As of: January 23, 2024 2:46 p.m
The poet Elke Erb is dead. She died on Monday evening in Berlin at the age of 85. In 2020, Erb was honored with the Georg Büchner Prize, which is considered the most important literary award in Germany.
She wrote both poetry and prose and campaigned for civil rights activists during the GDR era. The writer, who was born in the Eifel, is considered one of the most important contemporary poets in the German language. Most recently she lived in Berlin. She would have been 86 years old on February 18th. “Die Zeit” once described Elke Erb as the “queen of poetic stubbornness”.
In 2020, Erb received the most important literary award in Germany, the Georg Büchner Prize. Reason given by the German Academy for Language and Poetry: “For the undaunted enlightener, poetry is a political and highly vital form of knowledge.” Like no other, she succeeds in “realizing the freedom and agility of thoughts in language by challenging them, loosening them up, making them more precise and even correcting them.”
Move to the GDR in 1949
Elke Erb was born in 1938 in small Scherbach in the Eifel. As early as 1949, her father, the Marxist literary historian Ewald Erb, had the family come to Halle in the GDR. She studied German, Slavic studies and pedagogy and worked as an editor at Mitteldeutscher Verlag in the 1960s. Her work includes poetry, short prose and translations. Her first books were “Expert Reports, Poetry and Prose” (1975) and “The Thread of Patience” (1978), and selected texts also appeared in the West. She once described her work as follows: “I react like a wind harp and register its sounds faithfully like a research report.”
Spied on by the Stasi
Elke Erb was part of the GDR’s literary subculture. Her texts often appeared in unofficial literary magazines. Because of her support for civil rights activists, the author also came into the focus of the GDR state security in the 1980s. Over the course of her career, Erb received, among others, the Peter Huchel Prize (1988), the Rahel Varnhagen von Ense Medal (1994), the Literature House Prize (2011) and the Mörike Prize of the City of Fellbach (2018). . In 2019 she was also honored with the Federal Cross of Merit.
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NDR Culture | 01/23/2024 | 5:20 p.m