Paul Celan & Martin Heidegger: An Unresolved Conversation, 1951–1970 (review)

James K. Lyon’s monograph is a thorough and carefully argued analysis of the relationship between the poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan and the philosopher and former Nazi Martin Heidegger. Conceived of as an “intellectual biography,” it deals mainly with Celan’s reception of Heidegger’s œuvre and is based on a variety of documentary sources, among them Celan’s reading notes of works by Heidegger, references to Heidegger in his letters, and Heidegger’s own reactions to Celan’s writings. The study succeeds in its goal of acting as a “starting point for further exploration of their troubled connections, interactions, and responses to each other” and will no doubt provide the foundation for future analyses of the biographical and textual connections between the two men.

Born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Cernăuți, Bukovina, Celan (whose real name was Paul Antschel) was interned in a labour camp during the Second World War. His parents perished during the war, and his poetry, indeed his calling as a poet, stems in large part from his experience of the Holocaust. Heidegger, in contrast, joined the National Socialist Party in 1933 and was appointed rector of the University of Freiburg. Although he resigned from the post one year later, he was involved with the National Socialists until the war’s end.

Interestingly, Lyon has chosen not to examine the question of Heidegger’s culpability, nor does he attempt to psychoanalyze their relationship. Instead, his study focusses on the textual evidence linking Heidegger’s thought to Celan’s writings. This approach to the material allows for a substantial and objective rendering of the philosopher’s impact on Celan’s poetry and poetics. According to Lyon, the poet recognized in Heidegger a kindred spirit who shared his concern for language and poetry. Heidegger’s interest in the “primoridial” resonated with Celan and legitimized his own attempts “to recover genuine, uncontaminated language.” Like Heidegger, Celan was committed to protecting language from what he perceived to be the deleterious effects of modern technology. In part, this required “reinventing” language, and, as Lyon’s study demonstrates, Celan’s intricate attempts to etymologize and disassemble the German language in his poetry parallel Heidegger’s own efforts to recreate the language of philosophy in treatises such as Being and Time (1927).

Despite their affinities, Celan also discovered differences between himself and the philosopher that were crucial to the development of his poetics. Celan rejected the modernist argument, fashionable at the time, that poems are simple lexical and semantic artifices, created by assembling words. Heidegger’s notion that Being speaks through the poet resonated with Celan, and it helped underpin his rejection of modernist, or “concrete,” poetry. As Lyon points out, however, Celan recognized that by accentuating Being over the voice of the individual poet, Heidegger’s proposition ran the risk of depersonalizing the poem. Confronted by two contradictory views of poetry, Celan sought a middle ground in order to develop a poetics that reflected his own experiences.

Other points of convergence and divergence discussed in Lyon’s study range from Celan’s appropriation of particular metaphors from Heidegger’s works to their different opinions on more fundamental questions, such as whether or not poems are “timeless.” Lyon’s study also calls into question previous attempts to interpret the poem “Todtnauberg,” which was written after Celan’s 1967 visit with Heidegger While most interpreters see the poem as a condemnation of Heidegger, Lyon presents a persuasive argument to the contrary, arguing that the predominant interpretation of “Todtnauberg” is reductionist and based upon what he terms an “intentionalist fallacy.”

If there is a weakness to Paul Celan & Martin Heidegger: An Unresolved Conversation, 1951–1970, it concerns its organization. Since some of the concepts discussed appear in more than one work by Heidegger, it might have been better to organize the book thematically, rather than chronologically. Also, as an “intellectual biography,” it is safe to say...