Milk and ashes poets Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs confront the trauma of the shoah

Abstract

Both Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs were survivors of the Shoah who emerged deeply traumatized by the phenomenon. Both poets were thus displaced from their country of origin and linguistic environment. Their poetic strategies post-Holocaust were defined by the unspeakable enormity of the crime of genocide and the (contradictory) need to bear witness. In Celan’s famous poem “Todesfuge” (Death Fugue) the poet adopts the voice of a prisoner in a German death camp. Celan subsequently abandoned traditional formal poetic devices. His poetry became increasingly hermetic. The title of Celan’s poem contains the word “death,” as does that of Sachs’s first post-Shoah cycle “In den Wohnungen des Todes.” it is the unspoken thread in their work. Sachs turned to her Jewish background to construct a historical vision of the people of Israel and applied the notion of metamorphosis (Verwandlung) to articulate her status as a survivor. In his poem “Und mit dem Buch aus Tarussa” Celan links his fate to that of Marina Tsvetaeva, adumbrating his future suicide. Sachs survived the trauma, by embracing a solid set of religious values. Keywords: Celan; Sachs; Shoah; trauma; suicide