That she was never "the One," always "the Other," Gertrud Kolmar writes in 1942 about her last unfulfilled love for a younger man, just months before her deportation to Auschwitz. "One of the greatest German lyricists" (Wolfdietrich Schnurre) thus names her life's principle: the imposed, felt, and ultimately accepted otherness as a woman and as a Jew. In her love poems, gathered in this volume, she depicts her life and love worlds as a young girl growing up in the German Empire and later as a young educator in the 1920s, detailing her encounters, touches, and longings. But the disenfranchisement and persecution in the "Third Reich" are also expressed here: "And poor lovers die horribly in joyless places.".