A note on the life of Gertrud Kolmar

Gertrud Chodziesner was born on 10 December 1894 into a Jewish family in Berlin. After training as a teacher, she worked with orphaned and disadvantaged children until an ill-fated love affair with a non-Jewish army officer resulted in an abortion and subsequent suicide attempt. After the Armistice in 1918, she found work as a private tutor and governess until the autumn of 1927 when she attended a vacation course at Dijon University. But her time in France was curtailed when she was obliged to return home to nurse her mother. Following her mother’s death in March 1930, Gertrud assumed full-time responsibilities for the family household in Finkenkrug, an idyllic rural suburb of Berlin.

While living in Finkenkrug, Gertrud (under the pen-name Kolmar) composed nearly all her important works: not only the novel Die Jüdische Mutter (The Jewish Mother, 1930), the drama Cécile Renault (1935), the historical study on Robespierre (Das Bildnis Robespierres, 1934) and the dramatic legend Nacht (Night, 1938), but also her eight cycles of poetry: the nineteen sonnets (plus one) Bild der Rose (Image of the Rose, c.1932), the nineteen poem cycle Napoleon und Marie, the forty-five poem cycle Robespierre, the fifty-three poem cycle Alte Stadwappen, (Old Municipal Coats of Arms), the seventy-five poem cycle Weibliches Bildnis (Female Portraits), the twenty-nine poem cycle Mutter und Kind (Mother and Child), the forty-eight poem cycle Tiertraüme (Animal Dreams) and finally Welten (Worlds), the seventeen poem cycle which she wrote between 17 August and 30 December 1937. Although she would subsequently write the extraordinary novella Susanna (1940), Welten was to be her last collection of poetry.

In July 1941, Gertrud was conscripted to a munitions’ factory. Just over a year later, her father was deported to Theresienstadt and finally, in late February 1943, Gertrud herself was arrested and deported to Auschwitz where, had she managed to survive the nightmare journey east, she would have been selected, on arrival, for immediate extermination.

© Philip Kuhn 29 September 2010 /8 January 2012

This short note is extracted from Sein Antlitz ist Lei/His Countenance is Sorrow, Philip Kuhn’s full length essay on the life and work of Gertrud Kolmar, originally published in a limited edition by itinerant press to mark the world premiere of Julian Marshall’s Out of the Darkness.