With two highly successful poetry collections, the young Durs Grünbein began his literary career in the brief period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification. "Grauzone morgens," his first collection of poems, introduced to the Suhrkamp Verlag by Heiner Müller, reads today as a historical document: the last lyrical protocol from the crumbling socialist empire. "Schädelbasislektion" continued this exploration: Drawing from the experience of language decay and urban loneliness, from the destruction of ideology and the dissolution of the subject, it devised the megametaphor of the brain and documented the impact of the radically altered reality of a newly formed state as a moment of shock and a rupture of continuity. Finally, "Falten und Fallen" caused the poet to pause in taking stock of the new Western everyday life and led the search for orientation through nat.