Born: Berlin, Germany; December 10, 1891
Died: Stockholm, Sweden; May 12, 1970
PRINCIPAL POETRY
In den Wohnungen des Todes, 1946
Sternverdunkelung, 1949
Und niemand weiss weiter, 1957
Flucht und Verwandlung, 1959
Fahrt ins Staublose, 1961
Noch feiert Tod das Leben, 1961
Glühende Rätsel, 1964 (parts 1 and 2; 1965, part 3 in Späte Gedichte; 1966, part 4 in the annual Jahresring)
Späte Gedichte, 1965
Die Suchende, 1966
O the Chimneys, 1967
The Seeker, and Other Poems, 1970
Teile dich Nacht, 1971
OTHER LITERARY FORMS
Nelly Sachs (saks) published the short play, or “scenic poem,” Eli: Ein Mysterienspiel vom Leiden Israels (pb. 1951; Eli: A Mystery Play of the Sufferings of Israel, 1967). Her fiction is collected in Legenden und Erzählungen (1921) and her correspondence with Paul Celan in Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs: Correspondence (1995).
ACHIEVEMENTS
Nelly Sachs arrived at her characteristic poetic style late in life. She was heavily influenced by the German Romantic poets and did not consider her lyric poetry of the years prior to 1943 to be representative of her mature work, excluding those poems from the collection of 1961. Her first published book, a small volume of legends and tales published in 1921, was heavily indebted in style and content to the Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlöf. In the 1920’s and 1930’s, Sachs published lyric poetry in such respected newspapers and journals as the Vossische Zeitung of Berlin, the Berliner Tageblatt, and Der Morgen, the journal of the Jewish cultural federation.
Sachs’s stylistic breakthrough came with the traumatic experience of her flight from Germany and exile in Sweden. The play Eli was written in 1943 but published privately in Sweden in 1951. It was first broadcast on Süddeutsche Rundfunk (South German Radio) in 1958 and had its theater premiere in 1962 in Dortmund. Acceptance of her poetry in West Germany was equally slow, partly because her main theme (Jewish suffering during World War II) stirred painful memories. In the late 1950’s and 1960’s, however, she was hailed as modern Germany’s greatest woman poet and received numerous literary prizes. She was accepted for membership in several academies. In 1958, she received the poetry prize of the Swedish broadcasting system and, in 1959, the Kulturpreis der Deutschen Industrie. The town of Meersburg in West Germany awarded her the Annette Droste Prize for female poets in 1960, and the city of Dortmund founded the Nelly Sachs Prize in 1961 and presented her with its first award. In the same year, friends and admirers published the first volume of a Festschrift, followed by the second volume, Nelly Sachs zu Ehren, on the occasion of her seventy-fifth birthday in 1966. On October 17, 1965, she received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade Association, and on December 10, 1966, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Berlin, the city where she was born and in which she had lived for nearly half a century, made her an honorary citizen in 1967. The city of Dortmund, Germany, and the Royal Library in Stockholm, Sweden, have valuable collections of her letters and transcriptions of her early poems in their Nelly Sachs Archive.
Nelly Sachs ( ©The Nobel Foundation)
BIOGRAPHY
Nelly Leonie Sachs was born Leonie Sachs in Berlin on December 10, 1891, the only child of William Sachs, an inventor, technical engineer, and manufacturer, and his wife, Margarete (Karger) Sachs. The family lived in very comfortable financial circumstances, and Nelly Sachs was educated in accordance with the custom for daughters of the upper-middle class. Although both of her parents were of Jewish ancestry, her family had few ties with the Jewish community and did not practice their religion. Sachs attended public schools from 1897 to 1900, but because of poor health, she was removed and received private instruction until 1903. She then attended a private secondary school for daughters of wealthy and titled families and finished her education in 1908 without any formal professional training. In the summer of that year, she fell in love with a man whose name she never revealed. That experience, which ended unhappily, escalated into a crisis, making Sachs consider suicide. The man was later killed in one of Germany’s concentration camps.
For the next twenty-five years, even after the death of her father in 1930, Sachs led a sheltered and not particularly noteworthy existence. She produced some poetry, read extensively, and did watercolors, some of which have been preserved in the Nelly Sachs Archive in Stockholm. In 1906, Sachs received Lagerlöf’s novel Gösta Berling (1891) as a birthday present. Her admiration for the writer resulted in a correspondence between the two, and Sachs sent Lagerlöf many of her own literary experiments. Through the intervention of Lagerlöf and the brother of the reigning Swedish king, Sachs and her mother received permission to emigrate to Sweden in 1939. Shortly after Lagerlöf’s death in 1940, Sachs received orders from German authorities to appear for deportation to a work camp. Leaving all their possessions behind, Sachs and her mother fled Germany, arriving in Stockholm on May 16, 1940. They took up residence in a small apartment in the industrial harbor area, where Sachs remained until her death in 1970.
The imagery in Sachs’s later lyric poetry draws to a large extent on influences from her youth. Her father’s extensive collection of rocks, gems, and fossils was a source of inspiration to her, and she continued his hobby with a collection of her own in Stockholm; not unexpectedly, the use of the stones as a cipher is very prevalent in her work “Chor der Steine” (“Chorus of the Stones”). From her father’s library, she was also familiar with the work of Maria Sibylla Merian, a seventeenth century entomologist and graphic artist who specialized in the study of butterflies. Sachs’s poem “Schmetterling” (“Butterfly”) exemplifies her metaphoric use of this and other insects in her work. In 1959, Sachs wrote that of all childhood influences on her later works, her father’s musical talent was paramount. When he played the piano during evenings after work, she frequently danced for hours to the strains of his music. In addition to her early lyric poems, which she characterized as “dance and music poems,” the motif of the dance is also important in her later work.
In 1960, Sachs returned to Germany for the first time since her exile to receive the Annette Droste Prize. Not wishing to spend a night in Germany, she stayed instead in Zurich, traveling the short distance to Meersburg only to accept the honor. Hearing the German language spoken again proved to be so traumatic, however, that she experienced a “memory trip to hell.” In Zurich, she met Paul Celan, another exiled poet, who invited her to his home in Paris. The meeting resulted in a continuing correspondence, but Celan was in the midst of a personal crisis as well, and the relationship may have contributed to Sachs’s difficulties. After her return to Stockholm, Sachs suffered a mental breakdown and was hospitalized with severe delusions of persecution. Although she worked feverishly during the next decade, she continued to suffer periodic attacks in which she imagined herself persecuted and threatened with death. Her cycle Noch feiert Tod das Leben (death still celebrates life) was written while she recovered in the hospital. Celan attempted to aid her recovery through an intensive, supportive correspondence that was also, however, an attempt at self-healing, inasmuch as he suffered from a similar ailment. Their poetry, beginning with Sachs’s Noch feiert Tod das Leben and Celan’s Die Niemandsrose (1963), shows their continuing “dialogue in poems.” In the spring of 1970, Sachs became mortally ill and thus was not informed when Celan was reported missing early in April of that year. He was later found—an apparent suicide by drowning; his funeral services took place in the Cimetière Parisien near Orly, France, on the same day in May on which Sachs died in a Stockholm hospital.
ANALYSIS
It is difficult to speak of development in Nelly Sachs’s poetic works, inasmuch as she was well beyond fifty years old when she produced her first significant poems. It is true that she had published lyric poetry before the 1940’s, but this early work has little in common with that of her mature years. Most of the poems from the 1920’s and 1930’s are thematically quite distinct from the later work, devoted to musicians such as Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Jean-Philippe Rameau, and Luigi Boccherini or dealing poetically with certain animals, such as deer, lambs, and nightingales. The Nelly Sachs archives in Dortmund and in Stockholm have copies of a substantial number of these early efforts.
IN DEN WOHNUNGEN DES TODES
In contrast, the work of Sachs’s last twenty-five years concerns itself largely with existential problems, particularly with topics related to the Holocaust and rooted in personal experiences of flight, exile, and the death of friends. Her first collection of poems, In den Wohnungen des Todes (in the habitations of death), refers in its title to the Nazi death camps and is dedicated to those who perished there. It is a mistake, however, to perceive her work solely in the context of these historical events. Her topic is on a larger scale, the cycle of life itself—birth, death, rebirth—and Sachs develops various metaphors and ciphers to express the agony and the hope of this cycle.
STERNVERDUNKELUNG
Although it is desirable to interpret Sachs’s work separately from the context of specific historical events , it is almost impossible to analyze an individual poem without relying on information gained from a broader knowledge of her work. This difficulty is the result of her frequent use of ciphers, poetic images that can be “decoded” only by reference to other poems in which the same images occur. Such a cipher in Sachs’s work is the stone. Its properties are chiefly those of inert matter: lack of emotion, or lifelessness. The cipher may depict human callousness, death, or desolation in different contexts, and it is related to similar poetic images such as sand and dust—decayed rock—which signify the mortal human condition.
The poem “Sinai,” from the collection Sternverdunkelung (eclipse of the stars), contains entirely negative images of the stone. Sachs compares the ancient times of Moses, in which humanity was still in intimate contact with the divine and thus vibrantly alive, with the present state of lifelessness; there are only “petrified eyes of the lovers” with “their putrefied happiness.” Recounting Moses’s descent from Mount Sinai, Sachs asks: “Where is still a descendent/ from those who trembled? Oh, may he glow/ in the crowd of amnesiacs/ of the petrified!” The eyes of the lovers turned to stone signify the death both of sensibility and of sensuousness, and the inability to re-create or reproduce. It is ultimately a death of humankind. The call is for one perhaps still alive among the multitude of those dead in mind and body.
In “Chassidische Schriften” (“Hasidic Scriptures”), from Sternverdunkelung, Sachs writes: “And the heart of stones,/ filled with drifting sand,/ is the place where midnights are stored.” “Drifting sand” is sand blown skyward by the wind; thus, while it is inert matter, it has lost this inertia momentarily on the wings of the wind. The dead has come to life. Midnight, on the other hand, represents the end of one day and the dawning of the next, a time of rebirth. Sachs contends that the stone, dead as it is, is imbued with the desire for rebirth and transubstantiation. Another possibility for the stone to attain a semblance of life is offered in “Golem Tod!” (“Golem Death!”), from Sternverdunkelung. There, “The stone sleeps itself green with moss.” The suggestion that the stone is merely sleeping, not dead, and that it is capable of producing living matter (moss) is also an affirmation of the possibility of renewal of life after death.
“CHORUS OF THE STONES” AND “MELUSINE, IF YOUR WELL HAD NOT”
Scarcely less negative is the stone cipher in the poem “Wenn nicht dein Brunnen, Melusine” (“Melusine, If Your Well Had Not”), from Und niemand weiss weiter. If it were not for the possibility of transformation and escape, “we should long have passed away/ in the petrified resurrection/ of an Easter Island.” Easter Island’s petrified statues are merely reminders of an extinct civilization, not a resurrection from the dead. Still, the poem indicates that transformation is possible (the symbol for it is Melusine). In the poem “Chorus of the Stones,” from In den Wohnungen des Todes, stones are, like the statues of Easter Island, venerable objects depicting the history of humankind. The stone is symbolic of all that has died, but it carries memories within it and thus is not entirely devoid of life. The last lines of the poem even offer the hope that the stone is only “sleeping,” that it may come to life again: “Our conglomeration is transfused by breath./ It solidified in secret/ but may awaken at a kiss.”
Three ideas in “Chorus of the Stones” suggest that death is not the final answer to life: The lifeless entity (the stone) contains memories; it is imbued with breath, a necessary element of life; and it may be awakened by an act of love. Transformation, resurrection, and transfiguration are therefore within the realm of possibility. Such a flight from lifelessness to a new beginning is nevertheless fraught with difficulties.
“HALLELUJA”
The most dramatic depiction of the rebirth of the dead is to be found in Sachs’s poem “Halleluja” (“Hallelujah”), from the volume Flucht und Verwandlung (flight and metamorphosis). The poem describes a mountain rising from the sea by volcanic action. The rock is portrayed as a beloved child, the crowning glory of its mother, the ocean, as it thrusts forth from the womb to the light of day. While still embedded in the sea, the rock showed signs of sustaining life. As in “Golem Death!” with its stone covered with moss, this rock has been nurturing life. For the sea algae, birth of the rock means death, which the “winged longing” of the rock will bring about; although one form of life dies, another takes its place. These poems therefore encompass the cycle of life and death of living and inert matter on Earth.
“BUTTERFLY” AND “FLEEING”
In tracing the cipher of the stone, it is evident that the nihilism of the earlier cycles has given way to a guarded optimism in the later ones. A more traditional image of transfiguration is that of the butterfly. Its life cycle includes the apparent death of the homely caterpillar and its re-emergence from the cocoon as a beautiful winged creature, and thus it is readily adaptable as a symbol of the soul’s resurrection after physical death. Sachs uses the image of the butterfly within this tradition. The poem “In der Flucht” (“Fleeing”), from Flucht und Verwandlung, compares the flight of the Jews from their persecutors with the never-ending process of transformation, mutation, and metamorphosis. There is no rest and no end (no “Amen”) for that which is considered mortal (sand, dust), for it experiences endless metamorphoses. The butterfly, itself a symbol of metamorphosis, will reenter the life-giving element at its death and complete the cycle of life.
In “Butterfly,” from Sternverdunkelung, the butterfly is depicted as a mortal creature (one made of “dust”) which nevertheless mirrors the beauty of a world beyond: “What lovely hereafter/ is painted in your dust.” The butterfly is a messenger of hope for those who are dying, because it is aware through its own metamorphosis that death is only sleep. The butterfly is the symbol of farewell, just as it was the symbol of the last greeting before sleep.
“DANCER” AND “SHE DANCES”
More obscure than the image of the butterfly are Sachs’s ciphers of music and dance. The dancer appears to be able to defy gravity in graceful and effortless leaps and spins. A new image of man is created in the dance—that of emancipation from earthly limitations and acceptance into the sphere of the incorporeal. On this premise, Sachs bases her depiction of the dancer as a re-creator, savior, and emancipator from material limitations. In the poem “Sie tanzt” (“She Dances”), from Noch feiert Tod das Leben, the dancer rescues her lover from the dead. This act of rescue is not meant to save him from physical death, for he is no longer alive; metamorphosis is her aim. This she achieves, paradoxically, by her own death: “Aber plötzlich/am Genick/ Schlaf beünt Sie hinüber” (“But suddenly/ at the neck/ sleep bends her over”). In German, the word “over” (hinüber) signifies “to the other side” and thus clearly suggests death; this connotation is underscored by the image of her bending at the neck (hanging) and by the word “sleep,” which Sachs frequently uses as a synonym for physical, but not spiritual, death. In the act of dancing, the dancer has liberated both the dead lover and herself. The metamorphosis has released her from life and has rescued him from death. They are united in the spiritual realm. In Flucht und Verwandlung, a somewhat different form of creation is discussed in the poem “Tänzerin” (“Dancer”). Here the dancer becomes the vessel for the hope of the future, and Sachs depicts with physiological clarity the birth canal for a messianic prophecy: “In the branches of your limbs/ the premonitions/ build their twittering nests.” The dancer’s body becomes the maternal, life-giving promise of the future.
In the poem “She Dances,” the beginning and the end of life are shown to coincide at the point of metamorphosis, the dancer being the agent. The medium for transfiguration is music. The poem “O-A-O-A,” in Glühende Rätsel (glowing enigmas), describes the rhythmic “sea of vowels” as the Alpha and Omega. Music is the means of metamorphosis: “Du aber die Tasten niederdrücktest/ in ihre Gräber aus Musik/ und Tanz die verlorene Sternschunuppe/ einen Flügel erfand für dein Leiden” (“But you pressed down the keys/ into their graves of music/ and dance the lost meteor/ invented a wing for your anguish”). The English word “keys” is ambiguous, but the German Tasten refers solely to the keys of a piano in this context. The graves are made of music, the transforming factor, and are being played like the keys of a piano, while dance provides the wings for the flight from the corporeal.
“IN THE BLUE DISTANCE”
Finally, in the poem “In der blauen Ferne” (“In the Blue Distance”), from Und niemand weiss weiter, the pregnant last lines combine the ciphers of stone, dust, dance, andmusic in the depiction of metamorphosis: “the stone transforms its dust/ dancing into music.” The lifeless element needs no mediator here but performs the ritual of transubstantiation into music (release from corporeal existence) by “dancing” as “dust”—an action functionally identical to that of the drifting sand in the poem “Hasidic Scriptures.”
It has frequently been assumed that Sachs is chiefly a chronicler of Jewish destiny during World War II, a recorder of death and despair. This narrow view does not do justice to her work. Sachs’s poetry has many aspects of faith, hope, and love, and need not be relegated to a specific historical event or ethnic orientation. Sachs writes about the concerns of every human being—birth, life, love, spiritual renewal, and the possibility of an existence beyond physical death. To diminish the scope of her appeal is to misunderstand her message and to misinterpret her work.
OTHER MAJOR WORKS
SHORT FICTION: Legenden und Erzählungen, 1921.
PLAYS: Eli: Ein Mysterienspiel vom Leiden Israels, pb. 1951 (Eli: A Mystery Play of the Sufferings of Israel, 1967); Zeichen im Sand: Die szenischen Dichtungen, pb. 1962.
NONFICTION: Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs: Correspondence, 1995.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bahti, Timothy, and Marilyn Sibley Fries, eds. Jewish Writers, German Literature: The Uneasy Examples of Nelly Sachs and Walter Benjamin. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Biographical and critical essays of Sachs’s and Benjamin’s lives and works. Includes bibliographical references and an index.
Bosmajian, Hamida. Metaphors of Evil: Contemporary German Literature and the Shadow of Nazism. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1979. A historical and critical study of responses to the Holocaust in poetry and prose. Includes bibliographical references and index.
Bower, Kathrin M. Ethics and Remembrance in the Poetry of Nelly Sachs and Rose Ausländer. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2000. Critical interpretation of the works of Sachs and Ausländer with particular attention to their recollections of the Holocaust. Includes bibliographical references and index.
Garloff, Katja. Words from Abroad: Trauma and Displacement in Postwar German Jewish Writers. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. This work on German Jewish writers contains a chapter on Sachs as well as one on her friend Celan.
Langer, Lawrence L. Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982. Brilliantly illuminates the paradoxes in Sachs’s verse.
Roth, John K., ed. Holocaust Literature. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2008. Contains a chapter that analyzes Sachs’s “In the Blue Distance.”
Rudnick, Ursula. Post-Shoa Religious Metaphors: The Image of God in the Poetry of Nelly Sachs. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. A biography of the poet and an in-depth interpretation of seven poems. Rudnick traces the biblical and mystical Jewish tradition that grounds Sachs’s work. Includes bibliographical references.
Sachs, Nelly. Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs: Correspondence. Translated by Christopher Clark. Edited by Barbara Wiedemann. Riverdale-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Sheep Meadow Press, 1995. A collection of letters by two poets living outside Germany and tormented by guilt that they had escaped the Holocaust. Includes bibliographical references and index.
Soltes, Ori Z. The Ashen Rainbow: Essays on the Arts and the Holocaust. Washington, D.C.: Eshel Books, 2007. This work on art and the Holocaust contains a chapter that discusses Sachs.
Helene M. Kastinger Riley