“On the eve of the Second World War, many men of good will said that they could not understand how the great ‘people of poets and thinkers’ could have produced the realities of the thirties. The legend gained popularity that there were tow kinds of Germans, two different traditions, one good and one bad.

“The excessive aestheticism of some anthologies abets such notions. One picks pretty sentiments from Heine’s early poems, possibly also from Goethe’s, emphasizes the romantics’ lyric flights, concentrates on nostalgia and unhappy love, ignores everything in Goethe and Heine that bites, leaves out Nietzsche and George’s later verse, and stops with Rilke. My point in including many previously untranslated poems is not a mere desire for novelty and least of all the wish to indict any poet; rather, this selection should facilitate a better understanding of German poetry.”