"SECRET MONARCHS": LANDAUER’S ANARCHISM AND CELAN’S POETICS

In his 1960 speech "The Meridian" Paul Celan mentions a round dozen predecessors, among them the socialist thinker Gustav Landauer (1870-1919).

Gustav Landauer’s name occurs here as the second of a pair of writers, both of whom are generally remembered as "anarchists"; Kropotkin, as the author of the still-popular Mutual Aid a Factor of Evolution, is perhaps better remembered. The reference seems at first sight to convey no more than that the speaker grew up with non-Marxist leftist ideals to which he still feels a certain loyalty. If, however, one looks into Landauer’s writings, one discovers a relationship that is unexpectedly rich. There is a common core to Landauer’s politics and Celan’s poetics. And there is also a common struggle to reconcile universalist ideals and Jewish identity.

The passage in "The Meridian" in which the above-quoted sentences appear has a precedent in Landauer as well as in Büchner. In 1913 Landauer published an essay, "Twenty-Five Years Ago: On the Jubilee of Wilhelm II’s Reign," which outlines his personal development during the Kaiser’s reign, in mordant counterpoint to the patriotic sham reality which he saw being imposed around him (and which was soon to become the bloody earnest of the Great War). The last paragraph begins: "Although it is still somewhat too early for memoir writing, [...] I have allowed myself, on the occasion of Wilhelm II’s jubilee, to speak of myself and to give myself a modest torchlight parade." Landauer’s defiant self-assertion recalls Büchner’s/Lucile’s/Celan’s refusal to bow down to the "parade horses and street-corner gawkers of history."

Celan and Landauer both experience themselves as individuals pitted against history; moreover, both speakers convey this sense by emphasizing their physical presence before their respective audiences. In Call to Socialism, which was originally presented as a lecture series, Landauer says:

The speaker of "The Meridian’ also emphasizes his physical presence, more subtly, but insistently: "I have gone this way, here too, in your presence. It was a circle." True, "The Meridian" is not a call to socialism but only a call to poetry – poetry in the sense of Lucile’s "Long live the King." If read truly "against time," the muted concentration of "The Meridian" can become a slow fuse to Landauer’s vehemence.

Even the radical isolation from which Celan spoke – and the attempt to break through the narrows of despair to the enlargement of hope – are prefigured from early on in Landauer. In 1900 he gave a speech entitled "From Separation to Community," which title he explains as follows:

"We, too, in the void," Celan was to write in Speech-Grille, "stand by the banners." True community can only begin in an association of those who are true to themselves. One could say that for Landauer and Celan the self is implicitly communal. One thinks of the ancient concept of the self as "microcosm" or model of the universe. The idea appears to have been familiar to the anarchists: under "microcosm" the Oxford English dictionary gives a quotation from Kropotkin: "The molecule thus becomes a particle of the universe on a microscopic scale – a microcosmos which lives the same life." More recent writers have compared the universe to a hologram, in which every part contains the whole. The anarchist’s faith is predicated on this perception existing in others as well as in oneself. "This call is to everyone who can understand it": the "you" of Celan’s poetry, also, can be understood in this sense.

Again, in Landauer’s Call to Socialism the revolutionary drive comes precisely from within the self, powered not only by indignation at injustice but also by the desire for a larger life.

It seems logical to Landauer that those who share this disgust and this desire will reach out toward one another:

Thus he hopes for a kind of "snowball" effect, a rapid crystallization in a solution which he imagines as already saturated with disgust and desire. Celan, too, seems to have wanted to hold on to a similar hope. "A single flood-tide swells," he wrote in a late poem; he seems to have carried that hope with him into an uttermost isolation.

Landauer’s career is a history of brave attempts to set this process in motion. He hoped for a society that would not be dominated by a central authority, but composed through of small groups in federation. The longest-lived of his organizational attempts, the Socialist Bund, founded in 1908, contained at its height no more than a thousand workers and intellectuals. He resisted suggestions that he modify his methods to appeal more strongly to the masses; he had no interest in the creation of a mass movement, in any attempt to "move" people in ways that would negate their freedom. Hence his vituperations against Marxism in the Call to Socialism. From 1909 to 1915 he edited a newspaper, The Socialist, which spoke to both intellectuals and workers. To a correspondent who had evidently suggested he ought to talk down more to the latter, he wrote:

The uncompromising tone is typical of Landauer’s letters. He often expresses appreciation, affection, understanding, but where he sees something to criticize he does so in the bluntest terms, sparing no sarcasm. Amazingly, his friendships with at least some of the addressees (Martin Buber, Constantin Brunner, Fritz Mauthner among others) endured.

This kind of integrity can only be compared to that of the artist determined not to compromise his vision; and in fact Landauer’s first book, published in 1893, was a novel, Der Todesprediger; he also published a collection of stories, Macht und Mächte (1903); he wrote sensitively of Goethe and Hölderlin; his last work was a collection of essays on Shakespeare. Moreover, Landauer made no distinction between his political and literary activity. In his attack on the Marxists in Call to Socialism he writes:

Without the "spirit," the in-forming eros of poetry, Marxism can create only a duplicate of mass society – state capitalism. "The state is the surrogate of the spirit."

This conception of the political thinker as artist made it possible for Landauer to accept the contradiction between solitude and activism. In 1910 he wrote to Constantin Brunner

The letter ends, "Yours sincerely, but above all, mine sincerely, Gustav Landauer."

Landauer chooses, then, to focus on seeing his own vision clearly, hoping that others will eventually be influenced by it, recognizing that it is essentially Utopian. In The Revolution he plays on the word "Utopia," coining from it the form "Topia." (Could Celan’s hyphenation of the word in "The Meridian" hark back to this?) Landauer defines the "Topia" as "the general and comprehensive assemblage of communal life in a state of relative stability."

Deapite this insight, Landauer remained actively involved in politics; even while writing to Brunner that political meetings are to him a "painful duty" he acknowledges them as a duty; and when the moment came, he accepted a position in a revolutionary government. But his center of gravity remained the perceiving, thinking, artistically projecting self. Thus Landauer as the poet-leader already in a kind of internal exile seems to anticipate Celan (the "secret king of the German-language poem" in the words of one observer) as hermetic poet hinting – to whoever may be listening for such hints – on the possibility of eventual solidarity. One is tempted to speak of different phases in the life of the same being.

This feeling strengthens when we read Landauer’s 1918 essay "Goethe’s Politics," which begins: "To be a poet means to be somewhat shy; to write a poem means to hide something." It is already as though he were writing about the poet whose very surname suggests concealment. The poet, writes Landauer, is compelled by his nature to speak indirectly, and Goethe was particularly careful in his political utterances; to learn Goethe’s real beliefs one must undertake a "voyage of discovery" through his works and his statements to intimates. (This, too, sounds familiar.) Landauer concludes that an "alliance (Bund) of leading spirits, who regulate and form public life, is the decisively important thing to which Goethe returns again and again in his thinking and planning." Landauer quotes a statement in which Goethe wistfully contrasts the "social tone" in which his French admirers write: "One sees that these persons always think and speak in large society, whereas in the best Germans one always senses solitude and an individual voice." Landauer makes this point about Goethe despite the fact that, as he noted in his Hölderlin essay two years earlier, Goethe failed to recognize Hölderlin. Despite past failures of leading poetic spirits to recognize one another, Landauer still believes in the necessity and perhaps in the possibility of such alliances. As Landauer points out, Goethe did write one Utopia, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, in which the cooperation of "leading spirits" is envisioned. Landauer expresses a particularly warm appreciation for Goethe’s "Fairy Tale (Das Märchen)," which he interprets as a celebration of "the mutual aid of forces and their dependency on one another."The essay closes – a month before the Munich Revolution, as Landauer’s note to the essay points out – with a quote from the "Märchen": "Es ist an der Zeit! (the time has come)." One recalls the last line of Celan’s "Corona": "Es ist Zeit." "Corona" is a love poem, but then the "Märchen" is also about love; "Geist" is a form of eros.

Related to this perception of an in-forming eros is a sympathy for the feminine. In an essay on Martin Buber, Landauer wrote:

One knows that Celan had read these words; in "Before a Candle," which dedicates his work to the memory of his mother, he wrote:

in the name of the Three,

who contend with each other, till

the sky plunges down into the grave of the feelings

In view of the intervening tragedy the "Grund" has become a "grab," but that changes nothing in the basic image. For Celan the feminine was represented above all by the memory of Fritzi Antschel; for Landauer, by Hedwig Lachmann, the poet and translator, five years older than Landauer, who became his life-partner in 1901.

This sense of boundenness to the maternal principle prevents both Landauer and Celan from making an absolute value out of Art. Significantly, it is to Hedwig Lachmann that Landauer writes, summarizing a story by Edgar Allan Poe:

Misgivings of this kind also surface, again with a reference to the Pygmalion myth, in "The Meridian." Landauer, however, adds:

For all is poetry

With which man soothes his pain.

Thus Landauer, like Celan, sees the "Medusa’s head," but also believes in an art that is communicative and healing. In Celan there is at least the longing for such a belief, which comes out most clearly toward the end The No-One’s-Rose, in "The Bright Stones" and "Anabasis" and also in the ending of "Hut Window."

Landauer also questions the value of Art in that outburst on the occasion of the Kaiser’s jubilee:

Somewhere in this transaction the living figure of vision becomes a plaster figurine. Here the "Medusa’s head" seems an effect of the spiritual separation between the artist and his audience (a separation which Celan was to feel far more tragically). In commenting on the work and the suicide of a young decadent poet, Landauer mentions a saying of Hebbel about "a secret emperor that the people has." Similarly, he says, a "secret people" lives in the writings of the great poets:

How not think, in reading these words, of Celan who so laconically evoked, in the Bremen speech, "a landscape where books and humans lived."

The catastrophe which in 1941 broke over that "landscape" – the Jewish community of Czernowitz – was a sequel to World War I, which Gustav Landauer and Hedwig Lachmann already experienced as a cosmic cataclysm. World War I looked like a final refutation of the Enlightenment dream of human brotherhood which, despite the nineteenth-century nationalist reactions, had remained the spiritual sustenance of many German Jews who had distanced themselves from their ancestral tradition. In the edition of Hedwig Lachmann’s poems which Landauer edited after her death from influenza in 1918, there is a poem entitled "Schreckbild (Nightmare Vision)" which expresses this ultimate disappointment. A literal translation follows; the original is in iambic pentameter with alternating masculine and feminine rhymes. The first lines contain an unmistakable allusion to Schiller’s "Ode to Joy": "Seid umschlungen, Millionen (Be embraced, millions)."

Just yesterday from mouth to mouth a word –

Humanity! – ensouled alliance of all zones,

Flew round the globe, embracing

The yielding breast of millions.

 

Humanity! You primal power, like eternity,

From which of hold thousands took fire,

Willing to pious service and martyrdom,

For you those sent by God bled to death –

 

Did some demon gnaw your bones

Until your flanks, torn open, gape?

Did some frost eat into the marrow of your life,

That you fall apart into confused nations?

 

Or did you curse your own womb

And let your own brood perish miserably,

Did you deal them the mortal blow with your own hand,

That they die like animals under rubble?

 

From primitive times it smolders into the day

With the breath of rot and blood-colored mists;

The brother-tribes get ready for the strike,

To annihilate and gag each other.

 

Covering the world with ashes like a volcano,

Waves of doom crash through all quarters of heaven,

And how you stare – humanity – as if turned to stone,

Like a form (Larve) from which the spirit has departed.

Like Landauer (see the above-quoted pasage from Call to Socialism), Lachmann understands Geist (spirit) as a unifying principle, as what gives life. The falling-out of nations means the falling-apart of Humanity, the failure of Geist, the death of the world-spirit.

In "The Meridian" Celan says, "No one can tell how long the breath-pause (Atempause) [...] will last." "Atem" (a cognate of Sanskrit atman)" may be read as "spirit." Celan’s word-choice is in keeping with the modern preference for the concrete, the preference of a time that is skeptical about spirit and solidarity. Celan appears to accept this skepticism, but with a muttered "Nevertheless"; he chooses to regard the absence of breath/spirit as a "pause," to hope for a return – a hope which is an act of will. (I would note that in the Orthodox Jewish tradition, joy is similarly an act of will, an act of faith despite all appearances.) Similarly, the earth-encircling "meridian" that "binds" and "leads to the encounter" is a muted, concretized variant of Schiller’s world-embracing "Freude.". And the poem with which The No-One’s-Rose concludes harks back to "The Meridian" and speaks of an unnamed figure’s "sun-steered pain, which calls the lands brothers after/ the midday-saying of a/ loving/ distance" – again an echo of the "Ode to Joy" ("Alle Menschen werden Brüder"), the supreme proof-text of universalism. At the same time, The No-One’s Rose is the collection in which Jewish motifs come to the forefront, after being muted in Celan’s early work. We shall return to this topic.

Landauer’s letters from the war years are the prose version of Lachmann’s poem. To a friend bitten by the war fever, he wrote:

One hears the same note in an early poem of Celan’s: "Ich blieb derselbe in den Finsternissen (I remained myself in the darknesses)." And the verb "to stand," with a similar implication of holding out against despair, also occurs in the poems and letters of Celan’s last years.

Landauer survived the deep isolation of the war years. When, immediately after the war, a revolutionary government formed in Munich, he was called to participate. The revolutionary government lasted only a few months. After troops from Berlin took over the city, friends urged Landauer to flee, but he refused. He was arrested on May 1, 1919, and beaten to death the following day; his last words are said to have been: "Erschlagt mich doch! Dass ihr Menschen seid! (So kill me! To think that you are human!)" Paul Antschel was born in the following year; he was to live, like Landauer, to the age of 49.

*

In 1947 a still little-known poet named Paul Celan arrived in Vienna and joined a group of Surrealist writers and artists which included the painter Edgar Jené. During his brief stay there he wrote an essay, "Edgar Jené and the Dream of the Dream," which, in the form of a commentary on Jené’s paintings, reflects on the human condition in the light of the recent catastrophe. The last section of the essay appears to hark back to an early Communist affiliation, expressing disillusionment with the results of the Marxist revolution, seeking to revive a vision of individuals coming together without self-betrayal:

Between Landauer’s prose and this there is, it seems to me, a continuity not only of thought but of voice. In Celan’s later prose these aspirations are muted, pruned to the point of disappearance. Manifestos still echo in From Threshold to Threshold, with its dedications to kindred poets. But with Speech-Grille complete isolation has set in. There is no present comradeship, there is only memory and the hope of planting a word-seed that may unfold in the future. Nonetheless, in the late poetry forms of the noun "Schwur" (oath) and the verb "schwören" keep coming back, in uncertain context. The poetry is haunted by the desire of covenant. The radical aspirations of his youth lay low, rather than slumbered, and surfaced in a warm response to the student demonstrations of the late 1960's. And it appears that Celan continued to read Landauer, or at least to acquire every book connected with Landauer that he could get his hands on. Among his books, marked with the dates when he acquired them, are Hedwig Lachmann’s Gesammelte Gedichte (1958); the 1929 edition of Aufruf zum Sozialismus (1959); Der Werdende Mensch, Buber’s selection of Landauer’s essays (1960); a collection of letters from the French Revolution edited by Landauer (1963); a 1967 anthology on the Munich revolutionary government; another selection of Landauer’s essays, Zwang und Befreiung, published in 1968. Buber’s 1929 edition of Gustav Landauer’s letters bears the date: 17.7.69. And there is a book by a Georg Landauer with a card from Celan’s friend Klaus Demus: "Dear Paul, This was listed in the catalogue as G. Landauer – unfortunately not Gustav."

Besides anarchist views, Celan had another area in common with Landauer, – namely the problematics of the universalist Jew. On the cover of Zwang und Befreiung, Celan had noted page 198, and several passages are underlined on pp. 197-200. These pages are the concluding portion of "Are These Heretical Thoughts?", the 1913 essay in which Landauer responded to Zionism. Scrutinizing p. 198 to see what might have struck Celan, Günzel finds the sentence:

Actually, only the last eleven words of that sentence are on page 198; the rest of that page is as follows (I hope I can translate intelligibly these densely-packed sentences that seem to want to say everything at once):

And then, immediately following, on page 199:

"My Germanness and my Jewishness do each other no harm and much good": that sentence was quoted, according to Dr. Chalfen, in a letter to Gideon Kraft, a Czernowitzer who had settled in Israel and who had invited him to visit there in April 1968.. Dr. Chalfen comments: "Only many years later did Paul Celan doubt the validity of that sentence – in the war winter of 1939/40 it seemed to him a saving anchor." One could imagine the young Paul Antschel seizing upon this sentence as a response to his father’s Zionism; one does not have imagine the thoughts which the sentence suggested in 1968. Among his posthumous poems there is one dated July 2, 1968, in which the murdered father appears and says, in so many words: "I told you so."

On the above-translated page 198, a number of provocative things are said. In reply one might want to say to Landauer: "Can you really claim to have raised ‘all that ancient tradition that was in us, no less than the fervent power of our drives, into the purifying light’? You had, as you said in a letter, grown up in a "completely indifferent" environment, your letters refer occasionally to Christmas and Easter but never to Passover or Yom Kippur or the Sabbath, I am not sure you knew that the saying ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ did not originate with Jesus but comes from Chapter 19 of Leviticus. Like Simone Weil, you were evidently unacquainted with the traditional writings, with the oral Torah, with the classless learning community you unconsciously struggled to reconstruct; you were connected with Judaism by only two things: the fact that the non-Jewish world saw you as a Jew, and the affinities you still felt with others who shared this background." Celan knew more about the Jewish tradition than Landauer; but if he had absorbed in his formative years the sense that Judaism was only a remnant of the past, then the marking of the passage could reflect his own reluctance to re-open the question. He eventually visited Israel; he did not seek contact with a traditional community.

But the passage is not just about Jewishness; it is about the individual’s anxiety about being absorbed in the community, an anxiety we are surprised to find in Landauer. Part of the anxiety may stem from the tension between the self and a tradition perceived as rigid and authoritarian. From the totality of one’s experience the microcosmic self tries to act "in the present," a present which has no traditional precedent. Only from one’s individual standpoint can one hope to see truly and act rightly. So far, so consistent with Landauer’s general views. But then why the sudden fear of being only a "bridge" between the past and the future? Surely the more one has realized oneself individually, the more one is also a bridge, as the very filiation Landauer-Celan shows. This sudden cordoning-off of the self is all the more remarkable as the self is shot through, almost undermined, by a knowledge of the differences one human being encompasses: "I hope to be even more multifariously one than I am." One thinks of those recent writings on genetics where the individual is a battleground for separately-selected "genes." Landauer, however, sees this multiplicity of the individual as holding a promise for the unification of peoples. The essay concludes:

This only makes sense if we assume some overarching tendency toward unification. Geist, again, that Geist which for Hedwig Lachmann was to depart during World War I, and which barely breathes again in Celan’s poems; or perhaps that Name on whose unity or unification the Jewish tradition insists.

In Celan’s work there are beginnings of a reconciliation of Landauer’s views with the tradition, or a rediscovery of the tradition from a Landaueresque point of view. As said, The No-One’s Rose re-invokes Landauer’s universalism and reasserts the poet’s Jewishness with references to Jewish custom and ritual. In "Hut Window," a poem related to the Sukkot harvest festival when in Temple times sacrifices were made for the nations as well as Israel, the eye becomes the window of the Sukkah ("hut") into which the consciousness of Jewish and human history is gathered. An angel-like figure, after gathering the sparks of what remains after the destruction,

builds it, the star of David, lets it

flare up, once,

 

lets it go out – there it stands,

invisible, stands

with Alpha and Aleph, with Yud,

with the others, with

 

all of them: in

you,

Beit – that is

the house where the table stands with

 

the light and the Light.

In this conclusion the Star of David is invisible yet still present; the vision is universal yet on some level still deeply Jewish in its commitment to unification and its acceptance of a traditional form – the sukkah – as a vessel and vehicle. From the drafts of The No-One’s Rose it appears that "Hut Window" was actually written last – after the one that ends "too late." And Celan’s last poem, dated April 13, 1970, ends as follows:

The Open ones carry

the stone behind the eye,

it recognizes you

on the Sabbath.

Thus the forms of traditional Judaism are not, after all, necessarily opposed either to individuality or universality. They can also be envisioned as a framework within which individuals could assemble, communicate, stand together. The Jewish nation could also be a microcosm of Humanity.

Günzel notes one other underlining in Zwang und Befreiung: on p. 132. That page is devoted to an anecdote about Tolstoy who, as an old man, meets two peasants who tell him a story about how Truth, having drunk tea with Wrong, was unable to speak. Tolstoy recognizes the justice of the accusation and is cut to the heart. There is no need to guess how this passage affected Celan. His socialist as well as his Jewish conscience pained him to the end.

In retrospect, Celan’s "narrowing" of Landauer’s anarchism into a hermetic poetics, like his separation from Jewish communal life, could seem like a "dead end." On the other hand: through the concentration of his work Celan succeeded in establishing himself as the last great figure of Western literature, even while pointing back toward the Jewish tradition and community. His work has helped the Czernowitz community to be remembered, has caused a certain number of people to read Scholem and Buber and even Landauer. His hermeticism has compelled readers to learn in order to understand him. Recently John Felstiner has written of finding, in the end-papers of a copy of Kafka’s stories, a notation in Celan’s handwriting from December, 1965: "It’s still quite clear in my head – Kämen Menschen, If only people would come, I could almost begin anew, ich könnte fast neu beginnen." Felstiner also found Hebrew writing on those pages – shaddai shaddai, one of the names of God, and then "in a distracted Hebrew hand, the Judaic watchword: Shema Yisrael Adonai Elohenu Adonai Echad, "Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One"– the essential profession of faith which Jewish martyrs have recited over the centuries." Could the "secret people" of Landauer and Celan still emerge?