These Numbered Days

Peter Huchel (1903-1981) was born in Lichterfelde (now part of Berlin) as Hellmut Huchel. From 1923 to 1926 he studied literature and philosophy in Berlin, Freiburg and Vienna. Between 1927 and 1930 he travelled to France, Romania, Hungary and Turkey. In 1930, he changed his first name to Peter and befriended Ernst Bloch, Alfred Kantorowicz and Fritz Sternberg. His early poems, published from 1931 to 1936, are strongly marked by the atmosphere and landscape of Brandenburg. In 1934, Huchel married Dora Lassel. The couple would divorce in 1946 and Huchel would marry Monica Rosental in 1953. Between 1934 and 1940, Huchel wrote plays for German radio. During the Second World War, he served as a soldier until he was taken prisoner by the Russians in 1945. After his release, he began working for East German radio and in 1949, he became editor of the influential poetry magazine Sinn und Form (Sense and Form). After the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, Huchel came under attack from the East German authorities and the following year he was forced to resign the editorship of Sinn und Form. From 1962 to 1971, he lived in isolation under Stasi surveillance in his house in Wilhelmshorst near Berlin. In 1971, he was finally permitted to leave the GDR and move, first to Rome, then to Staufen im Breisgau in West Germany, where he later died. Martyn Crucefix has won numerous prizes including a major Eric Gregory award and a Hawthornden Fellowship. He has published six full collections of poetry, including The Lovely Disciplines (Seren, 2017). His translation of Rilke's Duino Elegies was shortlisted for the 2007 Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation and hailed as unlikely to be bettered for very many years (Magma). His translation of Rilke's The Sonnets to Orpheus appeared in 2012 and A Hatfield Mass was published by Worple Press in 2014. Karen Leeder (1962) is a writer, translator and leading British scholar of German culture. She is professor of Modern German Literature in the University of Oxford and from 2016-2017 was Associate Head of the Humanities Division, University of Oxford. In 2017 she became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She is an award-winning translator, and she has won prizes for her translations of Volker Braun, Evelyn Schlag, Durs Grunbein and Ulrike Almut Sandig. She has published widely on German culture, including several volumes on Rilke and Brecht.