Hans Jürgen von der Wense: the Imaginary Poet

Abstract

Hans Jürgen von der Wense (1894-1966) continues to be the poorly kept secret of the most original German language writers, and who knows for how long thanks to the recently published edition of his work. A personality and opus such as his would have won him the approval and probably deepest affection of outstanding figures and writers such as Kafka and W. G. Sebald. The majority of his vast work, approximately thirty thousand loose pages brimming with notes –details, outlines of essays on all kinds of knowledge, translations, versions in over a hundred languages and dialects from all over the world, over three thousand photographs, drawings, forty musical compositions, five to six thousand letters– are an inventory of the world, a world that Wense ordered and re-organised again and again, keeping it in an unfinished state. In the light of Wense’s texts, which reflect a unique concept of identity, once again, the author’s function and his relation with the fragmentary can be questioned.