Nelly Sachs: The Poetics of Silence and the Limits of Representation 9783110256734, 9783110256727

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Elaine Martin Nelly Sachs

Elaine Martin

Nelly Sachs The Poetics of Silence and the Limits of Representation

De Gruyter

ISBN 978-3-11-025672-7 e-ISBN 978-3-11-025673-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Martin, Elaine, 1982− Nelly Sachs : the poetics of silence and the limits of representation / by Elaine Martin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-3-11-025672-7 (acid-free paper) 1. Sachs, Nelly − Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PT2637.A4184Z719 2011 8311.914−dc23 2011016184

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. © 2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston Cover illustration: Detail of Nelly Sachs’ apartment at Bergsundsstrand 23, Stockholm. © National Library of Sweden, MS L 90:8:11. Photographer Harry Järv. Printing and binding: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ⬁ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Acknowledgements I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Professor Florian Krobb, whose encouragement and enthusiasm helped me towards the completion of this book, and whose depth of knowledge has been and continues to be an invaluable resource. Thanks also to Professor Karen Leeder of New College, Oxford, whose input was greatly appreciated, and to Dr. Jeff Morrison, whose constructive feedback made the book a more pleasant read. Furthermore, I wish to extend a word of gratitude to all members of the German Department at National University of Ireland Maynooth for their collegiality during the past number of years. Without the financial assistance made possible by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the John and Pat Hume Scholarship from NUI Maynooth, this project would not have come to fruition. My thanks therefore to these two bodies for funding the doctoral dissertation from which this book evolved. Additionally, the book’s publication was financed by publication grants from the National University of Ireland and National University of Ireland Maynooth. My thanks to both institutions for trusting in the merit of the book. I am also grateful to the Suhrkamp Verlag for its generous permission to reprint poems from the following volumes: Fahrt ins Staublose. Die Gedichte der Nelly Sachs (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1961), Suche nach Lebenden. Die Gedichte der Nelly Sachs (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971) and Nelly Sachs Werke. Kommentierte Ausgabe Band 1. Gedichte 1940 – 1950 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2010). Articles related to parts of chapters two and three of this book have appeared in the following volumes: Gert Hofmann, Marko Pajevic, Rachel MagShamrain and Michael Shields (eds.) German and European Poetics after the Holocaust: Crisis and Creativity (Rochester/New York: Camden House, 2011) and Alfred J. Drake (ed.) New Essays on the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009). I must also mention close friends who never forgot to ask how it was going. A special word of thanks goes to Anne Marie, Suzanne and John, all of whom generously gave their time to proofreading the manuscript at various stages.

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Acknowledgements

The most important word of thanks goes to my parents, who continually supported and encouraged me, and to Conleth for having been and continuing to be so supportive in ways too numerous to mention. Sadly, my mother is no longer here to see the final product. This book is dedicated to her.

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1

I Contexts 1 Nelly Sachs: A Tumultuous Reception History . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 West Germany’s Three Myths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Peace with The Perpetrators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Restoration in the Literary Arena . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4 Reception in the East . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.5 Reception in the West: “Die Dichterin der Versçhnung”

9 9 18 24 27 33

2 The Problematics of Holocaust Representation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Adorno’s ‘after-Auschwitz’ Aporia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 The Expropriation of Death and Adorno’s Modernist Critique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 ‘The Extremity that Eludes the Concept’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 The Failure of Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5 Adorno’s ‘Widerruf ’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

49 49 55 57 61 63

II Practices 3 Nelly Sachs’ Poetics of Silence: Poetry at the Limits of Representation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Defying ‘Verstummen’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 The Decay of Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Addressing the Perpetrators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Prosopopoeia as a Representational Device . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5 Sachs’ Nacht-Metaphorik: Reversing a Traditional Image 3.6 The Poetics of Disfiguration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.7 Adorno’s Extremity in Sachs’ Poetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.8 Writing the Inability to Write: Sachs’ Self-Reflective Poetics 3.9 ‘Grabschriften in die Luft’: Keeping Memory Open . . . . 3.9.1 The Open Wound . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

69 69 71 83 98 105 113 122 125 131 137

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3.10 The ‘Death of Death’: ‘Die Todentrissenen’ . . . . . . . . . . . 3.11 Archetypes as Representational Devices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.11.1 Sachs’ ‘Anti-Job’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.11.2 Abraham: Refuting the Martyrdom Thesis . . . . . . 3.11.3 Daniel: Interpreter of Nightmares . . . . . . . . . . . .

140 150 152 167 179

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187

Introduction The positive reception of Nelly Sachs’ poetry in the late 1950s and 1960s culminated in Sachs being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966, jointly with the Israeli author Samuel J. Agnon. Virtually unknown during the previous decade, Sachs was suddenly hailed as West Germany’s “Dichterin der Versçhnung”: she and her work became symbols of German-Jewish reconciliation in an era preoccupied with Vergangenheitsbewltigung – the attempt to critically address the legacy of the National Socialist past. A close examination of how Sachs’ poetry was received in West and East Germany, and of the socio-political factors which led to her person and her work becoming icons of German-Jewish reconciliation in the Federal Republic, sheds a fascinating light on the social and psychological trends that dominated the post-war German landscape. The manner in which literary works are received in the public domain is, of course, inextricably linked with the prevailing socio-political conditions. Topics, Raul Hilberg writes, “may be suppressed or catapulted to public attention, but always for reasons that reflect the problems and needs of a society” (Hilberg 1996: 123). Correspondingly – so the premise of the first section of this study – the socio-political conditions of the post-war period reveal why the tables turned with respect to the reception of Sachs’ work in the East and in the West as the events of the Holocaust receded in time. The initial disregard for Sachs in the Federal Republic, followed by the sudden discovery and ensuing appropriation of her person and work a decade later on the one hand, and the initial reception of and subsequent disregard for her work in East Germany on the other, can be attributed to the socio-political concerns of the day. The focus is then shifted to the ‘unspeakability’ maxim associated with Theodor Adorno, whose position on post-Shoah art so pressingly requires a re-examination. The debate on what has mistakenly come to be known as Adorno’s ‘dictum’ concerning the ‘barbarity of poetry after Auschwitz’ – “nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch” (Adorno 1977: 30) – dominated academic discussion in the decades following its publication in 1951. This debate serves as an effective springboard from which to evaluate Nelly Sachs’ Holocaust poetry given that the aporetics of Holocaust art identified by Adorno, namely, the impos-

2

Introduction

sibility and indispensability of bearing witness, are so evident in Sachs’ poetics. Time and time again Adorno’s extensive theoretical considerations on the possibilities and limitations of art in the aftermath of the Holocaust have been reduced to this single sentence, itself constituting but a sub-clause of the original passage. This frequent tendency towards simplification and misinterpretation has arguably been facilitated by the erroneous inclination to separate Adorno’s critique of modernity from his views on Holocaust art. This separation has done a disservice to Adorno’s thought in light of the fact that his theoretical considerations on Holocaust art are intertwined with this same critique. By exploring the ‘dictum’ within his larger assessment of capitalist modernity, and specifically within his assessment of modernity’s facilitation of the reification process, the ‘dictum’ can be restored to its original context. Reification, in conjunction with what Adorno viewed as the perilous legacies of modernity – all-encompassing instrumental rationality fused with irrational ends, technological domination and the reduction of all thought to the calculation of the efficiency of means – had its apotheosis in the Nazi death camps. The result was the liquidation of individualism which had formed the core of critical consciousness, the obliteration of the very concept of the autonomous subject. In light of this, Adorno considered any return to artistic subjectivism a problematical endeavour. Of further significance for a recontextualisation of the so-called ‘dictum’ is the fact that Adorno, crucially, does not view Auschwitz as an accidental relapse or a temporary ‘glitch’ in an otherwise progressive culture. Rather, he views Auschwitz as part and parcel of that ‘civilising’ process which we call ‘modernity.’ The fact that the heinous mass murder of millions had been carried out within the framework of a society that had achieved so much culturally and artistically meant that the legitimacy of artistic discourse, after this culture had gone so catastrophically awry, was suddenly called into question. However, while Adorno makes clear that culture’s complicity is irrefragable – and that of art as integral to this same culture – he nonetheless calls for testimony rather than an insistence upon silence. In the face of the seemingly insurmountable barriers which confronted the writer in the aftermath of Auschwitz, Adorno did not call for an end to art as has been claimed by critics such as Walter Jens (1997), Gnther Bohnheim (2002), Susan Gubar (2003), Elrud Ibsch (2004) and Stephen J. Whitfield (2007) – to mention just a few relatively recent contributors to the debate. On the contrary; “das Bedrfnis Leiden beredt werden zu lassen,” he stated in Negative Dialektik, “ist die Bedingung aller Wahrheit” (Adorno 1973: 27). Adorno’s pronouncements were

Introduction

3

never meant as silence-inducing taboos, but rather as theoretical reflections upon the moral status of art in the aftermath of the Shoah and as warnings of the moral peril involved in the artistic rendering of mass extermination. Against the backdrop of Adorno’s deliberations, Nelly Sachs’ poetic works will be examined as illustrative of what Annette Jael Lehmann has described as “die Poetik des Scheiterns”: Fr keine Art von Dichtung ist die ‘Poetik des Scheiterns’ so grundlegend wie fr die Holocaust-Dichtung. Das Scheitern ist immer schon im Gedicht angelegt. Sein Scheitern muss nicht nur eingestanden, sondern gewagt werden. Jedes Holocaust-Gedicht muß zu einem bestimmten Grade an seinem Thema scheitern. […] Jede literarische ußerung und sthetische Reflexion im Horizont der Shoah steht […] in der Spannung zwischen einem traumatischen Verstummen und dem Dilemma der Inadquatheit aller Artikulationsversuche. […]: dem unbedingten Darstellungsgebot, der Unangemessenheit des Schweigens steht immer wieder ein Verstummen gegenber, das die Unmçglichkeit bezeugt ber und nach Auschwitz zu schreiben. (Lehmann 1999: xvvv and 3 – 7)

Lehmann summarises the aporetic thread that runs through Sachs’ entire body of poetry. Her work is marked by a three-pronged tension between speechlessness, the recognition of the inevitable inadequacy of all attempts at communicating the suffering, and an attendant cognizance of the necessity of bearing witness. Erhard Bahr has issued a similar thesis: “Daß im Extremfall des Holocaust die Leistung der Literatur eng mit ihrem Versagen verbunden ist, versteht sich von selbst.” (Bahr 1980: 78) Sachs’ poetry, so emblematic of this crisis within artistic discourse in the wake of the Shoah, lends itself particularly well to evaluation within the framework of Adorno’s theoretical reflections. The crisis of language in her work, the aporetics of Holocaust representation, her dialogue with the perpetrators, her refutation of eschatological paradigms and, crucially, her refusal to impose a redemptive framework on the suffering by subverting Biblical archetypes together make Sachs’ poetry a quintessential case-study of the problematics of post-Holocaust writing as elucidated by Adorno. Biblical archetypes in particular can be considered important representational devices in her poetry, since they serve as an effective means of refuting any redemptive or religious ‘sense-making’ framework for the horrors of Auschwitz. This is significant given the frequent references to Sachs as a supposedly redemptive poet, an erroneous claim that has found many willing proponents in critical discourse, to the detriment of what is in fact a denunciation of any such sense-making

4

Introduction

schema. A consistent objective throughout the close reading of her work is to underscore the disintegrative, incoherent and fragmentary nature of her verse and to determine whether her poetry, in spite of the fact that it thematises the impossibility of adequate representation, has representational value. Representational elements are identified with the aim of assessing if and how, in the context of a poetics of unspeakability, the devices of ‘Verstummen’ become evocative and representational devices in their own right. With respect to this close reading, an important methodological qualification should be mentioned at the outset. In an effort to consider the semantic intricacy of individual works effectively, the tendency within the secondary discourse on Sachs to analyse just fragmentary portions of individual poems is avoided. The analyses of two Sachs critics represent welcome exceptions to this trend. Beata Sowa-Bettecken writes: “Die gngige Praxis, Stellen aus dem Kontext des Gedichts herauszureißen und als Beleg oder Widerlegung einer These zu nutzen, wird weder der Textstellung noch dem Gedicht zurecht.” (Sowa-Bettecken 1992: 33) While selecting lines can indeed be useful in terms of analysing certain motifs, an interpretation of her work on that basis alone can only provide piecemeal knowledge. Such an approach, as Sowa-Bettecken points out, cannot provide a sound foundation from which to infiltrate the complexity of Sachs’ poetics, which is appreciable only within the complete framework of each individual poem. Birgit Stocker-Keller, in a similar vein, writes: In vielen Aufstzen […] werden Gedichte von Nelly Sachs fragmentarisch ausgelegt; bestimmten Motiven werden nachgegangen, ohne dass aber das einzelne Gedicht, aus dem jeweils die Belege stammen, als ganzes verstanden wrde. Nelly Sachs hat aber einzelne Gedichte geschrieben, nicht eine Anzahl von Motiven in verschiedenen Texten abgehandelt. (Keller-Stocker 1973:1)

Matthias Krieg, by way of contrast to the methodological course chosen here, has argued that the “Bildwelt” of Nelly Sachs’ work exhibits “ein in sich geschlossenes Ganzes” which makes the interpretation of individual poems “zwangslufig fragwrdig” (Krieg 1983: 88). Paul Kersten also considers an interpretative methodology based on individual poems to be “zwangslufig problematisch” in the case of a “von weitreichenden Bild- und Motivverknpfungen konstituierten Werkes wie dem von Nelly Sachs” (Kersten 1970: 12). Krieg’s and Kersten’s objections are essentially one and the same: the assertion that the imagery and motifs employed by Sachs form a ‘system,’ and that it is the system as such that

Introduction

5

must be analysed. Both approaches are equally puzzling, however. Why, after all, should Sachs’ motif nexus render interpretation of individual poems ‘necessarily problematic’? If anything, one would imagine that such a nexus would render such a method of interpretation rewarding in terms of untangling that very nexus in the first instance. Surely a deductive method is facilitated in the first instance by an inductive point of departure. As Sowa-Bettecken explains: “[D]er These Krieges […] ist entgegenzuhalten […], daß er dieses Gesamtbild aus den Einzelgedichten erhlt.” (Sowa-Bettecken 1992: 33) In addition, it is on the basis of such an inductive method that the variations in Sachs’ motif nexus become appreciable. Thus whilst individual poems are analysed in this study under various thematical headings, and whilst priority is given each time to the heading in question, the theme is consistently embedded within the framework of the respective poem, as opposed to selecting individual lines to suit the theme. This is, moreover, accomplished without losing sight of intertextual connections. A balancing of the analytical scales, in other words, is attempted by focussing on complete poems as opposed to the problematic method of isolating individual parts to accommodate the theme under consideration. The ethical gravity of the human tragedy that lies at the core of Nelly Sachs’ work must be emphasised in any commentary on a proposed study of her work. The suffering that occurred as a result of the depths to which human beings sank during the period of National Socialism makes humility imperative in any approach to her work. Johannes Anderegg expresses this unequivocally when he states: “In der Stille, die die Sprache von Nelly Sachs erzeugt, klingt jedes Wort einer wissenschaftlichen Kommentierung zu laut,” and he criticises in particular the ‘methodological self-assurance’ that some Sachs criticism has displayed (Anderegg 1994: 137). He cites a letter that Sachs wrote in 1958 in which she makes reference to those literary critics who wrote to her requesting the ‘meaning’ of ‘incomprehensible metaphors’: “Zuweilen erhalte ich Anfragen ber unverstndliche Metaphern. Habe doch nicht ‘gemeint,’ sondern wurde aufgerissen.” (Sachs 1984: 183) This state of being ‘torn open,’ of being denied the luxury of carefully pondering and choosing metaphors and imagery, expresses the torment of the poetic voice in its attempt to bear witness to the horror and the urgency of this undertaking. In line with Anderegg’s call for humility in the face of the human disaster that shapes Sachs’ work, and mindful of the state of ‘aufgerissen sein’ outlined by the poet, this study tries not to ‘determine’ what Sachs definitively ‘means.’ Such self-assurance has no place given the ethical magnitude

6

Introduction

of the atrocities that lie at the core of her oeuvre. Rather, the objective throughout is to explore some ways of unravelling Sachs’ intricate portrayal of the greatest human calamity in twentieth-century history.

I Contexts

1 Nelly Sachs: A Tumultuous Reception History 1.1 West Germany’s Three Myths Despite prolific poetic production, Nelly Sachs remained a largely anonymous figure in the West German cultural sphere for a considerable period in the aftermath of the Second World War. An analysis of how the very gradual reception of her work was replaced by marked popularity sheds a very interesting light on the literary scene in the years 1945 – 1966 in West Germany. The socio-political conditions of the immediate post-war period initially presented a formidable obstacle to the publication of Sachs’ work in the West. The title alone of her first volume In den Wohnungen des Todes, dedicated to “Meinen toten Brdern und Schwestern,” left little doubt as to the overriding theme of her work. Leonard Olschner writes: Wo man nach Texten drstete, die vorgeblich dem Bedrfnis nach Zeitenthobenheit entsprachen, dann eigneten sich die Texte von In den Wohnungen des Todes und Sternverdunkelung wenig dazu, dieses Bedrfnis zu befriedigen. […] Der Poesie von Nelly Sachs blieb die angemessene Aufmerksamkeit versagt, da diese Dichtung […] das leistete, was nicht gefragt war: Erinnern, Mahnung an Verantwortung, Jdisches. (Olschner 1992: 279 – 81)

Ralf Trinks similarly outlines some of the criteria which governed reader tastes at this time: “Nur wenn die Autoren eine schlssige Interpretation des Krieges und eine berzeugende Antwort auf die drngende Schuldfrage anboten, konnten sie den Erwartungen ihres Publikums gerecht werden.” (Trinks 2002: 40) Sachs most certainly did not offer a coherent explanation for the war and, as for the question of guilt, her answer was not the exculpatory version sought by the West German populace. Herbert Marcuse has highlighted the three illusory longings which guided the West German populace and, by extension, national politics and, partly also, the literary scene in the post-war years. These were the myths of German victimisation, ignorance and resistance. They served, Marcuse argues, as “suitable tools for effacing the memory of genocide and replacing it with a much more palatable history” (Marcuse 2001: 74). These myths reveal some of the reasons for Sachs’ absence on the West German literary stage for a considerable period of time in the aftermath of the war.

10

1 Nelly Sachs: A Tumultuous Reception History

To the first of these – the myth of German victimisation. The immediate post-war years, and indeed right up until the late 1950s, saw not only an unwillingness amongst the populace to accept even partial responsibility for the Nazi crimes, but also the self-identification of the Germans themselves as victims – of Nazism, of Allied bombs and of the Red Army. They had been victims of ‘fanatical’ Nazis on the one hand and ‘vengeful’ Allied forces on the other. This illusion of double victimisation was one of the foundational myths that structured post-war memory in the Federal Republic, and it resulted in the long delay before widespread responsibility for the crimes perpetuated under National Socialism received honest recognition. This victimisation myth served two practical purposes in terms of exculpation. Firstly, the Holocaust was interpreted as some kind of ‘mysterious,’ ‘unfathomable,’ ‘extraneous force’ whereby the Nazi leadership had somehow ‘imposed’ its will upon an ‘unwilling’ German population; as the contemporary critic Joachim Boeckh wrote: “Es wird von geheimnisvollen Dmonen gemurmelt, die ber die unschuldigen Volksgenossen hergefallen seien.” (Boechk 1947: 15) This myth resulted in the automatic disassociation of the Nazi leadership from the national body. The consequent focus upon the leadership, and in particular upon the figure of Hitler himself, “dem es auf ‘dmonische Weise’ gelungen sei, das deutsche Volk […] zu verblenden” (Kogon 1983: 19 – 20), served an obvious exonerative purpose: Es existierte die Vorstellung der NS-Herrschaft als monolotischem [sic] Fhrerstaat unter dem Dmon Hitler, dem man erlegen war. Die HitlerZentrierung hatte fr die Gesellschaft (und ihre Beteiligung an der NSDiktatur) eine entlastende Funktion […], die Faschismusinterpretation dieser Jahre [hat] einen Gutteil dazu beigetragen, daß sich niemand zu sehr mit der Vergangenheit beschftigen mußte. (Kçlsch 2000: 69, 78)

If blame could be laid at the door of the ‘Fhrer’ and his most senior henchmen, that would render self-examination superfluous, especially so given that the Nazi leadership had ‘led’ the German populace ‘astray.’ The second effect of this victimisation myth was the attempt to equate the German war victims of Allied bombings with the victims of Nazi persecution: Neben dem verbreiteten Wunsch, das deutsche Volk in seiner Gesamtheit zum Opfer des Nationalsozialismus zu machen und es damit von seiner Mitschuld zu entlasten, fand sich eine Aufrechnungsmentalitt, die mit dem Verweis auf die eigenen Opfer des Krieges die Opfer des Holocaust und der Verfolgung in eine Reihe mit den Kriegsopfern stellen wollte. (Bergmann 1992: 332)

1.1 West Germany’s Three Myths

11

Again, the purpose of this “Aufrechnungsmentalitt” is clear: placing the deaths of German soldiers at the hands of the Allied armies on the same plane as the camp victims made sense in terms of allaying burdened consciences. In his lecture ‘Was bedeutet Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit,’ Theodor Adorno provides a scathing critique of these tendencies: Wir alle kennen auch die Bereitschaft, heute das Geschehene zu leugnen oder zu verkleinern – so schwer es fllt zu begreifen, daß Menschen sich nicht des Arguments schmen, es seien doch hçchstens nur fnf Millionen Juden und nicht sechs vergast worden. Irrational ist weiter die verbreitete Aufrechnung der Schuld, als ob Dresden Auschwitz abgegolten htte. […] Kampfhandlungen im Krieg […] sind kaum vergleichbar mit der administrativen Ermordung von Millionen unschuldiger Menschen. (Adorno 1997b: 32)

The attempt to equate German suffering with the suffering of the victims of Nazi persecution had the further effect of playing down the magnitude of the victims’ suffering. Labelling the attempt at understatement as a “Kollektiver Affekt,” Ralf Giordano writes: “Die Minimalisierer des kollektiven Affektes […] erweisen sich an anderer Stelle […] als ausgesprochene Maximalisierer von Opferziffern, aber stets nur, wenn es Deutsche betraf, zum Beispiel die Toten des alliierten Luftkrieges, und darunter wieder besonders die Dresdens.” (Giordano 1987: 37) Giordano goes on to state the obvious purpose of this “Affekt”: “Die Logik des Affektes: je niedriger die Zahl der ermordeten Juden gedrckt werden kann, desto beruhigter fhlt man sich.” (Giordano 1987: 37) Giordano thus highlights one of the more prevalent psychological mechanisms at work in the mind of the German populace, namely, the attempt to focus on and exaggerate the number of German losses in the war and to simultaneously lower the number of Jewish deaths. The second widespread myth amongst the post-war West German populace was the myth of ignorance of what was happening in the death camps – the “davon haben wir nichts gewusst” claim. This myth served the same purpose as the myth of victimisation in terms of exoneration. It is, however, an assertion that can be easily dispelled: Die Judenverfolgung durch das Regime [fand] in einem erheblichen Umfang çffentlich statt und [wurde] offen propagiert […]. Diese prinzipelle ffentlichkeit der Judenverfolgung gilt nicht nur fr die Vorkriegszeit, sondern auch fr die Phase der Deportationen und Massenmorde in den Jahren 1941 bis 1943, in denen zwar die przisen Einzelheiten des Mordprograms als Staatsgeheimnis behandelt wurden, das Regime sich zugleich aber çffentlich dazu bekannte, dass es dabei war, eine radikale, eine finale ‘Lçsung’ der ‘Judenfrage’ zu betreiben. (Longerich 2006: 8)

12

1 Nelly Sachs: A Tumultuous Reception History

Dedicated historical scholarship during the past two decades has demonstrated beyond doubt the extent of knowledge among the German populace about the concentration camps and the crematoria. Peter Longerich’s monograph, ‘Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!’ Die Deutschen und Die Judenverfolgung 1933 – 1945 (2006), its title mocking the standard defence of ignorance, is an elaborate and very successful attempt to prove the very opposite: that the German populace was very much aware of what was happening in Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka and the other concentration and death camps. Indeed, as early as 1947, Eugen Kogon had already begun to forge this argument. His words are pertinent, since they provide a disturbingly lucid picture of the intricate web of culpability: Kein Deutscher, der nicht gewußt htte, daß es Konzentrationslager gab. Kein Deutscher, der sie fr Sanatorien gehalten htte […]. Wenig Deutsche, die nicht einen […] Bekannten im KL gehabt oder zumindest gewußt htten, daß der und jener in einem Lager war. Alle Deutschen, die Zeugen der vielfltigen antisemitischen Barbarei geworden, Millionen, die vor brennenden Synagogen und in den Straßenkot gedemtigten jdischen Mnnern und Frauen gleichgltig, neugierig, empçrt oder schadenfroh gestanden haben […]. Nicht wenige Deutsche, die auf Straßen und Bahnhçfen Elendszgen von Gefangenen begegnet sind. […] Kaum ein Deutscher, dem nicht bekannt gewesen wre […], daß im Lande unentwegt hingerichtet wurde […]. Viele Geschftsleute, die mit der Lager-SS in Lieferbeziehungen standen, Industrielle, die vom SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungs-Hauptamt KL-Sklaven fr ihre Werke anforderten […], Medizinprofessoren, die mit Himmlers Versuchsstationen, Kreis- und Anstaltsrzte, die mit professionellen Mçrdern zusammenarbeiteten […]. Zahlreiche hçhere Wehrmachtsoffiziere, die ber die Massenliquidierungen russischer Kriegsgefangener in den KL, außerordentlich viele deutsche Soldaten und Feldgendarmen, die ber die entsetzlichen Greueltaten in Lagern, Ghettos, Stdten und Dçrfern des Ostens Bescheid gewußt haben. (Kogon 1947: 412 – 14)

As Kogon’s analysis lays bare, knowledge of Nazi crimes must have permeated the consciousness of the general populace to its core, and thus an assertion of ignorance, however untenable, provided welcome reprieve. The third myth that pervaded post-war society was the sanguine illusion of an unsullied “other Germany” that had done its best to resist the “intruding barbarians” (Marcuse 2001: 74). This myth served the welcome purpose of gliding over the recent ‘interlude’ and reconnecting to the supposed ‘true’ soul of pre-National Socialist Germany. This desire was especially evident in the restorative cultural climate of the immediate post-war years. In an article subtly entitled “Kultur als Alibi,” Max Frisch provided a picture of the extent of this restorative mood: “In Deutsch-

1.1 West Germany’s Three Myths

13

land […] reden wir vom Heute als stnde kein Gestern dahinter.” (Frisch 1967: 18) Frisch, in a tone of derision that is difficult to overlook, criticised the attempt made by the Germans to smother the recent past by concentrating exclusively on the present. Adorno similarly expressed his astonishment at the unexpected cultural euphoria that enveloped the German populace in the immediate post-war years: Der Intellektuelle, der nach langen Jahren der Emigration Deutschland wiedersieht, ist zunchst von dem geistigen Klima berrascht. Draußen hat sich die Vorstellung gebildet, als htte das barbarische Hitler-Regime Barbarei hinterlassen. […] Man [erwartet], daß der nackte Zwang zur Selbsterhaltung whrend des Krieges und der ersten Jahren danach dem Bewußtsein das Gleiche antat, was den Stdten durch die Bomben widerfuhr. Man setzt Stumpfheit, Unbildung, zynisches Mißtrauen gegen jegliches Geistige voraus. […] Man rechnet mit dem Abbau von Kultur, dem Verschwinden der Teilnahme an dem, was ber die tgliche Sorge hinausgeht. Davon kann aber keine Rede sein. Die Beziehung zu geistigen Dingen, im allerweitesten Sinne verstanden, ist stark. (Adorno 1971: 20)

Contrary to expectation, the German people display not a shattered national consciousness and a mistrust of all things cultural, but rather an intact national consciousness and a fervent desire to connect to Germany’s cultural past as a means of erasing the realities of the recent past. This restorative climate and the general cultural elation was overtly evident in the debates that surrounded the reconstruction of the bombed Goethehaus in Frankfurt and the celebrations in Weimar in 1949, less than ten kilometres from Buchenwald, marking the two hundreth anniversary of Goethe’s birth. The repressive tendencies as exemplified in the restoration debate help to expose the environment in which Nelly Sachs’ poetry was received, and the debate also reveals some of the reasons for the belated reception of her work. That the reconstruction project was started in the immediate aftermath of the war is in itself telling. Already on 5 July 1947 celebrations were held to mark the laying of the foundation stone for the planned reconstruction, followed by further celebrations on the occasion of the inauguration in 1949. Meier asks: “Fraglich schien, ob der Wiederaufbau des Goethehauses eine so vorrangige stdtebauliche Aufgabe war: Wrde es in restaurierter Anmut nicht wirklich deplaziert in dem Trmmergebirge stehen […]? Und weiter: War die Wiederaufrichtung dieses Reprsentationsbaues moralisch vertretbar?” (Meier 1991: 29) The debate is significant, since the rebuilding project can be considered symbolic of the attempt by Germany’s populace to suppress memories of the Nazi regime and interpret the Nazi rise to power as hav-

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ing been merely an unintended accident. The longing to patch over Auschwitz as an ‘interlude’ was quite palpable on the occasion of the inauguration in a speech given by Georg Hartmann, chairperson of the Freies Deutsches Hochstift, a foundation set up in Frankfurt in 1949 to promote the arts and sciences in Germany: “Wenn es auch nur zum Teil […] die alten Steine sind, so sind es doch berall die alten Formen und Farben […]. Und in allen Rumen birgt es den alten Inhalt.” Hartmann then proceeded to cite a passage from Goethe’s Italienische Reise: Heute frh war ich in Tiene, das nordwrts gegen die Gebirge liegt, wo ein neues Gebude nach einem alten Risse aufgefhrt wird, wobei wenig zu erinnern sein mçchte. So ehrt man hier alles aus der guten alten Zeit und hat Sinn genug, nach einem geerbten Plan ein frisches Gebude aufzufhren.

This was a well-selected paragraph: “alte Risse,” “wenig zu erinnern,” “geerbter Plan,” “frisches Gebude” could all be adopted for the present as metaphors for the acts of purging, reconciling, continuity and the notion of a new departure. Hartmann proceeded to comment on what he believed would be Goethe’s “schçne Besttigung” of the reconstruction project: “Wenn Goethe das schon von einem ihm gleichgltigen Gebude sagen konnte, so drfen wir annehmen, daß er […] auch dem Tun des Freien Deutschen Hochstiftes keineswegs mit Ablehnung gegenbergestanden htte.” (Hartmann 1951: 6 – 7) Hartmann, in effect, applied Goethe’s opinion on the rebuilding of an insignificant building, which he encountered on his Italian trip in 1786, to what he believed would be Goethe’s attitude towards the current reconstruction plan, and he did so without making any reference to the rubble on which the new Goethehaus was to be built. This allusion to Goethe as a moral authority and the utilisation of his person to serve the purpose of ‘Verdrngung’ is an example of a political attempt to reconnect to Germany’s pre-Auschwitz past. It was furthermore clear from Hartmann’s speech that the project was a state-funded venture. The creation of the Goethe stamp to mark the anniversary in 1949 had been, according to Hartmann, “der entscheidende Schritt” in the provision of funding for the reconstruction (Hartmann 1951: 10). The state itself was thus built on a culture of ‘Verdrngung’ as evinced by its support for the restoration of the Goethehaus. The timely creation of the stamp to coincide with the two hundreth anniversary of Goethe’s birth was, furthermore, a well-calculated strategy; as Glaser comments: “das Jahr 1949 bot dann mit der zweihundertsten Wiederkehr von Goethes Geburtstag die einmalige Chance, der Welt das ‘eigentliche’, das andere, das eigentlich ganz an-

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dere innere Deutschland zu prsentieren.” (Glaser 1991: 138) In the face of the horrific photographic evidence from the camps that had been spread worldwide with the help of the media, the opportunity had now come to show Germany’s ‘true’ side to the rest of the world. There were, however, several commentators who took an openly critical stance. Joachim Boeckh, for example, condemned the notion that returning to a culturally rich chapter of pre-National Socialist Germany could somehow eclipse the recent ‘interlude’: “Es ist doch wahrhaftig nicht so, daß wir, als ob nichts geschehen wre, auf ein unangetastetes Kapitel geistiger und moralischer Realitten zurckgreifen kçnnten. Wren wir vor 1933 im ungestçrten Besitz solcher Werte gewesen, dann wre es ja nicht zum großen Unglck gekommen.” (Boechk 1947: 20) Richard Alewyn was another outspoken critic of these post-war restorative trends demonstrated so vividly in the debate surrounding the resurrection of the Goethe cult. In a lecture entitled “Goethe als Alibi,” delivered at the University of Cologne in 1949, he derided the hollow nature of the post-war cultural elation: Es gibt wenig, was auf den Neuankçmmling in Deutschland einen so bestrzenden Eindruck macht, als die Unbekmmertheit, mit der man sich allerorten schon wieder anschickt, Goethe zu feiern, als ob dies fr einen Deutschen die natrlichste Sache von der Welt wre, als ob gar nichts geschehen wre, oder als ob irgend etwas damit ungeschehen gemacht werden kçnne. […] Meinen wir, er lasse sich heute, zu seinem zweihundertsten Geburtstag, leicht wieder ins Leben rufen? Freilich, wieder rstet sich die Welt Goethe zu feiern. Aber kann das uns irgend etwas anderes als peinlich sein? Auch bei uns stampfen schon die Druckerpressen, es hmmert auf allen Bhnen, noch ein Paar Monate, und Hallen und Mrkte werden von seinem Namen drçhnen. Aber es ist ja noch nicht so lange her, daß alle Lautsprecher Deutschlands einen anderen Namen ausspien, von dem Ihnen noch die Ohren gellen. Gestern Hitler, heute Goethe, und morgen? Ist es nicht angebracht und anstndig, einmal zu fragen, wie wir berhaupt dazu kommen, Goethe zu feiern? Ob es uns berhaupt zusteht. […] Zwischen uns und Weimar liegt Buchenwald. Darum kommen wir nun einmal nicht herum. […] Wir haben an Grenzen gestanden und haben in Abgrnde geblickt, die dem Brger des humanistischen Weltalters erspart geblieben sind. Wir wissen heute mehr darber, wessen der Mensch imstande ist. […] Es gibt kein zurck zu Goethe. (Alewyn 1977: 333 – 35)

Alewyn derides the notion of national radio ‘spewing out’ Hitler’s name one day and the next day Goethe’s and the German populace eagerly tuning in. By effectively linking Weimar and Buchenwald, he dismisses the idea that Goethe could be simply brought back to life merely because the socio-historical situation deemed such a resurrection timely. For the

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post-war populace, however, the activity surrounding the resurrection of the Goethe cult provided welcome reprieve from otherwise burdened consciences. The appeal of the reconstruction project to its supporters lay partly in the automatic focus on the Germans as victims: Reconstruction projects […] have some appeal to conservatives. Connecting to the pre-war cultural past makes it possible to remove the Nazi and Socialist years from cultural memory; turning the destroyed heritage buildings into symbols for German suffering during the war, without consideration for Nazi crimes, makes it possible to identify Germans as victims, shifting focus away from their role as perpetrators. (Vees-Gulani, 2005: 159 – 160)

Rebuilding the Goethehaus also served the dual purpose of reconnecting to apparently immaculate traditions and thereby passing over the ‘temporary glitch’ that had been Nazism. Supporters of the restorative project saw in the Goethehaus ein besseres, ein unzerstçrbares Deutschland […], eine Fortdauer nationaler Kultur und Wrde, der auch die ‘schlimmen Jahre’ seit 1933 nichts anhaben konnten. […] so als kçnne mit Rumlichkeit und Inventar auch der kulturelle Raum der Goethezeit – ber Faschismus, Weltkrieg und absehbare Niederlage – restauriert werden. (Meier 1991: 29 – 30)

Here, Meier condemns the idea that the restoration project would serve to distract from the reality of the Nazi past and that by gliding over the recent past the cultural greatness of the Goethe era could somehow be restored. For the supporters of the project, Goethe was called upon for precisely those reasons, as an advocate, a cultural icon that could be utilised to sponsor amnesia; as Glaser comments: “Goethe erwies sich fr die Trmmerjahrkultur als ein bedeutsamer Nothelfer. ‘Er war unser, er ist unser, er wird unser sein’ – eine solche Suggestion, mit deren Hilfe man sich weiterhin als Volk der Dichter und Denker verstand, verhalf zur Enthebung von trister Wirklichkeit.” (Glaser 1991: 137) The depths to which this same “Volk der Dichter und Denker” had sunk were overlooked as inconvenient details in the supposed greater scheme. Within this ‘greater scheme’ Nazism was interpreted as a downfall, a temporary regression, its memory thus serving no useful purpose: Es sind […] oft wiederholte Begriffe oder Metaphern, die dem Projekt eine Art historische, fast sogar metaphysische Rechtfertigung zu geben scheinen: ‘Sintflut’ beispielsweise, ‘Wideraufbau’ und ‘Heiligtum’. Naziherrschaft und Weltkrieg werden, wenn berhaupt, als Sintflut, Katastrophe, Not und Elend bezeichnet, als dunkle Zeiten, als Untergang […]. Fast scheint es, als mache solche schicksalhafte Katastrophik nicht nur die Frage nach Schuld, sondern die Rckerinnerung schlechthin unsinnig. […] Solche Auffassung entsprach

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in den Nachkriegsjahren einer weit verbreiteten Stimmung. In der neu einsetzenden […] Aktivitt glaubte man sich dem Zwang zu Erinnerung, Trauer und moralisch-politischer Selbstprfung enthoben. (Meier 1991: 33 – 34)

As Meier maintains here, interpreting the Holocaust in terms of regression had the attendant consequence of rendering memory superfluous. Dolf Sternberger, another outspoken critic of the project, argued that the recent past, by virtue of its being past and, as such, history could not be simply ignored. Writing in Die Wandlung, he recalled the Kristallnacht as Frankfurt’s synagogues were burned to the ground and the city’s Jews were deported: Ich weiß, daß man dergleichen Erinnerungen heute nicht mehr hçren mag. Aber es ist einmal geschehen und nicht wegzuwischen. Geschichte. Und das bedeutet eben Geschichte: daß es vorbei ist und gerade darum nicht wegzuwischen. Damals ist der Geist Goethes vertrieben worden aus der Luft dieser Stadt. (cited in Meier 1991: 37)

For Sternberger, the unpleasantness of memories such as the Kristallnacht does not condone amnesia. If anything, the reality behind such memories exposes the futility of re-connecting to and attempting to restore the cultural richness of the Goethe era. Karl Jaspers was one of the leading critical voices against resurrecting the ‘Goethe cult,’ and he used the occasion of his acceptance speech for the Goethe-Preis as a forum to express his view about the recent past. He criticised the attempt to revive the ‘Goethe cult’ as nothing more than escapist myth-making: “Die Zeit des Goethe-Kultus ist vorbei. Wir finden bei Goethe gleichsam Erholung und Ermunterung, nicht aber die Befreiung von der Last, die uns auferlegt ist […]. Goethe ist nicht Vorbild zur Nachahmung.” (Jaspers 1948: 34) Here, Jaspers provides a discerning perspective on the rebuilding venture. After all, German culture as exemplified by Goethe was itself caught up in the web of guilt. As Meier comments: “Fr […] die Gegner des Wiederaufbaus war der Goethe-Geist selber und das an ihn gebundene Kulturverstndnis zu innig mit dem realen Geschichtsverlauf verquickt, als daß sie einer eiligen Restaurierung htten zustimmen wollen.” (Meier 1991: 30) German culture had failed to prevent the rise of National Socialism, and the Nazis had even misappropriated Goethe and Schiller to justify their goals. Attempting to restore this same culture and erase the memory of the Nazi crimes in the process was therefore a morally questionable endeavour. The publicist Walter Dirks similarly criticised the restoration of the Goethehaus as evidence of a desperate attempt to suppress the memory of the atrocities of

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National Socialism by reviving old traditions. In a letter to the mayor of Frankfurt, Dirks argued that the restoration of the house was based on a “zentrale Lge,” and he added “die Haltung, die […] Goethes wrdig ist, heißt: das Schicksal annehmen […]; gefallen sein lassen, was gefallen ist.” He called on the German populace to have “die Kraft zum Abschied, […], zum unwiederruflichen Abschied, sich selbst und niemanden in frommer Tuschung vorschwindeln wollen, daß das Goethehaus eigentlich doch noch da sei: es ist nicht mehr da” (cited in Meier 1991: 36). The absurdity of the finished project has been highlighted by Meier: “1951 zeigte uns Pressefotos das wiedererrichtete Goethehaus […]: in einem Trmmerfeld.” (Meier 1991: 38) This laconic statement speaks volumes: an apparently impervious culture, represented by the Goethehaus, stood surrounded by the destruction wrought by Nazism.

1.2 Peace with The Perpetrators The restorative tendencies in the public sphere were mirrored in the political arena. During the founding years of the Federal Republic, the democratic left and the democratic right held profoundly contrasting views on the relationship between democracy and memory. The policy of the right, represented by Konrad Adenauer, was reticence about the crimes of National Socialism, while that of the left, represented by Kurt Schumacher, was direct confrontation with the crimes committed and justice for the perpetrators. The results of the 1949 elections made it very clear that Adenauer’s policy was one of strategic political calculation, with the democratic right producing a solid majority in the Bundestag. The electorate opted for Adenauer’s tactful silence about the Nazi past. The public will for ‘amnesia’ now had political legitimacy. As Jeffrey Herf writes: “The German electorate did not want him [Schumacher], in part because he would remind them of a past which Adenauer was willing to help them forget.” (Herf 1997: 280) Glaser summarises Adenauer’s success: Konrad Adenauer war […] deshalb so erfolgreich, weil er dem Volkswillen entgegenkam, der sich eben keine Trauerarbeit aufbrden wollte. […] ‘Bewltigung von Vergangenheit’ versprach keine sichere Mehrheit. Anstelle einer Katharsis kam es zu einem Amnestiefieber; die Masse der Mitlufer und Belasteten hatte allen Grund, dem Kanzler, der keine moralische Wehleidigkeit zeigte und Verdrngung wie Vergeßlichkeit fçrderte, dankbar zu sein. (Glaser 1991: 53, 151)

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Adenauer’s support for the suppression of memory came to the fore in his inaugural speech in 1949 in which he postulated “Vergangenes vergangen sein zu lassen” (Adenauer 1949). He also called for amnesty for those awaiting punishment in the Allied military courts, while, astonishingly, in a speech delivered to the Bundestag on the National Day of Reflection a year later, the Jews did not so much as receive mention. Schumacher’s death in 1952 deprived West German democracy and the remaining Jewish community of the most prominent West German advocate of a direct confrontation with the Nazi past. Ralf Giordano provides a trenchant critique of the strategic political calculations of the democratic right in West German politics during these years: Das Bewußtsein, daß es unpopulr war, sich mit den zwçlf Nazijahren auseinanderzusetzen, und daß es unpopulr bleiben wrde – diese unverdeckte Verweigerung betrchtlicher Whlermassen ist von allen Parteien der Bundesrepulik als feststehende Grçße in ihr wahlpropagandistisches Kalkl einbezogen worden. Im allgemeinen wurde die nationale Verantwortung fr die zwçlf Jahre methodisch verkleinert und einer winzigen Fhrungselite angelastet […]. Statt die verstokten Massen zu einer ehrlichen, wenn auch schmerzhaften Auseinandersetzung mit sich selbst aufzurufen, buhlten die ‘politischen Willenstrger’ von vornherein schamlos mit großzgiger Exkulpierung um Stimmen. Alle bundesdeutschen Parteien haben den Whlern Wahlhonig ums noch lange braungefrbte Mundwerk geschmiert […]. Die zweite deutsche Republik war die Nachfolgerin eines Gewaltstaates ohnegleichen, und sie war es ber eine lange Phase der Nachkriegsgeschichte, das sei wiederholt, mit derselben Bevçlkerung wie vor 1945. […]; der große Frieden mit den Ttern. Er ist das historische Fundament, auf dem die Bundesrepublik steht. (Giordano 1987: 95 – 103)

The long-term damage to memory caused by a campaign for short-term political gain was great. Blame was attributed solely to the Nazi leadership, a welcome message for a populace attempting to shake off oppressive feelings of guilt. The competition for voters by the SPD and CDU resulted in “Rcksichtsnahmen”; this meant in practice “dem offenkundigen Bedrfnis der Whler, die Vergangenheit Vergangenheit sein zu lassen, Rechnung zu tragen” (Kielmansegg 1989: 16 – 17). Political expediency came at the severe cost of memory suppression. There are admittedly a small number of historians who emphasise the practical function of this campaign of reticence. Hermann Lbbe and Jeffery Herf, to take two prominent examples, have argued that reticence was necessary for the successful establishment of a functional democracy. Herf argues that the establishment of what would prove to be a successful democracy was initially aided by a measure of collective “amnesia” (cf.

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Herf 1997). Lbbe goes a step further. He refutes the argument that a process of ‘Verdrngung’ was underway, emphasising instead the integrative function of what he calls “eine gewisse Zurckhaltung”: Diese gewisse Stille war das sozialpyschologisch und politisch nçtige Medium der Verwandlung unserer Nachkriegsbewçlkerung in die Brgerschaft der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Es htte eines solchen Mediums nicht bedurft, wenn die Herrschaft des Nationalsozialismus ihre Wirklichkeit exklusiv in jenen Machthabern gehabt htte, die in den Prozessen der Allierten abgeurteilt wurden […]. Zur nationalsozialistischen Realitt gehçrten ja aber ebenso die schließlich weit mehr als Duzendmillionen registrierter Parteigenossen, die noch grçßere Zahl der mitlaufenden Volksgenossen […] – kurz: die Mehrheit des Volkes. Gegen Ideologie und Politik des Nationalsozialismus mußte der neue deutsche Staat eingerichtet werden. Gegen die Mehrheit des Volkes konnte er schwer eingerichtet werden. (Lbbe 1983: 585 – 86) [my emphasis]

There is, however, a distinction to be made between this understated ‘lull’ as the necessary medium for transforming the populace into the citizenry of the Federal Republic and the degree of restoration that in fact took place. As Saul Friedlnder writes: “The two decades following the war can be characterised as a period of virtual silence about the Shoah: the consensus was one of repression and oblivion. Adult contemporaries of Nazism still dominated the public scene. Even the survivors chose to remain silent, since very few people were interested in listening to them.” (Friedlnder 2000: 5) [my emphasis] As Lbbe emphasises there were, of course, immense practical difficulties when it came to punishing each socalled ‘Schreibtischtter.’ The application of normal judicial standards to brown-collar criminality carried out under the direction of the state presented, practically speaking, formidable obstacles. Such crimes, after all, were “unprecedented in human history, transcending all situations for which laws had been devised. They were extremely modern in their conception and administration, and archaically barbarian in their day-to-day implementation” (Marcuse 2001: 89). These facts notwithstanding, the reinstitution of former compromised elites into the top echelons of national politics casts into doubt both the thoroughness of the denazification process and Lbbe’s concept of a mere “gewisse Stille.” With reference to the particularly strong continuity of elites in public office, a number of important observations deserve mention. Kielmansegg, for example, questions whether the need for the skills and knowledge of those who had served the Nazi state was really so great that the new Federal Republic could not have exercised a little more selectiveness:

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Bedurfte man des Sachverstandes der Richter, Staatsanwlte, Diplomaten, Verwaltungsbeampten, Lehrer, die bis 1945 dem nationalsozialistischen Staat gedient hatten, so sehr, daß man nicht allzu whlerisch sein durfte? […] Wo war die Grenze, jenseits derer solche Ntzlichkeitserwgungen schlechterdings unstatthaft waren? Htte man es nicht doch mit einem Programm vollstndiger Erneuerung des çffentlichen Dienstes versuchen kçnnen und mssen? […] Es ist unzweifelhaft eines der gravierenden Versumnisse der jungen Bundesrepublik gewesen. (Kielmansegg 1989: 38 – 40)

In his monograph Wohin treibt die Bundesrepublik? Karl Jaspers issued a similarly trenchant judgment on the reinstitution of former prominent members of the Nazi regime: Einst prominente Nationalsozialisten wurden wieder wirksam und maßgebend. […] Es gibt eine faktische, wenn auch nicht organisatorisch geplante Interessenpolitik aller, die sich belastet und irgendwie mçglicherweise angreifbar fhlen, weil irgendetwas in ihrer Vergangenheit ist, das sie wegwnschen. Ein einzelner, aber besonders wichtiger Fall ist die Bundeswehr. Sie ist aufgebaut und gefhrt von Offizieren, die in der nationalsozialistischen Armee gedient haben, Hitler gefolgt sind, am Geiste dieser Armee teilnahmen, das Attentat vom 20. Juli verwarfen. […] Analog liegt es bei den Richtern, den Professoren, der Polizei usw. Dieses Fortwirken der alten Nationalsozialisten ist ein Grundgebrechen der inneren Verfassung der Bundesrepublik. Alle verdammen sie Hitler, alle behaupten, nicht eigentlich Nationalsozialisten gewesen zu sein. (Jaspers 1966: 183)

Jaspers questions the apparent transformation of previously convinced party members and their claims to having never really been Nazis at heart. Their status as steadfast supporters of National Socialism, after all, would not prove conducive to the new political climate. One of the major symbols of this restoration at the highest levels of national politics was the appointment of Hans Globke as Adenauer’s Junior Minister. Globke had been the co-author of a commentary on the Nuremberg Race Laws which institutionalised the racial theories prevalent in Nazi ideology. Giordano summarises his person: “Dr. Hans Globke, Staatssekretr Konrad Adenauers, Schçpfer des Bundeskanzleramtes, graue Eminenz der bundesdeutschen Frhepoche und Kommentator der nationalsozialistischen Rassengesetze von Nrnberg aus dem Jahre 1935!” (Giordano 1987: 106) Other prominent cases of restoration in the upper echelons of political life were the appointments of Theodor Oberlnder, a highranking Nazi official who had developed so-called ‘resettlement’ plans for the occupied eastern territories, and Hans Filbinger, a former SA and Nazi party member, who was a leading CDU member in the

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1960s and 1970s. Schçnberger provides a clear sense of how entrenched these restorative practices really were: Hitlergenerle bauten die Bundeswehr auf, Gestapobeamte die Kriminalpolizei der Lnder, SD-Agenten den Bundesnachrichtendienst, Arisierungs- und Kriegsgewinnler die westdeutsche Wirtschaft. Die Hauptangeklagten im IGFarben-Prozeß waren sehr bald wieder auf leitenden Posten der chemischen Industrie ttig. Einige Spitzenfunktionre des ‘Dritten Reiches’, die einer Verurteilung durch die ordentlichen Gerichte entgangen waren, nicht zuletzt weil dort dieselben Verhltnisse herrschten wie berall, konnten sogar Minister und Staatssekretre werden. (Schçnberger 1999: 132)

Even those top functionaries of the Nazi state who did go through the judicial system managed to emerge safely and proceeded to occupy pivotal roles in the new Republic. This was facilitated by the fact that the judicial system itself was replete with reinstated former Nazi elites. These restorative policies resulted in what Giordano describes as “die scham- und hemmungsloseste Massenlge, die es je in der deutschen Geschichte gegeben hat” (Giordano 1987: 91). The policy of West-European integration was yet another step in this process of shaking off memories of the recent past. Given that the West Germans were suddenly on the ‘correct’ side once again, the need to remember the National Socialist past seemed inconsequential in contrast to fighting the communist ‘enemy’: Die rasche Eingliederung der Deutschen in den Ost-West-Konflikt [ist] einer offenen und gewissenhaften Auseinandersetzung mit der eigenen Vergangenheit keineswegs fçrderlich gewesen. […] So plçtzlich Mitverteidiger von Demokratie und Rechtstaat gegen ein totalitres Imperium geworden zu sein, mußte ihnen zu rasch ein gutes Gewissen bereiten. Das Engagement gegen den gegenwrtigen fremden Totalitarismus konnte ein Stck weit an die Stelle der Auseinandersetzung mit dem eigenen von gestern treten. Es ist nicht zu bezweifeln, daß von dieser Chance […] sehr bewußt Gebrauch gemacht worden ist. (Kielmansegg 1989: 71 – 72)

The East-West conflict thus served as a mechanism to facilitate amnesia by supplanting memory with other concerns. Further attempts by the federal government to foster a so-called ‘Schlußstrichmentalitt’ remained evident throughout the fifties. Aside from Adenauer’s aforementioned speech to the Bundestag on the National Day of Reflection of the German People in 1950, in which he made no reference to the persecution of the Jews, another speech to the Bundestag regarding the question of restitution a year later was equally questionable because the greater part of

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the speech was devoted to exculpating the majority of German citizens. His use of the passive voice is particularly striking: Die Bundesregierung und mit ihr die große Mehrheit des deutschen Volkes sind sich des unermeßlichen Leidens bewußt, das in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus ber die Juden in Deutschland und in den besetzten Gebieten gebracht wurde. Das deutsche Volk hat in seiner berwiegenden Mehrheit die an den Juden begangenen Verbrechen verabscheut und hat sich an ihnen nicht beteiligt. Es hat in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus im deutschen Volke viele gegeben, die mit eigener Gefhrdung aus religiçsen Grnden, aus Gewissensnot, aus Scham ber die Schndung des deutschen Namens ihren jdischen Mitbrgern Hilfsbereitschaft gezeigt haben. Im Namen des deutschen Volkes sind aber unsagbare Verbrechen begangen worden, die zur moralischen und materiellen Wiedergutmachung verpflichten. (cited in Vogel 1967: 36)

By mentioning elsewhere in his speech the ‘suffering brought upon the German people,’ Adenauer left the perpetrators unnamed, while his use of the phrase “im Namen des deutschen Volkes” had the effect of distancing the crimes from ordinary Germans. Separating the Nazi elite from the national body constituted, as Herf writes, an attempt to “soften the blow to the national psyche” (Herf 1997: 283). Language was thus very skilfully used as a tool in this widespread culture of memory suppression. The celebration of 5 May, marking the end of the Allied occupation, is further evidence of extensive attempts at suppressing the Nazi past: “Bezeichnenderweise feierte man in Bonn als den ‘großen Tag in der deutschen Geschichte’ den 5. Mai. 1955 – das Ende der Besatzungszeit – nicht den 8. Mai.” (Kçlsch 2000: 79) Surely if attempts at coming to terms with the recent past were genuine, then the day that the German army – and along with it the scourge of Nazism – had finally capitulated should be remembered as a date of intrinsic importance in the post-war German calendar? Kçlsch then proceeds to quote the words spoken by Adenauer in a bulletin on 5 May 1955: “Der Tag der Zurckgewinnung der Souvernitt ist ein großer Tag in der deutschen Geschichte. Vor zehn Jahren zerbrach Deutschland und hçrte auf, ein sich selbst zu regierender Staat zu sein. Es war die dunkleste Stunde unseres Vaterlandes.” (Kçlsch 2000: 80) For Adenauer Germany’s darkest hour was not the million-fold extermination, but rather the moment the country was forced to surrender sovereignty. Another telling sign was the fact that in 1956 the federal government commemorated the victims of Stalinism, but omitted those persecuted under Nazism. In the main speech held on the day of the commemoration by Dr. Heinrich Vockel, the West German governmental representative in Berlin, the victims of the Stalinist regime were re-

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membered “ohne ein Wort zur NS-Zeit, als sei einfach klar, daß eine solche Rede nicht auf deutsche Verhltnisse passe” (Kçlsch 2000: 80). With restorative trends so pervasive in the socio-political arena, there would be little scope within the literary sphere to serve the purposes of transparency and enlightenment.

1.3 Restoration in the Literary Arena The literary scene was directly influenced by the trends that characterised the socio-political landscape of post-war West Germany. Schçnberger summarizes the literary situation: Auf dem Buchmarkt und in den Illustrierten erschienen die Rechtfertigungsmemoiren von Prominenten des ‘Dritten Reiches’. In den Kinos dominierte amerikanische Militr- und Kriegspropaganda, gefolgt von westdeutschen Versuchen einer Entnazifizierung des Zweiten Weltkriegs. Unter diesen Umstnden htten Bcher, die ber das Naziregime und seine Verbrechen aufklren wollten, wenig Chancen. (Schçnberger 1999: 133)

Else R. Behrend-Rosenfeld’s novel Ich stand nicht allein: Erlebnisse einer Jdin in Deutschland 1933 – 1944 (1949) serves as a revealing example in this respect. Recounting the story of a Jew who recalls the humanity she encountered amongst her non-Jewish neighbours during the period of discrimination, and eclipsing the brutal suffering and mass extermination, the book understandably found a wide readership. It is easy to see why an account emphasising the benevolence, as opposed to the guilt, of ordinary Germans would be welcomed by the post-war West German populace. These escapist trends also made the Heimkehrerliteratur extremely popular in the post-war era, since it offered the West German populace a coherent interpretation of the war and fostered a sense of exculpation. Commenting on its popularity in the immediate post-war years, Trinks writes: Kaum ein anderes Sujet war fr die unmittelbare Stellungnahme zu den drngenden Zeitfragen in gleicher Weise prdestiniert wie das Heimkehrerthema. […] An den Kriegsheimkehrer ließ sich die Frage nach der Schuld und nach dem Sinn der Kriegsopfer knpfen, an seinem Vorbild die Misere der Gegenwart als berwindbar zeigen und eine Perspektive fr die Zukunft gewinnen. […] Das Heimkehrerdrama sollte helfen nach einer neuen geistigen Orientierung zu suchen [….]. Denn in den ersten Nachkriegsjahren kam es zu sozialen Umwlzungen nie gekannten Ausmaßes. […] Heimkehrer zu sein wurde folglich zu einer Orientierung stiftenden gesellschaftlichen Kategorie. (Trinks 2002: 27)

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What made the Heimkehrerliteratur so exculpatory in nature was the fact that the Germans were often presented not as perpetrators, but as victims: “Der Krieg auf der Bhne findet in der Defensive statt – im Luftschutzkeller oder in der Endphase der Heimatverteidigung. […] Die Auswahl hat Methode. […]; das Bild einer geschlagenen Armee wird beschworen. Die Deutschen erscheinen nicht als Tter, sondern als Opfer.” (Trinks 2002: 41) The exonerative nature of these works was further facilitated by the dramatic perspective chosen by the author, in particular the so-called ‘worm’s eye view’: the common soldier had merely obeyed orders without any knowledge of the bigger picture: Entscheidend gesttzt wird diese Exkulpation durch die dramatische Perspektive. Die Protagonisten berichten aus der ‘Froschperspektive’. Als einfache Befehlsempfnger, die weder strategische noch politische Zusammenhnge kennen, sind sie bar jeder Verantwortung und gegen Reflexion ber den Sinn des Krieges immunisiert. (Trinks 2002: 42)

The Heimkehrerdramatik was also perfectly suited to the presentation of German suffering: “Ein anderer Stoff […] eignete sich wie kaum ein anderer zur Darstellung der Leiden der Deutschen. Im ‘mçrderische[n] Luftkrieg’ konnte man den Tod von Frauen, Kindern und Greisen zeigen, mithin von solchen Opfern, die in der Logik der Stcke als unschuldig und wehrlos gelten.” (Trinks 2002: 57) In addition to the Heimkehrerliteratur, works written by political prisoners found a wide readership: Audiences in both Germanies found it comparatively easy to comprehend the stories of political prisoners who could make sense of the time they had spent in concentration camps. They could celebrate their survival because they had outlasted their tormentors, and triumphed over them. For Jews, Sinti and Roma, however, survival often meant being the only member of one’s family who was not gassed, shot dead, hanged or starved to death. (Neumann 1999: 63)

The literature of political prisoners attempted to make sense of what had occurred. The literature of a Jewish survivor such as Nelly Sachs, on the other hand, was anything but ‘sinnstiftend’ for the majority of the population and served only to remind the post-war German populace of the enormity of the crimes committed. Her work demanded of its readers the unwelcome task of engaging with the uncomfortable questions of perpetration and complicity. In the early years of the post-war period there were voices – albeit a small number – which criticised these restorative trends and called for a sober confrontation with the recent past. At the Berlin Writer’s Conference of 1948, attended by writers from all four occupied zones, Stephan

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Hermlin called on writers to confront the realities of National Socialism and to reflect on the consequences of the crimes committed for German literature. He attacked in particular the restorative character of much post-war writing and its avoidance of any engagement with the realities of fascism: Unsere zeitgençssische nichtfaschistische Literatur, unsere lyrische Dichtung im besonderen, trgt […] den Stempel des Troglodytenhaften, sie ist eine Dichtung von Hçhlenbewohnern. […] Was den geistigen Gehalt angeht, scheut man das Direkte, das Konkrete, man flchtet in die Metaphysik und nennt die Totschlger am liebsten Dmonen. (Hermlin 1998: 52)

Hermlin’s juxtaposition of post-war literature with the writing of troglodytes or cave-dwellers encapsulates the flight from reality that characterised the “lyrische Kuscheltiere” – to borrow Olschner’s phrase – that flooded the markets in the post-war period (Olschner 1992: 276). At the same event Joachim K. Boeckh delivered a similarly harsh critique of the failure of so much post-war literature to confront the recent past, and he criticised in particular the disregard for the few attempts that were made by historians to record what had happened: Wenn – ausnahmsweise – einmal ein Buch erscheint, das auf Grund umfassender Sachkenntnis […] die Motive und die Praxis des eigentlichen Nationalsozialismus […] enthllt und zugnglich macht – was geschieht? Die Lehrsthle schweigen. Die Schriftsteller schweigen. Das Buch erscheint – und verschwindet. Offenbar ist es unangenehm. […] Die Presse schweigt oder bringt es hçchstens zu einer kurzen Rezension. Die Zeitschriften schweigen …. Aber: Die Dichter! Sie dichten in Mengen. Sie dichten von der Liebe und vom Frhling und von Gott und der Welt. […] Es ist ein Elend mit unseren deutschen Poeten. Was haben ihre Gedichtchen mit dem Deutschland von 1947 zu tun? Nichts, gar nichts. Nennen wir diese Produkte frank und frei was sie sind: lyrische Selbstbefriedigungen. (Boechk 1947: 5)

The book in question is almost certainly a reference to Eugen Kogon’s Der SS Staat, the first thorough analysis of the Nazi system of terror, published in 1946. This first attempt to document the crimes committed and to encourage open engagement with the recent past had the wholly opposite effect to that intended. Boeckh’s reference to post-war “Gedichtchen” is a critique of what he considered to be the lack of merit of so much post-war poetry in its evasion of the realities of Auschwitz and its indifference to the “Zivilisationsbruch” (Diner 1988) that Auschwitz had ushered in. Those writers who did attempt to thematise the Holocaust also came under attack. In a review article entitled “Stimmen eines anderen Deutschland,” Max Frisch criticised the restorative tendency in works

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such as Ernst Wiechert’s memoir Der Totenwald (1945), written during his incarceration in Buchenwald. Frisch mocks a particular scene in the novel in which the same branches of the great oak, which had apparently fallen on Goethe and Charlotte von Stein, afford Wiechert’s alter ego, Johannes, spiritual comfort: Melancholisch steht Wiechert unter einer Eiche, die Goethe und Charlotte von Stein beschattet habe, im Grunde auch schon getrçstet, da er sich nher bei Goethe fhlt als bei der deutschen Wirklichkeit und Gegenwart, die unter dieser Eiche stattfindet; ohne auch nur die augenblicklange Frage: warum dieser Goethe, dessen Geisteshçhe uns bekannt und lange genug als Aushngeschild benutzt worden ist, und alle die anderen Schtze, die diesem Volk geschenkt wurden, Mozart und Hçlderlin, die er anruft, warum all dies gerade das deutsche Volk von nichts bewahrt hat.1 (Frisch 1946: 301)

Frisch was deeply critical of Wiechert’s unquestioned subscription to the notion of ‘Weimar versus Buchenwald,’ as if the former remained an unsullied and unblemished concept. He also criticised Wiechert’s resolute belief that the ‘true’ German tradition as personified by Goethe was still viable despite the recent past. Nelly Sachs’ poetry, completely lacking in any such restorative tendencies, was not to find a home in the West for a considerable period yet. It would be in the Soviet zone that Sachs would find an initial readership for her work, and her reception there sheds a very interesting light on the socio-political and literary trends in the East in the immediate post-war period.

1.4 Reception in the East As distinct from the complete lack of reception of Sachs’ work in West Germany for a considerable number of years in the aftermath of the war, her first volume of poetry, In den Wohnungen des Todes, was publish1

The part of the memoir to which Frisch is referring is presumably the following: “Er [Johannes] hatte nur eine Minute zu gehen, bis er unter der Eiche stand, von der man sagte, daß ihr Schatten schon auf Goethe und Charlotte von Stein gefallen sei. […] [U]nd er versuchte, sich aller der Verse zu erinnern, die er von dem wußte, der vor hundertfnfzig Jahren hier gestanden haben mochte. Es war nichts verlorengegangen von dem großen Leben, und auch wenn er mit fnfzig Jahren an eine Galeere geschmiedet worden wre, wrde nichts verlorengegangen sein. ‘Edel, hilfreich und gut…’ Nein, nicht einmal dies war untergegangen, solange ein einziger Mensch es vor sich hinsprach und es zu bewahren versuchte bis in seine letzte Stunde hinein.” (Wiechert 1957: 277)

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ed in 1947 in the Soviet zone by the Berlin publisher ‘Aufbau’ on the initiative of Johannes R. Becher, who later became the first Minister of Culture in the German Democratic Republic. Once again, the socio-political situation provides an explanatory framework for this. In the immediate post-war period it was a plausible assumption that the memory of the Jewish persecution would find a home in the post-war communist ‘anti-fascist’ narrative. Both Jews and communists had been victims of Nazi persecution. The Central Committee for the Victims of Fascism (Hauptausschuß fr die Opfer des Faschismus), which was established as a body outside the communist party by former prisoners of the Nazis in June 1945, published a front-page article in the Deutsche Volkszeitung in September 1945 acknowledging the Jews’ status as victims of fascism. A ceremony held in Berlin in November 1945 to commemorate the Kristallnacht pogrom was further evidence of the Communist Party’s approach to the persecution of the Jews. (Neumann 2000: 116) Another positive sign came from returned exile author Johannes R. Becher. In his essay “Deutschland klagt an,” published in January 1946 in the inaugural issue of Aufbau, the leading cultural and political journal of the SED – (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands), the destruction of European Jewry occupied a pivotal role. In April 1948, at a communist ceremony at Buchenwald, the Holocaust also received direct attention. This can be contrasted with Adenauer’s inaugural speech in 1949 in which he postulated “Vergangenes vergangen sein zu lassen.” At this ceremony Stefan Heymann, a VVN official (Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes), spoke directly of the millions of Jews murdered in the death camps. In addition, the decision of the authorities of the newly-formed German Democratic Republic to make anti-Semitism a criminal offence was praised in the various speeches, while the bonds between the racially and politically persecuted were also emphasised. (cf. Herf 1997: 96 – 97) It was admittedly a small minority of communists, most especially Becher and Merker, who were responsible for placing the issue of Jewish suffering at the core of the communist ‘anti-fascist’ narrative. For the majority on the other hand, represented by Walter Ulbricht, the Jewish catastrophe remained peripheral. However, as long as communists like Becher and Merker held influence – which, as later transpired, would prove short-lived – and as long as they had the opportunity to speak at public events such as the aforementioned ceremony, Soviet memory of Nazism would include Jewish suffering. It was within this arena that Sachs’ first volume of poetry was published in East Berlin in 1947. In addition, Peter Huchel, editor of the

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journal Sinn und Form, the primary organ of the Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands, also published several of her poems. In contrast to West Germany, Sachs thus, initially at least, found a forum in the East, amidst the adamant socialist disavowal there of any Nazi legacy. As Erhard Bahr explains: In der damaligen sowjetischen Besatzungszone gab es nicht das Phnomen der massenhaften Verdrngung der NS-Verbrechen von seiten smtlicher Bevçlkerungsschichten, sondern nur eindeutige Verurteilung, da das ‘neue Deutschland’ […] als antifaschistischer Gegenentwurf konzipiert war. […] Deshalb war man auch […] der Exil-Literatur gegenber weitaus aufgeschlossener als in den westlichen Besatzungszonen. (Bahr 1980: 12 – 13)

Following the news that the volume was to be published, Sachs wrote to the Swiss journalist and author Max Rychner: Ich erhielt einen Brief vom Aufbau-Verlag Berlin, darin wurde mir mitgeteilt, daß man nach Anempfehlung von Johannes Becher, Prsident des deutschen Kulturbundes, sich entschlossen hat, meine Gedichte in einer Auflage von 20.000 Exemplaren Anfang Dezember herauszubringen, und bittet gleichfalls um meine weitere Produktion. […] Sie werden verstehen wie froh es mich macht, daß die Stummen endlich reden drfen. (Sachs 1984: 69)

The decisive role played by Johannes R. Becher in getting Sachs’ work published comes to the fore in this passage, as does the stark contrast with the situation in West Germany: not only was the East German publishing house keen to publish her existing volume of poetry, she was even being encouraged to submit more of her work for consideration. Expressing her delight using a phrase that would come to dominate her work in varied forms – “die Stummen” – the aporia between the state of muteness and the indispensability of bearing witness is already perceptible at this early stage. Her choice of words also expresses how great the suppressive tendencies were in the West in relation to Holocaust memory. In a letter to Curt Trepte a week later, she conveyed her delight once again that her work was finally reaching her intended German audience: “Ich habe heute frh den Vertrag mit dem Aufbau-Verlag Berlin unterzeichnet zurckgesandt. […] [E]s ist fr mich eine unendliche Freude, daß die Gedichte dort sprechen drfen, wo das Leid seinen Anfang nahm.” (Sachs 1984: 70) At the same time, however, Sachs was acutely aware of the repressive tendencies in the West and, whilst delighted that her work was finally reaching its intended German audience, she expressed her disappointment in a letter to Walter Berendsohn at the fact that this was only the case in East Germany: “Man hat dort [in Ost-Berlin] […] eine Ausgabe von 20.000 Exemplaren herausgegeben, aber wer weiß

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wann etwas hierher kommt.” (Sachs 1974b: 137) That 20,000 copies was moreover viewed at the time to be a considerable number is evinced by a letter to Sachs from the publishing director of Aufbau, Erich Wendt: “Von Ihrem Buch ‘In den Wohnungen des Todes’ haben wir 20,000 Exemplare verbreitet. […], wobei ja auch zu bemerken ist, daß 20,000 eine beispiellos hohe Auflage fr einen Gedichtband in Deutschland darstellen.” (cited in Olschner 1992: 271) The reception of Sachs’ work in the East would prove short-lived, however. As the cultural politics of the GDR increasingly began to serve the ends of the USSR, Sachs’ initial success in the East began to wane. In 1950 she succeeded in having just one poem – “Vçlker der Erde” – published in Sinn und Form. Leonard Olschner points out on the basis of a letter which Sachs wrote to the journal’s editor that the latter had plans for further publication of her work. (Olschner 1992: 271) Although these plans would never be realised, the intent is nonetheless very clear in the letter in question: “Heute kamen die Exemplare ihrer […] Zeitschrift ‘Sinn und Form.’ Ich danke Ihnen, daß ich dabei sein darf. […] Inzwischen werden Sie wohl auch meine Sendung erhalten haben, die ich nach Ihrem Wunsch zusammenstellte.” (Sachs 1984: 115) With the increasing emergence of a dogmatic Soviet cultural policy, nothing was to come of this “Sendung,” and any previously harbored publication intentions had little hope of coming to fruition. From 1949 the Jewish question began to be decisively marginalized as the initial Soviet support for the state of Israel was reversed. The views of communists like Merker and Becher on the Jewish question grew progressively intolerable. Paul Merker’s essay, “Hitlers Antisemitismus und wir,” in which the persecution of the Jews was placed at the centre of Nazi crimes, conflicted with the interpretation of the majority of communists who saw the Jews as merely one among many persecuted groups and who placed the communist resistance at the pinnacle of the victim ‘hierarchy.’ In this essay, Merker also declared support for Jewish financial restitution and for the creation of a Jewish state. What stirred considerable ire amongst communist readership was his proposal to place the claims of Jewish survivors on the same plane as the ‘anti-fascist’ resistance fighters. (Merker 1942: 9 – 11) This proposal, instead of calling for what Jeffrey Herf calls “a monopoly of empathy or special treatment among the various victims of fascism,” came into direct conflict with the communists’ resolve that the “anti-fascist resistance fighters” should be at the top of the Nazi victim hierarchy” (Herf 1994: 632). An attack on so-called ‘cosmopolitanism’ and on communists who allied themselves with Jewish con-

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cerns ensued. This anti-cosmopolitan campaign rested, as Herf points out, “on reinforcing associations of Jews with the West, as well as Stalin’s personal blend of paranoia and anti-Semitism” (Herf 1997: 108). The initial sign of the dramatic turn was the removal of Merker from the Politburo, apparently on charges of espionage, and the abolishment of the ‘Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.’ (cf. Herf 108 – 109) However, the fact that all the other figures denounced alongside Merker were Jewish, and with Merker’s pro-Jewish stance a well-known fact, singling him out as the only non-Jewish party member to be expelled lent the affair a very sinister tone for those who were concerned about anti-Semitism resurging in a communist guise. (cf. Herf 1994: 365) The influence of a rigid Soviet cultural policy became increasingly evident, and the memory of the Holocaust was increasingly suppressed. Nazi ideology came to be interpreted primarily in terms of capitalist class interest. Memory of the Jewish catastrophe would now have to compete with the memory of the sufferings of communists under the Nazi regime. In the East works such as Bruno Apitz’s Nackt unter Wçlfen (1958) enjoyed major success and began to replace literature which specifically thematised the Jewish persecution. Apitz’s book went through over two million printed copies following its initial publication and inspired various radio dramas and film versions. The book’s success can be attributed to its plot in which a valiant communist resistance takes centre stage. Apitz provides a portrayal of the underground resistance in the final few months of the war. His specific focus on the heroic communist resistance in Buchenwald, with the Jewish figures remaining peripheral, was very much in line with the official memory politics of the GDR at the time. By this point a restrictive cultural policy was firmly in place which called for ‘socialist realism’ as the favoured form for art and literature. ‘Socialist realism,’ the primary function of which was to serve the propagandistic and ideological functions of the Soviet state, put emphasis on the advancement and glorification of the political and social ideals of communism. Culture in the East rapidly became ever more strongly moulded by the dictates of a socialist ideology. In addition, the official identification of monopoly capitalism as the source of fascism resulted in the rejection by the East German leadership of any responsibility for what had occurred: Die KPD, seit 1946 dann die SED, entpuppte sich […] trotz aller Verlusterfahrungen als historische Gewinnerin, die sowohl innen als auch außen auf der richtigen, am Ende siegreichen Seite gestanden hatte. Wer ihr beitrat oder ihre Politik untersttzte, konnte dieses Erfolgsbewußtseins teilhaftig werden.

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Potentiell verwandelte sich daher ein Volk von Opfern […] in ein Volk von Siegern, das jegliche Verantwortung fr die Geschehnisse zwischen 1933 und 1945 ablehnte. Verantwortlich und schuldig blieb lediglich das Monopolkapital, das im eigenen Staat wirkungsvoll entmachtet worden war, dafr aber, wie es schien, in der Bundesrepublik um so ungehemmter agierte. Der WestStaat stellte sich aus dieser Sicht nicht nur juristisch in die Nachfolge des “Dritten Reiches”, sondern auch politisch. (Assmann 1999: 168 – 69)

By interpreting Nazism as merely the direct result of monopoly capitalism and by ridding East Germany of these structures which, according to Marxism-Leninism, had facilitated fascism in the first place, East Germany essentially developed a myth all of its own: they had been on the ‘right side’ during the war and were on the ‘right side’ once again. East Germany was thus in a position to condemn the continued existence of those ‘fascist’ capitalist structures in the West. This sense of East German righteousness would lead to the complete absence of any form of critical public memory or sober confrontation with the recent past. Peter Graf Kielmansegg, drawing on the famous Mitscherlich thesis, writes: “In der DDR war es angesichts des makellos guten Gewissens, das die neuen Herren fr sich und ihren Staat zur Schau trugen, mit der ‘Fhigkeit zu trauern’ sicher nicht besser bestellt als im Westen.” (Kielmansegg 1989: 73) By parodying the supposed pristine communist consciousness, Kielmansegg lays bare how the so-called ‘coming to terms’ process in the East developed essentially into ritualistic ‘antifascism.’ Thus unlike the West, where the issue of the continuity of former compromised elites turned the denazification process into a questionable enterprise at best, it cannot be contended that denazification was a complete success in the East either since, although denazification at the highest political levels was more thorough and lasting than in the West, the former National Socialist elite was effectively replaced by an authoritarian socialist elite: In the Soviet zone, Russian military government officials were replaced by Germans, but elite positions remained in Russian hands through the de facto annexation of the zone to the Soviet Union. In effect, the problem of post-totalitarian succession leadership was solved by permanently replacing the old totalitarian elites of Nazi-Germany with Russian decision-makers in Moscow. (Edinger 1960: 78)

In the East fascism was viewed first and foremost as a regime for the repression of the working classes in the service of capitalism, at the centre of which was its anti-communism, not its anti-Semitism. In the face of such

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an increasingly dogmatic political, social and cultural arena, whatever initial success Sachs enjoyed in the East proved to be short-lived.

1.5 Reception in the West: “Die Dichterin der Versçhnung” The tripartite structure of post-war restorative tendencies in the public arena and on the political and literary stages examined earlier, presented a formidable barrier to any form of reception, let alone engagement, with Sachs’ work in West Germany. Her work was not to appear there until 1957. The post-war literary scene was not conducive to publishing the works of an exiled author whose overriding theme was the annihilation of the Jews in the death camps. Indeed, Sachs even faced difficulties when it came to those publishing houses sympathetic to exile literature. In a letter to the Swiss author and journalist Max Rychner, who had tried in vain to arrange for the publication of her work with the exile publisher Europa-Verlag Emil Oprechts, Sachs expressed her despair: Ich erhielt von diesem Verlag einen Brief […], in welchem man bedauerte, daß man das Manuskript bereits an meine Addresse gesandt hatte […], und mir weiter mitteilt, daß […] es durchaus nicht im Sinn des Verlages wre, allgemeine Urteile abzugeben. Man htte nur soviel Emigrantenliteratur erhalten, davon vieles nicht Gutes, so daß die Stimmung ermdet wre, hoffte aber, daß sich bald alles nderte etc. Es ist also, wie ich fhlte, wohl gewesen: man hat die Manuskripte, nachdem man den Titel sah, zu den Haufen der Zeugen- und Protokollschriften geworfen, die leider ja oft wirklich mit dem Rauch der Scheiterhaufen die Seufzer der Opfer ersticken. (Sachs 1984: 62 – 63)

The general lack of interest in publishing Holocaust-related literature is stated quite explicitly here by Sachs: the title of her volume alone, In den Wohnungen des Todes sufficed, she presumed, to preclude her from consideration. In a letter to Arnold Zweig in 1948, Fritz H. Landshoff, who had established the exile publishing house Querido in Amsterdam in 1933, expressed his disappointment at the fact that the doors of German publishing houses continued to be closed to exiled authors three years after the defeat of National Socialism: “Wer htte gedacht, daß drei Jahre nach der Niederlage Hitlers das […] deutsche […] Gebiet noch immer den Autoren, die 1933 Deutschland verlassen haben, praktisch vollstndig verschlossen sein wrde.” (cited in Schnell 1993: 75) In a letter to Johannes Edfelt as late as 1953, Sachs echoed this sentiment: “In Deutschland lehnt man bei fast allen Verlegern Dichtung ab, die […] eine Form fr diese, unsere zerbrochene Welt sucht. Es soll alles glatt und

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harmonisch im frheren Sinne sein. Wie ist das mçglich, fragt man sich […].” (Sachs 1984: 147) Terence Des Pres’ description of the Holocaust survivor provides an aid for understanding this refusal by West German publishers to sanction material by a writer like Nelly Sachs. The survivor, Des Pres writes, is a “disturber of the peace,” a “runner of the blockade men erect against knowledge of unspeakable things”; but, since it is about these “things” that the survivor aims to speak, he undermines in the process “the validity of existing norms.” The world to which the survivor appeals “does not admit him,” and the survivor is plagued with guilt with regard to “his task” and “his vow to the dead.” The survivor’s “worst torment,” Des Pres concludes, “is not to be able to speak” (Des Pres 1980: 42 – 43). Nelly Sachs’ work represented such a ‘disturbance of the peace.’ Already in 1946, in a letter to Max Rychner, Sachs expressed her disappointment at the fact that her work was being translated into Swedish and even Norwegian but was receiving no attention in Germany: “Johannes Edfelt hat eine Reihe meiner Gedichte ins Schwedische bertragen, auch erscheint der beigelegte Zyklus in norwegischer Sprache, aber wohin mit der deutschen Sprache?” (Sachs 1984: 48) Heinz Dieckmann, editor at the Saarlndischer Rundfunk, drew a direct causal relation between post-war restorative tendencies and the lack of reception of her work in the West: “Daß die deutsche Kritik […] und die gegenwrtige deutsche Literaturbetrachtung Sie gern bersieht, berhrt die Reuelosigkeit der Deutschen, sowie das Bestreben, die Anstze einer geistigen Erneuerung im restaurativen Schmutz zu ersticken.” (Dieckmann 1953) Dieckmann’s letter indicates that Sachs’ absence in the West German public arena did not go unnoticed; advocates of her work remained nonetheless in the minority. In a letter to Walter Berendsohn, Sachs herself commented – with premature accuracy, it might be added – on the repressive tendencies of the day: “Es ist merkwrdig, wie schnell das jdische Schicksal verschttet wird von den laufenden Ereignissen, als ob die Menschheit froh wre, einer Verantwortung, der sie […] sich nicht gewachsen gezeigt hat, ledig zu sein.” (Sachs 1974e: 145) As late as 1957, in the Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland, Berendsohn, who himself campaigned tirelessly for the public recognition of Sachs’ work, provided a further insight into the reasons for her belated reception: “Obwohl es nun schon ber ein Jahrzehnt her ist, daß die Verlagsarbeit nach dem Verfall im Dritten Reich erneuert wurde, ist bisher in West Deutschland kein Buch der jdischen Dichterin Nelly Sachs erschienen […]. Kein deutscher Verleger wagte es bisher, die Werke der Dichterin in Buchform zu verçffentli-

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chen.” (Berendsohn 1957: 9) Publishing literature about the extermination of the Jews was risky on two fronts. Firstly, it was not a financially viable venture in light of the post-war socio-political conditions examined earlier. Secondly, publishing Sachs’ poetry demanded a measure of courage, since it involved swimming against the tide. The imagery that permeates Sachs’ oeuvre was not likely to promote her popularity. In addition, given that her poetry contained “de[n] verzweifelste[n] Schrei des Grauens, der jemals im Gedicht deutscher Sprache gehçrt ward,” as Kurt Pinthus wrote in a 1949 review of her work, chances of publication were limited even further (cited in Olschner 1992: 275). The condemnatory message that permeated Sachs’ poetry was also unwelcome; the German public was more concerned with cultural restoration than with having the pangs of a guilty collective consciousness roused. In another letter to Berendsohn in 1949, Sachs quoted a line from correspondence she had received from an acquaintance who explained the lack of publishing outlets for her work thus: “Hier haben alle Verleger Angst, ihr schçnes Papier mit einem Stck glhender Lava zu verbrennen.” (cited in Braun and Lerman 1998: 182) By 1953 Sachs had surrendered all hope of ever finding a home for her poetry in Germany; as she put it in a letter to Johannes Edfelt: “Ich weiß nur zu genau, daß ich es bestimmt nicht mehr erleben werde, mit meinen Dingen eine hiesige Land-Heimat zu gewinnen.” (Sachs 1984:145) It would not be until the late 1950s and 1960s that Sachs’ work would begin to receive any further attention, and developments in the political arena by that stage were to have a profound effect on the reception of her work in West Germany. The intense focus on Nelly Sachs from the very late 1950s onwards was sudden and unexpected, but it had design. It was based less on the merit of her work – that would come with critical scholarship which really only began in the 1970s – than on avoiding a genuine attempt at ‘Vergangenheitsbewltigung.’ This sudden reception of her work coincided with a change in the relationship between memory and democracy in the Federal Republic. During the late 1950s and 1960s memory of the Nazi persecution of the Jews came to occupy a ubiquitous place in the West German political and public consciousness. There were a number of reasons for this transition. The first external influence was the media sensation caused by the so-called Ulm Task Force Trial in which the facts pertaining to the Jewish extermination were extensively uncovered. The trial brought to light the reality that the executions committed by the task force were but a miniscule portion of what had in fact been a programme of systematic mass execution throughout Eastern Europe and

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the Soviet Union during the war. In the wake of this trial, the ‘Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Aufklrung von nationalsozialistischen Verbrechen’ was established in 1958 as a centralised system to uncover and expose those perpetrators who had escaped punishment. Developments in the period between 1958 and 1965 provide the second key to understanding this transition. During this time the mass media played a significant role in bringing to the forefront of public consciousness two further events which rendered Auschwitz an agonizing actuality: the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 and the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt from 1963 to 1965. Along with the Auschwitz Trials – an important turning point since they were accompanied by broad national as well as international press coverage – this period also saw increased awareness in the face of a resurgence of anti-Semitic violence which reached a highpoint in 1959 with the desecration of the Cologne synagogue. 1965 marked yet another step as debates commenced over the statute of limitations on the crime of murder. The discussion centered on the question of the extension of Germany’s statute given that, unless it was extended, thousands of those who had been involved in Nazi crimes would escape trial and justice merely by virtue of the passing of time. These debates, alongside the various trials, all served to bring both the crimes of the Nazi past and the magnitude of the judicial failure of the 1950s to the centre stage of West German politics. The spring of 1965 saw yet another major step forward with Adenauer’s successor Ludwig Erhard establishing diplomatic relations with Israel. The sudden discovery of Sachs’ work ran concurrent to this transition in political and public memory. After years of non-recognition, publishers now had good reason to sanction her work. In 1957 the Heinrich Ellermann publishing house published the first collection of her poems in West Germany under the title Und niemand weiß weiter. It is clear from Sachs’ correspondence that Ellermann had approached her directly in 1956 expressing his interest in her work. He had sensed that the socio-political tide was turning and, along with it, the demands and tastes in the literary arena: “Ellermann [machte] mir ein Angebot betr. meiner eigenen Dinge. Er gibt jedes Jahr einen Dichter heraus, finanziert es privat und rechnet nicht mit Verdienst. So etwas gibt es auf Erden.” (Sachs 1984: 153) While Ellermann’s willingness to take a chance on publishing Sachs’ work is commendable, the timing indicates that this was not an uncalculated gamble. A number of Sachs’ poems also appeared in the journal Texte und Zeichen, edited by Alfred Andersch.

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The honours soon followed the publications. Virtually unknown in the West German public sphere in the post-war years, Sachs was suddenly showered with honours and prizes, beginning with the Lyrikpreis des Kulturkreises im Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie in 1959, followed by the Meersburger Droste-Preis in 1960. In 1961 she was endowed with the newly-created Nelly Sachs-Preis der Stadt Dortmund, named after its first recipient. This in turn was followed by the awarding of the prestigious Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels in 1965. These honours reached a highpoint in 1966 when Sachs was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, together with the Israeli author Samuel J. Agnon. Finally, in 1967, she was made an honorary citizen of Berlin in what one critic calls “a final and ironic act of reclamation” (Bahti 1995: 3). After decades of non-recognition, Sachs was transformed from a virtually unknown writer and had come to embody the concept of German-Jewish reconciliation. It became clear very quickly that Sachs’ poetry was being utilised as a vehicle for repressed mourning; the sudden reverence represented “die Vereinnahmung ihrer ‘Trauerarbeit’ fr die in Deutschland auf breiterer Ebene nicht geleistete” (Bossinade 1985: 143). The appropriation of her work and the reclamation of her person as a quasi ‘public alibi’ served a very definite purpose. Reclaiming Sachs would serve to relieve West Germans of the task of mourning: a reconciliatory message of the strength as the one supposedly on offer in her work, after all, rendered self-examination superfluous. The award of the Droste-Preis was surprising given that, at the time, Sachs was living in almost total obscurity in Sweden, while her work was also absent in most anthologies of the day. The presentation speech delivered by Swiss author and publisher Hans Rudolf Hilty at this particular award ceremony is especially significant, since it would prove to be one of very few speeches at the various award ceremonies in which the disregard for Sachs and her work would receive honest acknowledgement: Und nun also sind wir […] versammelt zum feierlichen Akt der Preis-bergabe in diesem festlichen Saal. […] Und nun erwarten Sie von mir eine entsprechend festliche Rede. […] Nun, gegen Festreden bin ich skeptisch. In jenem ersten Gesprch mit Nelly Sachs am vergangenen Mittwoch fiel auch das Wort ‘Verlogenheit’. Aus dieser Ecke stammt meine Skepsis gegenber Festreden. Gerade im Falle Nelly Sachs. […] Ich mßte nun vielleicht die anwesenden Verleger der Gedichtbnde von Nelly Sachs bitten, die Verkaufszahlen dieser Bcher zu nennen. Mag sein, daß auf 100.000 Menschen deutscher Sprache ein Exemplar trifft. Ich weiß nicht, was einen an dieser Bilanz besonders festlich stimmen kçnnte. Oder ich mßte darauf hinweisen,

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1 Nelly Sachs: A Tumultuous Reception History

daß die grçßte Dichterin, die heute in deutscher Sprache schreibt, in den meisten Anthologien deutscher Gegenwartsdichtung fehlt. (Hilty 1960: 1 – 3)

Hilty’s presentation speech also warned against ‘buying off ’ Sachs with literary prizes. Quoting from two of Sachs’ poems “Ihr Zuschauenden” and “An euch, die das neue Haus bauen,” from her first collection of post-war poetry, he warned: “Jene, die das neue Haus bauten – oder eben nicht ein neues Haus bauten, sondern wiederaufbauten – schttelten ihn gern ab, den Blick im Rcken, den Blick der Toten. […] Vom Blick auf den Rcken kann man sich nicht loskaufen mit Literaturpreisen.” (Hilty 1960: 4, 6) A later report in the Swiss paper Der Bund on the occasion of the awarding of the Nobel Prize expressed a similar sentiment: “keine Preisverleihung schafft sie aus der Welt.” (Erni 1966) Citing the well-known lines from Gnther Eich’s poem ‘Wacht auf ’ (1950), a poem that urges resistance against the machinations of power, Hilty then concluded: “Sie singt die Lieder, die man heute von einem Lyriker nicht erwartet. Ihre Gedichte sind nicht l im Getriebe der Welt, sondern Sand.” (Hilty 1960: 7) Hilty’s words of honesty had little consequence, however. Not long thereafter, as Olschner comments, “hagelte es Regelrecht Preise und Anerkennung” (Olschner 1992: 279). That same year, the anthology of lyric poetry from around the world Museum der modernen Poesie, edited by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, included Nelly Sachs as the only living German poet. The renowned linguist Helmut Geißner pointed out the unexpectedness and peculiarity of this: Das mag manchen Leser verwundern; er htte andere Namen erwartet, Namen, die in den Literaturzeitschriften zu finden sind, die man von Literaturpreisen her kennt, ber die gesprochen und geschrieben wird. Wer ist verglichen mit ihnen Nelly Sachs? Erst seit wenigen Jahren beginnt man ihre Gedichte zu entdecken. […] Und doch sollen ihre Gedichte die deutsche Lyrik in einer internationalen Anthologie reprsentieren – wie ist das mçglich? Nun, wie die Dinge liegen, es ist mçglich. Dieser Fall paßt genau in die fnfzehn zurckliegenden Jahre des Aufbauens und Verdrngens. Ein Stck deutscher Geistesgeschichte nach 1945. (Geißner 1961: 1)

There was, of course, good reason for Sachs’ virtual absence in poetry collections during the previous fifteen years. Anthologies in the decade prior to 1960, as Olschner points out, “geben […] ein Indiz ab fr Lesewnsche, Lesererwartung, lyrische Kuscheltiere, nicht jedoch fr herausfordernde Texte, die dem Leser unbequem werden kçnnen” (Olschner 1992: 276). Sachs’ works could certainly not be classified as “lyrische Kuscheltiere.”

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The “professionelle Vergangenheitsbewltiger,” as the literary critic Paul Kersten astutely refers to them (Kersten 1984), soon jumped on the band wagon with the creation and presentation of what would become the Nelly Sachs-Preis. Once again this award was somewhat bizarre since, as one journalist commented in his report on the ceremony, “man hat von Nelly Sachs […] bis vor wenigen Jahren in der ffentlichkeit kaum etwas gewußt” (Nils 1961). In the presentation speech at the award ceremony, the mayor, Dietrich Keuning, praised Sachs as the ‘guardian’ of the German language and exalted her ‘exemplary message of forgiveness’: Mit dieser Auszeichnung ehrt Dortmund eine Dichterin, die sich durch ihr lyrisches Werk als Hterin deutscher Sprache und Kultur erwiesen […] hat. Die Stadt will mit der Bindung des Kulturpreises an den Namen Nelly Sachs die Bedeutung der Dichterin […] wrdigen, die in vorbildlicher Weise Versçhnung und Toleranz ausdrckt. (Keuning 1961)

To describe Sachs as the ‘guardian’ of the German language and of German culture – forceful statements in light of the fact that no mention was made of Sachs’ despair at the breach in both language and culture that Auschwitz had engendered – was one thing. To describe her work as exhibiting an exemplary message of reconciliation was quite another. This marked just the beginning of the reduction of Sachs’ person to a reconciliatory figure. From this point on, what was arguably a process of appropriation was gradually developing into one of misappropriation, and the use of Sachs’ person and work for political purposes was becoming increasingly evident. One particular event speaks volumes in this respect. At a reading of Sachs’ poetry in Stockholm in 1960, organised by the German ambassador, Sachs was placed sitting between the German and Israeli ambassadors. This was a significant moment given that it was just five years before the establishment of diplomatic relations with Israel. As Sparr comments: “Das ist in der Tat ein unglaublicher historischer Moment – fnf Jahre vor der Aufnahme diplomatischer Beziehungen zwischen der Bundesrepublik und Israel, die gegen große Widerstnde in Israel durchgesetzt wurde. Es war der Markstein einer besonders symboltrchtigen, politisch inspirierten Rezeption ihrer Lyrik.” (Sparr 1998: 50) 1965 then marked the award of the prestigious Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels. The wording of the official announcement at the presentation ceremony was marked by a weighty vocabulary. Sachs was selected as the prize recipient on the following grounds: “Das dichterische Werk von Nelly

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1 Nelly Sachs: A Tumultuous Reception History

Sachs steht ein fr das jdische Schicksal in unmenschlicher Zeit und versçhnt ohne Widerspruch Deutsches und Jdisches. Ihre Gedichte und szenischen Dichtungen sind Werke hoher deutscher Sprache, sie sind Werke der Vergebung, der Rettung, des Friedens.” (anon. 1965: 2286) [my emphasis] What makes this event somewhat macabre retrospectively is the greeting that was sent by President Karl Heinrich Lbke, in which he thanked Sachs for her supposed willingness to forgive, claiming her poems “knden […] von der erlçsenden Macht der Verstndigung, Versçhnung und Nchstenliebe” (Lbke 1965: 9). At the time, Lbke’s iniquitous past had not yet been uncovered. It is thus with the benefit of hindsight that his greeting acquires its unsettling underside; as Erhard Bahr comments: “Wie es sich spter herausstellen sollte, bedurfte Lbke, als stellvertretender Bauleiter von Konzentrationslagerbaracken […] selbst dringend die Versçhnung, die er in seiner Grußadresse anpries.” (Bahr 1980: 57)2 A glimpse at any volume of Sachs’ work makes appraisals such as Lbke’s somewhat bewildering. In his presentation speech at the award ceremony, the chairman of the German Publishers’ and Booksellers’ Association Friedrich Wittig went so far as to speak of the ‘wonder’ that Nelly Sachs, who herself had escaped persecution at the last minute, had responded to the Jewish persecution with ‘forgiving love’: “Denn ist es selbstverstndlich, daß sie auf Bedrohung und Demtigung, auf Leiden und Grausamkeit mit verzeihender Liebe antwortet?” (Wittig 1965: 14) However problematic Lbke’s comment was regarding ‘Versçhnung,’ Wittig’s claim was even more questionable, not least because of the impudent supposition contained in the rhetorical nature of his wording. These speeches were then followed by a speech delivered by Werner Weber, and it was he who finally issued a warning against superficial applause: Es gibt verschiedene Mçglichkeiten, einen Dichter zu erledigen. Die freundlichste, freilich auch die hinterhltigste ist die: man spendet ihm Beifall, und zwar unter allen, besonders festlichen Umstnden. Das nennt man ‘Laudatio’. […] Wir wollen lieber versuchen […], vor dem Dichtwerk der Nelly Sachs zu bestehen. (Weber 1965: 2)

Applause, like laudatios, has an exculpatory function; it replaces the task of really engaging with the past. Weber proceeded to compare what Schiller called the ‘moral institution’ of the theatre space with a “Stundenho2

The enduring legacy of this scandal is chronicled in a substantial article entitled “Der Fall Lbke,” which appeared as recently as 2007 in Die Zeit. (cf. Wagner 2007)

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tel,” a morally dubious but functional space that provides temporary relief; one leaves the theatre having been entertained, provides a good solid applause for this entertainment and then returns to ‘business as usual.’ Instead of making citizens better people, drama, and by analogy Sachs’ poetry, makes them feel better, since it does the work of mourning for them. Weber thus warns against reducing her work to an alibi, since such a practice has a compensatory psychological function. He warns against cynical applause, the kind of applause that silences the work itself, the kind used to avoid any engagement with the work – “der zynische Beifall, in den wir uns flchten, um nicht ins Gesprch verwickelt, um nicht durch den Dichter in die volle Verantwortung gefordert zu werden” (Weber 1965: 2). Weber’s cautionary assessment received little attention in the press, however. Rather, sentiments in a similar vein to those expressed by Wittig above were echoed in the majority of the newspaper reports. One report in the Rheinische Post, for example, entitled “Dichtung aus dem Geist der Versçhnung,” contained the following assessment: “Das fr uns heute vor allem Bewundernswerte ist, daß diese Frau ohne Haß, ohne Vorwurf gelebt hat und ihr Werk ein einziger Appell zur Versçhnung ist.” (Schçfer 1965) [my emphasis] “Werke der Vergebung” was the headline in the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (anon. 1965a). “Bei Nelly Sachs findet sich keine Anklage” read the headline in the Neue Ruhr Zeitung (Schuman 1965). In addition to the emphasis placed on Sachs’ supposed reconciliatory message, the presentation of the Peace Prize in the same year as the establishment of diplomatic relations with Israel was too great a coincidence to go unnoticed. One report in Die Welt made the connection: “Warum [entschloß sich] Westdeutschlands Buchhandel erst so spt, eine Dichterin auszuzeichnen, deren Werk seit 1961 geschlossen vorliegt […]? Sollte die Vermutung berechtigt sein, daß die Aufnahme diplomatischer Beziehungen zu Israel eine entsprechende Geste nahelegte?” (Kleßmann 1965) The timing of the award, in other words, lent the honour a strong politically motivated undercurrent. One noticeable tendency in the newspaper reports was the extraction of one particular line from Sachs’ acceptance speech, where she said she had come to Germany to tell the new generation that she believed in it: “Preistrgerin Nelly Sachs: ‘Ich glaube an die neue deutsche Generation’” (anon. 1965c) is a representative example of press trends in this respect. Her qualifying words were omitted in almost every report:

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ber alles Entsetzliche hinweg, glaube ich an sie. […] Lassen Sie uns gemeinsam der Opfer in Schmerz gedenken und hinausgehen aufs Neue, um wieder und wieder zu suchen – von ngsten und Zweifeln geplagt zu suchen, wo vielleicht entfernt […] eine neue Aussicht schimmert. (Sachs 1965: 7)

Even with the glimmer of hope expressed in the last line, these words cannot be interpreted as an uncomplicated reconciliatory gesture. Nevertheless, her words regarding her belief in the future generation were decontextualised and read as a general absolution. The Nobel Prize for Literature was next in line, and it quickly became apparent that this decision was also politically and ideologically motivated. In his laudatio Walter Jens praised the Swedish Academy for their decision to award this accolade to Sachs: “Ich danke Ihnen, Nelly Sachs, und ich danke der schwedischen Akademie. Sie hat mit Ihrer Ehrung die Blicke wieder auf jene Symbiose gerichtet, die deutsch-jdische Verschwisterung im Geist, der die Welt so viel verdankt.” (Jens 1977: 389) This was an astonishing remark given that the Jewish population of Europe had little for which to ‘thank’ this German-Jewish symbiosis in recent decades. As Amir Eshel writes: “Die Worte, mit denen Walter Jens das Begehren, Deutsches und Jdisches widerspruchsfrei zu denken, sie gar symbiotisch aufzufassen und das Versçhnende einer immer schon gewesenen Verbundenheit ‘im Geist’ herbeizureden versucht, vermçgen nur Staunen zu erwecken.” (Eshel 1999: 84) Jens also made the rather bizarre claim that Sachs’ language was the language of Goethe, “aber nicht die Sprache Hitlers” (Jens 1977: 389), as if Sachs had somehow ‘undone’ the poisoning of the German language that had occurred during the years of National Socialism. This comment also overlooked the fact that Sachs’ work is permeated with a sense of despair at the knowledge of her linguistic medium having served as the “death idiom” of National Socialism (Steiner 1970: 108). The press reports employed a similarly weighty vocabularly: “Der Nobelpreis fr Nelly Sachs ehrt nicht nur eine literarische, eine poetische Leistung, er weist auf einen jener seltenen Menschen hin, die es uns immer wieder mçglich machen, an einem Sinn der Geschichte zu glauben” (anon. 1966b), was the stance taken by one reporter. As the analysis below will demonstrate, however, it is difficult to see how Sachs’ poetry could be interpreted as providing the reader with a reason to believe “an einem Sinn der Geschichte.” The newspaper headlines served to further boost what was essentially becoming a “Nelly-Sachs-Kult” (Lorenzen 2005: 2): “Versçhnende Kraft der Erinnerung” (Best 1966), “Ihr Werk versçhnt” (anon. 1966a), “Entscheidende Bereitschaft zur Versçhnung

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mit den Deutschen” (anon. 1967), “Werke der Rettung und des Friedens” (anon. 1965b) are representative examples of press trends, and they provide strong evidence of how excessive the process of misappropriation actually was. Particularly good expositions of the trends in West Germany are, however, those contemporary press reports which adopted a critical stance vis-a-vis the decision of the awards committee. These voices give a clear sense of how it was felt at the time, by at least some onlookers, that somehow something did not quite add up. Four aspects of the 1966 Nobel Prize award were highlighted in these critical reports. Firstly, in an article entitled “Unergrndlich,” the confusion felt by some contemporary commentators at the fact that the highest literary accolade was being awarded to a poet who had been virtually unknown less than a decade previously is perceptible: “Nelly Sachs ist, so heißt es, ganz sicher eine gute Lyrikerin […], doch bis vor wenigen Jahren wußte man kaum etwas von ihr.” (Grill 1966) Grill emphasises the very recent acknowledgement of Sachs as a poet of distinction and expresses his sense of perplexity at her being chosen nonetheless as the prize recipient. In another report, Karl Krolow highlighted the second questionable aspect of the 1966 award, namely, the division of the prize between Sachs and the Israeli writer Samuel Josef Agnon: Die Doppelung der Preistrger ist als eine Mehrung des literarischen und symbolischen Gehalts des Preises aufzufassen. […] Wir verstehen die Stockholmer Jury wohl nicht falsch, wenn wir annehmen, daß sie mit diesem gekoppelten Preis die Literatur einmal sehr deutlich unter Zeichen eines Volksschicksals stellen wollte […]. Die ihn erhalten, tragen den Preis zugleich stellvertretend fr ihr Volk. (Krolow 1966)

Krolow viewed the division of the prize – an exceptional case which had not occurred since 1917 – as cause for speculation, since it suggested a possible ideological motivation behind the decision, with Agnon representing the Jews of Israel and Sachs the remaining Jewish community in Germany. A third curious aspect of the award on this particular occasion was brought to the fore in another report subtly entitled “Flucht ins Konfessionelle,” namely, the sudden emphasis on the ‘Jewishness’ of the prize recipients: Von Anfang an waren Juden unter den Nobelpreistrgern […]. Ihre prozentuale Beteiligung am Nobelpreis ist bedeutend grçßer als ihre Verhltniszahl zur Kulturbevçlkerung der Welt, aber niemals hat man frher daran gedacht, bei der Auszeichnung das Glaubensbekenntnis des Preistrgers bekanntzugeben oder gar bei der Wahl zu bercksichtigen. Es war nicht der Halbjude Paul Heyse, der 1910 den Nobelpreis fr Literatur erhielt, sondern

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der deutsche Dichter Heyse, und es war auch nicht der Jude Henri Bergson, sondern der franzçsische Philosoph, dem 1927 der gleiche Preis zuerkannt wurde. […] Wer hat 1921 das Jdische in Albert Einstein betont, als ihm der Nobelpreis fr Physik zugesprochen wurde?

The author goes on to ask “Welche Grnde – etwa politischer Natur – […] haben zu dieser ungewçhnlichen Teilung und zu dieser Flucht ins Konfessionelle gefhrt?” (Unger 1967: 45 – 47). This report highlights the possible political considerations at play in awarding the Nobel Prize first and foremost to a Jew who had remained anonymous in literary circles up until a few years previously. By this point Sachs’ Jewishness had acquired what Sparr calls “eine representative Grçße” (Sparr 1998: 50). The fourth, and perhaps most significant, aspect was highlighted in a report in Der Bund, namely, the shallow reverence that the Nobel Prize on this occasion represented: Nelly Sachs – dieser Name hat noch vor zwanzig Jahren recht wenig bedeutet. Wenig oder vielleicht sogar nichts. Dann aber kam jene große Welle: die Welle der Wiedergutmachung; ausgehend von einem Deutschland, das sich im Wohlstand streckte und dehnte. Und Schwemmgut eben dieser Wohlstandswelle war auch sie […], sie und ihr Werk: Nelly Sachs. Als man nmlich in Deutschland damit begann, sich im Lehnstuhl zu rkeln und all des Bçsen und Grauenvollen zu fluchen, ‘das nazistischer Ungeist einem ganzen Volke angetan’, da nahm man auch ihre Gedichte zur Hand, denn sie gehçre ja schließlich dazu – eine Gepeinigte aus dem gepeinigten Volk. Und man las wohl auch einige ihrer Verse. Fand sie ‘ganz hbsch’; recht seltsam zwar oder fast wie Gebete. ‘Aber immerhin … ’. Und weil es sich ziemt, zum Beten niederzuknien, man aber – wie gesagt – im Lehnstuhl saß, so legte man schnell das Bndchen weg. (Erni 1966)

This report condemns the superficial recognition of her work in the Federal Republic and the avoidance of any form of meaningful engagement. It is a critique of the obsequious reverence shown towards Sachs which characterised the various awards. Hilde Domin later provided a subtle commentary on this servile reverence: Hohe Ehrungen hat die Dichtung der Nelly Sachs auf sich geladen, sogar die hçchste: den Nobelpreis. […]: als habe die deutsche Nachkriegsgesellschaft mit diesen Verbeugungen vor der Reprsentantin des bergroßen, des unaussprechlichen und doch ausgesprochenen Leids sich freigemacht von der Verpflichtung mit solchen Gedichten zu leben, das ist, sie lesen […] zu mssen. (Domin 1977: 105) [emphasis in original]

Domin calls for Sachs’ poetry to be read “unbelastet vom Zwang zum Kotau” that had characterised the reception of her poetry in West Germany (Domin 1977: 110). An article published on the occasion of the one

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hundreth anniversary of Sachs’ birth, a juncture that finally saw a welcome reassessment of how Sachs had been received in post-war Germany, expressed a similar critique of this deferential reverence. Drawing on Paul Kersten’s “professionelle Vergangenheitsbewltiger” thesis, Hannelore Crolly argued: “Immer wieder wurde ihr Werk jedoch von professionellen Vergangenheitsbewltigern ohne Blick auf den poetischen Gehalt zu einem Akt nachtrglicher Wiedergutmachung stilisiert. […] Als mache die Verbeugung vor Nelly Sachs’ Gedichten von der Verpflichtung frei, sie zu lesen und ber sie zu reden.” (Crolly 1991) The Nobel Prize, whilst representing the height of this obsequious veneration, did not, however, mark the end. The last accolade in the line of honours was the bestowal of honorary citizenship of Berlin on Sachs. Once again it became clear that this decision had a strong degree of political motivation which is exposed best by those reports which took a critical stance in relation to this honour: Als Nelly Sachs Deutschland besuchte und ihr dort ein Preis verliehen wurde, hat man sie wie eine Fremde begrßt, sie die große jdische Dichterin genannt, ihre Dichtung als Denkmal der nazistischen Judenverfolgung bezeichnet. Diese deutsche Einstellung hat ihre Wurzel in einer Scheu vor dem jdischen Leiden und in dem Gefhl, daß es vermessen wre, von seiten Deutschlands einen Anspruch auf Nelly Sachs zu erheben. Dennoch liegt in dieser Haltung ein schweres Irrtum. […] Es ist Zeit, daß man in Deutschland begreift, daß sie eine Landsmnnin ist, die vertrieben wurde, und keine Fremde, die man zur Ehrenbrgerin macht. Es ist leicht, allzu leicht, sie als große jdische Dichterin zu bezeichnen. Schwerer scheint es zu sein, zu verstehen und zu erkennen, daß Nelly Sachs auch des deutschen Volkes grçßte zeitgençssische Dichterin ist. (Wallmann 1967)

The bestowal of honorary citizenship seemed to suggest that Sachs was a stranger; it seemed to overlook the fact that Sachs wrote in German about a massacre committed by Germans on German soil, uncomfortable though this reality may be. As Helmut Geißner commented: “Daß sie es in der Sprache tut, in der die Schreie der Opfer und die Befehle der Mçrder klangen, in unserer Sprache, macht sie auf besonderer Weise zu unserer Dichterin.” (Geißner 1961: 64) To have Sachs’ uncomfortable works integrated as part of German culture was not, however, what the various accolades aimed for. The “Vergangenheitsbewltiger” chose selectively from her work, and in the process “das schmerzlich Unversçhnliche,” as literary critic Christine Rospert commented, “von dem ihr Schreiben doch auch kndet, wurde einfach ausgeblendet” (Lorenzen 2005: 2). A paradox resulted: on the one hand, the “Vergangenheitsbewltiger” were content to acknowledge Sachs as a German-speaking

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poet for the purposes of promoting her as a ‘guardian’ of the German language, and as a German-Jew who was apparently calling for forgiveness – who better, after all, to convey such a message than one of the persecuted. On the other hand, however, Sachs’ ‘Germanness’ was a thorn in West Germany’s side, and at the various award ceremonies, and in particular by bestowing honorary citizenship on her, she was treated to all intents and purposes like a foreigner. The litany of accolades that followed the years of non-recognition – to the extent that the presence of philo-Semitic trends was detectable – represented the process in post-war Germany outlined by cultural commentator Fritz Raddatz: Nicht Mord und Verfolgung drohen heute deutschen Schriftstellern, wohl aber zuweilen eine andere Gefahr: sie werden ‘heimgeholt’, mit Freundlichkeit und Beifall bedeckt, wenn nicht erstickt. Nelly Sachs ist ein solcher Fall. Den Krematorien knapp entronnen, ist es nun der Rauch der Weihrauchkerzen, der sie fast konturlos macht. […] Die Hymnen berwiegen in der Literatur ber Nelly Sachs. (Raddatz 1972: 43)

Regrettably, much of the initial subsequent Sachs scholarship, which began in earnest in the 1970s, proceeded to adopt the line taken by the “professionelle Vergangenheitsbewltiger” by avoiding critical engagement. Lili Simon’s article serves as a case in point: “Und doch ist diese Trauerdichtung frei von Haß, verharrt auch nicht beim unwiederbringlich Verlorenen, sondern klingt zukunftshaltig aus in einem Aufruf zur Versçhnung und zum Frieden.” (Simon 1973: 36) Aside from the problematic nature of any argument which suggests that Sachs’ poetry can be viewed as a clear-cut appeal for reconciliation, Simon’s assertion here is dubious on another front. To allege that Sachs’ work “verharrt auch nicht beim unwiederbringlich Verlorenen” and that it is “zukunftshaltig” is disputable on several counts. As the analysis below demonstrates, Sachs’ poetry is very much frozen in the events of the Shoah, while her entire poetic project is dedicated to the impossible task of recovering the unrecoverable – the dead. Simon’s article is also questionably selective in nature. She finishes her analysis by quoting four words from Sachs’ poem “An euch die das neue Haus bauen” which, when examined in its entirety, arguably contains one of the poet’s most austere cautionary messages for the post-Shoah world. Simon concludes her article with what appears to be one complete line from the poem: “Baue, aber weine nicht,” giving the impression that Sachs’ poetry is indeed “zukunftshaltig,” when in fact this poem is a distressing attempt at rendering within language the harrowing consequences of survivor trauma. Sachs cer-

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tainly does not paint a positive, future-orientated picture, as the second stanza demonstrates: “Seufze nicht, / wenn du dein Laken bettest, / Es mischen sich sonst deine Trume / Mit dem Schweiß der Toten.” (Sachs 1961: 9) This cannot be interpreted as an “Aufruf zur Versçhnung.” What the various prizes, honours and the attendant public discourse attest to is an attempt to have Sachs perform the task of mourning on behalf of the German people, to applaud her for doing so and to return to ‘business as usual.’ This casts doubt on the intentions of the postwar West German socio-political and cultural institutions, whose primary purpose appears not to have been a genuine attempt at ‘Vergangenheitsbewltigung.’ Rather, it can be argued that they were themselves instrumental to the wider agenda of memory suppression. Before an endeavour is made to examine the omnipresence of Auschwitz in Nelly Sachs’ work, an exploration of the debate surrounding one of the most oft-cited lines in post-45 literary history – “nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch” (Adorno 1977: 30) – provides a productive theoretical paradigm for that examination. Aside from being a very valuable springboard in terms of the formal analysis of Sachs’ poetry, what makes the ‘poetry after Auschwitz’ debate additionally relevant is the infrequently noted fact that Nelly Sachs herself was drawn into the centre of this debate following the publication of Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s article “Die Steine der Freiheit” in 1959, in which the author, having criticised Adorno’s supposedly harsh judgement, proceeded to hail Nelly Sachs as a writer whose work provided concrete evidence that poetry could and indeed should be written ‘after Auschwitz’: ‘Nach Auschwitz ist es nicht mehr mçglich, ein Gedicht zu schreiben.’ Wenn wir weiterleben wollen, so muß dieser Satz widerlegt werden. Wenige vermçgen es. Zu ihnen gehçrt Nelly Sachs. Ihrer Sprache wohnt etwas Rettendes inne. Indem sie spricht, gibt sie uns selber zurck, Satz um Satz, was wir zu verlieren drohten: Sprache. (Enzensberger 1995: 73)

A dialogue ensued with Adorno replying to Enzensberger’s concerns in the essay “Engagement” (1962), in which it is clear that an interdiction of ‘poetry after Auschwitz’ was not what Adorno had in mind: Den Satz, nach Auschwitz noch Lyrik zu schreiben, sei barbarisch, mçchte ich nicht mildern […]. Aber wahr bleibt auch Enzensbergers Entgegnung, die Dichtung msse eben diesem Verdikt standhalten, so also sein, daß sie nicht durch ihre bloße Existenz nach Auschwitz dem Zynismus sich berantworte. (Adorno 1965: 125 – 26)

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Adorno prescribes here what Nelly Sachs attempts to do; namely, to defy the verdict of the ‘barbarity’ of poetry in recognition of the indispensability of bearing witness. This aporetic tension finds a strong resonance throughout Sachs’ work, as indeed do all of Adorno’s reflections on what constitutes legitimate art in the aftermath of the Holocaust, including his deliberations on the perils involved in attempting to represent the Holocaust in aesthetic form, the inherent profanity of any attempt to ‘make sense’ of Auschwitz, the difficulties that the anonymity of death in the camps pose for the writer, the question of survivor’s guilt, and his emphasis on the significance of self-referential writing.

2 The Problematics of Holocaust Representation 2.1 Adorno’s ‘after-Auschwitz’ Aporia The debate that raged from the 1950s following the publication of Adorno’s ‘dictum’ regarding ‘the barbarity of poetry after Auschwitz’ raises many of the pivotal concerns that permeate Nelly Sachs’ poetry. Because representation necessarily mediates between a subject and its reader, and since, in the case of the Shoah, the subject is one of acute moral magnitude, there is inevitably a moral peril involved in its artistic rendering. Representation, after all, requires a medium, medium implies the imposition of form, and form raises the question of literary language as the means of representation. The publication of Adorno’s ‘dictum’ in 1951 acted as a catalyst for a debate on this moral peril that has continued up until the present day. The writer in the aftermath of the Shoah was confronted with an irresolvable dilemma: there was a moral obligation to bear witness to the heinous crimes, yet the writer was constantly threatened with speechlessness due to the constraints which this event of unimaginable magnitude imposed upon conventional language. As a formidable challenge to human comprehension and conceptualisation, the Shoah presented, by extension, a formidable challenge to articulation. The challenge to conceptualisation has been summarised by Ruth Kranz-Lçber. Lçber describes the chimneys of the crematoria as “Insignie eines Verbrechens, dessen bloße Quantitt das menschliche Vorstellungsvermçgen […] nicht fassen kann. Die Bilder von aufgetrmten Leichenhalden, und das Wissen, daß deren Beseitigung mit zu den grçßten organisatorischen Probleme der Tter gehçrte, ermçglichen vielleicht noch am ehesten eine Ahnung vom Charakter des Ereignisses.” (Kranz-Lçber 2001: 21) Giorgio Agamben has similarly commented on the challenge posed to the human mind that attempts to assimilate a horror such as the ‘Sonderkommando.’ Drawing on Primo-Levi’s concept of the “grey zone,” Agamben views the ‘Sonderkomando’ as the “extreme figure” of that horrific, morally confused space in the camps: The extreme figure of the ‘grey zone’ is the Sonderkommando. The SS used the euphemism ‘special team’ to refer to this group of deportees responsible

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for managing the gas chambers and crematoria. Their task was to lead naked prisoners to their death in the gas chambers and maintain order among them; they then had to drag the corpses, stained pink and green by the cyanotic acid, and wash them with water; make sure no valuable objects were hidden in the orifices of the bodies; extract gold teeth from the corpses’ jaws; cut the women’s hair and wash it with ammonia chloride; bring the corpses into the crematoria and oversee their incineration and, finally, empty out the ovens of the ash that remained.

“We can,” Agamben continues, “enumerate and describe each of these events, but they remain singularly opaque when we truly seek to understand them. (Agamben 2002: 11 – 12) Another aspect of Auschwitz utterly incomprehensible to the human mind is the normality of its perpetrators. That most of the perpetrators were ordinary human beings who would freely flow through any “psychiatric sieve,” as Zygmunt Bauman comments, is both morally disturbing and theoretically puzzling, especially when seen conjointly with those “normal” organisational structures that co-ordinated the actions of these normal individuals into the enterprise of mass murder (Bauman 1989: 19). Hannah Arendt’s controversial concept of the “banality of evil,” the result of her report on the Eichmann trial published in 1963, in no way obfuscates the fundamental evil that Auschwitz represented, as has been contended by some critics; it serves, rather, to highlight it. After all, the horror of the evil is inextricably linked with the banality of its perpetrators. (cf. Arendt 2006) Those writing in German faced yet another formidable barrier: the medium itself had become compromised as a consequence of having been manipulated and distorted under the National Socialist regime. The German language was now permeated with perverse and sinister meanings and associations. The writer attempting to bear witness was thus forced to express a horror of unimaginable magnitude by means of an impaired and misappropriated linguistic medium, which seemed to be completely incommensurate with its subject of representation. Added to this was the question of the legitimacy of the artistic rendering of the suffering of millions; in addition to the question of aesthetics there was also a grave ethical dimension. The moral and aesthetic justification for the very act of writing itself was now in doubt. The issue was not only how the Shoah could be represented, but whether its appropriation in literary form was legitimate at all. It is difficult to think of another area of literary discourse in which a critic has brought such a profound influence to bear as Theodor Adorno has in the area of Holocaust literature. It is also difficult to think of an-

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other area of literary discourse in which a critic’s pronouncements have been misinterpreted so often and to such a degree as Adorno’s reflections on the status of art after the Shoah. Reference here is of course being made to Adorno’s supposed ‘dictum’ concerning the ‘barbarity of poetry after Auschwitz.’ Originally published in Prismen. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft in 1951, this ‘dictum’ constitutes just a very minor part of what is in fact an extensive set of reflections on the possibilities and limitations of the representation of the Holocaust in aesthetic form. There are few contributions to the debate surrounding the representation of the Shoah that do not draw, to some degree or other, upon Adorno’s thought. And understandably so: his deliberations on the status of art after the event are crucial to any consideration of the representation of the event. The problem, however, is that time and time again his deliberations have been, and indeed continue to be, reduced to a single sentence: “Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch.” These eight words have come to be known as Adorno’s ‘dictum’; a ‘dictum’ that has supposedly denounced all art after Auschwitz. Of Adorno’s many reflections on the problematics of art in the wake of the Holocaust, this single sentence – by now a seemingly established ‘maxim’– has attracted the inordinate share of attention, and has been widely interpreted as a call for the abandonment of art in the face of the horrors of the Holocaust. What is somewhat bewildering is not only its repeated citation without reference to the broader framework of Adorno’s thought, but also the fact that it is habitually extracted from its immediate textual context. To cite but a very brief number of misquotations and misinterpretations: Walter Jens has interpreted Adorno’s words in terms of resignation: “‘Nach Auschwitz kann man nicht dichten.’ Ein bitteres, ein abschließendes Wort, ein Wort der Resignation.” (Jens 1967: 4) Hans Magnus Enzensberger has construed Adorno’s words as a pronouncement on the ‘impossibility’ of poetry after Auschwitz: “Der Philosoph Theodor W. Adorno hat einen Satz ausgesprochen, der zu den hrtesten Urteilen gehçrt, die ber unsere Zeit gefllt werden kçnnen: Nach Auschwitz sei es nicht mehr mçglich, ein Gedicht zu schreiben.” (Enzensberger 1995: 73) Three more recent contributors to the debate are Susan Gubar, Elrud Ibsch and Stephen J. Whitfield, all of whom have misread Adorno’s words as a call for silence. Gubar makes reference to Adorno’s “injunction against poetry” and to the “nihilism of his prohibition against poetry” (Gubar 2003: 240) [my emphasis]. Ibsch argues that Adorno must be contradicted since [d]as Verstummen der Poesie wre der Triumph der NS-Barberei noch ber ihr politisches Ende hinaus” (Ibsch 2004: 48) [my emphasis], while Whitfield refers

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to the “vow of silence” that Adorno’s “famous axiom” has implied (Whitfield 2007: 194). Adorno’s writings on this subject are, however, too involuted to license any such interpretation. The ambiguity that characterises the original proposition has almost certainly contributed to the frequent misunderstandings. “In spite of its forthrightness,” as Howard Caygill points out, “it remained unclear whether it was a judgement of poetry written after Auschwitz, a Darstellungsverbot on poems about Auschwitz, or a condemnation addressed to post-war art and culture in general” (Caygill 2006: 69). Caygill’s line of reasoning considered, however, one thing is nonetheless still relatively certain: the misinterpretation of Adorno’s thought generally emerges when quotations are examined in isolation from context. In this respect, the compound sentences nestled within the passage in question, as well as the tendency to split the original passage into two separate sentences in English translation, have also undoubtedly contributed to the simplification and dissemination of the ‘dictum’ in its partial form. When read in isolation from immediate textual context and without reference to the overall framework of Adorno’s thought, the ‘barbarity’ pronouncement and those others most frequently cited – in particular the so-called ‘Widerruf ’ thesis – lose the crucial dialectical quality conferred on them in the original text. What is perhaps most perplexing in the case of the ‘dictum’ is the fact that it constitutes a mere sub-clause of the original text. When analysed within both the more immediate and broader contextual framework, it becomes clear, however, that Adorno did not cancel the possibility of art after Auschwitz. Rather, his considerations highlight the aporia confronting the post-Shoah writer, an aporia so extreme that it leaves no space for meaningful resolution. Defined as an irresolvable impasse as a result of equally plausible yet inconsistent premises, the term ‘aporia’ captures the essence of Adorno’s deliberations on post-Shoah art: the imperative to represent the egregious crimes and the impossibility of doing so adequately. Je totaler die Gesellschaft, um so verdinglichter auch der Geist und um so paradoxer sein Beginnen, der Verdinglichung aus Eigenem sich zu entwinden. Noch das ußerste Bewußtsein vom Verhngnis droht zum Geschwtz zu entarten. Kulturkritik findet sich der letzten Stufe der Dialektik von Kultur und Barberei gegenber: nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch, und das frißt auch die Erkenntnis an, die ausspricht, warum es unmçglich ward, heute Gedichte zu schreiben. (Adorno 1977: 30)

For Adorno the barbarism of poetry after Auschwitz stems from the fact that it will fail to discern its own inadmissibility due to reification, which has halted the process of self-reflection. The artist, that is, fails to recog-

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nise the entrenchment of a reification process of which he too forms part. Reification or ‘Verdinglichung’ – the transformation of human beings into ‘thing–like’ beings – is the concomitant factor of advanced capitalist society that has liquidated individualism. Individualism, however, had formed the core of critical consciousness. The difficulty with representing the Shoah in figurative discourse lies in the tendency of the latter towards subjectivity. As a form of individual expression, the very nature of figurative discourse is irreconcilable with the reality of this reification process, the catastrophic reflection of which was to be seen in the liquidation of the individual under fascism, its murderous and most extreme reflection in the Nazi death camps, where human life had been rendered expendable. The extremity of this liquidation process in the concentration camps is most vividly evinced by the figure of the so-called Muselmann. Primo Levi provides a description of this figure: “Their life is short, but their number is endless; they, the Muselmnner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men.” (Levi 1959: 82) This liquidation of the very concept of the individual in the concentration camps is central to Adorno’s line of thought: Der Vçlkermord ist die absolute Integration, die berall sich vorbereitet, wo Menschen gleichgemacht werden, geschliffen, wie man beim Militr es nannte, bis man sie, Abweichungen vom Begriff ihrer vollkommen Nichtigkeit, buchstblich austilgt. […] Was die Sadisten im Lager ihren Opfern ansagten: morgen wirst du als Rauch aus diesem Schornstein in den Himmel dich schlngeln, nennt die Gleichgltigkeit des Lebens jedes Einzelnen […]; schon in seiner formalen Freiheit ist er so fungibel und ersetzbar wie dann unter den Tritten der Liquidatoren. […]; daraus fhrt so wenig hinaus wie aus der elektrisch geladenen Stacheldrahtumfriedung der Lager. (Adorno 1973: 353)

The Shoah marked the obliteration of the very notion of the autonomous subject, and Adorno’s reflections in this regard are fundamental to his deliberations concerning the status of art in its aftermath. Not only is the idea of artistic subjectivism intrinsically problematic, given that the Shoah had rendered the idea of individuality entirely void, the concept of subjectivism is itself an illusion in the aftermath of Auschwitz, an illusion which, in turn, prevents the artist from recognising the extremity of the reification process, in whose web he too is caught. Furthermore, the question of agency itself is highly problematic in a post-Auschwitz context: “Die Undarstellbarkeit des Faschismus aber rhrt daher, daß es in ihm so wenig wie in seiner Betrachtung Freiheit des Subjekts mehr

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gibt. Vollendete Unfreiheit lßt sich erkennen, nicht darstellen.” (Adorno 1980: 148) Reinhard Baumgart has taken a resolute stance with regard to the presentation of the individual subject in Auschwitz; it wasn’t just people who were murdered at Auschwitz, he argues, but also individuality: “die Individualitt ist liquidiert worden.” Where mass murder is the theme, he continues, literature cannot afford the luxury of such “Individuation”: “sie [die Literatur] wird esthetisch zur Lge, moralisch zur Heuchelei. (Baumgart 1966: 23 – 28) In the camps the victims had been robbed of freedom and individual choice. The imposition of agency on the part of individual characters in the process of representation would thus inevitably result in a distortion. It is in this regard that certain genres have intrinsic difficulties when it comes to the representation of the Shoah. This is especially true with respect to drama, since the basic premise upon which drama rests – human agency, individual motivation, the choice of one course of action over another – simply cannot be met. Drama depends on the freedom of its individual characters to choose and to opt for various courses of action. In the death camps, however, the inmates did not have the luxury of choice. Irving Howe writes: Exterminations, in which thousands of dazed and broken people were sent up each day in smoke, hardly knowing and barely able to respond to their fate, have little of drama in them […]. Those soon to be dead are already half or almost dead; the gas chambers merely finish the job begun in the ghettos. The basic minimum of freedom to choose and act that is a central postulate of drama has been taken from them. (Howe 1988: 189)

Tragedy, as one of the main dramatic genres, is particularly problematic. As Howe points out, if the death camps and the extermination do not allow much scope for the dramatic, nor do they allow much scope for the tragic in any traditional sense of the term. In classical tragedy, after all, “man is defeated,” whereas in the Holocaust “man is destroyed.” Additionally, in classical tragedy, characters struggle against forces that overwhelm them, and the resulting downfall may have “an aspect of grandeur.” (Howe 1988: 190) This is, of course, completely inappropriate when the subject of representation is systematic mass murder. Howe continues: Except for some religious Jews who were persuaded that the Holocaust was a re-enactment of the great tradition of Jewish martyrdom […], the Jews destroyed in the camps were not martyrs continuing along the ways of their forefathers. […] Few of the victims […] could even grasp the idea of total annihilation, let alone regard it as an act of high martyrdom. (Howe 1988: 190)

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Given these insurmountable barriers, it is not surprising that drama has yielded fewer individual works about the Shoah than the other major literary forms. This process of reification assumes further importance in Adorno’s modernist critique, which is in turn intimately related to his views on post-Holocaust art.

2.2 The Expropriation of Death and Adorno’s Modernist Critique The concept of reification assumes importance in Adorno’s deliberations on the possibilities and limitations of post-Shoah art in terms of the expropriation of death itself in the camps. In Auschwitz, as Giorgio Agamben writes, “people did not die; rather, corpses were produced. Corpses without death, non-humans whose decease is debased into a matter of serial production.” It is precisely this degradation of death, Agamben argues, that constitutes the “specific offense of Auschwitz” (Agamben 2002: 72). This expropriation was the direct consequence of mass-producing death on an industrial scale, and it is in this respect that Adorno’s indictment of modernity assumes significance: Mit dem Mord an Millionen durch Verwaltung ist der Tod zu etwas geworden, was so noch nie zu frchten war. Keine Mçglichkeit mehr, daß er in das erfahrene Leben der Einzelnen als ein irgend mit dessen Verlauf bereinstimmendes eintrete. Enteignet wird das Individuum des Letzten und rmsten, was ihm geblieben war. Daß in den Lagern nicht mehr das Individuum starb, sondern das Exemplar, muß das Sterben auch derer affizieren, die der Maßname entgingen. (Adorno 1973: 355)

It is this perfidious “Mord durch Verwaltung” that has become imprinted onto the consciousness of the post-Shoah world; it is the industrialised nature of the extermination process that is responsible for producing a set of ‘Auschwitz images’ which, despite their graphic nature, remain, as David Roskies puts it, “utterly inassimilable”: Unique to the Holocaust are the mounds of shoes, combs, hair, prostheses, eyeglasses, and valises belonging to the murdered victims. They bear witness to something heretofore unknown. Never have the innocent been so systematically stripped of security, sanctity, property, and sustenance before being stripped of their lives. Unique to the Holocaust are the tattooed numbers. They represent the permanent branding of every Jew marked for slave labor and eventual murder. (Roskies 2000: 6)

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The elimination of the concept of the individual – a concept traditionally considered central to the process of a dignified death – by means of this highly efficient and bureaucratically organised death machinery resulted in the expropriation of the one thing considered an indefeasible possession of the victim, namely, death itself. Giorgio Agamben directly links the fabrication of corpses, this “Mord durch Verwaltung,” with its logical extreme, namely, with the figure of the Muselmann, the camp figure that haunts his reflections on Auschwitz: What defines the Muselmnner is not so much that their life is no longer life – this kind of degradation holds in a certain sense for all camp inhabitants and is not an entirely new experience – but, rather, that their death is not death. This – that the death of the human being can no longer be called death […] – is the particular horror that the Muselmann brings to the camp and that the camp brings to the world. (Agamben 2002: 70)

A similar image appears in Adorno’s writings: “In den Konzentrationslagern des Faschismus wurde die Demarkationslinie zwischen Leben und Tod getilgt. Sie schufen einen Zwischenzustand, lebende Skelette und Verwesende, Opfer, denen der Selbstmord mißrt.” (Adorno 1973: 42) The Muselmann, neither alive nor dead, represented such a “Zwischenzustand.” Thus even suicide was not an option for this ‘living skeleton.’ Adorno’s link between the administrative murder of millions and modernity is a very direct one. The highly ‘efficient’ and industrialised murder system, after all, had been facilitated by modern industry and modern bureaucratic structures. Feingold provides a picture of the bureaucratic and mechanical nature of the extermination process: Rather than producing goods, the raw material was human beings and the end-product was death, so many units per day marked carefully on the manager’s production charts. The chimneys, the very symbol of the modern factory system, poured forth acrid smoke produced by burning human flesh. The brilliantly organised railroad grid of modern Europe carried a new kind of raw material to the factories. It did so in the same manner as with other cargo. […] Engineers designed the crematoria; managers designed the system of bureaucracy that worked with a zest and efficiency more backward nations would envy. (Feingold 1983: 399 – 400)

Moreover, the rational means employed to implement the death system were seen by Adorno as the perilous legacies of modernity, since their fusion with wholly irrational ends – the liquidation of European Jewry – had resulted in the catastrophic blend that Auschwitz represented. Modernity’s facilitation of the factory-like extermination is thus central to Adorno’s thought. As Kranz-Lçber writes: “Besonders in den Tçtungsme-

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thoden offenbart sich die Shoah als ein spezifisch modernes Ereignis, als technologisierter, arbeitsteilig organisierter und brokratisch verwalteter Prozess.” (Kranz-Lçber 2001: 25 – 26) Adorno’s critique of post-Shoah art must be seen within the framework of his critique of modernity. After all, it was this bureaucratically organised murder machinery that facilitated the programme of extermination which, in turn, led to the obliteration of the concept of the individual in Auschwitz, a concern that is central to his deliberations on art after Auschwitz. The deeply problematic concept of individuality in a post-Shoah world finds a similarly acute presence throughout Nelly Sachs’ body of poetry.

2.3 ‘The Extremity that Eludes the Concept’ Adorno’s reflections on the actual process of artistically rendering the suffering of the victims form an integral part of his overall stance on postShoah art, and these deliberations are thus indispensible for any exploration of his views on the dilemmas of Holocaust representation generally. These meditations highlight his concerns with regard to the moral peril involved in any attempt to render the suffering in artistic form. As such they serve as an important contextual framework for an analysis of his ‘dictum.’ Adorno highlights a multitude of obstacles which make the representation of the Shoah a formidably problematic endeavour. The first problem was the German language itself: “Kein vom Hohen getçntes Wort, auch kein Theologisches, hat unverwandelt nach Auschwitz ein Recht.” (Adorno 1973: 360) What is being referred to here is the decay that now lay at the core of the German language as a result of its abuse and misappropriation under the Nazi regime. “Use a language,” George Steiner writes, “to conceive, organise and justify Belsen; use it to make out specifications for gas ovens […]. Something will happen to it. […] Something will happen to the words. Something of the lies and sadism will settle in the marrow of the language” (Steiner 1970: 101). The German language had served the purpose of disseminating and justifying an ideology whose primary goal was to provide Lebensraum for those supposedly ‘worthy of life,’ while so-called ‘unwertes Leben’ was targeted for extermination. The extermination of such life designated ‘unworthy’ was facilitated by what H. G. Adler calls the ‘non-values” or “Unwerte” of the Nazi system: in order to present Jews as ‘unwertes Leben’ deserving of annihilation, they were assigned a purely negative ‘value’ as a prelude to their extinction. (cf. H. G. Adler 1960: 634) The language at the core

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of Nazi ideology, as Bauman writes, had been “fraught with images of disease, infection, infestation, putrefaction and pestilence” (Bauman 1979: 71). Language, as Adorno points out, had provided fascism with its medium: “Die Sprache gewhrt ihm [der Faschismus] Asyl; in ihr ußert das fortschwelende Unheil sich so, als wre es das Heil.” (Adorno 1967: 416) The German language had been used to shroud the most barbaric crimes in euphemisms such as Endlçsung, Umsiedlung, Selektion, Sonderbehandlung, whose technocratic abstractness concealed what was in fact a program of total extermination. Adorno viewed the task of cleansing the language after such abuse as a well-nigh impossible task: “Den berlieferten sthetischen Formen, der traditionellen Sprache […] wohnt keine rechte Kraft mehr inne. Sie alle werden Lgen gestraft von der Katastrophe jener Gesellschaft, aus der sie hervorgingen.” (Adorno 1971: 27) The second danger was the potential that some degree of pleasure would be derived from the artistic rendering of the victims’ suffering and that the transformation of this suffering into an artwork would result, by default, in diminishing the horror of the event: Aber indem es trotz aller Hrte und Unversçhnlichkeit zum Bild gemacht wird, ist es doch, als ob die Scham vor den Opfern verletzt wre. Aus diesen wird etwas bereitet, Kunstwerke, der Welt zum Fraß vorgeworfen, die sie umbrachte. Die sogenannte knstlerische Gestaltung des nackten kçrperlichen Schmerzes, der mit Gewehrkolben Niedergeknppelten, enthlt, sei’s noch so entfernt, das Potential Genuss herauszupressen. (Adorno 1965: 125)

As this passage makes clear, Adorno holds deep reservations concerning the artistic representation of the suffering. Experiencing any form of aesthetic pleasure from a portrayal of the victims’ suffering is considered to be an unacceptable distortion of that suffering. Not only would representation in aesthetic form shear away some of the horror; this would in turn result in the falsification and trivialisation of the suffering endured and lead to a breach between the artwork and the subject of representation. In the case of the Shoah, an event of such profound moral magnitude, this was deemed wholly unacceptable. The third, and perhaps, most formidable peril, was the possibility that aesthetic representation, which, by its very nature, results in the imposition of form upon the material, would result in the attribution of some kind of meaning and, by extension, some degree of sense to the wholly senseless massacre: “Durchs sthetische Stilisationsprinzip […] erscheint das unausdenkliche Schicksal doch, als htte es irgend Sinn gehabt; es wird verklrt, etwas von dem Grauen weggenommen, damit allein widerfhrt den Opfern Unrecht.” (Adorno 1965: 125) This formida-

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ble peril of somehow ‘making sense’ of or attributing some kind of meaning to Auschwitz was a thought to which Adorno returned again and again. In Negative Dialektik he attempts to describe an unsettling “Gefhl, das nach Auschwitz gegen jegliche Behauptung von Positivitt des Daseins als Salbadern, Unrecht an den Opfern sich strubt, dagegen, daß aus ihrem Schicksal ein sei’s noch so ausgelaugter Sinn gepreßt wird.” (Adorno 1973: 354) ‘Squeezing sense’ out of the victims’ suffering would be achieved, for example, by placing Auschwitz within some kind of progressive, teleological narrative whereby some higher moral truth or insight was gained at the expense of millions. This problem of ‘making sense’ of the events of the Holocaust affects historical enquiry also. Saul Friedlnder, for example, has noted the difficulties facing the historian who attempts to situate the historical place of the Jewish extermination, despite the fact that it has become one of the defining events of our time. He questions how historical enquiry can ever define the significance of sites such as Treblinka, whose sole function was immediate extermination. He questions how such events can ever be integrated in the interpretation of the epoch “as they neither influenced the course of the war, nor any major trend in post-war history” (Friedlnder 2000: 12). Of particular concern to Adorno in terms of the dangers inherent in an artistic rendering of Auschwitz, was what he termed “das sthetische Stilisationsprinzip.” This ‘principle of aesthetic stylisation’ ran the risk of attributing meaning to the fate of the victims by imposing meaningful form upon senseless mass murder: “Das sthetische Prinzip der Form ist an sich, durch Synthesis des Geformten, Setzung von Sinn, noch wo Sinn inhaltlich verworfen wird.” (Adorno 1970: 403) Adorno feared that by means of aesthetic stylisation the suffering of the victims would be transfigured into an aesthetically rounded and formally coherent narrative. This question of formal coherence was cause for particular concern: “Wo vom ußersten, dem quallvollen Tod die Rede ist, schmt man sich der Form, so, als ob sie an dem Leiden frevelte, indem sie es unausweichlich zu einem Material macht, ber das sie sich verfgt.” (Adorno 1973: 597) For Adorno the transformation of the events of the Shoah into meaningful form provides the artist with the semblance that the ‘material’ at his disposal – Auschwitz – can somehow be ‘shaped’ or ‘worked with’; that it can be ‘fitted’ into a neat narrative framework. However, representing the horror within such an ordered and coherent formal structure runs the risk, not only of attributing a sense of meaning – in aesthetic terms – to the senseless massacre, it also assumes the intelligibility of and the ability to conceptualise Auschwitz. For Adorno, however, there is something in

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the experience of the Shoah, which resists conceptualisation; an excess that exceeds the boundary of what the mind can assimilate. He calls this excess ‘the extremity that eludes the concept’: “Mißt es [das Denken] sich nicht an dem ußersten, das dem Begriff entflieht, so ist es vorweg vom Schlag der Begleitmusik, mit welcher die SS die Schreie ihrer Opfer zu bertçnen liebte.” (Adorno 1973: 358) Adorno’s concept of the extremity is similar to the “lacuna” that Giorgio Agamben speaks of in relation to survivor testimony. This lacuna makes the imposition of form on the events of the Shoah highly problematic, since it can neither be witnessed nor contained within any formal aesthetic framework: “At a certain point, it became clear that testimony contained at its core an essential lacuna; in other words, the survivors bore witness to something it is impossible to bear witness to.” (Agamben 2002: 13) This lacuna refers to the ‘non-testimony’ of those who – in Primo Levi’s words – “touch bottom”: “We the survivors are not the true witnesses. […] We survivors are not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority: we are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so […] are the complete witnesses.” (Levi 1989: 83 – 84) For Levi, then, the true witness is the one who, by definition, cannot bear witness. The ‘extremity’ and the ‘lacuna’ to which Adorno and Agamben refer mean that the very nature of thought itself must be different in a post-Auschwitz world. Thought must now recognise this ‘extremity’; the ‘lacuna’ must be “interrogated” and “listened to” (Agamben 2002: 17). Thought cannot simply be as it was before, since this would be a mockery of the deference owed to the victims. The Shoah, as a ceasura, must be formative for what comes after. Adorno is calling for thought to be self-referentially sceptical. This ‘extremity that eludes the concept’ must not, however, be equated with the idea of negative sacralisation, an interpretation which flows from the above-mentioned misinterpretation of Adorno’s thought as a general call for silence, since negative sacralisation inadvertently leads to exculpation by placing the event outside the realm of the human and, as such, beyond the reach of rational discourse. Johann Baptist Metz has summed up the dangers: “Dieses Grauen darf nicht aus der Geschichte herausgenommen und zu einer Art ‘negativen Mythos’ stilisiert werden. Dadurch wrde der Holocaust zum unfaßlichen Schicksal, zur Tragçdie beyond history, die den Standpunkt der Verantwortung und der Scham […] auflçsen wrde.” (Metz 1992: 36) Ruth Kranz-Lçber has pointed out a further urgent danger of negatively sacralising the Holocaust:

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Wie kaum ein anderes historisches Ereignis verlangt der systematische Vçlkermord nach Zeugenschaft […] und es sei nur, um dem immer wieder gespensterhaft auftauchenden Vorwurf der sogennanten ‘Auschwitz-Lge’ zu begegnen […]. Die Behauptung, der Genozid habe nie wirklich stattgefunden und die Nachricht davon sei bloß erlogen [erdichtet], nhert sich paradoxerweise vom Charakter des Ereignisses: seine Unvorstellbarkeit legt seine Undurchfhrbarkeit nahe, und demnach auch, daß es nicht durchgefhrt wurde. (Kranz-Lçber 2001: 39)

Negative sacrilisation can be used to further the goals of those who profess the ‘Auschwitzlge’: the more unimaginable the Holocaust is professed to be, the more argumentative capital the so-called ‘revisionists’ have at their disposal. This makes the record – however inadequate – of these events all the more pressing.

2.4 The Failure of Culture Critics have done a further injustice to Adorno’s position on post-Shoah art by overlooking the fact that his considerations are tightly interwoven with his reflections on the state of culture in the aftermath of the event. These considerations form an indispensable framework for any interpretation of his thought. In his essay “Auferstehung der Kultur in Deutschland” (1950), he writes: “Es hat sich noch nicht herumgesprochen, daß Kultur in traditionellem Sinn tot ist.” (Adorno 1971: 23) Writing against the backdrop of powerful restorative elements in post-war Germany, and taking issue with the attitudes displayed in the context of the Goethehaus restoration, Adorno argues against the delusion that German culture could simply be ‘resurrected’ at a time that called for a meticulous questioning of culture’s complicity – and that of art as part of this culture – in the Third Reich and the Shoah: “Zur Selbstverstndlichkeit wurde, daß nichts, was die Kunst betrifft, mehr selbstverstndlich ist, weder in ihr noch in ihrem Verhltnis zum Ganzen, nicht einmal ihr Existenzrecht.” (Adorno 1970: 9) For Adorno the Shoah did not emerge at the expense of culture; his writings do not lament the loss of once ‘glorious’ and ‘enlightened’ cultural traditions; on the contrary. He warns against the comfortable interpretation of the Shoah as historical anomaly or as a temporary breakdown of civilised norms: Auschwitz [hat] das Mißlingen der Kultur unwiderleglich bewiesen. Daß es geschehen konnte inmitten aller Tradition der Philosophie, der Kunst und der aufklrenden Wissenschaften, sagt mehr als nur, daß diese, der Geist, es nicht

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vermochte, die Menschen zu ergreifen und zu verndern. […] Alle Kultur nach Auschwitz […] ist Mll. (Adorno 1973: 360)

The Shoah, in Adorno’s view, had demonstrated conclusively that culture and barbarism are not diametrically opposed to each other. He does not see the Holocaust as a mere blemish on an otherwise pristine cultural tradition, since this very tradition had proven far from impervious to the crimes committed. He questions what the concept of culture could now mean, given that a culturally and artistically accomplished society had allowed such barbarity to be unleashed. What’s more, the gas chambers had flourished alongside civilised artistic pursuits; as Steiner poignantly states: “We now know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning.” (Steiner 1970: ix) In a letter to the reviewer of his play Nun singen sie wieder (1945), Max Frisch similarly reflected on culture’s complicity with National Socialism: Die bloße dumpfe Bestie, die nichts anderes kann und kennt, ist nicht das Ungeheuerliche; denn sie ist leicht zu erkennen. Ungeheuerlich scheint mir die Bestie mit dem Geist, der so hoch fliegt, daß er den gleichen Menschen nicht hindert, eine Bestie zu sein. Ungeheuerlich ist das Januskçpfige, die Schizophrenie, wie sie sich […] innerhalb des deutschen Volkes […] offenbart hat. Nicht wenige von uns hielten sich lange an den trçstlichen Irrtum, es handle sich um zweierlei Menschen dieses Volkes, solche, die Mozart spielen, und solche, die Menschen verbrennen. Zu erfahren, daß sich beide in der gleichen Person befinden kçnnen, das war die eigentliche Erschtterung […]. (Frisch 1983: 151)

In the light of the perviousness of culture to the evil of National Socialism described by Adorno, and the schizophrenia outlined here by Frisch, the original ‘dictum’ assumes yet another level of meaning; after all, given culture’s complete failure, what value could culture – and art as part and parcel of that same culture – possibly have after Auschwitz? After all, poems written before Auschwitz, as Howard Caygill comments, did not prevent it; so how could those written in its aftermath be called upon to prevent its repitition? (Caygill 2002: 81) To simply continue with those pre-Auschwitz artistic forms was seen by Adorno as ignoring the irredeemable break that Auschwitz had occasioned. He criticised the feverish attempts made in post-war Germany to reconnect to cultural traditions, since such efforts had the attendant danger of relegating Nazi Germany to the status of an irrelevant intermezzo: Millionen schuldloser Menschen […] wurden planvoll ermordert. Das ist von keinem Lebendigen als Oberflchenphnomen, als Abirrung vom Lauf der

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Geschichte abzutun, die gegenber der großen Tendenz des Fortschritts, der Aufklrung, der vermeintlich zunehmenden Humanitt nicht in Betracht kme. (Adorno 1997a: 49)

Adorno is at pains to reiterate the complicity of modernity and culture as part of modernity. Michael Rothberg comments in a similar vein: “as the rationalised production of death, Auschwitz […] casts a retroactive judgement on the ideology of Enlightenment with its trust in reason and the sanctity of culture.” (Rothberg 2000: 52) The legitimacy of artistic discourse, given that this culture had gone so catastrophically awry, was now cast into doubt. Adorno’s objective is to reiterate culture’s failure and to highlight the connection between modernity and the death camps, the latter falsifying the idea of the former as progressive. The elucidation thus far of the barriers facing the post-Shoah artist and the complicity of modernity and culture as emphasised by Adorno would seem to merely lend yet further support to an interpretation of his thought as a call for silence. In spite of these obstacles, however, Adorno is simultaneously at pains to make it clear that silence is not permissable. This aporetic tension is central to his deliberations, and it is in light of this tension that any argument which interprets his mediations as a general call for silence may be refuted. Adorno states unequivocally: “Das bermaß an realem Leiden duldet kein Vergessen. […] jenes Leiden […] erheischt […] die Fortdauer von Kunst, die es verbietet; kaum wo anders findet das Leiden noch seine eigene Stimme, den Trost, der es nicht sogleich verriete.” (Adorno 1965: 125) [my emphasis] The problem informing Adorno’s proposition is thus acutely aporetic in quality: it is, to borrow Caygill’s words, one of “how to select the appropriate form of impossibility to give expression to suffering” (Caygill 2002: 81). Adorno deems post-Shoah art inadmissible but obligatory; his objective is to highlight the profundity of the problematics of representation and the imperative – albeit inherently futile – to surmount these same problematics.

2.5 Adorno’s ‘Widerruf ’ With respect to this aporetic tension, Adorno’s own qualifications of his original pronouncement assume crucial significance. What has attracted much attention in critical discourse is Adorno’s supposed “Widerruf,” the alleged ‘retraction’ of his original ‘dictum’ (cf. Tiedemann 1997, Gubar 2003, Kyriakides 2005). The most obvious problem with reading

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the passage in question as a retraction – aside from the fact that one is essentially arguing that he retracted something he never actually stated to begin with – is that Adorno does not even come close to recanting his original pronouncement; what he does is in fact radicalise his position. The section of the passage in question most commonly cited from Negative Dialektik (1966) reads as follows: “Das perennierende Leiden hat soviel Recht auf Ausdruck wie der Gemarterte zu brllen, darum mag falsch gewesen sein, nach Auschwitz ließe sich kein Gedicht mehr schreiben.” (Adorno 1973: 355) When read like this in isolation from its immediate textual context, and alongside the original decontextualised pronouncement, then it does indeed appear to be a retraction of that same pronouncement. When examined in the light of the lines which immediately follow, however, Adorno’s words assume very different meaning: Nicht falsch ist aber die minder kulturelle Frage, ob nach Auschwitz noch sich leben lasse, ob vollends es drfe, wer zufllig entrann und htte umgebracht werden mssen. […] Zur Vergeltung suchen ihn Trume heim wie der, daß er gar nicht mehr lebte, sondern 1944 vergast worden wre. (Adorno 1973: 354)

These qualifying sentences are extremely significant. In both the original German text and in the English translation, it is evident that the second sentence is a qualification of the first. The use of negation in the clause “Nicht falsch aber” and the crucial inclusion of the adverb ‘however’ – which, by its very definition, is used to introduce a statement that contrasts with a previous one – clearly denote this connection. Adorno questions not only the possibility of art in the wake of the Shoah, he also questions existence itself. Adorno does not retract. Rather, he supersedes; the spheres of art and culture are subsumed under the all-encompassing notion of existence. He widens the scope of his reflections from the legitimacy of art after Auschwitz to the question of the legitimacy of existence itself. The verb “drfen” denotes permission; this is significant. Adorno is not writing about a physical ability to live on; rather, he raises the issue to a moral level. He broadens the scope of his deliberations to the figure of the unmerited survivor – unmerited because those who survived the camps did so purely by chance; the regime was simply not given enough time to fulfil its murderous task. He does so to refute the delusory notion of simply ‘moving on’ after Auschwitz. Its shadow must be formative for everything that follows in its aftermath. In the death camps, after all, staying alive had merely been a perverse question of statistics; survival for one had been secured at the cost of the life of another: “Die Schuld

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des Lebens, das als pures Faktum bereits anderem Leben den Atem raubt, einer Statistik gemß, die eine berwltigende Zahl Ermorderter durch eine minimale Geretteter ergnzt, […] ist mit dem Leben nicht mehr zu versçhnen.” (Adorno 1973: 357) Aesthetic order cannot be imposed on the chance and randomness that characterised death in the camps. How, for example, can one render in artistic form what Adorno calls the “drastische Schuld des Verschonten” (Adorno 1973: 354) – the guilt felt by the survivor for having usurped a fellow inmate’s place and lived in his stead? Any attempt to impose some kind of higher meaning on the arbitrariness and elusiveness of the death camp experience would be a violation of the deference owed to the victims. The most critical passage with respect to Adorno’s supposed “Widerruf ” can be found in his essay “Die Kunst und die Knste” (1966), in which Adorno makes explicit reference to his earlier pronouncement: “Whrend die Situation Kunst nicht mehr zulßt – darauf zielte der Satz ber die Unmçglichkeit von Gedichten nach Auschwitz – bedarf sie doch ihrer.” (Adorno 1970: 374) [my emphasis] Once again Adorno raises the issue to moral grounds: the verb “zulassen” signifies permission; yet again Adorno makes the dialectical tension of his argument clear: post-Shoah art is not permissible but simultaneously indispensable; the attempt must be made to give voice to the suffering whilst remaining conscious of the inevitable failure in doing so adequately. For Adorno art’s task is to say the ‘unsayable’ or to think the ineffable. He calls for a form of negative representation that presents the existence of the ‘extremity’ that defies representation; he calls for evocation through absence. Representation must be austere; it must avoid the possibility that pleasure or positive meaning be ‘squeezed’ from it. He warns against self-complacent, untroubled narrative that avoids dealing self-reflectively with the problematics of representing the ineffable. It must be anti-redemptory in nature to avoid a repetition of the violation of the victims. It must avoid ‘making sense’ of the event through the imposition of coherent formal structure or by incorporating it into any positive fable of progress. In Adorno’s view art regains validity by reflecting and engaging with its own impossible status even if the extremity of the reification process means that this reflection cannot be carried out in any meaningful way. He calls for art to be self-referentially wary of itself, of its form and of its means of representation. Beate Sowa-Bettecken highlights a line from Paul Celan’s poem “Nhe der Grber” as a quintessential example of such a self-reflective poetics: “Und duldest du, Mutter, wie einst, ach, daheim / den leisen, den deutschen, den schmerzlichen Reim?” (cf. Sowa-

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Bettecken 1992, 24) Deliberating on the problematics of formal aestheticisation and the German language, Celan questions through the medium of German whether the German language can be tolerated, and he questions in the form of rhymed verse whether rhyme can be tolerated. Nelly Sachs’ poetry can be considered a similarly quintessential example of a self-referential poetics. Through the medium of poetry, Sachs performs an intense engagement with the medium at her disposal; she mediates on the perils and dilemmas of Holocaust representation, attempting all the while, alongside this meta-poetic discourse, to represent.

II Practices

3 Nelly Sachs’ Poetics of Silence: Poetry at the Limits of Representation 3.1 Defying ‘Verstummen’ Alvin Rosenfeld, outlining the challenge which Auschwitz as the ultimate caesura poses for the writer attempting to render the event in poetic language, argues that the Nazi terror turned the long-held belief in a recognisable, commonly-accepted human scale into something that began to look like its opposite: the belief that human life could be, and in select instances even should be, undone, that certain people were trash and should be disposed of as such. (Rosenfeld 1988: 83) It was precisely such a realised horror – the ‘disposal’ of millions of human lives as “trash,” the loss of a “commonly-accepted human scale” – with which Nelly Sachs was confronted as reports began to filter into the Swedish press about the million-fold slaughter in the death camps. In a letter to Gudrun Dhnert in 1948, Sachs emphasised the exigency of the quest of bearing witness to this new reality: “Unsere Zeit, so schlimm sie ist, muß […] in der Kunst ihren Ausdruck finden, es muß mit allen neuen Mitteln gewagt werden, denn die alten reichen nicht mehr aus.” (Sachs 1984: 98) Like Adorno, Nelly Sachs was acutely conscious of the formidable task confronting the post-Shoah writer attempting to find literary tools with which to express the horror of the Shoah in artistic form. The issue was not the legitimacy of the artistic rendering of the Shoah, but rather the quandary of finding the appropriate artistic tools; the aporia, in other words, between compulsion and inability. The question was how the suffering was to be rendered, not whether, a fact highlighted by Sachs’ double employment of the modal verb ‘mssen’ as opposed to ‘sollen.’ This aporia is a constant theme running throughout Sachs’ work. Dying had, of course, as Rosenfeld points out, occasioned century upon century of poetic expression. (Rosenfeld 1988: 83) With the attempted Nazi annihilation of Europe’s Jewish population, however, dying was now of a new order; death in the camps had been an industrialised process of “willed de-creation,” “a savage and systematic undoing of the human species.” The factory-like attempt at exterminating the Jews of Europe “could not be embraced within any concepts of poetry known to

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us thus far” (Rosenfeld 1988: 83) [my emphasis]. Both Sachs and Adorno recognised the irreparable fissure that this concept of industrialised “willed de-creation” had left in its wake. Art’s task was now to find the means to present the reality of this fissure. Sachs was acutely aware of the fact that the literary tools of yesterday no longer sufficed to render the recent catastrophe. In a letter to Swiss author Carl Seelig in 1947, she expressed this dilemma: Wir […] sind geschieden von allen frheren Aussagen durch eine tiefe Schlucht, nichts reicht mehr zu, kein Wort, kein Stab, kein Ton – (schon darum sind alle Vergleiche berholt) was tun, schrecklich arm wie wir sind […], wir mssen es herausbringen […]. [A]ber wir wollen […] doch keine schçnen Gedichte machen … Nur darum, denke ich, geht es, nur darum, und deswegen unterscheiden wir uns von den frheren, denn der on der Schmerzen darf nicht mehr gesagt, gedacht, er muß durchlitten werden. (Sachs 1984: 83 – 84)

In this passage the aporetic tension between obligation and inability comes to the fore. A ‘gorge’ now separates the writer of the post-Auschwitz world from everything that has gone before. The writer is ‘impoverished’ in terms of representational tools, and yet in spite of this fact, the exigency of voicing the suffering is clearly stated: “wir mssen es herausbringen.” There can be no seamless return to traditional artistic forms, nor can the task of bearing witness be served by writing “schçne[.] Gedichte.” The suffering cannot be adequately ‘said,’ it cannot even be adequately ‘conceived’; it must be ‘suffered through.’ In another letter to Gudrun Dhnert, Sachs further emphasised this position using the image of the wound, a motif that appears repeatedly throughout her work as a reference to the rupture that Auschwitz has occasioned in language: “Zwischen Gestern und Morgen liegt die Wunde, die offen ist. Wir kçnnen einfach nicht mehr die alten verbrauchten Stilmittel anwenden. In keiner Kunst ist das mçglich.” (Sachs 1984: 110) That Sachs viewed the gorge dividing the pre- and post-Auschwitz worlds as unbridgeable is further evinced by the fact that she entirely dismissed her pre-war lyric poetry. In a letter to the Swedish academy, in which he recommended Nelly Sachs for the Nobel Prize, Walter Berendsohn commented: “Ich besitze etwa 100 Gedichte aus dieser Frhzeit […]. Ihre damalige Dichtung […] ist gebunden in traditionellen Formen. Alle Gedichte sind gereimt; sie fllt u. a. die kunstvolle Form des Sonetts […] und in ihrem Bilder- und Wortschatz steht sie im Bannkreis der deutschen Romantik. […] Nelly Sachs selbst will von diesen Dichtungen nicht mehr wissen.” (Berendsohn 1964: 1) Sachs deemed everything

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she had written prior to the Holocaust meaningless, so great was the fissure that had occurred. Mellifluous rhyme, the form of the sonnet and romantic imagery were no longer merely inappropriate, nor were they of any use; such poetic devices belonged to the pre-Shoah world. They were incapable of reflecting the horror of Nazism. It was imperative that appropriate literary devices be found, and yet the post-Holocaust writer was confronted with the predicament that this imperative could not be met. At the foundation of this aporia lay what can be considered one of the greatest impasses of the post-Auschwitz literary crisis, namely, the dilemma of language itself; the fact that the German-Jewish writer was attempting to render the suffering endured in the language of the murderers: “Genagelt ist meine Zunge an eine Sprache, die mich verflucht,” as the poet and survivor of the Holocaust Hilda Stern Cohen described the quandary (Stern Cohen 2003: 43). Bearing witness using the medium in which the extermination orders had been given posed an immense problem for the writer attempting to communicate the suffering of the victims. This is just the first layer of the multi-layered dilemma that Sachs was forced to confront.

3.2 The Decay of Language In a letter to Kurt Pinthus in 1952, Nelly Sachs expressed the hopelessness confronting the Jewish writer attempting to render the attempted extermination of the Jewish population of Europe through the medium of the German language: “An die deutsche Sprache verbunden hat man als jdischer Mensch nicht viel Aussicht.” (Sachs 1984: 144) Sachs continually wrestled with this irresolvable predicament, but held on to German nonetheless as her poetic idiom. On the occasion of the awarding of the Peace Prize, the “professionelle Verganenheitsbewltiger” conveniently referred to Sachs as one of the greatest language healers of the time: “Hterin der Sprache,” were the words used in one report (Kleßmann 1965). Another reporter claimed that she employed the German language with ‘the power of tenacious love’: “Sie hat die Sprache ihrer Verfolger nicht verdammt. Sie hat sich der deutschen Sprache angenommen mit der Kraft beharrlicher Liebe zu einer Zeit, da dieselbe Sprache entstellt war von Haß und Gewalt.” (Schçfer 1965) Der Jungbuchhandel, in a similar vein, carried the headline “Versçhnung in der Sprache” (Meuer 1965: 1070). What these appraisals failed to consider, however, was Sachs’ deep-seated scepticism as to whether language could ever be cured of

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the corruption it had endured under National Socialism. Sachs was certainly not of the belief that language could be simply cured by what Lawrence Langer calls “the stroke of an imaginative pen” (Langer 1982: 224). Rather, her work reflects a deep ambivalence about the efficacy of signification in general. Susan Gubar summarises the dilemma: “If stirring expressions – in speeches, songs, and slogans in scholarly and imaginative books – facilitated or failed to derail the Nazis’ ‘final solution’; if language was, therefore, itself an instrument and casualty of the disaster, then literary artists confronted a confounding perplexity about their own medium.” (Gubar 2004: 443) Although Sachs had severe reservations about the expressive capacity of language in general with regard to communicating the horrors of Auschwitz, these reservations were particularly entrenched with respect to German. The deceit that accompanied the misappropriation of language for the murderous purposes of the ideology it served was a dilemma that haunted her. In his lecture “Zerstçrte Sprache – Zerstçrte Kultur” (1939), Ernst Bloch sums up this deceit: Die deutsche Sprache ist des Teufels geworden, der Teufel ist der Vater der Lge, ihr allein soll sie dienen. Schleim und Schwulst, Nebel und Gebrll, Schwachsinn und Elefantiasis der Superlative dienen der Demagogie. Die Chloroformmasken, die dem Konzentrationslager leider fehlen, verwendet Goebbels fr die so gennante Massenbasis außerhalb: die Sprache wird Narkose, Worte verlieren ihren Sinn, Krieg heißt Frieden, Pogrom Notwehr, der Lustmçrder Fhrer. (Bloch 1970: 292)

Here, Bloch describes the wholesale linguistic perversion that lay at the heart of Nazism. Language had undergone a fundamental distortion within the Nazi propaganda machinery. The superlatives and the hyperbolic diction that characterised National Socialist propaganda had functioned as narcotics. Similarly, in his post-war philological study Lingua Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines Philologen (1947), Viktor Klemperer exposed the malevolent use of language by the Nazis through an intensive scrutinisation of newspapers, pamphlets, books, advertisements and even roadside conversations. He argued that Nazi propaganda, in its attempt to secure widespread public support for Nazi policies, involved a fundamental alteration of language, which made uniform a vocabulary that embodied the ideals of fascism. This ‘Nazi language,’ with its millionfold hyperbolic repetitions, permeated the German language and was disseminated in the public arena to such an extent that it was absorbed by the population in a mechanical manner. (cf. Klemperer 1996) The evil in which this hyperbolic propaganda culminated led Sachs to severely doubt the possibility of ever cleansing the German language of the malevolence

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that had been imposed upon it. Like Adorno, she despaired at the possibility of finding uncompromised words to render Auschwitz in literary form. “Wo nur finden die Worte / […] / die nicht mit Zungen verwundeten” she asked in a poem from her later cycle Glhende Rtsel. (Sachs 1971: 52) Michael Braun’s claim that “Celans schlechtes Gewissen gegenber der zur Mçrdersprache gewordenen Muttersprache war ihr [Nelly Sachs] fremd. Unbeirrt hielt sie an den alten Kçnigswçrtern wie ‘Stern’ und ‘Quelle’ fest” (Braun and Lerman 1998: 53), is disputable given that Sachs’ poetry contains in fact an acutely apparent distrust of the ability of language to render the realities of Auschwitz. Whilst she indeed held onto such words like ‘Stern’ and ‘Quelle,’ she did not do so “unbeirrt.” Rather, the traditional literary function of such former ‘royal words,’ of expressive poetic concepts, of images and their traditional associations, undergoes a fundamental distortion in her work. In a letter to Hugo Bergmann in November 1947, Sachs provided a vivid portrayal of the gap between the corrupted, ‘wounded’ linguistic medium at her disposal and the horror which she wished to express: “Es reicht ja doch kein Wort zu nichts mehr hin. Von gestern auf morgen ist eine Wunde, die nicht heilen darf.” (Sachs 1984: 85) In another letter she expressed the uselessness of pre-Auschwitz vocabularly in any attempt to render the horrors in literary form: “Unsere Zeit [kann] nicht mit einem frheren Zeiten angemessenen Wortschatz angerhrt werden.” (Sachs 1984: 173) Confronted with these seemingly insurmountable linguistic barriers, Sachs attempts to create new linguistic reference fields, and in the process she actively employs the abused vocabulary of a language which, in Gisela Dischner’s words, had been “verhunzt” and “prostituiert” under Nazism: Sie setzt sich der mißbrauchten Sprache aus […]. Diesem Ja-Sagen zu den mißbrauchten Wçrtern ist ein Gefhl tçdlicher Bedrohung – Bedrohung der Sprachexistenz als Ausschlag der Existenzbedrohung – vorausgegangen. Es ist kein trotziges, eher ein zçgerndes Dennoch-Sprechen vor der Folie tçdlichen Schweigens, hervorgegangen aus der Erfahrung des totalen Mißbrauchs der Sprache und des Menschen […]. Die verbrauchten und mißbrauchten Worthlsen werden zu neuen spannungsgeladenen Wortfeldern, Zeichenkonstellationen, Symbolbezgen und Metaphern zusammengefgt, zusammengefgt auf Widerruf, denn sie sind vom Zerspringen bedroht. (Dischner 1977: 329 – 30)

The jaded and abused catchwords of National Socialism are coalesced in Sachs’ work into new semantic fields, into constellations of signs, symbols and metaphors. The poem “Vçlker der Erde,” from the cycle Sternver-

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dunkelung (1949), serves as an exemplary instance of Sachs’ engagment with the polluted German idiom. Here, Sachs thematises the deceit that accompanied Nazi jargon, and the poem conveys the depth of the author’s despair at the distortion which language had endured: Vçlker der Erde ihr, die ihr euch mit der Kraft der unbekannten Gestirne umwickelt wie Garnrollen, die ihr nht und wieder auftrennt das Genhte, die ihr in die Sprachverwirrung steigt wie in Bienenkçrbe, um im Sßen zu stechen und gestochen zu werden – Vçlker der Erde, zerstçret nicht das Weltall der Worte, zerschneidet nicht mit den Messern des Hasses den Laut, der mit dem Atem zugleich geboren wurde. Vçlker der Erde, O daß nicht Einer Tod meine, wenn er Leben sagt – und nicht Einer Blut, wenn er Wiege spricht – Vçlker der Erde, lasset die Worte an ihrer Quelle denn sie sind es, die die Horizonte in die wahren Himmel rcken kçnnen und mit ihrer abgewandten Seite wie eine Maske dahinter die Nacht ghnt die Sterne gebren helfen – (Sachs 1961: 152)

This poem consists of four verse groups in varying lengths, each beginning with a repeated plea. The use of anaphora at the beginning of each strophe, combined with the imperative, serves to define Sachs’ intended audience: those who come after the Shoah. Symmetry and mellifluous rhyme are wholly absent, the length of each line is irregular, there is no discernible metrical pattern and a lack of traditional stanzaic patterns. The syntactic subordination resulting from the hypotactic style employed by Sachs – which, by its very nature, nestles thoughts within thoughts, qualifies and reflects – lends the poem a convoluted, almost tortuous quality. This is most especially evident in the first stanza which alone contains three relative clauses. Hypotaxis lends the entire poem an interrupted, confused and breathless sense of urgency and serves here as a highly effective representational device, since the “Sprachverwirrung” process is recreated in the hypotactical ‘structure’ of the poem itself; “der Vorgang

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der Sprachverwirrung,” as Michael Braun writes, “[wird] im Text selbst nachvollzogen” (Braun and Lerman 1998: 50). Each of the three relative clauses has a descriptive function. The first clause describes mankind – die Vçlker der Erde – as so wholly entangled that it resembles spools of thread; this evokes images of ensnarement. Language has been abused to such an extent that words no longer carry traditional meaning; it has been ‘ensnared’ in the “Schleim und Schwulst, Nebel und Gebrll, Schwachsinn und Elefantiasis” of Nazi propaganda, to draw on Ernst Bloch once again. In the next clause, the act of incessant knitting and unravelling is used by Sachs to communicate the senselessness of what has happened. Michael Braun argues that this may also be a reference to the senseless labour that the concentration camp inmates were forced to carry out. Braun cites a passage from Sachs’ dramatic piece Nachtwache (1962), in which she describes this camp labour in similar terms: “Ja so ist sie immer / baut mit den Steinen / und reißt wieder ein. / Das mußten sie im Lager so machen / einen Platz pflastern / und wieder aufreißen / oder / so eine Art / Strmpfe in die Wolken stricken.” (Braun and Lerman 1998: 51) The third clause mentions the fatal “Sprachverwirrung” process. This is a probable reference to the confusion of tongues that accompanied the fragmentation of languages during the construction of the tower of Babel. Traditionally associated with the hubris of mankind, Sachs uses this story from Genesis to deride the collective lethal hubris of the Nazis who considered themselves ‘Herrenmenschen’ over those ‘Untermenschen’ ‘destined’ to be obliterated. A tonal connection between the bees and “Sprachverwirrung” is also rendered audible here, since the comparison with beehives is mindful of the ‘hum’ one might associate with the “Sprachverwirrung” process. In the second stanza, Sachs employs a double imperative, directed once again at “die Vçlker der Erde.” The use of the verb ‘zerschneiden’ immediately brings the image of the wound to mind: her choice of this verb over ‘schneiden’ is significant: the prefix ‘zer’ indicates the destructive process of carving “den Laut” – a metaphor for language per se – to pieces. By choosing this verb, Sachs thus reminds her readers of the profundity of the destruction that language suffered under Nazism. The third stanza thematises the perfidious manner in which the horrific crimes were covered up in fatal euphemisms. The detachment of symbols from their original referents was characteristic of so-called ‘Nazi Deutsch’: Die unwillkrliche Trennung des Wortzeichens von seiner Bedeutung und die Fllung der alten Worthllen mit einer neuen Bedeutung, die dem ur-

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sprnglichen Inhalt entgegengesetzt ist, kennzeichnet die ideologisch verzerrte, von ihrer ‘Quelle’ im lebensspendenen Schçpferwort entfernte Sprache. (Vaerst 1999: 81)

In line with this description of the process of linguistic manipulation, whereby the word is separated from its source, the final three stanzas of the poem are similarly permeated with a ‘source’ vocabulary: “Quelle,” “Wiege,” “gebren,” and “Weltall” all indicate a creation motif: Sachs sees language and creation as inseparable. The purpose of language is to impose order on reality; the innocent, ‘ordering’ language of creation in these three verses is therefore juxtaposed with the confusion thematised in the opening stanza, highlighting the euphemistic and hyperbolic manipulation that characterised Nazi jargon. The third stanza contains a double imperative introduced with the interjection “O”; this double imperative functions as a stylistic characteristic of urgency: a warning to those who come after of what happens when words lose their innocence. This is the climax of the poem, where Sachs portrays the deadly consequences of the ‘Sprachverwirrung’ process. She attempts to describe a terrifying world where words such as ‘life’ and ‘cradle’ mean ‘death’ and ‘blood’; a world in which the language of creation is transformed into the language of “willed decreation” – to draw on Rosenfeld once again. These lines pivot on the knowledge that under Nazism language as a signifier became severed from the signified. The imperative in the final stanza is the most urgent in the poem. Of the several similar grammatical structures in the various strophes, it is the only imperative that is formulated in the affirmative: “lasset die Worte an ihrer Quelle” – Sachs commands that the word be left at its source. The poem “Diese Jahrtausende” (Glhende Rtsel IV (1966)) is another attempt to deal explicitly with the destruction of language: Diese Jahrtausende geblasen von Atem immer um ein zorniges Hauptwort kreisend aus dem Bienenkorb der Sonne stechende Sekunden kriegerische Angreifer geheime Folterer Niemals eine Atempause wie in Ur da ein Kindervolk an den weißen Bndern zog mit dem Mond Schlafball zu spielen –

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Auf der Straße mit Windeseile luft die Frau Medizin zu holen fr das kranke Kind Vokale und Konsonanten schreien in allen Sprachen Hilfe! (Sachs 1971: 91)

This poem is an example of Sachs’ coalescence of disparate images and concepts into new and often uncomfortable semantic constellations. In the first strophe, the language of creation reappears: “geblasen von Atem” may be read as a reference to a creative, divine, life-giving force. A tension immediately ensues, however, between creation as it was intended and the reality that ensued. By the fifth line the ‘millennia’ of the opening lines have become tortuous ‘stinging seconds’; as Gisela Dischner writes: “Es ensteht die Assoziation eines nicht endenden […], stndig stechenden Schmerzes.” (Dischner 1977: 349) The reader links this stinging with the image of the beehive in the previous line, while the genitive construction “Bienekorb der Sonne” connects it to the sun; instead of the sun being a life-giving force it has become an ‘aggressor’ and a ‘torturer.’ This is an exemplary instance of Sachs’ manipulation of familiar imagery. In the second strophe, Sachs makes reference to the city of Ur. Ur may be considered a primeval symbol of totalitarianism during the reign of the tyrannical King Nimrod, who ordered the building of the tower of Babel as a hubristic act of defiance against God. In a letter to Walter Berendsohn, in which Sachs discussed her use of this figure for her proposed drama Abram im Salz (1944), she describes him as “Jger” and “Gestalt des Unholdes unserer Zeit” (Sachs 1974b: 135). The allusion to moon worship contained in the curious reference to the “Kindervolk” playing “Schlafball” may, as Shanks interestingly points out, be an allusion to those who opted for “an attitude of sleepy resignation to tyranny” (Shanks 2001: 134) in the ancient city. This reference may thus be read as analogous to the German populace’s unquestioning acceptance of the tyranny of National Socialism. It may be an allusion, in other words, to the idolatry rampant in the ancient city and the subsequent uncritical, deadly worship of National Socialism. In the third stanza, Sachs presents the whole ‘body’ of language in anthropomorphic terms: it is ‘sick.’ This stanza is a reminder that just as a child requires care, so too does language. Neglect, in the form of the German populace’s naive and passive assimilation of the deadly Nazi propa-

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ganda, for example, leads to the medium being poisoned. The question as to whether adequate ‘medicine’ for the diseased linguistic corpus can be found is left unanswered in the void represented by the dash. The spacing in the linguistically reduced closing line “H i l f e ” physically marks the culmination of the writer’s despair; it is also a revealing illustration of how the formal features of Sachs’ work serve very often as functions of literary content: the image of vowels and consonants ‘screaming’ for help is physically recreated by the dissolution of the word itself. The climax of the poem is thus direct speech in the form of a plea; it is an engagement with language, or at least with what is left of it. Like the plea to the peoples of the earth in the previous poem, and hence expressing the danger that what happened in Germany can happen anywhere, Sachs similarly universalises her deliberations in these final lines by expanding her considerations beyond the German language to “alle[.] Sprachen.” While, for Sachs, the difficulties of representing the suffering are particularly anchored with respect to German, as evinced by her letter to Kurt Pinthus cited earlier, bearing witness presents obstacles for writers of all tongues. Throughout this poem Sachs thus engages in a meta-reflective discourse on the problematics of representation and on the crisis of language in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The poem “Abschied” (Sternverdunkelung (1949), sub-cycle berlebende) is one of Sachs’ most disturbing and multi-faceted attempts to present the rupture that Auschwitz has occasioned in language: Abschied – aus zwei Wunden blutendes Wort. Gestern noch Meereswort mit dem sinkenden Schiff als Schwert in der Mitte – Gestern noch von Sternschnuppensterben durchstochenes Wort – Mitternachtgekßte Kehle der Nachtigallen – Heute – zwei hngende Fetzen und Menschenhaar in einer Krallenhand die riß – Und wir Nachblutenden – Verblutende an dir – halten deine Quelle in unseren Hnden. Wir Heerscharen der Abschiednehmenden die an deiner Dunkelheit bauen –

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bis der Tod sagt: schweige du – doch hier ist: weiterbluten! (Sachs 1961: 124)

The “Abschied” motif, which can be counted among the fundamental ciphers of Sachs’ poetry, finds expression in this poem’s multi-layered semantic field. Sachs establishes an opposition between the state of language before and after the Shoah. This division of time into the preand post-Shoah segments occurs over and over in her work. The farewell of yesterday is associated with imagery such as the sinking ship, the shooting star and the sound of the nightingale. The farewell of today, however, is associated with rags and clawing limbs. The concept of leave-taking has undergone a fundamental distortion: ‘Abschied’ is now a ‘bleeding’ word, soaked in the blood of the victims: “blutendes Wort” / “durchstochendes Wort.” “Abschied,” as Eshel comments, “zeichnet eine unberbrckbare zeitliche Schwelle nach, einen gewaltttigen Schnitt: Was einst ein Ganzes war, wird zu ‘Fetzen’, das Wort – ‘durchstochen’” (Eshel 1999: 96). The word ‘Abschied’ has a multifaceted function in this poem. Apart from being a probable reference to the scene of separation on the ramps and, as such, standing as pars pro toto for the Shoah, its own linguistic make-up, Christine Rospert argues, also carries meaning: “Die Vorsilbe ‘Ab-’ impliziert eine Bewegung weg, fort, und ‘-schied’ geht bekanntlich auf das Verb ‘scheiden’ zurck, welches ‘spalten, trennen’ denotiert. Insofern ist das Substantiv ‘Abschied’ ber-, weil doppelt, bestimmt.” (Rospert 2004: 67) Rospert reveals the semantic polyvalence of “Abschied”: the word itself is literally split; the ‘word’ generally, that is, language, is ‘pierced,’ while the unspoken but palpable connotation that ‘Abschied’ evokes, namely, the selection process on the ramps of the death camps, also refers to a violent separation. The cause of the split between the language of yesterday and today is not explicitly mentioned. Instead, Sachs calls on the reader to supply the “unspoken reality behind the lines” (Langer 1982: 230). That unspoken reality is most probably the selection process on the ramps where family members and friends were violently separated from each other as some were ‘selected’ for labour and others were ‘selected’ for death. The process of ‘leave-taking’ on the ramps has forever distorted the traditional connotations associated with the notion of ‘Abschiednehmen’: it is now a process of forced and violent tearing apart. In her prose text Leben unter Bedrohung (1956), Sachs gives a similar description of the violence that accompanied the ‘Abschiedsprozess’ under Nazism: “Das Trennungsmesser [fuhr] tiefer. Aus der Familie wur-

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den Teile ausgeschnitten, Teile, die in weit fort eroberte Zeit verfrachtet wurden. In die Zeit der gekrmmten Finger und der starken Schritte.” (Sachs 1974: 10) The image of “hngende Fetzen” in the second stanza is significant in terms of the poem’s general lack of form: this image, it can be argued, is reproduced on a textual level in the poem, since we do not encounter a complete sentence until the final verse. The line “Menschenhaar in einer Krallenhand” carries clear associations of perpetration: the outstretched hand bidding farewell is distorted into the animal-like image of a clawing hand holding human hair. The aggression, violence and humiliation that characterised the Nazi terror culminate at this juncture. The hyphen after the violent verb ‘reißen’ leaves the reader to imagine the horror behind the words. This hyphen is an indicator of limits; it points to the limits of poetic expression in the process of representation. The final stanza conveys the life-long damage done to the survivors of the Shoah. The use of the present tense here is significant; as Eshel writes: “An der Erfahrung der brutalen Trennung bluten “wir” immer noch, an ihr erleben wir den Verblutungstod im prsentischen Raum des Gedichts.” (Eshel 1999: 96) The wound inflicted is so great that the attendant bleeding is ever present. The ‘bleeding in aftermath’ described in this stanza may thus be read as the consequence of the wound of the opening stanza. The use of the verb ‘bauen’ in relation to ‘Dunkelheit’ is unsettling; it suggests that as time passes, the survivor is being increasingly enveloped by rather than gradually emerging from the darkness that the ‘Abschiedsprozess’ has left in its wake. Of further significance is the ‘du’ of the final stanza. Although it is difficult to ascertain to whom or what this second-person subject might refer, one thing can be stated with relative certainty: the ‘du’ / ‘wir’ exchange in the poem supposes dialogue; the poem communicates. Thus, even though words may be bleeding, and even if “H i l f e” is the only viable utterance in the aftermath of the ‘Sprachverwirrung’ that characterised Nazi attempts at inculcation, Sachs does not completely abandon the notion of communication through language. Another example of the poetic voice on the brink of despair, working with language incommensurate with the horrors of Auschwitz, is the poem “Und berall” from the cycle Flucht und Verwandlung (1959): Und berall der Mensch in der Sonne den schwarzen Aderlaß Schuld werfend in den Sand –

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und nur im Schlaf dem trnenlosen Versteck mit dem lodernden Pfeil des Heimwehs fahrend aus dem Kçcher der Haut – Aber hier immer nur Buchstaben die ritzen das Auge sind aber lange schon unntze Weisheitszhne geworden Reste eines entschlummerten Zeitalters. Jetzt aber der Wettercherub knotet das Vier-Winde-Tuch nicht um Erdbeeren zu sammeln in den Wldern der Sprache sondern die Trompete vernderlich anzublasen im Dunkel denn nicht kann Sicherheit sein im fliegenden Staub und nur das Kopftuch aus Wind eine bewegliche Krone zeigt noch zngelnd mit Unruhgestirnen geschmckt den Lauf der Welt an – (Sachs 1961: 288)

Sachs opens this poem with a seemingly pleasant image. For the reader familiar with Sachs’ work, this apparently pleasing imagery is cause for suspicion. And such suspicion is justified, since this image undergoes immediate distortion in the line that succeeds it. For Sachs, the significance of the sun lies not its warmth or its brightness or in any of the positive properties we traditionally associate with it. Its significance lies, rather, in its exposure of the ‘bleeding shadows’ of human guilt in the sand. The image of bleeding shadows conjures up veins of guilt-suffused blood flowing in all directions, haunting the perpetrators “wie eine endlos ber den Sand kriechende Schleppe” (Schweizer 2005: 160). Blood and shadows are conflated here and, in this way, Sachs ascribes a new dimension to the romantic notion of ‘Schattenverkauf.’ Shadows, as Ralf Flores points out, are indicators of physical flesh and of mortality, and having a shadow means belonging to the society of mortal things. (Flores 1974: 571) The shadows of bloodletting guilt in Sachs’ poem thus remind the reader that guilt belongs to humans just as shadows do. Shad-

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ows of guilt cannot be bartered as in the case of Chamisso’s character, Peter Schlemiel. This impossibility of casting off shadows of guilt may be an allusion to the attempt made by the German populace in the post-war years to do just that. The message that Sachs is attempting to communicate here is clear: the guilt for the crimes committed in Auschwitz and the guilt of having stood by as onlookers – “die Zuschauenden,” as she puts it in another poem – is inescapable. The reference to “den schwarzen Aderlaß Schuld” is significant in terms of the medical connotations it carries: the darkness of venal blood is attributed to its deoxygenation. The venal blood in Sachs’ poem, however, is not only dark, it is black: the cause – its thorough permeation with guilt. In the second stanza, the poetic voice despairs once again at the futility of the language at her disposal to describe the horrors of the Shoah. The chiastic structure of the lines “Aber / nur – hier / immer” gives a strong impression of temporal and spatial linguistic ensnarement. Firstly, the adverb in the line “aber hier” connects this line to the “berall” of the opening line. The temporal phrase “immer” is, in turn, chiastically connected with the spatial phrase “hier”; the “berall” of the opening line is thus expanded to become a temporal perpetuity in which the witness is left in a constant state of linguistic ensnarement. This chiastic structure, as Erika Schweizer writes, “lsst den Ist-Zustand als totale rumlich-zeitliche Verfangenheit begreifen, aus der […] die Sprache keinen Ausweg zu weisen vermag” (Schweizer 2005: 160). Letters now ‘scratch out’ the eye; in the post-Shoah world they are ‘useless wisdom teeth,’ letters have lost their creative, regenerative force and yet, despite this, the lyrical subject has recourse to nothing except this same futile and tainted medium. Sachs performs a self-reflective poetics here: she ‘writes’ the uselessness of letters using these very letters. Once again she re-creates the before / after division so prominent in her work. Auschwitz has rendered letters mere remains of a previous, dead epoch. In the pre-Shoah world, letters were wise, they had representative powers; they were the micro parts of the system of language. In the aftermath of Auschwitz, they have been stripped of these properties; letters have become hollow, they are ailing. Letters are, moreover, poisoned by virtue of their being micro parts of the system of language which itself can be considered “Mittterin der schuldverstrickten Wirklichkeit” (Schweizer 2005: 161). In the final stanza, Sachs evokes the image of the ‘weather cherub’ who is curiously described as tying together the corners of the ‘four winds’ scarf.’ The scarf ’s corners are not being tied, however, for the purposes of gathering fruit – that is, words – from the ‘forests of language,’

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since the post-Holocaust poet no longer has the luxury of simply choosing words appropriate to the subject matter. Such a practice is a luxury that belongs to the past: “[v]orbei, und zwar unwiderruflich, ist die Zeit, da es mçglich war, mçglich und zulssig, ‘Erdbeeren zu sammeln in den Wldern der Sprache,’” as Michael Kessler comments (Kessler 1994: 235). Instead, Sachs’ Cherub knots the ‘four winds’ scarf ’ – a likely play on Job’s desperate search for God in all four cardinal directions – to sound trumpets “im Dunkel.” The cherub no longer functions as throne bearer as in the Old Testament. He now elicits his trumpet sounds in darkness. These trumpet sounds, in light of the probable intertextual references in this poem to the Job story, can be interpreted as futile cries as to the whys of the Holocaust. The cries must be sounded in the dark, because there are no longer any certainties when it comes to the divine: “[d]enn nicht kann Sicherheit sein.” This line presents the poetic persona as entirely vulnerable and exposed to the uncertainties – suggested by ‘fliegend’ and ‘beweglich’ – that characterise life in the aftermath of the Holocaust, while the crown shape of the knoted “Vier-Winde Tuch” is decorated with ‘uneasy stars’ which release a mere faint glow.

3.3 Addressing the Perpetrators “Ihr Werk enthlt kein einziges Wort des Hasses. Den Henkern […] werden verziehen und nicht gedroht.” (Enzensberger 1995: 73) [my emphasis] “Das dichterische Werk von Nelly Sachs […] versçhnt ohne Widerspruch Deutsches und Jdisches. Ihre Gedichte […] sind Werke der Vergebung, der Rettung, des Friedens.” (anon. 1965b: 2286) [my emphasis] While it is true that Sachs was certainly not a proponent of revenge, claims that the perpetrators of the million-fold massacre receive forgiveness in her work are very problematic. Critics have also suggested that the perpetrators generally find no place in her work: “Generell wird in den Gedichten […] der Aspekt der Tterschaft nicht bercksichtigt.” (Kranz-Lçber 2001: 41) An examination of several poems, in which Sachs explicitly addresses the perpetrators of the Shoah casts doubt upon the tenability of such evaluations. Sachs tackles the question of complicity by addressing and indicting those responsible for the Holocaust, those who were actively involved in the extermination program and, crucially, those who stood by. The poem “Auch der Greise” serves as a point of departure in terms of what can be considered an unrelenting engagement with the perpetrator motif. This poem is from the first vol-

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ume of her post-war poetry In den Wohnungen des Todes (1947),” the subtitle of which “Dein Leib in Rauch durch die Luft” can be read as a direct reference to the trail of the victims’ smoke through the chimneys of the crematoria: Auch der Greise Letzten Atemzug, der schon den Tod anblies Raubtet ihr noch fort. Die leere Luft, Zitternd vor Erwartung, den Seufzer der Erleichterung Zu erfllen, mit dem diese Erde fortgestoßen wird – Die leere Luft habt ihr beraubt! Der Greise Ausgetrocknetes Auge Habt ihr noch einmal zusammengepreßt Bis ihr das Salz der Verzweiflung gewonnen hattet – Alles was dieser Stern An Krmmungen der Qual besitzt, Alles Leiden aus den dunklen Verliesen der Wrmer Sammelte sich zuhauf – O ihr Ruber von echten Todesstunden, Letzten Atemzgen und der Augenlider Gute Nacht Eines sei euch gewiß: Es sammelt der Engel ein Was ihr fortwarft, Aus der Greise verfrhter Mitternacht Wird sich ein Wind der letzten Atemzge auftun, Der diesen losgerissenen Stern In seines Herrn Hnde jagen wird! (Sachs 1961: 12)

In this poem Sachs unambiguously addresses the perpetrators – “ihr” – and attempts to recount their horrific crimes. In the first stanza she employs the motif of ‘thievery’ as a descriptive tool in her attempt to describe the Nazis’ murderous deeds: the prisoners are described as having been ‘robbed’ of even the last breath that normally accompanies the inception of death. The reference to “die Leere Luft” in line four initially defies interpretation. However, by the time it reappears in line seven, Sachs has provided the reader with some supporting interpretative material: it may now be read as a reference to how the Nazis ‘stole’ and destroyed the ‘clean’ air necessary for life, replacing it with the poisonous gas from the pellets of Cyclone B. In the camps the “Seufzer der Erleichterung” that accompanies the onset of death was absent; instead the inmates

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were herded in their hundreds into a room where they waited “zitternd” for either water or gas to spout from the ceiling; the notion of death as a dignified individual experience was destroyed. The first strophe may thus be considered an attempt by Sachs to thematise the ‘death of death’ that occurred in the camps as a result of the industralised manner in which the million-fold slaughter was carried out, a concept that haunts both Adorno’s and Sachs’ post-Holocaust writing. In the second strophe the accusations continue unabated. The perpetrators are accused of pressing the parched and salt-filled eye of each victim to the point of perverse victory. Salt is an image that appears frequently in Sachs’ poetry as symbolic of the victims’ suffering: “das Salz der Trnen,” as one critic writes, “die sich zum Meer sammeln, geweint um die Qual der gepeinigten Schwestern und Brder […], gehçrt zum Bildkomplex des Leidens” (Jeziorkowski 1997: 133). The references to the “Krmmungen der Qual” and the anguish amassed from the “Verliese[n] der Wrmer” in the closing lines of this stanza conjure up the disturbing imagery of warped walking corpses – the “non-men” of the camps, to borrow Primo Levi’s term once again – and the decaying piles of bodies all-too familiar from the photographic evidence of Auschwitz. In the third stanza, the Nazi perpetrators are described as ‘robbers’ of the ‘authentic hours of death,’ a probable reference to how millions of lives were prematurely truncated. Although the suffering of the victims takes precedence throughout, it cannot possibly be argued that the perpetrators are forgiven; they are very clearly and unswervingly accused as responsible for this suffering. That Sachs does not so much as approach the notion of forgiveness is made clear in the final two stanzas: addressing the perpetrators with the foreboding imperative “[e]ines sei euch gewiss,” Sachs declares that the ‘thieves of the authentic hour of death’ will be on the receiving end of a whirlwind made up of the final breaths of those who were murdered, the verb ‘fortwerfen’ functioning as a clear reference to the manner in which the victims were ‘discarded’ like refuse. This cannot be interpreted as a reconciliatory gesture. In the poem “Hnde der Todesgrtner” (In den Wohnungen des Todes (1947), sub-cycle Dein Leib in Rauch durch die Luft), Sachs undertakes the ultimately unrealisable challenge of entering the minds of the perpetrators. This is a poem of acute despair as the poetic voice attempts to comprehend how normal human beings became what she calls ‘gardeners of death.’ Interestingly, the perpetrators are reduced to the bodily parts that committed the atrocoties: Sachs names the perpetrators’ hands as

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the tools of death. This serves a very significant purpose: it reminds the reader that individual perpetrators actively participated in the industrialised killing: Hnde Der Todesgrtner, Die ihr aus der Wiegenkamille Tod, Die auf den harten Triften gedeiht Oder am Abhang, Das Treibhausungeheuer eures Gewerbes gezchtet habt. Hnde, Des Leibes Tabernakel aufbrechend, Der Geheimnisse Zeichen wie Tigerzhne packend – Hnde, Was tatet ihr, Als ihr die Hnde von kleinen Kindern waret? Hieltet ihr eine Mundharmonika, die Mhne Eines Schaukelpferdes, faßtet der Mutter Rock im Dunkel, Zeigtet auf ein Wort im Kinderlesebuch – War es Gott vielleicht, oder Mensch? Ihr wrgenden Hnde, War eure Mutter tot, Eure Frau, euer Kind? Daß ihr nur noch den Tod in den Hnden hieltet, In den wrgenden Hnden? (Sachs 1961: 15)

The metaphor “Todesgrtner” draws a powerful contrast between the traditional image of the gardener as someone who, with due care, encourages life to flourish and the image of the Nazis as industrialised ‘gardeners of death.’ The first six lines of the poem constitute an incomplete sentence that is further disturbed by the apo koinou construction “Tod.” From the Greek “in common,” apo koinou is a device in which a single word or phrase is shared by two independent syntactic units. In this instance, “Tod” is not syntactically determined: it could relate to both what precedes and what follows. Its positioning, as pointed out by Henning Falkenstein, serves the purpose of presenting the omnipresence of death: “Dadurch daß das Wort hier als Apokoinu gebraucht wird […], wird es absichtlich berbetont. Es weist in dem Satzfragment gleichzeitig nach vorne und nach hinten und beherrscht so den ganzen Teil des Gedichts.” (Falkenstein 1984: 29) Sachs refers pointedly to the mass-produced killing by her use of the verb ‘zchten.’ In the camps, death became a ‘craft,’ a ‘trade’; it had been ‘bred’ as if in a glasshouse. This culminates in a desperate questioning of the deeds of the perpetrators. She asks what

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aspect of their childhood served as an impetus for the atrocities they subsequently committed; whether it was the death of a mother, a wife or a child that resulted in them, in turn, taking lives? This frantic questioning serves to compound the sense of poetic despair, especially so because it is done in vain, as demonstrated by the culmination of the poem in the paralysis of the final question mark; as Annette Jael Lehmann writes in relation to Sachs’ questioning of the ‘whys’ of the Holocaust: “Paralysierung und ohnmchtige Fassungslosigkeit nehmen bei ihr neue Gestalt an, wenn sie nach Antworten auf die Frage nach den Hintergrnden der Shoah sucht.” (Lehmann 1999: 27) In a letter to Gudrun Dhnert, Sachs outlined just some of the utterly inassimilable crimes committed by the Nazis, as knowledge about them unfolded and as reports on the camps began to filter into the Swedish press in the aftermath of the war: Gestern las man hier in der Zeitung, daß der Henker des Lagers Mislowitz, Rudolf Hçß, mit eigener Hand jdische Kinder den Mttern vom Arm nahm und lachend in die Flammen geworfen hat. Auch hat er außer den 4 Millionen Toten, die er auf dem Gewissen hat, 4000 Juden lebendig verbrannt. […] Wenn man noch dazu die Untaten der rzte liest, die alle erdenklichen Versuche am lebendigen Menschen in den Lagern machten, so glaubt man wirklich nicht mehr an das Urbild, das einmal Mensch hieß. (Sachs 1984: 74)

An acute sense of despair, similar to that perceptible in this letter, is audible in this poem through the use of rhetorical questions which, significantly, remain unanswered. Commenting on the culmination of the lyrical subject’s desperation in the final stanza, Erhard Bahr writes: “Die Bestialisierung des Menschen wird in den verzweifelten Fragen an die Mçrder thematisiert. Die Unfaßbarkeit der Grausamkeit, zu der diese Mçrder fhig sind, kommt […] zum Ausdruck. Die rhetorische Frage ist hier ad absurdum gefhrt: ihre existenzielle Unbeantwortbarkeit wird offenbar.” (Bahr 1980: 75) By the final lines of the poem, Sachs has distorted all familiar imagery; the image of the innocent child’s hands described in the second stanza is now contrasted with the hands of the Nazi henchmen. In childhood these hands played music; they clutched their mother’s skirt; they pointed to words in a story book. In the final stanza, these same hands are strangling the victims. By this point in the poem, Sachs has surrendered any hope of comprehending how the one-time innocence of the perpetrators disappeared. It is important to bear in mind, however, that in spite of her despairing questions as to the ‘bestialisation’ of man under National Socialism, Sachs – and this is tremendously significant – humanises the perpetrators, ascribing to them very real guilt in the process. She thereby avoids any exculpatory notions

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of the Nazis as ‘demons,’ that myth so prevalent, as hitherto seen, amongst the post-war German populace. Moreover, this attempt at humanisation serves a similar purpose to Sachs’ utilisation of the hands imagery: it delivers the message that although the killing was carried out on an industrial scale, each individual perpetrator is culpable. It serves as a reminder to the reader that the en masse murder system was composed of individual human beings, whose guilt cannot be assuaged by virtue of their being merely part of that system. Another poem in which bodily parts play an important role is “Welche geheimen Wnsche” (In den Wohnungen des Todes (1947), sub-cycle Dein Leib in Rauch durch die Luft). This may be counted among Sachs’ most acoustic poems, since she succeeds in reproducing both a tangible sense of the fear stoked by the so-called “Blut und Boden” ideology and an audible sense of the militaristic, tyrannical and ‘bulldozer-like’ nature of the Nazi oppression: Welche geheimen Wnsche des Blutes, Trume des Wahnes und tausendfach Gemordetes Erdreich Ließen den schrecklichen Marionettenspieler entstehen? Er, der mit schumendem Munde Furchtbar umblies Die runde, kreisende Bhne seiner Tat Mit dem aschgrau ziehenden Horizont der Angst! O die Staubhgel, die, wie von bçsem Mond gezogen Die Mçrder spielten: Arme auf und ab, Beine auf und ab Und die untergehende Sonne des Sinaivolkes Als den roten Teppich unter den Fßen. Arme auf und ab, Beine auf und ab Und am ziehenden aschgrauen Horizont der Angst Riesengroß das Gestirn des Todes Wie die Uhr der Zeiten stehend. (Sachs 1961: 17)

In this poem Sachs takes familiar items of nature which belong to the customary imagery of romantic verse and distorts their original consolatory function: we are confronted with constructs such as ‘earth a thousand times murdered’ and ‘an ash-grey horizon of fear.’ These are yet further poignant examples that cast doubt upon Michael Braun’s earlier claim

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that Sachs, in her alleged unshaken trust in language, holds “unbeirrt” on to traditional imagery. Nelly Sachs is not a poet who continues to trustingly employ traditional imagery in its traditional sense; rather, we are confronted with a thorough deformation of conventional imagery. By distorting their traditional function within romantic poetry, Sachs makes clear the futility of existing images to represent the horror of the Holocaust. She makes very clear that she is writing ‘nach Auschwitz.’ This is noteworthy in light of the earlier discussion of the problematics of Holocaust representation. As Wolf Dieter Schnurre comments: “es kommt darauf an, daß der Gedichtverfertiger es sich klarmacht, nach Auschwitz zu dichten. Er kann schreiben worber er will. Auch ber Bume. Aber seine Bume mssen andere sein, als die, die in den Gedichten rauschten, die vor Auschwitz entstanden.” (Schnurre 1978: 125) Sachs’ moon, earth and horizons are certainly not the moon, earth and horizons of romantic poetry: hers are murderous, evil and permeated with fear. The inexplicability of the slaughter is expressed in the opening lines of this poem. “Why,” as Langer comments, “is replaced by What as if to suggest […] the impossibility of discovering causal relationships in a fundamentally irrational situation” (Langer 1975: 26). Whilst the term ‘secret cravings of blood’ recreates the deep-seated hatred that lay at the core of National Socialism, it also has an accusatory function: Sachs accuses those who followed the murderous National Socialist ‘doctrine’ of having ‘dreamed up’ the ‘machinery’ that swallowed up millions of lives, so profound was their anti-Semitic hatred. “Geheime Wnsche des Blutes” is thus a highly effective representational construct; after all, we usually associate “geheime Wnsche” with unfulfilled desires in the positive sense. In National Socialist doctrine, however, it was blood in the form of a million-fold slaughter that was ‘dreamed up.’ Sachs then proceeds to use animal attributes in her description of the main perpetrator “Er,” this pronoun being a probable reference to Hitler himself. (cf. Bahr 1980: 76) With his animal-like ‘foaming’ mouth, he blew over the ‘stage of his deed’which is described as having an ash-grey ‘horizon of fear.’ The choice of colour is important here in terms of connotation; this horizon, as Anita Riede comments, “impliziert mit seinem attributiven Bestimmungswort ‘Asche’ die Ermorderung des jdischen Volkes in den Konzentrationslagern” (Riede 2001: 75). The lines “Arme auf und ab, / Beine auf und ab” are an unmistakable allusion to the terrifying uniformity and dictatorial oppression of the gigantic Nazi army. In these lines Sachs makes the ruthless ‘preußischer Stechschritt’ – attributed by association to the Nazi machine – audible to the reader. And while the Nazis

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march, the sun begins to set. Yet again, however, Sachs’ sun is not of the same order as times gone by. Rather, it is a red carpet composed of the blood of the countless victims. The repetition of “Arme auf und ab / Beine auf und ab” at the start of the final stanza expresses the tortuous incessancy of the murderous Nazi tread on this ‘carpet’ of coagulating blood. This poem can be considered profoundly anti-redemptive: the future is shrouded in darkness – “die untergehende Sonne” – while on the ‘horizon of fear’ a ‘star of death’ looms like a gigantic clock face functioning as a reminder to humanity of the depths to which mankind can sink. When reading this poem, it is important to bear in mind that although Sachs makes direct reference to Hitler by mentioning the puppet master and by using the capitalised pronoun “Er” in the first and second stanzas, the charge cannot be laid against her that she attributes the blame entirely to Hitler, exculpating those who were supposedly ‘misled’ by him in the process. Sachs makes it clear through the repetition of “Arme auf und ab / Beine auf und ab” – a reference to Hitler’s mass following – that those who supported the ‘Blut und Boden’ ideology are equally culpable. This is a significant element that Erhard Bahr overlooks in his assessment. (cf. Bahr 1980: 76) Sachs does not present the masses as rendered powerless by a manipulative ‘puppet master,’ that escapist myth so widespread amongst the general populace in the post-war period. Having been supposedly deprived of their capacities to identify right from wrong as a result of the ‘magic-like’ manipulative force of Hitler, the masses could consider themselves innocent of the crimes committed ‘in their name.’ The rhetorical question posed in the first stanza is evidence that this was definitively not the message that Sachs was attempting to deliver: she implicates the general German populace by emphasising that the people’s ‘secret cravings of blood’ allowed the ‘puppet master’ to come to power in the first instance. That Sachs considered the guilt of the masses to be widespread is further evident in “Die Zuschauenden” (In den Wohnungen des Todes (1947), sub-cycle Dein Leib in Rauch durch die Luft), a poem that thematises the appalling consequences of indifference and passivity towards the victimisation of others: Ihr Zuschauenden Unter deren Blicken getçtet wurde. Wie man auch einen Blick im Rcken fhlt, So fhlt ihr an eurem Leibe Die Blicke der Toten.

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Wieviel brechende Augen werden euch ansehn Wenn ihr aus den Verstecken ein Veilchen pflckt? Wieviel flehend erhobene Hnde In dem mrtyrerhaft geschlungenen Gezweige Der alten Eichen? Wieviel Erinnerung wchst im Blute Der Abendsonne? O die ungesungenen Wiegenlieder In der Turteltaube Nachtruf – Manch einer htte Sterne herunterholen kçnnen, Nun muß es der alte Brunnen fr ihn tun! Ihr Zuschauenden, Die ihr keine Mçrderhand erhobt, Aber die ihr den Staub nicht von eurer Sehnsucht Schtteltet, Die ihr stehen bliebt, dort, wo er zu Licht Verwandelt wird. (Sachs 1961: 20)

Helmut Geißner has argued that this poem goes some way towards explaining why poetry after Auschwitz can no longer be as it was: “Vielleicht gibt dieses Gedicht Antwort, warum es […] keine ungebrochenen Naturgedichte geben kann; warum daneben z. B. Carossas ‘Alter Brunnen’ beinahe lppisch wirkt mit seinen ‘vollzhligen Sternen’; warum das deutsche Gedicht nicht mehr so sein kann wie frher.” (Geißner 1961: 4) Geißner’s attribution of such significance to this particular poem becomes appreciable upon close examination. Sachs once again addresses the perpetrators – in this case those who stood idly by are considered equally guilty by virtue of their inaction and pretence of ignorance. The first stanza contains some of the most severe lines to be found in the entire body of Sachs’ work. The use of the passive voice – “getçtet wurde” – ironises the onlookers’ standard defence that the extermination of six million people occurred without their knowledge. The threefold repetition of the noun ‘Blick’ exerts a powerful effect: it brings the motif of the gaze into focus. Sachs uses this motif both as an accusatory tool – the killing took place under the gaze of those who looked on – and as a device of admonition in terms of the price the bystanders will pay: Sachs cautions that they will forever ‘feel’ the reverse ‘gaze’ of the murdered victims upon their own bodies. The verb ‘fhlen’ lends the gaze motif – “[den] Blicke[n] der Toten” – a penetrative effect: the reader conjures up the image of the countless vacant stares of the dead burning holes in the bodies of the bystanders.

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Sachs’ indictment of the bystanders continues in the second stanza. She cautions that in the post-Shoah world these same vacant stares of the dead will observe the everyday activities of those who failed to act during the suffering. She then proceeds with a relentless distortion of traditional descriptive vocabulary: the branches of the oak tree are transformed into mangled, countless hands begging for help, while memories are described as ‘congealing’ in the blood of the evening sun. Yet again Sachs employs traditional romantic imagery but thoroughly deforms it: she works with what remains of language after its abuse and engineers the linguistic means at her disposal in her attempt to bear witness. The reader then observes a transition from a tone of indictment to one of mourning. The reference to cradle songs represents the mourning of lost innocence and prematurely truncated lives, while the employment of the subjunctive suggests profound sadness at the thought of things that might have been. In the final stanza, the bystanders’ complicit status is emphasised once again, the adverb ‘aber’ suggesting that although they did not physically raise a ‘murderous hand,’ their complicity is beyond question. The bystanders, as Kathrin Bower writes, “are equivalent to accomplices because of their dust-covered inertia” (Bower 2000: 23). They halted and looked on – “Die ihr stehen bliebt” – but failed to ‘shake off ’ the dust of apathy. The poem “Chor der Waisen” (In den Wohnungen des Todes (1947), sub-cycle Chçre nach der Mitternacht) is another instance of direct indictment. Critics, generally speaking, have read this poem in terms of lament. This is a questionable interpretation, however, given that the interpretative capital that would support such an evaluation is, in my view, entirely lacking. Henning Falkenstein, to take just one example, has argued that Sachs presents “Klage” here but not “Anklage” (Falkenstein 1984: 32 – 33), when, arguably, the poem can be counted among Sachs’ most accusatory works: Wir Waisen Wir klagen der Welt! Herabgehauen hat man unseren Ast Und ins Feuer geworfen – Brennholz hat man aus unseren Beschtzern gemacht – Wir Waisen liegen auf den Feldern der Einsamkeit. Wir Waisen Wir klagen der Welt: In der Nacht spielen unsere Eltern Verstecken mit uns – Hinter den schwarzen Falten der Nacht Schauen uns ihre Gesichter an,

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Sprechen ihre Mnder: Drrholz waren wir in eines Holzhauers Hand – Aber unsere Augen sind Engelaugen geworden, Und sehen euch an, Durch die schwarzen Falten der Nacht Blicken sie hindurch – Wir Waisen Wir klagen der Welt: Steine sind unser Spielzeug geworden, Steine haben Gesichter, Vater– und Muttergesichter Sie verwelken nicht wie Blumen, sie beissen nicht wie Tiere – Und sie brennen nicht wie Drrholz, wenn man sie in den Ofen wirft – Wir Waisen wir klagen der Welt: Welt warum hast du uns die weichen Mtter genommen Und die Vter, die sagen: Mein Kind du gleichst mir! Wir Waisen gleichen niemand mehr auf der Welt! O Welt Wir klagen dich an! (Sachs 1961: 54)

The opening lines of this poem are among some of the most poignant to be found in Sachs’ entire body of poetry. They demonstrate plainly that Sachs’ work, contrary to the press reports that accompanied her various literary awards, does not deliver an uncomplicated reconciliatory message. We are presented with the image of branches being cut down – a likely allusion to the violent tearing apart of the family unit – as loved ones were ‘thrown’ into the fires of the crematoria. The orphans are left in a state of absolute vulnerability: those whose responsibility it was to protect them were wholly stripped of their dignity and their humanity and were used as mere “Brennholz.” Sachs’ use of the term ‘man’ in relation to the perpetrators may be considered a stylistic device with a purpose similar to that of the hands motif in the poem “Hnder der Todesgrtner” analysed above: it reminds the reader of the individuality of each perpetrator. Sachs once again avoids any escapist notions of individual perpetrators having merely acted amidst an anonymous murder machinery. The use of the hyphen at the end of lines four and five may be considered a marker of limits: limits in terms of what the poetic voice is capable of expressing and a moral limit that may not be transgressed; the reader is reminded of the dignity that must, above all else, be afforded the victims. The description of the orphans lying “auf den Feldern der Einsamkeit” in line six serves to drive home the sense of the never-ending loneliness they are forced to endure, while their absent dead loved ones paradoxically saturate each line. Sachs then presents her reader with the, ini-

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tially pleasant, image of murdered parents appearing to their children in the black folds of the night. This is, however, immediately distorted into the very disconcerting image of these same parents’ mouths recalling the unspeakable crimes that were committed against them. Sachs’ use of the present tense at this juncture is significant in terms of refuting those assessments that evaluate her work as reconciliatory: “Hinter den schwarzen Falten der Nacht / schauen uns ihre Gesichter an, / sprechen ihre Mnder: / Drrholz waren wir in eines Holzhauers Hand – /” [my emphasis]. The present tense is an indication that the crimes have not been forgotten; Sachs’ aim is to render the memory of Auschwitz an agonizing actuality. This point is further emphasised by the enduring image of the stone; each time the orphan plays with this new “Spielzeug,” the countless faces of the Shoah victims re-appear. The line “Sie verwelken nicht wie Blumen” is similarly an unambiguous reference to the fact that not only have the crimes not been forgotten, they will never be forgotten. At this stage, Sachs affords the victims the dignity of which they had been robbed in the death camps: the image of the victims ‘biting like animals’ as they are thrown into the fires of the crematoria and burning like dry wood is replaced by the simple image of “Vater- und Muttergesichter.” The use of anaphora “Wir Waisen / Wir klagen der Welt” serves as an effective crescendo to the final lines, at which point the poem becomes a renewed and poignant accusation of both the perpetrators and the world that looked on. “O der weinenden Kinder Nacht” (In den Wohnungen des Todes (1947), sub-cycle Dein Leib in Rauch durch die Luft), a poem that deals solely with the murder of children in the death camps, has an equally accusatory tone: O der weinenden Kinder Nacht! Der zum Tode gezeichneten Kinder Nacht! Der Schlaf hat keinen Eingang mehr. Schreckliche Wrterinnen Sind an die Stelle der Mtter getreten, haben den falschen Tod in ihre Handmuskeln gespannt, Sen ihn in die Wnde und ins Geblk – berall brtet es in den Nestern des Grauens. Angst sugt die Kleinen statt der Muttermilch. Zog die Mutter noch gestern Wie ein weißer Mond den Schlaf heran, Kam die Puppe mit dem fortgekßten Wangenrot In den einen Arm, Kam das ausgestopfte Tier, lebendig

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In der Liebe schon geworden, In den andern Arm, – Weht nun der Wind des Sterbens, Blst die Hemden ber die Haare fort, Die niemand mehr kmmen wird. (Sachs 1961: 10)

In this poem death is omnipresent, as Sachs attempts to depict a night scene in the death camps. The children have been literally ‘branded’ for death. While this can of course be interpreted as denoting the numbers tattooed on the inmates’ hands, it may also be a reference to their physical marking in the form of the yellow star before the onslaught of the wholesale massacre and, as such, a damning accusation of those who idly stood by during the initial stages of the Nazi terror. Night is associated with death and fear, and the pre- and post-Auschwitz time division is drawn up: the child of yesterday fell asleep in an innocent and safe environment with its mother and stuffed pet. The child in Auschwitz is torn from its mother and herded in among thousands of others to await death and, in a terrifying irony, the new “Wrterinnen” are the SS guards. The image of ‘tightening tendons’ recreates the sense of trepidation at the oncoming ‘false death,’ a likely allusion to the premature, unnatural and undignified death that the camp inmates suffered. In this first stanza, Sachs attempts to present the sense of terror stoked by the camp guards: death is ‘sown’ onto the walls and into the beams of the camp. The act of sowing is traditionally associated with growth and life. In Auschwitz, however, it was death that was ‘planted,’ and in this poem it is the “schreckliche Wrterinnen” who are the planters. The verb ‘sen’ evokes the ubiquity of death in the camps: “[d]iese Saat”, as Helmut Geißner writes, “durchdringt alles, setzt sich berall fest” (Geißner 1961: 2). The use of the verb ‘brten’ in relation to ‘nests of horror’ evokes the image of terrified children huddled into corners, a complete contrast to the cosy and safe ‘nest’ that was the home in the pre-Auschwitz world. The lack of an explicit subject in this line – “berall brtet es in den Nestern des Grauens” – suggests that death was being ‘sown’ on such a massive scale that it perversely began to take on a ‘life’ of its own. The child no longer has the protection of the mother, as alluded to by the complete distortion of the the hitherto life-giving process ‘sugen’; it now suckles on fear: “die bebrteten Nester und die saugenden Kleinen sind ins entsetzliche Paradox verschrnkt: ‘Nester des Grauens,’

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‘Angst statt Muttermilch’”1 (Geißner 1961: 2). The contrast between the language of the two stanzas, that is, between the simple language gestures from the child’s world in the second stanza (“die Puppe,” “das ausgestopfte Tier”) and the terrifying language of the death camp in the first (“der zum Tode gezeichneten Kinder Nacht,” “Schreckliche Wrterinnen,” “in den Nestern des Grauens,” “Angst sugt die Kleinen”) reminds the reader of the wholesale perversion of life that Auschwitz represented. In the final lines of the poem, Sachs proceeds to describe ‘the wind of death’ that blows through the camp. This is quite possibly an allusion to the deathly gas inhaled by the victims in the gas chambers. This ‘wind of death’ dishevels the child’s hair and the ensuing relative clause “die niemand mehr kmmen wird,” suggests that Sachs does not hold out on any salvatory or redemptive gesture. In the poem “Zahlen” (Sternverdunkelung (1949), sub-cycle berlebende), Sachs explicitly addresses the total loss of individuality in the death camps. Here, the perpetrator motif is presented by way of further enumerating the specifics of the extermination process: Als Eure Formen zu Asche versanken in die Nachtmeere, wo Ewigkeit in die Gezeiten Leben und Tod splt – erhoben sich Zahlen – (gebrannt einmal in eure Arme damit niemand der Qual entginge) erhoben sich Meteore aus Zahlen, gerufen in die Rume darin Lichterjahre wie Pfeile sich strecken und die Planeten aus den magischen Stoffen des Schmerzes geboren werden – Zahlen – mit ihren Wurzeln aus Mçrdergehirnen gezogen und schon eingerechnet in des himmlischen Kreislaufs blaugederter Bahn. (Sachs 1961: 110)

1

This distortion of the verb “sugen” reappears in the poem “Mund” where the mouth is disturbingly described as suckling on death: “Mund / saugend am Tod” (Sachs 1965: 344).

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The reader is very quickly drawn into a most uncanny atmosphere. The use of the term “Formen” in relation to the victims in the opening line conjures up countless silhouettes, each individual victim having become a mere undifferentiated ‘number’ among the millions exterminated. This opening line can be interpreted as an allusion to a concrete aspect of the annihilation process, namely, the reduction of the victims to ashes in the crematoria. Sachs then situates her poem: the scene is night. The plural neologism “Nachtmeere” suggests little hope of night being replaced by day, however. The countless, ghostly numbers tattooed onto the prisoners’ arms, representing the incalculable number of victims of the Nazi extermination, begin to rise up into this night sky. The use of parentheses immediately attracts the reader’s eye. Typically used to provide supplementary information, Sachs’ use of parentheses, instead of detracting the reader’s attention from the lines contained therein, leads us directly there, due to the fact that parenthesis is a feature otherwise virtually absent in her work. The words within thus acquire additional significance. Sachs’ employment of this formal device has design, naturally. She is attempting to draw attention to the manner in which each victim was thoroughly stripped of anything resembling dignity in the camps: they were ‘branded’ like cattle in order to ensure that the extermination process was as ‘comprehensive’ as possible. The tattooed arm can thus be considered a symbol par excellence of what H. G. Adler calls “de[s] verwaltete[n] Mensch[en]” (H. G. Adler 1974). Along with the infamous vacant stare of the ‘Muselmann’ and the endless piles of undifferentiated corpses, these tattooed numbers remain among the most horrifying images of National Socialism. Sachs proceeds to use astronomical terms as a means of conveying the path of destruction that Auschwitz has left in its wake: the image of ‘meteors of numbers’ brings to mind the spectacular brightness associated with a meteor shower. Brightness, however, is present in the poem not as a symbol of hope, but rather as a tool that exposes the numbers on the victims’ arms. Sachs creates a haunting spectre, a world in which the survivor cannot escape the image of the unspeakable crimes perpetrated against the millions who perished. Thus, as Karin Bower comments, the numbers “remain burned into the poetic persona’s memory long after the bodies […] have ceased to exist.” Bower describes this as “an ironic triumph of a program of depersonalization which had succeeded in systematically effacing individual identities” (Bower 2000: 189). Jeremy Adler makes a similar point to Bower with reference to the photographic ‘emblems’ of the death camps. He argues that concentrating on the sheer number of victims, as we do when contemplating

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photographs of inmates or corpses, defines the enormity of the crime without regard to the individual sufferers. Given the scale of the suffering, he writes “this needs no defence.” Adler goes on to argue, however, that the disadvantage of such a practice lies in the fact that it “metaphysically reasserts the position of the perpetrators and perpetuates their own master-slave ideology: the perspective of the prisoners as victims becomes absolute at the expense of their humanity.” He concludes that memory condemns the victims to “everlasting subjugation,” and he describes this as “a central, but […] largely unreflected aporia of our collective remembrance” (J. Adler 2000: 77). In the final lines Sachs attempts to address this very aporia by affording the victims the dignity of which they were robbed: the allusion to roots in the lines “Zahlen – mit ihren Wurzeln / aus Mçrdergehirnen gezogen” may be interpreted as a reference to the individual victim carrying the number. Sachs attempts, in other words, to represent the reality of mass annihilation and, at the same time, rehumanise the victims by re-ascribing to them some semblance of the individuality of which they were robbed. What these six poems have in common is their direct engagement with the perpetrators of the million-fold massacre. They provide strong evidence against claims that the perpetrators find no place in her work and the assertions that the perpetrators find forgiveness in her work. Sachs not only accuses the Nazis of the mass slaughter and indicts the passivity of those who stood by, she does so by reminding the reader that they were people, not monsters and, crucially, not just an anonymous mass of automated murderers; she casts them as individuals responsible for their crimes as opposed to mere ‘cogs’ in the Nazi machinery. Alongside direct accusation on the part of the poetic voice, Sachs also indicts the perpetrators by providing the mass dead collective and the conscience of the Holocaust survivor respectively with a voice.

3.4 Prosopopoeia as a Representational Device Prosopopoeia is a literary tool that Sachs frequently employs as a means of ‘equipping’ the anonymous collective of dead victims with words. As a rhetorical device, it identifies the specific rhetorical act of giving a voice to and speaking in the name of another. Prosopopoeia’s imaginary status, as Paul de Man explains, is announced by its name: “‘prosopon-poiein’ means to give a face and therefore implies that the original face can be missing or nonexistent.” (De Man 1984: 57) In addition to ventriloquis-

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ing the dead, Sachs also uses this device as a means of portraying the trauma of the surviving victims and, interestingly, the tormented conscience of the perpetrator. Prosopopoeia is an especially prominent device in the sub-cycle Chçre nach der Mitternacht (1947), where it serves to trouble the reader, to loosen traditional binaries and to undermine comfortable categories. It is employed by Sachs as a literary tool to provide the victims with a voice and to make tangible within the space of the poem the presence of the dead of the Shoah. Sachs composes her titles in Chçre nach der Mitternacht in such a way that the reader is forced to situate the poems historically; as Christine Rospert writes: “Schon in den Titeln der Gedichte deutet sich an, daß die verschiedenen Stimmen eines ‘Wir’ aus dem Blick zurck sich definieren; sie sprechen als ‘Gerettete’ (von was?), als ‘Waisen’ (wodurch dazu gemacht?), als ‘Trçster’ (wen? Warum?).” (Rospert 2004: 40) In other words, Sachs makes the fact of the Holocaust present before a single line of the main body of the poem has even been read. The poem “Chor der Toten” serves as a point of departure. The use of prosopopopeia in this poem is as an exemplary instance of a poetic device of ‘Verstummen’ assuming representational value: Wir von der schwarzen Sonne der Angst Wie Siebe Zerstochenen – Abgeronnene sind wir vom Schweiß der Todesminute. Abgewelkt an unserem Leibe sind die uns angetanen Tode Wie Feldblumen abgewelkt an einem Hgel Sand. O ihr, die ihr noch den Staub grßt als einen Freund Die ihr, redender Sand zum Sande sprecht: Ich liebe dich. Wir sagen euch: Zerrissen sind die Mntel der Staubgeheimnisse Die Lfte, die man in uns erstickte, Die Feuer, darin man uns brannte, Die Erde, darin man unseren Abhub warf. Das Wasser, das mit unserem Angstschweiß dahinperlte Ist mit uns aufgebrochen und beginnt zu glnzen. Wir Toten Israels sagen euch: Wir reichen schon einen Stern weiter In unseren verborgenen Gott hinein. (Sachs 1961: 56)

The title of the poem expresses an impossibility: the dead, an absent collective, are made present as part of a choral song. The break that Auschwitz has occasioned in terms of literary convention is made clear by Sachs’

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misuse of the chorus. As Rospert points out, Sachs’ chorus deviates significantly from the chorus associated with Greek tragedy, since hers has the significant additional element of self-reflection, an element that is lacking in the former. In other words, Sachs’ ‘Chorus of the Dead’ reflects both on the crimes committed and on the fact that the chorus, i. e. writing itself, has been damaged almost to the point of destruction by the mass atrocities. Her chorus represents “ein selbstreflektieres Sprechen – ein Klagegesang, eine Totenklage, die auf sich selbst zurckbezogen ist” (Rospert 2004: 42). The image of the sieve in the opening lines presents a collective ‘we’ as not merely injured, but rather so grievously harmed that a ‘black sun of fear’ has pierced countless holes in their bodies. Once again, Sachs’ sun is not a life-giving force; the traditional associations of this familiar image are distorted anew. The sun, traditionally associated with light, warmth, life and hope has turned black in the postAuschwitz world; it rouses only fear. It retains its burning properties, but no longer for the purpose of providing warmth from afar: it is now a relentless sun of terror that burns countless holes in the skin of the victims subjected to the Nazi terror: “Schwarz, zerstçrend,” Anderegg comments, “gewinnt sie [die Sonne] Eigenwert als Gegenbild zur Normalvorstellung einer lichtspendenden, lebensfçrdernden Sonne” (Anderegg 1970: 32). The image of black rays that Sachs evokes can be read as an allusion to the far-reaching and all-encompassing sphere of the Nazi terror. Rospert reads the oxymoron “schwarze Sonne” with its piercing form and penetrating effect as a likely reference to the Nazi swastika: “Die Schwrze und die stechend spitze Form dieser Sonne und ihrer Strahlen lassen sich […] als Anklang an das Symbol des Nazi-Faschismus schlechthin verstehen: an das Hakenkreuz, ein schwarzes Sonnenrad.” (Rospert 2004: 54) This is an interesting interpretation. For the victims of the Holocaust, this terrifying symbol of National Socialism did not represent the supposed ‘greatness’ of the ‘Third Reich’; rather it represented the allpervasive nature of the Nazi threat for those deemed to be ‘Untermenschen’ for whom this ‘Reich’ had no place. The accusatory overtones contained in the participle construction in the fourth line – “die uns angetanen Tode” – are clearly audible, while the use of chiasmus in lines four and five is an extremely effective representational device within the thematic constraints of the poem, since the chiastic structure directly connects “Hgel Sand” with “Leibe.” The resulting image is one of piledup corpses: “durch die chiastisch-anaphorische Wiederholungsstruktur […] treten die ‘Leibe’ mit dem ‘Hgel Sand’ in Beziehung. […] ‘Der Hgel Sand’ spricht von einer Anhufung, einem bereinanderlie-

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gen, welche(s) implizit das bereinander toter Leiber miteinschließt.” (Rospert 2004: 56 – 57) Although the typical chiastic ‘(a)-(b)-(b)-(a)’ pattern is not particularly strong in this instance – (a) “Abwelkt an unserem Leibe” (b) “sind die uns angetanen Tode” (b) “Wie Feldblumen” (a) “abgewelkt an einem Hgel Sand” – the repetition of “abgewelkt” is very striking, as is the fact that this verb is followed each time by the preposition “an,” and this makes the two ‘(a)’ sections of the chiasmus strong counterparts.2 Together, they leave behind a haunting feeling of refrain. Aside from the tonal connection between “die” and “wie,” the ‘(b)’ parts are not grammatically linked, but together they form a significant central nexus that links “die uns angetanen Tode” with “Feldblumen.” The irony of these “Feldblumen” as flowers of death which results from the chiastic arrangement of these lines is very poignant indeed. Further close observation reveals that, strictly speaking, what confronts us here are in fact lines that are both parallel and chiastic; parallel since “Leibe” is metonymically related to “Tode,” while “Hgel” is related to “Feldblumen,” and chiastic on the basis that “Leibe” is then correlated with “Hgel,” while “Tode” interacts with “Feldblumen.” Although it is impossible to know with certainty whether an author creates inverted parallel structures intentionally, the ethical gravity of the image that results from the structure, namely, an image of piled up corpses, would suggest the likelihood of a conscious employment of chiasmus here to create this disturbing effect. The chiastic structure thus extends this passage greatly beyond the meaning of individual words, resulting in the construction of images that may be read as unmistakable references to the Holocaust atrocities. The repetition of relative clauses and sentence structure in verse two lend the poem a sense of urgency – the reader senses that the poetic voice is on the verge of suffocation. On a number of occasions, Sachs herself expressed the urgency of the task of bearing witness when confronted with muteness induced by breathlessness. In a letter to Walter Berendsohn in May 1946 she wrote: Mein Leben ist so in Schmerz zerrissen, daß ich jedesmal wie in Feuer tauche, um mir die Worte zu dem sonst Unsglichen zu holen. Immer wieder berkommt mich das Zagen, das mich stumm machen will vor dem bermch2

I am indebted to John W. Welch’s article on the criteria for identifying and evaluating chiasmus (cf. Welch 1995) and to Professor Welch himself, who brought the prepositional aspect of the chiasmus in these lines to my attention.

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tigen, und es kommen die Nchte, wo es mich berwltigt und ich es zitternd wagen muß. (Sachs 1974a: 131)

In this letter the proximity between the looming threat of ‘Verstummen’ and creativity in defiance of this threat – ‘es wagen’– comes to the fore in a manner similar to the aporetic tension so perceptible in Adorno’s reflections. In the poem under consideration, Sachs presents us with a similar sense of petrified daring on the part of the poetic persona, and this is especially palpable in the aforementioned rushed declarative sentences of the second stanza; it is as if Sachs is attempting to recount the crimes committed against the victims before the poetic voice is suppressed by imminent muteness. The enormous scale of the destruction is clearly indicated by the assertion that the Shoah has destroyed even the four cosmological elements, the very basis of human existence. The original functions of the elements have been warped to the core: previously air gave life to the lungs; during the Shoah the ‘air’ in the gas chambers smothered the lungs; previously fire provided warmth, during the Shoah the fire in the crematoria completed the ‘process’ begun in the gas chamber; previously the earth was used for the repose of the dead, during the Shoah it became a mass grave in which the victims were ‘disposed of ’ – the Nazi description of the Jews as ‘vermin’ and ‘refuse,’ which served to upkeep the ‘logic’ and ‘necessity’ of the murderous program, resonates here with Sachs’ use of the term “Abhub” – previously water was a life-giving force, during the Shoah water appeared in the form of “Angstschweiß.” Sachs’ dead have not reached another redemptory world; rather, they maintain a ghostly omnipresence in this world, this uncanny omnipresence being a probable allusion to their prematurely truncated lives; the dead, as Lawrence Langer writes, are all-too present “because of the manner of their absence” (Langer 1982: 244). The final lines of this poem “Wir reichen schon einen Stern weiter / In unseren verborgenen Gott hinein,” have been read by numerous critics as Sachs’ affirmation of religious redemption. Anderegg, for example, claims “der Tod ist nicht mehr als Leid, sondern – bloßer Durchgang – als Annherung an Gott relevant” (Anderegg 1970: 34). Firstly, the claim that Sachs sees death as “bloßer Durchgang,” a mere transition en route to God, is to undermine the centrality that the concept of the premature, unnatural, ‘false’ camp death holds in her work. Secondly, the argument that an uncomplicated concept of divine redemption is present in Sachs’ work is at odds with Sachs’ overall stance in relation to the divine, a fact that will become clearly evident at a later point in

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this study with respect to Sachs’ employment of Biblical archetypes. Whilst it is true that Sachs rarely presents her readers with nihilistic statements, it cannot be argued that she held an unswerving confidence in divine transcendence. “To the end of her life,” as Lawrence Langer writes, “Sachs refused to lapse into nihilism […], but she insisted that we be absolutely honest about the terms on which we accept our continued existence (Langer 1982: 246). The adverb “weiter” in the penultimate line suggests that Sachs views a reconnection to the divine as neither an assured nor uncomplicated process. Another poem from this sub-cycle in which the device of prosopopoeia assumes an important role is “Chor der Schatten”: Wir Schatten, O wir Schatten! Schatten von Henkern Geheftet am Staube eurer Untaten – Schatten von Opfern Zeichnend das Drama eures Blutes an eine Wand. O wir hilflosen Trauerfalter Eingefangen auf einem Stern, der ruhig weiterbrennt Wenn wir in Hçllen tanzen mssen. Unsere Marionettenspieler wissen nur noch den Tod. Goldene Amme, die du uns nhrst Zu solcher Verzweiflung, Wende ab O Sonne dein Angesicht Auf daß auch wir versinken – Oder laß uns spiegeln eines Kindes jauchzend Erhobene Finger Und einer Libelle leichtes Glck ber dem Brunnenband (Sachs 1961: 57)

In the opening lines of this poem, the reader is confronted with a disconcerting scene. The suffering at the hands of the gargantuan death machine is being played out on a wall in the form of shadows. We see the shadows of the innumerable victims alongside those of the perpetrators committing their crimes. Interestingly, whilst prosopopoeia was employed in “Chor der Toten” to ventriloquise the dead victims, the device is used in this poem as a means of giving a voice to the tortured consciences of the surviving victims and, crucially also, the consciences of the perpetrators, both groups constituting absent faces. In the case of the victims, re-living the hell of Auschwitz alludes to the trauma that haunts the survivors of the camps in the manner described by Dominic LaCapra, namely, “the tendency to compulsively repeat, relive, be possessed by […] trau-

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matic scenes of the past. […] [W]hat is denied or repressed […] does not disappear; it returns in a transformed, at times disfigured and disguised manner” (LaCapra 1998: 10). The shadows of scenes from Auschwitz ‘dancing’ on the walls may be seen as an example of such disfiguration. The use of the present participle “zeichnend” suggests furthermore that this is an unremitting process for the survivor. The first strophe of this poem thus lends itself to interpretation within the framework of survivor trauma. As such, it can be read as a prescient commentary by Sachs on a subject that would later come to permeate psychological discourse on the Holocaust. In the third line, the shadows of the perpetrators are described as ‘bound’ to the dust of their deeds, a likely allusion to the impossibility of casting off guilt. Similar images of entrapment permeate the first verse. The image of the helpless, trapped moth brings to mind the panic that ensues when a winged creature attempts to escape a situation of ensnarement. This motif could be interpreted in two ways. Firstly, it may be a reference to the panic that broke out among the camp inmates in that space of ultimate entrapment, namely, the gas chamber. It could also be a reference to the panic experienced by the Holocaust survivor who attempts to give voice to the suffering, whilst continually ‘entrapped’ in a state of muteness. It may be read, in other words, as a reflection on the post-Auschwitz crisis of expression. The gradual burning of the trapped moth is underway while the shadows dance ‘in hell.’ The temporal phrase “wenn” in the line “Wenn wir in Hçlle tanzen mssen” indicates that this ‘dance’ is very much in the present for the Holocaust survivor. The use of the term “ruhig” in the phrase “ruhig weiterbrennt” does not arouse a sensation of calm and quiet in the reader. Rather, it generates a sense of the tortuousness and of the perpetuity of this burning entrapped state in which the Holocaust suvivor finds himself. The first stanza closes with a profoundly non-reconciliatory message: “Unsere Marionettenspieler wissen nur noch den Tod”: the minds of the puppeteers – a recurrent metaphor in Sachs’ work for the Nazi henchmen – will be continually invaded by reminders of their role in the million-fold annihilation. In the second stanza the sun is addressed as “Goldene Amme”, and it momentarily regains its light- and life-giving properties. These properties are promptly cast off, however, with the introduction of the relative clause “die du uns nhrst / Zu solcher Verzweiflung.” This use of the verb “nhren” in relation to “Verzweiflung” sits very uncomfortably with the reader. The sun in the post-Shoah world ‘nurtures’ the survivors, not by providing light and warmth, but by increasing their despair. Like

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in the poem “Und berall,” the sun’s sole function now is to expose the shadows of victims and perpetrators, as the former mentally relive the Auschwitz hell. At this juncture, the ventriloquised consciences of both survivor and perpetrator call on the sun to turn away – “Wende ab O Sonne dein Angesicht” – so that the shadows which it exposes will disappear. This wish for the sun to hide its countenance has a different motive in both cases, of course. In the case of the victims, the sun serves only as a reminder of suffering and pain, as it lays bare on the walls the shadows of Auschwitz. For the perpetrators, on the other hand, the sun is a continual reminder of their guilt; its rays expose their “Untaten.” This is yet another instance of traditional images being distorted, calling into question yet again Braun’s claim regarding Sachs’ alleged unwavering embrace of traditional imagery. In the final lines it remains unsaid, but nonetheless apparent, that the respective calls for the shadows to disappear will remain unfulfilled. Sachs draws again on the notion of ‘Schattenverkauf ’ as an unrealisable option: the survivors cannot be free of their trauma, nor can the perpetrators ever be free of their guilt. Prosopopoeia serves in these poems as an extremely valuable representational device in terms of commenting on the key notions of survivor trauma and perpetrator guilt that would find such resonance in later post-war historical and psychological discourse. This personifying trope serves, on the one hand, in “Chor der Toten” as a means of speaking in the stead of the dead victims, in spite of the fact that their experience can never truly be known – the true witnesses, to draw on Levi once again, are those “who touched bottom” (Levi 1989: 83 – 84) – while in “Chor der Schatten”, it is used by the poetic persona to tap into the minds of both the surviving victims and – albeit to a far lesser degree – the perpetrators, thereby ascribing to Sachs’ poetry a sense of comprehensiveness in terms of perspective.

3.5 Sachs’ Nacht-Metaphorik: Reversing a Traditional Image Night can be counted among Sachs’ most frequently employed images. This motif, which permeates Romantic poetry, undergoes, like all preAuschwitz imagery, a fundamental alteration in her work. In her poetry night is consistently synonymous with the death-world of Auschwitz: “Nachtgrab” (Sachs 1961: 158), “Nachtfetzen” (Sachs 1961: 173) and “Rabennacht” (Sachs 1971: 57) are just some examples of the neologisms with which Sachs confronts her readers. These constructs represent a dis-

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tortion of the traditional concept of night almost beyond recognition. Langer describes Sachs’ use of such neologisms as an attempt to “use a process of linguistic annealing to squeeze fresh vision out of weary words” (Langer 1976/77: 322 – 25). The objective is to engineer yesterday’s futile language in an attempt to find adequate expression for the horrors of the Holocaust. Night in the pre-Shoah world was an interval between twilight and dawn; it facilitated sleep and escape in the form of dreams. For the Romantics it was a time of ‘Erkenntnis,’ inspiration and a heightened sense of and unity with nature. Sachs deviates from all such associations. In her poetry night is permanent; it is haunted and shattered by nightmares from the concentration camps. The poem “Aber in der Nacht” (Sternverdunkelung (1949), sub-cycle Im Geheimnis) is an excellent example of Sachs’ manipulation of this conventional image: Aber in der Nacht, wenn die Trume mit einem Luftzug Wnde und Zimmerdecke fortziehen, beginnt die Wanderung zu den Toten. Unter dem Sternstaub suchst du sie – Deine Sehnsucht baut an der Schwester – aus den Elementen, die sie verborgen halten, holst du sie herein bis sie aufatmet in deinem Bett – der Bruder aber ist um die Ecke gegangen und der Gatte zu hoch schon eingekehrt du lßt die Demut dich verstummen – Aber dann – wer hat die Reise unterbrochen – beginnt die Rckkehr Wie der kleinen Kinder Wehklagen erschrocken an der Erde bist du – Der Tod der Toten ist mit der Zimmerdecke herabgesunken – schtzend liegt mein Kopf auf deinem Herzen die Liebe – zwischen dir und dem Tod – So kommt die Dmmerung mit dem roten Sonnensamen hingestreut und die Nacht hat sich ausgeweint in den Tag – (Sachs 1961: 139)

This poem is thoroughly permeated by death. The scene is night and the survivor’s nightly – as suggested by the temporal conjunction “wenn” in the second line – “Wanderung zu den Toten” begins. The survivor’s sense

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of the ubiquity of the dead victims of the Holocaust comes to the fore; “die Ermordung in den Konzentrationslagern,” as Lehmann writes, “[fhrt] zu einer permanenten Prsenz des Todes fr den berlebenden […]. Opfer und berlebende befinden sich in demselben vom Tod bezeichneten Lebensraum” (Lehmann 1999: 12). There is an audible overtone of weariness in the concept of a ‘nightly trek’ to the dead. Indeed, it could be argued that Sachs uses the concept of the ‘trek’ as a metaphor for the dilemma of the writing process in the aftermath of Auschwitz: the lyrical subject continually attempts to recover, to ‘write’ the faces of the countless victims and, initially at least – as suggested by the image of walls drifting apart – there is some hope of succeeding in this endeavour. The strange atmosphere of these opening lines finds momentary reprieve in the second stanza: the survivor, longing desperately to see the faces of murdered loved ones attempts to imagine close family members ‘back to life.’ Some, however, are not recoverable, not even by the imagination. Instead, they blur into one mass collective, and the survivor is left ‘verstummt.’ This state of muteness is then rendered absolute by the resounding silence into which the sentence trails off, represented by the familiar dash. The sense of eeriness perceptible in the first stanza returns in the third stanza: the ‘trek to the dead’ of the opening stanza now finds its reverse: the poetic persona now embarks on her return journey: “Aber dann / […] / beginnt die Rckkehr.” Just before this return journey begins, a question is posed: “wer hat die Reise unterbrochen?” This could be interpreted as a reference to the interruption of the nightly “Wanderung zu den Toten,” the interruption, that is, of the poetic ‘journey’ to represent the Holocaust. The answer, although not directly provided, could in fact be in terms of ‘what’ rather than ‘who’: the inability to imagine the faces of loved ones, the inability to recover the dead disrupts the writing process. The poet attempts to ‘write’ the dead, but it is the sheer scale of the dead collective that renders this attempt futile, a fact evinced by Sachs’ reference in the sixth line of this stanza to the ‘double death’ suffered by the victims – “der Tod der Toten”. This is a commentary on the fact that in addition to being murdered, the victims were denied the dignity of an individual passing as a result of the industrialised nature of the extermination. In a letter to Berendsohn in 1948, Sachs states this explicitly in her comments on the coming to be of the sub-cycle to which this poem belongs: “Mein neuer Cyklus ‘Und reißend ist die Zeit’ ist aus der Herzensangst vor allem ‘mechanisierten’ Tod im Vergleich zum leisen natrlichen […] enstanden.” (Sachs 1974d: 144) The futility of all attempts at

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imagining individual faces may thus be read as a reference to both the anonymity that characterised death in Auschwitz and to the sheer volume of the collective that fell victim to the Nazi death machinery. The initial hope of recovering the dead suggested by the shifting walls in the opening stanza is now reversed; the bedroom ceiling begins to ‘sink downwards,’ evoking the impression of a claustrophobic and deathly atmosphere invading the room. The language of entrapment and claustrophobia in this stanza forms a complete contrast to the imagery contained in the opening stanza, where the walls and ceilings had begun to drift outwards. As they gradually close in, any initial hopes of connecting with loved ones, of ‘writing’ the victims back to life, are dashed. In the final stanza, the all-pervasiveness of night for the survivor is conveyed anew. Sachs undermines the reader’s expectations here; we anticipate reprieve with the onset of dawn, but dawn has been eclipsed by the darkness of night which now invades the light of day – “die Nacht hat sich ausgeweint / in den Tag.” Sachs avoids juxtaposing night and day, because for the survivor it is darkness that continually holds sway. The hyphen, in which the poem culminates compounds this darkness; it symbolises that night, and with it the omnipresence of death, are destined to be a perpetual and inescapable state for the Holocaust survivor. The poem “Da” (Teile dich Nacht (1966)) similarly thematises the ubiquity of death. It explores the invasion of the survivor’s mind by memories from the death camps: DA in der Nacht wo sie am schrecklichsten dunkelt bevor Tod sie wieder erhellt im Brennesselwald des Wahnsinns der die Bume hinaufklettert die Wunden am Mond zu khlen zurckgeworfen nach Ost und West die Hnde gestreckt Aufgang und Untergang in einer Umarmung zu fassen und verzehrt von den Flammenden morsches Holz den Himmel zu versçhnen – (Sachs 1971: 139)

This poem is an account of acute survivor trauma. The poetic voice focuses on a particular point during the night – as suggested by the adverb

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“Da” – at which it grows ‘horrifyingly’ dark. We are presented with the evocative image of hysteria in the form of stinging nettles weaving themselves around and climbing up the trees. This may be read as a metaphor for the invasion of the survivor’s mind by traumatic memories of the Holocaust, “das wahnhafte Wiedererleben” of the traumatic event, as Birgit Kellet-Stocker describes it (Keller-Stocker 1973: 133). The past participle “zurckgeworfen” suggests that the wounds on the moon – an allusion to the profundity of the destruction – cannot be healed. In the second half of the poem, hands – possibly those of the lyrical subject – are outstretched within this night-time scene in an attempt to contain within one ‘embrace’ the rise and fall of the Jewish people. This can be read as a poetic attempt at embracing within language the disaster that befell the Jewish population of Europe – their “Untergang.” As such, this can be considered an element of meta-poetic discourse. The futility of this attempt, however, is expressed unequivocally in the image of the flames consuming the victims’ demise: “Verzehrt von den Flammenden” is a likely reference to the total obliteration that the Holocaust represented: the crematoria were part of the annihilation machinery; they merely completed the ‘process’ begun in the gas chambers. The only thing remaining of the trees of the first half of the poem is wood rendered rotten by its infestation with hysteria. The infinitive construction followed by the mute dash in the closing line makes it clear that just as the moon’s wounds in the opening lines cannot be healed, neither can the earth regain the good will of the sky. This, I would argue, should be read less as a reference to conciliating a divinity offended by the evil of mankind, than as an allusion to the depth of the destruction that the Holocaust has left in its wake. There is no suggestion of potential release, since once night’s darkest moment has passed, it is ‘lit up’ afresh by death. The use of the verb ‘erhellen’ with “Tod” is unsettling. It becomes clear that contrary to the brighter state expected by the use of this verb and by virtue of the adverb “wieder,” night for the survivor consists solely of progressive stages of darkness. Sachs uses language to unsettle her reader’s expectations. Just as the mention of the word ‘dawn’ in the previous poem sets the reader up for reprieve, here too Sachs undermines her reader’s presumptions by creating an irreconcilable semantic link between the terms “Tod” and ‘erhellen.’ The only certainty she provides is that the reliving of the traumatic event begins anew. There is no suggestion that the disaster which the Holocaust represents is followed by a new order; “[t]he blossoms of solace,” as Lawrence Langer writes, “that once balanced pain with comfort do not flourish in Sachs’ landscape of death,” its very soil

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“resists attempts to find a soothing balm” (Langer 1982: 220). Sachs refuses to provide such a “balm”; she completely avoids the construction of a consoling, eschatological resolution. In the poem “Nacht Nacht” (Sternverdunkelung (1949), sub-cycle Und reißend ist die Zeit), Sachs makes further use of night imagery, and performs a step-by-step renunciation of all its traditional connotations: Nacht, Nacht, daß du nicht in Scherben zerspringst, nun wo die Zeit mit den reißenden Sonnen des Martyriums in deiner meergedeckten Tiefe untergeht – die Monde des Todes das strzende Erdendach in deines Schweigens geronnenes Blut ziehn – Nacht, Nacht, einmal warst du der Geheimnisse Braut schattenliliengeschmckt – In deinem dunklen Glase glitzerte die Fata Morgana der Sehnschtigen und die Liebe hatte ihre Morgenrose dir zum Erblhen hingestellt – Einmal warst du der Traummalereien jenseitiger Spiegel und orakelnder Mund – Nacht, Nacht, jetzt bist du der Friedhof fr eines Sternes schrecklichen Schiffbruch geworden – sprachlos taucht die Zeit in dir unter mit ihrem Zeichen: Der strzende Stein und die Fahne aus Rauch! (Sachs 1961: 76)

In this poem night imagery is used by Sachs as a framework to describe the chaos to which the world order has succumbed. The first stanza is replete with an almost incessant series of apocalyptic images, by means of which Sachs attempts to portray the depth of destruction that the Holocaust has left in its wake. Time is described as perishing alongside a ‘ravenous’ sun into the ‘sea-covered’ depths of the night. The construct “in deiner meergedeckten Tiefe” conjures up an image of drowning, indicating that, in the post-Shoah world, night has become a perpetual state in which even the sun now ‘drowns.’ The moon no longer exhibits a peaceful radiance; rather, it is directly linked with death. It is ‘dragging’ “das

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strzende Erdendach” – an image that evokes destruction on a monumental scale – into night’s ‘congealed blood of silence,’ the present participle ‘strzend’ suggesting a process of continuous collapse. The moon thus no longer exerts a stabilising gravitational pull on the earth’s rotational axis; instead, it causes the earth to crumble. The image of blood coagulation is, at once, a most disquieting and highly effective construct: disquieting, by virtue of the fact that the reader quickly associates it with the congealed blood of the victims, and highly effective owing to the connotations it evokes in terms of permanence: it serves as a reminder of the impenetrability of the deathly silence that envelops the night. It may thus by inference also be interpreted as a reference to the impenetrability of the silence that envelops the Shoah. In the second and third stanzas, Sachs creates the familiar ‘before / after’ time division. She subdivides time into pre- and post-Auschwitz eras – with Auschwitz functioning as the line of demarcation – thereby highlighting the fundamental rupture that has occurred. In this instance, she uses the time division as a means of reflecting on the destruction language that has endured. At this juncture in the poem, the reader is confronted with a plethora of images which suggests, as Lehmann comments, “eine lyrische Artikulationsform, die eine Grenzerfahrung […] mit der Opulenz der Bilder zu artikulieren sucht” (Lehmann 1999: 57), or, as Joan Peterson comments, “a mind […] so burdened that it must spin out metaphor on top of metaphor” (Peterson 2000: 197). In the ‘preAuschwitz’ world – as suggested by the adverb “einmal” – night was associated with the mysterious mirage of the Fata Morgana that sparkled in the night sky, giving night its mystical character. In the pre-Auschwitz world, words such as ‘bride,’ ‘lily,’ and ‘rose’ could be mentioned in the same breath as night. As “orakelnder Mund” and “jenseitiger Spiegel,” night foresaw and mirrored not the disaster that was to follow, but rather dreams. Sachs reflects here on some of the associations of night in Romantic poetry which no longer serve any purpose in a post-Auschwitz world. In this way, the poetic voice engages in a meta-literary discourse. In the post-Shoah world, night’s symbolic possibilities are completely altered: night is now a graveyard; it is associated with the shipwreck of a star – an unmistakable reference to the destruction that has taken place. Time, already sinking in the first stanza, now submerges “sprachlos” into the ‘sea-covered’ depths of night. Lehmann interprets the symbol of the stone in the closing lines as a symbol of the necessity of “verfestigte Erinnerung” (Lehmann 1999: 57) in the face of this speechlessness, as a metaphor for the necessity of bearing witness in spite of the

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enormity of the destruction. The symbolic properties of permamence that the stone image evokes certainly invite such a reading. However, the presence of the present participle ‘strzend’ allows Lehmann’s reading to be qualified somewhat: the participle form suggests that the stone is plummeting within the space of the poem. “Der strzende Stein” is thus a somewhat more ambivalent image than Lehmann suggests. It may be read as despair on the part of the poetic voice that the sheer scale of annihilation has rendered even the ability to remember futile. “Verfestigte Erinnerung” is certainly the desired objective, but an ultimately unrealisable one. A significant aspect of this poem is its anti-redemptory message: the apocalyptic imagery is not complemented by any suggestion of a redemptive outcome. Sachs refuses to provide a ‘sense-making,’ eschatological interpretation for the Shoah. She refuses the eschatological solution of the apocalyptic destruction giving way to a messianic age that would promise a new world and universal salvation. Night itself, after all, as astutely pointed out by Lehmann, is not swallowed up in the destruction: “Die Nacht wird nicht in einer vollstndigen Apokalypse selbst zerstçrt, auf die eine neue Welt und eine universelle Heil folgen.” (Lehmann 1999: 58) Lehmann proceeds to note the significance of this: “Da die eschatologische Hoffnung und Erwartung aufgegeben wird, zeigt sich, daß die historische Erfahrung des Holocaust fr Nelly Sachs nicht durch den Rekurs auf traditionelle, religiçse Matrix sublimierbar ist.” (Lehmann 1999: 58) Sachs does not hold out on a new world order emerging from the destruction having ‘learned a lesson’ from the Holocaust. The extermination of the Jews as merely a ‘lesson learned’ is a thought that is repugnant to Sachs. The closure of the poem with the image of “die Fahne aus Rauch,” which can be read as a metaphor for the so-called ‘Final Solution,’ makes it clear that what follows the destruction is not renewal, but rather an unremitting reminder of the depths to which mankind sank during the Holocaust. Sachs thus dissolves the traditional Jewish connection between apocalypse and messianic salvation. This is enormously significant, since such a fusion would involve attributing some kind of meaning to what Sachs viewed as a wholly senseless massacre. The night motif in these poems thus serves a double purpose: firstly, it acts as a function of Sachs’ self-reflective poetics by facilitating meta-poetic mediation on the necessity of engineering traditional imagery to artistically engage with the catastrophe. Secondly, by making it clear to her readers, through the employment of apocalyptic imagery, that the destruction unleashed by the Nazis can neither be understood nor somehow

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‘made sense of ’ in the framework of traditional eschatology, Sachs – in a similar vein to Adorno – writes her repugnance at any attempt to make sense of the event into her poetry. By twisting familiar imagery, she encourages a particular conjecture in order to undermine it; words are used against their original meaning. Whilst the poems dominated by night imagery provide crucial interpretative capital to demonstrate the anti-redemptive nature of Sachs’ poetry, her rejection of sense-making interpretations comes perhaps most clearly to the fore in the physical disfiguration that characterises so much of her work.

3.6 The Poetics of Disfiguration The poems analysed thus far have brought to light a poetics of darkness, a non-redemptive poetics, a poetics threatened by and constantly on the verge of speechlessness. Many of Sachs’ poems are devoted solely to confronting this threat; they demonstrate the poet’s refusal to retreat in the face of the ‘after-Auschwitz aporia’; her resolution to write what cannot be written, notwithstanding the inevitable inadequacy of all attempts at articulation. This attempt very often manifests itself in the physicality of Sachs’ work, resulting in a shattered poetics, a poetics of disfiguration. A number of critics have interpreted the lack of aestheticisation in Sachs’ work purely in terms of the inappropriateness of aestheticisation in any representation of Auschwitz in line with Adorno’s concerns examined earlier. Vaerst-Pfarr, for example, writes: “Ihre Gedichte [verzichten] auf ein vorgeprgtes metrisches oder strophisches Muster sowie auch auf eine Reimbindung […], weil die […] in jedem Gedicht von Nelly Sachs evozierte historische Wirklichkeit des Vçlkermords an den Juden eine solche sthetisierung nicht vertrge.” (Vaerst-Pfarr 1982: 41 – 42) In addition to the perils presented by coherent aesthetic form in terms of aesthetic pleasure, there is, however, a more urgent rationale behind Nelly Sachs’ abandonment of the mellifluous rhyme and the notions of order, form and symmetry that characterised her pre-war poetry: the poetic voice is confronted with the ever-present threat of lapsing into speechlessness, and many of Sachs’ poems are wholly dedicated to merely avoiding this peril; these poems teeter as a result on the very verge of collapse. We are confronted with what Jeziorkowski calls “eine Artikulationsund Schweigegrenze,” “eine getriebene Reduktion des Sprechens,” “die Neigung, die Wçrter wie Hohlformen in sich ausbreitendem Schweigen erscheinen zu lassen, als immer sparsame Grenzmarken” (Jeziorkowski

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1994: 155). The result is a fragmented formal structure, which – paradoxically – can be considered a crucial achievement of her poetry in terms of the problematics of the literary representation of the Holocaust. Adorno, as hitherto seen, warns against attributing a semblance of meaning to Auschwitz and against the attainment of pleasure by means of what he terms ‘the principle of aesthetic stylisation.’ This is of immediate significance in the case of Nelly Sachs, since the so-called ‘principle of aesthetic stylisation’ itself prohibits these dangers. A crucial and paradoxical characteristic of the ‘form’ of her poetry is a lack of form. Her distinctive mode of writing is one not of construction, but of demolition. The poetic voice is very often gradually reduced to a state of speechlessness: fragmented sentences become single words, single words become individual syllables, individual syllables then culminate in the ultimate moment of silence represented by the hyphen. By actively employing an at times incoherent and utterly fragmented structure, Sachs avoids the risk of subjugating a ruptured and shattered language to what Susan Shapiro calls an “order making medium” (Shapiro 1984: 6) and attributing in the process some semblance of meaning to the senseless massacre in terms of formal or structural coherence. The strategy employed by Sachs was to use this ruptured language as her very means. Especially significant in this respect is the fact that the poetic medium itself facilitates this process; as Dieter Lamping has noted: “Es [ist] noch am ehesten mit den Mitteln der modernen Lyrik mçglich, den Holocaust knstlerisch darzustellen.” (Lamping 1997: 111) A brief examination of the characteristics of modernist lyric poetry will thus firstly serve to demonstrate its intrinsic advantages when it comes to expressing the horrors of the Holocaust and the attendent rupturing of language and of experience. Modernist lyric poetry is not bound to narrative structure, narrative or grammatical coherence or narrative closure. This is in direct contrast to the “metrische Dichtung” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which, as Dieter Lamping points out, was “immer nach Versmaßen […] geregelt, meist außerdem strophisch gegliedert und gereimt.” Modernist lyric poetry can be free from such formal coherence, “frei von all den Bindungen, denen Verse, Versgruppen und Gedichte herkçmmlicherweise unterworfen sind” (Lamping 1991: 10). As such, it is a fitting genre to recreate the senselessness of the Holocaust on a formal level by means of its own dissolution and avoiding in the process the attribution of a semblance of meaning – in aesthetic terms – to the slaughter. Modernist lyric poetry allows moreover for unorthodox punctuation which can have expressive value. It also facilitates strong congruency between form and con-

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tent: the formal structure itself can act as a function of literary content. In the absence of “vorgegebene Bautypen,” as Lamping argues, “kann sich die Form immer dem Inhalt passen” (Lamping 1991: 55), or, as Arno Holz writes, “der jedweilige Inhalt schafft sich seine ihm jedesmal adquate Form” (cited in Lamping 1991: 55). This is especially true in the case of Nelly Sachs’ poetry, since the ‘form’ of her work is very frequently determined, if not created, by what cannot be expressed in content. Additionally, modernist poetry does not rely on finite syntax – an indication of logic and reason – which is so essential to the formal coherence of a narrative, for example. It allows instead for complete destabilisation and fragmentation of form, and this can have strong expressive value: the irrationality of the massacre can thus be recreated in the dissolution of form, coherence and conventional logic. In much of Sachs’ poetry, such a textuality of rupture and disintegration of form become clearly manifest. Paul Celan’s oft-cited words are of relevance in this respect: Das Gedicht heute – zeigt, und das hat glaube ich […] mit den – nicht zu unterschtzenden – Schwierigkeiten der Wortwahl, dem rapiden Geflle der Syntax oder dem wacheren Sinn fr die Ellipse zu tun, – das Gedicht zeigt, das ist unverkennbar, eine starke Neigung zum Verstummen. […], das Gedicht behauptet sich am Rande seiner selbst […]. (Celan 1995: 79)

Here, Celan outlines some of the main tendencies that are observable in much of Sachs’ poetry: the rapid reduction of syntax, the tendency towards ellipsis – or, in Sachs’ case, towards hyphenation – and her search for a suitable vocabulary capable of embracing the profundity of the destruction which, as seen thus far, very often results in the distortion of familiar images and concepts. In fact, in a letter to Carl Seelig in 1946, Sachs commented directly on the fragmented nature of so much of her work: “Sie […] werden fhlen, daß ich, wenn ich so sagen darf, nicht rund verwundet bin, sondern einfach durchstochen. Darum kann ich keine Romane schreiben, es bricht aus mir heraus in den Formen, die ich Ihnen sandte.” (Sachs 1984: 67) Here, Sachs attempts to explain how her own broken and ‘pierced’ state has its correlation in the physical make-up of her poetry. She refers specifically to the fact that she is unable to write novels, due to the careful deliberation required on the part of the author to produce the rounded narrative coherence that is required to extend the narrative plot. The Holocaust poet does not have the luxury of such deliberation given the urgency of the task of bearing witness to what cannot be adequately described. Much of her poetry presents us instead

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with what seem like outbursts in a despairing attempt to avoid the imminent dissipation of the poetic voice. The poem “Szene aus dem Spiel Nachtwache” (Noch feiert Tod das Leben (1960)) serves as an excellent point of departure to demonstrate Sachs’ poetics of disfiguration: Die Augen zu und dann – Die Wunde geht auf und dann – Man angelt mit Blitzen O Die Geheimnisse des Blutes O fr die Fische Alles im Grab der Luft Opfer Henker Finger Finger Das Kind malt im Sarg mit Staub Den Nabel der Welt – und im Geheg der Zhne hlt der Henker den letzten Fluch – Was nun? (Sachs 1961: 375)

In this poem we get an powerful sense of the struggle surrounding the attempt to find commensurate words to articulate that which thwarts language. Just as the poet closes her eyes, the wound ‘becomes undone’ – “die Wunde geht auf.” This may be interpreted as a metaphor for the unhealed conscience of the survivor that is haunted by the memory of the atrocities. Structural disintegration and severe linguistic reduction appear in this poem with exceptional clarity. The collapse of language is implicit in the opening lines of the poem. The poem may be considered a manifestation of what one author calls a “Schrumpfungsprozeß,” defined as “eine Situation, die von progressiven verbalen Verflchtigungsvorgngen im Gedicht gekennzeichnet ist” (Krolow 1963: 133). The first thing which catches the reader’s attention is the frequent interruption of the poem by the familiar hyphenation. This formal feature, which has been encountered on numerous occasions thus far, is highly characteristic of Sachs’ work. These dashes permeate the very textuality of her poems and assume important symbolic value; they represent the aposiopesis of the poetic voice. Gisela Dischner describes the dashes as “verzweifelte

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Sprachgebrde des Verstummens, einen Abbruch des Gedichteten, weil Worte fehlen, das Ungeheuerliche, das Unsagbare zu sagen” (Dischner 1970: 89). As formal features of the poem, they also serve, however, as a function of literary content: they present that which is beyond words. The dashes are thus both a manifestation of the mutilation of language in the aftermath of the Shoah and an attempt, at the same time, to make known that behind the dash something is awaiting articulation. The hyphenation exposes arguably the most paradoxical aspect of Sachs’ work, namely, “daß die Worte dort ihr ußerstes Gewicht haben, wo sie aufhçren und allseits von dem umgeben sind, was Nicht-Wort ist” (Jeziorkowski 1994: 155). The hyphenation can be considered such “Nicht-Wort,” it presents the fact that the unsayable exists. “Der Gedankenstrich,” Rospert writes, “der so viele Gedichte der Nelly Sachs beschließt, ohne sie abzuschließen, […] weist ins Weiße des Blattes, in das die Buchstaben sich verlieren. Er fhrt an die Schwelle zwischen dem Schwarzen der Schrift und dem Weißen, auf das sie sich einschreibt.” (Rospert 2004: 38) This process of closing off poems without actually closing them off is a succinct description of the two-fold, paradoxical purpose of the ‘Gedankenstrich’ in Sachs’ work: it marks a physical end to the poem, that is, it marks the point at which the poet enters the state of ‘Verstummen,’ whilst simultaneously marking just the beginning of the abyss in which the unsayable has drowned. The lack of verbs and punctuation is immediately apparent in the second stanza, and by the third, the language has been reduced to single words. At this point it seems as if the poem is trying breathlessly to express the totality of its vision before speechlessness sets in, the single words acting as a kind of severely compressed synecdoche condensing a whole range of inexpressible images into a series of sharp and panicky outbursts (Foot 1982: 149). The repetition gives the impression of retardation; it is evidence of the poetic voice grappling for words in an effort not to succumb to silence. The final line of the poem “Was nun?” is evidence of a despairing poetic voice working with language that is incommensurate with the subject at hand. The lyrical voice thus attests in this poem to its own futility. Sachs thematises the powerlessness of words, all the while desperately holding on to them. Maeve Cook has argued that “Holocaust art must frustrate our attempts to make sense of suffering by preventing a projection of meaningful totalities” (Cook 2006: 267). There is not so much as a hint of such a redemptive or meaningful projection in this poem for the suffering endured, since the executioner still lies in wait for his victim and the threat is implicit that evil will ultimately

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triumph: “der Henker [hlt] den letzten Fluch.” Thus, neither in form nor in content does Sachs attribute any kind of meaning to the senseless butchery. “Hçlle ist nackt aus Schmerz” (Glhende Rtsel II (1964)) is another poem that displays acute structural disintegration of form. This poem also sees the lyrical persona engaging with the problematics of representation on a meta-poetic level: Hçlle ist nackt aus Schmerz – Suchen sprachlos suchen berfahrt in die Rabennacht mit allen Sintfluten und Eiszeitaltern umgrtet Luft anmalen mit dem was wchst hinter der Haut Steuermann gekçpft mit dem Abschiedsmesser Muschellaut ertrinkt Su Su Su (Sachs 1971: 57)

This poem is a quintessential portrayal of the inability of the mind to grapple with the realities of the Holocaust. Once again, the reader is confronted with severe linguistic reduction, and formal structure serves anew as a function of literary content. We encounter a poetic voice which, despite its desperate search for adequate words to express the naked pain which the Shoah has left in its wake, is unable to give expression to the experiences of the survivors. This poem not only thematises the speechlessness of the lyrical subject, the poem itself borders on speechlessness as it teeters on the edge of dissolution. The lyrical self thus uses the medium of words to express the fruitless search for words which could capture the experience. The opening line gives the impression of an allconsuming form of pain that threatens to assimilate the Holocaust survivor. “berfahrt in die Rabennacht” can be read as the mind’s journey back to the traumatic events of the Holocaust, guided by the horrifying image of the decapitated helmsman. The ‘travelling mind’ is equipped – “umgrtet” – with suffering and with ‘a certain something’ which ‘grows behind the skin.’ “Luft anmalen” can be read as an urgent interruptive outburst here: the poetic voice needs to ‘paint air’ as a means of breathing in this suffocating scene. Thus, the something growing behind the skin, by virtue of the repetition of the preposition “mit,” can be read as a continuation of the list of ‘items’ with which the traumatised mind en route

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to the “Rabennacht” is equipped. Without this interruptive outburst, these lines would read as follows: “mit allen Sintfluten / und Eiszeitaltern umgrtet / mit dem was wchst hinter der Haut.” The ‘something behind the skin’ could be interpreted as fear; it grows from within. Thus ‘armed’ with fear, with memories of the disaster that was the Holocaust – “Sintflut” – and guided by the beheaded helmsman, the survivor makes the journey back and relives the event. Birgit Keller-Stocker offers a very interesting alternative reading of the beheaded helmsman within the thematics of searching that dominate the poem: “Derjenige […], der beim Suchen die Richtung anzugeben htte, wurde durch den Trennungsschmerz ‘gekçpft,’ d. h. also die Wunde des Abschieds hat richtungslos gemacht.” (Keller-Stocker 1973: 141) The chances for success in the search for appropriate poetic expression are thus declared bleak. The drowning image in the line “Muschellaut ertrinkt” drives home this point: it conveys the impossibility of embracing within language the horror of the event. This is an image that recurs throughout Sachs’ work as a means of communicating the incommunicability of the victims’ suffering. In the main, and with the exception of the prepositional connection outlined above, the individual lines do not in any sense complement each other grammatically. It is as though the poetic voice has urgently – as evinced by the almost total absence of definite articles preceding the nouns – gathered together irreconcilable thoughts within the space of the poem prior to being overcome by speechlessness; “[d]ie Zeilen,” as Keller-Stocker writes, “gleiten nicht ineinander, sie stossen sich vielmehr; jede Kausalkonjunktion [fllt] weg” (Keller-Stocker 1973: 126). The poem quickly dissipates into fragments, from a linguistically reduced opening sentence ending with the familiar dash, to single words and finally to individual syllables. We are presented at this juncture with what William Franke observes in Paul Celan’s poetics, namely, context overwhelming text, threatening to cancel it out completely, overrunning it, crushing it, voiding it (Franke 2005: 626). The physical deconstruction of language evokes the fragmented mind of the lyrical subject. This is rendered absolute with the employment of aposiopesis in the final line: the poetic voice breaks off abruptly, having been overrun by context. The silence referred to in these poems has a twofold function: on the one hand, it may be equated with ‘Stummheit’: the poetic voice is mute and helpless in the face of the horror and heinous nature of the crimes committed. This silence, in its opacity, suggests that there is something which is impenetrable. This ‘something’ may be equated with Adorno’s concept of ‘the extremity that eludes the concept’ (Adorno

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1973: 358). On the other hand, presenting to the reader the existence of this ‘extremity’ is of utmost importance in terms of the representational value of silence in Sachs’ work. This ‘extremity’ is the ‘something’ that cannot be said, but the existence of which must be made known. Silence thus also has a constructive purpose; the way in which language collapses in Sachs’ work is itself a telling process: the breakdown of both the formal and linguistic structure makes manifest the “limits of representation,” to borrow Berel Lang’s formulation, but simultaneously succeeds in representing these very limits (Lang 1992: 300). The disintegration of form succeeds paradoxically in giving silence itself form. This “language of silence” – to borrow the title of Ernestine Schlant’s monograph (1999) – is constitutive of Sachs’ poetry: Silence is not a uniform, monolithic emptiness. Literature […] reveals even where it is silent; its blind spots and absences speak a language […]. Silence is not a semantic void […]. Silence is constituted by the absence of words, but is therefore and simultaneously the presence of their absence. (Schlant 1999: 1,7)

This is directly applicable to Sachs’ work. Her poetry paradoxically ‘speaks’ most in those empty spaces that permeate her work and in the abysses behind the dashes; her work ‘speaks’ most where it is silent. In the poem “Im Meer aus Minuten” (Glhende Rtsel II (1964)), the crisis of language is presented not only in formal structure by virtue of linguistic reduction, but also on the meta-poetic level as Sachs engages with the problematics of writing the unwriteable: Im Meer aus Minuten jede einzelne verlangt Untergang Rettung – Hilfe haushoch verschlungene Worte nicht mehr Luft nur Untergang raumlos nur Untergang Hoffnung wurde kein Schmetterling Tod erschaffen so mhsam Was den Gott verhllt auflçsen in Sand dieses Erstlingswort das in die Nacht strmt rettungslos

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Erde Trne unter den Gestirnen – ich sinke in deinen berfluß – (Sachs 1971: 48)

This poem portrays a poetic voice despairing at the expressive capacity of language. The lyrical self wavers on the verge of sinking and is accompanied throughout by the threat of dissolution: “jede einzelne [Minute] verlangt Untergang.” There is no longer any air to breathe, and the poetic voice begins to drown as words are ‘engulfed’ in this claustrophobic scene.3 The construct “raumlos” creates the image of the lyrical subject drowning in a bottomless pit. The poem’s verbal structure gradually dissipates as the poem progresses, and the paucity of words in the severely condensed lines “raumlos” / “nur Untergang” / “rettungslos” signify a poetic voice gasping for air. The threefold repetition of “Untergang,” apart from reinforcing the asphyxiation of the poetic voice, also gives the impression of inhibition and retardation. The poem is then further permeated by the familiar hyphenation which compounds the fragmentary sentence structure. The lines “Tod erschaffen so mhsam / was den Gott verhllt” may be read as a reference to the meticulous planning that went into the industrial-like death machine which shrouded the existence of a divinity. The culmination of the first stanza in the declarative outburst “rettungslos” signifies that the poet’s initial cry for help in rescuing words which have been devoured by the sheer scale of the slaughter will remain unanswered: words have lost their expressive capabilities. Once again the 3

Elsewhere, Sachs also uses the oceanic image in reference to the destruction of words: “O – A – O – A – / Ein wiegendes Meer der Vokale / Worte sind alle abgestrzt –” (Sachs 1971: 53). By declaring that words have come ‘crashing down,’ Sachs communicates her loss of faith in the expressive capacity of words, while the permeation of these lines by mute dashes and the poem’s dissipation into mere syllables serve to accentuate the magnitude of this loss. A similar sense of claustrophia makes an appearance in a poem from one of Sachs’ later cycles: “Vor den Wnden der Worte – Schweigen – / Hinter den Wnden der Worte – Schweigen –” (Sachs 1971: 112). Sachs sets up an opposition here to portray the impasse confronting the poet charged with the task of bearing witness, but continually threatened with speechlessness. The phrase “Wnde der Worte” expresses a negative evaluation of words as inhibitive and constrictive, while notions of separation are also evoked by the use of the prepositions “vor” and “hinter.” It is a separation between words and that which wishes to be expressed. There is a complete lack of verbal structure in these two lines, while the hyphenation compounds the silence described in the actual content: yet again formal features become a function of literary content.

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poem ends, not with a new ‘enlightened’ order emerging from the disaster, but rather with the poetic voice sinking into the ‘gigantic tear among the planets’ that the earth has become. The poem then trails off into the nothingness of the hyphen which functions once again as an indicator of limits. The muteness that threatens the poetic voice from the opening line is thus rendered absolute at this point. The aesthetic strategy employed by Sachs in these poems is something of a paradox; she uses form to enact a breakdown of form and, in so doing, she renders the sense of the unrepresentable strongly perceptible. In addition to presenting the ‘extremity’ in terms of formal disintegration, Sachs also thematises the ‘extremity’ by calling on the reader to play an active role in perceiving the reality behind the lines; in perceiving that which has been consigned to silence.

3.7 Adorno’s Extremity in Sachs’ Poetics “[D]as ußerste, das dem Begriff entflieht” lies at the heart of the aporia upon which Adorno’s reflections on post-Shoah art hinge: the ‘something’ in the experience of Auschwitz that does not lend itself to meaningful articulation, but which nonetheless conditions reflection on the meaning of thought in the post-Auschwitz world. In several of the poems thus far examined, the sense of this ‘something,’ of the ‘un-said’ has been clearly perceptible. In a number of poems, however, Sachs directly thematises the existence of this ‘extremity,’ and she succeeds in bringing to the fore the aporia between the indispensability of bearing witness and the impossibility of doing so adequately. The poem “Verzeiht ihr meine Schwestern” (Glhende Rtsel I (1963)) is an example of Adorno’s extremity at work in Sachs’ poetics: Verzeiht ihr meine Schwestern ich habe euer Schweigen in mein Herz genommen Dort wohnt es und leidet die Perlen eures Leides klopft Herzweh so laut so zerreißend schrill Es reitet eine Lçwin auf den Wogen Oceanas eine Lçwin der Schmerzen die ihre Trnen lngst dem Meer gab – (Sachs 1971: 27)

In this poem Sachs addresses the dead and pleads that her failure to voice their sufferings be forgiven. She has adopted the silence of the victims in

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the face of her inability to bear adequate witness to their suffering; the poetic voice has been rendered ‘stumm’ as a result of the silence that envelops the crimes of the Shoah. This silence, however, is an aporetic one: it is described as “laut” and “zerreißend schrill”; it is a silence that demands articulation – “[es] klopft Herzweh” – yet simultaneously thwarts speech. In this poem we encounter the menacing and lingering presence of the absent dead collective; their silence ‘lives’ inside the poet. There is not even momentary reprieve because this silence – as evinced by Sachs’ use of the present tense – continuously ‘knocks,’ demanding expression. This is an exemplary instance of the aporia upon which Adorno reflected. The silence into which many of Sachs’ poems evaporate is therefore not always to be equated with muteness. Sachs consistently attempts to lift the veil of silence surrounding the Holocaust atrocities, and whilst all attempts at satisfactorily performing this task were destined to fail, this did not warrant lapsing into further silence. Instead, Sachs confronts the reality that “jedes Holocaust-Gedicht zu einem bestimmten Grade an seinem Thema scheitern [muß],” to draw again on Lehmann’s concept of a ‘poetics of failure’ (Lehmann 1999: xvvv). The poetic voice has the responsibility of presenting the reality behind the silence: the ‘extremity’ inherent in the Shoah that evades description but the existence of which the poet is acutely conscious. This aporetic ‘absent presence,’ this ‘extremity’ in Sachs’ poetics, prevents any kind of closure from occurring; laying the dead to rest, as Jennifer Hoyer writes, is not, after all, what Sachs’ poems aim for. (Hoyer 2009: 39) In the closing lines of the poem, Sachs uses the oceanic trope to convey the magnitude of the suffering endured. We are presented with the image of the victims’ pain undulating in concert with the never-ending ebb and flow of the oceanic tide. The dative form “dem Meer” in conjunction with the verb “geben” is significant here; the “hardened pain of the tormented,” as Bower writes, “can only join with but not be washed away by the salt waters of the sea” (Bower 2000: 77). Another instance of this ‘absent presence’ is the immensely distressing poem “Sie schreien nicht mehr” (Teile dich Nacht (1966)). In this poem Sachs confronts what Lawrence Langer describes as “a major challenge of Holocaust art,” namely, “to project from the very spaces between words (and images) a resounding silence that engages the reader” (Langer 1982: 218): Sie schreien nicht mehr wenn es weh tut Einer steigt auf die Wunden des anderen aber es sind nur Wolken

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auf die sie treten die tropfen denn geisterhaft – (Sachs 1971: 126)

In this poem Nelly Sachs confronts this very challenge; she projects a silence that engages the reader, as she attempts to portray the ‘scene’ in the gas chamber. We are confronted with the victims fighting for their last breath and trampling upon each other in the process; as Ruth Klger writes in her text weiter leben: “In der letzten Agonie sind die Starken auf die Schwachen getreten und so waren die Leichen der Mnner stets oben, die der Kinder ganz unten.” (Klger 1992: 34) The use of the simple verb ‘wehtun’ may be read as a disquieting allusion to the presence of children in this uncanny death scene. The temporal phrase “nicht mehr” is a reference to that point in time in the gassing process at which the screams that accompany the terror of being trampled upon become silent: the droplets of ‘geisterhaft tropfende’ Cyclone B quickly stifle the victims’ screams. The poem then abruptly ends in a resounding silence, represented by the dash. It is at this point that Sachs attempts to afford the victims the dignity of which they had been robbed, from the time of deportation, through to their dehumanisation in the camps, through to the ultimate space of reification: the gas chambers. Such dignity can only be afforded the victims in silence. The dash thus brings to the fore the inadequacy of language in achieving this aim. The dash thus marks a constructive silence, since the reader is now confronted with the task of apprehending that which has been consigned to silence, that which has thwarted language. The silence that interrupts these poems is not a semantic void, and this is an important consideration to bear in mind when reading Sachs’ poetry. The reader is compelled to apprehend the silence produced by the failure of words and confront that which is not said. It is difficult for the reader to become anaesthetised to the realities of the camps, because it is the absences in Sachs’ poems that are the source of quintessential horror. The dashes that punctuate her poetry visually mark a caesura in speech; they highlight the ‘extremity’ that has slain the poetic breath and, in so doing, they leave to the reader the uncomfortable task of perceiving the horror behind the ‘non-words.’ Structural disfiguration, lapses into silence and presentation of the fact that so much has eluded representation are thus poetic devices used by Sachs to remind her readers of the ‘excess’ in the Holocaust that defies conceptualisation; they are devices employed with the objective of confronting this ‘excess.’

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3.8 Writing the Inability to Write: Sachs’ Self-Reflective Poetics One of Nelly Sachs’ greatest achievements is undoubtedly the fact that she weaves her reflections on the aporetics of post-Auschwitz writing into her medium: her poetry engages self-referentially with the problematics of representation. The aporia facing the post-Shoah writer – the indispensability and impossibility of appropriate representation – is a constant theme running through her work. Much critical discourse on Sachs’ work has highlighted her flight into the mystical and transcendental realms as a means of bearing the horrific realities of the Holocaust. This flight into the transcendental is viewed as her means of confronting the language crisis in the wake of Auschwitz. Albrecht Holschuh, for example, argues: “Die Sprache der Nelly Sachs ist noch heil […] und […] trgt den Leser aus der schwierigen Gegenwart in eine schlichtere metaphysische Vorwelt.” (Holschuh 1973: 344) Such a claim, in the light of the poems thus far examined, is questionable at best. Along with undertaking the ultimately unrealisable task of transporting the reader to the heart of the horrors of Auschwitz, as opposed to transporting him/her “aus der schwierigen Gegenwart” as suggested by critics like Holschuh, Sachs also reflects on the ‘unwriteability’ of the Holocaust whilst remaining very much within the earthly, non-transcendental realm – in effect she ‘writes’ the aporia that is preventing her from writing. In other words, while she desperately attempts to represent the unrepresentable, she is also faced with the simultaneous task of presenting the reality of its ‘unrepresentability.’ The poem “Und du gingst ber den Tod” (Glhende Rtsel III (1965)) serves as an excellent case in point: Und du gingst ber den Tod wie der Vogel im Schnee immer schwarz siegelnd das Ende – Die Zeit schluckte was du ihr gabst an Abschied bis auf das ußerste Verlassen die Fingerspitzen entlang Augennacht Kçrperlos werden Die Luft umsplte – eine Ellipse – die Straße der Schmerzen – (Sachs 1971: 65)

In the opening sentence of this poem, a “du” subject is charged with having crossed a boundary: “Du gingst ber den Tod.” [my emphasis] Precisely what this boundary is and the identity of the “du” subject remain,

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initially at least, unclear. The simile “wie der Vogel im Schnee” draws the reader into a false sense of security by the apparent pleasantness of the resulting image: the reader pictures a bird treading softly in the snow. This sense of security, this initial pleasantness, is then usurped in the ensuing line – a characteristic technique in Sachs’ poetry. The bird walking lightly in the white snow, leaving tiny imprints in its wake, is transfigured into the distorted image of the bird leaving black ‘seals’ upon the white background. The temporal phrase “immer,” combined with the present participle construction “siegelnd,” creates the sense of an unremitting ‘sealing’ process. Christine Rospert argues that this image of repetitive ‘sealing’ may be a reference to the writing process itself: “der Vogelschritt ist […] eine wiederholende, mechanische Bewegung, die an das gleichfçrmige Trippeln der Schreibmaschinenschrift erinnert.” (Rospert 2004: 178) These black seals may also, however, be read as a reference to the author’s attempt to communicate the events of the Shoah, the snow functioning as a metaphor for the blank page and the writer repeatedly attempting with each individual ‘seal’ to communicate adequately whilst never actually achieving this: “immer Schwarz siegelnd das Ende –”. The hyphenation at the end of this sentence once again serves as a reference to the ‘extremity’ inherent in the reality of Auschwitz that does not lend itself to articulation. Within this interpretative framework, the opening line of the poem is now more open to clarification; the “du” subject may be read as a reference to the writing process itself, while “Tod” may be interpreted as the boundary of what is ‘representable’: the writer has attempted to overstep the boundary of death, continually attempting to broach “das Ende” – adequate expression – but time has ‘swallowed’ the horrors that writing has attempted to describe. These horrors are alluded to by Sachs’ use of the word “Abschied,” the resonances of which are now familiar from the poems examined earlier: “Abschied” may be read as an allusion to the ‘selection’ process on the ramps of the death camps, functioning very often in Sachs’ work as pars pro toto for the annihilation process itself. By line eight, the poem’s initial narrative-like style is suddenly interrupted by a series of syntactical fragments. We are unexpectedly confronted with the single word “Augennacht.” This unsettling neologism evokes the image of the eyes of the dead staring from the night sky. The interlocking of physical detail – “Abschied” – with semiotically oriented images such as gazing and staring imbues the poem with an effective visceral import. The dead are now “kçrperlos,” and within the thematic constraints of the poem, namely, the inability to express the horrors of

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Auschwitz, this can be read as a concrete reference to the manner in which the victims died in the camps – their bodies dissolved to smoke as they left the chimneys of the crematoria. The final two lines of the poem may be read as a sustained commentary on the writing process or, more specifically, the difficulties thereof. The air, paradoxically, takes on the characteristics of water; it ‘washes around’ the streets of pain. This indirect action of ‘washing around’ may be examined in conjunction with both the image of “Fingerspitzen” that appears three lines previously and the image suggested in the present participle “siegelnd das Ende” in the opening lines, since all three imply a process of grappling whilst never actually reaching; grappling, that is, with the realities of the Holocaust, but never actually achieving artistic expression commensurate with those realities. The employment of the hyperbaton “eine Ellipse” complicates the tenth line; as Rospert points out: “Der appositionelle Einschub ‘ – eine Ellipse –’ ist selber elliptisch”; “[e]s handelt sich um die paradoxe Gleichzeitigkeit einer Einfgung inmitten des Satzes, die mit einer Auslassung einhergeht” (Rospert 2004: 183). The hyperbaton thus serves a paradoxical function: it ‘says’ the unsayable (by virtue of denoting an omission and thus presenting the fact that something has not been said), and it does not ‘say’ the unsayable (by virtue of standing in place of the unsayable). The hyphenation either side of this hyperbaton serves to further intensify the ‘Verstummen’ confronting the writer when attempting to articulate the horrors of the Shoah. Sachs thus reflects on and writes the inability to write into the poem itself; her reflections permeate the very texture of the poem and serve as a means of avoiding the forbidden alternative – a resignation to silence. Another poem in which this inability to write is written into actual texture and in which the motif of the bird imprints reappears is “Diese Felder aus Schweigen” (Teile dich Nacht (1966)): Diese Felder aus Schweigen unbetretbar Gebete mssen Umwege machen lassen schon Spuren wie Vogelfße noch verankert im Fleisch Nichts nichts Der Atem wußte noch von Liebe Tod wohnt zu nahe Hier sagt die Welt: – Es geschehe – Amen (Sachs 1971: 159)

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The ‘fields of silence’ in this poem are described as “unbetretbar” – impenetrable. The word “Felder” gives the impression that this silence is ubiquitous: it is the all-pervading silence of the dead. Rospert has interpreted “Felder” as an image containing physical borders and as such an attempt by Sachs to convey to the reader that this silence has limits: “‘Felder’: Offene Flchen die das ‘Schweigen’ nicht als grenzloses Nichts erscheinen lassen, sondern es vielmehr […] als abgegrenzte Bereiche visualisieren” (Rospert 2004: 186). While the text certainly invites such an interpretation, I read these lines somewhat differently. Firstly, the description of these never-ending “Felder aus Schweigen” as “unbetretbar” is too strong a word to interpret these ‘fields’ as “abgegrenzte Bereiche.” “Unbetretbar” clearly suggests that the silence they represent is a totalising one. Secondly, the very phenomenon of borders lends itself to the question of traversion; borders may be understood as both structures that facilitate enclosure but also as connectors. If interpreted in this latter vein, the borders of the “Felder aus Schweigen” can thus be seen as connecting the fields of silence, one field leading into the next. This interpretation serves to add to rather than take from the pervasiveness of the silence that Sachs is attempting to describe. Additionally, Sachs’ employment of the plural “Felder” serves to further convey a message of unbroken ubiquity. This poem is similar in may ways to the poem “Und du gingst ber den Tod.” There, the “du” subject – the writing process – attempts to cross an uncrossable frontier, namely, Auschwitz. In this poem Sachs similarly thematises the Holocaust as an uncrossable boundary. But of course the silence, the uncrossable boundary that lies at the heart of this poem has, paradoxically, already been both broken and crossed respectively by the fact that its existence is being presented. The phrase “Umwege machen” is reminiscent of the ‘grappling whilst never actually reaching’ images examined above: the author continually attempts to portray the horror but can only do so in an extremely tentative manner, never actually entering the ‘fields of silence.’ This “Umwege machen” process does, however, leave traces behind. Indeed, the image of “Vogelfße” in this poem may once again be read as a reference to the characters put on the blank page by the act of typing. As such, this poem may be interpreted as a commentary on the limits of the writing process: traces are left behind, but never anything remotely close to a complete picture of the suffering endured. Once again Sachs’ initial pleasant image of the “Vçgelfuße” is distorted into the violent, vulture-like image of bird claws “noch verankert im Fleisch.” Christine Rospert points out the possible reference here to the

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anguish of Prometheus: “[D]iese Metapher [evoziert] die Qualen eines Prometheus, dem sich Nacht fr Nacht der Schnabel, aber auch die Klauen eines Geiers in die Eingeweide graben.” (Rospert 2004: 188) This is a significant association. Firstly, the violent image of the claws anchored in the flesh may be read as the unabating and desperate attempt by the poetic voice to express the inexpressible pain that the Shoah has left in its aftermath. The association with Prometheus could have a further significant function that Rospert overlooks, however. Destined to eternal punishment, Prometheus is chained to a rock with a vulture feeding on his liver every night, and his liver then regenerates itself anew each passing day. This motif of daily regeneration could be read as an attempt to express the perpetual character of the pain that permeates the postShoah world, a form of unremitting psychological pain. This motif of unrelenting pain repudiates, moreover, any kind of eschatological conclusion. In lines nine and ten, Sachs juxtaposes “Atem” and “Tod”: whatever little “der Atem” still knew of love is rendered meaningless by the constant immediacy of death. ‘Breath’ here may be interpreted as the poetic breath; it is silenced by the suspended presence of death. This poetic ‘breath’ in turn appears to be gasping in the two seemingly rushed declarative outbursts: “Der Atem wußte noch von Liebe / Tod wohnt zu nahe.” At this juncture, the reader senses an urgency in the poetic voice; it is being threatened by the close proximity of death and hence ‘Verstummen.’ The use of the verb ‘wohnen’ and the choice of the present tense serves to reinforce the ubiquity of the threat of death lingering in the mind of the traumatised survivor. The final line of the poem could be considered a further example of meta-poetic reflection being integrated into the poem itself: “Es geschehe – Amen” may be a reference to traditional forms such as the prayer which must be abandoned in order to present what defies representation. Prayers, as Sachs declares in line three – which could be read as a synecdoche for traditional forms – are forced to take ‘indirect routes.’ Lines four to nine represent this indirect route; the entire poem can thus be interpreted in terms of reflection on traditional forms and, by extension, on the writing process. The only part of the ‘prayer’ that remains intact is its conclusion – “Amen,” the part that denotes finality; this serves thus to compound the image of impenetrability present in the initial description of the “Felder aus Schweigen”; they were “unbetretbar” at the beginning of the poem and they remain “unbetretbar” at the end. A self-reflective poetic voice is evident throughout the entire development of Sachs’ work, from her earliest post-war cycles, right up until her

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last volume. An example from her late poetry is the poem “Hier nehme ich euch gefangen” (Teile dich Nacht (1966)): Hier nehme ich euch gefangen ihr Worte wie ihr mich buchstabierend bis aufs Blut gefangen nehmt ihr seid meine Herzschlge zhlt meine Zeit diese mit Namen bezeichnete Leere Laßt mich den Vogel sehen der singt sonst glaube ich die Liebe gleicht dem Tod – (Sachs 1971: 136)

In this poem Sachs presents an outright, almost violent struggle between the lyrical self and its medium – words. The verb ‘gefangennehmen’ has connotations of force: the poetic voice attempts to take hold of and capture words. Words, in return, take hold of the poetic voice: “der Umgang mit Sprache,” as Stefan Kçhler writes, “bewirkt eine wechselseitige Inbesitznahme, die Dichterin bedient sich der Worte, diese ihrerseits nehmen die Dichterin in Beschlag” (Kçhler 2004: 58). The line “wie ihr mich buchstabierend bis aufs Blut gefangen nehmt” expresses a self-reflective discourse whilst the poem is being written: as the poet attempts to capture words, they simultaneously take hold of her, letter by letter. The term “aufs Blut” suggests that words are winning this struggle. In spite of this, Sachs makes a defiant attempt to reclaim the act of writing in the face of its destruction; the poetic voice declares through the medium of words that it is taking hold of them – “Hier nehme ich euch gefangen.” The underlying inability to do just that, however, is clear in having to make such a defiant declaration in the first instance. Sachs describes words as her “Herzschlge,” they count time. “Diese mit Namen bezeichnete Leere” is a likely reference to the countless jumbled names that Sachs envisions in the empty space before her – names of the victims which she tries in vain to untangle. This is similar to the poem “Aber in der Nacht,” where the poet’s nightly ‘trek’ to recover the dead is continuously interrupted by her inability to picture individual faces amid the mass collective of dead victims. The desperation of the poetic voice comes to the fore in the imperative employed in the final lines: the poetic voice demands to see a bird capable of producing a harmonious sound; the longer this harmonious sound is withheld, the more life begins to resemble death for the lyrical

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subject. The image of the singing bird brings to mind the throat metaphor so common in Sachs’ poetry. Sachs continuously renders this organ useless. In the poem “Landschaft aus Schreien,” for example, which will be examined below, the survivor’s throat releases hellish screams as a reflex action to a mentally re-lived scene of horror. More often than not, however, the throats in Sachs’ work generate no sound at all: they are trapped in a state of ‘Verstummen.’ The nothingness into which this poem trails with the familiar “Gedankenstrich des Verstummens,” to borrow Dischner’s description once again, suggests that the poetic persona’s hopes for expressive capacity, as symbolised by the lyrical subject yearning for the image of the singing bird, will not be realised. These poems call into doubt those hitherto mentioned assessments which view Sachs’ engagement with the crisis of language purely in terms of a flight into the transcendental. So too do the poems in cycle Grabschriften in die Luft geschrieben, where her self-reflective poetics comes to the fore.

3.9 ‘Grabschriften in die Luft’: Keeping Memory Open In the sub-cycle Grabschriften in die Luft geschrieben (1947), Nelly Sachs once again reflects on literary expression as a form of memorialising the dead in the aftermath of Auschwitz. She does this, moreover, whilst remaining very much in the earthly, non-transcendental realm. Her transfiguration of the epitaphic genre, an ancient tradition used to remember the dead, can be considered a significant device in her work in this respect. In Sachs’ poetry, however, this tradition undergoes a substantial alteration in accordance with her conviction of the futility of yesterday’s literary tools to render the realities of Auschwitz. (Sachs 1984: 83 – 84) Her alteration of the epitaph becomes apparent on four levels. Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, whilst the traditional epitaph was an attempt to commemorate the individual, Sachs’ epitaphs perform precisely the opposite function: such a luxury, after all, is not available to the writer who is attempting to recover a collective of six million people; as Jennifer Hoyer writes: “the notion of the artist as immortaliser of the fallen, as the guardian of memory through […] textual memorial, is complicated in the postSecond World War context, first by the mass of dead, and then by the Nazi method of dealing with that mass: the crematoria.” (Hoyer 2009: 24) The traditional epitaph was, in other words, rendered inept by the industrial manner in which the slaughter was carried out. Sachs’ epitaphs

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display not the recovery of the individual, but rather the dissolution of the mass collective which, given the scale of the slaughter, is beyond representation. Secondly, the point of departure of the traditional epitaph is the absence of the deceased individual who the epitaph attempts to recover. Sachs’ epitaphs reverse this traditional point of departure. Sachs, as William West points out, “begins with a problem that reverses the one usually proposed by epitaphic writings […], the dead are not absent in her work, but all too present.” (West 1995: 79) A paradox becomes perceptible: the dead are pervasive and yet are beyond recovery, and this highly troubling paradox is maintained throughout the entire cycle. A third facet of the traditional epitaph is also altered substantially by Sachs; epitaphs normally gesture explicitly at recovering a specific individual. Sachs alters this gesture by her use of initials in place of complete names, “Die Malerin (M.Z),” for example, and “Die Alles Vergessende (A.R)” are among the titles in this cycle. The result is that while the epitaph might initially seem to refer to an individual, the initials remind the reader that the individual in question is in fact unrecoverable. Hoyer points out the significance of this: The dead are present in Sachs’s work – but their names are not. Sachs purposely does not name their names, and takes care to point out that she is not naming their names; in so doing, she draws on the not infrequent literary practice of obscuring names, but this is a convention that, in the wake of the Holocaust, strikes the reader as troubling. (Hoyer 2009: 27)

The initials thus not only gesture towards an absence, they physically present it. A shortfall, in other words, is not just revealed but directly declared in the poem, and once again the reader is charged with apprehending this absence. The reader is presented with an explicit and deliberate absence that requires ‘filling in,’ but one which resists this very process. The presence of initials and the absence of actual names is not only troubling for the reader, it is, I would argue, a significant literary device in the context of Sachs’ attempt to present the ‘unrepresentable.’ The technique is mindful of that aspect of the Shoah that concerned Adorno and Sachs so deeply, namely, the obliteration of the concept of the individual in the industrialised extermination process. Any attempt to render the Holocaust in artistic form must take this fact into account. The presence of initials in the titles foreshadows the futility of any attempt to recover the desecrated individual in the main body of the poem; the unrecoverability

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of the individuality of the victims, in other words, is declared before the reader has read a single line. The fourth and final facet of the traditional epitaph that Sachs alters is the closure afforded by the inscription itself: the traditional epigraph is engraved onto stone. Sachs’ epigraphs, however, are written into the air – Grabschriften in die Luft – thereby avoiding any possibility of static closure. There is, as Hoyer writes, “a false security in an epitaph or Holocaust memorial in which the inscription relieves the reader of the work of remembering” (Hoyer 2009: 27). Conversely, Sachs’ epitaphs, which are so saturated with the paradoxical absent presence of the dead collective, ensure that the tasks of remembering and of ‘filling in’ the absences are the tasks of the reader alone. These poems demand the active participation of the reader. It is precisely in respect of this active engagement demanded of the reader that the accusative in the cycle’s title acquires meaning. As an allusion to the physical trail of smoke writing epigraphs for the victims as they pass through the chimneys of the crematoria, the title can be considered a mimetic reference to the actual method of annihilation: it serves as a chilling reminder once again of the total desecration of the human person in the death camps. The accusative has the effect of rendering the image of the trailing smoke acutely present, almost tangible for the reader; it eliminates the possibility of forgetting; it suggests a process of keeping memory open and present, as opposed to the closure afforded by a memorial set in stone. This elusive impermanence is a way of avoiding what Dominick LaCapra views as the danger inherent in the proliferation of museums, monuments, and memorials dedicated to the Holocaust, namely, the “covering over of wounds,” since this creates the impression that “nothing really disruptive has occurred” and renders impossible “a critical engagement with the past” (LaCapra 1994: 23). Sachs was thus (presciently, it might be argued) aware of the problematic relationship between memory and oblivion that would later find such a presence in Holocaust studies in the form of discussions on the questions of institutionalising, ritualising, exhibiting, publicising, celebrating and idolising memory. Sachs’ work demands active commitment on behalf of the reader to prevent the danger inherent in closure, namely, oblivion. Her epitaphs are inscriptions being written into the sky to memorialise, with acute actuality, the countless victims who maintain a presence there in the form of smoke from the crematoria. The poem “Die Malerin [M.Z]” is an example of Sachs’ employment of the epitaphic tradition as part of a process of meta-poetic reflection on

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the possibilities and limitations of Holocaust memory and the role played by the writing process: So gingst du, eine Bettlerin, und çffnetest die Tr: Tod, Tod wo bist du – Unterm Fuß du – Zum Schlafmeer mich fhr – Ich wollte die Liebsten malen Sie fangen schon an zu fahlen Wie ich den Finger rhr. Der Sand in meinem lçchrigen Schuh Das warst du – du – du – Male ich Sand der einmal Fleisch war – Oder Goldhaar – oder Schwarzhaar – Oder die Ksse und deine schmeichelnde Hand Sand male ich, Sand – Sand – Sand – (Sachs 1961: 42)

In the opening line the poetic persona addresses a “du” subject, presumably “die Malerin” of the title. She is described as a begger, searching for death, as though death were a person – “Tod, Tod wo bist du –”. The image of “die Malerin” opening the door may be a reference to the artist embarking on the process of representation. Sachs then outlines the problematics of this process by transposing the “du” subject and the lyrical self in the fifth line: the lyrical voice becomes a lyrical “ich,” having addressed the second person up until that point. This suggests that the issues that affect the “du,” that is, “die Malerin,” also affect the poet; indeed, as Hoyer writes, “perhaps more so, since the poet is alive and performing the very occupation she ponders, in the present tense” (Hoyer 2009: 29). Sachs attempts to communicate to her reader what happens when the artist attempts to paint or when the writer attempts to ‘write’ the dead – be it onto a canvas or onto a blank page, or indeed in the form of an epitaph: “Ich wollte die Liebsten malen / Sie fangen schon an zu fahlen / Wie ich den Finger rhr”: the moment the artist or poet begins to paint or ‘write’ the victims, they begin to fade – the countless faces of the dead victims of the annihilation become a blurred and undifferentiated mass collective. In the second stanza the poet attempts to paint ‘sand that was once flesh.’ Aside from being a probable reference to the remains of the victims, the sand motif also carries an additional level of meaning in this poem, a feature so typical of Sachs’ reference fields. The physical consistency of sand as an unstable substance assumes significance within the

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context of writing the inability to write: as the poet tries to ‘write’ the dead victims, their faces begin to elude her, like sand running through her fingers. The reader conjures up the image of the poetic persona trying desperately to grasp at this sand despite the futility of doing so. The sheer magnitude of the massacre that has occurred – “de[r] riesige[.] Tod” as she calls it in another poem in this cycle (Sachs 1961: 35) – means that the poetic voice is unable to capture anything approaching wholeness. At this juncture, it is possible to interpret the possessive pronoun “deine” in the closing lines as related to the “Du” of the second line of the first stanza, namely, “Tod.” All the artist can see before her is the “Goldhaar” and “Schwarzhaar” of the undiffrentiated mass collective of dead victims and the ‘flattering hand’ of death. The poem then acquires a despairing overtone as it reaches its peak in the final line with the threefold repetition of sand, each repetition truncated by the hyphen of muteness. At this point the sand image assumes yet another level of meaning. As a uniform, undiffrentiated, featureless substance in terms of appearance, its repitition can be read as an allusion to the poet’s failure to recover the individual from the similarly undiffrentiated annihilated collective. The mute dashes serve to compound this sense of poetic despair by reminding the reader that in addition to this failure, much of the victims’ suffering has also been confined to silence. Her epitaph leaves much unsaid, it demands that the reader engage with these silences; a Holocaust memorial that affords closure is not the kind of memorial that Sachs aims for. Rather, her epitaphs smother the air in the post-Shoah world. In terms of poetic meta-reflection on the problematics of representation, the presence of rhyme and refrain in this poem, so uncharacteristic of Sachs’ poetry, are significant: they may be viewed as bitterly ironic devices, since they attribute an almost ‘sing-song’ character to the poem. As simplistic, trivial devices, their employment here could be seen as a commentary by Sachs on the dangers of simple, uniform rituals of memory which have an inherent danger of trivialising the Holocaust. Sachs demands instead that the reader be made uncomfortable, that expectations be undermined, that closure be avoided at all costs. Another poem in this cycle, “Die Alles Vergessende [A.R],” can be considered exemplary of Sachs’ attempt to convey the futility of the epitaphic tradition. This poem negates any hope of the epitaph recovering the victims from the obscurity into which they dissipated through the chimneys of the crematoria:

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Aber im Alter ist alles ein großes Verschwimmen. Die kleinen Dinge fliegen fort wie die Immen. Alle Worte vergaßt du und auch den Gegenstand; Und reichtest deinem Feind ber Rosen und Nesseln die Hand. (Sachs 1961: 46)

This epitaph contains at its core an irresolvable paradox: the epitaphic genre is charged with remembering; Sachs’ epitaph, however, is a reminder of the impossibility of remembering. Her use of the participle construction in the title indicates a process of forgetting that is underway in the poem itself, a forgetting of words and objects, of reference and referent. Everything has become an indistinguishable haze; the faces of the countless victims fill the air like a swarm of undifferentiated bees. The woman who is forgetting has tried in vain to recover the victims’ faces, but they progressively elude her. Sachs reverses the familiar image of the bee as a gathering creature; as West writes: “It is like bees that the things of the world elude her rather than her being like a bee to gather them. Her relation to the world is one of loss rather than collection.” (West 1995: 97) The imagery that this poem conjures up is powerful: the reader can picture the ‘forgetting woman’ trying to recover the individual faces of the murdered victims, but these faces move further and further from her into an unintelligible, obscure haze. The form of this entire poem, in particular its simplistic rhyming scheme, may be read again as an ironic reference to the sombreness of form that characterises the epitaphic tradition. Indeed, Sachs’ adoption of and critical engagement with convention could almost be regarded as playful – were it not for content and context. She ironises traditional form as a valid conveyor of meaning.4 Once again her engagement with form is meta-poetic and self-reflexive. The final line suggests that Sachs views reconciliation in the post-Holocaust world as neither an assured nor uncomplicated process: the tension between a future-orientated, reconcilatory gesture, 4

In the poem “Ich male die ganze Nacht” (1942), Sachs similarly ironises rhyme as a conveyor of meaning in the post-Shoah world by employing the painting motif. “Ich male die ganze Nacht, / Und habe keine Farben. / Da habe ich die Farbe der Sehnsucht erdacht / und male wie sie darben. / Ich male die ganze Nacht, / Und habe keine Farben. / Da habe ich die Farbe der Liebe erdacht / Und male die Wunden als Narben. / Ich male die ganze Nacht / und habe keine Farben. / Da habe ich die Farbe der Tod erdacht / Und male wie sie starben.” (Sachs 2010: 106) This poem is a despairing account of the lack of tools at the artist’s or writer’s disposal when it comes to ‘painting’ or ‘writing’ the dead. The rhyming scheme can be considered a bitterly ironic device.

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represented by the rose image, and the shadow of the past, represented by the nettles, is left unresolved. 3.9.1 The Open Wound Sachs’ epitaphs, as just seen, are soaked with the presence of the dead, and yet the reader is charged with the unsettling task of making good their simultaneous, paradoxical absence. Involving and engaging the reader is Sachs’ method of keeping memory open, a means of preventing the Holocaust becoming an historical, ‘closed chapter.’ The poem “Zwischen,” published for the first time in a recent new edition of her work, is devoted entirely to this question of closure. This poem, composed, Aris Fioretos suggests, sometime before 1943 (cf. Sachs 2010: 292), is an austere caution to the post-Shoah world that the wound which the Holocaust has left in its wake must be kept open at all costs: Zwischen Gestern und Morgen geht ein Hohlweg. sie haben ihn gegraben, Ihn ausgefllt Mit ihrer Zeit. Mit dem Blut der Toten, Den ausgewanderten Schreien der Wahnsinnigen, Den hilflosen Blicken Der Greise und Kinder. Jetzt, wo der Abend einfllt, Versuche keine staubgebildete Hand Eine Brcke zu schlagen Zwischen Gestern und Morgen! Oder Ein Heilkraut zu pflanzen Von Gestern nach Morgen. Der Salbei Hat abgeblht. Rosmarin Seinen Duft verloren – Und selbst der Wermut War bitter nur fr Gestern. Die Blten des Trostes sind zu kurz Entsprossen, Reichen nicht an die Qual Einer Abschiedstrne. Neuer Same wird vielleicht Bei einem gçttlichen Grtner gezogen – Du sollst auch nicht singen

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Wie du gesungen hast – Ein Feuer brach aus nach der Musik von Gestern – O der Wolkengambe Urnachtton – Die zerrissen Saiten der Blitze – Die Flçte des Totengebeins – Und des Regens Grabgesang. Still, still Hier hat der Engel das Wort! Vielleicht, das dein kleines Amen Aufgenommen wird zu Gnaden Wenn du Sand bist in den Schuhen Kommender! In Der Tiefe des Hohlwegs Zwischen Gestern und Morgen Steht der Cherub, mahlt mit seinen Flgeln Goldene Blitze – Seine Hnde aber halten die Felsen auseinander Von Gestern und Morgen – Wie die Rnder einer Wunde, die Offen bleiben soll, die Noch nicht heilen darf… (Sachs 2010: 134)

In the opening lines the poetic voice declares that the worlds of yesterday and today, that is, the pre- and post-Holocaust worlds, are divided by an unbridgeable ravine. Form immediately becomes a function of literary content: the positioning of the preposition “Zwischen” draws the reader’s attention and formally stands in the stead of the unspeakable that has occasioned this gorge. The subsequent lines are an attempt to address this unspeakable. The accusative pronoun “ihn” in line four is connected to the “Hohlweg” of the previous line. A ‘they’ collective – an unmistakable reference to the perpetrators – is charged with having firstly ‘excavated’ and then ‘filled up’ this ravine with the blood, demented screams and helpless gazes of the murdered victims. This can be interpreted as an allusion to how the murderous annihilation machinery was first carefully devised before being put ‘into practice’; it can be read, in other words, as abhorrence on the part of the poetic persona at the careful deliberation that went into drawing up the plans of the so-called ‘Final Solution.’ The curious reference to the perpetrators having filled up this gorge “mit ihrer Zeit” may be an allusion to the period of the so-called ‘Third Reich’; it has divided time. Sachs then cautions that in the post-Holocaust world,

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represented by the adverb “jetzt,” no hand should attempt to bridge this divide. She introduces herbal imagery into these cautionary lines. The healing properties of sage, rosemary, and wormwood, which may have been of use in the pre-Shoah world, have been rendered inept: the sage plant has faded, the rosemary plant has lost its scent, the wormwood has lost its natural bitterness. Nature itself is irreparably wounded; its ‘blossoms of consolation’ no longer console: they are declared insufficient to cope with the anguish of the “Abschiedstrne.” Sachs then momentarily renews a sense of hope in the image of the ‘divine gardener’ planting new seeds. This hope is tempered, however, by the employment of the modifying modal adverb “vielleicht.” This (already tempered) hopeful reprieve itself lasts but a fleeting moment: the notion of renewal is reversed as the line dissolves in the bottomless void of the dash. The second half of the poem sees Sachs issuing an unambiguous directive to the post-Shoah world: “Du sollst auch nicht singen / Wie du gesungen hast –”. The adverb “auch” connects this directive with Sachs’ earlier demand in lines eleven and twelve: just as the hand should not attempt to bridge the gorge and thereby soothe the Holocaust wound, Sachs warns that art after Auschwitz (“Singen” can be read as an umbrella term for artistic expression generally) ought to be a different form of art. Keeping the memory of the Holocaust open cannot, after all, be served by writing what she calls “schçne Gedichte[.]” (Sachs 1984: 83 – 84). The use of the modal verb “sollen” is significant here: Sachs is appealing to the reader’s sense of moral obligation. Just as Adorno is concerned with the ethical implications of the ‘principle of aesthetic stylisation, which can only ‘soften’ the horror and thus do an injustice to the victims’ suffering, Sachs also sees a continuation with artistic tradition morally questionable. The breach in time needs to be reflected in artistic expression, since the ‘music of yesterday’ has been rendered inept by the fires of the crematoria. This reference to “[die] Musik von Gestern,” to torn bows and to the silencing of ancient viols and tones may be a commentary on culture’s failure to act as a bulwark against the barbarity that was unleashed. The only musical instruments that function in the post-Auschwitz world are the flutes of the dead – “die Flçte des Totengebeins,” while the only song to be heard is that from the grave. By the final lines, the gorge of the opening lines has grown deeper. Sachs now speaks of its ‘depths.’ The isolated positioning of the prepositions “In” and “Zwischen” attract renewed attention; once again formal structure becomes a function of literary content. “In” suggests that the post-Shoah world is engulfed in the depths of the Holocaust gorge,

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while the position of “Zwischen” reinforces this divide. This is followed by a description of the cherub painting “Blitze” with his wings. However, this future-oriented image is held in suspension by the cherub’s hands simultaneously holding apart the divide between the pre- and post- Holocaust worlds. This image is a quintessential instance of what Langer refers to as Sachs’ “paradoxical and exasperating version of survival,” which “encourages the spirit” in its leap towards heaven whilst simultaneously drawing it “steadily backward into the vast anonymous grave of Jewish doom” (Langer 1982: 250). The painting cherub represents this leap towards the divine; his hands, however, simultaneously pull back by holding apart the Auschwitz gorge. The permanence and solidity evoked by the image of “Felsen” remind the reader here that even with the passage of time, there can be no such thing as an unequivocal reconnection with the divine. The final lines of the poem see a final directive issued by the poetic persona using the wound motif. Just as the gap between yesterday and today should not be bridged and just as the song of today, that is, artistic expression, should differ to that of yesterday, so too must the wound that the Holocaust represents remain open. The changeover from ‘sollen’ to ‘drfen’ in the final line is important, since it is here that the poem’s directive reaches its peak; this verb delivers a message of warning to the reader against the dangers inherent in forgetting. For those who managed escape the slaughter, the consequences of this unhealed wound are, of course, of an entirely different nature, and Sachs devotes a significant selection of poems to those who dwell within this Holocaust wound – “die Todentrissenen”.

3.10 The ‘Death of Death’: ‘Die Todentrissenen’ Those who survived the Nazi slaughter experienced little in terms of what might be considered life in its aftermath. The devastating consequences of having endured the death camps meant that Sachs was forced to invent a new vocabulary to encapsulate survivor trauma. “Die Todentrissenen” is one term that Sachs uses to describe this group of victims. (Sachs 1961: 114) This is a powerful linguistic construct which says a great deal about the scale of the Nazi terror: the few inmates who did not perish are described having been ‘snatched from death,’ an unmistakable reference to the industrialised nature of the extermination process. What is noticable in those poems which explicitly address the question of survival is, firstly, their unexpected domination by the theme of death: “Welt, frage nicht

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die Todentrissenen / wohin sie gehen, / sie gehen immer ihren Graben zu” (Sachs 1961: 114), “Wir ben schon heute den Tod von Morgen / wo noch das alte Sterben in uns welkt –” (Sachs 1961: 154), “O Zeit, die nur nach Sterben rechnet / Wie leicht wird Tod nach dieser langen bung sein” (Sachs 1961: 28). What these brief initial examples suggest is that the ‘survivors’ of the camps who have narrowly escaped death do not experience life after Auschwitz; instead, life for them is merely a steady progression towards the grave. The reason for this lies in the manner in which the extermination process was carried out, namely, the liquidation not only of the million-fold collective, but of the very concept of the individual subject. The second conspicuous feature of the poems that deal with the question of survival is the prominence of speech in the plural. As a determining feature of Sachs’ work in general, the frequent absence of a lyrical ‘ich’ carries mimetic significance in respect of historical fact. The absence of the lyrical subject can be read “als Hinweis auf die konkreten Auswirkungen der nationalsozialistischen Rassenpolitik: Es erinnert an den massenhaften Tod, die Shoah, die, wenngleich sie ein millionfaches individuelles Sterben war, aus kulturhistorischer Sicht den individuellen Tod und somit auch den Status des Subjekts mitvernichtet hat” (Kranz-Lçber 2001: 68). This ‘ichlosigkeit’ thus assumes a mimetic quality. “Dieses pluralische Sprechen,” as Dieter Lamping writes, “das fr die Holocaust-Lyrik insgesamt durchaus typisch ist, […] ist untrennbar verbunden […] mit kollektivem Tod […]. Der massenhafte Tod und die Anonymitt der Opfer verweisen auf das Ende der individuellen Humanitt, die keine personale Identitt mehr zu erlauben scheint, auch nicht im Gedicht” (Lamping 1998: 103). Indeed, it is precisely in this respect that the poetic genre has a distinct advantage in the process of representation: not bound to the narration of individual characters, poetry can reflect the extermination process for what it was – “the unceremonious mass-production of death” (Ezrahi 1980: 83). In the poem “Chor der Wolken” (In den Wohnungen des Todes (1947), sub-cycle Chçre nach der Mitternacht), this prominence of speech in the plural comes to the fore. Sachs attempts to portray what ‘life’ after Auschwitz means for “die Todentrissenen”: Wir sind voller Seufzer, voller Blicke Wir sind voller Lachen Und zuweilen tragen wir eure Gesichter. Wir sind euch nicht fern. Wer weiß, wieviel von eurem Blute aufstieg Und uns frbte?

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Wer weiß, wieviel Trnen ihr durch unser Weinen Vergossen habt? Wieviel Sehnsucht uns formte? Sterbespieler sind wir Gewçhnen euch sanft an den Tod. Ihr Ungebten, die in den Nchten nichts lernen. Viele Engel sind euch gegeben Aber ihr seht sie nicht. (Sachs 1961: 63)

In this poem the “wir” in the main body of the poem can be equated with the “Wolken” in the title: Sachs anthropomorphises the clouds, equipping them with a voice to perform their ‘chorus.’ In the opening lines, Sachs arouses the reader’s expectations in order to subsequently thwart them with a radical alteration of customary imagery. The initial image of the smiling clouds is transfigured into the contorted image of blood-drenched clouds being ‘formed’ by the blood of the victims ‘rising’ in the form of smoke from the chimneys of the crematoria. Sachs’ use of the verb ‘aufsteigen’ in connection with blood is very troubling here. At this point the three plural nouns of the opening lines, namely, “Seufzer,” “Blicke” and “Lachen” exhibit their disconcerting effect within the framework of ‘rising blood’ motif. Sachs presents a muddled field of association here: the smiles of the victims – possibly children – are mentioned alongside the sighs of the dead and the empty, listless gazes – almost certainly – of the Muselmnner. The image of the raindrop carrying the faces of countless victims, each face in turn stained with this ‘rising blood,’ may be considered a stylistic device, the function of which is to portray the presence of the dead victims in the minds of the survivors. The raindrops form a multiple poetic function: firstly, they can be viewed as representing the tears of the concentration camp victims. Secondly, they serve as a way of keeping memory open, since they are filled, Sachs tells us, with the ‘sighs,’ ‘gazes,’ and ‘laughter’ of the victims. Thirdly, by being stained with the ‘ascending blood’ of the victims, these bloodied raindrops can be linked to the desecration of the individual in the camps: in Auschwitz, one did not die as an individual in the manner associated with death in previous times. Rather, the blood of millions ‘rose up’ in the form of smoke through the crematoria chimneys. In the line “wir sind euch nicht fern,” the reader senses the uncanny presence of the Holocaust victims saturating the survivors’ existence; their omnipresence means that the survivors become ‘acustomed’ not to life in the post-Shoah world, but rather to death. The line “Gewçhnen euch sanft an den Tod” can moreover be read as an ironic reference to the

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fact that the process of the survivors becoming ‘accustomed’ to death, by virtue of their being surrounded by death, is anything but “sanft.” In the closing lines the clouds address the survivors. The survivors do not see the divine, as represented by the angel image, at work in the world. This can be read as an allusion to the fact that a meaningful relationship with the divine cannot be simply reignited after Auschwitz. In this respect “Ihr Ungebten” could be read as a reference to the survivors who are ‘out of practice’ in respect of matters pertaining to the divine, and with the resonances of Sachs’ night imagery now familiar, it is also clear why night does not reveal or ‘teach’ the survivor anything in this respect. By means of the profusion of ominous images, Sachs makes clear the abyss that divides the pre- and post-Shoah worlds; she shows that death, in its traditional sense, can no longer be assumed by the survivor: “Hçchster Wunsch auf Erden,” she wrote in her prose text Leben unter Bedrohung, “Sterben, ohne gemordert zu werden” (Sachs 1974: 9). With the concept of the mass annihilation of a specific group having become a reality, the greatest thing the survivor can now wish for is to die a natural death. By declaring a natural death the yardstick in a post-Auschwitz world, Sachs underlines the irreparable rupture that the Shoah has occasioned. As Lagercranz writes: “Sie hatte […] keine Angst vor dem Tod, sondern davor gemordert zu werden,” in the face of “diese[s] maschinengefertigte[n] Massentod der Neuzeit” (Lagercrantz 1966: 43). She does not present the reader with any illusory sense of death as a release from suffering. Rather, ‘life’ for the survivor is merely one step away from death. Although ‘die Todentrissenen’ may have survived physical annihilation, death is now ubiquitous; it has become a haunting spectre that permeates life itself. The poem “Chor der Geretteten” (In den Wohnungen des Todes (1947), sub-cycle Chçre nach der Mitternacht) is perhaps Sachs’ most direct portrayal of the atmosphere of terror that envelops the survivor: Wir Geretteten Aus deren hohlem Gebein der Tod schon seine Flçten schnitt An deren Sehnen der Tod schon seinen Bogen strich – Unsere Leiber klagen noch nach Mit ihrer verstmmelten Musik. Wir Geretteten, Immer noch hngen die Schlingen fr unsere Hlse gedreht Vor uns in der blauen Luft – Immer noch fllen sich die Stundenuhren mit unserem tropfenden Blut.

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Wir Geretteten, Immer noch essen an uns die Wrmer der Angst. Unser Gestirn ist vergraben im Staub. Wir Geretteten Bitten euch: Zeigt uns langsam eure Sonne, Fhrt uns von Stern zu Stern im Schritt. Laßt uns das Leben leise wieder lernen. Es kçnnte sonst eines Vogels Lied, Das Fllen des Eimers am Brunnen Unseren schlecht versiegelten Schmerz aufbrechen lassen Und uns wegschumen – Wir bitten euch: Zeigt uns noch nicht einen beißenden Hund – Es kçnnte sein, es kçnnte sein Daß wir zu Staub zerfallen – Vor euren Augen zerfallen zu Staub. Was hlt denn unsere Webe zusammen? Wir odemlos gewordene, Deren Seele zu Ihm floh aus der Mitternacht Lange bevor man unseren Leib rettete In die Arche des Augenblicks. Wir Geretteten, Wir drcken eure Hand, Wir erkennen euer Auge – Aber zusammen hlt uns nur noch der Abschied, Der Abschied im Staub Hlt uns mit euch zusammen. (Sachs 1961: 50)

This poem thematises some of the formidable repercussions of Holocaust survival. Sachs encapsulates the never-ending effects of trauma for the survivor, as summed up by Cathy Caruth: The story of trauma […], far from telling of an escape from […] death […] – rather attests to its endless impact on a life. […] From this perspective, the survival of trauma is not the fortunate passage beyond a violent event, a passage that is accidentally interrupted by reminders of it, but rather the endless […] repetition which may lead to destruction. (Caruth 1996: 7)

This endless impact of trauma comes to the fore in this poem, as Sachs presents the scenario of perpetrator and victim as all-pervasive. With disturbing clarity, she portrays the image of the survivor haunted by the presence of death. Nooses dangle from the sky, worms of fear feed on the survivors, the hourglass drips blood instead of sand.5 The image of 5

A similar image to the rope dangling in the sky appears in Leben unter Bedro-

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the blood dripping from the hourglass attracts the reader’s attention by virtue of its unusual positioning: its isolated location makes its dripping sound audible to the reader’s ear. This image is another example of the distortion of routine imagery. The hourglass is now a menacing reminder of human transitoriness: it is human blood instead of sand that drips with each unit of time. This can be read as the traumatised perspective of the Holocaust survivor on life, since life is now constantly accompanied by the threat of violent death. The image of death ‘stroking its bow’ on the sinews of the survivors is almost certainly a play on the absurd scene at the entrance gates to the death camps, where inmates were forced to play classical music to ‘soothe’ the incoming prisoners and thereby avoid rioting, while its conflation with the image of death as fiddler from the ‘Totentanz’ could be read as a reference to the inevitability of death. This poem does not contain a hint of redemptive release; death has become omnipresent, determining life itself, while the frequent hyphenation expresses the muteness to which the poetic voice has succumbed in its attempt to portray the agonised trauma of those who survived the slaughter. The imagined threat of death that the traumitised survivor continues to experience comes to the fore in the mutilated sentence structure; the survivors attempt in vain three times to make a plea – “Wir bitten euch” – finally succeeding in lines fourteen and fifteen: “Wir Geretteten / Bitten euch: / Zeigt uns langsam eure Sonne.” Even though the subject up until this point was followed by either a sub- or main clause, each with its own subject or predicate, the whole sentence itself (lines one to thirteen can be considered a fragmented but nonetheless sustained attempt to formulate this one sentence) remains mutilated. The repetition of the opposite temporal phrases “schon” and “immer noch” is significant: these phrases act as reminders of the continual presence in the survivor’s life of the menacing presence of death. The lines “Es kçnnte sonst eines Vogels Lied, / […] / Unseren schlecht versiegelten Schmerz aufbrechen lassen” are a reminder that the wounds of the Shoah are only ever superficially healed; they are liable to burst open at any time. These lines highlight the precariousness of life in a post-Auschwitz world. This volatility hung: “Eine Nachricht kam. Und die Nachricht verschluckte ich. Das war mein Angelhaken. Aufgehngt an der Luft.” (Sachs 1974: 11) The “Nachricht” to which Sachs is referring is when she was ordered to the Gestapo headquarters. Although she was allowed to return home, the SA men later forced themselves into her home plundering everything before her and her mother’s eyes.

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became real for Sachs herself upon her visit to Meersburg to accept the Meersburger Drostepreis in 1960, in the aftermath of which she suffered a severe nervous breakdown. This, her first visit to Germany after twenty years, proved catastrophic. It signalled the start of Sachs’ struggle with the ‘Verfolgungsangst’ that would plague her for the next decade, during which time she believed herself to be surrounded by Nazi spies above her Stockholm apartment. In a letter to Hilde Domin in July 1960, her increasingly acute paranoia comes to the fore. This very short letter, which reads as if Sachs was utterly breathless whilst writing it, is permeated with the hyphens that are so characteristic of her poetry: “Liebes Du – Hilde – / muß Dir doch schnell antworten, trotz dieser endlosen Mdigkeit, verursacht durch diesen schrecklichen Radiotelegraphistenbetrieb oberhalb meiner Wohnung – grausig.” (Sachs 1984: 251) The inscription of the image of the biting dog in the second half of the poem can be read as a further reference to survivor trauma. The survivors plead that they never again be shown “einen beißenden Hund.” Such a sight could be a reminder of the terrorising bloodhounds used by the SS; the biting dog may thus be interpreted as a symbol of Nazi brutality. In the final lines, Sachs reminds the world that the sole link between the survivors of the Shoah and those untouched by the terror is merely mortality. She does this to express the abyss that exists in terms of experience between the two groups and to remind the reader of the incommunicability of the suffering endured by ‘those snatched from death.’ The poem “Auf daß die Verfolgten nicht Verfolger werden” (Sternverdunkelung (1949), sub-cycle Und reißend ist die Zeit) is another attempt by Sachs to recreate the sense of urgency and continual state of anxiety that envelops the life of the Holocaust survivor. An analysis of this poem is especially significant given the exploitation of the poem’s title during the years of the ‘Nelly Sachs cult’ in West Germany. Representative of general press trends are claims such as the following 1966 report: “Ihre Dichtung […] gilt dem Frieden und der Versçhnung, damit, wie sie sagt, ‘die Verfolgten nicht Verfolger werden.’” (Wallmann 1966) The poem itself, however, when examined in its entirety, paints quite a different picture: Schritte – In welchen Grotten der Echos seid ihr bewahrt, die ihr den Ohren einst weissagtet kommenden Tod?

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Schritte – Nicht Vogelflug, noch Schau der Eingeweide, noch der blutschwitzenden Mars gab des Orakels Todesauskunft mehr – nur Schritte – Schritte – Urzeitspiel von Henker und Opfer, Verfolger und Verfolgten, Jger und Gejagt – Schritte die die Zeit reißend machen die Stunde mit Wçlfen behngen, dem Flchtling die Flucht auslçschen im Blute. Schritte die Zeit zhlend mit Schreien, Seufzern, Austritt des Blutes bis es gerinnt, Todesschweiß zu Stunden hufend – Schritte der Henker ber Schritte der Opfer, Sekundenzeiger im Gang der Erde, von welchem Schwarzmond schrecklich gezogen? In der Musik der Sphren wo schrillt euer Ton? (Sachs 1961: 77)

In the first stanza, the use of the verb ‘bewahren’ in relation to the sound of the Nazi henchmen’s steps may be an allusion to the fact that these steps have not faded for the survivor. The echo motif imbues the steps with acoustic value: the survivor continually hears them approaching. The steps evoke a sense of foreboding in the survivor; as Dischner writes: “[d]ie Grotten der Echoes […] bewahren die ‘Schritte’ als eine Form der Todesweissagung” (Dischner 1997: 22). The title of this poem “Auf daß die Verfolgten nicht Verfolger werden” should be understood in this vein, as a warning to future generations, and not in terms of forgiveness. In the second stanza, Sachs describes how the millions who were massacred in the death camps were made aware of their impending slaughter: the message came not through the examination of entrails or the flight of birds as in olden times, but rather through the ominous sound of the Nazi henchmen’s steps. As the poem progresses, hours are described as being ‘draped’ in wolves, a likely symbol of Nazi brutality, while time is measured not by seconds, but by the screams and sighs of the victims;

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their blood seeps to the point of coagulation, while their ‘deathly sweat’ piles up. The reference to the ‘steps of the hangman over the steps of the victims’ creates a distortion of scale in terms of the physicality of the henchmen’s steps; the reader is left with an image of these enormous steps trampling upon the victims. Lawrence Langer sees Sachs’ use of the neologism “Schwarzmond” in the next line as an attempt to fuse what were once polarities into a single image. (Langer 1976/77: 322) The construct ‘black moon’ may be considered such an attempt, similar to the genitive construct “die Monde des Todes” seen earlier in the poem “Nacht, Nacht.” The moon, traditionally a source of light amidst the dark, is black in the post-Auschwitz world, while its gravitational pull is now a pull of terror. The anaphoric use of “Schritte” throughout lends the poem an urgent overtone: the reader can hear the reverberation of these death-pronouncing footsteps. These “Schritte” continually haunt the traumatised survivor; they represent a death-announcing omen. The motif of the Nazi footsteps is also used by Sachs in Leben unter Bedrohung to describe her own experience of the sound of the SS boots as they plundered her home: “Es kamen Schritte. Starke Schritte, Schritte, in denen das Recht sich huslich niedergelassen hatte. Schritte stießen an die Tr. […] Die Tr war die erste Haut, die aufgerissen wurde. Die Haut des Heims.” (Sachs 1974: 10) The terror she endured that night is encapsulated in this prose text by means of images like “Angstschweiß,” a similar construct to the “Todesschweiß” in the poem examined above: Unter Bedrohung leben: im offenen Grab verwesen ohne Tod. Das Gehirn faßt nicht mehr. Die letzten Gedanken kreisen um den schwarzgefrbten Handschuh, der die Eintrittsnummer zur Gestapo verdunkelte und fast das Leben kostete. Angstschweiß hatte unsichtbar zu bleiben.“ (Sachs 1974: 10 – 11)

Whilst awaiting interrogation by the Gestapo her card registration number becomes smeared by the ‘sweat of fear’ that literally seeps through her gloves. In the poem “Greise” (Sternverdunkelung (1949), sub-cycle berlebende), Sachs recreates a similar atmosphere of the terror: Da, in den Falten dieses Sterns, zugedeckt mit einem Fetzen Nacht, stehen sie, und warten Gott ab. Ihr Mund hat ein Dorn verschlossen. ihre Sprache ist an ihre Augen verlorengegangen,

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die reden wie Brunnen darin ein Leichnam ertrunken ist. O die Alten, die ihre verbrannte Nachfolge in den Augen tragen als einzigen Besitz. (Sachs 1961: 111)

In this poem Sachs portrays the elderly survivors of the Holocaust. The old people are described as covered with ‘shreds of night,’ the image of “Fetzen” suggesting to the reader that this night does not cover the survivors in a sheltering and protective way. The use of the verb ‘abwarten’ in the fourth line creates a sense of unease in the reader; “the verb ‘abwarten,’ as Ursula Rudnick writes, “irritates German readers because it is not ordinarily used with people or with God. […] ‘Abwarten’ implies passivity. […] It is a waiting for nothing in particular.” (Rudnick 1995: 83 – 84, 90) The reader conjures up the image of an endless number of elderly survivors with gaunt, listless and empty faces lining up and waiting around for God; a God who did not intervene to stop the suffering and who is not about to reveal himself in its aftermath. A ‘thorn’ has ‘sealed’ the survivors’ mouths shut, their language is ‘lost to their eyes,’ these eyes in turn ‘speak’ like a well into which a corpse has drowned. The survivor’s state of speechlessness is encapsulated very effectively here. The horrors of the death camps have forcefully – as suggested by the prefix ‘ver’ in the verb ‘verschließen’ – sealed shut the mouths of the survivors; the eyes attempt instead to perform the function of the voice, but this also fails. The only thing visible in the eyes of each survivor are the emaciated faces of those who perished in the death camps – similar to a corpse floating in a well. The well, traditionally a life-sustaining image, now polluted by the corpse reminds the reader that nothing in the post-Shoah world can sustain the inmate who ‘survives’ Auschwitz. The construct “verbrannte Nachfolge” in the closing lines is a likely allusion to the countless children who were murdered. It points to the fact that “the natural order of life has been destroyed” (Rudnick 1995: 87). The few parents who did manage to survive the slaughter carry the spectre of their murdered offspring as their ‘sole possession’; there is no redemptive release from the camp memories. Sachs’ portrayal of the effects of survivor trauma serves as a means of ensuring that the memory of the Holocaust remains open. The survivors, to draw on Terence des Pres once more, are, after all, “disturbers of the peace”; “runners of the blockade men erect against unspeakable things” (Des Pres 1980: 42 – 43). Whilst alive, their very existence was a remind-

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er of the atrocities; their existence kept memory open. Their physical presence in the post-Shoah world, however, had a time limit. Sachs’ poetry can thus be viewed as preparation for the eventuality of their passing; as her contribution to ensuring that the Holocaust did not fall concurrently into oblivion. Her poetry undertakes the urgent task of keeping open the wounds of Auschwitz, to avoid any comfortable notions of closure. Unease, apprehension, agitation, insecurity, undermining and disappointing the reader’s expectations are the intended effects. Setting the reader on insecure ground plays a particularly important role in those poems where Sachs employs familiar, theologically comforting Biblical archetypes, only to subsequently thwart their original consolatory function as part of her project of representing the unrepresentable.

3.11 Archetypes as Representational Devices “To think about, to remember, and to express the events of the Holocaust,” James Young argues, “is either to do so archetypically or not at all” (J. E. Young 1988: 89). What Young means is that, short of creating a new vocabulary not imbued with previous meaning and without associations and assonances, we are only capable of interpreting the past within the paradigms of historical precedent, in relation, that is, to other events and in familiar terms of reference. In much of her early poetry, Nelly Sachs draws on the pool of Biblical archetypes available to her in her attempt to represent the Holocaust in literary form. She uses them, that is to say, as representational devices.6 What is significant about her method, however, is the fact that she employs them to highlight not their efficacy, but rather to expose their vulnerability as analogues for an understanding of the suffering. Her work demonstrates what James Young refers to as a “self-reflexive questioning of the available archetypes […], retaining the shell of the archetype while disposing of its meaning” (J. E. Young 1988: 95 – 96). Previous Sachs scholarship has taken quite a different interpretative approach. That approach has interpreted her employment of Biblical archetypes within the framework of the supposed redemptive nature of her poetry. Horst Bienek, for example, commenting on Sachs’ use of the Biblical figure Job, writes: 6

Aspects related to Sachs’ use of Biblical archetypes were developed in Martin (2011).

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Spricht nicht aus diesen Gedichten der eschatologische Glaube der prophetischen Bilder? Und ist nicht mitten unter uns Hiob […] alle Fhrnisse und Prfungen in unerschtterlichem Glauben bestehend? In den Gedichten der Nelly Sachs stoßen wir auf das Wort ‘durchschmerzen.’ In diesem Sinne hat sie ihre Gedichte ‘durchschmerzt’ […], ohne im Erlebnis steckengeblieben zu sein. Die Zeit der Mçrder, die Zeit der Verfolgung ist […] berwunden […], in der Anrufung der Gestalten aus dem alten Testament [findet sie] […] Kraft. (Bienek 1966: 86)

Such a view of Sachs’ use of this Biblical figure is very problematic, given that Sachs expresses only despair at the inadequacy of this archetype to encapsulate the Holocaust. Sachs’ Job certainly does not ‘pass’ the test of suffering “in unerschtterlichem Glauben.” Bienek’s is just one of a large number of critical voices which commend the larger redemptive strategy of Sachs’ work and which see her utilisation of Biblical archetypes as evidence of a supposed religious ‘sense-making’ paradigm. This commendation is questionable. Sachs certainly appropriates Biblical figures, but she takes great liberties in subtracting from, adding to and indeed, on occasion, even reverses the original text. This manipulation of Biblical archetypes may be viewed as the author’s prescient engagement with an overarching issue at the heart of the contentious debate on Holocaust representation that later came to dominate Holocaust literary studies, namely, the question as to whether it is ethically permissible for Holocaust art to redeem in terms of encouraging the reader to see the event as part of some larger meaningful plan; whether it is permissible, that is, to make sense of suffering by projecting what Maeve Cook terms “meaningful totalities” (237). Through her employment of Biblical archetypes Sachs engages with this very question: she employs familiar archetypes as representational devices with the aim of initially encouraging a redemptive trajectory, a ‘meaningful totality,’ which is subsequently thwarted. She disrupts, in other words, the facile linear progression of the Biblical narratives upon which she draws and circumvents their redemptive affirmations. She thereby avoids the dangers of trivialisation inherent in what Saul Friedlnder describes as “simplistic and self-assured historical narrations and closures” (Friedlnder 1992: 52 – 53). A number of critics alongside Friedlnder have expressed discomfort at the notion of reconciling the concept of redemption with the realities of the Holocaust. Geoffrey Hartmann, for example, is perturbed by the notion that the immeasurable human suffering during the Holocaust can be somehow ‘made good’ in terms of the lesson learned; the Holocaust for Hartmann has challenged the very “credibility of redemptive thinking” (326). Cyn-

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thia Ozick has also expressed concern. She comments on the tendency in the post-Shoah world, in its urgent struggle towards what she calls “the veil of redemption,” to extract “redeeming meaning” from the Holocaust. She argues that the Holocaust is “incapable of any hint or aura of redemptiveness” and that nothing can be pulled “out of the abyss” (278, 284). Lawrence Langer has similarly noted how comforting it would be to say that Nelly Sachs makes of Israel’s anguish a similar legend to Dante’s arrival in Paradise, namely, “ a descent into night, a period of suffering, and a return – a reascent – into light and firmer spiritual purity.” For Sachs, however, there can be “no simple turning from despair to hope” (Langer 1982: 244). The Holocaust for Sachs, as Lawrence Langer points out, was about “a kind of dying unimagined by her poetic predecessors” ( Langer 1982: 217); it represented a suffering “so far in excess of comprehensible cause that it was simply incompatible with any view of existence hitherto available to the human imagination” (Langer 1976/77: 315). Sachs was nonetheless faced with the task of locating images in an attempt to communicate this incommunicable suffering, “um das Unsgliche in unzulngliche Sprache zu bringen,” as the author put it in a letter to Carl Seelig (Sachs 1984: 83). Her employment of archetypes is, I would argue, extremely significant in the framework of her endeavour to present the ‘unrepresentable,’ in view of the fact that she undermines their original function. She engages in a process referred to by one critic as “figuration”; a process whereby Biblical character types are appropriated and transformed into new types that reflect the experiences and accommodate the needs of the present (Jacobson 1987: 4). She maintains the shell of the archetype, to borrow Young’s words again, whilst disposing of its meaning (J. E. Young 1988: 95 – 96). Sachs’ use of the Job story from the Old Testament is a particularly good example of the poet’s engagement in this “figuration” process. 3.11.1 Sachs’ ‘Anti-Job’ For Sachs, the Job story was ineluctable material in her attempt to present the suffering of the Jewish people during the Shoah. In a 1966 radio interview with ‘Radio Israel,’ she spoke of the significance of Biblical archetypes in enabling her to broach the task of portraying the horror: “In den ersten Gedichtsammlungen, In Wohnungen des Todes, Sternverdunkelung […] haben biblische Texte strkend und ermutigend eingewirkt,

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daß ich berhaupt versuchte, das Unsgliche auszusprechen.” (cited in Bahr 1980: 63) Biblical texts did not embolden her in the sense of providing her with an explanatory framework for the suffering. On the contrary; by exposing their deficiencies as explanatory paradigms, Sachs finds a means of portraying the unintelligibility, the enormity and the incommunicability of the suffering. The employment of the Job archetype in one of Sachs’ best known poems “O die Schornsteine” (In den Wohnungen des Todes (1947), sub-cycle Dein Leib in Rauch durch die Luft) is an exemplary instance of Sachs’ method: Und wenn diese meine Haut zerschlagen sein wird, so werde ich ohne mein Fleisch Gott schauen (Hiob) O die Schornsteine Auf den sinnreich erdachten Wohnungen des Todes, Als Israels Leib zog aufgelçst in Rauch Durch die Luft – Als Essenkehrer ihn ein Stern empfing Der schwarz wurde Oder war es ein Sonnenstrahl? O die Schornsteine! Freiheitswege fr Jeremias und Hiobs Staub – Wer erdachte euch und baute Stein auf Stein Den Weg fr Flchtlinge aus Rauch? O die Wohnungen des Todes, Einladend hergerichtet Fr den Wirt des Hauses, der sonst Gast war – O ihr Finger, Die Eingangsschwelle legend Wie ein Messer zwischen Leben und Tod – O ihr Schornsteine, O ihr Finger, Und Israels Leib im Rauch durch die Luft! (Sachs 1961: 8)

Bruno Bollinger who, it will be noted, was writing at the peak of the ‘Nelly Sachs cult,’ has claimed that this poem was written “ohne das leiseste Ressentiment” (Bolliger 1966: 144). This is a curious claim in light of the fact that Sachs portrays the horrors of the death camps here with imagery that is more visually evocative than in any other poem. The frequency with which the epigraph from the Book of Job which accompanies this poem is overlooked in the research literature – indeed some critics have even reproduced the poem on its own without its attendant epigraph – is surprising, not least given the fact that it is one of the most

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widely disseminated of Sachs’ works. The epigraph provides the reader with an immediate insight into the thematic context of the poem, namely, the question of a presumably just God who permits human suffering. As the motto for the opening poem of her first post-Auschwitz volume – and as such a leitmotif for the entire volume – Sachs chooses the most controversial lines from the Biblical narrative, namely, Job’s endurance of the calamities which befall him without reproaching divine providence – “so werde ich ohne mein Fleisch Gott schauen” [my emphasis]. By selecting the traditional redemptory ending as the opening motto, Sachs draws her readers into a false expectation of a similarly redemptive message with respect to the suffering endured during the Holocaust in the main body of the poem. In this way, the motto can be viewed as having very definite repercussions for the remainder of the poem in terms of encouraging presumptions that are subsequently thwarted. In place of the redemptive message expected on the part of the reader, however, Sachs presents us instead with a series of highly disturbing images relating directly to the death camps. The first stanza introduces the chimneys of the crematoria “auf den sinnreich erdachten Wohnungen des Todes”; almost immediately that which was familiar has undergone total perversion: a dwelling is traditionally a place to live, during the Holocaust, however, ‘habitations’ were ‘purposefully built’ for the sole purpose of death. The next image in the series sees Israel’s ‘body,’ a reference to the millions of Jewish victims, dissolving to smoke through these chimneys. A star welcomes “Israels Leib” – suggested by the accusative personal pronoun “ihn” – as a ‘chimney sweep’: ‘Ein Stern, der schwarz wurde, empfing ihn (Israels Leib) als Essenkehrer.’ This can be interpreted as an allusion to the victims’ remains lining the chimneys of the crematoria. These charred remains cause this ‘welcoming’ star to subsequently turn black. The question “Oder war es ein Sonnenstrahl?” is grammatically connected to the relative clause “der schwarz wurde” in line six. Such a reading is supported by the masculine nominative relative pronoun “der” which, grammatically, could govern both “Stern” and “Sonnenstrahl.” Such a reading adds to the general blackness that permeates this poem: the poetic person asks whether it was in fact less a mere star than an actual ray of sun that ‘welcomed’ the remains of the Jewish victims and turned black. Thus, whilst an initial reading might suggest that the ray of sun is a positive one, close examination reveals that it is in fact a profoundly anti-redemptive gesture; “the groping dead,” as Langer comments, “constantly darken the horizon of hope” (Langer 1982: 242).

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In the second stanza, Sachs reminds her readers of the meticulous planning that went into constructing the camps. The verb ‘erdenken’ denotes creativity, thought and design: these ‘dwellings’ were carefully devised for murderous purposes. The employment of this verb, along with the ironic reference to the “einladend hergerichtet[e]” dwellings in the third stanza, perform a similar function to the attribute ‘sinnreich erdacht’ in the second line of the poem. Commenting on its purpose, there Kranz-Lçber writes: “Die Perfedie des durchorganisierten Massenmordens spiegelt das Attribut ‘sinnreich erdachten’ wider, das den Wohnungen vorangestellt ist. Es ist eine fast sarkastische Anspielung auf den brokratischen und organisatorischen Aufwand des Mordens.” (Kranz-Lçber 2001: 21) These references function as chilling reminders that these ‘abodes’ were technologically planned and scientifically administered entirely for the purposes of annihilation. The third stanza leads the reader into a parodying of the perpetrator’s perspective. That which was once guest – death – is now “Wirt” and, in a horrifying irony, this former ‘guest’ now welcomes its new ‘guests’ – the Jewish victims. The notion of death as ‘host’ serves as a reminder of the omnipresence of death in Auschwitz. Sachs then proceeds to describe the fingers of the Nazi henchmen “wie ein Messer zwischen Leben und Tod,” a probable allusion to the selection process on the ramps. Each thought in this third stanza culminates in the silence of the dash, at which point the poetic voice has reached the limit of what is representable. In the final stanza, Sachs proceeds to thwart the redemptive expectation still held at that point in the poem by the reader. Job’s resolved embrace of his faith in the motto – analogous with hope – is abandoned in the face of the corpses of the dead dissolving to smoke. In place of restitution for Job, Sachs’ Job perishes: the reader is presented with his violated body – “Hiobs Staub.” His ashes are scattered in the air as he leaves the chimneys of the crematorium. By letting Job perish, Sachs makes clear her position in relation to ‘Wiedergutmachung.’ Restituting Job would be a problematical gesture in the face of a million-fold, state-led annihilation programme; “Wiedergutmachung,” as Guy Stern comments, “even if it came from a divine source, could not undo the evil” (Stern 1990: 204).7 By selecting the redemptory message as the poem’s motto, 7

The problematic notion of restitution for the crimes of the Shoah has been commented on, perhaps most poignantly, by the Hebrew poet Ka-tzetnik 135633 [pseud. of Yehiel Dinur] (‘Ka-tzetnik’ meaning ‘Konzentrationslager,’ 135633 the camp number that was tattooed on his arm). In the poem “Star Eternal,”

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and subsequently reversing it, Sachs engages in the above-mentioned process of “figuration”: she employs the available Biblical imagery but turns it on its head. Job, as the embodiment of the Jewish people as a whole, no longer carries a message of hope. Lured into a false sense of religious ‘sense-making’ by means of the affirmations present in the epigraph, the reader finds instead that Sachs deceives all comfortable expectations. The Biblical story is divested of its sanguine message. Kuschel has remarked on another noteworthy aspect of this poem in respect of its physical direction: Obwohl […] die Bewegung in allen Strophen eine Bewegung von unten nach oben ist – der Leib zieht als Rauch durch die Luft […] – versagt sich Nelly Sachs in ihrem Text jede Identifizierung dieses ‘oben’ mit dem ‘Ort’ einer Transzendenz im religiçsen Sinn. ‘Luft’ und ‘Stern’ sind hier gerade nicht von vornherein Transzendenzsymbole, sondern konkrete Details des Raumes. Wohin Israel, aufgelçst in Rauch, geht, bleibt gerade offen, bleibt unbesprochen. (Kuschel 1994: 206)

In terms of the anti-redemptory message that “O die Schornsteine” carries, this movement from below to above is significant, since Sachs resists the transcendental interpretation expected on the part of the reader: a star welcomes Israel’s body as a ‘chimney sweep’ – an uncomfortably direct allusion as hitherto seen to the remains of the victims lining the chimneys of the crematoria – and subsequently turns black. Meanwhile the smoke from the crematoria is drifting nowhere in particular, merely “durch die Luft.” A number of critics have interpreted Sachs’ use of the Job archetype in this poem rather differently. Georg Langenhorst, in a similar vein to Bruno Bollinger, claims that in the figure of Hiob Sachs sees “ein[en] unausrottbare[n] und lebensnotwendige[n] Restfunken von Hoffnung,” and he asserts “es bleibt im Gedicht ‘O die Schornsteine’ eine […] lebenserin which Dinur deals with the question of accepting German reparations, he ridicules the very concept of ‘Wiedergutmachung’ in a sarcastic and bitter tone of derision: “Mother, now they want to give me money to make up for you. / I still can’t figure out how many German marks a burnt mother comes to.” (Ka-tzetnik 1971: 120 – 126) As Efraim Sicher writes, Ka-tzetnik gave the last chapter of his 1971 collection Star Eternal the ironic title of ‘Wiedergutmachung,’ because when he considered the shoes taken from his father, his mother’s hair recycled for clothing, and his sister’s body used for prostitution, to take ‘compensation,’ would make him a pimp. The poet Dan Pagis similarly ridiculed the concept as if – as he put it in his poem “Draft of a reparations agreement” – the scream could be returned to the throat and the gold teeth back to the gums (cf. Sicher 1998: 52 – 53).

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haltende Hoffnung auf Versçhnung und Erlçsung gerade im […] Zeichen Hiobs” (Langenhorst 1994: 184, 89). Birgit Lerman argues that, through her use of the Job figure, Sachs holds on to the hope of some kind of religious explanation for the events: “Hiob [ist] nicht nur der Leidende, sondern der durch seine Leiden Erhçrte, und eine letzte Hoffnung auf Sinn [wird] nicht aufgegeben” (Braun and Lerman 1998: 185), while Horst Bienek has gone so far as to claim that Sachs’ Job “[wird] zum Trost der berlebenden” (Bienek 1966: 85). These are questionable claims. The final image Sachs leaves us with, after all, is Job’s ‘body,’ representing the millions of victims, drifting as smoke from the chimneys of the crematoria – there is little in the way of “Hoffnung,” “Erlçsung,” “Sinn,” or “Trost” here. Gwenith Young has argued that by mentioning Jeremiah and Job, Sachs places the Shoah “within a continuity of Jewish calamity and a tested Jewish paradigm of response” (G. Young 2006: 210). This interpretation is very difficult to uphold given that the “paradigm of response” – in this case Job’s affirmation of God despite his earthly suffering – is refuted as he perishes in the poem. Anita Riede has put forth perhaps the most problematic argument: “das KZ,” she argues, “[wird] als eine in der Heilgeschichte verankerte Prfung Gottes gesehen, die von der religiçsen Hoffnung auf ein erlçstes jenseitiges Leben, wie es sich im Motto ausdrckt, ertragen […] wird” (Riede 2001: 66). The claim that the concentration camps are presented by Sachs “als eine Prfung Gottes” is highly problematic. While the Biblical Job may very well have endured the various tests “in unerschtterlichem Glauben,” to draw on Bienek’s words once again, Sachs’ Job, the embodiment of the murdered Jewish collective, does not undergo any such ‘test’ of faith, nor does he accept his fate with a supposed unshaken trust in the divine. In fact, Sachs completely avoids the Biblical construct of Job’s suffering as a test of his faith. For Sachs, the crimes of the Shoah were crimes committed by man onto man and not a test of supposed Jewish ‘chosenness.’ The critic Bengt Holmqvist shares this view: “Viele fromme Juden haben noch auf dem Weg zur Gaskammer ihr Los als eine ‘Prfung’ verstanden. Nelly Sachs blieb eine solche Deutung unannehmbar. Das maßlose Verbrechen war nichts als ein maßloses Verbrechen.” (Holmqvist 1979: 39) It should also be noted that Sachs does not touch upon the guilt aspect of the Biblical text, the idea that Job was somehow ‘deserving’ of his punishment. In the face of the attempted mass extermination of the Jewish population of Europe, such a line of enquiry would be absurd. The lines “O die Schornsteine! / Freiheitswege fr Hiobs Staub –” have received much criticism for their supposed conciliatory message. Er-

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hard Bahr, to take one example, writes: “Die Antwort wird nicht ausdrcklich gegeben, aber ist implizit […]. Der Erdenker und Erbauer der Freiheitswege ist der Gott Israels, der Gott des Jeremias und Hiob.” (Bahr 1980: 81) Michael Hofmann has expressed similar discomfort. He describes these lines as “das Skandalon des Gedichts” and explains his stance thus: “Wenn dieses [das Gedicht] von ‘Freiheitswegen’ fr Israels Volk spricht, so liegt der Gedanke nahe, das der Rauch ein Opferfeuer darstellt und damit erscheint das Undenkbare vorstellbar: dass die Vernichtung der europischen Juden einen Sinn haben kçnnte, einen religiçsen Sinn.” (Hofmann 2003: 121) I disagree with these readings of the lines in question. A literal interpretation of “Freiheit” fails to acknowledge Sachs’ probable cynical use of the term. To suggest, as Bahr does, that Sachs views the death camps as some kind of ‘divine creation’ and that, as such, the Holocaust served some kind of greater purpose known only to God, can be disputed on the grounds that her entire poetic project is dedicated to exposing the senselessness of the mass extermination. What these three critics overlook is the fact that Sachs employs a deep cynicism of bitter anguish in the line in question; “the ‘road for refugees of smoke,’” as William West writes is, ironically, itself smoke, and so the escape of the dead relies on their being infused into the very air that the living still breathe” (West 1995: 92). That ‘infusion’ is the extent of the ‘freedom’ of which Sachs speaks. The irony in the reference to the chimneys as “Freiheitswege” is in fact quite explicit: the chimneys are certainly ‘freedomways’ – but in the narrowest possible sense in that the victims’ smoke physically ‘escapes’ through them. There is no explicit suggestion, however, that this smoke is en route to God. There can be, Lawrence Langer argues, “no easy reconciliation between the smoke of Israel’s body and the mysterious cosmos into whose regions that smoke slowly drifts.” Sachs’ crematorium chimneys, he argues, “are not signposts to the divine” (Langer 1982: 218). Georg Langenhorst argues that an interpretation supposing the use of irony is untenable: “Die Schornsteine der Krematorien von Birkenau werden allerletzte ‘Freiheitswege’ genannt, und das ist aus dem Kontext heraus ganz sicherlich nicht ironisch gemeint.” (Langenhorst 1994: 184) Why “ganz sicherlich nicht” in the framework of the “Kontext” in question? Irony is, after all, most certainly not an alien device in Sachs’ work. At an earlier juncture in this poem Sachs employed irony in her description of the death camps as “einladend hergerichtet.” In her poem “Ihr Zuschauenden” she ironises the onlookers’ claim of ignorance through her highly effective employment of the passive voice, and does so in direct reference to the killing in the death camps – pre-

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sumably the same ‘context’ to which Langenhorst refers. Irony, albeit an infrequent occurrence, has enormous representational value in her work and indeed in Holocaust literature in general. Ka-tzetnik’s use of this device in the poem cited above, for example, can be considered a sharp commentary of the concept of ‘Wiedergutmachung.’ Johanna Bossinade, to take one last example, contends that the reference to the chimneys as “Freiheitswege” “deutet […] eine letzthin doch noch ‘sinnvolle’ Aufhebbarkeit […] der Judenvernichtung an. […] Es hat den Anschein, als sei in diesem Fall das sprechende Ich vom Verlangen nach Rckkehr in eine errinerte (‘mystische’) Geborgenheit […] berwltigt worden, als kçnne oder wolle es der ‘Realittsprfung’ nicht mehr standhalten” (Bossinade 1985: 151). This line of argumentation is especially problematic, since it supposes a transfiguration of the events of the Shoah into the mythical realm as a way of avoiding reality. This argument does not hold up very well, however, given that in this poem the death camps and their ‘factory-like’ operation are not merely alluded to, but are, rather, directly and unreservedly delineated. Sachs’ employment of the Job archetype can be considered a significant literary device in the context of her attempt to represent the Shoah. She refutes the redemptive closure offered by the book of Job and, in so doing, thwarts any secure, redemptory expectations on the part of the reader. This refutation is significant in terms of assessing the scope and limitations of Sachs’ engagement with the Holocaust since, by refuting the terms offered by the Biblical account, she simultaneously avoids attributing any kind of sense to the senseless massacre. She does not place the Shoah within a continuity of Jewish calamity; rather, she brings to expression the rupture that has occurred. In the poem “Hiob” (Sternverdunkelung (1949), sub-cycle Die Muschel saust), Sachs directly addresses the Biblical figure and penetrates the very core of the Job story: Hiob O du Windrose der Qualen! Von Urzeitstrmen in immer andere Richtungen der Unwetter gerissen; noch dein Sden heißt Einsamkeit. Wo du stehst, ist der Nabel der Schmerzen. Deine Augen sind tief in deinen Schdel gesunken wie Hçhlentauben in der Nacht die der Jger blind herausholt.

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Deine Stimme ist stumm geworden, denn sie hat zuviel Warum gefragt. Zu den Wrmern und Fischen ist deine Stimme eingegangen. Hiob, du hast alle Nachtwachen durchweint aber einmal wird das Sternbild deines Blutes alle aufgehenden Sonnen erbleichen lassen. (Sachs 1961: 95)

In this poem the process of “figuration” plays an important role. Sachs presents the reader with what one critic refers to as an ‘anti-Job’, since neither Job’s former happiness nor his eventual redemption make an appearance: “der Sachssche Hiob wird zu einem genau kalkulierten GegenHiob, prziser: zu einem Hiob radikaler Reduktion.” (Kuschel 1994: 207) In the first stanza, Sachs utilises the image of the wind rose, a graphic tool used in meteorology to depict wind frequencies from different directions at various locations. Job is subject to artistic manipulation as the wind rose is subject to the wind. In the opening line, Job is described as this wind rose; what is being measured are not wind frequencies, however, but suffering. The wind rose is continually swept in new directions of agony and suffering, while the spot upon which it – Job – stands is described as the ‘navel of pain.’ Significantly, as noted by Langenhorst, the image of the wind rose is taken from the book of Job itself: In der Metapher der Windrose wird ein Bild aus dem biblischen Hiobbuch selbst aufgenommen. Dort heißt es: ‘Geh ich nach Osten, so ist er nicht da, / nach Westen, so merk ich ihn nicht, / nach Norden, sein Tun erblicke ich nicht; / bieg ich nach Sden, sehe ich ihn nicht.’ (Langenhorst 1994: 186)

The image of Job being swept in all directions presents the Biblical figure as exposed, deserted, and without orientation. Just as Job was deserted by God in the Biblical story, Sachs sees the Jewish people as a whole as having been abandoned by God during the Shoah. However, in contrast to the Biblical narrative the temporal phrase “noch” in the line “noch dein Sden heißt Einsamkeit” indicates that the redemption offered by the Biblical text is not on offer for the recent suffering. Job does not embody the pious man who is untiringly engaged in dialogue with God. Rather, Sachs’ Job has become “stumm”; his ‘whys’ as to the reasons for the Jewish suffering during the Holocaust remain unanswered. Crucially, the theophany offered in the Biblical text is withheld, and Sachs thereby avoids the redemptory expectation on the part of the reader. As Kuschel writes: “Der Sachssche Hiob [ist] vçllig verstummt. Der Grund? Er kann […] nur darin liegen, daß ein Leiden solchen Ausmaßes selbst jeden Hader

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mit Gott abwrgt, weil Hadern noch eine Erwartung an Gott implizierte.” (Kuschel 1994: 209) Sachs’ Job is without any such expectation; his dialogue with God has been silenced; he does not vent his rage at God, because doing so would mean searching for some kind of meaning or explanation. As Christian Wiese writes: “[D]as Suchen nach Gott, das Hadern […] mit Gott, die Hoffnung auf transzendente Erlçsung [fehlen] vçllig – was bleibt ist die Klage, die nirgends im Werk der Dichterin aufgelçst wird, die Erfahrung der Abwesenheit […] Gottes. Worte, die wirklichen Trost und Sinn bergen kçnnten, gibt es nicht, sie sind unwiderruflich zerbrochen.” (Wiese 2003: 55 – 56) Sachs thus intensifies the senselessness of the million-fold massacre; its unimaginable scale has even stifled the ‘whys’ as to its occurrence. Job’s eyes are sunk deep into his skull; this disquieting image conjures up the countless emaciated faces of the death camp inmates; his eyes have been blinded and his voice has been rendered mute after so many unanswered ‘whys.’ This state of muteness is then heightened in the final stanza: Job’s voice has ‘joined the worms and the fish,’ both of which can be considered “Sinnbilder eines schrecklichen Verstummens.” (Braun and Lerman 1998: 189) Commenting on the worm motif in the Job story Erika Schweizer writes: “Wurm ist als Bildwort mehrmals im Buch Hiob belegt, um die Schmach Hiobs, seine Entwrdigung, seine Nhe zu Gruftreich und Verwesung vor Augen zu fhren.” (Schweizer 2005: 229) It could be argued that each of Schweizer’s descriptions apply as much to the death camp inmates as they do to Job: the inmates experienced complete humiliation and degradation; they lived in continual proximity to death and they underwent gradual physical putrefaction whilst remaining nominally alive. The use of the worm motif thus assumes even greater significance within the thematic constraints of the poem. The fish motif also has interpretative import, since the process of being rendered “stumm” is transferable to the poetic voice in its desperate and ultimately futile attempt to find answers to the ‘whys’ of the Holocaust. The verb ‘durchweinen’ in the last stanza is connected to the blinded eyes of the second; we are now given the reason for this state of blindness: grief at the scale of the suffering endured has rendered the witness blind. This state of blindness calls to mind the Job motto that precedes “O die Schornsteine,” in which Job claims that even though his skin may have been destroyed by worms, he will nonetheless see God. This redemptory vision of God was then refuted by Sachs in the main body of the poem. This refutation was unexpected and at odds with the certainty of the vision contained in the motto. This

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poem is a similar refutation of this redemptory message; the only certainty here is muteness and blindness. The final lines of the poem – “aber einmal wird das Sternbild deines Blutes / alle aufgehenden Sonnen erbleichen lassen” – deserve particular attention, given their frequent interpretation in religious ‘sense-making’ terms. Georg Langenhorst has provided a questionable reading of these lines. He initially makes the following very valid point: “die negativen besetzten Wçrter ‘Blut’ und ‘erbleichen’ entlarven jede allzu optimistische Interpretation dieser Schlußverse als Wunschdenken.” He then proceeds, however, to argue that Sachs nonetheless provides a future-orientated eschatological outlook: Hier ist nun die Rede von einem alles berstrahlenden ‘Sternbild,’ das einmal ‘alle aufgehenden Sonnen erbleichen lassen’ wird. […] Es handelt sich hier […] um eine eschatologische Zukunftsvision, die […] einen unzweideutigen Umschwung zum Guten andeutet. […] Der derzeitigen ‘Sternverdunkelung’ wird […] eine zuknftige ‘Sternerstrahlung’ entgegengesetzt.“ (Langenhorst 1994: 188) [emphasis in original]

Langenhorst reads the final two lines of the poem as suggestive of an ‘unambiguous’ redemptive ‘turnaround’ of humanity “zum Guten”; he argues that Sachs presents her reader with the victory of a “Sternerstrahlung” over the “Sternverdunkelung” that was the Holocaust, thereby conjuring up an image of a grand future radiance. This is a problematic reading, however, when one takes into account the crucial genitive qualification of the “Sternbild” metaphor in question, which Langenhorst overlooks – “das Sternbild deines Blutes” [my emphasis]. An alternative reading is that “alle aufgehenden Sonnen” – as symbols of hope – will be paled by a constellation of Job’s blood, that is, the blood shed by millions of Jews during the Shoah. Thus the ‘redness’ of each single rising sun will be blanched by the ‘redness’ of a constellation composed of the blood of the victims. This cannot be interpreted as “eine eschatologische Zukunftsvision.” Erika Schweizer has suggested that Sachs leaves open the possibility of a theodicy in this poem (Schweizer 2005: 230). Such a view is similarly disputable if one carefully considers the definition of theodicy – a justification of God that is concerned with reconciling the goodness and justice of God with the observable facts of evil and suffering in the world. The last two lines of the poem rule out the applicability of Schweizer’s reading, since the genitive metaphor suggests that Sachs does not attempt to provide a vindication of divine justice in the face of evil in this poem. Her recourse to traditional Jewish imagery, can as Lehmann comments, only ever be partial: “Aufgrund der erlittenen Geschichte

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kann auf jdisch-religiçse Vorstellungen nur gebrochen Bezug genommen werden. Eine Rckbindung an die religiçse Tradition im Sinne eines alle Gegenstze versçhenden und erlçsenden Paradigmas wird negiert.” (Lehmann 1999: 69) For Sachs, there can be no direct renewal of a connection to religious transcendence. She makes this very clear in the poem “Und aus der dunklen Glut” where she states: “es kehrt auch niemand heil zu seinem Gott zurck –” (Sachs 1961: 213). The prefix “zurck” is significant here: it makes clear a time division, with Auschwitz being the line of demarcation. In another poem, Sachs openly challenges the value of religion in terms of providing an explanatory framework: “dein Feind mit dem Rauch / deines verbrannten Leibes / [schrieb] deine Todverlassenheit / an die Stirn des Himmels” (Sachs 1961: 101). In a tone of deep cynicism Sachs, whilst not denying the existence of heaven, certainly exhibits a cynical attitude towards the concept: on heaven’s brow the smoke from the crematoria has ‘written’ the abandonment of the Jews by God during their mass slaughter; the only thing that reaches heaven is the smoke from the incinerated bodies. This could be read as an accusation: the smoke reaches heaven as if to accuse. The poem “Vertriebene” (Flucht und Verwandlung (1959)), in which Job makes an important appearance, has also been interpreted by critics in terms of a renewed and untroubled relationship with the divine: Vertriebene aus Wohnungen Windgepeitschte mit der Sterbeader hinter dem Ohr die Sonne erschlagend – Aus verlorenen Sitten geworfen dem Gang der Gewsser folgend dem weinenden Gelnder des Todes halten oft noch in der Hçhle des Mundes ein Wort versteckt aus Angst vor Dieben sagen: Rosmarin und kauen eine Wurzel aus dem Acker gezogen oder schmecken nchtelang: Abschied sagen: Die Zeit ist um wenn eine neue Wunde aufbrach im Fuß.

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Reißend wird ihr Leib im Salz der Marter fortgefressen. Hautlos augenlos hat Hiob Gott gebildet. (Sachs 1961: 282 – 83)

“Vertriebene” may be interpreted as a reference to those who were expelled from their homes prior to their extermination. The apo koinou construction between lines four and five, connecting what are in fact two independent syntactic units, has the effect of drawing the reader’s attention to the unsettling neologism “Sterbeader”: yet again Sachs creates an effect of disruption by distorting familiar imagery. Veins, normally associated with life, are now ‘veins of death.’ This ‘vein of death’ ‘slays’ the sun – this English rendering does not do justice, however, to the phonetics of the German term “erschlagend” which has a percussive, intensive, almost violent effect. The result is a menacing sense throughout the first stanza of the omnipresence of death under the Nazi dictatorship which has even eliminated the light of the sun. The hyphenation after “erschlagend” paradoxically, as is always the case with Sachs’ “Sprachgebrde des Verstummens,” makes present a terrifying absence: with any light from the sun now blocked by the ubiquity of death, the stanza trails into nothingness. Sachs opens the second stanza with a phrase carrying more semantic weight than it might initially suggest to the reader. “Verlorene Sitten” can of course be interpreted as a reference to the destruction of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe: the Holocaust attempted to destroy a whole population and, along with it, its culture. The term “Sitten” carries an extra semantic layer, however, since it also connotes morals: it could be read as a reference to the complete loss of dignity and the attendant loss of moral awareness that the inmates of the camps suffered in the morally conflicted space of the “grey zone.” Such an interpretation also assists the reader in understanding Sachs’ choice of the verb ‘werfen’ which has connotations of force: the inmates, after all, did not choose to abandon their previously intact moral framework; rather, work, exhaustion, disease, starvation and an hourly sense of impending death made the adherence to any such framework impossible. The initially pleasant reference to “Gang der Gewsser” that follows is then distorted as the reader learns that these ‘waters’ are in fact weeping “Gelnder des Todes.” The connection of the abstract term ‘death’ with the concrete object ‘Gelnder’ reinforces the ubiquity of death in the reader’s mind: the camp is presented as an ‘enclosure’ of death. The expellees (by this stage of the poem they are the survivors of

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the death camps) hide words in what are described as ‘hollow mouths’: it is only at this point that the main clause, which was initiated in the opening line, is continued. This ‘hiding of words’ can be read as a reference to the impossibility of adequate testimony. It could also be an allusion to the fear so prevalent among the survivors that their testimony, so utterly inassimilable as it was, simply wouldn’t be believed. Alternatively, it may be a reference to the fact that some survivors chose not to speak, since they did not consider themselves what Primo-Levi calls “the true witnesses,” “those who touched bottom” (Levi 1989: 83 – 84). In the third stanza, “Abschied,” a term carrying some of the most sinister connotations in Sachs’ lexicon, reappears: the survivor’s can ‘taste’ it “nchtelang.” This seemingly permanent presence of death has the attendant result of opening up new wounds. The use of the participle construction “reißend” in conjunction with the prefix “fort” in “fortgefressen,” intensifies this sense of permanence: the survivors’ wounded bodies continue to be ‘fed on’ in the ‘salt of torture.’ As a caustic substance, on the one hand, salt corrodes their bodies. As a preservative, on the other hand, the salt image serves to compound survivor trauma, presenting it as an enduring condition. Ursula Rudnick contends that this line portrays an “uncharacteristically violent image” (Rudnick 1995: 97) [my emphasis]. This is difficult statement to uphold, given that this line can in fact be considered rather tame in light of some of the imagery that has been encountered thus far. At first glance, the final verse of this poem would seem to suggest that in his state of suffering, Job formed an image of God. Accordingly, these lines have been interpreted by critics as positing a redemptive conclusion. (cf. Kuschel 1994 and Bohnheim 2002) Gwynith Young similarly views these lines as an affirmation of the divine (cf. Young 2006). A poem that concludes with Job apparently successfully forming an image of God, in spite of the trials endured in the preceding stanzas, certainly provides these critics with convincing interpretative capital. The first difficulty, however, with such an interpretation is that redemption in relation to the divine does not appear anywhere in any of the poems discussed thus far. Sachs’ Job, in the poems hitherto examined, was described exclusively in terms of smoke from the crematoria and as having been rendered mute. Sachs’ Job is certainly not a redemptive Job; hers is a Job who has been rendered speechless, who has literally gone up in smoke and thus powerless to ‘form’ anything. Aside from Sachs’ general non-redemptive treatment of the Job theme in her work, there is also a grammatical ambiguity in the final stanza of this poem that must be considered. While

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the final line cannot be translated as anything other than “Job formed God” or as “Job created God,” the German original can be read quite differently. Grammatically speaking “Gott” can be considered the subject of the final sentence. Gesine Schauerte is one of the few critics who acknowledeges this. Her subsequent interpretation, however, then falls back on the problematic redemptive argument. Having acknowledged the grammatical ambiguity, she proceeds to argue that Sachs’ treatment of Job in the preceding lines represents Hiob’s “Gottesbedrftigkeit” and that the final lines represent an invocation of God: Da sowohl ‘Gott’ als auch ‘Hiob’ als Subjekt des Satzes […] angesehen werden kçnnen und dadurch der jeweils andere zum Objekt der Schçpfung wird, muss das verzweifelte Fragen des biblischen Hiobs nach Gott im Lichte dieser Zeilen […] als Ausdruck […] seiner Gottesbedrftigkeit angesehen werden […], als Selbstbehauptung Hiobs, der sich Gottes in der Anrufung vergewissert, ihn […] ins Leben ruft. (Schauerte 2007: 80)

I interpret this ambiguity differently. The closing lines arguably embody the unresolved tension in Sachs’ paradoxical “version of survival” (Langer 1982: 250) which, as mentioned earlier, encourages the spirit towards heaven whilst simultaneously drawing it back to the realities of the Holocaust. The image of God represents this spiritual journey, whilst the image of an eyeless and skinless Job represents the consequences that “the vast anonymous grave of Jewish doom” (Langer 1982: 250) now holds for religious belief. Kuschel argues that reading God as the subject is invalid on the basis that it would represent eine noch unerhçrtere Aussage, ohne Parallele im sonstigen Werk der Nelly Sachs, weil dies die Verantwortung Gottes fr das schreckliche Leidensschicksal Hiobs direkt benennen wrde. Die Frage nach der Schuld Gottes wre damit unmißverstndlich aufgeworfen, was aber im sonstigen autobiographischen oder lyrischen Werk der Nelly Sachs nicht vorkommt. (Kuschel 1994: 213)

Kuschel’s reasoning is unsound, however. Sachs’ thematisation of the Job archetype can be seen – chronologically speaking – as steadily radical; at no point does she temper her refutation of the redemptory terms offered by the Biblical account. Indeed, the chronological presentation of these three poems was intentionally chosen to demonstrate Sachs’ unabated radical position in relation to the Job archetype. In the first poem examined, Job trailed as smoke from the chimney of the crematorium; in the poem “Hiob,” composed two years later, Sachs describes a constellation of stars composed of Job’s blood that will one day pale even the sun, while in this poem Sachs performs perhaps her most radical reversal of

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the Biblical story: by declaring that God formed Job eyeless, Sachs makes it clear that there was never any hope of ‘seeing’ God. Furthermore, Kuschel’s claim that a direct thematisation of divine guilt does not appear anywhere in Sachs’ work is untrue. The most poignant poem in this respect, “Landschaft aus Schreien” will later provide evidence to counter Kuschel’s claim. Alongside Job, another recurrent Old Testament archetype in Sachs’ work, namely, the Biblical figure Abraham, has led to just as much misinterpretation and perhaps even greater controversy. 3.11.2 Abraham: Refuting the Martyrdom Thesis It is easy to appreciate the value of the Job story when it comes to the representation of Auschwitz: depending on the writer’s stance, he/she can either apply Job’s unwavering embrace of faith in the divine despite his earthly suffering to the Holocaust experience or, as in the case of Nelly Sachs, dismiss this redemptive outcome and expose the inadequacy of biblical paradigms. It is much more difficult, however, to comprehend how the story of the binding of Isaac, the Akedah, has found such a strong presence in post-Shoah literary, philosophical and theological discourse. Before examining Sachs’ employment of this archetype, the question must be addressed as to how a Biblical story which, according to some critics, thematises martyrdom could be mentioned in the same breath as Auschwitz. The martyrdom message that the tale supposedly carries has in fact been attributed to the original Biblical account. I use the word ‘attributed’ here, because in fact the Biblical account, strictly speaking, has nothing to do with martyrdom.8 The Akedah, as an ode to martyrdom, was disseminated by the midrashim, that is, by commentators on the story, according to whom Isaac did in fact die, but was resurrected. (cf. Berman 1997: 89) Most contemporary Jewish scholars, however, insist that the Akedah does not convey the theme of martyrdom, since the glorification of martyrdom in traditional Judaism is in fact a grave breach of halakha – the collective body of Jewish religious law. Elie Wiesel, for example, takes an intransigent stance in this respect. “[I]n the Jewish tradition,” he argues “one cannot use death as a means 8

This discussion of martyrdom is not intended as an authoritative investigation into the complexities of the development of this problematic concept, but aims, rather, to highlight those aspects which are most relevant within the context of this study.

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of glorifying God” and he adds: “the idea that suffering is good for the Jews is one that owes its popularity to our enemies” (Wiesel 1976: 79). Haym Soloveitchik, a leading contemporary historian of Halakha, takes a similar stance: Jewish law has very stringent regulations regarding rules of martyrdom. In a few extreme cases, martyrdom is absolutely mandatory. In those cases in which it is not mandatory it is forbidden, and […] one who suffers voluntary martyrdom should be viewed as having committed suicide. Life is not optional in Judaism. And one knows of no allowance for committing suicide to avoid forced conversion. (Soloveitchik 1987: 207 – 08)

In his article “Halakhah, hermeneutics, and martyrdom in medieval Ashkenaz.” Soloveitchik outlines further his position of martyrdom in Judaism: Jewish law recognizes two types of coercion: absolute and relative. ‘Absolute coercion’ means that someone throws me down in front of an idol; ‘relative coercion’ means I choose to bow down to the idol because I fear otherwise being murdered. In the former, the individual’s body is the object of another’s action; in the latter, the person’s will is the object of coercion, for in relative coercion the individual must freely choose to actively abjure his religion to avoid death. This distinction is maintained in the martyr imperative, where the victim is given a choice between compliance and death. Compliance involving absolute coercion does not require martyrdom; one involving relative coercion, where action is demanded of the individual, does. For example, should someone say, ‘Stand still so I can throw you down in front of the idol otherwise I will kill you’ there is no imperative of martyrdom. A statement of ‘Bow down or I will kill you’ demands a martyr’s response. In other words, Jewish law demands martyrdom only in the case of coercion of the will where the victim must act upon a choice he has made, not in cases of coercion of the passive body.9 (Soloveitchik 2004: 80 – 81) [my emphasis] 9

Soloveitchik describes the massacre of Ashkenazi Jews in 1096 and the slaughter of children by their parents to prevent them falling into Christian hands, not as martyrdom, but rather as an enormous breach of halakha (cf. Soloveitchik 2004 and Berman 1997: 93). It is important to note that the Book of Maccabees – essentially a panegyric to the concept of martyrdom – was embraced by the Christian Church long before it was embraced by rabbinic literature. At the time the Book appeared the Church was being persecuted by Rome and martyrdom was soon adopted as an important Christian concept. It would not be for another one thousand years that the Books of the Maccabees would be translated into Hebrew, since the Greek eulogy of martyrdom was regarded as having no place in Judaism. The glorification of martyrdom, as Berman writes, was considered “too Hellenistic” in spirit (Berman 1997: 91 – 92).

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There was, however, no such ‘or’ option in the Holocaust, since there was no option of conversion; every Jew on European soil was to die regardless, and thus the concept of martyrdom, by definition, cannot apply here. Moreover, the issue of voluntariness is crucial. During and after the Holocaust, the term kiddush ha-shem – ‘the sanctification of God’s Holy name,’ a process which involves Jews voluntarily accepting martyrdom rather than betraying their religion – ceased to make any sense. The concept of voluntariness, so central to the concept of martyrdom, was, after all, completely absent in the Holocaust. Judaism, as Jonathan Sacks points out, had had its chronicles filled with martyrs before. But death in past times had retained at least the dignity of choice: throughout the religious persecutions of the past, Jews could escape death by renouncing Judaism. What makes the Holocaust different is that for the first time Jews had no such choice. (Sacks 1992: 43) Kiddush ha-shem was thus replaced by the term kiddush ha-hayyim, a term coined by Rabbi Yitzhak Nissenbaum in the Warsaw ghetto. The term translates as ‘the sanctification of life,’ and describes Jewish resistance attempts that glorified Jewish life, rather than supposed Jewish ‘martyrdom.’ The intrepration of the Akedah as a story of martyrdom and the application of this Biblical tale to Auschwitz as an explanatory framework has led to some very problematic theological analyses of the Holocaust. Jacob Neusner, for example, has attempted to ‘explain’ the Shoah in terms of the redemption offered by the Biblical account. In his view, the slaughter at Auschwitz was ‘redeemed’ by the birth of the state of Israel; the Holocaust is seen by him as God’s ‘mysterious way’ of bringing the state of Israel into being: In this rebirth of the Jewish state we see […] the resurrection of Israel […] out of the gas chambers of Europe. The binding of Isaac today stands for the renewal of Israel in its life as a state […]. It is as though we have died and been reborn, for if truth be told, we have died and we have been reborn. No wonder then that we find in the details of the binding of Isaac as our sages read it an account of what has happened to us […]. (Neusner 1990: 114)

Commenting on Neusner’s interpretation, Louis Berman writes: “‘We have died and have been reborn.’ With these words, Neusner comes close to saying the Akedah and the Holocaust are both events of martyrdom.” (Berman 1997: 87) Emil Fackenheim has denounced any attempt to view the coming into being of the state of Israel as having somehow ‘redeemed’ the Holocaust as blasphemous. He argues that whilst “to see a causal connection is possible […] to see a purpose is intolerable” (Fackenheim 1987: 163) [my emphasis]. Yehuda Bauer has outlined the prob-

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lematics of the martyrdom thesis put forward by the orthodox line of thought which has “appropriated not only the victims of the Holocaust, but increasingly all the Jews who died in it, considering them all believing Jews who supposedly died in Kiddush Hashem”: For an orthodox Jew, sanctifying the name of God (Kiddush Hashem) through martyrdom is the highest degree of religious observance, and the martyr will thank the Almighty for having been given the privilege of being a sacrifice. However, in the Holocaust Jews were not killed for what they did or did not believe, and they could not escape death by conversion, apostasy, or change of ideology. They were murdered for being Jews […]. There was absolutely no element of personal decision in their fate: they were murdered for having been born. […] Traditional Jewish martyrdom had an important moral element – voluntariness – which was absent in the Holocaust. […] All martyrdom is voluntary by definition. A person who does not want to be a martyr but is killed anyway is the victim of murder not martyrdom. (Bauer 2001: 206)

Bauer’s astute analysis is significant; while the orthodox Jew might ‘thank the Almighty’ for having been given the privilege of being ‘chosen’ as a sacrifice, the vast majority of those murdered most certainly did not see their annihilation as a sacrifice, let alone ‘thank’ God for the supposed ‘privilege.’ In addition to Neusner’s views, the martyrdom thesis has given rise to a number of other morally questionable analyses in post-Shoah theology. Ignatz Maybaum, for example, has interpreted the Shoah as the vicarious suffering of the Jews in terms of their supposed ‘atonement’ for the sins of the gentiles. (Maybaum 1965: 32) Another thesis that has found a presence in post-Shoah theology, albeit a minimal presence in contemporary Jewish thought, is the ‘punishment’ thesis expounded by the orthodox Jewish thinker Menachem Imanuel Hartom. Hartom has interpreted the Shoah as the supposed ‘punishment’ for the sins of the Jews themselves – “Unserer Snden wegen,” as he titled his essay. Having embraced emancipation and the attendant freedom from the Torah that accompanied it, and having abandoned Zionism, the Jews were, in his view, ‘deserving’ of their ‘punishment’ at Auschwitz. (cf. Hartom 1982) In the light of such views, Emil Fackenheim has called for a “total and uncompromising sweep” of all explanations purporting to give purpose to Auschwitz. “No purpose,” he writes, “religious or non religious, will ever be found in Auschwitz. The very attempt to find one is blasphemous” (Fackenheim 1987: 163). Nelly Sachs unquestionably refutes both the theological attempts at explaining Auschwitz and the ‘sense-making,’ redemptive messages that have been attributed to the Akedah as in any way applicable to the Hol-

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ocaust. She draws upon this story, not to exploit its message of divine sacrifice as a way of somehow ‘explaining’ Auschwitz, nor to use the martyrdom message that has been attributed to it as a means of somehow transforming the million-fold slaughter into some kind of martyrdom act. Rather, she draws on it to do precisely the opposite: to repudiate any such suggestions. “Ein Totes Kind spricht” (In den Wohnungen des Todes (1947), sub-cycle Dein Leib in Rauch durch die Luft) serves as a case in point. In this poem the reversal of the Akedah story occupies a pivotal role, both in terms of reversing its sacrificial message and its alleged martyrdom message: Die Mutter hielt mich an der Hand Dann hob jemand das Abschiedsmesser: Die Mutter lçste ihre Hand aus der meinen, Damit es mich nicht trfe. Sie aber berhrte noch einmal leise meine Hfte – Und da blutete ihre Hand – Von da ab schnitt mir das Abschiedsmesser Den Bissen in der Kehle entzwei – Es fuhr in der Morgendmmerung mit der Sonne hervor Und begann sich in meinen Augen zu schrfen – In meinem Ohr schliffen sich Winde und Wasser, Und jede Troststimme stach in mein Herz – Als man mich zum Tod fhrte, Fhlte ich im letzten Augenblick noch Das Herausziehen des großen Abschiedsmessers. (Sachs 1961: 13)

In this poem Sachs provides the reader with a taste of the ineffable terror that reigned in the death camps. She opens the poem with the seemingly innocent image of a mother holding her child’s hand which, in terms of Sachs’ poetics, is immediate cause for suspicion. This innocence duly lasts but a fleeting moment, undergoing immediate distortion in the second line with the introduction of the brutal image of the “Abschiedsmesser.” In this poem the “Abschied” motif, standing once again as pars pro toto for the annihilation process, reaches its fullest expression. The image of this knife being raised serves a double purpose. Firstly, it functions as a reference to the violent selection process on the ramps of the death camps as children were forced from their mothers for immediate extermination. In the eyes of the Nazis, Jewish children were to be ‘disposed of ’ immediately, since they were considered ‘worthless’ on all counts: they could not even serve the temporary purpose of slave labour. Secondly, the

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image calls to mind Abraham raising the knife to kill his son. The reader is thus drawn into a clear allegorical field: Sachs has chosen one of the most redemptive stories from the Old Testament, and the reader is led to expect that like Isaac, the child will be saved by divine intervention. This allegorical field allows the poem to be read as a maternal reconfiguration of the binding of Isaac in Genesis. The child, as Joan Peterson comments, “transposes Isaac of the Akedah while Abraham’s role is reversed by that of the mother” (Peterson 2000: 202). In the Biblical account, Abraham concedes to God’s demand to offer his son as a sacrifice to test his faith. The imposition of any such interpretative framework on Auschwitz is, of course, wholly inappropriate. In her attempt to demonstrate the futility of available paradigms to deal with the slaughter, Sachs proceeds instead to reverse the Biblical story on all fronts; she reverses it, she distorts it and she dismembers it: there is certainly no ‘offering’ of the child on the part of the mother, while the celestial voice audible from ‘above’ and the provision of the ram in place of Isaac for the slaughter in the original story are also absent. Instead, both mother and child are slaughtered at the hands of the perpetrator’s “Abschiedsmesser.” The mother, in her attempt to save her child, as opposed to offering her child, releases the child’s hand, but her own hand is then bloodied in the process – a metaphor for the mother’s death. This is a further glaring inversion of the Biblical account in which the paternal figure is rewarded for his will to sacrifice his son, with God promising to bless Abraham’s descendents. The child is also subsequently slaughtered – “als man mich zum Tode fhrte” – a clear inversion of the provision of the ram as Isaac’s replacement in the Biblical account. In Auschwitz and Treblinka, after all, there was certainly no last-minute divine substitute for the slaughtered victims. Just like Sachs’ refutation of the redemptory terms offered by the book of Job, the reversal of the sacrificial message of this Biblical story is similarly significant in terms of refuting any kind of religious ‘sense-making’ interpretation. Annette Jael Lehmann, claiming that Sachs makes use of the traditional concept of martyrdom in her work, argues that martyrdom for the camp inmates offers them one final opportunity to practice their religion: “Das dem jdischen Volk zugefgte Leid,” she continues, “verbrgt seine Auserwhlung und Berufung. Das Leiden ist […] ein Verdienst, mit dem der Leidende in einer anderen Welt erhçht werden soll.” Lehmann concludes: “Das Martyrium des jdischen Volkes bildet die unabdingbare Voraussetzung fr seine Erlçsung.” (Lehmann 1999: 85) This is an extremely problematic assessment in light of this poem. At no point does Sachs deliver the message that the

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million-fold slaughter somehow ‘vouched for’ the ‘chosenness’ of the Jewish people, let alone declare this slaughter an inevitable prerequisite for their “Erlçsung.” The temporal phrase “Von da an” signifies the ‘before-after’ division so common in Sachs’ work; her poetry is consistently punctuated by the pre- and post-Auschwitz time division, symbolic of the irreversible “Zivilisationsbruch,” to borrow Diner’s term, that Auschwitz has occasioned. The ‘Verstummen’ into which the poem begins to drown with the slaughter of both mother and child, is a resounding one, rendered absulute by the dash. This silence is broken only by the unsettling image of the knife sharpening itself within the child’s own eyes. This conveys not only a sense of terror on the part of the child, it also attributes animate properties to the “Abschiedsmesser,” indicating the way in which the Nazi annihilation machinery took on an uncontrollable life of its own. The line “als man mich zum Tode fhrte” carries clearly perceptible accusatory overtones: it is evidently a reference to the Nazi henchmen who ‘led’ the Jews to their death. The Akedah is thus not used by Sachs as an affirmation of God’s saving benevolence, nor as a test of Abraham’s – and by extension the Jewish people’s – faith. Nor is there any saving gesture comparable with the Biblical account. Sachs presents her reader instead with a subversion of the archetype as a way of communicating the challenge to accepted religious paradigms in the face of the extremity of the atrocity to which she is attempting to bear witness. Subverting established myths and, in the process, exposing their vulnerability as explanatory paradigms, is thus a very effective tool in Sachs’ attempt to present the unrepresentable. In the poem “Landschaft aus Schreien” (Und niemand weiß weiter (1957), sub-cycle Die Stunde zu Endor), Sachs’ most acoustically evocative work, Sachs brings together both Abraham and Hiob. This is one of the longest and most tortuous of all of Sachs’ works. She uses apocalyptic imagery to describe a nightmare landscape of horror, a post-Auschwitz landscape that resembles a “Hçllengemlde” (Schweizer 2005: 231), in which the survivor’s existential world is composed of nothing but screams. “Landschaft aus Schreien” is a poem that attempts to portray the “agonised conscious and unconscious mind” of the one who witnesses evil, a poem in which Sachs constructs “a nightmare, blood-drenched world of madness and of pain” (G. Young 2006: 211). “Landschaft aus Schreien” is an attempt by Sachs to portray the physical and psychological effects of survivor trauma, and a sense of hysteria pervades each line to the point that it seems to affect the poem’s very texture. The name of

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the cycle alone from which this poem is taken Und niemand weiß weiter, provides the reader with a taste of the despair that characterises the poem: In der Nacht, wo Sterben Genhtes zu trennen beginnt, reißt die Landschaft aus Schreien den schwarzen Verband auf, ber Moria, dem Klippenabsturz zu Gott, schwebt des Opfermessers Fahne Abrahams Herz-Sohn Schrei, am großen Ohr der Bibel liegt er bewahrt. O die Hieroglyphen aus Schreien, an die Tod-Eingangstr gezeichnet. Wundkorallen aus zerbrochenen Kehlenflçten. O, o Hnde mit Angstpflanzenfingern, eingegraben in wildbumende Mhnen Opferblutes – Schreie, mit zerfetzten Kiefern der Fische verschlossen, Weheranke der kleinsten Kinder und der schluckenden Atemschleppe der Greise, eingerissen in versengtes Azur mit brennenden Schweifen. Zellen der Gefangenen, der Heiligen, mit Albtraummuster der Kehlen tapezierte, fiebernde Hçlle in der Hundehtte des Wahnsinns aus gefesselten Sprngen – Dies ist die Landschaft aus Schreien! Himmelfahrt aus Schreien, Empor aus des Leibes Knochengittern, Pfeile aus Schreien, erlçste aus blutigen Kçchern. Hiobs Vier-Winde-Schrei und der Schrei verborgen im lberg wie ein von Ohnmacht bermanntes Insekt im Kristall. O Messer aus Abendrot, in die Kehlen geworfen, wo die Schlafbume blutleckend aus der Erde fahren, wo die Zeit wegfllt an den Gerippen in Maidanek und Hiroshima. Ascheschrei aus blindgequltem Seherauge – O du blutendes Auge in der zerfetzten Sonnenfinsternis zum Gott-Trocknen aufgehngt im Weltall – (Sachs 1961: 221 – 23)

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In this poem the poetic voice frantically proceeds from one image to another, creating in the process a nightmarish, blood-drenched post-Holocaust montage. The poem’s frantic pace exemplifies what Bosmajian describes as the ability of the confined space of the lyric to “crowd the rhythms and associations of images to such a degree that their inherent energies are driven to a pitch and maintained at a point of balance whence they might break forth creatively or destructively” (Bosmajian 1979: 183). The first stanza introduces the sense of chaos that permeates the entire poem. That chaos is the recurrent night-time terror experienced by those who have survived the Shoah. In a letter to Walter Berendsohn, Sachs herself described how her mother relived the terror every night: “Wir waren zu Tode gehetzt hier angekommen. Mein Mttchen erlebte jede Nacht noch den Schrecken.” (Sachs 1984: 157) Night, synonymous with death in Sachs’ lexicon, tears open all seams of apparent healing and closure; it rips open the daytime ‘bandage’ which by nightfall is black with blood. This bandage has been interpreted by Bossanide as a “Zeichen fr das falsche Vergessen, das, was das Unverheilte oder Unverheilbare nur vordergrndig berdeckend zusammenhlt” (Bossinade 1985: 149). The wound that the Holocaust has inflicted is thus only ever superficially healed. Sachs proceeds to construct what Young describes as a “nightmare montage” (G. Young 2006: 215). The topography of the remainder of the poem is an ominous one. Sachs compresses a series of blood-drenched images ranging from the binding of Isaac, to Job’s suffering, to the Nazi death camp at Maidanek, and eliminates in the process any prospect of healing.10 Mount Moriah, the location of the binding of Isaac, is named as the first landscape of screams. Any redemptive expectations which the reader might harbour upon encountering this quintessential location of divine deliverance are, however, quickly shattered. Sachs provides no such reprieve. If anything, her imagery in relation to the Akedah becomes increasingly radical in this poem. Her focus is on Abraham’s scream. She frantically proceeds from this image to the next picture in the montage – hieroglyphs of screams at the “Tod-Eingangstr,” and then leaves the reader with the most disquieting image of a sinister ‘flag’ bearing the illustration of the “Opfermesser” hovering heraldically 10 The reference to Hiroshima is evidence of the gradual movement in Sachs’ poetry towards the universal concept of victimhood that characterised her work from the mid-1950s until her death in 1970. The Holocaust remained, however, “a perpetual theme” (Langer 1982: 218).

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above Mount Moria. This hovering image can be read as Sachs’ repudiation of the redemptive aspect of the Biblical tale, while the description of Abraham’s scream as a resounding silent scream preserved “am großen Ohr der Bibel” brings the aporia of Holocaust testimony to the fore. The image of “Klippenabsturz zu Gott” – Mount Moria plunging downward, as opposed to ascending to God – is significant. Gwynith Young argues that Sachs reverses the traditional metaphor of ascent to God that characterises the original scriptural narrative, in which Abraham, carrying a knife and fire, begins to ascend Mount Moriah with his son Isaac, who carries the wood for his sacrifice. By contrast, Young argues, the mountain becomes for Sachs “the falling off of cliffs to God,” since the scriptural metaphor of steady ascent is replaced by a violent fall (G. Young 2006: 216 – 17). Young interprets this image of collapse, however, in a highly problematic way. She argues that “because it is linked with the statement that the fall is towards God, the change of direction in this poem collapses together concepts of heaven and hell; in this way, Sachs insists on the presence of the Divine in the hell of Holocaust suffering” (G. Young 2006: 217). Young essentially argues that in this poem Sachs is attempting to deliver the message that God was present in Auschwitz. Her argument has the unintended effect of presenting the Holocaust as somehow divinely ordained, that the Jews were ‘sacrificed’ for some greater purpose only known to God. Such an interpretation is, however, at odds Sachs’ refusal in this poem to frame the Holocaust within a meaningful religious narrative, since this would have the attendant result of attributing some kind of sense to a wholly senseless massacre. She refuses the comforting notion that meaning can somehow be reclaimed by wrestling a redeeming message from the slaughter. The collapse of this paradigmatic location of divine deliverance can be interpreted as precisely this refusal to impose any such framework on the million-fold annihilation. After all, at no point in this poem is the profusion of apocalyptic imagery complemented by any suggestion of a redemptive outcome. The demonic imagery in the lines “O die Hieroglyphen aus Schreien / an die Tod-Eingangstr gezeichnet” immediately conjures up the inscription above the ‘gate of death’ at Auschwitz, namely, “Arbeit macht frei”; these words have become hieroglyphic screams due to their absolute unintelligibility. Hamida Bosmajin’s concept of “constriction” is helpful in analysing this poem, since the screams contained in this landscape of horror are in fact screams of entrapment. (Bosmajian 1979: 183) I would argue that these images of constriction become apparent to the reader precisely

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because they are the antithesis of the ‘aufreißenden’ images contained in the first stanza. Images of entrapment and constriction abound from the second verse onwards: Abraham’s scream is held preserved, screams are ‘sealed’ tight in the shredded mandibles of fish and in the “schluckende[n] Atemschleppe” of the old. Both of these images describe a state of constriction in terms of the entrapment of words within impenetrable walls of silence, as the survivor attempts to bear witness to the horrors endured. Saints and prisoners are now trapped in cells, these cells in turn are tapestried – another image of covering over – with the ‘nightmare pattern of throats’: rendered useless, the throat has become a mere pattern on a tapestry. The entrapped spirit – possibly the poetic voice – of the “Hundehtte des Wahnsinns” – itself an enclosed space – attempts to escape this space of madness, but is capable only of shackled leaps; Job’s scream to the four winds is trapped “wie ein von Ohnmacht bermanntes Insekt im Kristall”; this image of the trapped insect in solid crystal is reminiscent of the trapped moth examined earlier and may be read as an allusion to the aporia of Holocaust testimony. All of these images point to the claustrophobia, the “constriction” and the hysteria of the lyrical subject in its attempt to describe the horrors of Auschwitz. The image of the “zerbrochene[n] Kehlenflçten” is quite possibly connected to the asphyxiation of the poetic breath; deprived of the necessary air, the flute, as a wind instrument, becomes choked and releases a hellish scream in place of harmonious sound. Further intertextual references come to mind here: the throat motif in the neologism “Kehlenflçte[.]” is reminiscent of the demand made by Sachs in the poem “Hier nehme ich euch gefangen” to hear a harmonious sound. Just as any hope of such a sound was dashed in that poem, here too it is clear that the post-Auschwitz guttural flutes are capable only of screams. The ‘landscape of screams’ is then described as emerging from “des Leibes Knochengittern,” while screams are released from ‘bloody quivers.’ At this point, Sachs presents the reader with a chaos so total that, in parts, it resists analysis. The significance of many of the images in the poem may be seen in terms of their unambiguous Holocaust connotations. The poem, as Bosmajian writes, “reveals a chain of fragmented images, each reinforcing a variable of the same idea, just as documentary photos of mountains of glasses, shoes, or hair say finally the same thing and point to something beyond their ‘thingness’” (Bosmajian 1979: 203). The scream, representing the most primal human response to terror, has been silenced; it has been dispossessed of its power of expression. What remains is a nightmare terrain devoid of any meaning. This ‘silent

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scream’ which, to the reader’s ear, is anything but silent, also has a constructive purpose, however, in terms of Sachs’ attempt to present the ‘unrepresentable.’ As Lehmann writes: “Der Schrei ist das auf dem schmalsten Grad zwischen Sprechen und Verstummen angesiedelte Zeichen […]. [Der Schrei] macht auf die Kluft zwischen Zeichen und damit zu Bezeichnendem aufmerksam, da die im Schrei erreichte Ausdrucksgrenze neuerlich beweist, daß es ein Undarstellbares gibt.” (Lehmann 1999: 31 – 32) The scream replaces words; it points to ‘the extremity that eludes the concept.’ In Sachs’ poetry, the scream may thus be considered another device of ‘Verstummen’: it expresses nothing but, at the same time, it presents the fact that there is an ‘excess’ in the Holocaust that defies articulation. The images of hands and fingers, so frequent in Sachs’ work, appear once again with a distorted physicality; they are now “Hnde mit Angstpflanzenfingern.” This image immediately calls to mind the “Hnde der Todesgrtner” and the “schrecklicke Wrterinnen” sowing “de[n] falsche[n] Tod” in the poem “O der weinenden Kinder Nacht”: just as death was ‘sown’ in those poems, fear is being ‘sown’ in this “Landschaft aus Schreien.” The verb ‘pflanzen,’ traditionally carrying connotations of growth and blossom, is now associated with terror. The line “Ascheschrei aus blindgequltem Seherauge” carries a significant synesthetic metaphor. Defined in linguistic terms as “a description of something one experiences by a definite sense organ by using adjectives whose referent is another” (Cacciari 1998: 128), the term “Ascheschrei” fuses together the intensities of two disparate concepts from two incongruous sensory spheres, thereby creating an effect of disorientation and distress. The image of the “Seherauge” that follows may be interpreted as an allusion to the collective eye of those who have witnessed the Shoah. This ‘visionary eye’ has been ‘tortured blind’ by the evil it has seen. The paradoxical concept of blind clairvoyance contained in this image brings to mind the mythological blind seer Teiresias whose prophetic ability was gained at the high price of physical blindness. The eye of Sachs’ seer, however, is not only blinded, it is a disembodied bleeding eye, deprived of prophetic vision; it has been ‘hung out to dry’ like a tattered, ‘eclipsing sun’ – the term “Sonnenfinsternis” conjuring up an all-enveloping, ominous and sinister darkness. The line “zum Gott-Trocknen aufgehngt” is used here by a resigned poetic voice as an unmistakable allusion a Divinity indifferent to the fate of the suffering of the Jewish people during the Shoah. Once again Sachs does not provide any form of redemptive release. Gwynith Young’s claims that “in the Akedah passage […] Sachs […] brings to

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awareness traces of God’s covenantal promises” and that she “never wavers in her faith in Israel’s God” (G. Young 2006: 219 – 20) are difficult to uphold in the face of such a poem. Far from a reaffirmation of her faith in divine covenantal promise, Sachs expresses instead her despair, not at a divinity that was merely temporarily veiled from human perception given the scale of the evil, but at an absent divinity. Sachs’ use of the Abraham motif, like Sachs’ distortion of the Job archetype, can thus be viewed as a clear example of the process of “figuration” which she exploits in her work. She chooses those aspects of the Akedah that are useful in terms of the connotative imagery they evoke – the “Abschiedsmesser” and Isaac’s scream being exemplary in this respect – whilst refuting the original consolatory endings of the Biblical tale. In the poem “Daniel Daniel,” Sachs engages in a similar process, as she draws on another redemptive Biblical tale from the Old Testament. 3.11.3 Daniel: Interpreter of Nightmares Despite the fact that Sachs devotes a complete poem to Daniel, this archetypal figure has been largely overlooked in critical contributions to her work. The poem in question, “Daniel Daniel,” from the cycle Sternverdunkelung (1949) (sub-cycle Die Muschel saust), may be read as a despairing address at this Biblical figure: Daniel, Daniel – die Orte ihres Sterbens sind in meinem Schlaf erwacht – dort, wo ihre Qual mit dem Welken der Haut verging haben die Steine die Wunde ihrer abgebrochenen Zeit gewiesen – haben sich die Bume ausgerissen die mit ihren Wurzeln die Verwandlung des Staubes zwischen Heute und Morgen fassen Sind die Verliese mit ihren erstickten Schreien aufgebrochen, die mit ihrer stummen Gewalt den neuen Stern gebren helfen – ist der Weg mit den Hieroglyphen ihrer Fußspuren in meine Ohren gerieselt, wie in Stundenuhren, die der Tod erst wendet.

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O die grberlosen Seufzer in der Luft, die sich in unseren Atem schleichen – Daniel, Daniel, wo bist du schreckliches Traumlicht? Die ungedeuteten Zeichen sind zu viele geworden – O wir Quellenlose, die wir keine Mndung mehr verstehen, wenn sich das Samenkorn im Tode des Lebens erinnert – Daniel Daniel, vielleicht stehst du zwischen Leben und Tod in der Kche, wo in deinem Schein auf dem Tische liegt der Fisch mit den ausgerissenen Purpurkiemen, ein Kçnig des Schmerzes? (Sachs 1961: 96)

In the opening line of this poem, the poetic voice addresses Daniel, the archetype of wisdom and righteousness. Just like the redemptory message anticipated by the reader when confronted with the Job and Abraham references in the various poems discussed thus far, so too here, the reader is confronted with one of the Bible’s most redemptory figures and entertains accordingly the prospect of a redemptive ending. Sachs once again begets a conjecture with the objective of thwarting it. The first stanza provides a terrifying insight into the psychological effects of survivor trauma. The lyrical subject is haunted by nightmares of the dead victims of the Holocaust, and we are confronted with a tangible sense of despondency and anguish. During the tormented hours of night, “die Orte ihres Sterbens” – an unambiguous reference to the Nazi death camps – come alive in the mind of the survivor. The possessive pronoun in the line “dort, wo ihre Qual mit dem Welken der Haut verging” may be read as allusion to the Muselmnner, the camp figures that haunt both Adorno’s and Sachs’ post-war writing. Their emaciation was so acute that they were reduced to wretched victims of gradual disintegration, who had endured disease, starvation and exhaustion to such a degree that they exhibited a horrifying apathetic listlessness regarding their impending death. The wounds their deaths represent are reflected in stones in the post-Auschwitz world. As paradigmatic symbols of solidity and permanence, these stones are a probable reference to the unlikely prospect of these wounds ever being healed. In the immediate aftermath of having addressed arguably the most redemptive figure of the Old Testament, Sachs has already overthrown the reader’s suppositions by providing a

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set of images of the kind that, after the liberation of the camps in 1945, imprinted themselves on to the collective imagination as the ‘emblems’ of Auschwitz. The reference to the victims’ “abgebrochene[.] Zeit” is a renewed reminder of the premature and unnatural truncation of their lives – “der falsche Tod,” as Sachs writes in the poem “O der weinenden Kinder Nacht.” The description of these images ‘waking up’ while the survivors sleep demonstrates the permeation of the survivors’ lives by the past realities of the camps and the attendant physical and psychological anguish; sleep no longer provides respite. In the second stanza the imagery becomes increasingly distressing. Sachs describes the breaking open of dungeons – a possible reference to the gas chambers – by the victims’ ‘suffocated screams.’ The message of renewal momentarily expected by the reader with the mention of the birth of a new star is immediately refuted: the relative pronoun “die” makes it clear that it is these same suffocated screams with their violent, mute force which bear this very star. The next image in this litany is the footprints of the victims. Sachs describes these footprints as ‘trickling’ into the ear of the lyrical subject and compares this trickling to that of the hourglass. But, of course, it is not sand that trickles through Sachs’ hourglass. Just as blood was the dripping substance in the poem “Wir Geretteten,” here time is measured not by sand, but by death. The use of the verb ‘rieseln’ in relation to the sound of these footsteps of countless victims reinforces the sense of a gradual agonisation of the survivor’s mind, to the point of madness. In the third stanza, the tormented mind of the lyrical subject is further intensified. Sachs describes how the sighs of the dead ‘creep into the breath’ of those who survived the massacre. Like the verb ‘rieseln,’ ‘schleichen’ suggests the gradual invasion of the mind by traumatic memories, while the term “grberlos” reminds the reader that the victims have not found a resting place. It is at this point in the poem that Sachs calls upon Daniel, and the reader’s initial redemptory expectations are – temporarily at least – renewed. She chooses the tale of Daniel recounting and interpreting King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, a Biblical narrative of divine affirmation. Having experienced a recurrent, unfathomable dream, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon issues the decree that unless one of his wise men can interpret this dream (having first recounted it to ensure the legitimacy of their interpretation), execution would follow. Daniel, having been appointed to the King’s court, prays to God and asks Him to reveal the King’s dream. His prayer is answered. Daniel duly recounts the dream to the King and interprets it as a message of the coming-to-be of God’s

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kingdom on earth. The King’s wise men are spared and, viewing Daniel’s interpretation as a direct message from God, the story concludes with King Nebuchadnezzar proclaming of the greatness of Daniel’s God. In the poem Sachs calls on Daniel to similarly interpret “die ungedeuteten Zeichen,” that is, the litany of horrific images which have dominated the poem up until this point and which have slain the poetic voice to such an extent that there is a trail into nothingness, represented once again by the dash. It becomes clear, however, that it is not Daniel’s ability to interpret dreams that we are presented with, but rather the futility and indeed repugnancy of any attempt at interpreting the nightmares that permeate the poem and imposing on them some kind of meaning or explanatory framework in the process. Daniel is called upon, not as an interpreter of dreams that prophesy some future event, as in the Biblical account, but rather as an interpreter of nightmares that already have their basis in past reality. Sachs thus – as suggested by “schreckliches Traumlicht” – does not summon Daniel in the hope that he can provide a meaningful, redemptory interpretation of the suffering. In the final stanzas Sachs proceeds to compound the refutation of any kind of redemptory or explanatory framework. Those who survived the slaughter are described as “Quellenlose”: they have no meaningful source to which to turn. Biblical archetypes are thereby denounced as deficient paradigms. We are then presented with the most anti-redemptory lines to be found anywhere in Sachs’ entire body of poetry. She states that Daniel’s light exposes only a fish with ‘ripped-out purple gills,’ that quintessential creature of ‘Verstummen’ that permeates her work. Daniel’s interpretative capabilities have been rendered entirely inept in the face of the recent suffering. Unlike his interpretation of the dream and his prophecies in the Biblical text, any attempt to ‘read’ the significance of or any attempt to attribute some kind of ‘meaning’ to the nightmarish images from Auschwitz is refuted by Sachs. All that remains are the asphyxiated and disembodied fish gills which represent the mute poetic voice. The reader’s initial expectations, encouraged by the poem’s title, are completely thwarted by this point. Sachs has refuted the terms of the Daniel tale, and in so doing, has highlighted the inefficacy of this archetype as a reflective foil for the horrors of the present.

Conclusion At the award ceremony for the Literaturpreis der Freien Hansestadt Bremen in 1958, Paul Celan summarised the arduous journey which language had to endure in the aftermath of its defilement under National Socialism: Sie, die Sprache, blieb unverloren, ja, trotz allem. Aber sie mußte nun hindurchgehen durch ihre eigenen Antwortlosigkeiten, hindurchgehen durch furchtbares Verstummen, hindurchgehen durch die tausend Finsternisse todbringender Rede. Sie ging hindurch und gab keine Worte her fr das, was geschah; aber sie ging durch dieses Geschehen. (Celan 1983: 185-186)

This book has been an attempt to expose such ‘answerlessness,’ such ‘terrifying muteness,’ and such ‘darkness of death-bringing speech’ in the poetry of Nelly Sachs. Her work can be viewed as an exemplary case study of the aporia facing the post-Shoah writer: she succeeds in addressing this antinomy by inscribing it into both the content and form of her poems. Sachs is thus not only a test-case for Adorno, she is engaged in the same debate as Adorno: her writing is a reflection on the act of writing. One of the questions posed at the beginning of this study was whether Sachs’ poetry, in spite of the fact that it thematises the impossibility of adequate representation, has representational value, or whether her work is bereft of concrete, representational meaning as a result of its often fragmented nature. The answer is something of a paradox. Although the language and the formal structure of her poetry are often characterised by destabilisation, condensation, indeterminacy and absence, and even though words are very often engulfed as she writes, her poems nonetheless ‘speak’ a language. Her poetry is evidence that language still has representational power – albeit severely compromised. The potential for pleasure when reading her poetry is drastically reduced, given its permeation by despair, pain and relentlessly distorted imagery. In its moments of clarity, her poetry is unsettling, while in its more prevalent moments of opacity – the quintessential manifestation of which is the ‘unsaid’ that lies behind the dash – it is profoundly distressing. The source of this distress lies in the knowledge that behind the imagery, which in itself seems to provide such a tangible sense of the Nazi terror, the reader is left with the perturbing realisation that so much has also been consigned to si-

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lence: behind words, between words and in the bottomless void of the ‘Gedankenstrich.’ It is during these moments that the reader is compelled to confront Adorno’s ‘extremity’; it is also during such moments that thought is denied closure. These voids and the nothingness into which so much of her work threatens to disintegrate thus have representational value: they point to what has been left unspoken. Sachs’ dashes are mute indicators, they are devices of ‘Verstummen’ which, paradoxically, speak volumes. Sachs’ poetry is evidence that its author was plagued by doubt at the expressive capacity of language and plagued by the knowledge of her predestined failure in achieving her desired aims: the suffering evades language and thus language necessarily betrays the experience of the victims. Simultaneously, however, as her poems gravitate towards silence, the poetic voice attempts to extricate itself from this dilemma, to defend itself against the threat of disintegration and to preserve the value of words with full knowledge of their impotence. Those poems which are ‘structured’ around acute linguistic disintegration and violation of grammatical norms bear witness to the immensity of this threat and the urgency of this defence, whilst the foundering of words also indicates a representational limit. Sachs’ topography is a landscape of the dead, the airways of the lyrical ‘ich’ are blocked by the smoke of corpses, while the frequent compression of imagery represents the chaos and frustration of a mind struggling to communicate. This struggle – marked by her poetry’s selfreferential scepticism about its own means of representation – makes Sachs’ work troubling both in form and in content. This self-referential scepticism is perhaps most evident in Sachs’ manipulation of traditional archetypes: she forges what might be called an anti-redemptive aesthetic. She presents her readers with decidedly redemptive Biblical archetypes followed by a display of the impropriety of any redemptive exposition with regard to the Shoah. She falls back, in other words, on the archetypes available to her, whilst at the same time making it clear that the Holocaust resists understanding through traditional theological categories. She attempts to communicate the futility of Judaism’s traditional theological interpretations of Jewish suffering using the very archetypes that form the foundations of these time-honoured explanations. Setting the reader on insecure ground is a crucial element in her method: she employs familiar, theologically comforting Biblical archetypes, generating in the process certain expectations on the part of the reader, only to subsequently thwart and deconstruct their original consolatory function. For Sachs, the Holocaust cannot be incorporated

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into the traditional narrative of Jewish history; it cannot be seen as merely another ‘chapter’ in the chronicle of destructions, inquisitions and pogroms of the past or as a mere temporary suspension of the commonly accepted values of humanity. By bringing traditional Biblical narratives into conversation with the legacy of the Holocaust, Sachs wrestles with the themes of divine abdication, rendering the Biblical tales entirely vulnerable in the process. She allows her poems to argue with the Biblical text and thereby brings the weight of Auschwitz to bear on the meaning of the traditional narrative. Her work is a critique of both the inadequacy of these time-honoured interpretative paradigms and of her own work’s inherent inadequacy at representing the ineffable. Sachs’s work is a call for active memory. It is only by keeping memory open, by having Auschwitz accompany all thought, that any possibility of its repetition can be avoided. It is through active forms of memorialising the dead that Adorno’s new categorical imperative can be realised, namely, “[das] Denken und Handeln so ein[zu]richten, daß sich Auschwitz nicht wiederhole, nichts hnliches geschehe” (Adorno 1973: 358). The image of the wound that permeates her work represents the breach that the Holocaust has left in its wake; this breach must remain open with the passing of time, since closing it over is just one step removed from forgetting and forgetting restores the possibility of repitition: “aus Vergessenheit,” as Sachs writes, “graut der Tod” (Sachs 1961: 141). Sachs’ poetry is an attempt to keep open this wound. The voids that punctuate the linguistically condensed sentences of her work bear witness to an incommunicable anguish; they are a source of disconcertion and anxiety. Sachs calls on her readers to explore these silent voids as a means of instilling in the reader recognition of this anguish which lies beyond the confines of poetic articulation. Sachs’ poetics of silence is thus as much an attempt to artistically represent the Holocaust as it is an attempt to describe a poetic predicament. Sachs’ poetry attempts to present the abyss that Auschwitz represents by questioning the value of the tools that served the writer in pre-Holocaust times. She reveals the irrelevance of traditional poetic modes by exposing the unbridgeable gulf between the time-honoured poetic ideal of mellifluous rhyme, stanzaic patterns and formal and syntactical structure and the reality of the Holocaust which cannot be contained within the constraints of this ideal. While her use of devices like prosopopoeia and chiasmus may suggest continuity in terms of poetic technique, the totality of Sachs’ method may nonetheless be described as novel: this totality is a complex constellation of fragmented sentences, hyphens, neo-

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logisms, reversed archetypes, reversed epitaphic forms and distorted traditional imagery. In the process of dealing with the questions of poetic form and method, Sachs reveals Auschwitz as an irreversible breach of the human, cultural and literary spheres. The urgency that Sachs’ work continues to hold is demonstrated best perhaps in an article published in Die Zeit in 1991, on the 100th anniversary of Sachs’ birth: Wie gut, daß sie [Nelly Sachs] nicht mehr unter uns ist […], wie gut, daß sie nicht miterleben muß, wie die Handlanger des Schreckens von einst schon salon- und feuilletonfhig geworden sind, allen voran jener teuflische Carl Schmidt, der 1947 – ich wiederhole: 1947 – geschrieben hat: ‘Juden bleiben immer Juden, whrend der Kommunist sich bessern und ndern kann […]. Gerade der assimilierte Jude ist der wahre Feind.’ Wie gut auch, daß sie nicht Zuschauerin jenes schlimmen Schauspiels sein mußte, das bis vor kurzem unter dem harmlosen Titel ‘Historikerstreit’ ablief und das sie als furchtbare Verhçhnung der Opfer htte empfinden mssen, wurden dort deren Qual relativiert bis zu dem Punkt, an dem sie nur noch das unvermeidliche Resultat einer angeblich ‘asiatischen Tat’ waren. Der Erfinder dieser Entlastungserklrung, Ernst Nolte, schreibt in seinem jngsten Buch das Wort Judenvernichtung konstant in Anfhrungszeichen.(Hamm 1991)

Ernst Nolte advanced the view that the crimes of the Nazis were merely a ‘defensive reaction’ against the crimes of the Soviet Union, and that it was an ‘understandable, if ‘excessive,’ response on the part of Adolf Hitler to the Soviet threat. In June 1987, Nolte went so far as to make the highly contentious statement that the Jews would eventually come to ‘appreciate’ Adolf Hitler as the individual who contributed more than anyone else to the creation of the state of Israel. Such a viewpoint, promoted by a renowned authority on nineteenth- and twentieth-century history, makes engagement with authors such as Nelly Sachs all the more pressing. In a letter written to Paul Celan in 1960, Sachs conveys the sense of unremitting entrapment which was experienced by so many survivors of the Nazi terror. This letter also conveys the claustrophobic sense of fear which enveloped Sachs’ being until her death in 1970 and the torment endured as she undertook the task of producing an artistic portrayal of the greatest human catastrophe of the twentieth century: “Noch bin ich nicht im Freien Paul, noch ist das Netz aus Angst und Schrecken, was sie ber mich geworfen haben, nicht gelftet.” (Sachs and Celan 1993: 57)

Bibliography Sachs’ Works Sachs, Nelly (1961), Fahrt ins Staublose. Die Gedichte der Nelly Sachs (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp) [contains the cycles In den Wohnungen des Todes, Sternverdunkelung, Und niemand weiß weiter, Flucht und Verwandlung, Fahrt ins Staublose and Noch feiert Tod das Leben]. – (1971), Suche nach Lebenden. Die Gedichte der Nelly Sachs (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp) [contains the cycles Glhende Rtsel, Die Suchende and Teile dich Nacht]. – (1974), ‘Leben unter Bedrohung’, in Nelly Sachs. Einfhrung in das Werk der Dichterin Jdischen Schicksals mit unverçffentlichten Briefen aus den Jahren 1946 – 1958 (Quellen und Interpretationen zu Literatur, Kunst und Musik 1), ed. by Walter A. Berendsohn (Frankfurt am Main: Agora). – (2010), Nelly Sachs Werke. Kommentierte Ausgabe Band 1. Gedichte 1940 – 1950 (Kommentierte Ausgabe in vier Bnden), ed. by Aris Fioretos (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp).

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