"OVER THE THORN": THE POST-HOLOCAUST POETRY OF PAUL CELAN

It is a paradox worthy of our time that the most significant continuer of the Western poetic tradition after World War II was a Jew who had survived the Holocaust, and that one of the most original positions in post-Holocaust theology was formulated in poems written in German. The work of Paul Celan is something like what physicists call a singularity – a terminal or initial point at which the usual laws seem to be suspended. Sixteen years after his death, his reputation continues to grow, accompanied by a sense of his more-than-literary importance.

Celan was born in 1920 in Czernowitz, capital of the Bukovina region, which had a large population of German-speaking Jews. Among the influences to which he was exposed there were his mother's love for the German language and the German classics; his father's Zionism and commitment to Hebrew; the illegal Communist youth movement, with which he was briefly associated; and theYiddish, Rumanian, French, Russian and English languages and literatures. During the Nazi occupation his parents were deported to the Transnistria camp and there murdered; he himself spent eighteen months in labor camps. After the war he moved to Bucharest; in 1947 he emigrated illegally to Vienna and in 1948 went on to Paris, which became his permanent home. Apart from numerous translations (Shakespeare, Mandelstam, Esenin, Valery, Ungaretti, Emily Dickinson, René Char, André du Bouchet, and others), Celan's work consists of nine volumes of verse, three of them published posthumously, and a few brief, densely-compacted prose pieces. The poems are the protocol of an inner odyssey, of a struggle to endure the memory of his experiences and to find or make a meaning for them. The stages of this struggle are reflected in the successive styles of the poems, from the romantic-surrealist early lyrics to the late atonal cryptograms. It is a work of great literary sophistication and ingenuity; as a master-innovator of language, Celan ranks with Joyce. But the note of personal and immediate authenticity is never lost; he remains true to his own definition of poetry as the expression of "one once-only-animate being who with his speech and his silence is seeking a way."

At the same time, as Celan also stressed, his poetry is "dialogic." The influence of Buber's I and Thou is evident throughout Celan's work, which may be seen as an attempt to find a way of speaking truly consistent with Buber's "basic word," "I-Thou." Most of the poems explicitly invoke a "you." Sometimes the "you" is self-addressed, in which case the poet is presenting himself as one addressed by the world and inviting the reader to identify with him; sometimes the "you" is another person. It is clear that specific encounters are behind many of these poems, but the "you," in Celan as in Buber, tends to assume a numinous generality, so that the identity of the referent remains open.

Another consequence of the "I-Thou" orientation is the absence of objectifying description. Realities are invoked, pointed to, hinted at, called by name; they are not usually given hard and immediately recognizable outlines. In order to see them the reader has to enter into the scene, supply his or her own knowledge and associations. This may account for the paradoxical first impression which Celan's poems often make. On the one hand they may seem "obscure," because we are used to the patterns and stereotypes of "I-It" discourse, and because we have not yet found our way around the poet's universe. On the other hand we sense immediately that we are being addressed, that someone is trying to tell us something, and that it is not indefinite but precise, although we cannot yet translate it into our language.

With many readers Celan's reputation still rests on the early poem "Todesfuge" (Death Fugue), written in 1945. In his work this poem is exceptional, yet constitutive: it is his most explicit picture of the historical trauma which forms the background of his work. The persona is

the chorus of martyrs, yet the poet's personal rhythmic signature – the amphibrachic beat which was to crop up repeatedly even in the truncated later lines – is already present. It is as though, in transmitting their message, the poet had both completely submerged his own identity, and attained it by that very act. The poem begins:

Black milk of the daybreak we drink it at evening

we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night

we drink it and drink it

we shovel a grave in the air there no one lies narrow

We recognize the elements of life in hell.

Implicitly, the poem also raises the problem of its own moral status. For it is an indictment not only of Nazism but of German culture – which the poet, by writing it, joins. The murderer's heartlessly sentimental invocation of Margarete recalls the heroine of the German classic, Goethe's Faust. The poem has to be read in conjunction with the last act of that work; it is Faust's megalomania that constructed the world of Auschwitz, just as it is the sentimentality evoked by the name "Margarete" that enables the murderers to go on feeling "human." And yet the indictment of the culture can also be read as a lament for its genuinely humane elements. For Margarete in Faust was intended by Goethe as a compassionate portrayal of an innocent victim – Faust's first victim, in fact. Thus the final juxtaposition of Celan's poem "your golden hair Margarete/ your ashen hair Shulamit" grieves for a general loss of human innocence, as well as for the victims.

"Death Fugue" is said to have caused Theodor Adorno to revise his notorious dictum that poetry cannot be written after Auschwitz. But the poem has not escaped criticism on grounds of "aestheticizing" the horror, and Celan himself came to mistrust it – or perhaps rather its all-too-ready reception by Germans anxious to make a token display of reawakened conscience. Deeper than this, one senses Celan's awareness of having accepted the role of a token figure by continuing to write in German as a Jewish poet. This awareness must have helped to stoke the internal rage of his poems, their intense self-criticism, self-denudation and self- destructive gestures. But, given his commitment to writing in his mother-tongue ("The fateful once-onliness of language"), he had little choice but to accept the role of a token figure, play it to the hilt, try to awaken a real instead of a pseudo-response – to give the symbol real meaning. His work can be read as a quest for the bridge between the symbolic and the real. Involved in this quest is the question of whether or not poetry can make things happen, and perhaps even the question of God's existence or effectiveness. All these concerns are reflected in the poem with which Celan's first book, Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and Memory), begins.

                    A SONG IN THE DESERT

A garland was woven of leaves that turned black in the region of Acra.

There I reined my dark stallion around and aimed at Death my sword's blow.

There I drank from wooden cups the ashes of the fountains of Acra

And lowered my visor and charged – the ruins of Heaven were the foe.

 

For dead are the angels and blind went the Lord in the region of Acra,

And there's no one to watch in my stead over those who here went to their rest.

The moon was hacked to pieces, the blossom of the region of Acra –

So the hands shall blossom like the thorn in their rings all of rust.

Acra was a fortress which the tyrant Antiochus Epiphanes, in the second century B.C.E., built on a hill overlooking the Temple mount, in order to keep Jerusalem in check. The association with the Crusader town of Acra (Akko) is also apposite; both are connected with past persecutions. These allusions and the medieval imagery make the contemporary Holocaust which is the poem’s real subject seem like something eternally recurring. Cast in regular metric form, more romantic than surrealist in imagery, this poem forms an almost conventional introduction to Celan's work. But its stylization only seems to hold the horror at a distance; poignancy arises precisely from the sense that this is not an adequate treatment of the Holocaust – though no more inadequate than any other. Death cannot be run through with the sword, the ruins of Heaven cannot be taken by storm; these things, like the Lord who has "gone blind," are absences, nothingness, and any human response to them can only be a tilting at windmills. Yet despite this awareness of nothingness and futility, the poet remains pledged to the memory of the dead and the ravaged community The "moon," the "flower of the region of Acra," suggests the Shekhinah, the "rose among thorns." The rusted rings stand for a bond that persists even in destruction; hands, throughout Celan's work, often represent the act of writing. His commitment in a Godless world is a conscious quixoticism; later, in "The Meridian" (1960), he will speak of "the majesty of the Absurd, which bears witness for the human presence and present." But he is not free from self-reproach; the hands "blossom like the thorn" because he has survived into the world of the murderers and is writing in their idiom, even in the guise of a Crusader knight. Perhaps this is why he becomes "the iron cherub of Acra" – a counter-image to the cherubs of the Temple. If in the last line he "still pronounces the Name," this is both a profession of stubborn faith and a profanation: the Name's holiness forbids its pronunciation. The necessity of speaking of sacred things in a secular context – "in the middle of the market," as he was later to write in "Shibboleth" – is another persistent source of anguish.

Celan's second book, Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (From Threshold to Threshold, 1953), also begins with a poem that relates a symbolic action taken in response to a real catastrophe.

I HEARD IT SAID

I heard it said, there be

in the water a stone and a circle,

and over the water a word

that places the circle around the stone.

 

I saw my poplar go down to the water.

I saw how her arm grasped down into the deep.

I saw her roots raised heavenward, begging for night.

I did not hasten to follow her.

I only picked up from the ground that breadcrumb

which has your eye's form and nobility;

I unclasped from your throat the chain of the sayings

and with it bordered the table, where now the crumb lay.

This is an extraordinarily delicate and subtle poem which illustrates Celan's practice of giving the reader enough information to feel the situation, but not enough to categorize it. We can never be quite certain of understanding the relations among the "I," the poplar, and the "you," nor the meaning of the poet's gesture in the context of these relations. We can only approach such certainty of understanding through a deeper knowledge of Celan's work as a whole. Yet even out of context, on first reading, the poem's structure makes its impression. We see that in the first stanza a kind of order is created with the placing of the circle round the stone. The second stanza hints at loss, death, reversion to chaos. In the third stanza, again, there is the creation of an order, parallel to that in the first stanza, with the "chain of the sayings" encircling the "breadcrumb." In the fourth, consisting of a single line, we are again reminded of loss.

Furthermore, the first stanza is a version of the Creation story, although the ambiguous phrasing of the first line (ich hörte sagen, es sei) leaves us in doubt as to whether the poet is claiming actually to have heard the "yehi" of Creation or merely reporting hearsay in the German subjunctive of indirect speech. The destructive image of the second stanza inevitably recalls the Shoah, the more so as "poplar" (pappel) comes from a Latin word (populus) nearly homophonous with the word for "people" (pÇpulus). The second "creation," in the third stanza, is the poet's own. It cannot undo the destruction; it is purely symbolic. Yet the presence of a "you" adds a dimension: for the eyes of another person, a symbol may have meaning. The picking up of the breadcrumb that reminds him of the other's eye (that is, capacity for sight, for insight) recalls both the minhag of not letting bread fall to the ground and the Kabbalistic gesture of" raising the sparks." In the structure created by the poet, the breadcrumb replaced the stone, but we may also think of it as a word; in the Scriptural field of associations, a word can be bread and also light.

So this poem voices a hope for the future, even in the presence of the irreparable: the hope that after the disaster, poetry may be able to reconstitute humanity, by a rearrangement of the symbols that guide its consciousness. In the first two volumes this hope is the source of a certain lyric and visionary exaltation, in which Celan did not feel completely alone; both books contain references to other poets whom he evidently regarded as sharers in a sacred enterprise. But in a disillusioned age that hope and the "vatic" voice seemed increasingly out of place.

In the summer of 1959 Celan wrote his only piece of fiction, a four-page story entitled "Gespräch im Gebirg (Colloquy in the Mountains)". In it a Jew named Small (the etymological meaning of the poet's first name) meets his older cousin, Big, and the two speakùnot in literary German but in the dialect of Czernowitz, which leaned toward Yiddish. It is a release from the terrible solitude, an opportunity to talk "to me or to you ... with my mouth and with my tongue and not just with the stick," as Small says. But the release is short-lived. Each can tell the other only what he knows already; it quickly becomes hard to tell the speakers apart, and the dialogue ends in monologue. Celan later showed the story to Adorno, who replied that the real "Jew Big" whom Celan ought to meet was Gershom Scholem. The poems of Die Niemandsrose (The No-One’s-Rose, 1963), suggest that Celan did indeed find something of a "rav" in Scholem. The encounter with Scholem's works on Jewish mysticism probably did not change Celan's basic approach, but it gave him a much surer sense of the rootedness of that approach in Jewish tradition.

In 1960 Celan received the greatest literary honor of his career: the Georg B6chner prize of the German Academy of Language and Literature in Darmstadt. It was an occasion on which the awkwardness of being a token figure became especially acute (in a letter to a friend he said it was "a trial, that is a temptation and an affliction"). He dealt with it in his speech by making "The Meridian" his definitive statement about what he was attempting to do as a poet. The circuitous and painstakingly-qualified argument of the speech may be summarized "on one foot" as follows: The poet's basic commitment is to human life as a thing to be defended against all systems and ideologies which rationalize its wanton destruction. In the identification with what is destroyed, the poet experiences a kind of annihilating exodus from historical and social reality, even from nature itself. Celan both describes and prescribes this quasi-mystical kind of experience. But this exodus is also an entering into contact with the potential for response of a human other who might be addressed. It may even be a contact with the will of a "wholly Other" – a broad theological hint – who may just possibly speak through the poem even as the poem speaks on its "very ownmost behalf," out of the "straits" into which the poet is led by his experience and perceptions. The ultima ratio of this view, even though God’s existence is not definitely asserted, is the Biblical idea of the human being as made "in the image of God" and therefore to be respected. Subtending the argument, and cautiously surfacing at the end, is a hope that the isolate radical perceptions might one day add up to a new basis of human solidarity, to a foundation for "Utopia." He also hints – it is a hint of utmost importance, which has not yet been sufficiently taken up – that this hope may depend on the development of a method of interpretation adequate to deal with poetry "in the light of Utopia." The "meridian" which he imagines touching, along with his audience, at the end of the speech, symbolizes this possibility of human communication, by which inmost perception becomes the basis for a new universalism.

The poems of The No-One’s-Rose, published three years later, drawn on the confidence which this definition of his position had given him, as well as on the Kabbalistic imagery to which he gained access through Scholem’s work. Among the poems which show Kabbalistic influence is the one which give the collection its title.

PSALM

 

No one kneads us again out of earth and clay.

No one speaks to our dust.

No one.

 

Praised be thou, No One.

For thy sake we

will blossom.

Towards [or: against]

thee.

 

A nothing

we were, we are, we

will be, blossoming:

the nothing-, the

No-One’s-Rose.

 

With

the pistil soul-bright,

the stamen heaven-desolate,

the crown red

with the crimson word we sang

over, O over

the thorn.

Like "A Song in the Desert," this poem, which conveys the quintessence of Celan's post-Holocaust theology; starts from the perception of God's helplessness or nonexistence and the irrevocability of death. The poem recalls the Yom Kippur prayer ("Before I was created I was worthless, and now that I have been created it is as if I had not been created"), but now there is no God, promising resurrection, to whom that prayer could be addressed; there is no one. But then the very idea of "No One" is hypostatized and addressed. We could say this is because humanity cannot endure the thought of God's nonexistence, but we also sense here the Kabbalistic view that sees God in the very abyss of nothingness. Around this Name that remains empty, like the "heaven-desolate" (himmelsw6st) stamen, the speakers assemble into the rose which is the image of the Shekhinah. They are united by their common need for God and understanding that this need is destined to remain forever unrequited. This understanding (which unlike a positive image of Godhead could not be used as a club to assault unbelievers) replaces "faith." It is now the human soul which, in accepting this destiny, becomes luminous (seelenhell). The rose is dyed red (in contrast to Dante's rose, which derives from the same tradition) as the sign of a human, earthly solidarity, which begins in identification with the victims and assumption of the pain of God's absenceùboth of which, I think, are implied by the "thorn." Before the radiant negativity of this poem, in which the poet's voice is once more absorbed in a community which spreads out from the dead of the Holocaust, through all human dead, to all humanity viewed under the aspect of mortality, questions of the efficacy of symbols fall away. The symbol has become a reality in which one lives.

This certainty can also be found in a longer poem, "Tabernacle Window," which continues the global vision of "The Meridian":

The eye, dark:

as a tabernacle window. It gathers

what was once, is still, a world: the Wandering

East, the Hovering Ones, the

Humans-and-Jews, the Folk-of-the-Clouds, magnetically

it draws, with heart-fingers, at

you, Earth:

you come, you are coming,

dwell, we shall dwell

The "eye" which can exert a gravitational pull on the earth is the fused vision of those united in understanding. In the course of the poem sparks are gathered from the human and Jewish past, to form "the constellation/ which he, the human, needs/ in order to dwell, here, among humans." Finally the letters of the alphabet – both Hebrew and Greek – are gathered into "you,// Beth – that is/ the house where the table stands with// the light and the Light." In 1970 those posters with the photograph of the earth taken from space, and that phrase "Earth Household," were for this reader a kind of déjà vu.

After The No-One’s-Rose there is a radical break in Celan's work. In Atemwende (Breathturn, 1967), the poems are "darker" in every respect – more difficult and more desperate. Whereas in Celan's early work the separate poems strike one as "outcroppings" of a profound unity, here there is a sense of irreparable fragmentation. In Fadensonnen (Thread-Suns, 1968), technological and commercial jargon invades a vocabulary which suffers rather than absorbs it, often to incredibly grotesque and violent effect. The posthumous collections Schneepart (Snowpart, 1971), Lichtzwang (Compulsion of Light, 1970), and Zeitgehöft (Croft of Time, 1976) are final messages in the same basic manner. It is as if some second catastrophe had occurred for Celan, which may well have been a catastrophe of communication. In "The Meridian" and The No-One's-Rose Celan had succeeded in formulating a world-view which implies a certain program. But the program could only have been executed with the help of others. The consequent next step after "Tabernacle Window" would have been not another volume of poems by an isolate poet, but something like the beginnings of a poetic Talmud, a real innovation in intellectual and religious institutions. But poetry, together with its interpretation, is a very different kind of speech from halachic discussion based on an authoritative text. It is much more difficult to socialize, for reasons which are deeply rooted in the human psyche and which cast Freudian shadows over Celan's Buberian vision. Part of the agony of the last work is Celan's perception of them in himself. But unless the vision could prevail in practice, as well as in poetic projection, Celan saw that he was doomed to the creation of symbols that had no counterpart in reality – to tokenism with all it implies. The late work is punctuated with desperate lunges out of that false position: "The namegiving ends,/ over you I throw/ my fate."

In 1969 Celan paid his one visit to Israel, where he stayed for three weeks. While there, and after his return, he wrote a series of love poems whose ultimate addressee is Jerusalem as the symbol of human community: "Say that Jerusalem is." He considered settling there, and efforts were made to help him do so. But whether he feared the final conjunction of symbol and reality in Jerusalem, or feared on the contrary some final disillusionment there, or whether he simply lacked the strength for a new beginning (recurring mental breakdowns had left him unable to function without medication), the thought came to nothing. He returned to Paris, where he committed suicide the following April by drowning in the Seine.

Strangely, his last two poems are expressions of hope. One contains a phrase toward which his whole work seems to point: "... a shared truth." The other – the last – seems to look back to his stay in Israel and ahead to some fulfillment that still might occur there. But to summarize it thus is already to have inflected a poem which, as if deliberately, leaves the determination of its meaning up to us. As in many Celan poems, this effect is produced by exploiting the ambiguity of the present tense in German, which can also have a present progressive or even a future meaning. Translation is, of course, always interpretation.

Vineyardmen are redigging

the dark-houred clock,

depth upon depth,

 

you are reading,

 

the Invisible

summons the wind into bounds,

 

you are reading,

 

the open ones bear

behind the eye the stone

that recognizes you

on the Sabbath.

To offer a further paraphrase, which partly follows that of John Felstiner: The "dark-houred clock" must refer to Jewish history with its many sufferings. The "redigging" of the clock might be the working through of traumas in Israeli life today. The "wind" could stand for the hostile forces still threatening the State of Israel (compare Agnon's story, "From Foe to Friend"), and these lines are something like a prayer for the peace of Zion. The open ones with the stone behind the eye (the singular of "eye" is important) are those whose insight, sharpened by suffering and unified by understanding, will enable them to recognize the "you," the one who is reading, in a "Sabbath" atmosphere where conflict is held at a distance. If this interpretation corresponds to his intention, then he seems to have felt, at the last, that the mutual trust and recognition which readers of his work would need to find must be sought in the Jewish community.

It would be another paradox worthy of the post-Holocaust era if in these years the most profound hope was expressed by one for whom the struggle to express hope ended in the ultimate act of desperation. But this should not be allowed to obscure the hope itself. Celan was one of the final inheritors of that German Jewish intelligentsia, with its hope for synthesis at a high level between Jewish and Western cultural values, to which Nazism dealt such a crushing, perhaps mortal blow. In the wake of the catastrophe he tried to sort things out, and to give universalism a symbolism it had lacked before. If this symbolism and its implications could be understood and accepted, perhaps the vitally important movements for social justice, peace, and protection of Earth's environment would gain in spiritual depth and staying-power, in relation to Judaism's age-long quest. Which would indeed be "a new light."