At the Burning Abyss: Experiencing the Georg Trakl Poem

**Franz Fühmann's magnum opus.** *At the Burning Abyss* is a gripping and profoundly personal encounter with the great expressionist poet Georg Trakl. It is a taking stock of two troubled lives, a turbulent century, and the liberating power of poetry. Picking up where his last book, *The Jew Car*, left off, Fühmann probes his own susceptibility to ideology's seductions-Nazism, then socialism-and examines their antidote, the goad of Trakl's enigmatic verses. He confronts Trakl's "unlivable life," as his poetry transcends the panaceas of black-and-white ideology, ultimately bringing a painful, necessary understanding of "the whole human being: in victories and triumphs as in distress and defeat, in temptation and obsession, in splendor and in ordure." In 1982, the German edition of *At the Burning Abyss* won the West German Scholl Siblings Prize, celebrating its "courage to resist inhumanity." At a time of political extremism and polarization, has lost none of its urgency.