I CLOSE THIS READING of Sachs's work with one final example that shows the importance of bearing in mind that Sachs, since the early 1920s, was fascinated by conventional perceptions of words and literary traditions and what they can mean if they are broken apart and reread unconventionally. In a letter from July of 1946, Sachs wrote to writer and literary historian Max Rychner of her latest frustrations in finding a publisher for In den Wohnungen des Todes. She concluded from a vague rejection letter that, upon seeing the title of her manuscript, the publisher had tossed it onto a mounting pile of tedious emigrant literature, of eyewitness reports and protocols of the camps that, Sachs believes,

Sachs's word choices often make reading her letters as challenging an interpretive task as reading her poetry. The words “Scheiterhaufen” and “Verklärung” in particular make this statement difficult to clearly interpret. “Scheiterhaufen” can refer to burning someone at the stake, but can also mean a funeral pyre; broken down to its component parts (scheitern + Haufen), it is a pile of shattered or splintered things. “Scheitern,” moreover, is usually used in a more figurative sense of failure or collapse. Considering that she is referring to the poems of In den Wohnungen des Todes, one interpretation of “Scheiterhaufen” does not seem better suited than another.