PoetryThe photograph shows the 23-year-old Stella Sigmann around the time when her promising career as student of medicine at Vienna University was abruptly curtailed. Soon after Hitler's annexation in March 1938, all Jewish students and professors were expelled from the university.
In 1939, Stella escaped the gathering storm by acquiring a visa, first to Holland and then to England. There she was given a job as an orderly in a psychiatric clinic in Colchester, the first of several more or less menial jobs. She then married Wolf Rotenberg, a former fellow-student of medicine in Vienna who had also escaped to England. They settled in Leeds in 1948, where she has lived ever since. Stella began writing poetry in 1940, then, as for the rest of her life, in German. When I first met her in Brighton in 1997, she told me in her melodious and old-world Viennese that she normally conversed only in English but wrote exclusively in German, a manifestation of her split relationship to her mother tongue and everything associated with Austrian enthusiasm for the Anschluss. Stella's parents and all her relatives except for her brother had stayed on in their native Vienna out of the sheer inability to conceive of the horrors that were to come, and inevitably fell victim to the Shoah.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Stella's poetry is about loss of language, home and loved ones. But her experience of the last kind of loss is different from ours. People who have witnessed a dearly beloved person dying and being buried know it to be one of the most harrowing experiences in life. Who will ever forget hearing the thud of the first clod of earth on the lid of a coffin, that moment when it gets through to you that you will never see that person again? And yet the ritualisation of death, whatever form it might take - the graveside homily, the commiserations, the shared memories at the funeral dinner - helps you to cope with bereavement by lending it definition, by making its culmination communal, and even if you rarely or never visit the grave afterwards, it is still a consolation to know that the person's remains are there where you saw them being buried. But what if, like Stella Rotenberg, you neither know how your parents died, except that it was by an utterly gratuitous act of violence, nor where they were killed, nor where, if at all, they are buried?
"On the 20th of May 1942," she said in an interview, "my parents were transported from Vienna to Poland with the destination Izbica near Sobibor, but on the way there they are thought to have been taken out of the train and shot dead in a woods. But it is also possible that my mother was murdered in Auschwitz."
Where there is no certainty and nothing left, bereavement cannot find an end. Stella Rotenberg's entire oeuvre is, in a sense, an unceasing mourning. The 12 short prose texts under the title 'When my mother . . .' all start with those three words: "When my mother was a little girl . . . ", "When my mother was a child . . .", "When my mother was little . . ." I read them as attempts to reclaim a mother-figure with a normal past, even an invented one, from the indignity of imposed oblivion. The 12 texts are like modest but exquisitely carved memorial slabs in an imaginary garden of remembrance where the mother can find repose.
When Stella refers to her mother tongue, she takes the word "mother" literally as meaning the cadences of her own mother's speech, epitomising a gentler and warmer Viennese dialect ("I would go back/ through the jaws of hell/ just to hear the sound/ of my mother tongue/ again"). After many years of being unable to overcome an aversion to the idea of returning to Austria, she wrote a poem called 'Back Home' about venturing back into those "jaws of hell", indeed into the very house where she had grown up:
(In the house in which they fetched her to her death)
Mother hear me!
I have survived!
Your child has survived Satan!
See now how I
go down
the long stairway,
retrace
your last steps.
I step
onto the tiled floor,
into the passage-way where you walked,
I look and look
for your traces -
The entrance, wide
open, shows the way
to your death.
O time! Time
is useless.
A lifetime
of mourning
is not enough.
The poem is even more moving in German because the last stanza is rendered in slightly archaic language that is reminiscent in tone of the first words of Urlicht in the Resurrection Symphony of that other Jewish Austrian, Gustav Mahler.
It is to the credit of Donal McLaughlin that he arranged the first ever public reading by Stella Rotenberg in the Aberdeen Exile Centre in 1990. Since then she has received many invitations to read in Austria and Germany. Two Austrians that were at that first reading, Konstantin Kaiser and Siglinde Bolbecher, have recently created a prize for exiled Austrian authors named after one of the most remarkable poets of the last century and, like Stella, one of the more neglected: Theodor Kramer. In 2001, Stella returned to Vienna in more felicitous circumstances to receive the first Theodor Kramer Prize and the recognition she deserves from her compatriots. The bilingual volume Shards also does an invaluable service to non-German speakers in giving access to at least some examples of Stella's pared-down, probing and incisive verse.
Eoin Bourke is Professor of German at NUI Galway. His last book, The Austrian Anschluss in History and Literature (Arlen House, 2000), was dedicated to Stella Rotenberg
Shards By Stella Rotenberg, translated by Donal McLaughlin and Stephen Richardson Edinburgh Review, 95pp. £5.99