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Elke Erb (in 2020): “I react like a wind harp and register its sounds faithfully like a research report.”

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Berlin Academy of Arts / gezett / IMAGO

The Büchner Prize winner Elke Erb is dead. The poet died on Monday evening in Berlin, as a spokeswoman for the Suhrkamp publishing house 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 the federal capital.

She would have been 86 years old on February 18th.

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.

She succeeds like no other in “realizing the freedom and agility of thoughts in language by challenging them, loosening them up, making them more precise, and even correcting them.”

Steinmeier condoles

Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier praised her as a "very special voice in recent German literature." She always retained the joy of her own amazement and the thinking it triggered, Steinmeier said on Tuesday, according to a statement.

At first it was a poetic and then also a political attitude to be resistant.

»Precisely because Elke Erb chose to tread her literary path cautiously and quietly, 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.«

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.

"I react like a wind harp..."

Elke Erb's 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.

She was part of the GDR's literary subculture.

Her texts often appeared in unofficial literary magazines.

Her support of civil rights activists also brought the author into 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.

sol/dpa