On 12 September 1962, in a speech which was widely reported around the world, President John F. Kennedy explained his ambition to land a man safely on the moon before the end of the decade:

We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained […]. There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? […] We choose to go to the Moon! (quoted in Crotts 2014, 68)

This speech marked a key moment in the space race and, indeed, in the cultural history of space more broadly. Although the rhetoric of his speech suggested continuity with the daring spatial explorations of the past, the introduction of extra-terrestrial space as a potential realm of human conquest demanded a radical expansion of people’s understanding of the spaces which surrounded them.

The US’s technological ambition was informed by changing geopolitical contexts much closer to home, which also exerted significant influence over contemporary understandings of global space. The speech’s allusions to the threat of intergalactic conflict were a reminder of the military need for new space technology. A month after Kennedy’s speech, the Cuban Missile Crisis began, ushering in a new phase of the Cold War. Such was the impact of the Cold War on global spatial consciousness that by 1967 commentators had begun to speak of the world itself not as one contiguous domain, but rather as divided into ‘First’, ‘Second’ and ‘Third World’ countries, as if the three geopolitical groupings belonged on different planets entirely.

These terms, which originated in a 1952 article by the French anthropologist Alfred Sauvy, form part of a new vocabulary of space which emerged between the late 1950s and early 1970s (Sauvy 1952). The Oxford English Dictionary records the first use of the term ‘space race’, for example, as occurring in 1955.¹ Google’s Ngram Viewer, which charts the frequency of chosen terms in a large corpus of published texts over time, can be used to assess the extent to which the public discourse shifted throughout the twentieth century: the phrase ‘outer space’, first recorded in the mid-nineteenth century, entered the public consciousness at this time: instances of its use rose over 600 per cent between 1950 and 1960 (Michel et al. 2011). ‘Outer space’ even overtook ‘open space’ in terms of frequency of occurrence between 1960 and 1965, while terms like ‘free space’ and ‘empty space’ display a gradual decline. It is no coincidence, then, that it was also in this decade that Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre and others began to think of space in new ways, revealing it to be constructed by discourses, rather than being a neutral container for experience or simple physical reality. ‘Outer space’ was brought closer to everyday experience precisely because the terminology to describe it had become a part of everyday parlance.

The discovery of outer space was not the only spatial revolution which influenced the perception and representation of space in the 1960s and early 1970s. Critics now speak of the ‘global’ 1960s, highlighting the effect of new technological developments such as an increase in the speed of long distance travel and the circulation of global mass media, and their role in shaping political and popular discourses with a global reach (Dubinsky et al. 2009; Brown and Lison 2014). Looking backwards, perceptions of space were also profoundly affected by the trauma of the two World Wars, and attempts to memorialise atrocity. Literary representations, in poetry and other forms, were necessarily affected by these shifts: in light of the space race, the moon was no longer merely a distant symbolic locus of longing, romance and desire, as it had been for hundreds of years. Instead, Kennedy’s speech positioned it as a key battleground within a new spatial hierarchy. Philip Larkin’s ‘Sad Steps’, first published in 1968, can be read in these terms, as perhaps the first post-space race moon ode:

The poem’s title is taken from Sir Philip Sidney’s Sonnet XXXI in Astrophil and Stella, but earlier literary conventions for describing the moon are sarcastically eschewed. Instead, Larkin’s speaker ‘shivers slightly’ when imagining the physical reality of being on the moon. Before the technological advances of the 1960s, that physical reality would have been both unimaginable and largely irrelevant to the moon’s symbolic status. The poem marks the ‘invention’ of the moon as a place which might be experienced, even if only imaginatively, in its physical reality rather than as an abstract space or symbol. ‘Sad Steps’ is but one example of how the rapidly changing spatial paradigms of the 1960s and 1970s were reflected in poetry of the period; others are examined in the following chapters, including the intriguing spaces of language and memory which feature in the work of two linguistically experimental writers, J. H. Prynne and Paul Celan; the ‘unpartitioned’ poetic representations of space in politically divided cultural spaces, reflected in the work of the Irish writer Derek Mahon and the German Sarah Kirsch; and the shifting perspectives on space and place offered by Edwin Morgan and Ernst Jandl’s concrete poetry.

Attentive readers will notice that each of these pairs of poets consists of one German-language and one Anglophone writer. One aim of this book is to present a case for the importance of comparison in discussing representations of space, place and landscape in poetry, and it is to this end—as will become clear below—that I have made these two particularly sharply divided and unstable language areas the focus of my argument. There is a rich literary and critical heritage of writing about space and place in both language areas, and the comparisons presented in this book in the form of case studies of pairs of authors are intended to highlight the usefulness of—even need for—cross-language comparative study, and reveal areas in which both literary and critical work can be brought into productive dialogue.

Kennedy did not live to see the vision outlined in his speech become reality on 20 July 1969, just a few months before the end of the decade. His speech was delivered during the period of most intense rivalry between the two superpowers, shortly after the USSR had succeeded in launching the first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, into space in April 1961. The Apollo moon landing of 1969 marked the climax of the space race, after which the conflict—military, ideological and technological—began temporarily to de-escalate; the crises of the late 1950s and early 1960s were replaced by a détente between Richard Nixon’s administration and the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev which held until the late 1970s (Daigle 2008).

European powers may not have played a key role in the space race (the European Space Agency was not established until 1975), but the shift from confrontation to collaboration nevertheless reflected to some extent the trajectory of European involvement in global geopolitics. In particular, West Germany’s move from refusing to engage with the German Democratic Republic (GDR) or its allies in the early 1960s to the ‘Ostpolitik’ of 1969 onward mirrored the overall status of US–USSR relations (Sarotte 2001; Von Dannenberg 2008). The events of 1968 were undoubtedly a turning point on both sides of the Iron Curtain, demonstrating the power of countercultural and counterhegemonic movements around the world. March 1968 saw political violence in Poland, foreshadowing the Prague Spring which took place in the summer of that year. At the same time, student movements in Berlin and Paris found their aims aligned with those of the broader New Left movement, leading to the famous mass protests and general strikes of May 1968.

In the UK, one of the most notable developments was the rapidly accelerating demise of colonial power structures. Three British colonies had gained independence in the 1950s: the 1960s saw the transfer of power to autonomous governments in almost three times as many places. There had been little expectation of a long-term future for the British Empire in its existing form since at least the end of the Second World War, and decolonisation continued into the 1980s and beyond.² Nevertheless, as Neil Lazarus has argued, the late 1960s and early 1970s were a crucial period during which postcolonial discourses and theories began to emerge against the backdrop of growing cynicism about the likelihood of equitable international relations emerging as a consequence of decolonisation (Lazarus 2004). The consequences for British society and the economy were far-reaching. Economic decline was a feature throughout the 1960s and 1970s: growth was slow, traditional manufacturing and heavy industry began to disappear, and unemployment grew. Accelerated decolonisation also led to the acceleration of migration patterns based on colonial relations: in particular, Indian, Pakistani and West Indian immigrant populations in the UK increased significantly over the course of the decade (Hansen 2000, 3).

Migration in Germany was affected by quite different factors, most notably the active recruitment of migrant workers (‘Gastarbeiter’) by the government of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) beginning in 1960–1 (Bade 1992, 393–401). These workers came predominantly from southern Mediterranean countries including Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Turkey. Similarly, the GDR welcomed contracted workers from Mozambique, Vietnam and other Communist countries from the 1970s onwards (Zwengel 2011, 5). There was significant migration into the GDR from other Eastern Bloc countries (and vice versa), but limited migration from the GDR to West Germany after the late 1950s, due to movement restrictions imposed by the GDR government. Ethnic German ‘Aussiedler’ from other parts of Eastern Europe resettled in both West Germany and the GDR.

The Cold War undoubtedly drove some parts of the globe further apart in terms of physical accessibility and mutual understanding. At the same time, through changing patterns of mass migration and the development of new technology, it also linked parts of the globe in new ways—for example, through a rise in the influence of advertising and ...