There is little question that Death Fugue (Todesfuge) is Paul Celan’s most celebrated and anthologized poem, a work that, as Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi avers, has become “as much an icon of the Holocaust as the photograph of the little boy with his hands raised in the Warsaw Ghetto.” Composed during World War II and appearing in May 1947 in a Bucharest magazine (in Romanian translation) with the title Tango of Death, it was his first published poem and the first to feature his newly crafted pen name, Celan.
Today every German pupil knows the text since it is required reading in German high schools. On the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht (November 10, 1938), the countrywide pogrom against Jews living in Germany, their homes, and their businesses, the poem was recited by Ida Ehre in the Bundestag, the lower house of the German parliament. Often quoted in art and film, it has been canonized to the extent that it is “part of the official ritual of remembrance in Germany.”
There is an account that Theodor Adorno, upon reading Death Fugue, with its fusion of surreal imagery and shocking beauty, wrote his famous 1951 stricture that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Actually Adorno intended to translate one of Celan’s volumes and, according to his editor, retracted his celebrated dictum in 1966 (in Negative Dialectics) after becoming better acquainted with Celan’s writings.
Commentators have noted that initially the poem was denounced for its aesthetic treatment of the indescribable, for being overly romantic and sublime, and for dimming the terror of the Holocaust. In the 1960s, as the poem gained monumental recognition, especially in Germany, Celan felt Death Fugue was being appropriated to allay national guilt. Consequently, he refused to recite the poem publicly and forbade its inclusion in anthologies.
While the poem is rich in metaphors, the particular images and occurrences it delineates are certainly based on historical fact and on accounts given by survivors. The introduction to the poem, when it was first published, made it clear that the poem’s language was rooted in fact. Described by John Felstiner as “the Guernica of post-war European literature,” Death Fugue is a meditation on the collective fate of the Jews, beginning with the recurring, haunting voice of the prisoners that opens the opus: “Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening / we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night / we drink it and we drink / we shovel a grave in the air.”
This incantatory refrain appears at the start of each of the stanzas, and is then followed by a chilling description of the inmates and the death camp commander. The sameness of the words—divested of punctuation, reformulated in different combinations and cycles—underlines the annihilation of the individual, replaced by the walking dead. At one point the “We drink it” is substituted by “We drink you,” amplifying the relentless atmosphere of despair.
The paradoxical and irreducible metaphor, image, and oxymoron of black milk combine to indicate an impossible situation. Milk—which usually provides nourishment and is a symbol of life, purity, motherhood, fertility, and innocence—is transformed into something like bile (a black, bitter liquid that devours all color and highlights the seemingly immense unspeakability of the camps). In essence the speakers are imbibing death in a warped universe that has denuded itself of the potential for growth. Also, black milk denotes the bitterness of confinement, which the prisoners had to bear every day. Celan specialists have observed that it is probable that inmates actually named the drink they were given “black milk.”
The unidentified camp outside Germany transmits to the reader the typical monotonous drudgery of forced labor chronicled by survivors: the gangs of prisoners slaving on the brink of collapse. The usage of the first person “we” transports the reader behind the barbed wire. It is noteworthy that Celan employs the “we” (instead of “I”) to refer to the victims. One could maintain that such use strives to envelope all people, not just the designated Jews of the poem, in the horror, positing that the Nazi terror could strike at all people. Further, the unspecified, collective “we” invokes the stripping away of any trace of individuality from the internees. This use of the first-person-plural pronoun announces that Celan and the reader are inseparably bound to the events signified and to the murdered millions.
Paul Celan
The trope of the German master—who writes to his golden-haired Margarete while whistling commands to the Jews to dance as they dig their mass graves and who summarily executes his captives—encases within its signifying system manifold possible interpretations. First, the German language, as Jewish Italian Holocaust survivor Primo Levi recalls, was spoken in the camps to inmates who frequently did not understand what they were being told. Likewise, the word master (Meister) works on various levels. Master could refer to the mastery of the craft of industrialized extermination, as the German devolved to, or to the master of the concentration camps, or to the infamous “master race.”
During the poem the “master” is described addressing the Jews in the camp, ordering the victims to play music while their kin were marched into gas chambers. The tango motif alludes not only to the brisk, enchanting dance that enthralled European society during Celan’s adolescence, but also to the sickening tangos the SS officers at the concentration camps near Chernivtsi, in Lemberg (now Lviv, Ukraine), and in Auschwitz would customarily order the Jewish fiddlers to play while watching their victims walk into the gas chambers or during torture and shootings. Before demolishing the camp, the entire orchestra was executed. In many cases one group of prisoners would hum nostalgic tunes while another group would dig graves.
The tango theme references the European, Judeo-Christian culture of German society that had once included Jewish citizens. On still another level, the tango device is embedded within the timbre of the poem, which shimmers with a symphony of musical sounds and builds to a crescendo toward the end. The “fugue” of the title may pertain to the fugal composition in music known for its acutely structured and disciplined form, featuring an exact and monotonous conformation. At the same time the word fugue could denote the polyphonic, reciprocal exchange between the Nazis and their victims, present in the poem—and do so without an artful undertone of pathos, which would embellish the devastating horror of the Holocaust.
The poem’s metrical and lilting rhythm, especially as read by Celan, reminds us of the commandant’s grotesque decree that those who dig their own graves must simultaneously dance and play. In fact, the rhythmical nature of the verse permeates the fabric.
The poem’s brew of Genesis, Wagner, and the biblical Song of Songs, melded with the inferno of the camps, shatters the lyrical fabric evoked by the beautiful passages. The German woman Margarete (perhaps a lover, perhaps a spouse, to whom the SS executioner writes and of whom he dreams) embodies stereotypical Germanic traits—“Golden” blonde hair—and stands in sharp contrast to Shulamith, the winsome princess from the Song of Songs (6:13), the archetype of doomed beauty, with her ashen-colored tresses. Later in the poem Shulamith has been incinerated, reduced to ashes, evoking the dual meaning of “ashen hair.” Shulamith is the all-purpose metaphor for the Jewish woman burned in the crematoria of the concentration camps.
The blonde Margarete, safe in Germany, recalls the virginal and romantic beloved of Goethe’s Faust and is the personification of German ideal womanhood. The name Margarete also calls attention to the fact that the commander of Auschwitz was reading Faust during his idle hours. In that regard Celan underlines the warped reality of Nazi Germany, wherein young German men, cultured enough to read fine literature and write to their girlfriends, could simultaneously shoot their compatriots (or, as the poem puts it, reaching “for the rod in his belt he swings it”).
The act of “digging” appears elsewhere in the Celan canon, most obtrusively in the poem There Was Earth in Them, which depicts Jews digging and digging, all day and all night. In that poem the Jews never praise God, do not hear anything, do not grow wise, and devise no kind of language. In Death Fugue the “grave in the air” points to the horrific reality that the Jews were usually not buried but cremated, their ashes rising as clouds of smoke into the sky, disappearing into air. Only in the world of the concentration camps and extermination is death conceivable as a form of release that literally allows the victims to escape the terrifying, immured oppression by entering “a grave then in the clouds there you won’t lie too cramped.”
The “vipers” signify evil and disease, and according to one interpretation are linked to hair. Hair—customarily the emblem of fertility, plenteousness, and sexuality—is totally obliterated here. Celan marshals prototypical elements associated with the Third Reich and its extermination machine: the hounds/dogs, the graves, the spades, the blue eyes of the commander, the autocratic ordering.
The conjoining of Margarete and Shulamith at the close of the poem, contrary to the opinion of certain readers, was not a nod by Celan to an appeasing, forgiving, placatory union between the German and the Jew, but rather a direct reflection of the abnormal state that had led to Shulamith’s demise. The poem’s concluding lines evince the unbridgeable gap between the Jewish tradition of the Bible and the Nazi use of Faust’s Margarete. The two women, twinned at the poem’s coda, remain unreconciled, as far apart as Germans and Jews were after the Third Reich sent millions of Jews to the ovens.
Celan’s choice—to place Shulamith in the last sentence—may reveal his desire to grant to this comely female dancer from the Song of Songs (the epitome of the Jewish beloved) the poem’s last words and, thus, conclusively to deny the expurgation of Jewish identity that the Nazis so strove to accomplish.
Bibliography
DeKoven Ezrahi, Sidra. By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Felstiner, John. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995.
Categories: British Literature, European Literature, Literature, War Literature
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