Surrealist texts by surrealist women: Anneliese Hager

Of the poison of Dreams



Anneliese Hager (1946)



I offer you the fog of ideas in the poison cup of dreams. Veil the false stars (of those who know) and immerse your body down to the ground. You will seek in vain the last sin; for the cup sinks, like you, with every stroke of the hour, deeper into the torn mouth of time. Despairingly, you hang your eyes like lights on a walls of, where blossoms of the instant they speak glitering prayers. [...]

Anneliese Hager, in Penelope Rosemont, op.cit. , p. 261

Anneliese Hager,  (1904–?). German poet, artist and photographer born in Dresden. She was active on the German art scene in the 1920s, specializing in “splash and drip automatism” but the rise of Nazism obliged her to go underground. After World War II she and her painter husband Karl Otto Götz were involved in the Cobra movement (1948–51). In 1954 she collaborated with Max Holzer and Edgar Jené on Surrealistische Publikationen. Her artwork is typified by Endless Kette (1962) and her poetry was gathered together in Der rote Uhr und andere Dichtungen (The Red Clock and Other Poems), published in Zurich in 1991. The surreal quality of her poem “Nebel” (Mist) is evident from the opening line, “Nebel ist blaue Sprache”(Mist is blue speech).

Keith Aspley, Historical Dictionary of Surrealism, (Lanham,Toronto, Plymouth,The Scarecrow Press, Inc, 2010), p.238