4 - Mourning as Remembrance: Writing as Figuration and Defiguration in the Poetry of Rose Ausländer

Summary

Viele Verwandlungen erlebte ich mit offenen / Augen, meine Erinnerung an sie ist intakt.

[I underwent many metamorphoses with open eyes. My memory of them is intact.]

— Rose Ausländer

The bunch of lilacs Rose Ausländer felt transformed into on her ninth birthday turns up as a rejected souvenir in one of her symbolist Gettomotive poems (Ghetto Motifs) she wrote between 1942 and 1944. “Warum verfolgt mich noch ein Traum? / Ich rieche Flieder durch den Schlaf. / Verlaß mich, blauer Fliederbaum! Es ist kein Glück, daß ich dich traf.// Kann es bei uns noch Frühling sein?” (GW 1:144–45; Why does a dream still pursue me? / I smell lilacs in my sleep. / Abandon me, blue lilac tree! / It is not good fortune that made us meet // Can it be spring here any more?). Her childlike, romantic, psychotic boundlessness has been exchanged for the barest of existences. Ausländer's poetry is a distant echo of this shock, and tries to sublimate it.

While Celan makes a radical break with prevailing modernist thought, Rose Ausländer still clings to certain aesthetic and metaphysical traditions. In this respect she resembles Nelly Sachs. While Sachs, using a transcendental approach focusing on the forms of language (down to the level of the letter) and on verbal esotericism, works toward a mystic conception of the Shoah, Ausländer advocates a (seemingly more conventional) mythical return to topoi of the unthinkable. Their common trust in language results in different poetic strategies.