Dramaturgie im zeitgenössischen Tanz ist ? positiv gemeint ? ein heißes Eisen. Idealerweise sind Dramaturginnen und Dramaturgen während der Erarbeitung eines Stücks die besten Freunde der Choreografen.
more
Every now and then, a wunderkind appears. The phenomenon is always a tad distressing. It's hard to tell if the wunderkind will last. Its future is unpredictable. But this unpredictability is almost reassuring, human. And one can't help but be amazed - in the face of talent that cannot be explained by age, education or biography. How it is possible, how does she do it?
Ann Cotten
Photo: Suhrkamp Verlag
Yes, "she" is the correct pronoun, we are talking about a woman. Her name is Ann Cotten and she writes stunning poetry. But before we go into details, let's make one thing clear: this writer, born in Iowa in 1982, is no nerd. Her family moved to Austria when she was five, and when she started school in Vienna, she showed a rebellious mix of arrogance and refusal. Today she's embarrassed about the way she behaved towards the nice teacher. But she already knew how to read, she says, and the others didn't. And she had yet to learn German. She grins shyly when talking with her Viennese lilt about her first schoolgirl pirouettes.
Ann Cotten moved to Berlin last year. No surprises there. But she didn't opt for the usual jeunesse d'oree life in Prenzlauerberg. Ann Cotten shares a flat in Neukölln, where veiled beauties parade the grey streets and the undemployed lean out of windows - just as they did twenty years ago.
Ann Cotten has asked the journalist from Frankfurt to meet on board the MS Hoppetosse, a boat restaurant anchored on the edge of Treptower Park. She orders white wine and pulls nervously on her cigarette. It is not easy to start up a conversation with the young poet - "I don't see myself as a poet" - which may be due to a natural reticence or possibly the youthful radicalness that Ann Cotten exudes.
Together with a few like-minded individuals, Ann Cotten runs www.forum-der-13.de. An early bird, the poet published a manifesto dated August 13, 6:14 a.m., which reads: 'Literature is not for entertainment.' But what about the readings she gives at the legendary Kaffee Burger and other venues (photos of her in action are available on the site). Aren't these just a tiny bit entertaining? At any rate, the people that gather here are highly organised and have plenty of fun doing their thing.
The reason for meeting Ann Cotten is not just because she's the poster girl for Germany's poetry jet set. It's a book, or rather a booklet, namely Ann Cotten's "Fremdwörterbuchsonette", which was published as part of the Edition Suhrkamp series last spring. The book has 80 pages, the same number of poems and is more than worth its 8 euros 50. Indeed, these "sonnets from dictionaries of foreign words" make up a cornucopia of virtuoso etudes, nice and nasty feelings, high-speed witticisms and shrewd seductions. The almost impenetrable, yet fantastically rhythmical mix is held - or rather whisked together - by an old-fashioned form: the sonnet. Hence the title, a genre parody by Ann Cotten.
The tone is at times funny and light and vaguely reminiscent of Robert Gernhardt ("Wir stemmen ohne es zu wissen /die kompliziertesten Prämissen" - which roughly translates as "We heave most unwittingly / premises most unwieldy" -ed). Most of the time, however, you can hear the Vienna School in the background. When still a schoolgirl in the city library Ann Cotten stumbled across H.C. Artmann, Reinhard Priessnitz and Liesl Ujvary - who later helped to kickstart her career - and went into creative shock. It was the death of one (linguistic) world for this daughter of an American emigree, and and the birth of a new one.
Ann Cotten's asymmetrical, mildly punky haircut, is being played havoc with by the wind. The Hoppetosse rocks on the Spree. In the meantime, a group of French tourists has found a seat on the deck. Ann Cotten is a searching, softly-spoken poet who seems embarrassed to comment on her poems. I eventually manage to squeeze out of her that she is 'adventurous' in her approach to foreign words. (Of course she is! That's what makes it so wonderful.) At the same time, some of these foreign words are evidently no such thing (any more), but rather the eclectic-lexical remains of associations. They are snippets of words ("intermission/n's ironie-mist" - mist meaning bullshit -ed) washed ashore in the digital-global-anglophonic swamp, and they bring to bear Ann Cotten's bilingualism, her familiarity with American and pop. Two poems placed bang in the middle of the book are dedicated to Daniel Johnston, the depressive genius of a singer from Texas. Her heart-rending excursion to the dangerous line between poetry and illness ends with the line "ich hoffe nur, du schläfst noch unterm Baum da vorn." (I just hope you're still asleep under that tree over there.)"
Some of Cotten's lines may sound a little wise for a twenty-five-year-old: "An etwas, warum dann nicht an dir? musste das Schöne scheitern,/um richtig schön zu sein." ("Beauty had to fail at something/ in order to be really beautiful/why not at you?") Others, on the other hand, brilliantly encapusulate vague youthful drives. "Words can't be separated from their semantics," says Ann Cotten. With her goal clearly in mind, she steers her poetry through the semantic waves of abstraction to return again to kisses agiley exchanged in her sonnets between men and women and between women and women. "Female fantasy is no concept," she dictates to the journalist, adding: "The muse is impertinent."
Indeed she is. As a student in Vienna, Ann Cotten used to work at the British Bookshop every Saturday. During her lunch break she would write her sonnets from the dictionary of foreign words. This went on for a little over a year. She would incubate them during the week, when no doubt she received frequent visits from the impertinent muse.
There's so much more to talk about, like Johann Karl Wezel, the oddball from Thuringia, who was the subject of her PhD thesis. About her plans for prose. And about America, whose double standards disgust her. Sometimes, however, she looks back wistfully at the blistering heat of the people-less Kansas landscape, where a small solitary girl listens to the sound of a train as it disappears.
*
The article originally appeared in the Frankfurter Rundschau on August 17, 2007.
Ina Hartwig is the editor of the literature section of the Frankfurter Rundschau.
Translation: Claudia Kotte
RSS
Twitter
A precision engineer of the emotions, Peter Nadas traces the European upheavals of the past century in his colossal and epic novel "Parallel Stories", which was published in English in December. The core and epicentre of the novel is the body, which bears the marks of history and trauma. In his seemingly chaotic intertwining of lives and stories, Nadas penetrates the depths of the human animal with unique insight. A review by Joachim Sartorius 
The USA and the USSR should not simply be thought of as arch enemies of the Cold War. Beyond ideology, the two nations were deeply interested in one another. Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov were thrilled by the American Way of Life in 1935/6, John Steinbeck and Robert Capa praised the sheer vitality of the Russian people in 1947. Historian Karl Schlögel reviews a perfect pair of travel journals. Photo by Ilf and Petrov.
Turkish-born author, actor and director Emine Sevgi Özdamar was recently awarded the Alice Salomon Prize for Poetics. Coming to West Berlin in 1965, Özdamar first learned German at the age of 19. After stage school she went on to become the directorial assistant to Benno Besson and Matthias Langhoff at the Volksbühne in East Berlin while still living in West Berlin. Harald Jähner warmly lauds the author's uniquely visual sense of her acquired language and her ability to overcome the seemingly insurmountable dividing line through the city.
Nadezhda Mandelstam's personal memories of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, her intimate friend, offer a unique and moving testimony to friendship and resistance over decades of persecution. Published only after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the text is still unavailable in English but has recently been translated into German. A unique historical document, celebrating an intellectual icon in an age of horror. Portrait of Akhmatova
This year is the 200th anniversary of the death of German writer Heinrich von Kleist. The author Gertrud Leutenegger has a very Kleistian afternoon on Elba, when she encounters the Marquise von O in the waiting room of a very strange eye doctor. 
Eugen Ruge has won the German Book Prize with his novel "In Zeiten des abnehmenden Lichts" (In times of fading light), an autobiographical story of an East German family. The award is presented to the best German-language novel just before the start of the Frankfurt Book Fair. Here we present this year's six shortlisted authors and exclusive English translations of excerpts from their novels.
Chinese dissident Liao Yiwu escaped into exile in Germany in July this year. His new book about his life in Chongqing prison has just been published in German as "Für Ein Lied und Hundert Lieder". Both book and author have a life-threatening odyssey behind them. I am overjoyed that Liao Yiwu is here with us and not at home in prison. By Herta Müller
No other European city suffered more in World War II than Leningrad under siege, when over a million people lost their lives. Russian literature delivers a rich testimony of the events which have been all but forgotten by the West. Only a few works, though, also do the disaster aesthetic justice. By Oleg Yuriev 
In this apology for the vice of reading, Bora Cosic describes the magnificent and fantastic discoveries of one of its practitioners – revealing how texts contain what we bring to them, how we sometimes read without reading and how books are not only found in books but many other places.Â
This year's German International Literature Award goes to "Venushaar", a Russian novel that starts out as a dialogue between an asylum seeker and an immigration officer, and opens into a vast choir of voices. A conversation with its author Mikhail Shishkin, a literary giant in his own country, and his German translator Andreas Tretner. By Ekkehard Knörer. (Image: Mikhail Shishkin © Yvonne Böhler)
Algeria's youth: Frustrated, isolated and in the stranglehold of clandestine political structures. Young Algerians are rebelling against being locked in traditional political and social structures, but have no chance of a national uprising like that in Tunisia, says Algerian author Boualem Sansal. An interview with Reiner Wandler. 
On what would have been Romanian philosopher E.M. Cioran's 100th birthday, Suhrkamp has published a volume of his essays from the 1930s, "Über Deutschland". Effervescing with enthusiasm for Hitler and fascist ideas, they cast a dark shadow over his later writing. Fritz Raddatz wishes he'd never had to read such abominations and bids a former companion a bitter farewell. Photo: E.M. Cioran © Surhrkamp Verlag
Andre Müller Germany's most insightful and most feared interviewer is dead. Elfriede Jelinek said of him in her obituary: "Andre Müller goes all the way into people and then he makes them into language, and only then do they become themselves." Read his interviews with Ingmar Bergman and Hitler's sculptor Arno Breker in English. Photo courtesy 
Serbia was the country in focus at this year's Leipzig Book Fair – its extensive literature seems to be bound up in the straitjacket of politics. Serbia is having a hard time with Europe, and Europe is having a hard time with Serbia. Although there are signs of a softening stance, the country is still locked up in the self-imposed nationalist isolation into which it manoeuvred itself as the aggressor in the Yugoslavian war of secession. A visit there inspires mixed feelings. By Jörg Plath