My Gaze Is Turned Inward: Letters 1938-1943

Jewish Lives

by Gertrud Kolmar, Johanna Woltmann (Editor), Brigitte Goldstein (Preface)

"Event of the time are a bit like Impressionist paintings . . . which combine into a recognizable whole only when observed from a distance." —Gertrude Kolmar in a letter to her sister, October 22, 1939

So a picture of Gertrud Kolmar, a gifted Jewish writer struggling to sustain her art and family, emerges from these eloquent and allusive letters. Written in the stolen moments before her day as a forced laborer in a munitions factory began, the letters tell of Kolmar's move from the family home in Finkenkrug to a three-room flat in Berlin, which she and her father must soon share with other displaced Jews. They describe her factory work as a learning experience and assert, in the face of ever worsening conditions, that true art, never dependent on comfort or peace, is "capable of triumphing over . . . time and place."

These letters are a triumph of art, proclaiming the freedom of the human will amidst oppression. Though prevented by Nazi censorship from saying too much too directly, Kolmar still conveys the intensity and determination of her inner world, as well as the relentlessness of the outer world bent on crushing her. For its insight into the mind and soul of a poet submitting to and denying fate, and for its interior vision of one of history's darkest moments, My Gaze Is Turned Inward is a unique document of literary, historical, and spiritual power.

112 pages, Paperback

First published August 26, 2002

About the author

Gertrud Käthe Chodziesner, known by the literary pseudonym Gertrud Kolmar, was a German lyric poet and writer. She was born in Berlin and died, after her arrest and deportation as a Jew, in Auschwitz, a victim of the Nazi Final Solution. Though she was a cousin of Walter Benjamin, little is known of her life. She is considered one of the finest poets in the German language.

Post-war critics have accorded Kolmar a very high place in literature. Jacob Picard, in his epilogue to Gertrud Kolmar: Das Lyrische Werk described her both as 'one of the most important woman poets' in the whole of German literature, and 'the greatest lyrical poetess of Jewish descent who has ever lived'.

Michael Hamburger withheld judgement on the latter affirmation on the grounds he was not sufficiently competent to judge, but agreed with Picard's high estimation of her as a master poet in the German lyrical canon.

Patrick Bridgwater, citing the great range of her imagery and verse forms, and the passionate integrity which runs through her work, likewise writes that she was 'one of the great poets of her time, and perhaps the greatest woman poet ever to have written in German.