Penguin Mit uralten Kinderaugen

New Poems - for the 90th birthday of Wolf Biermann and the 50th anniversary of his expatriation. Since his miraculous survival in the inferno of the bombing nights of 1943, during which, as he wrote, his life clock melted down and he remained forever six and a half years old, Wolf Biermann has always looked at life with a child's eye. This childlike perspective is the bright-eyed wonder in the gaze of the old poet. On his 90th birthday, Wolf Biermann is now publishing a new collection of poems: With Ancient Child's Eyes. For in the meantime, Wolf Biermann also says of himself: I am no longer an old man! I am already a youthful old man! Wolf Biermann – an icon of German-German history and an incorruptible witness to the times across decades and borders – is first and foremost a great German poet. This is evident in this volume, which contains his lyrical work from the last twenty years. Unpublished poems, reflections, and ballads written between 2006 and 2026 – tender and furious, cheerfully undeterred and charmingly biting, intoxicated by life and highly poetic. Biermann writes with provocative and well-tempered curiosity about a world that continually entangles itself in new apocalypses. With unbroken joy of love and a desire for contradiction. And despite all the sorrows, his verses do not fall into a comfortable despair. Rather, Biermann writes with self-ironic bravery, even in the struggle with the ailments of old age. Wondering and wide awake, with ancient child’s eyes, Wolf Biermann registers, reflects, condenses, and sings our crazy escapades of barbarism, for he has "wonderfully survived" in the – hopefully – last two German dictatorships. "I’ve rhymed a few truths together / Mocked, kissed, lamented, cursed / Spat and vomited, but never fawned / I found you, I searched for myself. / I have gazed at the world in wonder, since time immemorial / - with child’s eyes, ancient.".