Marie Luise Kaschnitz: "the poetess of ruins"

Abstract

Writing her lyrics written during WW II and in the first decade after its end about her personal experiences, the German writer Marie Luise Kaschnitz (1901- 1974) has been proclaimed "the poetess of ruins". However, although she wrote about ruins and hunger, defeated man and his lost homeland, she managed to transpose into her lyrics almost untransferable contents, attempting to exchange her contemporary chaos with a desire for a new existence which would be based on spirit and goodness. Through basic motifs such as childhood, homeland, love, nature and death she compared the bygone idyllic time with the present destruction. On the symbolic level she created oppositions with the male-female relationships and she transformed the desert of the ruins into patience and hope for the renewal of ethical values after the war. With her poems she directed the perception of man at what is important, at man's magic possibilities but also at the mortal dangers to his being.