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Jan Greshoff se ‘aanval’ op Olga Kirsch as een van die hoofredes vir haar emigrasie: ’n Psigoanalitiese beskouing / Jan Greshoff’s ‘Attack’ on Olga Kirsch as One of the Main Causes of Her Emigration: A Psychoanalytical Point of View

100%

Minnaar T.

Werkwinkel

2014

vol. 9

issue 2

99-118

The poet Olga Kirsch left South Africa permanently for Israel in 1948. It is evident from her poetry that her Zionism, opposition to the racism of the National Party and a failed love played a role in her decision. This article focuses on another reason - a public attack by the Dutch critic Jan Greshoff in an Afrikaans literary magazine in 1946. Using concepts from psychoanalytical theories around borderline and narcissistic personalities, as well as the effect of emigration, Kirsch’s actions are examined as a reaction to narcissistic wounding. Investigating Greshoff’s criticism gives insights into the poet’s actions and explains the hiatus before she started publishing again in Afrikaans from 1971. It is stated that the poet is not considered to be a narcissist as her oeuvre is a testimony to her empathy with others, but the healthy narcissism needed in building one’s self-esteem underwent a severe blow when Kirsch lost the man she loved and was humiliated so devastatingly by the great Dutch critic.

’n Nuwe lewe: Olga Kirsch se studentegedig “Resurrexit” / A New Life: Olga Kirsch’s Student Poem “Resurrexit”

63%

Minnaar T., Roth E.

Werkwinkel

2014

vol. 9

issue 2

59-72

The poem “Resurrexit” published by Olga Kirsch in 1945 in the student paper WU´s VIEWS has been all but forgotten. It is, however, a beautiful and an important poem with a pantheistic character. It commemorates the death of the young Jewish flight navigator lieutenant Alec Medalie, whose fighter plane was shot down by German antiaircraft fire near the Yugoslavian coast in 1944. Psychoanalysis opens the poem up to a reading which turns the typical male symbolic order’s death and men’s chaos caused by war into the young man’s rebirth as a new form of being. This happens through the maternal earth’s uterine sea. The fallen is absorbed by the sea and after a period taken up into the clouds to return to the mother and the earth, albeit in a new form. The concept of the chora plays a part in this resurrection which offers consolation to all who are subject to the inevitable uncertainty of the human condition and those who stay behind after a sudden death.

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2 Werkwinkel

2 Minnaar T.

1 Roth E.

2 2014

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Jan Greshoff se ‘aanval’ op Olga Kirsch as een van die hoofredes vir haar emigrasie: ’n Psigoanalitiese beskouing / Jan Greshoff’s ‘Attack’ on Olga Kirsch as One of the Main Causes of Her Emigration: A Psychoanalytical Point of View

’n Nuwe lewe: Olga Kirsch se studentegedig “Resurrexit” / A New Life: Olga Kirsch’s Student Poem “Resurrexit”