To Give Saying Its Shadow: Celan's Poetry and the Politics of Language

On June 28, 1942, Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary, "Even if I hated Germany, I would not thereby become un-German, I could not tear what was German out of me." A Protestant convert of Jewish parentage, Klemperer had been forced out of his position as a professor of Romance languages at the Technical University of Dresden following the Nazi "dejudification" of the civil service. His car had been confiscated; his cat, euthanized; his house, "Aryanized." He and his wife, Eva, were forced to move into a Jews' House, where they roomed with a number of other families, all of whom were subject to constant surveillance and harassment by the Gestapo. He performed forced labor in a segregated factory, and lived on the brink of starvation.

Klemperer was one of the lucky ones. Because Eva was Aryan and because he had been a combat veteran, Klemperer's status was officially "privileged"—meaning he had been granted the privilege of not being immediately deported to Theresienstadt or Auschwitz. Deprived of access to libraries, he could no longer complete his professional research. So the former philologist instead turned his attention to the language around him: the language of Hitler and Goebbels, of the Jews' House and the factory, of birth announcements and reports from the front, of his Aryan neighbors and the friends and former colleagues from whom he had become estranged, one by one, as they embraced Nazism. In his diary, he kept meticulous notes on this material for a project he cryptically called LTI.

The same day Klemperer was recording his conflicted emotions about his national identity, some eight hundred miles to the east, a student of Romance languages and literature named Paul Antschel was rushing home through the streets of Czernowitz. For centuries, Czernowitz had boasted a significant German-speaking Jewish community, which, like so many others in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, balanced local religious and cultural traditions with a secular, cosmopolitan outlook influenced by trends in Vienna. But control of the town had been transferred to the Kingdom of Romania in 1920, the year of Antschel's birth, and it was now under the administration of a Nazi puppet-state. That month, SS-Einsatzgruppen and local police had begun to round up Jews and other "undesirable elements," sending them on cattle cars to concentration camps in Transnistria.

The details on where Antschel had spent the previous night are unclear. According to some accounts, he'd been hiding in a cosmetics factory after failing to persuade his parents to take refuge with him there. Others claimed that he'd simply been visiting friends until past curfew and had to stay the night. Wherever he in fact woke up, his biographer John Felstiner writes, one thing seems definite: When he returned home, he found "the front door sealed, his mother and father gone."

It was to be the defining trauma of his life. One month later, he was arrested and deported to a concentration camp in Tăbăreşti, where he learned that his father had died—most likely of a typhus outbreak—in a camp in Nazi-occupied Ukraine. His mother, declared "unfit to work," had been shot. Antschel did hard labor—mostly "shoveling," he later recalled, but also writing poetry, in German, whenever he had the time, energy, and presence of mind to do so—until the camp was liberated by Soviet troops in February 1944. He returned to Czernowitz, and then headed off for Bucharest in the back of a Red Army truck.

On the day the remaining Jews of Dresden were scheduled to be deported to Theresienstadt, Allied bombers reduced the city to rubble. The Klemperers survived the firebombing; as soon as the air raids stopped, they rushed to the center of the city, where they saw the smoldering ruin of the Gestapo headquarters. Klemperer ripped...