Emma May

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Emma Kann (born May 25, 1914 in Frankfurt am Main , † January 19, 2009 in Konstanz ) was a German poet and essayist .

Life

Kann grew up in Frankfurt am Main. She came from a liberal Jewish family without close religious ties and, even in old age, described herself as being more ecumenical. Because of her Jewish religious affiliation, she was refused admission to study in 1933, which prompted her to emigrate to England. Her first poem ever, Heimatlos , written in 1933 , reflects the experience of having to leave Germany.

Emma Kann lived in England for two and a half years, initially as an au pair student, later as a language teacher and occasionally as a domestic help. At the end of 1935 she visited her sister in Holland before she went to Belgium in the spring of 1936, lived in Antwerp and worked there as a secretary. From here she tried again at Christmas 1936 to visit her mother and grandmother in Frankfurt. Although she still had a valid German passport, she was refused entry to Germany at the Belgian-German border. In 1937 her passport was finally no longer renewed, and in 1938 her name appeared on a list of expatriates published in the German Reichsanzeiger . In the meantime she had a Belgian stateless person's passport .

Passport photo around 1939

When the German army invaded neutral Belgium in May 1940, Emma Kann was able to flee to France via Brussels on May 12, 1940. The train, which she could take from Brussels, did not go to Paris, as hoped, but ended in a small village near Toulouse . After a delay of a few days, it was brought from here to the Gurs camp .

Emma Kann, who was housed in a barrack in Gurs where Adrienne Thomas and Hannah Arendt lived temporarily at the same time , found the camp conditions to be primitive, but attested that the French guards and the camp administration were behaving correctly. As a single person, she experienced life in the camp much more “relaxed” than most other internees or than Lisa Fittko , who was interned there about a month later and who Emma Kann first met in Cuba.

Emma Kann was able to leave the Gurs camp after a short time - before the situation in the camp changed drastically after the armistice between Germany and France and many Jews from southwest Germany were deported here, for the Gurs often to the stopover in front of the extermination camps in the east of the German Reich has been. She lived in France until 1942 and then emigrated to Cuba via Casablanca . In Havana she found employment as an English teacher and belonged to the circle around Fritz Lamm and Hans and Lisa Fittko . In this context, Ursula Krechel dedicated a small portrait to her in her book Landgericht . During her time in Cuba she had to have her eyes operated twice, which not only made reading almost impossible for her for a year, but also made it difficult for her to access Spanish-Latin American literature.

Out of consideration for her sister, who had survived the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and did not understand a return to Germany, Emma Kann left Cuba for the United States after the war ended in 1945 and lived in New York until 1981 . There she actively devoted herself to writing poetry and took courses at the Poetry Center . She continued to write in German until 1948, before starting to write in English from 1950. In the mid-1960s she had to stop writing temporarily because she could see less and less. From the end of the sixties she dictated her poems on cassette recorders after she was completely blind in 1969. Until she went blind, she reviewed German literature, especially volumes of poetry, for the University of Oklahoma's Books Abroad, which was temporarily edited by Ernst Erich Noth , which primarily gave her the opportunity to stay in contact with the German language and literature.

Emma Kann, who occasionally visited Germany again during her time in New York and, after going blind, initially spent her summers in Austria and Switzerland, finally returned to Germany in 1981. The decisive factor was a niece of hers who was already living in Konstanz and who urged her to move, but also her desire to write in German again. She lived in Konstanz until her death in 2009. In 1991 she began to hand over her estate to the German Exile Archive 1933–1945 of the German National Library , where her estate is now kept.

About writing

Emma Kann was introduced to literature at an early age by her mother, who had attended the teachers' seminar in Heidelberg . However, she did not begin to write continuously until 1933. The poem Heimatlos is her first poem and, like many others, reflects on her experiences abroad and the loss of her homeland. Still, for Emma Kann, the Stranger is not all about loss and renunciation. She is always characterized by an intense zest for life - even in the midst of grief and death. She opposes external threats with a "defiant insistence on enjoying one's self and one's life, one's own logic, one's own sense". In her memories of the Gurs camp that appeared in 1995 - 45 years later - she repeatedly emphasized the friendliness of the people she met on her escape through France. She used her onward journey from Gurs to Marseille - more tourist-oriented than on the run - not only to visit Lourdes , but was also impressed by the beauty of the French landscape on the edge of the Pyrenees . So it is hardly surprising that Ursula Krechel only mentions one Pyrenean poem from Emma Kann's time in Cuba, in which she celebrates the beauty and freedom of this landscape. She takes pleasure in the language, in the sensuality of every experience and in the beauty of the landscape. This also results in a very positive review of the time abroad, which Emma Kann describes in her poem Distances as follows: "On five islands of my life / I left faces / that I loved." These five islands are the five stations in life outside Germany between 1933 and 1981: England, Belgium, France, Cuba, USA.

After Emma Kann began writing in English in New York in 1950, she kept it that way until her return to Germany in 1981. She reflected, also on the basis of her reviews for “Book Abroad”, the changes in the German language during the period the time she used English herself, which is why she did not find it difficult to write in German after her return in 1981. Her blindness also had no significant influence on her writing, which had thus become speaking on a recorder - not dictation. She has often chosen a pictorial starting point for her writing, always starting from the visual, from an idea or memory. That is obviously what also impressed Ursula Krechel a lot about her.

For Emma Kann, her writing is an attempt to express complex facts or symbolic meanings in a simple language. It is important to her to repeatedly question the language and the terms used in order to find her way back to simple words. This also means always reflecting on words and concepts that she was familiar with from her youth against the background of the time between 1933 and 1981 and still working out and maintaining the essential meaning of individual terms. Religiousness in the narrower sense is alien to her. She is committed to Spinoza and to a form of pantheism that was also influenced by Emmanuel Levinas in her later years . In addition, there are influences from Martin Buber , whose lectures she still heard during her time in Frankfurt. She does not see herself primarily as a Jew; Her Jewish origins are only important to her insofar as she is part of her experiences that have influenced her life - without any involvement of her own.

Writing in German, writing as an attempt to establish communication with readers, curiosity about the latest technical and scientific findings, which must be understood and shaped in a poetic language, what has been experienced in words and passed on: For Emma Kann, the poem is only half done by the writer, the reader will only complete it - by virtue of his projections.

Works

  • In the wide space: Poems 1992–1996. Hartung-Gorre, Konstanz 1998, ISBN 3-89649-250-0 .
  • My memories of the Gurs camp. In: exile. XV, 2, 1995, pp. 25-28.
  • Current and countercurrent: poems. Hartung-Gorre, Konstanz 1993, ISBN 3-89191-660-4 .
  • In Sight of the Other: Poems 1989. Hartung-Gorre, Konstanz 1990, ISBN 3-89191-315-X .
  • Change of time: poems 1981–1985. Hartung-Gorre, Konstanz 1987, ISBN 3-89191-109-2 .
  • Autobiographical mosaic.

literature

  • Ottmar Ette : In Emma Kann's garden. On the experience and survival knowledge of literature. In memoriam Emma Kann (1914–2009). In: Exil, No. 1, 2009, pp. 87-95.
  • Ottmar Ette: What goes beyond time. Interview with the poet Emma Kann. In: Exil, VIII (1993), 2, pp. 34-40.
  • Ursula Krechel: Regional Court . Jung and Jung, Salzburg / Vienna 2012, ISBN 978-3-99027-024-0 .
  • Lisa Fittko: My way across the Pyrenees . dtv Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-446-13948-6 .
  • Hans Riebsamen: Exhibition: The stranger is foreign only in the foreign. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. ( faz.net Emma Kann's poem as the title of an exhibition on exile literature).
  • Annika Maier: Memory of a special woman. In: Südkurier. 2014 (On the hundredth birthday of Emma Kann: [1] ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Ottmar Ette: What goes beyond time. P. 34.
  2. ↑ Ottmar Ette: What goes beyond time. P. 35.
  3. ↑ Emma Kann: My memories of the Gurs camp. P. 25.
  4. ↑ a b Estate of Emma Kann in the German Exile Archive of the German National Library (call number: EB 91/053).
  5. ↑ Emma Kann: My memories of the Gurs camp. P. 26.
  6. ↑ Gurs. May and June 1940. In: Lisa Fittko: My way across the Pyrenees. P. 26 ff.
  7. ↑ Ursula Krechel: Regional Court. P. 317 ff.
  8. ^ A b Ottmar Ette: What goes beyond time. P. 38.
  9. ↑ a b c d Ottmar Ette: What goes beyond time. P. 36.
  10. ↑ Ottmar Ette: In Emma Kann's garden. Pp. 89-90.
  11. ↑ Emma Kann: My memories of the Gurs camp. P. 27.
  12. ↑ Ursula Krechel: Regional Court. P. 318.
  13. ↑ Emma Kann: Zeitwechsel: Gedichte 1981–1985. P. 26.
  14. ↑ Ottmar Ette: What goes beyond time. Pp. 34-35.
  15. ↑ Ottmar Ette: What goes beyond time. P. 37 ff.
  16. ↑ Ottmar Ette: What goes beyond time. P. 39.
  17. ↑ Ottmar Ette: What goes beyond time. Pp. 39-40.
personal data
SURNAME Can, Emma
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German poet and essayist
DATE OF BIRTH May 25, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Frankfurt am Main
DATE OF DEATH January 19, 2009
Place of death Constancy