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German lessons: one prime divergence

Slam poetry in Germany is not as political as America's, and that has been a source of interest on both sides of the Atlantic. Americans are sometimes a bit struck with the absence of politics in German slam, and Germans seem a bit taken aback that politics should sully such a fine art.

It's not like both sides of the Deutsch-Amerikanisch dialog aren't aware of the difference, but in Germany the public want to treat poetry as a diversion. They don't want it dumbed down, and so they do not want it to be absent of political consiousness. I believe that a straw poll of most German writers would reveal that they have very active political lives anyway. But politics are not the top concern for either the poets or the audiences in Germany. Points go to those slam poets who score a good story, a smart turn of phrase, or coin an interesting and fresh literary trope. Political causes don't earn points much, if at all.

In Germany, heftige Dichtung (which is very loosely translated meaning "hard-ass poetry") as entertainment does not clash with the concept of heftige Dichtung as high art. Compare that to America, where the tension between art and entertainment is itself political.

In America, "art" connotes something seen in a museum or theater, something that is high culture. "Entertainment," on the other hand, is something brokered over martini'd lunches in Hollywood. With that schism, American art is almost obliged to critique American entertainment. There may be something puritanical lingering in the American conscience that art (and poetry, being an art) is obliged to be cleansing, medicinal, and therapeutic. Therefore a "serious" poem in America may not really be art unless it imparts a bitter taste, perhaps from teaching a moral lesson.

While American slam practicers say that they have put the fun back into poetry, slam nevertheless puts a cleansing imperative in American poetry by drawing from evangelistic religious effects, populist political movements, and charismatic rites. American slam zeal is almost purely religious, and so it is certainly political; in America, if you haven't heard a slam poem, surely your poetic soul has not been saved.

Germans, on the other hand, seem to be a bit more apolitical and dispassionate about slam. They are just as energetic as Americans, but cooler-headed about the political messages in the poetry. For example, if you look for a political slam poet in Germany and actually manage to find one, you may discover that they are very closely bent on emulating their American kin for style and subject matter, and are therefore on the outside looking for a way in. It's an American criticism to say that German poetry, used as an entertainment, may be missing opportunities to act as a fuller soundingboard for German society. But it's a German criticism to say that American performance poetry may be sacrificing its artistic prerogatives for pathos and politics, in order to serve whatever dogma is morally "necessary."

Germany's neighbors, the French, have used literature as a political foil for centuries, and have never skimped on performance with their line of wit. Think of Antonin Artaud, Voltaire, and Moliere. And yet slam in France is rarely heard. It may be that slam isn't as necessary in French culture, as there's been a political release in poetry and other forms of creative writing all along. Revolutions happen where the denial of a cause is repressive. So why hasn't there been a French slam poetry revolution? One speculation is that in centuries of French history, an intoxicating mix of performance, language, politics, and wit has never been denied for long.

In Germany, though, freedom of expression was conspicuously inhibited through significant parts of the 20th Century. That release was stifled through World War II, then finally and gradually permitted. Today, the Germans may be making up for lost time, now that they can. Like American slam poetry, German slam poetry borrows much from charismaticism, as both societies have feral, self-educated writers seeking a certain cleansing force in their work. Both performance poetry cultures borrow the pulpit's thunder and brimstone. In Germany, though, this energy is rarely applied to politics, as doing so can harken back to images of the Third Reich and other sorts of political charismaticism and fanaticism. History has trained aversion into the German response to political and declamatory language.

But if we accept German society's past experiences with the suppression of free speech as an example, and consider its present embracing of slam poetry, can we infer that American society is undergoing a similar awakening? Has America really been sleepwalking through the 20th Century? Or has it finally reached a point of development where, like the French, politics and prose will live durably side by side, in a continuous bathing of stage light and public dialog?

[ -KEH ]

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