On the death of Franz Mon: The big concrete one

Franz Mon was an exclusive poet of rank.

Hardly noticed by the general public, he nonetheless created a canonical work that deserves mention alongside that of Ernst Jandl, Eugen Gomringer and Friederike Mayröcker.

This selected language mover, who also worked as a visual artist and understood his work as a symbiosis of typography, graphics and poetry, made a significant contribution to concrete and visual poetry in particular.

Sandra Kegel

Responsible editor for the feuilleton.

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Born in Frankfurt am Main in 1926 under the real name Loffelholz, Mon practically never left his hometown.

Only once was he swept away when, at the age of sixteen, he left the school desk at the Lessing Gymnasium and was drawn into World War II as an anti-aircraft helper, an experience that he described until old age as a catastrophic onset.

A few years ago, a visit to the poet's workshop in the attic of his house provided fascinating insights into the laboratory of an experimentalist.

Between prints on the walls, hundreds of collaged word art images and several Leitz folders with manuscripts of poems, filed according to their date of origin from the early fifties to the present, sat an eighty-nine-year-old

Hear and see pass

This language juggling can be found in his entire oeuvre, starting with early radio collages such as “Das Gras wieswachsen” (“The Grass Was Growing”) or “Hearing and Seeing Passing” to his late word pictures, those visually boldly clustered letters behind which words can only be recognized on closer inspection .

As befits a concrete person, Franz Mon typed until the very end on his white “Monica”.

For him and his colleagues in the post-war period, when paper was expensive and they couldn't afford a printer, the typewriter was more than just a tool, it was their "poetic instrument" that made it possible to make text look like it was printed.

When Franz Mon published his first poem in the early 1950s, "The Lie is the Passport of Crossing the Border", he chose his pseudonym, named after a character from his story "The Cemetery East of the Nile" from 1948. The new name was of course the program , short and catchy, and moreover not only the French palindrome for “my name” –

– was in there, but also the Greek “monos”: alone.

He always wanted to keep the “I” out of his texts, his own biography or autofiction were neither his genre nor the business of concrete poetry, the central element of which is to use language not as a means but as material.

And that literary texts not only consist of words and their meaning, but also have an acoustic experiential space, this was discussed by Franz Mon in 1959 in his first important book, "artikulationen", about the connection between writing, image and voice.

This triad determined Mon's work, and so it is no wonder that the volume of texts and essays by Franz Mons published by S. Fischer by the poet Michael Lentz (see the adjacent anthology) from 1956 to the present includes this three-part division into scriptural, visual and acoustic phases are documented.

In the post-war period, Mon made the decision that art would become his purpose in life.

In the British prison camp, at the age of nineteen, he first came into contact with modernism, which had been banned in Nazi Germany.

After the depressing experience of coercion and coercion, a whole new, unexpected poetic freedom opened up to him, and starting from the experience of fascism, he tried from then on to tie in with the lost traditions of the literary avant-garde and to free language from its meaningful brackets, so to speak.

The analyst among language players

Mon studied literature, history and philosophy, received his doctorate with a thesis on the poet of the Enlightenment Barthold Heinrich Brockes and dealt, among other things, with the works and theories of the painter Karl Otto Götz.

But it was Kandinsky's essay "On the Spiritual in Art" about the art of isolating words that became Mon's initial spark.

In 1960, together with Walter Höllerer and Manfred de la Motte, he published the poetry anthology "movens", which influenced a whole generation of young artists and authors.

In 1968, his novel “herzzero”, printed in duplicate, asked the reader to change the text at will.

Mon's analyzes of the Baroque, Expressionism and Surrealism, as well as his observations of individual artists from Mallarmé to Schwitters, reveal the cosmos of this analyst among language players.

However, Franz Mon could never get used to the concept of exploiting art.

Art was too important to him, which is why he worked as a publisher's editor until he retired and taught at art schools in Offenbach, Kassel and Karlsruhe.

He was a theory-driven juggler of syllables and sentences who never denied his love of the game.

Franz Mon died yesterday in the early hours of the morning.

He was ninety-five years old.