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and meaning rise like a tide out of language to carry
individual utterance away upon a current stronger and
deeper that the individual could have anticipated.”
(Note the pervasive river theme!)
He then goes on to examine how Plath developed her
poetry yet never moved beyond “the dominant theme
of self-discovery and self-definition”. Nowadays, of
course, that theme is enough to launch 10,000 poems
beginning with “I”. But what does moving beyond
this theme mean? Celan was ambivalent, to say the
least, about that rising tide out of language. Indeed,
it caused him to lose trust in his most famous poem,
‘Deathfugue’. This is how that poem ends; the subject,
you will notice, is explicit:
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany
we drink you at sundown and in the morning we
drink and we
drink you
death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue
he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his pack on us he grants us a grave in the air
he plays with the serpents and daydreams death is a
master from
Germany
your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith
(trans. Michael Hamburger)
BUY Paul Celan books online from and
If any help is needed, the line “a grave in the air”
can be read as the smoke rising from the camp chimneys;
plain fact as much as metaphor. Overall, the
poem emerged from reports of small Jewish orchestras
playing tangos within concentration camp fences,
often accompanying gravedigging and executions. The
poem mimics the pace and rhythm of the dance that
had captivated carefree Europe between the wars. Its
first title was indeed ‘Death Tango’. In placing such
lightness within the realm of such darkness, an entire
culture is incriminated. The change to ‘Deathfugue’
recalls the divine lightness of Bach, while “Margarete”
alludes to the tragic heroine in Goethe’s Faust, forgiven
by God despite everything. (It is a bizarre but telling
fact that Goethe’s famous oak tree outside Weimar was
protected by the SS as the Buchenwald concentration
camp went up around it.) Margarete is contrasted with
Shulamith, the female symbol of Jewish hope in the
Song Of Solomon, who is not forgiven.
In post-war Germany the poem became part of the
curriculum for schools and was acclaimed by numerous
critics in the new Federal Republic. However, praise
tended to be for what was called the poem’s “mastery”
of what had passed – the Holocaust; enabling a rec-
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