Well-Versed: Edith Jacobson's Expressionism: Edith Jacobson: Gefängnisaufzeichnungen (Edith Jacobson's Black Prison Notebook). Edited by Judith Kessler and Roland Kaufhold. Giessen:  Psychosozial-Verlag, 2015,  247 pp., €29.90 paperback.

… färben Schmerzen deine Lieder / werden tiefer sie erwärmen

… pains tainting your songs / will be warming them more deeply

Edith Jacobson is a leading voice in anglophone psychoanalysis. Her English oeuvre has been the primary focus of her work's reception in North America, whereas her German publications dating from the years of the Weimar Republic and incipient Nazism have received significantly less attention.1 That Jacobson was not only an analytic author but also a literary writer of prose and poetry is a lesser-known aspect of her fascinating transatlantic career.

While she wrote some fiction in her American exile, she had turned to verse in the Nazi remand prison in Berlin-Moabit, writing in her native tongue. Her voice in Gestapo captivity was primarily poetic and exclusively German, which accords with Jacobson's autobiographical prison poem “Bekenntnis” (Kessler and Kaufhold, pp. 136; May and Mühlleitner 2005, p. 210), where the speaker powerfully characterizes herself as “ein Jude” (“a Jew”) in her traits and ancestry (first stanza), “ein Deutscher” (“a German”) in her language, mind, and birthplace (second stanza), and