Abstract
‘It’s not all that simple,’ Paul Celan is said to have responded, when asked about his seeming lack of political engagement in the spring of 1968.1 Oppression, for him, was deeply entrenched in social customs and language. A more just and inclusive political order could not be ushered in overnight, especially not through a violent outburst of rage and rebellious energy. Waves of rising fists, flooding the streets of Paris, seemed visually and acoustically too reminiscent of a recent and rather grim chapter in German history, one that Celan had experienced personally. Not that he was indifferent to the voicing of dissent. His poetry was all about the search for thinking space. Yet, he located revolutionary potential not in heroic upheavals, but in slow and inaudible processes, in the gradual transformation of societal values.
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Notes
János Szász, ‘Es ist nicht so einfach …: Erinnerungen an Paul Celan’, in W. Hamacher and W. Menninghaus (eds), Paul Celan (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988), pp. 3, 25–3.
Paul Celan, ‘Sprich auch du’, in Von Schwelle zu Schwelle, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. I, p. 135 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), trans. M. Hamburger as ‘Speak, you also’, in Poems of Paul Celan (New York: Persea Books, 1988), p. 99.
For biographical accounts see John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995);
Israel Chalfen, Paul Celan: a Biography of His Youth, trans. M. Bleyleben (New York: Persea Books, 1991);
Amy D. Colin (ed.), Argumentum e Silentio (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1987).
George Steiner, Language and Silence (London: Faber & Faber, 1967), pp. 121–1.
Jerry Glenn, Paul Celan (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1973), pp. 69–70.
Theodor W. Adorno, Prismen: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1955), p. 31.
John D. Caputo, Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 183.
Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, trans. R. Czerny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), p. 7.
Clarise Samuels, Holocaust Visions: Surrealism and Existentialism in the Poetry of Paul Celan (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993), p. 101.
See Michel de Certeau, Arts de Faire, trans. S. F. Rendall as The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. xlvi–xlvii, 60–1.
Hans Egon Holthusen, in Merkur (1954) as cited by Agnes Körner Domandi, Modern German Literature (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1972), p. 150.
Durs Grünbein, ‘Zu Kieseln gehärtet: Über das lyrische Sprechen’, in Grauzone morgens (Frabkfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985), p. 50;
Jacques Derrida, ‘Shibboleth for Paul Celan’, trans. J. Wilner, in A. Fioretos (ed.), Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp. 3–72.
Paul Celan, ‘Aschenglorie’, in Atemwende, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. II, p. 72. For a translation by P. Joris see Paul Celan, Breathturn (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995).
Dieter Lamping (ed.), Dein Aschenes Haar Sulamith: Dichtung über den Holocaust (München: Piper, 1992);
Bernd Jentzsch (ed.), Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland: Deportation und Vernichtung in poetischen Zeugnissen (München: Kindler, 1979);
Lea Rosh and Eberhard Jaeckel, Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland: Deportation und Ermordung der Juden (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1992).
Monika Schmitz-Emans, ‘Paul Celan’, in H. Steinecke (ed.), Deutsche Dichter des 20. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1994), p. 648.
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Poesie und Politik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987/1962).
See also Wolfgang Kuttenkeuler (ed.), Poesie und Politik: Zur Situation der Literatur in Deutschland (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1973); Text + Kritik special issues on ‘Politische Lyrik’, Vols. 9/9a (June 1973/October 1984).
Lawrence L. Langer, Art from the Ashes: a Holocaust Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 11.
Lamping, Dein Aschenes Haar Sulamith, p. 276; Langer, Art from the Ashes, p. 3 and The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), pp. 1–30;Alan Udoff, ‘On Poetic Dwelling: Situating Celan and the Holocaust’, in Fioretos (ed.), Word Traces, p. 324;Hans J. Schütz, Juden in der Deutschen Literatur (München: Piper, 1992), pp. 312–13;
Randolph L. Braham (ed.), Reflections of the Holocaust in Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. v–vii.
James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 1, 5.
Gérard Vincent, Sous le soleil noir du temps: Trakl, Mandelstam, Celan (Lausanne: Éditions l’âge d’homme, 1991), p. 113.
F. Kröll, ‘Anverwandlung der “Klassischen Moderne”’, in L. Fischer (ed.), Literatur in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland bis 1967 (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1986), pp. 258–9.
Hermann Schlösser, ‘Subjektivität und Autobiographie’, in K. Briegleb and S. Weigel (eds), Gegenwartsliteratur seit 1968 (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1992), pp. 406–7.
Harald Weinrich cited in Karl Krolow, ‘Lyrik’, in D. Lattmann (ed.), Die Literatur der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Zürich: Kindler Verlag, 1973), pp. 443–4.
Peter Szondi, ‘Durch die Enge geführt: Versuch über die Verständlichkeit des modernen Gedichts’, in Celan-Studien (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972), p. 48. For a translation by D. Cadwell and S. Esh see ‘Reading “Engführung”: an Essay on the Poetry of Paul Celan’, Boundary 2, Vol. 11, No. 3, 1983, pp. 231–64.
Concurring with this interpretation are Szondi, ‘Durch die Enge geführt’, p. 50 and Véronique Fóti, Heidegger and the Poets (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1992), p. 86.
Klaus Weissenberger, Die Elegie bei Paul Celan (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1969), p. 48.
Dorothee Kohler-Luginbühl, Poetik im Lichte der Utopie: Paul Celans poetologische Texte (Bern: Verlag Peter Lang, 1986), p. 266.
Emmanuel Levinas, ‘De l’être á l’autre’, in Noms Propres (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1976), pp. 59–66.
See also Foti, Heidegger and the Poets, 105–12; Evelyn Hunnecke, ‘Poésie et Poétique de Paul Celan’ (Doctorat d’Etat, Aix Marsaille I, 1987); Kohler-Luginbühl, Poetik im Lichte der Utopie, pp. 59–65.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘Philosophische Untersuchungen’, in Werkausgabe Band 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993), p. 250, §23.
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© 2009 Roland Bleiker
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Bleiker, R. (2009). Poetry after Auschwitz. In: Aesthetics and World Politics. Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230244375_6
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