EVA STRITTMATTER AND ERWIN STRITTMATTER. A MARRIAGE SURROUNDING WORDS

Abstract

Symbiotic and yet very fragile was this couple’s relationship, held together by the silence of a woman who resisted her life only through poetry. The tension created by the dichotomy of a domestic life in East Germany and her existence as a writer was the source of Eva Strittmatter’s (1930-2011) creativity. Only by writing on the fringe of a reality centered on her husband’s needs as a novelist, was she able to create her own poetic oeuvre. As such, much of Strittmatter’s work reflects her escape into nature to compose poetry in opposition to her husband’s prose. Writing on “branches” and “paddock posts” became metaphors for expressing the disparity between the existences of two writers, one of which drew his creative sustenance from the other. Drawing her own energy from the landscape surrounding the hamlet of Schulzenhof, north of Berlin, Eva Strittmatter was able to write herself into existence as a serious poet. Her poetry as well as letters they wrote to each other show how she derived poetic vigor from the friction of her multiple roles as homemaker, editor and companion of Erwin Strittmatter.