Painting Sand: Nelly Sachs and the Grabschrift

In the poem cycle Grabschriften in die Luft geschrieben (1947), Nelly Sachs (1891-1970) probes the poet's task of and form for memorializing the dead. The poems do not conform to the traditional elements of the epitaph; rather, Sachs engages and even rejects the epitaph's task of identifying and immortalizing the dead by obscuring individual identity, then proceeding to implicate the poet, traditionally the immortalizer of the fallen, in the obliteration of the dead. Appearing at a time in which identifying and memorializing victims of the Holocaust attains critical importance, the cycle makes a significant statement regarding literature in the postwar era: poetic form can no longer function as it once did, and the role and task of the poet must be reexamined. In its refusal to identify individuals, but insistence on making that absence palpable, the cycle also complicates the ritual of memorial for the reader in a post-Holocaust setting.