According to Mathilda Cullen, Jayne-Ann Igel was born in Leipzig, 1954, in the German Democratic Republic. Fahrwasser was her second poetic work, inaugurating her diaristic style with its publication in 1991. It was the first book she published after she came out (as a transgender woman) and changed her name as the Berlin Wall fell around her. She burst onto the samizdat literary scene of East Germany with a dysphoric style that meditates on fragments of language that approach her as strange, as a stranger.
She writes, “I think everything I’ve written so far is only because Jayne-Ann had kept quiet, kept withdrawing;” noting that “no matter how my language might change, internally, essentially, in its quality, it will not become unknowable, for it draws its life from the same identity I have assumed, it’s been with me for a long time, it’s the reason I move.”
