On Monday we recorded poetry talks together for Deutschlandfunk, in which Michael Braun had been involved from the start.

One of the volumes we talked about was the “Poems from Guantánamo” edited by Sebastian Köthe.

During the conversation, you could not only hear it in Braun's words, but also in his voice: the poems of the prisoners had taken him away.

One cannot speak about these testimonies solely on the basis of aesthetic categories, he said, who had been closely associated with poetry for four decades.

Michael Braun, born in Hauenstein in the Palatinate in 1958, was a critical fixed star in the wild and colorful cosmos of contemporary German-language literature.

After studying German and philosophy, he published his reviews in major daily newspapers and literary magazines as well as on radio.

For decades he published the poetry calendar for Deutschlandfunk, which offered a poetic moment of concentration on the power of words every day.

No poet in the German-speaking world has been able to ignore Braun over the past few decades, and many of them have received attention through his mediation, including Nico Bleutge, Paul-Henri Campbell, Mara Genschel, Kerstin Preiwuß and Katharina Schultens.

Numerous interviews, essays and laudations emerged from his exchanges with authors, including Ulrike Draesner, Kurt Drawert, Jürgen Nendza and Henning Ziebritzki.

What fed Michael Braun's critical interest in knowledge can also be put more precisely by some of the titles of his numerous editorships: the anthologies "Aus Lack of Proof" and "Lied aus Reiner Nullen", two volumes of German-language poetry of the 21st century edited together with Hans Thill , just like the title “What I know is none of my business.

The works of Günter Eich and Ilse Aichinger were at the forefront of Braun's lyrical collection.

In his critical work, the shyness of “better words” (Aichinger) was also combined with the anarchy of a Hugo Ball. Through his erudition, his ability to concentrate, his devotion to the word coupled with his understanding of the free-floating existence of poets, he was one institution of literary life.

On the night of December 23, Michael Braun died in Heidelberg at the age of 64.

With him, the literary world has lost an enthusiastic mediator of 21st-century poetry.