Helga Grimm and Her Poetry
In June 2011 I
was rummaging around in my mind for memories from my childhood, and the name
Helga Grimm came to the surface.
Helga was a poet
and a friend of my mother’s in the 1950s. How they met I have no idea, but I do
know that they had an active correspondence, and I remember my mother remarking
whenever one of Helga’s poems was printed in a local newspaper. And in 1955 and
1956, when I was shipped off to Camp Seneca Hunt, in the Poconos (we lived in
Philadelphia), my mother shipped her Plymouth off to the tiny village of Georgenborn, Germany, where she spent the summers with
Helga and her partner Ingeborg Pott.
That
Plymouth was
the object of some wonderment in the village, where young boys practicing their
English decided it was pronounced “ply mouth.” One of those boys, my mother
told me, was killed when he stepped on an unexploded landmine in the woods. Ingeborg was a
masseuse in the nearby spa of Schlangenbad.
I met Helga and
Ingeborg several times. Once, I think, was in 1951-52, when my parents returned
to Germany
to press their case for reparations (I would have been about five), and then
later when I must have been 11 or 12. They had two dogs, Jockel (a dachshund)
and Jeppo (of indeterminate breed). Ingeborg had an Isetta, and I drove with her once to Schlangenbad.
Their tiny house was on the main road; it was the first place I ever saw those
records by Bach in the sleeve that read Das
alte Werk. There was a
little garden behind the house that always smelled of growing things and good
dirt. They were probably just scraping by, because I
know that my mother prevailed on my father to pay for their coal over
several winters.
Beyond that I
knew nothing, and so I had no idea what to expect when I went looking for Helga
on the Internet: “helga grimm” gedichte. One of the hits
that came up -- there weren’t many -- was to an anthology of poems called Neue deutsche Gedichte,
and intriguingly subtitled “Band III der Dokumente des anderen Deutschland”
– Volume III of documents of the Other Germany. It was published in 1946
by Verlag Friedrich Krause, in New York, undoubtedly an exile press. I
requested it through interlibrary loan. The Other Germany indeed! What I found when
the book arrived left me stunned.
Written in the
rhythms and rhymes of folk songs, Helga’s poems lure you in innocently enough –
until you realize that under the sometimes child-like singsong their subject is
violence and murder. She used well-worn German literary conventions against themselves.
The nine poems document Helga's
experiences and observations of daily life under Nazism. They were her form
of resistance, and in some respects they are more successful as witnessings than as poetry. From what I read in Renate Wiggershaus’s
Frauen unterm Nationalsozialismus [Women under National Socialism], she actively helped Jews where she could.
Below is a
section of the foreword to Helga’s poems by the anthologist Hellmut
Lehmann-Haupt. On the next page are her poems along with my
inadequate literal translations. Whatever my skill as a translator, it does not extend to emulating rhythms and rhyme patterns. I will continue to refine the translations as I can.
The beauty of Helga Grimm’s poems is of a
completely different order. It is much simpler and of a more common touch; I
would almost say ballad-like. Here we find expressions of everyday life in the
immediate description of the events and fates of individual human beings. We
should not, however, be fooled by the simplicity and ingenuousness of her
story-telling. There is far more experience and understanding of poetic effect
in these poems than one might think on first reading. But more important is the honesty of the poems’ compassion and the power of
their rage at the violation of innocent victims. The poems of Helga Grimm are
genuine documents of experience; they were created as an immediate response of
a feeling human being to the ruthless brutality of daily life in the Third
Reich. They are diary entries in the form of poems. Some of the people in these
poems were friends whose fate she witnessed and whom she tried to help bear
their lot. Others were probably nameless victims whose sufferings she witnessed
purely by chance.
Helga Grimm is a young person who lives
quietly and withdrawn in Schlangenbad, in the Taunus,
from where she brought her poems to us, in Wiesbaden. The selection printed in this
volume is taken from a larger collection that she hopes to have published by a
licensed German publisher in the American Zone. Perhaps by the time these lines
appear in print, her plan will have been realized. The poems deserve to be read
both in Germany and abroad.
It
is my intention to make that possible.
I
would be grateful for any further information about Helga Grimm (especially from relatives or people who might have known her), the other
poems mentioned in the foreword above, and about her work
in general. The little that I do know about her comes from a brief bio in An den Wind geschrieben (1961, ed. Manfred Schlösser): Helga was born in Münster, on May 11, 1914. She attended acting school in Münster and Berlin. During the war she was sentenced to forced labor, presumably for helping others. The nine poems included here were apparently her first published work.