A sheltered Berlin childhood
Leonie Nelly Sachs was born on 10 December 1891 in Schöneberg, then a wealthy suburb of Berlin, the only child of Georg William Sachs, an engineer, inventor and manufacturer of rubber and gutta-percha goods, and his wife Margarete, née Karger. The family was Jewish but largely assimilated; they did not observe even the High Holy Days, and Nelly grew up in a cultivated, comfortable villa world of books, music and dance, with little contact with Jewish tradition.
She was a delicate, introverted child. After three years with private tutors she entered a girls’ high school in 1903 and finished her schooling around 1908. She studied dance and music, and dreamed for a time of becoming a dancer. Her parents protected her closely, and she remained deeply attached to them, above all to her mother, for the rest of their lives.
A letter to Selma Lagerlöf
At fifteen, a devoted reader of the Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlöf, Nelly began a correspondence with her. The correspondence lasted more than thirty years and would, in the end, save her life. Sachs began writing poems at seventeen, in a gentle neo-romantic style, together with puppet plays and legends in the manner of Lagerlöf. Her first book, Legenden und Erzählungen (Legends and Tales), appeared in 1921 with the support of Stefan Zweig, and she sent a copy to Lagerlöf, who responded warmly.
She published poems in Berlin newspapers in the 1920s, but she was a minor and private writer, and in later life she disowned almost everything she had written before the war, refusing to let it be reprinted. Her father died of cancer in 1930 after a long illness, and she and her mother moved from the family villa to an apartment in the Hansaviertel.
Persecution and escape
After the Nazis came to power in 1933, the Sachs women lived through the steady tightening of anti-Jewish laws, the loss of property and rights, and the terror of Kristallnacht in 1938. Nelly was so terrified that for a time she lost the ability to speak. Her friend Gudrun Harlan travelled to Sweden to plead on her behalf; Lagerlöf, by then old and ill, wrote a recommendation, and Prince Eugen, the painter brother of the Swedish king, lent his support. Lagerlöf died in March 1940, before her friend could reach her.
In 1940, as deportation threatened, a Swedish visa came through. On 16 May 1940, about a week before Nelly was due to report to a camp, she and her mother left Berlin on one of the last regular flights to Stockholm. They had escaped with almost nothing, and they arrived in a country whose language Nelly did not yet speak.
A room by the water
In Stockholm mother and daughter lived at first on the help of Jewish welfare organisations, in a tiny flat in a building belonging to a welfare organisation in the harbour district in the south of the city. Nelly nursed her ailing mother and supported them both by learning Swedish and translating contemporary Swedish poetry into German. She became one of its foremost translators, publishing anthologies such as Von Welle und Granit (1947) and Aber auch diese Sonne ist heimatlos (1957), which introduced German readers to Swedish modernists.
The work was poorly paid and exhausting, and for years the two women lived close to poverty, supported in part by Swedish publishers and Jewish welfare bodies and, after the war, by restitution payments from the West German government. Yet translation gave Sachs a living, a place in Swedish literary life and a deepening intimacy with the language of the country that had saved her.
It was in this narrow room, with the news of the extermination camps arriving from Europe, that she found her true voice. The neo-romantic poet of Berlin vanished. In its place came a visionary poet of mourning who drew on the Hebrew Bible, and the imagery of the Kabbalah, in which the Shekhinah, the presence of God in the world, goes into exile with her people, to speak of what had been done to her people.
In the Habitations of Death
Her first collection of the new poems, In den Wohnungen des Todes (In the Habitations of Death), was published in East Berlin in 1947, dedicated to her dead friends and companions in suffering. Its poems speak to and for the dead, mourning those who vanished as smoke from the chimneys of the camps; when a selection of her work first appeared in English in 1967, it was titled O the Chimneys. Sternverdunkelung (Eclipse of Stars) followed in 1949.
During the war years she also wrote Eli: Ein Mysterienspiel vom Leiden Israels (Eli: A Mystery Play of the Sufferings of Israel), set in a Polish Jewish village after the catastrophe. It was printed privately in a small edition around 1950, broadcast on German radio, and became her best-known dramatic work; in 1967 an opera based on it by Walter Steffens had its premiere in Dortmund. Sachs once said that if she had not been able to write, she could not have survived, and that death had been her teacher.
Grief, fear and friendship
Margarete Sachs died in early 1950 after a long illness, leaving her daughter, who had depended on her emotionally all her life, desolate. Sachs became a Swedish citizen in the early 1950s. Her poetry grew more abstract and searching in the collections Und niemand weiß weiter (And No One Knows How to Go On, 1957), Flucht und Verwandlung (Flight and Metamorphosis, 1959) and Fahrt ins Staublose (Journey into a Dustless Realm, 1961).
Her closest literary friendship was with Paul Celan, the younger poet from Czernowitz who had also survived the Holocaust and also wrote in German. They corresponded from the 1950s; in 1960 they met in Zurich, and she visited him in Paris. On returning to Stockholm she suffered a severe breakdown, haunted by the conviction that she was being persecuted by a Nazi spy ring, and she spent long periods, about three years in all, in a psychiatric hospital near Stockholm. Celan visited her there. Even in the clinic she went on writing.
Recognition at last
From the late 1950s West Germany, struggling to confront its past, began to honour her. She became a member of the German Academy for Language and Literature in 1957, received the cultural prize of the Federation of German Industry in 1959, joined the Free Academy of the Arts in Hamburg and received the Droste Prize in Meersburg in 1960, and in 1961 the city of Dortmund founded a literary prize in her name and made her its first recipient. In 1965 she became the first woman to receive the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, and in 1967 she was made an honorary citizen of Berlin, the city that had driven her out.
In Sweden, too, she was honoured: the Swedish Poets’ Association awarded her its prize. For a woman who had arrived in Stockholm in 1940 as a refugee with no Swedish and no money, the transformation was remarkable. She remained, all the same, the shy and private woman she had always been, living in the same small apartment.
On 10 December 1966, her seventy-fifth birthday, she received the Nobel Prize in Literature in Stockholm, sharing it with the Hebrew novelist S. Y. Agnon. The Swedish Academy honoured her for lyrical and dramatic writing that interprets the destiny of Israel with touching strength. She herself drew the distinction between the two laureates: Agnon spoke for the State of Israel, she said, while she spoke for the tragedy of the Jewish people.
Last years
Fame did not change her quiet life in the small Stockholm apartment. She continued to write, publishing collections such as Glühende Rätsel (Glowing Enigmas) and the dramatic poems gathered in Zeichen im Sand (Signs in the Sand, 1962), but her health was fragile; she suffered further breakdowns and had to cancel a planned visit to Israel in 1967.
Nelly Sachs died of cancer in a Stockholm hospital on 12 May 1970, at the age of seventy-eight, on the very day that Paul Celan, who had drowned himself in the Seine weeks earlier, was buried in Paris. She was buried in the Jewish section of the Northern Cemetery, Norra begravningsplatsen, in Solna, just north of Stockholm. Her private library is preserved at the Royal Library in Stockholm.
Legacy
Nelly Sachs came late to her calling and wrote her major work in her fifties and sixties, in exile, in a language that had become the language of the murderers. Her achievement was to find words of lament for the destruction of European Jewry that were neither documentary nor consoling, but rooted in the oldest Jewish traditions of prophecy, psalm and mysticism. She is remembered, with Celan, as one of the two great German-language poets of the Holocaust.
The Nelly Sachs Prize of Dortmund is still awarded every two years, and a park on Kungsholmen in Stockholm bears her name. The sheltered girl who once wrote fairy-tale letters to Selma Lagerlöf became, in the words of the tributes that greeted her Nobel Prize, the voice of the suffering of the Jewish people.
Sources & further reading
Nelly Sachs, Wikipedia · Nelly Sachs, Wikipedia (German) · Nelly Sachs, Encyclopedia.com (Encyclopaedia Judaica and other reference entries) · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.