This paper will re-read Durs Grünbein’s 2005 Porzellan: Poem vom Untergang meiner Stadt. This is a book length cycle consisting of forty-nine ten-line rhymed poems written over a decade: a lament for the poet’s hometown of Dresden destroyed in the Allied firebombing of February 1945 (seventy-five years ago this year). The poem is at once a history and declaration of love: reaching back to the founding of Dresden as the famed ‘Venice on the Elbe’, the making of the Meissen porcelain which brought the city is wealth, through the war years, the days of the bombing...
In her book Poetik der Wunde: Zur Entdeckung des Traumas in der Literatur der Romantik (Poetics of the Wound: The Discovery of Trauma in Romantic Literature, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2019), Nicole Sütterlin argues that German Romantic poetics is deeply informed by the concept of psychological trauma avant la lettre.