultural journalist Ulrich Gutmair writes about the repurposing and bricolage of inherited objects as a major feature of the golden-age club scene. In Star 111, Carl’s Assel buddies make a living by flogging off random pieces of concrete as authentic chunks of the Berlin Wall.) Carl inhabits a particularly object-crowded world, having been barricaded into his family’s apartment with his mother’s typewriter and his father’s tools, in addition to a pile of frozen meat, which goes off in the back of his car. A chunk of Thuringian uranium slag remains stuck in his hand. Alongside his accent and attitude to work, that chunk reminds him that his class identity distinguishes him from his countercultural friends.

Objects serve a poetic purpose as well. Carl’s old schoolmate reminds him of his injury: “Radioactive. Maybe it's good for you, Carl, right? A bit of dirt from home under your skin. Slag in your writing hand.” While holding an old gun, Carl’s lips start to move, conjuring what he calls a “material shape for language.” In Seiler’s work, East German objects are not nostalgic fetish products, but portals into the author’s local history of sound and sensation—an underground seam of associations and lost utopias, linguistic constructions, and obsolete accents. In an essay about his poetry from In Case of Loss, Seiler describes his impulse to “talk to things, converse with their substance.” He continues: "Objects are not important for their past reality, but as part of our perception, of hearing or seeing, of the very sensations they once helped to shape. They are the go-betweens and indirect paths taking you to the poem.” Objects, especially radioactive ones, bring a centrifugal energy to Seiler’s work. A few lines of dialogue in Star 111 might easily be a manifesto for his poetry. Visiting the Curie Museum in Paris, Carl describes radiotherapy to his lover as "a substance that transmits something, a message that penetrates everything—you, me, everything, without limit.” Inside, he observes that "[e]verything is radiating . . . even her logbooks, the paper, the ink, every word is radiating. They should only be read with protective clothing.” But what about the slag in Carl’s own hand?

Later, we learn that Carl hates “anecdotal poems” with their “predictable stories” and “the silky, hollow knowledge of good sons-in-law.” He prefers the elaboration of crude connections, the following of leads that take the poet into danger. “A good poem,” he muses, “had to be a cascade, a glittering stream in the magical light that it, itself, constantly creates.” This stream—a recurring image of creative possibility for Seiler, as it was for the Romantics—brings to mind the poem from Pitch & Glint whose speaker dodges and dances the floating corpses. That poem ends by clearing a noun-sequence riffing on a German nursery rhyme about dangerous objects, before landing on the word fontanelle, describing the not-yet-solid soft spot on the head of an infant:

                 . . . it was raining I was dancing in 
the giant heaving swell until 
the evening threw down a shimmer for scissors 
  
knives and matches 
under thinly glazed fontanelles

The stream of inspiration, it seems, is dangerous. And a poet—inchoate and permeable as one is—must be prepared to dip inside it, and to not quite master what they find. The music, the rhythm, the objects take the lead. In “The Tired Territory,” Seiler approvingly cites Francis Ponge’s Introduction to the Pebble: “The whole secret of an observer’s happiness lies in his refusal to consider the intrusion of things into his personality as an evil.” For Seiler—whose alter ego has a chunk of Thuringian rubble in his hand— the intrusion of things and sounds is not just un-evil, but utterly generative. His is a poetics not of self-projection, but of something like tactical surrender. Here, the poet is no conqueror—no world-historical hero, not even an activist. Rather, the poet is a multifrequency radio operator, a champion of the rearguard whose literary excellence comes afterwards.

This might feel politically underwhelming to some, but it is quietly provocative in its own way, especially in the context of German reunification—a process that demanded all easterners renounce their past lives entirely and embrace the zero hour of post-historical freedom. To Seiler, things are never quite so simple. Every new beginning bears the traces of the past, and every literary work is a co-production at its core: between self and world, between presence and past, between the traces of this and the radiation from that. At the end of Star 111, we learn that Carl has been reading the books left behind at the bar. “When there were bookmarks,” he says, “I opened the book to that page and read. Whatever customer had stopped reading at that passage, I continued the story from there, at least for a while. It had something to do with humility. And possibly reconciliation.”

***

Seiler is an underground man twice over. He belongs to the post-Wall, bohemian Berlin underground and to the contaminated, underground mineshafts of his childhood. Both undergrounds are lyrically fertile, and both need digging up. (“Who will excavate us?” asks an Assel crewmember once things start going pear-shaped.) East German literary history is populated with both kinds of underground men. There were the German Romantics, who, like Seiler, spent formative years in Thuringia’s resource-rich hills, and made hay with the imagery and economic reality of mining. The likes of Ludwig Tieck and Novalis, a trained geologist, found romance in the dangerous, subterranean depths, while Goethe picked up a day job overseeing mines in the Grand Duchy of Saxe-Weimar. Later, under the GDR, young literary rebels read and published zines from church basements while self-identifying as the nation’s artistic underground. The proletarian poet Wolfgang Hilbig, who worked (and wrote) in East German boiler rooms for many years, lyricized the stoker as an overlooked figure who nevertheless commands an elemental energy—including in the matter of language: “Must he add new lines of text to the endless flood of old ones,” his stoker wonders in 'I’(translated by Isabel Fargo Cole), “must he increase all the words and syllables already extracted from the coal, must he stir up their embers afresh and expose them to the flames of time to transform them still more swiftly into grey ash.”

Trace elements of both appear in Seiler’s own subterranean, homesick blues. His is a post-Romantic proletarian digging down. When he digs, he is not seeking emptiness—the sheer lawlessness of anarchy and the unencumbered individualism of Western-style freedom-mania—but something he describes as absence, an echoey space beyond the ego and the id. Call these soundings into the unknown unknown. Seiler, after all, is someone whose hometown was flattened—and then whose nation was erased. (His old East Berlin bohemia has also gone kaput, but that’s another story.) As the German writer Judith Schalansky has noted, a felt absence is its own kind of presence; it is also something more unstable—perhaps even more potent—than memory. In Star 111, Carl’s parents have gone away; they are weg, in the German. So Carl physically traces their path away from him, into pure absence: “The Way of My Parents,” he calls it, but then the German word for “way” is also weg. It is only in his parents’ present absence that the young man learns to stand on his own two feet. And it is only by accepting his castaway condition—the novel, like Kruso, abounds with references to Crusoe and rafts lost at sea—that he can come to terms with his condition in space and time.

Absence, for Seiler, allows the poet to reach into regions unknown. In an essay about a childhood memory of shouting for his absent friends, he writes: “My calling, this plaintive and contented singsong about absence, had turned into an invocation whose reverberations in the image of the place—of my infant world—and its echoing within myself had combined to create a moment of extraordinary beauty.” Elsewhere he describes absence as “a looked-for state, the opportunity, as it were, to step back as an observer, to try to perceive things without design, rather than judging them in the light of preconceptions.” It is a literary program of self-transcendence and self-escape—except that the self is itself constituted by all this. Everyone has only one song, remember, and that song is a sound played on the instrument of a lifetime.

Seiler’s underground soundings represent a case for the generative power of absence. They also make a claim about what it means to exist (and write) in time. Even when his poems’ speakers are standing on solid ground, he assures us that underneath the surface is all manner of flotsam and jetsam, discarded tools and workers’ bones, and further down an unseen parallel universe of cavernous, dark-lit spaces, as dangerous and contaminated as they are full of potential energy. This is an energy that makes, destroys, repairs, obscures. Disintegration, Carl thinks at one point in Star 111, used to be seen as the promising stuff of life rather than something merely deathly. Seiler is one of many poets who has wrestled with the shocking discontinuity that came with 1989—the radical loss of orientation, the devalued biographies, and the postindustrial social changes that reshaped the lives of basically all eastern Germans. His accent is local; his poems and essays are made with both pre- and post- materials. His body has kept the score—that is, a kind of music written down. Like Carl, he accepts his fundamental condition of abandonment. He sings his song in case of loss. What can’t be had, or known, or mastered, is part of the music every day. A Star 111 radio, a blue-collar family, a long-lost state. The grandfather waves his arms; the radio echoes, chokes, hums. And sat there at the table is the young poet Lutz, and he’s still there, he’s still listening, and then the signal comes back in.