Fembio Special: Famous Women Poets
Gertrud Kolmar
(Gertrud Käthe Chodziesner [eigentlicher Name])
(Gertrud Käthe Chodziesner [actual name])
Born on 10 December 1894 in Berlin
Died presumably early March 1943 in Auschwitz
(officially designated date of death: 2 March 1943)
German-Jewish poet and author
125th birthday on 10 December 2019
Biography • Literature & Sources
Biography
Gertrud Kolmar created a lyric oeuvre of great intensity and visionary power. During her lifetime only a small amount was published, and she remained relatively unknown long after the war as well. Now recognized as one of Germany’s greatest women poets, her lyrics focus on the manifold aspects of female identity, on nature and animals as a counterweight to a destructive civilization, and on the suffering of the Jewish people.
Gertrud, the oldest daughter of a well-off Jewish family, was a quiet, introverted child. After completing secondary school she gained qualification to teach English and French; she had also learned Russian. During the 1920’s she worked as a governess in Berlin and Hamburg; in 1927 she trained to become an interpreter in Paris and Dijon. In 1928, due to her mother’s failing health, she returned to her family home in the Berlin suburb of Falkensee; she managed the household and served as her lawyer father’s secretary.
Kolmar’s 1931 novel Eine Mutter {A Jewish Mother from Berlin: A Novel) was not published until 1965. She published the volume of poems Die Frau und die Tiere (The Woman and the Animals) with a Jewish publisher in 1938; it was soon pulped by the Nazis. Although one critic has named her “the most important Jewish lyric poetess since … Lasker-Schüler,” the deeply self-motivated poet did not need such “external praise” to keep writing: “Today I know, even without critics, what I’m worth as a poet, what I can and cannot do.” In her cycles of poems she created women “who state their claim to life with a wild, rebellious attitude, who stand up against subordination and contempt and don’t surrender their self-assurance even in the face of suffering.” (Schlenstedt).
Kolmar considered emigrating as her siblings had done, but instead remained with her aged father. After the forced sale of their home the two moved into an apartment in the “Judenhaus,” a tenement reserved for Jews, and endured the ever more repressive measures that followed “Kristallnacht,” the pogrom of November 1938. From 1941 on Kolmar performed forced labor in an armament factory. Her father was deported to Theresienstadt in September 1942; five months later she was deported herself to Auschwitz. “And so I intend to enter my fate, be it lofty as a tower, be it black and oppressive as a cloud.” (Letter of 15 December 1942)
(Text, slightly revised, taken from the Kalender »Berühmte Frauen 1994«)
Literature & Sources
Please see the German version for a list of Kolmar's works and additional links and bibliographical references.
Brinker-Gabler, Gisela, Ludwig, Karola und Wöffen, Angela (Hg.) (1986): Lexikon deutschsprachiger Schriftstellerinnen. 1800 – 1945. München. Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag. (dtv, 3282) ISBN 3-423-03282-0. (Amazon-Suche | Eurobuch-Suche | WorldCat-Suche)
Kolmar, Gertrud (1960): Das lyrische Werk. Erweiterte, durchgesehen Auflage mit einem Nachwort von Kolmars Schwester Hilde Wenzel. Herausgegeben von Hermann Kasack. München. Kösel. (Amazon-Suche | Eurobuch-Suche | WorldCat-Suche)
Kolmar, Gertrud (1970): Briefe an die Schwester Hilde. (1938 – 1943). Herausgegeben von Johanna Zeitler. München. Kösel. (Amazon-Suche | Eurobuch-Suche | WorldCat-Suche)
Kolmar, Gertrud (1981): Eine jüdische Mutter. Erzählung. Mit einem Nachwort von Bernd Balzer. Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Wien. Ullstein. (Ullstein, 30122 : Die Frau in der Literatur) ISBN 3-548-30122-3. (Amazon-Suche | Eurobuch-Suche | WorldCat-Suche)
Schlenstedt, Sylvia (1985): Bilder neuer Welten. In: Gnüg, Hiltrud; Möhrmann, Renate (Hg.): Frauen Literatur Geschichte. Schreibende Frauen vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Stuttgart. Metzler. ISBN 3-476-00585-2. S. 300–317 (Amazon-Suche | Eurobuch-Suche | WorldCat-Suche)
Smith, Henry A. (1975): Introduction. Gertrud Kolmar's Life and Works. In: Kolmar, Gertrud: Dark soliloquy. The selected poems of Gertrud Kolmar. Herausgegeben von Henry A. Smith. New York. Seabury Press (A Continuum book). ISBN 0-8164-9199-2. S. 3–52. (Eurobuch-Suche | WorldCat-Suche)
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