A Bird Sat Beneath the Barbed Wire

“A Bird Sat Beneath the Barbed Wire"
 On Poetry in the Camps

At the heart of the event are the poems created in Ravensbrück by women and girls of various nationalities. The aim of the music is to serve them.

This is not some far-fetched idea – after all, many of the poems created in the camps were chanted or set to well-known melodies.
 We let the words enter into a dialogue with music because we hope that it will help both with taking up their message and with supporting the content captured in the verse.


Music in the Flamenco Tradition 


The unique feature of this dramatic reading is the connection we have created with musical improvisations in the flamenco tradition. Although the contexts in which they were created are not really comparable, there are valid parallels between the two forms of artistic expression: flamenco and concentration camp poetry are both forms of self-expression in the face of an experience of suffering and humiliation. Forms such as Sigueriya, which tells of death and the miserable pain of grief, or Solea, which deals with human loneliness, are a very suitable musical counterpoint to the poetry.

There are many international cultural influences behind flamenco – another point of contact with camp poetry, which should be viewed in international terms and an international context. Flamenco and most of the poems owe their vitality to the immediate moment brought into an artistic form. They also share the fact that during the creative process, moments of hope, optimism and even high spirits were frequently achieved out of the descent into grief and pain and sadness. 

Poetry as Self-Assertion


We would like to give you an impression of the things the women wrote their poetry about. The poems in themselves are to be understood as soliloquies or as oral cries; for this reason, it is more important to let them be heard than to read them.

And this is why it is more important to let them speak to us – via the spoken word.

Their rhythm is significant here as it emulates the breath or the heartbeat. Through their oral, rhythmic language, the poems represent, to a certain extent, the individuals who bore witness not only to their own destruction but also to their longing for a future.

The selected poems take as their subject the shock of arrival at the camp and conditions there, but also nature as a personified counterpart. They span a spectrum of subject matter from documenting crimes and suffering, through to a wistful evocation of a better future, even one the author would not experience herself, from bitter laments to sarcastic humour; forms, in which the self seeks a way to give a name to the catastrophe it has suffered and at the same time to banish it into the word.

Hear the poem "The Sky of Ravensbrück" (mp3) by a British female parachutist, composed in the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

Flyer on the reading (Flyer zur Lesung)