Volker Braun e Paul Celan. Figure del naufragio nella letteratura tedesca

Starting from the work of two of the most significant German-speaking poets of the last two centuries - Paul Celan, whose family was exterminated in camps and Volker Braun, a son and orphan of socialist expectations, hopes and dreams - the essay explores the ideological idealised shipwrecks of Western civilisation at the turning point caused by the final collapse of utopias in East Germany and the assumed dissolution of ideals in the new millennium. Focusing on text-linguistic investigation the contribution highlights with the instruments of psychoanalytic literary criticism the anabases of contemporary poetry, torn with the impossibility of representing extermination in Celan’s oeuvre and the struggle for engagement in Volker Braun, whose latest lyrical production stands for the utopia of Rojava, for a world supportive of cooperation and freedom against individualism and exploitation. If the sinking of Braun’s kósmos implies the presence of a spectator who rebels against the cancellation of his own world and fights with the pen and the poetic word in favour of the oppressed, the world of Paul Celan has been erased from the fury of history without leaving any trace of a possible self-representation thus compelling the reader to cope with a major radical critique of anthropocentrism.