Search - Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, David Klein, Ute Lemper :: Selma

Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger was born in Czernowitz (Bukowina) in 1924. She began writing her own poems in 1939 as well as translating from French, Romanian and Yiddish. Following the invasion by German troops of Czernowitz which had been seceeded by Romania to the Soviet Union in 1940, her family was forced to take up residence in the ghetto in July 1941. Miraculously she managed to get her handwritten album entitled " Blütenlese" (Blossom Harvest) to a girl friend before being deported to the concentration camp "Michailowska" in the Ukraine in 1942. She died there on 16th Dec. 1942 of typhus. Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger left a work of world literature when she died at the age of only 18 in a concentration camp in 1942. The love poems for a friend have lost none of their fascination to this day. "These lyrics will bring tears of excitement to your eyes, so pure, so beautiful, so bright and so threatened" ( Hilde Domin). 25 years ago the journalist and exile researcher Jürgen Serke published a book which caused considerable attention: 57 poems of an, at that time, unknown female author poems about a love which was more of a dream than reality, dedicated to a friend who later died fleeing to Israel. The life of this distant cousin of Paul Celan who wrote her first poems at the age of 15, seemed related in fate to that of Anne Frank. The poems had been lost for a long time before they were first made available to the public in 1980. David Klein's latest release "Selma-In Sehnsucht eingehüllt" features 12 of Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger's poems set to music by him and his Quintet and interpreted by twelve of Germany's most renowned singers, such as: Xavier Naidoo, Reinhard Mey, Sarah Connor, Yvonne Catterfeld, Hartmut Engler (Pur), Thomas D, Joy Denalane, Jasmin Tabatabai, Volkan Baydar (Orange Blue), Inga Humpe (2raumwohnung), Stefanie Kloß (Silbermond) and Ute Lemper. A fellow prisoner of Selma in "Michailowska" is said to have told her: "You are a rare flower whose scent will one day bring joy to the world". Fortunately, he was right!