As revelatory as it is disconcerting, and grounded in an encyclopedic knowledge, this book offers an eye-opening analysis of a major contemporary poet, Durs Grünbein, and of the cultural discourses of the Berlin Republic. Eskin uncovers an anti-Americanism and related antisemitism hiding in plain sight in Grünbein's oeuvre, and trenchantly asks how and why this aspect of the work of a poet so prominent in current German letters could be overlooked. Timely, cogent, uncomfortable yet compelling, this is a book that everyone must read to better understand our current troubled times.

Benjamin Morgan, Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Fellow and Tutor in German, Worcester College, University of Oxford, UK

With empathy, a fine eye for structural correlations, and sorrow, Michael Eskin brings out the fraught historical analogies, moral equivalences, and sedimented prejudices that mar the work of a great contemporary German poet. Durs Grünbein's most effective English-language advocate is also his most stringent critic. And that's as it should be.

Haun Saussy, University Professor, University of Chicago, USA; author of Are We Comparing Yet?

This timely book, which chronicles the encounter between a critic and a poet, is as much a memoir as it is a book of criticism and should be read as a meditation on German culture today. It is a reminder that despite the efforts put into reckoning with the past, ideologies long declared dead can reappear in unexpected places.

Martin Puchner, Byron and Anita Wien Professor of Drama and of English and Comparative Literature, Harvard University, USA; author of The Language of Thieves: My Family's Obsession with a Secret Code the Nazis Tried to Eliminate