Contents
This study shows how Rolf Dieter Brinkmann’s later poetry can be seen as intensely ethical. First, Jonathan Woolley sets out a model of ethics adapted chiefly from Wayne C. Booth’s The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Woolley’s discussion of this model introduces key terms such as ‘implied author’ and ‘open texts’, which provide the foundation for the following analysis. He then looks at the type of openness found in Brinkmann’s poems and takes issue with those critics who claim that these contain no interpretive guidance. He argues that both in the pop poems of the 1960s and Westwärts 1&2 (1975) we find an implied author that elicits a particular activity, rather than a specific interpretation, from his reader. Woolley then focuses on Westwärts 1&2 and outlines why Brinkmann’s implied author views the activity elicited in this collection, spontaneity, as an ethical requirement within stagnant West German society. Woolley goes on to define this ethics of spontaneity more closely and insists that it must be viewed as a thinking ethics. He contrasts ‘the vulnerable rationality’ deployed by Brinkmann’s implied author with ‘the invulnerable rationality’ characteristic of the state. Finally, Woolley considers the appropriateness of including Brinkmann under the rubric Neue Subjektivität and concludes that it is the ‘ethics of spontaneity’ that sets his poetry apart from that of his contemporaries.
