Conclusion

Summary

I CLOSE THIS READING of Sachs's work with one final example that shows the importance of bearing in mind that Sachs, since the early 1920s, was fascinated by conventional perceptions of words and literary traditions and what they can mean if they are broken apart and reread unconventionally. In a letter from July of 1946, Sachs wrote to writer and literary historian Max Rychner of her latest frustrations in finding a publisher for In den Wohnungen des Todes. She concluded from a vague rejection letter that, upon seeing the title of her manuscript, the publisher had tossed it onto a mounting pile of tedious emigrant literature, of eyewitness reports and protocols of the camps that, Sachs believes,

mit dem Rauch der Scheiterhaufen die Seufzer der Opfer ersticken. Nur die eine Mühe machte man sich offenbar nicht: zu sehen, daß diese Gedichte, wenn auch mit begrenzten Kräften, versuchen, das Furchtbare in das Reich der Verklärung zu heben, wie es ja die Aufgabe aller Dichtung in allen Zeiten von den griechischen Geschlechtersagen bis heute hinauf immer war und bleiben wird.

[suffocate the sighs and sobs of the victims with the smoke of the pyres. One [the publisher] is obviously not making an effort in one thing: to see that these poems, though with limited powers, attempt to lift that which is terrible into the realm of transfiguration, as the task of all poetry was and always will be, from the Greek epics to today.]

Sachs's word choices often make reading her letters as challenging an interpretive task as reading her poetry. The words “Scheiterhaufen” and “Verklärung” in particular make this statement difficult to clearly interpret. “Scheiterhaufen” can refer to burning someone at the stake, but can also mean a funeral pyre; broken down to its component parts (scheitern + Haufen), it is a pile of shattered or splintered things. “Scheitern,” moreover, is usually used in a more figurative sense of failure or collapse. Considering that she is referring to the poems of In den Wohnungen des Todes, one interpretation of “Scheiterhaufen” does not seem better suited than another.