16. Sachs // Info  Stephanie

First Jewish Woman to Win a Nobel Prize.
Survivor of the Holocaust.
Born December 10, 1891 in Berlin, Germany; died May 12, 1970.
German poet, Nelly Sachs shared the Nobel prize for literature with S.Y. Agnon in 1966.

One of the major Jewish poets and a refugee who fled from Nazi Germany to Sweden in 1940.

Her best known poetry deals with the Holocaust.

Nelly, (she was called Leone at birth) Sachs was the only child of a wealthy Berlin industrialist. The family lived in the Tiergartenviertel, one of Berlin's better neighbourhoods. Because of her family's wealth, Nelly was educated by private tutors. She studied music and dancing. Her early love of literature came from home.

By the age of seventeen, Nelly began writing poems in traditional, rhymed forms. She also wrote plays for puppets that had a fairy-tale flavour. Although some of her early work appeared in newspapers. She wrote mainly for her own enjoyment.

In 1921, Nelly Sachs published her first full-length work, a volume entitled Legenden und Erzaehlungen ( Legends and Stories). The stories in the book reflected the influence of Christian mysticism in both the world of German Romanticism and the Catholic Middle Ages. In the decade before Hitler came to power, Sachs had been renowned in Germany for her expressionist lyrics. With Hitler's rise, she rediscovered her Jewish heritage and began searching for mystical ideas in the Zohar (a mystical interpretation of the Torah written in Aramaic which she utilized in her poetry.)

Every member of her family, with the exception of her elderly mother was killed in the concentration camps of the Holocaust. She, too, might have met such a fate and indeed, in 1940 Nelly Sachs herself was ordered to a "work camp." Fortunately, a German friend of Sachs's, at great risk to herself, journeyed to Sweden and met with the great Swedish poet and 1909 Nobel-prize winner, Selma Lagerlof, then on her deathbed. Sachs and Lagerlof had corresponded with each other for many years. In one of Lagerlof's final acts, she made a special appeal on Sachs's behalf to Prince Eugene of the Swedish Royal House. Though virtually no Jews were permitted to leave Germany, Prince Eugene arranged a visa for Nelly Sachs and her mother so that they could travel to Sweden. Sadly, Selma Lagerlof died before Nelly's arrival in Stockholm.

Many of Nelly Sachs's works, among them the writings for the puppet theatre, were lost after her flight to Sweden. Her early work is therefore largely unknown. Her reputation has been based on her creative output since the start of World War II. During the war years, ]Nelly Sachs wrote some of her most impressive poetry. At the center of her poetry is the motif of flight and pursuit, the symbol of the hunter and his quarry. Her poetry has been described as ecstatic, mystical and visionary.

She wrote her best known play, Eli, A Mystery of the Sorrows of Israel, in 1943. It was published eight years later. The play is made up of seventeen loosely connected scenes, which tell the tragic story of an eight year old Polish shepherd boy. The boy poignantly raises his flute heavenward in anguish when his parents are taken away and then murdered by a German soldier. A cobbler named Michael traces the culprit to the next village. Filled with remorse, the soldier collapses at Michael's feet. The play is interwoven with the themes from the Jewish legend of the Lamed Vav Zaddikkim ("The 36 hidden Saints").
Nelly Sachs said she wrote Eli, later presented as a radio play and an opera, "Under the impression of the dreadful experience of the Hitler period while smoke was still commingled with fire."

Concentrating on the Holocaust, Nelly Sachs combined elements of Jewish mysticism with tradition of German Romanticism. She tried to convey the incomprehensible horror of the Holocaust, making constant use of two words:
tod and nacht, German for death and night, respectively.

Although her adult poems were largely composed in free verse, Nelly Sachs wrote with careful craftsmanship and utilized a German that was influenced by the language of the Psalms and was full of mystical imagery of Hasidic origin. "If I could not have written, I could not have survived", she wrote." "Death was my teacher....my metaphors are my sounds."

Nelly Sachs was almost fifty years old when she reached Sweden. She shared a two bedroom apartment on the third floor of a building with her mother. At the outset, living in exile in Sweden, Nelly Sachs made a modest living by translating Swedish poetry into German. She eventually published several successful volumes of her translations. Of her own poems, her best known one was die Schomsteine ("O the Chimneys") with its poignant lines:
O the chimneys, On the cleverly devised abodes of death,
As Israel's body drew, dissolved in smoke, Through the air,
As a chimney-sweep a star received it, Turning black,
Or was it a sunbeam?

In that poem, the body of Israel is in the smoke emitted by the chimneys of the Nazi concentration camps. In her book In den Wohnungen des Todes (In the Habitations of Death), dedicated to "my dead brothers and sisters", Nelly Sachs included cycles entitled: "Prayers for the Dead Fiance,." "Epitaphs Written On Air," and "Choruses After Midnight."

Sternverdunkelung (1949) contains poetry that expressed an unyielding faith in the survivability of the people of Israel and the importance of its mission. Sachs recognized the existence of evil and accepted the tragedy that flows from that evil. But she did not believe in being vindictive or plotting retaliation against evildoers. When Sachs was awarded the peace prize from the German Book Publishers Association in October 1965, she said, "In spite of all the horrors of the past, I believe in you....Let us remember the victims and then let us walk together into the future to seek again a new beginning."

Her Spaete Gedichte ( Late Poems) (1965) contained the extended poetic sequence Gluehende Raestsel, (Glowing Riddles) (1964). Sharing the 1966 Nobel prize for literature with the Israeli novelist and short story writer S.Y. Agnon, Nelly Sachs noted "Agnon represents the state of Israel. I represent the tragedy of the Jewish People."

The Nobel prize citation declared: "With moving intensity of feeling she has given voice to the worldwide tragedy of the Jewish people, which she has expressed in lyrical laments of painful beauty and in dramatic legends. Her symbolic language body combines an inspired modern idiom with echoes of ancient biblical poetry. Identifying herself totally with the faith and ritual mysticism of her people, Miss Sachs has created a world of imagery, which does not shun the terrible truths of the extermination camps and corpse factories, but which at the same time rises above all hatred of the persecutors, merely revealing a genuine sorrow at man's debasement".

Explaining her writing, Nelly Sachs said: "I have constantly striven to raise the unutterable to a transcendental level, in order to make it tolerable, and in this night of nights, to give some idea of the holy darkness in which the quiver and the sorrow are hidden."

Nelly Sachs's later work examined the relationship of the dead and the living, the fate of innocence, and the state of suffering.

At night when dying seems to sever all seams

When is it more quiet than in the dead of night? Things are so still and so silent. No one is awake. Even the animals are sleeping. This is a great way to start off. It provides a sharp contrast to the choas and outburst of the screams that are to come in the poem. This also draws me back to ancient times, when people believed that evil spirits walked among us at night. Hence the expression, the dead of night, that hour where nothing seems to move and everything has an eery, frightening edge. Sever all seams, when does dying not sever seams? Why should dying at night be any different? Read on, perhaps i will figure it out.

The landscape of screams

a metaphor of painting and of art, and yet a paradox. What is more beautiful and moving than art, and what can be more horrifying than a scream in the darkness when you dont know what is out there? A line ago we were thinking of the calness and almost unnerving quiet of night, now this image of a land of screams is thrown at us.

Tears open the black bandage

Im sure all of us at one point or another have had a bandaid ripped off and yelled. This is such a powerful metaphor. The black bandage. It is made to stop the bleeding and protect the wound, but it is black. It is evil. It holds in all the dark and perverse elements found in the psyche.

I will now use some poetic license to skip to the last stanza

Oh you bleeding eye

We discussed the other day the power behind the simple word eye. It has so many intertextual relations that i could spend hours talking bout that one simple word. The fact that the eye is bleeding means that it has seen and been involved with the great violence mentioned in the rest of the poem, most specifically the eye of the visionary made blind the line before. If i didnt know better (SAchs is Jewish), i would say this ending is about jesus christ. He is the visionary eye made blind. He is the bleeding eye.

In the tattered eclipse of the sun

This conjures post apocalyptic images in my head. visions of the world collapsing and everything in choas.

Hung up to be dried by God// in the cosmos

Jesus was hung up to be dried. first he hung on the cross and then Jesus was granted a seat next to god side. could be, it could also be that God is besting fear and hanging it up.

(Sorry, I'm attempting to catch up from before Spring Break...)

In Nelly Sachs' poem, "Landscape of Screams," I was overwhelmed at the startling images and profound religious background weaving throughout the poem. We went over this poem fairly thoroughly in class but I was instantly drawn to this poem for some reason. I think part of it has to do with the fact that I have read Sachs' poetry before. In "Chorus of the Rescued," she examines how the Jews were fragile, what they endured, and what they're going through as a people. The second half of the poem then looks at how they are supposed to go back to considering themselves human again and being treated that way again. Here is the ending to that poem:
We beg you:

Do not show us an angry dog, not yet--

It could be, it could be

That we will dissolve into dust--

Dissolve into dust before your eyes.

For what binds our fabric together? (Sachs, Nelly. "Chorus of the Rescued" One World of Literature, 551)

To imagine the brutality they were exposed to so much that it would cause them to dissolve into dust like at the camps from an angry animal. Sachs points out how this is what happened, that the Nazis dissolved them into dust and destroyed the fabric that binds us together. Or Sachs is curious how we are each connected and what is it that connects us if we slaughter one another. The power of her words gives us a glimpse into the extreme pain and suffering people endured. We are left to ponder how well words can capture meaning and feeling and if literature and poetry can justifiably portray the Holocaust...but if not them, then what or who?

Sachs poem, Landscape of Screams, in Pinter, 99 poems, is a gripping tale of the power of communication. What noise conveys more passion, more emotion that the human scream? This is such an extraordinary poem because it discusses what happens when even the scream is killed. The final stanza in this poem, I feel, is the most exciting part as it conveys the message of the poem well.

O you bleeding eye-

The scream is referred to as an eye. This metaphor is interest ring because it ascribes two senses to the scream, vision and hearing. If a scream is killed, is it like an eye that cannot see? Can we see with our screams? Also, a bleeding eye is a veer repulsive vile thing and conjures a distinctive mental image. But a bleeding eye is not necessarily a dead eye, but a dying organism with a distorted view of its surroundings.

In the tattered eclipse of the sun-

An apocalyptic scene created through surreal imagery. A bleeding eye scream in the tatters of an eclipse. An eclipse in ancient times was a bad omen, a portent of evil. Killing this visionary scream is a signal for bad days to come for all things. What does it mean to silence a scream, to take away someone's most fundamental way to express horror or rage? It must be a totally incapacity experience.

Hung up to be dried by God-

Wow. God is silencing the people. Is this poem filled with rage against god due to religious conflict? This line gives total control of the universe and shows the incredible power someone has by silencing peoples screams. Are the people screaming to god and god is ignoring their cries for help? This seems like a poem that could have been written about the holocaust with people in concentration camps feeling forsaken by their god with no one to scream to. What a horrible sense of powerlessness.

In the cosmos- -

I very fitting end to this poem. Finally, the screams are taken up, and displayed in the cosmos. This action seems to reverse the thought of god in the previous line, as now god is viewed as not only hearing the screams of his people, but raising them up to heaven.

In- Within and encompassed by. "In" fits the poem because it shows the intimacy between the screams and the screamer. By showing the scream coming form the insides of a person, and being placed in the cosmos, it transforms the scream from a personal sound to a universal scream. There is one scream in the universe, and it is the screams of all people combined.

the- I know everyone is thinking, "how can you write about the word 'the'?" but I am going to anyway. "The" sets the reader up for something big. One big thing, singular. This is important because it connects the universal ness to the cosmos.

Cosmos- The sky and stars, but also the universe. Cosmos works well because it gives a sensation of both "up there" and "everything." This fits into the poem as a whole because the poem is about all these choked off screams and where they go, and it is a fitting place for many screams. A unique part of this poem is the fact that it ends with a hyphen, as if the poem would be longer but was cut off. Wonderful and fitting ending because this is the final scream, the scream to end all screams and it too is cut off.

I think this poem can serve as a reminder to not become desensitized to screaming. We cannot ignore others emotion or our own, or we lose the power of the screa

At night when dying proceeds to sever all seams

This is an ominous beginning, first with "night," which is darkness and mystery; then the word "dying." The most foreboding part, however, is the last part: "to sever all seams." It implies a sort of chaos or disorder, as if everything is about to fall apart. At this point, I wonder what Sachs is referring to, what exactly is going to be severed. Is it the night itself?

The landscape of screams

Screams is such a potent, descriptive word for me. Right away, I can hear them. The word "landscape" makes me think that the screams are all around, that they cannot be escaped from. It is interesting that this line ends with a word so similar to the line above. My eyes kept playing tricks on me when I read this, thinking "seams" was "screams," vice versa. The poem uses the word "scream" a lot, and it is interesting that there is also this word so similar. It's almost as if the word "seams" is a phantom "scream" which fades in and out, playing tricks on the eyes, haunting the reader. aaah.

Tears open the black bandage

Here is the severing of seams, the undoing of order mentioned in the first line. What is the black bandage? A metaphor for night? "Tears" adds action to the poem, and tension. It is a violent action and I can almost hear the rip. The word "tears" is also interesting because it could be read two ways--as "teardrops" or "to rip." I think "to rip" makes the most sense here, but the ambiguity is interesting. The one is a powerful, violent action, while the other is a passive, sorrowful or pain-filled one. One meaning is an action, the other a reaction.

Above Moria, the falling off cliffs to God,

The word arrangement here is interesting . . . I would think it would say "the cliffs falling off." But with the way it is arranged, I read it with "cliffs" as the verb. This is a powerful, descriptive verb, implying to me a swift, severe fall. I wonder if this is a description, a metaphor for the death she mentions earlier. Maybe this is the source of the screams. It is interesting that it is a "falling" toward God, a downward movement, instead of an upward swing toward heaven.

there hovers the flag of the sacrificial knife / Abraham's scream for the son of his heart, / at the great ear of the Bible it lies preserved.

The flag remains suspended, a reminder. It has a knife, so a reminder of the deaths that occurred? "Sacrificial" is interesting here, however . . . I'm not sure how it fits into the Holocaust. It may, however, only be a referral to the metaphor of Abraham that follows. Here is the word "scream" again, this time not involved in an action (the tearing above) but instead "preserved," suspended like the flag. This pain, this regret and remorse doesn't go away. It is "preserved" like a baby fetus in formaldehyde, untouched like the day it was born. This is an incredible way to describe a scream, which is a sound and will inherently fade. These screams, however, don't seem to fade.

O hieroglyphs of screams / engraved at the entrance gate to death

I think these two lines are the most important for me in the poem.

O

makes me think of a moan, it seems to express great despair. It also reminds me of Molly Peacock's :) interpretation of the letter "o", how it is never-ending, perpetual. The moan keeps echoing and reverberating, without end, preserved like Abraham's scream.

hieroglyphs

brings an ancient, historical quality to the screams. From my experience, seeing hieroglyphs is a very powerful thing; it feels like almost being able to see into the minds of the ancient people who wrote them. It is such a close, tangible connection to people from so long ago. A moment of their time, of their expression, is frozen, "preserved" on the wall.

of screams

The screams are like these paintings; they are recorded, permanent, stilled in time. A frozen moment in history, of a specific person, of a specific past.

engraved

This adds to the permanency . . . they are etched in stone.

at the entrance gate to death

I can't help but think of banshees with this poem, and especially with this line. The screams came, or are frozen, right before death, the line seems to say. I went to Pastiche last Friday, and since then Banshees have been on the mind, so bear with me, but I think it really relates. At the concert, Brian Campbell played a song called "The Banshee" on the strings of the piano. He would slide his fingernails over the strings making an array of screeching noises that would echo and reverberate for a really long time. It created a very eerie, supernatural effect. Campbell explained that Banshees were a part of Irish folklore, fairies that would scream before someone died. See how this relates? I think I'm hearing these screeching noises as I read the poem, and the effect is really quite frightening.

The first thing I noticed about this poem is the frequent Biblical references. I see Abraham, Job, and God twice. After a couple more readings I can't help but feel a resonance with the apocalypse. A few more readings and I see this poem as the story of an imposed apocalypse. It is not the heavenly one of the Bible, this is earthly.

of shackled leaps--

This imagery is very strong. The unnatural misplacement of a fish's mouth in a person's closing the voices, the light spinning cry of a child, and the laborious breathing of an older person, all ending in blood, life, trailing off into seared water, also life. The life of the blood and water was expunged. The cells (both biological and imprisoning) are tapestried with this nightmare. Why is this a tapestry, something so carefully crafted and beautiful? Here it is grotesque. Senseless.

from the skeletons of Hiroshima and Maidanek.

This line expresses again the purposeless injustice of these events. But these are not isolated incidents, they are one, a tapestry.

This event is terrible because it is so wasteful of life, and has no purpose. This is not God's apocalypse, it is humankind's.

in the cosmos--

At night

When darkness falls, anything can happen and usually does. But I'm not so sure that Sachs writes of night in the literal sense. Here, night seems to mean more than just a time of day. It is a way of explaining the pains inherent in life and how they are meant to be defeated. Night is calm, night is dark, but night is also a time on intense thinking and dreaming. One must come to grips with how the world works when everyone else is asleep. The only light is the one constantly turned on inside your head, when images come into focus much more clearly than they do during the day. Things are known at night that cannot be known or talked about during the daytime hours. The freaks come out to play, I might say, but never during the day. The day is simply much too bright for the trouble of the world. Sunshine works to destroy all chances of evil. Why does one feel scared at night? Because we cannot see what lurks ahead. Sachs uses these two words to break down the barriers separating the author from the reader. She holds us in her power. She is able to see through the darkness and into the dark path, where our human eyes cannot follow. Therefore, we must wait for the next descriptive word to find out how the future looks. The darkness attempts to cover all of the difficulties of the day, but it never seems to work. Sachs tells us immediately that the following is going to be taking place at night. It lends a sense of mystery and suspense. Why do things happen at night instead of the day? Let's see...

when dying proceeds

I like the image of death reaching out across the land to pull in more victims. I don't like the image as in "Wow! Isn't that nice image," but I think it serves the purpose well. I picture death to be a hand that constantly reaches out for more--it can never be satisfied with a handful of victims. Death itself may not be the thing that sweeps across the land, but instead it's a sense of reality and violence. We must come to grips with the world as it is, since there is no other world to join while alive. The word "proceeds" is very important. It alludes to the fact that dying may stop for a short period of time, but it always returns. That's what it means to proceed: to continue on forward toward something, especially after an interruption has taken place. We can only hold on to life for short period of time. Death can be pushed aside for a few days, a few years, but it cannot cease to exist within our future.

to sever all seams

The act of dying really does divide or dissolve relationships. The seams are tightly knitted in a good friendship or relationship, but each nightfall enhances the little tear that's always present. Little by little, time and sacrifice take over, and the small tear becomes a tremendous hole. In the end, we are half of what we once were. Sever and seams each have five letters in them and sound somewhat similar, but they have very different images associated with them. When I think of sever, I think of pain and separation from a whole. A seam is where the tear begins, but it's also how a hole can be put back together--by placing the seams back together. There is a fragile element to this line. No person is a whole piece of cloth or a complete bandage. We are put together by seams; two or more pieces that come together to form one. But it's always possible to see our seams--those small pieces that continually work together to form the character of an individual. We are limited, but perhaps also proud, of our seams. They tell us about our weaknesses, and we must learn how to sew them together the next time around.

the landscape

When I first see the word "landscape," I think of a vast body of land or a type of art. It has a limitless quality to it; the cup never runs out; the corn never fails to grow. Dictionary.com tells me that landscape can also mean "an extensive mental view; an interior prospect." Sachs word choice here lets it be known that dying covers all points in history and all parts of the world. I must refer back to my hand image: dying reaches out for everything and we cannot hide from it. A landscape is an expanse of scenery that can be seen in a single view. Well, death does not knock twice at the door. It sees it's victim once, from anywhere, and ends life right there.

of screams

A landscape of screams makes me think of a high-pitched wail. You can't cover your ears to avoid it. The screams force their way into the very depths of my soul. I'm reminded of Edgar Allen Poe's short story, "The Telltale Heart." The screams, like the heart, become of part of the conscience that cannot be escaped. They continually sound off until something is done--until we come to terms with them. I think that the screams are always going on too, regardless of whether we choose to hear them or not. How many of us take time out of the day to hear the screams from those who have no voice. Of course, you might argue, one can't hear screams if there is no voice, but that's exactly the point. I think Sachs is attempting to give a voice, a piercing voice, to those who previously wailed in silence.

tears open the

The word "tears" is full of action. It is a constant ripping of the seam. But not only does it continually occur, it slowly reveals the inside. A bandage or cover of some sort has hidden the wound underneath. The wound is a gaping hole in the human heart, a hear that clearly understands its own mortality. But why the word "tear." To me, tear is also a forced action. We are tearing apart the seams ourselves. Things are not torn by an invisible source of power but by the human hand.

black bandage,

Nelly Sachs’ "Landscape of Screams" really strikes me because of its overflowing images of the body in distress. Screaming blind eyes, bleeding throats, and hanging skeletons all add to the most erie landscape that Sach paints for us. Sach paints an image of a night for us. However, this night is not black. This night is red. Red of human blood. This contrast of colors makes me step back and remember the "black milk" in Celan’s poem that we read earlier. One big difference between these two poems is that the color is not tainted by the darkness. This blood in Sachs’ poem does not get darker, it gets bloodier:

tears open the black bandage,

The evening night is usually associated with a sense of quietness and calm. The day’s events are covered by a "black bandage" of the night. This bandage in Sach’s poem doesn’t hold. The blood oozes out of the poem from the very beginning until the very last stanza associated with the morning sun. The night’s bandage is broken. The sore continues to bleed, infecting the bright sun with an eclipse of a bloody eclipse. Finally, at the end, the scab begins to form: "hung up to be dried by God / in the cosmos -" (Sachs, "Landscape of Screams," in 99 Poems in Translation p.110-11).

The landscape is not the landscape of the earth. The landscape is the landscape of the human body being inflicted with injustice. Knives, shackles, grates, and arrows are just some of the weapons listed in this poem that torture the body. In a sense, these dangerous weapons do add new contours, lines, valleys, and rivers to our body. After a sever injury or a cut, the body will never be able to rid itself of some of the permanently remaining scars and cuts. The greatest of man’s weapons, the nuclear bomb, Sachs saves until the second to last stanza: "from the skeletons in Hiroshima and Maidanek" (Sachs, "Landscape of Screams," in 99 Poems in Translation p.110-11).