There are poets one admires.
And there are poets who slowly take root somewhere inside one’s own thinking.
Max Herrmann-Neiße belongs, for me, to the second category.
His poem Der Zauberkünstler (The Magician) affected me deeply. It was one of those poems that do not simply end once they are read, but continue to resonate quietly in the background over many years. At some point I began collecting his books through antiquarian dealers until I eventually owned his complete body of poetry. Books carrying the scent of past decades, yellowed pages, traces of other hands. Books one does not merely consume, but repeatedly returns to.
Perhaps that was the true beginning of this series.
Shortly before, I had completed a cycle dedicated to Georg Trakl. I showed some of the resulting images to a model and spoke about the ideas behind them — the poems, the darkness, the emotional atmosphere surrounding the work. She looked at the images for a long time and finally said, with shining eyes:
“I want to do this too.”
That was how the Max Herrmann-Neiße cycle began.
And once again, it became a deeply intimate body of work. Perhaps even more intimate than the Trakl cycle. Not because of the writing on the body, but because this series reveals a great deal about myself. Max Herrmann-Neiße describes large parts of my own inner landscape. His poems touch those darker, more vulnerable regions that people usually keep carefully hidden in everyday life.
The model understood these poems with remarkable sensitivity. She did not merely pose, but attempted to embody the emotional states behind the texts through expression, posture and physical presence. What emerged was not simply a photographic staging, but a shared approach toward the inner atmosphere of these poems.
The work in the studio was marked by a peculiar calmness. Concentrated. Quiet. The collaboration rested upon a trust that had developed over many previous shootings together — a trust built not through words, but through the repeated confirmation of the seriousness of my work and my intentions.
In order to write directly onto the body, I had to enter the model’s intimate personal space — she unclothed, I clothed, the body simultaneously becoming both canvas and bearer of expression. It was a profoundly vulnerable situation, one only made possible through mutual trust. For that, I remain deeply grateful.
The poems of Herrmann-Neiße resist illustration. They do not function through grand gestures or exaggerated Expressionist drama. Their power often lies precisely in restraint. In an inner trembling. In a form of existential exhaustion that nevertheless never becomes banal.
This also shaped the photographic language of the series.
Where the Trakl cycle relied more heavily on fragments, isolated body parts and almost dissolving forms, this series shifts more strongly toward the body as a whole — not as a classical nude, but as a carrier of psychological states. Shadow became more important than light. Suggestion more important than explicit visibility. Some figures seem already halfway dissolved.
The texts were once again written onto the body in Kurrent, a historical German cursive script officially taught in schools until 1941 — and therefore also the script in which Max Herrmann-Neiße himself wrote. Outside the German-speaking world, Kurrent is now almost entirely unknown and often illegible even to younger native speakers. Its broken lines, swelling strokes and unusual forms feel less like modern typography and more like traces or inscriptions. That was precisely what interested me.
Max Herrmann-Neiße himself remains largely unknown outside the German-speaking world and even within Germany or Austria is mainly familiar to dedicated readers of poetry. Unlike many major European poets, his work has never truly entered international literary consciousness, partly because his poems are extraordinarily difficult to translate. Much of their emotional force lies not only in meaning, but in rhythm, sound and subtle alliterations that resist transfer into another language without losing something essential.
Throughout his life, Herrmann-Neiße remained an outsider. A severe physical deformation shaped not only his appearance but also his experience of intimacy, estrangement and social isolation. Many contemporary reactions toward him were marked by cruelty and ridicule. His poems carry this experience within them — not as self-pity, but as a constant tension between longing and vulnerability.
His love poems therefore possess a very particular intensity. They rarely feel triumphant or confident. Instead, they approach intimacy with painful caution. In his work, homelessness often means more than political exile. It becomes an existential condition of not fully belonging — not to society, not to life, sometimes not even to one’s own body.
What fascinates me personally most about his poetry is his nearly perfect handling of sound and rhythm. His alliterations in particular possess extraordinary precision. They never feel decorative or artificially constructed, but seem to arise naturally from the language itself. Because of this, many of his poems develop a strange inward pull.
One does not merely read them through meaning.
One almost hears them physically.
Perhaps that is part of their enduring power. Herrmann-Neiße rarely writes loudly. His language never forces itself upon the reader. Yet beneath the surface there operates a dense network of repetitions, tonal echoes and delicate rhythmic shifts. The poems continue reverberating quietly in the mind long after one has finished reading them.
Perhaps that is precisely where their greatness lies.
They do not try to appear important.
They simply are.
When the series was completed, the model said something that affected me unexpectedly:
“No man has ever captured me so beautifully.”
What moved me about that sentence was that it was true in more than one sense. During the creation of the series, I had literally written on her body — with marker, with Kurrent script, with broad and swelling strokes, and with the words of a poet who has long been part of my own inner world.