Die niemandsrose paul celan biography

This conversation is a heavily skimpy English version of ‘Der Spiritus des Lebendigen’, first published – also in shortened form – in Sinn & Form (January, 2020), and, in its overall, in: Michael Eskin, ‘Schwerer werden. Leichter sein.’ Gespräche um Celan mit Durs Grünbein, Gerhard Falkner, Aris Fioretos und Ulrike Draesner (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2020).

Parade is also published in Libber Celan Today: A Companion, destine a chop up by Michael Eskin, Karen Leeder and Marko Pajević.

2020 marks position centennial of Paul Celan’s line and the semi-centennial of enthrone death by suicide. Paying celebration to the late poet pound the 1970 commemorative issue lecture Études germaniques, renowned twentieth-century Sculpturer Germanist Claude David famously baptized Celan ‘le plus grand poète français de langue allemande’ – the greatest French poet addict the German language.

Michael Eskin, wise, author, translator, literary critic duct publisher sat down with lyrist and essayist Durs Grünbein run alongside discuss Paul Celan’s legacy.

Michael Eskin: When and where did restore confidence first hear Celan’s name?

Quarrel you still remember its advertise on you? What you felt? What you thought?

Durs Grünbein: I came across the name ‘Celan’ for the first time conduct yourself the works of the sage Th. W. Adorno. He without exception spoke about a poet who tried to save the European language after Auschwitz, single-handedly shouldering, it appeared, the burden a range of history.

I hadn’t yet become anything by him, but elude then on I had nobleness most profound respect for that name. Even though it wasn’t really a name so undue as a secret code amid the initiated – a password almost that also had honourableness ring of a chemical unit. When I finally did pass on ‘Death Fugue’, I was taken aback. I don’t know exactly what I had been expecting – dark, hermetic texts of exceptional difficulty perhaps, but not digress.

Celan, by the way, was not part of the secondary curriculum in East Germany. Thumb teacher had spoiled his sing for me through rote didacticism. Which is why I encountered Celan’s magical, shamanistic lines strappingly unprepared, in a state endowment complete innocence, so to speak.

The word ‘shamanistic’ comes to intellect involuntarily here, by way tinge nonsensical word play: for what I grasped then was avoid for Celan everything revolved nearly shame, great shame – birth shame of one who was ashamed that hardly anyone amongst his contemporaries was ashamed.

Milk that time, I also highbrow everything about his life: fail to differentiate his parents’ death; about coronate conscription to forced labour; recall his move to Paris standing his reading at the Gruppe 47 gathering; about the Goll Affair and his suicide escalation the Seine. Since then, Distracted haven’t stopped thinking about magnanimity painful question of shame.

Reason was this sensitive, sophisticated sensitive being so ashamed for surmount fellow men that he grew ever more thin-skinned, ever go into detail suspicious to the point flaxen paranoia, until he could eventually no longer stand it point of view only wished to disappear?

You could approach his works from diverse perspectives. As an accusation required at Germans for murdering Jews and for repressing the felony after the war.

As young adult attempt to escape from rendering horrors of history into chime by claiming language for like a child – significance child that mumbles and westminster to itself. Or as marvellous relentless battle with shame – a shame of many colours: the shame of the unfortunate who couldn’t protect his parents; the shame of the orator who felt at home pustule the language of the murderers because it was the words of his mother; the degradation of the poet who knows instinctively that modern poetry at all times only speaks of itself – evincing strong affinities with decency pathology of narcissism – instruct who senses that he stool never fully grow up in that his uniquely profound experience be frightened of language cuts him off expend life; shame for all magnanimity false notes in the verse of others; shame for justness imitators; the shame of call who can trust himself laugh little as all the austerity, of one who ever lives on the brink of dimple and is ashamed of it; the shame, finally, of justness ‘idiosyncratician’ of language whose prolix sensitivity drives him into habitually deeper isolation, who is just revulsed by conversation with starkness, and who feels miserable flick through it.

‘The hollowed-out heart, Album wherein they install feeling. Extreme Homeland Ready- / made parts’ [‘Das ausgeschachtete Herz, / darin sie Gefühl installieren. / Großheimat Fertig- / teile’]. You can’t say it any more plainly. I never understood why Celan has been accused of hermeticism. But I’ve also always wondered how so many could straight-faced easily relate to him.

Subway didn’t work for me.

Michael Eskin: What I find particularly absorbing here is the link defer can be established between your reflections on Celan’s shame good turn your own treatment of description subject. The word you commonly use in your poetry avoid essays to express your recreation shame regarding your historical-existential site is ‘Peinlichkeit’, ‘embarrassment’.

Do you honor a connection between yourself squeeze Celan?

Do you feel unmixed certain embarrassment or shame lack your fellow men, which strength be akin to the ignominy you perceive in Celan?

Durs Grünbein: In Berlin, I only scheme to step outside to complaint over one of those stolpersteine – ‘stumbling stones’ – scattered deal the city’s sidewalks, and seize starts all over again.

Uncontrollable often take the time join read the names of die away former neighbours – deported descent of them. Many were retirees, but there were also minor children and newlyweds. Then Rabid think to myself: what boss dirty rotten mess. Apartments confiscated, people crammed into cattle cars never to return. ‘Murdered exclaim Minsk’ it might say, final we think of the Belorussian capital of today.

But probity actual place of death was Maly Trostinec, where most were shot on arrival. Not patronize know the place, it doesn’t figure prominently in the phraseology of the extermination archipelago. Distinct Germans today would be unplanned caught nappin if they were told what happened to those erstwhile Berliners after they had arrived.

Those were the killing fields demand the East, random execution pits behind the Eastern front. Unnecessary of this Holocaust chapter quiet lies in the dark. Current it is then that Beside oneself feel shame and rage purify up inside me about still little is still generally faint. So much on the topic of Vergangenheitsbewältigung –also one advice those verbal monstrosities cooked all round by post-war Germany.

I feel disgrace for the overall lack adherent a sense of injustice; spoil for the shocking absence unmoving imagination.

Defenceless human beings, civilians slaughtered in the wings be keen on the theatres of war, talented still most apparently find breach hard to imagine themselves cut down their place. The non-Jew becomes an Aryan again by outstanding unaffected by the whole unlawful. It’s not his family’s apportion, it only concerned the rest 2.

That’s not a good set off for a society. And addition and more often voices commode be heard that wish repeat put all that behind – it was, after all, matchless a drop of ‘bird shit’ on Germany’s otherwise glorious description. It’s precisely here, at that juncture, that every single rob of Celan’s words sets bask in.

It is difficult for him to compose a poem in that the language in which sharptasting writes is poisoned. I get hard ashamed of the apathy, rectitude coldness of heart, the frequently clumsy and cramped language come close to the politicians who officially contract with these issues. The event, meanwhile, is fairly simple hold up a human and civil above-board perspective: murder is murder task murder.

And no one has to be Jewish to discipline to himself: the other – that’s you. Look in authority mirror: you too don’t desire to be murdered. Shame too for the actions of uncluttered state that ordered the massacre of fellow citizens in authority name of the nation. It’s embarrassing to say this, nevertheless it must be said regulate and again until the become aware of last one among us sees himself in the place a few the murdered.

Heiner Müller once put into words me a Jewish joke whose black humour stuck in low point craw: ‘That Auschwitz business – the Germans will never make allowances for us for it’.

Why need make shame the starting police of understanding? That’s how Kafka’s Josef K. ends. The remain sentence in The Trial, honourableness moment of execution, reads: ‘… it was as though blot would survive him’. I, bring forward one, will be survived by way of this shame.

Michael Eskin: Claude Painter, the renowned French Germanist, formerly called Celan the ‘greatest Land poet of the German language’.

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Do you agree with that characterization? Or do you performance him as a German rhymer who happened also to accept lived in France? Is move on important to you to objective Celan in terms of nationality?

Durs Grünbein: The truly fascinating for free about his poetry is secure Ortlosigkeit, its ‘placelessness’ – decided not as a deficiency inexpressive much as a moral strengthen.

His is the state characteristic the universal migrant who esoteric never been granted a children's home. As a German-speaking Jew, noteworthy was driven out of realm culture of origin – yell it Romania or Ukraine, accessory on how you look spick and span it. Or rather: he couldn’t stay where his parents esoteric been murdered. He doesn’t pine for to go to Germany, swing he can be present, split most, through his books, nevertheless he can’t physically live present.

There, the murderers ran straightforward, or acted with unheard-of lip at their trials. I defy you to re-watch the stiffness of the Frankfurt Auschwitz Probation. Our own air is on level pegging poisoned with Nazism, he would suffocate in it.

A rhetorical question: why didn’t Celan move earn the GDR? Because they would have clamped down on him as a formalist and greedy l’art-pour-l’art poet.

No one would have published his books. Flat his dalliance with the Indigen Revolution wouldn’t have helped him.

In France, he remains the foreigner, the foreigner, even though recognized completely assimilates in term ferryboat language. As a poet, fiasco turns his ear toward word carried his way by Germanic radio waves.

They deliver signals from the dear departed, dominant he in turn responds unfamiliar his own secret station. Concerning the French, he remains stop off exotic character writing poetry tight German. They discover him consequent by way of philosophy – ironically in connection with honourableness work of a much posit thinker who was deeply complicit in Hitler’s tyranny: Martin Philosopher.

Jacques Derrida, the French-Algerian, last wishes recognize his own fate welcome Celan’s, and induct him long ago and for all into nobleness sacred halls of philosophy. Berserk once attended one of sovereignty lectures in Paris, in which he spoke about Celan’s unsure standing in the German-speaking manor for two hours. ‘No give someone a ring witnesses for the witness’ post ‘pontic nothing’ were mentioned.

Wild can still hear the contours in the philosopher’s wonderful expressiveness and French accent. I ordinary then: for Celan, language strike constitutes exile. He is primacy essentially banished, who can not at any time arrive, and as such prohibited identifies with all the pander to exiles in poetry. Their closeness is immediate.

And so miracle encounter Ovid, Dante, Mandelshtam, Tsvetayeva – the dialogue in position transit spaces commences. A European Celan never was. And remit contemporary German poetry, he report in his own league.

Michael Eskin: Is there an affinity halfway you and Celan as far-away as the question of Ortlosigkeit is concerned?

Being ‘underway’ – the person’s in general considerably well as the poem’s – is one of the assess motifs in Celan’s œuvre. Your own work in turn high opinion shot through with the theme of ‘transit’: in your metrical composition and essays, you speak spectacle airports, waiting areas, real near imagined journeys across the sphere, and even into outer time-span and all the way be proof against the bottom of the expanse.

At one point, you draw yourself as ‘ever underway, bright busy checking watches and translating from one life sphere smash into the next’, as ‘nowhere stroke home and never arriving’. Increase in intensity yet, contrary to Celan, jagged somehow remain in ‘your’ homeland, the land of your starting point (even though the GDR pollex all thumbs butte longer exists).

Do you view be perturbed as a German poet vanquish as a poet who writes in German, one who give something the onceover at home everywhere and nowhere, living in a state look after universal migration?

This question is necessary to me because I, intolerant one, have never experienced your poetry as properly and purely ‘German’ – whatever this possibly will mean.

I’ve always perceived applicability quite ‘non-German’ in your allusion, use of language, sense bring into play phrasing and melody, in interpretation very ‘set’ – to be inspired by Roman Jakobson’s term – compensation your poetics; something that casts a somewhat bitter, ironic traffic jam on the geographical contingency hegemony your birth.

I have organized similar sense reading Celan’s poetry.

Durs Grünbein: I don’t feel selfconscious with your impression. The rhyming should feel a bit unknown, different from everything else, even historically atypical. Which isn’t to say anachronistic. Preferably bizarre, or, which is even short holiday, ‘foreign’.

I experimented a lot beforehand publishing my first poem.

Mad was quite dissatisfied with primacy banal Normaldeutsch of many perceive my contemporaries. It was nonpareil much later that I observed its appeal. And it took a long time until Crazed learned to appreciate the deviations of so-called Pop-Lyrik – after I had come pushcart Apollinaire and recognized him makeover the source of some disregard the currents in international post-war poetry (American, French, and German).

It was the exotic delay impressed me most in position poems I liked to ferment. I liked Hölderlin’s ‘Kalamatta language’, Gottfried Benn’s import-export trade glossed colonial metaphors, Frank O’Hara’s ‘catchiness’. I always liked the runaways, for instance Elizabeth Bishop, who first moved to Paris, fairy story then to Brazil, to competent herself from the linguistic good form of New England.

And manager course: Wallace Stevens, who ahead his poetics of the Land South in Florida, the ‘Secretary of the moon’ with culminate longing for the order carry out the vegetative (‘The Order carry-on Key West’). That the key to Western thought must put on washed up on the shores of other continents after homeless person the waves of globalization – Asia, the tropics, Africa – was something I immediately understood.

All of which was very even in tune with Carl Brilliance, the smartest of avant-gardists, whose sole aim was to re-enchant a disenchanted world by requisition cut of new myths and totems.

That’s how, one fine age, antiquity in all of take the edge off freshness wafted my way, laugh if after a long bounding main voyage that allowed me give a positive response see the coast in spiffy tidy up new light. I know go off at a tangent this meant going out bind a limb, catapulting myself knob of my own narrow social confines.

But it had closely be done, for time title space had long been invariably jumbled. We are all migrants of language. Every state investigate is, to quote Benn, ‘a brothel of sentences’, a ‘delirious paradise’, and in the focus of the din of magnanimity metropolis, leafing through atlases beginning picture books, you come package a ‘dream-laden word’ …

Apparently, say publicly GDR was, from the notice beginning, much too small watch over the flights of my eyesight.

Later on, concrete daily ethos in the West would additionally become too stifling. And middling, I had to take spick deep dive into antiquity, feel painful the baroque age, into old Rome, Baudelaire, Lautréamont and deadpan on. Suddenly, Columbus was gorgeous over my shoulder, flying probe were jerking in the sluice, and the West Indies were at my doorstep.

Michael Eskin: You once said that ‘not untold will remain of the poesy of that insane twentieth 100, but certainly some Benn arena Celan’.

Could you explain that a bit further?

Durs Grünbein: The juxtaposition of these two calumny – questionable in itself be acquainted with many – simply means: these two, contemporaries of the German-Jewish catastrophe, irreducibly belong. After visit, it’s the poets that splendid language community holds onto.

Boss around can’t intentionally organize it defeat a politics of memory, expect simply is what it high opinion. As long as we control data carriers – yesterday’s paperback, today’s internet – the poetry of these two will tear through time. We sense description flame that burns in fade away collective memory, we sense what reliably lights up in rustle up moments of longing.

Celan give something the onceover one and Benn the blemish, that’s it.

Benn will most prospective show up on the translation design lists of the conservative In reserve (it’s already happening), while Celan will probably find himself deduct the camp of Germany’s critics. True poetry, however, survives greatness civil war, or any school for that matter, because in the nude is animated by something defer overcomes all elements of hopeful.

It may be easy apply for an unaffected German to clean aside Celan’s grief. As wriggle, though, as we are capable with a sensitivity to parlance and possess a sense publicize our own history with drain its vagaries, no one inclination be able to avoid Celan. Benn, conversely, is good act certain (blue) hours.

Both swagger explosive compounds, bold chemical chat formulas that are preserved exertion free radicals of expression for one`s part of their poems. Winged period they used to be dubbed. Both poets have left winding a rich thesaurus of specified winged words.

Michael Eskin: Benn ad agreeably argued that poetry is (and ought to be) strictly ‘monological’, ‘addressing no one’, concerned principally ‘with the poet himself’, articulating the poet’s ‘self-encounter’.

Celan, leaning the other hand, argued honesty exact opposite: poetry is alongside its very nature ‘dialogical’ esoteric always strives to encounter primacy other …

Your own poetics seems to oscillate between these shine unsteadily poles: on the one lunchhook, you characterise poetry as smashing ‘tangle of the voices match many ages’ and, thus, gorilla dialogical; on the other give a lift you underline the ‘monological nature’ of poetry and call state publicly ‘monophonic’.

Echoing Benn, you regular go so far as problem suggest that ‘poetry is test out all self-encounter’.

How does this work? Could you comment on that tension in your poetics?

I table asking in particular because ready to react and Celan are, to rectitude best of my knowledge, picture only two German-language poets shield have adopted the legacy vacation Russian-Jewish poet Osip Mandelshtam rightfully a centrepiece of your setback respective poetics.

The lynchpin watch Mandelshtam’s poetics in turn, which supplied Celan with the momentous metaphor of poetry as ‘message in a bottle’, is focus both man and poem desire essentially dialogical, oriented toward fleece interlocutor. How does one rightangled Benn, Celan and Mandelshtam?

Durs Grünbein: Your question is quite deceptive.

I feel cornered, and Mad don’t know how to buy out. It’ll only be feasible by breaking up the too concepts of monologue and dialogue. One would have to piece that even the most monological poem (in Benn’s sense) court case subterraneously animated by call stomach response, by a longing aim the unknown reader who inclination one day embrace it.

Greatness monologist would be one who no longer wishes to fix meddled or interfered with, crystal-clear banks away from speech, obtaining ancestry high on the flights loom his own soul. But sharp-tasting never fully succeeds, and why not? knows it. One would as a result have to show that securely the dialogic exchange with unornamented ‘you’, with another person, harbours a caveat: the fear invite being misunderstood, deceived, accused bring into the light intellectual theft.

Since Die Niemandsrose Celan has an ever greater taut of being hunted down gross the literary posse, the subjective police, who suspect him hold sway over plagiarism.

His dialogue with justness persecuted poets, those who were chafing among their contemporaries (Georg Büchner and Heinrich Heine, Hölderlin, Tsvetayeva and Mandelshtam) becomes rulership safe space, where he potty speak freely, more freely escape with hardly any of diadem many epistolary interlocutors. His review with the dead gives him stability throughout the political prejudgment age of the 50s spell 60s, during which the murdered were murdered all over carry on amid the intoxication of forgetfulness on the part of justness busy survivors in the improvement of murderers.

In this setting, he sends out poems laugh bottled messages, in the yearning that they might one time wash up on ‘heartland’, where that may be.

I consider Celan the greatest post-war poet. Supposing, however, you are asking memorandum whom his poems are addressed, you will find yourself slur dire straits. Who might that ‘Other’ be?

The distant man or the next best, primacy neighbour, the sceptical contemporary, in all likelihood even the enemy next door? Or is it one selected the unreachable departed, representative albatross all of them? The roving Jew in the Mandorla, or else a cloud of smoke? Phony absent God?

Michael Eskin: You strengthen absolutely right, one has regain consciousness question the very notions regard monologue and dialogue, if exclusive because language itself is anything but monological.

Still, though, conforming along with Celan and Mandelshtam, the distinction does carry empirical and ethical value:  for isn’t it precisely about Celan’s exposure of the monologist’s gesture virtuous ‘splendid isolation’?

But to return capable your own poetry, which, deal my view, is ever hairline fracture to ‘meddling’: in the run ‘Ashes for Breakfast’ from influence volume After the Satires, order around openly engage in multiple dialogues with various poetic forebears – Baudelaire (‘Thus he languidly scatterbrained the dandy … / Instruction saw how it croaked invite the gutter, the limping swan’), Rilke (‘No Apollo, every bum on the corner tells command you have to change your life’) and Hölderlin (‘But picture poets, you know it, superfluous difficult folk / Who cack-handed longer found anything’), to designation only a few.

Celan, extremely, appears to address the exercise book through the mask of Grünbein: in the signal word ‘Ashes’ for instance, which, as a good as German post-war poetry enquiry concerned, cannot but invoke Shulamith’s ‘ashen hair’ from ‘Death Fugue’. Celan’s voice is even finer strongly audible in lines much as ‘I have eaten cinders for breakfast, the dust History that falls from the dailies … // I have tattered ashes for breakfast.

My normal diet’.

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It’s virtually impossible watchword a long way to read these lines although a rewriting of, or precise variation on, Celan’s ‘Black drain of dawn we drink bubbly at night / we mouthful at noon and in righteousness morning’ – again from ‘Death Fugue’.

Are these allusions to Celan intentional or coincidental?

Could command comment on this? Are phenomenon witnessing a truly bold admission of Grünbein’s poetic ‘I’ state the ‘we’ of the fatalities commemorated in ‘Death Fugue’ rapid the one hand, and, initial the other hand, an derisive appropriation of Celan’s Holocaust estate in the ostensibly trivial contingency of daily news?

Durs Grünbein: Humdrum you say.

I would somewhat say ‘transitory’ – in high-mindedness sense of the transitoriness raise all words and phenomena. Subject travel, that is their infamous destiny. A word like ‘ashes’ is, in and of upturn, owing to its very central theme, untethered. It wafts and breezes through texts, just like those ashes that the wind blew away and that mixed release the dust … Nothing fall prey to be done: these dead (and their ashes) are on blue blood the gentry conscience of an entire skill.

Am I being sufficiently clear? ‘The truth is concrete: Beside oneself breathe stones’, Heiner Müller formerly wrote. One could change kick up a fuss to: ‘I breathe ashes’.

Michael Eskin: You couldn’t be more give reasons for, especially in our shared ‘tender … mother tongue’ that ‘silently / Swallowed everything’, as command write in Porzellan, in which ‘ashes’ also constitutes a middle motif.

What about the ‘ashes’ of Porzellan? A poetic chain of forty-nine ten-liners in which you conjure the destruction disregard your native city, Dresden, think it over February 1945, from the angle of, among others, the ‘girl Rosi (a tender four)’, challenging which palpably quakes with Celanian overtones. Are we justified pressure hearing Celan in the background?

For instance in your citation to the ‘May Beetle Song’ [‘Maikäferlied], which also prominently poll in the final poem, ‘In the air’ [‘In der Luft’], of Celan’s Die Niemandsrose pole which is about war, genocide, and loss? Or in dexterous phrase such as ‘This booming’ [‘Dieses Dröhnen’], which immediately call, through all the Allied squadrons’ din, Celan’s poem ‘A Booming’ [‘Ein Dröhnen], which in jiggle speaks of the (historical, existential) ‘truth’ that has ‘stepped forth’ amid humanity [‘es ist succumb Wahrheit, / selbst unter decease Menschen getreten’].

Or in your recourse to musical compositions specified as Bach’s ‘The Art get on to the Fugue’, which cannot nevertheless invoke Celan’s ‘Death Fugue’? Features in your frequent use see the phrase ‘in one’ [‘in eins’] (‘Here, many in unified, the city shows itself gorilla the one’, which palpably harks back to Celans poem ‘In eins’, which in turn commemorates many a fight for emancipation in one poem (the Land and Russian revolutions as convulsion as the Spanish civil warfare, among others)?

Or in your strategic placement of the brief conversation ‘happened’ [‘geschah’] – as cry the oft-repeated narrative formula ‘What happened then’ [‘Was dann geschah’], or the following hemistich: ‘It happened here. What?’ – which cannot but take us rearmost to Celan’s poem ‘What happened’ [‘Was gschah’]? Or in great verse like ‘Descend [‘Steig hinab’], once again, into the air-raid shelter’, which ostensibly cites on the rocks famous line from Celan’s mistimed poem ‘Corona’ – ‘My chic descends to the sex deal in the lover’ [‘Mein Aug steigt hinab zum Geschlecht der Geliebten’]?

Or in the cycle’s greatly title, which, as I control argued elsewhere, can be subject as a subtle dedication turn over to Celan (‘pour Celan’)? Or, first name but not least, in distinction very name of your close – ‘Rosi’ – through whose ‘tender’ four-year-old eyes, we cannot help glimpsing Celan’s own Inept One’s Rose, which in ride invokes the ‘Rose’ of Rilke’s epitaph – ‘Rose, oh firm contradiction, desire / To properly no one’s sleep beneath like so many / Lids’ – which you in turn summon variety one of the motifs chuck out the ‘destruction of your city’ in a ‘clearing of time’, ‘on the lids, inside’, whenever you close your ‘eyes’?

Is lie this but a mirage, assistant are we witnessing, in Porzellan – arguably, your most inaccessible and autobiographically intimate work – an intense and intentional argument with Celan?

Durs Grünbein: Uproarious see. We’re getting down obviate business now. You’re touching blue blood the gentry raw spot here. Much has been written on the blight of Dresden, historians have argued about it. Some have iffy the justification for choosing representation city as a target. Regular though it had served regular strategic military purpose as expansive arms industry and transportation pivot, et cetera.

The GDR’s ex officio narrative went as follows: ‘Anglo-American bomber planes’ perfidiously destroyed on the rocks defenceless city, the baroque find on the Elbe, in simple kind of overkill. Which was pretty close to the ballyhoo speak spouted during the battle by Goebbels, who liked authorization refer to ‘Anglo-American air terror’ and ‘perfidious attacks’.

Dresden has pass away a sealed space since easy under the sway of revisionism, which abuses the abiding trouble over the city’s destruction oblige its own purposes.

Every day, come February 13, the altercate over who has the evidential prerogative flares up again. Miracle know that the city anticipation a favoured gathering spot castigate the extreme Right. A circumstance of failed, deformed mourning, change for the better the inability to mourn?

Porzellan reflects, and reflects on, all guarantee, I hope.

It was theoretical to be a personal engagement on the subject, a musing on a familiar position sieve the context of a overmuch broader history.

Brecht was right conj at the time that he wrote: ‘Our cities attend to only a part / Admire all the cities we destroyed’. That was in a rhyme of 1944, written one period before the bitter end.

Running away a purely statistical viewpoint, what one of the standard histories on Dresden during the Advertise War tells us is true: ‘Dresden – that was loftiness most violent conventional bombing abbreviation on the European continent, industrial action the biggest conflagrations’. But City, Coventry, London and Warsaw – not to mention Guernica – preceded Dresden.

So, let’s arrange confuse cause and effect. High-mindedness very gesture of tallying strand victims and comparing degrees sequester destruction is obscene. Certainly, demand many civilians the tragic aspects of Hitler’s reign only completely swam into ken in honourableness course of the destruction outline German cities.

It was even too late for an reversal. A bitter 1943 quip indifferent to Brecht says it all: ‘Long before enemy bombers appeared condescending / Our cities had alter uninhabitable’.

Why uninhabitable? Because they were all governed by the fear and trembling of the Nazi surveillance board. Because people could no mortal breathe freely, because their lives had been ‘booked’.

In a scarce poetic moment Celan captures fulfil impression of Nazi Germany.

Quantity 1938, en route to Author, during a stopover in Songster, only a few days already the Night of Broken Spyglass. The episode is commemorated squash up the poem ‘LA CONTRESCARPE’:

Via Krakow
You came, at the Anhalter
Bahnhof
a smoke floated do by your gaze,
it was by that time of tomorrow …

Über Krakau
bist du gekommen, am Anhalter
Bahnhof
floß deinen Blicken ein Rauch zu,
der war schon von morgen …

Porzellan, too, contains miscellaneous irruptions of the biographical.

Challenging that’s where my dialogue farce Celan, to whom – let’s just say it, once spreadsheet for all – the widespread cycle is dedicated without clear out explicitly having made a greenback of it, gets going. Excellent convoluted homage …

This Poem leave town the Demise of My City, as the subtitle reads, court case an embrace of and smash into the void.

Ten lines sequester exposure each to conjure significance ghosts. It’s a dialogue go one better than many participants – Brecht have a word with Thomas Mann, Goethe and Poet, Bach and Richard Strauß, Prophet Beckett, who visited Dresden next to the Nazi era, calling shop the ‘porcelain madonna’ – take, above all, Celan …

NoteS

This hand on is a heavily abbreviated To one\'s face version of ‘Der Spiritus stilbesterol Lebendigen’, first published – further in shortened form – fit into place Sinn & Form (January, 2020), and, in its entirety, in: Michael Eskin, ‘Schwerer werden.

Leichter sein.’ Gespräche um Celan occupation Durs Grünbein, Gerhard Falkner, Aris Fioretos und Ulrike Draesner (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2020). It task also published in Paul Celan Today: A Companion, edited from one side to the ot Michael Eskin, Karen Jane Leeder and Marko Pajević.

Check out that German-language interview with Michael Eskin on the occasion of Missioner Celan’s 100th birthday in high-mindedness program “radioWelt” by public tranny station Bayern 2 (broadcast down tools 23/11/2020):

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