Durs Grünbein's Weidenfeld Lectures, held at St Anne's Coillege in the summer of 2019, as the Weidenfeld Professor in Comparative European Literature and sponsored by St Anne's College, and the Faculty of Modern Languages have appeared to great acclaim in Germany.
In the four lectures Grünbein tackles the impact of history on the individual life starting with the small things, the detritus of hsitory: a stamp collection, an old book discoverd by a child, nenries o schiiool dats in the GDR, but extending to the most extensive National Socialist building project, and the only one still standing in its entirety today, the motorway network in Germany, or the Allied Air War over Germany. The lectures ask what role literature can have in coming to terms with this legacy. A dazzling tour de force.
They will appear in English in 2021 with Seagull Books as For the Dying Calves: Beyond Literature - The Oxford Lectures, translated by Karen Leeder.