A few days ago, a small group of Höllerians met at the Literary Colloquium in Berlin.
Ernst Osterkamp could be seen, Marcel Beyer, Ursula Krechel, later the rough voice of Rolf Dieter Brinkmann was added as a clip and the moving image of Friederike Mayröcker.
At the front of the stage, under the small arches, someone opened with the words: "We all owe him a lot." And then the old days were talked about.
And about today's poetry.
Walter Höllerer – on December 19, 2022 he would have been one hundred years old.
A man who shaped the literary scene in post-war Germany as decisively as few others.
As a Germanist, as a poet, as a literary mediator.
Basically, it was Höllerer who invented what we today call the literary business in the first place - convinced that
Through his activities, Höllerer provided "building blocks of a poetics of modernity", as the title of a commemorative publication published in his honor in 1987 read.
As a literary scholar, first in Frankfurt and then in Berlin from 1959, Höllerer invited well-known writers to readings and introduced German readers to the works of Ingeborg Bachmann, Uwe Johnson and Alfred Andersch, for example.
From 1954 he published the literary magazine "Akzente" at Hanser-Verlag, with which he opened the view to modernity without turning away from tradition.
Gottfried Benn appeared alongside Hans Magnus Enzensberger.
Home concept without homeland
In the mid-1960s, Höllerer himself caused a sensation with an edition of the "Long Poem".
On the basis of "16 theses" he pleaded for the poem as a casket that should not reveal its precious interior too quickly.
In 1961 Höllerer also published the magazine "Language in the Technical Age" and founded the Literary Colloquium Berlin ("LCB") as a venue for contemporary literature.
For several decades, literary life seemed unthinkable without him, who also took part in Group 47 meetings.
Höllerer was born in the Upper Palatinate, where he set up a literature archive in 1977 – definitely as a programmatic step.
Under the motto "Province is a possibility", Höllerer, who, as a member of the NSDAP, had been trained as a radio operator by the Wehrmacht and had witnessed mass shootings in southern Italy, advocated a modern concept of homeland without being fond of homeland.
The Höllerians on this evening of remembrance spoke of something else.
The Frankfurt Anglicist Klaus Reichert raved about the joint anthology of the "Junge Amerikan Poetry", the young poet Nico Bleutge praised Höllerer's emancipatory effect: he gave a whole generation the courage to rebel against the hermetic in poetry.
When Höllerer died on May 20, 2003, someone who understood literature in an admirably natural way as art and a program left.
It did not seem suitable to him for entertainment or moral satisfaction.
When you left the LCB that evening, there was a man with slightly curly hair standing against the wall at the back: Florian, Höllerer's son, who has been running the Literary Colloquium for a few years and now holds his father's poetic building blocks in his hands.