Gertrud Kolmar

Monika Shafi spoke about German-Jewish poet Gertrud Kolmar. Kolmar came from an assimilated, upper-class family but understood herself as being an outsider. It was very interesting to see how someone so well-off and absolutely brilliant as Kolmar would feel this way. The three main reasons she felt so different were 1. her Jewishness, 2. her Femaleness and 3. her being an artist. A Jewish presence was felt in many of her works, and this Jewish identity was always intertwined with her female identity. Kolmar, living in the time when Nazi Germany came to power, never underestimated the danger of the Nazi’s. One poem cycle of hers, “The Words of the Silenced,” (Das Wort der Stummen) was about the situation of Hitler’s victims. In it, Kolmar identifies with them and speaks as one of them. It deeply saddened me to hear how Kolmar made many references to her knowing she would die at the hands of the Nazi’s. Kolmar was published very little in her lifetime but wrote close to 800 poems. Because it was hard to women to break into the industry and because Kolmar wrote very traditionally, very few of her works made it to print. I thought the combination of hearing about Kolmar’s life and the influence of her Jewish roots on her works was very interesting.