The Washing of the Word, the Washing of the World: Paul Celan and the Language of Sanctification

In its communicative gesture to its listeners, in its movement "toward something open, inhabitable, an approachable you, perhaps, an approachable reality," Celan's poetry performs a sanctifying function. Such a function, however, finds its origin in the unique space of collapse and reconstruction, belief and despair, hope and vehement rejection of hope-inducing saving devices. This essay traces Celan's use of the term "waschen" (to wash) as a metaphor for his interpretation of Kiddush HaShem (sanctification of the divine name). Both a linguistic necessity and an ethical imperative, "waschen" symbolically directs the already communicative gesture of the poem toward the deliberate construction of an ethical system that accounts for and is grounded in loss. The marker of this "system" in Celan's project is "Schattensprache"—a language of the shadows—a language that tends toward silence at the same time that it incorprates the compulsion to speak and bear witness.