Commemorative plaque for Gertrud Kolmar in Berlin-Westend. Translated, it reads:"The lyric poet Gertrud Kolmar spent her childhood and youth in the previous building on this site. Committed to forced labour as a Jew after 1933, she was deported to Auschwitz in 1943, and murdered there."
(Written in the stolen moments before her day as a forced ...)
Written in the stolen moments before her day as a forced laborer in a munitions factory began, the letters tell of Kolmar's move from the family home in Fikenbrug to a three-room flat in Berlin, which she and her father must soon share with three other displaced Jews.
(When poet Kolmar's voice was silenced at Auschwitz almost...)
When poet Kolmar's voice was silenced at Auschwitz almost 55 years ago, she also left two prose works, now published here in English for the first time. Written in 1931 and 1940, respectively, each of these novellas is a psychological portrait of a solitary social misfit, a surreal characterization set against the political and social realities of pre-war Berlin.
Gertrud Käthe Chodziesner, known by the literary pseudonym Gertrud Kolmar, was a German lyric poet and writer. She is considered one of the finest poets in the German language.
Background
Gertrud Käthe Chodziesner was born in Berlin on December 10, 1894 into an assimilated German-Jewish family. Her father Ludwig Chodziesner, a loyal monarchist, worked as a criminal lawyer. Her mother Elise (Schönflies) Chodziesner came from an intellectual mercantile family. Kolmar would later take her pseudonym from the German name of the town Chodziez in the province of Posen (Poznan), where her father’s family originated.
Kolmar grew up in a family that loved to read and write, perform plays and read prose at the dinner table. Although her father had published short stories in the local paper Kolmar was apprehensive about making her own writing public. She had no ties to the literary community of Berlin even though she had written fictional works since her childhood and her family welcomed such interactions.
Education
From 1901 to 1911 Kolmar attended a private girls’ grammar school, continuing her studies at a women’s agricultural and home economics school in Arvershof near Leipzig.
Career
Gertrud Kolmar worked at a public kindergarten and studied Russian before receiving a teaching degree as a French and English language instructor and military interpreter in 1916. The following year Kolmar had her first and bitterly disappointing love affair, during which she became pregnant. Her parents forced her to have an abortion — surely a traumatic event at a time when abortions were illegal in Germany, which may explain Kolmar’s focus on childless women and mother figures in her poetry.
According to her sister Hilde, it was their father who first urged Kolmar to publish her book of poetry Im Herbst (In Autumn) in 1917. In 1936 three of Kolmar’s poems were published in a journal of the Jewish Book Club (Jüdische Buchvereinigung). In 1938 Kolmar’s collection of poems, written ten years earlier, Die Frau und die Tiere (The Woman and the Beasts) was published by the Jewish Publishing Company Erwin Loewe (Jüdische Buchverlag Erwin Loewe). It is unclear whether all six thousand members received their printed copies, since the book appeared only two months before the publishing house was forced to shut down during the November 1938 pogrom.
At the end of World War I, Kolmar served as governess and teacher in private households. After her mother fell terminally ill in 1928, Kolmar returned to Finkenkrug, running the household and caring for her mother until her death in 1930. She then took over her mother’s position in the household, became her father’s notary assistant, and focused on her own writing. Kolmar’s experiences of isolation and loneliness as a woman and Jew are expressed vividly in the poetry she wrote during this time of growing antisemitism.
In Die Jüdin (The Jewess), published in Blätter der jüdischen Buchvereinigung in Berlin in 1936, Kolmar expressed her longing to rediscover the Jewish heritage from which she feels removed. A Jewish widow complains of her child’s mistreatment by National Socialist children in the 1933 poem “Die jüdische Mutter.” From 1930 to 1931 Kolmar wrote her only novel, Die jüdische Mutter (The Jewish Mother), which first appeared in 1965, under the shortened title Eine Mutter (A Mother) and then again in 1978 with the altered title Eine jüdische Mutter (A Jewish Mother). In the novel the Jewish mother Martha Wolg discovers that her five-year old daughter Ursa has been raped and will not recover from her severe physical and psychological trauma. Ending her daughter’s life by administering poison, the mother searches for the rapist out of a desire for revenge but takes her own life when she realizes that she is in fact her child’s murderer.
In 1938, as the antisemitic political and social climate became intolerable for Kolmar, she made plans to escape Nazi persecution by emigrating to England to work as a governess. Her sister Hilde Wenzel emigrated to Switzerland in 1938. That same year Kolmar and her father were forced to sell their house in Finkenburg and move to a so-called “Jewish house” in Berlin-Schöneberg. Despite terrible living conditions Kolmar continued her writing, including Susanna, which she wrote out of a sense of her own powerlessness. In her effort to escape persecution Kolmar also sent her resumé to her uncle Fritz Crzellitzer, who had emigrated to Palestine.
In 1940 Kolmar began to study Hebrew, in part because she hoped to emigrate to Palestine, and wrote prose in this language, also translating a poem by Hayyim Nahman Bialik into German, as stated in letters sent to her sister. However, she was unable to leave Germany since proof of employment was necessary in order to receive a visa for Palestine. In mid-1941 Kolmar was forced to work at an arms factory. Her eighty-one-year-old father’s dependence on her led her to remain with him until his deportation to Theresienstadt in September 1942, where he died the following year. Kolmar was arrested by the SS on February 27, 1943 and deported on March 2, 1943 with the “eastern transport” to Auschwitz. It can be assumed that at the time of her arrest and deportation the Nazis destroyed her personal papers, letters, and documents. The exact date of Kolmar’s death is unknown.
Kolmar’s surviving work consists of four hundred and fifty poems, three plays, and two short stories that exist as manuscripts or typoscripts. Although much of her work has been published, some of it is also held at the Gertrud Kolmar archives in Marbach, Germany. A three-page resumé and a series of letters to her lawyer Jacob Picard from 1937 to 1939 and to her sister from 1938 to 1943 make up her non-literary writings. Her most poignant letters are those written between 1939 and 1943 to her sister and her niece Sabine in which Kolmar wrote of her suffering under antisemitism. In 1955 Kolmar’s readership grew with poems from her posthumous collection Das lyrische Werk (The Lyrical Work), which was expanded and reprinted in 1960.
Gertrud stated that she associated her Jewishness only with her father’s mother, Johanna.
Views
Kolmar’s feelings of isolation and alienation are evident in her works concerning salvation, justice, and metamorphosis, which feature animals and female figures. Although her works are atypical of the expressionist style of her time and have instead been likened to the poetry of French Symbolists such as Charles Baudelaire, she can be considered a modernist due to her poetry’s dark themes of madness and her use of a non-traditional and individualistic language. Her impassioned lyrical writings are comprised of both carefully constructed rhymes and melodic free verse that transform everyday objects and situations into visionary and mystical images. Her poetry cycles about Napoleon and Robespierre are historical portraits, while the fifty-four poems Alte Stadtwappen (Old Municipal Coats of Arms) demonstrate her identification with the Prussian provinces of her German homeland.
The German-Jewish author considered poetry a more spiritual and superior form of writing that allowed for a revelation of spiritual beliefs and personal growth. Kolmar published three collections of poetry during her lifetime, primarily detailing the experiences of women as mothers, childless women, lovers, mourners, travelers and the persecuted. Kolmar’s later poems voice the outrage and powerlessness experienced by persecuted German-Jews during the Shoah by revealing the unspeakable and the unthinkable through symbolic imagery. Her poems of staggering sadness are transcended by a hope for humanity that enables readers to value her work more than a half century later.
Because Kolmar’s work reveals the tension between her identification with the German literary culture and her outrage against German antisemitism, her poetry can be read in the context of other German-Jewish writers, such as Else Lasker-Schüler, Nelly Sacks, and Rose Ausländer, whose Jewish heritage was a focal point of their work.
Quotations:
“I am a poet, yes, that much I know; but I never want to be a writer.”
Personality
Kolmar was shy and would not often share her written works or ideas, instead hiding her works in a brown starch crate. She considered herself “a simple, unliterary person,” “who had never experienced the artistic struggles of other poets,” yet who fought to be strong and committed to personal growth.
Connections
Gertrud had a brief affair with an army officer, Karl Jodel, which ended with an abortion, which her parents insisted on.