Stella Rotenberg: a Viennese Poet in Leeds by Eoin Bourke After Hitler annexed Austria in March 1938 and the Viennese, otherwise known for their good-humoured nonchalance, turned into enthusiastic Nazis overnight and severely harassed their Jewish fellow-citizens (the story is told stirringly in George Clare's Last Waltz in Vienna), several well-known Austrian writers took flight to England. Most of them, as for instance Erich Fried, Theodor Kramer and Hermynia Zur Mühlen, settled in London where they continued writing in their native language. One of them, the medical student Stella Siegmann, who had been expelled from Vienna University for being Jewish, applied for a visa to Britain and found employment as a trainee nurse in a psychiatric clinic in Colchester, Essex. As she was to discover after the war, her entire family except for one brother perished in the Holocaust: On the 20th of May 1942, my parents were transported from Vienna to Poland with the destination Izbica near Sobibor. On the way there they are thought to have been taken out of the train and shot dead in a wood. But it is also possible that my mother was murdered in Auschwitz. Stella married the medical student Wolf Rotenberg, a former companion from Vienna, and after he joined the British Army she moved with him to various garrison towns around Britain. In 1948 they settled in Leeds, where Stella has lived ever since. Thus she missed out on the encouragement of young artistic voices and the vibrant cultural activities associated with the Austrian Centre in London and wrote for most of her life in complete isolation. It was to take thirty-two years after she began writing in 1940 for her first volume of poetry to appear in Tel Aviv. A German and two Austrian volumes were to follow in the 1980s and 1990s, and it is only now in her advanced years that she has begun to receive the attention her extraordinary work deserves. Among other honours she was made the first-ever recipient of the recently created Theodor Kramer Prize in 2001. The fact that she had no audience for so long lends her writing a quality of searing honesty and unaffectedness. The syntax is unembellished, the style economical and lapidary. Her breakthrough to poetry was not a response to the promptings of some muse, but rather a personal strategy of survival in the face of involuntary exile and the unbearable quandaries inflicted upon her by the Shoah: AUSCHWITZ The unspeakable, how can I speak it? The unthinkable, how can I think it? The ungraspable, how can I grasp it? The inhuman, how can I find it in me? How indeed could one ever grasp why a twentieth century Central European regime would want to exterminate her beloved mother Regine Siegmann simply because she was Jewish? 'When I say "mother"', she once explained, 'I mean all innocent people. To kill my mother was like murdering a child, for she was innocent.' As in much post-Holocaust literature the tormented question of deus absconditus crops up: TRANSPORT TO TREBLINKA When you were torn from your last sleep, then locked up in trains, blind to the sunshine, the rains; when you were stripped of your clothes, and your hair, why didn't God care? A second reason why she felt compelled to write was to preserve the memory, even if only for herself, of the many nameless victims whom the Nazis wantonly killed: BIOGRAPHY Born in wartime in Vienna, died in wartime on the long march to Minsk, when beaten by an SS-man from Vienna because she couldn't walk any faster. She left behind no name remains nothing but a small cry. Stella's own mother met a similar fate. And where there is no certainty as to what exactly happened and no burial ground, bereavement cannot find closure. Stella Rotenberg's entire oeuvre is, in a sense, an unceasing mourning. A third reason was the attempt to preserve her native language as a substitute for her lost homeland and as a commemoration of the cadences of her mother's old-world Viennese, as well as to rescue Austrian German from the linguistic pollution foisted upon it by the Nazis: ON WRITING VERSE My mother had a treasure stored. A rich and precious store of words. In which she dipped, with which she filled my hands and eyes and ears; she quenched my thirst, I hungered not; she spoon-fed me sweet balsam. Now, onto the wound her murderers inflicted, I pour her balm, her words drop by drop. Don't ask is there enough. Listen, hear me? mute now. Her greatest concern was to preserve the language she associated with the Vienna of her untroubled youth and with the great authors whose novels she had devoured as a young girl (Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann among many others). Although she could not brook the idea of returning to live among her fellow-Austrians, referring to them as 'Hitler's bootlickers', she wrote in 1962 that she would like to return just one more time to the places of her childhood and '…go back / through the jaws of hell / just to hear the sound / of my mother tongue / again.' To keep that last thread to her past intact, she cultivated German assiduously throughout her years of exile. A recollection of when she was nine years old illustrates how hyper-sensitive she was in this regard. She experienced how a friend of her father's who had emigrated to Canada had difficulties in expressing himself when visiting their home and conversing in German: While he spoke, I noticed with utter amazement that he often faltered, seemed to search for words and ultimately applied the wrong one. I was gripped by pain and anguish - he had forgotten his own language… [After arriving in Britain] I spent many nights thinking about this incident and took it upon myself not to have any more to do with the English language than was absolutely necessary in the absurd hope that the less English I learned, the more German I would retain… I have already spent two-thirds of my life in Great Britain. It is a beautiful country, a country to which I owe my life. The fact that I don't feel at home here is my fault. I am nowhere at home. It is not a locality that I lost but rather a phase of development - and a generation. The abiding sense of severence and liminality that pervades her work is well conveyed in the hauntingly dream-like poem Astray, in which her favourite author Kafka seems to have left his imprint: I have strayed into the wrong stair. Opened the wrong door. Now I stand stand at a window and look across at a room, from which from time to time the sound and maybe a shimmer of my relations coming and going reach me in the dead of night. In the 1980s Stella turned to prose, resulting in a collection of twelve short prose pieces under the title Ungewissen Ursprungs (Of Uncertain Origin) which was brought out in Vienna in 1997 (published by Theodor Kramer Gesellschaft). They reflect Stella's lifelong fascination with the folktale and are set in an unnamed village in the Austrian countryside. The theme of Shoah has been superseded. However, as in so many of her poems, here, too, a mother-figure appears in each of the stories. They all begin with the same formula: 'When my mother was a little girl…', 'When my mother was a child…', 'When my mother was small…', 'When my mother was young…'. The mother recalls older people in turn recalling figures from their past. By means of this narrative device the reader is carried back through layers of memory to times more redolent of the Austro-Hungarian Empire than of the ugly world from which Stella was forced to escape. Even if it is a time with cruelties of its own, they are never as inconceivable as the savagery of the Nazi period. But though the stories treat more felicitous times, the recurrence of the words 'my mother' is striking. One feels oneself reading them as the author's attempt to reclaim a mother-figure with a rightful place in Austrian society and a normal past, even an invented one, from the indignity of imposed oblivion. The twelve texts are like modest but exquisitely carved memorial slabs in an imaginary garden of remembrance where the mother can at last find repose. Eoin Bourke dedicated his latest book, The Austrian Anschluss in History and Literature (Galway: Arlen House, 2000), to the poet Stella Rotenberg. He is Emeritus Professor of German at the National University of Ireland, Galway. The translations quoted here are from Stella Rotenberg: Shards, translated by Donal McLaughlin & Stephen Richardson (Edinburgh Review, 2003).