Professor David Peimer
Paul Celan - The Jewish Poet of WWII

Professor David Peimer - Paul Celan The Jewish Poet of World War II

- It’s, so, that’s okay. So, so Dennis, yeah. On behalf of us from Lockdown University, your 70th birthday, absolutely incredible.

Visuals are displayed throughout the presentation.

• [Dennis] Thank you.

• You are the epitome of a Renaissance man. And I just want to say, apart from being the most brilliant, funny, intelligent, talented, multi-talented man, you’ve been the most incredible friend, most unbelievable friend and anchor for Lockdown from the very very beginning, from actually from the very very first week when we discussed it. So I just want to say that during this very very very very difficult time and traumatic time, you have brought light to thousands and thousands of people and with an open heart and so enthusiastic and always available. And I know how busy you are, and it’s just been an absolute joy and pleasure to work with you and to have you as part of our integral team. And I know that you are really just so connected with everybody else. So I just wanted to say, on behalf of us, behalf of me, I want to thank you for being such an outstanding person, outstanding friend, outstanding lecturer and participant, and on every level. Thank you very very much. And I want to wish you a very very happy birthday, filled with blessings, good health, warmth, love, and everything that you could wish for.

• [Dennis] Thank you so much.

• Happy birthday, Dennis.

• That’s very kind, thank you.

• Dennis, I just want to say I never met you, but I know you and you’ve been the most incredible support, the most incredible, the most incredible comfort, mentor. You’ve been absolutely brilliant. My grandson is sitting with me because he’s your biggest admirer.

• Yeah, I know that. Hello, thank you.

• So anyway, all the luck in the world and a special day today, God bless.

• Thank you so much.

• And we will meet in London.

• Please God.

• Yeah.

• Thank you, and can I say to you Dennis, first of all, happy birthday, my fine fine man. Seventy today, that’s incredible, and I just want to wish you all health and happiness, and I’m going to use one or two of Wendy’s phrases. You are a Renaissance man, Dennis, you’re a beautiful man. You’re also intelligent, creative and such generosity of spirit. It’s been amazing for me to have the opportunity, and I want to say this to you strongly, the opportunity to work with you, to share in every way together with you and everybody on Lockdown University, It’s been an incredible journey. May it continue in many ways and in honour of your birthday, for you we have one or two special things lined up, which will come to you in a moment. Just be a few minutes for everybody. I want to thank everybody for helping just create this today, obviously Wendy, Judy, Trudy, Patrick, everyone. And Dennis, I know we haven’t even met in life. When you come to England, you know where I’m going to be taking you the first two places, okay? Liverpool and Manchester. There are two places in Liverpool and Manchester. May I say from my heart to your heart to you, you have soul and beauty. Please stay with us for many many years to come on this planet, happy birthday.

• Thank you so much.

• I think we seem to have lost Patrick’s connection, so I’m just going to jump in and say have happy happy 70th birthday. I am not going to go along with speech. I’m going to say this is year is going to be filled with everything wonderful, Dennis, and happy 70th birthday from me. David, back to you.

• Sorry David.

• Sorry Dennis, we’ve got a place for you at the end.

• Oh okay.

• First of all, we’ve got two little presents for you. Okay, and I want to thank Claudette for being part of this as well. Very very much to thank Claudette for being part of the planning. Dennis, these are three very special people who have a few words from Manchester, from a certain place in Manchester, to say happy birthday to you Dennis, in your honour, it’s your day. Okay Judy.

• Dennis, it’s Michael Owen here. I just wanted to say happy birthday mate. I know you are 70 today, that is fantastic news. I know you are a big Manchester United fan, the Lockdown University team have told me all about you. So thanks for your support over the years. I had a fantastic three years at Manchester United, a great family club. Anyway, mate, here’s to many more years together. Happy birthday Dennis, have a great day.

• Dennis, how are you mate? Paul Linz speaking here, known as the governor. I hope you are well mate. I believe it’s your 70th birthday today. Wow, you’ve done well mate, you’ve done well. That’s absolutely fantastic. And the Lockdown University team just want to thank you for supporting them, and your part in the Manchester family, and here’s to many many more years together mate. Plenty of dancing, plenty of drinking. Yep, you can still do it mate. You can still shake it at 70, and you can still drink at 70. I’ll suppose you’re on a little whiskey or a little vodka or something like that. Anyway, forget about that. Have a great day, enjoy your day. Hopefully next year we’ll be celebrating Man United winning the title. Take care Dennis, have a fantastic day mate, Paul Linz.

• Hi Dennis, Andy Collier. First and foremost, I’d like to wish you a very very happy seventieth birthday. Hope you have a fantastic day, and I hope you live to see many more. And then second of all, I’d to say thank you very much for supporting Manchester United. I know you’re part of the big big Manchester United family and here’s to you, have a good one my friend, bye now.

• [David] And then Dennis, we have a short piece to show you in honour of your brilliant wit and sharing in so many ways. Thanks Judy.

Video plays.

• [Sports Commentator] Good afternoon and welcome to a packed Olympic stadium, Muenchen, for the second leg of this exciting final. And here come the Germans now, led by their skipper, Nobby Hegel. They must surely start favourites this afternoon. They’ve certainly attracted the most attention from the press with their team problems. And let’s now see their lineup. The Germans playing four, two, four. Leibniz in goal. Back four Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Schelling. Front runners Schlegel, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. And the midfield duo of Beckenbauer and Jaspers. Beckenbauer obviously a bit of a surprise there. And here come the Greeks led out by their veteran center-half, Heraclitus. Let’s look at their team. As you’d expect, it’s a much more defensive lineup. Plato’s in goal, Socrates a front runner there, and Aristotle as sweeper. Aristotle very much the man in form.

One surprise is the inclusion of Archimedes. Well here comes the referee, Kung Fu Tsu Confucius and his two linesman, Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas, And as the two skippers come together to shake hands, we’re ready for the start of this very exciting final. The referee Mr. Confucius checks his sand, and they’re off. Nietzsche and Hegel there. Karl Jaspers number seven on the outside, Wittgenstein there with him. There’s Beckenbauer, Schillings in there, Heidigger covering, Schopenhauer. And now it’s the Greeks, Epicures, Plotinus number six. Aristotle, Empedocles of Acragus and Democratus with him. There’s Archimedes; Socrates, there he is, Socrates. Socrates there going through. There’s the ball, there’s the ball. We will be bringing you back to this exciting contest the moment anything interesting happens. Well there may be no score, but there’s certainly no lack of excitement here. As you can see, Nietzsche has just been booked for arguing with the referee. He accused Confucius of having no free will and Confucius he say, “Name go in book”. And this is Nietzsche’s third booking in four games. And who’s that? It’s Karl Marx. Karl Marx is warming up, and it looks as though there’s going to be a substitution on the German side.

Obviously manager Martin Luther has decided on all out attack, and, indeed, he must, with only two minutes in the match to go. But the big question is, who is he going to replace? Who’s going to come off. It could be Jaspers, Hegel, or Schopenhauer, but it’s Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein who saw his aunty only last week. And here’s Marx, let’s see if he can put some life into this German attack. Evidently not, what a shame. Well, now, with just over a minute left, a replay on Tuesday looks absolutely vital. There’s Archimedes, and I think he’s had an idea.

• Eureka.

• Archimedes, Socrates, Socrates back to Archimedes, Archimedes out to Heraclitus, he beats Hegel. Heraclitus a little flick, here he comes on the far post. Socrates is there, Socrates heads it in, Socrates has scored. The Greeks are going mad, the Greeks are going mad. Socrates scores, got a beautiful cross from Archimedes. The Germans are disputing it. Hegel is arguing that the reality is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics, Kant by the categorical imperative is holding that ontologically it exists only in the imagination, and Marx is claiming it was offside. But Confucius has answered them with the final whistle. It’s all over. Germany, having trounced England’s famous midfield trio of Bentham, Locke, and Hobbes in the semi-final, have been beaten by the odd goal, and let’s see it again. There it is, Socrates, Socrates, heads in and Leibniz doesn’t have a chance. And just look at those delighted Greeks. There they are. Chopper, Sophocles, Empedocles of Acragus, what a game he had. And Epicurus is there, and Socrates, the captain who scored what was probably the most important goal of his career.

• It’s wonderful.

• Over to you Dennis.

• David, can I just say to everybody, I see Patrick there as well. It’s really odd that of all of the people that I’m seeing, the only one that I’ve actually met physically is Wendy. All of you have become my friend through Zoom. And great friends, you’ve become too, I mean, in a sense, just an extraordinary privilege for me to have worked with all of you, and you particularly David, because we’ve done all these things together. All sorts of people say to me, how long have you known David for? And it’s actually, we’ve never met, and they can’t believe it. And so I just want to say to you, David, I’m incredibly enriched by the engagement we’ve had. To you, Trudy, for putting everything together for all these extraordinary lectures. It’s just been, I think, an incredible lift out of the despair of Covid. And I’m just incredibly indebted to you for everything that you’ve done. Just fantastic that I should have had a dean like that in all my years at the law school, I could have only wished for, to be perfectly frank. And to your grandson, as long as he keeps supporting me on music I’m extremely happy . And as for you, Patrick, I think a wish of my two of my friends and us is that when the lockdown is over, can we, will you take us to lunch in one of your favourite restaurants in Paris?

• I can’t wait to do it. Sorry, I just got cut off in my prime by my horrible new computer. But I just want to say, I just feel we have so much in common. I can’t wait to meet up. We’re going to have such a good time when we meet.

• I’m going to convey that to them. And I have to say, it’s just been fantastic. I, both on the art and the music, I’ve learned so much. As I have from everybody. So I can’t wait for our lunch and just again, to David and everybody else has who has put this together, thank you so so much. It’s just been, you know, top of the day, if I could put it that way, thank you. You I’ve known for a very long time, and thank you so much for everything.

• So from all of us, a very very happy birthday and Neville Jossel has offered to get you tickets for when you’re next in London for a Man U match.

• Good, I will take him up on that.

• Very good.

• Thank you so so much. Okay, thanks.

• Thanks, enjoy the rest of your evening. Over to you David, thanks a million.

• Over to you David.

• Thank you so much. Can I just thank everybody again? Wendy, Judy, Trudy, Patrick, and Dennis, thanks.

• [Wendy] Thanks David.

• And Claudette, thank you, okay. Okay, I just have to quickly put up the PowerPoint so I just have to connect it.

• [Wendy] You do your screen share?

• Yeah, but it’s not opening now, the advanced oh wait portion.

• [Wendy] There we go.

• Okay, could you tell me if it’s coming up?

• You need to open up your PowerPoint, There we go, it’s up on the screen now, perfect.

[LECTURE BEGINS HERE]

• Great, thank you so much. Okay, I know this is obviously going to be a major change from L'Chaim to celebrate life and also as we move into Paul Celan. Just to mention Elisha Wiesel last week saying, you know, the one thing that people never speak about is, was his father’s sense of humour and his love of Monty Python. So in the spirit of L'Chaim and life, in the spirit of celebrating his birthday and, yesterday, all those years ago was when a certain Mr. Hitler shot himself. So to try and give a little bit of context to wishing happy birthday and now moving on to Paul Celan. I know it’s a huge shift and I want to thank everybody for coming with us on this journey to make this big change to looking at the remarkable life and poetry of Paul Celan. Okay, Paul Celan was, for me, the most interesting and the most incredible poet coming out after the second World War. Going through the Holocaust himself, which I’m going to go into in a moment. And that he was absolutely, we will go through his story, he was interned, et cetera, many things, but the poetry that he wrote afterwards and his understanding of language and memory in trying to, in some way, speak the unspeakable, find words for the unspeakable. Look at the German language. What had happened to the German language during the war.

And I guess, this today, I want to focus on Celan’s poetry. We’re going to look at his one poem in particular, The hundred lines of Death Fugue, which many people are speaking about nowadays as the Guernica of the 20th century poetry and literally comparing it to that and seeing Celan as part of the great traditions of poets internationally, globally, as well as one of the few most remarkable of German poets. And what he was grappling with, I think speaks to so many of the themes of our times today. In the context of language, memory, and how to bear witness when you’re a poet. And with the, you know, with the factual approach of documentary or history essential and the poetic approach of a poet of metaphor and image in language, and how to try and see a world where both can coexist after the Holocaust. As Kafka said, art is a knife to cut open the frozen heart. Celan, for me, is really a story of endless loss. The story of the horror, and we’ll come to his life story in a moment. The story of restless search for language to speak the unspeakable, to understand, the profoundly elusive understanding of the holocaust, the sheer enormity, grotesque machinery of death of ultimate hell done by humans to humans. How do we really begin to grasp this? How do we really find the words to tell the story?

Can we tell it as story? Would it be told in a hundred years, 500 years, a thousand years, as story of the Jewish culture, of Jewish life, of Jewish people? How will it be told in the future? How stories from the ancient past of the Jews told today? Meaning how does poetry, literature, try to say the unsayable? Many people know, of course, Adorno’s famous phrase– He was one of the most brilliant philosophers who escaped the Nazis, got to New York, and many of the great thinkers of Germany who got out as well to work in the States or England or elsewhere. And Adorno said after the war, he had this brilliant essay called, Commitment. And in it he talks about it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz. And obviously he’s meaning Auschwitz as a symbol of all the camps and the whole Holocaust. It is barbaric to write poetry. What does he mean? Adorno meant it is barbaric to think of any way to say the unsayable, perhaps silence is the only thing, but then how to tell the story? Why is it barbaric to write poetry? Because for Adorno, poetry requires and metaphor and ways of artistically expressing through words, stories, to capture the emotion and the thought of what had happened.

And how do you combine the beauty, the majesty, the remarkable feelings and images that poetry creates in our mind. How do you use that to represent something like this? Can art approach life or should art take a backseat when it comes to trying to engage with the Holocaust? And in a sense, can we take art out of it, should we? There aren’t answers. I just pose these as questions to share. We’ve looked at Elie Wiesel’s, Night, we’ve looked at Primo Levi, If This Is A Man, each with their own particular way of writing about what had happened and bearing witness and their own way of bearing witness. Each using poetic but in more of a personal narrative, personal story, but telling the story, using story structure, using stories of dramatic structure and literary aesthetics and structures. Do we need more than the documentary testimony? How can words on a page really begin to express that grotesque moment in human history. Do we need poetry after that? These questions are the obsessive questions of Paul Celan. Celan, unlike Primo and Elie Wiesel, Celan, before the war, saw himself as a writer and wanted to be a poet and studied literature, studied languages, learnt them all before the war. He’s only 24 by the end of the war.

I’m talking in his late teens going into his early twenties. But he wants to be a poet, a writer, very different to Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi. Their experience before and obviously after the war. So we begin in a different position of Paul Celan. He lives, he’s born in 1920 and dies, commits suicide in 1970. He was a Romanian-born, German language poet and translator. He was known as Paul Antschel, which he then changed to Paul Celan. It’s an anagram of his surname. Already he’s playing with language at a young age. In the then-Romania and now-Ukraine, he’s born to a German-speaking Jewish family in Romania with German-speaking Jewish family. His father Leo was a committed Zionist and insisted that his son’s education was in Hebrew at the Jewish school in the small town that they grew up in, in the then-Romania. His mother Fritzi, loved German literature, and she insisted that German was the language in the home. In 1938, Celan was studying . Romanian schools were hard to get into because of new imposed Jewish quota. So in 1938, he goes to France to study medicine in Paris, but the night that he travels through Berlin on the way to France is the Night of Kristallnacht. From that moment, he’s only 21, he senses what is to come. The Soviet occupation.

So he goes back to his family town. He’s in Paris for a little bit then goes back. The Soviet occupation, because of, everyone knows, the non-aggression pack between the Soviets and the Germans. The Soviet occupation of his family town happens in June 1940. The Russians, together, with their, or the Soviets, rather, together with their Romanian lackeys start the deportations to Siberia. 1941, the Nazis conquer Romania. They set up a puppet fascist Romanian regime who helped them set up ghettos. They arrive in his town where he and his family are, and the Nazis burn the city’s great synagogue. They murder 700 Jews in a couple of days, three. And they murder 3000 Jews over the next 60 days, just from his little town. In October 1941, the Romanian lackeys deport a large number of Jews from the ghetto. Celan and his parents are still in the ghetto. While he’s in the ghetto, he translates Shakespeare’s sonnets into German and other languages and he continues to write his own poetry. He’s not yet 21. In 1941, he is taken into slave labour, and his job? Destroying Russian books for the Germans. The level of insanity happening so fast in a couple of years, month after month, insane experiences but real. Before the deportations, Celan had tried to convince his parents to leave the country. He didn’t succeed. While Celan was away from home, he was only 20, on the 21st of June 1942, his parents were picked up by the Romanian lackeys and the Nazi, taken from their home and sent to a camp in Romania.

He discovers after the war his father died of typhus, and his mother was shot pretty soon after arriving in the camp, slave camps. He then, in late 1942, he’s taken himself to a slave labour camp in Romania. February 44, the Red Army advances. The Romanians are forced to abandon a lot of the slave camps. He then works briefly as a nurse in a mental hospital that the Russian army sets up. He discovers what has happened to his parents. He feels immense guilt about not having insisted that his parents and he leave and try and escape just in time. After the war, he goes to Bucharest. In 1947, he works there as a translator of Russian literature into Romanian. And he’s also writing poetry, gets published. The literary scene is highly influenced by the surrealists at the time. The communist regime is set up in Romania.

He sees it, and he flees to Vienna. They has an affair with a lady, Ingeborg Bachmann, who has done her PhD on the great philosopher, Heidigger, but who was also a member of the Nazi Party, as we know. Then he moved to Paris a year later in 1948 where he finally settles. 1952, seven years after the war has finished, Celan starts to be invited to Germany, to West Germany, to read his poetry, many many times. 1951, he meets Gisele Lestrange. Forgive my translation of of the French, in Paris. He sends her many love letters. He’s hugely influenced by Kafka, all the German writers and others, Shakespeare and many others. He’s a literary person, and he’s influenced by Kafka’s correspondence with his girlfriend, who he was with me many years, a number of years, Milena. Anyway, Celan and Giselle marry in 1952, against the serious opposition of her French aristocratic family. Over the following 18 years, they write 700 letters to each other, which have been kept. He made his living as a translator and as the lecturer in Paris. He was a close friend of Nelly Sachs, who later won the Nobel prize for literature.

Celan was awarded the Bremen literature prize in 1958. It’s only 13 years after the end of the war in Breman Germany. And the George Buchner Prize in 1960, 15 years after the war. The George Buchner Prize is one of the great prizes of German literature named after the remarkable German poet and playwright who died when he was 24 years old but wrote three of the greatest plays of German theatre. In fact, world theatre. Buchner would’ve probably gone on to at least get close to a Shakespeare. 1970, Paul Celan drowned himself in the River Seine, in Paris in April 1970, 50 years old. A life of no roots, desperate search to belong, but obviously knows he can’t. He was 24 with the Russians came to the camp where he was a slave. His life is full of horrors, of history. He’s lived the history that we all know through the books. Language he speaks about as being his temporary home and in a way identifies with Kafka in that sense. He also was part of a Jewish socialist movement as a teenager, as a kid, the age of 14, 15, 16, through his father’s influence, his father being a committed Zionist.

So Judaism and language and literature are his homes. Writing poetry, translating that is his home, his being. I’m not again comparing, but it’s fascinating to look at, compared to the life trajectory of Ellie Wiesel and Primo Levi, the other two remarkable writers about the Holocaust. Celan writes that poetry and his struggle with language were his battle. Obviously, the Holocaust is that the core. And he writes this, he’s saying, can I write after Auschwitz? This is Celan. Only one thing remains reachable for me. Close and secure amid all the losses. Language, yes language. In spite of everything, it remained against loss, but it had to go through its own lack of answers through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech it went through. It gave me no words for what was happening, no words. But the language went put, went through, could it resurface, could it, is it mad? Can I help rebirth the German language? Am I mad to think this? Then he also says in a separate piece of writing, there is nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing. Not even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German. He’s always thinking as a poet. His most famous poem is Death Fugue, which I’m going to just read and share together now. This is just first here. Some other pictures of Celan.

The bottom right, that’s Gisele, who is his wife that he lived with in Paris. And these are other pictures of Paul Celan. And you can see drawings painted by artist friends in Paris after the war, et cetera. Okay, this is Celan reading, reading Death Fugue, which is the main poem I’m going to focus on, a hundred lines. And please bear with me. I’m going to do it, and purposely, in the German language, given the context of what I’ve said. This is Celan reading his own poem in German. And I’ll ask us to just hear what he creates with the rhythm, with a cadence, the tone, the atmosphere, the feeling of it, through language, although I’m sure many of us may not know it.

• Okay, what I’m going to do is share with you in English now, Death Fugue, which is obviously the poem that he read, this is his great poem. Black milk of morning we drink you evenings we drink you at noon and mornings we drink you at night. We drink and we drink. A man lives in the house. He plays with the snakes he writes he writes when it darkens to Deutschland and your golden hair Margarete he writes in steps in front of his house and the stars glisten and he whistles his dogs to come he whistles his Jews to appear let a grave be dug in the earth he commands us play up for the dance Black milk of dawn we drink you at night we drink you mornings and noon time we drink you evenings we drink and we drink A man lives in the house he plays with the snakes he writes he writes when it turns dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margarete Your ashen hair Shulamit we dig a grave in the air there one lies at ease.

He calls dig deeper into the earth you there and you other men sing and play he grabs the gun in his belt he draws it his eyes are blue dig deeper you your spades you there and you other men continue to play for the dance Black milk of dawn we drink you at night we drink you at noon we drink you evenings we drink you and drink a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete, your ashen hair Shulamit he plays with the snakes. He calls out play death more sweetly death is a master from Deutschland he calls scrape those fiddles more darkly then as smoke you’ll rise in the air then you’ll have a grave in the clouds there you’ll lie at ease. Black milk of dawn we drink you at night we drink you at noon death is a master from Deutschland we drink you evenings and mornings we drink and drink death is a master from Deutschland his eye is blue he strikes you with lead bullets his aim is true a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete he sets his dogs on us he gives us a grave in the air he plays with the snakes and dreams death is a master from Deutschland your golden hair Margarete your ashen hair Shulamit I just want to go back a little bit here to the beginning, Black milk are the prisoners or the inmates of the camps. He doesn’t mention the name of any camp, of any prisoner.

The only proper noun is the word Deutschland. Doesn’t use the word Germany and insisted on Deutschland in the translation. Margarete is the image of the golden hair, the perfect Arian woman, and Germany and the German language. Shulamit, the Jewish woman. For Celan, the German language is home. German literature, the language of German, Margarete, I love. Shulamit, the Jewish side of his life, growing up with both, as I mentioned in his home, his mother and his father, mother loving German literature, German language insisting on it. His father, Judaism through being a Zionist and the Jewishness of insisting he go to Hebrew school. Black milk are the prisoners. One of the most unforgettable images for me in two words of 20th century literature, Black milk of morning we drink you evenings. The rhythm, the language which he tries to capture and his own way of reading it. When he was reading it in the German there. A man, this is the commandant of the camp.

A man lives in the house he plays with the snakes. He writes, he writes when it darkens, he writes to Deutschland. And demands his own fantasy of the perfect German or Arian woman, golden hair Margarita. He writes and steps in front of his house and the stars glisten. He whistles his dogs to come. He whistles his Jews. So he is ordering the Jews, dig your grave. Commands us to play up for the dance. Jews who dig, have to dig the grave. Jews have to play an orchestra in the camps as Jewish inmates are marched to and from work and back to the barracks. Black milk of dawn we drink you at night. Black milk at dawn we drink you at night? Most incredible putting together words for me. And again, that rhythm, what he’s trying to do with the language. Your ashen hair Shulam. Just that phrase is so powerful to evoke, if we can through poetry, if we can in words, something to capture the most grotesque moment of human history. We dig a grave in the air there one lies at ease. The way he puts together ideas, words, language, it’s extraordinary. And this is coming through his own absolute suffering and pain. And obviously his own family, the Jewish people he grew up with and many many others. He calls dig deeper in earth.

This is the commandant. Dig deeper, you are the men, sing and play. Can imagine the attitude of a commandant in the language. He grabs the gun in his belt, he draws his eyes are blue. To be so concise and precise to try and personalise through metaphor, through language, something of what had happened. Again, the rhythm comes back. Black milk of dawn we drink you at night we drink and we drink. A man is in the house again. The way he is putting the words back together. He calls out play death more sweetly. So this is to the orchestra, you know, that is marching, as the Jewish inmates are marching to and fro, from work in the camp. Death is a master from Deutschland. That has become one of the most iconic phrases of the 20th century. He calls, scrape those fiddles. Not just play those fiddles, scrape them, more darkly then as smoke you’ll rise in the air and you’ll have a grave in the clouds there. is pretty obviously meaning. And then here lastly, black milk of dawn we drink you at night, et cetera, it goes on. Death is a master from Deutschland. It’s only repeated three times. But that phrase, it’s like a riff. It’s a phrase that just resonates again and again.

For me, once I heard it, when I read this poem the first time, I just spent hours just letting the words reverberate. He strikes you with lead bullets, his aim is true. And goes on again. You know, he plays with the snakes and dreams death is a master of Deutschland. It’s so evocative of so many meanings that are resonant. And it ends, your golden hair Margarete, your ashen hair Shulam. The two women. The one is the archetypal symbol of Germany, the German Arian woman. And you ashen hair Shulamit, the Jewish woman, dead, ash. But it’s his own, also is from his own family, you know, of his love of the literature and the German language and the Jewish influence in his upbringing. So this is remarkable, and it’s called A Death Fugue. And we all know the fugue, obviously the point in music and in composition, how you’re working with paradox and changes in the music composition itself. The rhythm of music is what makes great literature. When one looks at Shakespeare, any of the other great writers in any language, Dante, others, it’s the rhythm of the words that creates the poetry. Rhythm ultimately is the unseen invisible inside for me. , Celan, all poetry and literature.

There’s an amazing exercise. It’s a rhythm that gets to us together with the language. And that’s what great music does for me as well. Whether it’s tonal or atonal or a mixture. There’s a brilliant essay by J.M. Coetzee on Paul Celan. For J.M. Coetzee, perhaps there’s some people who don’t know of him, but he was one of the great remarkable novelists to come out of South Africa. Won the Nobel Prize, et cetera. J.M. Coetzee wrote a brilliant essay on Celan, and the high and incredible regard he had him in. And there are so many others. And what I want to mention is that this is the poem that I showed my students in Liverpool. They had read it in school, the history, a little bit of the Holocaust, of the Second World War, what happened with the Jews, the camps, et cetera. They’d seen some films, but this, I was stunned. This poem just got straight to them. And this poem, of the many things I’ve taught them over the last year, this Rimbaud’s poem, The Drunken Boat, and James Baldwin, The Fire Within Us, those three pieces spoke to them more than any other. And this is quite a big group of 19-, 20-year-old, you know, working class, middle class students at my university in Liverpool, this is what most of them wrote about and responded to. The words could reimagine, try to, in their own youthful way, the Holocaust, their own way in as it were.

Given the context of what I said, what he’s trying to do with the language, with German literature and writing a poem, this is 1947, two years after the war finishes, he wrote Death Fugue. After battling for a long time, struggling over it, and condensing it finally, to the hundred words. The lyricism of the German language, the sort of influence of Romanian language in terms of folk poetry, folk songs. It’s rare, and what he’s trying to do with literature and language, of German and of many other languages. And he knows what he’s trying to do and the odds he’s up against, again, Adorno’s phrase. Is it barbaric to try to write this? When he worked as a translator, he worked, he translated literature from Romanian, French, Italian, Russian, and Hebrew and English into German. He spoke all those languages. He was incredibly knowledgeable with language, with words, and translated all those into English. And his love of the sound, the meaning of words, how words can capture, inspire, create imagined worlds and bear witness but through art. And again, how, you know, after the Holocaust, everything, this is what he was battling with. What we debate today, what we talk about so much today. He’s become one of the most significant of poets.

His reputation has slowly grown over the decades, and now is seen as one of the great poets of the last century and of German literature in total and world literature. The language disturbs, his incantations, the images, the rhythms. And this is what, and obviously the camp in the poem is nameless. He doesn’t need extra. We know so many of the facts and the names and other things. So it’s another way to simply try and evoke emotion and thought about that grotesque horror. Black milk, the phrases. This is J.M. Coetzee writing about Celan. The phrases circle back and around incantation patterns. The poem tells of a commandant who orders the prisoners to work as the camp orchestra plays. “He calls out play death more sweetly, death is a master from Deutschland.” The only people named are Margarete, the Commandant’s woman, but also Margarete is the name of the heroin in Gretchen Faust. Look what he’s trying to contrast in German literature. And Shulamit is a figure in the poem whose name stems from the song of songs. This is J.M. Coetzee writing. And whose ashen hair contrasts with Margarete’s golden tresses. The only other proper noun mentioned is Deutschland, is left in the original. The two syllables grip the rhythm better than the word Germany.

Three syllables. The work included like a Romanian folk song. This is from a poem that he wrote to Ingeborg Bachmann, the lady who he had an affair with, just after the war, before going on to Paris. This was in Vienna. Aspen tree, your leaves gaze white into the dark. My mother’s hair never turned white. My mother’s hair never turned white. That’s a reference to a Romanian song. J.M. Coetzee has referenced to so many of his words, of his literature and so many of the other poems I don’t want to go into. Ingeborg Bachmann the lady he had the affair with in Vienna, her father was a major Nazi functionary in Vienna. We can imagine the contrast between the daughter, her father, and then the daughter having an affair with Paul Celan, the Jewish survivor of the Holocaust. His love poems to her contain images of violence, death, betrayal. In the spring of your eyes, Ingeborg, a hanged man strangles his rope. This is Celan writing in a letter to her. It’s a macabre metaphor, it’s grotesque.

The insanity, the craziness, and yet the reality. Another poem to her, the hair of my evening beloved burned more brightly. To her I sent the coffin made of the lightest wood. It’s got the power of language that is so original and striking to me, again what he’s trying to attempt with words. Then he goes back and he lives in Paris where he meets Gisele after the war in 1948. And that’s where he lived for the rest of his life. And he ends up living in the same street where his uncle, next door to the place, the apartment building where his uncle lived. And that uncle was taken to Auschwitz and murdered. Living next door where the uncle lived. Then in 1953, he and Gisele have their first child. She dies three days after the birth. This story of loss after loss, looking to belong, looking for some solace, some meaning through language and home. Where’s the home, is the endless, the ceaseless search in Celan. Then Celan is invited to West Germany again and again to read his literature. Of course, the ironies are obvious. There’s this guy, Hans Holzhausen. He’s a former SS officer who becomes a critic for a well-known German literary magazine after the war.

He calls Death Fugue, well, it’s just a surrealist fantasy. It just comes from a bloody chamber of horrors. This is only a decade after the war, where an ex SS officer has become a literary critic in West Germany he says. Celan is appalled. I don’t want to go into what happened between the two of them. Then he’s invited back and he goes to read at the University of Bonn. People come out with antisemitic cartoons at the lectern. He is physically attacked. A Berlin newspaper, a critic writes and compares his poetry, they’re just exercises on music paper. Ad Celan replies, you invite me to Germany for readings. Huh, even the anti-Semites have discovered me now. In terms his poetry, he wrote in 1958, the German language has become more sober. It’s more factual, it’s more data driven. The language distrusts itself. It’s an extraordinary insight. The language distrusts itself. The way people use the language. Too much data, too much technical, too much only factual. There is no other language. And he’s talking about the German language specifically, and I’m sure many of us can relate it to uses of language in many other areas of work and life.

So I want to just in a way mention In 1969, he went to Israel. His work is huge in Israel. I mean, it’s really well studied. Hannah Levine, the great Israeli poet, wrote about him as well and many of the others, huge. He went there, but the questions, obsessions in him remained. A year later is when he jumped into the River Seine. When he died, he left just a phrase from the poet, the German poet Holderlin. And the words were sometimes a man becomes dark, can’t stop it, and sinks into the bitter well of the heart. And I would like to just read as close to an ending here. This is from Primo Levi because Primo wrote a whole chapter on Celan. It’s brilliant by Coetzee, and the way Primo saw him is extraordinary. And the way he revered Celan, the way he tried to access Celan’s obsessions and understand him. And if I can just share with you here, this is Primo. And the terror-filled dream has never ceased to haunt me. He’s talking about himself. It’s a dream embedded in another dream. I’m at a table with a family, or with friends, or at work, or in the green countryside. In other words, I’m in a peaceful, relaxed atmosphere, devoid of tension. Yet I have an insidious sense of profound anxiety, a definite sensation of something threatening about to occur.

Indeed, as the dream proceeds little by little or with brutal suddenness, everything disintegrates around me. The dream scene, the people, the anxiety becomes intense. I’m alone in the middle of a grey void and once again I’m in the concentration camp. And nothing outside the camp was ever real. The rest was a brief holiday, a dream. The family, the flowering countryside, my home. Now this inner dream, the dream of peace is over. And in the outer dream, which icily proceeds, I hear a voice, a single word. It is the dawn command in Auschwitz, a foreign word feared and expected, Get up attention . The camp is the inner inner reality and the rest of brief holiday? This is Primo writing. The combination for me of poetry and narrative, of bearing witness and trying to find language to speak the unspeakable, again, as Celan, and as Elie Wiesel. Primo writes about Celan, and I’ve just taken a few words from him. Primo speaking, Celan’s poetry tries to reflect our generation. The words build up around the reader, closing in on him like a cold metal vice. This dark impenetrableness that keeps on building up beckons the reader like the incomprehensible sound of burning Jews. Paul Celan, the poet, this is Primo carrying on, on his shoulders fell burden after burden, grief after grief, loss after loss.

And he ultimately committed suicide. But his poem, this is Primo, his poem Death Fugue, I wear it inside my veins. Extraordinary. This is Primo Levi writing about Celan. We know obviously the bits of Elie Wiesel from Night, never shall I forget that night, the first night in the camp, which turned my life, et cetera. So all these three writers, for me, are trying to bring memory and language and bearing witness together. Celan is mostly through metaphor and poetry. Is it barbaric to try and write poetry about an event like this or is not? There’s some poetry in Elie Wiesel, some in Primo Levi, but they’re all trying to grapple with the same thing. How on earth do we really find words for such grotesque horror, for such pain, for such suffering and loss, for life ultimately, and to call back to life. And, for me, the call back in trying to, if you like, resurrect, the German language for Celan was an attempt. And I think Primo speaks about this as well, Coetzee and Elie Wiesel, the attempt to use language to tell the story, get it out. Tell the story, and in that way, not even try to make some sense or they try to, but also to get the story into the world, for Jews obviously, but for humans everywhere.

How else, what else to use? And art has no guns, it has no knives, no weapons, no bullets. All it can do with music, with words, with stories, it can only do it in this way. And yes, it is barbaric, to go back to Adorno, to try and use art, but at the same time, art, for me, is such a profound way of being human in the world and living and for life. And the fact of it, of using art, is ultimately a celebration of life over the death and the death image and the death skull of the horror perpetrated, but that life is forced to come back in some way with a certain appreciation, at least, if not beauty, but of being alive and of living. And to me, this is what Celan promotes and Elie Wiesel, all try to do just with words on a page. And finally, may I say that it’s been such an honour to look at these three writers, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Celan. I think the three of them will go forward over the centuries to be, in a sense, artistic in terms of literature and writing, in a sense to capture, you know, that era in the 20th century, grow more and more in the way that the Guernica does. Thanks very much everybody, and sorry it went over just a couple of minutes.

• That was fabulous, thank you David. Are you going to take questions? Do you have time for questions?

Q&A and Comments:

• Yeah, sure, with pleasure. Okay, just looking at all the questions here. Dennis first, okay, thank you. Everyone’s fantastic, happy birthday to Dennis. Let me say the same. And for Lockdown,

Q: Okay, which town did he come from?

A: Czernovitz. Sorry I didn’t mention Ruth. The name of the town was Czernovitz. It’s was Ukraine. Sorry, it was Romania now part of the Ukraine.

Yeah, just a note, thanks Acei. Celan was born in Czernovitz, Romania at the time. The city I was born in when it became part of the Soviet Union, and he was a distant relative of mine.

That’s incredible, thank you for sharing that. And it’d be amazing to hear more from you, if you would be so kind as to email us. He was a distant relative, that’s amazing.

Q: Gail, what caused him to commit suicide?

A: We can speculate, but I don’t know in the end, you know, I mean, such loss and horror and what he’s trying to do maybe or just other things. It’s speculation to be honest, Gail.

Q: Maria, is Margarete taken from Gretchen Faust?

A: Absolutely.

Q: Miriam, if you’re familiar with it, can you comment on the use of Celan’s poem, Death Fugue, in the art works of Asenlm Kiefer?

A: Yes, Anselm Kiefer is an amazing artist and I’m going to call him Europe, from Europe, not only from, from his own country. And he’s done amazing art if anybody wants to look at which has been, if the word is inspired, I don’t know, but certainly yes, has been inspired by Death Fugue. There’s been amazing music pieces inspired by Death Fugue. Post Webern and post contemporary or should I say the mid, you know, mid 20th century composers, and many people have been inspired unbelievably by Death Fugue. There are more literary articles about Death Fugue in scholarly and academic than many of Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi’s as well, and artists, Anselm Kiefer, and others, as you’ve mentioned here.

Q: Jennifer, I’m sorry, what is the black milk metaphor?

A: It’s for the inmates, the prisoners of the camps.

Q: Jennifer, what podcast?

A: That was from a reading, that’s from a reading that Celan did many many years ago on Death Fugue.

Q: Michael, what are the three books your students responded to?

A: Celan’s poem, Death Fugue; Rimbaud’s poem Rimbaud, The Drunken Boat, which is an extraordinary poem he wrote at the age of 16. And James Baldwin, The Fire Within Us.

This is a really good point you’re making. Sorrell, thank you. Yeah, black milk is much more than prison, absolutely. I mean, milk, fertility, you know, of human beings, breast, everything, all of that, you know, and milk, life, rebirth, regeneration, absolutely, black as night, absolutely diluted milk. But also the bewitching night and evil, treacherous.

These comments are all so brilliant, thank you. And it’s an illusion to Lady Macbeth. You’re spot on, and Coetzee mentions it, the witches, the horror, et cetera. Two women of the choices. Yeah et cetera, that’s great, thank you. Thanks very much for that Sorrell.

Q: Whose translation?

A: This is a mixture of, I’ll send you. It’s a mixture of a few translators from the German.

Miriam, could you kindly write the name of Celan J.M. Coetzee and Primo Levi that I’ve used today, there are many others.

Q: Janet, is there a biography in English?

A: Yes, I can forward that on if anybody wants.

Q: Thelma, can you spell the name of J.M. Coetzee?

A: Yeah, with pleasure.

Okay then Judy, fantastic.

Q: Judy, do you know the work of the artist Anselm?

A: Yes. Paris belonged in the group, yes.

Q: Gita asks, what saved Ellie Biel from killing himself as Primo Levi did and Paul Celan did.

A: That’s a powerful question, I don’t know. We can speculate, but I don’t know if we can be definitive.

Ruth, thank you. Thanks for your kind words. Debbie, thank you. Rita, thank you.

Miriam, Nelly Sachs also won a Nobel Prize for literature and Nelly Sachs was his great friend, yes.

Okay, Sharon, thank you. Margo, thanks. Josie, thank you. Sharon thank you. Shirley, happy birthday Dennis. Thank you, thanks very much.

Ruth, deeply appreciate Death Fugue. There’s a narrative theme in addition to the metaphor poetic use of language, yeah. His other works are much harder. Absolutely, they’re more influenced by surrealism. I think he was trying to pull together surrealism, bearing witness, poetry, factual. I think he was trying to do all of that in those hundred lines of Death Fugue.

Freda, okay, thank you. And to Dennis, Ruth the biography and that’s it, okay. All right, thank you, thanks everybody.

• [Wendy] Thank you so much. Thanks David, see you next week.

• Okay, thank you, take care.

• [Wendy] Take care everybody. Enjoy the rest of your birthday Dennis. Bye-bye, thank you.

• Ciao, ciao.

• [Wendy] Bye.