- Person
- Nelly Sachs
- Lived
- 1891–1970
- Field
- Poetry
- From
- German-Swedish
The story
Nelly Sachs's early poetry, written as a young woman in Berlin, drew on German Romanticism and Christian legend. Her first book, Legends and Tales, appeared in 1921, and by the late 1920s her neo-romantic poems were appearing in Berlin newspapers. Later she disowned this early work and would not allow it to be republished.
The Holocaust transformed her writing. After fleeing to Stockholm in 1940, she was surrounded by people who spoke Swedish, and the writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger later observed that she was thrown back on the German language as her only homeland. As news of the extermination camps arrived, she wrote in 1943 and 1944 the poems that became a single long lament for her tormented people. As Wikipedia puts it, her experiences under Nazism made her a poignant spokesperson for the grief and yearnings of her fellow Jews.
Her collection In den Wohnungen des Todes (In the Houses of Death) appeared in 1947, published in East Berlin and dedicated to her dead brothers and sisters. It was followed by Sternverdunkelung (Eclipse of Stars) in 1949. Its poem 'O the Chimneys' has led German critics to call her the first writer to make the chimneys of Auschwitz the subject of poetry. The Nobel Foundation later wrote that the book creates a cosmic frame for the suffering of her time.
In these poems she mourned not only personal loss, including the death in a concentration camp of a man she had loved in her youth, but the catastrophe of the whole Jewish people. Cycles such as 'Prayers for the Dead Fiancé', 'Epitaphs Written on Air' and 'Choruses After Midnight' speak for the murdered and for those who survived them. Her language grew ever more compressed, returning again and again to images such as dust, stars, breath and stones, while echoing the prophetic language of the Hebrew Bible.
Sachs also drew on Jewish mysticism, reading the Zohar and Gershom Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, and the kabbalistic image of the Shekhinah mourning God's suffering people shapes her lament.
Verses from the 1947 collection now frame the sculpture The Deserted Room on Berlin's Koppenplatz, unveiled in 1996, and composers from Germany to Korea have set her poems to music. Her poems remain among the earliest and most enduring memorials to the murdered Jews of Europe.
Why it matters
Sachs's Holocaust poems gave the victims a lasting memorial in verse and helped readers confront an almost unspeakable loss.
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.
More about Nelly Sachs
- Nelly Sachs brought Swedish poetry to German readersIn exile, Nelly Sachs learned Swedish and became a highly regarded translator of contemporary Swedish poetry into German.
- Nelly Sachs wrote Eli in memory of Holocaust victimsNelly Sachs's verse play Eli: A Mystery Play of the Sufferings of Israel was written in memory of those who perished in the Nazi camps.
Sources
- Nelly Sachs Wikipedia
- Nelly Sachs Encyclopedia.com
- Nelly Sachs German Wikipedia
- Nelly Sachs: Biographical NobelPrize.org
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