Words from Abroad: Trauma and Displacement in Postwar German Jewish Writers

4. Paul Celan’s Revisiting of Eastern Europe

4 Paul Celan’s Revisiting of Eastern Europe The Plagiarism Charge When in 1960 Claire Goll, the widow of the French Jewish poet Yvan Goll, charged Celan in an open letter with plagiarizing her late husband ’s poetry, the ensuing debate in West Germany about the validity of this accusation cast Celan into a major crisis during the course of which he was temporarily hospitalized in a psychiatric clinic. Goll’s charges concerned a number of metaphors in Celan’s poems, among them the famous “Todesfuge” [“Deathfugue”], which by then had been canonized and reprinted in German high school textbooks. 1 In Western aesthetic culture, which regards originality as the most important quality of art, and especially of poetry, the public charge of imitating another poet’s work would challenge any poet’s self-legitimization. This is even more true for a writer such as Celan, whose postwar work developed in the absence of a German-speaking environment and relied on the ability of poetry to free language from its historical boundedness, especially its implication in German Nazism. Left by the Holocaust “searching for a self and a voice by which to describe [his] own obliteration,” 2 Celan had espoused a notion of the text as the proper place of the Jew. Yet the plagiarism charge annulled even this last home, his own language: “you know what it means for an author 131 CHAPTER 4 132 of the German tongue, who survived the Nazi terror, to be severed a second time from his language. For among other things, they have managed —perfectly well—to create a vacuum around me.” 3 Growing up in the Bukovina, a historically multiethnic and multilingual region in today’s Romania, Paul Celan spoke German as his mother tongue. After the Second World War, during which both of his parents perished in a concentration camp while he himself was temporarily incarcerated in a labor camp, he went first to Bucharest, then to Vienna, and finally to Paris, where he continued to write and publish in German. He never ceased to write in German, a choice he sometimes explained in terms of the specific demands and possibilities of poetic language. In the immediate postwar years, he “answered everyone who reproached him for writing in the language of his parents’ murderers: ‘Only in the mother tongue can one speak one’s own truth. In a foreign tongue a poet lies,’” 4 and later he emphasized, as a friend recalls, “how much his linguistic isolation served to refine his poetic language.” 5 Celan’s emphatic affirmation of German was, however, accompanied by an uneasiness regarding the public dimension of this language, a language that exposed him to an audience from which he felt separated both geographically and historically. During the late 1950s, Celan grew concerned about the political climate in West Germany . He was alarmed by the resurgence of Nazi groups in West Germany and by a series of desecrations of Jewish cemeteries in 1959. As a result of such public displays of antisemitism, he grew more aware of his own Jewish identity and regarded the resonance his poetry found in Germany with some suspicion: “Every now and then I am invited to Germany for readings. Even the antisemites have discovered me.” 6 Celan’s vehement reaction to the plagiarism charge shortly thereafter is not surprising, given the tenacity of the antisemitic stereotypes of unproductive, thieving, or parasitic Jews in German culture. Some comments in his letters, one of which he signed with “Old-Metaphors Dealer,” 7 show that Celan heard the reverberations of these stereotypes in the accusations against him. Less comprehensible, at first glance, is the paranoia he developed during the course of the plagiarism affair. He suspected behind the charge a conspiracy comprising not only his assailants but also a number of prominent German writers who immediately came to his defense, including Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Marie Luise Kaschnitz, and critics such as Reinhard Döhl, who dismissed the plagiarism charge on philological and chronological PAUL CELAN’S REVISITING OF EASTERN EUROPE 133 grounds.8 Thus he wrote in a letter “that the defamation campaign instigated against me continues in the so-called Federal Republic. . . . What is new in this Nazi-Renaissance is that nowadays one can discover how one—in contrast to Hitler—can do things ‘better’: namely through the double game. . . . My ‘defenders’ are those who collaborated against me.” 9 Celan’s...