Lorand Gaspar et Paul Celan, « derrière le dos de Dieu »

Paul Celan, Europe's most compelling postwar poet, was a German-speaking, East European Jew. His writing exposes and illumines the wounds that Nazi destructiveness left on language. John Felstiner's sensitive and accessible book is the first critical biography of Celan in any language. It offers new translations of well-known and little-known poems-including a chapter on Celan's famous Deathfugue-plus his speeches, prose fiction, and letters. The book also presents hitherto unpublished photos of the poet and his circle. Drawing on interviews with Celan's family and friends and his personal library in Normandy and Paris, as well as voluminous German commentary, Felstiner tells the poet's gripping story: his birth in 1920 in Romania, the overnight loss of his parents in a Nazi deportation, his experience of forced labor and Soviet occupation during the war, and then his difficult exile in Paris. The life's work of Paul Celan emerges readings of his poems within their personal and historical matrix. At the same time, Felstiner finds fresh insights by opening up the very process of translating Celan's poems. To present this poetry and the strain of Jewishness it displays, Felstiner uncovers Celan's sources in the Bible and Judaic mysticism, his affinities with Kafka, Heine, Holderlin, Rilke, and Nelly Sachs, his fascination with Heidegger and Buber, his piercing translations of Shakespeare, Dickinson, Mandelshtam, Apollinaire. First and last, Felstiner explores the achievement of a poet surviving in his mother tongue, the German language that had passed, Celan said, through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech.

Paul Celan, Europe's most compelling postwar poet, was a German-speaking, East European Jew. His writing exposes and illumines the wounds that Nazi destructiveness left on language. John Felstiner's sensitive and accessible book is the first critical biography of Celan in any language. It offers new translations of well-known and little-known poems—including a chapter on Celan's famous "Deathfugue"—plus his speeches, prose fiction, and letters. The book also presents hitherto unpublished photos of the poet and his circle. Drawing on interviews with Celan's family and friends and his personal library in Normandy and Paris, as well as voluminous German commentary, Felstiner tells the poet's gripping story: his birth in 1920 in Romania, the overnight loss of his parents in a Nazi deportation, his experience of forced labor and Soviet occupation during the war, and then his difficult exile in Paris. The life's work of Paul Celan emerges through readings of his poems within their personal and historical matrix. At the same time, Felstiner finds fresh insights by opening up the very process of translating Celan's poems. To present this poetry and the strain of Jewishness it displays, Felstiner uncovers Celan's sources in the Bible and Judaic mysticism, his affinities with Kafka, Heine, Hölderlin, Rilke, and Nelly Sachs, his fascination with Heidegger and Buber, his piercing translations of Shakespeare, Dickinson, Mandelshtam, Apollinaire. First and last, Felstiner explores the achievement of a poet surviving in his mother tongue, the German language that had passed, Celan said, "through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech."

A Weak Messianic Power: Figures of a Time to Come in Benjamin, Derrida and Celan

Paul Celan’s “Tenebrae” is a scandalous poem: it describes how “unity with the dying Jesus” (in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s words) is achieved by means of the Jewish experience of the concentration camps. In this paper, I provide a new interpretation of “Tenebrae” that breaks from the two traditional ways in which the poem has been viewed—on the one hand, as a Christian poem that suggests that Jesus, insofar as he suffers just like Jewish concentration camp victims do, can provide “hope and redemption for the faithful” (Gadamer), and, on the other hand, as an ironic criticism of this Christian idea. Rather, I suggest that “Tenebrae” is a modification of Christianity: preserving Christian belief about Jesus’s death, it destroys that belief, and does so for the sake of the defense against Christian persecution. Finally, I suggest that this view reveals the peculiar poetic form of “Tenebrae”—what I call “political form.”

Corpus Darrah Teitel Click for larger view View full resolution Photo on the previous page Sophie Ristelhueber, Every One #14, 1994. Silver print mounted on fiber board, 270 x 180cm. Unique. Collection Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Introduction Sara Horowitz (bio) No one bears witness for the witness. —Paul Celan Although not among the Shoah-related writings alluded to in Darrah Teitel's award-winning play Corpus, this haunting problem posed in Paul Celan's 1967 poem, "Ash-glory," seems to hover above the action on stage. The play focuses on contemporary efforts to document and interpret events of the Holocaust, and in doing so, interrogates our postmodern relationship to the past, atrocity, and memory. Tracing the research efforts of a graduate student of genocide studies to uncover and engage with testimonies about the Nazi genocide, the play asks difficult questions about the proliferation of academic work on the Holocaust and the public fascination with it, as well as the varied motivations of belated witnesses and those who witness for them. Set in contemporary Toronto and Berlin, and Auschwitz during World War II, Corpus takes as its starting point the personal and academic struggles of Megan White, a University of Toronto graduate student whose dissertation focuses on explaining the "formative conditions" that shaped the attitudes and behaviours of Nazi perpetrators and supporters. Using the Internet to track down aging unrepentant Nazis who feel compelled to talk to someone about their past but cannot trust those around them, Megan penetrates private chat rooms and gains their confidence as research subjects. She wishes to understand the nature of racism not simply intellectually and emotionally, but physically—to feel the totality of racism and the entire being of the racist. She wants to launch her career and become an academic star. She desires love. Equipped with an academic toolkit shaped by theorists who work on the historiography and theory of genocide, Megan and her evolving work serve as biting critiques of the burgeoning academic fascination with this past and its career-building capability. The writings of people such as philosopher Hannah Arendt and French feminist Jules Kristeva buttresses Megan's work. Arendt's controversial concept of the banality of evil and Kristeva's thinking about our relationship to the "abject" provides a framework for humanizing the perpetrator. Ultimately, however, high theory fails Megan. It does not make her the most discerning of listeners—neither to the life-narratives of others nor to her own. Intersecting with the narrative arc that follows Megan in her research is the story she uncovers of Eva Woolfe, an aging Berlin woman with an untold past. Formerly Eva Reiniger, wife of an S.S. officer stationed at Auschwitz, Eva wishes to entrust her wartime story to someone who will value it. Smitten with a member of the Sonderkommando—Jewish prisoners forced to aid in the killing process and disposal of corpses—she schemes to rescue him and flee together close to the war's end. Eva's memory—of unlikely romance across racial barriers—captivates Megan, not only for its affirmation of the power of love amidst evil, but for its promise of celebrity for the researcher who publicizes it. One is reminded of Rosa, the central character of Cynthia Ozick's novella, The Shawl, who complains of a professor who pursues her to interview her for his academic project about survival: "Who made up these words, parasites on the throat of suffering!" But Eva's is not the only narrative of her last days at Auschwitz and on the run with the Jewish prisoner. As Teitel's play unfolds, competing memories of Eva's choices complicate the action. Not only Megan, but an adoring public that has seized on Megan's account of unexpected love among the ashes—and the play's audience that has followed along—are pushed to confront what it is that we seek to recover from the past. And the ability of a crafted story to elicit responses uncannily evokes the well-honed mechanisms of Nazi duplicity. The present world of the play is one marked by technological advances. Indeed, Megan's research would be impossible without the benefits of the Internet and digitization...

As a unifying principle in nationalism, language has played a crucial role in the development of western European nations, foreign-dominated countries in Eastern Europe, as well as in the borderland regions of the Russian and Ottoman Empires. During the nineteenth century, linguistic nationalism spread from European megacities to these distant borderlands. In this dissemination, intellectuals, mostly Turcophone Muslims from the Russian Empire who circulated between St Petersburg, Crimea, Kazan, Baku, Istanbul, and Paris, played a key role. For one of the co-founders of modern Turkish nationalism, Yusuf Akcura, who was born in Simbirsk, studied in Istanbul, and spent years in exile in Paris, a language was “the most important cultural phenomenon” (Akcura 1998: 19). Turkish sociologist Ziya Gokalp (1876-1924), in his programmatic work Turkculugun esaslarl (The Principles of Turkism, 2006 [1923]), promoted the idea of establishing the Istanbul dialect of Turkish as the principal language of the Turks and pleaded for the purging of Arabic and Persian loanwords from Ottoman Turkish (Gokalp 2006: 93–100). The Azerbaijani-Turkish entangled intellectual Ali Bey Huseynzade stressed the linguistic bonds between the predominantly Muslim Turks and Christian Hungarians in his verse “Turan,”1 which significantly inspired Turanist and pan-Turkist circles among Turkish intellectuals during World War I and beyond.

Posterity is not kind to music critics. Their writings are quickly consigned to a limbo reserved for period documents, curiosities of limited perspective whose relative value is gauged against present prejudice; critical missteps are the subject of tittering censure, while insights earn patronizing praise for their prescience. A few critics like Eduard Hanslick stand above their time-bound errors and insights by virtue of the coherence of the aesthetic philosophy revealed in their judgments. Others, like Francois-Joseph Fetis, make such manifold contributions to musical life that their stature as historical figures overshadows any critical shortcomings. By such measures Paul Bekker, arguably the most articulate and influential German critic of the first third of this century, ought to be triply blessed. Not only have the bulk of his critical opinions been affirmed by posterity, but the keen and original intellect informing his judgments and the range of his contributions to the musical life of his time should assure him an important place in music history. And yet Bekker's ideas and activity, like the culture of which they were so integral a part, have been largely buried by the tortuous course of events in our century. To recover any measure of Bekker's stature and relevance therefore requires a patient archaeology that reconstructs from historical artifacts those links that reveal the path of our passage from past to present. During the period of Paul Bekker's critical activity in Europe, roughly 1905 to 1935, a world war, revolutions in communications and transportation technology, and an unprecedented politicization of the arts helped transform the critic's function from a chronicler and arbiter in a relatively stable cultural environment to an active participant in an ongoing debate about the very nature and purpose of art within contested cultural terrain. Bekker's influence extended from the reading public of music lovers to the inner sanctums of cultural power; his interlocutors were the composers, performers, conductors, and administrators -- men and women like Ferruccio Busoni, Luise Dumont, Alfred Einstein, Leo Kestenberg, Ernst Krenek, Franz Schreker, Georg Schunemann, Heinz Tietjen, and Werner Wolffheim -- who shaped German musical life of late Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, and who themselves increasingly formulated the premises of their works and activities in print. Whenever Paul Bekker took up his pen, whether in writing essays, lectures, books, or private correspondence, he contributed to elevating this often stormy discourse, eschewing polemics for reasoned analysis, prejudice for imaginative insight. In Bekker's passionate engagement in more than three decades of German musical life (including his years of exile in Paris and New York) his voice was that of both a perceptive witness and engaged activist. Born in Berlin on 11 September 1882, Paul Eugen Max Bekker was the only child of Hirsch Nachmann Michel Bekker (1852-?) and Olga Elsner (18??-1943). Bekker's father, a tailor by trade, apparently abandoned his family in 1888 and emigrated to the United States (no further traces of his activities there have yet come to light). Olga Elsner Bekker, who worked in the costume department of the Berlin Court Opera, subsequently married Julius Panse, likewise an employee of the Court Opera. Bekker's musical education included piano studies with Alfred Sormann (1861-1913) and violin instruction with Benno Horwitz (1855-1904) and Fabian Rehfeld (1842-1920). He was professionally active as a violinist before being engaged as a conductor, first in Aschaffenburg (1902/03), then in Gorlitz (1903/04). Upon his return to Berlin he served a year in the military (April 1904 to March 1905) before turning to music journalism. Bekker's articles appeared in a variety of journals and periodicals, and he served as music critic for the Berliner Neueste Nachrichten 1906-09 and the Berliner Allgemeine Zeitung 1909-11. …

Paul Celan was born in 1920, in Czernowitz, in a severing time, in what was once the capital of the Hapsburg province of Bukovina, two years after the province became Romanian, after World War I. Czernowitz had become Cernauti, which it remained until the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1940, when Chernauti became Chernovtsy of Soviet Ukraine. In 1941, German and Romanian armies invaded. A year later, Celan's parents were taken to a concentration camp in Transnistria, east of Chernovtsy. There, his father died of typhus; his mother was shot by the SS. Celan was imprisoned for a year and a half in Romanian labor camps. After the war, Celan returned to Chernovtsy and completed his university studies. During the Hapsburg period, the dominant language of the region was German, though Ukrainian was spoken in the surrounding villages. With Soviet occupation, Russian was the official language and Stalinist strictures and anti-Semitism replaced Nazi rule.

Reviewed by: Paul Celan und Gottfried Benn: Zwei Poetologien nach 1945 B. Venkat Mani Paul Celan und Gottfried Benn: Zwei Poetologien nach 1945, by Agis Sideras. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005. 218 pp. €28.40 Studies of conjectures of subjectivity through a poet's reflections on the Self in his/her poetry and theoretical writings are not new to literary scholarship. A study of this nature becomes ambitious and merits attention when it simultaneously unravels poetic and political Selves in the works of Paul Celan and Gottfried Benn—two of the most influential German/European poets from the 20th century. Agis Sideras's book promises such an investigation. Through a reconsideration of hitherto under-discussed works of these two poets, Sideras attempts to reconfigure and challenge prevalent understandings of Paul Celan and Gottfried Benn's poetical theories (Poetologien). At the very outset, Sideras claims that extant research on these two poets has largely limited itself to outlining the intersections between their modernist poetics, without taking into account distinctive nuances. This mode of study impedes a clearer understanding of key elements that form and inform their poetry (p. 8). While research on Celan, Sideras points out, has concentrated almost exclusively on the essay Der Meridian (1960); scholarly studies of Benn have heavily drawn upon Probleme der Lyrik (1951), without considering the textual and intertextual genealogies of either of these texts. In order to illuminate the bifurcation in the poetics of Celan and Benn, Sideras argues convincingly for reconsideration of hitherto neglected texts: Roman des Phänotyp (1945) by Gottfried Benn, and Edgar Jene und der Traum von Traume (1948) by Celan. In addition to isolating important strands from these two works, that eventually contribute to, and are assimilated in Probleme der Lyrik and Meridian respectively, Sideras provides detailed discussions on textual moments from the Meridian whereby Celan fashions his poetics against that of Benn. A sustained engagement with this counter-fashioning becomes the engine of study. The juxtaposition of the two poets and their works is carefully carried out under two long sections, each of them bringing several distinguishing contours of their distinct poetics to relief. While the first section locates the features of their poetics in the concept of subjectivity, the second section expands the evaluation of self, individuality, and collectivity in conceptions [End Page 218] of existentialism and reality on the one hand, and poetic techniques such as dialogue and monologue on the other. One of the achievements of Sideras's study is his careful explication of the tensions that underlie poetic theories of Celan and Benn that depart from the larger poetic agenda of early 20th century modernism. Notable in Sideras's evaluation of Benn are, for example, the discussions on the split between individuality and the poetic "I" as expressed through language (28 pp.), the discrepancy between an ostensibly hermetic character of poetry and Benn's larger poetic program (p. 62), and, most important, Benn's belabored incorporation of a destructed and obfuscated reality after the Second World War (p. 117). These tensions play out differently in Celan. As Sideras demonstrates, Celan operates with a fundamental schism that registers in his struggles against the language with the language as a medium (p. 50). It is this very schism that moves Celan's poetry from hermetic inclinations, thereby elucidating multiple degrees of freedom for the poetic and the political "I" in Celan's poetry. This distinction becomes key to understanding the two poets' conceptualization of the poetic Self, as well as to their construction and intuition of the Other (p. 152). Such conceptualizations are rendered explicit, among other techniques, in their preferences for monologue (Benn) and dialogue (Celan) respectively (p. 166). While the two poets converge in their thematic decoding of concerns of modernity—indexed especially in their dissociations they propose between poetry, the artistic enterprise, and the predicament of representation—they diverge in their radically different stances toward these issues. As reactions to their perceptions of reality, they posit the abstraction of reality rather differently, thereby providing not identical, but two distinctly traceable poetics of European modernism. The merits of Sideras's book lie in a clear demarcation of the differences in the two...

Reviewed by: Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew Alicia Ostriker Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew, by Susan Gubar. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. 313pp. Illustrated. $35.00. We inevitably begin with Theodor Adorno's famous 1949 injunction, "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." Susan Gubar disagrees, as do I. With the poetry of the Book of Lamentations in mind as precedent, and with the counter-injunction "therefore choose life" as moral guide, it has always seemed to me that to fall silent in the face of the Holocaust is to surrender to it. Dmitri Shostakovich, composing his Thirteenth Symphony based on Yevtoshenko's "Babi Yar," commented, "People knew about Babi Yar before Yevtoshenko's poem, but they were silent. And when they read the poem, the silence was broken. Art destroys silence." Moreover, I believe simply that freedom to write—to write anything and everything, profound or trivial—is life's best response to death. Gubar's views are considerably less simple. Surveying the debates around Holocaust art, she notes the danger of policing creative responses. Should only documentaries, testimonials, diaries and histories—eyewitness accounts—be considered "authentic?" Should any attempt to compare the genocide of Jews with other horrors of [End Page 145] human history be considered profanation? Should specifically feminist studies of the Holocaust be condemned? But she also notes the phenomenon of fetishizing and commodifying the Holocaust in an anything-goes world, turning shock into schlock, using it for professional and commercial advancement, multiplying images of genocide into banality. As the saying goes, "There's no business like Shoah business." And is not the esthetic realm itself somehow suspect, she wonders, given the manipulation of "high culture" by the Nazis in the course of the Final Solution? Gubar's response, first of all, is that there exists de facto an immense body of post-Holocaust poetry written by poets who did not themselves endure the horrors of World War II Europe, and which is worthy of our attention. More importantly, she argues that the memory of the Holocaust will inexorably die if it is not kept alive by post-Holocaust generations, and that poetry may be especially capable of avoiding what she calls "the sinister potential of our own rhetoric." Central to Gubar's approach is the conviction that the Holocaust is like a black hole, a force field pulling into itself—and annihilating—whatever meaning falls into its orbit. Over and over, in chapters organized thematically rather than by author, and with excursions into the related arts of painting and photography, she sees Holocaust art as essentially absurdist, ironic, anti-cathartic. "Where did the way lead when it led nowhere?" asked Paul Celan. "The Jews I've felt rooted among/ are those who were turned to smoke," writes Adrienne Rich. A number of poems Gubar quotes in a chapter on "Masters of Disaster" brood over the issue of Holocaust-related suicide. Is it defiance, martyrdom, heroism, weakness? "To understand despair/ and be comfortable with it—/ something you could not do—/is how we live," writes Harvey Shapiro apologetically to Primo Levi and Paul Celan. Roberta Gould on the other hand pleads against self-inflicted injury: "don't cut off your wrists as Jim did/ don't go mad every year like Renee. . . . don't go sexually dead/ obeying the message/ "Work for death/ you handcuffed slave/ you pest!" In a chapter on the anguish of the child-survivor, reacting to "the void of the unspeakable" or the ongoing juggernaut of suffering crushing the next generation, Gubar quotes, among others, Marge Piercy, haunted as a child by ghosts at her bedfoot reminding her "What you/carry in your blood is us," and Louis Simpson's recollection of his youth: They want me to stick in their mudhole Where no one is elegant, They want me to wear old clothes, They want me to be poor, to sleep in a room with many others— Not to walk in the painted sunshine to a summer house But to live in the tragic world forever. An adjacent theme is the loss of the mother-tongue, and the efforts of poets like Irena Klepfisz to...

There are clear signs of control and repression in the architecture and layout of most internment camps, but internment camps were not the only form of institutional accommodation present in the United Kingdom during the Second World War. Comparison of a prisoner of war camp and a forestry work camp, both in Scotland, reveals similarities and differences between the two. The similarities highlight issues of control and authority, while the differences reveal issues of repression and punishment. The comparison also reveals much about official mind-set in the United Kingdom during the Second World War.

More Human Than Human: The Exile in <i>Blade Runner</i>

<i>Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire</i>. Marjorie Perloff. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. xi+204.

516 Reviews achieved considerable success as a writer of novels in English, his novel By the Waters of Babylon (1939) being chosen as Book ofthe Month by the Evening Standard. What Dove investigates most successfully is the inexorable impact of exile in an insular and culturally alien Britain on these writers fromthe German-speaking world. This emerges clearly in his sensitive account of the failure of Alfred Kerr, a critic of immense stature in Germany, to achieve even a modicum of recognition in Britain and thus to rise above the genteel poverty that enveloped his exile years. Even Zweig, whose biography of Mary Queen of Scots brought him renewed success, could not escape the corrosive effects of losing contact with his native language, losing status and stability in his working life,and losing the delicate cultural equilibriumnecessary to continued literary production. There was to be no literary assimilation for these writers. Neumann's integration into the British literary scene was badly jolted by his sufferings in internment on the Isle of Man in 1940, and though the success of his post-war novel Children of Vienna (1946) seemed to secure his place in his adopted country, he decided to leave for Switzerland in 1958. Zweig left for Brazil, and died in despair in 1942. Perhaps significantly,Herrmann-Neisse was the only one to die in England, a foreigner there in death as in life. Dove makes much of Herrmann-Neisse's happiness during his brief escapes from London to Zurich, but in wartime neutral Switzerland was to prove far less congenial than Britain: refugees were interned in work camps, or even turned back at the German border, while the more fortunate, like the dramatist Georg Kaiser, had to endure the tribulations of a makeshift life on a succession of temporary permits. The refugees' perception, during the era of appeasement, of the urgent need to awaken the British to the threatposed by Nazi Germany gave rise to works like Otten's Die Reise nach Deutschland, written in 1938 but published only in 2000. Richard Dove has rescued from oblivion this vivid account of a young Englishman's journey to the Third Reich, where he comes face to face with the militarization of German society and the indoctrinationof its youth with an ideology of violence and aggression. Thus he learns that he and his countrymen will have to take an active stand against Nazi barbarism. The novel is a historical document of considerable interest, and it forms an apt complement to the broader picture of literary exile in Journey of No Return. London Anthony Grenville Langer es Gedankenspielund Dystopie: Die Mondfiktion in Arno Schmidts Roman 'Kajf auch Mare Crisium'. By Roswitha M. Jauk. (Erlanger Studien, 122) Erlangen und Jena: Palm & Enke. 2000. 126 pp. ?14. ISBN 3-7896-0822-x (pbk). The focus of this study, a Graz University Diplomarbeit, is the fictional and metafictional role played by the 'Mondfiktion', a so-called 'Langeres Gedankenspiel' (extended mind-game) embedded in Kajf auch Mare Crisium, a novel published in 1960. Notable forits dual narrative structure, the novel presents on its main level the storyof Karl Richter and his female companion, who are visiting a relative in the country side of Lower Saxony. On the second and subsidiary level, the protagonist Richter turns narrator and recounts the satirically utopian yarn of the last surviving human beings in two moon colonies following a devastating Third World War. With its tightly interwoven levels, the novel Kajf was expressly intended as a manifestation of the 'Langeres Gedankenspiel' (LG), the third of four prose models that Schmidt devised in his 'Berechnungen' in the mid-1950s. As Schmidt, and in his wake Jauk, contends, any depiction, and hence any analysis, of an LG must differentiatebetween El ('ob? jective reality) and EII (subjective reality). The daydreamer's subjective fantasy (EII) is always predicated on the real world from which he or she is trying to escape (El). MLR, 98.2, 2003 517 Like many Schmidt scholars before her, Jauk takes Schmidt too much at his word; in leaving the premisses of his theory unquestioned she succumbs to the metho? dological vicious circle that one recent scholar, Stefan Voigt, has termed Schmidt...

In Doctor to the Resistance, Hal Vaughn constructs an insightful and moving tale about the life of Dr. Sumner Jackson, an American surgeon stationed in Paris during World War II. This well-researched narrative depicts a physician whose indefatigable devotion to his patients compels him, on numerous occasions, to undertake perilous risks, with the possibility always in mind that “the reward would be death, or worse than death” (9). Born and raised amid the rural valleys of northern Maine, Dr. Jackson joined the American military as a volunteer physician at the conclusion of World War I, only weeks after completing his medical education at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1919. A brief visit to a prisoner-of-war camp during this period exposed the young doctor to harrowing images of malnourished prisoners being transported, like chattel, to various work camps throughout Europe. The experience struck a responsive chord in the empathetic surgeon and unleashed an irrepressible urge within him to strive to protect the assaulted and effaced identities of human victims of war in whatever capacity he could.