„Auch hier brannte der Strauch“ – Strategien der Anspielung und Bilderverbot in Rose Ausländers Malergedichten

Abstract

The so-called painter-poems by Rose Ausländer refer to the Old Testament prohibition of images. Not only God, but also the Shoah and the experience of being exiled are included in the ban on representation. They are referred to in allusions which are encoded in multiple ways. Ausländer largely follows the Jewish ban on the image, to the extent that she transfers it into her own poetology. The poems obey it by avoiding any kind of verbal representation, replacing mimesis by the poetics of allusion. Reflecting on the aesthetics of modernist art at the beginning of the twentieth century, the poet practises what Imdahl calls „seeing seeing“ that transcends representation and focuses on what is virtually present in paintings. The poetics of allusion, which Ausländers finds in modernist art, introduces ambiguity and thus offers the possibility to articulate the unsayable.