Paul Celan's poem Todesfuge

Paul Celan's Poem "Todesfuge"

Todesfuge or Death Fugue is one of Paul Celan's earliest creations, and, at the same time, one of his best-known works. Roughly speaking, the poem describes the experience of the Holocaust, from one of the horrifying concentration camps. The most interesting aspect of the poem is however the way in which the Celan translates the experience into language. The text has been sometimes criticized precisely because it transposes the hard reality of the Holocaust in a highly aesthetic manner, which seems, at first sight, to divert the attention from the atrocities of death and of the concentration camp. Nevertheless, Paul Celan does not transform the experience aesthetically but rather creates a self-standing reality to describe the other reality of the Holocaust. There is obviously no easy or direct way to talk about such a dehumanizing experience as that of the slow torture that the Jews had to endure in the death camps. Language inevitably fails to convey the horrors by itself. But the language used in Celan's poem, as well as the structure of the text form the core of an artistic experience that translates the reality of the Holocaust in a very effective way. Thus, Celan's Todesfuge reveals the nightmarish Jewish experience during the Nazi regime through its musical form, which superimposes two opposed realities, that of death and that of love and beauty.

Therefore, the most powerful effect of the text is given by the sharp contrast between two contradictory realities which are united in the structure of the poem through the musical rhythm that imitates a fugue. First of all, the lack of punctuation and the frequent and rhythmical repetitions of the same phrases or metaphors throughout the poem, make the text resemble a fugue. As the title indicates, Celan attempted to create a "death fugue" that would artistically plunge the reader into the experience of death and sufferance. The structure of the poem is very similar to that of Johann Sebastian Bach's famous musical masterpiece, Die Kunst der Fuge. In the Art of Fugue, Bach translates discord and roughness into harmony. All through the piece, as Tovey observes, Bach preserves the whole subject, either by merely repeating it or by introducing only fragmentary allusions: "In Die Kunst der Fuge Bach always preserves the whole subject, from first note to last. Accordingly, it is possible to distinguish between genuine entries and fragmentary allusions, such as often constitute the bulk of more loosely constructed fugues, like many of Handel's, where the subject is soon boiled to rags. Yet even in Die Kunst der Fuge the listener will find that, at all events after the first four fugues, it is as well to abandon the effort to count the entries of the subject. You obviously cannot tell whether the subject is complete until it has been completed: and in the higher orders of fugue the subject is only one of many elements that demand the attention, though it is the only thing that many pianoforte players have ever been taught to respect."(Tovey, 77-78) This rule of the fugue is obeyed to the point by Celan's poem: the same sequences of phrases and metaphors are repeated identically all through the text, either entirely or only fragmentarily. These repetitions actually create the auricular impression of the fugue. In Bach's Art of Fugue, there are, as Tovey notes, recurring episodes which are derived either from the scale figure or from the chromatic figure of the text: "The episodes arise from the chromatic figure marked, though there are also two short episodes derived from the scale figure. It is now quite clear that the episodes are definite recurring ideas. The countersubject gives a chromatic character to the whole fugue, and in all probability Bach would have called this a chromatic fugue and classed it in a genus as such."(Tovey,78) the same pattern can be identified in Celan's poem, where, the same ideas reoccur either through mere repetition of the same linguistic structure or through repetitions of the same elements at the metaphorical level, such as the metaphors constructed around the opposition between black and white, sky and earth, golden and ashen and so on. The mastery of form exemplified both by Bach's fugue and by Celan's poem relies precisely on the effect that the superimposed, disparate elements produce when they are heard at the same time: "Psychologists tell us that it is impossible to attend to more than two things at once. From this it must follow that we cannot attend to all the four parts of these fugues at once, and that it must be still more impossible to attend to all the details of augmentation, diminution, stretto, inversion, double, triple, and quadruple counterpoint through which Bach develops his subject and countersubjects."(Tovey, 76) in Todesfuge, Celan also develops the subject and the countersubjects at the same time, opposing two sets of reality permanently. Along with the elements proper to the poem itself, intertextuality also plays a very important part. The poem alludes to major texts such as the Bible, Goethe's Faust or Heine's Das Skalvenschiff. Through the intertextual elements, Celan creates two opposite realities which, as in a fugue, are heard at the same time by the reader. It can be said that the main effect of the poem is given precisely by the fact that the listener or reader of the text is permanently faced with two oxymoronic realities, that of death and sufferance opposed to that of birth, innocence and love.

Thus, in the first place, the white/golden and black/ashen imagery forms the main opposition in the poem, and has complex, ramified meanings. The black milk of the daybreak, "Schwarze Milch der Fruhe," already opposes two realities: by changing the color of the milk from white to black, Celan goes from innocence and purity to murder and death. Also, the milk as the food that is first given to babies represents birth and is opposed to the death theme in the poem: "Schwarze Milch der Fruhe wir trinken sie abends / wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts / wir trinken und trinken.."(Celan) Also, the "we," representing the Jews, is opposed to "he," denoting the German master all through the poem. Significantly, when Celan refers to the Jews who are made to dig their own tombs, he tells us that they shovel them upwards, in the air, inversing the natural order, whereas when the linguistic register shifts to the German commander, the tombs are dug in the ground:..wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Luften da liegt man nicht eng [....]l sst schaufeln ein Grab in der Erde..."(Celan) it is well-known that the Jews were made to dig common tombs in which they would be crammed after death in a large number. Celan thus at once alludes to this terrible reality and to the other reality of heaven and hope: the Jews are innocent, and the fact that they build their tombs in the air may hint at their probable ascension to paradise. Nevertheless, the same image may allude to the well-known method of killing in the concentration camps: cremation. The German master himself is also constructed of two different realties: on the one hand, he seems just a man who lives in the house and writes letters to his family or to his lover in Germany, who whistles his hounds. The friendly figure is however opposed by the dreadful fact that he is an instrument of death, who plays with his "vipers" which are presumably his whips, and commands the Jews to erect their own tomb. He gives them orders and watches the grim process of grave digging in all serenity. His serenity and indifference are suggested by the starts that sparkle joyfully in the sky. Also, he whisteles the Jews in the same manner that he whisteles his dogs, as if there were no difference between the two: Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt / der schreibt wenn / es dunkelt nach Deutschland / dein goldenes Haar Margarete / er schreibt es und tritt vor das Haus und es blitzen die Sterne / er pfeift seine Ruden herbei er pfeift seine Juden hervor..."(Celan)

Thus, the German master is constructed so as to allude to the image of the perfect Arian race, handsome, detached, self-assured and serene. Margaret's golden hair already appears in this first sequence of the poem, and will recur over and over in the latter part of the poem, paired by Sulamith's ashen hair. Again this opposition is very effective and meaningful: Goethe's Margaret is usually seen as the symbol of beauty and innocence, corrupted by Faust unintentionally, because he made a pact with the devil. Here, Margaret's golden hair has a double role: on the one hand, it alludes to the reality of beauty and purity indeed and contrast with the death in the terrible concentration camps, but more importantly, it is a figure that represents, like the German master himself, the image of the perfect Arian race. It is interesting thus that many of the symbols that usually have a positive meaning in the literary tradition, such as the starts which are shining brightly in the sky or Margaret's golden hair which makes her resemble an angelic figure, have negative connotations in the poem through the reversals that Celan proposes. Also, the blue eyes of the German master and the fact that he writes love letters to Germany might beguile the reader for a moment and make him or her believe that these are the symbols of purity and innocence in the text. Both the commander and Margaret symbolize the Arian race which was considered by Hitler as absolutely faultless. The fact that Margaret is corrupted and destroyed by evil in Faust is a hint at the way in which the Nazi regime turned the qualities of the Arian race into an instrument of evil. Sulamith, by contrast, represents the Jews and the power of true, uncorrupted love, as it is described in Solomon's Song of Songs. Her ashen hair, opposed to Margaret's golden one, alludes in the first place at the contrast between the two races. Sulamith is in the Biblical text, the black lover of King Solomon: Ich bin schwarz, aber gar lieblich, ihr Tchter Jerusalems, wie die Hutten Kedars, wie die Teppiche Salomos."(Hohelied, 1:5)