by Paul Celan
Introduction "Polysemy without mask"
Thirty-four years after his death, Paul Celan's status as the greatest German-language poet of the second half of the twentieth century seems assured. His oeuvre — roughly 900 pages of poetry distributed over eleven volumes, 250 pages of prose, more than 1,000 pages of published correspondence, and nearly 700 pages of poetry translated from eight languages — has by now received massive critical attention, amounting to an astounding six thousand-plus entries, including reviews, essays, memoirs, and books in a dozen or more languages. And yet the work continues to be to a great extent terra incognita, a vast territory with uncertain, shifting borders, a map on which the unexplored sections by far outweigh the few areas that have been sketched in, reconnoitered.
Even of those textual areas crisscrossed repeatedly by various explorers, we have widely differing and often contradictory reports: it seems that every time a commentator ventures into an already mapped area, he or she returns with a new map charting different coordinates or a different topography for the same place. A Kafkaesque landscape and trek: the terrain the reader is confronted with appears simultaneously stony and amoebic, composed of multilayered strata continuously shifting in shape and consistency. It is so dense and multiple, in fact, that the various critical tunnels drilled into its layers never seem to cross or link up, constituting at best — that is, when the critic-explorer at least manages to get back home from the uncharted territories — a self-referential or self-interfering network of reticulated interconnections, often more relevant to the explorer's preoccupations than to the land under hand. It is an inexpugnable fortress, an unconquerable landscape, a "hyper-uranian" cosmos.
Why do such geostrategic, quasi-military images and metaphors so readily come to mind when one gropes toward a comprehension and description of Celan and his oeuvre? No doubt the poems themselves, their vocabulary, their syntactical gnarledness, their textual strategies, tactical evasiveness, and philological ruses, propose and even demand such a reading. But the life itself seems to fit such a description: mapped out spatially, it describes an encirclement of Germany, originating in Czernowitz and moving through Bucharest and Vienna to Paris, from where Celan undertakes a number of quick, short raids across the borders into that country. Two of the people he considered his real friends and associates were in fact strategically situated on "meridians" he himself could not inhabit and which helped him to encircle Germany: Osip Mandelstam (the "brother," on whom more later) in Russia and Nelly Sachs (the "sister" poet) in Sweden. I use the military metaphor advisedly, for there seems to me to run through Celan's life if not a desire for assault on Germany and revenge for the death of his parents (or rather of his mother) then at least a constant, unrelenting feeling of being under attack and needing to counter this attack.
The Celanian dynamic is, however, not simple-minded or onedirectional: it involves a complex double movement — to use the terms of Empedocles — ofphilotes (love) for his mother's tongue) and neikps (strife) against her murderers who are the originators and carriers of that same tongue. He is caught in this love/strife dynamic, the common baseline or ground of which (as Grund, ground, but also and simultaneously asAbgrund, abyss) is the German language, irrevocably binding together both the murdered and the murderer, a dynamic that structures all of Celan's thinking and writing.
But the critics' problems are specific to their undertaking (i.e., their need to prove that the methodologies they are invested in are the right ones and will result in the "true" interpretation of the poem) and should not discourage the reader. It is important to state at the outset that if Celan's poems are often difficult (and get more opaque in the late work) they are not incomprehensible. Celan himself, when asked about the difficulties of the poems, insisted that they were in no way hermetic and that all one had to do was to read them again and again. At the same time he claimed a necessary opacity for poetry today, first because the poem is "dunkel" (dark, obscure) because of its thingness, its phenomenality. In a note toward his essay "The Meridian" he writes: "Regarding the darkness of the poem today, imagination and experience, experience and imagination let me think of a darkness of the poem qua poem, of a constitutive, even congenital darkness. In other words: the poem is born dark; the result of a radical individuation, it is born as a piece of language, as far as language manages to be world, is loaded with world."1
And this world-making, this making of a new world through and in poetry, is what I want to insist on, lest the above description of Celan's relation to Germany would tend to elide the desire for "making it new" and limit Celan's work to a revenge play. It is just that for Celan, as survivor, the poetry that will be — that has to be — written after Auschwitz has to always remain conscious of—eingedenk — the horror of the Shoah. If the past is the abyss and simultaneously the ground on which the work rests, the stance it will take is, however, resolutely forward looking and hopeful (except perhaps in some of the bitter late poems written under the psychic pressure of mental illness). It will certainly not deny the possibility of a new world, of a new and more human age. In early 1946 the American poet Charles Olson suggested in his poem "La Preface" that one world age had come to an end, an age, or yuga, that stretched from the prehistoric caves (among the major discoveries in relation to art of the twentieth century) to the concentration camps: "Buchenwald new Altamira cave/With a nail they drew the object of the hunt." By implication, Olson was simultaneously making the claim for a new age, to begin after Buchenwald. "We are born" he writes, "not of the buried but of these unburied dead" — an eerie echo of Celan's "Death Fugue" in which the "we" of the survivors "scoop[s] out a grave in the sky where it's roomy to lie." All poetry, after that date, will have to be, at some level, a poetry of witnessing. But it cannot stop there if it wants to be of essential use, as both Olson and Celan insist; it cannot simply bear witness to the past but must at the same time be resolutely turned to the future: it has to be open, it has to be imaginatively engaged in the construction of a new world, it has to look forward, to be visionary. It is that forward looking, that vertical stance that I also hear in Celan's question about bearing witness for the witness. Celan's work is that of both a witness and a visionary.2
I. Paul Celan, Der Meridian, Endfassung, Vorstufen, Materialien, edited by Bernhard Boschenstein and Heino Schmull, Tubingen Ausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1999), 84.
2. This combination — witness and visionary — is not as rare as it would seem in our times. Ammiel Alcalay, for example, speaks in the same terms of the Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laabi in his foreword to Laabi's volume of selected poems, The World's Embrace (San Francisco: City Lights, 2003).
A word more needs to be said about the mode of Celan's witnessing, as it differs markedly from that of other Holocaust writers, and that difference itself is what makes possible the visionary stance I am so insistent about. Despite the presence throughout the work (or better maybe, below the work) of the events of the Nazi years, especially the murder of his mother, there is a strong refusal in Celan to let his writing become simply a repository for a narrative of the Shoah, in profound contrast to most Holocaust writers, a major part of whose endeavor has been to dwell again and again on the past in order to chronicle with as much accuracy as they could muster the events of their lives during those fateful years (Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi come to mind but also poets like Abba Kovener or Abraham Sutzkever). Not only did Celan not write such an autobiographical prosopopoeia, but, according to all accounts, he refused steadfastly to speak in public or in private about the events of his life connected with the Shoah. Symptomatic for this reticence is the following biographical comment from 1949: "With the exception of a one-year stay in Fran
ce, I, for all practical purposes, never left my native city prior to 1941.I don't need to relate what the life of a Jew was like during the war years." This decision not to relate, not to dwell on those years — no matter how much they shaped his early life, no matter the shadow they threw on the rest of his life — informed the stance of his writing for the next quarter century. One way to see this is to examine his rewriting of "Death Fugue" in the poem "Stretto," which I do later in this introduction. But let me now turn to a closer look at Paul Celan's life, before addressing some of the issues his poetry raises.
Celan was born Paul Antschel in Czernowitz, capital of the Bukovina, in 1920. He was raised in a Jewish family which insisted that young Paul receive the best secular education, with his mother incul
eating her love of the German language and culture, and also that he remain firm in his Jewish roots: both his parents came from solid orthodox and, on one side, Hasidic backgrounds. His father had strong Zionist convictions, and his mother, notwithstanding her great admiration for classical German culture, kept the Jewish tradition alive in the household on a daily basis: it was a kosher household in which the Sabbath candles were conscientiously lit every week. In this, the Antschels were not very different from most of the more than fifty thousand Jews of Czernowitz during the tail end of those "golden years" for Bukovina Jewry — years that started under the benign though calculating Austrian-Hungarian regime with the "emancipation" of the Jews in 1867 and began to decline after the fall of the Hapsburg monarchy in 1918 and the incorporation of the Bukovina into Romania, the government of which immediately began to try to "romanize" the province, though with relatively little success. Czernowitz retained its "pulsing Jewish life which resisted all antiSemitic attempts to undermine it" until 1940.3
In November 1938 Celan traveled by train from Czernowitz to Paris via Berlin, where he arrived at a fateful moment — the morning after Kristallnacht — later remembered in a poem set by its title in Paris ("La Contrescarpe") but alluding to the stopover in Berlin:
Via Krakow
you came, at the Anhalter
railway station
a smoke flowed towards your glance,
it already belonged to tomorrow.
3. Much of the information for this section is indebted to Israel Chalfen's Paul Celan: A Biography of His Youth (New York: Persea Books, 1991) and to Wolfgang Emmerich's Paul Celan (Reinbek by Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1999).
In summer 1939 Celan returned to Czernowitz after his first year as a medical student at the University of Tours. The Hitler-Stalin Pact in August of that year put Romania on a war footing, and any return to studies in France became impossible. In spring 1940 the Soviet Union addressed an ultimatum to the Romanian government, demanding the immediate handing over of Bessarabia and North Bukovina. Romania, powerless and unable to expect any support from its theoretical allies, France and England, who were themselves now under attack from Hitler, handed over both provinces. On June 28 Soviet troops entered Czernowitz. The first year of occupation by foreign troops was relatively peaceful, but on June 13, 1941, the citizens of Czernowitz got a first inkling of the horrors to come. In a single night the NKVD arrested four thousand men, women, and children and deported them to Siberia. Then, on June 22, Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. On the southern front German troops reinforced by Romanian units pushed the Soviets back and occupied the Bukovina and Czernowitz (Antonescu, the Romanian dictator, had enthusiastically joined the German-Italian-Japanese axis in November 1940). The retreating Soviet troops helped their own civilians — bureaucrats and party officials who had joined the occupation troops — to evacuate the Bukovina, but only just before the last train was ready to leave, reports Israel Chalfen, did they make the rather lukewarm suggestion that the general population of Czernowitz should flee to Russia. Only a few committed Communists followed suit, among them Paul Celan's close friend Erich Einhorn. On July 5, 1941, the Romanian troops occupied Czernowitz, and the German EinsatzTruppe D, led by SS-Brigadefuhrer Ohlendorf, reached the city the very next day. The SS had one essential job to fulfill — "Energisch durchgreifen, die Juden liquidieren," to energetically liquidate the Jews — as they did not trust the Romanians to do it thoroughly enough. On July 7 the Great Temple went up in flames, and for the next three days the hunt was open: 682 Jews were murdered. By late August Ohlendorf triumphantly reported to Berlin that more than 3,000 had been killed. On October 11 the ghetto was created — the first one in the history of the Bukovina and of Czernowitz. Then began the "Umsiedlung" (relocation) of most Jews to Transnistria. The Romanians managed to argue with the Germans and to retain 15,000 Jews in Czernowitz to keep the city functioning. The Antschel family were among those who, at least for the time being, remained in the ghetto. Paul was ordered to forced labor on construction sites. Then, in June 1942, a new wave of arrests and deportations began, taking place primarily on Saturday nights. With the help of his friend Ruth Lackner, Paul had found a large and comfortable hideout, but his parents refused adamantly to take refuge there, preferring to remain in their own house — where Celan's mother prepared rucksacks in case they should be deported. On one of those Saturday nights, disobeying his parents' orders, Paul left the house and spent the night in the hideout. When he returned the next morning he found his home sealed off: his parents had been deported.
Celan continued to work in forced labor camps, hauling stones and debris from the Prut River for the reconstruction of a bridge. In late fall 1942 a letter (probably from his mother) brought the news that his father, physically broken by the slave labor he was subjected to, had died — either shot by the SS or succumbing to typhus; the exact cause of death was never established. Later that winter the news that his mother too had been killed by the Nazis reached him via an escaped family member. Paul himself was now sent to a forced labor camp some four hundred miles south of Czernowitz, where he remained throughout the next year until the labor camps were closed in February 1944. In April Soviet troops occupied Czernowitz without a fight. Celan was put to work as a medical auxiliary in a psychiatric clinic and made one trip as an ambulance assistant to Kiev. Another year was spent at the university in Czernowitz, now studying English literature (he had already started translating poems by Shakespeare during the years in the forced labor camps). While making a living translating newspaper articles from Romanian for a Ukrainian newspaper, he put together two manuscripts of his poems, an act that clearly affirmed his decision to become (or remain) a German-language poet.
Celan left his hometown for good in April 1945 to move to Bucharest, the capital of Romania, where he found work as a translator of Russian literature into Romanian. He also translated a number of short stories by Franz Kafka, an author who was to remain of central importance to him for the rest of his life. He started to engage in a life devoted to writing, gathering and reworking the early Bukovinan poems, writing new ones and beginning to publish. It is also at this time that he changed his name from Antschel to Celan. He sought out the most influential Bukovinan poet of the time, Alfred MargulSperber, who welcomed him warmly, and met Petre Solomon, who was to remain a lifelong friend. A relatively happy time, then, but one always framed by the dark past and an uncertain present and future. The work of those years is tinged with investigations of surrealism, as is most obvious in the prose poems in Romanian (the only time he used a language other than German) he wrote during that period, one of which opens the poetry section of this book.
Then, in December 1947, he clandestinely crossed over to Vienna — from the little we know, a harrowing journey on foot from Romania through Hungary to Austria. The only German-speaking place the poet was ever to live in, the Vienna of those years4 — Orson Wells's The Third Man comes close to what it must have felt like to Celan — was relatively hospitable to the young poet, though the minimal and superficial denazification program it had submitted itself to must have left the survivor uneasy, to say the least. Through an introduction from Margul-Sperber he met Otto Basil, editor of the avant-ga
rde literary magazine Der Plan, in which he would publish a number of poems, and at some point he went to meet Ludwig von Picker, who had been a close friend of Georg Trakl's and who celebrated the young Bukovinan poet as "heir to Else Lasker-Schuler." The meeting with the surrealist painter Edgar Jene led to the writing of the first essay by Celan we have, "Edgar Jene and the Dream of the Dream," composed as a foreword to a Jene exhibition catalog. He also met people who were to remain lifelong friends, such as Nani and Klaus Demus, and maybe most important, the young poet Ingeborg Bachman, who — even after their early love affair faded — remained a close friend and staunch defender in the later, darker days of the Goll affair. He readied his first book, The Sand from the Urns, for publication — though he would recall the book and have it destroyed, judging that the many typos and mistakes lethally disfigured his work. But Celan clearly did not find what he was looking for, and even before his first book came out he left Vienna for Paris, where he arrived in July 1948 and where he would remain until his death in late April 1970.
From Holderlin's hallucinatory walk to the Bordelais and back, to von Horvath's strange death (a branch severed by lightning killed him on the Champs Elysees), France has always proved a point of focal, not to say fatal, attraction — and certainly often enough, a point of rupture — for poets and writers of the German language: suffice it to mention in this context the names of Heinrich Heine, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Walter Benjamin. For most of these, the stay in France was limited and freely chosen. But often also their residence was a matter of political or intellectual exile. Few of them, however, had as symbiotic and long-term a relationship with France as Paul Celan.
