Analysis
From Celan’s very first work, the Holocaust was the overwhelming center of his poetry. There was no escape from the Holocaust into art, into language, into friendship, or into love. The poems are powerfully effective in bringing back the reality of the Holocaust and making those who came after it aware of what it did to those who survived it, as well as to those who did not.
His earliest poetry is his clearest, but Celan repudiated some of his early work even when it was popular. In his earliest work, Celan shows the horror of the Holocaust directly through description and reflection. The later work becomes more cryptic, enigmatic, folded in upon itself. The later work also has a more religious or spiritual dimension, asking a distant or absent God how such a thing as the Holocaust could be allowed to happen. Early poems are more purely mournful; later poems also interrogate, reach after answers that forever remain elusive. His late poems have been slow to appear in English despite their power and Celan’s reputation because they pose almost insurmountable problems to the translator.
In Celan’s early work, rhythms often ironically underscore the horror that is depicted in the poetry. These poems are more lyrical and more expansive than the poems that came later. The later poems are a grappling with the German language, which represented the destroyer to Celan, and yet was the only language in which he felt comfortable writing. Later poems have to be pored over, as the reader learns to appreciate the invented words and the words or expressions with multiple meanings. Celan develops a private mythology of death in which colors and sounds play against blacks and silences.
His view of poetry as a desperate attempt at communication is reflected in the acceptance speech he delivered when he received the Bremen Literary Prize in 1958. In this speech, he describes poetry as “a message in a bottle, cast out and addressed to something that stands open, perhaps an addressable Thou, an addressable reality.” He writes to connect, and yet this connection is unpredictable and unreliable. His speech is inseparable from silence. As he said when he accepted the George Büchner Prize, “Certainly the poem, the poem today shows—and this I think has only indirectly to do with the sharper fall of syntax or heightened sense of ellipsis—the poem unmistakably shows a strong bent toward falling silent.” He goes on to articulate something of his struggle as a poet, which may illuminate his struggle as a tormented Holocaust survivor: “It holds on . . . the poem holds on at the edge of itself; so as to exist, it ceaselessly calls and hauls itself from its Now-no-more into its Ever-yet.” (Translation is by John Felsteiner.)
Many critics claim that the early poem “Death Fugue” is the preeminent poem of the Holocaust. Other Celan poems, including “Todtnauberg,” have received major critical attention for their complex, difficult representation of World War II and its causes, its results, and its apologists. While some of Celan’s poetry was published in English shortly after the war, his reputation grew tremendously toward the end of the twentieth century. His importance is based on the depth of his work, its struggle with theological issues and with human evil. The intense torment of his desire to “survive” his experience, to find some reason for which life still could be lived, is present in every poem.
“Death Fugue”
First published: 1947, in Romanian; 1948, in German as “Todesfuge” (collected in Nineteen Poems, 1972)
Type of work: Poem
The deaths of the Jews in...
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the Holocaust are mourned in a musical poem that is the most frequently anthologized and taught of Celan’s poems.
“Death Fugue,” or “Todesfuge,” remains Celan’s most popular poem, although he at one time repudiated it, refusing to anthologize it further or to read it aloud. In this poem, Celan treats his subject, the Holocaust, directly and graphically. He wrote “Todesfuge” in 1944 or 1945—critics disagree—and it was first published in 1947 in Romanian, not German, having been translated by Celan’s friend, Petre Soloman. This poem was immediately and immensely popular, as it expressed in unshakable images the Jewish experience under Adolf Hitler.
Celan indicated that the poem arose from the Nazi practice of forcing Jews to play dance tunes while prisoners were executed; in one camp where this was done, the entire orchestra was shot after the performance. His first name for the poem was Todestango (death tango), and it was first published under the Romanian equivalent of this name. The bleak, obsessive repetitions and the music of the lines suggest the death dance. The poem also has qualities of the musical form of the fugue, in which a theme or themes appear again and again in differing patterns. The theme of the blond-and dark-haired women, the black milk, and the death-dealer are repeated throughout the poem, the repetitions themselves creating a musical effect. Changes appear in the repeated lines, as variations on the theme.
In the poem the “we” who narrate describe the “black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening”;“we,” perhaps the voiceless, annihilated Jews, are destroyed by those who should nourish them. (Translation is by Michael Hamburger.) The reader, too, is implicated, forced in mind to drink the milk and breathe the ashes of destruction. The ideal German, Aryan woman, Margarete, is compared with “ashen-haired” Shulamith, who is the erased Jewish woman. Margarete’s name evokes the woman whom Faust seduces in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s play Faust: Eine Tragödie (part 1, pb. 1808, pr. 1829; The Tragedy of Faust, 1823; part 2, pb. 1833, pr. 1854; English translation, 1838). Shulamith’s name may suggest “shalom,” the Hebrew word for peace, and it also alludes to the Beloved in the Song of Solomon. The speaker, the “we” or the Jews, are forced to “shovel a grave in the air” for Shulamith. Shulamith’s hair is not merely covered with ashes—it is ashes; she is ashes. The women and the milk are motifs throughout the poem.
Another motif is the death-dealer, a man who “lives in the house,” who is present in the enclosed society and whose pleasure is killing. He “looses his hounds on us grants us a grave in the air.” The death-dealer is at the center of the action, playing “with his serpents” and sowing destruction around him. The repetition gathers heaviness as the poem proceeds, shifting back and forth between the women and the man. The phrase, “Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening” goes through various permutations; the last is “Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night,” the German familiar du (you) taking the place of the objective “it.” The black milk is internalized, a part of the speaker. The poem concludes with a final reference to the two women, she of the golden hair and she of the ashen hair, as the music seems to die away into silence.
In “Death Fugue,” the ashes of the death camps become the air that “we” must breathe—we the speakers, as well as we the readers. “We” become saturated with the Holocaust, drink its black milk, breathe in its smoke. Knowledge of Celan’s life and of the Nazi’s forced execution dances only deepens the experience. The images evoke the monstrous violation that was the Holocaust, and the eerie repetitious music ensures that the images of profound, irremediable loss will stay with the reader.
“Todtnauberg”
First published: 1970 (collected in Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, 2001)
Type of work: Poem
This difficult poem shows Celan’s ambivalent reaction to Martin Heidegger, a German philosopher whose work Celan respected but who has been accused of Nazi sympathies.
“Todtnauberg” was inspired by Celan’s single encounter with one of the most famous philosophers of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger. It has been the center of a fierce debate, most of which has taken place in France among contemporary philosophers, but the poem has been discussed at length in Germany, England, the United States, and elsewhere. It is a difficult poem because of its compression and allusiveness; without knowing its background the reader may find it impenetrable.
Todtnauberg was the name of Heidegger’s home in the Black Mountains of Germany, and therefore this title cannot be translated, although the name’s components reflect some of Celan’s preoccupations: Tod (death) and Berg (mountain). In 1966, after giving a reading, Celan was taken to a meeting with Heidegger at Todtnauberg. The two went for a walk and talked, and Celan wrote in Heidegger’s guest book in his home. Then Celan went back to his hotel. That very week, he wrote the poem, identifying the time and place of composition.
Heidegger remains a major figure in contemporary theory. His reputation has been tainted by his association with Nazism, and rumors of this connection were already afloat when he met Celan. He was interested in Celan’s work and Celan in his; Heidegger went to hear Celan read his work. However, the issue of Heidegger’s politics remained a barrier between them.
In the poem, Celan describes his single visit with the German philosopher at Todtnauberg. The beginning seems bright with hope, as the first images in the poem are of the healing herbs, arnica and eyebright, that Celan spotted upon his arrival there. (Heidegger was impressed by Celan’s knowledge of botany.) The speaker then takes a drink from a well—perhaps another symbol of hope and renewal. This is followed by his writing in the guest book, which is almost exactly what he wrote to Heidegger: “a hope, today,/ for a thinker’s/ word/ to come,/ in the heart.” (Translation is by Pierre Joris.) The question is: Was Celan asking for an explanation or an apology from Heidegger himself? The “thinker” is probably Heidegger.
In the poem, Celan is then driven back to his hotel, as he was after the actual visit. Upon leaving, he talks of how nature now appears: orchids, log trails, and dampness. There is a suggested unpleasantness: “Krudes,” or crudeness, is shown, probably by another passenger, and the driver is witness to it. The trip continues with nature now appearing oppressive and overbearing.
As in many poems, the speaker is effaced; the event seems to happen unobserved. This poem includes only one reference to “us” and the rest is objective; Celan’s later poetry tends to place the subject matter outside of the recorder. This makes the poem difficult to decipher. Is the crudeness indeed from another passenger? It is not identified. Or is it some insight into the visit that has just ended? Could it be that Celan has simply decided that no hope could possibly be justified, despite what he has just written in Heidegger’s guest book?
Some argue that Celan is asking in the poem for an apology from Heidegger that does not come. Others think that he is looking to Heidegger as a thinker who could help the healing process. If the former, Heidegger did not seem to read the poem that way; he felt honored by it.
Snow Part
First published: Schneepart, 1971 (English translation, 2007)
Type of work: Poetry
Celan’s last and often most difficult poems are translated by Ian Fairley in a collection published in 2007; some of these poems were previously untranslated and unpublished.
Snow Part represents Celan’s last work and shows his most difficult struggles with language and silence. Some of these poems were not authorized by their writer for publication, but Celan’s son allowed them to be published. This collection is for those who wrestle with philosophical and psychological questions surrounding the Holocaust. These are Celan’s last words on the subject, and their knotted, gnarled syntax, their effaced narrators, and their ambiguities make them difficult to enter but rewarding of study. They are shadowed by Celan’s suicide, which took place shortly after the last poems were written, but they should not be read exclusively in the light of his death, as some of them show signs of hope.
The English translation by Ian Fairley is mostly comprised of the poems included in the poetry collection Schneepart, which Celan wrote around the time of his 1967 breakdown. The poems show the breakdown, the falling away, of any constructed coherence the poet had brought to or read into his shattered world. Most of the poems are short, terse, and dense. A few poems express a kind of distant optimism—a shaky faith that sometime, somehow, all will be well. In addition to the poems in Schneepart, Fairley also has translated and included some previously uncollected and unpublished poems as part of this collection.
The most extensive poem here and perhaps the most optimistic is “Was Naht” (“What Knits”). The poem asks what “this voice” is knitting, or drawing together, on “this side and on that,” maybe the abyss of the Holocaust, maybe death and life. The “snow needle” springs from the “chasms” and the “you” addressed in the poem is asked to come forth:
tumuli, tumuli,youhill out of there, alive,comeinto the kiss.
“Hill” is used here as a verb, and this transformation is Celan’s, who invents the word “hugelst,” the familiar form of the nonexistent verb “to hill.”
The poem works toward some transformation and resurrection; though “worms/ inweb you,” still the globe gives you “safe passage,” and there is “a word, with all its green” that you are told to follow. (Translation by Ian Fairley.) The poem is somewhat spooky, suggesting that the dead are coming alive, being reborn into the unimaginable. Yet, it is a rebirth. Beetle and worms are weighted against words, a tree, green. The green concludes, suggesting at least a possibility of renewal.
Other poems are less accessible, and Fairley’s translations do not always open them to readers unfamiliar with Celan, as he uses words not familiar to many, such as “grimpen” for “marshy,” and “thole” for “endurance.” Nevertheless, these last poems will be part of the Celan canon, and the explanations that Fairley provides of their sources help the student who is unfamiliar with German history to enter into their world.
