Shira Miron is an MA student in the department of German literature and language at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is currently spending the second year of graduate studies at the Freie Universität Berlin under the direct exchange-student program between the FUB and The Hebrew University. Her master's thesis, advised by Prof. Vivian Liska and Prof. Yoav Rinon, focuses on the poetical language in the late work of German-Jewish poet and author Gertrud Kolmar. Shira holds a B.Mus in Piano Performance from the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. She received scholarships for piano studies from the America-Israel Cultural Foundation. She worked as a guide and educator at the International School for Holocaust Studies, Yad Vashem, and currently works as a research assistant for Dr. Ofer Ashkenazi in a research project of Jewish Photography in Germany during the Third Reich.

Between Polyphony and Silence – on Gertrud Kolmar's Late Poetic Language

In her project, Shira will analyze the late works of the German-Jewish author and poet Gertrud Kolmar (1894-1943). Focusing primarily on literary aspects in Kolmar's work, the research will be located in the wider context of German modern literature. It will persuade to claim back the attention to Kolmar's poetic work rather than to a merely biographical-based interpretation of it.
Kolmar's understanding of themes such as space, identity and belonging will be revealed through her unique approach to language. Based on the dialogical theory of Bakhtin, Benjamin's reflections on the language and Foucault's discourse theory, the research will tend to shed light on Kolmar's incessant fragmentation of the language. It will illuminate Kolmar's creation of a tangled net of co-existing linguistic worlds, each of them presenting a different perception of language and accordingly a different representation of the world. Consequently, the research will discuss the possibility of the literary language to establish a multi-perspective experience, parallel discourses, polyphony and silence.