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Oswald Egger is a German poet renowned for his closeness to nature and his translingual, transmedial qualities, having received the Georg Büchner Prize. His poetic language is self-sufficient, encouraging associative interpretations and subverting traditional textual hermeneutics. Egger currently serves as a professor at the Kiel University of Fine Arts, engaging with multiple disciplines to enrich his creative vocabulary and modes of expression. His avant-garde approach manifests in elements beyond language, text, and script—such as typography, layout, and illustrations—rendering his works multilayered and multifaceted, akin to a "Gesamtkunstwerk" (total artwork) that transcends traditional artistic categories. The complexity and intermediality of his works have earned him numerous awards and critical acclaim, yet they also pose challenges for readers and scholars. Current academic research on Egger remains limited, and traditional philological methods prove inadequate when confronted with his intricate, multidimensional creations. His 2007 poetry collection *Die ganze Zeit* (All the While) epitomizes his avant-garde vision of "total art," seeking to unify disciplines like mathematics, visual arts, and music under the ancient framework of "song." This study aims to employ a combination of conceptual history and musicology, close reading and distant reading, to analyze the relationship between the collection and music, specifically addressing the intermediality in Egger’s work. By doing so, it hopes to offer possible interpretive pathways for his obscure texts, clarify their connection to the modernist tradition in German-speaking regions, and reflect on the characteristics and challenges of contemporary German avant-garde literature.

Avant-Garde and Popularity: German Literature and Music in the Modern Context

This section explores the avant-garde and popular dimensions of German literature and music in modernity. Martin Luther’s hymns propelled the Reformation, while Herder’s folk song collections and works like *Winterreise* significantly influenced intellectual and political modernization in German-speaking regions. The modernist era in literature, spurred by Wagner’s modernist aspirations, shaped thinkers like Nietzsche. German literary modernism gave rise to key figures such as Rilke and Trakl, whose works, in turn, influenced modern music. Modernist literature exhibits trends like the dissolution of subjectivity, defiance of tradition, and deconstruction of artistic boundaries, fostering polysemy and fragmentation. Despite its obscurity, modernist literature maintains a close tie to popularity, as writers, driven by avant-garde consciousness, sought to lead society into a new era through art. The modernization of music is evident in the dismantling of tonality, with new music reflecting societal distortions through dissonance while upholding its popular appeal. The avant-garde and popular aspects of new music converge in its dialectical cognitive function. The collaboration between modern German writers and musicians laid the groundwork for *Die ganze Zeit*'s "total art" approach, offering a framework for understanding its experimental "songs."

Atonality, Polyphony, and the Tristan Chord: Musical Experimentation and "Total Art" in *Die ganze Zeit*

*Die ganze Zeit*, published in 2007, is a poetry collection accompanied by a CD and defined as a "total artwork." It explores the connection between land and discourse through the concept of "zinc flowers," linking poetry to the isomorphic structure of zinc oxide crystals and suggesting that poetry originates from a mysterious convergence of life and language. The collection’s structure mimics zinc flower patterns, with 3,650 quatrains divided into 365 groups, each accompanied by a radial geometric design, forming a metaphor for wholeness. The poems exhibit linear counterpoint and atonal techniques, where content and numbering follow no logical sequence, and recurring elements lack coherent connections. Egger selected 365 poems for recording, organized into three "voices" using an odd-numbered sequence, echoing Baroque-era crab canons. The grammatical features of the collection further underscore its "atonality," subverting syntax to create an impression of lexical equality, polysemy, and multidimensionality. Egger deconstructs language both horizontally and vertically, dismantling syntactic and traditional reading constraints to achieve unprecedented freedom in word relationships. The macro-design of the collection aligns with "zinc flower" morphology, while its atonal and polyphonic techniques bear resemblance to new music.

Absolute Art and the Absolute Subject: *Die ganze Zeit* and the Values of Avant-Garde Music

This section delves into the concept of "new song" in Egger’s *Die ganze Zeit* and its alignment with avant-garde musical values. Egger declares traditional song obsolete, using musical techniques to radically reinvent "song" and offer new metaphysical insights. The "new song" in the collection shares traits with new music, such as irregular rhythms and lexical juxtaposition, embodying "atonality." The polysemy of adjectives like "tönern" (earthen) mirrors the Tristan chord, expanding the gap between signifier and signified and introducing différance. Through linguistic play, Egger challenges the phonocentrism of conventional "song," emphasizing the materiality of text and the importance of visual reading. The fusion of "new song" and imagery in the collection liberates words from syntactic and social constraints, highlighting textual complexity and rejecting literary tradition. Egger envisions a prehistorical unity of art forms, where "being beyond beings" or "the origin of the child" can momentarily reveal itself. The "new song" reflects his confidence in its dialectical cognitive function, signaling a return to new music’s technical rigor and a rethinking of art and subjectivity. However, the collection also exposes the paradox of pursuing "absolute art." The tension between atonal content and tonal form conveys Egger’s struggle, while his use of present-tense verbs embodies a defiant persistence. This underscores how no art can fully escape history and praxis—once created, it inevitably engages with the "outside," solidifying into new traditions or dogmas.

The Dilemma of "Artistic Autonomy" and the Avant-Garde

This section examines how *Die ganze Zeit* transcends modernism to forge new paths for contemporary literature. Egger draws from new music to emphasize the "newness" of art and the "truth" of existence, integrating atonality and linear counterpoint into literature to liberate words and expand expressive boundaries. His "new song" concept surpasses Wagner, aligning more with Kandinsky’s "synthetic total art," bridging disciplines and pioneering literary-musical fusion. Yet Egger’s understanding of "song" clashes with Adorno’s new music theory—his lyrical subject is elitist and detached from mass culture, rooted in pre-industrial nostalgia and Rousseauian "return to nature" ideals. This deliberate disregard for the "present" ironically highlights the historical dimension of *Die ganze Zeit*. Despite its formal innovations, the collection remains modernist in content, reflecting the risks of formalism and expressive dilemmas in contemporary German literature.

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