Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger

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Selma Merbaum (born February 5, 1924 in Chernivtsi , Greater Romania ; died December 16, 1942 in the Michailowka forced labor camp in the Romanian occupation region of Transnistria Governorate ) was a Romanian German-speaking poet who, as a persecuted Jew, died exhausted of typhus at the age of eighteen. Your work is now counted among world literature.

Life

Memorial plaque on the house, Siegmunds Hof 20, in Berlin-Hansaviertel

Selma Merbaum was the daughter of the shoe retailer Max Merbaum and his wife Friederika, née Schrager. She was the 2nd cousin of Paul Celan - the mothers' fathers were brothers. When Selma was nine months old, her father died. Her mother married Leo Eisinger three years later. There is no evidence that Leo Eisinger legally adopted Selma Merbaum . From 1934 to 1940 Selma Merbaum attended the formerly private, Jewish girls 'lyceum, the Hofmann-Lyzeum, which was brought into line with all Czernowitz schools and thus became a state-recognized Romanian girls' high school - the fifth in the list, »LPF 5«, »Liceul Particular de Fete cu drept de publicitate «. Selma began reading the authors who were to exert a great influence on her own work at an early age: Heinrich Heine , Rainer Maria Rilke , Klabund , Paul Verlaine and Rabindranath Tagore . Selma Merbaum's own poems have been preserved since 1939. She also translated from French , Romanian and Yiddish . In 1940 Czernowitz was ceded by Romania to the Soviet Union under the Hitler-Stalin Pact . After the beginning of the Second World War, Romanian troops marched into Chernivtsi again in July 1941. On October 11, 1941, a forced ghetto was set up in Chernivtsi, into which all the city's Jews had to report. Also Selma, her mother and her stepfather Leo Eisinger. Within six weeks, 28,700 Jews were deported from this ghetto to the Transnistria governorate annexed by Romania , until the trains were blocked by the onset of winter. Deportations and epidemics had decimated the Jewish population to such an extent that the ghetto barriers could be lifted. Of the 20,000 surviving Jewish people, only a few were able to return to their old apartments because they had been devastated and looted. In June 1942, the deportations started again, Selma, mother and stepfather were picked up on June 28th. They were put in cattle wagons and set down on the banks of the Dniester River, driven across the river the next morning, loaded onto trains again and driven to the Cariera de Piatra camp (the quarry on the bow). In August 1942 the SS selected one thousand one hundred and fifty prisoners for forced labor; Selma Merbaum and her parents ended up with 500 fellow sufferers in the Michailowka forced labor camp on the east bank of the Bug, which was under the German SS. The prisoners had to do heavy labor in the construction of thoroughfare IV , a gravel road that was supposed to reach into the Caucasus. Selma died on December 16, 1942, exhausted from typhus.

plant

Selma Merbaum's work comprises 57 poems, which she had carefully written on individual pages with fountain pen and bound to form an album that she titled “Blossom Harvest”. She dedicated it to her friend Leiser Fichmann from the Zionist youth group Hashomer Hazair . On the way to the deportation, she was able to slip the album to a friend who gave it to her friend Else Schächter (1924–1995) with the request to pass it on to Leiser. Leiser took the album with him to the labor camp, but gave it back to Else when he decided to flee to Palestine in 1944. The motor glider Mefkure was torpedoed on August 4, 1944, only the crew and five passengers survived - Leiser did not. But Selma's poems and her last letter from the camp at the quarry were carried by her friends Renée and Else through Europe to Israel. Works in the 'language of the murderers' could not be published. Selma's poems were in a bank safe. Hersch Segal, Selma's teacher from the Yiddish school in Chernivtsi, came across Selma's poem 'Poem' in the anthology "What a word called in the cold" in Israel in 1968. Segal found Selma's friends Renée Abramovici-Michaeli and Else Schächter-Keren, who in 1976 allowed him to publish Selma's poems as a one-off private print.

The actual discovery of Selma Merbaum came in May 1980 through the Stern report of the journalist and exile researcher Jürgen Serke , who had been made aware of the poems by Hilde Domin . Serke published the poet's poems under the title I am wrapped in longing by Hoffmann and Campe . A new edition appeared in November 2005. An audio book with Iris Berben was also produced. David Klein set twelve of Selma's poems to music with interpreters such as Xavier Naidoo , Reinhard Mey , Ute Lemper .

Selma Merbaum's traditional poems are mainly impressionistic love and nature poetry of considerable stylistic certainty , which are consistently characterized by a melancholy mood. The narrow work of Merbaum, along with the poems by Rose Ausländers and Paul Celan, is part of the literary legacy of the German-Jewish culture of Bukovina, which was erased by the Germans .

Commemoration

In memory of the author, the Federal Association of Young Authors , the Armin T. Wegner Society and the Cologne authors' group Faust announced the Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger Literature Prize at the end of 2010, which was awarded for the first time in 2011. The Anne Frank Fund supports the award.

Iris Berben went to Chernivtsi (Ukraine) in 2011 and recited the poems where they were written.

The family center of the Evangelical Kaiser Friedrich Memorial Congregation in Siegmunds Hof 20 in Berlin-Tiergarten is named after the poet "Meerbaum-Haus".

expenditure

  • Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger: blossom harvest . Chaim Rosenberg School of Jewish Studies, Tel Aviv 1979.
  • Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger: I am enveloped in longing: poems . Ed .: Jürgen Serke. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2005, ISBN 978-3-455-05171-1 . (first published in 1980, revised new edition in 2005 and special edition in 2008)
  • Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger: blossom harvest. Poems . Ed .: Markus May. Reclam, Stuttgart 2013, ISBN 978-3-15-019059-3 .
  • Selma Meerbaum: You, do you know how a raven screams? Poems . Ed .: Helmut Braun. Rimbaud, Aachen 2013, ISBN 978-3-89086-439-6 . (Contains all of the poems, a lengthy biographical essay by the editor, photos and documents. 3rd supplemented edition 2016)
  • Marion Tauschwitz : Selma Merbaum: “I didn't have time to finish”. Biography and poems . zu Klampen, Springe 2014, ISBN 978-3-86674-404-2 . (In addition to a detailed biography, it also contains all of the poems.)

Audio books

  • Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger (Speaker: Mirjam Heller. Music: Klaus Burger, Director: Frank Hertweck): I am wrapped in longing. Poems .
  • Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger (speaker: Iris Berben): I am wrapped in longing, poems . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-455-30429-X .
  • Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger (speaker: Herman van Veen , guitar: Edith Leerkes): You, you know ... Lübbe, 2008, ISBN 978-3-7857-3758-3 .

Settings

Scenic interpretations

  • Heinrich Hartl (music) / Jutta Czurda (vocals and direction): Selma or the journey around the table . A research with songs based on poems by Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger (premiere 2002 Stadttheater Fürth )
  • Herman van Veen (music) / Eva Schuurman (libretto): Windekind . Musical fairy tale. An ode to Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger; together with Edith Leerkes (guitar) and Lina Lindheimer (dancer) (UA 2008 Essen?)
  • Saskia Brzyszczyk, Peter G. Dirmeier (drama) / Ewelina Nowicka (violin and composition), Shin-Ying Lin (flute) / Christa Krohne-Leonhardt (script and direction) / Anneke Gräper (stage design) / www.echtzeit-entertainment. de (production): "And the longing sings me to rest - songs of life" (November 5, 2015 Goldbekhaus-Theater Hamburg)

Visual interpretations

Organ symphony

  • Andreas Willscher: Organ Symphony No. 27 "The Yiddish" . Homage to Selma Merbaum (2018). LMV 294.

literature

  • “Let me live”, Arnold Daghani's camp diary. Ed .: Felix Rieper, Mollie Brandt Bowen. Zu Klampen, Lüneburg 2002. ISBN 3-934920-25-X . (Daghani reports, inter alia, of the death of Selma Meerbaum.) * Ortrun Niethammer: Inner differentiation. Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger: Reception of her poems after 1980. In: Inge Hansen-Schaberg (Ed.): As a child pursued. Anne Frank and the others. Weidler, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-89693-244-6 .
  • Mariana-Virginia Lăzărescu: “Look, life is so colorful”. Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, Karin Gündisch and Carmen Elisabeth Puchianu: three representative German authors from Romania . WVB, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-86573-445-7 .
  • Claus Stephani : "Green Mother Bukowina". German-Jewish writers from Bukovina. Documentation in manuscripts, books and pictures. Catalog for the exhibition of the same name from April 22nd to June 25th, 2010. House of the German East: Munich, 2010. 48 pp., 9 illustrations. ISBN 978-3-927977-27-3 .
  • Markus May: "Like a line of dark blue silence". Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger in the context of the poetry of Bukovina of the 1930s and 1940s. In: Walter Busch / Chiara Conterno (eds.) Female Jewish voices in German poetry from the time of persecution and exile , Würzburg 2012, pp. 27–44. ISBN 978-3-8260-4982-8 .
  • Francesca Paolino: Una vita. Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger (1924-1942). , Edizioni del Faro, Trento 2013, ISBN 978-8-86537-139-8 .
  • Helmut Braun: "I want to live". The poet Selma Meerbaum. In: Selma Meerbaum: "You, do you know how a raven screams?" Poems. Ed .: Helmut Braun. 3rd supplemented edition. Rimbaud / Aachen 2016, ISBN 978-3-89086-439-6 , pp. 106–188.
  • Marion Tauschwitz: Selma Merbaum: “I didn't have time to finish”. Biography and poems. Foreword by Iris Berben, on Klampen , Springe 2014, ISBN 978-3-86674-404-2 .
  • Barbara Breysach: Meerbaum-Eisinger, Selma. In: Andreas B. Kilcher (Ed.): Metzler Lexicon of German-Jewish Literature. Jewish authors in the German language from the Enlightenment to the present. 2nd, updated and expanded edition. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02457-2 , p. 365f.
  • Therese Chromik : Life in Word. Poets in threatening times. Nelly Sachs, Gertrud Kolmar, Rose Ausländer, Hilde Domin, Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger . Lang, Berlin [and others] 2019, pp. 157-180. ISBN 978-3-631-77004-7 .

Web links

Commons : Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Selma Merbaum is her name in the Jewish birth register and in all school documents and certificates. "Eisinger" was apparently added posthumously to the first publication of her poems in 1976 - at that time still without a hyphen. The hyphen has been inserted in various editions since 1979.
  2. ↑ Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger Literature Prize ( Memento of the original from January 14, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / amobo.de
  3. ↑ I want to laugh and lift loads Welt.de from May 6, 2011
  4. ↑ Albin Fries, Lieder, op.46 Petrucci Music Library
  5. ↑ List of Hartmut Neubauer's works at Musicalion
personal data
SURNAME Meerbaum-Eisinger, Selma
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Merbaum, Selma
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-speaking Jewish poet
DATE OF BIRTH February 5, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Chernivtsi , Bukovina
DATE OF DEATH December 16, 1942
Place of death Michailowka Labor Camp, Transnistria Governorate