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134 Recenzijos
Brazaitis, Kristina. Johannes Bobrowski:
Pruzzische Vokabeln.
An Old Prussian Glossary, introduced and edited by Kristina
Brazaitis. Department of Languages and Cultures German Section,
University of Otago / Otago German Studies edited by August
Obermayer, vol. 25. Dunedin, New Zealand 2010, 373 pages.
The book under review is the first monograph dedicated to linguistic
interests of famous German poet and writer Johannes Bobrowski
(1917–1965). He became known immediately after the appearance of
his collections of poems The Land of Sarmatia (Sarmatische Zeit, Berlin:
Union-Verlag 1961) and Shadowland (Schattenland Ströme, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt:
Stuttgart 1962, Union-Verlag: Berlin 1963). In those poems
J. Bobrowski revitalizes the ancient myth of Sarmatia, a pseudo-historical
land between the Vistula River and the Black Sea, whose peoples (Sarmatians),
Old Prussians, Lithuanians, Poles, Russians, and Jews are romanticized
as victims of the evil represented by the Teutonic Order and its later
reincarnation in the form of the German Nazis. This makes a difference
between his Sarmatia and the romantic Sarmatia of the nobility of the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of the 17th – 18th c., which was the
first to popularize the myth of Sarmatia as an ideology of freedom that was
conceived as an alternative to the Western absolutism. Despite (or due to)
his democratism and consistent Christianity, J. Bobrowski was doomed to
be a non-conformist not only under the Nazis (he belonged to the Confessing
Church) and under the Communists of East-Germany. To some
degree, he appeared to be alien in the West too, where his Lament of Old
Prussia (Pruzzische Elegie) was three times removed from the collections
(Stuttgart 1961, 1961/1962, Munich 1966).
Born in Tilsit, in the former East Prussia, and married (1943) to a
Prussian Lithuanian Johanna Buddrus, J. Bobrowski viewed Sarmatia from
his native perspective (several stories and a novel are dedicated to Lithuanian
themes). Therefore, it is not surprising that from the very beginning
(Lament of Old Prussia) he could not avoid the theme of the fate suffered
by the Old Prussians. This fate, in turn, underlies his melancholic representation
of all his Sarmatians.