Nelly Sachs 1910

N E L L Y  L E O N I E  S A C H S  

Her lyrics combine 

lean simplicity with imagery variously tender, searing, or mystical.

Nelly Leonie Sachs was a German poet and dramatist. Sachs wrote poems mainly for her own entertainment, until the advent of Nazism darkened her work and forced her to flee to Sweden.

Nelly Sachs 1938

Nelly Leonie Sachs (1891 – 1970) born Leonie Sachs, Berlin, died in Stockholm, was a Jewish German poet and playwright whose experiences resulting from the rise of the Nazis in World War II Europe transformed her into a poignant spokeswoman for the grief and yearnings of her fellow Jews.

Her best-known play is Eli: Ein Mysterienspiel vom Leiden Israels (1950); other works include the poems "Zeichen im Sand" (1962), "Verzauberung" (1970), and the collections of poetry In den Wohnungen des Todes (1947), Flucht und Verwandlung (1959), Fahrt ins Staublose (1961), and Suche nach Lebenden (1971).

Born Leonie Sachs in the Schoneberg district of Berlin, Germany in 1891, to a wealthy manufacturer, she was educated at home because of frail health. She showed early signs of talent as a dancer, but her protective parents did not encourage her to pursue a profession. She grew up as a very sheltered, introverted young woman and never married. She pursued an extensive correspondence with, and was friends with, Selma Lagerlöf and Helde Domin.

As the Nazis took power, she became increasingly terrified, at one point losing the ability to speak, as she would remember in verse: "When the great terror came/I fell dumb." Sachs fled with her aged mother to Sweden in 1940.

It was her friendship with Lagerlöf that saved their lives: shortly before her own death Lagerlöf intervened with the Swedish royal family to secure their release from Germany. Sachs and her mother escaped on the last flight from Nazi Germany to Sweden, a week before Sachs was scheduled to report to a concentration camp.

 Selma Lagerlöf - photo: Mårbacka

Sachs' earlier work were part of the book burning in Berlin in 1933. The Nazi book burnings were a campaign conducted by the German Student Association of Nazi Germany to ceremonially burn books in Germany and Austria by classical liberal, anarchist, socialist, pacifist, communist, Jewish, and other authors whose writings were viewed as subversive or whose ideologies undermined the National Socialist administration.

On April 6th, 1933, the Main Office for Press and Propaganda of the German Student Association proclaimed a nationwide "Action against the Un-German Spirit", which was to climax in a literary purge or "cleansing" ("Säuberung") by fire. Local chapters were to supply the press with releases and commissioned articles, sponsor well-known Nazi figures to speak at public gatherings, and negotiate for radio broadcast time. On the 8th of April, the Students Association also drafted the Twelve Theses which deliberately evoked Martin Luther and the historic burning of "Un-German" books at the Wartburg festival on the 300th anniversary of the posting of Luther's Ninety-Five Theses. 

The theses called for a "pure" national language and culture. Placards publicized the theses, which attacked "Jewish intellectualism", asserted the need to "purify" German language and literature, and demanded that universities be centers of German nationalism. The students described the "action" as a response to a worldwide Jewish "smear campaign" against Germany and an affirmation of traditional German values.

In a symbolic act of ominous significance, on 10 May 1933, the students burned upwards of 25,000 volumes of "un-German" books, such as Jewish or American novels. Presaging an era of state censorship and control of culture. On the night of 10 May, in most university towns, nationalist students marched in torchlight parades "against the un-German spirit." 

The scripted rituals called for high Nazi officials, professors, rectors, and student leaders to address the participants and spectators. At the meeting places, students threw the pillaged and unwanted books into the bonfires with great joyous ceremony, band-playing, songs, "fire oaths," and incantations. In Berlin, some 40,000 people gathered in the Opernplatz to hear Joseph Goebbels deliver a fiery address: "No to decadence and moral corruption!" Goebbels enjoined the crowd. “Yes to decency and morality in family and state! 

"The era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is now at an end. The breakthrough of the German revolution has again cleared the way on the German path...The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character. It is to this end that we want to educate you. As a young person, to already have the courage to face the pitiless glare, to overcome the fear of death, and to regain respect for death - this is the task of this young generation.

And thus you do well in this midnight hour to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past. This is a strong, great and symbolic deed - a deed which should document the following for the world to know - Here the intellectual foundation of the November Republic is sinking to the ground, but from this wreckage the phonenix of a new spirit will triumphantly rise."

— Joseph Goebbels , Speech to the students in Berlin

- - - - - - - - - - 

Show us the sun slowly

Lead us step by step from star to star

Gently let us learn how to live again.

Or else a bird’s song

Or the filling of a bucket at the well

Could break open our pain so lightly sealed

And wash us away.

- Chorus of the Saved

In 1961 she became the inaugural winner of the Nelly Sachs Prize, a literary prize awarded biennially by the German city of Dortmund, and named in her honor. 

When, with Shmuel Yosef Agnon, she was awarded the 1966 Nobel Prize in Literature, she observed that Agnon represented Israel whereas "I represent the tragedy of the Jewish people."

Hulton Archives

Living in a tiny two-room apartment in Stockholm, Sachs cared alone for her mother for many years, and supported their existence by translations between Swedish and German. 

After her mother's death, Sachs suffered several nervous breakdowns characterized by hallucinations, paranoia and delusions of persecution by Nazis, and she spent a number of years in a mental institution. 

She continued to write even while hospitalized. She eventually recovered sufficiently to live on her own, though her mental health would always be fragile. Her worst breakdown was ostensibly precipitated by hearing German speech during a trip to Switzerland to accept a literary prize. 

However, she maintained a forgiving attitude toward a younger generation of Germans, and corresponded with many German-speaking writers of the postwar period, including Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Ingeborg Bachmann.

In the context of the Shoah, her deep friendship with "brother" poet Paul Celan is often noted today. Their bond was described in one of Celan's most famous poems, "Zürich, Zum Storchen" ("Zürich, The Stork Inn"). Sachs and Celan shared their concern with the Holocaust and the fate of the Jews throughout history, their interest in Jewish and Christian mysticism, and their literary models; their imagery was often remarkably similar though developed independently. Their friendship had the unfortunate side effect of intensifying each other's paranoia.

Paul Celan 

Celan also suffered from fears of persecution (he blamed Claire Goll's accusations of plagiarism on antisemitism) and frustration over the reception of his work. When Sachs met Celan she was embroiled in a long dispute with Finnish-Jewish composer Moses Pergament over his musical adaptation of her stage play Eli: Ein Mysterienspiel vom Leiden Israels. Her relationship to Pergament became entangled with her paranoia, with Sachs repeatedly accusing Pergament of not believing her delusions of persecution. In Celan, she found someone who appeared to believe her. Sachs was first institutionalized shortly after her only visit to Celan.

Sachs' poetry is intensely lyrical and reflects some influence by German Romanticism, especially in her early work. The poetry she wrote as a young woman in Berlin is more inspired by Christianity than Judaism and makes use of traditional Romantic imagery and themes. Much of it concerns an unhappy love affair Sachs suffered in her teens, with a non-Jewish man who would eventually be killed in a concentration camp.

After Sachs learned of her only love interest's death, she bound up his fate with that of her people and wrote many love lyrics ending not only in the beloved's death, but in the catastrophe of the Holocaust. Sachs herself mourns no longer as a jilted lover, but as a personification of the Jewish people in their vexed relationship to history and God. Sachs' fusion of grief with subtly romantic elements is in keeping with the imagery of the kabbalah, where the Shekhinah represents God's presence on earth and mourns for the separation of God from His people in their suffering.

Thus Sachs' Romanticism allowed her to develop self-consciously from a German to a Jewish writer, with a corresponding change in her language: still flowery and conventional in some of her first poetry on the Holocaust, it becomes ever more compressed and surreal, returning to a series of the same images and tropes (dust, stars, breath, stones and jewels, blood, dancers, fish suffering out of water, madness, and the ever-frustrated love) in ways that are sometimes comprehensible only to her readers, but always moving and disturbing. 

Though Sachs does not resemble many authors, she appears to have been influenced by Gertrud Kolmar and Else Lasker-Schuler, in addition to Paul Celan.

In 1961 she became the inaugural winner of the Nelly Sachs Prize, a literary prize awarded biennially by the German city of Dortmund, and named in her honour. When, with Shmuel Yosef Agnon, she was awarded the 1966 Nobel Prize in Literature, she observed that Agnon represented Israel whereas "I represent the tragedy of the Jewish people."

Following her death from intestinal cancer in 1970, Nelly Sachs was interred in the Norra begravningsplatsen in Stockholm. Her possessions were donated to the National Library of Sweden. 

A memorial plaque commemorates her birthplace, Maaßenstraße 12, in Schoneberg, Berlin; where there is also a park, in Dennewitzstraße, named after her. A park on the island of Kungsholmen in Stockholm also bears her name.

The Seeker, and Other Poems (1970)

Collected Poems I, 1944–1949 (2007)