396 GRANICE
In a cool and gentle valley
The mill-wheel still is turning.
But my sweetheart has departed,
And will not be returning.
O valleys broad! O soaring crags,
And fair green woods below!
My refuge for reflecting
On all life's joy and sorrow...
Deep in the forest stands engraved
The quiet, telling truth
Of how aright to live and love,
Of where lies man's real wealth...
Yet I, too, soon must leave you.
A stranger in a stranger's land.
I'll watch on some packed avenue
The world's immodest pageant.
Misfortune and pain, like familiar thieves
So stealthily overtake us;
For everything that we hold most dear
Must surely be parted from us.^41Indeed, from today's viewpoint, Eichendorff's exquisite nostalgia presaged the
impending doom of German life in the east no less forcefully than the apoca-
lyptic scenes of 'War' in the poetic premonitions of yet another Silesian, Georg
Heym (1887-1912):
Hugely he towers above the glowing ruins,
And thrice thrusts his torch into the wild heavens...
Through the storm-rent billows' fiery reflection
Into the deathly darkness of cold desolation,
Shrivelling the night with distant flames of horror
As fire and brimstone consume and engulf Gomorrah.^42Both Germans and Poles are still coming to terms with the changes of 1945.
As in the Polish-Ukrainian case, the forcible separation of the nationalities gave
an opportunity for respite and reflection. But in Polish-German relations, the
wounds, if not older, were deeper, and may take longer to heal. Historians on
both sides have begun to correct the grosser distortions which have fed nation-
alist prejudices in the past. On this score, scholars in West Germany did not
have to operate within the ideological constraints prevailing in People's Poland
or in the German Democratic Republic, and undertook the most far-reaching
revisions. Nor did the West German literary scene lack interest in Polish themes.
In the work of Gunther Grass (born 1927 in Danzig), whose 'Danzig Triology'
- Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1959), Katz und Maus (Cat and Mouse,
1961), and Hundesjahre (A Dog's Life, 1963) - must be counted among the mas-
terpieces of contemporary literature, there were signs that the old Polenlyrik
was not entirely dead. As a witness to eastern Germany's catastrophe, Grass