SACHS, Nelly (LITERATURE)

Born: Berlin, Germany, 10 December 1891. Naturalized Swedish citizen 1952. Education: Educated at school in Berlin, 1897-1900; privately, 1900-03; Aubertschule, 1903. Career: Corresponded with Selma Lagerlof (q.v. for many years; suffered from serious depression due to the Holocaust; emigrated to Sweden with Lagerlof`s help in 1940 and lived there for the remainder of her life. Awards: Peace prize, 1965;

Nobel award for literature, 1966. Died: 12 May 1970. Publications Collection

Gedichte, edited by Hilde Domin. 1977. Verse

In den Wohnungen des Todes. 1947.

Sternverdunkelung. 1949.

Und niemand weiss weiter. 1957.

Flucht und Verwandlung. 1959.

Fahrt ins Staublose. 1961.

Die Gedichte. 2 vols. 1961-71.

Ausgewahlte Gedichte. 1963.

Gluhende Ratsel. 1964.

Spate Gedichte. 1965.

Die Suchende. 1966.

O the Chimneys: Selected Poems, Including the Verse Play, Eli, translated by Michael Hamburger, Christopher Holme, and others. 1967; as Selected Poems, 1968. The Seeker and Other Poems, translated by Ruth Mead, Matthew Mead, and Michael Hamburger. 1970.

Teile dich Nacht, Die letzten Gedichte, edited by Margaretha and Bengt Holmqvist. 1971. Fiction

Legenden und Erzahlungen. 1921. Plays

Eli. 1951.

Zeichen im Sand. 1962.

Simson fallt durch Jahrtausende und andere szenische Dichtungen. 1967.

Verzauberung: Spate szenische Dichtungen. 1970. Other

Das Buch der Nelly Sachs, edited by Bengt Holmqvist. 1968. Briefe, edited by Ruth Dinesen and Helmut Mussener. 1984. Briefregister, edited by Ruth Dinesen. 1989.

Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs: Correspondence, translated by Christopher Clark. 1995.

Editor and translator, Von Welle und Granit: Querschnitt durch die Schwedische Lyrik des 20.

Jahrhunderts. 1947.

Editor and translator, Aber auch die Sonne ist heimatlos. Schwedische Lyrik der Gegenwart. 1956.

Editor and translator, Der Schattenfischer, by Johannes Edfelt. 1958.

Editor and translator, Weil unser einziges Nest unsere Flugel sind, by Erik Lindegren. 1963.

Editor and translator, Schwedische Gedichte. 1965.

Translator, Poesie, by Gunnar Ekelof. 1962.

Translator, Poesie, by Karl Vennberg. 1965. Critical Studies:

Poetik des modernen Gedichtes: Zur Lyrik von Nelly Sachs by Gisela Bezzel-Dischner, 1970; Die Metaphorik in der Lyrik von Nelly Sachs by Paul Kersten, 1970; Nelly Sachs: Einfuhrung in das Werk der Dichterin judischen Schicksals by Walter A. Berendsohn, 1974; Nelly Sachs by Ehrhard Bahr, 1980; Religion und Religiositat in der Lyrik von Nelly Sachs by Ulrich Klingmann, 1980; Nelly Sachs and the Kabbalah by Burghild O. Holzer, 1983; Nelly Sachs by Henning Falkenstein, 1984; Post-Shoa Religious Metaphors: The Range of God in the Poetry of Nelly Sachs by Ursula Rudnick, 1995; Jewish Writers, German Literature: The Uneasy Examples of Nelly Sachs and Walter Benjamin, edited by Timothy Bahti and Marilyn Sibley Fries, 1995; Ethics and Memorial in the Poetry of Nelly Sachs and Rose Auslander by Kathrin M. Bower, 2000.

Nelly Sachs was one of the two famous German-language poets whose works focused on the Nazi genocide against the Jews (Paul Celan was the other). She was famous as the part of the suffering of the Jewish people when she received the Nobel award for literature in 1966 (together with the Israeli novelist S.Y. Agnon). Her verse was then characterized as a representation of the "world-wide tragedy of the Jewish people," but has mostly been forgotten since, while Celan`s fame has lasted. This may be due to the prayer of Celan`s poetry to academic criticism. Celan, who was a dear friend of Sachs, was a poeta doctus, which Sachs, a mystical poet, was not. She was raising the number of mystical poetry in a century averse to mysticism. Her poetry invited either celebration or rejection rather than critical reading. Nonetheless, hers is an authentic poetic voice and her achievements cannot be denied. As Marie Syrkin has said, "the literary virtue of Sachs is that she has managed to transmute personal anguish into personal vision" (Midstream, 8 [3], 1967).

Sachs`s poetry can be divided into three periods. The verse of the low period (1943-49) is consecrated to the storage of the victims of the Holocaust. The idea of dying is at the eye of all these poems. In place to avert any mistake about the variety of death referred to, the poet avoids metaphors, and identifies the objects of the extermination camps: the fingers pointed at the victims at the selection ramps, the gas chambers deceptively constructed as showers, and the smoke stacks of the crematoria. Only victimization allows transfiguration: the poet`s brothers and sisters escape on "the route for refugees of smoke," "freedom-ways for Jeremiah and Job`s dust" ("O die Schornsteine").

The bit period, in the 1950s, was a form of experimentation under the work of Jewish mysticism, especially the Kabbala. The source of the Zohar, one of the central 13th-century texts of the Kabbala, becomes a model. Opposing modes of creation are unified: fleeing is experienced as homecoming, exile as homeland. The poet holds, as Sachs says, "instead of a homeland / The metamorphoses of the world" ("Flucht und Verwandlung"). Metamorphosis is one of the fundamental concepts of this period, represented most frequently by the butterfly.

Sachs`s late poetry was scripted in the 1960s after a nervous breakdown and a long continue in a sanatorium. Many poems deal with experiences in hospital, showing the evolution of an individual language expressing a universal mysticism. The poems are frequently based on commonplace incidents of daily life, interpreted in price of their mystic message. The four-part cycle, entitled "Gluhende Ratsel" ("Glowing Enigmas"), epitomizes this tendency. In their laconic brevity, the poems of this cycle represent the better of her later poetry.

Sachs`s drama, which is exclusively lyric, can likewise be divided into three periods, with the low period around 1943, the second covering 1944-55, and the last 1956-62. The beginning is represented by her mystery play Eli, written in 1943, which deals with the persecution of an innocent child and the calvary of Israel. Set in the market rate of a little Polish town after the Holocaust, the fun begins with a few Jewish survivors trying to reconstruct their houses. The plot revolves round the end of eight-year-old Eli, who was killed during the German occupation. His murderer is sought by Michael, a survivor who may be one of the 36 righteous men on whom, according to Jewish legends, the earth rests. The murderer, when observed in Germany, is ruined by his own sense of guilt, not by the revenge of the survivors. His end by guilt marks the fall of confidence in full on earth.

The plays of the bit period deal largely with religious ritual, even in new settings, while the plays of the net period are mostly pantomimes, employing dancers and even marionettes. Although Sachs considered Samuel Beckett a model, her plays never achieved a corresponding success, in spite of their modernist form. Her drama never constitute a place on the German or international stage, partially because Sachs was low and first a lyrical poet.