
Carl-Christian Elze, born in Berlin in 1974, grew up in Leipzig. His father was a zoo veterinarian, so he spent a large part of his childhood at the Leipzig Zoo. He studied biology and German, and later, creative writing at the German Literature Institute Leipzig. Since 2006, he has published several volumes of poetry and short stories, most recently Oda and my stuffed father (Zoo stories; kreuzerbooks 2018), slowly fading in the labyrinth (Venice poems; Verlagshaus Berlin 2019), and panic/paradise (Verlagshaus Berlin 2023). His debut novel Freudenberg (Voland & Quist 2022) was longlisted for the 2022 German Book Prize. He has received several awards for his work, including the Munich Poetry Prize (2010), the Joachim Ringelnatz Young Talents Prize (2014), the Rainer Malkowski Scholarship (2014), and a writing residency at the German Study Center in Venice (2016). In 2023 he was Dresden's writer-in-residence. Elze is the founder and host of the Leipzig reading series “Niemerlang” and a member of the PEN Center Germany.
Amsterdam Review: What are some of the most pressing aims of your work?
Carl-Christian Elze: Intensity, calmness, connection. My writing began with poetry at the age of 19. I was in a moment of crisis and for the first time felt writing as an act, felt that the sound of a poem could soothe me and banish my fears. The pieces worked like magic spells or prayers, or both. That's basically how it has remained to this day: as soon as I'm in trouble, the first thing I want to do is write poetry. Through it I can always feel a better sense of connection: most immediately with myself because I can suddenly think and feel more clearly, but also with others when thinking about them through writing, and even with something else, something higher, perhaps God. At times I have the distinct feeling that something is being dictated to me and I just have to listen carefully for a few seconds. Or I could say: nothing but poems can really surprise me and comfort me and amaze me and repair me a little. Writing poetry is an instrument of knowledge and at the same time, it is faith, prayer. On the other hand, as soon as I feel better and focus on certain topics and ideas, I tend to write prose more often. I also love writing dialogues. It makes me happy when I manage to come up with good, lively dialogues because they, in turn, make me more lively.
AR: Your interest in biology and natural sciences is closely connected to your writing, especially poetry. In what measure does it affect the content of your work?
CCE: My father was a veterinarian at the Leipzig Zoo for 30 years, so, along with my brother, you could say I grew up at the zoo. That certainly had a big influence on me. Animals were always running, swimming, and flying around in my head. At some point, they had to enter my poems and stories, I think. I wrote a whole book about my childhood memories at the Leipzig Zoo called Oda and my stuffed father (“Oda und der ausgestopfte Vater”, kreuzerbooks, Leipzig 2018). Incidentally, Oda was my father's favorite lioness. I wouldn't even know where to start telling you about it, there were so many animals, so many animal friendships. Later I studied biology, which resulted in scientific and zoological topics also flowing into my work, for example the manifestation of death. The answer to that question, of course, is in the development from unicellular to multicellular organisms.
Ultimately, it’s the scientific in relation to the personal which interests me. It's important that you don't hide your self in your poems. I think my writing is closely linked to my own life, including my fears. Death is a dark cloud over my head and a major driving force for my writing. I have probably been a seeker of God since my childhood. I believe that the only way my poems can echo with other people is if I don't hide myself in my own poems. Only then can they also touch others who feel the same. Because we all share similar feelings. I have to open up as much as possible in the poem, I have to be brave. I think writing poetry is a matter of courage.
AR: The collection slowly fading in the labyrinth: venice poems (langsames ermatten im labyrinth, Verlagshaus Berlin, 2019) gives the impression that something beyond literature is about to come to life, and does. What was the inception point of the labyrinth?
CCE: When I left for Venice at the beginning of July 2016 for a writing residency, I was very unsure whether it was possible to do it justice in my poems, especially as a visitor. Even though I was a seasoned tourist, I said to myself: be careful not to fall into the “Venice trap”! Repeating what had already been said a thousand times in the rush of beauty—that was the minefield I’d entered. On the other hand, I asked myself: if all I can do is fail with poetry in this city, then shouldn’t I address this failure? And if I do so, can there perhaps still be some kind of success in the poems? With all these questions and warnings in mind, I entered Venice and crawled around its labyrinth for weeks to the point of exhaustion. The biggest gift I had been given was time. For once in my life, unlike the thousands of hasty day trippers, I had time to get lost in the city. I did not need a map or a smartphone with a navigation app. The way was cleared for me to visit all the dead-ends.
AR: The protagonist in the Venice poems is constructed as a reflection of Venice itself: the physical body is eroding, collapsing onto itself and giving in to the water inch by inch, which also acts as a self- (or soul-?) reflective surface. Eating away at the body, it slowly reveals what’s inside. The protagonist’s perception of reality blurs and leads to deep introspection. Is this the meaning of fading slowly in the labyrinth?
CCE: Never before and never since in my life have I been in a city that had such a strong effect on my psyche and perception. In addition to the more well-known syndromes such as Stendhal syndrome and Paris syndrome, there is also a Venice syndrome, a phenomenon where suicides and suicide attempts occur frequently among tourists in Venice. The explanation given is that Venice is often romanticized and associated with melancholy and doom, which attracts suicidal people. But that was not what I felt. Months after I wrote the book, I came across the term “psychogeography.” Psychogeography examines the influence of the architectural or geographical environment on perception, psychological experience and behavior. I think I ended up writing a book on psychogeography. There was no death in Venice, but there was a loss of control, which is only the appearance of control anyway. There was a dissolution of all apparent certainties in this city, so otherworldly and dreamlike. Yes, you move around in a dream in broad daylight, and you become more and more confident in the idea that your whole life could be a dream. Your own self fades, blurs.
What also triggered this state in me was a great insomnia there, as I’ve never experienced before. At night I found no sleep in my tiny room at the Palazzo Barbarigo della Terrazza. Rats danced, loved, and fought in the adjoining pit; a water pump made monotonous sounds that couldn’t be switched off and, every morning at five o'clock, empty bottles shattered into the shaft, dumped by an adjoining hotel. Nevertheless, I had to leave my window open not to suffocate, for there was no air conditioning. After three weeks, I had started to lose it, and I began to write the Venice poems. I threw all caution to the wind and just wrote to avoid falling asleep during the day. I became an unbridled rodent myself, the wired rat in the laboratory of my cerebral doge. I sat exhausted in the labyrinth every day, examining myself, trying to measure my own changing perceptions and brainwaves as best I could. After three months, I realized I was sitting on a small mountain of about fifty Venice poems.
AR: Are they somehow informed by your previous collection, diese kleinen, in der luft hängenden, bergpredigenden gebilde (Verlagshaus Berlin, 2016), more precisely by the themes of loss and grief in it?
CCE: I believe that I take the main themes of my writing with me everywhere, that I never get rid of them in life, always circling around them with each new volume, each new place. Because there are no definitive answers. No one, not the smartest person in the world, can answer the question that is most important to me. Where do we all disappear to, where are my dearest dead loved ones, will we all ever meet again somehow? That is why I have been sending poems into orbit like space capsules or prayers for three decades now, in the hope that my questions will yet be answered in some way through “spooky action at a distance,” Einstein’s term for quantum entanglement, which I find more apt. At least in Venice there was a kind of answer: dream, dissolution, the blurring with the city, with everything.
AR: What are your literary influences?
CCE: As a child, I loved reading fairy tales from around the world, and as a teenager I read a lot of classic crime fiction, from Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes) to Agatha Christie. I also read Edgar Allen Poe, and especially Patricia Highsmith. I think I became a proper reader when I was 16, with Hermann Hesse. He was also the first writer whose complete works I wanted to buy and read. Then Dostoyevsky, over and over again. Long periods of reading and living with Anton Chekhov, Franz Kafka, Robert Walser, Thomas Bernhard, Raymond Carver. The first big influences on poetry were Bertolt Brecht, Gottfried Benn, Georg Trakl, and of course Rainer Maria Rilke. Always Rilke. Oh dear, far too many men, I know. Today, however, I am much more inspired by contemporary German female poets than male poets.
AR: Your first novel, Freudenberg (Edition Azur, 2022), was longlisted for the German Book Prize. The common point with your verse seems to be the exploration of the human mind and the question of our self—what makes us who we are? How did you navigate the transition from poetry to prose? In the case of Freudenberg, what did prose achieve that poetry couldn’t?
CCE: I’ve been writing both poetry and prose for many years, and there were times when I wrote screenplays with great dedication. But the language of the poem came first in my writing and will always remain my original literary language. The language of the poem is most closely linked to my inner self, to my deepest wishes and fears. Writing poetry always means striving to learn more about yourself, but with an open outcome, without guarantee that the pursuit will ever be successful. It’s like fishing. No one knows whether a fish will bite, but the longer you keep the rod in the water, the more likely it is that one will. Writing poems never follows a predetermined plan or plot, it is perhaps the exact opposite of a crime novel, which has to be meticulously prepared in order to work. In the end, a crime novel may be more exciting for some readers than a poem, but I think poetry is the most exciting form of writing for an author. I actually approached the novel Freudenberg like a long poem. I let myself drift, completely immersed myself in this character who I didn’t quite understand and who wasn’t me either. Freudenberg came to me directly from real life. He was a 17-year-old boy in a secondary school class I had taught for a few months many years before. A boy who never spoke, at least I never heard him speak, not a word. Even when I spoke to him directly, he would remain silent. He was trapped in a kind of psychological bunker, unable to look anyone in the eye. The other students ignored him at best or at worst bullied him, which I tried to prevent. I couldn’t let go of this boy, I felt compelled to think about him more and more often, every day. Maybe I started writing this novel because I couldn’t help the boy out of his bunker back then—to try to understand him better as a character in the novel, to be able to open him up and ultimately save him. All other characters and events in the novel are purely fictional. I never met the real boy again. What remained was a novel, or an extended poem, a great perception machine. Having said that, I sometimes think that this novel is also a hellish machine the protagonist has to go through to emerge as a more open person at the end. Another wild thought from that time: I wanted to write a novel that was thematically linked to Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. Back then, no author had impressed me more.
AR: Derrida says somewhere that there is no literature without a suspended relation to meaning and reference--suspended which could mean suspense but also dependence, conditionality. What do you make of that in terms of your own writing?
CCE: Derrida seems to me to be too broad a field for a short answer, but I do like thinking about how much I like the word “suspended” in connection to literature. Yes, true literature exists in a floating state and also puts readers into a kind of floating state. Sentences, poems, stories that leap up into the air to look around, to see and understand better. Of course there is always the desire for a safe place to land, but great literature does not rush back to these apparently safe landing places in the form of quick punchlines and solutions, it does not land so quickly and sometimes not at all. It endures the floating. It endures the not knowing. Great literature marvels with us. There is no landing, only wonder.
Amsterdam Review: What are some of the most pressing aims of your work?
Carl-Christian Elze: Intensity, calmness, connection. My writing began with poetry at the age of 19. I was in a moment of crisis and for the first time felt writing as an act, felt that the sound of a poem could soothe me and banish my fears. The pieces worked like magic spells or prayers, or both. That's basically how it has remained to this day: as soon as I'm in trouble, the first thing I want to do is write poetry. Through it I can always feel a better sense of connection: most immediately with myself because I can suddenly think and feel more clearly, but also with others when thinking about them through writing, and even with something else, something higher, perhaps God. At times I have the distinct feeling that something is being dictated to me and I just have to listen carefully for a few seconds. Or I could say: nothing but poems can really surprise me and comfort me and amaze me and repair me a little. Writing poetry is an instrument of knowledge and at the same time, it is faith, prayer. On the other hand, as soon as I feel better and focus on certain topics and ideas, I tend to write prose more often. I also love writing dialogues. It makes me happy when I manage to come up with good, lively dialogues because they, in turn, make me more lively.
AR: Your interest in biology and natural sciences is closely connected to your writing, especially poetry. In what measure does it affect the content of your work?
CCE: My father was a veterinarian at the Leipzig Zoo for 30 years, so, along with my brother, you could say I grew up at the zoo. That certainly had a big influence on me. Animals were always running, swimming, and flying around in my head. At some point, they had to enter my poems and stories, I think. I wrote a whole book about my childhood memories at the Leipzig Zoo called Oda and my stuffed father (“Oda und der ausgestopfte Vater”, kreuzerbooks, Leipzig 2018). Incidentally, Oda was my father's favorite lioness. I wouldn't even know where to start telling you about it, there were so many animals, so many animal friendships. Later I studied biology, which resulted in scientific and zoological topics also flowing into my work, for example the manifestation of death. The answer to that question, of course, is in the development from unicellular to multicellular organisms.
Ultimately, it’s the scientific in relation to the personal which interests me. It's important that you don't hide your self in your poems. I think my writing is closely linked to my own life, including my fears. Death is a dark cloud over my head and a major driving force for my writing. I have probably been a seeker of God since my childhood. I believe that the only way my poems can echo with other people is if I don't hide myself in my own poems. Only then can they also touch others who feel the same. Because we all share similar feelings. I have to open up as much as possible in the poem, I have to be brave. I think writing poetry is a matter of courage.
AR: The collection slowly fading in the labyrinth: venice poems (langsames ermatten im labyrinth, Verlagshaus Berlin, 2019) gives the impression that something beyond literature is about to come to life, and does. What was the inception point of the labyrinth?
CCE: When I left for Venice at the beginning of July 2016 for a writing residency, I was very unsure whether it was possible to do it justice in my poems, especially as a visitor. Even though I was a seasoned tourist, I said to myself: be careful not to fall into the “Venice trap”! Repeating what had already been said a thousand times in the rush of beauty—that was the minefield I’d entered. On the other hand, I asked myself: if all I can do is fail with poetry in this city, then shouldn’t I address this failure? And if I do so, can there perhaps still be some kind of success in the poems? With all these questions and warnings in mind, I entered Venice and crawled around its labyrinth for weeks to the point of exhaustion. The biggest gift I had been given was time. For once in my life, unlike the thousands of hasty day trippers, I had time to get lost in the city. I did not need a map or a smartphone with a navigation app. The way was cleared for me to visit all the dead-ends.
AR: The protagonist in the Venice poems is constructed as a reflection of Venice itself: the physical body is eroding, collapsing onto itself and giving in to the water inch by inch, which also acts as a self- (or soul-?) reflective surface. Eating away at the body, it slowly reveals what’s inside. The protagonist’s perception of reality blurs and leads to deep introspection. Is this the meaning of fading slowly in the labyrinth?
CCE: Never before and never since in my life have I been in a city that had such a strong effect on my psyche and perception. In addition to the more well-known syndromes such as Stendhal syndrome and Paris syndrome, there is also a Venice syndrome, a phenomenon where suicides and suicide attempts occur frequently among tourists in Venice. The explanation given is that Venice is often romanticized and associated with melancholy and doom, which attracts suicidal people. But that was not what I felt. Months after I wrote the book, I came across the term “psychogeography.” Psychogeography examines the influence of the architectural or geographical environment on perception, psychological experience and behavior. I think I ended up writing a book on psychogeography. There was no death in Venice, but there was a loss of control, which is only the appearance of control anyway. There was a dissolution of all apparent certainties in this city, so otherworldly and dreamlike. Yes, you move around in a dream in broad daylight, and you become more and more confident in the idea that your whole life could be a dream. Your own self fades, blurs.
What also triggered this state in me was a great insomnia there, as I’ve never experienced before. At night I found no sleep in my tiny room at the Palazzo Barbarigo della Terrazza. Rats danced, loved, and fought in the adjoining pit; a water pump made monotonous sounds that couldn’t be switched off and, every morning at five o'clock, empty bottles shattered into the shaft, dumped by an adjoining hotel. Nevertheless, I had to leave my window open not to suffocate, for there was no air conditioning. After three weeks, I had started to lose it, and I began to write the Venice poems. I threw all caution to the wind and just wrote to avoid falling asleep during the day. I became an unbridled rodent myself, the wired rat in the laboratory of my cerebral doge. I sat exhausted in the labyrinth every day, examining myself, trying to measure my own changing perceptions and brainwaves as best I could. After three months, I realized I was sitting on a small mountain of about fifty Venice poems.
AR: Are they somehow informed by your previous collection, diese kleinen, in der luft hängenden, bergpredigenden gebilde (Verlagshaus Berlin, 2016), more precisely by the themes of loss and grief in it?
CCE: I believe that I take the main themes of my writing with me everywhere, that I never get rid of them in life, always circling around them with each new volume, each new place. Because there are no definitive answers. No one, not the smartest person in the world, can answer the question that is most important to me. Where do we all disappear to, where are my dearest dead loved ones, will we all ever meet again somehow? That is why I have been sending poems into orbit like space capsules or prayers for three decades now, in the hope that my questions will yet be answered in some way through “spooky action at a distance,” Einstein’s term for quantum entanglement, which I find more apt. At least in Venice there was a kind of answer: dream, dissolution, the blurring with the city, with everything.
AR: What are your literary influences?
CCE: As a child, I loved reading fairy tales from around the world, and as a teenager I read a lot of classic crime fiction, from Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes) to Agatha Christie. I also read Edgar Allen Poe, and especially Patricia Highsmith. I think I became a proper reader when I was 16, with Hermann Hesse. He was also the first writer whose complete works I wanted to buy and read. Then Dostoyevsky, over and over again. Long periods of reading and living with Anton Chekhov, Franz Kafka, Robert Walser, Thomas Bernhard, Raymond Carver. The first big influences on poetry were Bertolt Brecht, Gottfried Benn, Georg Trakl, and of course Rainer Maria Rilke. Always Rilke. Oh dear, far too many men, I know. Today, however, I am much more inspired by contemporary German female poets than male poets.
AR: Your first novel, Freudenberg (Edition Azur, 2022), was longlisted for the German Book Prize. The common point with your verse seems to be the exploration of the human mind and the question of our self—what makes us who we are? How did you navigate the transition from poetry to prose? In the case of Freudenberg, what did prose achieve that poetry couldn’t?
CCE: I’ve been writing both poetry and prose for many years, and there were times when I wrote screenplays with great dedication. But the language of the poem came first in my writing and will always remain my original literary language. The language of the poem is most closely linked to my inner self, to my deepest wishes and fears. Writing poetry always means striving to learn more about yourself, but with an open outcome, without guarantee that the pursuit will ever be successful. It’s like fishing. No one knows whether a fish will bite, but the longer you keep the rod in the water, the more likely it is that one will. Writing poems never follows a predetermined plan or plot, it is perhaps the exact opposite of a crime novel, which has to be meticulously prepared in order to work. In the end, a crime novel may be more exciting for some readers than a poem, but I think poetry is the most exciting form of writing for an author. I actually approached the novel Freudenberg like a long poem. I let myself drift, completely immersed myself in this character who I didn’t quite understand and who wasn’t me either. Freudenberg came to me directly from real life. He was a 17-year-old boy in a secondary school class I had taught for a few months many years before. A boy who never spoke, at least I never heard him speak, not a word. Even when I spoke to him directly, he would remain silent. He was trapped in a kind of psychological bunker, unable to look anyone in the eye. The other students ignored him at best or at worst bullied him, which I tried to prevent. I couldn’t let go of this boy, I felt compelled to think about him more and more often, every day. Maybe I started writing this novel because I couldn’t help the boy out of his bunker back then—to try to understand him better as a character in the novel, to be able to open him up and ultimately save him. All other characters and events in the novel are purely fictional. I never met the real boy again. What remained was a novel, or an extended poem, a great perception machine. Having said that, I sometimes think that this novel is also a hellish machine the protagonist has to go through to emerge as a more open person at the end. Another wild thought from that time: I wanted to write a novel that was thematically linked to Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. Back then, no author had impressed me more.
AR: Derrida says somewhere that there is no literature without a suspended relation to meaning and reference--suspended which could mean suspense but also dependence, conditionality. What do you make of that in terms of your own writing?
CCE: Derrida seems to me to be too broad a field for a short answer, but I do like thinking about how much I like the word “suspended” in connection to literature. Yes, true literature exists in a floating state and also puts readers into a kind of floating state. Sentences, poems, stories that leap up into the air to look around, to see and understand better. Of course there is always the desire for a safe place to land, but great literature does not rush back to these apparently safe landing places in the form of quick punchlines and solutions, it does not land so quickly and sometimes not at all. It endures the floating. It endures the not knowing. Great literature marvels with us. There is no landing, only wonder.
Carl-Christian Elze's most recent books are Oda and my stuffed father (Zoo stories; kreuzerbooks 2018), slowly fading in the labyrinth (Venice poems; Verlagshaus Berlin 2019) and panic/paradise (Verlagshaus Berlin 2023). His debut novel Freudenberg (Voland & Quist 2022) was longlisted for the 2022 German Book Prize.
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