Born: Czernowitz, Bukovina (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine); May 11, 1901
Died: Düsseldorf, Germany; January 3, 1988
PRINCIPAL POETRY
Der Regenbogen, 1939
Blinder Sommer, 1965
36 Gerechte, 1967
Inventar, 1972
Ohne Visum, 1974
Andere Zeichen, 1975
Gesammelte Gedichte, 1976 (expanded 1977)
Noch ist Raum, 1976
Doppelspiel, 1977
Es ist alles anders, 1977
Selected Poems, 1977
Aschensommer, 1978
Es bleibt noch viel zu sagen, 1978
Mutterland, 1978
Ein Stück weiter, 1979
Einverständnis, 1980
Einen Drachen reiten, 1981
Im Atemhaus wohnen, 1981
Mein Atem heisst jetzt, 1981
Schatten im Spiegel, 1981 (in Hebrew)
Mein Venedig versinkt nicht, 1982
Südlich wartet ein wärmeres Land, 1982
So sicher atmet nur Tod, 1983
Gesammelte Werke in sieben Bänden und einen Nachtragsband, 1984-1990 (8 volumes)
Festtage in Manhattan, 1985
Ich zähl die Sterne meiner Worte, 1985
Brief aus Rosen, 1994
Mother Tongue, 1995
Schattenwald, 1995
The Forbidden Tree: Englische Gedichte, 1995
OTHER LITERARY FORMS
The reputation of Rose Ausländer (OWS-lehn- dehr) is based solely on her poetry. Volume 3 of her collected works, containing her writings from 1966 to 1975, includes several short prose pieces; volume 4, containing her writings from the year 1976, comprises, aside from her poetry, only one short autobiographical piece.
ACHIEVEMENTS
In 1957, the highly acclaimed poet Marianne Moore awarded Rose Ausländer the poetry prize of the Wagner College in New York. In 1967, Ausländer received the Meersburger Droste Prize; in 1977, the Ida Dehmel Prize and the Andreas Gryphius Prize; in 1978, the prize of the Federation of German Industry; and in 1980, the Roswitha Medal of the city of Bad Gandersheim.
BIOGRAPHY
Rose Ausländer was born Rosalie Beatrice Ruth Scherzer on May 11, 1901, to Jewish parents in Czernowitz, the capital of Bukovina. Her mother’s name was Etie Binder and her father’s, Sigmund Scherzer. Originally her father was supposed to become a rabbi, but later he decided to become a businessman. Until 1918, Bukovina was the easternmost part of the Habsburg Empire. The population of Czernowitz was about 110,000 and consisted of Germans, Romanians, Ukranians, Poles, and a large proportion of Jews. The Jewish population had assumed the role of preserving the German culture and of being an intermediary between it and the Slavic culture. As a child, Ausländer was educated in the German-Austrian school system, but she also learned Hebrew and Yiddish. Through her schooling she became acquainted with the German literary classics, especially those by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Heinrich Heine. She enjoyed a harmonious childhood, which was filled with love toward her parents and her native country. With the advent of World War I and the Russian occupation of Czernowitz, however, this peaceful existence was abruptly terminated. Ausländer’s family fled first to Bucharest and later to Vienna. There they led a life full of suffering and misery. As a result of the Treaty of Versailles, Bukovina became a part of Romania. The family returned to their hometown, where Ausländer finished her secondary education and subsequently attended the University of Czernowitz, majoring in literature and philosophy. At the university, she became especially interested in Plato, Baruch Spinoza, and Constantin Brunner, a follower of Spinoza who lived in Berlin at that time. Later the teachings of Brunner were to become an integral part of her poetry.
Ausländer’s studies and her active membership in literary circles exposed her to the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin, Franz Kafka, Georg Trakl, Rainer Maria Rilke, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Gottfried Benn. Despite their distance from Vienna, the Jewish literary circles in Czernowitz had adopted the Viennese Karl Kraus as mentor. With the publication of the journal Die Fackel (the torch), Kraus had assumed the role of the ”high priest of truth,” the herald of an ethical humanism and poetry against nationalist chauvinism and the corruption of bureaucracy and politics.
In 1921, as a result of the worsening of the family’s already dire financial situation following her father’s death, Ausländer decided to emigrate to the United States. She emigrated with her childhood friend Ignaz Ausländer. After failing to establish themselves in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, they settled in New York City, where they were married in 1923. Ausländer had a position in a bank, and her husband worked as a mechanic. The marriage was not to last; they separated in 1926 and were finally divorced in 1930. In 1924, Ausländer met Alfred Margul-Sperber, who later became the major sponsor of her poetry after her return to Czernowitz. In 1926, she became a U.S. citizen and in 1927 visited Constantin Brunner in Berlin. She returned to New York in 1928, where she lived with Helios Hecht, a graphologist, a writer, and an editor of several periodicals. She published her first poems in the Westlicher Herold-Kalender, a Minneapolis publication, and later published a few poems in the New Yorker Volks-zeitung. In 1931, she returned to Czernowitz with Hecht and remained there to care for her ailing mother. After her prolonged absence from the United States, her U.S. citizenship was revoked in 1934. Eventually, she and Hecht separated.
Between 1931 and the outbreak of World War II, Ausländer published poems in various periodicals. Margul-Sperber arranged for the publication of her first volume of poetry, Der Regenbogen (the rainbow), despite the Romanian government’s policy of suppressing non-Romanian literature. In 1941, the Germans occupied Czernowitz, forced the Jews to return to the old ghetto, and periodically deported groups to concentration camps in Transnistria. Ausländer and her mother escaped almost certain death by hiding from the Gestapo in basements where friends supplied them with food and clothes. The experience of persecution and underground existence was to become the motivating force behind Ausländer’s later poetry. In secret poetry-reading groups, she met Paul Antschel, who later changed his name to Paul Celan. It was during this time that she came to believe in the existential function of poetry to preserve her own identity in a hostile world.
When the Soviet Union seized Bukovina after World War II, Ausländer, together with her mother and her brother’s family, left Czernowitz for Bucharest. With the help of friends in the United States, she was able to obtain an immigration visa but only for herself; her family had to stay behind. In the fall of 1946, she arrived again in New York and found work as a translator and foreign-language secretary for a large shipping company. All her attempts to obtain an immigration visa for her mother proved futile. The news of her mother’s death in 1947 caused a psychological breakdown, after which for some time she wrote poetry only in English.
Although Ausländer became naturalized again in 1948, she never felt at home in New York. The American lifestyle remained alien to her. During a visit to Europe in 1957, she again saw Celan, who had emigrated to Paris. He introduced her to contemporary European poetry, which resulted in the rebirth of her poetry in German. The new poems, however, were stripped of all harmonizing prosodic elements.
In 1961, in failing health, Ausländer could not continue her job and was forced to live on her Social Security income. In 1966, she received additional support from the West German government. By that time, she had once again returned to Europe, where she attempted unsuccessfully to settle in Vienna, which was to her the cultural center of the former Habsburg Empire. Finally, she moved to Düsseldorf, West Germany, in 1965. The year 1965 was not only the date of the publication of her second volume of poetry, twenty-six years after her first one, but also the year of her belated reintroduction to a German audience. Although she could not return to her native country, she returned to her mother tongue, the only medium through which she could express her poetic message and establish a dialogue with an audience. In 1970, she moved into Nelly-Sachs-Haus, a Jewish home for the aged, which she made her permanent home. After a long illness and an increasing retreat from the outside world, she died in 1988. She left more than twenty thousand pages of manuscripts and typescripts, as well as numerous notebooks, material that was used to form much of her posthumous collections.
ANALYSIS
Rose Ausländer did not become recognized as a major poet until the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, when volumes of her poetry appeared in rapid succession. At the same time, various German newspapers and magazines printed some of her poems, and her work appeared in anthologies as well. Because of the outbreak of World War II and her Jewish background, her early writings had never reached a sizable audience beyond her hometown. Not until her visit with Celan in 1957, when she became acquainted with his elliptic Hermetic style and that of his European contemporaries, did she adopt the curt, laconic manner of her mature poetry. In this style, she vividly expressed the horrors of the Nazi persecution and her total desolation and despair, which continued even after the war, in her exile in the United States and later in Germany. Although the trauma of her persecution and exile was not diminished, she was able to transcend the pain of these experiences to reach a level beyond despair, a new affirmation of life and its riches—each object of which becomes the motif for a poem. Perhaps her hard-won message of consolation and redemption explains the increasing recognition of her achievements.
The titles of Ausländer’s collections, such as Blinder Sommer (blind summer), Ohne Visum (without a visa), and Aschensommer (ash summer), like the images and motifs in the poems themselves, such as “ash,” “smoke,” and “dust,” clearly reveal that Ausländer’s poetry is directly linked to the Holocaust. She deeply identified with the suffering of her people. Even her first volume of poetry in 1939, however, reflected a troubled outlook on life. Here, nature, homeland, and love provide a refuge from a threatening reality, as the danger of national socialism loomed on the horizon. Despite their harmonizing prosodic elements, these early poems are characterized by a beginning awareness of the general crisis during these years. This awareness is put into the cosmogonic perspective of the world’s fall from its original godlike state. Poetry became to Ausländer the only means of renewing this divine state. This concept is in direct accordance with Spinoza’s philosophical theory of harmonizing microcosm and macrocosm. As acceptable as the harmonizing prosodic elements may be in this idealized conception, however, they are self-contradictory in the poems from the underground, appropriately titled Ghettomotifs. They first became available to a wider audience in volume 1 of Gesammelte Werke, containing the poetry from 1927 to 1956. The English poems written from 1948 to 1956 in the United States continue in this style, which Ausländer abandoned when she was confronted with the modern development of poetry during her 1957 visit to Europe.
HOLOCAUST AND PERSECUTION
Aside from the departure from rhyme and classical meters, her change in style can best be seen in the inclusion of the Holocaust into the cosmogonic process and in the reduction of the imagery to key words or constellations. The images of sun, stars, and earth lose all their divine characteristics, and references to the Holocaust are so explicit that they evoke the absolute perversion and denaturalization of the human calling. “Ash-summer,” “ash-rain” or “smoke is pouring out of the eyes of the cannibals” are only a few examples. The trauma of persecution is carried into the depiction of Ausländer’s experience of exile in the United States. The escape to freedom across the Atlantic resembles the never- ending search of the Flying Dutchman for a final resting place; the Nazi persecution is reenacted in the United States: “Men in Ku Klux Klan hoods, with swastikas and guns as weapons, surround you, the room smokes with danger”; the “ghetto-garb has not been discarded” despite a “fragrant” table full of food. This threat overshadows all personal relationships: “Can it be/ that I will see you again/ in April/ free of ashes?” The exile only reinforces the expulsion from paradise; the house turns into a prison, New York into a jungle, the subway into a funeral procession of war victims, and the summer heat of one hundred degrees evokes the image of the cremations in the concentration camps. Even more significant, the technology and modern civilization in New York are seen as symbols of the absolute denial of God.
YEARNING FOR HER HOMELAND
Against this background of persecution and exile, Ausländer’s native country takes on the qualities of a fairy tale—it is a “once-upon-a-time home” representing a “once-upon-a-time existence”—or is mythologized as filled with the presence of God: “the Jordan river emptied into the Pruth” (the Pruth being the main river of Bukovina, the country of beech trees). Although political reality does not allow a physical return to her homeland, Ausländer’s “always back to the Pruth” can only be a spiritual return to the full awareness of her cultural, religious, and family roots, to her beginnings; in its “utopian” fulfillment it would signify the unity of beginning and ending. The poet calls this state “the dwelling,” in conscious or subconscious reference to the Kabbalistic schechina, which symbolizes the dwelling place of God’s bride, or the lowest level of the sefiroth tree. She laments, “Flying on the air swing/ Europe America Europe// I do not dwell/ I only live”; her settling in Germany becomes merely another stage in her continuous exile.
The poet’s desire to return to her homeland corresponds to that of the Jewish people to reestablish their homeland in Israel: “Phoenix/ my people/ cremated// risen/ among cypress and/ orange trees.” To these “wandering brethren,” to “Ahasver, the wandering Jew,” she offers the Jewish greeting “Le Cháim”: “We/ risen/ from the void/ … we are talking/ softly/ with risen/ brethren.” Despite that bond, her social and national identity has been lost forever: “born without a visa to this world/ she never looks the other way/ people like us are always/ suspicious.” For that reason poetry itself takes over the function of reestablishing a dwelling place that secures Ausländer’s spiritual identity.
THE REDEMPTIVE PROCESS
The creative poetic process had to build upon the foundation of annihilation and exile before any redemption and transfiguration could occur. As late as 1979, Ausländer maintained, in a poem: “I do not forget// my family roots/ mother’s voice/ the first kiss/ the mountains of Bukovina/ the escape in World War I/ the suffering in Vienna/ the bombs in World War II// the invasion of the Nazis/ the anguish in the basement/ the doctor who saved our lives/ the bitter sweet America// Hölderlin Trakl Celan// my agony to write/ the compulsion to write/ still.” In the strictest consistency with her fate, the redemptive process begins, “retracing my steps/ in the urn of memory,” and culminates in a paradoxical statement that combines trauma and bliss: “Nothing is lost/ in the urn/ the ash is breathing.” The ambiguity of this statement is heightened by the middle line being grammatically linked to both the first and the third lines. This grammatical linking is employed again in these lines: “how beautiful/ ash can blossom/ in the blood.” Only by “losing herself in the jungle of words” can Ausländer “find herself again in the miracle of the word,” ultimately God’s Word, “my word/ born out of despair// out of the desperate hope/ that poetry/ is still possible.” Only poetry can grant this renewed existence: “mother tongue is putting me together// mosaic of people” in a space “free of ashes/ among verses.” Poetry offers renewed life, the divine breath of life that links past and future in a timeless present: “The past/ has composed me/ I have/ inherited the future// My breath is called/ NOW.”
Such stances became more frequent in Ausländer’s old age, possibly because the poet, being bedridden, had only poetry left as a means of self-affirmation: “My fatherland is dead/ they have buried it/ in fire// I live/ in my motherland/ the word”—an obvious play on the word “mother tongue,” which has taken on the extreme existential function of being the only guarantor of Ausländer’s identity. Even then, this process does not entail an escape from reality but rather builds upon “professing to the earth and its dangerous secrets … toman I profess myself with all the words that create me.” It is a reciprocal act which grants poetic identity by giving meaning to both humankind and life. For that reason, Ausländer can arrive at an otherwise unbelievable statement affirming the poetic process out of the annihilation of humanity: “Magnificent despite all/ dust of flesh// This light-birth/ in an eyelash womb/ Lips/ yes/ much remains/ to be said.”
Ausländer has called the specific mode of this poetic process “this dual play/ flower words/ war stammering.” It is a play of mediation or reconciliation between language and reality that might result in simplistic affirmation if the never forgotten point of departure were not to forbid such a reduction. On the contrary, this play takes on mystical proportions, striving for the redemption of the world by making it transparent to manifest its divine destiny. This interdependence between language and reality culminates in the image of the crystal, in which microcosm and macrocosm meet, in reverence to Spinoza, who was a lens maker as well as a philosopher: “My saint/ is called Benedict// He has/ polished/ the universe// Infinite crystal/ out of whose heart/ the light radiates.”
Although the later poems, especially those after 1981, reduce the poetic process to such a degree that they can become manneristic, Ausländer’s total poetic production clearly shows her to be among the most significant post-World War II poets. She has been able to find meaning in life despite the traumas she has experienced. Her “self-portrait” lists all the conditions that denied her the status of a regular member of society and at the same time testifies to poetry’s power to transcend personal tragedy: “Jewish gypsy/ raised/ in the German language/ under the black and yellow flag// Borders pushed me/ to Latins Slavs/ Americans Germanic people// Europe/ in your womb/ I dream/ my next birth.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Boase-Beier, Jean. “Translating Repetition.” Journal of European Studies 24, no. 96 (December, 1994): 403. Any literary translation must involve a careful stylistic analysis of the source text, particularly the translation of poetry. Includes an English translation of her poem “Damit kein Licht uns liebe.”
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 poetry of Nelly Sachs and Ausländer relating to the Holocaust during World War II. Includes extensive bibliographic references and an index.
_______. “Rose Ausländer.” In Women Writers in German-Speaking Countries: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Elke P. Frederiksen and Elizabeth G. Ametsbichler. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Excellent overview of Ausländer’s life, the main themes of her poetry, and its critical reception. English translations of German quotations. Includes bibliographies of primary and secondary works and translations.
_______. “Searching for the (M)Other: The Rhetoric of Longing in Post-Holocaust Poems by Nelly Sachs and Rose Ausländer.” Women in German Yearbook 12 (1996): 125-147. English translations and interpretations of six of Ausländer’s poems.
Frederiksen, Elke P., and Elizabeth G. Ametsbichler, eds. Women Writers in German-Speaking Countries: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Includes a chapter on Ausländer and an introductory essay that examines the history of literature by women in German-speaking countries. Includes an extensive bibliography.
Glenn, Jerry. “Blumenworte/Kriegsgestammel: The Poetry of Rose Ausländer.” Modern Austrian Literature 12, nos. 3/4 (1979). A brief critical study of selected poems by Ausländer.
Keith-Smith, Brian. “Rose Ausländer.” In Encyclopedia of German Literature, edited by Matthias Konzett. Vol. 1. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000. Outlines Ausländer’s poetic development, from the early influences to the final epigrammatic poems.
Klaus Weissenberger