On 19 January 2009, lyricist Emma Kann died in Konstanz at the age of 94.
Born on 25 May 1914 in Frankfurt am Main, where she also grew up, Emma Kann emigrated to England after obtaining her university matriculation qualification in 1933; here she lived in Brighton and London. She left England in 1936 and first went to Antwerp, where she had found employment. “At Christmas 1936, on my way to visit my mother in Frankfurt, I was refused entry at the German-Belgian border despite having a valid passport. The official showed me my name on the list he had to follow. In 1937, my German passport was no longer renewed. [...] That meant I had to escape before the German army got to Antwerp.” (Emma Kann: Meine Erinnerungen an das Lager Gurs [My Memories of the Camp in Gurs]. In: Exil, XV (1995), 2, p. 25).
Emma Kann’s emigration to France began with four weeks of internment in the camp at Gurs in the Pyrenees. Many of her poems relate to this period. She describes her experiences in her memories of the camp in Gurs: “The conditions were very primitive. Our îlot contained around 25 large wooden barracks that accommodated 60 women. We slept or sat on straw sacks on the wooden floor of the barracks. [...] I sometimes felt extremely hungry and had to try to conserve my energy. But I thought that this was perhaps unavoidable in the turmoil of war and that far worse things were happening in France at that time.” (Exil, XV (1995), 2, p. 26).
Nach ihrer Entlassung aus dem Frauenlager Gurs blieb Emma Kann bis 1942 in Frankreich und emigrierte dann über Casablanca nach Havanna, Kuba, wo sie als Lehrerin für Englisch Beschäftigung fand. Von dort ging sie 1945 in die Vereinigten Staaten und lebte bis 1981 in New York. Dort widmete sie sich aktiv dem Schreiben von Gedichten, belegte Kurse an der New School for Social Research und dem Poetry Center, u.a. unter der Leitung von Louise Bogan und W.H. Auden.
After being released from the women's camp in Gurs, Emma Kann remained in France until 1942 then emigrated via Casablanca to Havana, Cuba, where she found work as an English teacher. In 1945, she moved on to the United States and lived in New York until 1981. Here she actively devoted herself to writing poems, besides taking courses at the New School for Social Research and the Poetry Center, directed for example by Louise Bogan and W.H. Auden. Emma Kann, who had become blind in 1969, returned to Germany at the beginning of the 1980s. This change of location also marked her return to the German language. In 1981, Emma Kann resumed writing poems and essays in German, a language that she had abandoned in 1948 to write in English, the language of her world of experience. Her passion for literature had been shaped at her parental home; even as a child, she had spent a lot of time reading and written her first poems. Emma Kann’s poems and essays dealt with her emigration and the milestones of her life; however, her definition of the main theme of her lyrics was a sweeping one: “If he has the time, the reader will often have very similar feelings but perhaps be unable to put them into words; he will then find that the poem expresses what he himself is feeling. This means that the poem is only partly composed by the author and that the reader completes it. The reader has to be able to project something into it that I may not have deliberately included. [...] After all, a poem encompasses many levels.” (Ottmar Ette: Was über die Zeit hinausgeht. Interview mit der Lyrikerin Emma Kann [What goes beyond time. An interview with lyricist Emma Kann]. In: Exil, VIII (1993), 2, p. 39f.)
Emma Kann began successively transferring her pre-mortem estate to the German Exile Archive 1933–1945 at the German National Library back in 1991. These documents include poems, autobiographical writings, essays on various subjects, diaries and personal documents that came into being in England, Belgium, Havana, New York and Germany. All of these testify to the various milestones of her life.
Erinnerungssturm
Sonett
Aus meinem Vorrat der Erinnerungen
Hob sich ein Wirbelsturm der schönen Stunden.
Am Rand des Schlafs hab ich mich ganz erfüllt
Von diesem Reichtum meiner Zeit empfunden.
Die bösen Tage haben andre Gaben
Der Wiederkehr. Heute ließ mein Hirn dem Glück
Die Wege offen. Ein geliebtes Wesen,
Ein schöner Anblick kam zu mir zurück.
Ich fühle mich, als ob ich Flügel hätte,
Vom Wirbelsturm der Freude straff geschwellt,
Dem Sturm, der mich von allen Seiten trifft,
Mich vorwärts trägt, mir keine Fragen stellt.
Ich war so reich, ich war so unversehrt.
Das war die Mühe eines Lebens wert.
Emma Kann, April 1994
