Rose Ausländer
(born 11.05.1901 in Chernovtsy, Austro-Hungary; died 03.01.1988 in Düsseldorf), poet
Rose Ausländer, born Scherzer, fled with her parents in the First World War to Budapest and then on to Vienna, where she attended the business school. She then returned to Chernovtsy, now part of Romania, where she studied literature and philosophy. In 1921 she emigrated to the USA. There, she published her first poetry in the America Herold calendar, of which she was the editor. In 1931 she returned to Chernovtsy, publishing her first poetry anthology in 1939, Der Regenbogen (The Rainbow), which was to be followed by several more. Rose Ausländer had to spend the years between 1941 and 1944 with her mother and brother in the Chernovtsy ghetto, where she hid in a cellar to survive. In 1946 she emigrated to the USA again, where she was granted American citizenship in 1948. In 1965 she came back to Germany to live in Düsseldorf, spending the final ten years until her death in a nursing home run by the Jewish community. She received several high-profile awards for her life works, which comprise more than 3000 poems dealing with themes such as homeland, childhood, Judaism, Shoa, love and death. They include the Grand Prize for Literature of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, the Federal Cross of Merit and the Evangelischer Buchpreis (i.e. Protestant Church Book Prize).