Dreams and dream imagery constitute an important, if far from pervasive theme in the postwar German lyric….

At first glance, Celan seems to stand in the surrealist tradition…. Celan's own poetry of the first three postwar years abounds in images and stylistic devices which have a close affinity with those typical of surrealistic verse….

Celan's dream imagery is puzzling. In many cases individual images and entire poems at first defy explication. At the risk of seeming to oversimplify this complex problem, I propose that the following three theses provide the necessary basis for gaining access to the enigmatic dream world of Celan's poetry: 1) Celan … is a Holocaust poet, and the dream world in his early poetry is related to the phenomenon, often noted in literature on the Holocaust, that for the victims reality had become a nightmare; 2) many of Celan's early poems, whether the word dream is explicitly mentioned or not, resemble the images of a dream, and on the basis of the first thesis, these dreams are nightmares; 3) Celan's use of dream imagery did not remain constant but underwent one significant break (in 1948) and a series of subsequent gradual modifications….

Accounts of the Holocaust, autobiographical as well as scholarly, contain frequent comparisons between life in the camps and a nightmare. Especially interesting is a comment by Terrence des Pres [from The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in a Death Camp]: "The first weeks in the camp were literally unreal and embedded in a nightmare."… Not only the fact of the nightmarish nature of the experience is significant, but also the language used in a scholarly work in attempting to describe the experience: literally unreal….

[This illustrates] Celan's dilemma. In his early poetry dreams often directly reflect experience. The images are distorted and defy rational explanation, not because the poet was concerned with some theory of language and the relationship between dreams and reality, but primarily because the experience itself, though a fact in his life, was "literally unreal."

A cursory reading of Celan's poetry written in the years 1944–47 leaves the impression that dreams are associated with evil and danger, by virtue of the contexts in which dream (in various noun, verb and adjective forms) appears. For example, it is associated with weapons ("daggers of dream,"…), blood …, the grave …, weapons and the grave …, insanity …, and appears in other less specific contexts which evoke a feeling of anxiety or uneasiness. Only on very rare occasions does the word dream seem to carry clearly affirmative connotations such as one often finds in poetry of earlier eras (one example: "Where dream is and lovers are reclining …"…). (p. 522)

An examination of portions of two poems in which the word dream occurs and dreamlike imagery is prevalent will elucidate the nature of the nightmarish world of Celan's early poetry. In "Der Einsame" (A Man Alone …) the contents of the first stanza could with no difficulty be taken for a report of an actual dream: Autumn, who loves the speaker (the dreamer) more than it loves the dove and the mulberry tree, gives the speaker a veil, on which it has embroidered "Take it [the veil] for dreaming" and "God is also as near as the vulture." Although differing in specifics, psychological theorists—Freud and Jung, for example—are in agreement that some dream symbols are based on personal experience and others are common to all—or most—people and also that a dream can only be adequately interpreted in relation to the experiences of the dreamer. The juxtaposition of normal behavior and events and bizarre symbols and situations is also typical of dreams. In the present poem the vulture might seem to be a universally recognizable symbol of death, which is counteracted by the nearness of God. The presence of a personal symbol, however, precludes the possibility of the second part of such an interpretation. In the poem which follows "Der Einsame" in Der Sand aus den Urnen (The Sand from the Urns; 1948) Autumn is again personified, here being the messenger who brings to the poet the news of his parents' death in a camp. Autumn, then, is a personal component of the dreamer's nightmare, and nightmares are the sort of dream elicited by the veil. Furthermore, as one sees elsewhere in Celan (e.g., "Tenebrae" …) and in several other Holocaust writers, God's nearness is not necessarily a blessing.

A second poem in which the word dream is mentioned in the context of imagery reminiscent of a nightmare is "Marianne."… The first three stanzas contain dream imagery suggesting a love relationship and conclude with the words "we sleep." The destruction of the idyll is foreshadowed in the second line ("The cloud moves from eye to eye, like Sodom to Babel") and completed in the final stanza, where the beloved who is addressed in the poem is interred, and "Now the hard coin of dreams clinks on the tiles of the world." Like a nightmare the dream of love ends in the burial of the beloved. The final line suggests not only awakening from the dream, but also, as best language can, the identity of "dreams" and "the world"—reality. (pp. 522-23)