The question of whether the Bundestag, as it is called in the generic feminine, would look good on a parliamentary poet, occupies the literary and political world.

In a newspaper article at the beginning of the year, Mithu Sanyal, Dmitrij Kapitelman and Simone Buchholz called for such an office.

The model is the Canadian institution of the "Parliamentary Poet Laureate".

The poetess is responsible for presenting poetry for Parliamentary occasions, hosting poetry readings and stocking the Parliamentary Library in Ottawa.

The proposal has been the subject of controversy ever since, not least among writers.

PeterLicht and Thomas Gsella have submitted ironic applications with which they satirically expose the external control of a parliamentary poet they fear.

They were reacting to Bundestag Vice President Katrin Göring-Eckardt, who welcomed the proposal differently than her colleague Wolfgang Kubicki.

Carsten Brosda, the Hamburg Senator for Culture, also asked optimistically: "Why don't we just try it out?"

In fact, it has been tried before, exactly one hundred and fifty years ago.

A year after the founding of the German Reich in January 1871, playwright Albert Lindner became the Reichstag's first librarian.

The then forty-year-old had had a great stage success a few years earlier with the historical tragedy "Brutus und Collatinus".

At the instigation of the theater man Eduard Devrient, who found the "tendencies" of the "big" time expressed in the play, Lindner was awarded the Prussian Schiller Prize in 1866.

Inspired by this success, Lindner resigned from his teaching position and spontaneously moved to Berlin with his family.

His enthusiasm soon gave way to disillusionment.

With the historical drama "Die Bluthochzeit" he achieved another theatrical success.

Ultimately, however, Lindner was unable to establish himself as a freelance writer.

It was therefore fortunate that the President of the Reichstag, Eduard von Simson, put him in charge of the newly founded parliamentary library.

Brutus, Collatinus, Bismarck

As a contemporary noted, the National Liberal Simson's concern in appointing Lindner was to provide a deserving patriotic writer with an attractive post and to fulfill "the national duty to the poet".

In addition to administrative tasks in the library, the post also required Lindner to accompany political events in the Reichstag as a chronicler and publicist.

At first, Albert Lindner was enthusiastic about his new post, which after a long period of suffering he finally believed would secure him financially.

But shortly after his appointment on February 20, 1872, he complained that he was becoming a "little pen in the Prussian office mechanism".

Lindner felt that the librarian's work was unreasonable and secretly hired two clerks

which should create the desired index of the books present in the library.

He also failed to meet the obligation to deal with the Reichstag in a literary manner, since – as he wrote – he preferred to work on “something dramatic”, on a new historical tragedy.

He quickly lost his job for neglecting his duties.

From then on, Lindner went steadily downhill until he finally developed symptoms of mental illness and began to regard himself as the greatest poet in the world.

In this state of mind, he received a complete surprise when he received an invitation from the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, who headed a theater of European renown and wanted to speak to Lindner at the Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin.

It is not known what this conversation was about.

But Lindner now imagined a happy future in Meiningen and finally lost his mind over this.

When his confidants pretended that the emperor was inviting him to an audience, he was not surprised.

Instead, he was taken to the Charité and soon admitted to what was then known as the Dalldorf Insane Asylum.

There the mentally deranged Lindner died on February 4, 1888 of a pulmonary embolism.

The fact that writers are active in parliament has been a tradition since the Paulskirche in Frankfurt.

Towards the end of the German Empire, the Expressionist poet Alfred Wolfenstein even suggested a Parliament of Intellectuals that would advise the Reichstag and whose members he envisaged included Gerhart Hauptmann, Heinrich Mann and Frank Wedekind.

According to Sanyal, Kapitelman and Buchholz, a parliamentary poet can translate the world of politics into a generally accessible language and strengthen democratic cohesion.

In the words of Buchholz, she should work with the greatest artistic freedom so that we “listen to each other more again”.

The office of Reichstag librarian and unofficial parliamentary poet did not bring Albert Lindner any luck.