In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: An Unresolved Conversation, 1951–1970
  • Ammon Allred (bio)
Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: An Unresolved Conversation, 1951–1970. By James K. Lyon. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. xii + 249 pp. $55.00.

James K. Lyon's Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: An Unresolved Conversation, 1951–1970 is a carefully researched study of the philosopher and poet's mutual influence on one another, with particular emphasis on the way in which Heidegger influenced Celan. While this is well-covered terrain, what makes Lyon's book particularly valuable is his decision to hew as closely as [End Page 370] possible to influences that can be corroborated by primary sources, generally Celan's own reading notes of Heidegger or manuscripts, but also research from Heidegger's library, correspondence, and records of conversations. This leads him to a more conservative assessment of their relationship than others who have taken up this question, but he does establish definitively that Heidegger's influence on Celan was enormous and began quite early. Lyon also helps to clarify Heidegger's attitude towards Celan, although the full extent of Heidegger's understanding of Celan is neither the thematic focus of the book nor susceptible to the sort of documentary corroboration that Lyon relies on for Celan's understanding of Heidegger. The book can be divided roughly into a treatment of three topics: 1) the influence of Heidegger in Celan's poetry prior to his writing "The Meridian" address, Celan's most sustained prose consideration of poetry (chapters 1–9); 2) the presence of Heidegger leading up to and in "The Meridian" address as well as Heidegger's response to the address (chapters 10–13); and 3) an account of the events surrounding both Heidegger and Celan's first meeting as well as the poem "Todtnauberg," which explicitly engages that meeting (chapters 14–17).

In documenting Celan's growing understanding of Heidegger in the 1950s, Lyon charts the "mounting cognitive dissonance" (the title of chapter 9) produced by Celan's enthusiastic admiration for and fascination with Heidegger's writing on poetry, his awareness of Heidegger's Nazi past, and his growing fear of resurgent anti-Semitism in Germany. Relying on Celan's reading notes of Heidegger, Lyon finds a number of themes that occupied Celan's attention and that crop up in his own poetry, particularly pertaining to the nature of poetry and the poet's relationship to language, creativity, and memory. Lyon's claim that Celan seems to have been using Heidegger to "learn German" is of particular interest. Noticing that at a particular point, Celan seems to be marking words and phrases without any indication of "engagement with the content," Lyon posits:

One explanation for this practice might be that Celan hoped to develop his own innovative and original style of diction and that he found Heidegger's somewhat obscure way of writing worthy of imitation or at least usable as a source from which he could learn . . . another, more basic, reason for engaging Heidegger's language this way might have had to do with Celan's own command of German, which, at least during the first years in Paris, he did not consider adequate. From this perspective, it could be said that he engaged [End Page 371] this vis-à-vis as a highly sophisticated, congenial mentor or model for writing in German.

(25)

Although this second, more basic sort of learning drops out over the subsequent years, Lyon documents a verbal and semantic engagement with Heidegger which needs to underline any discussion of a thematic or philosophical relationship. Indeed, given both figures' shared sense that truth is embedded in the very fabric of language, it is impossible to separate the thematic from the semantic. Lyon is particularly successful with Celan's appropriation of the key Heideggerian word entsprechen (correspondence) (70–77). A more complete synopsis of these linguistic resemblances can be found in Lyon's short final chapter (215–218). Lyon occasionally speculates about how this semantic engagement marks itself in the thematic or philosophical language in the poetry. But the price of focusing carefully on what we can know with certainty about Celan's study of Heidegger is...

pdf