Sachs, Nelly

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Nelly Sachs

Nelly Sachs, 1966
UPI

born Dec. 10, 1891, Berlin, Ger.

died May 12, 1970, Stockholm, Swed.

German poet and dramatist.

Born to a prosperous family, Sachs wrote poems mainly for her own entertainment until the advent of Nazism darkened her work and forced her to flee to Sweden. Her lyrics from those years combine lean simplicity with imagery variously tender, searing, or mystical. In the famous title poem of her collection O the Chimneys (1967), Israel's body drifts upward as smoke from the Nazi death camps. Her best-known play is Eli (1951). She shared the 1966 Nobel Prize with S.Y. Agnon.

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Agnon, S.Y. - Israeli writer.

More on "Nelly Sachs" from the 32 Volume Encyclopædia Britannica:

Sachs, Nelly - German poet and dramatist who became a poignant spokesperson for the grief and yearnings of her fellow Jews. When, with Shmuel Yosef Agnon, she was awarded the 1966 Nobel Prize for Literature, she observed that Agnon represented Israel whereas "I represent the tragedy of the Jewish people."

Agnon, S.Y. - Israeli writer who was one of the leading modern Hebrew novelists and short-story writers. In 1966 he was the corecipient, with Nelly Sachs, of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Holocaust - Artists the world over and camp survivors themselves have responded to the Holocaust through art. The very existence of Holocaust art can, however, create a sense of unease. Critic Irving Howe has asked, "Can imaginative literature represent in any profound or illuminating way the meanings of the Holocaust? Is 'the debris of our misery' (as one survivor described it) a proper or manageable ...

German literature - In the part of Germany that became West Germany in 1949, the immediate aftermath of World War II was known as the "Stunde Null," or "zero hour." Writers felt that the need to make a clean sweep after the defeat of Nazism had left them in a cultural vacuum, but in fact the postwar situation made it possible to establish new connections with European and American literature. Ernest Hemingway and ...

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