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Nelly Sachs (1891-1970) | |
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German poet and dramatist, who became a spokesperson for her fellow Jews of experiences in the Nazi death camps. In 1966 Nelly Sachs shared the Nobel Prize for Literature with the novelist S.Y. Agnon. Sachs spent the rest of her life in Sweden after escaping from Germany in 1940. O, der weinenden Kinder Nacht! Nelly Sachs was born in Berlin into a middle-class Jewish family. She was the only child of the inventor and industrialist William Sachs and Margareta (Karger) Sachs. The family was religiously liberal and cultured and considered itself wholly at home in Germany. Before entering the Berliner Höhere Töchterschule, Sachs was educated by a private teacher. Sachs studied music, dance, and literature. At one time she planned to become a dancer. At the age of 15, after reading Selma Lagerlöf's Gösta Berling, she started a correspondence with the famous Swedish author. Her contact with Lagerlöf lasted some 35 years. Sachs began writing verse as a young girl, and eventually her work attracted the attention of the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, who arranged for the publication one of her poems. Sachs had read widely German Romantic writers – Goethe and Friedrich Schiller – and these slightly melancholic early poems reflected the influence of neoromantic tradition. However, later Sachs excluded these youthful productions from her collected works. Her first book was LEGENDEN UND ERZÄHLUNGEN (1921), a collection of stories. During the 1920s and 1930s Sachs's lyrical works appeared in newspapers and magazines, but she never became a visible part of the literary scene in Berlin. However, in the late 1930s she joined the Jewish Cultural Association. After her father died in 1930, Sachs lived with her mother. The Nazis seized power in 1933 and Sachs life became even more recluse. In 1940 Sachs fled with her to Sweden with the aid of Selma Lagerlöf. By the time they arrived, Lagerlöf had died. Sachs managed to escape the forced labour camp but other members of her family died in concentration camps. It was not until 1960 when she visited Germany after leaving the country. In her new home country, Sachs learned Swedish and managed to support herself and her mother by translating into German works from such Swedish poets as Gunnar Ekelöf, Erik Lindegren, and Johannes Edfelt. She also became a Swedish citizen in 1953. Sachs's mother died in February 1950, which brought her to a serious psychological crisis. During the postwar years, Sachs read Hasidic literature and the Bible. With Lenke Rothman, a Hungarian-born Swedish artists, she studied Kabbala in German - Lenke Rothman had learned German in Auschwitz. Sachs published plays, dramatic fragments, and poems as a "mute outcry" against the Holocaust. In 1954 she started a correspondence with Paul Celan. "There is and was in me, and it's there with every breath I draw," she wrote in a letter, "the belief in transcendence through suffusion with pain, in the inspiritment of dust, as a vocation to which we are called." Sachs also visited the Celan family in Paris in 1960. The both shared the conviction that the sole reason for their being lay in language. "Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language," Celan once said. After years of isolation, Sachs started to gain an international fame. In 1960 she received the Droste-Hülshoff Prize and in 1965 the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. Accepting the award, she said, "In spite of all the horrors of the past, I believe in you." Scholarly interest in her work began in 1970 with the appearance of three dissertations Sachs saw victims as part of eternal metamorphosis and in her work she returned especially in the fate of Job. In the collection DEN WOHNUNGEN DES TODES (1947) the central motifs were flight and pursuit, the symbols of the hunter and his quarry. The protagonist of 'Gebete für den toten Bräutigan' (Prayers for the Dead Bride) was the unnamed man, with whom she fell in love in her youth and who was murdered by the Nazis. ELI: EIN MYSTERIENSPIEL VOM LEIDEN ISRAELS (1951) depicted the tragedy of an 8-year-old Polish boy, his death, and the search for his murderer. The work was later presented as a radio play and an opera. In 1959 appeared FLUCHT UND VERWANDLUNG, which established Sachs as an outstanding writer in German literature. In it Sachs developed her visions of metamorphosis and exile of human beings on earth. After receiving the Nobel Prize, Sachs continued to live modestly in her small apartment. The house where she lived was owned by the Jewish community of Stockholm. Sachs never married, but the image of a male lover was recurrent in her poems; her only significant romanticn affair, with a non-Jewish man, ended in disappointment. According to some sources he died in a concentration camp. Over a period of many years, she suffered nervous breakdowns. Sachs died of cancer on May 12, 1970. Recurrent images in her poetry are stars, dust, sand, as in the collection ZEICHEN IM SAND (1962). She spoke with the rhythm of prophets and lifted the sufferings into a timeless plane, continuing the tradition of psalmists and prophets. In O The Chimneys (1967) the Jewish nation is represented as smoke drifting from concentration camp chimneys, a way to freedom between life and death. Sachs rarely breaks loose her rage like Primo Levi in his poem 'Shemá', but transcends the tragedy of the Jewish people and her apocalyptic vision and conveys a message of reconciliation and resurrection. For further reading: Apropos Nelly Sachs by Gisela Dischner (1997); Jewish Writers, German Literature: The Uneasy Examples of Nelly Sachs and Walter Benjamin, ed. by Timothy H. Bahti and Marilyn Sibley Fries (1996); Post-Shoa Religious Metaphors: The Image of God in the Poetry of Nelly Sachs by Ursula Rudnick (1995); Nelly Sachs. Neue Interpretation by M. Kessler et al (1994); Nelly Sachs: Mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten by Gabriele Fritsch-Vivié (1993); Nelly Sachs by R. Dinesen (1992); Nelly Sachs by E. Bahr (1980); Poetik des modernen Gedichts by G. Bezzel-Dischner (1970); Nelly Sachs by P. Kersten (1969); Nelly Sachs - Nobel laureate by A. Alan Steinbach (1967); Nelly Sachs zu Ehren, ed. by W. Berendsohn et al. (1961) Selected works:
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