Nelly Sachs

Nelly Sachs was born in 1891 in Berlin, the only child of a prosperous, assimilated Jewish industrialist. Of frail health, she was educated largely at home, loved dance and music, and began writing neo-Romantic poems and puppet plays; her Legends and Tales appeared in 1921. A long correspondence with the Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlöf, whom she admired from girlhood, would eventually save her life.

As Nazi persecution intensified, Sachs and her elderly mother were trapped in Berlin. With Lagerlöf’s intervention, the two escaped to Sweden in 1940, shortly before Sachs was due to be deported. In a small Stockholm apartment she nursed her mother and supported them both by translating modern Swedish poetry into German. There her own work was transformed. In the Habitations of Death (1947) and the collections that followed, written in a compressed, incantatory language drawing on the Bible, Kabbalah and Hasidism, mourn the murdered and question the survivors; the mystery play Eli takes as its subject the killing of a shepherd boy. Recurring images — dust, stars, breath, sand, chimneys — form a private cosmology of grief and transfiguration. She became a Swedish citizen in 1952.

After her mother’s death in 1950, Sachs suffered severe breakdowns and spent periods in psychiatric care, while maintaining a deep friendship and correspondence with Paul Celan. Recognition came late, in Germany above all. She received the Nobel Prize, shared with S. Y. Agnon, on her seventy-fifth birthday in 1966, and died in Stockholm in 1970.