The Experience of Alienation in Christoph Meckel’s Collection Säure

Abstract

The German poet Christoph Meckel was born in 1935 and died in 2020, bequeathing to German-speaking literature a work in which he sedimented important phenomena of the existential configuration throughout the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. In this legacy, the reader can find the collection Säure (‘Acid’), in which the author collects poems that show the dissolution of affective configurations, previously experienced as an organic unit. Thus, experiences that previously provided feelings of belonging and continuity start to produce ruptures and alienation. In this sense, this article wishes to discuss three poems from this collection, trying to identify how the process of alienation materializes. The first part of the article recovers some theoretical vectors of the concept of alienation (such as social structuring, affective configuration and, communicational rupture), seeking to understand it, above all, as a phenomenon of dissolution of affective organicity. In the sequence, the discussion of the three poems reveals different ways of experiencing this alienation, having in common the rupture of the communicational and affective flows. Through his lyrical language, Christoph Meckel condenses paradigmatic images of contemporary existence. The analysis tries to discuss this poetic language through close readings.