"Be uncomfortable, be sand, not oil in the machinery of the world" - this is perhaps the most famous line from the poems of Günter Eich, who was at the height of his fame in the 1950s and 1960s, and whose poems, alongside those of Gottfried Benn and Karl Krolow, represented for many readers the epitome of what modern poetry could achieve after 1945. What had driven people to the atrocities of the Third Reich did not simply vanish with its end. Günter Eich addressed this persistence with a new imagery, using ciphers, riddles, and symbols for the uncanny and inexplicable aspects of human nature. His poems increasingly moved towards a witty-laconic pessimism, quietly directing stubbornness and dry mockery against the all-consuming force of consumerism, against thoughtless consensus and foolishness.