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Hilde Domin

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Hilde Domin (27 July 1909 – 22 February 2006), whose real name was Hilde Palm, was a German lyric poet and writer. She was amongst the most important German-language poets of her time.

Contents

Biography

She was born in 1909 in Cologne as Hilde Löwenstein, the daughter of a German Jewish lawyer (her year of birth has been erroneously reported as 1912). Between 1929 and 1932 she studied at the universities in Heidelberg, Cologne and Bonn, and at the Humboldt University of Berlin. She initially read law, and later changed her specialism to economics, social sciences and philosophy. Among her teachers were Karl Jaspers and Karl Mannheim.

The political situation in Nazi Germany prompted her to emigrate to Rome in 1932 with her friend Erwin Walter Palm, a student of archeology and writer. In 1935 she received a doctorate in political sciences in Florence. From 1935 to 1939 she worked as a language teacher in Rome. She married Palm in 1936.

In 1939 the couple went to England where she worked as language teacher at St Aldyn’s College, before they emigrated in 1940 to the Dominican Republic, where they lived for 14 years. In Santo Domingo she worked as a translator, lecturer at the University of Santo Domingo, and as a photographer of architecture. She began to write in 1951, after the death of her mother, under the pseudonym Hilde Domin, a name inspired by the city in which she was living.

Some years after the end of World war II, in 1954, she and her husband returned to Germany. Domin lived as a writer in Heidelberg from 1961 until her death.

She was a close friend of Nelly Sachs, her lyric colleague living in Stockholm, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966. From 1960 to 1967 they had a correspondence that was almost sisterly in intensity. She was also a friend of Hans-Georg Gadamer.

In 1968, she presented Das zweite Paradies (The second Paradise), her first volume of prose, and a critical love story dealing with the experience of exile and home.

Her poems are rarely metaphorical, completely unpathetic and of a simple vocabulary that in its simplicity meets magic, but the more frequently evoking and appealing; hence poems, which are easily accessible to a wide range of readers, and not confined to specialist audiences. Her output also included some pieces on literature theory.

In an interview in 1986 she was asked the question how much courage a writer needed. "A writer needs three types of courage. To be himself/herself. The courage not to lie and to misrepresent and skew, to call things by their right names. And thirdly, to believe in the open mindedness and forthrightness of the others."

Her husband died in 1988. The anthology of poetry "Der Baum blüht trotzdem" (The Tree blossoms nevertheless) which was published in 1999, is her personal farewell. In one of her late poems she encourages us not to become tired. We are rather, as she writes, called to long for "the miracle/quietly/like a bird/the hand reaching out".

She continued to read her poems to audiences until 2006. She died in Heidelberg, a "grande dame" of German verse, aged 96, on February 22 2006.

Books

Her work has been translated into more than 21 languages.

Awards and prizes

For her work Hilde Domin has been awarded a wide range of prizes including:

Readings and lectures

References

Special Collections & Archives

External links

 

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