At Christmas a friend was clearing out the apartment of an older neighbor who’d recently died. He had a three-room apartment in Westend overlooking a quiet corner. Most of the furniture had been claimed, but my friend needed help removing the thousands and thousands of books. 

When she first invited me, I felt kind of morbid and invasive. But personally I would take comfort thinking a crowd of readers might adopt my books when I died. In fact come to think of it, living in a foreign country, I have worried about this very thing. 

The man who’d died, Raimond, was a bibliophile. The majority of his books were in German so I skipped the novels and history and went for art and photography, though I did surrender to some particularly beautiful books, whether for the covers or subject or gothic font. I don’t have much shelf space left at home so I tried to be disciplined and discerning. I even turned my back on his ample poetry collection. 

I did give in to one small book, though. I felt like a voyeur leafing through something so personal, but in a flimsy floral notebook, Raimond had pasted poems he choose from newspapers and magazines. Some clippings were still bunched together at the back of the book. In pasting, he grouped a poet’s work together — there’d be two pages of Günter Eich, for example, before moving on to Sarah Kirsch, whom he obviously loved. 

The notebook appealed to me because I have one in which I’ve done exactly the same thing. The difference is I pasted only one poem per page, accompanied by an image. I remember the hours spent carefully choosing and arranging, and enjoyed thinking of my kindred out there doing the same.

Raimond’s curated anthology was the prize of my trip. I hope he wouldn’t have minded passing it along. 

Raimond Hagenmaier 29.3.1922 – 27.11.2018