Günter Eichberger: WELTVERLUST/Fragmente einer anarchistischen Poetik

Günter Eichberger (Ritter Verlag)

World loss, Ritter Verlag 2023

A man is sent to the doctor because he has visions that immediately take shape for him.

The city of Graz appears to him as a small Venice with gondolas on the Mur, at the same time – so he claims – he is in Istanbul as a dead man. He believes he has come from a book called “Loss of the World”.

Günter Eichberger’s prose plays around theorems of constructivism with poetic esprit as well as topoi of anarchism and classical avant-garde. With all the inventiveness and inclination to the grotesque, Eichberger’s fantastic scenarios prove to be worldly in a striking way.

His fictional art translates threatening developments of trans-humanization into bizarre images of tangible physicality. A counterweight to the hearty brutal comedy of his plots

Günter Eichberger’s speech satire, which, with fine cutlery, uncloses the ulterior motives hidden in well-wise phrases and is thus able to sharpen the view of virulent social contradictions.

Fragments of an anarchist poetics (2025): In the present volume, Günter Eichberger traces of readings of classics of anarchism (Lafargue, Bakunin, Proudhon) and anarchist-inspired surrealists in texts by Austrian writers. Compared to thesis-like generalization, Eichberger favors the view of the particularity of the respective text context and breaks – also in the composition of his book – a lance for aesthetic deviation. Anecdotes from the life of the author and his artist friends and colleagues announce that romantic longing for a different being, freed from all utilitarianism and compulsion: an obituary that is as wistful as it is cheerful to the “individual anarchists of Austrian influence”, as H.C. Artmann, Helmut Eisendle and Peter Rosei once described themselves in a self-deprecating gesture.

Günter Eichberger

ISBN: 978-3-85415-654-3

Günter Eichberger

Günter Eichberger /Foto Credit Wolfgang Temmel

Günter Eichberger /Photo Credit Wolfgang Temmel

* 15. September 1959 in Oberzeiring

Lives as a freelance writer in Graz.

From 1978 he studied German and English at the Karl-Franzens-University in Graz, 1984 doctorate.

After that, school librarian at the Carneri-Gymnasium in Graz for about a year and a lecturer at the German Institute of the Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz for about two semesters.

Since 1987 plays, radio plays and prose volumes.

Numerous awards and scholarships, most recently Günter Eichberger received the Literature Prize of the State of Styria 2020.