Rose Ausländer (born Rosalie Beatrice Scherzer; May 11, 1901 – January 3, 1988) was a Jewish poet writing in German and English. Born in Czernowitz in the Bukovina, she lived through its tumultuous history of belonging to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Kingdom of Romania, and eventually the Soviet Union. Rose Ausländer spent her life in several countries: Austria-Hungary, Romania, the United States, and West Germany.
Biography
Early life and education, 1901–1920
Rose Ausländer was born in Czernowitz, Bukovina (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine), to a German-speaking Jewish family. At the time Czernowitz was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Her father Sigmund (Süssi) Scherzer (1871–1920) was from a small town near Czernowitz, and her mother Kathi Etie Rifke Binder (1873–1947) was born in Czernowitz to a German-speaking family. From 1907, she went to school in Czernowitz. In 1916, her family fled the Imperial Russian Army to Vienna but returned to Czernowitz in 1920, which had become part of the Kingdom of Romania and was known as Cernăuți after 1918.
In 1919, she began studying literature and philosophy in Cernăuți. At this time, she developed a lifelong interest in the philosopher Constantin Brunner. After her father died in 1920 she left university.
Minneapolis & New York, 1921–1927
In 1921, she immigrated to the United States with her university friend, and future husband, Ignaz Ausländer. In Minneapolis, she worked as an editor for the German language newspaper Westlicher Herold and was a collaborator of the anthology Amerika-Herold-Kalender, in which she published her first poems. In 1922, she moved with Ausländer to New York City, where they were married on October 19, 1923. She separated from Ausländer three years later aged 25, but kept his last name. She became an American citizen in 1926.
In the cycle of poems New York (1926–27), the expressionism of her early work yields to a cool-controlled language of Neue Sachlichkeit. Her interest in the ideas of Baruch Spinoza inspired philosopher Constantin Brunner, next to Plato, Sigmund Freud and others is a topic of later essays, that he disappeared. 4 In the spring of 1944, the Bukowina became part of the Soviet Union. Ausländer worked in the Cernăuți city library until September 1944. From 1953 to 1961, she made a living by working as a foreign correspondent at a shipping company in New York, and obtained US citizenship again in 1948.
While attending the New York City Writer's Conference at Wagner College, Staten Island, Ausländer met poet Marianne Moore. This was the beginning of a friendship documented in several letters, in which Moore advised Ausländer on her writing and finally encouraged her to return to writing poetry in German. Several of Ausländer's English poems are dedicated to Moore.
In 1957, she met Paul Celan in Paris again, with whom she discussed modern poetry, poem and shoah. She returned to her mother tongue.
Here she created her expansive late work in rapid sequence and several major pushes. After an accident she moved in the Nelly Sachs Home for the elderly starting in 1972.