RUTHFULLY YOURS

THE POETRY AND LIFE OF GERTRUD KOLMAR: MICAH MATTIX

Posted By Ruth King on July 8th, 2013

The final line of Gertrud Kolmar’s early poem “Woman Undiscovered,” written sometime before 1933, ends with eerie prescience. “I am a continent,” she writes, “that one day soon will sink without a sound into the sea.” The continent is the speaker’s body that “no adventurer has claimed,” whose “secrets” will die with it. But it’s hard to read these lines without thinking of Kolmar’s own hardly noticed disappearance in Nazi Germany in 1943, along with millions of other Jews.

Poet and critic Jacob Picard has called Kolmar “the greatest lyrical poetess of Jewish descent who has ever lived,” but her work, if hardly unknown, has been obscured by the great tragedies of the war. And until recently, very little was known about her life. Dieter Kühn’s ambitious biography, translated into English by Linda Marianiello, both explores the poet’s life and exhibits the best of her work—poems that alternately whisper like Sappho and rage like Medea.

Born in Berlin on Dec. 10, 1894, Kolmar had an early life that seems idyllic. Her father, Ludwig Chodziesner (Kolmar was a pen name), was a renowned defense lawyer who counted many members of the aristocracy among his clients. Shy and readerly, with a soft spot for Robespierre and Napoleon, Kolmar studied at the upper girl’s school in Charlottenburg before entering at 17 the Arvedshof Country Women’s School in Saxony—a home-economics and agricultural school. This was an odd choice for the eldest daughter of a famous lawyer. Kolmar may have been considering a move to Palestine (she would live there, briefly, in 1939), which urgently needed farmers. But it is more likely that she studied at the school because of her keen and abiding interest in nature.

The defining moment of her early life came sometime before 1917 (the precise order of events is unclear) when she met a German officer named Karl Jodel. The two were most likely engaged to be married, but Kolmar became pregnant, and, according to Mr. Kühn, Jodel was assigned to the front. Whatever arrangement had been made was broken, and Kolmar had an abortion. At some point during this time she was sent to a sanatorium.

In 1923, the family left Berlin for a house with a garden in Neu-Finkenkrug, “a posh residential section west of Spandau.” Kolmar worked as a tutor and a nanny in the first years following the move. She traveled to France sometime late in the summer of 1927 and returned home in October with a certificate in French language from the University of Dijon. From 1928 she cared full-time for her ailing mother, who died in 1930, and afterward worked and cared for her 69-year-old father until they were forced to move back to Berlin in 1939.

Kolmar published only seven poems between 1917 and 1934, but she continued to write poetry through these years. Many of her poems deal with motherhood and her overwhelming regret at the loss of the child. In “Mother,” for example, she addresses her “dearest one”: “My child. / I touch you and with my mouth and nostrils / Like a lovely fruit inside a bowl / Where sweet and bitter mingle naturally.” “Can you be,” she asks, “anything I say?” In “Murder,” the poet is “shackled” to her bed “with grating chains all gnawed with rust” and screams “Mother!” as she sees her dead child, “of dark green bronze, so stern and grave.”

Kolmar is equally frank in her poems to an absent lover, which oscillate between tenderness and violent passion. In “Sea-Monster,” for example, her lover has risen from the sea, his body “dripping cool and icy smooth.” His arms embrace and soothe her. “And all my sheets,” she writes, “smelled of the sea.” In “Metamorphoses,” however, the poet is a bat, hanging “rigid from a rafter.” “Oh, man,” she writes, “I dream your blood; my bite is death. / I’ll claw into your hair and suck your breath.”

Kolmar’s nature poems on animal life and flowers are both whimsical and concrete. Toads are “low, fat, and wise,” and a sunset cracks “the crystal laws,” releasing a torrent of “flames” like “a golden net / Over a cherry tree in April.” But it is in her final volume, “Worlds” (1937), that her originality and range are expressed most powerfully. In this cycle exploring places from the biblical world and from her own (Babel, Nineveh, the Urals, among others), Kolmar becomes a visionary who sees through to a primordial womb, a cave with a “nameless raven” under which she will crouch “to rest beneath the sheltering shadows of his giant wings.”

One odd aspect of Mr. Kühn’s exhaustive examination of Kolmar’s life and work is that the author often shares tidbits of his own thought process as he researched Kolmar. These can be annoying, but occasionally they pay off. He repeatedly wonders, for example, why Kolmar remained in Germany while her brother, sister and other family members left. Kolmar’s sister, Hilde, had moved to Switzerland in 1938, and her brother had been sent to Australia in 1940, following a period in England. Her sister and her cousin, the philosopher Walter Benjamin, had urged her to leave Germany, but she remained with her father, who could not abandon the country that had abandoned him.

There is no doubt that caring for her father was an important part of Kolmar’s own decision to stay. Mr. Kühn also suggests that it may have been that leaving Germany, for Kolmar, would have been to leave the very soil of her imagination—an imagination that was, in effect, her life. Kolmar suggested as much herself. In one of her later poems, “Asia,” she wrote: “Yours is the vision . . . . You live to be, if not to act.” Kolmar’s father was deported to Theresienstadt in September 1942. Four months later, Kolmar was sent to Auschwitz.

She was 48.

Mr. Mattix is an assistant professor of literature at Houston Baptist University.

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