Sylvia von Harden

August Sander, Sylvia von Harden, Journaliste, 1920s

Nestor Gianaklis by Apollinaire

Je goûte ton haleine plus exquise que la fumée

Tendre et bleue de l'écorce du bouleau

Ou d'une cigarette de Nestor Gianaklis

Ou cette fumée sacrée si bleue

Et qu'on ne nomme pas.

I taste your breath more exquisite than the smoke

Tender and blue of a birch's bark

Or of a Nestor Gianaklis cigarette

Or this sacred smoke so blue

And which you don't name.

 Otto Dix, Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden, 1926

Sylvia von Harden (March 28, 1894 – June 4, 1963) was a journalist and poet. During her career as a journalist, she wrote for many newspapers in Germany and England.  Born Sylvia Lehr in Hamburg, von Harden (she chose the name as an aristocratic pseudonym) wrote a literary column for the monthly Das junge Deutschland from 1918 to 1920, and wrote for Die Rote Erde from 1919 to 1923. From 1915 to 1923, she lived with the writer Ferdinand Hartkopf, with whom she had a son. During the 1920s she lived in Berlin, and published two volumes of poetry in 1920 and 1927. In 1933, von Harden left Germany for self-exile in England, where she continued to write but with less success. She died in Coxley Green, England in 1963.