Rose Ausländer (1901–1988)

Rose Ausländer was born Rosalie Scherzer to a German-speaking Jewish family in Czernowitz, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, present-day Chernivtsi, Ukraine. She began writing poetry as a child. She went to high school partly in Vienna and studied literature and philosophy at the university in Czernowitz. In 1920, she emigrated to the USA together with Ignaz Ausländer, whom she married in 1923; after they separated three years later, she kept the surname. She worked as assistant editor of the magazine Westlicher Herold and published her first poems during this time. In New York City in 1926, she was a co-founder of the group of intellectuals, politicians, and artists know as the Constantin Brunner Circle. She returned to her hometown in 1931 and published poems in newspapers, magazines, and anthologies, while working as a journalist, translator and English teacher. She lost her citizenship in 1934 because she had been out of the USA for more than three years. She went to live mainly in Bucharest, working at a chemical factory. In 1939, her first collected volume of poetry, Der Regenbogen (The Rainbow) was published. During World War II, she was forced into the Jewish ghetto at Czernowitz, and then spent a year in hiding. She survived to be liberated by the Red Army in 1944. After the war, she returned to Bucharest, where she befriended the poets Paul Celan and Immanuel Weissglas, and then went back to New York, where she worked as a translator and foreign correspondent. She traveled widely in western Europe and eventually decided to live in West Germany. Her second book, Blinder Sommer (Blind Summer), appeared in 1965, and several volumes were published posthumously.