Writing Against the Silence: Female Poets in Postwar Spain and West Germany

The article takes a comparative approach to the writing of female poets in postwar Spain and West Germany, focusing on the ways in which the semantics of silence and writing as an explicit breaking of the silence are reflected within their literary production. The selected writers are the Spanish poets Carmen Conde, Acacia Uceta, and Ángela Figuera, and the German poets Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Hilde Domin, and Nelly Sachs. These authors each had unique experiences in the war and postwar periods—marked by censorship, exile, and return, but also by (late) public recognition.