Das erste Jahr

The new, as banal as it sounds, is for the time being nothing more than a two followed by three zeros. Feared by some, euphorically welcomed by others: the year 2000 AD. A moment of beginning, of tabula rasa, it seems. And yet, in everything new there is the old, in the unprecedented now, unsettled, the once. It is the moment when the mass past becomes critical.The First Year is Durs Grünbein's attempt at a personal stocktaking, a workbook in the rotation of an entire year, a collection of reflections on such diverse motifs as childhood, world war, cannibalism, genome revolution, the connections between poetry and trance, and the birth of his own daughter. Grünbein's diary is a walk through time, through cities such as New York, Pompeii, Moscow, or Berlin, immersed in a dialogue with the thoughts and works of the great ancestors, knowledgeable companions such as Baudelaire and Mandelstam, Seneca and Augustine, Darwin and Cézanne.