Hilde Domin

Lyric poet, Writer
1909 (Cologne)–2006 (Heidelberg)

She dedicated the poem Exil (Exile) to her father, which is about the loss of language: "The dying mouth / struggles / with the effort of the word / correctly spoken / in a strange / language." Hilde Domin turned to lyricism late in life, after 20 years in emigration. In 1932 the Jewish daughter from a bourgeois family and her future husband Erwin Walter Palm, an archeologist, went to Italy. However, when Germany became a deadly threat in 1939, they left for England and finally to Santo Domingo. It was there that she experienced "her second birth" in 1951 as poet. She returned home to Germany in 1954 with her husband. Her poetry, which deals with the indestructibleness of humanity in a quietly haunting, powerful way, was met with overwhelming resonance.

Close