The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Paul Celan · a book of poems in four sections, with “Todesfuge” set alone as a section of its own · published as “Mohn und Gedächtnis” by the Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart, 1952 · scored as the collection as published, on Celan’s German, read from knowledge, with the desk’s own English renderings; no text in hand, and German quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
The lyric in voices and in address: fugue, litany, love poem and dream lyric, a self speaking to a “you”
Mythos
Margarete and Sulamith, the German and the Jewish beloved; Ruth, Noemi and Mirjam in a stranger’s land; the almond, the watchful tree; the grave in the air
Phase
From the dream lyric of the early years, through the fugue of the camps set alone at the centre, to love poems written under the memory of the dead
Presentation
A collection in four sections, with one poem set as a section of its own: long unpunctuated dactylic lines with refrains, couplets in a folk song’s manner, free verse in the surrealist manner
Register
Incantatory, plain and dreamlike by turns: dread at its height, grief as litany, love as a summons
Scale
One voice and its dead: a mother, a beloved, a murdered people, and the order that murdered them
Governing Proposition
Paul Celan’s first book of poems published in Germany, gathering the dream lyric of his early years around one poem set alone at its centre, “Todesfuge”. Its wager is that the murder of the European Jews can be told in German only in the murderers’ language and with their art inside the telling, and that love, after that murder, is made under a mourning that cannot be finished: the lovers of its title love each other like poppy and memory, forgetting and remembrance at once.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Paul Celan’s Mohn und Gedächtnis was published by the Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt in Stuttgart in 1952, his first book of poems published in Germany. Its first section takes up, revised and pruned, poems from Der Sand aus den Urnen, a book printed in Vienna in 1948 that Celan withdrew for its misprints. That earlier book is context, not the unit. The unit is the collection as published in 1952, in four sections, scored on Celan’s German. The title comes from “Corona”: “wir lieben einander wie Mohn und Gedächtnis”
“we love each other like poppy and memory”.
“Todesfuge”, written in or about 1945, had a history before the book. It was first printed in Romanian translation, as “Tangoul morţii”, in 1947, and then in German in the withdrawn Vienna volume. In the book it stands alone, a section of its own, a hinge between the early pieces and the later love poems. In May 1952 Celan read at the meeting of Gruppe 47 at Niendorf and was coldly received; his listeners heard the music as aestheticising. Adorno’s sentence of 1949 on poetry after Auschwitz stood against the whole enterprise.
The inheritance is the German lyric of Rilke and Trakl, read in Czernowitz, and the surrealism of Bucharest in the years 1945 to 1947, and much of the book stays within it: the genitive metaphor, the dream landscape, the urns, the sand and the night. The poems are not of one weight, and the desk does not pretend they are. Weighed most are “Todesfuge”, “Corona”, “Espenbaum”, “Zähle die Mandeln”, “In Ägypten”, “Kristall”, “Ein Lied in der Wüste” and “Lob der Ferne”, with the mother poems and the love poems of the last two sections as the body around them. The centre is necessary and the margin assembled, and the heavy pruning of the 1948 book shows that the margin was Celan’s own question too.
Movement II
“Todesfuge” opens on the inversion of every nourishing thing: “Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends”
“Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening”. The speakers are a “we”, the prisoners, “wir trinken und trinken”, “we drink and drink”, and there is no speaking self, only voices. A man lives in the house. He writes letters to Germany, “dein goldenes Haar Margarete”, “your golden hair Margarete”, and he orders the prisoners to play for the dance while they dig.
The poem takes the fugue, the most learned of German musical forms, and makes it the form of the death order. Subject and countersubject enter; the refrains return in shifted order, varied by one word or by their order; there is no punctuation, so the voices run together; the long dactylic lines are made with a composer’s control. The form is the camp itself, a repetition commanded from outside, in which the prisoners’ “we” and the master’s “he” are bound in one measure. Change the form and the poem stops knowing what it knows. A prose account would lose the knowledge that the order was also an art.
What the poem discloses can be stated: the murder was carried out by the culture that also made music and poetry, in the same order and by the same hands, and the poem that tells it must be made in the murderers’ language and in their art. The new voice arrives exactly when the fugue requires it: “der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland”
“death is a master from Germany”. Its early German listeners heard the music as aestheticising atrocity, and Celan himself later grew reserved toward the poem. That is not a failure of disclosure. The commander demands music while the grave is dug, and the poem makes its reader hear the beauty as complicit. The music is the subject.
Movement III
The grave the prisoners dig is in the air: “ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng”
“a grave in the air where one lies not cramped”. The image was new, and the century took it as its own. The terror of the poem rises by repetition until its close sets two heads of hair side by side, with nothing said between them: “dein goldenes Haar Margarete / dein aschenes Haar Sulamith”
“your golden hair Margarete / your ashen hair Shulamith”. It is one of the summits of dread in the century’s poetry.
The two names are the poem’s structure, not its allusions. Margarete is Goethe’s Gretchen, the German beloved of the German master work. Sulamith is the Shulamite of the Song of Songs, whose black hair has become ash. The archetype of the beloved is split between the nations, and that split is the poem’s argument. “In Ägypten” does the same work in a love poem, gathering Ruth, Noemi and Mirjam as the beloved’s companions in a stranger’s land: the exile of Israel laid over the lovers.
By its existence the poem answered the question whether poetry in German could be written after the camps, and it showed what such a poem would have to do. It became the poem of the Shoah in German, taught in schools and read at the Bundestag’s commemoration of 1988. Anselm Kiefer’s paintings of Margarethe and Sulamith take their titles and their two heads of hair from it, and Adorno qualified his dictum in Negative Dialektik (1966), in a passage generally read with Celan in mind. Seventy years of criticism have not closed its questions: whether its music redeems or betrays what it tells, who the “we” is, what the grave in the air promises. The reach runs through one poem more than through the book.
Movement IV
Celan’s mother was killed in Transnistria, and she is present in “Espenbaum”, “Der Reisekamerad” and elsewhere. “Espenbaum” keeps its couplets with a folk song’s plainness, each pairing a thing in nature with the mother who did not return: “Meiner Mutter Haar ward nimmer weiß”
“My mother’s hair never turned white”. And again: “Löwenzahn, so grün ist die Ukraine. / Meine blonde Mutter kam nicht heim.”
“Dandelion, so green is the Ukraine. My fair-haired mother did not come home.” The poem knows grief as a litany, each natural thing returning to the mother, and its elevation is plain and terrible.
“Zähle die Mandeln” makes counting its music: “Zähle die Mandeln, / zähle, was bitter war und dich wachhielt, / zähl mich dazu”
“Count the almonds, count what was bitter and kept you awake, count me in”. The almond carries the Hebrew almond, shaqed, the watchful tree, and the bitterness of the almond eye. With “Kristall” it is among the book’s heights after “Todesfuge” and “Corona”. In these poems the natural order is emblem, aspen, dandelion, almond, poppy, and the emblem bears weight.
The charge against the book lies in its margin. The genitive metaphor of the surrealist years, the mills of death, the sand of the urns, recurs until it becomes a tic, and in those poems one image could stand for another. Some of the dream lyrics are loose, in a manner Celan pared away in Sprachgitter and Die Niemandsrose, where the radical departure of his art is made. The early pieces obey a law of the image more than the law of memory, and here and there the book reads as the gathering of a poet’s first decade rather than one physics. The command is load-bearing in the best poems and conventional in a fair share of the rest.
Movement V
“Corona” states the book’s law. It turns on the colon of its first line, “Herbst frißt mir aus der Hand sein Blatt: wir sind Freunde”
“Autumn eats its leaf from my hand: we are friends”, and knows love as time in a closed circle, the crown of its title. Its lovers love like poppy and memory, forgetting and remembrance at once. Then the circle breaks open in a public, almost prophetic summons: “Es ist Zeit, daß der Stein sich zu blühen bequemt”
“It is time the stone made an effort to flower”; and at the last, “Es ist Zeit, daß es Zeit wird. / Es ist Zeit.”
“It is time it became time. It is time.”
The same law governs the commanded dance of “Todesfuge” and the private love poems of the last section: love and speech are made under the memory of the dead, and every embrace has the mother, the ash and the night inside it. The love poems were reopened by the publication of the correspondence of Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, which changed how “Corona” and “In Ägypten” are read. Across the book a self addresses a “you”; the family is there in the mother, history and the state in the fugue, the sacred in Sulamith, Ruth and Mirjam and a God addressed obliquely. Labour, society and the ordinary world are mostly absent, and outside the strongest poems the orders are held one at a time.
On this desk it stands level with Anselm Kiefer’s Sulamith (8.5), the finest of the works that descend from it: the painting, one unified work, leads most on The Inevitable, The Living Form and The Inner Law, and the book leads on The Sublime, The Bottomless Well, Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable. Kiefer’s Margarethe (8.2) stands three tenths below it. Akhmatova’s Requiem (8.8), a single cycle on the same century’s terror, stands three tenths above it, more unified, leading by eleven tenths on The Inevitable and by seven on The Inner Law. Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday (8.5) stands level. The Epochal Gate is not met, at The Swerve, and the book is placed among the Canonical on its standing.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and in a collection it falls unevenly. “Todesfuge” cannot lose a line: each refrain returns because the order it records returns, and each variation arrives exactly where the fugue requires the new voice. “Espenbaum” is as close: every couplet pairs a thing in nature with the mother who did not come home, and none could go. “Corona” builds to its close and stops. But the book also holds poems whose images are exchangeable, the genitive chains of the surrealist years in Bucharest and Vienna, where one mill of death could stand for another, and a number of the later love poems could go without the book losing its argument. The centre is necessary; the margin is assembled.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: the murder of the European Jews was carried out by the culture that also made music and poetry, in the same order and by the same hands, and the poem that tells it must be made in the murderers’ language and in their art. “Todesfuge” makes this by structure, not assertion: the man in the house writes letters to Germany, “dein goldenes Haar Margarete”, “your golden hair Margarete”, and orders the prisoners to play for the dance while they dig. A second disclosure runs through the book: mourning that cannot be completed shapes love itself. Much of the rest discloses a mood of dream and grief more than a meaning, and that holds the figure where it is.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Height and frequency both. The height is “Todesfuge”, whose terror rises by repetition until its last lines set two heads of hair side by side, “dein goldenes Haar Margarete / dein aschenes Haar Sulamith”, “your golden hair Margarete / your ashen hair Shulamith”, with nothing said between them: one of the summits of dread in the century’s poetry. “Corona” rises in another register, a love poem that ends in a public, almost prophetic summons. “Espenbaum” reaches a plain and terrible elevation, and “Zähle die Mandeln” and “Kristall” rise again. The rises are frequent in the strong poems and absent from the weaker ones, and that keeps the figure below 9.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Myth is built in the poems that carry the book. “Todesfuge” sets two figures as its structure: Margarete, Goethe’s Gretchen, the German beloved of the German master work, and Sulamith, the Shulamite of the Song of Songs, whose black hair has become ash. The poem is built on their pairing and ends on it; the archetype of the beloved is split between the nations, and the split is the argument. “In Ägypten” gathers Ruth, Noemi and Mirjam as the beloved’s companions in a stranger’s land, the exile of Israel laid over a love poem. The almond carries the Hebrew watchful tree. Outside these poems urns, sand and night are evoked in passing, not made to bear weight.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance is the German lyric of Rilke and Trakl, read in Czernowitz, and the surrealism of Bucharest in the years 1945 to 1947. The turn is real: Celan brought the surrealist image, the long incantatory line and the musical form into German at the moment the language was most compromised, and turned them on the camps; “Todesfuge” makes the fugue, the most learned of German musical forms, the form of the death order. The stake was paid, at Niendorf and against Adorno’s sentence of 1949. But much of the book stays within its inheritance: the genitive metaphor and the dream landscape are Trakl’s and the surrealists’ more than Celan’s own, and the radical departure of his art comes in later books.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Change the form of “Todesfuge” and it stops knowing what it knows. The entries of subject and countersubject, the refrains returning in shifted order, the absence of punctuation that lets the voices run together, are the form of the camp itself: a repetition commanded from outside, in which the prisoners’ “we” and the master’s “he” are bound in one measure. A prose account would lose the knowledge that the order was also an art. “Corona” knows love as time in a closed circle, the crown of its title, broken open only by its last line; “Espenbaum” knows grief as a litany. In the lesser poems the form is the period’s free-verse dream lyric, and could be other.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Evidence first, and the evidence is seventy years of return. “Todesfuge” has a criticism of its own: of its sources, its reception in Germany, its musical form, its author’s later reserve toward it. Its questions stay open: whether its music redeems or betrays what it tells, who the “we” is, what the grave in the air promises. The love poems were reopened by the publication of the correspondence of Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, which changed how “Corona” and “In Ägypten” are read. Outside its central poems the book is read mostly as the first stage of a greater work, the yield of the lesser poems on return is thin, and the deepest criticism of Celan, Szondi’s, Derrida’s and Gadamer’s, works mainly on the later books.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The field is German poetry of the century, and after 1945 in particular. The intrinsic force is high: through “Todesfuge” the book answered by its existence the question whether poetry in German could be written after the camps, and showed what such a poem would have to do: speak in voices, in a form the culture prized, with the murderers’ art inside it. The axis is held below 9 because the reach runs through one poem more than through the book, and Celan’s formal influence on later poetry comes from his later books. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Anselm Kiefer’s paintings of Margarethe and Sulamith take their titles and their two heads of hair from the poem, and Adorno qualified his dictum in Negative Dialektik (1966), in a passage generally read with Celan in mind.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Seventy-four years, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The text survives whole as Celan published it, with his own revisions of the earlier poems settled in it, in his collected works and in print: form and fabric take no charge. Presence is wide but uneven. “Todesfuge” has as wide a presence as any German poem of its century, in schools, in translation, in memorial use and in the other arts; it was read at the Bundestag’s commemoration of 1988. The book as a book is read mainly by readers of Celan and in the academy, its lesser poems known chiefly as the setting of the great ones. Its subject is a historical event, but the poem has outlived the conditions of its first hearing. The widest presence belongs to one poem, and the figure stands at the foot of what its age allows.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on Celan’s German. At the top the command is complete: in “Todesfuge” the long dactylic line, the refrains varied by one word or by their order, the compressed syntax with no stop and the closing pair of half lines are made with a composer’s control. “Corona” turns on the colon of its first line, “Herbst frißt mir aus der Hand sein Blatt: wir sind Freunde”, “Autumn eats its leaf from my hand: we are friends”, and on a chiastic close. “Espenbaum” keeps a folk song’s plainness; “Zähle die Mandeln” makes counting its music. Against this, the genitive metaphor, the mills of death and the sand of the urns, recurs until it becomes a tic, and some of the dream lyrics are loose, in a manner Celan himself pared away in the books that followed.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the commanded dance of “Todesfuge” and a private love poem of the last section. One law governs both, and the title names it: love and speech are made under the memory of the dead, and every embrace has the mother, the ash and the night inside it; the poppy of sleep and forgetting and the memory that will not sleep are paired throughout. “Corona” is the law’s clearest statement, a love poem whose time is the time of the dead and the stone. The law holds from litany to dream to fugue. But the early surrealist pieces obey a law of the image more than the law of memory, and here and there the book reads as a gathering of a poet’s first decade rather than one physics.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Judged on what a book of lyrics holds, not punished for its form. Consciousness, fully, in a self addressing a “you”. The family, in the mother killed in Transnistria, present in “Espenbaum”, “Der Reisekamerad” and elsewhere. Love and the erotic, through the later sections. History and the state, in “Todesfuge”, where the machinery of murder, its commander, its labour of digging, its music and its letters home, is held in thirty-odd lines. The sacred, in Sulamith, Ruth and Mirjam, and a God addressed obliquely. Nature as emblem: aspen, dandelion, almond, poppy. What holds the axis at 7.5, the lowest of the twelve, is what is absent: labour, society and the ordinary world, and outside the strongest poems the orders are held one at a time.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.0, then The Sublime at 8.8 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.7. A text whole and in print for seventy-four years, with one poem as widely present as any German poem of its century; a summit of dread in “Todesfuge”, with heights again in “Corona”, “Espenbaum” and “Zähle die Mandeln”; and the beloved split between Margarete and Sulamith as the structure of the poem, not its ornament.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.5, then The Inevitable at 7.8. A lyric collection’s range, wide for its form, with labour, society and the ordinary world absent; and a necessary centre in a margin of period dream lyric that could lose poems without loss to the argument. Among the gated axes The Swerve is lowest, at 8.4: the turn of “Todesfuge” is real and was paid for, but most of the book continues Rilke, Trakl and the surrealists of Bucharest.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 8.6, The Living Form at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.0, The Archetypal Deep at 8.7, The Unconcealment at 8.6 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.4 falls a tenth short, the wager of one poem real and costly while most of the book is a gifted continuation of its inheritance, its own radical departure left to the books that followed. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below The Inevitable at 7.8, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.5. The twelve sum to 101.4, and the aggregate, 8.5, stands in Tier IV in any case.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Paul Celan’s Mohn und Gedächtnis, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart, 1952, scored as the collection as published, in four sections, on Celan’s German. Der Sand aus den Urnen (Vienna, 1948), withdrawn by Celan for its misprints, from which the first section takes up poems revised and pruned, is context, not the unit. The poems weighed most are “Todesfuge”, “Corona”, “Espenbaum”, “Zähle die Mandeln”, “In Ägypten”, “Kristall”, “Ein Lied in der Wüste” and “Lob der Ferne”, with the mother poems and the love poems of the last two sections as the body around them. The major poems are read closely, word for word in places; the order of the book and the lesser poems of its later sections less closely, and no axis is argued from a poem that is not named. No text was in hand: nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. German is quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s own English beneath, and cited by poem; everything else is paraphrased. Translation · Pierre Joris’s complete version of the early books, Memory Rose into Threshold Speech (2020), was used for sense across the whole book, and John Felstiner’s Selected Poems and Prose (2001) and Michael Hamburger’s Poems of Paul Celan for the poems weighed most; none is quoted, and no translation’s shortfall is charged to the work. Matters that could not be verified are not given, among them the titles and order of the four sections, the number of poems in the book, the line and stanza counts of “Todesfuge”, “Corona” and “Espenbaum”, the dates and circumstances in which poems of the book passed to Ingeborg Bachmann, the history of the charges made about the sources of “Todesfuge”, Celan’s late wishes about its reprinting, and the name of the reader at the Bundestag’s commemoration of 1988.