SACHS's SENSE OF UNEASE in the space of words intensified and took on greater urgency after the Second World War. Fascinated with and mindful of the power of figurative language already since the 1920s, Sachs experienced increasing confirmation of the need to retain critical distance to figurative language throughout the 1930s and 40s. First, Nazi propaganda introduced a new vocabulary of exclusion and obfuscation; then, upon hearing in the early to mid-1940s of Nazi atrocities, Sachs was confronted with the ethics of using figurative language to react and respond to mass murder; and finally, between 1945 and 1949, she was confronted with the need of both Germany and the newly founded State of Israel to rely on writers to help define national identity and national narrative. She understood that there is a clear link between nation and text, but it is a link that she chose to problematize rather than validate. Sachs's poetics continue after the war to posit the text as a deceptive and dynamic landscape that both reader and writer traverse; the need for the individual reader to be aware of this is magnified by the violence done to and with figurative language during the Nazi genocide. Both Germany and Israel sought through literary voices to re-create unified cultural identities, and this depended on a longing for reconciliation and return, to a place as well as to a tradition. Sachs had an embattled relationship to both.

The construction of unified identity and the celebration of wholeness and singularity through longing for reconciliation that dominate the postwar Zeitgeist are often attributed to “Emigranten-” or “Exil-Literatur,” of which Sachs was considered part; in Sachs's work they are, however, the object of critique, not the goal. Sachs's postwar poetics suggest that the idea of the nation as an exclusive, sovereign topographical body, and the defense or even mythologizing of this body through poetic language, reinforce an ontology of conflict, whereas a more fluid encounter between differences would allow for individual awareness that prevents overidentification with the state.