Marx, Anne, 1913-2006

The poet and lecturer Anne Lowenstein Marx was born to Susan and Jacob Lowenstein on March 8, 1913, in Bleicherode am Herz, a small town in northern Germany. After the deaths of both of her parents during her early childhood, Marx and her younger sister were raised by a grandmother in the same region of Worms on the Rhine. Although Marx was introduced to poetry at the age of five when her mother encouraged her to fill scrapbooks with poems, her formal education at the Universities of Heidelberg and Berlin was in the field of medicine, the profession of her father and uncles. The choice of poetry over a career in medicine was made as part of her consciously chosen new life as an American that involved turning away from her German roots and language. Her poetry often uses images and themes from the tragedies that she escaped as a refugee from the Holocaust. She created for herself a place in American society and within the society of poets and artists through involvement in the Poetry Society of America and The League of American Pen Women from the 1960s through the 1980s. While growing up in Germany, Marx enjoyed the intricacies of language and excelled at English (UK) and French in school. The discovery of Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry in college encouraged her to begin her own writing. In October 1933, she made her own longhand copy of his works, including his Letters to a Young Poet, which she was to keep with her always. Marx published her first small book of poems, Ein Buchlein, in 1935, and proudly gave copies to friends. At this time, Marx saw her writing as a form of personal expression more than a career. Marx, who was Jewish, realized that her future was not in Germany when her further matriculation into medical school was prohibited in 1933. With the political order rapidly degenerating around her, she prepared all the necessary affidavits and documents for her and her younger sister's emigration from Germany to the United States in 1936. They were welcomed to New York by uncles in an arrival that later became the poem "Port of Entry" in her second volume, The Second Voice .

During her first year in America, Marx worked as a physiotherapist in New York City. It was to be the only time she made use of her medical degree. She later credited her job with her ease in adopting American slang. She strove to become an American in all ways, and was especially eager to perfect the English that she had studied in Germany. She admitted later that she had blotted Germany from her mind to begin her life over again at the age of twenty-three. She met Frederick E. Marx, a vice-president for Helmsley Spear, Inc. Real Estate of New York during her first year in America. The following February they were married and they moved to Scarsdale, New York. In 1938, she became a naturalized American citizen. Her life in Scarsdale was centered on her family and her husband. She had two sons, Thomas and Steven, and she did not publish any poetry until her eldest son left for college in 1953.

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