From the Annex to the Studio Hans Magnus Enzensberger's Museum of modern Poetry (1960)

In 1960, two competing anthologies of modern poetry were published in an attempt to renew and internationalize German poetry: Gunther Steinbrinker's Panorama moderner Lyrik and Hans Magnus Enzensberger's Museum der modernen Poesie. This essay argues that the success of Museum over Panorama was based on Enzensberger's comparative approach to modernist poetry in the first half of the twentieth century as a "chrestomathy" (a textbook) for a "world language of poetry". This chrestomathy also provided the blueprint for his own German-language poems, which he published the same year in a collection titled Landessprache.