Collected Prose: Autobiographical Writings, True Stories, Critical Essays, Prefaces, Collaborations With Artists, and Interviews (56 page)

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“Todesfugue” (Death Fugue) is not Celan’s best poem, but it is unquestionably his most famous poem — the work that made his reputation. Coming as it did in the late forties, only a few years after the end of the war — and in striking contrast to Adorno’s rather fatuous remark about the “barbarity” of writing poems after Auschwitz — “Todesfugue” had a considerable impact among German readers, both for its direct mention of the concentration camps and for the terrible beauty of its form. The poem is literally a fugue composed of words, and its pounding, rhythmical repetitions and variations mark off a terrain no less circumscribed, no less closed in on itself than a prison surrounded by barbed wire. Covering slightly less than two pages, it begins and ends with the following stanzas:

Black milk of dawn we drink it at dusk

we drink it at noon and at daybreak we drink it at night

we drink and drink

we are digging a grave in the air there’s room for us all

A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes

he writes when it darkens to Germany your golden hair Margarete

he writes it and steps outside and the stars all aglisten

he whistles for his hounds

he whistles for his Jews he has them dig a grave in the earth

he commands us to play for the dance

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Black milk of dawn we drink you at night

we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany

we drink you at dusk and at daybreak we drink and we drink you

death is a master from Germany his eye is blue

he shoots you with bullets of lead his aim is true

a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete

he sets his hounds on us he gives us a grave in the air

he plays with the serpents and dreams death is a master from Germany

your golden hair Margarete

your ashen hair Shulamite

(trans. by Joachim Neugroschel)

In spite of the poem’s great control and the formal sublimation of an impossibly emotional theme, “Todesfugue” is one of Celan’s most explicit works. In the sixties, he even turned against it, refusing permission to have it reprinted in more anthologies because he felt that his poetry had progressed to a stage where “Todesfugue” was too obvious and superficially realistic. With this in mind, however, one does discover in this poem elements common to much of Celan’s work: the taut energy of the language, the objectification of private anguish, the unusual distancing effected between feeling and image. As Celan himself expressed it in an early commentary on his poems: “What matters for this language … is precision. It does not transfigure, does not ‘poetize’, it names and composes, it tries to measure out the sphere of the given and the possible.”

This notion of the possible is central to Celan. It is the way by which one can begin to enter his conception of the poem, his vision of reality. For the seeming paradox of another of his statements — “Reality is not. It must be searched for and won” — can lead to confusion unless one has already understood the aspiration for the real that informs Celan’s poetry. Celan is not advocating a retreat into subjectivity or the construction of an imaginary universe. Rather, he is staking out the distance over which the poem must travel and defining the ambiguity of a world in which all values have been subverted.

Speak—

But keep yes and no unsplit,

And give your say this meaning:

give it the shade.

Give it shade enough,

give it as much

as you know has been dealt out between

midday and midday and midnight.

Look around:

look how it all leaps alive—

where death is! Alive!

He speaks truly who speaks the shade. 

(from “Speak, You Also,” trans. by Michael Hamburger)

In a public address delivered in the city of Bremen in 1958 after being awarded an important literary prize, Celan spoke of language as the one thing that had remained intact for him after the war, even though it had to pass through “the thousand darknesses of death-bringing speech.” “In this language,” Celan said — and by this he meant German, the language of the Nazis and the language of his poems — “I have tried to write poetry, in order to acquire a perspective of reality for myself.” He then compared the poem to a message in a bottle — thrown out to sea in the hope that it will one day wash up to land, “perhaps on the shore of the heart.” “Poems,” he continued, “even in this sense are under way: they are heading toward something. Toward what? Toward some open place that can be inhabited, toward a thou which can be addressed, perhaps toward a reality which can be addressed.”

The poem, then, is not a transcription of an already known world, but a process of discovery, and the act of writing for Celan is one that demands personal risks. Celan did not write solely in order to express himself, but to orient himself within his own life and take his stand in the world, and it is this feeling of necessity that communicates itself to a reader. These poems are more than literary artifacts. They are a means of staying alive.

In a 1946 essay on Van Gogh, Meyer Schapiro refers to the notion of realism in a way that could also apply to Celan. “I do not mean realism in the repugnant, narrow sense that it has acquired today,” Professor Schapiro writes, “… but rather the sentiment that external reality is an object of strong desire or need, as a possession and potential means of fulfillment of the striving human being, and is therefore the necessary ground of art.” Then, quoting a phrase from one of Van Gogh’s letters — “I’m terrified of getting away from the possible …” — he observes: “Struggling against the perspective that diminishes an individual object before his eyes, he renders it larger than life. The loading of the pigment is in part a reflex of this attitude, a frantic effort to preserve in the image of things their tangible matter and to create something equally solid and concrete on the canvas.”

Celan, whose life and attitude toward his art closely parallel Van Gogh’s, used language in a way that is not unlike the way Van Gogh used paints, and their work is surprisingly similar in spirit.
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Neither Van Gogh’s stroke nor Celan’s syntax is strictly representational, for in the eyes of each the “objective” world is interlocked with his perception of it. There is no reality that can be posited without the simultaneous effort to penetrate it, and the work of art as an ongoing process bears witness to this desire. Just as Van Gogh’s painted objects acquire a concreteness “as real as reality,” Celan handles words as if they had the density of objects, and he endows them with a substantiality that enables them to become a part of the world, his world — and not simply its mirror.

Celan’s poems resist straightforward exegesis. They are not linear progressions, moving from word to word, from point A to point B. Rather, they present themselves to a reader as intricate networks of semantic densities. Interlingual puns, oblique personal references, intentional misquotations, bizarre neologisms: these are the sinews that bind Celan’s poems together. It is not possible to keep up with him, to follow his drift at every step along the way. One is guided more by a sense of tone and intention than by textual scrutiny. Celan does not speak explicitly, but he never fails to make himself clear. There is nothing random in his work, no gratuitous elements to obscure the perception of the poem. One reads with one’s skin, as if by osmosis, unconsciously absorbing nuances, overtones, syntactical twists, which in themselves are as much the meaning of the poem as its analytic content. Celan’s method of composition is not unlike that of Joyce in
Finnegans Wake
. But if Joyce’s art was one of accumulation and expansion — a spiral whirling into infinity — Celan’s poetry is continually collapsing into itself, negating its very premises, again and again arriving at zero. We are in the world of the absurd, but we have been led there by a mind that refuses to acquiesce to it.

Consider the following poem, “Largo,” one of Celan’s later poems — and a typical example of the difficulty a reader faces in tackling Celan.
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In Michael Hamburger’s translation it reads:

You of the same mind, moor-wandering near one:

more-than-

death-

sized we lie

together, autumn

crocuses, the timeless, teems

under our breathing eyelids,

the pair of blackbirds hangs

beside us, under

our whitely drifting

companions up there, our

meta-

stases.

The German text, however, reveals things that necessarily elude the grasp of translation:

Gleichsinnige du, heidegängerisch Nahe:

über-

sterbens-

gross liegen

wir beieinander, die Zeit-

lose wimmelt

dir unter den atmenden Lidern,

Das Amselpaar hängt

neben uns, unter

unsern gemeinsam droben mit-

ziehenden weissen

Meta-

stasen.

In the first line,
heidegängerisch
is an inescapable allusion to Heidegger — whose thinking was in many ways close to Celan’s, but who, as a pro-Nazi, stood on the side of the murderers. Celan visited Heidegger in the sixties, and although it is not known what they said to each other, one can assume that they discussed Heidegger’s position during the war. The reference to Heidegger in the poem is underscored by the use of some of the central words from his philosophical writings:
Nahe
,
Zeit
, etc. This is Celan’s way: he does not mention anything directly, but weaves his meanings into the fabric of the language, creating a space for the invisible, in the same way that thought accompanies us as we move through a landscape.

Further along, in the third stanza, there are the two blackbirds (stock figures in fairy tales, who speak in riddles and bring bad tidings). In the German one reads
Amsel
— which echoes the sound of Celan’s own name, Anczel. At the same time, there is an evocation of Günter Grass’s novel,
Dog Years
, which chronicles the love-hate relationship between a Jew and a Nazi during the war. The Jewish character in the story is named Amsel, and throughout the book — to quote George Steiner again — “there is a deadly pastiche of the metaphysical jargon of Heidegger.”

Toward the end of the poem, the presence of “our whitely drifting / companions up there” is a reference to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust: the smoke of the bodies burned in crematoria. From early poems such as “Todesfugue” (“he gives us a grave in the air”) to later poems such as “Largo,” the Jewish dead in Celan’s work inhabit the air, are the very substance we are condemned to breathe: souls turned into smoke, into dust, into nothing at all — “our / meta- / stases.”

Celan’s preoccupation with the Holocaust goes beyond mere history, however. It is the primal moment, the first cause and last effect of an entire cosmology. Celan is essentially a religious poet, and although he speaks with the voice of one forsaken by God, he never abandons the struggle to make sense of what has no sense, to come to grips with his own Jewishness. Negation, blasphemy, and irony take the place of devotion; the forms of righteousness are mimicked; Biblical phrases are turned around, subverted, made to speak against themselves. But in so doing, Celan draws nearer to the source of his despair, the absence that lives in the heart of all things. Much has been said about Celan’s “negative theology.” It is most fully expressed in the opening stanzas of “Psalm”: