Paul Celan: Holograms of Darkness (review)

164 SHOFAR Fall 1992 Vol. 11, No. 1 some bearing on the interpretation. Christine Maria Grafinger's succinct, yet readable account of the life of Anton Raphael Mengs and his frescoes in the Stanza dei Papiri of the Vatican Library concerns an anist whose Jewish f;lther convened to Protestantism, while Mengs himself was to become a Roman Catholic. Whether the painter and his ideas were affected by his ancestry and in what manner would be an appropriate question to explore, but Grafinger does not do so. In Carol Salus's elucidation' ofR. B. Kitaj's The Murder ofRosa Luxemburg, the anist's religious identity comes to the fore in his concern for the martyred heroine as the victim of antisemitism. This concern, however, must be inferred on the basis of statements made by the anist in other contexts, and it is not made explicit in the painting. The value ofjewish Art is enhanced by its calendar ofevents and exhibitions of interest to the topic ofJews and an, as well as by a thorough bibliographic chronicle of recent publications on the subject. One very much hopes that the means will be found to ensure its continued appearance in the future. Walter Cahn Depanment of An History Yale University Paul Celan: Holograms of Darkness, by Amy Colin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. 211 pp. $35.00. This imponant book on Paul Celan's search for a radically new poetic idiom to engage linguistically as well as anistically the workings of a personal and collective history begins, appropriately, on a mnemonic key. Permitted to leave Romania in 1970, author Amy Colin (then a young girl) and her parents had made their way to Dusseldorf, Germany, to her uncle and aunt, close friends of Celan from early days in Czernowitz. The telephone rang: it was Celan calling from his home in Paris to inquire when Colin's relatives might come to Paris for a visit. Several weeks later this caller, who many years ago had followed her Uncle Jacob Silbermann's advice to change his name from Antschel to Celan, committed suicide. It's hard to imagine a stronger prefatory note. But the preface surprised me for another reason. I had not forgotten a four-column repon I had read in 1985 in the Hamburger Abendblatt about a high-powered international symposium on Celan across the Atlantic in Seattle. This repon, by a Herr Speier, was remarkably insightful, judicious, comprehen- Book Reviews 165 sive, and sophisticated by journalistic standards. Having openedHolograms ofDarkness, I remembered having filed the piece. Rereading the piece, I recalled how I had unquestioningly accepted the reporter's"Anglo-Saxon" reference to symposium director, Amy Colin. Should a German scholarjournalist be expected to get everything right in Seattle? Celan admitted to a friend, "Ich habe als Jude und deutscher Schriftsteller keinen leichten Stand." His mission as a poet was not to make everything right, but to find new ways to get some things right in his poetic inscriptions of pre-War multilingual Czernowitz literary culture, Romanian Jewish culture, the Nazi invasion, the Holocaust, extermination of family, removal to Paris, new Franco-German literary community, successful and controversial literary career, stubborn pact with the German language, irrevocable experience of exile, increasingly troubled mind,and increasing articulation of spiritual mystery. The question of whether he considered himself truly a Jewish poet is (correctly, I think) reconstituted by Colin into the question of What kind ofJew, what kind ofJewishness?, which in his case cannot be separated from the question of What kind of poet? This fundamental move on Colin's part differentiates her work from that of a number of European and American scholars, especially the former. In profiling a poet who must reach aesthetically beyond H6lderlin, Mallarme, Kafka, Hilke, Auslander, and Mandelstam, and philosophically through yet beyond Heidegger, Colin essentially agrees with Alvin Rosenfeld that Celan's unprecedented and virtually untranslatable verse is also a poetry of expiration, a record of an unspeakable struggle with his past. Her subtitle, Holograms of Darkness, signifies the many enigmatic poems, early to late, that resemble "certain mysterious holograms" in which "strange, disturbing shapes, depth, and colors ... often change dramatically with the spectator's angle of...