Nelly Sachs

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Nelly Sachs, 1966 (credit: UPI)

(born Dec. 10, 1891, Berlin, Ger. — died May 12, 1970, Stockholm, Swed.) German poet and dramatist. Born to a prosperous family, Sachs wrote poems mainly for her own entertainment until the advent of Nazism darkened her work and forced her to flee to Sweden. Her lyrics from those years combine lean simplicity with imagery variously tender, searing, or mystical. In the famous title poem of her collection O the Chimneys (1967), Israel's body drifts upward as smoke from the Nazi death camps. Her best-known play is Eli (1951). She shared the 1966 Nobel Prize with S.Y. Agnon.

For more information on Nelly Leonie Sachs, visit Britannica.com.

The German-born poet and playwright Nelly Sachs (1891-1970), winner of the Nobel Prize, is noted for her austere but moving work, which constitutes a solemn monument to the hardships and sorrows of the Jewish people.

Born on Dec. 10, 1891, into a wealthy Jewish family, Nelly Sachs grew up in Berlin. After having studied dance and music with private tutors, she began at the age of 17 to write poetry. Her first collection of legends and sagas from the Middle Ages was published in 1921; this work reflected her fascination with the mystical elements of Christianity. Despite the influences of her own religious tradition, which can be traced throughout her poetry, in the years before the overt political persecution of the Jews accompanying Hitler's rise to power, she was not particularly concerned with her own religious origins. But with the advent of anti-Semitism, she turned to Orthodox Hasidism, where she discovered many of those occult aspects which had earlier attracted her to Christianity.

With the aid of Selma Lagerlöf, a well-known Scandinavian novelist, Sachs and her mother fled Germany in 1940 and settled in Sweden. While still working on her own poetry, she acquired sufficient knowledge of Swedish to earn a living translating Swedish works into German. Her postwar anthology of Swedish verse, Wave and Granite (1947), brought some well-deserved acclaim to little-known writers. Her first collection of poetry was But Even the Sun Has No Home (1948). Both this volume and Eclipse of the Stars (1951), which were written during her flight from Germany, deal with the annihilation of 6 million Jews under the Third Reich; for diverse reasons they received little critical attention.

In 1950 a group of Swedish friends issued a private edition, 200 copies, of Sachs's Eli: A Miracle Play of the Suffering Israel, which eventually found its way into Germany, where it became a widely acclaimed radio play. Like the other 11 plays written in this period, Eli was created in memory of those who had suffered and perished in Nazi concentration camps. Structurally the work has the simplicity of a medieval miracle play, but thematically it depicts a world devoid of trust and goodness, where innocence falls victim to evil.

Recognition of Nelly Sachs's gift as a lyric poet came in the late 1950s after the publication of And No One Knows Where to Go (1957) and Flight and Metamorphosis (1959). Once again the focus is on the black theme of the victims of the holocaust, as well as the author's personal loneliness. In the following decade she was the recipient of numerous honors, among which were the 1961 Nelly Sachs Prize, established by the city of Dortmund, and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade at the Frankfurt Fair of 1965. In honor of her seventieth birthday, a Frankfurt publisher issued her collected works, containing a new series of poems, "Journey to the Beyond," which was dedicated by the author to "my dead brothers and sisters."

Despite the esteem in which she was held by many German-language readers, Nelly Sachs was little known to the rest of the European and American public when she received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1966. She died in Stockholm on May 12, 1970.

Further Reading

There is no substantial study of Nelly Sachs in English. A chapter in Paul Konrad Kurz, On Modern German Literature, vol. 1 (1967; trans. 1970), provides biographical information and comments on her work; and Harry T. Moore, Twentieth-century German Literature (1967), includes brief biographical data. A recent, important background study is Peter Demetz, Postwar German Literature: A Critical Introduction (1970)

Additional Sources

Jewish writers, German literature: the uneasy examples of Nelly Sachs and Walter Benjamin, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.

Sachs, Nelly (Nelly Leonie Sachs) (Berlin, 1891-1970, Stockholm), the only child of well-to-do parents of Jewish extraction, was brought up in Berlin, being partly educated by private tuition because of her delicate health, which also prevented her from becoming a ballet dancer. She began with a volume of prose, Legenden und Erzählungen (1921), which she dedicated to Selma Lagerlöf, the Swedish author whom she admired. At the same time she wrote poetry, the genre congenial to her exceptional gifts. Some time after 1933 she was subjected to agonizing harassment by the Gestapo, though she did not contemplate emigration until 1939/40 when it was almost too late. Helped by a woman friend who alerted Lagerlöf, she escaped to Sweden just after her arrest. Though saving her mother, she could not help the man for whom she grieved for the rest of her life. Because of her extremely modest circumstances in her new country (she was naturalized in 1952), she began to translate Swedish poetry, of which she published several volumes. Promoted by J. R. Becher, and later by H. M. Enzensberger, she published her own verse as In den Wohnungen des Todes (1947), Sternverdunkelung (1951), Und niemand weiß weiter (1958), and Flucht und Verwandlung (1959). At the height of her powers, she had also achieved full recognition. In 1960 she travelled to Zurich, making a detour to Meersburg to receive the Droste Prize, and to Paris, where she met Paul Celan. Overwhelmed at being celebrated and at returning to Germany with its traumatic memories, she suffered a breakdown, and soon after her travels was admitted to a sanatorium, periodically receiving treatment for persecution mania throughout the 1960s. She nevertheless continued to write until shortly before her death. In 1961 her 70th birthday was marked by the first collected edition of her poetry, Fahrt ins Staublose, and by the foundation of the Nelly Sachs Prize by the city of Dortmund, whose first recipient she was. She published two more volumes, Glühende Rätsel (1964-6) and Die Suchende (1966). Her posthumous poetry was edited by M. and B. Holmqvist as Teile dich Nacht (1971). Other collections include Gedichte (1977, postscript by H. Domin), Späte Gedichte (1965), and Und Leben hat immer wie Abschied geschmeckt. Frühe Gedichte und Prosa (1987); correspondence, Briefe, ed. R. Dinesen and H. Müssener, appeared in 1984, Briefwechsel with Celan in 1993.

Nelly Sachs devised her poetry in cycles, characterized by her consistent use of metaphors, which make much of her verse difficult to understand if read in isolation. Her early poetry was written under the immediate impact of the horrors faced by those who had not escaped deportation. Although death remained a major theme, it became associated with her appeal for reconciliation and her yearning for love, ultimately pertaining to her spirituality (‘Liebe vom Erdenstoff befreit’, in Glühende Rätsel). In this she was mainly influenced by Hasidism, the Old Testament, and the mysticism of J. Böhme. Her dramatic work shows a similar development, beginning with Eli. Ein Mysterienspiel vom Leiden Israels (1951); completed in 1945, it was turned into a libretto for an opera by Walter Steffen and premièred in 1966. Her scenic arrangements were published as Zeichen im Sand (1962). Like some of her poetry, they are related to the Expressionist style of presentation.

The most prestigious of her prizes are the award of the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (1965) and the Nobel Prize for Literature (1966, jointly with Samuel Joseph Agnon).

Nelly Sachs
Nelly Sachs, 1966
Born	Leonie Sachs 10 December 1891(1891-12-10) Schöneberg, Berlin
Died	12 May 1970 (aged 78) Stockholm
Occupation	Poet, Dramatist
Nationality	German
Notable award(s)	Nobel Prize in Literature 1966
Signature

Nelly Sachs, 1910

Nelly Sachs (10 December 1891 – 12 May 1970) was a German poet and dramatist whose experiences resulting from the rise of the Nazis in World War II Europe transformed her into a poignant spokesperson for the grief and yearnings of her fellow Jews. Her best-known play is Eli: Ein Mysterienspiel vom Leiden Israels (1950); other works include the poems Zeichen im Sand (1962), Verzauberung (1970), and the collections of poetry In den Wohnungen des Todes (1947), Flucht und Verwandlung (1959), Fahrt ins Staublose (1961), and Suche nach Lebenden (1971).

Contents 1 Life and career 2 References 3 See also 4 External links

Life and career

Born as Leonie Sachs in Schöneberg, Berlin in 1891, she was educated at home due to her frail health. She showed early signs of talent as a dancer, but her protective parents did not encourage her to pursue a profession. She grew up as a very sheltered, introverted young woman and never married. She pursued an extensive correspondence, and was a friend of Selma Lagerlöf and Hilde Domin. As the Nazis took power, she became increasingly terrified, at one point losing the power of speech, as she would remember in verse: "When the great terror came/I fell dumb." Sachs fled with her aged mother to Sweden in 1940. Her friendship with Lagerlöf had saved her life and that of her mother when shortly before her own death Lagerlöf intervened with the Swedish royal family to secure their release from Germany. Sachs and her mother finally escaped on the last airplane flight to leave Nazi Germany for Sweden, a week before Sachs was scheduled to report to a concentration camp.

Living in a tiny two-room apartment in Stockholm, Sachs cared alone for her mother for many years, and supported their existence by translations between Swedish and German. After her mother's death, Sachs suffered several nervous breakdowns characterized by hallucinations, paranoia, and delusions of persecution by Nazis, and she spent a number of years in a mental institution. She continued to write even while hospitalized. She eventually recovered well enough to live on her own again, though her stability would always be fragile. Her worst breakdown was ostensibly precipitated by hearing German speech during a trip to Switzerland to accept a literary prize. However, she maintained a forgiving attitude toward a younger generation of Germans, and corresponded with many German-speaking writers of the postwar period, including Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Ingeborg Bachmann.

In the context of the Shoah, her deep friendship with "brother" poet Paul Celan is often noted today. Their bond was described in one of Celan's most famous poems, "Zurich, zum Storchen." Sachs and Celan shared their concern with the Holocaust and the fate of the Jews throughout history, their interest in Jewish and Christian mysticism, and their literary models; their imagery was often remarkably similar though developed independently. Their friendship had the unfortunate side effect of intensifying each other's paranoia. Celan also suffered from fears of persecution (he blamed Yvan Goll's accusations of plagiarism on anti-Semitism) and frustration over the reception of his work. When Sachs met Celan she was embroiled in a long dispute with Finnish-Jewish composer Moses Pergament's musical adaptation of her stage play Eli: Ein Mysterienspiel vom Leiden Israels. Her relationship to Pergament became entangled with her paranoia, with Sachs repeatedly accusing Pergament of not believing her delusions of persecution. In Celan, she found someone who appeared to believe her. Sachs was first institutionalized shortly after her only visit to Celan.

Sachs' poetry is intensely lyrical and shows some influence by German Romanticism, especially her early work. The poetry she wrote as a young woman in Berlin is more inspired by Christianity than Judaism and makes use of traditional Romantic imagery and themes. Much of it concerns an unhappy love affair Sachs suffered in her teens, with a non-Jewish man who would eventually be killed in a concentration camp. After Sachs learned of her only love interest's death, she bound up his fate with that of her people to write many love lyrics ending not only in the beloved's death, but in the catastrophe of the Holocaust. Sachs herself mourns no longer as a jilted lover but as a personification of the Jewish people in their vexed relationship to history and God. Sachs' fusion of grief with subtly romantic elements is in keeping with the imagery of the kabbalah, where the Shekhinah represents God's presence on earth and mourns for the separation of God from His people in their suffering. Thus Sachs' Romanticism allowed her to develop self-consciously from a German to a Jewish writer, with a corresponding change in her language: still flowery and conventional in some of her first poetry on the Holocaust, it becomes ever more compressed and surreal, returning to a series of the same images and tropes (dust, stars, breath, stones and jewels, blood, dancers, fish suffering out of water, madness, and the ever-frustrated love) in ways that are sometimes comprehensible only to her readers, but always moving and disturbing. Though Sachs does not resemble many authors, she appears to have been influenced by Gertrud Kolmar and Else Lasker-Schuler in addition to Paul Celan.

In 1961 she became the inaugural winner of the Nelly Sachs Prize, a literary prize awarded biennially by the city of Dortmund, and named in her honour. When, with Shmuel Yosef Agnon, she was awarded the 1966 Nobel Prize for Literature, she observed that Agnon represented Israel whereas "I represent the tragedy of the Jewish people."

Following her death from intestinal cancer in 1970, Nelly Sachs was interred in the Norra begravningsplatsen in Stockholm.

A memorial plaque commemorates her birthplace, Maaßenstraße 12, in Schöneberg, Berlin; where there is also a park, in Dennewitzstraße, named after her.

References

• www.nobel-winners.com — Nelly Sachs. This article includes some text from that page, in its version as of 13 December 2006, which is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License
• Paul Celan, Sachs' most important colleague
• Hilde Domin, a lyric colleague and friend
• Map showing location of Maaßenstraße and Nelly-Sachs-Park in Berlin-Schöneberg.

See also

• List of female Nobel laureates

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Nelly Sachs

• Nelly Sach's Photo & Gravesite

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