Historical Context

The selected poem, titled “Ein Psalm aus Babylon, zu klagen,” was written during his imprisonment at Theresienstadt. Directly invoking religious imagery, one of the repeated lines is a slight alteration of a line from Psalm 137 in the Book of Psalms, which describes the destruction of Jerusalem, with his chosen alterations (namely replacing “waters” with “walls”) describing the physical layout of Theresienstadt. While the poem invokes religion and nature to describe a sense of home and the past, it is also clear that these things are no more. Furthermore, the religious imagery could be seen as a critique of God, as the last part of the poem, in which the “we” that Kien speaks of “will be swirled into the directions of the four winds / each one alone into hostile deserts” references a passage in Genesis. While the original spoke of God’s protection, Kien’s poem ends on a note of hostility and moving into a bleak future. In conveying his lamentation through a psalm, Kien expresses longing for a now-unattainable past, despair looking toward the future, and even something resembling blasphemy in potentially criticizing an absent God.