The Germans are not the only objects of scorn in Celan's poetry. The traditional God of Judaism and Christianity is another, and these objects of scorn—I hesitate to say hate, although it would perhaps be valid—are certainly quite closely related to each other…. Celan's pessimism cannot be explained in terms of a general post-Nietzschean conviction that God is dead; it is rather a very specific form of theological thinking found in a number of contemporary Jewish poets and philosophers…. Celan's poems sometimes display an awareness of the role of Christianity in the historical development of anti-Semitism. The poem "Spät und tief" …, for example, while alluding to Jewish "guilt" in the death of Christ, denies the possibility of the Resurrection, in effect reversing or refuting the Christian symbolism contained in the poem. Much of Celan's verse is profoundly pessimistic and correct interpretation is facilitated if the poems are approached with the historical background in mind. (p. 26)

[An important technique used by Celan in his hermetic poetry] is based on an apparently arbitrary succession of images and exclamations, a kind of stream-of-consciousness, often marked by verbal associations and word plays….

The complexity of the word associations is considerable, as is the significance of their implications. The word Mandel in this poem is applied to the Jewish people, to the hair of the Jews killed in concentration camps, to a Jewish eye (which is contrasted with the Christian eye viewing the picture), then to the Christian halo and, by way of the picture of Christ within it (or rather, which was formerly within it), to Christ himself, ironically a Jew in whose name the Jews have been persecuted….

The single line "Judenlocke, wirst nicht grau" [Jewish hair, you don't get gray] is rhythmically set apart and the same holds true for the final two lines. These two, furthermore, comprise a rhymed couplet. Such couplets are extremely rare in Celan's later poetry and when they do occur they usually have a bitter tone…. Celan was forced to write his poetry in German, the language of the Nazis…. Celan was in fact very personally aware of the dilemma, and specifically of the implications of the German rhyme. For this reason rhyme is sparingly used in his poetry and for this reason the places in which it is used tend to be intense and bitter. (p. 29)

Celan's works are not universally and unambiguously pessimistic, but the affirmative aspects have been stressed by critics to great excess. The similarities between Celan and contemporaries such as Elie Wiesel are overlooked because Celan, unlike Wiesel, never discussed his own personal fate or his personal reaction to it. The lasting psychological effects of the Holocaust, of which Wiesel and others openly speak, were surely felt by Celan and are indirectly reflected in his poetry. There is a decided pessimism in many of his poems, a result of his Jewish experience, which we see corroborated in life by his suicide. (p. 30)