“Todesfuge” and “Todtnauberg”
IN 1967, the Jewish poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan visited Martin Heidegger’s famous ski hut in the heart of Germany’s Black Forest. It was there that, forty years earlier, the German philosopher had written Being and Time, one of the milestones of twentieth-century existentialism.1 For the Heideggerian faithful, the tiny cabin still functions as an obligatory pilgrimage site. A day earlier, Celan had delivered a reading to an overflow crowd at Freiburg University. When poet and philosopher met for the first time following the reading, a journalist suggested that they pose together for a photograph. Celan demurred. Heidegger’s Nazi past stood in the way. After all, the philosopher had never publicly distanced himself from his political misdeeds. Though Celan admired Heidegger’s philosophy, he was not about to provide the philosopher with the political absolution he so desperately sought. Celan biographer John Felstiner has glossed the situation as follows: “It is clear that an encounter with the man who under Hitler was Rector at Freiburg in 1933–34, who in 1935 declared Nazism’s ‘inner truth and greatness,’ who in 1936 still signed his letters Heil Hitler!, had his classes give the salute, and sported a swastika pin, and who paid party dues until 1945—an encounter with this man had to be fraught, especially given Heidegger’s silence about it all since the war.”2
In the poem “Todtnauberg”—after the site of Heidegger’s hut—Celan recalls how he signed the cabin log book with “hope of a thinking man’s coming word in the heart”—a word of contrition. But his hopes met with stony silence. From the philosopher’s lips came no words of remorse. To add further irony to an already tense situation, Tod is the German word for death, and “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”) is the poem that, following the war, catapulted Celan to international literary renown.
Toward the end of the poem, Celan, a former concentration camp inmate, makes a portentous declaration: “Death Is a Master from Germany.”3 They are by far the most quoted words of Celan’s luminous oeuvre. The poem’s remarkable opening lines bear citing:
Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening
We drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night
We drink and we drink
We shovel a grave in the air there you won’t lie too cramped
Undoubtedly, the linguistic overlap between “Todesfuge” and the name of the ex-Nazi Heidegger’s mountain retreat proved unsettling to the world-weary poet. The composition of “Todtnauberg” must have stood as the negative confirmation of a lifetime of experience. Like so many Central European Jews, Celan, who hailed from Bukovina, Rumania, had as a youth vigorously imbibed German cultural traditions. He viewed Germany, as did Heidegger, as a nation of Dichter und Denker—a nation of writers and thinkers. It was the land of Geist and Bildung, a culture that prided itself on the values of spiritual inwardness and the tasks of self-cultivation. It was the nation of Goethe, Schiller, and Hölderlin—poets who, during the epoch of German classicism, elevated native German traditions to the rank of world literature. In her famous treatise De l’Allemagne (1809), Madame de Staël could, following two decades of war and revolution, chastise her countrymen for not being more like the Germans; for while the French were preoccupied with all manner of political excess, including the folly of world conquest, the Germans had produced a literary efflorescence unequaled since the days of classical antiquity.
How, though, were writers and thinkers of German-Jewish provenance to reconcile their biographical allegiances to German culture with the grim horrors those traditions had yielded a little more than a century later? This was the problem Celan confronted time and again in his poetry. It also forms one of the essential leitmotifs of Heidegger’s Children: the way in which Heidegger’s most gifted students—many of whom were Jewish—strove to confront their profound indebtedness to German intellectual traditions given the obscene uses to which those traditions had been put during the Nazi era. There can be no doubting the fact, moreover, that the misbegotten marriage between Nazism and Kultur was actively encouraged by the mandarin professorate, which quite frankly saw the regime as a golden opportunity to put paid to the chaos of the “liberal system” and reassert the value of authentic German traditions.4
In Celan’s case, the dilemma of which strands of German culture had been contaminated and which ones had survived relatively unscathed manifested itself as much in the formal structure of his poetry—abrupt disjunctions and tortured neologisms—as in its content per se. In the manner of a postapocalyptic bricoleur, Celan attempted to wrest consolation and meaning from a language that had been used for unspeakably reprehensible purposes. It was a theme that must have been in the forefront of his thoughts during his visit to Heidegger’s Schwarzwald lair when, during his audience with the German sage—the heir apparent to the literary traditions Celan revered—he waited with “hope of a thinking man’s coming word” for a gesture of reconciliation that never materialized.
Like so many Germans of his generation, Heidegger never engaged in a serious attempt to work though the sins of the German past. In this respect, he certainly didn’t make the task of his Jewish “children”—several of whom implored him in the postwar period to make a public and forthright break with those dalliances and flirtations during the Nazi era that continued to mar his reputation—any easier.5 Instead, in those relatively few passages of his immense corpus where he condescends to address the horrors of the war the Nazis had unleashed, one finds only evasions and rationalizations—as in the lecture from the late 1940s in which Heidegger tastelessly equates “the manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers” with “mechanized agriculture.”6
Three years following his disappointing encounter with Heidegger, Celan met with a fate that was sadly all too familiar to Holocaust survivors: he took his own life by drowning himself in the Seine.