German-Jewish Poetess
Gertrud Kolmar: Das Lyrische Werk.
Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung.
Heidelberg Darmstadt: Verlag Lambert Schneider. DM 16.50.
In his epilogue to this posthumous collection of Gertrud Kolmar’s complete poems, Mr. Jacob Picard describes her as “one of the most important woman poets” in the whole of German literature, and “the greatest lyrical poetess of Jewish descent who has ever lived.” The present reviewer for one is not erudite enough either to question or confirm the latter claim, but he certainly accepts the former. And Mr. Picard is right to stress Gertrud Kolmar’s feminity: she was indeed a poetess, rather than a poet who happened to be a woman.
Her real name was Gertrud Chodziesner; she was born in a Berlin suburb in 1894 and is presumed to have died sometime between February 1943 and the end of the war, most probably in one of the German extermination camps. Like Emily Dickinson, to whom Mr. Picard compares her, she was never married and spent most of her life in quiet seclusion. Her love poems have an intensity and a distinction rarely attained—and more rarely sustained for long—by poets whose passions were reciprocated. The theme of the lost lover recurs throughout her work, sometimes with simple and poignant directness, sometimes with magnificent elaborations touching on history or myth; and the same is true of a related figure, that of the lost child or, as she usually specifies, the lost son. Although she published a first collection as early as 1917, it was not till a decade later that she began to produce her best work; most of it remained unpublished during her lifetime.
One would like to know more about Gertrud Kolmar than the few facts recorded by Mr. Picard; but, though one of the incidental effects of poetry as powerful as hers is that it tends to arouse am indecent curiosity about the author’s person and circumstances, her work is self-sufficient to a quite uncommon degree. If she had opinions about this, that, and the other, she did not make the mistake of stating them in verse, but left them implicit in her manner of presenting images and cadences. Praise, love, and compassion are her general themes; and her creed was both a poetic and a feminine one, the amo ergo sum of an English poet with whom she has much in common, Miss Kathleen Raine. Her most striking quality is a sensuousness that can do justice even to sensuality in such poems as Die Tänzerin, Leda, Nächte, Das Frendenmädchen, and Hafenstadt.
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If Gertrud Kolmar must be given a literary classification, it will be with the new school of German nature poets whose leading representative in her time was Oskar Loerke; but though her affinity with Loerke, Elisabeth Langgässer, and other German contemporaries is a real one, her independence and scope make every label useless. Because of her strange capacity for self-identification with almost every living creature—from historical personages like Marie Walewska and Robespierre to dogs, toads, and fishes—Mr. Picard is justified in claiming that her death deprived Germany of a major poet. Her range and mastery of poetic media are no less astonishing: they extend from strict sonnet form and terza rima to the Biblical free verse of her splendid last poems, the cycle Welten already published separately in 1947 by Herr Hermann Kasack, who has also edited the present collection. This great variety of media corresponds to the range of observation and sympathy revealed in her work, to her intimate knowledge of animals, plants, and minerals, and her ability to combine minute realism with a visionary penetration that transcends it. Cooking, embroidering, rag-collecting are a few of the occupations to which she devotes poems that are neither patronizing nor whimsical.
Very few of her poems, even those written in her last years, refer specifically to Jewish matters or to the Jews. One of her last poems alludes to “the olive tree of my strange, lost home,” but the image is one of many that evoke distant and exotic countries. In earlier poems—but unfortunately this edition provides no dates other than those of her published cycles—the Jew appears as one of several pariah figures. That is what one would expect; for not the least tragic aspect of the destruction of the German Jews was their successful and very genuine assimilation—an assimilation so thorough as to make a Gertrud Kolmar possible.
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