Images: Recha Freier; Jewish children singing at the Youth Aliyah School in Berlin, ca. 1940; a group of German children who have made it to Palestine as part of Youth Aliyah in 1934. The following poems (in German) are taken from Recha Freier’s Auf die Treppe. (Hamburg : Hans Christians Verlag, 1976). Freier founded the Youth Aliyah organization in 1933, which was responsible for…
Your Golden Hair, Margarete, 1980Anselm Kiefer (German, born 1945)Watercolor, gouache, and acrylic on paper The artist Anselm Kiefer (who was recently awarded the Leo Baeck Medal) was inspired by Paul Celan’s poem “Death Fugue” (“Todesfuge”) to create more than 30 paintings, painted photographs and watercolors, each of which somehow refers to the poem. You can see that the above painting – which is one of this…
Click on the text of the poem above to see an enlarged version for easier reading. The Buried Womanby Gertrud Kolmar – Gertrud Käthe Chodziesner (10 December 1894–March 1943), known by the literary pseudonym Gertrud Kolmar, was a German lyric poet and writer. She was born in Berlin and died, after her arrest and deportation as a Jew, in Auschwitz, a victim of the…
Holocaust Remembrance Day begins this evening (4/18) and ends tomorrow evening (4/19). As the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website explains: “The internationally recognized date comes from the Hebrew calendar and corresponds to the 27th day of Nisan on that calendar. It marks the anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising.” The poets that we feature today and tomorrow (as part of our National Poetry…