LANGUAGE AND THE INHUMAN

Paul Celan's poetry is marked by the consciousness of being written, as he put it to his friends, "in the language of his mother and of his mother's murderers."

Celan was a native of Czernowitz, capital of the Bukovina region, where there was a large, German_speaking Jewish community; he was the only child of parents who died in the Transnistria death camp, and was himself interned in a forced labor camp; after the war he resided in Paris from 1948 until his suicide in 1970. He had a strong gift for languages, had read the great writers of Europe and Russia in the original, and included foreign words in many of his poems, so that there are sometimes overtones of the Joycean dream of a universal language. But except for a few early poems in Rumanian and a single sentence in French which was published posthumously, he wrote exclusively in German.

In the short speech which he gave in 1958 on receiving the Bremen literary prize, Celan spoke of his relation to the German language and to language in general in the wake of the Holocaust. I would like here to examine this speech, as it expresses some positions and definitions which are basic to his work. I shall then look briefly at the continuation of the line of thought in his 1960 "Meridian" speech and in Die Niemandsrose (The No-One's-Rose, 1963).

The Bremen speech opens with the remark that in "our language" the word "danken" (to thank) is related to "denken" (to think) and to "gedenken" (to remember). "Permit me," he then says, "to thank you from this standpoint (Erlauben Sie mir, Ihnen von hier aus zu danken)." As Jerry Glenn has pointed out, this opening is bitterly ironical, addressed as it is to a German audience who may be suspected of not having a "common language" with a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust; nor do we have to guess at what he is "thinking" about, what he is "remembering," while "thanking" them. (2) Suppressed rage is one of the reasons for the so called "esoteric" quality of his poems. He cannot even speak directly to this audience about his background and experiences, so he speaks mostly in hints and, to modify a favorite phrase of Nachmanides, ha_ rotseh le_havin yavin, whoever wants to understand will understand. But such a mode of address, though it implies no forgiveness, does give the listener a chance to react like a human being. After this opening Celan goes on to mention his destroyed homeland:

The last_quoted words recall a standard epithet for the Jewish people "the people of the book." This phrase characterizes a relation to books, to literature, quite different from the approach of a Western writer. Celan does not put up a barrier between art and life; in his later "Meridian" speech he expressly rejects the concept of "art for art's sake." As we shall see, he approaches poetry as "Torah" in the original sense of "hora'at derekh," a pointing of the way. Yet the books which "lived" along with the human beings in this region surely included the works of Western literature. This also implies that Western culture was murdered along with European Jews by the Germans acting in defiance of civilization and humanity; the survivor poet stands before them as a representative of their own betrayed values.

Next, Celan recalls – again in a tone of bitter understatement – the barrier which the events of World War II set up between his home region and the centers of German culture.

The last words are again ironical; but this time the irony strikes at the poet too. "Enriched" (angereichert) is a metallurgical term, referring to an increased concentration of metal in the ore. This sentence can only mean that the suffering of the Holocaust gave language the German language a new associative force. The associations of the Holocaust are the "black milk" which nourishes Celan's poetry from "Todesfuge" (Death Fugue) to the end. In his second collection, Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (From Threshold to Threshold), he wrote: "Welches der Worte du sprichst/ du dankst/ dem Verderben" (Whichever word you may speak/ you give thanks/ to perdition). As a poet within the framework of Western culture he takes on himself a grave moral peril the peril of exploiting the suffering of the Holocaust for merely aesthetic ends, for a frisson nouveau. Theodor Adorno is said to have revised his famous dictum that poetry is morally impossible after Auschwitz upon reading Celan. But to Celan's own conscience the poem could not justify itself by itself. What might justify it is the reality (or as he says in "Der Meridian," the Utopia) toward which the poem is heading. In the Bremen speech he begins to describe this course.

Here Celan makes use of the double meaning of "Sinn"– "direction" and "meaning". The poem first of all determines the poet's way and destination. Thus it might be called a prayer in the sense of the Hebrew verb lehitpalel, if one takes this as a reflexive from a root meaning "estimate, assess, judge." (As we shall see, it is also a prayer in the sense of a plea, but not with God directly). To be understood such a poem must be placed within the context of the poet's life and the life of his generation.

Here is a further reason for the "esoteric" character of Celan's poetry: it contains references which can be understood only from his own viewpoint. He does not conceal under abstract language the distance between himself and the reader, which is not "aesthetic distance" but the real distance between any two subjects in this concrete world. Nor does he seemingly bridge this gap with "confessions." Rather by acknowledging the distance, through the consciousness of speaking from within a specific circle of perception, the poem makes us aware of an encompassing totality: of the world in which both subjects, poet and reader, are embedded.

Again, the claim to infinity is bound up with the acceptance of limitation. In "Der Meridian Celan" will say that the poet must speak "unter dern Neigungswinkel seiner Kreatürlichkeit" (under the angle of inclination of his creaturehood), a formulation which seems as if intended to counter Flaubert's "The artist in his work must be like God in his creation, everywhere present and nowhere visible." The language of the artist_god aims to create a world which will be separate and complete in itself; that of the poet_creature is visible human speech within the given world.

Human speech presupposes a human hearer. And therefore the poet, as he moves with the poem toward his destination, is also moving toward some human other who might be "occupied" by the consciousness the poem is seeking to instill. This other is the "reality" with which the poem is concerned, even if it is not clear whether such a "reality" exists or whether the poet, under the dialogic compulsion of language, is merely "projecting" it.

In the poem "Before a Candle," which appeared in Von Schwelle zu Schwelle, we witness the very act of this "projection":

"Beaten gold" seems to stand for language as an inheritance from the mother. In shaping this language the poet summons up a human figure who represents the possibility of understanding. Overt his child of death he then pronounces a blessing, the key phrase of which – "sprech ich dich freh" may be translated either "I acquit/exonerate you" or "I set you free by speaking." The poem concludes:

The listener is absolved of guilt on the condition of remaining faithful to the "no" of the poet's longing– his refusal to accept. This refusal implies a freedom in the face of forces which threaten to overwhelm the human. The poet believes – even though with a faith "not always very strong in hope" – in the ability of language to resurrect humanity.

The Bremen speech concludes:

The "stars that are the work of human hands" are the artificial satellites, the first of which was launched not long before this speech was given. Thus we are reminded that the time is not only the post_Holocaust era, but also the age of technological developments which increase the power of the inhuman and threaten the survival of the human race. And thus the compulsion under which Celan is speaking is not – even in this setting – his alone, but that of any poet who understands the time in which he is living and who therefore "goes with his existence to language' stakes everything on an effort at communication. With this the poet's subjectivity, even while working with the terms of his particular existence, ceases to be merely his own and becomes that of the human being simply. Subjectivity becomes objective. Hence the final words of the speech – "wounded by reality and seeking reality" – refer grammatically not to the speaker but to the one who "goes with his existence to language," this consciousness in which the I is subsumed. It is the positing of this potentially shared consciousness which makes it possible for the one wounded by reality (the inhumanity of human beings) to seek reality (humanity in the positive sense of the word Mensch on which Celan continued to insist).

In the speech "Der Meridian," which Celan gave in acceptance of the Georg Büchner prize in 1960, the poet returns to the thoughts expressed in the Bremen speech and develops them further.

As in the preceding speech, the poem directs the one who writes it along his unique path, but thereby also makes an encounter with the other possible. This other, this "thou" for which the poem is heading is someone different each time, but all addressed by the poem share the name "thou". This may be why Celan hints that the poem may even be able to speak on behalf of the wholly other ("in eines ganz Anderen Sache"). The expression "wholly other" is, as Celan points out, a well known one; in the language of German theology it means "God." This seems to me something like the view of Martin Buber, who understood God as the "Eternal Thou," the point in which the lines of individual I_Thou relations meet. Other terminology in the "Meridian" recalls several Hebrew designations for "God": "der König" (ha_Melekh/the king; "der Ort" (ha Makom/the place), "Unendlichsprechung", "zu keinem Ende komrnende Frage" (Eyn Sof/ the infinite). But Celan is not in a hurry to get to this final Other, who is glimpsed as it were only out of the corner of the eye; the focus is on the concrete act of speech, the poet's hope of reaching another human being who may understand and continue him.

In the "Meridian" this possibility is represented by Lucile, a character in Büchner's play Dantons Tod (The Death of Danton). After listening to a conversation on art between Danton and her husband Camille, she tells the latter, "I love to watch you speak," although she admits not understanding a word. Celan remarks that she has "perceived language and form and (...) at the same time breath, that is, direction and fate" (Sprache wahrgenommen hat und Gestalt, und zugleich auch (...) Atem, das heisst Richtung und Schicksal). After Camille's execution Lucile walks past the guillotine and cries out, "Long live the king!" Celan comments that this is not to be understood as homage to any historical monarchy; rather: "Gehuldigt wird hier der für die Gegenwart des Menschlichen zeugenden Majestät des Absurden" (Homage is paid here to that which witnesses for the human presence: to the majesty of the absurd). Lucile's outcry is an "act of freedom, a "step", in which Celan sees the essence of poetry. At the same time, the reader is reminded of the experience of first reading Celan's work an experience of "watching someone speak," perceiving "form," yet understanding very little. Poetic language does not transmit only "content," nor is poetic form merely "aesthetic"; they embody the human image, which is allegedly the image of the "King." Presumably it is the awareness of this image which binds poet and reader, indeed almost annuls the distinction between them. It is in Lucile's name (ein "Lucilesches" Gegenwort) that Celan urges his hearer: "geh mit den Worten in deine allereigenste Enge. Und setze dich frei" (Go with the words into those straits which are most your own. And set yourself free). We recall the beginning of Psalm 118: "Out of my distress (meitsar, narrowness) I called to the Lord; the Lord answered me with enlargement (merhav, from rahav, wide)." This "enlargement" this liberation, comes from the identification of speaker and hearer: it is this identification which holds the promise of a "Utopian" reality which might be constituted by human identities converging in this manner.

One might speak here of "mysticism." But in the "Meridian" Celan emphasizes that he also grew up with the writings of Peter Kropotkin and Gustav Landauer. That is, he identifies himself as a social revolutionary, though one who places his trust in poetic language as a vehicle of understanding. The concreteness and exactitude of his language are a pledge of the concreteness of the world to be rebuilt. This is why the speech concludes with the finding of' "etwas – wie die Sprache Immaterielles, aber Irdisches, Terrestrisches, etwas Kreisförmiges, über die beiden Pole in sich selbst Zurückkehrendes" (something – like language – immaterial, yet earthly, terrestrial, something circular, which returns through both poles into itself) – the Meridian.

In Die Niemandsrose (The No_One's_Rose), which appeared in l963, a number of poems express the dream of a human language finally allowed to have its way. In "Hüttenfenster" (Booth Window), "etwas ein Atem? em Name?" ("something a breath? a name?") gathers the light of a scattered heritage into "the constellation which he, the human, needs! for a dwelling, here, among humans" (pflückt/ das Sternbild zusammen, des er,/ der Mensch, zum Wohnen braucht, hier,/ unter Menschen). Poetic speech implies the possibility of a world order similar to the ordering ofwords in a poem: an "associative" order where each particular keeps its uniqueness.

Simone Weil said that just as the aim of the poet in the poem is beauty, the aim of the statesman in society is justice. I believe that this observation indicates the direction in which the line of Celan's thinking might be extended. In the "Meridian" he addressed his interpreters:

The Utopia, the no_place, is the point in which the perspectives meet, and it is also the ideal political order which can be envisioned from that point and from that point only. Celan had grown disillusioned with "revolutions" which lacked a spiritual basis, but he never renounced the hope of a change for the better which might begin with the encounter between speaker and hearer in the human heart.

In 1962 Celan wrote to a friend in Germany that after his return from Darmstadt (where he had given the "Meridian" speech) he "encountered" Kepler's saying: "God is symbolized in the sphere; a cross section through the sphere produces a circle; this circle signifies the human being." And Celan adds: "Yes, it exists , this circle. Long live the Meridian!" Celan did not say "the sphere exists." Yet the tone suggests (and it would not be an isolated instance) that he took the Kepler saying, coming to him at that moment, as a confirming "sign" from something "beyond humankind" (jenseits der Menschen), to use a phrase which occurs in Atemwende (Breath_turn, 1967).

As we know; the end of Celan's career as a Western writer at war with the basic assumptions of Western literature was tragic. Although he was praised, analyzed, commiserated with, and even held in a certain awe by many people in the literary world, his work after Die Niemandsrose increasingly expresses his despair of an answering voice. "Niemand zeugt für/den Zeugen (no one bears witness for the witness)," he wrote in Atemwende. With the sense of a widening distance between him and his audience, solitude deepens into despair and disorientation, until his suicide in 1970 which came to his readers as an end long foretold. "Celan left the stage of life in the manner in which he walked upon it," a Swiss friend wrote to me late that year, and the almost banal remark had for me something uncannily exact about it. He had spoken in the "Meridian" of Camille's "theatrical" death on th

e scaffold, to which Lucile's "Long live the king!" is the counterword; he had made a connection between an art that does not acknowledge itself as human speech and a politics not made for human beings. But he himself had accepted a role in that production perhaps had to, in order to demonstrate the point and he played it to the end. Perhaps this explains why, when he came to Israel in 1969, he could not remain here, could not take refuge in Jerusalem.

In 1958 Celan said to his audience that he had come to them "by what detours! But are there such things as detours?" In Die Niemandsrose he said:

In another poem he uses the image of the boomerang:

This month the poetry of Paul Celan, in Manfred Winkler's Hebrew translation, comes home to the people of his origin. And this too, for that word tempered in exile, is a destination.