Nichts und niemand kann dich ersetzen.

They have both tended to avoid the prominent stages of the literary establishment; the novel that one reads and the play that one must have seen are sought in vain in their work. As lyricists and short prose writers, Günter Eich and Rainer Brambach are nonetheless among the immovable greats in the literature of Germany and Switzerland after 1945.Their relationship was initiated in 1950 by a reader's letter from Brambach, to which Eich reacted with both delight and surprise: that someone wrote to him in response to the publication of three poems in a magazine was something he - living in a remote corner of Lower Bavaria - was not necessarily used to. It was not until the third letter that Brambach seems to have realized that he, too, was writing poetry. By then, the correspondence had already turned into a pen-pal relationship, which intensified even more after the personal encounter. Until Eich's death in 1972, both were to remain the person to whom they could entrust everything.This unbreakability is all the more astonishing given that the two came from different countries, generations and social milieus. Eich's literary beginnings reached back to the time before 1933. He was already an experienced and recognized author when war and destruction reduced Europe to rubble. Eich experienced 1945 as a British prisoner of war and wrote the poem "Inventur" (Inventory), the text that became a signature for an entire era. Brambach - ten years younger - lived through these years in spared Switzerland, but was so unwilling to adapt to its bourgeois order that he ended up behind bars. He remained an outsider later on, eking out a living as a horticultural worker, but perhaps for that very reason he had the elemental power of someone who writes poetry not out of education but out of the intensity of rhythm and world experience. Eich, the older, was more cerebral and skeptical, but Brambach's intoxicating verve took him over every time.