Briefe

This edition focuses on the letters Gertrud Kolmar wrote to her sister Hilde Wenzel, who had emigrated to Switzerland, from September 1938 until she was deported to Auschwitz in March 1943. She writes about the increasingly difficult and ultimately hopeless situation of the last Jews in Berlin and gives her sister comprehensive and often coded insights into her experience, her work and her memories. The last letters before deportation, in particular, read like a conscious legacy of the poetess; in addition to the letters to her sister, the volume contains the few surviving early letters to Jacob Picard and Walter Benjamin. In addition, the newly discovered letters and postcards to the actress and writer Leni Steinberg are published for the first time in this volume. Gertrud Kolmar's letters are not only a unique contemporary fad.