Beziehung und Bruch in der Poetik Gertrud Kolmars

Using Gertrud Kolmar’s (1894-1943) complex relationship to her German-Jewish origins as a point of departure, this study explores the hidden discursive structures in her poetry. The focus is on the poem “Garden in Summer” from her 1937 cycle of poems titled WELTEN (WORLDS). A detailed analysis of transtextual traces and their discursive interpolation reveals the poem as a kaleidoscope of scenarios of cultural, emotional, and spiritual encounter and permeation between Germanness and Jewishness within the scope of a melancholic “endgame.”