Born in Czernowitz, Bukowina in what is now present day Ukraine, Paul Celan was the only son of a Jewish couple. Born under the name Paul Pessach Antschel or Ancel, only later did he change his surname to Celan. This region, strongly steeped in the Jewish tradition of Hasidim, left an indelible mark on his writings and personality ("Poetry of Paul Celan," Lyon 50). Although not born in Germany, German was his mother tongue. According to Israel Chalfen, Bukowina was a: "jüdische Stadt deutscher Sprache" (Chalfen 21). Much of Celan's knowledge in the German language was gained from his mother, who influenced him much in his early years. She was to be a recurring image in his writings.
Without question his vast knowledge of foreign languages strongly influenced his poetry. "Außer Deutsch sprach und schrieb Celan Rumänisch, Russisch, und Französisch. Jiddisch verstand er mühelos; Hebräisch konnte er lesen. In der Schule lernte er gründlich Englisch" (Buck 33).
Celan began writing poetry at the age of 15. His religious identity played an important role in his writings. At an early age he became aware of religious and racial discrimination. While only thirteen he entrusted to his aunt, Minna Brettschneider in Palestine, the following: "Ja, was den Anti-Semitismus in unserer Schule betrifft, da könnte ich ein 300 Seiten starkes Buch darüber schreiben" (Buck 29).
In late 1942, his parents fell victim to Hitler's genocidal crusade against the Jews. Paul survived after hiding in a factory, but was forever molded by the death of his parents and his fellow Jews. Shortly thereafter he was captured and was sent South for roadbuilding under a Romanian military guard. He continued this forced labor until early 1944 when he was sent back to Czernowitz. When the Russians liberated his city, Celan was beginning his studies in Middle High German that were to later influence his understanding of the German tongue. After the war Celan became an exile in his own country. His homeland seemed more and more alien (Felstiner 23).
In early 1948, he spent seven months in Vienna and there adopted the name Celan in order to better disguise his religious ancestry. He reversed the spelling of his surname, placing the "an" at the end, thereby giving it a more distinct French sound. He then settled permanently in France in 1948 (Buck 15). Though he lived the majority of his life in Paris, he retained German as his poetic language.
Celan's poetry illustrates the corruption of language and the abuse of the Jews by the Nazis. His are some of the strongest poetical statements made by a post-Holocaust writer. The images he uses are descriptive and illuminating. His feelings for the German language are also personal. Some classify his poetry as Erlebnislyrik, or poetry that focuses on incidents particular to him and events in his life ("Poetry of Paul Celan," Lyon 54-55). Many of the figures in Celan's works are people whom he knew. His mother and the poet Nelly Sachs, for example, play an important role in his writings. Most important, however, were the writings about his fellow Jews' sufferings.
Celan did not begin to seriously pursue his religious identity until after the war. His search for his own Jewishness acquired a nearly painful urgency with the death of his parents and that of millions of Jews (Mayer 190). Celan identified himself with the Jews' persecution and grew fearful of the growing anti-Semitism during his time. In the early 1960s he feared reprisal at the hands of former Nazi sympathizers. His increasing paranoia was brought about in part by the Goll affair. The widow of his late friend, Yvan Goll, brought charges against him that he had plagiarized much of her late husband's writings. Although Celan's friends defended him against many of the attacks, this assault intensified his sense of being persecuted for his Jewishness (Glenn 17).
In early works he identifies himself with the Jews, often using the personal pronoun "we." One of his most haunting phrases comes in his early and well-known poem TODESFUGE: "wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng" (GW I, 41) 1 For Celan the Jews were not some distant people. He felt himself intrinsically linked to their fate. He could not feel part of the German culture because of the Nazis and their treatment of his people, yet neither could he fully separate himself from the language. This tension between his German language and his separation from the German people, whom he considered his oppressors, surfaces in his poetry.
Though Celan lost nearly everything else in the Second World War, he firmly retained his language and his Jewish identity. These two possessions became paramount in his works. His poetry became a quest to give himself a homeland that the Nazis had stripped from him and to renew the German tongue which had been defiled by the Nazis. As he struggled with his Jewishness in later years, Celan detailed within his poems concepts for a metaphoric home. The images of glaciers, snow, and ice became symbols for the desolation which he felt. The silence, so often equated with snow, became a perfect metonym for his feeling of abandonment. Yet these images also became the means to purge his soul and purify his identity. Glacial imagery reflects his sympathy for the Jews' sufferings. Many of the images associated with glaciers are synonymous with Jewish belief. His poems have dual biblical and literal meanings and become the focal point for his identity and religion.
Celan's purpose for using glacial imagery in connection with snow and ice is to perhaps conceal his Jewishness. Under this layer of language found within glacial imagery he hides his true feelings for his ancestry. Celan had many reasons to conceal his Jewish identity, the first being paranoia. Though he did later in life acknowledge and even embrace his religion through his poetry, he still remained suspicious of those who criticized his works. 2 With the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe during the 1960s, Celan felt compelled to disguise Jewish elements within his poems. Following the publication of his volume Niemandrose in 1963, which was considered "openly and aggressively Jewish," his subsequent poems became more convoluted and enigmatic (Glenn 21). The formerly open Jewish references were hidden beneath difficult imagery. That does not mean, however, that he abandoned his search for a secure Jewish identity, but rather that he concealed it under more obscure imagery. 3
Celan's glacial imagery also expresses the conflicting ideas of death and suffering in contrast to redemption and hope. His poetry, according to many, is pessimistic in tone. Celan's poetry becomes redemptive when seen in the context of glaciers. He speaks to the reader with a hopeful and optimistic voice. The ice and snow in conjunction with glaciers conveys not only frozen silence or a wasteland, but also an optimistic view of his language, people, and identity.
Paul Celan expresses his ideas through imagery that spans various fields of study (e.g. physiology, geology, music, medicine, psychology, etc.). His interests in literary images range from the highly technical to the common vernacular. George Steiner recognizes Paul Celan, along with Rilke and Brecht, as one of the three: "größte[n] Meister der deutschen Lyrik im 20. Jahrhundert" (Steiner 49). One reason for such profound recognition is his unique handling of the German language.
Celan adopted German as his language of choice while growing up in Bukowina. He was adamant in his decision to be a "German" poet rather than to write in Romanian. Chalfen states that Celan felt that only in his mother tongue could he tell the truth and faithfully testify of the events he saw. He believed that in a foreign language the poet lies and distorts the truth. "Dennoch wollte Paul Celan kein rumänischer Dichter werden. So sagte er jedem, der ihm vorwarf, in der Sprache der Mörder seiner Eltern zu schreiben: "Nur in der Muttersprache kann man die eigene Wahrheit aussagen, in der Fremdsprache lügt der Dichter" (Chalfen 148). Yet the tension he felt between the language of his oppressors and the language of his poetry appears throughout his works.
In the speech he gave upon receiving the Bremen literary prize, Celan refers specifically to the corruption of the German language. He explains that his own tongue had undergone a terrible muting while passing "through the thousand darknesses of death-bringing speech," meaning what had happened to the German language. Once it had passed through these events, it emerged "enriched" by what it experienced. It is in this language that he attempts to write and orient himself.
The Geschehen that he discusses in this passage is, among other things, the misuse of the German language since 1933. The atrocities of the Nazi government, particularly those acts which resulted in the Holocaust, muted the entire Rede ("Last Poem," Felstiner 23). Following this epoch of German history, many words were closely associated with the Third Reich and its crimes.
Celan focuses on extracting a purity out of the corrupted German language. Earlier he recognized how his desire for expression often did not correspond to what was spoken. He asked himself if a new and pure language could emerge out of the corrupt. Only through veiling and uncovering words does he hope to strip away the corrupted elements of language. What remains is, in his words, a Neue Helligkeit:
Celan conceptualized some form of purifying medium which transforms the corrupted words into clear ideas and subsequently gives them verbal form. One physical form that this medium takes, as will be shown later in the next chapter, is that of snow and ice within glaciers. In this new form he hopes to find all images, pictures, and movements revealed in their purest sense: "traumhaft verschleiert und traumhaft entschleiert."
Celan presents these new and pure ideas through a Verschleierung and Entschleierung of language. Only by concealing and again revealing language's hidden meanings can its importance remain unsullied by the corrupt state of physical communication. By veiling obvious images in oblique metaphors, he makes references more cryptic and reduces the readers' understanding. Yet at the same time he regenerates and breathes new life into language. One way he accomplishes this is through his frequent use of language from various disciplines. Only in such scientific terminology can one find unbelastete Wörter, or words that still retain an undefiled meaning. Such words have not been corrupted by mis- or overuse.
The Nature of Celan's Language
Celan's poetry draws extensively from technical terms taken from geology, mineralogy, biology and physiology. According to Jörg Ortner, his library contained technical reference books on Gletscherkunde by Fritz Machecek, Physische Meereskunde by Gerhard Schott, and Physische Geographie and Astronomische Geographie by Günther Stegmüller ("Rilke," Lyon 202). These books show the wide extent of his interests and the depth of his investigative study. Words occurring in these fields appear frequently throughout his works. One such general subject or image is water, and within this category there is the sub-topic of glaciers.
Celan plays upon the many individual characteristics that compose a glacier, imbuing them with metonymic significance. Similar to a glacier's multi-layered structure, under each successive layer of poetic imagery one can also find allusions to the German language and later to the poet's Jewishness. The more obvious references to the German language are at the surface of his glacial images, while allusions to his religion are located deeper.
Celan constructs his poems precisely. Each layer of both figurative and literal metaphor he forms as carefully as one would a brick wall. He does this not only out of respect for the language, but in what might be considered a mocking salute to German excellence. To quote Bruno Bettelheim, who examined the psychological make-up of inmates in concentration camps: "In order to gain self respect, some prisoners tried to work well . . . They also rationalized that regardless of who might finally enjoy the product of their labor, it was important to work well 'in order to feel like a man'; or else they retired to the general statement that one ought to do well any job one had to do" (Bettelheim 205).
Like other Holocaust writers, Celan wrote both in order to survive and to give purpose to his existence. Primo Levi in his book Survival in Auschwitz details the work of a fellow captive: "At Auschwitz I often observed a curious phenomenon. The need for lavoro ben fatto — 'work properly done' — is so strong as to induce people to perform even slavish chores 'properly.' The Italian bricklayer who saved my life by bringing me food on the sly for six months, hated Germans, their food, their language, their war; but when they set him to erect walls, he built them straight and solid, not out of obedience, but out of professional dignity" (Levi 179). Hans Mayer states: "Celan liebte Genauigkeit" (Mayer 1154). This same "existential dignity" is what spurred Celan on to make his poems as perfect as possible. He wrote as stoically as a bricklayer, making sure that each and every successive layer of "bricks" or lines of verse was straight and solid. Glacial imagery reflects this attention to details. Each pictorial representation of glaciers and snow in a layered format holds meaning.
The Crystalline Structure of Language
Language can appear as complex as the structure of ice crystals. Many of the words Celan uses are, in fact, taken from the study of crystallography. His fascination with crystalline lattice structures carries over from the physical into the linguistic. Natural crystals apply not only to the structure of ice but also to the formation of words and word groupings. In their book Word Systems in Modern Hebrew, Edna Aphek and Yishai Tobin outline the structure of texts in a physical representation. They view words and sentence formations within larger texts as being three dimensional while sharing many similarities with ice. These textual structures are comparable to glaciers, which are also layered three dimensionally. Written text refracts meaning and perception much as light is dispersed as it passes through ice. This is similar to what Celan attempts to do with his glacial images — refract and scatter understanding of language. Aphek and Tobin explain further how a text shares many similarities with that of a glacier, having mass and crystalline properties. "[They] view the text as: (a) a multitextured and multidimensional structure in relief, where the concept of word systems are its most outstanding feature, or (b) a prism, a crystallized mass which remains intact as a single, undivided, integral entity which can be apprehended and interpreted in diverse ways" (Aphek and Tobin 81). The prism-like quality of ice also functions in the material formation of words. Glaciers become an embodiment of language. As Celan captures the German language in these glacial structures, they diffuse its true nature.
Footnotes:
1) All references to Celan's works will hereafter be made by the
annotation GW, which stands for the 1983 release of his Gesammelte Werke by
Beda Allemann and Stefan Reichert. The roman numeral stands for the volume number from
which the poem or prose is taken.
2) For a more detailed account of Celan's delusional bouts of paranoia
during his so-called "crisis years" of 1960-62 see James K. Lyon's "Judentum, Antisemitismus,
Verfolgungswahn: Celans "Krise" 1960-1962," Celan Jahrbuch 3 (1989).
3) Both Peter Mayer and Joachim Schulze demonstrate how Jewish
themes exist within Celan's poems (Glenn 19).