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4 - Mourning as Remembrance: Writing as Figuration and Defiguration in the Poetry of Rose Ausländer

from Part I - Poetics after Auschwitz

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2013

Annette Runte
Affiliation:
University of Siegen
Gert Hofmann
Affiliation:
University College Cork
Rachel MagShamhráin
Affiliation:
University College Cork
Marko Pajevic
Affiliation:
Queen's University Belfast
Michael Shields
Affiliation:
National University of Ireland, Galway
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Summary

Viele Verwandlungen erlebte ich mit offenen / Augen, meine Erinnerung an sie ist intakt.

[I underwent many metamorphoses with open eyes. My memory of them is intact.]

— Rose Ausländer

The bunch of lilacs Rose Ausländer felt transformed into on her ninth birthday turns up as a rejected souvenir in one of her symbolist Gettomotive poems (Ghetto Motifs) she wrote between 1942 and 1944. “Warum verfolgt mich noch ein Traum? / Ich rieche Flieder durch den Schlaf. / Verlaß mich, blauer Fliederbaum! Es ist kein Glück, daß ich dich traf.// Kann es bei uns noch Frühling sein?” (GW 1:144–45; Why does a dream still pursue me? / I smell lilacs in my sleep. / Abandon me, blue lilac tree! / It is not good fortune that made us meet // Can it be spring here any more?). Her childlike, romantic, psychotic boundlessness has been exchanged for the barest of existences. Ausländer's poetry is a distant echo of this shock, and tries to sublimate it.

While Celan makes a radical break with prevailing modernist thought, Rose Ausländer still clings to certain aesthetic and metaphysical traditions. In this respect she resembles Nelly Sachs. While Sachs, using a transcendental approach focusing on the forms of language (down to the level of the letter) and on verbal esotericism, works toward a mystic conception of the Shoah, Ausländer advocates a (seemingly more conventional) mythical return to topoi of the unthinkable. Their common trust in language results in different poetic strategies.

Type
Chapter
Information
German and European Poetics after the Holocaust
Crisis and Creativity
, pp. 69 - 87
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2011

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