Background
Nelly Sachs was born on December 10, 1891 in Schöneberg, Germany to the wealthy natural rubber and gutta-percha manufacturer Georg William Sachs (1858-1930) and his wife Margarete, née Karger (1871-1950).
(This richly illustrated biography is the first book in En...)
This richly illustrated biography is the first book in English to chronicle the life of Nelly Sachs (18911970), recipient of the 1966 Nobel Prize in Literature. The book follows Sachs from her secluded years in Berlin as the only child of assimilated German Jews, through her last-minute flight from the Nazis in 1940, to her exile in "peaceful Sweden"?a time of poverty and isolation, but also of growing fame. Enriched by over 300 images of Sachs's manuscripts, photographs, and possessions, Flight and Metamorphosis not only offers detailed insights into the contexts of Sachs's formation as a writer, but also looks at themes of trauma and testimony in her central works. Aris Fioretos draws upon many previously unknown manuscripts, documents, medical records, and photos to produce the first reliably detailed narratives of Sachs's foundational experiences: her teenage years when she experienced the unrequited love later designated as the source for her entire oeuvre; her involvement with the Jewish Cultural League?seven years marked by mounting terror but also by her first public recognition as a writer; and her exposure to the radical Modernism of Swedish poetry in the 1940s. The book further describes the years of public recognition, addresses the paranoia that marked Sachs's final decade, and scrutinizes her close but complicated friendship with Paul Celan. An interview with Sachs's dear friend Margaretha Holmqvist provides touching insights into both her life in the 1960s and the events leading up to the Nobel Prize. Throughout, the book emphasizes the singularity of Sachs's accomplishments as a writer and the exemplarity of her existential situation?as a woman, as an exile, and?as she herself said?"a battleground."
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(Hard to find book)
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Nelly Sachs was born on December 10, 1891 in Schöneberg, Germany to the wealthy natural rubber and gutta-percha manufacturer Georg William Sachs (1858-1930) and his wife Margarete, née Karger (1871-1950).
Nelly Sachs was educated at home because of frail health and after having studied dance and music with private tutors, she began to write poetry at the age of 17.
Nelly Sachs's first collection of legends and sagas from the Middle Ages was published in 1921; this work reflected her fascination with the mystical elements of Christianity. After 1933 she discovered her Jewish heritage and became interested in the common roots of Judaism and Christianity. Despite the influences of her own religious tradition, which can be traced throughout her poetry, in the years before the overt political persecution of the Jews accompanying Hitler's rise to power, she was not particularly concerned with her own religious origins. Her first collection of poetry appeared in East Berlin in 1947 under the title In den Wohnungen des Todes ("In the Habitations of Death"). Together with the play Eli, written in 1943, it is, thematically, the fountainhead of all her later poetry. While still working on her own poetry, she acquired sufficient knowledge of Swedish to earn a living translating Swedish works into German. Her first collection of poetry was But Even the Sun Has No Home (1948). Like the other 11 plays written in this period, Eli was created in memory of those who had suffered and perished in Nazi concentration camps. Once again the focus is on the black theme of the victims of the holocaust, as well as the author's personal loneliness. "Despite the esteem in which she was held by many German-language readers, Nelly Sachs was little known to the rest of the European and American public when she received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1966.
Sachs was a German poet and dramatist who became a poignant spokesperson for the grief and yearnings of her fellow Jews.
(This richly illustrated biography is the first book in En...)
(Hard to find book)
Nelly Sachs was born Jewish, but with the advent of anti-Semitism, she turned to Orthodox Hasidism, where she discovered many of those occult aspects which had earlier attracted her to Christianity.
