Zwischen ‚Kammerlyrik’ und Requiem: Anna Achmatova in deutschen Übersetzungen

The article analyses the fate of the poetry of Anna Akhmatova in the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic. Obviously, Akhmatova was considered as a ‘political’ author in both German states in a different way. Her Rekviem, unpublished in the Soviet Union till the Perestroika, was available in translations of Mary von Holbeck (1964) and Hans Baumann (1966) in Western Germany. Thus, in the FRG, the Rekviem was recognized as a poetic memorial against the crimes of totalitarism. In the GDR it was translated by Martin Remané and published in the literary magazine Sinn und Form only 25 years later when the centenary of Akhmatova’s birth coincided with the crisis of communism (1989). In Eastern Germany the Poėma bez geroja was perceived as the author‘s clear rejection of the way into emigration. Despite these differences, the detailed analysis of two of Akhmatova poems (both of them dedicated to the themes of lament and memory), and their various German translations proves the devotion of both the Western and Eastern German translators to aesthetical aspects of poetry and to their own poetic style, independent of political conditions.