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"" (Deathfugue) is a German language poem written by the
Romania Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central Europe, Central, Eastern Europe, Eastern and Southeast Europe. It borders Ukraine to the north and east, Hungary to the west, Serbia to the southwest, Bulgaria to the south, Moldova to ...
n-born poet
Paul Celan Paul Celan (; ; born Paul Antschel; 23 November 1920 – c. 20 April 1970) was a German-speaking Romanian poet, Holocaust survivor, and literary translation, literary translator. He adopted his pen name (an anagram of the Romanian spelling Ancel ...
probably around 1945 and first published in 1948. It is one of his best-known and often-anthologized poems. Despite critics claiming that the lyrical finesse and aesthetic of the poem did not do justice to the cruelty of the
Holocaust The Holocaust (), known in Hebrew language, Hebrew as the (), was the genocide of History of the Jews in Europe, European Jews during World War II. From 1941 to 1945, Nazi Germany and Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy ...
, others regard the poem as one that "combines mysteriously compelling imagery with rhythmic variations and structural patterns that are both elusive and pronounced". At the same time it has been regarded as a "masterful description of horror and death in a concentration camp". Celan was born to a
Jew Jews (, , ), or the Jewish people, are an ethnoreligious group and nation, originating from the Israelites of ancient Israel and Judah. They also traditionally adhere to Judaism. Jewish ethnicity, religion, and community are highly inte ...
ish family in Cernăuți, Romania (now
Chernivtsi Chernivtsi (, ; , ;, , see also #Names, other names) is a city in southwestern Ukraine on the upper course of the Prut River. Formerly the capital of the historic region of Bukovina, which is now divided between Romania and Ukraine, Chernivt ...
, Ukraine); his parents were murdered in the Holocaust, and Celan himself was a prisoner for a time in a work camp. The poem has reached international relevance by being considered to be one of the most important poems of the post-war period and the most relevant example of ''
Trümmerliteratur ''Trümmerliteratur'' ("rubble literature"), also called ''Kahlschlagliteratur'' ("clear-cutting literature"), is a literary movement that began shortly after World War II in Germany and lasted until about 1950. It is primarily concerned with t ...
''.


Summary

The poem is 36 lines long, with breaks after lines 9, 15, 18, 23 and 26, which would seem to divide it into six stanzas. However critics typically regard it as being in four sections, each of which begins with the image which can be translated as "Black milk of dawn." The speaking voice in the poem is mostly a collective "We". The structure of the poem has been said to reflect that of a musical
fugue In classical music, a fugue (, from Latin ''fuga'', meaning "flight" or "escape""Fugue, ''n''." ''The Concise Oxford English Dictionary'', eleventh edition, revised, ed. Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson (Oxford and New York: Oxford Universit ...
in that phrases are repeated and recombined, comparably to the musical genre.


First section (lines 1–9)

The "we" of the poem describes drinking the black milk of dawn at evening, noon, daybreak and night, and shovelling "a grave in the skies". They introduce a "he", who writes letters to Germany, plays with snakes, whistles orders to his dogs and to his Jews to dig a grave in the earth (the words " Rüden" (male dogs) and "Juden" (Jews) are assonant in German), and commands "us" to play music and dance. "He" uses the phrase "your golden hair Margarete", (hair, like the "black milk" becomes a recurrent theme of the poem); this may possibly be in the letter that he writes to Germany, although the wording leaves this unclear.


Second section (lines 10–18)

The poem repeats many of the images of the first section, but with some changes of word-order. The golden hair of Margarete is now
counterpoint In music theory, counterpoint is the relationship of two or more simultaneous musical lines (also called voices) that are harmonically dependent on each other, yet independent in rhythm and melodic contour. The term originates from the Latin ...
ed with "your ashen hair Sulamith", and "he" now grabs his gun, and is described as blue-eyed, while issuing his orders.


Third section (lines 19–26)

Again the images are counterpointed and extended. "He" is now associated with the phrase "Death is a master from Germany", and in his orders to play music threatens "you'll rise to the sky like smoke, you'll have a grave in the clouds".


Fourth section (lines 27–36)

In a further reworking of the themes and images of the poem so far, it emerges that "Death is a master from Germany, his eye is blue", and the "he" shoots his victims with leaden bullets, and sets his dogs on the victims, leading to their "grave in the sky." The final two lines of the poem counterpose "your golden hair Margarete/your ashen hair Sulamith."


Origins, composition and publication

"It was clear to every reader from the start that 'was concerned with camps and the (The
Final Solution The Final Solution or the Final Solution to the Jewish Question was a plan orchestrated by Nazi Germany during World War II for the genocide of individuals they defined as Jews. The "Final Solution to the Jewish question" was the official ...
to the
Jewish Question The Jewish question was a wide-ranging debate in 19th- and 20th-century Europe that pertained to the appropriate status and treatment of Jews. The debate, which was similar to other " national questions", dealt with the civil, legal, national, ...
), made doubly poignant by the circumstance that the author was known to be a Jew from Eastern Europe." It has often been assumed to reflect the author's own experiences, but Celan himself was never a prisoner in a death camp; the poem reflects more directly the experiences recounted to him. The exact date of composition of the poem is not known; a date of 1944 or 1945 seems to be most likely. The poem contains direct references, or apparent references, to other contemporary works. The
oxymoron An oxymoron (plurals: oxymorons and oxymora) is a figure of speech that Juxtaposition, juxtaposes concepts with opposite meanings within a word or in a phrase that is a self-contradiction (disambiguation), self-contradiction. As a rhetorical de ...
ic image of "black milk" appeared in a poem published in 1939 by
Rose Ausländer Rose Ausländer (born Rosalie Beatrice Scherzer; May 11, 1901 – January 3, 1988) was a Jewish poet writing in German and English. Born in Czernowitz in the Bukovina, she lived through its tumultuous history of belonging to the Austro-Hungarian E ...
. Ausländer herself is recorded as saying that Celan's use of this image was "self-explanatory, as the poet may take all material to transmute in his own poetry. It's an honour to me that a great poet found a stimulus in my own modest work". The relationship of "" to the poem "" (HIM) by is more complex. Written in the early 1940s (the exact date is unknown), "" includes lines about "Gretchen's golden hair", "digging graves in the air", "playing with snakes", and "Death, the German Master", all of which occur in "". Weissglas (1920–1979) was like Celan, a native of Cernăuți/Czernowitz in the
Bukovina Bukovina or ; ; ; ; , ; see also other languages. is a historical region at the crossroads of Central and Eastern Europe. It is located on the northern slopes of the central Eastern Carpathians and the adjoining plains, today divided betwe ...
, and the two were at school together, and knew each other in the immediate post-war period in Bucharest, when they were also both acquainted with Rose Ausländer. It was probably Weissglas, who had been interned in
Transnistria Transnistria, officially known as the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic and locally as Pridnestrovie, is a Landlocked country, landlocked Transnistria conflict#International recognition of Transnistria, breakaway state internationally recogn ...
with Celan's parents, who told Celan of his parents' deaths and their circumstances. "" was written in the early 1940s (the exact date is unknown), and was never published. It was, however, part of a typescript collection by Weissglas, ' (''God's Mills in Berlin''), which Celan would almost certainly have read. Though the two poems have so many elements in common, the tone and form of "" and "" are completely different.
Jean Bollack Jean Bollack (15 March 1923 – 4 December 2012) was a French philosopher, philologist and literary critic. Biography He first studied classical philology at the University of Basel, among others with and Albert Béguin, and from 1945 at the U ...
wrote of "" that Celan "rearranges heelements f ""without adding any new ones; the elements are the same, but he manages to create something completely different using them". "" was first published in a Romanian translation titled "" ("Tango of Death") in 1947; Celan's close friend Petre Solomon was the translator. This version was also the first poem to be published under the pseudonym "Celan", derived from the syllables of "Antschel", Celan's real name. The original German version appeared in the 1948 '' Der Sand aus den Urnen'', Celan's first collection of poems; but the print run was small, and the edition was withdrawn because of its many misprints. The poem first became well known when it was included in Celan's 1952 collection, '' Mohn und Gedächtnis''. It has since appeared in numerous anthologies and translations.


Themes and interpretation

Although the work is titled a
fugue In classical music, a fugue (, from Latin ''fuga'', meaning "flight" or "escape""Fugue, ''n''." ''The Concise Oxford English Dictionary'', eleventh edition, revised, ed. Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson (Oxford and New York: Oxford Universit ...
, there is no literal manner of reproducing the musical form of fugue in words; the title must therefore be taken as a
metaphor A metaphor is a figure of speech that, for rhetorical effect, directly refers to one thing by mentioning another. It may provide, or obscure, clarity or identify hidden similarities between two different ideas. Metaphors are usually meant to cr ...
, the phrases and rhythms of the work parallelling the introduction and repetition of musical themes. Rhythm is a strong element of the work, which in its Romanian and German typescript versions was called ''Death
Tango Tango is a partner dance and social dance that originated in the 1880s along the Río de la Plata, the natural border between Argentina and Uruguay. The tango was born in the impoverished port areas of these countries from a combination of Arge ...
''; the poem is structured to give a strong impression of dactyl and
trochee In poetic metre, a trochee ( ) is a metrical foot consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable, unstressed one, in qualitative meter, as found in English, and in modern linguistics; or in quantitative meter, as found in ...
rhythms. These are brought out in the poet's own reading of the work, which also varies speed, becoming faster at moments of tension and slowing dramatically for the final lines. While the events which emerge for the poem strongly evoke aspects of life (and death) in the concentration camps, other references are more indirect. "Margarete" may evoke the heroine of
Goethe Johann Wolfgang (von) Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German polymath who is widely regarded as the most influential writer in the German language. His work has had a wide-ranging influence on Western literature, literary, Polit ...
's ''
Faust Faust ( , ) is the protagonist of a classic German folklore, German legend based on the historical Johann Georg Faust (). The erudite Faust is highly successful yet dissatisfied with his life, which leads him to make a deal with the Devil at a ...
'', whilst "Shulamith" (the female version of the
Hebrew Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and ...
name Solomon), is a figure who appears in the
Song of Songs The Song of Songs (), also called the Canticle of Canticles or the Song of Solomon, is a Biblical poetry, biblical poem, one of the five ("scrolls") in the ('writings'), the last section of the Tanakh. Unlike other books in the Hebrew Bible, i ...
, where she describes herself as "black, yet comely" (Ch. 1 v. 5). The two figures may thus stand as metaphors for Germans and Jews. There is extensive evidence of Nazi concentration camp orchestras being created from amongst the prisoners and forced to provide entertainment for their SS gaolers. However, the victims in "" being forced to make music and dance for "Him" also recall the exiled Jews in Babylon being asked by their captors to sing (
Psalm 137 Psalm 137 is the 137th psalm of the Book of Psalms, beginning in English in the King James Version: "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down". The Book of Psalms is part of the third section of the Hebrew Bible, and a book of the Christi ...
v. 3; "For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion"). Moreover, in the specific context of German poetry, they recall the slaves in
Heinrich Heine Christian Johann Heinrich Heine (; ; born Harry Heine; 13 December 1797 – 17 February 1856) was an outstanding poet, writer, and literary criticism, literary critic of 19th-century German Romanticism. He is best known outside Germany for his ...
's poem "The Slave Ship" being forced to dance by the mercenary captain. The recurrent themes, encoded content and dialogic constructions demonstrate Celan's tendencies towards
hermeticism Hermeticism, or Hermetism, is a philosophical and religious tradition rooted in the teachings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, a syncretism, syncretic figure combining elements of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth. This system e ...
.


Influence

Bonnie Roos asserts that the poem "has become a national symbol in postwar Germany." Nan Rosenthal has noted "It was anthologised in readers for
erman Erman may refer to: Given name * Erman Bulucu (born 1989), Turkish footballer * Erman Eltemur (born 1993), Turkish karateka * Erman Güraçar (born 1974), Turkish footballer * Erman Kılıç (born 1983), Turkish footballer * Erman Kunter (born ...
high-schools...It was also set to music by numerous German composers and read on television programmes...To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of
Kristallnacht ( ) or the Night of Broken Glass, also called the November pogrom(s) (, ), was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party's (SA) and (SS) paramilitary forces along with some participation from the Hitler Youth and German civilia ...
in 1988, "Death Fugue" was read aloud in the
Bundestag The Bundestag (, "Federal Diet (assembly), Diet") is the lower house of the Germany, German Federalism in Germany, federal parliament. It is the only constitutional body of the federation directly elected by the German people. The Bundestag wa ...
" (the German Parliament). "" has been set as a musical work by, among others, the American composers Samuel Adler and
Aaron Jay Kernis Aaron Jay Kernis (born January 15, 1960) is a Pulitzer Prize- and Grammy Award-winning American composer serving as a member of the Yale School of Music faculty. Kernis spent 15 years as the music advisor to the Minnesota Orchestra and as direct ...
, the Hungarian composer
György Kósa György Kósa (24 April 1897 – 16 August 1984) was a Hungary, Hungarian composer. Life and career György Kósa was born in Budapest, Hungary on 24 April 1897. He began studying music with Béla Bartók when he was ten years old. From 1908-191 ...
and the Israeli composer Leon Shidlovsky.
Harrison Birtwistle Sir Harrison Birtwistle (15 July 1934 – 18 April 2022) was an English composer of contemporary classical music best known for his operas, often based on mythological subjects. Among his many compositions, his better known works include '' T ...
has set the poem as part of his cycle ''Pulse Shadows: Meditations on Paul Celan''; the setting also contains hints of the poem's original tango associations. The German composer
Hans-Jürgen von Bose Hans-Jürgen von Bose (born 24 December 1953) is a German composer. Life After an unsettled adolescence, Bose entered the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt in 1969, where he received instruction in piano and music theory. Upon graduating from the ...
has written a version for mixed choir, organ and
baritone A baritone is a type of classical music, classical male singing human voice, voice whose vocal range lies between the bass (voice type), bass and the tenor voice type, voice-types. It is the most common male voice. The term originates from the ...
solo.
Diamanda Galás Diamanda Galás (born August 29, 1955) is a Greek American musician, singer-songwriter, and visual artist. She has campaigned for AIDS education and the rights of the infected. Galás's commitment to addressing social issues and her involvemen ...
composed and performed a version for voice and piano, on her 2003 live album Defixiones: Will and Testament. The phrase ("Death is a master from Germany)" has been used in songs, often in altered form, e.g. by the
Black Metal Black metal is an extreme metal, extreme subgenre of heavy metal music. Common traits include Tempo#Beats per minute, fast tempos, a Screaming (music)#Black metal, shrieking vocal style, heavily distorted Electric guitar, guitars played with tr ...
-Band
Eisregen Eisregen is a German Gothic metal, Gothic/death metal/black metal band formed in 1995. The members are from Tambach-Dietharz, a village in Thuringia. Four of the band's albums are banned in Germany, with different restriction levels. History ...
(their 2005 album ' contains "Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Thüringen"). The poem is used in a song by German
punk Punk or punks may refer to: Genres, subculture, and related aspects * Punk rock, a music genre originating in the 1970s associated with various subgenres * Punk subculture, a subculture associated with punk rock, or aspects of the subculture s ...
band
Slime Slime or slimy may refer to: Science and technology Biology * Slime coat, the coating of mucus covering the body of all fish * Slime mold, an informal name for several eukaryotic organisms * Biofilm, or slime, a syntrophic community of micr ...
, "Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland".
Rüdiger Safranski Rüdiger Safranski (born 1 January 1945) is a German philosopher and author. Life From 1965 to 1972, Safranski studied philosophy (among others, with Theodor W. Adorno), German literature, history and history of art at Goethe University ...
titled his biography of
Martin Heidegger Martin Heidegger (; 26 September 1889 – 26 May 1976) was a German philosopher known for contributions to Phenomenology (philosophy), phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. His work covers a range of topics including metaphysics, art ...
, who was involved with the Nazi party, . The poem's concluding couplet—in translation, "your golden hair Margarete / your ashen hair Sulamith"—was used as the title of two paintings, ' and ', created in 1981 by the German artist
Anselm Kiefer Anselm Kiefer (born 8 March 1945) is a German painter and sculptor. He studied with Peter Dreher and Horst Antes at the end of the 1960s. His works incorporate materials such as straw, ash, clay, lead, and shellac. The poems of Paul Celan h ...
.


References

Notes Sources * * * Duroche, L. L. (1967)
"Paul Celan's 'Todesfuge': A New Interpretation"
in ''MLN'', (October 1967), Vol. 82/4, pp. 472–477. , accessed 2 July 2014. * * Forstner, Leonard (1985). "'Todesfuge': Paul Celan, Immanuel Weissglas and the Psalmist", in ''German Life and Letters'', (October 1985), Vol 39, Issue 1, pp. 1–20. * Glenn, Jerry (1972)
"Manifestations of the Holocaust: Interpreting Paul Celan"
in ''Books Abroad'' (Winter 1972), Vol. 46/1, pp. 25–30. , accessed 2 July 2014. * Olschner, Leonard (1989). "Fugal provocation in Paul Celan's 'Todesfuge' and 'Engführung'", in ''German Life and Letters'', (October 1989) Vol. 43, Issue 1, 79–89 * Roos, Bonnie (2006)
"Anselm Kiefer and the Art of Allusion: Dialectics of the Early 'Margaret' and 'Sulamith' Paintings"
in ''Comparative Literature'' (winter 2006) Vol. 58/1, pp. 24–43. , accessed 2 July 2014. * Rosenthal, Nan (1999). ''Anselm Kiefer: Works on Paper in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art, colloquially referred to as the Met, is an Encyclopedic museum, encyclopedic art museum in New York City. By floor area, it is the List of largest museums, third-largest museum in the world and the List of larg ...
.'' New York: Harry Abrams Inc. * Safranski, Rüdiger (1994). ''Ein Meister aus Deutschland: Heidegger und seine Zeit.'' Munich: Carl Hansler Verlag. * Weimar, Karl S. (1974)
"Paul Celan's 'Todesfuge': Translation and Interpretation"
in ''PMLA'', (January 1974), Vol. 89/1, pp. 85–96. , accessed 2 July 2014. * Whittall, Arnold (2003). ''Exploring Twentieth-Century Music: Tradition and Innovation.'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. .


External links





A. Z. Foreman * {{Authority control 1947 poems German poems Poems about the Holocaust Poetry by Paul Celan