My Gaze Is Turned Inward

by Kolmar, Gertrud

• ISBN13: 9780810118553
• ISBN10: 0810118556
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-08-01
• Publisher: Northwestern Univ Pr

Summary

The portrait of Gertrud Kolmar that emerges from her eloquent and allusive correspondence is of a gifted Jewish poet struggling to sustain her art and family in the face of the encroaching horrors of Nazi Germany. Written to family members and intellectuals such as Walter Benjamin and Jacob Picard in the stolen moments before Kolmar began her day as a forced laborer, the letters collected in My Gaze Is Turned Inward document the rich inner life of a woman paradoxically submitting to and defying fate. Book jacket.

Author Biography

The poet Gertrud Kolmar was born into a prominent Jewish family in Berlin in 1894 and died in Auschwitz sometime after February 1943.

Table of Contents

Translator's Preface	vii
Letters to Family Members, 1938-1943	3	(148)
Letters to Walter Benjamin, 1934	151	(6)
Letters to Jacob Picard, 1937-1939	157	(8)
Editor's Afterword	165	(6)
Chronology of Gertrud Kolmar's Life	171	(4)
Translator's Chronicle of Selected Nazi Anti-Jewish Legislation, Decrees, Ordinances, and Actions, 1933-1943	175	(6)
Editor's Notes to the Letters	181