Rose Auslaender, the 73-year-old Jewish poet whose work has been praised for its “shorthand of fear,” its shaping of language to reflect the fear that the “annihilation madness” of the Third Reich may recur, was the winner of the 1980 Roswitha Memorial Medal.
The award is presented by the city of Bad Gandersheim in Lower Saxony to commemorate the first woman author in the German language, Roswitho von Gandersheim, who wrote between the years 960 and 973.
Auslaender was born in 1907 in Austria-Hungary. During the Nazi period she lived in the United States and returned to West Germany in 1965. Since then she has lived in a Jewish old age home in Duesseldorf. Illness prevented her from accepting the prize in person.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
