German Requiem: Poems of the War and the Atonement of a Third Reich Child

Louis D. Rubin, Jr., author of Comic Imagination in America
The poet’s skill in recreating these emotion-draining memories in language is matched by his honesty of recall...


Book Description
German Requiem recounts the haunted memory and experience of war as seen through a child’s eyes, the most vulnerable and impressionable witness to man’s inhumanity to man. Each poem is the crystallized image of a particular experience cast into narrative poetic form and impelled by powerful emotion. Collectively, the poems describe a psychic journey from loss, dislocation, and suffering through the healing catharsis of art, which transmutes all grief into beauty.


About the Author
Ted Hirschfield was born Helmut Hirschfeld, in Prussia, Germany, in 1941. During WWII, his father, a Baptist minister, was ousted from his pulpit, and his family was separated by the Nazis. Reunited in 1946, they emigrated, in 1951, to the United States. Hirschfield was educated at Hollins College and Vanderbilt University. He is presently teaching at Southeast Missouri State University, in the Department of English. A volume of his selected verse, entitled Human Weather, appeared in 1991.


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The poet's skill in recreating these emotion-draining memories in language is matched by his honesty of recall. Nothing is melodramatized or faked. The remembering adult does not stylize or sentimentalize what the child saw and felt. This is the human price paid for the resort to evil. This is what a child underwent, and these poems are the understanding that they record. German Requiem is a memorable book. — (Louis D. Rubin, Jr., author of Comic Imagination in America)


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