Nelly Sachs (10 December 1891 – 12 May 1970) was a Jewish German-Swedish poet and playwright. Nelly Sachs was a Jewish German-Swedish poet and playwright. Her experiences resulting from the rise of the Nazis in World War II Europe transformed her into a poignant spokeswoman for the grief and yearnings of her fellow Jews.

Nelly Sachs (10 December 1891 – 12 May 1970) was a Jewish German-Swedish poet and playwright. 
Nelly Sachs was a Jewish German-Swedish poet and playwright. Her experiences resulting from the rise of the Nazis in World War II Europe transformed her into a poignant spokeswoman for the grief and yearnings of her fellow Jews.

Nelly Sachs, in full Nelly Leonie Sachs, (born Dec. 10, 1891, Berlin, Ger.—died May 12, 1970, Stockholm, Swed.), German poet and dramatist who became a poignant spokesperson for the grief and yearnings of her fellow Jews. When, with Shmuel Yosef Agnon, she was awarded the 1966 Nobel Prize for Literature, she observed that Agnon represented Israel whereas “I represent the tragedy of the Jewish people.”

The daughter of a prosperous manufacturer, Sachs grew up in the fashionable Tiergarten section of Berlin and began writing verse at age 17. Romantic and conventional, her poems of the 1920s appeared in newspapers but were mainly for her own enjoyment.

As the advent of Nazism in Germany darkened her life, she sought comfort in ancient Jewish writings. In 1940, after learning that she was destined for a forced-labour camp, she escaped to Sweden with the help of the Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlöf, with whom she had corresponded and who interceded with the Swedish royal family on her behalf. Sachs lived with her mother in a one-room apartment, learned Swedish, and translated German poetry into Swedish and Swedish poetry into German.

Sachs’s lyrics from those years combine lean simplicity with imagery variously tender, searing, or mystical. Her famous “O die Schornsteine” (“O the Chimneys”), in which Israel’s body drifts upward as smoke from the Nazi death camps, was selected as the title poem for a 1967 collection of her work in English translation. Another collection in English translation, The Seeker, and Other Poems, was published in 1970.

Her best-known play is Eli: Ein Mysterienspiel vom Leiden Israels(1951; Eli: A Mystery Play of the Sufferings of Israel, included in the O the Chimneys collection). Before she won the Nobel Prize on her 75th birthday, she received the 1965 Peace Prize of German Publishers. In accepting the award from the land she had fled, she said (in the spirit of concord and forgiveness that are among the themes in her poems), “In spite of all the horrors of the past, I believe in you.”

in these related Britannica articles:

• German literature: The post-1945 period: Stunde Null
  The exile poets Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan emerged as two of the most prominent poetic voices to reflect on the concentration camp experience. Celan’s poem “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue,” from his collection Mohn und Gedächtnis [1952; “Poppy and Memory”]) is perhaps the best-known poem of the entire postwar…
• 
  S.Y. Agnon
  S.Y. Agnon, Israeli writer who was one of the leading modern Hebrew novelists and short-story writers. In 1966 he was the corecipient, with Nelly…
• 
  Selma Lagerlöf
  Selma Lagerlöf, novelist who in 1909 became the first woman and also the first Swedish writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. An illness left her lame for…
• 
  Berlin
  Berlin, capital and chief urban centre of Germany. The city lies at the heart of the North German Plain, athwart an east-west commercial and geographic axis that helped make it the capital of the kingdom of Prussia and then, from 1871, of a unified Germany. Berlin’s former glory ended in 1945, but…
• 
  Stockholm
  Stockholm, capital and largest city of Sweden. Stockholm is located at the junction of Lake Mälar (Mälaren) and Salt Bay (Saltsjön), an arm of the Baltic Sea, opposite the Gulf of Finland. The city is built upon numerous islands as well as the mainland of Uppland and Södermanland. By virtue of its…

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MORE ABOUT Nelly Sachs

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