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Sarah in Romania
30 octobre 2009

Nelly Sachs

Nelly_Sachs_1910My discovery of Roumanian-German poets has been fascinating so far: Herta Muller, Oscar Pastior, Paul Celan. Celan led me to Nelly Sachs, who wasn't Roumanian at all, but pure German...and Jewish, so I veer off course for a post, simply because I cannot help it. Her story touched me very much and I would like to share it with you. Perhaps it is no different from that of many German Jews born and growing up in the pre-war era, her fear like anyone's in her position...and yet she became a Nobel prize for Literature winner in 1966 despite (or maybe because of) her ghosts, her terrors, her paranoia and her repetitive and deteriorating mental health that followed her through the entirety of her life. After the war, her fragility became more and more evident and the death of her mother brought with it a crashing down of her sensitivity, breakdowns ebbing and flowing like waves on a shore, leaving her more alone than ever. Her suffrance was that of the pain and guilt of a survivor. Her profound chagrin for the innocent dead gave her a voice on behalf of all those other voices disappeared up the chimneys of Auschwitz. She and Celan had that in common...Celan was a fatal victim of it, resulting in suicide, drowning himself in the Seine (see post 26/10).

Escaping from Germany to Sweden with her mother in 1940 with the indispensable help of a dear and well-connected friend in Germany and her friendship by correspondence with Selma Lagerlöf, she continued to suffer...she was fifty years old when finally they arrived in Stockholm, too late to meet Selma who had organised her visa from her deathbed. Nelly was a washerwoman to make ends meet and then, having conquered the Swedish language, she became a translator of Swedish poetry to her mother-tongue. Her style had changed completely. The romanticism was replaced by nightmarish horrors. 

Please visit this beautiful site for more information.
 

Here's an excerpt from Wikipedia:

'Born as Leonie Sachs in Schöneberg, Berlin in 1891, she was educated at home due to 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. 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. Every member of her family with the exception of herself and her mother were killed in concentration camps.

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 hospitalised. 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. 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.

Nelly_Sachs_1966In 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 on her birthday, she observed that Agnon represented Israel whereas "I represent the tragedy of the Jewish people."

Incidentally, I should tell you that Nelly didn't keep her prize money from the Nobel...she gave half away to the poor and the other half to the great friend so instrumental in her escape to Sweden from Germany. See Amazing Grace for more on Nelly. Tortured by memories and years of living in the cold fists of fear, she was the voice of those who could no longer bear witness of mans inhumanity to man... She was their requiem.

 

photos from Wikipedia

 

 

 

 

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