Language:
German
Year of publication:
1994
Titel der Quelle:
Exil
Angaben zur Quelle:
14,2 (1994) 5-12
Keywords:
Sahl, Hans
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Psychological aspects
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in literature
;
German literature History and criticism
Abstract:
A revised version of a lecture delivered at a conference in Mondello/Palermo, April 1994. Sahl (1902-1993), a poet and critic from an assimilated Jewish family, was born in Dresden but lived in Berlin. An active communist in the 1930s, he went to Paris in 1933 and emigrated to the U.S. in 1941 (with the aid of Varian Fry), settling in New York. He denied any tie to Judaism, and insisted that he had fled Germany not as a Jew but as a political opponent of Nazism. He considered the Holocaust a universal rather than a purely Jewish tragedy and compared it to other cases of mass murder in history. Discusses three of Sahl's poems in which he deals with the possibility of poetry after Auschwitz. In his poem "Memo" he asserts, apparently in response to Adorno, that only a poem can express the inexpressible.
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