Our last poet in this week’s line-up really needs no introduction. We, however, need a reminder what we as host country  did to some of those refugees who fled a totalitarian regime….

The poem I chose is optimistic and that is how I want to end this week. There might be a time, perhaps sooner than you think, where some can return to the countries they’ve had to flee.

I have always felt an affinity to the poetry of Rose Ausländer (her last name means foreigner in German) as well as to the poet. Her poetry evolved from tightly structured writing early on to more free flowing, ethereal words, not coincidentally perhaps after she developed a friendship with Paul Celan, one of my favorite poets of all time.  I am drawn to the ways she uses language, but I am also drawn to the person who owned but two suitcases (if that) for all of her life, and who had an intense, loving, perhaps even enmeshed connection to her mother, not unlike my own. (Today’s photographs of lines are meant to represent both: connection and parallels.)

I think I have written about her in this blog before, but here is a quick summary of her life – details in link below. Ausländer was born in Czernowitz in 1901 (now Ukraine) surrounded by the many languages of the many different nationalities all congregating in Bukowina. She came from a liberal Jewish household, studied literature and philosophy, survived being forced into the Ghetto and hiding during the Holocaust, and, after a stint in the US, chose to return to Germany and live there until her death in 1988.

She was by all reports a warm person with a sunny disposition and she became the voice of reconciliation in her last years of life in Germany, embracing even her enemies. Another thing I admire and feel drawn to: the ability to forgive.

https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/auslander-rose

I chose two poems by her, one that expresses such bittersweet longing and mourning for her mother (Ausländer had a physical and emotional breakdown when hearing of her mother’s death that kept her ill for a year.)

The other poem is in response to her own request: I am speaking her words, as I hope will you.

That English translation, by the way, is really weak.

This is what the German actually says:

When I pass

the sun will continue to burn

the planets will

move according to their own laws

around a center 

unknown to anyone.

A sweet fragrance will emanate forever from

the lilac

white streaks of lightning radiate from the snow.

When I depart

from our oblivious earth

will you speak my words for me

for a short while? 

Her name is often spoken in the same breath as these others who are considered among the most brilliant German lyricist of the 20th century: Hilde Domin, Rose Ausländer, Ingeborg Bachman.  I am talking about Dagmar Nick who is nonetheless most likely NOT a household name. At least she wasn’t in my household. Not quite sure why that is.

Born in Poland in 1926 to musician parents, with some Jewish background, she experienced several displacements, among them one caused by World War II bombs that hit her apartment in Berlin.  She had a steady career as a writer, author of radio plays and poetry anthologies, with early acknowledgement through national rewards and prizes, and is still alive, living in Munich.

I came across her when reading After Every War – 20th century women poets –   (a Princeton Paperback) which has been one of my nightstand go-to’s since I discovered this small volume a decade or so ago. Here is a link that informs you about the anthology.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/the-rubble-women-of-poetry-1.406672

The sheer breadth of poetry in it, and the emotional depth, intensified by the awareness that several of these poets did not survive the Holocaust, make it a must – read.

Since we read Nowhereland on Monday, I thought No-Man’s-Land today would be a good follow-up, particularly since it touches on the guilt experienced by those who survived.

No-Man’s-Land

Where the landscape dissolves

into sky,

where night after night

our shadows

touch each other

its fettered wings

on the narrow ridge

between here and there,

between where we are

and where we are not –

in a cursed circle of blood,

our dreams gone and no guarantees –

we lie on the pulsing shore

battered and beneath

our fallen banners –

Powerlessness. Guilt.

Dagmar Nick, translated by Eavan Boland

I, by the way, have not read one of her more recent books, Alter Baum, but was amused by her publisher’s description of the series that added her work. “Only authors who are 80 or older and write about transience or death without sentimentality and with wit….. ”

Yesterday I introduced an Eastern European poet writing about exile who was not very well known. As a permanently poor refugee she never had the privilege of higher education, but started writing early in life.

Today I offer a striking contrast. Hilde Domin, (Hildegard Löwenstein) was born in 1909 into a well-to-do Jewish family near Cologne, got her PhD in political science among other degrees, studying with Karl Jaspers; she left Germany early, in 1930, to Italy, then to England, then fled to Santa Domingo in 1940, since she could get no-one to be a guarantor in any other countries that accepted Nazi refugees. She only starte to write poetry in 1951 when her mother died, and took up in full force upon her return to Germany in 1954.

She was smart, regal, prone to acerbic gossip, and never shy. She was a brilliant poet, with a confidence that I believe originated in her sense of self that was securely rooted in her intellect and her belief that poetry had a responsibility to be political.

She won about every honor and prize there is, was active until her last breath (she died this month in 2006 in her 90s.)

The obituary below gives the details.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2006/mar/16/guardianobituaries.bookscomment1

I am also attaching a clip from a documentary about her that gives you a sense of her personality.

And I liked the fact that Abbas Khider, a Germany Iraqi poet who won the Literature in Exile prize in 2013, prefaced his collection with one of Domin’s most famous poems. (You can see the dove in question in the documentary trailer.)

http://www.dw.com/en/german-iraqi-wins-literature-in-exile-prize/a-17095449

My choice of poem, though, is more closely related to the experience of those who seek a haven and have little chance to find one if they are without means and/or connections. Ask anyone in Aleppo today.

Last week I found myself averting my eyes every time I came across images or words on the carnage in Syria. I simply could not integrate the fact that we are witnessing another genocide, and I, personally, as a by-stander, doing nothing.  Those who are so much more familiar to me, the European poets of the 1930s, who faced the same situation as today’s Syrians, some lucky to escape some not, at least wrote about their experience, facing it head on.

This week, then, I will dig out some of that poetry as a stand-in for what Syrians experience right now, as a way to confront my own cowardice when I try not to think about war.

Some of the poets are well known, others less so. I will start with one of the latter, Masha Kaléko. A Galician Jew, she moved to Germany with her parents to flee the progoms; living in Frankfurt, Marburg, and eventually Berlin she became part of a group of writers know for their political approach and everyday wit. In 1938 she had to flee again, this time the Nazis. In New York she faced poverty and isolation, trying to support a scholar husband and a young son while trying to learn the language. Her husbands occupation as a scholar of synagogal music eventually led them to Israel, where she again had no words and needed to make ends meet. In the 1960s her poetry saw a revival in Germany which was brought to a halt when she declined a major literary prize because one of the jury members had belonged to the SS. She died miserably of stomach cancer, having lost her 31 year old son and husband in short succession to illness, in Zurich. The link below gives a comprehensive description of a life lived out of a suitcase.

https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/kaleko-mascha

It is hard to find her poetry in English. The book below is out of print; I believe it is also extraordinarily difficult to translate her German, since it has a certain style that is know as Berliner Schnauze, a Berlin argot that refuses to be transnational.

Mascha: The Poetry of Masha Kaleko – Andreas Nolte.

This is the one poem I could find in translation.

Not a Children’s Song

No matter where I travel,

I go to Nowhereland.

The suitcase full of longing,

Just knick-knacks in my hand.

As lonely as the desert wind.

As homeless as the sand.

No matter where I travel,

I come to Nowhereland.

The forests are all gone now,

Each home a firebrand.

Found no one left whom I know.

Not one knew me first-hand.

And when the alien bird cried out,

I ran, could not withstand.

No matter where I travel,

I come to Nowhereland.