Marcel Beyer Dämonenräumdienst
[Demon Clearing Service]

It was no surprise that the Peter Huchel Prize, the most prestigious award for German-language poetry, was awarded to Marcel Beyer this year: His Dämonenräumdienst (Demon Clearing Service) easily topped all the competing volumes the jury had to choose from. At best, it may have come as a surprise that the author had never been awarded with this prize before. This is because Beyer - who was born in the Swabian Mountains in 1965 and who lived in Cologne until moving to Dresden in 1996 - has received nearly every award that the German establishment grants for his work as a poet, novelist, author, and essayist. This also includes the most significant award, the Georg Büchner Prize. The jury’s explanatory statement for this award in 2016 states: “His texts are dedicated to calling forth German history with the same precise devotion with which they trace the sound of the present.”
 
The term “sound” is essential to Beyer’s poetic practice. Not only does it apply to his affinity with music, but also to his creative approach on the sonic dimension of language and with the resonance chamber of words, names, slogans, and aphorisms. For the volume Dämonenräumdienst, he primarily mapped out the sound that shaped his own youth in West Germany and then rearranged it for the present - the result is strange, ironically cut up and often surreally distorted, and yet the sound is astonishingly recognizable.
 
The author discovered the material while cleaning out his archive and in the storehouse of his memory. The “demons” that Beyer summons in his mind in order to, as it were, exorcise them are occasionally creepy but they only pose a threat on very rare occasions. They correspond then to the “daemon” of Greek mythology, as they are fundamentally neither good nor evil. Making an appearance are the ghosts of the dead, the ghosts of artists and major fellow poets, ghosts of tabloid stars and heroes from pop culture, who, as revenants, behave mischievously or can’t find any peace because posterity keeps summoning them. Demons in this sense also include characters in movies as well as mythical creatures, they are images from childhood, scenes and phantasms of every kind, which haunt the writer’s subconscious until he contains them with language.
 
This is performed in a strict form of ten four-line stanzas, which is sustained over the course of 76 poems. Within these parameters, Beyer allows his capricious figures to dance and gallivant; they often assume pretences of deception and cunningly entice the reader towards abysses, only to then tear off their masks, revealing hidden associations. With complicated words and meandering sentences, the poet creates highly comical situations as well as subtle shock effects, acrobatically balancing between an analysis of society and delightful inventiveness in its purest form.
 
Whoever translates this lyrical roundelay of ghosts would also have to be very inventive, and yet he or she, like Beyer himself, could remain very nimble in the clearly structured framework - with its free rhythms and abruptly changing beats, with the alternating use of end and internal rhymes, alliteration and assonance - so long as the intense sound effect and the rousing force of the original are conveyed. After all, the gallery of demons - from Hölderlin and Elvis Presley to Joseph Beuys and Mickey Mouse - have international appeal.