Ernst Jandl (1925-2000) was one of the most original poets to write in German after 1945. His poems can be found in innumerable school books, anthologies, German language textbooks, calendars, almanacs and even in preaching guides for priests. As early as June 1965, the as yet unknown Jandl caused a great stir at a group reading at the Royal Albert Hall in London in front of an audience of 4000. He was instrumental in promoting understanding for non-traditional lyric forms, and alongside poetry also produced radio plays, theatrical texts and essays. Not only have his works been enshrined in the literary canon, but the richness of his language has found its way into everyday culture. Ernst Jandl began writing in the 1940s as a way of coming to terms with his Catholic family background, National Socialism and the conservative restoration of Austrian culture after the Second World War. He modelled his verse on the interrupted traditions of avant-garde literature, Gertrude Stein and Kurt Schwitters, but also on the poetry of Bertolt Brecht. His first collection Andere Augen (1956) still featured poems in a realistic vein, whereas the famous second volume Laut und Luise (Loud and Louise, 1966) included a broad range of little-known varieties of experimental poetry - visual poems, ‘Sprechgedichte’ (‘performance poems’), sound poems and dialect poems. Between these two publications, Jandl fought for recognition as an author, continuously extending his expressive potential and poetic idiom. With each of his following volumes of poetry, Ernst Jandl conquered new lyric territory - from poems in ‘run-down’ language to the poetry of his old age, which deals with illness, physical decay and ‘elevated’ themes in poems of unequalled radicalism.
Jandl’s personal habitus was not at all that of the bohemian artist. After taking his school leaving certificate, he was called up in August 1943 and defected to the Americans on the Western Front in 1945. On his return to Vienna, he studied German and English, and worked as a grammar school teacher in the Austrian capital with minor interruptions until 1979. At the same time he was a founding member and long-time general secretary of the Graz Authors’ Convention (‘Grazer Autorenversammlung’). Ernst Jandl’s position in the literary field was conditioned on the one hand by his relationship to the avant-garde artists of the ‘Wiener Gruppe’ (Konrad Bayer, Gerhard Rühm, Oswald Wiener, H. C. Artmann, Friedrich Achleitner) and the international avant-garde, although his development was always very autonomous. On the other hand, the decades he spent practising the middle-class profession of grammar school teacher also exercised a decisive influence on his writing. His life-long partnership with the poet Friederike Mayröcker epitomises a ‘writing life’ in which works and life form an indissoluble whole. In the play Aus der Fremde (‘Out of Estrangement’), Jandl not only thematised this context, but gave it aesthetic form.
The coexistence of order and anarchy is fundamental to the works and person of Ernst Jandl. He seems to have been divided into poet on the one hand and teacher and ‘accountant’ on the other. The biography will trace this dialectic of avant-garde versus convention, strict formal order versus the breaking open of forms on many levels. The close relationship between life, works and cultural field will form a focal point. For example, the category of the ‘religious’ poem runs through his whole oeuvre in many different variations; this will be examined in the context of Jandl’s Catholic socialisation, with reference to the evolution of his personal literary idiom and the relationship between voice and text in his works. The ‘English’ Jandl will also be given special attention. As a prisoner of war, Ernst Jandl worked as an interpreter for the American occupying army; as a student and English teacher, as translator of Gertrude Stein, John Cage and Robert Creeley and by collaborating with artists such as Ian Hamilton Finlay, he interacted with Anglophone culture in many different ways. He harboured a life-long enthusiasm for English and American popular culture and even wrote a series of poems in English.
The biography will situate Ernst Jandl between the opposing poles of his functions as writer, teacher, translator and literary activist. The wealth of material to be found in the Ernst Jandl archive at the Austrian National Library will form its basis. Jandl’s influence, closely bound to his physical presence as a performance artist, must be seen in the context of a story full of contradictions, the story of his liberation from family constraints and social and artistic limitations.
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