Celebrating Mascha Kaléko谷歌标志

Celebrating Mascha Kaléko谷歌标志
16 September 2020

Today’s Doodle, illustrated by Hamburg-based guest artist Ramona Ring, celebrates the German-Jewish poet Mascha Kaléko, whose incisive poems and chansons earned her notable acclaim among the literary avant-garde in 1930s Berlin. On this day in 1974, Kaléko held her final reading in Berlin’s America Memorial Library.

Mascha Kaléko was born Golda Malka Aufen in 1907 in Schidlow, Galicia, in what is today southern Poland. With the outbreak of World War I, she and her family fled the country for Germany and eventually made a new home in Berlin in 1918.

As a teenager, she began to write poetry, and within several years, she achieved a level of celebrity as newspapers began publishing her work throughout the capital. In Kaléko’s poem “Das Bißchen Ruhm” (“A Little Bit of Glory,” 2003) she metaphorically wrote of her fame as plants that must be maintained with daily care, a concept reflected in the illustration of today's Doodle.

By the early 1930s, Kaléko was an established figure among Berlin’s literary avant-garde. She could often be found deep in conversation at the Romanische Café, the iconic bohemian hub frequented by notable contemporaries like Else Lasker-Schüler and Erich Kästner.

In 1933, she published her first book, “Das Lyrische Stenogrammheft” (“The Lyrical Shorthand Pad”), followed two years later by “Kleine Lesebuch für Große” (“The Little Reader for Grown-Ups”). Kaléko’s work wittily captured the essence of daily urban life during the twilight of the Weimar Republic and through satirical verses explored weighty themes like social injustice and exile.

After nearly two decades spent in the United States, Kaléko settled in Israel and continued to write poetry for the rest of her life.