love with a man, though little is known about him except for the fact that the Nazis dragged him away to his death.

When she went to Sweden in 1940, she knew only one person there—Lagerlöf; yet Lagerlöf died only two months after her arrival in Stockholm, a further source of anguish for Sachs and her mother. A stranger in a strange country, Sachs, exiled from a country gone insane with blood lust and hatred of the Jews, started to write as a survivor surveying the wreckage of lives she had known. Gone were the nature poems of her youth. In their place was a new kind of poetry, a harder, tougher poetry that spoke of the unspeakable—tortures, ashes, smoking chimneys, madness, suicide, mass death, all the realities with which she was faced as a survivor of the cruelest spectacle in mankind’s cruel history. In her tiny apartment she could join with her ailing mother in lamenting the loss of friends and family. In Stockholm she was alone and unknown as a writer. Her poetry became her only way out of spiritual torpor and anguish.

Out of the wartime exile came her first notable poems, those of In den Wohnungen des Todes (in the dwellings of death), first published in 1946, in which she discovered her true themes and poetic voice. Here she concentrated her considerable imaginative powers upon the sufferings of the people of Israel and, for the first time, took as her own responsibility the solemn, enormous task of remembering the dead victims of Hitler’s tyranny. To Sachs, there could be no division between herself and those who perished; she consciously chose to craft a poetic monument worthy of them.

Writing in German and living in Sweden meant that Sachs’s audience was far smaller than if she had chosen to write in Yiddish or English or lived in New York, London, or Paris. Nevertheless, German recognition came to her because she wrote in that language and later international attention was finally given her.

Her collection of poetry entitled Sternverdunkelung (1949; eclipse of the stars) increased her readership and gained for her some critical attention. The biblical cadence, the magnificent themes of death, life, and rebirth, and the harrowing intensity of these poems announced that the wandering Jews of Europe, those alive and those dead, had found their poetic voice. Though heartened by the critical reception of her latest poems, Sachs and her mother endured extreme economic hardship in the early phase of their exile. After her mother’s death in 1950, however, Sachs’s burden began to lighten as money from her translations of Swedish writers into German came in. Moreover, she was heartened by sales of Eli: Ein Mysterienspiel vom Leiden Israels (Eli: A Mystery Play of the Sufferings of Israel, 1967), a verse play written in 1943 but published in 1951 which dealt with the death of a Jewish shepherd boy at the hands of a Nazi soldier.

In Sachs’s next volume, Und niemand weiss weiter (1957; and no one knows where to turn), she began to universalize the torments of the Jews, seeing them as part of the larger story of human suffering throughout history; by so doing, she no longer envisioned the Holocaust as the only catastrophic event in history but as the greatest of them all. This new vision of universal suffering and the searching of all people for meaning and hope found further expression in her subsequent collection, Flucht und Verwandlung (1959; light and change), which brought her increased critical attention, especially in Germany.

Sachs’s collected poems, Fahrt ins Staublose (1961; journey beyond the dust), brought her new readers intrigued by her ability to ask the difficult questions of God that naturally occur after Auschwitz. Following this volume came Zeichen im Sand: Die szenischen Dichtungen (1962; signs in the dust), Späte Gedichte (1965; later poems), and Glühende Rätsel (1964-1966; glowing enigmas), in which her exploration of silence and the questions God leaves unanswered deepens. Here again is the Jewish experience translated into the experience of all human beings alive in the twentieth century—and of all who have ever lived.

To Sachs, the apocalypse that was the Holocaust is contrasted with the promise held by a resurrected state of Israel, the sorrow mitigated thought not erased by the joyful re-creation of the Jewish nation. Sustained by the hope for the future of not only Jewry but also mankind, Sachs increasingly appreciated her adopted homeland and grew ever more proficient in speaking and writing Swedish. Her Swedish admirers were many but so too were her East and West German ones. In fact, she was honored by many German societies in several cities and towns.

The culmination of her career, however, came in two ways: with her being awarded the 1966 Nobel Prize in Literature and with the publication of what would become her most noted work, the epic-length lyric O the Chimneys in 1967. With characteristic modesty, Sachs accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the millions of Jews who perished in the Holocaust and dedicated it to their memory. This award enabled Sachs once more to widen her reading public, yet she did not become a popular poet. Her works were thought by many to be far too painful or too difficult to read, their abstract quality and enormous themes tending to overwhelm first-time readers.

O the Chimneys is generally acknowledged as Sachs’s finest poem. She labored on it for many years, trying to create a mighty epic of lasting significance. With the publication of this great poem, Sachs’s reputation as the poet of the Holocaust was established for all time. Lyrical at a time when lyric poetry was thought archaic, long when brevity was sought in poetry, and biblical in tone and cadence when sophisticated readers looked for irony, O the Chimneys bewildered some critics and disappointed others. Yet most critics who wrote about it found it masterful. Sachs determined that this poem would be an unsentimentalized lament for a vanished people as well as a wellspring of hope for a desperate, confused world.

Sachs’s final years were relatively happy ones spent in an adopted land she came to acknowledge as home, where her fellow Swedes saw her as a national treasure. Always the mystic, she spent her last years as she had spent previous ones—in contemplation. She died quietly in Stockholm on May 12, 1970, and her mourners were many.

Summary

Nelly Sachs wrote as an outcry against horrors and evils she had known and those she had narrowly escaped knowing. In her career as a poet, she began as a romantic nature poet and ended as a portrayer of history’s darkest event. Increasingly, she dealt with the biggest themes: death, life, resurrection, man’s destiny, God’s love, and peace, and her poetry became less and less descriptive and more abstract, even hermetic.

No other poet gave herself over so completely to the incredibly difficult task of portraying the Holocaust. Perhaps the only others who could have written about the concentration camps, gas chambers, and ovens were murdered or, if they survived, were too emotionally scarred to express their horror and outrage adequately. Postwar Europe needed a poet of Sachs’s intensity to help understand the incomprehensible event that was the Holocaust. With her biblical language, Sachs gave her readers a sense of the mystery at the heart of human experience, the sense of wonder and terror one experiences when one contemplates monstrous crimes and their aftermath.

Sachs is undeservedly little known in North America, but her reputation is assured in Europe. Ironically, Germans remain her most avid readers. Her sustained vision of freedom for all people is that of a remarkable woman who never allowed hatred to dominate her life or her art. Hers is one of the twentieth century’s most resonant voices, and she needs to be heard.

Bibliography

Kurz, Paul K. On Modern German Literature. Translated by Mary Frances McCarthy. 2 vols. University: University of Alabama Press, 1970-1971. The author emphasizes Sachs’s considerable contribution to modern German poetry, citing her as a master of form and technique. Included is a valuable bibliography.

Opfell, Olga S. Lady Laureates. 2d ed. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1986. Opfell chooses Sachs as one of several seminal women writers who have earned lasting recognition. Her analysis of Sachs’s inner qualities is fascinating as is her discussion of Sachs’s achievements.

Rosenfeld, Alvin H. “The Poetry of Nelly Sachs.” Judaism 20 (Summer, 1971): 356-364. Rosenfeld’s article discusses Sachs being close to silence, even madness, asking unanswerable questions to an unfathomable God. He emphasizes how fragile are her abstract concepts in the face of the horror of the Holocaust.

Slater, Joseph. “From Death to Rebirth.” Saturday Review 1 (November 4, 1967): 36. Slater discusses the various elements that make Sachs’s poetry so powerful and makes a strong plea for her to be accepted by American readers.

Spender, Stephen. “Catastrophe and Redemption.” The New York Times Book Review, October 8, 1967: 5, 34. One of Sachs’s most ardent admirers, Spender compares Sachs to other notable writers of the twentieth century and finds her contribution unique. He also expounds upon the essential unity of her themes developed over the decades.