Günter Eich
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Günter Eich (1907 February 1 - 1972 December 20) was a German lyricist, dramatist, and author. He was born in Lebus, on the Oder River, and educated in Leipzig, Berlin, and Paris.
After being held as a prisoner of war, he was one of the founders in 1947 of Gruppe 47, and for poems in his then unpublished Abgelegene Gehöfte, he was one of the first two recipients, in 1950, of its Literature Prize for young writers.
He published prose, poetry, and radio plays over the rest of his life. In 1953, he married the Austrian writer Ilse Aichinger. They lived in Germany, but he died in Salzburg.
His collected works were published in four volumes in 1991.
James Dickey opened his 1965 poem "The Firebombing," about a nighttime air raid on the Japanese town of Beppu, with this epigraph from Eich's work:
- Denke daran, dass nach den großen Zerstörungen
- Jedermann beweisen wird, dass er unschuldig war.
roughly:
- Think of this: that after the great destructions
- every man will attest that he was innocent.
- See Valuable Nail: Selected Poems, trans. Stuart Friebert, David Walker, and David Young, ISBN 0-932-44008-8
