Im Zeichen der Shoah: Aspekte der Dichtungs- und Sprachkrise bei Rose Ausländer und Nelly Sachs by Annette Jael Lehmann

Abstract

518 Reviews Im Zeichen der Shoah: Aspekte der Dichtungs- und Sprachkrise bei Rose Ausldnder und Nelly Sachs. By Annette Jael Lehmann. (Stauffenburg Colloquium, 47) Tubingen: Stauffenburg. 1999. xxvi + 246pp. ?43.50. ISBN 3-86057-147-8 (pbk). This monograph, a Berlin doctoral thesis from the school of Eberhard Lammert with an input from California, sets out to compare and contrast two Jewish women poets in whose lives there are striking surface similarities and whose 'Jewishness' was thrust upon them by National Socialist policies and practices. A loss of roots and their reconstruction is a constant theme for the sheltered Berlin daughter saved by Sweden and also for the young sometime naturalized American, caught up, after her return 'home' to Romania in the 1930s, in the horrors ofthe Czernowitz ghetto ofthe 1940s. It is thereforenot surprising that this book starts by comparing the place of the Shoah in their writings and the legitimacy of the language of poetry: the crisis of the continuity of experience 'after Auschwitz' and the cultural potential of various 'holo? caust discourses' (pp. xxii-xxiii). The differingconflicts and contradictions for the two poets are dealt with under various topics, such as the destruction of meaning, the disintegration of reality, the loss of self, mysticism, and a loss of confidence in the power of language with the resulting struggle to (re-)establish a new tradition and to (re-)activate a language that could be adequate to cope with these concerns, which are primarily poetological in nature. This leads with Sachs to a retreat to quasireligious mystical roots for reorientation and with Auslander to the suppression and relinquishing of (a) tradition. The firstof the four major sections of the study, 'Lyrik nach Auschwitz und iiber die Shoah', is devoted to the poets' reaction to the traumatic events of the Shoah. The problems of silence and an inability to speak in the face of the horrors of eth? nic cleansing lead to the 'crisis of language'. The extensive second section, 'Krise von Transzendenz und Subjektivitat', presents the attempt to deal with this crisis. A search for a metaphysical Jewish identity on the way to coming to terms with death leads to an acceptance of philosophical theological elements adapted from Roman? ticism (notably Novalis) and the Kabbalah, although the theme of death produces echoes of many cultural and monotheistic religious traditions. In considering how far the medium of lyric poetry can itself produce a substitute for inadequate meta? physical structures, we are shown how Auslander is concerned with the making of a subjective self and the extent to which lyrical subjectivity, a poetic self, can be articulated at all in the face of the death camps. The poet wishes to exist despite the destruction and damage in history, but the fragilityand threat to the self exposes a crisis of subjectivity given the failure and loss of hitherto valid systems of meaning. Auslander achieves this through the, for her, important concept of metamorphosis, which can establish autonomous poetic spaces. Sachs tries to overcome the tensions of this situation through a transcendence rooted in a mythical and mystical framework of reference. Her key metaphor, 'Verwandlung', permits her to see her poetry as a kind of transcendence. In this context the use of images of light and stellar space, love and the absence of the loved ones, and topographical references is seen as an aid for establishing an, albeit ambivalent, poetic self-awareness. The third section, 'Poetik zwischen Mystik und Spiel. Nelly Sachs: Wortmystik und Sprachzweifel', highlights Sachs's deepening and radical ambivalence concern? ing the inadequacy of language, the limits and areas of silence, and the myriad ways this finds expression. This poetry lies within the boundaries of lamentation litera? ture, which italso stretches and extends (pp. 15,29). Evidence forsuch a fundamental questioning of language is not to be found so overtly in Auslander's ceuvre, nor does it reveal a recourse to a mystical or 'hieratic' tradition. Auslander attempts to root her poetry in her own existence, dreams, a linguistic playfulness, and self-referential MLRy 98.2, 2003 519 poetological roundedness, which often find expression in an aesthetically reduced form. The fourth section, 'Rose Auslander. Spiel- und Lebensversuche', deals par? ticularly...