The Nobel Prize in Literature 1966

On May 12 1970, Leonie "Nelly" Sachs, German Swedish poet and playwright who was the first German speaking woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966, died at the age of 78. A short excerpt:

"Nelly Sachs’s career as a poet of note started only after her emigration, when she was nearly fifty years old. Her first volume of poetry, In den Wohnungen des Todes (In the Houses of Death), 1947, creates a cosmic frame for the suffering of her time, particularly that of the Jews. Although her poems are written in a keenly modern style, with an abundance of lucid metaphors, they also intone the prophetic language of the Old Testament. The collections Sternverdunkelung (Eclipse of Stars), 1949, Und niemand weiss weiter (And No One Knows Where to Go), 1957, and Flucht und Verwandlung (Flight and Metamorphosis), 1959, repeat, develop, and reinforce the cycle of suffering, persecution, exile, and death which characterizes the life of the Jewish people, and becomes transformed, in Nelly Sachs’s powerful metaphorical language, into the terms of man’s bitter, but not hopeless, destiny."