Else Lasker-Schüler
In her moving and essential new book, After Every War, the Irish poet Eavan Boland has gathered together and translated the work of nine German-speaking women poets, all of whom wrote in the decades surrounding World War II. The title comes from the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, who notices with a kind of wry domestic wisdom that "After every war somebody must clean up."
The poets in this collection recognize the hard personal truths -- the intimate consequences -- of warfare. They are both witnesses and participants. Some of them I've known and admired for years, such as Nelly Sachs (1891-1970), Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) and Else Lasker-Schüler (1869-1945), whom her friend Gottfried Benn called "the greatest lyric poet Germany ever had." Others are revelations to me, such as Elisabeth Langgässer (1899-1951), who is represented by a single devastating poem ("Spring 1946"), and Rose Ausländer (1901-1988), who sounds the ground note for the book with her poem "Motherland":
My Fatherland is dead.
They buried it
in fire
I live
in my Motherland --
Word
These poets -- the others are Gertrud Kolmar (1894-1943), Marie Luise Kaschnitz (1901-1974), Hilde Domin (1909- ) and Dagmar Nick (1926- ) -- were all deeply shaped by the cataclysm of World War II. Boland has chosen a small but crucial selection of their overall work, a kind of personal anthology, that shows them to be war poets with a difference. The difference comes from being both poets and women, with all that entails.
"I had to do it -- suddenly, I had to sing./ I had no idea why," Else Lasker-Schüler cries out in her poem "In the Evening": "But when the evening came I wept. I wept bitterly."
These poets have a particular angle of witness that comes from powerlessness, from being vulnerable, injured, marginal, excluded. Most were exiles. Several of them were Jewish, which means they suffered the Holocaust. Dispossession is a key theme. They recognized what they had lost. "I am one who cannot live among my own kind," Bachmann declares in "Exile." "A stranger/ always carries/ his native land in his arms," Nelly Sachs observes in "If Someone Comes."
Here is Hilde Domin's "Exile":
The mouth dying
