Although Johannes Bobrowski is known primarily for his poetry, he made significant contributions to the development of East German fiction, and his influence was also felt in West German letters. In the 1960s, when socialist realism and the portrayal of contemporary conflicts dominated the literary scene in the German Democratic Republic, Bobrowski introduced a fragmented, disjunctive, nonlinear prose in which the narrator continually intrudes into the story by questioning the choice of words or the development of the plot. This device serves to remind the reader of the fictional nature of the work and the arbitrariness of the creative process. The disavowal of the omniscient narrator and the skepticism regarding the adequacy of literature to capture reality can also be found in the literary theories of Uwe Johnson and Arno Schmidt. Bobrowski's style, which has its roots in the oral tradition of folk literature and is thus colloquial...