Translation on the Move: Place, Language, and the Jewish Body in Rose Ausländer’s Poetry

Abstract

Scholarly work on Rose Ausländer tends to focus too much on her biography, a gendered phenomenon closely linked to trivialization of the female poet. This dissertation presents a flexible framework of three main approaches which allow for an eclectic set of interpretations that are more suitable to Ausländer’s diverse body of work than any single approach. The three themes are (1) critical representations of the home city and empire, (2) movement in and among languages, and (3) the role of the body. The coexistence of traumatic and nostalgic memory manifests in all three categories, calling Ausländer’s work into focus not only as a particular, complex oeuvre, but also as a test case for reading German-Jewish literature.