Inner Workings Read online

  Liberated by the Russians in 1944, he worked for a while as an aide in a psychiatric hospital, then in Bucharest as an editor and translator, adopting the pen-name Celan, an anagram of Antschel in its Romanian spelling. In 1947, before Stalin’s iron curtain came down, he slipped away to Vienna and from there moved to Paris. In Paris he passed his examinations for the Licence ès Lettres and was appointed lecturer in German literature at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, a position he held until his death. He married a Frenchwoman, a Catholic from an aristocratic background.

  The success of this move from East to West was soon dampened. Among the writers Celan had been translating was the French poet Yvan Goll (1891–1950). Goll’s widow Claire took issue with Celan over his versions, and went on to accuse him publicly of plagiarising certain of Goll’s German poems. Though the accusations were malicious and perhaps even crazy, Celan brooded over them to the point of convincing himself that Claire Goll was part of a conspiracy against him. ‘What must we Jews yet endure?’ he wrote to his confidante Nelly Sachs, like him a Jew writing in German. ‘You have no idea how many should be counted among the base, no Nelly Sachs, you have no idea! . . . Should I name names? You would stiffen with horror.’1

  His reaction cannot just be put down to paranoia. As postwar Germany began to feel more confident, anti-Semitic currents were again beginning to flow, not only on the right but, more disturbingly, on the left. Celan suspected, not without reason, that he had become a convenient focus for the campaign for the Aryanisation of German culture that had not given up in 1945, merely gone underground.

  Claire Goll never relented in her campaign against Celan, pursuing him even beyond the grave; her persecutions poisoned his days and contributed heavily to his eventual breakdown.

  Between 1938 and his death in 1970 Celan wrote some eight hundred poems in German; in addition there is a body of early work in Romanian. Recognition of his gifts came soon, with the publication of Mohn und Gedächtis (Poppy and Memory) in 1952. He consolidated his reputation as one of the more important young German-language poets with Sprachgitter (Speech Grille; 1959) and Die Niemandsrose (The No-One’s Rose; 1963). Two more volumes appeared during his lifetime, and three posthumously. This later poetry, out of phase with the leftward swing of the German intelligentsia after 1968, was not quite so enthusiastically received.

  By the standards of international modernism, Celan up to 1963 is quite accessible. The later poetry, however, becomes strikingly difficult, even obscure. Baffled by what they took to be arcane symbolism and private references, reviewers called the later Celan hermetic. It was a label he vehemently rejected. ‘Not in the least hermetic,’ he said. ‘Read! Just keep reading, understanding comes of itself.’2

  Typical of the ‘hermetic’ Celan is the following posthumously published poem, untitled, which I quote in John Felstiner’s translation.3

  You lie amid a great listening,

  enbushed, enflaked.

  Go the Spree, to the Havel,

  go to the meathooks,

  the red apple stakes

  from Sweden –

  Here comes the gift table,

  it turns around an Eden –

  The man became a sieve, the Frau

  had to swim, the sow,

  for herself, for no one, for everyone –

  The Landwehr Canal won’t make a murmur.

  Nothing

  stops.

  What, at the most elementary level, is this poem about? Hard to say, until one becomes privy to certain information, information supplied by Celan to the critic Peter Szondi. The man who became a sieve is Karl Liebknecht, ‘the Frau . . . the sow’ swimming in the canal is Rosa Luxemburg. ‘Eden’ is the name of an apartment block built on the site where the two activists were shot in 1919, while the meathooks are the hooks at Plötzensee on the Havel River on which the would-be assassins of Hitler in 1944 were hanged. In the light of this information, the poem emerges as a pessimistic comment on the continuity of right-wing murderousness in Germany, and the silence of Germans about it.

  The Rosa Luxemburg poem became a minor locus classicus when the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, defending Celan against charges of obscurity, gave a reading of it through which he argued that any receptive, open-minded reader with a German cultural background can understand what it is important to understand in Celan without assistance, that background information should take second place to ‘what the poem [itself ] knows’.4

  Gadamer’s argument is a brave but losing one. What he forgets is that we cannot be sure that the information that unlocks the poem – in this case, the identities of the dead man and woman – is of secondary importance until we know what it is. Yet the questions Gadamer raises are important ones. Does poetry offer a kind of knowledge different from that offered by history, and demand a different kind of receptivity? Is it possible to respond to poetry like Celan’s, even to translate it, without fully understanding it?

  Michael Hamburger, one of the most eminent of Celan’s translators, seems to think so. Though scholars have certainly illumined Celan’s poetry for him, Hamburger says, he is not sure he ‘understands’, in the normal sense of the word, even those poems he has translated, or all of them.5

  ‘[It] asks too much of the reader,’ is the verdict of Felstiner on the Rosa Luxemburg poem. On the other hand, he continues, ‘what is too much, given this history?’ This, in a nutshell, is Felstiner’s own response to accusations of hermeticism against Celan. Given the enormity of anti-Semitic persecutions in the twentieth century, given the all-too-human need of Germans, and of the Christian West in general, to escape from a monstrous historical incubus, what memory, what knowledge is it too much to demand? Even if Celan’s poems were totally incomprehensible (this is not something that Felstiner says, but it is a valid extrapolation), they would nevertheless stand in our way like a tomb, a tomb built by a ‘Poet, Survivor, Jew’ (the subtitle of Felstiner’s study), insisting by its looming presence that we remember, even though the words inscribed on it may seem to belong to an undecipherable tongue. (Felstiner, p. 254)

  At stake is more than a simple confrontation between a Germany impatient to forget its past and a Jewish poet insisting on reminding Germany of that past. Celan was made famous by, and is still most widely known for, the poem ‘Todesfuge’ (‘Death Fugue’):

  Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night

  we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany

  we drink you at sundown and in the morning we drink and we drink you

  death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue

  he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true

  (I quote from Hamburger’s translation, in Poems of Paul Celan, p. 63, because Felstiner’s version of the passage, quite as riveting in its own way, is controversial out of context.) ‘Death Fugue’ was Celan’s first published poem: it was composed in 1944 or 1945 and first appeared, in Romanian translation, in 1947. It absorbs from the Surrealists everything that is worth absorbing. It is not entirely Celan’s brainchild: here and there he takes over phrases, among them ‘Death is a master from Germany’, from fellow poets of his Czernowitz days. Nevertheless, its impact has been immediate and universal. ‘Death Fugue’ is one of the landmark poems of the twentieth century.

  ‘Death Fugue’ has been widely read in the German-speaking world, anthologised, studied in schools, as part of a programme of what is called Vergangenheitsbewältigung, coming to terms with, or overcoming, the past. At the public readings Celan gave in Germany ‘Death Fugue’ was always in demand. It is the most direct of Celan’s poems in naming and blaming: naming what went on in the death camps, blaming Germany. Some of Celan’s defenders argue that he is labelled ‘difficult’ only because readers find the encounter with him too emotionally bruising. It is an argument that needs to account for the reception of ‘Death Fugue’, a reception with apparently open arms.

  In fact, Celan himself never trusted the spirit in which he
was welcomed and even f êted in West Germany. In the line that German critics took with ‘Death Fugue’ – to quote one eminent critic, that it showed he had ‘[escaped] history’s bloody chamber of horrors to rise into the ether of pure poetry’ – he sensed that he was being misinterpreted, and in the deepest historical sense, wilfully misinterpreted.6 Nor was he pleased to hear that in the classroom German students were being directed to ignore the content of the poem and concentrate on its form, particularly its imitation of musical (fugal) structure.

  When Celan writes of the ‘ashen hair’ of Shulamith, he is invoking the hair of Jews that fell as ash on the Silesian countryside; when he writes of ‘the sow’ bobbing in the waters of the Landswehr Canal, he is referring, in the voice of one of her murderers, to the body of a dead Jewish woman. Against pressure to recuperate him as a poet who had turned the Holocaust into something higher, namely poetry, against the critical orthodoxy of the 1950s and early 1960s, with its view of the ideal poem as a self-enclosed aesthetic object, Celan insists that he practises an art of the real, an art that ‘does not transfigure or render “poetical”; it names, it posits, it tries to measure the area of the given and the possible.’7

  With its repetitive, hammering music, ‘Death Fugue’ is as direct as verse can be in its approach to its subject. It also makes two huge implicit claims about what poetry in our time is, or should be, capable of. One is that language can measure up to any subject whatsoever: however unspeakable the Holocaust may be, there is a poetry that can speak it. The other is that the German language in particular, corrupted to the bone during the Nazi era by euphemism and a kind of leering doublespeak, is capable of telling the truth about Germany’s immediate past.

  The first claim was dramatically rejected in Theodor Adorno’s pronouncement, issued in 1951 and reiterated in 1965, that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.’8 Adorno might have added: doubly barbaric to write a poem in German. (Adorno took back his words, grudgingly, in 1966, perhaps as a concession to ‘Death Fugue’.)

  Celan avoids the word ‘Holocaust’ in his writing, as he avoided all usages that might seem to imply that everyday language is in a position to name, and thereby limit and master, that towards which it gestures. Celan gave two major public addresses during his lifetime, both acceptance speeches for prizes, in which, with great scrupulousness of word choice, he responded to doubts about the future of poetry. In the first address, in 1958, he spoke of his halting faith that language, even the German language, had survived ‘that which happened’ under the Nazis.

  There remained in the midst of the losses this one thing: language.

  It, the language, remained, not lost, yes in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed through and could come to light again, ‘enriched’ by all this. (SPP, p. 395)

  Coming from a Jew, such an expression of faith in German might seem odd. Yet Celan was by no means alone: even after 1945, numbers of Jews continued to claim the German language and intellectual tradition as their own. Among them was Martin Buber. Celan paid a visit to the aged Buber to ask Buber’s counsel about continuing to write in German. Buber’s response – that it was only natural to write in one’s mother tongue, that one should take a forgiving stance toward the Germans – disappointed him. As Felstiner puts it, ‘Celan’s vital need, to hear some echo of his plight, Buber could not or would not grasp.’9 His plight was that if German was ‘his’ language, it was his only in a complex, contested, and painful way.

  During his time in Bucharest after the war, Celan had improved his Russian and had translated Lermontov and Chekhov into Romanian. In Paris he continued to translate Russian poetry, finding in the Russian language a welcome, counter-Germanic home. In particular he read Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) intensively. In Mandelstam he met not only a man whose life-story corresponded in what he felt were uncanny ways to his own, but a ghostly interlocutor who responded to his deepest needs, who offered, in Celan’s words, ‘what is brotherly – in the most reverential sense I can give that word’. Setting aside his own creative work, Celan spent most of 1958 and 1959 translating Mandelstam into German. His versions constitute an extraordinary act of inhabiting another poet, though Nadezhda Mandelstam, Mandelstam’s widow, is right to call them ‘a very far cry from the original text’. (Felstiner, pp. 131, 133)

  Mandelstam’s notion of poem as dialogue did much to reshape Celan’s own poetic theory. Celan’s poems begin to address a Thou who may be more or less distant, more or less known. In the space between the speaking I and the Thou they find a new field of tension.

  (I know you, you’re the one bent over low, and I, the one pierced through, am in your need. Where flames a word to witness for us both? You – wholly real. I – wholly mad.)

  (This is Felstiner’s translation. In the freer version by Heather McHugh and Nikolai Popov, the last line reads: ‘You’re my reality. I’m your mirage.’10)

  If there is one theme that dominates John Felstiner’s biography of Celan, it is that Celan developed from being a German poet whose fate it was to be a Jew to being a Jewish poet whose fate it was to write in German; that he outgrew kinship with Rilke and Heidegger to find in Kafka and Mandelstam his true spiritual forebears. Though Celan continued during the 1960s to visit Germany to give readings, any hope that he might develop an emotional involvement with a re-arisen Germany faded, to the point that he would call it ‘a most tragic and indeed most childish error’. (Felstiner, p. 226) He began to read Gershom Scholem on the Jewish mystical tradition, Buber on Hasidism. Hebrew words – Ziv, the unearthly light of God’s presence; Yizkor, memory – appeared in his poetry. The theme of testifying, witnessing, came to the fore, along with the bitter personal subtheme: ‘No one / bears witness for the / witness.’ (SPP, p. 261) The ‘Thou’ of his now insistently dialogical poetry became, intermittently but unmistakably, God; echoes emerged of the Kabbalistic teaching that the whole of creation is a text in the divine language.

  The capture of Jerusalem by Israeli forces in the 1967 war filled Celan with joy. He wrote a celebratory poem that was widely read in Israel:

  Just think: your

  own hand

  has held

  this piece of

  habitable earth,

  again suffered

  up into life. (SPP, p. 307)

  In 1969 Celan visited Israel for the first time (‘So many Jews, only Jews, and not in a ghetto,’ he marvelled ironically). (Felstiner, p. 268) He gave talks and readings, met Israeli writers, resumed a romantic relationship with a woman from his Czernowitz days.

  As a child Celan had for three years attended a Hebrew school. Though he studied the language unwillingly (he associated it with his Zionist father rather than his beloved Germanophile mother), his command ran surprisingly deep. Aharon Appelfeld, by then an Israeli but by origin a Czernowitzer like Celan, found Celan’s Hebrew ‘rather good’. (Felstiner, p. 327) When Yehuda Amichai read out his translations of Celan’s poems, Celan was able to suggest improvements.

  Back in Paris, Celan wondered whether, in staying behind in Europe, he had not made the wrong choice. He toyed with the idea of accepting a teaching position in Israel. Memories of Jerusalem gave rise to a brief burst of composition, poems that are at the same time spiritual, joyful, and erotic.

  Celan had long been troubled by fits of depression. In 1965 he had entered a psychiatric clinic, and later underwent electroshock therapy. At home he was, as Felstiner puts it, ‘sometimes violent’. He and his wife agreed to live apart. A friend visiting from Bucharest found him ‘profoundly altered, prematurely aged, taciturn, frowning’. ‘They’re doing experiments on me,’ he said. To his Israeli lover he wrote, in 1970: ‘They’ve healed me to pieces.’ Two months later he drowned himself. (Felstiner, pp. 243, 330)

  To
the historian Erich Kahler, with whom Celan had corresponded, Celan’s suicide proved that to be ‘both a great German poet and a young Central European Jew growing up in the shadow of the concentration camps’ was a burden too great for one man to bear.11 In a profound sense this verdict on Celan’s suicide is true. But we cannot discount more mundane causes like Claire Goll’s prolonged, mad vendetta, or the nature of the psychiatric care he underwent. Felstiner does not comment directly on the treatment to which Celan’s doctors subjected him, but from Celan’s own bitter asides it is clear they have much to answer for.

  Even during Celan’s lifetime there had developed a busy scholarly trade, principally in Germany, based upon him. That trade has today grown to an industry. As Kafka is to German prose, so Celan has become to German poetry.

  Despite the pioneering translations of Jerome Rothenberg, Michael Hamburger, and others, Celan did not really penetrate the English-speaking world until he had been taken up in France; and in France Celan was read as a Heideggerian poet, that is to say, as if his poetic career, culminating in suicide, exemplified the end of art in our times, an end in parallel to the end of philosophy as diagnosed by Heidegger.

  Though Celan is not what one would call a philosophical poet, a poet of ideas, the link with Heidegger is not fanciful. Celan read Heidegger attentively, as Heidegger read Celan; Hölderlin was a formative influence on both. Celan approved of Heidegger’s view of poetry’s special claims to truth. His own explanation of why he wrote – ‘so as to speak, to orient myself, to find out where I was and where I was meant to go, to sketch out reality for myself’ – is fully in tune with Heidegger. (SPP, p. 396)

  Despite Heidegger’s National Socialist past and his silence on the subject of the death camps, Heidegger was important enough to Celan for Celan, in 1967, to call on him at his retreat in the Black Forest. Afterwards he wrote a poem (‘Todtnauberg’) about that meeting and the ‘word / in the heart’ he hoped to hear from Heidegger, but failed to get.