I Too Am America / Auch ich bin Amerika

For the first time again accessible: the bilingual collection of poems by significant Black American poets, selected and translated by Stephan Hermlin. Three years after the end of World War II, the publishing house Volk und Welt in the Soviet occupation zone published an anthology of poetry by Black authors from the USA, despite ongoing paper shortages. The editor and translator Stephan Hermlin, himself a politically and "racially" persecuted individual under the Nazi regime, focused on the perception of a "different" America, which would remain significant for the GDR long beyond the post-war period. He carefully selected and commented on poems from a hundred years of Black American poetry. The volume, introduced by a programmatic foreword, impressively showcases Hermlin's art of translation. "I too am America," declares Langston Hughes in 1926, asserting the claims of Black American citizens to their country. "I too am America," can be read in Hermlin's work from 1948. This edition makes the bilingual poetry collection accessible again while preserving the historical wording, accompanied by an afterword by Heinrich Detering. Featuring poems by Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Countee Cullen, Frances E. W. Harper, Margaret Walker, and others.