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Paul Celan's Counterword: Who Witnesses for the Witness?

2023; Duke University Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/01903659-10694155

1527-2141

Pierre Joris,

German History and Society

“Who witnesses for the witness?”—The question of my title may be rhetorical to the highest degree, not to say disingenuous, or at least it could be perceived as such, especially by anyone familiar with the work of Paul Celan.1 It is a question that draws on, or rather, that is drawn from a poem by Paul Celan, though Celan, in those lines, does not phrase these matters as a question, and that clearly puts my own question into question. Celan, when he brings up the matter of the “witness” in the poem beginning with the line “Aschenglorie hinter” from the 1967 volume Atemwende, in fact makes a simple statement—that is, he answers my question before I had even thought of asking it. And his answer seems, on the surface at least, to be clear and unambiguous. He says, “Niemand zeugt für den Zeugen” (No one witnesses for the witness) (Celan 2014: 64–65). This statement throws up several problems: Is that “Niemand” the simple negation of “Jemand,” of a full presence needed to witness, to lend the word “weight”? Could it simply be read as a determination of Celan's pessimism, even bitterness, of his despair? Or can one conceivably read it as a positive statement—that is, does the “Niemand” point somewhere else than at a simple negativity, absence? We will need to take a closer look at the way that word, that noun “Niemand” functions in Celan's work. It would also be necessary to go into a detailed analysis of the words witness, and the verb “to witness.” I will briefly try to sketch the problems involved in that vocabulary at the end of this paper. Before turning to the poems themselves, let's take a quick look at Celan's biography, at his life in relation to the experiences of the Shoah.Celan himself is not much use in this endeavor: he left no narrative account, no “story” of his life. This already sets him apart from many, if not most Holocaust writers, a major part of whose endeavor has been to chronicle, to relate, to set down with as much accuracy as they could muster the events of their lives—and it is that chronicling of the unthinkable horror of the Shoah which usually comes to mind when we think of “Witnessing.” (Elie Wiesel or Primo Levi come to mind, but also to some extent poets like Abba Gavener or Sutskever.) But not only did Celan not write or bear witness in terms of a prosopopoeia, but, according to all accounts, he refused steadfastly to speak in private about those events in his life connected with the Shoah, and thus, as John Felstiner (1985: 44) put it, “the precious little we know from his own mouth comes as oblique, fragmentary glimpses in his conversations, letters, talks, poems. Before he had turned twenty-one, his had become a life at risk, its worst realities inaccessible to ready speech or memory.” Symptomatic of this reticence is the following biographical comment from 1949, which appeared in issue 4 of the magazine Die Wandlung, in which Celan published some of his early poems: “With the exception of a one-year stay in France, I, for all practical purposes, never left my native city prior to 1941. I don't need to relate what the life of a Jew was like during the war years.”2Briefly, then, here is what we know of his life in those dark times. Born in Czernowitz, the capital of the Bukovina in 1920, he was raised in a Jewish family that insisted both on young Paul receiving the best secular education, with the mother inculcating her love of the German language and culture, and on his Jewish roots: both his parents came from strong orthodox and, on one side, Hassidic family backgrounds; his father had strong Zionist convictions, and his mother, notwithstanding her great admiration for classical German culture, kept the Jewish tradition alive in the household on a daily basis—it was a kosher household in which the sabbath candles were consciously lit every week. In this, the Ançels was certainly not very different from most of the over fifty thousand Jews of Czernowitz during the tail end of those “golden years” for Bukovina Jewry, years that started under the benign though calculating Austrian-Hungarian regime with the “emancipation” of the Jews in 1867 and began to decline after the fall of the Habsburg monarchy in 1918 and the incorporation of the Bukovina into Romania—the Romanian government immediately trying to “Romanize” that province, though with relatively little success, Czernowitz retaining its “pulsing Jewish life which resisted all anti-Semitic attempts to undermine it” until 1940 (Chalfen 1991: 17).In the summer of 1939, Celan returned to Czernowitz after his first year as a medical student at the university of Tours. The Hitler-Stalin Pact in August of that year immediately put Romania on a war footing, and any return to medical studies in France became impossible. In the spring of 1940 the Soviet Union addressed an ultimatum to the Romanian government, demanding the immediate handing over of Bessarabia and North Bukovina. Romania, powerless and unable to expect any support from its theoretical allies France and England, who were themselves now under attack from Hitler, handed over both provinces. On June 28, Soviet troops entered Czernowitz. The first year of occupation by foreign troops was relatively peaceful, but on June 13, 1941, the citizens of Czernowitz got a first inkling of the horrors to come: in a single night the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) arrested four thousand men, women, and children and deported them to Siberia. Then, on June 22, Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. On the southern front, German troops were reinforced by Romanian units (Ion Antonescu, the Rumanian dictator, had enthusiastically joined the German-Italian-Japanese axis in November 1940).The retreating Soviet troops helped their own civilians—bureaucrats and party officials who had joined the occupation troops—evacuate Bukovina, but only just before the last train was ready to leave, says Israel Chalfen (1991), did they make the rather lukewarm suggestion that the general population of Czernowitz should flee to Russia. Only a few committed communists and apparatchiks did follow suit. The students (and young Paul Celan among them) had been ordered to flee, something which, says Chalfen (1991: 17), caused stormy discussion: “Some warned against the Nazis, some showed faith in the German ‘Kulturnation,’ believed in the restitution of Rumanian sovereignty and hoped that then the Jews would at least get back those rights and possessions they had before the Russian occupation. . . . Finally only a few Jewish students left Czernowitz . . . among them (Celan's close friends) Erich Einhorn and Gustav Chomel.”On July 5, 1941, Romanian troops occupied Czernowitz, and the German Einsatz-Truppe D, led by SS-Brigade-führer Ohlendorf, reached the city the very next day. The SS had one essential job to fulfill: “Energisch durchgreifen, die Juden liquidieren,” as they didn't trust the Romanians to do the job thoroughly enough. On July 7, the Great Temple went up in flames and for the next three days the hunt was open: 682 Jews were murdered. By late August, Ohlendorf triumphantly reported to Berlin that more than 3,000 had been killed. On October 11, the ghetto was created—the first one in the history of the Bukovina and of Czernowitz. Then began the “Umsiedlung” of most Jews to Transnistria. The Romanians managed to argue with the Germans and to retain 15,000 Jews in Czernowitz to keep the city functioning. Celan and his family were among those who, at least for the time being, remained in the ghetto. Celan was ordered to forced labor in construction. Then, in June 1942, a new “Vertreibungsaktion” took place.For a while the Celan family took refuge in safe houses on those nights when it was known that the SS made their arrests. But Paul's mother hated these moves and on one occasion declared, “One cannot escape one's fate, and anyway, there are already many Jews living in Transnistria” (Chalfen 1991: 17). Paul Celan, maybe for the first time in his life, had a major fight with his mother. With the help of his friend Ruth Lackner, he had indeed found a large and comfortable hideout, but his parents refused adamantly, preferring to remain in their own house—where Celan's mother did prepare rucksacks in case they should be deported. Disobeying his parents’ injunctions, Paul left the house and took refuge in the hideout. When he returned the next morning, he found the house sealed off: his parents had been deported.Celan continued to work in forced labor camps. In the late fall of 1942 he learned from a letter from his mother that his father, physically broken by the slave labor he was subjected to, had been killed by the SS. Later that winter the news that his mother, too, had been shot by the Nazis reached him via an escaped family member. Paul himself was now sent to a forced labor camp some four hundred miles south of Czernowitz, where he remained throughout the next year; then, early in 1944, in February, the labor camps were closed—for good, as it turned out. In April, the Soviet troops occupied Czernowitz without a fight. Celan was put to work by the Red Army, collecting books destined to be burned—according to Chalfen, but here our knowledge of Celan's biography becomes problematic.According to other sources, this is what happened, as summed up by John Felstiner (1985): “Sometime in late 1943—the date and circumstances remain unclear—he escaped [from the forced labor camp ‘four hundred miles south of Czernowitz’ where he had been interned] to the Red Army, served as a medical orderly in Kiev and finally returned to Czernowitz.” Be that as it may, after another year spent at the now Sovietized University of Czernowitz, Celan left his hometown for good in April 1945 and stayed in Bucharest until December 1947, when he clandestinely crossed over to Vienna, which in turn he left in July 1948 to settle in Paris, the city he was to remain in until his death in late April 1970.Let us now turn to the poetry. As I said in the introduction, Celan does not refer directly in either talk or prose narrations to the events of those years—it is a silence he keeps throughout his life. In fact, his narrative prose output is extremely limited (though see Microliths They Are, Little Stones, the posthumous prose [Celan 2020b]). What we know of the narrative of his life, we know from other sources. His poetry does break this silence in a way, in more than one way, in fact, and in very different and complicated ways. For Celan, as witness to the “univers concentrationaire,” cannot but bear witness, even though the mode of this witnessing differs vastly from that of most survivors, while simultaneously radically differing in relation to itself over time. The single best-known poem by Celan is his “Todesfuge,” which is also one of the paradigmatic poems of what came to be known as Holocaust literature.The “Todesfuge” was written at the latest in early 1945, and more probably than not it was already completed in late 1944. This positions it squarely as one of the early “mature” poems of the young Celan, preceded only by the youthful poems—mainly love poems, though they already contain some of the darkness that became the hallmark of the later Celan—gathered by Ruth Kraft in the volume Gedichte, 1938–1944, published in 1985. When he publishes it for the first time, it is in the magazine Contemporanul and in Romanian translation as “Tangoul Mortii” (“Tango of Death”). When he gathers it in his first volume, Der Sand aus den Urnen (The Sand from the Urns) (1948), it appears as the closing poem of that book—clearly in order to mark its special space, though not its chronological situation. Celan, for various reasons, pulled back this book, and when his first actual book comes out in 1952 (Mohn und Gedächtnis; included in Celan 2020a) the “Todesfuge” is found at the very center of the book, surrounded by poems that for the main postdate it.We know Celan's later uneasy relationship to this poem: throughout the 1960s he refused to have it anthologized any further or to read it at public readings. This refusal has several reasons: the most obvious one is that that poem, through its very “success,” had become endangered—in Germany it had become a pawn in the so-called Überwältigungs-Prozess, the claim that the dark days and acts of the Nazi era had been overcome and dealt with. For Celan himself, it was, due to the hurt inflicted in 1960 by Claire Goll—who falsely accused Celan of plagiarism, while, shockingly, a range of German newspapers and reviews uncritically accepted and spread those false accusations—a kind of drawing back. Also, and more deeply, I believe, it was a question of refusing to be identified with that single, early work, and this on at least two levels: first, as a man, as a “survivor,” Celan was loath to be made a mouthpiece of or for what by then came to be called Holocaust poetry. This, in fact, created some animosity against him among Jewish circles, where he has been at times criticized for not being Jewish enough, or at the least for “the contradiction and ambivalence” that marks his stance and work, according, for example, to Alfred Hoelzel (1986) in his essay “Paul Celan: An Authentic Jewish Voice?” We have already indicated his resistance to talk of, to narrativize his experiences during that period of his life.Second, as a poet, Celan did not want his opus identified with the “Todesfuge”—especially as that early poem can in fact be read as an exception in his work, and not as paradigmatic for his mature poetics. At the same time, his refusal to let the poem be anthologized any further coincides more or less with a critical turn away from his work in Germany, where, from the volume Sprachgitter (Speechgrille) onward, one can hear ever louder complaints as to the supposed obscurity and hermeticism of his work. (There is simultaneously a new generation of German poets, such as Jürgen Theobaldy and Rolf Dieter Brinkman, who move away from the “hermetic” or just introspective poetry of the first postwar generation and, convinced that they have overcome their fathers’ generations’ past, and influenced by US poetry and events such as the Vietnam War and the student movement, are concerned with other poetics and problematics.)The tension surrounding his relationship with the “Todesfuge” can be seen as emblematic of the tension in Celan in regard to two essential poles: on the one hand the need to witness, and on the other the desire not to speak out, arising out of a deep sense of the impossibility, the unsayability of the horror of Shoah, played out throughout his work in the constant, obsessive problematic of the “verstummen,” of falling silent, of being caught, surrounded, pervaded by an absolute absence, by a silence, a silence that constitutively endangers and questions the very act of writing.This tension, this question as to the necessity/possibility of witnessing, could be read very schematically in Celan if we were to look at the first part of his opus as an attempt to witness, while considering the late work, starting with Atemwende (Breathturn) (1967), if not already with Niemandsrose (NoOnesRose) (1963) as essentially concerned with the very possibility or impossibility of witnessing, as a questioning of that possibility.The reason why “Todesfuge,” as against the late poetry, exercises such a fascination and is so “readable” is essentially due to the fact that its poetics are still rather traditional in the sense that the relationship between word and world, between signifier and signified, are not put into question. It is a poem that still, somehow, maybe desperately, believes, or wants to believe, or acts as if did believe in the fullness of utterance, in the possibility of representation. This fullness of language presupposes a fullness of being, a being who speaks and in whom both language and what language talks about are grounded. As against nearly all of Celan's subsequent poetry, the one thing not questioned in “Deathfugue” is the one who speaks, and the place from which that one speaks. The poem is written/spoken by a “survivor” who adopts the persona of a “wir,” who speaks in the name of a “wir”—the “we” of the murdered Jews. “Schwarze Milch . . . wir trinken sie abends, wir trinken sie mittags, wir trinken und trinken. . . . Wir schaufeln ein Grab in der Luft” (Celan 2020a: 42).That the dead can speak, or that a “survivor” can speak for them, that there can be a witnessing to their death, this is what Celan is going to radically put into question. The poem “Engführung” (“Stretto”), written in 1958, is in many ways a rewriting of the “Deathfugue”—down to musical theme, as the word Engführung, which means “Stretto,” literally a narrowing, comes from the technical vocabulary of fugal composition. In that poem, there is no more direct reference to the Shoah, no more “Meister aus Deutschland,” for example. The poem starts, Verbracht insGeländemit der untrüglichen Spur:Gras auseinandergeschrieben. Die Steine, weiß,Displaced intothe terrainwith the unmistakable track:grass written asunder. The stones, white,(226)We no longer know who speaks, who is being addressed; the landscape can be, and is, simultaneously an inner and an outer landscape. On one level we can read these opening lines as indicating the situation of the reader coming to this difficult poem; on a second level it is the “inner landscape” of the poet's mind/psyche; on a third level it is also the landscape of his parents’ death, the “Gelände” into which they were “verbracht” (brought, carried, though the initial “ver” of the German word immediately makes it rhyme with the word “verbrechen”—commit a crime). The same can be said for the opening verses of the next stanza: The place where they lay, it hasa name—it hasnone. They didn't lie there. . . .(229)The problematics of the poem include, in an unstated way, the Shoah, but in combination with another problematics—namely, that of speaking, of saying itself, and by extension that of the possibility of the poem itself. The fourth stanza, for example, plays on the noun “Wort” (word), which is the most often repeated/questioned/“heraufbeschwört” word in the Celan opus, and, contrapuntally, the words “Asche” and “night” (230). Where the poet/narrator/reader of the “Todesfuge” had his mouth full of words, in “Stretto,” what is “fullest,” most present, is absence. Cosmically: Partikelngestöber—particle flurries, reminiscent of Celan's later coinage “Metapherngestöber.”The only place/object the poet finds to address his speaking to is the stone: “There was time, to try it with the stone—it remained hospitable, it didn't interrupt [ins Wort fallen].” This stone that is addressed reappears in the opening line of the last poem I want to briefly address, the poem “Radix, Matrix,” from the later volume NoOnesRose. That poem opens, “As one speaks to the stone, as / you, to me from the abyss” (285). The poem, as Werner Hamacher (1985: 294) has stated, “describes the figure of an impossible dialogue.” The you and the I of the poem are caught in an unending, indeterminable interchange; they change places, inverting the direction of speaking, so that Hamacher can conclude, “The irreconcilable ambiguity of Celan's formulation—in which the absence of the you suspends the I, that of the I suspends the you, and along with it discourse itself is suspended—realizes on the level of composition what the apostrophe says of the you . . . that it is what is ‘in the nothing of a night . . . encountered.’ . . . As one speaks to the stone, so speaks the stone: to nobody and nothing” (295–96). And further, “The poem, a texture of interrupted illocutionary acts and muteness, thus becomes itself the mute discourse of a stone, a nothing encountered” (296). This most radically stated impossibility of speaking—and thus of witnessing, and here we are coming back to the title and center of this paper—is linked in the third stanza to the murdered Geschlecht, race: Whowho was, thatrace, the murdered one, the onestanding black in the sky: rod and ball—?(Celan 2020a: 285)Celan answers this question in the following stanza—though he puts the answer between parentheses, indicating that this is somehow extraneous matter, finally not central to the poem, and yet it is there, stands centrally in the poem, this matter of, if I may permit myself to pun on the typographical symbol used by Celan, the parent thesis: (Root.Root of Abraham, Root of Jesse. No one'sroot—oours.)(285)The root of the Jews, Abraham's, Jesse's is also, now, after the Shoah, “no one's root.” That “no one,” that “Niemand,” already given in the title of the volume in which the poem “Radix, Matrix” appears, as the NoOnesRose, and encountered in many versions throughout Celan's work, is no longer simply the figure of a straight inversion: that is, it does not simply mean the absence of someone. Hamacher (1985: 296), who has brilliantly analyzed the role of inversion in Celan's work, states, “In this most radical version of inversion, language no longer converts its own nothingness into the substantial being of appearance, sound, and consciousness, as with Hegel and Rilke [and I could add, Hölderlin and Heidegger]. Rather, it converts its literary being, compositionally and semantically into nothing. This inversion is grounded in the third stanza's questioning after the murdered race.”So here, in the late Celan, the language itself in stating, imparting, acting out the impossibility to speak, becomes the very “stigma of the murder of European Jewry in the extermination camps of the Nazi regime” (297). Peter Szondi countered Adorno's well-known dictum by saying that “after Auschwitz no poem is any longer possible except on the basis of Auschwitz” (quoted in Hamacher 1985: 297). “Radix, Matrix” speaks out of that ground, but that ground, “Grund” is an “Abgrund,” an abyss. Hamacher again: [This abyss] is not the condition of its possibility but rather that of its impossibility. . . . The poem is still only capable of speaking because it exposes itself to the impossibility of its speaking. It no longer speaks the language of a race that could be the ground, center, origin, father and mother. Rather it speaks—uprooted, orphaned—the language of the murdered. On this account Auschwitz, a name for innumerable unnamables, can never become for it a historically bound fact. Murder cannot become the univocal object of its speaking; it can only be the projection of a questioning that recognizes itself as objectless and mute, and therein as itself a victim of the murder. (297)Celan's “Niemand” is clearly not a simple negative, the negation of a “someone.” Rather, it is the possibility of the impossibility of the poem itself, and that possibility of the impossibility of the poem is the only possibility that Celan will grant the poem after Auschwitz. It is from that no-place, that abyss, that the poem speaks. It is that “Niemand” who does the witnessing in the verse: “Niemand zeugt für den Zeugen.” Nobody witnesses for the witness. The impossible/possible poem witnesses for the witness. What Celan, as a “survivor”—that is, as someone who should be dead, because he comes/is there after death, as someone whose life is in suspension, is a mere supplement of death—bears witness to is another, a new way of speaking, the only way possible after the Shoah.And yet, there is even more here; another problematic I will try to sketch briefly. It also concerns the Zeugen complex in his work, and it starts as a translation problem of the lines I have used in my title. The last lines of the poem beginning “Aschenglorie hinter” read, Niemandzeugt für denZeugen.Back in 1969, when I translated that volume, this stanza easily became, Nobodywitnesses for thewitness.At the time this formulation seemed both straightforward and extremely pregnant to me, encapsulating a central concern in Celan's work—a work one can read as an ongoing witnessing, a lifelong effort to bear witness to the horrors of Shoah: the concern that that tragedy eventually, already in the second generation will become lost—not necessarily as a simple “forgetting” but also lost into mere storytelling, “mythos,” mythified.As I moved deeper into Celan's work, reworking the Atemwende translations and translating later volumes, it became clear that the zeugen/Zeuge complex was much more semantically multilayered then I had at first perceived. The German word “zeugen” also has the meaning “to beget, to generate,” a meaning kept more or less alive in the English word “testify” via its Latin root “testis,” which refers both to the “witness” and to “testicle” (as the “witness” of virility). Remember also the “rod and ball,” the “Hode” from “Radix, Matrix.” Unhappily in English there is no synonym for “witness” based on the verb “testify” (the back-formation “testifier” sounds odd and is unusable), and rendering the line as “Nobody testifies for the witness,” while getting some of the semantic richness of the Zeugen complex in, ruins the poetics of the line, which use repetition and rhyme, one of Celan's favorite and most pregnant technical devices.The Zeugen complex appears on only six occasions in the poems, but the concept of bearing witness is all-pervasive, and central to it is that familiar Celanesque two-step, one look back, one look forward, both actions taking place in the same word or in the repetition of that word. Zeugen is very clear on this: in Celan it always carries the meaning of looking back, of bearing witness for the Dead, those ever-present “they” of his poems, but at the same time it looks forward, in the above case in desperation and gloom, and “zeugt,” engenders the future or at least the present—the poem.