“Anbeten Will Ich Dich, Unverstandener!”: On the Poet-God Relationship in Hedwig Caspari’s Poetry

Abstract

Hartmut Vollmer (1993) and Barbara Wright (2005) argue that women Expressionist poets have been largely neglected and forgotten. The article seeks to make a modest contribution towards remedying this scholarly lacuna by examining Hedwig Caspari’s poetry, while focusing on the relationship between Poet and God as reflected in her poetry. Caspari (1882–1922) was a German-Jewish poet who lived and worked in Berlin. During her lifetime, she published two books—a play entitled Salomos Abfall (1920) and a volume of poetry entitled Elohim (1919). Like her play, most of her poetry deals with biblical themes. Caspari’s multifaceted relationship with God informs her poetry from the earliest to the latest poems. This article wishes to expose Caspari’s unique fe/male voice, showing her stance as a “prophet,” “lover,” and “Psalmist”, and attempts to explain why as a modernist poet she decided to write spiritual poetry.