Photograph: Hilde Domin’s apartment in Rome, January 1937
Photograph: Hilde Domin’s apartment in Rome, January 1937
Die meisten Wohnungen in meinem Leben waren Fluchtwohnungen, Zufluchtwohnungen, oder verwandelten sich plötzlich, aus scheinbar ganz normalen Behausungen. Das steckt einem in den Knochen ein Leben lang.
[Most of the apartments in my life were places of escape or refuge, or they were suddenly transformed from being apparently normal accommodation into something quite different. That feeling stays in your bones for the rest of your life. (ed. trans.)]
Hilde Domin: Meine Wohnungen – „Mis moradas“, 1974
Home and exile are the great themes of Hilde Domin’s poetry. She and her husband Erwin Walter Palm found temporary homes in three different countries while fleeing Nazi persecution. In 1974 she wrote about the apartments in which she had lived. The first abode she and her husband rented for themselves in Rome, where the couple lived from 1937 until they fled Italy in 1939, is mentioned in this work. The world-famous Italian actress Eleonora Duse is thought to have once lived in the same space on the first floor. The couple bought the furniture at flea markets and they had their books sent to them from Germany. The building in the Via Monte Tarpeo no longer exists – it was torn down after they moved out.
Her feelings looking back at this time are ambivalent. “Yes, it’s true that we had happy moments there. And no, that’s not a crazy thing to say, it was a happy time, and yet we were relentlessly shocked and driven away from it. Looked at objectively, from outside, it was an awful time. In terms of politics and the economy. But that’s only from outside. Only objectively.” (ed. trans.)
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