Auszug aus >V<

Daniela Danz is one of the most exciting young poets to come out of East Germany and has been described as the “new voice” of German poetry. Her third book of poems, V, published in 2014, explores the concept of fatherland. Danz explains that the word Vaterland, from which the title initial comes, used to denote “the father’s field” but has expanded through the Latin patria to a very different sense of national identity. V explores this evolution of fatherland through a series of wide-ranging but interconnected poems that include prose poems constructing a mythological stone-age past, pieces set in Danz’s homeland of Saxony, and a poetic sequence applying the prisoner’s dilemma to international relations. As such, Danz interrogates the individual’s place in the world, often engaging directly with past and current political issues and events, both in the former GDR and abroad.

The poems here come from a section titled “limen,” a Latin word that can mean “threshold,” but also “beginning” and “termination”; these poems journey through a series of scenes interrogating notions of beginning, ending, borders, and time. Seven of the twelve poems in this section are addressed to a jackdaw, a bird whose range spans Europe, the Balkans, parts of Russia, and northern Africa. A boy who is either a refugee or in a war zone is juxtaposed against school children on a class trip into an old mine in the shadow of an enormous slag heap, literally descending into their history; both the ice in the final poem and the snow in the short poem about fatherland reveal borders to us and allow us to change our perspectives or simply become more aware of them.

Danz’s vision for her work is that it help foster international understanding. The poems themselves speak to the global through the local, never losing sight of the fact that we cannot fully understand ourselves or each other without looking honestly at how easily communities can lose sight of an individual’s humanity. At a time when Europe’s and Germany’s role in the world is being shaped by the refugee crisis and when national identity in Germany stands to change as much, if not more, than it did at the end of WWII or the fall of the Berlin wall, Danz’s work offers us an opportunity to reflect on how our homelands and national boundaries define us, anchor us, and can separate us from one another.