Nelly Sachs and the Limits of Iconic Status

THE 1966 NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE was split between two writers cast as voices for Israel: Israeli S. Y. Agnon for the geographical and political State of Israel, and German Jewish refugee Leonie “Nelly” Sachs for her poetic treatment of the current “state”—the psychological, historical, diasporic or exilic state—of the abstract Israel, that is, of the Jews. She is, along with Paul Celan, the quintessential Germanlanguage Holocaust poet. Such a significant position in German literature has proven to be paradoxically limiting and limited, however. Although she was also active as a translator and playwright, and indeed had written and published poems and prose long before she fled to Sweden in 1940, reading of and scholarship on her work has only rarely moved beyond the foundational psychoanalytical approach to her mystical poetic imagery that revolves around the Shoah. But there is much more to discuss in Sachs's work. Recent scholarship has begun to explore new avenues in Sachs's oeuvre, for example her later poetry or her theater pieces; but her prewar work remains largely unexamined. This book undertakes an examination of her early writing and poetics, in order to help situate them in the larger history of twentieth-century German Jewish literature, but also to show what critical insights they provide for a more nuanced reading of her iconic Holocaust poetry.

Nelly Sachs herself sought to put distance between her postwar poetry and her earlier works; indeed, it seems that Sachs feared her early work would distract from the significance of her postwar poetry. Scholars and critics adopted the position that her early work is negligible, either based on Sachs's own views or because they found her early texts merely conventional. Ehrhard Bahr, for example, refers to her postwar work as “Nelly Sachs’ gültiges Werk” (the work that counts), because Sachs herself, as evidenced by her correspondence especially with exile scholar Walter Berendsohn, “wollte nur gelten lassen, was sie seit dem Durchbruch von 1943/44 verfaßt hatte” (only wanted the work that she composed after the breakthrough of 1943/44 to receive attention).