Uwe Kolbe-tri-fold - Oberlin College

Works (selection):
• Die Lüge. S. Fischer Verlag, to appear in
February 2014.
• Lietzenlieder. Gedichte. S. Fischer Verlag, 2012.
• Vinetas Archive. Annäherungen an Gründe.
Wallstein Verlag, 2011
• Storiella – Das Märchen von der Unruhe.
Wolbern Verlagsgesellschaft, 2008.
• Heimliche Feste. Gedichte. Suhrkamp, 2008.
• Diese Frau. Liebesgedichte. Mit
Farbholzschnitten von Hans Scheib. Insel, 2007.
• Rübezahl in der Garage. Franz Fühmann in
Märkisch-Buchholz und Fürstenwalde 1958–
1984. Kleist-Museum, Frankfurt (Oder) 2006.
• Ortvoll. Gedichte. UN Art IG Verlag, 2005.
• Thrakische Spiele. Nymphenburger, 2005.
• Der Tote von Belintasch. Wunderhorn, 2002.
• Die Farben des Wassers: Gedichte. Suhrkamp,
2001.
• Renegatentermine. 30 Versuche die eigene
Erfahrung zu behaupten. Suhrkamp, 1998.
• Vineta. Suhrkamp, 1998.
• Die Situation. Wallstein Verlag, 1994.
• Nicht wirklich platonisch. Suhrkamp, 1994.
• Vaterlandkanal. Ein Fahrtenbuch. Suhrkamp,
1990.
• Bornholm II. Suhrkamp, 1987.
• Abschiede und andere Liebesgedichte. Suhrkamp,
1983.
• Hineingeboren: Gedichte 1975-1979.
Suhrkamp, 1982.
Former Writers-in-Residence:
1968 Kuno Raeber
1969 Fritz Hochwälder
1970 Tankred Dorst
1971 Christoph Meckel
1972 Peter Bichsel
1973 Helga Novak
1974 Christa Wolf
1975 Ulrich Plenzdorf
1976 Barbara Frischmuth
1977 Max von der Grün
1978 Jurek Becker
1979 Johannes Schenk
1980 ChristophGeiser
1981 Walter Helmut Fritz
1982 Bernd Jentzsch
1983 Peter Rosei
1984 Gert Hofmann
1985 Rainer Malkowski
1986 Karl-Heinz Jakobs
1987 Gernot Wolfgruber
1988 Helga Schütz
1989 Josef Haslinger
1990 Hanna Johansen
1991 Jürg Amann
1992 Richard Wagner
1994 Ralf Rothmann
1995 Thomas Rosenlöcher
1996 Barbara Neuwirth
1997 Anna Mitgutsch
1998 Werner Söllner
1999 Gert Loschütz
2000 Zafer Senocak
2001 Irina Liebmann
2002 Doron Rabinovici
2003 Peter Stephan Jungk
2004 Katja Lange-Müller
2005 Mariella Mehr
2006 Gila Lustiger
2007 Uwe Kolbe
2008 Jan Wagner
2009 Barbara Köhler
2010 Esther Dischereit
2011 Susanne Schädlich
2012 Peter Wawerzinek
Invitation to a Reading
by
Uwe Kolbe
45 th Max Kade German
Writer-in-Residence
at Oberlin College
Sailor’s Language Lesson
and Indolence
Poems and excerpts from his
new book, in German with
English translations
© Photo: Gaby Gerster
Saturday, December 7, 2013
4:30 p.m.
Max Kade German House

Uwe Kolbe – poet, essayist,
novelist – was born in the former East
Berlin in 1957, four years before
construction on the famous Berlin Wall
commenced in 1961, which would divide
the city in half for the next 28 years. His
early childhood was spent with his parents
on river barges navigating the inland
waterways on which they worked. Strong
visions of these waters swirling in and
around Berlin resurface time and again in
his poetry, tying it not only to Berlin’s
history as a settlement in the Märkisch
marshes, but also to Kolbe’s own history as
a child of this city.
German riverscapes not only
nourished Kolbe’s roots, but also perhaps
symbolize an escape route – fluidity was
not readily available in the strictly
controlled East German regime, but in
poetry, anything is possible. Kolbe began
writing at age 14 and published his poems
at 19, in the venerable literary journal Sinn
und Form in 1976; he managed to publish
his first books of poetry, Hineingeboren
and Abschiede, before being banned from
further publication in the GDR for three
years. Following this interdiction, Kolbe
stirred up his own groundwater currents by
collaborating with Bernd Wagner and
Lothar Trolle on the underground literary
newspaper Mikado (1983-1987). In 1986
Kolbe obtained a visa permitting him to
travel outside the GDR, and after several
years of touring the Netherlands, Austria,
Switzerland, and Germany to give lectures,
Kolbe spent the fall of 1989 as the Writerin-Residence
at the University of Texas at
Austin - which put him in the strange
position of witnessing the historic fall of
the Berlin Wall from the other side of the
world instead of from his own front door.
Kolbe has continued to travel
widely and publish prolifically since then.
He has received fellowships to work in a
wide variety of places, including Italy
(Konrad-Adenauer Stiftung, Villa la
Collina), and Bulgaria (Stiftung
Künstlerhaus Edenkoben, Rheinland-
Pfalz). He has also participated in readings
and festivals in Jerusalem, Beirut, Tel Aviv,
Sarajevo, Nicaragua, Colombia, and New
York City, and he has lectured and held
workshops in London, Buenos Aires,
Sydney, and Seoul. In between his
numerous engagements, Kolbe found time
to grow his already substantial collection
of poetic publications, most recently
releasing Lietzenlieder (2012), Heimliche
Feste: Gedichte (2008), and Diese Frau:
Liebesgedichte (2007). He has explored
genres as much as places: in addition to
poems, Kolbe has also published essays,
translations, stories, and a detective novel.
Since his first Writer-in-Residence
position in Texas, Kolbe has also held
appointments at a number of German,
British, and American universities –
including Oberlin College in the fall of
2007. In fact, Kolbe is Oberlin’s only
Writer-in-Residence to be invited back for
a second term. (Readers of Kolbe’s latest
book, Lietzenlieder, may recognize
Oberlin’s landscape in some of the
American-inspired poems.) He is glad to
be back to work in a community with
which he is already so well acquainted, and
is excited to use the “amazing resources”
of this “wonderful island,” as he calls
Oberlin, to push forward with his latest
projects.
Kolbe’s personal philosophy
dictates that once an experience has been
translated into an artistic work, it is no
longer purely a receptacle for the artist’s
own sentiment, but rather a conduit for
conversation, an avenue by which to
access and interact with the audience’s
experiences. This emphasis on artistic and
experiential interaction underlies Kolbe’s
collaborative work, including the woodcuts
by Hans Scheib that illustrate Diese Frau
and the sonnet cycle in Lietzenlieder,
which was written to accompany an artist’s
exhibition in Berlin. In addition, all of
Kolbe’s work is strongly informed by his
impressive grasp of literary history, which
puts his words in conversation not only
with his contemporaries and his audience,
but also with the great artists before him
who shaped literature as we know it.
Kolbe’s repertoire for this reading was,
unsurprisingly, chosen with the spirit of
collaborative engagement; each student in
his German seminar selected a poem to be
read, and some furnished their own
translations.
We hope that all who attend the
reading will join the conversation.
by Ida Hoequist and Sophie Richardson