Pathways to Paul Celan: A History of Critical Responses as a Chorus of Discordant Voices (review)

146 SHOFAR Spring 1998 Vol. 16, No.3 Pathways to Paul Celan: A History of Critical Responses as a Chorus of Discordant Voices, by Bianca Rosenthal. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. 239 pp. $47.95. Paul Celan is widely recognized as one ofthe great lyric poets ofthe twentieth century. He is also one ofthe most difficult. Much has been written about his "hermeticism" and his own remark that his work is not the least bit hermetic. In making that statement he may have been thinking exclusively in terms of the original meaning, sealed off, i.e., lacking connections with the world. In any event, his work is unquestionably hermetic in the popular sense of "difficult," and these "pathways," which do indeed make his work more accessible, are welcome. There are things about the book to criticize and I will briefly mention them here: there are too many typos; the bibliography is not complete, even for the works mentioned; the index is not complete; the use of German and English is inconsistent; and neat summaries sometimes turn into oversimplifications . But this is not a simplified introduction to Celano As the subtitle indicates, it is a substantial if admittedly selective account of his reception. Following a brief introduction, the first chapter traces the reception of the lyric poetry, from Mohn und Gediichtnis (1952) to the posthumous later works. Shorter chapters on the prose and the posthumously published early works then follow, before the longest chapter, "Mostly Academic Responses," a chronological survey ofCelan scholarship. The final chapter is aptly entitled "Epilogue: Celan and No End." A chronological bibliography of works discussed and an index ofnames conclude Rosenthal's book. Celan has been called many things. His first book "provoked epithets of surrealism." He came to be viewed primarily as a metapoet, an interpretation that is still prevalent: "the acceptance of the reflexivity ofCelan's language, and the understanding that his poetry's chiefcharacteristic was a search for a new language, have increasingly become topics ofCe1an criticism." Most recently he has become a Heideggerian. Born in 1920 of German-speaking Jewish parents in a Romanian city that had formerly belonged to the Austro-Hungarian empire, he has also been called an Austrian poet and a Jewish poet. Although the early "Todesfuge" ("Deathfugue"), still Celan's best-known work, is not only a poem after Auschwitz but also about Auschwitz, it was long considered the exception that proved the rule that Celan was not primarily a Jewish poet. A very few voices in the 1960s detected signs that Celan, who lost his parents in the Holocaust, remained profoundly influenced by "what happened" (as he laconically described the Nazi period). But the fact that Celan has no entry in the Encyclopedia Judaica (1971-72) more or less tells the story. As Rosenthal summarizes, however, "Shortly after Celan's death in 1970, the significance ofthe Jewish element in his poetry began to receive attention." More and more critics have seen the importance ofthe Holocaust in his writings, and as Rosenthal Book Reviews 147 states in her concluding chapter, in a rare assessment ofher own, "The specter of Jewish suffering is always present in his works." In 1969 Peter Mayer's dissertation, Paul Celan als jildischer Dichter (Paul Celan as a Jewish Poet), opened up much broader perspectives. This work stressed Celan's relation to the Jewish intellectual tradition, and was followed by studies emphasizing the poet's interest in (especially Jewish) mysticism. A number of recent critics have written about the poet's connections with Jewish intellectuals and artists such as Martin Buber and Nelly Sachs. Significantly, however, there are more references to Heidegger in Rosenthal's index (11) than to Sachs (6) or Buber (7). In her fmal chapter, Rosenthal returns to Celan's problematic relationship to Heidegger, cryptically concluding that "the elusive, hermetic lyrics of Paul Celan are by no means timeless," which I take to be a warning that however much Celan may have been fascinated by aspects of Heidegger's thought, Heidegger's Nazi past-and, by virtue of his refusal to confront it, his Nazi present-remained an enormous stumbling block. Is Celan about "poetry after Auschwitz" or, in the words of...