Opinion: Broken hearts in heartlands
Jacques Derrida writes in his Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan: ‘There is a holocaust for every date, and somewhere in the world at every hour. Every hour counts its holocaust’
By Pramod K Nayar
Some years after World War II, a Jew who survived the camp and lost his parents in the Holocaust, published his first volume of verse. In 2022, we are witness to the 70th anniversary of ‘Todesfugue’, which, although written around 1944, was published in the 1952 collection, Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and Memory). Translated as ‘Deathfugue’, this remains Paul Celan’s masterpiece.
Born Paul Antschel, Celan returned home one morning in 1942 to find his parents deported from their home in Czernowitz (now in besieged Ukraine, if one wants to see historical irony). He himself would spend the years 1942-1944 in labour camps. His father died of typhoid and his mother was shot in the camps. After the war, Celan settled in Paris, publishing several volumes of poems and some prose. On 20th April 1970, Celan drowned himself in the Seine.
Celan was the subject of critic Theodor Adorno’s famous comment of 1949, ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’. To this Celan is said to have responded: ‘[in poetry] we know at last where to seek the barbarians’. Avant-garde in formal experimentation and thus not an easy read, Celan is now seen as the preeminent poet of the Holocaust.
Remembering Mother/land
His mother and Ukraine figure prominently in Celan’s poems. In an early poem he writes:
My mother’s hair never turned white.
My gentle mother cannot return.
In ‘Winter’, he speaks of snow in the Ukraine, asking:
What would come, Mother: wakening or wound –
If I too sank in snows of the Ukraine?
The snow image would repeat in very powerful ways later:
Just like the wind that rebuffs you,
Packed round your word is the snow.
John Felstiner, Celan’s translator, notes that the ‘word’ is ‘shut between “packed” and “snow”’, recalling the snow in which Celan’s parents died, so that his words are still mired in that snow.
In ‘Wolfsbean’, Celan asks:
In The Ukraine, where
They murdered my father and mother: what
Blossomed there, what blossoms there?
Celan understood the risks of poetry:
What kind of times are these,
When a conversation
Is well nigh a crime
Because it includes
So much that is said?
It is, he writes, a ‘landscape with urn beings’, capturing in the evocative phrase a landscape of loss. In this ‘land called Lost’ in Celan’s ‘Ice, Eden’,
The ice will rise up free
Before this hour is through.
Yet again, the image of freezing, of ice and snow that reminds Celan of both Ukraine and his parents’ death, recurs.
Black Milk
Adapting the oxymoronic ‘black milk’ from a poem by Rose Auslander, Celan crafts ‘Deathfugue’. Celan’s celebrated poem begins with
Black milk at daybreak we drink it at evening
The image of black milk repeats, albeit the time of drinking changes, after their labours where they ‘shovel a grave in the air’. The German guard ‘whistles his hounds’, ‘whistles his Jews into rows’, then gets them to ‘shovel a grave in the ground’, but also to dance. The blue-eyed (Aryan) oppressor is forever ordering the Jews to either dig ‘this earth deeper’ or to ‘sing up and play’. For the Jew, ‘Death is a master from Deustchland’.
Celan’s maternal metaphor is also cast as a savage twist: it is poisoned milk that they have to drink. Commentators believe the milk metaphor signals Celan’s problem with the language for his poetry: the language (German) he uses to speak of his mother/land is the language of the people who killed his mother/tongue.
There is the constant sense of death, whether in the image of the grave or black milk. The Nazi guard calls out
Scrape your strings darker you’ll rise up as smoke to the sky
The reference to the crematoria smoke ties in with the lines ‘grave in the air’. Air, ash, smoke become intertwined metaphors here (Shulamith’s ‘ashen hair’) and elsewhere. In ‘The Straitening’ Celan writes:
Ash.
Ash, ash.
Night. Night-and-night
The words of the poet gesture at those who have lost words. In another work, Celan writes:
like unsepulchered words, roaming
in the orbit of attained
goals and stelae and cradles
The linkage of words with both death and mourning was never made clearer. Then, if we read the above in conjunction with the shouted command in ‘Deathfugue’, ‘play death more sweetly’, we understand that the Jews’ music in the camp segues into death.
Although Celan himself was dismissive of the poem’s lyricism, the poem with its many translations captured for the world the horrors of the Holocaust and the camp.
Primo Levi, Auschwitz survivor, said of ‘Deathfugue’: ‘I carry it inside me like a graft’. The simplicity of the statement belies what the poem has come to mean. Philosophers find in the poem a contemporaneity, a warning sign that the events of 1942-45 are returning.
Jacques Derrida writes in his Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan: ‘There is a holocaust for every date, and somewhere in the world at every hour. Every hour counts its holocaust’. Somewhere in the world, a Holocaust is being readied.
Celan’s poem is about future Holocausts too. Celan once said: ‘A poem…can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the – not always greatly hopeful – belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps’.
With his formal experiments Celan defamiliarises reality, even that of the Holocaust. He is, said the critic Marjorie Perloff, ‘elusive’, because ‘a reader who has not been informed about Celan’s biography can hardly identify them as referring to the Holocaust’.
70 years later, Celan’s ‘unsepulchred words’ continue to wash up on the heartlands of the world. Many in those lands die of broken hearts, as the land to which they had given their heart turns against them. Celan’s is this poetry of the broken heart/lands.
(The author is Professor, Department of English, University of Hyderabad)
