Peter Michelsen: gears

On January 17, 2023, Peter Michelsen would have turned 100. For more than 20 years (1967-1988) he was professor of modern German literature at the University of Heidelberg.
After his death in 2008, a completely different side of this man of literature unexpectedly emerged: his own poems. His children found them in a drawer of his desk – loose in one of many folders. These poems, often groping in tone, reflect the still-young man’s shaking through the years of the Nazi era. His lesson from these experiences was to doubt everything and everyone, including his own perception, his own judgment. Peter Michelsen liked to lead conversations into the open: “Maybe everything is also completely different” is a sentence that rings in the ears of many who knew him.

Martina Michelsen published her father’s poems with a preface in 2022.

Reading: Kathrin Becker, actress
Music: Steffen Dieckow (cello), Prof. Franz Wassermann (piano)

In the series Local Monday