In her study Keepers of the Motherland: German Texts by Jewish Women Writers, Dagmar C. G. Lorenz comments that Nelly Sachs wrote In den Wohnungen des Todes (In the Dwellings of Death), the collection of which O the Chimneys is a part, after Sachs had fled to Sweden from Nazi Germany in 1940, had begun to study the Hebrew Kabbalah, and had shed her earlier faith that assimilation into European civilization was possible for Jews.

O the Chimneys (O die Schornsteine) is a short, unrhymed poem in four irregular stanzas. Each stanza represents a cry of grief and indirectly conveys the speaker’s distress and bewilderment regarding the heartlessness of the designers of the Nazi crematoria in the concentration and extermination camps.

The poem is composed of exclamations and questions. It combines bitter descriptions of those “houses of death” with references to the Torah. The first, second, and fourth stanzas begin with the exclamation “O the chimneys”; the third stanza begins with “O die Wohnungen des Todes” (O the dwellings of death).

In each stanza the poet uses a different euphemism for the crematoria, calling them “sinnreich erdachten” (cleverly devised) dwellings in the first stanza; in the second they are “Freiheitswege” (freedomways, freeways) for the dust of Jeremiah and Job; in the third they are houses “Einlandend hergerichtet” (invitingly readied) / “Für den Wirt des Hauses, der sonst Gast war” (for the landlord, who used to be a guest), houses whose chimneys are like fingers that define the difference between life and death; in the fourth they are only chimneys, those fingers pointing to “Israels Leib im Rauch durch die Luft!” (Israel’s body in smoke through the air).

In the first stanza the image is introduced of Israel’s body drifting (zog aufgelöst) as smoke through the air, blackening a star (the Sun). The second stanza asks, “Wer erdachte euch und baute Stein auf Stein / Den Weg für Flüchtlinge aus Rauch?” (Who designed you and built you stone by stone / the path for refugees of smoke?). The third stanza, in its biting, ironic reference to a landlord who was once a guest, concisely represents the historical reality of tables turned on European Jews, who had once (before Hitler’s time) lavishly regaled their gentile friends.

The poem’s images are restrained, and the poem’s tone is a lament, not simply for the fate of Jewry in Europe, but also—as indicated in the third stanza—for what had become of the rest of the European population.

Bibliography

Lorenz, Dagmar C. G. Keepers of the Motherland: German Texts by Jewish Women Writers. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.
———. O the Chimneys: Selected Poems, Including the Verse Play Eli. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967.

Categories: German Literature, Literature, World Literature

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