Paul Celan : After The Disaster

Stephen Mitchelmore explores the post-Holocaust poetry of Paul Celan

"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
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his pack on us he grants us a grave in the air 
he plays with the serpents and daydreams death is a master from 
Germany

your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith"

...It troubled Celan that the man he saw as one of the greatest of modern thinkers, so close to his own work, was a Nazi. One cannot even say 'had been a Nazi' because he never said anything that amounted to a renunciation. Late in life, Heidegger became interested in Celan's work. He recognised him as the only living equal of Hölderlin. He attended public readings given by the poet, and in 1967 even invited him to his famous Black Forest retreat at Todtnauberg. Celan accepted. This was a significant move as Celan had developed an intense sensitivity (one might say 'anxiety') toward anti-Semitic tendencies in post-war Europe. When his dedicated publishers re-issued the work of a poet popular in the Nazi years, he left for another, and when German literary authorities exonerated him over plagiarism charges, he regarded it as a humiliation to be even under investigation. Yet here he was meeting a man in his most intimate home, a home in which, it is said, he had once run Nazi indoctrination sessions. Perhaps Celan never knew the full extent of Heidegger's culpability.

Generally, not much is known about Celan's reasons for accepting the invitation, nor what happened during the visit, but very soon after Celan wrote a poem called 'Todtnauberg'. The title reference is explicit; the place name is synonymous with the philosopher..

As Pierre Joris points out in his exceptional analysis of the various translations of the poem, 'Todtnauberg' is barely a poem than single sentence divided into eight stanzas. The first of the three above display Celan's extraordinary eye for nature, as noted earlier in "Nocturnally Pouting". Arnica and Eyebright are flowers noted for their healing qualities, so right from the start there is the sense of what the meeting is all about. In the third, the poet signs the visitors book and makes plain his awareness of who might have signed it before - Germans being indoctrinated into Nazi ideology perhaps. He hopes for a word in the heart of the great man. Did the word reveal itself? ..

Almost certainly not. The two men walked across woodland each in his isolation: an orchid and an orchid. And the poem remained isolated as far as Heidegger was concerned. He displayed his special copy of the poem proudly to subsequent visitors to the cottage, seemingly unaware of its implications. Perhaps this is enough to indicate the blindness of a man, even one with genius, rooted in his familiar landscape - brought out here in Hamburger's translation of log-paths as 'fascine', a word so close to 'fascist', the etymological origin coming, as Joris says, from the Latin 'fasces' - a bundle of wooden rods - the symbol of fascism.

'Todtnauberg' , therefore, cannot be regarded as a coded accusation, or as a shy expression of bitterness, or sentimental regret, or of pompous self-definition in contrast to a supposed intellectual superior, but rather the very openness Heidegger apparently lacked. As Celan once said: "Poetry does not impose itself, it exposes." The lack of a second 'itself' in this sentence exposes.. 

Read the full article:<http://www.spikemagazine.com/0900celan.php>