Martin Gumpert’s poem intersperses his native language and the foreign language of this “desperate emigrant”, neither of which was any longer adequate to express what he had to say. If the emigrant holds on tightly to his native tongue in his foreign location, he remains unheard. And yet if he uses the new language, he finds himself regressing to the expressive capabilities of a child.

The writer and doctor Martin Gumpert left Berlin in 1936 to live in exile in New York, where he opened a dermatological surgery. He published from then on in both languages; poetry and literary prose in German, medical and journalistic texts in English. Like the author Richard A. Bermann (alias Arnold Höllriegel), to whom the poem is dedicated, Gumpert spent time in the summer of 1939 at the Yaddo artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs. He had been invited there at the recommendation of Erika Mann. While Bermann was there to work on his autobiography Die Fahrt auf dem Katarakt,the dedicated physician Gumpert was working on his book Heil Hunger! Health under Hitler. He intended with this work to inform the public at large about the real meaning of the Nazi propaganda of “Volksgesundheit” (The People’s Health), which he succeeded in doing. The book was released in the USA and in Great Britain in 1940.