Else Lasker-Schüler also narrowly escaped the Nazis to Israel, but continued to write in German.
Image: ullstein bild – ullstein bild
Many German-speaking Jews went to Israel, but German was frowned upon there after the Shoah. In the circle of poets Lyris they remained loyal to him.
Manfred Winkler, born in 1922 in Romanian Bukovina, was a poet, translator, painter and sculptor. Two years younger than Paul Celan, he still found his way to Israel, unlike him. And there he gave the rare example of a poet who was also successful in Hebrew, who had published his first German-language publications in Romania in the 1950s and later also in Germany. Winkler learned Hebrew after arriving in Israel in 1959 as an “illiterate”, but after only a few months he wrote his first poem in the new language, published his first sensational volume of poetry a few years later and later received the Prime Minister’s Grand Prize for his Hebrew poetry .
A decisive impetus for Winkler to continue writing poetry in his native German after he emigrated from Romania to Israel was his encounter with a group of German-speaking poets who had cultivated the language of childhood for decades. Lyris – as the loose group called itself – presented the unusual and not always comfy example of a linguistic assertion by German in Israel.
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