"Sein Antlitz ist Leid / His Countenance is Sorrow"
Some thoughts on the life and work of Gertrud Kolmar [1]
By Philip Kuhn
1
Gertrud Chodziesner was born in Berlin on 10 December 1894 the eldest child of Ludwig and Elise. She had two younger sisters; Margot (b.1897) and Hilde (b.1905) and a younger brother Georg (b.1900). Details of Gertrud's childhood are relatively sparse. After leaving school she trained as a teacher and then started working with orphaned and disadvantaged children. Around this time she had an ill-fated love affair with Karl Jodel, a non-Jewish army officer which resulted in an abortion and subsequent suicide attempt. [1] Some time in 1917 Gertrud took a job as a letter censor in a prisoner-of-war camp near Spandau. Following the Armistice she resumed her teaching career finding work as a private tutor and governess. She eventually moved to Hamburg in 1927 [2] and in the autumn of that year attended a vacation course at Dijon University at which time she took the opportunity to visit Paris. But her time in France was cut short when she was obliged to return home, in 1928, on account of her mother's illness. Following her mother's death, in March 1930, Gertrud assumed full-time responsibilities for the family household which was situated in Finkenkrug an "idyllic" rural suburb of Berlin.
With Hitler's seizure of power there followed, from April 1933, a barrage of anti-Jewish decrees which, over the next five years, placed German Jews under ever tightening restrictions. After Kristallnacht, in November 1938, Ludwig Chodziesner was forced to sell the house in Finkenkrug and "re-locate", with his daughter Gertrud, to an apartment in Berlin. Although there appear to have been several opportunities for Gertrud to escape she remained or perhaps more specifically, felt unable to abandon her father who was either unable or unwilling to leave Germany. To this end Gertrud, like countless thousands of other German Jews, became trapped her rights systematically curtailed, her freedom of movement confined to an ever diminishing radius and eventually, as others were billeted into the Chodziesner’s apartment, forced to live with "strangers who have taken possession of everything that is mine .... and nothing belongs to me anymore." [3]
In July 1941 Gertrud was conscripted to work in a weapons' factory first in Lichtenberg then in Charlottenburg. In September 1942 her father was deported to Theresienstadt subsequently known as "the ante-room" to Auschwitz. Despite his age Ludwig survived the rigours of the camp for about five months. Finally, in late February 1943, Gertrud was arrested during the so-called Fabrikaktion and then “deported” to Auschwitz on the 2nd of March transport. [4] Although there is no record of what happened to her after she was bundled onto the train all the circumstantial evidence suggests that if she managed to survive the nightmare journey east [5] she would have been "selected", on arrival, for immediate "extermination".
These are the bare bones of the remarkably unremarkable life of one middle-aged Jewish woman trapped in the abysmal world of Nazi Germany. But this brief biographical sketch, with just a change of name and a few other minor details, could just as easily be applied to any one of the countless German Jewish women who were unable or unwilling to countenance the possibility of escaping if it also meant abandoning their loved ones. Gertrud Chodziesner's story is just one of those untold thousands of heroic stories of German Jewish women condemned to face a life in living-death rather than in living.
And yet take care for [Gertrud's] heart beats like a little bird held fast in your fist [for] she still lives utterly in the book[s] that you leaf through .... But even if you hear what she says can you hear what she feels? [6]
2
And of course I have only written these brief words about Gertrud Chodziesner because of the extraordinary body of writings she created under the pseudonym of Gertrud Kolmar: writings that were salvaged, preserved and, at the end of the war, assiduously promoted by her sister and brother-in-law Hilde and Peter Wenzel and by her friend and cousin Susanne Jung.
For the most part Kolmar's work remained virtually unknown and largely unpublished during her life time. Her first venture into print occurred as a result of her father's encouragement when he helped finance the publication of a small collection of her poems in 1917. For her part Gertrud seems to have chosen Kolmar, as her nom de plume, being the name the Germans used, in 1874, when they "re-christened" Chodziez, the Polish town in Poznán which they had previously occupied and which had been "the place of origin of the Chodziesner family". [7] By general consensus Kolmar's first publication was no more than competent: so too the poems which she wrote during the next few years. And there matters would have rested but for the writings which followed.
Two prose narratives, Die Jüdische Mutter (The Jewish Mother, 1930) & Susanna (1940): the drama Cécile Renault (1935) together with the dramatic legend Nacht (Night, 1938) and the historical study of Robespierre (Das Bildnis Robespierres, 1934). But ultimately her reputation will probably rest upon the 9 cycles of poetry which she wrote during the 1930s: - the 22 poems of Wort der Stummen, (the Word of the Mute), the 19 sonnet (plus one) cycle Bild der Rose (Image of the Rose), probably completed around 1932, the 19 poem cycle Napoleon und Marie, the 45 poem cycle Robespierre, the 53 poem cycle Alte Stadwappen, (Old Municipal Coats of Arms), the 75 poem cycle Weibliches Bildnis (Female Portraits), the 29 poem cycle Mutter und Kind (Mother & Child), the 48 poem cycle Tiertraüme (Animal Dreams) and last, but not least, Welten (Worlds), the 17 poem cycle which Kolmar wrote between August and December 1937 and is probably the last set of poems Kolmar ever wrote. "Aus dem Dunkel" (Out of the Darkness), the poem which serves as the inspiration and text for Julian Marshall’s Cantata, [8] sits near the heart of this cycle.
But in amongst these writings I must also include that powerful collection of 95 letters and postcards which Gertrud Chodziesner sent to her sister and niece, Hilde and Sabine Wenzel, after they had escaped into Switzerland. Those letters, written between 13 September 1938 and 21 February 1943 help deepen our understanding of Gertrud's perceptions about her own writings, whilst also offering us important, if circumspect, insights into her endurance during those increasingly difficult times and illuminating something of the pressures working against her creativity.
3
Gertrud Kolmar is still not well known in Germany and Dieter Kühn’s recently published biography has attracted little critical attention. [9] Furthermore whilst some Kolmar’s writings are still in print others are difficult to find. She is, of course, even less well known in the English speaking world. Until the mid 1990s there was very little published about her in English. One of the earliest, maybe even the first article to discuss her work, was Michael Hamburger's 1957 review of Jacob Picard's edition of Das Lyrische Werk which had just been published in Germany. In 1969 Bernhardt Blumenthal's passionate plea promoting her poetry appeared in a relatively short article in The German Quarterly. In 1978 two articles appeared: Laurence Langer’s “Survival through Art”, published in the Leo Baeck Year Book, and Erika Langman's article on "The Poetry of Gertrud Kolmar" which was published in Seminar. Then in 1984 a short article by Michael C. Eben appeared in German Life and Letters. Translations of her work have been just as sparse. Christopher Middleton translated two of her poems for Modern German Poetry, the anthology he co-edited with Michael Hamburger in 1962. Elizabeth Spencer translated a very small selection from "Das Lyrische Werk" in 1960, whilst David Kipp translated a slightly larger selection in 1970. Then in 1975 Henry Smith translated a book which contained selections from five of her 8 cycles. Given that the translations by Spencer and Kipp have long been out of print Smith's book, which is itself hard to find and also highly problematic in its approach, remains the only access for non-German speakers wishing to obtain a sense of the breadth and depth of Kolmar's poetic oeuvre. On the other hand Kolmar’s prose has been somewhat better served: A Jewish Mother From Berlin and Susanna were published, in translation, in 1997, whilst her letters to Hilde and Sabine eventually appeared, in translation, in 2004. [10]
It might be worth speculating as to why Kolmar's writings have attracted this surprising degree of neglect. One possible reason, hinted at by Ruth Schwertfeger is that a series of seminal manuscripts, written after "Auschwitz", have tended to eclipse many of the fine works that pre-dated (what is now considered to be) "year zero". [11] It could be argued, therefore, that Kolmar's writings lie under the shadow of that small but highly significant body of Jewish texts which were written by those who survived long enough to engrave their anguished experiences into print. There are, for example, those who escaped Germany in time, like Nelly Sachs [1967] [12] or Else Lasker-Schüler,[2001]. [13] There are those who survived the Shoa, like Paul Celan [2001], [14] Piotr Rawicz [2004], [15] and Primo Levi [1987a, 1987b, 1989]. [16] And then there were those others who subsequently appeared, like ghosts, to "speak" from out of the ashes. I am thinking, for example, of the notebook of poems found in the raincoat pocket of Miklós Radnóti when his body was exhumed from a mass grave a year after the end of the war. [17] Somehow, somewhere, Kolmar's writings have been lost in amongst these shades. And of course there may also be something of a gender bias at work.
But there are also, no doubt, questions concerning poetics and aesthetics. With the exception of Welten, Kolmar's poems are composed mainly "in regular stanza form with strict end-rhyme construction ... marked by frequent use of simile and metaphor". [18] Apart from the technical problems this will invariably pose for translators Kolmar’s lyrical style, with its mystical and anthropomorphic themes, its “quality of ritual” and sense of “a timeless pool of myth” [19] also seems strangely at odds with the often dislocated, un-rhymed, broken language and stark realistic imagery manifest in many of the more ‘popular’ post Shoapoems. In this respect a brief comparison between Kolmar's "lyrics" and say Paul Celan's or Miklós Radnóti's pre-war poetry might be instructive. [20] It may well be that because Kolmar's poems were stopped abruptly in 1937 readers are left with a sense of compositions being somehow frozen on the brink of time. And perhaps this temporal dislocation, in turn, tempts readers to read into Kolmar’s poems predictions of her own death and presages of the catastrophes that were about to engulf her. Whilst such retrospective readings might, indeed, be difficult to avoid (for do they not offer us something other than themselves?) they also tend to destabilise the potency of what she has written. I would suggests, therefore, that it is precisely because her writings do not emerge out of the Shoa that they continue to be consigned into a no-man's land: floating somewhere between that still critical-lyrical innocence of Weimar (1919-1933) [21] and those unspeakable nightmares of "Auschwitz".
4
The term Kristallnacht means "night of broken glass": just one of the many glorious euphemisms – like "The Final Solution" – coined by the Nazis to sanitise and deflect attention from the reality of their actions. In fact Kristallnacht, which occurred on the night of the 9th to 10th November 1938, was a full scale pre-planned pogrom levelled directly and brutally against all German Jews. Some commentators have even suggested that it was planned with the view to forcing mass Jewish emigration. [22] It was not just glass that was shattered that night but thousands of German Jewish lives and, with those lives, the very fabric of German Jewish communities. That night and the following morning over 35,000 Jewish men were "taken into protective custody" – in other words seized and sent to concentration camps. Hundreds died of the ill-treatment they received and hundreds more committed suicide as a result of the harsh camp conditions and the brutality of the guards. Bodies were often sent back for burial in sealed coffins which families were forbidden to open. Hundreds of synagogues were torched and when fires failed to destroy the buildings, as happened in Bamberg, bulldozers were sent in to complete the job. And then the bill was served on the Jewish community. Shops were looted, Jews were beaten up in the streets, many were severely injured and in some cases died of their wounds. Kristallnacht was a night of sheer terror with lasting consequences. Ludwig Chodziesner, along with all Jewish males over the age of sixteen, was arrested but being considered too old for the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen was released a few days later. He returned home a broken man, [23] and then had to face the imminent forced sale of the house that he and his family had lived in since July 1923.
5
Set against the voluminous literature concerning the death camps relatively little has been written about the daily humiliations suffered by Jews trapped inside Germany after Kristallnacht. To this end it is difficult for most Western Europeans, born after 1945, to grasp what it must have been like for Jews to have lived in that "death-stressed environment",[24] waiting for the unknown that might yet still not happen: hoping against each false hope, even as their world disintegrated about them, that their lives might yet somehow still improve even as restrictions tightened daily around them. [25] Although Gertrud's letters offer an occasional glimpse into that darkness they remain, by and large, circumspect and studiously moderated and thus offer us little sense of the appalling conditions under which she and her father were living. A series of constraints circumscribed what Gertrud, and others like her, were able to communicate to friends and family abroad. Her letters were self-censored not just because of justified fears of the "censor" (after all she had been a letter-censor herself), but also out of concern for the sensibilities, real or imagined, of her younger sister. Reading Gertrud's letters suggests that she was not only protecting herself from the authorities but also shielding Hilde from knowing too much about what she and their father had to endure. [26]
I want to illustrate this point by recounting a small but significant incident from my own family history. My paternal grandparents lived in Bamberg, a large town some 50 kilometres north of Nürnberg. Like Ludwig and Gertrud my grandparents were also trapped inside Germany but unlike the Chodziesners they were desperate to escape. In their case, as with so many others, they had simply left it too late and they were eventually ‘deported’, in November 1941, to Jungfernhof, a purpose-built concentration camp just outside Riga. During their own ‘waiting time’ my grandparents wrote extensively to their eldest son Hans, and to Gustav (my grandfather's younger brother). Hans, somewhat like Hilde Chodziesner, had managed to escape from Berlin, in September 1938. But he found his refuge in New York where he joined his uncle Gustav who had been living in America since 1923. From time to time Lehman, my 78 year old great-grandfather, who was virtually the same age as Ludwig Chodziesner, would add his comments to my grandparents' letters. His words were always brief and, in some respects, quite banal. Suddenly, in April 1939, my grandparents managed to secure Lehman's safe passage out of Germany. Shortly after he arrived in England, and clearly no longer afraid of the German censors pressing upon him, Lehman wrote the following letter to his youngest son:
My dear Gustav,
Since last Friday I have been here [in Brighton] with my loved ones. They came to fetch me from London to bring me here by car. I am grateful for all the care, I am grateful to the Almighty that he has rescued us from this valley of misery. In Bamberg we could not sleep for fear, for no day passed without something happening and it was impossible to write to you about this from Bamberg itself. I was in prison for one day and dear Philipp was inDachau and the sorrow that he experience(s) there. We sent the telegram as quickly as possible that he may be able to get to Cuba that he may have a good Yomtov but they are such cruel people I have never cried so much as I have since the 9 and 10 November. I am myself, thank God, healthy and hope that the same is true for you .... I hope that you will soon be able to send words to our loved ones for every day carries with it danger. We send our warmest greetings and kisses also to Hans. [Your] dear father and grandfather.
The gold watch and everything has been taken from us. We got out with only seventeen shillings and the clothes that we stood up in. [27]
6
My grandfather, Philipp, was born on 6 December 1889 and so was just five years older than Gertrud Chodziesner. On the morning after Kristallnacht Philipp was arrested and sent to Dachau. His wife, my grandmother Helene, mentioned nothing of his arrest in the postcard she wrote to her son on the following day. A week later, when she must have realised that she would have to explain why Philipp did not add his own news to her weekly letter, she glossed his absence with this rather anodyne phrase: "dear papa is on a journey". [28] However oblique my grandmother did at least make some reference to her husband's arrest. For his part Philipp never mentioned this "journey" when he was returned home a month later. He simply resumed his letter writing as if nothing had happened. And yet within that short space of time everything had changed.
It is those silences from post Kristallnacht Germany which remain so chilling and which can perhaps, also, be read into the poetry that congealed inside Kolmar’s pen.
7
On 16 October 1938, some three weeks before Kristallnacht, Gertrud wrote to tell her sister that she and their father were still living, in relative security, in the family home in Finkenkrug. And whilst their situation was no doubt difficult it was not yet fatal. In that same letter Gertrud mentions how she had decided to learn to cook. And she linked this decision with her much earlier decision to study languages. Thanks to that decision she could now tell herself "with confidence: 'No matter where you may end up, you will be able to communicate immediately or within a short while.'" [29] Surely this speaks of a sense of some kind of a future? Indeed in the next part of the letter Gertrud informs Hilde that she is about to post two copies of Die Frau und die Tiere (Woman and Animals), a selection of her poems which had just been published by the "Jewish publishing house" of Erwin Löwe. How bad could things be when she could still have a book published and even favourably reviewed?
Gertrud's next communication to Hilde, dated 24 November 1938, was written just over two weeks after Kristallnacht. It is short and to the point:
..... I have to ask you to hold the 'English' matter in abeyance for a while. I'm sorry you had to expend so much effort and money. But we are not masters of the course of events here. Yesterday we sold our house, will probably have to move in about four to eight weeks. Helene [the Chodziesner cook for forty years] wants to retire, and since the plans [father] had made in case I should obtain a position as tutor in England must be filed away, I want to stay for the time being. I can and will not leave [father] alone at his age and under the present circumstances. You understand that, don't you? And you won't be angry with me? [30]
In just five weeks Ludwig Chodziesner's wealth had been expropriated, the plans that he and Gertrud had made for his retirement and for her "emigration" were in shreds and all remaining copies of Die Frau und die Tiere had been burnt.
8
If we assume that Gertrud was no longer free to emigrate after the pogrom of November 1938 the question arises as to how she was able (if at all) to reconcile herself with her fate. By October 1941, which was close to the third anniversary of Kristallnachtand about a year before her father's deportation, Gertrud appears to have found a way to settle this deeply disturbing metaphysical problem. She articulates something of this in a letter to her friend and cousin Susanne Jung who was living in Düsseldorf:
Believe me that whatever may come, I won't be unhappy or given to despair, because I know in my heart that I am going the way for which I'm destined .... So many of us went that way through the centuries; why should I want to go a different one than they [.......] Until now I didn't know my inner strength and to know it makes me happy. [31]
This might be read as Kolmar's attempt to link her own personal and subjective fate with an irrevocable Jewish destiny - I am even tempted to say with that mythical-mystical Jewish destiny of Olah (whole sacrificial offering). And yet this raises an even more intractable dilemma. In her letter to Hilde, dated 15 December 1942, Gertrud mentions a friend who was also a Spinoza scholar: he had spoken to her "about the concept of freedom of the human will in the midst of unfreedom."
I said that I understood this very well from my own experience. For it was not up to me to accept or reject this factory work that has been imposed on me; I had to acquiesce and carry it out. But I was free in my inner soul to adopt a negative or a positive attitude toward it, to approach it willingly or unwillingly. At the moment when I affirmed it in my heart, the pressure was lifted from me. I was determined to regard it as a learning experience and to learn from it as much as I could. In this way I was free in the midst of my unfreedom. [32]
And yet this freedom in the midst of unfreedom seems to have opened a further contradiction: namely the unspoken tension which Gertrud felt to exist between her commitment to a personal subjective freedom and her commitment to a belief in a mystical attachment to that (imposed) racial destiny with which she now identified. The resolution she found, if it can be described as such, seems to have manifested itself in a profound sense of guilt.
How many of those who are now collapsing in the face of an overwhelming fate have asked themselves whether they might not deserve this punishment, that they might owe some form of atonement? I was not worse in what I did and desired than other women. But I knew that I did not live my life the way I should have and was always ready to atone. And all the suffering I had to bear and still will have to bear, I shall accept as punishment, and it will be just. I shall bear it without moaning, and I shall find somehow that it belongs to me and that I was born to endure and somehow overcome it and that I shall have grown in my innermost being because of it. [33]
9
Living in a post-Shoa society which has become so deeply secular I find it almost impossible to comprehend how anybody could believe, let alone argue, that Hitler was "the rod of God" and that Shoa, or Hurban (total destruction), was sent by God as punishment and as purification for the Jews. [34] And yet Gertrud Chodziesner, like countless thousands of others, seems to have believed that she, as a Jew, deserved whatever punishments might be meted out upon her.
One theory, that is often advanced to explain this mind-set, is that Gertrud Chodziesner, like most assimilated German Jews, had introjected (taken into themselves) those negative images of the Jew which had been promulgated by late nineteenth century racists and then widely accepted by a majority of Germans. It was this introjection which then led to an internalisation of anti-Semitism and this, in turn, manifested itself in self-hatred. This, so the argument runs, was why so many Jews came to believe that they deserved what was happening to them. [35] Indeed aspects of this belief-system can even be read into some of Kolmar's own writings. [36] But while I do not wish to dismiss this theory out of hand I find it too pat, too "pathologising". I want, therefore, to suggest a somewhat different response to Gertrud's sense of owing atonement.
My starting point is an essay by Lawrence Langer which touches obliquely upon this question but from an obverse, maybe even tangential, point of view. Langer quotes from a fragment of a harrowing narrative told by Bessie K., a survivor of Stutthof Concentration Camp. [37] Having quoted the fragment Langer offers a reading which suggests that what Bessie K. relates can be heard as the expression of a woman who "has survived ... an event to be endured, not a trauma to be healed." But then Langer continues by suggesting there is another, perhaps deeper meaning to be found in Bessie K.'s narrative; because in its telling
she invites us to reflect on a consequence of atrocity that surfaces in numerous survivor testimonies – the condition of having missed one's intended destiny by surviving one's death. [38]
If I turn Langer's insight through a process of chiasmus (or contrast by parallelism in reverse order) then it becomes possible to read Gertrud's life and work not only through how she lived and died but also by reference to the ways in which she struggled to understand, and make sense of her destiny with death. For Gertrud Chodziesner was also Gertrud Kolmar: and she was not just a Jew, nor just a woman, nor just a poet, nor just a daughter, nor just an elder sister, or a maiden aunt, or a friend, or lover: but all these people individually and together and maybe even each one at once. If this notion of a fractured self disturbs "our dependence on coherence, reason, order, the moral and psychological balance that constitutes for us civilised being," [39] then it may also help us to open to a deeper understanding of how Gertrud Kolmar or Gertrud Chodziesner or those countless thousands of other women managed to endure their time locked in the waiting rooms of death.
10
Susanna, a novella, is effectively Kolmar’s last extant work. I found it complex and disturbing. In it she has her main and anonymous protagonist speak in the first person singular. But, as Kolmar makes clear, that protagonist speaks not as "a poet" but as "an old governess with graying hair, a furrowed forehead and tear-filled bags under her eyes" [1997b, p.163]. Near the end of the story that she is telling to us, she, the governess, seeks to justify, or to explain, or maybe even to excuse her actions in relation to her conduct towards Susanna, the young melancholic teenage girl over whom she had charge.
Maybe it was the quality of unreality that held me back. Perhaps. I still ask myself today why I hesitated and as then I have no answer. A poet must always try to illuminate the cause of human action; life saves itself the effort and leaves all motivation in the dark. What I am writing here is what was experienced.
In that same novella, and in an explicitly rhetorical passage, Kolmar has Susanna ask her, or is Susanna asking her governess (but who is actually telling the story?) - the following:
"Tell me .... is it possible? Is it possible for words to disappear from a book? The print fades gradually until it is very faint and finally a word is no longer there. And in the empty space a new word slowly begins to form: at first the letters are unclear and gray and then they become more and more distinct and black ... And this way completely new stories are created inside books, but perhaps also sentences nobody understands? Is that possible? [40]
I wonder whether something in these passages can be read not just as a denial of herself as a poet but also, and at the same time, as a recognition that she was no longer a poet? For I read these words as Chodziesner’s / Kolmar’s attempt to resign herself to the brutal fact that she must now learn to endure life rather than try to illuminate it. And if this is so then it may well help me better understand the poetic silences which followed in the wake of Welten?
11
What then if there are still other stories hidden, like palimpsests, beneath the words that Kolmar and Chodziesner left behind: words and sentences which we still cannot read let alone understand?
Chodziesner (or was it Kolmar?) wrote Susanna in 1940. We also know from her letters that she was learning Hebrew at the time and had even written poems in that language. [41] But apart from these brief references it is probably now impossible to know to what extent Gertrud continued writing through those dark times. Yet I like to think that with a close listening it might still be possible to hear, and feel, the weight of the silences that she left behind: to catch at the sighs that punctuated those endless days of labouring or to listen for her screams as they pierced through the darkness of those interminable hours trapped inside the "cattle truck" rattling her towards Death.
And through that listening I am reminded of a short poem by Dan Pagis[xlii]
Written in Pencil in the Sealed Boxcar[xliii]
Here in this transport
I am Eve
With Abel my son
If you should see my older son
Cain son of man [or Adam]
Tell him that I
© philip kuhn
24 november 2008 / 23 february 2009
26 Cheshvan 5769 / 28 Shevat 5769
Notes & Bibliography
I would like to thank Julian Marshall for inviting me to write some programme notes for his Cantata and thereby introducing me to the works of Kolmar whom I had not heard of before. My thanks also to Anthony Rudolf for his helpful comments on the first draft of this essay.
The title is taken from Der Engel im Walde / The Angel in the Forrest, in Kolmar 1999, p.23 / 1970, p.24.
Aspects of this and its aftermath might be read into Kolmar's 1930 novel 1997a, pp. 11-16, 127-128, 141. See also Frantz 1997, p.26
Aspects of this might be read into Kolmar's 1940 novella 1997b
Kolmar 2004, p.135
Woltman 2004, p.167
Semprun 1993. This graphic and harrowing account of his five day journey to Buchenwald offers something of a glimpse into the kind of journey Gertrud might have had to endure
Paraphrased from "Die Dichterin", Kolmar 1975, pp. 54-57
Woltman 2004, p.166.
The first performances will be in Winchester Cathedral and St. Gabriel's Church (London) during March 2009.
Dieter Kühn, telephone communications; 26 October 2008 & 11 January 2009.
Kolmar 2004. The translation includes several letters to miscellaneous others including Jacob Picard and Walter Benjamin, who was Gertrud's cousin.
Schwertfeger 1997, p. 615
Nelly Sachs escaped to Sweden.
Else Lasker-Schüler fled to Switzerland in 1932. When she was subsequently refused the right for permanent stay she emigrated to Israel
Paul Celan endured some two years in Rumanian Labour camps.
Piotr Rawicz was in Auschwitz for more than two years. See also Anthony Rudolf’s study of Rawicz’s novel Blood from the Sky (Rudolf 2007)
Primo Levi was also a survivor of Auschwitz
Miklós Radnoti was sent to a forced labour camp in occupied Serbia. He was executed on 9 November 1944 during a forced march back into Hungary.
Kipp 1970, p.7
Langer 1978, p.256
Fragments of Celan's early poems appear in translation in Felstiner 1995, pp. 10-21: Radnóti's early poems in Radnóti, 2003 & 1972
Kipp 1970, p.7, likens Kolmar's poems to Georg Heym's (1887 to 1912). A fine translation of Heym's work can be found in Heym 2004.
Traverso 1995, pp.112f.
According to Peter Wenzel, his son-in-law, Ludwig's experiences "made him very apathetic." Kolmar 2004, p.169
Langer 1998, p.74.
For a brief glimpse into this nightmare world see Appelfeld 1984
It is worth recalling that Gertrud's brother-in-law, Peter Wenzel, was not Jewish and continued to live in Germany. Separated from Hilde he was still able to travel, from time to time, to visit his daughter in Switzerland.
Kuhn 2005, p. 242.
Kuhn 2005, p.22.
Kolmar 2004, p.8.
Kolmar 2004, p. 9
Kolmar 2004, pp. 83-84
Kolmar 2004, p.135
Kolmar 2004, pp.135-136
See i.e., the arguments as countered by Donat 2007, pp. 275-286
See i.e., example the arguments made by Frantz 1997, pp. 28-29
See i.e., Kolmar 1997a, pp.151-152 & 1997b, p.172
Bessie K.'s fragment also happens to have disturbing resonances with Kolmar's novel 1997a
Langer 1998, p.72, italics mine
Langer 1998, p.73
Kolmar 1997b, p.182-183
Kolmar 2004, pp. 43 & 46.
Born in Bukovina in 1930, deported at age 11 to a camp in the Ukraine, survived the war and finally found his way to Israel in 1946.
Quoted & translated by Langer 1998, p. 60
Bibliography
Appelfeld, A., 1984, Badenheim 1939, J.M. Dent & Sons, London
Blumenthal, B.G., 1969, Gertrud Kolmar: Love's Service to the Earth, The German Quarterly,
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Celan, P., 2001, Selected Poems and Prose, trans. John Felstiner, W.W.Norton, New York.
Donat, A., 2007, Voice from the Ashes: Wandering in search of God, in Katz, Biderman &
Greenberg, 2007, pp.275-286
Eben, M. C., 1984, Gertrud Kolmar: An Appraisal, German Life and Letters, 37(3), 196-210;
Felstiner, J., 1995, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, Yale Univ. Press, New Haven
Frantz, B. C., 1997, Gertrud Kolmar's Prose. Studies in German Jewish History vol 2.
Peter Lang, New York.
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Culture, 1096-1996, Yale Univ. Press, New Haven
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Hamburger, M., & Middleton, C., 1962, Modern German Poetry 1910-1960, MacGibbon
& Kee, London
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