«Hier / nicht fast schon dort». L’arte del transito di Durs Grünbein

The present paper aims to analyse Durs Grünbein’s ‘transit poetics’ in light of the controversial shifts and events that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. In this respect, the aesthetical category of «transit» can signify both spatial crossing and historical transition. Born and raised in the GDR, in his early work Grünbein internalises the concept of border despite cultivating a strong cosmopolitan ideal, as well as the perception of inhabiting a «no man’s land». After 1989, with an inside view on the transfiguration of Berlin, he witnesses the sudden disappearance of East Germany, the collapse of Soviet socialism and the swift establishment of global logics in the Western world. Observing and depicting the «transit spaces» of today’s geography and urban environments, Grünbein raises a decisive question about the situation of art in such a transforming context. The core of this study is to outline Grünbein’s poetics by retracing the multiple intertextual relationships throughout his poems and essays and, lastly, bring into focus how his literature – «simultaneously creative and receptive» – originates precisely in a condition of movement and impermanence.