Ilse Blumenthal-Weiss

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Ilse Blumenthal-Weiss (born October 14, 1899 in Berlin-Schöneberg ; died August 10, 1987 in Greenwich (Connecticut) ) was a German-speaking poet.

Life

Her father was a textile merchant, her mother a teacher. Until she was “one year old” she attended the Uhland Lyceum in Berlin. After graduating from school, she completed an apprenticeship as a state-certified gymnastics teacher and medical orthopedist. She wrote poetry even before World War II . In 1921 she was in correspondence with Rainer Maria Rilke . In 1937 she fled to the Netherlands , was first imprisoned in Westerbork transit camp in 1943 and then deported from here to Theresienstadt on December 6, 1944 , where she experienced liberation and moved to the USA ( living in New York since 1947 ).

There she worked as a librarian at the Leo Baeck Institute .

After the war, she tried to give linguistic expression to the incomprehensible experience and wrote poetry. She was on friendly terms with Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs . She emigrated to the Netherlands in 1945 and to the USA with her daughter in 1947.

Her son, the student Peter David Blumenthal (born April 4, 1921 in Berlin) was born on October 23, 1941 in Mauthausen , her husband, the dentist Dr. med. Herbert Blumenthal (born February 25, 1886 in Berlin) murdered in Auschwitz on October 21, 1944 . Her daughter Miriam, born in 1927, published some memoirs in 2016.

Works

  • Face and Mask , 1929
  • The Key Miracle , 1954
  • Memorial. Poems from the concentration camp , Hamburg 1956
  • Without a coffin. Poems and a documentary report , Hanover 1984

literature

  • Desider Stern : Works by authors of Jewish origin in German. Vienna 1969.
  • Walter Tetzlaff: 2000 short biographies of important German Jews of the 20th century. Askania, Lindhorst 1982, ISBN 3-921730-10-4 .
  • Joseph Walk (ed.): Short biographies on the history of the Jews 1918–1945. Edited by the Leo Baeck Institute, Jerusalem. Saur, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-598-10477-4 .
  • Wilhelm Sternfeld , Eva Tiedemann: German Exile Literature 1933-1945. A bio bibliography. Foreword by Hanns Wilhelm Eppelsheimer , Schneider, Heidelberg / Darmstadt 1962.
  • Blumenthal-Weiss, Ilse. In: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors . Volume 3: Birk – Braun. Edited by the Bibliographia Judaica archive. Saur, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-598-22683-7 , pp. 224-228.
  • Miriam Merzbacher-Blumenthal: Een meisje uit Berlijn. Translation into Dutch from English and German Anne Stoffel. De Wilde Tomaat, Amsterdam 2016, ISBN 978-90-824288-3-4 .
  • Thomas Hartwig , Hans-Joachim Roscher: Meeting with Ilse Blumenthal-Weiss. In: The Promised City: German-Jewish Emigrants in New York; Conversations, impressions and pictures. Das Arsenal, Berlin 1986, ISBN 978-3-921810-66-8 , pp. 128-136 (conversation with Blumenthal-Weiss).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Rilke's letters to Ilse Blumenthal-Weiss on December 29, 1921 and January 25, 1922
personal data
SURNAME Blumenthal-Weiss, Ilse
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-speaking poet
DATE OF BIRTH October 14, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin-Schöneberg
DATE OF DEATH August 10, 1987
Place of death Greenwich (Connecticut)