Emergency Information

"Time heals all wounds, except the last one." Günter Kunert confronts life's tribulations with a generous dose of cynicism – and collects things to remember in everyday emergencies.
Günter Kunert, one of the most important German poets and narrators, has always remained a piercingly ironic observer of life's major and minor catastrophes, and this is reflected in the present collection of writings that detail his personal history – a history defined by spiritual and geographical homelands, the fuzzy borders of metropolis and suburb, and the urge to look beneath stones that many Germans would prefer to leave unturned.

In portraits of Primo Levi and Theodor Lessing, Günther Anders and Wolf Biermann, Kunert shows what matters most to him: a political consciousness that confronts history unflinchingly – and the responsibility for his own historical involvement that a writer must shoulder and accept. Auskunft für den Notfall is no less than the sum of Günter Kunert's poetical and political thinking.