Paul Celan und Gottfried Benn: Zwei Poetologien nach 1945 (review)

Studies of conjectures of subjectivity through a poet's reflections on the Self in his/her poetry and theoretical writings are not new to literary scholarship. A study of this nature becomes ambitious and merits attention when it simultaneously unravels poetic and political Selves in the works of Paul Celan and Gottfried Benn—two of the most influential German/European poets from the 20^th century. Agis Sideras's book promises such an investigation. Through a reconsideration of hitherto under-discussed works of these two poets, Sideras attempts to reconfigure and challenge prevalent understandings of Paul Celan and Gottfried Benn's poetical theories (Poetologien).

At the very outset, Sideras claims that extant research on these two poets has largely limited itself to outlining the intersections between their modernist poetics, without taking into account distinctive nuances. This mode of study impedes a clearer understanding of key elements that form and inform their poetry (p. 8). While research on Celan, Sideras points out, has concentrated almost exclusively on the essay Der Meridian (1960); scholarly studies of Benn have heavily drawn upon Probleme der Lyrik (1951), without considering the textual and intertextual genealogies of either of these texts. In order to illuminate the bifurcation in the poetics of Celan and Benn, Sideras argues convincingly for reconsideration of hitherto neglected texts: Roman des Phänotyp (1945) by Gottfried Benn, and Edgar Jene und der Traum von Traume (1948) by Celan. In addition to isolating important strands from these two works, that eventually contribute to, and are assimilated in Probleme der Lyrik and Meridian respectively, Sideras provides detailed discussions on textual moments from the Meridian whereby Celan fashions his poetics against that of Benn.

A sustained engagement with this counter-fashioning becomes the engine of study. The juxtaposition of the two poets and their works is carefully carried out under two long sections, each of them bringing several distinguishing contours of their distinct poetics to relief. While the first section locates the features of their poetics in the concept of subjectivity, the second section expands the evaluation of self, individuality, and collectivity in conceptions of existentialism and reality on the one hand, and poetic techniques such as dialogue and monologue on the other.

One of the achievements of Sideras's study is his careful explication of the tensions that underlie poetic theories of Celan and Benn that depart from the larger poetic agenda of early 20^th century modernism. Notable in Sideras's evaluation of Benn are, for example, the discussions on the split between individuality and the poetic "I" as expressed through language (28 pp.), the discrepancy between an ostensibly hermetic character of poetry and Benn's larger poetic program (p. 62), and, most important, Benn's belabored incorporation of a destructed and obfuscated reality after the Second World War (p. 117). These tensions play out differently in Celan. As Sideras demonstrates, Celan operates with a fundamental schism that registers in his struggles against the language with the language as a medium (p. 50). It is this very schism that moves Celan's poetry from hermetic inclinations, thereby elucidating multiple degrees of freedom for the poetic and the political "I" in Celan's poetry. This distinction becomes key to understanding the two poets' conceptualization of the poetic Self, as well as to their construction and intuition of the Other (p. 152). Such conceptualizations are rendered explicit, among other techniques, in their preferences for monologue (Benn) and dialogue (Celan) respectively (p. 166). While the two poets converge in their thematic decoding of concerns of modernity—indexed especially in their dissociations they propose between poetry, the artistic enterprise, and the predicament of representation—they diverge in their radically different stances toward these issues. As reactions to their perceptions of reality, they posit the abstraction of reality rather differently, thereby providing not identical, but two distinctly traceable poetics of European modernism.

The merits of Sideras's book lie in a clear demarcation of the differences in the two...