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“As for my alleged encodings” he said “I’d rather say:
undissembled ambiguity. I see my alleged abstractness
and actual ambiguity as moments of realism.” It seems
odd that a poet so keen – perhaps even desperate – to
reach across time, to provide us with such realism,
should do so by writing wilfully unreadable poems.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to assume it is the
poetry’s problem.
Professor John Carey of Oxford would disagree.
He is Britain’s foremost opponent of difficulty. In his
best-selling book The Intellectuals And The Masses,
he argues that Modernism – the epitome of difficulty –
was invented by intellectuals in order to alienate the socalled
masses, who, newly emancipated from illiteracy,
were seen as muddying the pure waters of literature.
Celan indicates other reasons. In fact, the “enjoyment”
Carey demands is really a means of retaining a dualistic
attitude to literature; of “talking eyes into blindness”, to
use Celan’s phrase. Of course, many Modernists were
proto-fascists, yet this doesn’t mean difficulty equals
Totalitarianism. It means, instead, a “crossing through
danger” is not mere rhetoric. The dangers led Heidegger
to his great error.
It troubled Celan that the man he saw as one of the
greatest of modern thinkers, so close to his own work,
was a Nazi. One cannot even say ‘had been a Nazi’
because he never said anything that amounted to a renunciation.
Late in life, Heidegger became interested in
BUY Paul Celan books online from and
Celan’s work. He recognised him as the only living equal
of Hölderlin. He attended public readings given by the
poet, and in 1967 even invited him to his famous Black
Forest retreat at Todtnauberg. Celan accepted. This was
a significant move as Celan had developed an intense
sensitivity (one might say ‘anxiety’) toward anti-Semitic
tendencies in post-war Europe. When his dedicated
publishers re-issued the work of a poet popular in the
Nazi years, he left for another, and when German literary
authorities exonerated him over plagiarism charges, he
regarded it as a humiliation to be even under investigation.
Yet here he was meeting a man in his most intimate
home, a home in which, it is said, he had once run Nazi
indoctrination sessions. Perhaps Celan never knew the
full extent of Heidegger’s culpability.
Generally, not much is known about Celan’s reasons
for accepting the invitation, nor what happened during
the visit, but very soon after Celan wrote a poem called
‘Todtnauberg’. The title reference is explicit; the place
name is synonymous with the philosopher. This is the
first half:
Arnica, eyebright,
the draft from the well
with the star-crowned die above it,
In
the hut,
156
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