GE3904 - Paul Celan

Biography:

Celan was a member of Romania's German speaking Jewish population. He spent time in a Nazi labour camp during WWII and lost his parents there. He was released in 1944 when the Russians occupied Romania and he emigrated to escape Stalinism, ultimately coming to live in France. He committed suicide 1970.

Work: 

Celan was known as a poet and translator. He was one of the foremost figures of the German literary avant garde. He was widely recognised as the poet of the Holocaust. His poem Todesfuge ('death fugue') is particularly well known.

Todesfuge:

• Text of the poem

Interpretation: 

• Fugue - a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or phrase (the subject) is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts.
•  in terms of this poem, 'fugue' means that repetitive textual elements (phrases/motifs/images) are interwoven 
• the monotonous repetition of certain phrases suggests the endless tedium of life in the concentration camp - the same horrible experiences, over and over
• etymologically derived from Latin fuga, meaning to flee or run away
• as the poem progresses, the images are extended and counterpointed 
• e.g. the expansion from Margrete's hair to Sulamith's
•  The purpose of a fugue - to reveal relations between unlikely things
• The poem is not punctuated - given that punctuation imposes logical structure and meaning on language, helping us to interpret a text, the lack here could indicate the impossibility of interpreting the experience in the camps, of finding any meaning or logic in it 
• also means that the reader cannot catch their breath and is forced to speed up as they read and pause in odd places creating a disjointed, discomforting reading experience
• allows polysemy - does "er schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland" means he writes to Germany, when it gets dark, or he writes, when it gets dark in Germany
• "Schwarze Milch der Frühe" - the key image which opens the poem and repeats throughout the text
• 'black milk' - essentially mutually exclusive concepts
• milk is white and associated with motherhood and birth, empowering and enabling life 
• black is associated with death and nothingness
• therefore the juxtaposition of the two ideas is a clash, something that cannot exist
• aka a concentration camp - a reality so horrific it cannot be real
• der Frühe - the beginning of life 
• the monotony of life in the camp emphasised again by the constant consumption of the schwarze Milch - abends, mittags, morgens, nachts 
• no meaning is created through the metaphor  - but rather an 'anti-meaning
• "wir trinken und trinken" - drinking is a passive action - the image of force feeding, helplessness of the inmates - the impossibility of resistance
•  "wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften" 
• in part referring to the awful reality of the camp where grave digging is part of the daily routine
• however, it also refers to the ashes of the dead burned in Auschwitz, hanging in the air, the only grave they will ever receive
• 'digging a grave in the air' is also a contradictory image - like the black milk, it presents an impossible reality through contradiction 
•  Two of the main metaphors introduced at the beginning of the poem deconstruct our expectations of a metaphor 
• rather than creating new meaning as a metaphor is supposed to do, they are used to marry the real and the unreal 
• like concentration camps which "hätte nie geschehen dürfen" - to quote Hanna Arendt
• this poem deals with the problem of depicting the holocaust in a language that was tainted by the Nazis' use of it - therefore they create new ways of expressing meaning (or anti meaning)
•  "Ein Mann wohnt im Haus" - the commandant writing letters to a woman 
• shows that despite the horrors he perpetrates, he is not outside of civilisation - he can love, can write - this makes his choice to be involved with the camps worse 
•  "der spielt mit den Schlangen" - the man in the house plays with snakes, a traditional symbol of evil 
• the old testament incarnation of the devil - represents the evil of the Nazis
•  "Dein goldenes Haar Margarete" - a line laden with cultural significance 
• golden hair = blond hair = Aryan stereotype
• Margarete - shares a name with Faust's Gretchen - the image of German womanhood
• also the archetype of German romanticism and artistic genius
•  "Dein aschenes Haar Sulamith" - the image of Jewish womanhood
• a name from the Old Testament (Song of Solomon) 
• the contrast between German and Jewish beauty - German is treasured, golden, Jewish is ashen, burned 
• the presentation of these two images side by side at the end of the poem creates a stark contrast and highlights the impossibility of these two contradictory realities ever being integrated into one cultural role
•  "Jüden" und "Rüden" - the assonance creates an automatic comparison between these two things 
• implies that the Jews were treated like animals
• "Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland" - Nazi dogma portrayed Germans as the 'master race' and in this case they have become masters of life and death within the camps
• "stecht tiefer ins Erdreich ihr einen ihr andern singet und spielt" - refers to the inmates who were forced to play in an orchestra for the entertainment of their German guards
• recounting the facts in an impressionistic way 
• demonstrating the sheer cynicism of the Nazis 
• "Spielt auf nun zum Tanz" - Jewish orchestras forced to play cheerful music while their people were gassed in the chambers 
• also a reference to the danse macabre - the allegory of people of all ages and statuses dancing with the dead - i.e. death comes for us all
• "Steigt ihr als Rauch in die Luft" - the ashes of the burned dead floating away in the wind
• "wir trinken sie"/"wir trinken dich" - the move from the formal to informal 'you' implies a sense of acceleration 
• makes the poem more intense, more personal as it proceeds 
• The odd structure of the poem would be a radical assault on traditional poetic form, however, as far as Celan is concerned this assault has already been carried out by history itself
• Rhythm - dactylic meter interrupted by staccato repetitions of 'trinken'

Theodor Adorno:

•  German philosopher of the Frankfurt school - known for his theories on "Ideologiekritik"
• Famously declared "Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch" 
• "to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric"
• triggered a lot of discourse on the ethics of representing the Holocaust
• Meaning any attempt at cultural response to the events of the holocaust would be morally wrong, rather than just poetry in general
•  because a cultural response would involve making it part of a cultural traditional, would imply that the holocaust can be processed and interred in our collective memory 
• poetry epitomises culture and as such has a strong integrative power  
• To persist, after Auschwitz, in the production of monuments of the very culture that produced Auschwitz is to participate by denial in the perpetuation of that barbaric culture and to participate in the process that renders fundamental criticism of that culture literally unthinkable.
• Adorno believed we could no longer rely on Western cultural traditions to keep us civilised 
• however he eventually altered his stance on that 
• suggested that poetry and culture had to be reinvented strongly enough to never again fall victim to such a 'Zivilisationsbruch'
• This change of heart could be partly attributable to Celan's poetry
• Adorno later stated that perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured man has to scream
• "Das perennierende Leiden hat soviel Recht auf Ausdruck wie der Gemarterte zu brüllen"
• i.e. the victims of the holocaust had the right to make it part of their cultural tradition 
• the victims cannot escape the experience (continued presence) therefore, if they are poets, they cannot escape writing about it
• As Celan's poem Todesfuge presents the holocaust as a personal experience and makes no attempt to interpret or rationalise it 
• in fact he strongly resists rationalising it and dwells heavily on the total illogicality of the events
• it is not barbaric it is the cry of the tortured 
• Celan's poem is actually the artistic realisation of the refusal to integrate the holocaust into any sort of cultural response

Michael Hamburger notes: 

• Difficulty and paradox are of the essence of Celan's work
• Death is the all encompassing reality of his poetry
• The loss of his parents and his early experience of persecution left indelible scars
•  suffered acute crises and breakdowns throughout his life
•  Wrested a kind of terrible beauty from the ugly theme of the holocaust
• certain critics objected to his 'aestheticising' of death camps
• The power and pathos of Todesfuge arises from the extreme tension between its grossly impure material and its pure form