Guest of the ilb 2006 Ulla Hahn is one of the most important
contemporary poets writing in German. Apart from over ten collections
of poems she has also published three novels since the nineties and has
recently brought out a collection of essays. In her first collection of
poems, »Herz über Kopf« (1981; t: Heart over head), she takes up
traditional forms which she subjects to ironic alienation and then
takes further. In the later collections, such as »So offen die Welt«
(2004; t: So open the world), modern forms of speech are included and
mirrored playfully. Poems about love and nature, as well as poetic
investigations of the self and political issues, the Nazi period in
particular, are the focus of her collections. The role of the Wehrmacht
in Russia is also a theme in her most recent novel, »Unscharfe Bilder«
(2003; t: Blurry Pictures). The experience of the war is set against
the completely different experiences of the next generation in haunting
daughter-father dialogues.
Through her second novel, »Das verborgene Wort«
(2001; t: The hidden word), Hahn also established herself as an epic
writer. This wide-ranging, autobiographically inspired novel tells the
story of young Hildegard Palm, who grows up in the fifties in a family
of labourers in a Rhineland village. In order to free herself from her
poor and intellectually simple surroundings, the protagonist embarks on
a »flight into the mind« and discovers her love of words and
literature. Yet, her parents lack any understanding of their daughter's
intellectual emancipation, as she suddenly starts speaking cultured
German and develops a passion for Friedrich Schiller. She is
reprimanded for reading books and is kept away from school. Hahn offers
a precise and expressive description of the postwar Catholic-Rhine
milieu. A commitment to dialect lends the novel a naturalistic flow.
The author has made use of other genres for the
first time in her latest work: »Liebesarten« (2006; t: Forms of love)
that brings together thirteen tales of love in various guises, from
selfless devotion and vain self-love to passion, happiness and
desperation. Ulla Hahn has been awarded many prizes, including the
Leonce and Lena Prize, the Hölderlin Prize, the German Book Prize and
the Elisabeth Langgässer Prize for Literature. She lives in Hamburg
with her husband, the former mayor of Hamburg, Klaus von Dohnanyi.
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