Great Fugue is Volker Braun’s most recent collection, an attempt to understand the strange, silent world of 2020 and the COVID pandemic. Drawing on Dante, Beethoven and Pound, the book examines the catastrophic conflict between Progress and Nature in the Anthropocene Age. A book about the day the world stood still in 2020, when our cities were sedated, the streets fell silent and Nature refused to submit to human ideas of Progress. In the Anthropocene era, the Mekong no longer finds its delta, fires burn in the dry forests, and the seas and the skies are fatally poisoned. German writer Volker Braun tries to measure a world caught between climate emergency and global instability, economic growth and social decay.