Lessie Sachs

Lessie Sachs (born in Breslau in 1896 ; died January 28, 1942 ) was a German author .

Life

As the child of a family of Jewish origin - the father was a doctor and qualified psychiatrist - Lessie Sachs studied at the Breslau Academy of Arts and Crafts after graduating from school. In the autumn of 1917 she went to Munich, where she studied painting and drawing school for women at a so-called " Ladies Academy ", since the Academy of Fine Arts did not accept female students. Lessie Sachs was part of the lively Munich bohemian community. She became known as a portrait and silk painter.

In Munich she experienced the brief phase of the Soviet Revolution and in February 1919 - "spurred on by the artist couple Mia and Eugen Esslinger, who were friends with her " - joined the newly founded Communist Party of Germany . She became the third secretary in their Schwabing section. In the vicinity of the communist party, she met the author Otto Urbas , co-founder of the Munich KPD, to whom she became engaged.

Drawing by Lessie Sachs published in Der Orchideengarten , 1919.

After seeing its opponents in the Second Soviet Republic, she was sentenced to eighteen months in prison after the crackdown. This was followed by strict police surveillance, it forced the abandonment of politics, "but did not stifle their latent protest against role assignments and authorities". In September 1920 she was imprisoned in the Wroclaw XII prison, and six months later Sachs was released for good conduct.

Her father died in 1928; During this time she began to write her first funny poems for friends, which - casual and pointed - corresponded to the taste of the time. She then published sporadically in well-known media of the bourgeois feature pages of the Weimar Republic such as the Vossische Zeitung and the Simplicissimus . Her friends in Breslau included the 13 years younger pianist and composer Josef Wagner. She worked closely with him. The two married on March 3, 1933, shortly after the NSDAP and its German national alliance partners came to power.

Under the conditions of a life in the Nazi state, the couple made the decision to flee Germany. In August 1937 the couple left for the USA with their daughter Dorothee, who was born in 1934. First they landed in St. Louis , Missouri . From February 1938 they lived in poor conditions in New York. Lessie Sachs fell ill with cancer and died in 1942; her husband Josef Wagner followed her five years later.

In 1944, a volume of "day and night poems" compiled by her husband and writer friends was published posthumously. He had a foreword from Heinrich Mann , Oskar Maria Graf discussed him: “With her real talent, she often copes with the most indifferent appearances. It is seldom mannered, mostly it remains simple and genuine. In her poems of the day, of course, there are often phrases that are reminiscent of Erich Kästner , but always that delicate taste prevails that one encounters in deeply melancholy people. "

In 2019, her poems and short prose appeared in the features section under the title The moody brain .

literature

• Jürgen Krämer / Christiana Puschak (eds.), Lessie Sachs, The moody brain. Poetry and short prose , epilogue, Berlin 2019
• Joan Weinstein, The End of Expressionism. Art and the November Revolution in Germany, 1918–19 , Chicago / London 1990

Web links

• German love poetry, here text examples

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Susanne Klingenstein: Poet Lessie Sachs: But if I didn't have the pressure . In: FAZ.NET . ISSN  0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed April 5, 2020]).
2. ↑ Werner Jung , Don't let yourself be suffocated. A selection of books invites you to rediscover the communist poet Lessie Sachs, in: Junge Welt, August 22, 2019, p. 10.
3. ^ Joan Weinstein, The End of Expressionism. Art and the November Revolution in Germany, 1918-19, Chicago / London 1990, p. 212.
4. ↑ Jürgen Krämer / Christiana Puschak (ed.), Lessie Sachs, The moody brain. Poetry and short prose, epilogue, Berlin 2019.
5. ↑ Unless otherwise stated: [1] .