The present Doodle, delineated by Hamburg-based guest artist Ramona Ring, celebrates the German-Jewish poet Mascha Kaléko, whose sharp sonnets and chansons earned her outstanding recognition among the artistic vanguard in 1930s Berlin. On this day in 1974, Kaléko held her last perusing in Berlin’s America Memorial Library.
Mascha Kaléko was conceived Golda Malka Aufen in 1907 in Schidlow, Galicia, in what is today southern Poland. With the flare-up of World War I, she and her family fled the nation for Germany and in the long run made another home in Berlin in 1918.
As an adolescent, she started to compose verse, and inside quite a long while, she accomplished a degree of big name as papers started distributing her work all through the capital. In Kaléko’s sonnet “Das Bißchen Ruhm” (“A Little Bit of Glory,” 2003) she allegorically composed of her acclaim as plants that must be kept up with every day care, an idea reflected in the delineation of the present Doodle.
By the mid 1930s, Kaléko was a set up figure among Berlin’s artistic cutting edge. She could regularly be discovered somewhere down in discussion at the Romanische Café, the famous bohemian center point frequented by striking peers like Else Lasker-Schüler and Erich Kästner.
In 1933, she distributed her first book, “Das Lyrische Stenogrammheft” (“The Lyrical Shorthand Pad”), followed two years after the fact by “Kleine Lesebuch für Große” (“The Little Reader for Grown-Ups”). Kaléko’s work cleverly caught the substance of every day metropolitan life during the dusk of the Weimar Republic and through ironical refrains investigated profound subjects like social foul play and outcast.
After almost twenty years spent in the United States, Kaléko got comfortable Israel and kept on composing verse for an incredible remainder.
