Four German Poets: Gunter Eich, Hilde Domin, Erich Fried and Gunter Kunert by Agnes Stein (Editor), Agnes Stein (Translator)

Choice

These four very good poets are worth reading by Americans, particularly since the English versions are exceptionally well done.

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Gunter Eich (1907-1972) is a pastoral poet but nature is no longer trustworthy reassuring:

Unrest in field furrows and elderbush.
the incomprehensible in the heart
Perfection does not thrive,
here no one binds the unruly into noble proportions,
and the dark is as before creation
undifferentiated from light. (Oder My River)

Hilde Domin (born 1912) began writing in 1951 as an exile in Santo Domingo.  Exile and return are recurrent themes of her work:

The dead and I
We swim
through the new doors
of our old houses   (Cologne)

Erich Fried (born 1921in Vienna) lived in London from 1938.  He was a novelist, translator and worked for the B.B.C's German Service.  He was a political radical uncommitted to any party or program but unable not to act, unable to forget.

The Freedom to Open the Mouth

The freedom to open the mouth
exists even there
where others cry:
These mouths are to be shut!

So much so
one need only posit a list
of everything that may come
out of the mouths supposedly shut

First screams
second at the beginning
and finally at the end
perhaps even protests

Third teeth
and fourth blood and fifth
vomits
and sixth in many cases

liquids
that were first injected
through tubes or
through immersions of the head

One must not have a one-sided view
because the freedom to open the mouth
is an equal right for all
and certainly for the authorities as well

to open the hard-bitten mouth
of the prisoner
What to put in it?
Much water or much oil

or the heel of boots
or dirt and bloody rags
or urine
or sawdust or earth

so that there comes out of it
if everything works well
the freely willed
confession

Sometimes the mouth gets hurt
but there's always the freedom to open it
which will continue to govern - in one way or another-
throughout our land

Gunter Kunert (born 1929) an East Berlin resident he was dismissed from the Communist Party in 1976 for protesting the expulsion of Wolf Biermann, a dissident balladeer.

Because I said:
 
it stinks here
slop jars were emptied
on my head
as contradictory evidence  (On the Way to Utopia)