“Es kehrt niemand heil zu seinem Gott zurück—”: Biblical Archetypes as Representational Devices in the Poetry of Nelly Sachs

No restitution for Job, no last‐minute divine intervention: Nelly Sachs's refusal to impose any kind of redemptive framework on the suffering of the Holocaust is the subject of this article. Her use of Biblical archetypes can be considered a highly significant representational device in her œuvre since, contrary to the claims made in much existing Sachs scholarship, they serve as an effective means of refuting any redemptive or religious, “sense‐making” framework for the horrors of Auschwitz. This is significant given the frequent references to Sachs as a supposedly “redemptive poet,” a gravely erroneous claim that has found many willing proponents in critical discourse, to the detriment of what is in fact an absolute denunciation of any such rationalizing schema.