The Saga of Melitta Urbancic

ABSTRACT: Very few Jews fleeing from the Holocaust in Central Europe between 1937 and 1945 managed to reach the safety of the shores of Iceland, which was not a major player in this catastrophic event, but was also not a non-participant. Melitta Urbancic, a Viennese Jewish author and actress, was one of these very few. Under dramatic circumstances, she was allowed to settle in Iceland in late 1938, where she remained for the rest of her long life. As we now know, when she died in Reykjavík in 1984 she left behind a voluminous oeuvre of German-language poetry, a selection of which appeared in 2014 in the bilingual Icelandic-German book Frá hjara veraldar. Vom Rand der Welt, edited by Gauti Kristmannsson, which contains the only works of Melitta Urbancic that are in print in any language. This review article presents the adventurous saga of Melitta Urbancic, includes some of her poems in German and in English translation, and looks at the special quality of her relationship to Iceland, her writing style, and the content of the poetry as it changed from that of a traumatized refugee in a very foreign environment to someone who gradually found a new home.