Nelly Sachs the woman who challenged the Holocaust

Nelly Sachs formulated her deepest wish. It is the central sentence of her prose sketch "Life under Threat," in which the Jewish poet worked on Hitler dictatorship.

She born in 1891 in the Schöneberg district, the Berlin-born woman experienced the Nazi persecution of the Jews on her own - and survived her because she escaped to Sweden with her mother in 1940, shortly before she was deported.

In emotional, accusatory poems they processed the events - and finally got to her 75th birthday in 1966 the Nobel Prize for Literature for her "lyrical and dramatic works that interpret the fate of Israel with touching strength". After Herrmann Hesse, she was the first German-speaking Nobel laureate for 20 years.

Nelly Sachs died in Stockholm in 1970. Today, on December 10, 2018, she would have been 127 years old.

Already at 17, Nelly Sachs wrote her first poems, was even supported by the great Stefan Zweig. At that time her poetry was still about music and nature. After her escape and experiences in the Third Reich, her subjects changed. She wrote about the Holocaust and was one of the first writers to put the horror of Auschwitz in verse form. In the post-war years, Sachs created stirring poems and became the soulmate of Paul Celan.

Although these poems were written at the end of the 1940s, Sachs did not receive all-German attention until a decade later. After her poetry volumes reached a larger, West German audience in 1957, came the late glory. Despite increasing recognition, Sachs did not want to return to Germany for a long time; the trauma of her memory was too great. It was not until 1960 that she returned to her native country after 20 years to receive the Droste Prize. There followed countless other awards. In 1961, the city of Dortmund donated the named after her Nelly Sachs Prize, four years later, she was the first woman to receive December 10, 1966, on her 75th birthday, and Nelly Sachs received the greatest literary honor. Together with Samuel Joseph Agnon, she received the Nobel Prize for Literature "for her outstanding lyrical and dramatic works that interpret the fate of Israel with forceful power." Her short acceptance speech was given by Nelly Sachs in German, of course in verse form. It says:

"In place of home


I hold the transformations of the world ". Peace Prize of the German book trade.

In 1970, at the age of 78, she died after a busy life in Stockholm. Nelly Sachs' poetry has survived to this day. That's also why Google dedicates a doodle to her 127th birthday on 10 December. It shows a black and white drawing, in the foreground a typewriter. In the background, you can see impressions of Berlin and Stockholm - as well as the chimneys of Auschwitz, to which she dedicated her poem "O the chimneys" in 1947.