Elements of tragic: Nelly Sachs choirs

Abstract

The shadow of Shoah hovers over the vast works of the German author and poetess Nelly Sachs. The strong impressions about the great catastrophe and its unrepresentable monstrosity are the main topics of twelve poems called “Coros depois da meia-noite”. In these poems, various personages are voiced and receive a role to express its fears. Survivors, vagabonds, orphans, shadows, stones, trees, and even those who have not yet born cry out for a feeling of justice and moral, showing how the Death, as an entity, was present and ready to make flutes with their hollow bones and arcs with their tendons. The present article intends to study the elements of tragic in Sachs’ poetry with especial focus on those poems-choirs, and, then, open the discussion about the ethic responsibility and esthetic freedom within the processing of the extreme experience of Shoah.