Books & Poetry - 5 December 2021 by C. Mauer

ROSE AUSLÄNDER

the outstanding poet who lived in Düsseldorf

Rose Ausländer is one of the most important German-language poets of the 20th century. She lived in Düsseldorf from 1965 until her death in 1988. Her oeuvre includes more than three thousand poems of great fascination, which are marked by her eventful life. Rose Ausländer had to overcome great disadvantages in her life: She was a woman and had to earn her own living under difficult circumstances, and she was Jewish. She survived the persecution and the ghetto wounded in body and soul. Her work went unnoticed for decades. 

She was honored with numerous German literary and poetry awards. Her poems are pure and unadorned and uninfluenced by the literary trends of her time. Some poems are romantic, others bear witness to great sorrow and grief. Her estate is now administered by the Cologne publisher Helmut Braun, who wrote that Rose Ausländer's literary secret was "to say all of me, with the love of you." with "words as strong as the breath of the earth."

3 POEMS BY ROSE AUSLÄNDER

Ich

By Rose Ausländer

bin 

eine Koralle

im Meer der 

Erinnerungen 

und warte 

auf den Wind

Prinzessin 

fisch 

mich auf 

leg mich 

um deinen Hals

Das wär 

mein Glück

----------

Ich weiss nur

By Rose Ausländer

Du fragst mich

was ich will

Ich weiß es nicht

Ich weiß nur

dass ich träume

dass der Traum mich lebt

und ich in seiner

Wolke schwebe

Ich weiß nur dass ich

Menschen liebe

Berge Gärten das Meer

weiß nur daß viele Tote

in mir wohnen

Ich trinke meine 

Augenblicke

weiß nur

es ist das Zeitspiel

Aufundab

----------

Noch bist du da

By Rose Ausländer

Wirf deine Angst

in die Luft

Bald

ist deine Zeit um

bald

wächst der Himmel

unter dem Gras

fallen deine Träume

ins Nirgends

Noch

duftet die Nelke

singt die Drossel

noch darfst du lieben

Worte verschenken

noch bist du da

Sei was du bist

Gib was du hast

Rose Ausländer was born in 1901 in Czernowitz, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian crown land of Bukovina. She grew up in a liberal German-Jewish home. At that time Czernowitz was a cultural metropolis in which Germans, Jews, Romanians, Russians, Poles and Ukrainians lived together and formed a literary landscape, which unfortunately perished in 1944. Important authors from that time are Paul Celan and Rose Ausländer.

Together with her student friend and later husband Ignaz Ausländer, she left Bukovina in 1921 on the advice of her mother and emigrated to the USA. In America she began writing and her first poems appeared. In 1926 she separated from her husband and in the same year she received US citizenship.

In 1927, she returned to Bukovina to care for her ailing mother. There she met Helios Hecht, a cultural journalist and graphologist. In 1928, the couple traveled together again to New York, where Rose Ausländer published a number of poems and feature articles in German-language American newspapers in the following years.

In 1931 Ausländer returned to Czernowitz with Hecht. She worked as an author, but also as an English teacher and foreign language correspondent. Her second marriage to Hecht also ended in divorce.

She returned to the U.S. briefly, but soon left again, again to care for her ailing mother in Cernowitz. As a result of the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, Soviet troops occupied Czernowitz and northern Bukovina in June 1940. Ausländer was arrested as an alleged U.S. spy by Soviet domestic intelligence and released from prison after four months in custody. She was arrested a second time and imprisoned in the city's ghetto. There she met Paul Celan.

In the spring of 1944, the Red Army marched into Czernowitz and liberated the few surviving Jews. Rose Ausländer traveled via Romania back to New York and worked again as a foreign language correspondent. She wrote her poems exclusively in English until 1956.

In 1964 Rose Ausländer moved to Vienna and arrived in Düsseldorf in 1965. As a persecutee of the Nazi regime, she received compensation and drew a pension. Until 1971, Rose Ausländer traveled extensively throughout Europe, especially to Italy, and in 1968/69 for the last time to the U.S. In 1972, she moved to the Nelly Sachs House, the retirement home of the Düsseldorf Jewish Community. It was Rose Ausländer who suggested that the retirement home be named after Nelly Sachs.

Despite her great work, Rose Ausländer was not yet very well known, but this changed when she met the publisher Helmut Braun in 1975. In 1976 the volume "Gesammelte Gedichte" (Collected Poems) was published by the literary publishing house Braun, Cologne.

After a fracture of the neck of the femur, from which she never recovered, Rose Ausländer decided in 1977 not to leave her room. Until her death in 1988, she concentrated only on writing, and her publisher published numerous volumes of poetry that achieved high circulations. Today, the estate of her works is kept at the Heinrich Heine Institute and the estate is administered by the Rose Ausländer Society founded by her publisher Helmut Braun. Rose Ausländer found her final resting place in the Jewish cemetery on the grounds of the Nordfriedhof Düsseldorf.

Quellen:

Helmut Braun, „Rose Ausländer: Gedichte“, Apr 9th, 2019: 

http://www.planetlyrik.de/rose-auslaender-gedichte/2019/04/

Helmut Braun:

http://www.roseauslaender-gesellschaft.de

Hanne Tyslik: „Rose Ausländer Leben und Werk“, 10. Juli 2019

https://www.text-feinschliff.de/rose-auslaender-leben-und-werk/

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Ausländer