Selbstversuch by Gerhard Neumann (review)

According to the critic Helmut Böttinger, Gerd Neumann was one of the "most influential and powerful" literary scholars of the last few decades. For anyone who knew him within scholarly circles, whether in Berlin or elsewhere, it was inevitable that his memoirs, which he completed just before his death in January 2018 and published with Rombach under the title Selbstversuch (Self-Experimentation), would be neither a typical scholar's autobiography nor a purely scholarly endeavor. Selbstversuch is indeed a successful experiment in that the narrator becomes the interpreter of his own scholarly achievements and shortcomings. Some reprints of letters from and to Neumann suggest authenticity, as do some other typescripts by the young scholar, including some of his early reviews. Neumann revisits important milestones of his career from his time as student at Freiburg University to his last position as honorary professor at the Free University Berlin, with his failed relationship to Paul Celan being the most important episode, for himself and for the readers.

Although Neumann brings new insights to the infamous meeting between Celan and Heidegger on July 25, 1967, by delivering an autobiographically colored interpretation of Celan's poem "Todtnauberg" (273–317), he portrays himself as a silent witness, one who did not just drive his contemporaries, Celan and Heidegger, from Freiburg to the Heideggers' Black Forest hut but who also felt driven to make an impossible confession of guilt happen. If we believe Neumann, he felt pushed into this role, which in Celan's poem is just described as that of a "human, who listens in" ("der Mensch, / der's mit anhört," 287); this listener, however, would eventually be able to independently report back from the meeting and thus would take on the "function of a messenger" (289). It must have been an uncomfortable role Neumann had to play, no doubt, since it was first Heidegger, who, in the "closed space of the automobile" (289), silently resisted Celan's objectives, and it was then Celan, who resisted Neumann's attempt to place his poetry within the context of Mallarmé's writings and responded to Neumann's notion of the "absolute metaphor" with absolute silence followed by ending their relationship. This traumatic experience became Neumann's motivation for writing his memoirs, as he himself admits, since he was unable for a long time to move beyond Celan's way of "staging a situation that, through silence, elicits the question of guilt from the counterpart" (307).

To understand Neumann's trauma better, we need to look at the semiotic triangle of hermeneutics which he implicitly sees at work when interpreting his own scholarly life and work. It entails (a) an author, (b) a reader and (c) a text between (a) and (b) that calls for an interpretation. For Neumann, the text further becomes a stage on which a scholar appears, not in the foreground but in the background, by playing a quasi-chorographical part in the performance of meaning. It is also important to note that the methodological approach of Neumann—as well as that of his partner and dance scholar, Gabriele Brandstetter—has always been informed by the deconstructionist semiotics of Roland Barthes and others, in focusing on images, figures, and metaphors. Hence we can embrace Neumann's attempt to utilize the metaphor of the swarm to explain the missing chronology of his memoirs and instead to look at his life through clusters of texts, cultures, and philosophies, which can intersect and reappear at different places and in new formations.

It is perhaps this methodological focus of metaphors as performative vehicles of textual meaning that has been responsible for Neumann's successful academic career as an expert of Kleist and Kafka, among others, but it also provides the blind spot for his own interpretations of Celan, including the traumatic end to their relationship. Neumann implicitly turns the triangle of reader, author, and interpreter into the triangle of "victim (Celan), perpetrator (Heidegger) and witness (Neumann)" (290), but this analogy does not fully suffice to cover the delivery of memoirs in the context of Holocaust history. [End...