In the Holocaust museum of Yad Vashem, there is a big screen near the end depicting the celebrations and jubilation across the whole of Europe after the Germans surrendered at the beginning of May 1945. One can view Stalin presiding over a huge military parade at the Kremlin, De Gaulle driving in a motorcade towards the Eiffel Tower and snatches of Churchill and Montgomery joining in the general revelry.
The pointed irony of this screen is that after more than 200 years of integrated contact between Germans and Jews in Germany, from Moses Mendelssohn's entry into Berlin in the mid-18th century and up until the tragedy of the Holocaust, Germans and Jews are again linked, albeit for antithetical reasons, in their inability to join in the joyous festivities at the end of the war. The Jewish remnant, about three hundred thousand survivors crawling out of concentration camps and hiding places, had to be physically rehabilitated before they could absorb human food normally, and additionally, they were becoming aware of having lost their families. As for Germans and Germany, the physical damage and loss of life was also immense and thus, Jews and Germans both find themselves in tragic circumstances, if for obviously different reasons.
This ongoing historical nexus between Jews and Germans over centuries has been covered in accounts of the period by various historians.
However, it is to the poets we turn time and time again because, with their finely honed antennae and the gift of their poetic insight, they are able to propel us right to the heart of the matter, which is how the survivors coped with the sudden transition from untermensch – a non-being, to being liberated. This is not to be observed in the limited framework of weeks or months but along an extended time continuum, even to the end of their lives.
The example we will delve into in this short essay is Deathfugue written by Paul Celan toward the end of 1944, even before the end of the war. Paul Celan had worked in various forced labor camps, subjected to the conditions in which the Germans exploited their slave labor everywhere. He was liberated in 1944 from a labor camp several hundred kilometers from Czernowitz, the city of his birth.
One of the startling sentiments that Celan voiced after the war was about the German language. He purposefully wrote all his poetry in the language of the perpetrators and on this he said that not only had the Germans murdered his parents but they had also murdered the German language and this was one atrocity that he could redress.
The whole poem Deathfugue can be found on various internet sites in English translation and YouTube has recordings of Paul Celan reciting his own poem in German to German audiences. We will only provide three short examples from this poem which present pointers to the reader of the emotional turmoil that informed the life of survivors putting pen to paper.
"Black milk of daybreak, we drink it at evening
we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink"
These are the opening lines of the poem and they repeat with gathering insistence four times throughout the poem. By their repetition and the rhythm they create, one is thrust into the maelstrom of a deadening camp regimen that hardly altered from day to day and never faltered in its singlemindedness.
From a literary point of view, the first two words "black milk" present the first shock of the poem for the obvious reason that milk is the universal life-giving liquid that is white and not black. So Celan propels us right from his first words by means of a blatant non-sequitur into the impossible reality of the concentration camp world where the prisoners were indeed given some kind of dark liquid to drink in the morning. The poet has created a word-picture so striking in its contrariness that students in Germany who were taught the poem in the fifties noted in a follow-up study that this is the phrase they remembered from the poem.
The second example is another set of two lines that also repeat several times in the poem and generate the crucial question of what Celan was suggesting in these lines:
"..your golden hair Margarete
Your ashen hair Shulamit"
He has juxtaposed the quintessential German image of a woman from Goethe's Faust, Margarete, with her Jewish opposite from the Biblical source, The Song of Songs, Shulamit. The glaring contrast is the "golden" hair of the German and the "ashen", or burnt hair of the Jew.
In the same study referred to above, the students were also asked if Celan wrote this poem with its powerful word-pictures in an attempt at German-Jewish reconciliation or as an accusation against the recent German atrocities. Their answer was that the poet favoured appeasement.
Celan's reaction to these results was a prohibition of the reading and general use of his poem in Germany. He could not abide the misuse and misappropriation of his poetry in Germany. All this happened within the first two decades after the Holocaust.
There is a further example of telling repetition that also appears four times in the poem and this unforgettable line all crowded into the last ten lines of the poem:
"Death is a master from Germany..."
This is the only poem from his considerable oeuvre of poetry in which Celan has used the word Germany, or Deutschland. (In some translations, the German name was retained and not translated). The accusation in these six words is echoed in the title of the poem, Deathfugue, with the added irony of another "master" from Germany, Johann Sebastian Bach, taking the musical form of the fugue to its apogee of beauty nearly two hundred years before the Nazi travesty.
Paul Celan was born in 1920 as Paul Antchel (he changed the syllables of the original family name around) into a cultured Jewish family; traditional, yet steeped in German culture and German serving as the language of the home. He created a stinging contrast. He has taken the fugue form and in his poetic style he has transfigured its potential beauty into the ugly reality of the Holocaust. The rhythms and repetitions of the musical fugue are hinted at in the repetitions and rhythms that appear in the poem and these in turn reflect the inexorable repetition day after day of the pain and suffering of the camp prisoner. In fact one of the criticisms levelled at Celan was that he had described such inhuman behavior in too beautiful a style, thus belying the depth of the suffering involved
What is presented here is a survivor's poetry written, as indicated, at the end of 1944 with his liberation, and discerning the obvious chasm separating the reality of physical liberation with internal liberation the survivors had to constantly deal with as time progressed.
This poem is easily read and understood compared with much of his later work. The poetry of his later years is much more difficult to unravel and penetrate. Despite his statement that all his poetry could be understood after repeated readings, this writer sees some of the inherent difficulties in plumbing the depths of his later writing as reflecting his own growing malaise, especially in his last years, culminating in his act of suicide when he was just short of his fiftieth birthday.
The question of internal liberation is by definition a very personal issue and no one on the outside could gauge the pendulum swings of the process on any survivor. The biography of Paul Celan compared with that of another poet/survivor, Dan Pagis, will suffice to clarify the point.
Celan, as shown in this article, was driven to "unload" the weight of his Holocaust experience even before the Holocaust was over in other parts of Europe, hence Deathfugue from the end of 1944.
Dan Pagis had a diametrically opposed reaction to Celan: the young poet's deafening silence on the theme of Holocaust was only broken twenty-five years after the end of the war in 1970 when he published his first poems on the subject.
Celan took his own life, age forty-nine, and Pagis died in a hospital bed at age fifty-six, a tired and sick man. Both men had wonderful success in their professional, literary careers, both married and had families. Both died before their time.
