SOURCE: "Nelly Sachs," in Colloquia Germanica, Vol. 10, April, 1976–77, pp. 316-25.

In the following essay, Langer discusses Sachs's treatment of divine and human justice in her writings.

One of the last poems Nelly Sachs wrote before her death is called "Teile dich Nacht" (the name also given to her last volume of poems by its editor). Her first collection of verse was called In den Wohnungen des Todes. It should come as no surprise to us that the two words used most often in her poems, according to the count of a diligent scholar, are "Tod" and "Nacht". For in the twentieth century, we have lived in the habitations of death as no previous generation has been compelled to, and no matter how we "divide" night in our search for greater light, we only seem to encounter the memory of more corpses. "Death" and "night" are not merely metaphors...