The article investigates Durs Grünbein’s love for ruins. This passion for archaeology is not only reflected in Grünbein’s poetic imagination but also in his poetic and aesthetic agenda, with its recourse to the great classics of German literature. On the whole, it can be stated that archeology itself and the archaeological object paradoxically acquire their materiality and sensory presence through the poetic activity, whereby it is the poetic word itself which is excavated through language, or retrieved among the waste and the débris of our European culture.
