front cover of Gertrud Kolmar
Gertrud Kolmar
A Literary Life
Dieter Kühn
Northwestern University Press, 2013

Linda Marianiello here translates into English for the first time Dieter Kühn’s highly praised and definitive biography of one of Germany’s greatest poets, Gertrud Kolmar. Kolmar carried German-language poetry to new heights, speaking truth in a time when many poets collapsed in the face of increasing Nazi repression. Born Gertrud Käthe Chodziesner in Berlin in 1894, she completed her first collection, Poems, in 1917. She took her pen name, Kolmar, from the name of the town where her family originated.

Kolmar’s third collection of poems appeared in 1938 but soon disappeared in the wake of the overall repression of Jewish authors. At the time, she served as secretary to her father, Ludwig Chodziesner, a prominent lawyer. In 1941, the Nazis compelled her to work in a German armaments factory. Even as a forced laborer, the strength of her poetic voice grew, perhaps reaching its highest level before her deportation to Auschwitz. From gentle nature verses to stirring introspection, these are poems in which we can still find ourselves today. Both she and her father died in Nazi concentration camps, he in 1942, she the following year. The translation of Dieter Kühn’s biography conveys the tragic, yet courageous, life of a great poet to an English-speaking audience. 

[more]

front cover of My Gaze Is Turned Inward
My Gaze Is Turned Inward
Letters 1938-1943
Gertrud Kolmar
Northwestern University Press, 2004
"Event of the time are a bit like Impressionist paintings . . . which combine into a recognizable whole only when observed from a distance." —Gertrude Kolmar in a letter to her sister, October 22, 1939

So a picture of Gertrud Kolmar, a gifted Jewish writer struggling to sustain her art and family, emerges from these eloquent and allusive letters. Written in the stolen moments before her day as a forced laborer in a munitions factory began, the letters tell of Kolmar's move from the family home in Finkenkrug to a three-room flat in Berlin, which she and her father must soon share with other displaced Jews. They describe her factory work as a learning experience and assert, in the face of ever worsening conditions, that true art, never dependent on comfort or peace, is "capable of triumphing over . . . time and place."

These letters are a triumph of art, proclaiming the freedom of the human will amidst oppression. Though prevented by Nazi censorship from saying too much too directly, Kolmar still conveys the intensity and determination of her inner world, as well as the relentlessness of the outer world bent on crushing her. For its insight into the mind and soul of a poet submitting to and denying fate, and for its interior vision of one of history's darkest moments, My Gaze Is Turned Inward is a unique document of literary, historical, and spiritual power.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter