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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! Leonie Sachs, better known as 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. They belonged to the Berlin Jewish community, but did not celebrate Jewish holidays. Sachs did not read and write Hebrew and she did not speak Yiddish. Before entering the Berliner Höhere Töchterschule, Sachs was educated by a private teacher and she also received instructions in Judaism. Sachs studied music, dance, and literature. At one time she planned to become a dancer. According to Sachs, she felt herself lonely, but she also had a close friend, Dora, and even shared an art studio with her in Berlin. 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 inspired by the figures of Jesus and St Francis. Most of her work written before exile she lost or destroyed. Sachs lived in comfortable circumstances in a quiet district of
Berlin. 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 of the city. She admired greatly the work of Gertrud
Kolmar, with whom she was occasionlly connected, along with Else
Lasker-Schüler. Texts by all these three writers were already recited
in 1936 in a reading of women's poetry in Berlin. (Keepers of the Motherland: German Texts by Jewish Women Writers by Dagmar C. G. Lorenz, 1997, p. 130) Between 1937 and 1939 she published in
Jewish magazines only. In the late 1930s Sachs joined the Jüdische
Kulturbund (the Jewish Culture Association), which was
established to allow Jewish artists to perform for Jewish
audiences. After her father died of cancer in 1930, Sachs lived with
her
mother. The Nazis seized power in 1933 and Sachs' life became even more
recluse. She was arrested in 1937 with a close friend, who was active
in the Resistance; Sachs never revealed the identity of her friend. "My
fate was to be alone, like the fate of my people," she once said. A
group of SA men and their wives plundered Sach's and her mother's
apartment before their very eyes. Afterwards Sachs was mute for days.
She depicted this experience in the only prose text published during
her lifetime, 'Leben unter Bedrohung' (1956): "Fünf Tage lebte ich ohne
Sprache unter einem Hexenprozeß. Meine Stimme war zu den Fischen
geflohen." (Ethics and Remembrance in the Poetry of Nelly Sachs and Rose Ausländer by Kathrin M. Bower, 2000, pp. 40-41) In 1939 Sachs and her mother were required to take the middle name Sarah, as all Jewish women had to. With the help of her non-Jewish friend Gudrun Harlan and Selma Lagerlöf, the Sachs fled to Sweden in 1940, leaving all of their belongings behind. Sachs had only one small suitcase and ten Deutschmark in her pocket. Lagerlöf, her most important literary contact in Sweden, had died by the time they arrived. Sachs managed to escape the forced labour camp but other members of her family died in the Holocaust. It was not until 1960 when she visited Germany, to receive the Droste-Hülshoff Prize. In her new home country, Sachs learned Swedish and supported 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 1952. Her most famous works Sachs wrote in the 1940s, beginning from the poem cycles 'Grabschriften in die Luft geschrieben' (1944, Epitaphs written into the Air), 'Gebete für den toten Bräutigam' (Prayers for a Dead Bridegroom), and Eli, ein Mysterienspiel vom Leiden Israels
(1945-46, Eli: A Mystery Play of the Sufferings of Israel), published
in 1951 in Malmö. The play was printed in 200 hand
signed copies. Sachs's mother died in February 1950. Her
loss brought Sachs to a serious psychological crisis, from
which she found an escape in Jewish mysticism. In the early 1960s,
Sachs spent time in a psychiatric hospital. She had
heard loud noises, a motor run all night long in the above apartment,
and she could not get any sleep. She weighted only 36 kilos. Curiously,
according to a document, she was 154 cm tall when she had arrived
Sweden, but in her Swedish passport her height was written as 148 cm.
At the Beckomberga Mental Hospital she was given shock therapy. With
electric shocks she was treated about 15 times. During the postwar years, Sachs read Martin Buber's Hasidic tales and the Bible. With Lenke Rothman, a Hungarian-born Swedish artists, she studied Kabbala in German – Lenke Rothman had learned German in Auschwitz. As a gift from a rabbi of the Great Synagogue in Stockholm, she received the Gershom Scholem's translation of the first chapter of the Zohar, Die Geheimnisse der Schöpfund von Sholem. This cabalistic work, originally written in Aramaic, influenced her deeply. In 1954 Sachs started a correspondence with Paul Celan. "I thank you, I thank you from my heart. All the unanswerable questions in these dark days. This ghastly mute Not-yet, this even ghastlier, muter No-longer and Yet-again, and in between, what cannot be overcome, even tomorrow, even today," he wrote about some poet she had sent, referring to Nazism and its legacy. (Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew by John Felstiner, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995, p. 112) "There is and was in me, and it's there with every breath I draw, the belief in transcendence through suffusion with pain, in the inspiritment of dust, as a vocation to which we are called," she said in a letter to Celan in September 1958. "I believe in an invisible universe in which we mark out our dark accomplishment. I feel the energy of the light that makes the stone break into music . . ." (Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs: Correspondence, introduction by John Felstiner, translated by Christopher Clark, edited by Barbara Wiedemann, New York: The Sheep Meadow Press, 1995, pp. 5-6) Both Sachs and Celan used the image of smoke before they had read one another's work. She also visited the Celan family in Paris in 1960 and laid with him flowers on Heine's grave in Montmartre. Both Sachs and Celan 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 said in speech in 1958. "Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss." (Writing in Witness: A Holocaust Reader, edited by Eric J. Sundquist, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018, p. 242) Sachs's Heimat was in her written words. Celan also visited her in 1960 in Stockholm when she was hospitalized. He "stood at the door of her room, but either she did not recognize him or else would not admit him." (Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, p. 161) Celan returned to Paris. Sternverdunklung (1949) had a great reception but sold
poorly and the publisher, Bermann-Fischer Publishing
House, destroyed most of the copies. "It is a rough climate to be
in exile! Believe me, Peter, it demands courage, courage again and
again," she wrote to Peter Hamm in 1958. 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." A letter bomb was sent in October 1967 to the Nelly Sachs home for the aged in Dusseldorf. Sachs saw victims as part of eternal metamorphosis and in her work she returned especially in the fate of Job. In the collection In 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' 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 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. Flucht und Verwandlung (1959) 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 dwelling. The house where she lived, part of an apartment block in a district of workers and petits bourgeois, was owned by the Jewish community of Stockholm. She wrote with an old-fashioned Mercedes Prima typewriter, placed on a little table and sitting at the edge of her bed. Throughout her life, Sachs suffered from health problems. She never married; her only significant romantic affair, with a non-Jewish man, ended in disappointment; her father supposedly did not approve him. After her father's death, she met him again and possibly continued the relatioship. According to some sources he died in a concentration camp. Sachs dedicted Prayers for a Dead Bridegroom to him in an anthology published in 1947. Also Fahrt ins Staublose (1961) reflected her early love. Her private life Sachs kept to herself. Sachs suffered from a persecution mania and she heard electronic voices. Some of her finests texts she wrote while struggling with her health. Sachs died of cancer on May 12, 1970, and was buried in the Jewish cemetery. By the time of her death, her work had been translated into fifteen languages. In her final published work, Die Suchende (1971), Sachs tried to find a balance between her German upbringing and her identity as a Jewish writer living in exile. Her tiny apartment has been reassembled at the National Library of Sweden. Scholarly interest in her work began in 1970 with the appearance of three dissertations. Recurrent images in Sachs' poetry are stars, darkness, dust, and sand, as in the collection Zeichen im Sand
(1962, Signs in the Sand) and in almost all in her works; sand is associated with time,
past and present, and the experience of the Jews: "But who emptied your
shoes of sand / When you had to get up, to die? / The sand which Israel
gathered, / Its nomad sand?" ('But Who Emptied Your Shoes of Sand,' in O the Chimneys: Selected Poems, 1967) Speaking with the free accentual rhythm of biblical verse, she lifted the sufferings
into a timeless plane, continuing the tradition of psalmists and
prophets. Noteworthy, Sachs rejected the idea of revenge: "Man kann nur bitten und flehen, daß die Verfolgten niemals Verfolger werden," she wrote in a letter in 1948 as a response to the assassination of UN ambassador Folke Bernadotte by Jewish terrorists. ("The Space of Words": Exile and Diaspora in the Works of Nelly Sachs by Jennifer M. Hoyer, 2014, p. 98) In 'O die Schornsteine' (O the Chimneys) the Jewish nation is represented as smoke drifting from concentration camp chimneys, a way to freedom between life and death. "O the chimneys / On the ingeniously devised habitations of death / When Israel's body drifted as smoke / Through the air – / Was welcomed by a star, a chimney sweep, / A star that turned black / Or was it a ray of sun?" (O the Chimneys: Selected Poems: including the verse play, ELI, translated by Michael Roloff, p. 3) 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: "The Space of Words": Exile and Diaspora in the Works of Nelly Sachs by Jennifer M. Hoyer (2014); Nelly Sachs, Flight and Metamorphosis: An Illustrated Biography by Aris Fioretos, translated by Tomas Tranæus (2012); The Change of the Religious Voices through the Trauma of Exile in the Works of Else Lasker-Schüler, Nelly Sachs, and Barbara Honigmann by Renate Kaiser Sturdevant (dissertation, 2010); Flykt och förvandling. Nelly Sachs, författare, Berlin / Stockholm by Aris Fioretos (2010); Ethics and Remembrance in the Poetry of Nelly Sachs and Rose Ausländer by Kathrin M. Bower (2000); Apropos Nelly Sachs by Gisela Dischner (1997); Jewish Writers, German Literature: The Uneasy Examples of Nelly Sachs and Walter Benjamin, edited 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. W. Berendsohn et al. (1961) Selected works:
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