Jewish Identity in Liminality: the Poet Nelly Sachs and the Holocaust

This thesis analyses the way in which the German-Jewish author Nelly Sachs stages her identity as a poeta vates in her letter correspondence since 1940. This poetic stylisation is interpreted as a reaction to the Holocaust as a negative liminalisation; that is, the exclusion of "the Jews" with the intention of destroying identity and "murdering the soul" of individuals. Nelly Sachs tries to transform the negative liminality which threatens her life into the positive liminality of a poet as a mystic media. This process is mainly based on Martin Bubers existentialist approach towards Chassidism and Kabbalah and relates the process of writing to a mystical understanding of a necessary transformation of the fallen world. However, this transformation of liminality which helps the author to effectively survive surviving, makes it simultaneously impossible for the excluded "Jewess" Nelly Sachs to find her way back into society and community