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Reading Poetry by: Debora Vogel

Reading
Talk
Polnisches Institut Berlin
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Please note the event will be held in German.

Debora Vogel (born 1920 in Burshtyn — then part of Austria-Hungary — and murdered in 1942 in the ghetto of Lviv) came from an enlightened Jewish family of publishers, writers, lawyers, and translators. A cosmopolitan by nature, she felt equally at home in Berlin, Paris, New York City, Vienna, and Stockholm. She spoke Polish and German from childhood, learned French and Latin early on, and later — during her studies — Yiddish, a language that would become the medium of her art.

From Lviv, where she worked artistically, she established contacts with the Krakow avant-gardists, with Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz and Bruno Schulz, whose patron she became and in whose shadow she still unjustly remains. In her short and eventful life, violently cut short by the fascists, Vogel was driven by the idea of constructivism. Trained in the philosophies of Kant and Hegel, on whom she completed her doctorate, she was always concerned with the interrelation between language acquisition and perception of reality.

Using the example of Chagall’s painting (although Cézanne might have been the happier choice in her case), she articulated her ideal of the essential unity of content and form, always privileging idea over matter. In her early cubist-constructivist poems, which appeared from the mid-1920s, she invented a modern visual language deeply shaped by technology, industry, and economy. A reality mounted on the surface emerged, broken down into geometric basic forms such as ellipse, circle, and rectangle. Urban gray and the rhythm of machines predominated. The word took on the function of brushstroke and color. Complexity and abundance gave way to pure geometry. The highest goal, the ideal: the gray ascetic line.

In her work, Vogel pursued exactly what other writers tend to avoid: absolute monotony. Her poems are cross-sections, still lifes of glass or shivering cold. Her poetry is a brittle beauty of a quiet radicalism unparalleled elsewhere. Individual lines move close to etching, incised line by line with a burin into “the gray zinc plate of the world.” And yet in her later poems — she wrote legends, drinking songs and penny‑dime magazine–inspired “trash ballads” — a great delicacy infused into the verses.

A joint event by Haus für Poesie and Polnisches Institut Berlin

In reading & conversation Anna Maja Misiak, Tomasz Rózycki
Moderation Matthias Weichelt