Anton G. Leitner (born 16 June 1961) is a German writer and publisher.
He has also gained a widespread reputation as an editor, reciter, and organizer of literary events. Since 1980, Leitner edited over 40 anthologies for major publishers in the German language, such as , dtv, dtv/Hanser, Eichborn Lido, Goldmann, and Reclam. He is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the poetry magazine DAS GEDICHT, which has been published annually since 1993.
Although he specializes on poetry, Leitner is also the author of short stories, essays, as well as literary critique and reviews. Additionally, he has published children's books and audiobooks. He has been instrumental in raising public awareness for the art form since the early 80s and has concentrated his efforts on fostering a broad environment for poetry that crosses cultural and intergenerational boundaries. In doing so, he has not shied away from controversy and critical public debate on the role of poetry within society.
Leitner is co-founder of PEN Berlin and member of PEN International as well as Poets of the Planet (PoP).
Life Leitner was born in Munich. After graduating in 1981 from the Wittelsbacher-Gymnasium in Munich (a secondary school with a strong humanistic tradition), he studied law and philosophy from 1982 to 1988 at LMU Munich.Tageblatt. Die Zeitung für Luxemburger, Wir sind Irrfahrer. Anton G. Leitner über die Macht der Poesie, 22.08.2006. Having attained his bar examination in 1989, he completed his legal clerkship at the Oberlandesgericht (Higher Regional Court) Munich from 1990–1993. Since 1993, he lives and works professionally as an author, critic, editor, and publisher in Weßling (County of Starnberg), because "he prefers dealing with poems rather than sitting around at courts."Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, Die Solidarität der Neugierigen, 8.08.2001. Early on, as a high school student, Leitner published, parallel to his childhood friend Helmut Krausser, private prints, which already indicated a remarkable talent in the realization of editorial and publishing projects, as his early books Füllhorn and Nachböen (1980/1981) show.
Initiative of Young Authors
In the early 80s, he founded the Initiative of Young Authors (IJA German: "Initiative Junger Autoren") together with Friedrich Ani, Michael Lentz, Nicola Bardola, and others. He was the chairman of the organization until 1991.Süddeutsche Zeitung, Sprudelnder Quell des Anstoßes. Gedichte machen nicht satt, aber glücklich: Das Leben des Lyrikers und Provokateurs Anton G. Leitner, 26.01.2011. Under Leitner's aegis, the IJA organized the Festival Interactions / "Young Literature Days" ("Tage junger Literatur") in cooperation with IBM-Germany at the Gasteig Cultural Center in 1988. It remains to this day one of the largest literary festivals in the Bavarian capital of Munich. The Tagesspiegel, amused by the young and independent organization, wrote: "This young movement does not exhaust its effort in intimate orange tea readings."Der Tagesspiegel, Unterwegs in die Öffentlichkeit. Junge Autoren helfen sich selber, 18.01.1987 S. VIII. One important platform within the IJA was the Munich-based publication, Der Zettel, in which many now widely celebrated writers published their first poems and have frequently been flanked by international authors, such as Vladimir Sorokin.Münchner Merkur, Hebamme für neue Talente. Der Bundesring junger Autoren in München, 26.06.1986 S. 38. Leitner's personal reading style has been influenced by the many public performances within the ranks of the Initiative. During his enrollment as a law student, he already edited poetry and prose focused on aspiring authors for Goldmann and was member of the jury for the national competition "Schüler schreiben" at the "Conference of Young Authors" in Berlin.Starnberger Merkur, Fortschritt-Gedichte in Richtung Untergang, 03.09.1986.
Poetry Currently, 24 volumes of poems stand out in Leitner's larger contribution to the art form, which also includes over 40 poetry anthologies, as well as more than 30 issues of the magazine . His poems have also been featured in magazines, newspapers, television and radio broadcasts (e.g. Brigitte, mare, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Zeit, Bayerischer Rundfunk, etc.).Die Horen Nr. 189 Schreite fort, Schritt, 43. Jg. Bd. 1, 1998 Nr. 189 S. 209: "In keiner Phase seiner lyrischen Entwicklung ist Leitner steckengeblieben, sondern hat nach seinem eigenen Motto Schreite fort, Schritt inzwischen den Weg gefunden, der ihn wohl allmählich, aber sicher zu Paul Wühr, Ernst Jandl und Karl Riha führen wird, nämlich zur Demontage des Wortes, um neue Sinngebung der Teilelemente in der Brechung, im Sprachspiel, in der Remontage zu finden." Many of his poems have been included in anthologies, focusing on contemporary poetry in German. Leitner's poetic work has always stood in critical relation to his editorial work, which not only informs and influences his work as an author, but also places his own poetry in a unique situation in terms of aesthetic production, as various commentators have noted.Die Welt Der Verleger als Poet, 21.04.2001 S. 42. While attempting to locate Anton G. Leitner's persona within the literary landscape of contemporary poetry in 1986, Manfred Lange wrote: "He's hard to classify, and that makes him likeable. He doesn't give you ready-to-use worldviews, but thoughts, perspectives, and a strong plea for new departures."Deutsche Tagespost Schreite fort, 17.05.1986 S. 15.
"So! Cease / Hearing / The silence of / things." Poetry as a Necessitating Breaking Point
Various critics have placed Leitner's poetic approach at a gap between modernism and postmodernism. The Süddeutsche Zeitung said that in Leitner's work "what is happing between the words, is a conquest of new territories:" in a lingually recorded terrain, "large spaces emerge amongst the seemingly trusted and established networks."Süddeutsche Zeitung Der Vulkan in der Analyse, 17.04.2001. His poetry, critics say, captures reality in fragments that are broken in their apprehension, but do not simply remain as scattered pieces, "as Leitner's technique of fragmentation along with his steady shifts in pitch, tone, and perspective are embedded in a comprehensive design."Anton G. Leitner: Das Meer tropft aus dem Hahn, Meer – Insel – Liebe. Ein Vorspruch, von Joachim Sartorius 2001. The immediate evidence of his imagery, displayed in his verse, has been noted by his admirers as well as his rivals. In the weekly newspaper based in Hamburg, Die Zeit, Alexander Nitzberg wrote: "The verbal simulacrum/Blendwerk frequently only frames sentences full of serenity and poetry."Die Zeit, Das Wort beim Wort nehmen, 04.10.2001. What Nitzberg, as well as, for example, Joachim Sartorius, have discovered to be characteristic of Leitner's work is a form of poetry that balances the ambiguity inherent in outward intelligibility and inward magic.Anton G. Leitner: Das Meer tropft aus dem Hahn, Meer – Insel – Liebe. Ein Vorspruch, von Joachim Sartorius 2001. With Leitner, the poet, "the art of the enjambment achieves a height that fringes on charlatanry" (Nitzberg). Nitzberg furthermore remarks that Leitner does not show us "smoothly rippling oceanic waves, but tiny painful drops."Die Zeit, Das Wort beim Wort nehmen, 04.10.2001. Die Zeit, Feuilleton Literatur, 08.12.2011 S. 71.
Style and technique Leitner sabotages conventional ways of verse construction by a systematic usage of the enjambment, whereby he attains a multiple coding of his lines with meaning. Steffen Jacobs, for example, highlighted this procedure during a discussion of Leitner's poem Abends, immer in Die Welt: "Anton G. Leitner's poem Abends, immer offers interesting material exemplifying an extreme form of the enjambment: here the line breaks frequently give the poem an entirely new direction. In the beginning, Leitner's poem seems to bring us into a car: 'Preferably, // he lay / obliquely. She // stands up.' A dialog full of tensions may be implied here, but also a change of position – of the erotic type."Die Welt, Abends, immer, 02.03.2005. By dramatically "shattering the relations of sentences and individual words"Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, Nicht bei dieser Hitze, 30.07.1998. in his poems, he creates the effect of estrangement, the conventional usage of language and images within everyday language is opened to new interpretations. In combination with an extremely condensed language, Leitner's poetic approach has proven to be exceptionally productive in bringing contemporary phenomena into the domains of verse: "His verse mimics the high velocity of contemporary experience in the meters of a new age – no word, no syllable, no character too much."Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, Kritik in aller Kürze, 23.08.2011. "Leitner relentlessly works with chiastic and superimposed semantic vectors that are capable of producing paradoxical and bamboozling effects. He frequently mixes word families, crosses through boundaries of word fields, splices word compounds, contrives unusual sequences of associations, and shatters those which we might expect."Ulrich Johannes Beil, Nachwort zu Die Wahrheit über Uncle Spam 2011 S. 114.
Poetry as cultural critique Relatively early in his career, the literary scholar Ulrich Johannes Beil observed the specific form of critique within Leitner's verse: "By way of his language, Leitner creates the resistance that reality is no longer able to offer him."Anton G. Leitner: Schreite fort, Schritt, Nachwort von Ulrich Johannes Beil, 1986. In his review entitled "Love and social critique," Fritz Deppert has verified that observation while exploring Leitner's collection of poems "Schreite fort, Schritt."Darmstädter Echo, Leitners Lyrik. Liebe und Gesellschaftskritik,16.06.1995 S. 13. Leitner, says Lutz Rathenow in an analysis of the poem Angel in Die Welt, often varies the motif of uncertainty: "Anton G. Leitner goes beyond that: and what is there to do, when angels no longer know what they are and what their mission is? In this slender poem of no more than 27 words, angels are, above all, exhausted. The author is able to place each word with such ambiguity that the poem raises more questions than answers."Die Welt, Engel, 24.04.1999. While some commentators capitulate in the face of a supposed "pessimism,"Starnberger Merkur, Fortschritt-Gedichte in Richtung Untergang, 03.09.1986: "Es überwiegt der Zorn und das Entsetzen über eine aus den Fugen geratenen Welt." others accentuate the notion of a "cynical reason:"
The mode of critique evident in Leitner's poetry, which operates with a subjectivity that is well aware of its post-modern loss of normative frameworks, places his poetry in close proximity with the spirit of philosophical existentialism. Thomas Krüger has commented on the battle for authenticity documented in Leitner's work in a review published in Die Horen: "[Leitner's search for authenticity] is refracted in evident fact that in an environment dominated by market capitalism, political disorientation, and the vane apostasy of product labels, there is no authentic existence – not even in the believable simulacrum called utopia."Die Horen Nr. 192, Spiel mit Perspektiven, Jg. 43 Bd. 4 1998 Nr. 192 S. 203.
Humor – irony – parody