Nelly Sachs · Arts & Literature
German-Swedish poet, Nobel Prize in Literature 1966; wrote on the Jewish experience and Holocaust
1891, Berlin, Germany — 1970, Stockholm, Sweden
Germany · Sweden
Nelly Sachs is recognized among Jewish contributors to Arts & Literature — German-Swedish poet, Nobel Prize in Literature 1966; wrote on the Jewish experience and Holocaust
Origins and early life
Leonie Sachs, called Nelly, was born in Berlin-Schöneberg on 10 December 1891, into a Jewish family: her father Georg William Sachs and her mother Margarete Karger were wealthy manufacturers of rubber and gutta-percha. Frail health kept her at home rather than at school; she showed a gift for dancing that her protective parents did not let her follow, grew up sheltered and solitary, and never married.
Work and career
She wrote conventional verse in her youth and began a long correspondence with the Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlöf. As the Nazis took power the terror reached her physically — she lost the power of speech for a time, and remembered it later in a line: when the great terror came, I fell dumb. That friendship saved her life: shortly before her own death Lagerlöf intervened with the Swedish royal family, and in May 1940 Sachs and her aged mother left on the last flight from Germany to Sweden, a week before she was to report to a camp.
In a two-room flat in Stockholm she nursed her mother, supported them both by translating between Swedish and German, and wrote the poems of In den Wohnungen des Todes, the collection of 1947 that gave the murdered a voice in the language of the murderers. The mystery play Eli followed in 1950, then Flucht und Verwandlung and Fahrt ins Staublose. She became a Swedish citizen in 1952, kept a close and famous friendship with Paul Celan, and shared the 1966 Nobel Prize in Literature with Shmuel Yosef Agnon. She died in Stockholm on 12 May 1970.
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Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelly_Sachs
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German-Swedish poet, Nobel Prize in Literature 1966; wrote on the Jewish experience and Holocaust
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelly_Sachs
