Yevgeniy Breyger's hallo niemand fuses satire, myth, and blasphemous wit in bold new poetry
When War, Crisis, and Inflation Become Too Much—Can You Hurl a Poem at Reality's Frozen Grimace?
Can poetry, if only temporarily, suspend the clichés and hollow phrases of a world gone rigid? Yevgeniy Breyger's new collection, hallo niemand (hello nobody), does just that. The "hello" in the title signals spoken dialogue—rapid-fire exchanges and fluid, conversational rhythms that pulse through the book's 14 chapters, weaving them into a single sprawling poem. And "nemo," the Latin for "nobody," evokes Odysseus, who outwitted the Cyclops Polyphemus by hiding behind that very name. But it also summons Captain Nemo from Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea—a figure who rejects society for the depths, bound only to the ocean.
In Breyger's hallo niemand, the sea becomes the German Autobahn, where the lyrical "nobody," arriving from Vienna, speeds along in a red Audi A6. Homer and Verne aren't so much rewritten as repurposed—serving as a vast associative space for this anarchic verse road trip, packed with bizarre encounters and linguistic play, even slipping in biblical allusions. Religious language, invoking God and His wrathful Jewish counterpart, G'tt, is central to Breyger's dramaturgy. At the book's launch in Vienna's Alte Schmiede, he spoke of the "joy of blasphemy."
That joy is ever-present in this brilliant lyrical farce, which has no fixed center or overarching theme. The Hamburg villa of left-wing politician Gregor Gysi morphs into a torture chamber; Chancellor Friedrich Merz—deliberately misspelled as "März" (March)—and AfD co-leader Alice Weidel swap parties: März joins the far right, Weidel the CDU. "Nobody" confronts Weidel and her right-populist colleague Alexander Gauland with: "you have to take me now / … / to the camp, i'm a jew." Behind the anarchic humor, it's often unclear who's speaking. Breyger calls the text a "single hallucination," where identities are forged against external labels. Only occasionally does the visor lift: "forced sentences with 'i' out of me / ukraine, i say, i jew from ukraine." Here, he echoes his 2023 collection Frieden ohne Krieg (Peace Without War), a direct response to Russia's invasion.
Once caught in the pull of Breyger's meandering, sentence-long verses—each poem a river of thought—hallo niemand becomes impossible to put down. The surprise rhymes that flicker throughout and the effortless, flowing rhythm (sometimes tightening into classical hexameter) are hypnotic. Of this buoyant oral quality, Breyger notes: "Creating spontaneity is harder than writing hexameter."
This spoken immediacy, which satirically assembles reality's grotesque fragments into collages, elevates hallo niemand to a first-rate lyrical comedy. Asked about its tone, Breyger cites Shakespeare's belief: to depict sorrow, you must write comedy. Eschewing themes or theses, his work never begs for approval—embodying what he declared in his 2023 Munich speech on poetry: "Approval kills thought. Approval is the death of art. Approval is death. Resistance is life."
