Poems: Florian Günther
Photographs: Michael Dressel
Publisher: Moloko Plus
Year: 2021
Size: 200 x 130 x 13 mm
Pages: 194, offset printed & perfect bound
Languages: English/German
Translations: Amira Jehia, Michael Dressel, John Tottenham
Design: Florian Günther
Postage & packing not included
For the third time Florian Günther and Michael Dressel have teamed up to publish a book under the wings of Moloko Plus. But where Moloko’s Aus der Traum in 2017, followed by Aus dem hoch Parterre in 2019, appeared in German only, a choice of Günther’s poems from these two books – and from earlier publications by other presses – has now been translated into English. Combined with new photographs by street photographer Michael Dressel they form the bilingual edition Remnants of Life / Ein Rest von Leben that Moloko Plus published early in 2021. For English readers a first opportunity to get acquainted with the work of this streetwise duo and get real with it.
Florian Günther was born in East Berlin in 1963. Formally trained as an offset printer, Günther did odd jobs such as gravedigger, construction worker, and pizza delivery boy, before finding his feet as a writer, photographer and publisher. Günther used to be singer in the Eastern German punk band Klick & Aus, co-edited Floppy myriapods, a Berlin based magazine, and has published his own magazine Drecksack – Lesbare Zeitschrift für Literatur from Berlin since 2010. “I was born in 1963 in the East Berlin district of Friedrichshain”, Günther once explained, “and I have lived there since, only a couple of hundreds of yards away from the hospital where I first saw the light of day and opposite the graveyard, where I will end in a shallow grave with the epitaph: it took him a lifetime to cross the street.”
Michael Dressel is also from Friedrichshain, where he was born in 1958. At the age of 23 Dressel tried to escape the German Democratic Republic, but was caught and sentenced to two years in a house of correction in 1981. No sooner had he finished doing time there, than he escaped to the West again, this time successfully. After a brief stay in West Berlin he moved to Los Angeles in 1984, where he has worked as a sound editor for many Hollywood productions since. During all those years Dressel has been active as a painter and a photographer of life on the streets both in the US and Europe.