Baeume lesen. Natur als Provokation in den Gedichten von Sarah Kirsch

This essay questions the cliché of Sarah Kirsch als "Naturlyrikerin". Showing the provocative rhetorical structure of Kirsch's poems, it argues that her poems on Trees and Nature challenge socialist Realism, while developing an original discourse on the liberty of Nature and of the human being. By revealing the deep wounds that history and its crimes have left both in the natural and the human world, Kirsch's poems confirm the inadequacy of that distinction between Naturlyrik and Geschichtslyrik which had already been rejected by Th.W. Adorno as well as by Paul Celan.