One of the things I plan to do this summer is to read more by and about Johannes Bobrowski. I first came to know him in an undergraduate German class at Penn State, Several things intrigued me about him; his last name, his interest in Eastern Europe, and that he lived by choice in the German Democratic Republic. Primarily for the latter reason, reading him was not encouraged. At the time I had wanted to explore Germany's literary concertinas with Eastern Europe.
I visited friends in the GDR, an certainly am not fan of totalitarian governments. Years later I found out some more about Bobrowski. He was an active Lutheran layman, who had joined the Confessing Church (Bekennede Kirche), as Bonhoeffer has done, and resisted Nazism. Bobrowski even was an eyewitness to German atrocities on the Eastern Front. He firmly believed that socialism and Christianity were not incompatible with each other. Maybe that is why he was not part of the curriculum.
Bobrowski was a great-great-nephew of Joseph Conrad. Born on the edge of East Prussia, Bobrowski ended his days living and working in site of the Berlin Wall, another border. I post three links, including an English translation of a poem.
More about him will follow!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Bobrowski
http://www.ndbooks.com/author/johannes-bobrowski/
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/midstream-2/
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