Remembrance Undisciplined: Reading Paul Celan with Max Czollek

Abstract

Taking Walter Benjamin’s critique of history’s “disciplining” nature as a starting point, this article reads Paul Celan in dialogue with the contemporary German-Jewish poet, playwright, and essayist Max Czollek to consider the undisciplining of remembrance in both their poetry. The article highlights two sites where poetry makes an undisciplined sense of the past felt: language and historical perception. Readings of Celan’s “Lila Luft” and “Mapesbury Road” and Czollek’s “von der wiederkehr” and “nachrichten aus marathon” show how both poets draw on the resources of poetry to produce perceptual openings toward the pervasive reverberations of the national socialist past in the present. In doing so, they convey a sense of time in the aftermath of National Socialism that recent debates around memory in Germany—drawing on theoretical accounts of postcolonial aftermaths—described as “post-national socialist.” Reading Celan with Czollek renders visible to what extent Celan resonates with this contemporary discourse, while also highlighting the historical specificity of remembering in the wake of the Nazi genocide.