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Full-Text Articles in German Language and Literature
Nelly Sachs (10 December 1891-12 May 1970), Kathrin M. Bower
Nelly Sachs (10 December 1891-12 May 1970), Kathrin M. Bower
Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications
Nelly Sachs was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966 on her seventy-fifth birthday, a coincidence of dates that her father had been fond of noting during Sachs's girlhood in Berlin. In her acceptance speech, Sachs made reference to her father's annual teasing every December 10 and acknowledged that the award was like a dream come true. Nelly Sachs's work was largely unknown outside Germany and Sweden when the prize was announced; she had been writing in relative obscurity for almost two decades. Two literary awards she received in Germany in 1960 and in 1965 had earned her a …
Searching For The (M)Other: The Rhetoric Of Longing In Post-Holocaust Poems By Nelly Sachs And Rose Ausländer, Kathrin M. Bower
Searching For The (M)Other: The Rhetoric Of Longing In Post-Holocaust Poems By Nelly Sachs And Rose Ausländer, Kathrin M. Bower
Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications
The post-Holocaust poems of Nelly Sachs and Rose Ausländer demonstrate shifts toward experimentation in form and message, particularly in relation to religious belief and the expressive potential of poetic language. The experience of the Holocaust forced both authors to confront the interconnections between their Jewishness, their relationship to the German language, and their displacements as homeless exiles. They turned to poetry as a means of mediating the past in the present, and their post-Holocaust writings represent acts of both remembrance and reproduction. As victims and witnesses to suffering, devastation, and loss, Sachs and Ausländer appealed to images of the maternal …