Gertrud Kolmar

Gertrud Kolmar ( pseudonym of Gertrud Käthe Chodziesner, born December 10, 1894 in Berlin, † probably in early March 1943 in Auschwitz ) was a German poet and writer.

Life

Gertrud Kolmar was the daughter of the Jewish lawyer Louis Chodziesner (1861-1943) and his wife Elise, born Schoenflies (1872-1930), and cousin of Walter Benjamin and his brother George Benjamin ( → Family Schoenflies and Hirschfeld ). She grew up in Charlottenburg Westend, today's Berlin Westend, Berlin and attended by a number of private girls' schools in 1911/12, a house - wife and agricultural school in Elbisbach near Leipzig. She was meanwhile in a kindergarten operates, learned Russian and completed 1915/16, a seminar for language teachers in Berlin with a degree in English and French. At that time she had a love affair with an officer, which ended with an abortion and the subsequent separation.

1917 her first book of poems was published under the pseudonym Gertrud Kolmar. The pseudonym is explained by the origin of her surname from the town of Chodziesen (Polish Chodzież ) in the former Prussian province of Posen, which was renamed in 1878 in Kolmar. In the years 1917/18 Gertrud Kolmar worked as a censor in the POW camp Doberitz in Berlin. 1921 the family moved Chodziesner in the center of Berlin, in 1923 after Falkirk at Spandau in the villa colony Finkenkrug. Gertrud was during this time educator in various families in Berlin, 1927, she went into this function to Hamburg. In the same year she undertook a study trip to France, with stops in Paris and Dijon. From 1928 she took over because of a serious illness of the mother, the leadership of the parental household and worked next as a secretary for her father, for his sake she remained in Germany after 1933, while her siblings managed to escape.

From the late 1920s, published some of their poems in literary journals and anthologies. In 1934, her second book of poetry was published, the Prussian coat of arms Rabenpresse of Victor Otto Stomps in publishing. This publication brought the publisher to a list of undesirable publishers of the Association of German Book Trade, of which he was then boycotted. Kolmar was not allowed to publish under her stage name but only under their family name Chodziesner from 1936.

Her third book of poems The woman and the animals that appeared in a Jewish publisher in August 1938, was scrapped after the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9, 1938. The Chodziesner family was forced as a result of the intensified persecution of the Jews during the time of National Socialism in November 1938 sale of her house in Finkenkrug and to move to a floor apartment in a Jewish home in Berlin -Schöneberg.

As of July 1941 Gertrud Kolmar had to do forced labor in the armaments industry. Her father was deported in September 1942 in the Theresienstadt ghetto and died there in February 1943. Gertrud Kolmar was arrested on 27 February 1943 at the factory during the action and deported to the concentration camp Auschwitz in 32 so-called Osttransport the RSHA on March 2, 1943. Of the approximately 1,500 Berlin Jews who arrived in the train on March 3, 1943 in Auschwitz, 535 men and 145 women were after the selection of the ' Old Ramp ' registered as " fit for work " prisoners and sent to the camp. The remaining about 820 deportees of this train, including Gertrud Kolmar, were not registered as prisoners and presumed murdered immediately upon arrival in the gas chamber.

Gertrud Kolmar, of whose work was published during his lifetime relatively little, is considered one of the most significant German poets of the 20th century. After more conventional beginnings she found in her poems, especially from the late twenties to their own, distinctive sound, characterized by great linguistic virtuosity and expressivity, while maintaining traditional forms. In her work prevail against natural and women's issues are often raised into the mystical and anthems.

Honors

Works

Publications during his lifetime

  • Poems, Berlin, Fleischel & Co. 1917
  • Prussian coat of arms, Berlin, The Raven Press 1934
  • The woman and the animals, Berlin, Jewish book publisher E. Leo 1938

Posthumous editions

  • Worlds, Berlin, Suhrkamp 1947
  • The lyrical work, Heidelberg, Darmstadt, Lambert Schneider 1955
  • The lyrical work, Munich, Kösel 1960
  • A mother, Munich, Kösel 1965
  • Letters to the sister Hilde, Munich 1970
  • The word of the dumb. Posthumous Poems. Edited and with an afterword by Uwe Berger and "Memories of Gertrud Kolmar " by Hilde Benjamin, Berlin, Buchverl. The morning 1978
  • Susanna, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, ​​1993; 2 CD Berlin: palpitations Records, 2006
  • Night, Verona 1994
  • Letters. Edited by Johanna Woltmann. Göttingen, Wallenstein 1997
  • The lyrical work. Edited by Regina Nörtemann. 3 volumes. ( first critical, annotated edition ). Göttingen, Wallenstein 2003 ( ² 2010)
  • The dramas. Edited by Regina Nörtemann. Göttingen, Wallenstein 2005
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