Background info about Rolf Dieter Brinkmann The german poet Rolf Dieter Brinkmann died at the age of 35 in an accident in London in April 1975. He left behind a voluminous, unfinished work-in-progress that included many hours of documentary film material, audio recordings and thousands of photographs. The film, Brinkmanns Wrath, incorporates portions of this existing material with new scenes shot in Cologne. Brinkmann had been invited to read at the Cambridge Poetry Festival, where he read with John Ashbery, Ed Dorn, and others. Just a few weeks after his death, Brinkmann's seminal, parameter-expanding poetry collection, Westwärts 1 & 2, appeared, which was posthumously awarded the Petrarca Prize. Considered to be one of the most important poets of post-war Germany, Brinkmann's work is definitely in the marginal outsider vein, approximating a sort of hybrid of Frank O'Hara, William Burroughs, and W.C. Williams, all of whom were important influences on Brinkmann's work. His permanent confrontation with the post-war German literary establishment and his envelope-pushing experiments with language and mixed-media led him further and further away from the literary scene, finally resulting in the self-imposed exile which he pursued until shortly before his death. His confrontational nature and volatile personality were feared at readings, and together with his huge creative output and his early death, earned him a reputation as the "James Dean of poetry", a true enfant terrible of contemporary letters. During his lifetime, Brinkmann published nine poetry collections, four short story collections, several radio plays, and a highly acclaimed novel, Keiner weiß mehr. He also published two German-language anthologies of contemporary American poetry and translated Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems into German. Rather than being obsessed with the question of collective guilt that so preoccupied other post-war German writers, Brinkmann's stance was one of absolute immediacy; forever looking at the world in the here-and-now, without a trace of sentimentality or nostalgia. Brinkmann's critical deconstruction of contemporary culture remains an important document in postmodern literature.   The following piece by Jürgen Theobaldy gives an impression of the character of Brinkmann and the atmosphere of Brinkmann's last days in Cambridge and London, as well as a description of the fatal accident in Westbourne Grove in London, which will also be in the movie.     1 Rolf Dieter Brinkmann died on Wednesday, April 23rd, 1975, at around ten in the evening, in Westbourne Grove in London, where the districts of Bayswater and Paddington meet. He had wanted to cross Westbourne Grove, a small but at this time busy street, to stop briefly in the pub, "The Shakespeare," on the way to an Italian restaurant. It was my suggestion, after Brinkmann had told me that he had stopped in there often during his stay in London. The constant flow of traffic was stopped at a light somewhere behind us and Westbourne Grove appeared to be free to cross. A few meters behind Brinkmann, I stepped quickly into the street as he did and was shocked by the sudden appearance of a black sedan: it seemed to appear out of nowhere and passed by so close that I instinctively watched it as it continued on. In a light coat which shimmered palely in the half-darkness, his face still fixed on the opposite side of the street, Brinkmann collided against the car, whose driver neither braked nor attempted to veer out of the way. There probably are no sufficient words with which to describe the force of the impact which sent Brinkmann flying and then sprawling onto the street. As I learned later, the collision happened so fast that I couldn't have followed it with my eyes, although I clearly saw him, bent over forwards and with his jaw hitting against the mirror on the left fender before he was catapulted into the air. "I think he's dead," a woman said who had been walking behind us with her companion, and who was now kneeling next to Brinkmann just a few seconds after the accident. His face looked peaceful; more peaceful than someone sleeping. The eyes were closed and despite the force of the impact, his body was not particularly twisted on the ground. He lay in the gutter, one leg on the sidewalk, his face on the left side; a thin trail of blood trickling out of his right ear and under the right side of his face and onto the curb. The woman, who was a doctor by profession as I soon learned, placed a handkerchief under Brinkmann's head and kept saying "The jaw," in answer to my incessant questioning about his injuries, yet I didn't understand her answer.     2 We had wanted to go out for dinner. Just a few minutes before the accident we had left the Rhine Hotel in Hereford Road, where I had met Brinkmann in his room after I had written a few postcards. Although earlier that evening he had pleaded with me to leave as soon as possible, he now asked me to come in for a moment. He sat on the bed, a notebook next to him, and handed me the bottle of beer that he must have just opened, as it was still almost full. With the language you can only name things, he said, even if you wanted to express feelings. In order to describe the atmosphere of this room, he had to describe things; the color of the wallpaper, the bedspread. But what always remained left out were what I had been referring to as "vibrations" during the last few days. I told him that during my ride into London on the bus it had occurred to me that the language was always getting further behind the latest technological developments. In order to describe the sounds and movements of machines we still used words that were originally intended to describe the course of events in nature. He parodied formal technical language, we laughed, and then we set off. Hereford Road leads into Westbourne Grove, and there we turned left and soon passed a Greek restaurant where a sizzling spit of meat was turning in the window. Shall we go in here? No, he didn't know anything about Greek food, and insisted on looking for an Italian restaurant. At the next corner I pointed out an empty snack bar on the other side of the street; bathed in harsh light, there didn't even appear to be anyone at the counter waiting for customers, although a sign in the window said "Open 24 Hours." The sign reminded Brinkmann of Austin, Texas, where he had spent half a year writing and giving a seminar at the university. In Europe, he said, everything is so close, the people too crammed together, everything is overfull, no one has enough room. In contrast, America is a wide, marvelous country. The people are more open than the English for example, who hide behind their smoothed-over politeness. If the Americans had developed a different social structure, America would be the country. The use of "different social structure" surprised me, and for that reason remained in my memory. Sociological concepts were not something that Brinkmann had normally used during his stay in England. I no longer know why I was lagging behind him; probably I had become absorbed in a storefront window and not caught up with him as we saw "The Shakespeare."     3 The five-day Poetry Festival began with an opening party on Thursday evening, April 17th. I remember the building with the open wooden stairs, polished wooden floors, and wide windows looking out over a river, where the lights of the city were reflected in the water. There were pretzels, beer and wine, and the mood was relaxed; after two years of preparation and without the help of government funding, the festival was finally taking place, the foreign guests had already arrived. During the course of the evening, Brinkmann came barging in accompanied by several young poets, including the English poet John James, at whose house Brinkmann had been staying. We laughingly greeted each other and without any transition, Brinkmann asked me if I was writing a novel. I said no, but I wished I'd written one. So what, he said with a wave of his hand, Now we'll make some real poetry, we'll just concentrate on poems. He dismissed novel writing as an uninteresting marketing ploy, then changed the subject, as though it wasn't worthy of a discussion. He anyway never stayed with any one subject for very long; he did not seek out discussions about contemporary German authors, probably because they seemed unimportant to him, and otherwise he seemed more reconcilable and magnanimous than I'd been led to believe from what I had heard from others. Either we agreed right away on our views, or he spoke about something else, which suited me fine. Certain German poets of the fifties and sixties he referred to as "Wegrandlyriker," meaning that they were only of peripheral importance, which sounded more pitiable than contemptuous. Perhaps this had to do with his own situation in general, or with his return to published literature, or perhaps neither. At any rate, just prior to the appearance of his most recent poetry collection, Westwärts 1 & 2, it would be inopportune to stir up old rivalries.     4 During the next two days I met Brinkmann often, and after I left the student home at the edge of the city where I had been staying and moved in at John James', we saw each other constantly, from breakfast until the last beer of the evening, from the trip back to London after the festival up until his death. Brinkmann didn't like the fact that in the small house of John James he didn't have his own room and had to sleep on an air mattress in the living room, where the visitors came and went. While the others slept in the kitchen or the cellar, he had to wait until the living room was finally empty, and during the day he sat during short breaks at the window, his back to the others, and wrote in his notebook or on postcards. He was in an uncertain state of mind. His wife Maleen and their son Robert had left the apartment in Cologne a few days earlier and Brinkmann didn't know where they were staying, or if they had already returned, or if his marriage was about to fall apart. In addition to this, the only money that he had was the fee and travel expenses he'd received for the reading; later at the German embassy in London he had them pay him the money for the flight in cash. Even if he had been particularly frugal, the money wouldn't have lasted. He cursed his lack of means and the fact that from the grant money he'd received for his stays in Rome and Austin he'd had to send most of it home "like a foreign worker." Now he had to see to it that the money lasted until at least next Sunday. In this situation Brinkmann's mood changed constantly. One moment he would be lamenting over Maleen, the next moment he would be cursing the situation, the next he would be hoping that she was back in the apartment (which she actually was). During lunch with an employee of the German embassy Brinkmann presented his plan for a reading tour through England, and she promised to look into the feasibility. As the two of us were alone together again, Brinkmann called the embassy employees "parasites," who lived from the taxes that his brother paid and who would never voluntarily give up their posts. Sometimes he spoke in a jargon in which I could only understand the meaning of a word by the way he intoned it. The way he expressed himself was plebian and far removed from the sort of worn out irony that one often used in book stores, or after readings or theater performances. The way he was constantly in motion, sometimes in a feverishly good mood and confident, then suddenly agitated and restless, was the same manner in which he spoke and explained; almost monological but at the same time one-to-one to the person he was speaking with. Considering his situation, he seemed rather strong to me, and appeared neither bitter nor gloomy. Perhaps it was the Poetry Festival that gave him energy; meeting with English friends, the thoughts of a reading tour, the new book of poems. Again and again he weighed the plan to finish studying to become a teacher in Cologne, which he'd broken off several years before. There remained only three weeks in which to write his admission thesis and he was considering writing it at a friend's place near Cologne, who lived together with some others in a former monastery. In a book store across from the Compendium Bookshop in Camden, the day before his death, Brinkmann bought several educational books, although this didn't necessarily mean that he'd made his decision. But thus he managed to at least postpone his No to an existence as a teacher. He'd heard about the free, improvisational teaching methods in the USA, in which children spontaneously composed poetry to music, and this had impressed him very much. Nonetheless, I couldn't imagine him as a teacher, especially as a civil servant for life. He seemed much too impatient, erratic and indifferent, if not perhaps totally opposed to all forms of mediation. And the thought of any another kind of job, the morning commute in the streetcar, gray in the face, produced a salvo of laughs in John James' living room.     5 I believe that Brinkmann's state of mind concerning consciousness and the world was the source of much suffering, and not something he could articulate either in conversation or in the lyrical gags in Die Piloten (The Pilots). The irresolvable paradox that one could not destroy literary forms without creating new ones was something that tormented him physically. As he saw the state as a linguistic entity, which he rejected along with the language, so he felt "the urge to go raving mad at a family lunch." He searched for new concepts and was not satisfied with anything that was offered, neither engaged nor concrete poetry, both of which were for him merely "Literature." He wanted to break through, and that was something that could be said in no other way than in his later poems. In a café in Kensington Garden on the morning of the day he died, he told me an example of a conventional episode that had made him angry. For Easter, his wife Maleen had hung painted Easter eggs from a palm frond in a vase for their son. When it became obvious that I didn't find this so disturbing, Brinkmann's voice dropped to a low mumble. He looked at me with an expression that mixed skepticism with contempt, as though he was considering giving me up like he had already given up on so many others. Then we changed the subject. In Westwärts 1 & 2, Brinkmann had found his way back to his origins, his own personal history, and in Kensington Garden, in the record stores in Piccadilly, and during our walks through London from the afternoon until late at night, he told me much about himself, about Maleen, about Robert, their son, and the "musty fifties" and his naiveté and uncertainty at that time. He, the restless, ever-forward-moving wanderer through the cities, found it difficult to deal with the fact that his son could only walk quite slowly. In the present, which he saw as disintegrating all around him, he continuously forced himself to leave behind all habits and opinions. In 1968, he had dedicated Die Piloten (The Pilots) to all those "who were always satisfied to sit back in the cheapest seats in the cinema." In London, he said, he hardly ever went to the cinema. Ha had also distanced himself from many of his friends, as though he was only interested in poetry, the words buried under the linguistic rubble, the dimly lit chasm between language and reality. Besides Westwärts 1& 2, a second collection was almost ready, he said, and he was planning a book with genre-breaking texts (which appeared as Der Film in Worten), including a reworked version of his afterword to Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems, which would be a "real essay." In this situation any occupation other than writing was strictly out of the question. The fact that Lee Harwood would return to work at the post office after their reading together was something that Brinkmann repeated again and again with astonishment. Even the four or five days in Cambridge in which he hardly got around to writing were torture for him. He had a notebook with him, and on the afternoon of the 23rd, as we were relaxing over a beer after much walking around, he insisted that we collaborate on a poem. The text that he wrote in the notebook, which was completed without much contribution on my part, we entitled "Red Corner's Inn," after the pub in which we were sitting. Brinkmann was also writing on the evening when I came by to pick him up in his room on our way out to dinner. His advice was simple, like all advice from people who speak from experience, whose aesthetic principles are both demanding and challenging. Write down what you saw today, write down what you experienced, write down everything. Perhaps he meant the same thing when he said that there are only words for things, or that when he wrote, a poem was not always a poem, or that poetry is always that which is not said, not formulated.     6 In talking about himself, Brinkmann had said that he'd grown up in the street; to Christopher Middleton in Austin, he'd referred to himself as a "guttersnipe," a street kid, and it was there that he died. After the woman had placed the handkerchief under his head, there where the blood had run onto the curb, someone from the crowd stepped forward and in a helpless gesture placed the one leg next to the other in the gutter. When the companion of the woman doctor and I were unable to locate the driver among the bystanders and we started toward the car, it drove away. We noted down the license number, and as I was giving a statement to a policeman shortly after, an ambulance pulled up and two medics got out and placed a stretcher on the ground and placed Brinkmann's body on it. I only saw this out of the corner of my eye, as the policeman was maneuvering me toward the police car, as I was somewhat dazed from all that had happened. Later, after I'd given my last statement at the police station in Paddington, I had to officially identify Brinkmann's body at the morgue. The way there seemed to pass through empty side streets and tiny squares, poorly lit in the middle of the night, like inner courtyards closely surrounded by buildings. In the old St. Mary's Hospital the policeman walked ahead of me through a cool, shabby cellar and into a windowless room where the body was laid out. He lay there exactly as he had been lying in Westbourne Grove, on his side in the light coat, half on his stomach, his head turned to the left. A purple blanket that had been pulled over him reached to his shoulder. I went around the waist-high stretcher, looking at his neck, unable to look at his face anymore. The policeman asked again if that was Brinkmann, and I said Yes.   (Taken from a longer text of Jürgen Theobaldy, which originally appeared in Rowohlt Literaturmagazin No. 15, in April, 1985)