Articles

Gertrude Stein taunts Hitler in 1934 and 1945

(Sieg heil, sieg heil, right in der Fuehrer's face.)

On May 6, 1934, The New York Times published an interview by Lansing Warren, entitled “Gertrude Stein Views Life and Politics.” The full piece is available online at the Times site.  A pdf of the article, as it appeared in the paper, in available here (useful given that the OCR version on the Times site has a few minor errors).

Gertrude Stein: A complex itinerary, 1940–1944

A version of this paper by Edward Burns, titled “So I Went on Looking at Pictures: Gertrude Stein’s Last Decade,” was delivered as part of Sundays at the Met, April 29, 2012, in conjunction with the exhibition The Steins Collect.


How did two Jewish lesbian women manage to survive in France during the Second World War, particularly after the line of demarcation ended in November 1942 and the Vichy government began to follow the stricter laws enacted by the Nazi government in Paris? How, too, did a well-known collection of modern art, with masterpieces by Picasso, Juan Gris, and Cézanne escape looting to survive intact during the occupation of Paris? Much has been made in recent years about Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas remaining in France during World War II. Their failure to return to the United States in 1939, and the discovery that Stein translated and wrote an introduction to a book of speeches by Marshal Pétain, has raised questions about her politics. Her failure to identify herself in her writings as Jewish has also entered the conversation.

Poetic representations of the holocaust

Poetic engagements with the Holocaust must overcome the argument that language cannot portray the inhumanity of the Nazis’ actions. Poetry must challenge its traditionally humanist pose in order to respond to the dehumanizing Shoah. Poetry can either concentrate on the highly personal — which runs the risk of reducing the scale of the events — touching the reader with the retelling of individual testimony, or it can try and reform language to find a new means of expressing the inexpressible.

Heimrad Bäcker (1925–2003) renounced his former membership of the Hitler Youth and the Nazi Party after World War II. He spent the remainder of his life as a poet, editor,

Never without

On Diane Ward

The Los Angeles River. Photo by Diane Ward.

Never without (or) a sensible world, a sentence (or) here
we move in constant this (or) so life is a word

Basics of definition

The Hubble Space Telescope drifts over the Earth, 2009. Image courtesy of NASA.

Fisher: OK, I understand what is being asked and pretend that I no longer wonder what it is that a poem is and I’m guessing that we don’t all agree about this. It is clear to me that I don’t have a clue.

I think that we might as well agree what the reading limits are. What is being asked for in a selection, 5 or 10 pages each or 1,500 or 3,000 words?