https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/paying-tribute-paul-celan-chernivtsi

Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1989

EDWARD SEROTTA

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  Paying Tribute to Paul Celan in Chernivtsi


    Our correspondent concludes a literary journey through wartime Ukraine

BY
EDWARD SEROTTA
<https://www.tabletmag.com/contributors/edward-serotta>
APRIL 18, 2024

    /No one bears witness for the witness.
    “Ashglory,” Paul Celan. Translation by Pierre Joris/

The first time I heard of Paul Celan was on the press bus as we were 
leaving Auschwitz-Birkenau on Sunday, Nov. 12, 1989.

The motorcade was cutting its way across southern Poland toward the 
Krakow airport. Inside the bus were 40 West German photographers and 
reporters who had just accompanied Chancellor Helmut Kohl on his visit 
to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Except for the whine of tires on the asphalt, there was total silence in 
that bus. Minutes before, Heinz Galinski, the 77-year-old chairman of 
the Central Council of Jews in Germany, had faced the German chancellor 
and recounted how 46 years before, he, his first wife, Gisela, and his 
mother, Renata, had been brought to this place.

This was the very last time he saw them alive. Galinski was sent off to 
work as a slave laborer. His wife and mother were sent immediately to 
the gas.

Galinski told his story in flat, cold cadences and with every sentence 
Kohl’s fleshy face seemed to crumple. Then, Menachem Joskowicz, Poland’s 
sole rabbi, stood next to Galinski and recited/El Malei 
Rachamim,/then/Kaddish/. As he prayed, he closed his eyes and his hands 
grabbed at the air before him. When he finished, no one moved, nothing 
stirred. Then everyone quickly headed toward the waiting cars and buses.

It was clear how much the experience had shaken the photographers. They 
cleaned lenses, rewound film, and looked anywhere but at each other. I 
was the only non-German, and I presume, the only Jew on that bus. Back 
at Birkenau, I had been the only one who had covered his head with a 
yarmulke/./

Suddenly, a young photographer turned to me. “That’s the first time I’ve 
ever been to such a place!” he said, nearly blurting out the words in 
English. “I never learned anything about the Holocaust in school and my 
teachers refused to discuss it. What I learned I learned from TV.”

When he saw the surprised look on my face, he added hastily, “I saw you 
wearing that little cap at Birkenau when the rabbi prayed. You are Israeli?”

Taken aback, I shook my head. I stammered that I was an American. “And 
Jewish,” I added.

Another photographer leaned forward. “When we asked our teacher about 
the Holocaust, she said all we have to know is that everything the Nazis 
did was horrible, and we should do the opposite.” He added softly, “Then 
she started crying so we didn’t push it any more.”

Another put his camera down and moved closer. “Crying has always been a 
good way to stop the children from asking about the war,” he said, 
“especially at home.”

Heads nodded in agreement. “Oh yeah,” one said. “That always worked.”

It seemed everyone wanted to say something, but the words, in English or 
German, weren’t coming. Then one young man began slowly. “Well our 
teacher made us learn—by memory—“/Todesfuge/,” by Paul Celan. “Death 
Fugue” in English. Do you know it?”

I said I didn’t. Had never heard of it.

“Well I still do. And repeating from memory, he recited the last stanza, 
which I recount here in the English translation by Michael Hamburger, 
although I will later provide another version, by John Felstiner.

    /Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
    we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany
    we drink you at sundown and in the morning we drink and we drink you
    death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue
    he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true
    a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
    he sets his pack on to us he grants us a grave in the air
    he plays with the serpents and daydreams death is a master from Germany

    your golden hair Margarete
    your ashen hair Shulamit/

The press bus rolled on. No one said a word. Finally, this sandy-haired 
young man, whose name I never learned, looked up. Staring directly at 
me, he said, “So I’m German.” He paused, and as if to explain something, 
he added, “and 24 years old. Bloody, bloody Germany. Bloody, bloody me.”

To visit Paul Celan’s hometown of Chernivtsi, I was taking the evening 
train from Lviv. The 702 is a modern, five-car train with second-class 
seating and makes only four stops. It leaves the ornate, Austrian-era 
station at 5:25 p.m. and comes to a halt at 9:55 p.m. in the equally 
ornate Austrian-era station in Chernivtsi. I had nabbed the last seat on 
the train, and these days, entire trains are sold out for days, if not 
weeks, in advance. In the first year of the full-scale invasion, I 
almost never used my Ukrainian Railways app more than a day ahead. Can’t 
do that now.

MAKS LEVIN

The brutal September heat wave that had followed me for the past 16 days 
as I traveled around Ukraine had finally broken, and I exited the 
Chernivtsi station in a soft rain.

Unregistered, illegal taxis still abound in Ukrainian cities but much to 
Ukraine’s credit, there are now local apps as well as Uber to use. But 
none were working at 10:00 p.m. as I walked out of the station. I chose 
the oldest, most beat-up taxi, where a tiny elderly man looking all the 
world like a munchkin from the/Wizard of Oz/hoisted himself out of the 
driver’s seat, shook my hand with the grace of an official greeter, and 
we lumbered off in his aging Korean car and over the shiny black cobbled 
lanes.

In the yellowish gauze of the street lamps set against the 
turn-of-the-last-century buildings, it was clear I was riding through 
yet another Austro-Hungarian city: an art nouveau apartment house here, 
a huge opera square there, and looming behind a brick wall, an enormous, 
Moorish-styled red brick university campus. Hello Habsburgs, I said to 
myself.

Where the Austrians had invested heavily in Lemberg/Lwow/Lviv as the 
capital of Galicia, they invested just as heavily in 
Czernowitz/Cernauti/Chernivtsi, the capital of their easternmost 
province of Bukovina, and which sat hard on the empire’s eastern border 
with Russia.

The population of Czernowitz at the end of the Austrian era was around 
100,000 and the language of its administration, its law courts, and that 
impressive university was German. Nearly half of the city was Jewish, 
and Jews looked to Vienna as their beacon. German was spoken as much or 
more than Yiddish. After 1867, Jews obtained full civil rights and they 
became the empire’s most loyal citizens. A third of the students in what 
was then the Emperor Franz Joseph University were Jewish; three daily 
German-language newspapers were edited by Jews. A majority of doctors 
and attorneys were Jewish. And wealthy Jews supported the symphony, the 
Museum of Art and both the German-language and Yiddish theater companies.

But this was a multi-ethnic city, and Romanian, Russian, Polish and 
Ukrainian were also heard on the streets and taught in its schools.

When the First World War began in 1914, Romania’s King Ferdinand kept 
his country neutral. Then in 1916 he sent his army to fight the Central 
Powers in Transylvania. In a matter of weeks, much of Romania was 
overrun and occupied by German and Austro-Hungarian troops, but since 
the country had been on the winning side at war’s end, Romania was able 
to sit at the winners’ table at the treaties of Versailles in 1919 and 
Trianon in 1920. Even the most rabid Romanian nationalists could hardly 
believe their winnings.

Romania was given all of Hungarian Transylvania, the lands south of the 
Danube were taken from Bulgaria, and Russia lost Bessarabia. Czernowitz 
would now be known as Cernauti and the rest of Bukovina came along with it.

But Romania received something it desperately did not want: hundreds of 
thousands of Jews. In his landmark study from 1983,/The Jews of East 
Central Europe Between the Two World Wars/, Ezra Mendelssohn labeled 
Romania, along with Russia, as the most antisemitic country in Europe. 
Which was saying something.

For the most part, the Romanian authorities left Cernauti to its own 
devices. My institute interviewed a half dozen elderly Jews in Vienna 
who had been born there between the wars. They, as children, had little 
difficulty learning Romanian in schools; few of their parents ever did. 
And it was during the interwar years that Cernauti continued to produce 
a plethora of writers we know of today: the Israeli novelist Aharon 
Appelfeld is the best known among them, as well as the poet Rose 
Ausländer and Yiddish poet Joseph Burg. Perhaps most enjoyable of all 
was Gregor von Rezzori, who wrote fiction, several volumes of memoirs 
and spent a decade in the 1970s as a talk show host in Vienna. His 
irony-laced/Memoirs of an Antisemite/is well worth your time.

To briefly summarize Paul Celan’s life: He was born in 1920 and his 
family name was Antschel, which he would later change. His father, Leo, 
was a building engineer, worked as a broker in the lumber industry and 
was an ardent Zionist. His mother, Fritzi, had a passion for German 
culture and Paul grew up speaking German at home, Hebrew and then 
Romanian in school, and he became fluent in French.

Celan left to study medicine in the French city of Tours in 1938. He 
returned for summer holidays in 1939, but once Germany invaded Poland 
that September, he found himself trapped at home. With no possibility of 
studying medicine, he turned his attention to literature.

In June 1940, King Carol II was forced to relinquish much of the 
territory Romania gained after the First World War and Cernauti found 
itself under Soviet rule. A year later, the Romanians invaded, this time 
accompanied by Nazi Germany. Jews were forced from their homes, sent to 
labor brigades, herded into ghettos. And whereas Romania’s earlier 
governments were truly antisemitic, under strongman Marshal Ion 
Antonescu, they turned murderous.

According to Israel Chalfen’s book/Paul Celan: A Biography of His 
Youth/, in June 1942, his friend Ruth Lackner offered Celan refuge but 
his parents refused to join him. They were deported to camps in 
Transnistria by the Romanian army, then turned over to the Germans, who 
sent them to the camp in Mihailovka. There, Leo died of typhus. Fritzi, 
too weak to work, was killed, I have read, by a shot to the back of the 
neck.

EDWARD SEROTTA

Celan spent the next two years in Romanian forced labor, and John 
Felstiner, author of the indispensable/Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, 
Jew/(1996), tells us he learned Yiddish from fellow prisoners.

Celan returned to Cernauti in February 1944 to work as a nurse in a 
mental hospital where he learned Russian. With the Soviets in control 
and the name of the city changed to Chernovtsy, he made his way to 
Bucharest. Around the time King Carol’s son Mihai was forced to abdicate 
in 1947 and the communists began their arrests, Celan fled—surely with 
great difficulty—to Vienna. At that time, there were few functioning 
trains and the borders were heavily guarded. I’m assuming Celan must 
have walked most of the way—a distance of nearly 700 miles.

The vaunted cultural world his mother had loved so much was hardly in 
evidence, while Austria’s denazification program was coming to an and. 
In 1948 Celan made his way to Paris. Felstiner said it best: “France 
would have to serve for now, since Bukovina was Soviet, Romania 
Communist, Austria hopeless, and Germany out of the question.”

Celan brought nothing with him other than his language: German, which 
was his/muttersprache und mördersprache/, as he said (mother tongue and 
murderer’s tongue). He was alone in the world, broke, depressed and 
stateless. He began earning his way by translating, giving German 
lessons, taking on any jobs he could. In September 1948 he began 
studying at the Sorbonne. He married a graphic designer, Gisèle 
Lestrange, in 1952 and they had two sons, one of whom died in 
childbirth. They divorced in 1967.

Celan taught German literature in the École Normale Supérieure. As a 
translator, he brought Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Valéry, and Apollinaire from 
French into German; Shakespeare, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, and 
Dickinson from English, and Mandelstam and others from Russian.

All the while he wrote poetry: Felstiner tells us he wrote 800 poems 
that were collected, in German, in eight volumes.

Paul Celan threw himself into Seine either on the 19th or 20th of April 
1970; his body was found downstream a few days later. He was buried in 
the municipal cemetery of Thiais on May 12 and his grave can be found 
one row outside the Jewish section. Just on the other side of the Jewish 
section lies the grave of Joseph Roth.

Paul Celan may have survived the Holocaust but he did not escape it. He 
felt overwhelming guilt and shame about the death of his parents, 
especially his mother. His first poems, written before the Second World 
War, are one thing. After 1943, the Holocaust would not let go of him.

Thousands of research papers have been written on Celan. German 
composers and artists have drawn from his work, and German academics 
have mined one incident after another in Celan’s life to dissect it. 
Just google “/Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland/” and you’ll find 
books, films, theater pieces, panel discussions, and works of art—by the 
thousands. And//“/Todesfuge/” overshadows everything he would write later.

Countless school classes in Germany recite it each year. For instance: 
In February 1995 I sat in the audience of a high school auditorium in 
Berlin’s Köpenick, where nine girls sat on the stage and recited the 
poem to a packed hall of students and family members. A year later I was 
in a Waldorfschule in Bremen, where 30 high school seniors took to the 
stage and with a choir master in front of them, yelled the poem, in 
perfect precision, at the top of their lungs, to devastating effect.

Celan is such a powerful force in German literature and its relationship 
to the Holocaust that German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier hosted an 
evening commemorating the centenary of his birth in November 2020. Among 
his most telling remarks:

“Today it seems that no one who has ever read one of Celan’s poems and 
who knows about his origins and life story could ever be surprised that 
this poet had a broken relationship with Germany, the country of his 
mother tongue. Precisely because his mother loved German culture and 
German his mother tongue, and because both meant everything to him and 
had been the foundation for his career as a poet, the loss of his mother 
was a lifelong sorrow. He could never overcome the fact that she was 
killed at German hands by a shot to the back of the neck. His mother 
tongue had become the language of murderers; the language of “racial 
jurists,” “people of culture,” even that of the “philosophers” had 
become toxic, like Celan’s relationship with Germany: a mismatch.”

MAKS LEVIN

While Celan certainly had a toxic relationship with Germany, it is where 
his work was lauded, discussed and published.

Celan found little acceptance of his poetry in France, though. I have 
been told that until the day he died he was never asked to give a public 
reading. Although the French love commemorating and memorializing their 
intellectuals, it was not until 2016 that the first monument for Celan 
went up in Paris.


His reception in Germany, however, was the opposite, although the first 
encounter could not have been more painful.

Celan could not find a German publisher and in 1952 he was invited to 
present his work to Gruppe 47/,/a regular gathering of young German 
writers who met in various cities. Among its members were Günther Grass, 
Heinrich Böll, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Ingeborg Bachmann, an 
Austrian poet who had been a friend and lover of Celan. Hans Werner 
Richter, whose own novels are now forgotten, led the group for some two 
decades. Gruppe 47 would invite a writer to present and the assembled 
would critique the work then and there.

Celan presented at their meeting in the Baltic port of Niendorf. It was 
Celan’s first visit to Germany and that evening Celan read three of his 
poems, one of which was “/Todesfuge./”

It did not go down well. Others reported that Richter said Celan’s 
reading reminded him of Goebbels. Another observer is said to have 
remarked that his reading of//“/Todesfuge/” sounded like singing in a 
synagogue—not that anyone there had any idea of what went on in 
synagogues (the one Jewish member of the group, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, 
did not join until 1958).

Painful as the evening was, Celan soon had what he prized most: a 
publishing contract. His first collection of poetry,/Mohn und 
Gedächtnis/(Poppy and Memory) was published by Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt 
in Stuttgart in 1952. It is surely his most accessible to readers, and 
it is here we find “/Todesfuge/,”//which he actually wrote in Romania in 
1947, then published for the first time in German in 1948.

And while that evening in Niendorf must have shaken him badly, much 
worse was to come.

A few years earlier, Celan met the Alsatian poet Yvon Goll along with 
his wife, Claire. Goll, who lay dying in a hospital in Neuilly, asked 
Celan to translate some of his poetry from French into German, which 
Celan did. After Goll died in 1950, Claire Goll (who, like her husband, 
had been born Jewish) began saying that Celan had stolen from her 
husband. She accused him of plagiarism and the German-speaking world, 
where antisemites gleefully attacked any Jewish target they could light 
upon, often sided with Goll.

It was later established that Celan’s poetry had been published before 
he had even met the Golls, but he was devastated by the fact that people 
he counted on as friends only offered what he considered a weak defense 
on his behalf. Worse, Celan’s exculpation only made Claire Goll angrier 
and she pursued the poet to such a degree that he suffered one breakdown 
after another. His paranoia and depression worsened and Celan was 
institutionalized for a while in 1965. In 1967, he stabbed himself. 
Celan’s wife, fearing for her own life, then took their son Eric and 
moved away. Although Celan would kill himself three years later, Claire 
Goll continued her attacks on Celan right up until her own death in 1977.

It took the German literary historian Barbara Wiedemann to pursue the 
story to a granular level, and in 2000, she published a highly regarded 
928-page investigation of the “Goll affair,” which comes out firmly on 
the side of Celan.

Celan has had several translators in English over the years, and three 
of the most respected are Michael Hamburger, who had been born in Berlin 
and fled to England; American academic John Felstiner; and French-born 
Pierre Joris. All three offer invaluable insights.

Simply put, while Celan’s early work is accessible to most of us, as the 
years passed, he stripped away all sense of the rhythm that made 
“/Todesfuge/” and other earlier poems so compelling, even musical, and 
began using pared down words and phrases that few of us can 
understand—unless we were reading the books that he had been reading, 
traveling to he places he went, and understood his relationship with 
Judaism.

One well known example is that after a public reading in Freiburg in 
July 1967, Celan visited the philosopher Martin Heidegger in his cabin 
in the Black Forest. Heidegger never recanted his support for the Nazis, 
but Celan and he had been in touch earlier by post. Celan entitled the 
poem about that visit “/Todtnauberg/,” which is where Heidegger lived. 
The poem begins with the words “Arnica” and “Eyebright” (in German: 
Arnica, Augentrost), which are two herbs used for treating wounds. Of 
which Celan had more than a few. Besides, the translation of 
“/Todtnauberg/” itself is the mountain of death. That is by far one of 
the less obtuse references.

Harvard German scholar Peter Gordon wisely compares Celan to James 
Joyce’s novel/Ulysses/. “But where Joyce makes each sentence into joyful 
abundance, with Celan the density of reference only plunges his lines 
further into darkness, and no explanations can undo the enigma of his 
language.” Still, there is no doubt that “/Todesfuge/”/is/one of the 
most powerful poems of the second half of the 20th century. In German, 
nothing approaches it.

One of the most insightful remarks I have read came from Pierre Joris 
and his first exposure to the poem, when a lecturer came to read it in 
his high school class in Luxembourg. This is how he described that first 
hearing to David Brazil in/The Los Angeles Review of Books/in 2021.

“I had maybe the only epiphany of my life—my hair stood up on the back 
of my neck, my breath stopped. It was that absolute an experience. 
Thinking on it, I realized that what I had experienced was another way 
of using language—not how we use it everyday at home or on the street. 
But it was not ‘literature’ either. This was something else. This was a 
level of involvement where language could get you to that was totally 
unique—only poetry was able to reach it.”

But as the poem’s fame grew and Celan was asked to recite it at one 
event after another, he began to refuse permission to reprint it. Yet he 
continued to visit Germany for public readings, where as many as a 
thousand people would crowd in to listen to him read this and other poems.

EDWARD SEROTTA

And one cannot have a conversation about “/Todesfuge/”//or the rest of 
Celan’s work without bringing up German Jewish philosopher Theodor 
Adorno’s quote from 1949, “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” 
Of course, Adorno never said that philosophy was barbaric after he spent 
the war years in the ritzy Los Angeles suburb of Brentwood while Celan 
was digging ditches in a forced labor camp surrounded by men who were 
sick and dying, all while trying to cope with the news about his mother 
being shot to death.

One thing we can all agree on: Celan is still not terribly well known in 
the English-speaking world. To better understand the matter, I turn to 
Michael Hofmann, the critic and translator of Joseph Roth, Hans Fallada, 
Thomas Bernhard, Franz Kafka, Alexander Döblin, and other German writers.

In his review for/The London Review of Books/in 1996, Hofmann tells us 
that “Felstiner’s book is unique because he tackles for us the 
impossible task of translating what is, for the most part, untranslatable …”

That is why when Felstiner presents us his translation of “/Todesfuge/,” 
we read:

    /a man lives in the house your goldenes Haar Margarete/
    /he looses his hounds on us grants us a grave in the air/
    /he plays with his vipers and daydreams der Tod/
    /ist ein Meister aus Deutschland/

    /dein goldenes Haar Margarete/
    /dein achenes Haar Sulamith/

Hofmann then goes on to say what makes a great deal of sense: “I’m not 
sure how important Celan is to poetry in English … But I don’t 
understand how people with a basically uncomplicated relationship to 
their own blameless language can think they are learning from Celan.”

Which brings us back to that day in Auschwitz more than three decades 
ago and the blameless young German photographer.

I recounted that story about Auschwitz over a beer with another 
photographer. We were in Kyiv in September 2021, sitting in the bar of 
the Hyatt Hotel and were there for the 75th anniversary of the massacre 
at Babyn Yar. The photographer’s name was Maks Levin and he had been 
shooting at seminars and in schools for my institute since 2016.

Maks had recently bought a drone and used it to shoot a short 
documentary on Jewish Chernivtsi for my institute. I had also asked Maks 
to use a steadycam and walk along the main avenue of tombstones in the 
Jewish cemetery and send me a four-minute tracking shot. I told Maks it 
would be set to someone reading the poem I had first heard about in 
Auschwitz and I repeated a few lines of “/Todesfuge/.”

A few weeks later Maks sent the video footage, and I was just starting 
to look for Ukrainian, German, and English actors to read the poem. But 
by then the Russians had invaded Ukraine and Levin charged off to the 
front. He and I stayed in touch; my institute made two bank transfers to 
him as he rushed to provide images to Reuters,/Der Spiegel/and others.

On March 12, his drone went down near the Hostemel military airport and 
on the 13th Maks went to recover it. That was the last time I heard from 
him.

On April 1, as Ukrainian troops retook the area, they found Maks’ body 
and that of a friend. They had been caught by Russian soldiers on March 
13, tortured, and shot at close range.

I still have Maks’ footage and I know the poem I need to set it to. But 
I can’t.

On my last day in Chernivtsi, I found the apartment house where Celan 
was born and grew up. He, his father, Leo, and mother, Fritzi, would 
have entered and left through that front door hundreds upon hundreds of 
times. There’s a plaque in Ukrainian and German next to the entrance.

I could only think of his poem “The Aspen Tree,” which was one of his 
early poems. To read it on my phone in front of his house meant the 
world to me.

    /Aspen tree, your leaves gaze white into the dark./
    /My mother’s hair ne’er turned white.

    Dandelion, so green is the Ukraine./
    /My fair-haired mother did not come home.

    Rain cloud, do you dally by the well?/
    /My quiet mother weeps for all.

    Round star, you coil the golden loop./
    /My mother’s heart was seared by lead.

    Oaken door, who ripped you off your hinges?/
    /My gentle mother cannot return./

Edward Serotta <https://www.1989.centropa.org/>is a journalist, 
photographer and filmmaker specializing in Jewish life in Central and 
Eastern Europe. He is the head of the Vienna-based institute Centropa.



-- 
»Wenn ein unordentlicher Schreibtisch einen unordentlichen Geist repräsentiert, 
was sagt dann ein leerer Schreibtisch über den Menschen aus, der ihn benutzt.«

--Albert Einstein

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