Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T01:07:55.750Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Foreword to the English-Language Edition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2018

Stuart Taberner
Affiliation:
Professor of Contemporary German Literature
Dorothea Heiser
Affiliation:
Holds an MA from the University of Freiburg
Stuart Taberner
Affiliation:
Professor of Contemporary German Literature
Get access

Summary

TWENTY YEARS AGO the German-language edition of My Shadow in Dachau (Mein Schatten in Dachau) was published—following eight years of painstaking detective work by Dorothea Heiser, a resident of the small Bavarian town indelibly associated with the first Nazi concentration camp, who was inspired by a poem by a seventeen-year-old inmate, Nevio Vitelli, to contact survivors or the families of the deceased and to compile an anthology of German translations of “poems from Dachau” (an Italian compilation came in 1997). Even before this, in fact, Dorothea had become aware of her historical responsibility as a German when she spent time as a schoolgirl in the late 1950s in Roundhay, a residential area of the English city of Leeds with a significant Jewish population. Here, and during the years that followed, she came to understand the importance of mutual understanding between peoples and nations, and of the way her own biography had been shaped by the Nazi past—her father, a German soldier, had been killed in Egypt in 1942, and a brother of her grandmother had been interned in Dachau concentration camp. Dorothea's work on the “Dachau poems” has been accompanied by a commitment to personal and national reconciliation, including establishing twinning arrangements between schools in Dachau and elsewhere in Bavaria and schools in France.

In this present edition, we present sixty-eight poems in English translation. In this way, we hope to honor, and continue, Frau Heiser's commitment to the preservation of these documentations of the inhumanity of the Nazi camps and of the trauma endured even after “liberation.”

I am grateful to Frau Heiser for drawing my attention to these lyric responses to experiences that were, in themselves, anything but poetic. Dorothea visited the University of Leeds in May 2011 to introduce the poems to undergraduate and postgraduate students and to work with them on translating extracts into English. Some of those students have been involved in the preparation of this edition as translators, editors, and formatters: Matthew Beaumont, Winnie Smith, and Rachael Plant. I am also beholden to the thirteen translators who—in their own time, and without compensation—lent us their expertise and created the carefully crafted English verses that fill this volume.

Type
Chapter
Information
My Shadow in Dachau
Poems by Victims and Survivors of the Concentration Camp
, pp. xxi - xxiv
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2014

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×