Martin Roemer

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Martin Roemer (born March 16, 1958 in Hamburg ) is a German writer. In addition to his work as a poet , he also works as a musician and composer.

Life

Martin Roemer grew up as the only child of the Hamburg microbiologist Gerd Benno Roemer and his wife Birgid in Hamburg. His parents recognized this early on and encouraged his musical talent. After graduating from high school at the traditional Johanneum (1976), he studied history, art history and German literature, first in Hamburg, then in Tübingen. At the end of his academic training, he dealt with contemporary political drama, for which he interviewed numerous authors in the German-speaking area. Familiar with the culture of the Mediterranean region from an early age, Roemer moved to Italy for more than a decade before starting the publication of his volumes of poetry after 2000.

Literary work

This article or the following section is not adequately provided with supporting documents ( e.g. individual evidence ). Information without sufficient evidence could be removed soon. Please help Wikipedia by researching the information and including good evidence.

After the first volume Die Heimat des Traums (2003), which is now out of print , first Star Eclipse was published in 2007 . The book contains seventy poems on the Shoah . This collection of poems was included as a German contribution to the topic in a series of Judaica, in which testimonies and reports from survivors of the Holocaust are usually published. In contrast to the well-known texts from the Jewish side, for example, Roemer's poems from the position of the born later confront the reader with the moral fragility and ambiguity of the human species that is always only 'superficially civilized'. Roemer writes: “Only those who take in the events of the Shoáh can perhaps one day escape it. Those who keep silent about this will never escape the Shoah, because they will only be persecuted by themselves forever. "

Since 2009 Roemer has published volumes of poetry at Lit Verlag in the ATE Edition every year . In these volumes, too, he repeatedly takes up the subject of the Holocaust with individual poems. Arena follows the biblical image of forty days in the desert, with one light and one dark poem meditating on a 'self-talk with God' on a basic question of human existence such as war, death, love, sexuality and fear for each day. The poems in Mensch Ärgernis (2010), grouped in chapters whose names are borrowed from baroque compositional techniques such as toccatas , fugues or passacaglia , go through all stages of human life. Before the cycle of poems ends in 'chorals', the poems in the middle section become decidedly political in a kind of journey around the globe; the poem title "The Gardens of Torture" stands for a program. In The Divine Game (2011), a cycle of 100 love poems, the three-part structure of the volume follows the model of Dante's 'Divina Commedia' , until love, having escaped hell and purified in purgatory, enters the garden of paradise to which the cover picture (cracked pomegranate in a prayer niche) invites. His volume of poems Vanitas (2012) is on the trail of the transience of everything earthly. As much as the 144 poems - a symbolic number from the Apocalypse - surrender to decay, they still imagine a 'city above the wind'. Therefore the final poem 'Vanitas' closes with the words: “As if not a single line”.

Roemer's poetry is deeply rooted in the occidental tradition and calls for its critical continuation, also when dealing with other cultures. His poems reveal the proximity of their author to classical music, so that, even if they are complex, they reveal themselves through their mostly strictly maintained metrics and rhythms ; The inner rhyme or a network of sound structures dominate more than the end rhyme, which is only occasionally used, so that a specific timbre corresponds to the theme. His volumes are also well composed. Even texts that sometimes go to the extreme limit in their harshness, trust that the contrasting embedding in sonic beauty still gives hope out of loss and corruption.

In addition, Roemer is primarily active as a composer for piano and organ and also performs improvisations; his music, which likes to fall back on traditional composition techniques, always remains tonally bound.

Recently, Martin Roemer has presented his very own form of travel guide, in an elegant combination of descriptive and reflective essays on the one hand and lyrical texts depicting inner experiences on the other. It is not about tourist tips, but about the heart of European cultural landscapes, the respective harmony of myth and religion, natural and artistic beauty, past and present (e.g. Apollo by the hand. Streifzüge durch Greece (2017); Baltic Rhapsody. A Journey in Poems and Essays (2020)).

Works

  • The home of the dream. Hamburg 2003.
  • Star eclipse. Seventy poems for the Shoah. Hartung-Görre, Konstanz 2007. ISBN 3-86628-166-8 .
  • Arena. Forty days and nights - 80 conversations with God. LIT, Münster 2009.
  • Man nuisance. 120 days in Sodom. LIT, Münster 2010.
  • The Divine Game. 100 love poems. LIT, Münster 2011.
  • Vanitas. Poetry of the end times. LIT, Münster 2012.
  • Apollo by the hand. Forays through Greece. With 21 pen drawings by Hubertus Lilienthal. Foreword by Andreas Arnakis. Publishing house of the Greek newspaper (GZ), Athens 2017. ISBN 978-3-99021-024-6 .
  • Baltic rhapsody. A journey in poems and essays. ATHENA-Verlag, edition exemplum, Oberhausen 2020. ISBN 978-3-7455-1092-8 .

Memberships

  • Schleswig-Holstein House of Literature
  • Association of Writers in Schleswig-Holstein

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Roemer, Martin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 16, 1958
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg