La città di Durs Grünbein dopo l'ultima pioggia : Un tributo a Max Ernst

The present contribution aims at highlighting the idea of city and citizenship in Durs Grünbein's oeuvre at the time of the “digital flood”, taking as a reference the cycle Europa nach dem letzten Regen, (August-October 1996), published in Nach den Satiren (1999). The dimension of the social Unthought bursts into Grünbein’s poetics with the power of the unprocessed past that makes mankind accountable for decent life in the third millennium. The allusion to Max Ernst – in particular to the paintings L'Europe après la pluie I (1933), realised in Paris in full National Socialist ascendancy, and L'Europe après la pluie II (1940-1942), completed after his arrival in the USA – contains an evident reference to the ghostly presence of the 20th-century European city in our globalized and hypermedialised space. The idea of the city and its practice require for Durs Grünbein a constant working-through of the discomforts and discontents produced by civilisation, where the process of hominization does not deny the work of mourning (Trauerarbeit), expressed in the poetics of transience that innervates the entire cycle Europa nach dem letzten Regen. The protagonist is the city of Dresden, razed to the ground by the bombing of the allied troops like the city of Cologne, from which Max Ernst's artistic experience took its start. The cosmopolitanism pursued by Grünbein and Ernst roots them in the European city fantasised and phantomised in the works of the painter from Brühl, whose presence is here investigated and deepened to highlight the working-through of the past in Grünbein’s poetics, as son of the generation that suffered the consequences of the destruction of his city and of Europe