Holding of the Nothing: Nihilation in Paul Celan’s Sprachgitter and Die Niemandsrose

Abstract

This article considers Paul Celan’s poetic treatment of the philosophical notion of the nothing ( das Nichts) in Sprachgitter (1959) and Die Niemandsrose (1963). In his middle period, Celan is drawn to what Martin Heidegger calls “the nihilation of the nothing.” For Heidegger, the nothing is a withdrawal of Being that crucially reveals beings as a whole and opens up chances of transcendence and freedom. For Celan, on the other hand, the question is instead to force thought-images of the nothing out of pre-existing conceptions in a way related to but different from both Heideggerian and theological discourses. Celan seems more concerned with how to be free in the face of the nihilation of memory and history, or how to “stand” on the philosophical un-ground as a German-Jewish poet after two world wars and the Holocaust. While recognizing the nothing as constitutive of Dasein, Celan treats the experience of nothingness as an endless fall into pure expanse due to the loss of the Same ( das Selbe).