Shira Miron (Universität Basel): Gertrud Kolmar – Dichten gegen den Alltag

In the immediate post-war period, the name of Gertrud Kolmar (1894–1943) was hardly known to anyone. She was deported to Auschwitz in 1943 and murdered there. The German-Jewish poet wrote her most significant and sophisticated works, including the poetry cycle Welten (1937) and the novella Susanna (1940), amid increasingly oppressive circumstances in Nazi Berlin. Her imaginative literary work was shaped by the forced move with her father to a so-called “Judenhaus” (Jewish house) on what is now Münchener Straße, the separation from her sister who had already fled, and the daily forced labour. It was not until the end of the 20th century that her work received its long-overdue place in the canon of German-language literature.

Reading by Feryal Djavadi and Dilan Graf, students in the Acting program at Berlin University of the Arts.  

Literarische Heimat Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf

Many authors who helped shape the cultural life of their time spent years of their lives in Berlin’s Wilmersdorf and Charlottenburg districts. In cooperation with the ZfL and the Acting program at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK), the Stadtbibliothek Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf presents some of these authors.

Fig. above: D.M. Nagu from the series Songs for a Future Generation (2020) (detail)