Nelly Sachs wrote Eli in memory of Holocaust victims

Person: Nelly Sachs
Lived: 1891–1970
Field: Poetry
From: German-Swedish

The story

When Nelly Sachs reached Stockholm in May 1940 she was nearly fifty, almost unknown as a writer, and living in poverty with her elderly mother. As news of the Nazi extermination camps reached her, her writing broke through into something new. Alongside the poems that became In the Houses of Death, she wrote a series of plays in memory of those who had suffered and perished in the Nazi concentration camps. The best known is Eli: Ein Mysterienspiel vom Leiden Israels (Eli: A Mystery Play of the Sufferings of Israel). Encyclopedia.com notes that Eli was one of twelve plays she wrote in this period.

Written in 1943, Eli unfolds in seventeen loosely connected scenes set in the aftermath of the Holocaust. At its centre is the murder of Eli, an eight-year-old shepherd boy who raised his flute to the sky in anguish and was killed by a German soldier. Sachs wove his story together with the old Jewish legend of the thirty-six hidden righteous people on whom the world depends. Structurally the play has the simplicity of a medieval mystery play, while its world is one where innocence falls victim to evil.

Swedish friends arranged a private edition of just 200 numbered copies, signed by the poet. The play found its way to Germany, where it became a widely acclaimed radio play and was later staged. The Swedish composer Moses Pergament set it to music as an opera for Swedish radio, and the German city of Dortmund commissioned the composer Walter Steffens to write another opera, Eli, which premiered at the city's new opera house in 1967.

When the Nobel committee honoured Sachs in 1966 it praised her lyrical and dramatic writing alike, and the Nobel Foundation's biography singled out Eli as her widely acclaimed poetic drama. The play was translated into English with a selection of her poems in the 1967 collection O the Chimneys, translated by Michael Hamburger and others.

Eli remains her best-known play. It gave German audiences, only a few years after the war, a way to face what had been done in their name through the gentle, haunting voice of a child, and, written while the murders were still going on, it stands among the earliest dramatic responses to the Holocaust.

Why it matters

Eli brought the memory of the murdered Jews of Europe to German audiences through radio, theatre and opera in the years after the war.

About Nelly Sachs

Berlin-born poet who escaped to Sweden in 1940 and gave voice to the murdered Jews of Europe, sharing the 1966 Nobel Prize in Literature with S. Y. Agnon.

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Nelly Sachs

1891–1970 · Poetry

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