German and European Poetics after the Holocaust: Crisis and Creativity (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

German and European Poetics after the Holocaust Crisis and Creativity

Edited by

Gert Hofmann , Rachel MagShamhráin , ´ , and Michael Shields Marko PajeviC

German and European Poetics after the Holocaust

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Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture

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German and European Poetics after the Holocaust Crisis and Creativity Edited by Gert Hofmann, Rachel MagShamhráin, Marko Pajević, and Michael Shields

Rochester, New York

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Copyright © 2011 by the Editors and Contributors All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2011 by Camden House Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA www.camden-house.com and of Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN-13: 978-1-57113-290-1 ISBN-10: 1-57113-290-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data German and European poetics after the Holocaust: crisis and creativity / edited by Gert Hofmann . . . [et al.]. p. cm. — (Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-57113-290-1 (acid-free paper) ISBN-10: 1-57113-290-2 (acid-free paper) 1. German poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Poetics— History—20th century. 3. European poetry—20th century—History and criticism. I. Hofmann, Gert, 1958– II. Title. III. Series. PT553.G48 2011 831'.91409—dc22 2010048211 This publication is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America. Cover image: The Denkmal zur Erinnerung an die Bücherverbrennung (Monument in Remembrance of the Book Burning) on the Bebelplatz, Berlin. Photograph by and courtesy of Tina Stephan.

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Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Gert Hofmann, Rachel MagShamhráin, Marko Pajević, and Michael Shields

vii 1

Part I: Poetics after Auschwitz 1: The Poetics of Silence: Nelly Sachs Elaine Martin

19

2: “Flaschenpost” and “Wurfholz”: Reflections on Paul Celan’s Poems and Poetics Gisela Dischner

35

3: History and Nature in Motion: Paradigms of Transformation in the Postwar Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann Marton Marko

53

4: Mourning as Remembrance: Writing as Figuration and Defiguration in the Poetry of Rose Ausländer Annette Runte

69

5: On the Fringes: Mistrust as Commitment in the Poetics of Ilse Aichinger Marko Pajević

88

6: Nazi Terror and the Poetical Potential of Dreams: Charlotte Beradt’s Das Dritte Reich des Traums Hans-Walter Schmidt-Hannisa

107

Part II: Tradition and Transgression 7: Between Kahlschlag and New Sensibilities: Notes toward a Poetics of Thought after Gottfried Benn Rüdiger Görner

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8: “Barely explicable power of the word, that separates and conjoins”: Gottfried Benn’s Problems of Poetry and Its Poetology of Existence Stefan Hajduk

137

9: Concrete Poetry Chris Bezzel

158

10: Heiner Müller: Discontinuity and Transgression Renata Plaice

170

11: Let’s Begin, Again: History, Intertext, and Rupture in Heiner Müller’s Germania Cycle Barry Murnane

180

12: Rupture, Tradition, and Achievement in Thomas Kling’s Poetics and Poetry Aniela Knoblich

200

Part III: Comparative Explorations in European Poetics 13: Sartre and His Literary Alter Ego Mathieu in Les Chemins de la liberté (1938–49): From the Roads to an Abstract Freedom to the Roads of Authenticity Manuel Bragança

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14: André Malraux and Oswald Spengler: The Poetics of Metamorphosis Peter Tame

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15: Freud’s Brain in the Snow: Catastrophe and Creativity in the Poetics of Danilo Kiš Tatjana Petzer

253

16: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and the Aesthetics of Ohnmacht Gert Hofmann

267

Works Cited

273

Notes on the Contributors

295

Index

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Acknowledgments

T

HE EDITORS WOULD LIKE TO THANK Queen’s University Belfast and the Centre de Recherches sur l’Allemagne et l’Autriche (CR2A) of the University of Rouen for their generous financial support of this publication.

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Introduction

I

N THIS SIXTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY YEAR of the end of the Second World War and the liberation of Auschwitz, we are fast approaching the eightdecade death-knell for all “lebendige Erinnerung”1 (living, or communicative, memory) of the Nazi genocide. It would seem, then, that we have reached another critical milestone on our path backward into the future. As the last witnesses, survivors, and perpetrators pass out of real time, the imperative of Holocaust remembrance and attendant conundrum of how to express that re-presented past, seems to be entering a new and particularly perilous phase, one that will soon be exclusively characterized by “post-memory,” to borrow Marianne Hirsch’s term.2 The idea of a dawning age of post-remembrance is associated for many with a terrible sense of urgency, fueled by the idea that such a transition may take us a step nearer to a coming time of complete erasure. The act of remembrance is now engaged in a “race against time,”3 requiring such massive interventions as, for example, the Survivors of the Holocaust Visual History Foundation, which aims to record and archive on film and in aeternum the memories of all remaining Holocaust survivors. So, nearly seven decades after the “break” of 1945, another major sense of caesura has come upon us, arguably even more radical than that first Zero Hour. With this sense of an impending end comes the sense that returns, recall, and representations are needed now more than ever. The awareness of the coming break prompts us also to revisit with renewed vigor old debates of total, partial, and impartial recall, and discussions of the hows, ifs, and shoulds of Holocaust testimony, representation, and rememoration, not to mention the question of the proper and improper reception of the resulting cultural material in a consumer age. In this sense, the aesthetic and theoretical debates of this volume are particularly timely. It would, however, be a mistake, despite the attractiveness of neat periodizations and of clear beginnings, endings, and breaks, to see them as something new. After all, one of the most revisited diagnoses of the postwar cultural period is Theodor W. Adorno’s statement of statements announcing the barbarity of the poem after Auschwitz. Apparently inexhaustible, it has given rise to some sixty years of reinterpretation (and of course misinterpretation). As such, our anxious returns to the Holocaust debates of the past may be restoked by, but are certainly not unique to, the advent of a post-memory period. The contributions to the current volume are merely the latest realizations of an on-going struggle

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with the issue of the present’s representation of, its relationship, and its duties toward the past, a struggle that is revealed in all its complexity in the context of the Holocaust. One of the most pressing difficulties with which the fault line between past and present confronts us in the case of post-Holocaust poetics is how to resist and replace the lingua (et cultura) tertii imperii, which, in Adorno’s and others’ eyes, constitute the heart of darkness of the entire modern European Enlightenment project.4 All post-Holocaust writing must return, and defy oblivion, and yet it must perform this while resisting what Ernst Cassirer called the Enlightenment’s restitutio in integrum, too perfect a return.5 Initially, it was Adorno’s famous dictum that unleashed (mainly in Germany) both the ethical and the aesthetic discourse on the conditions of possibility for the survival of literature, culture, and humanity after the Holocaust, which eventually transmuted, on the global stage, into the terminologically more focused discourse about the (negative) principles of Holocaust representation6 and remembrance,7 in the context of the historical event of total annihilation as a traumatizing8 factum brutum that paralyses every attempt at conceptualization.9 Adorno’s dictum is a categorical verdict against the continuation of any traditional cultural practice after the Holocaust, using “Gedicht” (poem) and “Kulturkritik” (cultural criticism) only as examples of the most advanced and therefore most striking productive or cognitive modes of cultural discourse as a whole: Kulturkritik findet sich der letzten Stufe der Dialektik von Kultur und Barbarei gegenüber: nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch, und das frißt auch die Erkenntnis an, die ausspricht, warum es unmöglich ward, heute Gedichte zu schreiben.10 [Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today.11]

Having articulated his view for the first time in 1951 in a Festschrift for Leopold Wiese,12 Adorno differentiated, but also radicalized his position significantly during the following two decades,13 intensifying the ontological apodicticity of his rhetoric. It is the triumphant attitude of culture, its ignorant and pretentious aspiration to represent sublimity, that ultimately proves its failure: Sie perhorresziert den Gestank, weil sie stinkt, weil ihr Palast, wie es an einer großartigen Stelle von Brecht heißt, gebaut ist aus Hundescheiße. Jahre später als jene Stelle geschrieben ward, hat Auschwitz

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das Mißlingen der Kultur unwiderleglich bewiesen. . . . Alle Kultur nach Auschwitz, samt der dringlichen Kritik daran, ist Müll.14 [It abhors stench because it stinks  — because, as Brecht put it in a magnificent line, its mansion is built of dogshit. Years after that line was written, Auschwitz demonstrated irrefutably that culture has failed. . . . All post-Auschwitz culture, including its urgent critique, is garbage.15]

This is arguably the bluntest version of Adorno’s dictum, taken from his magnum opus Negative Dialektik, published in 1966. This formulation uses all available rhetorical and literary means to reinforce its claim to irrefutability, utterly defying any attempt at reinterpretation in a mitigating or relativizing register. At the same time, the uncompromising negation of culture in its historical entirety prepares and necessitates a final and paradoxical shift out of Adorno’s sociological thought, and into an ethical debate about the pre-societal sediments of the human condition. This means taking a step beyond the societal range of his critical theory and its dialectic tool of “ideology criticism” into a state of basic awareness of the omnipresence of physical suffering ignored by the critique of culture and ideology, an awareness that requires a “new categorical imperative” as a precondition for any possible cultural or intellectual discourse:16 Denken und Handeln so einzurichten, daß Auschwitz sich nicht wiederhole, nichts Ähnliches geschehe. Dieser Imperativ ist so widerspenstig gegen seine Begründung wie einst die Gegebenheit des Kantischen. Ihn diskursiv zu behandeln, wäre Frevel: an ihm läßt leibhaft das Moment des Hinzutretenden am Sittlichen sich fühlen. Leibhaft, weil es der praktisch gewordene Abscheu vor dem unerträglichen physischen Schmerz ist, dem die Individuen ausgesetzt sind, auch nachdem Individualität, als geistige Reflexionsform, zu verschwinden sich anschickt. (Negative Dialektik 359) [to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen. When we want to find reasons for it, this imperative is as refractory as the given one of Kant was once upon a time. Dealing discursively with it would be an outrage, for the new imperative gives us a bodily sensation of the moral addendum, bodily because it is now the practical abhorrence of the unbearable physical agony to which individuals are exposed even with individuality about to vanish as a form of mental reflection. (Negative Dialectics 365)]

“Das Übermaß an realem Leiden duldet kein Vergessen”17 (The abundance of real suffering permits no forgetting).18 Adorno’s categorical imperative commands an aesthetic response that resists in principle the

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sublime and “cold”19 refuge in any kind of “redemptive thinking,”20 be it discursive (critical) or revelatory (theological), because this would imply forgetting the suffering. As an act of reflection, its purpose cannot be to revise and hermeneutically restore the historical past, but must instead be to amplify and perpetuate the “Krise des Sinnes” (crisis of meaning) that has revealed its absoluteness in Auschwitz. Acknowledging and adopting the state of crisis affects both constituents of reflective production, the cultural subject and its object, the “sinnvolle Verfassung der Welt” (meaningful constitution of the world): “Die Kunstwerke heute, die allein als sinnvoll sich legitimieren, sind jene, die gegen den Begriff des Sinnes am sprödesten sich zeigen” (Today the only art works capable of legitimizing themselves as meaningful are those that are least accessible to the concept of meaning).21 Commitment to Auschwitz, as the meaningless fact of world history that obliterates the conditions under which cultural production, art and poetry were possible, is the ethical “impulse” that nevertheless, in face of these impossibilities22 and as an erratic act of pure defiance, “animates literature” (Commitment 87). “Auschwitz” denotes a reality of irredeemable suffering and an all-devouring crisis of meaning that demands a response that cannot be discursive or cognitive  — therefore it has to be artistic and creative. Only an art that does not aim to reproduce discursive consistencies and therefore does not depend on conventional or conceptual means of communicability  — Adorno suggests the “avant-gardism” and “anti-conventionalism” of the 1920s as a historical model (“Zwanziger Jahre” 50) — is deemed capable of capturing the historical void of meaning after Auschwitz: “Weil jedoch die Welt den eigenen Untergang überlebt hat, bedarf sie gleichwohl der Kunst als ihrer bewußtlosen Geschichtsschreibung. Die authentischen Künstler der Gegenwart sind die, in deren Werken das äußerste Grauen nachzittert” (However, because the world has survived its own downfall, it still needs art as its unconscious historiography. The true artists of today are those in whose works absolute horror still quakes; “Zwanziger Jahre” 53). In Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s interpretation, Hegel’s philosophy of history described history as the articulated progress of historical consciousness,23 and historiography as the dialectical discourse on historical meaning: the dialectic of enlightenment. If Auschwitz marks the ultimate, total, and irreversible failure of this discourse and manifests the complicity of cultural history with barbarism, then the ethical response to it must necessarily be neither discursive nor dialectic (that is synthetic),24 but only erratic and, in a supplementary sense, creative: presentation of absence itself. Adorno’s meditations on poetry after Auschwitz thus exemplify the paradoxicality of his “negative Dialektik”: if the act of cultural criticism becomes complicit with the depravation of culture, meaning can no longer be seen as a product of historical synthesis. Culture only persists, and survives, in an act of self-resistance. Negation of any

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given predicament and the refusal to provide ready-made sets of meaning is then the very impulse that propels art. This art proves inaccessible to any attempt at sociocultural and economic appropriation; it is committed to the excluded, exploited, and annihilated not because it adopts and promotes their positive claims, but because it resonates and exposes both the absence of historical meaning and the societal presence of their torment: “jenes Leiden, nach Hegels Wort das Bewußtsein von Nöten, erheischt auch die Fortdauer von Kunst, die es verbietet” (“Engagement” 422; that suffering  — what Hegel called the awareness of affliction  — also demands the very art it forbids, “Commitment” 88). Therefore, the impulse of such an art — and, a fortiori, of poetry — as a case of negative dialectics is not (for Adorno) an intellectualizing revision or a materialistic (Marxist) reinforcement of the dialectics of enlightenment as established by Hegel, but rather a radical denial of the synthesizing implications of art as an ideological force in history. Art after Auschwitz can only be meaningful as an act of categorical resistance: Das perennierende Leiden hat soviel Recht auf Ausdruck wie der Gemarterte zu brüllen; darum mag es falsch gewesen sein, nach Auschwitz ließe kein Gedicht mehr sich schreiben. Nicht falsch aber ist die minder kulturelle Frage, ob nach Auschwitz noch sich leben lasse. . . . (Negative Dialektik 356) [Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living . . . (Negative Dialectics 362)]

This shows the aporia at the core of Adorno’s dictum, which art must acknowledge and come to terms with: art is to incorporate the crisis of annihilation, and refute it at the same time by giving expression, form, and consequently meaning to the suppressed reality of suffering. The only way out of this aporia lies in a creative form of self-denial. At this point Adorno’s reflections on the problem of culture after Auschwitz offer suggestions with regard to possible future forms of art and poetry: Any artistic practice can no longer present itself as autonomous in the sense of a morally conscious, socially communicated, and culturally established state of being in and for itself (in Hegelian terms) but must manifest itself instead, in an inversion of this discredited tradition, as an aesthetically sovereign act of dedication to nothing but the brutal fact of crisis in a state of being “für anderes” (for something else).25 Without relying on terminologies derived from the increasing impact of psychoanalysis and semiotics on cultural and literary analysis, Adorno invokes questions that became decisive for the Holocaust discourse of the

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decades that followed, particularly the ethical and representational state of the witness coming to terms with the humanitarian crisis of Auschwitz as an absolute trauma.26 It is the uncompromisingly ethical thrust of Adorno’s reflections that raises the awareness for the specific agony of the surviving witness between guilt and shame.27 He still has to live on, but finds himself deprived of the necessary healing powers, that is, of all the symbolic tools of “redemptive thinking” that culture once used to provide but that have effectively proved irrelevant in the event of Auschwitz. Therefore, testimony itself is to be recognized primarily as an ethically necessary act of quasi-redemptive fiction, as an act of creativity by the survivors on behalf of those others who perished. But on a secondary level of fiction it could then even “inspire poems” because it is also representing a “struggle for humanity in its own right.”28 Acknowledging Adorno’s categorical imperative regarding the urgency of writing since Auschwitz, and paying homage to Maurice Blanchot’s literary fragments on Auschwitz, “scattered throughout his texts,” Sarah Kofman, for instance, formulates her own version of the pledge, undertaking, “as a Jewish woman intellectual who has survived the Holocaust,” to find a new way of writing: a “writing of the ashes, writing of the disaster, which avoids the trap of complicity with speculative knowledge, with that in it which is tied to power, and thereby complicit with the tortures of Auschwitz.”29 Similarly, Jean-Luc Nancy described the Holocaust as the “ultimate crisis of representation.”30 How is writing still possible here? Or should we rather understand writing now as an attempt to make the impossible possible or real? Crisis is always a moment that simultaneously imposes change and creativity. It is a period of transition, paving the way for the new. Henri Meschonnic expresses very succinctly the necessity of crisis for all creation: La crise est permanente. Elle l’a toujours été.  .  .  . La crise est la condition même, et l’histoire, des concepts, des stratégies. Le conceptuel ne se fait que de se défaire. Inchoatif. Dès qu’il s’installe, il devient du pouvoir, il devient un obstacle à lui-même. Il faut le casser pour penser.31 [Crisis is permanent. This has always been the case.  .  .  . Crisis is the very condition and the history of concepts and strategies. The conceptual cannot be made without unmaking itself. Inchoative. As soon as it establishes itself it becomes power, it becomes an obstacle to itself. One has to break it in order to make thoughts.]

Cathérine David applied this idea to the visual arts on the occasion of the documenta 1994, affirming “Krise ist immer” (There is always crisis).32 Usually the term “crisis” is applied to periods of turbulence, to

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eruptions or irruptions of new ideas and phenomena; it is hardly, if ever, used to describe states of stagnation, or of conceptual decay. In the creative sphere  — in the arts and in thought  — ironically, it would be a “crisis” if there were no crisis. Paul Celan described his poetry collection Die Niemandsrose to Ingeborg Bachmann as “Das Dokument einer Krise, wenn Du willst — aber was wäre Dichtung, wenn sie nicht auch das wäre, und zwar radikal?” (The document of a crisis, you might say — but what would poetry be if it were not this as well, and, indeed, radically so?).33 There is, then, an obvious and recognized connection between crisis and creativity. This volume examines this connection in the specific and radical context of literary production after the Holocaust, as well as charting the ongoing consequences of the issues of this period for poetics. Drawing on historian Dan Diner’s 1988 conception of the Third Reich as a “Zivilisationsbruch”34 (rupture in civilization), the following articles demonstrate how and if this rupture is reflected in poetics, approaching the subject in very different ways. In his 1989 book Modernity and the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman posited the thesis that the Holocaust was no accident in, but rather an expression of modernity and its culture of Enlightenment. He affirms: The Holocaust was conceived and realised in the midst of modern rational society, in a highly developed civilisation and in the context of extraordinary cultural performances: it must therefore be considered a problem of this same society, civilisation and culture.35

Bauman goes on to deduce from this that the Holocaust is not an exclusively German problem or phenomenon, but a problem of modernity in general. Consequently, more fundamental changes are clearly necessary if we are to prevent other such catastrophes, which by now presumably have the potential to destroy the world completely. It is not simply a question of political structures, then; a way of thinking in general seems to be the issue. The fact that Bauman’s thesis received so much attention some forty years after the Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectics of Enlightenment)36 had already said much the same thing, demonstrates how little of Adorno’s and Max Horkheimer’s criticism of what they called the “Kulturindustrie” (cultural industry) had actually filtered through, and shows how strong resistance to this idea has always been. The problem of an enlightened modernity compromised by National Socialism and the Holocaust, and the devastating implications for the German rational mind as such, remain unresolved. Poetics, however, has the potential to show the way forward here, offering new ways of dealing with this past, paths that lead out of the aporia of instrumental reason. Adorno’s dictum — infamous by the late 1950s though it was thoroughly analyzed only from the 1990s on  — casts a dark shadow over postwar German literature, and expresses in nuce the arguably unique

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difficulties facing any act of artistic creation in Germany after the catastrophe of the Third Reich, but with implications that stretch far beyond the borders of this country of perpetrators. In the afterword to his semi-fictional novella Der Vater eines Mörders (The Father of a Murderer), Alfred Andersch questions the idea of humanity to which the humanist tradition subscribed. He discusses the fact that Heinrich Himmler’s father taught Latin and Greek at a Humanist Grammar School (the school in Munich that Andersch himself attended), asking: “Schützt Humanismus denn vor gar nichts? Die Frage ist geeignet, einen in Verzweiflung zu stürzen”37 (Does this mean that humanism offers no protection whatsoever? The question may well plunge one into despair).38 The question is disturbing, even devastating, because it suggests that, far from offering resistance, there is, in fact, a connection or continuum between humanist ideals and education, on the one hand, and the ruthless murders perpetrated by the SS on the other. In short, the afterword offers us the thesis of Dialectics of Enlightenment personified, in the human form of the (father of the) man responsible for the Holocaust. Humanism now takes on a Janusfaced aspect, the noble aim of perfecting humankind being coupled here to its technical manipulation. Humanism, at the latter, obscene end of its development, opens the door, then, to a way of thinking that considers human beings in terms of bio-political strategies. This flaw still haunts humanist ideals today. As we have seen, Adorno’s provocative verdict on the possibility of post-Holocaust poetry has also given rise to multifarious poetic and theoretical endeavors that attempt to transform the prevailing sense of negativism into artistic and literary acts of resistance against history.39 A certain historical distance allows new questions to be asked, such as whether it is possible to talk about postwar poetics in terms of creativity rather than merely in terms of the destruction of traditions? And if so, how does or did this crisis generate new potential? If we consider, with Jean-Luc Nancy, “representation” as the “birthmark” of Western civilization, then the “entire fevered history” of what he calls “the gigantomachies of mimesis, of the image, of perception, of the object and the scientific law, of the spectacle, of art, of political representation” (Nancy 37) has fallen victim to the Holocaust. A “fissure of absence,” of absolute violence has opened up; the gap of those who have been lost or silenced and annihilated, of people and their works, ideas and thoughts, shatters the integrity of our Western historical self-image. The challenge is to develop new and alternative literary and artistic approaches that convert the violent exclusions of this image into an absence within the image, readmitting, in a way, those who are absent, their extinguished lives and acts of expression, allowing them a sort of presence in their own right, albeit, perhaps only at the very margins of our awareness, and never to be re-presented completely.

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Such attempts range from Peter Weiss’s Poetik des Widerstands40 (Poetics of Resistance) and Blanchot’s L’Écriture du désastre41 (The Writing of the Disaster) to more recent theories in which certain kinds of literature are seen as acts of témoignage (testimony) (for instance, Emmanuel Lévinas42) and processes of survival (Giorgio Agamben43), to mention just a few. The first part of this volume deals with major acts of literary reflection on the immediate postwar period, such as those of Nelly Sachs, Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, Ilse Aichinger, Rose Ausländer, and Gottfried Benn. The second part examines examples of what followed on from this phase of poeticized thought, moving from Concrete Poetry, through Charlotte Beradt’s dream protocols, to the re-appropriations of Thomas Kling. Two contributions of this section concentrate on a single major representative of postwar poetics, analyzing Heiner Müller’s take on the idea of a rupture in civilization. The final section deals with the central question as viewed from elsewhere in Europe, focusing on the cases of France and Yugoslavia. As editors we are conscious that it would have been desirable to extend this section to include other literatures such as that of Italy (and, indeed, literatures beyond Europe); there is, however, some justification for the primary emphasis on Germany in the light of the prompt and specifically Germanophone response to Adorno’s dictum. In the first section of the book, the focus is mainly on actual “survivors” of the period of National Socialist persecution, such as Nelly Sachs, Paul Celan, Ilse Aichinger, Rose Ausländer, and including Ingeborg Bachmann, who always emphasized how fascist rule in Austria, and her father’s allegiance to the National Socialist regime, traumatized her in childhood. Elaine Martin’s article examines the work of Nelly Sachs, revealing it to be emblematic of the crisis within artistic discourse in the wake of the Holocaust and Adorno’s verdict against “poetry after Auschwitz.” Martin argues that Adorno did not, in fact, want to negate the possibility of writing after Auschwitz, but to problematize the aestheticization of the Holocaust. Gisela Dischner’s contribution discusses how Paul Celan, influenced by the Russian Akemeists and convinced of the failure of human dialogue in times of persecution, still pursues a poetic dialogue of the “message in a bottle” kind, which, although no recipient is specified or guaranteed, is not to be confused with Gottfried Benn’s “monologic” poetry. Marton Marko points out how Ingeborg Bachmann’s writing engages in a confrontation with the fascist backdrop of Austria and Germany by interrogating the violence of authoritarian symbolic systems. Annette Runte explores Rose Ausländer’s mytho-poetic return to the “unthinkable,” which, contrary to Paul Celan’s approach, is based on a common trust in language and results in “a process of resignification without designification.” Ausländer’s approach remains, however, embedded in poetic features of “undecidability.” In the case of Ilse Aichinger, Marko Pajević identifies a “privatistic” and privative attitude in her

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poetics, demonstrating her texts’ sophisticated “inaccessibility,” where any pragmatic or common use of language is disavowed and any easy communication refused, instead provoking and promoting an upheaval of thought — a literary practice that claims to resist the “cultural industry.” In the last article of this section Hans-Walter Schmidt-Hannisa looks at Charlotte Beradt’s collection of dreams gathered from people living in Nazi Germany and recorded between 1933 and 1939. They are interpreted in this chapter as products of the unconscious, which not only reflect terror, persecution, and propaganda but form part of a system of pressure that penetrates even the privacy of sleep. In the second section of the book, which deals with the wider discourse on postwar poetics, going beyond the realm of those who are driven by the ethos of the witness, the first two articles deal with Gottfried Benn, whose poems and poetology had a profound impact on German poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. Rüdiger Görner’s contribution pays tribute to Benn’s influence on contemporary poetic praxis. He notes that, inspired by Benn, a “poetics of thought” emerged in post-1945 German poetry, following a “hermeneutical paradigm” that gained particular prominence in the immediate postwar period and still remains of genuine significance for current discourses on poetry. Stefan Hajduk diagnoses Benn’s entire oeuvre as “suffering” from a “theoretical unrest,” showing that Benn understands “mental existence” as lifelong crisis conjoined with an obsessive drive to creativity. Benn’s theory seems to exist in a state of tension, caught between the traditional idealist focus on creative subjectivity and his own linguistic materialism. Chris Bezzel’s essay investigates the phenomenon of Concrete Poetry, seeing it as a form of avant-garde literary production, and not only as the poetic innovation of a younger generation, but also as a radical reaction to the postwar crisis in society and culture. Aniela Knoblich takes a similar position in her analysis of Thomas Kling’s poetics and poetry. Casting himself actively as a postwar writer, Kling shows particular interest in the “rupturing” potential of poetry since 1945. Knoblich’s examination looks at the ways in which his poetry seeks to realize this potential. The two articles of this section on Heiner Müller address discontinuity in his poetics from different viewpoints. Renata Plaice pursues traces of an anti-dialectical historical and poetological train of thought in Müller’s texts that heralds the new by way of the destruction of history’s utopian telos. Literature loses here its ability to create a (utopian) “realm of aesthetic appearance,” and persists only in acts of transgression, as a fragment of a deconstructed reality. Barry Murnane, on the other hand, highlights traces of poetological and historical continuity in Müller’s writings that employ the figure of the specter or revenant as a “poetological and historical trope.” Referring to Derrida’s theory of spectrality, and drawing on theories of the carnivalesque, he shows how intertextuality and repetition thus become productive poetological models in Müller’s writing.

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The final part of the collection contains comparative explorations of post-1945 poetics in the European context. Manuel Bragança analyses Jean Paul Sartre’s trilogy Les Chemins de la liberté (The Roads to Freedom) in order to unveil the intertwining of his philosophical development with his literary style in his postwar shift from “the quest for individual freedom to the necessity of authenticity.” Peter Tame compares André Malraux and Oswald Spengler in terms of the “poetics of metamorphosis,” and looks at the idea of a repeated, but metamorphosed, “rupture of civilization” after the First and Second World Wars. Finally, Tatjana Petzer discusses the poetics of the Yugoslavian author Danilo Kiš, analyzing the techniques he uses to retrace the catastrophic trauma and violence of the Holocaust in the narrative text. Petzer connects this to Viktor Šklovskij’s concept of ostranenie (defamiliarization) and Arthur Koestler’s principle of “bisociation,” demonstrating how human creation in a biological sense, when activated by a catastrophic event, can be transformed into the act of literary creation. The last study of the collection takes the volume into the sphere of intermediality. Gert Hofmann approaches Claude Lanzmann’s monumental film Shoah from the perspective of the Ästhetik der Ohnmacht (aesthetics of non-power), where the moment of annihilation, of death, is articulated by leaping over it, producing elliptical figures of absence, elision, caesura, and reduplication.

Notes 1

Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen, 6th ed. (Munich: C. H. Beck 2007), 51. 2

Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997). 3

Slogan from a fund-raising poster for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, cited in Oren Baruch Stier, Committed to Memory: Cultural Mediations of the Holocaust (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2003), 68. 4

Another formulation of this idea would be Blanchot’s “Concentration camps, annihilation camps, figures where the invisible is forever made visible. All the features of a civilization are revealed or laid bare.” Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1995), 81. 5

“The philosophy of the Enlightenment  .  .  . does not understand its task as an act of destruction but as an act of reconstruction. In its very boldest revolutions, the enlightenment aims only at ‘restitution to the whole’ (restitutio in integrum).” Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz Koelln and James Pettegrove (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1951), 234. Cassirer, of course, saw this dynamic in the positive sense of a return to the eternal rights of man. 6

Most influential are: Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992); Dominick

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LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996); Berel Lang most rigidly emphasizes the representational problematic and refers in this context explicitly to Adorno in Holocaust Representations: Art within the Limits of History and Ethics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000): “Adorno’s assertion of the barbarism  — not the impossibility, but the barbarism — of writing lyric poetry after Auschwitz . . . is an instance of the application of this representational limit and one that at least in its premises ought to be taken seriously in any judgment or imaginative writing about the ‘Final Solution’” (70). In German: Sven Kramer, Auschwitz im Widerstreit: zur Darstellung der Shoah in Film, Philosophie und Literatur (Auschwitz in Conflict: On the Representation of the Shoah in Film, Philosophy, and Literature; Wiesbaden: Deutscher Universitätsverlag, 1999); Stefan Krankenhagen, Auschwitz darstellen: ästhetische Positionen zwischen Adorno, Spielberg und Walser (Representing Auschwitz: Aesthetic Positions between Adorno, Spielberg, and Walser; Köln: Böhlau, 2001). 7

Shoah. Formen der Erinnerung: Geschichte, Philosophie, Literatur, Kunst (The Shoah. Forms of Remembrance: History, Philosophy, Literature, Art), ed. Nicolas Berg, Jess Jochimsen, Bernd Stiegler (München: Fink, 1996); Ulrich Baer, “Niemand zeugt für den Zeugen”: Erinnerungskultur und historische Verantwortung nach der Shoah (“No One Bears Witness for the Witnesses”: The Culture of Memory and Historical Responsibility after the Shoah) (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000); Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust (New York: Public Affairs, 2004). 8

In the post-Adorno phase of the discourse, influenced by the poststructuralist renewal of psychoanalytical thought, the discussion about the trauma characteristic of the Holocaust experience gains particular significance. See, for example, Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995) and Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996); Jeffrey C. Alexander, Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkeley: U of California P, 2004); Michael Elm, Zeugenschaft des Holocaust: zwischen Trauma, Tradierung und Ermittlung (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2007). 9

See Geoffrey Hartman, “The Book of the Destruction,” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution”: “My first thought . . . is that even in the case of the Shoah there are no limits of representation, only limits of conceptualization. Though our technical capacity for depicting the extremest event is in place, it has outstripped the possibility of thinking conceptually  .  .  . about those representations, despite the growth of a literary and cultural criticism that wishes to overcome the intelligibility gap” (320). Subsequent references to this text are quoted using Hartman and page numbers. 10

Theodor W. Adorno, “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft,” in Gesammelte Schriften in zwanzig Bänden, vol. 10, bk. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1977), 30. See also Lyrik nach Auschwitz? Adorno und die Dichter, ed. Petra Kiedaisch (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1995), 49. Subsequent references to this work will be quoted in the text using “Kulturkritik” and page numbers. 11 Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 210. Subsequent references to this work will be quoted in the text using “Cultural Criticism” and page numbers.

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12

Soziologische Forschungen in unserer Zeit: Ein Sammelwerk. Leopold Wiese zum 75. Geburtstag, ed. Karl-Gustav Specht (Köln: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1951), 228–41. 13

Howard Caygill gives a very insightful account of the development of Adorno’s thought about poetry “after Auschwitz” in his “Lyric Poetry before Auschwitz,” in Adorno and Literature, ed. David Cunningham and Nigel Mapp (London, New York: Continuum, 2006), 69–83. See also the editor’s introduction in Lyrik nach Auschwitz? Adorno und die Dichter, 9–25, which additionally comments on the literary debate that unfolded in Germany in response to Adorno’s remarks. Subsequent references to Caygill’s essay will be given in the text using Caygill and page numbers. 14 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966), cited here from Gesammelte Schriften in zwanzig Bänden, vol. 6, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 361. Subsequent references to this work will be quoted in the text using Negative Dialektik and page numbers; also in Lyrik nach Auschwitz?, 61–62. 15

Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1973), 366–67. Subsequent references to this work will be quoted in the text using Negative Dialectics and page numbers. 16

“Ideologiekritik” is the basic method of Frankfurt School’s “critical theory.” It aims to explore, and overcome, the limitations of human (cultural) awareness due to the societal and economic conditions of life. It operates as dialectic response to the deterministic approach of bourgeois cultural critique. 17

Theodor W. Adorno, “Engagement,” in Gesammelte Schriften in zwanzig Bänden, vol. 11: Noten zur Literatur, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 422. Subsequently quoted in the text using “Engagement” and page numbers.

18 Theodor W. Adorno, “Commitment,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Columbia UP, 1992), 88. Subsequently quoted in the text using “Commitment” and page numbers. 19 “Coldness” is according to Adorno the “Grundprinzip der bürgerlichen Subjektivität, ohne das Auschwitz nicht möglich gewesen wäre” (Negative Dialektik 356; basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without there would have been no Auschwitz, Negative Dialectics 363). 20

The phrase originates from Geoffrey Hartman (326), but it fits well in the Adorno debate about post-Holocaust culture. 21 Theodor W. Adorno, “Jene zwanziger Jahre,” in Lyrik nach Auschwitz?, 50. Subsequently quoted in the text using “Zwanziger Jahre” and page numbers. 22

Howard Caygill has analyzed this mutuality of conditions of possibility and impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz as follows: “According to Adorno, works of art are by definition objects that exist in breach of their conditions of possibility — their peculiar form of possibility is that they exceed their conditions of possibility. The impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz is its condition of possibility; yet it must establish a form of existence that affirms this impossibility, otherwise art will affirm the very conditions of possibility of a repetition of Auschwitz, transgressing the categorical imperative” (71).

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23

History appears as synthesis of fact and narrative, of res gestas and historia rerum gestarum. See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophie der Geschichte, chapter III.b. 24

Howard Caygill, however, claims that Adorno still follows a strictly dialectic logic, applying “Hegelian concepts of reflection” (Caygill 73). 25

“Der moderne Begriff der reinen, autonomen Kultur bezeugt den ins Unversöhnliche angewachsenen Antagonismus durch Kompromißlosigkeit gegenüber dem für anderes Seienden sowohl wie durch die Hybris der Ideologie, die sich als an sich Seiendes inthronisiert” (“Kulturkritik” 21; The modern notion of a pure, autonomous culture indicates that the antagonism has become irreconcilable. This is the result both of an uncompromising opposition to being-for-something-else, and of an ideology which in its hubris enthrones itself as being-in-itself, “Cultural Criticism” 203). 26

See note 8.

27

“Die Schuld des Lebens, das als pures Faktum bereits anderem Leben den Atem raubt, . . . ist mit dem Leben nicht mehr zu versöhnen” (Negative Dialektik 357; The guilt of a life which purely as a fact will strangle other life . . . is irreconcilable with living, Negative Dialectics 364) 28

Sue Vice, Holocaust Fiction, New York: Routledge, 2000), 7.

29

Sarah Kofman, Smothered Words: Holocaust Studies (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1998), 7. 30 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image (New York: Fordham UP, 2005), 34. Subsequent references to this work will be quoted in the text using Nancy and page numbers. 31

Henri Meschonnic, Les États de la poétique (Paris: PUF, 1985), 95.

32

“Krise ist immer,” in Die Zeit, 23 Sept. 1994.

33

Herzzeit: Ingeborg Bachmann — Paul Celan. Der Briefwechsel. Mit den Briefwechseln zwischen Paul Celan und Max Frisch sowie zwischen Ingeborg Bachmann und Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, ed. B. Badiou, H. Höller, A. Stoll, B. Wiedemann, letter from 21 September 1963 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008), 240. 34 Zivilisationsbruch: Denken nach Auschwitz, ed. Dan Diner (Fischer: Frankfurt am Main, 1988). 35

Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity, 1989).

36

Written already during the Second World War and published in 1947.

37

Alfred Andersch, Nachwort für Leser, in Der Vater eines Mörders — Erzählung (Zürich: Diogenes, 1982 [1980]), 136. 38

Translation from Alfred Andersch, The Father of a Murderer, trans. Leila Vennewitz (New York: New Directions, 1994), 92. 39

Selected literary texts in reply to Adorno can be found in Lyrik nach Auschwitz? Adorno und die Dichter, ed. Petra Kiedaisch (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1995). 40

Peter Weiss, Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975–81). 41

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Maurice Blanchot, L’Écriture du désastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980).

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42 See, for instance, Emmanuel Lévinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1974). 43

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (1995; repr. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998); and Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (1998; repr. New York: Zone books, 2000).

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Part I: Poetics after Auschwitz

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1: The Poetics of Silence: Nelly Sachs Elaine Martin Hinter den Lippen / Unsagbares wartet. [Behind lips / the unsayable awaits] — Nelly Sachs, “Behind Lips” Unsere Zeit, so schlimm sie ist, muß [. . .] in der Kunst ihren Ausdruck finden, es muß mit allen neuen Mitteln gewagt werden, denn die alten reichen nicht mehr aus. [Our epoch, as terrible as it is, must find expression in art. We must dare to express it using all possible new means because the old methods no longer suffice.] — Nelly Sachs, letter to Gudrun Dänhert, 1948 Das Übermaß an realem Leiden duldet kein Vergessen; [. . .] jenes Leiden [. . .] erheischt [. . .] die Fortdauer von Kunst, die es verbietet; kaum wo anders findet das Leiden noch seine eigene Stimme. [Extreme suffering tolerates no forgetting. This suffering demands the continued existence of the very art it forbids. It scarcely finds a voice anywhere else.] — Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature

T

from two highly significant figures in the field of post-Shoah art: both Nelly Sachs and Theodor W. Adorno recognized the formidable task confronting writers attempting to find new literary tools to express the horror of the Shoah in artistic form. Both were acutely aware of the dilemma facing the post-Shoah artist: the absolute necessity of giving voice to the suffering and the impossibility of doing so adequately. Both recognized the irreparable fissure that the Shoah had left in its wake; art’s new task was to find means of presenting the reality of this fissure. In much of her poetry Nelly Sachs engages with this post-Auschwitz dilemma. Sachs questions the medium at her disposal; she mediates on the perils and dilemmas of Holocaust representation, WO CLEAR DIRECTIVES

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attempting all the while, alongside this meta-poetic discourse, to represent. Before an attempt is made to evaluate the representative value of a selection of Sachs’s Holocaust poems, a re-examination of the debate surrounding Adorno’s so-called “dictum” regarding “the barbarity of poetry after Auschwitz” provides a productive framework for that evaluation, since the debate raises many of the pivotal concerns that permeate Sachs’s work. These include Adorno’s deliberations on the dangers involved in attempting to represent the Holocaust in aesthetic form, the inherent profanity of any attempt to “make sense” of Auschwitz, the difficulties that the anonymity of death in the camps poses for the post-Shoah writer, the question of survivor’s guilt, and his emphasis on the significance of self-referential writing. Adorno’s statement has exerted a profound influence on the course of postwar literary discourse pertaining to the Shoah, accompanying almost every critical contribution to the debate surrounding its “representability” like an uneasy shadow. The exceptional range of interpretations it has solicited — and indeed continues to solicit — is simply astounding. These have ranged from references to Adorno’s “injunction against poetry,” to the “nihilism of his prohibition against poetry,”1 to his “silencing of poetry,”2 to his supposed pronouncement of the “impossibility of poetry.”3 Others have made reference to Adorno’s “bitter and final word of resignation,”4 to his “desperate rhetorical flourish,”5 to his “hyperbolic dictum”6 and, most recently, to his “famous axiom” demanding a “vow of silence.”7 It is somewhat of an anomaly, however, not least considering Adorno’s explicit directive above in respect of art’s obligation to give voice to the suffering, that the name Theodor Adorno has come to be automatically associated with a general interdiction against post-Shoah art. The ambiguity that characterizes Adorno’s original proposition has almost certainly contributed to its frequent misinterpretation. “In spite of its forthrightness,” as Howard Caygill points out, “it remained unclear whether it was a judgment of poetry written after Auschwitz, a Darstellungsverbot [ban on representation] on poems about Auschwitz, or a condemnation addressed to postwar art and culture in general.”8 This considered, however, it is nonetheless perplexing that the so-called dictum in question — constituting a mere sub-clause of the original German paragraph, this paragraph in turn constituting but a minuscule element of Adorno’s extensive reflections on the problems of artistic production in a post-Auschwitz world — is quoted time and time again as epitomizing Adorno’s stance in relation to Holocaust art. What is especially bewildering is not only its repeated citation without reference to the broader framework of Adorno’s thought, but also the fact that it is habitually quite literally extracted from its immediate textual context. When examined within its context, however, and within the general framework of Adorno’s extensive deliberations on post-Shoah art, the aporetic tension that Adorno was attempting to communicate comes, unmistakably, to the fore:

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Je totaler die Gesellschaft, um so verdinglichter auch der Geist und um so paradoxer sein Beginnen, der Verdinglichung aus Eigenem sich zu entwinden. Noch das äußerste Bewußtsein vom Verhängnis droht zum Geschwätz zu entarten. Kulturkritik findet sich der letzten Stufe der Dialektik von Kultur und Barbarei gegenüber: nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch, und das frißt auch die Erkenntnis an, die ausspricht, warum es unmöglich ward, heute Gedichte zu schreiben.9 [The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its attempt to escape reification on its own. Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism: to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, and this even corrodes the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today.]

For Adorno, the barbarity of post-Auschwitz poetry lies in the fact that the poet is prevented from recognizing poetry’s inadmissibility by the process of reification, which, having reached such an extreme in the Nazi death camps, is irreversible in the post-Auschwitz world. The artist, that is, fails to recognize the entrenchment of a reification process of which he too forms part. Adorno considers the concept of subjectivity an illusion in the aftermath of Auschwitz, since in the death camps the very concept of individuality  — the core of critical consciousness and the condition for self-reflective thought — was rendered void. This in turn renders the notion of artistic subjectivity intrinsically problematic, since figurative discourse, by its very nature subjective, cannot be reconciled with the reality of this reification process. In the Nazi death camps, where “life” had become a kind of death, the process of reification had been reduced to an absolute extreme: In den Konzentrationslagern des Faschismus wurde die Demarkationslinie zwischen Leben und Tod getilgt. Sie schufen einen Zwischenzustand, lebende Skelette und Verwesende, Opfer, denen der Selbstmord missrät.10 [In the concentration camps the line of demarcation between life and death was erased. The Nazis created an in-between state; living skeletons, decomposing wretches for whom even suicide would go wrong.]

The concrete manifestation of this process was to be seen in the figure of the so-called Müselmann, the wretched victim of gradual liquidation. This figure has been most terrifyingly described by Primo Levi: “Their life is short, but their number is endless; they, the Müselmänner, the drowned,

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form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men.”11 The obliteration of the very concept of the individual in the death camps and the resulting death of death itself effected, in Adorno’s view, immense repercussions for both the survivor and the post-Shoah writer. For the survivor, death can never mean death in the traditional sense of the word, after a hell has been created in which specimens and not human individuals die, where “life” means walking corpses, where the line between life and death has become blurred and where the central aspect of a dignified death — individuality — has itself been obliterated: Mit dem Mord an Millionen durch Verwaltung ist der Tod zu etwas geworden, was so noch nie zu fürchten war. . . . Daß in den Lagern nicht mehr das Individuum starb, sondern das Exemplar, muß das Sterben auch derer affizieren, die der Maßnahme entgingen. (Negative Dialektik 355) [With the murder of millions as an administrative measure, death has become something never before feared in this manner. The fact that the specimen, not the individual, died in the death camps, must of necessity also affect the dying of those who escaped the administrative measure.]

For the post-Shoah writer the repercussions were similarly grave: in the death camps the victims had been wholly robbed of freedom and individual choice, and this reality posed an immense practical problem for the writer attempting to portray the Shoah: “Die Undarstellbarkeit des Faschismus . . . rührt daher, daß es in ihm [keine] . . . Freiheit des Subjekts mehr gibt. Vollendete Unfreiheit läßt sich  .  .  . nicht darstellen” (The impossibility of portraying fascism stems from the fact that in it subjective freedom does not exist. Absolute lack of freedom cannot be represented).12 Failure to reflect this changed reality would result in a breach between the artwork and the subject of representation. Reinhart Baumgart has taken a resolute stance in this regard. Not just people, but individuality, humanity itself, was exterminated in Auschwitz, and as a result: “Wo Massenmord ihr Gegenstand wird, kann sie [die Literatur] sich den Luxus solcher Individuation nicht mehr leisten. Es wird ästhetisch zur Lüge, moralisch zur Heuchelei” (Where mass murder is its subject, literature can no longer afford the luxury of individuation. If it does it becomes an aesthetic lie and morally hypocritical).13 Adorno’s dictum must be examined within the overall framework of his thoughts on culture in the aftermath of the Shoah. Upon his return to Germany he was astounded by the cultural euphoria among the postwar populace in its desperate attempt to glide over the recent past and reconnect to the supposed “true” soul of pre-National Socialist Germany.

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Adorno emphasized instead the need to examine culture’s complicity.14 The fact that the egregious crimes had been committed by one of the world’s supposedly most “civilized” nations is a dilemma that haunts Adorno’s postwar writings. Max Frisch provides a disturbing description of this anomaly: Die blosse dumpfe Bestie, die nichts anderes kann und kennt, ist nicht das Ungeheuerliche; denn sie ist leicht zu erkennen. Ungeheuerlich scheint mir die Bestie mit dem Geist  .  .  . Ungeheuerlich ist das Janusköpfige, die Schizophrenie, wie sie sich  .  .  . innerhalb des deutschen Volkes, . . . offenbart hat. Nicht wenige von uns hielten sich lange an den tröstlichen Irrtum, es handle sich um zweierlei Menschen dieses Volkes, solche, die Mozart spielen, und solche, die Menschen verbrennen. Zu erfahren, daß sich beide in der gleichen Person befinden können, das war die eigentliche Erschütterung.15 [The mere hollow beast that knows no better is not what’s terrible, since it is easily recognized. To me what’s terrible is the beast endowed with intellect . . . the Janus-headed one, the schizophrenia that revealed itself among the German people. For a long time many of us held on to the comforting notion that this nation was made up of two categories of people: those who play Mozart and those who burn people. To discover that both types could be found in the one person — that was the real shock.]

For Adorno the Shoah was not simply a blemish on an otherwise pristine cultural tradition, since this very tradition had proven far from impervious to the murderous National Socialist ideology. Germany’s cultural tradition, as demonstrated by the fact of Auschwitz, had manifestly failed, and this fact had grave repercussions for the production of cultural products in a post-Auschwitz world. After all, poems written before Auschwitz, as Caygill comments, did not prevent it, so how could those written in its aftermath be called upon to prevent its repetition? (Caygill 81) The fact that the Holocaust had taken place in the midst of the great German philosophical and artistic traditions had the effect of reducing these traditions, in Adorno’s view, to the status of rubbish (Negative Dialektik 360). Within this context the original dictum assumes yet another level of meaning; after all, given culture’s complete failure, what status could culture — and art, as part and parcel of that same culture  — possibly have after Auschwitz? To simply resume pre-Auschwitz artistic forms was seen by Adorno as overlooking the complicity of culture itself: “Den überlieferten ästhetischen Formen, der traditionellen Sprache . . . wohnt keine rechte Kraft mehr inne. Sie alle werden Lügen gestraft von der Katastrophe jener Gesellschaft, aus der sie hervorgingen” (Those aesthetic forms that have been handed

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down, and traditional language . . . no longer have any power. They are belied by the catastrophe of that society from which they emerged).16 Adorno thus warned against simply assuming pre-Shoah artistic forms. For Adorno, if art is to claim any kind of ethical legitimacy, then it cannot be as it was before Auschwitz. Not only has the medium of language become thoroughly tainted as a result of its misappropriation for murderous purposes, subjectivity is now also inherently problematic. Art thus cannot be as before and yet the suffering must be voiced in art. His later qualification of his original dictum summarizes this aporetic tension: “Während die Situation Kunst nicht mehr zuläßt — darauf zielte der Satz über die Unmöglichkeit von Gedichten nach Auschwitz  — bedarf sie doch ihrer” (In a situation where art is no longer acceptable  — that was the point of the sentence about the impossibility of art after Auschwitz — the situation nonetheless demands it).17 Adorno enjoins us to try to create art even in the face of insurmountable obstacles. It is not the legitimacy of the artistic rendering of the Shoah that is at issue but the attempt, however futile, to find the appropriate artistic tools to do so. The problem informing Adorno’s proposition is thus acutely aporetic in quality: it is, to borrow Caygill’s words, one of “how to select the appropriate form of impossibility to give expression to suffering” (Caygill 81). For Adorno, art regains validity by reflecting and engaging with its own impossible status even if the extremity of the reification process means that this reflection cannot be carried out in any meaningful way. He calls for art to be self-referentially wary of itself, of its form and of its means of representation. Adorno’s dictum must also be explored in the light of his extensive reflections on the ever-present dangers involved in any attempt to portray the victims’ suffering in aesthetic form. He argued that the danger inherent in any artistic attempt to portray the events of the Shoah lies in the potential of each artwork, in spite of the hellishness of content, to facilitate aesthetic pleasure as a result of the beauty of the artwork’s formal qualities. Adorno deemed any such pleasure an unacceptable violation of the victims’ suffering.18 What concerned him most was what he termed “the principle of aesthetic stylization”: Durchs ästhetische Stilisationsprinzip . . . erscheint das unausdenkliche Schicksal doch, als hätte es irgend Sinn gehabt; es wird verklärt, etwas von dem Grauen weggenommen, damit allein widerfährt den Opfern Unrecht. (Noten 125) [By means of the principle of aesthetic stylization the unimaginable fate of the victims appears as having had some kind of sense after all; it becomes transfigured, some of the horror is softened, and that already involves doing an injustice to the victims.]

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Adorno’s concerns are thus multiple: not only is there a very real danger that pleasure might be somehow “squeezed” from the portrayal of human suffering, there is also a possibility that some kind of “sense” might be attributed to the senseless suffering of millions by means of the formal and structural coherence of the artwork, since, he argued, the aesthetic principle of form always means the attribution of meaning, even where meaning is rejected at the level of content.19 Given the moral magnitude of the event, Adorno viewed any such attribution of sense with mistrust: Wo vom Äußersten, dem qualvollen Tod die Rede ist, schämt man sich der Form, so, als ob sie an dem Leiden frevelte, indem sie es unausweichlich zu einem Material macht, über das sie sich verfügt.” (Negative Dialektik 597) [Where the subject is utmost extremity and agonizing death, form is shameful, as though it sinned against the suffering by reducing it inevitably to a material over which it disposes.]

Presenting extreme human suffering within an orderly, coherent, formal framework creates the impression that the artist can deal with this suffering that has now been reduced to mere “subject matter” at his disposal. Adorno makes it clear that there is an “extremity” in the reality of Auschwitz that is not amenable to human conceptualization, and that all thought processes must recognize this extremity: Mißt es [das Denken] sich nicht an dem Äußersten, das dem Begriff entflieht, so ist es vorweg vom Schlag der Begleitmusik, mit welcher die SS die Schreie ihrer Opfer übertönen ließ. (Negative Dialektik 358) [If thought is not measured against the extremity that eludes concept, it is automatically of the same cast as the musical accompaniment with which the SS drowned out the screams of its victims.]

For Adorno self-complacent thought in the aftermath of Auschwitz is not permissible  — he warns against any form of self-satisfied, conclusive reflection on Auschwitz; mediation of this matter must itself remain unsettled, closure is not an option. Adorno’s “Äußerste” (extremity) should not, however, be equated with the concept of negative sacralization whose dangers have been summed up by Johann Baptist Metz: Dieses Grauen darf nicht aus der Geschichte herausgenommen und zu einer Art “negativen Mythos” stilisiert werden. Dadurch würde der Holocaust zum unfaßlichen Schicksal, zur Tragödie beyond history, die den Standpunkt der Verantwortung und der Scham . . . auflösen würde.20

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[This horror must not be removed from its historical framework and stylized as some kind of “negative myth.” If that were to happen the Holocaust would become some kind of inconceivable fate, a tragedy beyond history. This would render the notions of responsibility and shame superfluous.]

It is precisely at this juncture that the poetry of Nelly Sachs can be examined as an example of a work dealing self-referentially with problems of representation. The aporia facing the post-Shoah writer — the indispensability of appropriate representation and its impossibility  — is a constant theme running through her work. First, a brief examination of the characteristics of the poetic genre will serve to demonstrate the intrinsic advantages that place it in a position to best express the rupture of language and experience, the horror of unimaginable magnitude in the wake of the Shoah. Bound neither to narrative structure, narrative or grammatical coherence, nor to expectations of narrative closure, poetry is in a position to bring the senselessness of the event to the fore without attributing a semblance of meaning — in aesthetic terms — to the slaughter. Moreover, poetry allows for unorthodox punctuation that can have expressive value; by allowing for a strong congruency between form and content, the formal structure itself can act as a function of literary content. Nor does the poem rely on finite syntax — an indication of logic and reason that is so essential to the formal coherence of most narrative, for example. It allows for complete destabilization and fragmentation of form that can have strong expressive value: the irrationality of the massacre can thus be recreated through the dissolution of form, coherence, and conventional logic. Adorno, as we have seen, warned against attributing a semblance of meaning to the events, and against the attainment of pleasure by means of what he called “das ästhetische Stilisationsprinzip.” This is of immediate significance in the case of Nelly Sachs, since here the so-called “principle of aesthetic stylization” itself prohibits these dangers; a crucial and paradoxical characteristic of the “form” of her poetry is a lack of form, and hers may be described as a poetics of disfiguration. Her distinctive mode of writing is one not of construction but of demolition, incoherence, and fragmentation. She avoids the risk of subjugating a ruptured and shattered language to what Susan Shapiro calls an “order making medium” and attributing in the process some semblance of meaning to the senseless massacre in terms of formal or structural coherence.21 The strategy employed by Sachs was to use this ruptured language as her medium. In a letter to Carl Seelig in 1946, Sachs stated that her own broken and “pierced” state had its correlation in the physical make-up of her poetry: Sie . . . werden fühlen, daß ich, wenn ich so sagen darf, nicht rund verwundet bin, sondern einfach durchstochen. Darum kann ich

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keine Romane schreiben, es bricht aus mir heraus in den Formen, die ich Ihnen sandte.22 [You’ll see that I’m not so much in a state of all round injury, but rather — if I may say so — pierced. That’s why I can’t write novels. It erupts from within me in the forms I’ve sent to you.]

In much of her poetry a textuality of rupture and severe formal disintegration become manifest. The poem “Szene aus dem Spiel Nachtwache” (Scene from the Play Night Watch) is a good example: DIE AUGEN ZU und dann — Die Wunde geht auf und dann — Man angelt mit Blitzen O die Geheimnisse des Blutes O für die Fische Alles im Grab der Luft Opfer Henker Finger Finger Das Kind malt im Sarg mit Staub Den Nabel der Welt — und im Geheg der Zähne hält der Henker den letzten Fluch — Was nun?23 [Eyes shut / and then — / the wound opens / and then — // Fishing with flashes of lightning / O / the mysteries of blood / O / for the fish / all in the grave in the sky / victim / hangman / finger / finger // The child draws with dust in the coffin / the belly-button of the world  —  / and the hangman holds the final curse  / in the stockade of teeth — / What now?24]

In this poem we get an intense replay of the struggle surrounding the attempt to find commensurate words to articulate what thwarts language. The image of the wound  — an image characteristic of Sachs’s work — appears in relation to the abyss between the pre- and post-Shoah worlds. Structural disintegration and severe linguistic reduction appear in this poem with exceptional clarity. The collapse of language is implicit

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in the very opening lines of the poem. The first thing that immediately catches the reader’s attention is the frequent interruption of the poem by means of hyphenation. This is highly characteristic of Sachs’s work. This hyphenation permeates the textuality of her poems and assumes crucial symbolic value. Gisela Dischner describes the dashes as “verzweifelte Sprachgebärde des Verstummens, einen Abbruch des Gedichteten, weil Worte fehlen, das Ungeheuerliche, das Unsagbare zu sagen” (despairing gestures of speechlessness, a breakdown of the poetic voice because there are no words to say the unsayable).25 As formal features of the poem they serve as a function of literary content: they express that which is beyond words. The dashes are a manifestation of the mutilation of language in the aftermath of the Shoah. The lack of verbs and punctuation is immediately apparent in the second stanza, and by the third stanza the language has been reduced to single words. It is at this point that the poetic voice appears breathless. As Robert Foot writes, it is as if the poem is trying breathlessly to express the totality of its vision before speechlessness sets in, the single words acting as a kind of severely compressed synecdoche condensing a whole range of inexpressible images into a series of sharp and panicky outbursts.26 The repetition gives the impression of retardation; it is evidence of the poetic voice grappling for words in an effort not to succumb to silence. The final line of the poem “Was nun?” is evidence of a despairing poetic voice working with language completely incommensurate with the subject at hand. In this poem there is not so much as a hint at redemptive release from the suffering endured, since the executioner still lies in wait for his victim and the threat is implicit that evil will ultimately triumph: “der Henker [hält] den letzten Fluch.” Thus neither in form nor in content does Sachs attribute any kind of meaning to the senseless butchery. The following poem is another example of the acute structural disintegration of form: Hölle ist nackt aus Schmerz — Suchen Sprachlos Suchen . . . Su Su Su27 [Hell is naked with pain  —  / searching  / speechless  / searching / . . . / sear sear sear]

This poem is another primary example of severe linguistic reduction; in it, too, formal structure serves as a function of literary content. The poetic voice struggles to find the words to express the naked pain that the Shoah has left in its wake, but is unable to give expression to the experiences of the survivors. The use of aposiopesis — the poetic voice

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breaking off abruptly as if unable to continue — suggests that the poetic voice is searching desperately for adequate words but does so in vain. Once again the poem is progressively fragmented and dispersed, moving from a syntactically complete, if reduced opening sentence ending with the familiar dash, to single words, to individual syllables without defined semantic content. The speechlessness referred to in these poems may be equated with “Stummheit”: the poetic voice is mute and helpless in the face of the horror and heinous nature of the crimes committed. This silence in its opacity suggests that there is something that is impenetrable and incomprehensible. This “something” may be equated with Adorno’s concept of the “extremity that eludes concept.” In another poem this silence once again comes to the fore as Sachs makes a direct appeal to the victims themselves: Verzeiht ihr meine Schwestern ich habe euer Schweigen in mein Herz genommen Dort wohnt es und leidet die Perlen eures Leides klopft Herzweh So laut so zerreißend schrill . . . (Suche nach Lebenden 27) [Forgive me my sisters / I have taken your silence into my heart / There it lives and suffers the pearls of your suffering  / heartache knocks / so loud, so piercingly shrill . . . (Chimneys 257)]

In this poem Sachs makes a direct petition to the dead and pleads that her failure to voice their sufferings be forgiven. The sisters’ “Schweigen” (silence) is described as “laut” and “zerreißend schrill”: it is a silence that demands articulation  — “dort klopft Herzweh”  — yet simultaneously thwarts speech. This is an example of the aporia upon which Adorno reflected. The silence thematized in so much of her work and into which so many of her poems evaporate is not always, therefore, to be equated with mere muteness. The silence that permeates Sachs’s work also has a constructive purpose; the way in which language collapses is itself a telling process. To use Berel Lang’s formulation, the breakdown of both the formal and linguistic structure makes manifest the limits of representation but simultaneously succeeds in representing these very limits.28 The disintegration of form succeeds paradoxically in giving silence form. So the silence that permeates Sachs’s work is a constitutive part of her poetry; as Ernestine Schlant says, it is not just a “monolithic emptiness” or a “semantic void,” but has representational value. Silence, after all, is the absence of words. At the same time, therefore, it is the “presence of their absence.”29 The applicability of such comments to Sachs’s work is clear. The hyphenation that permeates her writing is a symbol that there is something unsayable to be said. The sense of the unrepresentable is thus

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strongly perceptible in her work: that which is not said is just as important as that which is. One particularly distressing poem in which the reader is forced to apprehend an unspoken reality behind the lines is “Sie schreien nicht mehr.” This is undoubtedly one of Sachs’s most disturbing poems: SIE SCHREIEN NICHT MEHR wenn es weh tut Einer steigt auf die Wunden des anderen aber es sind nur Wolken auf die sie treten die tropfen dann geisterhaft — (Suche nach Lebenden 126) [They no longer scream  / when it hurts  / one stands upon the wounds of another  / but they are only clouds  / which they are climbing onto / and it makes them drip, like ghosts —]

In this poem Sachs attempts to portray the scene in the gas chamber. We are confronted with the image of the victims fighting for the last breath of oxygen. The death scene in the chambers is presented here with disturbing clarity. As Ruth Klüger writes: “In der letzten Agonie sind die Starken auf die Schwachen getreten und so waren die Leichen der Männer stets oben, die der Kinder ganz unten” (In the last moments of dying the strong stood upon the weak, and so the corpses of the men were always on top, those of the children on the bottom).30 This is the image that Sachs attempts to provide us with. The poem ends, like so many of Sachs’s poems, in a resonant silence represented by the dash, bringing to the fore the inability of language to portray such unimaginable horror. It is, however, a constructive silence, since it is at this point that the reader is confronted with the task of apprehending Adorno’s concept of the “extremity,” that which has been consigned to silence, that which has thwarted language. The silence that interrupts these poems is thus not a semantic void. The reader is compelled to apprehend the silence produced by the failure of words and confront that which is not said. The aesthetic strategy employed by Sachs is, thus, paradox; she uses form in such a way as to enact a breakdown of form.31 What lies behind the dash is the true horror. For Sachs, the primary task of the post-Shoah writer is to lift the veil of silence that enveloped the unspeakable crimes at Auschwitz. The inevitable failures in adequately performing this task do not, however, mean an automatic lapse into further silence; instead the poetic voice now has the responsibility of presenting the reality of this silence and the reality of the “extremity” inherent in the Shoah; one that evades description but of whose existence the poetic voice is acutely aware. The very uncomfortable and ever-active absent presence of this “extremity” in Sachs’s poetics prevents any kind of closure from occurring.

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Another issue to which Adorno repeatedly returned in his writings was the liquidation in the death camps of the concept of the individual subject. As hitherto discussed, this acquires central importance in Adorno’s reflections on post-Shoah art. His primary concern lay with the possible dangers of representing the Shoah in figurative discourse and in particular with the tendency of the latter toward subjectivity. The mass production of death, as has been seen, had rendered void the very concept of the individual. One of the determining features of Sachs’s work, correspondingly, is the prominence of plural forms of speech. As one critic comments: Das Fehlen des Subjekts  .  .  . erinnert an den massenhaften Tod, die Shoah, die, wenngleich sie ein millionenfaches individuelles Sterben war, . . . den individuellen Tod und somit auch den Status des Subjekts mitvernichtet hat.  .  .  . Die Ichlosigkeit der Lyrik  .  .  . gewinnt . . . nahezu mimetische Qualität. (Kranz-Löber 68) [The absence of the individual subject  .  .  . serves as a reminder of the mass death that occurred — the Shoah. While millions of individual deaths occurred, the concept of individual death itself was also exterminated and with it the status of the individual subject. . . . The absence of the lyrical “I” . . . in the poems thus acquires . . . a mimetic quality.]

As has been mentioned above, it is in this respect that the poetic genre has a distinct advantage. Not tied to the narration of individual characters, poetry can reflect the extermination process as it was: “the unceremonious mass-production of death.”32 In the aftermath of Auschwitz, death can no longer be comfortably assumed to exist in its traditional forms. This is particularly relevant with respect to Sachs, since she most certainly does not present us with any illusory sense of death as a release from suffering. Rather, she presents the scenario of perpetrator and victim as all-pervasive. Death has become a haunting specter that permeates life itself. Life for the survivor is now a steady progression toward the grave. Although they may have survived physical annihilation, death is now ubiquitous. The poem “Chor der Geretteten” (Chorus of the Saved), undoubtedly one of Sachs’s most disquieting works, demonstrates this clearly by portraying a survivor constantly haunted by the presence of death. Wir Geretteten, Immer noch hängen die Schlingen für unsere Hälse gedreht Vor uns in der blauen Luft — Immer noch füllen sich die Stundenuhren mit unserem tropfenden Blut. Wir Geretteten,

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Immer noch essen an uns die Würmer der Angst. (Fahrt ins Staublose 50) [We the rescued  / The nooses wound for our necks still dangle  / before us in the blue air — / The hourglasses still fill with our dripping blood / We the rescued / The worms of fear still feed on us. (Chimneys 25)]

In its clarity the imagery in this poem is disturbing, to say the very least. Nooses dangle in the blue air, worms of fear feed on the survivors, the hourglass contains blood instead of sand. Death has become omnipresent, determining life itself. The distortion of traditional imagery is characteristic of Sachs’s work: the symbol of the hourglass is no longer a reminder of a transitory but a permanent state. There is no hint of redemptive release. The dash once again expresses the muteness with which the poetic voice is struck in the all-pervasive presence of death. We have seen how the compulsion to bear witness lay at the heart of the aporia that the writer faced in the aftermath of the Shoah: a moral obligation to give expression to the events together with the impossibility of doing so adequately. Sachs’s accomplishment is thus paradoxical: she “succeeds” by presenting in her representation the fact that adequate representation is impossible to achieve. She confronts the aporia facing the post-Shoah writer by inscribing into her poetry the impossibility of representing the suffering. I have attempted here to demonstrate that although the language and the formal structure of her poems are characterized by destabilization, severe condensation, indeterminacy, and absence, they nonetheless speak a language. The potential for deriving aesthetic pleasure from her poetry  — that ultimate danger against which Adorno warned — is reduced given the permeation of her poetry by fragmentations; of despair, pain, and relentlessly distorted imagery. In its clarity, her poetry is disturbing; in its opacity it is distressing. The source of this distress lies in the knowledge that behind the stark imagery, which in itself reveals so much, the reader is left with the perturbing realization that so much has also been consigned to silence. It is at that moment of realization that we confront Adorno’s “extremity” and our thought is denied closure. Opacity and clarity are mutually exclusive, but Sachs succeeds in presenting both simultaneously: the opacity in her poetry presents the fact that speech has been thwarted; it is what is left unspoken that counts. Sachs presents the fact that this unspoken reality exists. Paradoxically, by making clear through the formal structure of her work the impossibility of adequate communication, Sachs makes communication possible.

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Notes Epigraph. Fahrt ins Staublose: Die Gedichte der Nelly Sachs (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1961), 319; Briefe der Nelly Sachs, ed. Ruth Dinesen and Helmut Müssener (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 98; and Noten zur Literatur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1965), 125. Unless indicated otherwise, all translations are my own. 1

Susan Gubar, Poetry after Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000), 240. 2

Elrud Ibsch, Die Shoah erzählt: Zeugnis und Experiment in der Literatur (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2004), 48.

3

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Die Steine der Freiheit,” in Lyrik nach Auschwitz: Adorno und die Dichter, ed. Petra Kiedaisch (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1995), 73–76; here, 73.

4

Walter Jens, “Nobelpreis für Literatur: Nelly Sachs,” Ruperto-Carola: Zeitschrift der Vereinigung der Freunde der Studentenschaft der Universität Heidelberg 14.4 (1967): 4–7; here, 4.

5

Ronald Aronson, “The Holocaust and Human Progress,” in Echoes from the Holocaust: Philosophical Reflections on a Dark Time, ed. Alan Rosenberg and Gerald E Myers (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1988) 223–44; here, 223. 6

Casey Haskins, “Art, Morality, and the Holocaust: The Aesthetic Riddle of Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59.4 (2003): 373–84; here, 373. 7

Stephen J. Whitfield, “The Holocaust: Remembrances, Reflections Revisions,” Religion Compass 1.1 (2007): 190–202; here, 194. 8

Howard Caygill, “Lyric Poetry before Auschwitz,” in Adorno and Literature, ed. David Cunningham and Nigel Mapp (London, New York: Continuum, 2006), 69–83; here, 69. Subsequent references are cited in the text using the abbreviation Caygill and page number.

9

Theodor W. Adorno, “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft,” in Gesammelte Schriften in zwanzig Bänden, vol. 10, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 30. 10

Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, in Gesammelte Schriften in zwanzig Bänden, vol. 6, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 42. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation Negative Dialektik and page number. 11

Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (New York: Orion, 1959), 82.

12

Theodor W. Adorno, Minima moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, in Gesammelte Schriften in zwanzig Bänden, vol. 4, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 148. 13

Reinhard Baumgart, Literatur für Zeitgenossen: Essays (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966), 28. 14

This restorative climate was starkly evident in the debates that surrounded the reconstruction of the bombed Goethehaus in Frankfurt, and the celebrations in

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Weimar  — less than ten kilometers from Buchenwald  — of the two hundredth anniversary of Goethe’s birth. 15

Max Frisch, Gesammelte Werke in zeitlicher Folge, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), 292.

16

Theodor W. Adorno, “Auferstehung der Kultur in Deutschland,” in Kritik: Kleine Schriften zur Gesellschaft, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), 20–33; here, 27. 17

Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, in Gesammelte Schriften in zwanzig Bänden, vol. 7, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 374.

18

Noten zur Literatur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1965), 125. Subsequent references are cited in the text using the abbreviation Noten and page number. 19

Ästhetische Theorie, 403.

20

Johann Baptist Metz, “Für eine anamnetische Kultur,” in Holocaust: die Grenzen des Verstehens Eine Debatte über die Besetzung der Geschichte, ed. Hanno Lowey (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1992), 36. 21

Susan Shapiro, “Hearing the testimony of radical negation,” Concilium. International Journal for Theology 5.175 (1984): 3–10; here, 6. 22

Briefe der Nelly Sachs, ed. Ruth Dinesen and Helmut Müssener (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 67. Subsequent references to this edition are cited in the text using the abbreviation Briefe and page number. 23

Nelly Sachs, Fahrt ins Staublose: Die Gedichte der Nelly Sachs (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1961), 375. Subsequently cited in the text as Fahrt ins Staublose, with page number. 24

Nelly Sachs, O the Chimneys, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Farrar Straus 1967), 367. Subsequently cited as Chimneys, with page number. 25 Gisela Bezzel-Dischner, Poetik des modernen Gedichts: Zur Lyrik von Nelly Sachs (Bad Homburg, Gehlen, 1970), 89. 26

Robert Foot, The Phenomenon of Speechlessness in the Poetry of Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Günter Eich, Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan (Bonn: Bouvier, 1982), 149. 27

Nelly Sachs, Suche nach Lebenden — Die Gedichte der Nelly Sachs (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), 57. Subsequent references to this volume are cited in the text using the abbreviation Suche nach Lebenden, with page number. 28

Lang, Holocaust Representations, 300.

29

Ernestine Schlant, The Language of Silence: West German Literature and the Holocaust (New York and London: Routledge, 1999). 30

Ruth Klüger, weiter leben  — Eine Jugend (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1992), 34. Here quoted in Ruth Kranz-Löber, “In der Tiefe des Hohlwegs”: Die Shoah in der Lyrik von Nelly Sachs (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2001), 149. Subsequently cited in the text as Kranz-Löber, with page number. 31

Lea Wernick Fridman, Words and Witness: Narrative and Aesthetic Strategies in the Representation of the Holocaust (New York: SUNY P, 2000), 132. 32

Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi, By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980), 83.

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2: “Flaschenpost” and “Wurfholz”: Reflections on Paul Celan’s Poems and Poetics Gisela Dischner

W

HILE GOTTFRIED BENN SPOKE OF the monologic character of the poem, “the poem, addressed to nobody,” Celan insisted on the dialogical nature of “every true poem.” In any case, both refer very often to a “you” in their poems, which can be the lyrical ego, a beloved woman, or even the reader. In his concept of dialogue, Celan was influenced by the Russian poetical movement of Acmeism (from Greek acme: peak or culmination), a literary group formed as a counter to symbolism. It brought together poets such as Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova and Nikolaj Gumilev in 1912–13. When he was composing his Büchner Prize acceptance speech, Der Meridian, Celan came across the Acmeists’ polemics against traditional Symbolists, and also read Mandelstam’s essay On the Nature of the Word and Gumilev’s Letters on Russian Poetry. Both Mandelstam and Gumilev not only saw dialogue as being central to their idea of the poem, but as something that reflected their idea of a literary community. When Mandelstam says: “There are no lyrics without dialogue,” he is referring to the reader as well as to the text itself. Or, as Gumilev says, the poet always speaks to somebody, while for Anna Akhmatova the reader is the invisible friend of the poet. The poet must remain at a great distance to the reader to remain free, of course, but he is there, looks after him from this distance. There is no doubt that these statements influenced Celan’s poetics, for instance his idea of the poem as a “Flaschenpost” (message in a bottle)1 that could reach the “land” of the reader’s heart, “gespült an Herzland.” Another of the group’s ideas that clearly resonated with Celan was one that can be encapsulated in Mandelstam’s statement: “Away with symbolism, long live the living rose.”2 Having read Margarete Susman’s book Deutung biblischer Gestalten, Celan wrote to the author in early 1963, saying that in a time of “inflation of symbols” she had given him back the idea of the invisible and the unique communicating with one another through the creative form.3 Celan refers to this as a sensitivity

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toward the thing itself to which the poet opens his soul, reflecting a familiarity with Heidegger’s sentence “das Ding dingt” (the thing things) in which the separation of subject and object is abolished for a moment — “Die Dinge schlagen die Augen auf” (the things open their eyes), as Walter Benjamin says. Here the word returns to the dignity of name; it is not just a medium of communication. In contrast to this, words suffered a degradation in the propaganda of the Stalin and Hitler regimes. Recognizing often overlooked parallels between the two political systems, Celan, who was in his heart of hearts an anarchist in the old sense of the word  — that is, in the desire for freedom from rule  — saw Stalin’s massacres reflected in the fascist movement. After all, most of the Russian poets whose works he had translated were murdered or committed suicide under Stalin, for according to the doctrine of Socialist Realism, the Acmeists were “reactionary.” In this fight against “entartete Kunst” (degenerate art) and simultaneous encouragement of kitsch propagandaart, Stalinist Russia could not fail to be reminiscent of Nazi Germany. For Benn and Celan, however, both of whom would be considered “degenerate” by the Stalinists, art was not something to be made into an instrument for, or a weapon against, anything. Poetry set its readers free inasmuch as they were open to such an experience, and it was this freedom that resisted all totalitarian tendencies, making the poetry so politically relevant. The poem entails, then, a process of initiation rather than analysis. Only an existential reading can lead to the point where the reader experiences freedom. The “I” is not connected to, but resides between earth and heaven; it is like the iris in another of Celan’s poems that connects both spheres for a short moment. The invoked reader, the poem’s “you,” feels his own being — Dasein — as an in-between, a moment of eternity in consciousness of his mortality: “Ewig, verunewigt bist du, / verewigt, unewig, du” (GW 2:122, eternal, rendered non-eternal you are, / eternalized, non-eternal, you). In opposition to the illusion of eternity and the traditional language of sublime symbols and metaphors, Celan evokes the allegory of truth, not as adornment or in terms of moral “engagement,” but rather as a resonating noise: “Ein Dröhnen: es ist / die Wahrheit selbst” (GW 2:89, a rumbling: truth / itself).4 This may cause the reader to experience the “shock of the unintelligible,” a shock that, according to Adorno, makes all other debates about political commitment mere shadow-boxing. Celan always uses words that are very precisely related to their context and to the time in which the poet was living.5 The particular time in which he lived made it necessary for him to break with the conventional rules of poetry. In other words, the poem after Auschwitz is possible, but it cannot be a poem in the old manner; its breath is different. Breath — Atem  — is an essential word for Celan, and the book title Atemwende

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(Breath Turn) refers to this change of breath necessary for new poetry. I have elsewhere called poetry of this disputed tradition within modernity “die Hölderlinlinie der Moderne” (the Hölderlin line of modernism”).6 Rilke, Trakl, Nelly Sachs, Benn, and Celan belong, I claim, to this Hölderlin line, distinguishing them from the other main tradition of modern poetry, French Symbolism. In the former, the existential situation of the poet is responsible for the breaking of traditional rules, whereas in the latter it is motivated by an experimental impulse. As in Benn’s so-called monologue poems, when Celan says “you” in his poems, it refers at the same time to himself as his own lyrical alter ego, to a beloved woman who is remembered in a situation of love, and to the reader. Whereas the lies of propaganda or commercial advertisement degrade words, Celan’s poetry invokes another form of language. The poetry of the Hölderlin-Linie addresses the situation both of the poet in his simultaneous freedom and responsibility, and of the poem dwelling at the horizon of its particular time. Celan refers to the aftermath of National Socialism, asserting his own responsibility as a poet, and pitting himself against the language abuse of the tertium imperium. The following poem expresses this: WEGGEBEIZT vom Strahlenwind deiner Sprache das bunte Gerede des Anerlebten — das hundertzüngige Meingedicht, das Genicht. (GW 2:31) [ETCHED AWAY from the ray-shot wind of your language the garish talk of rubbedoff experience — the hundredtongued pseudopoem, the noem. (SP 239)]

The first word “weggebeizt” (etched away or corroded) is difficult to translate without losing its very specific connection to a geographical phenomenon. In a copy of Sigmund Günther’s book Physikalische Geographie, Celan had underlined this very word in a passage describing pyramids in the Libyan desert that had become ruins because their softer stone structures had been gradually etched away by the wind, “vom Winde weggebeizt.”7 Celan imports the two words (Wind, weggebeizt) into his examination of language, which is connected, of course, with breath (for example, at the end of the poem where we find the often-used word “Atemkristall,” which means literally “breath crystal”). Celan, who was familiar with the

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different meanings of the Greek term pneuma (he uses this word in his poetological writings), also combines the ideas of wind and breath. The “Strahlenwind” (ray-shot wind) of language refers both to the geographical phenomenon in Günther’s book as well as to the more physiological meaning of breath that is connected with spoken language (“deiner Sprache”). The word “Strahlenwind” has a synaesthetic element inasmuch as it fuses wind and light. But light and language are also combined in the cabbalistic theory of language: its most important part, the Book of Zohar, is called das Buch der Strahlen (Book of the Rays). Interestingly, Nelly Sachs referred to Celan’s anthology Sprachgitter (Language Lattice) as “Das Buch der Strahlen” and to Celan himself as “the new Hölderlin of our time.”8 If we pursue these interconnections further, we note that the Hebrew word ruach, similar in its chain of meanings to pneuma, means breath, wind, storm, and soft breath (in German: Hauch). Celan was naturally aware of these etymological links and refers indirectly to them. Ruach, however, is also the “speaking spirit of God” who appears in light and a column of fire. In the Old Testament, God appears in a burning bush and accompanies the people of Israel in the desert night as a column of fire. The reader is dared to connect the lines “Weggebeizt vom / Strahlenwind deiner Sprache” (etched away by the / ray-shot wind of your language) not only to the lyrical I, but possibly also to the “speaking voice” in the column of fire. But this is not written out of religious conviction, because Celan, unlike Nelly Sachs, was skeptical about any attempt to positively define the nature of God, as we see in his poem “Zürich, zum Storchen.” I assume the reference to the cabbalistic tradition is connected with the cabbalistic idea of language, where word and name are the same. But Celan could equally be referring to the idea of a deus absconditus, who departs, leaving all creation to mankind. In translating his favorite poet Osip Mandelstam, Celan writes: “Ossip Mandelstamms [Gedichten] ist . . . das Tetragrammaton eingeschrieben, der Name des Deus absconditus, der El” (inscribed in Osip Mandelstam’s [poems] is the tetragrammaton, which is the name of the Deus absconditus, the El, Meridian 203). The mystic interpretative approach refuses to acknowledge one singular meaning, always engendering a new approach to the language of names, taking the word as a source and not simply as a communication tool. Never is any given interpretation the only or ultimate one. This takes us back to the importance of the reader, who is seen as a new creator. Friedrich Schlegel’s idea of the “progressive universal poetry,” which remains in a constant state of becoming, without ever being perfect, is reminiscent of this gesture of language where the breath of the reader intertwines with the words of the poem that he speaks. The poet here is never possessive, he is open and his poem thus becomes a message in a bottle.

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The “bunte Gerede des An-/erlebten” (garish talk of rubbed-off experience) has no real existence, it is a decoration, without truth, lying, “hundert-/züngig” (hundred-/tongued) and possessive  — “Mein-  / Gedicht” (a word that could be read, as Michael Hamburger does, to mean pseudo-poem, but can also mean my poem). “I” is nothing (“das Genicht“) and it shall be etched away, “weggebeizt” like the soft stone of the pyramids that fall into ruins. The “Strahlenwind” (pneuma, ruach), however, is stronger, as is therefore also language; this “Strahlenwind deiner Sprache” transcends mere colorful, garish talk (“Gerede“) of something that has no real existence, but is simply “anerlebt.” “Weggebeizt” in its hard (dental) articulation is a very appropriate word in Celan’s description of language because of the connection with wind as a force of nature that can erode even stone. Celan wrote many poems while undergoing psychiatric treatment; most of these are found in Fadensonnen. These poems speak about the situation of being confined and distant from a nature that he loved. Only in the landscape of language can he go out; otherwise the “living sky” has disappeared and with it the stars. His brain is in vibration and gets what he calls a second “Nesselnachricht” (nettle message). As no first message is mentioned, the reader is left to imagine what it might have been. Nothing explicit is mentioned about the second, either. The old-fashioned word “tuckern,” a combination of zucken (twitching) und ticken/tackern (ticking), suggests a state of nervous vibration in the skull or brain (“tuckernder Schädel”), which receives a second “Nesselnachricht”:9 DIE ZWEITE Nesselnachricht an den tuckernden Schädel: Weggesackt der lebendige Himmel. Unter der jaulenden Düse, mitten im ewigen Blinkspiel, beiß dich als Wort in den wissenden, sternlosen Halm!10 (GW 2:149) [The second / nettle message / to the / trembling /skull: // Subsided / the living sky. Under / the yowling / jet, / amid the eternal  / twinkle play,  / bite yourself as a word into the knowing,  / starless blade (of grass)!11]

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In the powerless painful situation described, the only strength is the word: you bite yourself “als Wort” (which means you are the word) into the starless “Halm” (blade of grass). Starless — “sternlos” — links back to the living sky (“der lebendige Himmel”) earlier in the poem; but this sky is “weggesackt,” has sunk, subsided. The “Halm” can also be understood here as a blade of straw, Strohhalm, suggesting the last possible solution in a painful or dangerous situation, the idea of clutching at straws. Via its etymological connection to cones (see note 10), the idea of “Halm” can be linked to that of “Düse” (cone) and man as a thinking cone or tube, a hollow reed (both in the sense of the primitive pen and of Psalm 89:11), blown in unexpected directions, powerless. His only power is the capability of thinking. The second stanza-part at the beginning of the anthology Sprachgitter reminds one of the “Nesselnachricht”:12 “Stimmen vom Nesselweg her: / Komm auf den Händen zu uns. / Wer mit der Lampe allein ist, / hat nur die Hand, daraus zu lesen” (GW 1:147; Voices coming from the nettle road: / Come to us on hands. / Whoever is alone with the lamp, / has only the hand from which to read). The last and often-quoted part of Sprachgitter is the poem “Engführung” (The Straightening). There we find yet again the image of grass blades, if not reeds, in combination with reading and looking  — both in the imperative form, “go”: “Gras, auseinandergeschrieben. Die Steine, Weiß / mit den Schatten der Halme: / Lies nicht mehr — schau! / Schau nicht mehr  — geh!” (GW 1:197; Grass, written asunder. The stones, white  / with the shadows of grass blades  / Don’t read anymore  — look! / Don’t look anymore — go!, SP 141). The imperative forming the last two lines is addressed both to the lyrical “I” as well as to the reader. This strong gesture of the imperative is found again in the second “Nesselnachricht”: “beiß dich als Wort in den wissenden / sternlosen Halm.” Here I find the most dominant gesture to be toward the lyrical “I” itself. But the reader can participate in this imperative to do something — in the case of “Engführung,” to move, to go away. The poem is to be understood as a message in a bottle, a “Flaschenpost” that is perhaps washed ashore in the reader’s heart (the heart as the landing place): Das Gedicht kann, da es ja eine Erscheinungsform der Sprache und damit seinem Wesen nach dialogisch ist, eine Flaschenpost sein, aufgegeben in dem — gewiss nicht immer hoffnungsstarken — Glauben, sie könnte irgendwo und irgendwann an Land gespült werden, an Herzland vielleicht. Gedichte sind auch in dieser Weise unterwegs: Sie halten auf etwas zu. (GW 3:186) [Since it is a linguistic phenomenon and therefore essentially dialogical, the poem can be a message in a bottle, posted in the — certainly not always hopeful — faith it could be washed ashore somewhere, to

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heartland perhaps. In this sense poems too are underway: They are heading toward something.13]

In this poem, “Die zweite Nesselnachricht,” the “Flaschenpost” arrives in the form of a sound effect. Sound elements from “Weggebeizt” echo back at us again in “Weggesackt [. . .] beiß dich als Wort” in what I would call Klangsemantik (a semantics of sound). But there is also an analogy in terms of the content: In both poems it is the power of language (“Weggebeizt vom / Strahlenwind deiner Sprache”) and the word (“beiß dich als Wort . . .”) that resists the aforementioned trivial or degraded strains of language, thereby creating what we are reading: the poem. Part of the fascination of these poems is the tension between the often dark content and the semantics of sound that awaken a magic power in the reader’s soul even if he does not “understand” the poem. The poem’s effect derives from another dimension: the dimension of magic participation that the reader can only access if he opens his “Herzland” (the land of his heart). When the word is identified with the name, as in the cabbalistic theory of language, it becomes its own reality. One example of this would be the word “Nesselnachricht,” a term that is not understandable at first glance. But on the basis of a semantics of sound, the two elements Nessel and Nachricht, both beginning with “n” and forming an alliteration, also echo each other rhythmically as each is made up of a trochee — a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed. The neologism “Nesselnachricht,” by dint of this metric regularity, starts to sounds like Morse code, a code word, or a hidden message, pointing back to something prior to or outside the space of the poem: It is pointing back to the poetological space then, the space of its origin, as it were. The content of the second nettle message says: “Weggesackt der lebendige Himmel” (subsided the living sky). Before, then, there was a living sky that has disappeared in a sudden movement: not upwards into the air, but downwards to earth like a heavy piece of material sinking down beneath the horizon. The poet leads the reader into a paradoxical situation, outside of normal logic, in which the coordinates of down and up are no longer distinct. This paradoxical message reaches a brain that is probably in pain and vibration. The receiver is not in a passive state, but in one of excitement brought about by that unwritten previous nettle message that has caused him to tremble. The second message is transported to that “tuckernden / Schädel.” The reader could wonder if, paradoxically, the message’s content has undergone a metamorphosis because of the place at which it arrives: the trembling skull? And who is the speaker of this second message? The lyrical “I”? And, if so, who exactly is this lyrical “I”? The sender? The recipient? Who speaks, in what time, and where? And who is

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the “you” who is at the receiving end of the “Nesselnachricht”’s imperative: “beiß dich als Wort” (bite yourself as a word)? A sound-semantic biography of life in a closed hospital, enclosed not only in a room but in his own “tuckernden Schädel”? The power of transforming an unbearable situation into lyrics as a means of survival? While researching my thesis on Nelly Sachs,14 I asked her about her influences. She answered in a letter of 12 July 1966 from Stockholm: Die furchtbaren Ereignisse, die mich selbst an den Rand des Todes und der Verdunkelung gebracht haben, sind meine Lehrmeister gewesen. Hätte ich nicht schreiben können, so hätte ich nicht überlebt. Der Tod war mein Lehrmeister. Wie hätte ich mich mit etwas anderem beschäftigen können, meine Metaphern sind meine Wunden. [The terrible events that pushed me to the edge of death and darkness have been my teachers. If I had not been able to write, I would not have survived. Death was my teacher. With what else could I have occupied myself, my metaphors are my wounds.]

Paul Celan met Adorno several times, read his books, and cast him as the “Jud Groß” (the big Jew) in his Gespräch im Gebirg (Conversation in the Mountains), with himself as the “Jud Klein” (the little Jew).15 But the incipient friendship was burdened by Adorno’s well-known and muchdiscussed statement that after Auschwitz it would be barbaric to write a poem. Adorno elaborated further on that, when he said: Den Satz, nach Auschwitz noch Lyrik zu schreiben, sei barbarisch, möchte ich nicht mildern; negativ ist darin der Impuls ausgesprochen, der die engagierte gute Dichtung beseelt . . . Aber wahr bleibt auch Enzensbergers Entgegnung, die Dichtung müsse eben diesem Verdikt standhalten, so also sein, daß sie nicht durch ihre bloße Existenz nach Auschwitz dem Zynismus sich überantworte. Ihre eigene Situation ist paradox, nicht erst, wie man sich zu ihr verhält. Das Übermaß an Leiden duldet kein Vergessen. [I do not want to soften my statement that it is barbaric to continue to write poetry after Auschwitz; it expresses, negatively, the impulse that animates committed literature. . . . But Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s rejoinder also remains true, namely that literature must resist precisely this verdict, that is, be such that it does not surrender to cynicism merely by existing after Auschwitz. It is the situation of literature itself and not simply one’s relation to it that is paradoxical. The abundance of real suffering permits no forgetting.16]

Paul Celan was disappointed by the original statement and wrote in anger that Adorno’s sentence originated from the mistaken view that poetry

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merely peddled what he called a “Nachtigallen- oder Singdrosselperspektive” (a nightingale or song thrush perspective). However, in a letter of 13 August 1969 to the author of this article, Celan wrote: Auch ich war betroffen, bestürzt, als ich in der Zeitung die Nachricht vom Tode Adornos las. Ich empfand Schmerz, auch jetzt empfinde ich Schmerz. Es ist ein schwerer Verlust. Er war ein genialischer Mensch, ein Reichbeschenkter, und nicht der Teufel hatte ihn beschenkt. [I too was upset, distressed, when I read in the paper the news of Adorno’s death. I felt pain, even now I feel pain. It is a grave loss. He was an ingenious man, richly gifted, and it was not the devil who had thus endowed him.17]

I see the poetry of the Hölderlinlinie der Moderne as addressing the question of the place of poetry in times that reject the poetic impulse. When Hölderlin’s lyrical ‘I’ asks “wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit”18 (what need for poets in times of want), he is referring to the period’s appreciation of harmless poems with “Nachtigallen- oder Singdrosselperspektive” for the leisure time of busy men, and its concomitant hostility toward real poetry. He who speaks in a new existential language is seldom on the list of bestsellers, but is very often in the situation of being pathologized by society. So poets and artists suffer most from normality’s pathological desire to annul anything it does not find immediately intelligible;19 they are isolated and live in a constant struggle for social survival (often consumed by alienating work).20 In the words of Margarete Susman’s letter of 3 July 1963 to Paul Celan: Vielleicht  .  .  . muß jemand, der derart eine neue Sprache spricht, notwendig leiden und einsam werden, weil er sehr schwer verstanden wird. . . . [D]as bedeutet, daß die vollkommene Dichtung ein Element des Verstummens enthält, von dem Sie in Ihrer BüchnerRede sprechen.21 [Perhaps  .  .  . someone who speaks this new language necessarily must suffer and become isolated, because he is so difficult to understand. . . . This means that perfect poetry contains that element of muteness which you speak about in your Büchner speech.]

The content of Celan’s poems remains more and more hidden in magic sound and evocation, moving nearer to silence. A poem that tries to utter the horror of the Shoah, like the Todesfuge (Death Fugue), is no longer possible for Celan in his later work. But any poem that does attempt to speak out in this way does so only via the readable dimension of the text, the analyzable part that does not require the weary process of initiation.

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Celan’s Holocaust poem, which can be found in every German schoolbook, made him famous, but it was not a fame he enjoyed. By contrast, his late poetry is inaccessible to a wider public, and, although there are many interpretations, most of them attempt to translate the content into the (annulling) language of normality. In terms of interpretations, Barbara Wiedemann manages to negotiate this tendency to normalize very well. The commentary in her edition of Celan’s collected poetry, written with great knowledge and respect, helps the reader to understand certain words and allusions, but eventually it is the reader who has to step alone into Celan’s landscape of language, a universe that often relates the human to the cosmic, and is full of paradoxes and isolated details that do not come together without the imagination of the reader, requiring him to leave the firm ground of normal logic and discourse. Much has been written about Verstummen and Schweigen (becoming and being silent). This constellation is significant in two different ways: One aspect is the unspeakable horror of the Shoah that moved Adorno to talk about the barbarity of writing a poem after Auschwitz. At the other end of the spectrum from the horror that renders speechless is the ecstatic wordless experience of being merged with the universe — an experience called “god” by the mystics who influenced Celan (as well as Nelly Sachs): Meister Eckhart, Jakob Böhme, and the cabbalistic tradition. The words Nichts, Niemand, Leere (nothing, no-one, emptiness) are often found in Celan’s poems. These words, associated with both Eastern and Western mystical traditions, are taken up in one of Celan’s books entitled Die Niemandsrose (The No One’s Rose, 1963). To quote from the poem of this collection entitled Psalm: Niemand knetet uns wieder aus Erde und Lehm, niemand bespricht unseren Staub. Niemand. Gelobt seist du, Niemand. Dir zulieb wollen wir blühn. Dir entgegen. Ein Nichts waren wir, sind wir, werden wir bleiben, blühend: die Nichts-, die Niemandsrose. (GW 1:225) [No one molds us again out of earth and clay,  / no one conjures our dust. / No one. // Praised be your name, no one. / For your

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sake / we shall flower. / Toward / you. // A nothing / we were, are, shall / remain, flowering: / the nothing-, the / no one’s rose. (SP 179)]

The Zohar begins with the interpretation of the rose (Song of Solomon 2, 3).22 It is the ghetto-rose of Israel.23 “Rabbi Chiskija begann mit den Schriftworten: ‘Wie die Rose zwischen den Dornen’ . . . Wer ist die ‘Rose’? Die Gemeinschaft Israels” (Rabbi Chiska began with words from the Scriptures: “Like the rose among the thorns” . . . Who is the “rose”? The community of Israel). In the Psalms (for example, Psalm 41:13 and 72:1, among others), the formula is introduced “Praised be the Lord God [the God] of Israel.” But Celan, throughout his poem that retells the first story of the Bible and the Zohar, replaces this God of Israel with the God Niemand. The reborn human being made of spirit rather than flesh (John 3:3– 7) is not created by God in this poem, but by Niemand. Joachim Schulze refers to the poem “Mandorla” (GW 1:244), stating that Niemand is identical with God: Nach einem Seitenblick auf Mandorla läßt sich Niemand . . . als Gottesbezeichnung verstehen, als Negation des unpersönlichen Etwas. Der Anfang der zweiten Strophe bestätigt die Zulässigkeit dieser Annahme. Denn die Wendung Gelobt seist du, Niemand klingt an die Preisungsformel mancher Psalmen an.24 [A glance at “Mandorla” shows that no one . . . can be understood as the name of God, as a negation of the impersonal Some-thing. The beginning of the second stanza confirms this assumption. For the phrase “praised be thou, no-one” reminds us of the formula of praise used in certain psalms.]

I would contend, however, that the idea of Niemand and Nichts, though used in Christian and Jewish mysticism, is not simply to be identified with the name of God. There is another tradition at work in Celan’s words: the tradition of existentialism, specifically Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. The connection between Celan and Heidegger is well known, of course, and recorded in the poem Todtnauberg (recalling a visit to Heidegger’s hut in the Black Forest). But the connection goes further: Heidegger, understanding his philosophy as the end of metaphysics, also refers to the mystic tradition when he speaks of Nichts (Jakob Böhme, Meister Eckhart). His concept of “being” (Sein) and “beings” (das Seiende) is important in relation to the human being as the only Seiendes, which participates in the Sein as transcendence: Sein ist das transcendens schlechthin. Die Transzendenz des Daseins ist eine ausgezeichnete, sofern in ihr die Möglichkeit und Notwendigkeit der radikalsten Individuation liegt.25

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[Being is the transcendens pure and simple. The transcendence of the Being of Dasein is a distinctive one since in it lies the possibility and necessity of the most radical individuation.26]

Individuation is the task of the human as self-transcending being. From this point of view, it is quite possible to take nobody — Niemand — literally, because it refutes the idea of a God who created men: There is nobody who formed human beings out of dust. The personal address to the subject Niemand “Gelobt seist du, Niemand” (as opposed to God) could be seen as the post-religious thinking of the free self-fashioning man as responsible for himself. The cabbalistic and Bible references are, from this viewpoint, parts of a religious tradition that is present in Celan’s poems, but that is “aufgehoben” — raised and stored away — to recall two aspects of Hegel’s triple sense of the word Aufhebung (sublation): dissolved as firm belief (in the third aspect), but saved and preserved as the possibility of transcending the visible world and accessing the invisible universe of the soul’s poetical landscape  — destroyed and salvaged at once, “aufgehoben”  — “Ein Nichts / waren wir, sind wir, werden / wir bleiben, blühend: / die Nichts-, die / Niemandsrose” (GW 1:225). Human beings — we — are a nothing. This nothing, like the whole book Die Niemandsrose, is transcending upwards from the earth to the sky and vice versa — in both ascent and descent. The landscape of language (Sprachlandschaft) stretches from the earthly stone to the star in the sky. Incidentally, Osip Mandelstam, the poet beloved of Celan and to whom the Niemandsrose is dedicated, sees an analogy between the star and the poet. He speaks of a possible reader, who may be reached after the poet’s death — perhaps. As with the “Flaschenpost” in Celan’s speech, the reader remains unknown, and so the poet weighs the possibility of a communication with this unknown party. Similarly, Mandelstam speaks of a “Leser in der Nachwelt” (reader located in the afterworld / in posterity), to whom he has a connection after the “Lichtgestirne” (light stars) have vanished.27 In Celan’s poetical landscape, water and air are the elements into which the instruments of poetical language are thrown by the poet in order to reach somewhere, someone, in some future time. The instrument in the air, the poet’s language (sometimes message) is seen as a “Wurfholz” (a boomerang) that can return to whoever has thrown it: “EIN WURFHOLZ, auf Atemwegen, / so wanderts, das Flügel- / mächtige, das  / Wahre  .  .  . verbracht und verworfen,  / sich selber der Reim,—/ so kommt es / geflogen, so kommts / wieder und heim” (GW 1:258; A boomerang, on breath-ways, / thus wandering, mighty / of wings, the / truthful . . . brought and cast away, / its own rhyme,—/ so it comes / flying, so it comes / back and home).

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The “Wurfholz” is like a poet’s word that has been forgotten or not understood for a thousand years and that suddenly comes back, “einen Herzschlag, ein Tausendjahr lang,” and in the skipped heartbeat moment of its return are gathered the thousand years of its absence. The moment of return and the thousand years are one in the kairos, the eternal moment in which time stands still, because the poet’s word has finally (momentarily) reached somebody, describing this someone’s soul in describing his own. By joining together the thousand years (of its absence) and moment (of its return), the boomerang brings with it the whole idea of time. When the boomerang word returns, it hits the as-yet-unmarked soul that is then “beziffert” (be-numbered like a clock or marked) in that instant of “innehalten,” the pause between heartbeats. The time of somebody (the reader), who is reached by the word out of a past that could stretch to a thousand years, marks or numbers the recipient’s soul: another time begins after the poetic word comes back through time and space like a boomerang, a “Wurfholz.” It comes on the wings of breath, and is thus called “das Flügel- / mächtige, das / Wahre” (mighty / of wings, the / truthful).28 The wings allow us to connect this flight to Pegasus, the winged horse of Greek mythology that symbolized poetic genius. The poet, on wings of imagination, professes truth, “das Wahre”  — as in the poem “Ein Dröhnen” (GW 2:89) mentioned above. The “Wurfholz” is another such flying object, but this time a tool or weapon used for hunting. Professing truth, “das Wahre,” can be a shock for the reader (the “Schock des Unverständlichen,” or shock of the unintelligible, as Adorno put it). Truth does not come “auf Taubenfüßen” (on doves’ feet), but loudly, suddenly, unexpectedly, accompanied by “Dröhnen” (a rumbling). The “Wurfholz” too is something that comes suddenly, literally out of thin air, but not with a rumbling. In the poem “Aber” it is compared to the noise of the swan’s flight. die Schwäne, in Genf, ich sah’s nicht, flogen, es war, als schwirrte, vom Nichts her, ein Wurfholz ins Ziel einer Seele: soviel Zeit denk mir, als Auge, jetzt zu: daß ich’s schwirren hör, näher — nicht neben mir, nicht, wo du nicht sein kannst. (GW 1:182) [the swans,  / in Geneva, I didn’t see it, were flying, it was,  / as if, from the Nothing, a boomerang was whirring / into the target of his soul: so much / time / think toward me now, as an eye: / that I shall hear it whirr, closer — not / beside me, not, / where you cannot be.]

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Celan transforms the experience of a noise into a poetical sign just as the swan itself is — in the French language — connected with the poetical signe: cygne. The “Wurfholz” as swan sound contrasts with the idea of the “swansong”: The change from this to the airy whirring of the flying swans mirrors a change in poetry itself; it is a good-bye to the sublime metaphor of the swan as well as to its erotic tradition (as, for example, with Leda and the swan). The “Wurfholz” is also to be understood as an aggressive tool — it is thrown to hit somebody and, in this case, push him out of the world of lies and hypocrisy. The cluster of perceptions of the flying swans making a loud noise with their wings is condensed into the metaphor of the “Wurfholz”: The boomerang also provides the lyrical “I” with a ready image for swans not seen but heard — a sound that, like the “Wurfholz,” comes suddenly “out of nothing.” In this poem it is “das Flügel-  / mächtige, das  / Wahre” that also comes from the Nothing  — “vom Nichts her.” Celan, acquainted with the philosophy of Heidegger, was familiar with the Greek word aletheia (truth) that Heidegger had translated into German as “Unverborgenheit des Seins” (unconcealment of Being).29 Truth is nothing that you can grasp and identify like a fact; it is a Nothing that is essentially hidden and can suddenly appear and disappear like the rainbow between earth and sky. The truth in this old sense is the moment of transcending; it is the moment in which you realize that you yourself are  — in the depths of your soul — a transcending being, wandering from earth to sky and back, wandering from past to future and back into the present. The reader is like a glider tethered to the ground. The “Wurfholz” has the power to slice through the string and you fly upwards, and from this higher point of view (after the release), the pathological structure of reality is left below — “das Flügel- / mächtige,” the poem, endowing the unleashed reader with the ability to recognize “das / Wahre.” The other metaphor of the poem, “Flaschenpost,” can again be found in Celan’s poem “Weissgeräusche,” dedicated to Hans Mayer. Weissgeräusche, gebündelt, Strahlengänge über den Tisch mit der Flaschenpost hin. (Sie hört sich zu, hört einem Meer zu, trinkt es hinzu, entschleiert die wegschweren Münder.) Das Eine Geheimnis mischt sich für immer ins Wort. (GW 2:146)

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[WHITE NOISES, bundled, / ray- / ways / over the table / with the message in a bottle. // (It is listening to itself, listening / to a sea, drinking it  / over, un-veiled  / the mouths heavy of way). // The single secret / intermingles forever in the word.]

Hans Mayer mentioned the “Flaschenpost” in a lecture on Hofmannsthal in October 1957, at which Celan met him for the first time. Mayer remembered later that Celan himself had spoken about the origin of the “Flaschenpost” that, he said, had been one of Adorno’s favorite ways of conceptualizing literature: as an esoteric message in a bottle (Gedichte 762). In Celan’s poem the (esoteric) “Flaschenpost” is connected with “Strahlen- / gänge / über den Tisch” (ray- / ways / over the table). In the singular form we find the same word in the poem “Aber” (But): (Du fragst ja, ich sags dir:) Strahlengang, immer, die Spiegel, nachtweit, stehn gegeneinander, ich bin, hingestoßen zu dir, eines Sinnes mit diesem Vorbei. Aber: mein Herz ging durch die Pause, es wünscht dir das Aug, bildnah und zeitstark, das mich verformt-: die Schwäne, in Genf . . . (GW 1:182) [(You / ask, yes, I / tell you.) // Ray way, always, the / mirrors, night wide, stand / against each other, I am, / pushed toward you, one / sense with this / over. // But: my heart / passed through the pause, it wishes you / the eye, image close and time strong, / that deforms me —: // the swans, in Geneva . . .]

So the word “Strahlengang” links the ideas of the “Wurfholz” and the “Flaschenpost” as it is used in conjunction with both, as a singular and in conjunction with the boomerang in “Aber,” and as a plural and in relation to the message in a bottle in “Weißgeräusche.” Barbara Wiedemann writes in her commentary that Celan originally chose the word “Strahlengang” as the title of the anthology he later called Lichtzwang (light compulsion). In the volume’s notes, he remarks: “Strahlengang  / die durch die Linse

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hindurchtretenden Lichtbündel” (Gedichte 659; ray way / bundles of light moving through the lens). Following the text of “Weißgeräusche,” the message in a bottle “hört sich zu, hört / einem Meer zu, trinkt es / hinzu” (is listening to itself, listening / to a sea, drinking it / over). In this listening and drinking in, the “Flaschenpost” removes the veil that covers the mouths: When this cover is cast aside, the secret trickles into the spoken word, merging with it forever, like the water in the belly of a bottle at sea, leaking back into the ocean the sea water it has taken in. The returned words are not the same anymore, their meaning is different, is enriched with the content of the “Flaschenpost.” The eye in the poem “Aber” (But), “bildnah und zeitstark” (close up to the image and time-strong), is able to see (what has been overlooked), and the ear is able to hear the message of the “Wurfholz” in “Weißgeräusche”: the idea of real seeing and listening is present in both poems, but this real perception is hidden in a context that the reader has first to enter. Having entered, his eyes will open to the “Strahlengang” of light and his ears to the secret of the “Flaschenpost” and the whirring of the “Wurfholz.” Only then shall he receive a book of poems, a Book of Rays, that provokes a new kind of reception in every initiated reader.

Notes 1

Paul Celan, “Ansprache anläßlich der Entgegennahme des Literaturpreises der Freien Hansestadt Bremen,” in Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden, ed. Beda Allemann and Stefan Reichert, vol. 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), 186. Subsequent references to this edition are cited in the text using the abbreviation GW and volume and page number. “Since it is a linguistic phenomenon and therefore essentially dialogical, the poem can be a message in a bottle, posted in the — certainly not always hopeful — faith it could be washed ashore somewhere, to the heartland perhaps.” Translated by the editors. All subsequent translations are by the editors, unless otherwise stated. 2

See Annette Werberger, “Das sublunarische Gedicht. Celans Dialog mit dem Akmeismus,” Celan-Jahrbuch 8 (2001/2): 240. 3

Paul Celan and Margarete Susman, “Der Briefwechsel aus den Jahren 1963– 1965,” ed. Lydia Koelle, Celan-Jahrbuch 8 (2001/2): 35. 4

Paul Celan, Selected Poems, trans. Michael Hamburger (London: Penguin, 1990), 271. Subsequently referred to in the text using the abbreviation SP and page numbers.

5

“Das Gedicht blüht mit all seinen Horizonten, ein kreatürliches Phänomen” (The poem flourishes within all its horizons, a creature-like phenomenon). Paul Celan, “Der Meridian,” in Lichtzwang: Vorstufen  — Textgenese  — Endfassung, ed. H. Schmull, Markus Heilmann, and Christiane Wittkopf (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 215. Subsequently referred to in the text using the title Meridian and page number.

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6

Gisela Dischner, “.  .  . bald sind wir aber Gesang”: Zur Hölderlin-Linie der Moderne (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 1996). 7

Sigmund Günther, Physikalische Geographie (Stuttgart: Göschen, 1891).

8

See Gisela Dischner, “‘.  .  . die wildernde Überzeugung, daß dies anders zu sagen sei als so.’ Postkabbalistische Poetik: Nelly Sachs und Paul Celan,” CelanJahrbuch 8 (2001/02): 153–74. 9

The most well-known sort of Nessel (nettle) is the Brennessel, the stinging nettle, which is burning and painful. It is in this sense that the word is used in the Bible (Hos. 9.6; Hiob 30.4). To plant Nesseln means to despise a person, while “sich in die Nesseln setzen” means to expose yourself to something that is painful and shaming. To become a Nessel means to get strong and brave. Nesselausschlag is a painful skin disease. So “Nesselnachricht” suggests a message that is painful and burning.

10 From the volume Fadensonnen 2. See the “thinking tube” in the unpublished poem “Eine Handstunde” (A Hand Hour) in Paul Celan, Die Gedichte. Kommentierte Gesamtausgabe in einem Band, ed. Barbara Wiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 465. Subsequently cited in the text as Gedichte and page number. 11

The term “Halm” in German means both tubular plant stem as well as grass blade, linking it not only to the “thinking tube” of another of Celan’s poems, but also to this poem’s “Düse” (literally, a truncated cone), which is derived from the Czech word for the inside of a tube, and, perhaps more interestingly, the Old Slavic dŭsa meaning soul and breath. One cannot help but speculate that Celan knew all of this. 12

Celan wrote this part of Sprachgitter in 1956–57. In February 1958 Celan translated a poem by Sergej Esenin “Bei den gelben Nesseln” (Near the Yellow Nettles. Gedichte 667). 13

Bremer Rede. See endnote 1.

14

Gisela Bezzel-Dischner, Poetik des modernen Gedichts: Zur Lyrik von Nelly Sachs (Bad Homburg, Gehlen, 1970). 15

See Marlies Janz, “‘Judendeutsch.’ Paul Celan’s ‘Gespräch im Gebirg’ im Kontext der Atemwende,” Celan-Jahrbuch 9 (2003/2005): 75–102. 16

Theodor W. Adorno: “Engagement” in Noten zur Literatur, vol. 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1965), 125–26; translated as “Commitment” in Notes to Literature, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia UP, 1992), 87–88.

17

Paul Celan and Gisela Dischner, Briefwechsel 1964–1970 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2011). 18 Friedrich Hölderlin, “Brot und Wein,” in Hölderlin Werke und Briefe, vol. 1, ed. Friedrich Beißner, Jochen Schmidt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969), 118. 19 Erich Fromm’s idea of the “Pathologie der Normalität” (pathology of normality) sees normality as annulling everything that is not immediately comprehensible. 20 See “Schreiben und wie überleben” and “Pathologie der Normalität” in Gisela Dischner, Wörterbuch des Müßiggängers (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2009).

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21

Paul Celan and Margarete Susman, “Der Briefwechsel aus den Jahren 1963– 1965,” ed. Lydia Koelle, Celan-Jahrbuch 8 (2001/2): 33–61; here, 44–45. In her autobiography she highlights the non-abstract — however, in a unique way, reality-metamorphosing — quality of his poetry: Margarete Susman, Ich habe viele Leben gelebt: Erinnerungen (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1964), 175. 22

See Psalm 116:13.

23

On the simile of the “Rose von der Rose,” see Der Sohar: Das Heilige Buch der Kabbala, ed. Ernst Müller (Düsseldorf: E. Diederich, 1932), 21. 24

Joachim Schulze, Celan und die Mystiker: Motivtypologische und quellenkundliche Kommentare (Bonn: Bouvier, 1983), 22. 25

Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1977), 38.

26

Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 1978), 85. 27

Ossip Mandelstam, Über den Gesprächspartner: Gesammelte Essays 1913–1924, ed. Ralph Dutli (Zürich: Ammann, 1991), 248. 28

In his interpretation of the poem, Marko Pajević stresses the “concentration” that takes place in Celan’s Wurfholz and interprets it as a form of “Selbstbehauptung” (self-assertion). This movement conveys truth to the reader who embarks on the trajectory of the “Wurfholz, das Flügel-  / mächtige.” (Marko Pajević: “Die Konzentration. Zur Bewegung des dichterischen Sprechens in der Poetik Paul Celans,” Weimarer Beiträge 47 [2001/2]: 213–21; here, 215–16.) 29 This idea of truth coming out of concealment is also found in the line “Schwirrhölzer fahren ins Licht, die Wahrheit  / gibt Nachricht” (GW 2:67; Whirring woods wayfaring to the light, truth sends a message).

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3: History and Nature in Motion: Paradigms of Transformation in the Postwar Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann Marton Marko

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T THE TIME OF Ingeborg Bachmann’s premature death at age fortyseven in a 1973 apartment fire in Rome, she was a leading figure of the postwar Central European literary scene as a poet, essayist, critic, prose writer, and radio playwright. In the voluminous critical discussion of Bachmann, focused largely on the self-reflection of language as a theme in her writing, there has as yet been little attention given to the relationship between language and nature in her work. While aspects of the natural are significantly visible throughout her writing, nature imagery is particularly present as a motif in her lyrical work of the early 1950s, the period in which German-language authors sought to establish new avenues of socially conscious and critical writing in the aftermath of the Second World War. These efforts were most notably represented by the well-known association of progressive postwar German-language authors, Group 47, of which Bachmann became a prominent member. In her use of natural motifs during a period in which the prospect of returning to traditional paths of literature was regarded as particularly problematic, Bachmann’s commitment to literary innovation involved a renegotiation of Central European aesthetic traditions. Her engagement with the natural directly confronted the immediate fascist past in Austria and Germany by interrogating authoritarian systems, clearly represented by National Socialism. By presenting traditional tropes of nature that become challenged and transformed, Bachmann set both history and nature in motion to reclaim poetic language as a catalyst for cultural change in the postwar era. In re-positing the transformational value of literary engagement in the wake of catastrophe, Bachmann’s postwar poems present in their idealism an aestheticized model of nature by which human history can be critically confronted, and from which utopian bonds between world and self can be recognized and internalized. These connections are rooted in what amount to meeting points between nature and language, highlighted by the concentration of linguistic form afforded by the poetic genre. Such convergences

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are significant from the standpoint of the simultaneous de- and re-romanticization of the natural that Bachmann’s poetry performs; in this respect, her lyrical work from the early 1950s is to be regarded as groundbreaking, both in its challenge of paradigms and its transformational force. Bachmann herself claims that the phenomenon of personal transformation took on significance for her early in life. In an interview in 1971 she tells of her reaction at age twelve to the marching of the German National Socialists into her hometown of Klagenfurt in the southern Austrian province of Carinthia in 1938; Bachmann describes the brutality surrounding the event as so horrific that her memory begins with that day. The experience of Hitler’s troops marching into her “quiet, peaceful Carinthia,” Bachmann insists, shaped her consciousness from that point on as a critical one.1 Of note here is the fact that it has been debated whether Bachmann was actually a witness to the events in Klagenfurt on 12 March 1938, the date the troops entered the city. If we accept suggestions that she may have been hospitalized on this day and not actually present at the scene she describes in the interview, this would in fact point even more strongly to the significance of the trauma surrounding these events in the construction of her critical consciousness.2 The supposedly tranquil realms of provincial Austria would, of course, become among the most fertile breeding grounds for the propagation of fascism in all of Central Europe. Among key figures in Bachmann’s early life who illustrate the ubiquity of fascism in her everyday world, we find her school teacher and mentor, Josef Friedrich Perkonig, who, while guiding Bachmann’s first literary efforts during the war, became a Nazi sympathizer.3 Later on, as a graduate student at the University of Vienna, Bachmann turned her critical eye toward one of the notorious cases of philosophy, and problematic politics, of the recent past. In her 1949 thesis, “Die kritische Aufnahme der Existentialphilosophie Martin Heideggers” (The Critical Reception of Martin Heidegger’s Existential Philosophy), Bachmann refused to dissociate the philosopher from his Nazi affiliations. As Sara Lennox has described, though Bachmann was “powerfully drawn” to the existential questions Heidegger had posed, she found his answers “historically and politically inadequate.”4 Bachmann soon turned to the philosophy of a fellow Austrian, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and to his treatment of ethics as related to problems of language. She became deeply involved with Wittgenstein’s writings, and returned time and again in her work to the implications of the famous conclusion to his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen” (one must remain silent about that of which one cannot speak).5 As Bachmann began to concentrate on poetry, Wittgenstein’s examination of the role of language in both its creative and limiting capacity became an intuitive guide in her thinking and writing. The assertion that eventually leads to the conclusion of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,

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“Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt” (The limits of my language mean the limits of my world, Tractatus 114–15, Proposition 5.6), confronts Bachmann with the specific challenge of working in the German language following the war as well as with the necessity of examining her world through what had now become a problematic medium. The inheritance of a language condemned as poisonous, and possibly even irredeemable, would prove a formidable hurdle particularly for poets, as notably articulated in Theodor Adorno’s influential assertion that to write poetry after Auschwitz was akin to barbarism.6 Adorno’s claim echoes earlier doubts expressed by Bertolt Brecht, who at the outset of the war in 1939 had already recognized poor prospects for poetry, famously questioning the times in which he wrote, “wo / Ein Gespräch über Bäume fast ein Verbrechen ist / Weil es ein Schweigen über so viele Untaten einschließt!” (where / A talk about trees is almost a crime / Because it implies silence about so many horrors).7 Whether themes of the natural, symbolized by Brecht’s trees, could in fact make proper poetic material in the wake of such terror as the Second World War is the question that Bachmann would address a decade and a half later. Examining Bachmann in the light of Brecht and the politicization of postwar German literature, Christa Bürger references disparaging notes reportedly made by Brecht after reading the rising Austrian poet in the 1950s, in which he criticized the alleged lack of social orientation in her work.8 In the thematic and linguistic experimentation of postwar German-language poets such as Bachmann, Paul Celan, and Nelly Sachs, Bürger identifies a brand of modernism arising in postwar Central Europe that begins to depart from the realist social criticism of the interwar period and reconnects to an avant-garde associated with surrealism that arose following the First World War (Bürger 9–10). Bachmann, Bürger claims, represents a particularly radical gesture toward subjectivism that is suggestive of surrealism in its rejection of the value of social institutions as she focuses instead on dimensions of the linguistic and the psychological. The aftermath of the Second World War unquestionably marked a rupture in people’s belief in institutions in Central Europe. In the midst of mass devastation both physical and cultural, formal domains of the social became targets of skepticism and scrutiny. Breaking from the model of the collective, Bürger argues, postwar writing in Central Europe began to cultivate another side of the modernist tradition in the form of liberalism re-focusing on subjective expression, as evidenced in Bachmann’s acutely multi-voiced poetry. In her analysis of the poem “Früher Mittag” (Early Noon) from Bachmann’s first published lyrical volume Die gestundete Zeit (Borrowed Time, 1953), Bürger maintains that while the poem appropriates traditions ranging from the folk ballad to neo-romanticism, the pronounced alienation yielded by its recycled lyrical images creates a fragmentation of expression that ultimately becomes little else

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than “privatized” (Bürger 9). In making this argument, Bürger alludes to the opening lines of the poem’s second and second-last stanzas, “Wo Deutschlands Himmel die Erde schwärzt” (Where Germany’s sky blackens the earth) and “Wo Deutschlands Erde den Himmel schwärzt” (Where Germany’s earth blackens the sky)9 — both of which echo Paul Celan’s famous lyrical piece from 1945, “Todesfuge” (Death Fugue), and illustrate the close relationship between Bachmann and Celan. Bürger suggests that the reversal of the images in each stanza  — the switch in position between subject and object, “sky” and “earth”  — leads to an “emptying” of each statement and ultimately to their neutralization (Bürger 10). Reinforcing her point with regard to “emptying,” Bürger directs her attention to the following stanza: Schon ist Mittag, in der Asche krümmt sich das Eisen, auf den Dorn ist die Fahne gehißt, und auf den Felsen uralten Traums bleibt fortan der Adler geschmiedet. [Already it’s noon, in embers the iron bends, on the thorn the flag is hoisted, and onto the cliff of the ancient dream the eagle is welded remaining forever. (Songs 36–37)]

Alluding to the appropriated myth of Prometheus, the Titan who stole fire  — a metaphor for language10  — from Zeus and gave it to humankind, Bürger notes that the eagle (instead of Prometheus) is chained to the rocks and further asks what clues might be evident in the poem to direct us to interpret the meaning of this inversion. Ultimately, she decides that the pointed multiplicity of possible meanings does not bring the work into a “space of social reality,” but rather symptomizes Bachmann’s “doubts about reality” (Bürger 11). Following the experiences of the war, however, one imagines that a reception that challenged the reality of the war period would, in fact, have been warranted. Bachmann’s vision of the path ahead as a difficult one stemmed from her recognition that the realities of militarism, patriarchy, and social denial of culpability, which had prevailed during the Nazi regime, still persisted after the war. The final two stanzas of “Früher Mittag” articulate this in terms of the silent reality of prewar conditions and prevailing attitudes. Wo Deutschlands Erde den Himmel schwärzt, sucht die Wolke nach Worten und füllt den Krater mit Schweigen, eh sie der Sommer im schütteren Regen vernimmt.

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Das Unsägliche geht, leise gesagt, übers Land: schon ist Mittag. [Where Germany’s earth blackens the sky, a cloud seeks words and fills the crater with silence before summer is made aware of its sparse rain. The unspeakable passes, barely spoken, over the land: already it’s noon. (Songs 38–39)]

Bürger takes the term “Das Unsägliche” (the unspeakable) to represent a kind of compromise between two central features of modernism, rationalism and utopianism, and sees the appropriation of a “surrealistic-mythic language” as a desire to address these two modernist aims without having to directly name the social realities of the time (Bürger 15). Yet this “unspeakable” that is “barely spoken” goes much further than to furnish a compromise and to avoid naming something that could otherwise be identified more precisely, in this case, German cultural history and its path to National Socialism and the atrocities of the war. As Eva Revesz asserts, the discourse between texts and traditions in “Früher Mittag” yields a pointed critical treatment of the cultural lineage through which its multilayered legibility is formed.11 Revesz directs her attention to the presence of classical German literary tradition in “Früher Mittag” by highlighting Bachmann’s appropriation of “Gretchen’s Song” from Goethe’s Faust and imagery from Wilhelm Müller’s 1823 poem “Der Lindenbaum” (The Linden Tree), best known as part of the Winterreise (Winter Journey) poem cycle that was set to music by Franz Schubert in 1827. The first image of “Früher Mittag” is in fact a linden tree — “Still grünt die Linde im eröffneten Sommer” (Silently the linden tree greens in approaching summer, Songs 37). The echo of Müller is substantiated by the fountain that appears in the poem and also serves as a citation of “Der Lindenbaum.” As Revesz notes, the phrase “Brunnen vor dem Tore” (fountain before the gate), from the third line of the fourth stanza, is taken verbatim from Müller and for Bachmann’s purposes serves as imagery that destabilizes the German literary tradition in light of the recent trauma of the war (Revesz 202). Bachmann’s allusion to the golden goblets in “Gretchen’s Song”  — “in einem Totenhaus  / trinken die Henker von gestern / den goldenen Becher aus” (the hangmen of yesterday drain the golden cup, Songs 37) — further pursues the agenda of emptying otherwise historically laden cultural material. While drawing from classical and folk traditions in literature, “Früher Mittag” provides a contemporary critical commentary of the time from perspectives of both philosophy and history. The reference to ash along with the blackening points of the German earth and sky are scarcely veiled

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allusions to the Holocaust. In discussing the trace of “the great mid-day” from Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus spoke Zarathustra) in “Früher Mittag,” Revesz demonstrates how Bachmann succeeds in fusing metaphors that promote a dialogic approach toward the reception of history in the poem: Both noon and midnight cast no shadow and hence may be seen as emblematic of an untraceable past in the poem, Früher Mittag is, after all, about none other than a dark cloud casting its shadow over a distinctly traceable past. The poem is constructed around the very tension between a (Nietzschean) shadowless past and a past literally engulfed by shadows. (Revesz 201)

The use of natural metaphor in “Früher Mittag” brings forth a renegotiation of such conventional oppositional symbolism as darkness and light. The emptying of this standard opposition is, in fact, a form of poetic action that critically engages such potentially static notions as the natural or the historical and regenerates a capacity to reevaluate such categories and givens in more general terms. This emptying also involves a method that simultaneously develops a socio-political critique through the liquidation of the chosen imagery with respect to the specific context of German-speaking culture. Toward the conclusion of “Früher Mittag,” images of nature parallel aspects of the temporal and the linguistic. Water is connected to sky as speech is to speechlessness. The height of the midday sun corresponds with the midpoint of the year, the summer. The liquidation of these images also serves to suggest the inverse of each, namely the low-point of history experienced by the culture in question, and perhaps, human history itself. The disaster of midday, of the everyday, is nonetheless modified by the presence of a natural process. As the sky blackens, a cloud “seeking words” releases silence, “fills the crater” with it, inviting a plurality of readings of what each image can evoke: the graves of the dead, the ears of those wakefully listening for a new language, an earth preparing for redemption. The silence released by the sparse rain produces a new space of perception issued by the natural, suggesting by utopian gesture the idea of an authentic natural language still audible (if perhaps only “barely”) in the aftermath of the midcentury disaster in Central Europe at the allegorical point of midday. As the title Die gestundete Zeit (Borrowed Time) would suggest, the title poem of the volume involves a pointed engagement with issues of the temporal. Relationships in the piece between human experience and the natural world are posed through a confrontation between social history and an ominously naturalized realm of time. Siegfried Mandel frames this relationship as one where cosmic time becomes a separate backdrop to the borrowed time of humankind. On the one hand, cosmic time can be seen as an eclipsing element, with which borrowed time must contend

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and against which it must ultimately lose in a battle ending in death.12 In the broadest sense, this suggests a tension between “boundlessness” and “boundary,” a confrontation that the relationship of language to the natural world inherently produces. A meeting point between ideas of the limitless and the framing processes of language that operates within the framework of human — or borrowed — time is offered in the second and third lines of the poem: Die auf Widerruf gestundete Zeit wird sichtbar am Horizont. [The loan of borrowed time Will be due on the horizon. (Songs 22–23)]

While this horizon lies within sight, it also remains temporally beyond the particular moment. A construction of time situates itself here between the present and the future, clearly informed by ominous events of the past. The resulting effect is one of both prophecy and warning, as expressed by the first line of the poem, which is also reiterated as the last: “Es kommen härtere Tage” (Harder days are coming). The last line of the final stanza that precedes this repeated line is not only a direct address in the imperative, “Lösch die Lupinen!” (Put out/extinguish the lupines), but, as Karen Achberger notes, arguably a borrowing from Brecht’s “Lesebuch für Stadtbewohner” (Reader for City-Dwellers) published in 1930, a satirical instructional pamphlet for the new twentieth-century species of humankind: the urbanite.13 Unlike Brecht’s poem, the scene in Bachmann’s is essentially a rural one. Both works, nonetheless, address the common target of modern culture beyond specific urban or provincial contexts. The comparable passages from Bachmann and Brecht to which Achberger alludes read respectively as follows. From Bachmann: Sieh dich nicht um. Schnür deinen Schuh, Jag die Hunde zurück. Wirf die Fische ins Meer. Lösch die Lupinen! Es kommen härtere Tage. [Don’t look around. Lace up your boots. Chase back the hounds. Throw the fish into the sea. Put out the lupines! Harder days are coming. (Songs 22–23)]

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From Brecht: Trenne dich von deinen Kameraden auf dem Bahnhof Gehe am Morgen in die Stadt mit zugeknöpfter Jacke Suche dir Quartier, und wenn dein Kamerad anklopft: Öffne, o, öffne die Tür nicht Sondern Verwisch die Spuren!14 [Separate yourself from your comrades at the train station Head into the city in the morning with your jacket buttoned up Look for a place to stay, and when your comrade knocks, Don’t, oh, do not open the door But instead Wipe away your tracks!15]

Bachmann’s adoption of Brecht’s “instructional approach” also reads as a foreboding that is cast in the shadow of Austria and Germany’s recent fascist experience. She fuses this aspect of instructional language with both cosmic and human time through allusions of prophecy represented by the appearance in the first stanza of the image of fish entrails, which are known to be traditional tools of soothsaying (Mandel 94). The first stanza, which anticipates the imperatives compiled in the last section, begins with the term “bald” (soon), signaling a temporal middle zone between now and the future where the time yet to come represents the foretold destiny of further hardship. Bald musst du den Schuh schnüren Und die Hunde zurückjagen in die Marschhöfe. Denn die Eingeweide der Fische sind kalt geworden im Wind. [Soon you must lace up your boots and chase the hounds back to the marsh farms. For the entrails of the fish have grown cold in the wind. (Songs 22–23)]

While suggestions of prophecy appear in the image of the entrails of the fish, these instruments of augury have nonetheless become “cold in the wind.” A vision of the future can only be furnished through demise of the past and dissection of the present. In this sense, the deciphering suggested here is a literal one. The moment of linking the sign and the signaled, offered through the imagery, is ephemeral, subject to the power of natural, cosmic time illustrated by the wind. The central image, which depicts history as flung between dimensions of language and the natural, is that of the sand that emerges in the

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second stanza in the middle of the poem. As time mounts, so too does the difficulty of expression in the given moment between past and future. Drüben versinkt dir die Geliebte im Sand, er steigt um ihr wehendes Haar, er fällt ihr ins Wort, er befiehlt ihr zu schweigen [There your loved one sinks in sand; it rises up to her windblown hair, it cuts her short, it commands her to be silent (Songs 22–23)]

While in the previous stanza the flow of time remains veiled in the invisibility of the wind, here it assumes the more tangible, threatening physical form of the sand. Though the sand is illustrated as rising, it is in fact the figure that sinks into it, causing the effect of the sand to overcome her. The thematic arc from wind to sand, upheld by the blowing hair of the woman, draws attention to the problem of language and speechlessness. As in “Früher Mittag,” a command of silence appears, which the natural world threatens to wield against voices that speak out against the violent tide of recent history at the aforementioned horizon point. Only borrowed human time presents the stage on which the challenges of postwar culture can be approached. The ambiguous context of the rising-sand scene suggests not only the natural setting of either a desert or shoreline, but also that of an hourglass, measuring time by capturing the natural elements through the physical force of gravity. A metaphor of linguistic control also appears, as language serves to encase and channel these forces. At the same time, the threatening images of accumulation and burial further point to the limits of language as something borrowed from a problematic history. As a complement to the focal point of time in these poems during this period of self-conscious historic awareness, the motif of journey also takes on a prominent role. The unfolding of history and the extension of the self into new domains each reflect departures from the familiar. Language itself becomes de-familiarized as an object of investigation and as a space where known frameworks and formulas of expression are challenged to afford new experiences and perceptions through an “interplay of fact and intuition” (Mandel 94). While the opening poem of the volume, “Ausfahrt” (Journey Out), signals a breakaway that is characteristic of Group 47, it also heralds a journey inward — as a model of both individual and cultural introspection. Connected to this dual model of outward and inward is a movement between realms of time portrayed through the contrast of day and night. The opening setting of the poem is at the threshold point of dusk. In underscoring the transformative

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context of the unfolding lyrical space, the image of smoke rising yields a double suggestion, both of smoldering destruction following the war and of a more fundamental symbol of metamorphosis that hints of a changing world to come. Through this rising smoke at day’s end, signs of devastation  — notably derivative of associations with the Holocaust  — are coupled on the one side with associations of fleetingness, dissolution, and death, and on the other, in the image of the lifting waft, of possible renewal and transcendence. In his discussion of the nocturnal and diurnal in Bachmann’s work, Robert Vilain identifies the opening dusk imagery of “Ausfahrt” as a movement toward the “exile of night,” where night represents a return to the subconscious in the wake of the laborious everyday.16 In this regard, “Ausfahrt” can again be witnessed as a psychological allegory in the midst of the personal and cultural challenges of postwar reconstruction. Darkness becomes associated with alienation and despair, as “signs of commonality” become “veiled” by the onset of dusk and the threat of isolation (Vilain 24). The punctuation of the opening smoke can, in fact, be read as part of a broad dynamic of break-up, a general tendency of the poem, as solid matter becomes reduced to particle and is brought into movement suggesting flight, flow, and disappearance. Vom Lande steigt Rauch auf. Die kleinste Fischerhütte behalt im Aug, denn die Sonne wird sinken, ehe du zehn Meilen zurückgelegt hast. [Smoke rises from the land. Remember the tiny fishing huts, because the sun will sink before you’ve set ten miles behind you. (Songs 4–5)]

The move toward disintegration heralded by the ascending smoke cloud takes on a dimension of social critique with the glance cast at the last visible dwellings, as the self, in its journey out to sea, displaces itself ever further from given signs and traces of civilization. However, this oceanic existence, symbolizing an open and unknown future, also proves to represent a battle against the elements as well as against the natural progress of time, as the poem’s sun will imminently sink before it has been possible to venture far. While the ensuing darkness presents a threatening discontinuation of the familiar and reassuring activities of the day — as fishermen cast their nets and tie their knots — it also, as Vilain points out, provides a different kind of communion, namely that afforded by the “bread of the dream” (Vilain 9). As a reverse dimension to the descent of darkness that night represents, the idealization of the dream also points to a utopian

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dimension yielded by day’s otherness. The inferred bond, allowed for through the suggestion of transcendence and communion, can be seen as affixed to the idea of a natural subject placed in peril, as depicted in the fifth stanza by the tree standing against the elements. Die erste Welle der Nacht schlägt ans Ufer Die zweite erreicht schon dich. Aber wenn du scharf hinüberschaust, Kannst du den Baum noch sehen, Der trotzig den Arm hebt — einen hat ihm der Wind schon abgeschlagen — und du denkst: wie lange noch, wie lange noch wird das krumme Holz den Wettern standhalten? [The first wave of night hits the shore, the second already reaches you. But if you look hard, you can still see the tree which defiantly lifts an arm — the wind has already knocked one off — and you think: how much longer, how much longer will the twisted timber withstand the weather? (Songs 6–7)]

The tree in this passage is situated between the two forces that Reingard Nethersole sees defining the tension of the poem, namely the directional pull of each escape and arrival.17 While the poem moves toward arrival at the “forever recurring shore of the sun,” as expressed in the work’s final lines, the piece also consists of tugs and pulls between departure and destination in further terms. The “heroic, personified tree,” as described by Nethersole, stands as a symbol of resistance against the threats that face it, couched in overtly natural imagery and underscored by the mercilessness of the elements as well as the erosive and destructive power of time (Nethersole 145). As Peter Beicken notes, the tree ultimately represents not only a fight against the tide of time itself, but also against the “misdeeds and atrocities of the past” (Beicken 37). The red trace in the water, suggestive of blood, that follows the traveler, punctuates this battle and directs attention to the inescapability of recent history. And through her reference to Immanuel Kant’s “krummes Holz” (twisted/crooked wood), out of which, according to Kant, humanity is made, Bachmann also revisits issues of the idealized and the flawed with respect to constructions of the human and the natural world. Nature itself can be regarded as far less benign than the utopian invention of nature that poetic language can achieve as an answer to previous “twisted” human history.18

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In contrast to the motif of idealized arrival in “Ausfahrt,” the following poem of the volume, “Abschied von England” (Departure from England), evades a sense of destination and turns its lyrical voice instead into an ongoing state of flux. It is a carefully woven work with hints at a ballad-like rhyme scheme whose fleeting moments of harmonious connection steadily yield to detachment and disjunction. The key to this tapestry is the inclusion of a wealth of natural, transformational images that punctuate the poem’s fluctuating, posed, and broken structures. The opening and closure of the poem follow a span of expression that shifts from “barely stepping on land” in the first line to “never having stepped on it” in the last (Songs 8–9). The interplay of sky, land, and sea, connected to a lyrical voice that also travels between elements, yields to us a fragmented subject placed amid the unifying potential of language as an idealized open field. In her examination of empty spaces and final lines in Bachmann’s poetry, Monika SchmitzEmans focuses on the “yet to be written page” highlighted in Bachmann’s essay Literatur als Utopie (Literature as Utopia), where suggestions of this “not yet written” utopia are evidenced by spatial and conceptual blanks in Bachmann’s work.19 In a summating commentary on her literary output of the 1950s, in the fifth of her Frankfurt Lectures on Poetics written while poet in residence at the University of Frankfurt, Bachmann emphasizes that literature always expresses human hope and desire based on the possibilities offered by the “white, unwritten page”: unsere Begeisterung für bestimmte herrliche Texte ist eigentlich die Begeisterung für das weiße, unbeschriebene Blatt, auf dem das noch Hinzugewinnende auch eingetragen scheint.20 [our enthusiasm for certain marvelous texts is actually enthusiasm for the white, unwritten page, upon which that which still stands to be gained already appears to be written.21]

Faced by the unspeakable, the unspoken, and the ominous silence yet to be answered, which loomed over writers of the postwar generation, Bachmann addresses this silence not by simply negating or denying its power; instead she engages it, challenges it, and radicalizes fundamental questions of how we establish power over our own identities not by the boundaries of language but through its possibilities. Sabine Gölz’s treatment of “Abschied von England” focuses on this matter of self-determination and autonomy, concentrating on the third stanza of the piece and the single line that follows the stanza. Durch die Straßen flatterten die großen, grauen Vögel und wiesen mich aus. War ich je hier? Ich wollte nicht gesehen werden.

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[Through the streets flapped the great, grey birds that singled me out for expulsion. Was I ever here? I didn’t want to be seen. (Songs 8–9)]

According to Gölz, Bachmann’s call here is for readers or listeners “not to join the birds” that cast this glance.22 In the opening of the lyrical self’s eyes, Gölz recognizes a refusal on the part of this voice to subject itself to a final interpretation. This is in light of the poet’s desire for invisibility in “the eyes of an existing order of reading” (Gölz 31). Of note here is the plurality of meaning of the German verb ausweisen, translated by Peter Filkins as both “to single out” and “to expel,” found in the second line cited above as “singled me out for expulsion.” While this rendering in English provides a rich resonance of meanings for the translation, it can be noted that another English meaning for the term ausweisen would be “to identify.” An Ausweis is, for example, an identity card. By exploiting the multiple meanings of ausweisen to “cast out,” “identify,” or to “make something or someone out,” Bachmann highlights the indeterminacy involved in establishing not just individual identity, but arguably, in a larger sense, cultural and linguistic identity, as well. In this regard, the immediate departure upon arrival heralded in the first lines with the term Boden in German, and repeated with the term in the last line, is a pointed one, oriented toward the significant multivalent associations of the word in German. While Filkins, in working with this problem, offers for Boden the English translation “land,” the original German Boden can also mean the more elemental “ground” or “soil.” Furthermore, the word Boden is also historically charged, resonating with the Nazi euphemism Blut und Boden (blood and soil), a term used as a fanatical invocation of German geopolitical (soil) and racist identity (blood). The blood that otherwise makes up the infamous German phrase is replaced in the poem by references to soluble water, which, through clouds and mist, serves as an intermediary dimension between earth and sky from the outset of the piece. Ich habe deinen Boden kaum betreten, schweigsames Land, kaum einen Stein berührt, ich war von deinem Himmel so hoch gehoben, so in Wolken, Dunst, und in noch Ferneres gestellt, daß ich dich schon verließ, als ich vor Anker ging. [I have barely stepped upon your land, silent country, barely disturbed a stone. I was lifted so high by your sky, placed so in clouds, mist, and remoteness,

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that I had already left you the moment I set anchor. (Songs 8–9)]

As the poet approaches the final recognition that it is the “land of her soul” that she has, in fact, yet to set foot on and discover, the open page of identity in the aftermath of catastrophe proves on the one hand an inviting stage on which to establish a future script of the German language. On the other hand, as Bachmann recognizes, it is also a daunting one. In this regard, nature does not represent an idealized space to which to flee for Bachmann and her peers, but rather a paradigm by which to negotiate such ideals via the transformative capacity of poetic language.

Notes 1

Ingeborg Bachmann, Interview with Gerda Bödefeld, 24 December 1971, in Ingeborg Bachmann: Wir müssen wahre Sätze finden: Gespräche und Interviews, ed. Christine Koschel and Inge von Weidenbaum (Munich: Piper, 1983): 111–15; here, 111. 2

Eva B. Revesz, “Poetry after Auschwitz: Tracing Trauma in Ingeborg Bachmann’s Lyric Work,” Monatshefte 99 no. 2 (2007): 194–215; here, 214. Revesz refers to reports that Bachmann was under medical care during this time and may have been hospitalized on the mentioned date. Revesz also points out that this hospitalization may have taken place outside of Klagenfurt. 3

Peter Beicken, Ingeborg Bachmann (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2001), 20. Subsequent references are indicated as Beicken, followed by page number. 4

Sara Lennox, “Bachmann and Wittgenstein,” Modern Austrian Literature 18, no. 3/4 (1985): 239–59; here, 246. Following her discussion of the evolution of Bachmann’s philosophy studies in Vienna, including the dissertation on Heidegger, Lennox presents a comprehensive and illuminating treatment of the unfolding role of Wittgenstein in Bachmann’s career from her first encounters with his ideas to the influence of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations on her later prose work. Lennox concentrates on how Wittgenstein’s critical engagement with problems of language persistently draws Bachmann who was particularly attuned to the crisis of language and expression precipitated by the Second World War.

5

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in The German Text of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung,” trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), 1–151; here, 150–1, Proposition 7. Subsequent references are indicated as Tractatus, followed by page number and numbered proposition.

6

Theodor W. Adorno, “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft,” in Lyrik nach Auschwitz? Adorno und die Dichter, ed. Petra Kiedaisch (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1995), 27–49; here, 49. 7

Bertolt Brecht, “An die Nachgeborenen” (To Those Born Later, 1939), trans. Michael Hofmann, in Twentieth-Century German Poetry: An Anthology, ed. Michael Hofmann (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 159.

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8

Christa Bürger, “Ich und wir: Ingeborg Bachmanns Austritt aus der ästhetischen Moderne,” in Ingeborg Bachmann, ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Munich: Piper, 1984), 7–27; here, 7. Subsequent references are indicated as Bürger, followed by page number. 9

Ingeborg Bachmann, “Früher Mittag,” in Songs in Flight: The Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann, Bilingual Edition, trans. Peter Filkins (New York: Marsilio, 1994), 37, 39. The poems in their original German are also included in the Songs in Flight edition and are reprinted from Ingeborg Bachmann, Werke (Munich: Piper, 1978). Subsequent references to and citations from Filkins’s English translations, along with the reprinted original German, are indicated as Songs followed by page number.

10 George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975), 230. In this extensive study treating the interconnections between language, history, and culture, Steiner refers to the “language factor” of the Prometheus myth, alluding to the “association between man’s mastery over fire and his new conception of speech.” As Steiner puts it, “The symbolic affinities between words and fire, between the live twist of the flame and the darting tongue, are immemorially archaic and firmly entrenched in the subconscious.” 11

For Revesz’s discussion of Bachmann’s engagement in “Früher Mittag” with Goethe and Romantic poet Wilhelm Müller along with late-nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, see Revesz, 198–204. Subsequent references are indicated as Revesz, followed by page number. 12

Siegfried Mandel, Group 47: The Reflected Intellect (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1973), 94. Subsequent references are indicated as Mandel, followed by page number.

13

Karen Achberger, “‘Kunst als Veränderndes’: Bachmann and Brecht,” Monatshefte 83 no. 1 (1991): 7–16; here, 9. 14 Bertolt Brecht, “Aus einem Lesebuch für Städtebewohner,” in Bertolt Brecht: Gedichte 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1960), 161. 15

Author’s translation.

16

Robert Vilain, “‘Immer die Nacht. Und kein Tag?’ Funktionen der Tageszeiten in der Lyrik Ingeborg Bachmanns,” in Kritische Wege der Landnahme: Ingeborg Bachmann im Blickfeld der neunziger Jahre, ed. Robert Pichl and Alexander Stillmark (Vienna: Hora, 1984), 21–37; here, 24. Subsequent references are indicated as Vilain, followed by page number. 17

Reingard Nethersole, “Ingeborg Bachmann’s Poetry: A Sense of Passing,” in Thunder Rumbling at My Heels: Tracing Ingeborg Bachmann, ed. Gudrun Brokoph-Mauch (Riverside: Ariadne, 1998), 139–60; here, 143. Subsequent references are indicated as Nethersole, followed by page number. 18

Immanuel Kant coins his term “krummes Holz” (twisted wood) in reference to the tension between ethical ideals and human imperfection in his essay Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht (Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, 1784), Vermischte Schriften von Immanuel Kant (Leipzig: Insel, 1921), 230. Kant’s assessment reads: “Aus so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts Gerades

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gezimmert werden” (From such crooked wood as that from which humankind is made nothing straight can be built). This reference also frames the title of Isaiah Berlin’s examination of the history of idealism, the concluding chapter of which is entitled “The Bent Twig: On the Rise of Nationalism.” See Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990), 238–61. Like Bachmann, Berlin was strongly influenced by Wittgenstein and the problems Wittgenstein addressed regarding the translatability of concepts, most notably moral and ethical ones, between languages and, ultimately, between individuals and cultures. 19

Monika Schmitz-Emans, “Worte und Sterbensworte. Zu Ingeborg Bachmanns Poetik der Leer- und Endzeilen,” in Ingeborg Bachmann: Neue Richtungen in der Forschung?, ed. Gudrun Brokoph-Mauch and Annette Daigger (St. Ingbert: Röhrig, 1995), 46–87; here, 47. 20

Ingeborg Bachmann, “Literatur als Utopie,” in Ingeborg Bachmann: Werke 4, ed. Inge von Weidenbaum and Clemens Münster (Munich: Piper, 1982), 255– 71; here, 258.

21

Author’s translation.

22

Sabine Gölz, “Reading in the Twilight: Canonization, Gender, the Limits of Language, and a Poem by Ingeborg Bachmann,” New German Critique 47 (1989): 29–52; here, 30.

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4: Mourning as Remembrance: Writing as Figuration and Defiguration in the Poetry of Rose Ausländer Annette Runte Viele Verwandlungen erlebte ich mit offenen / Augen, meine Erinnerung an sie ist intakt. [I underwent many metamorphoses with open eyes. My memory of them is intact.] — Rose Ausländer

T

HE BUNCH OF LILACS Rose Ausländer felt transformed into on her ninth birthday turns up as a rejected souvenir in one of her symbolist Gettomotive poems (Ghetto Motifs) she wrote between 1942 and 1944.1 “Warum verfolgt mich noch ein Traum? / Ich rieche Flieder durch den Schlaf. / Verlaß mich, blauer Fliederbaum! Es ist kein Glück, daß ich dich traf.// Kann es bei uns noch Frühling sein?” (GW 1:144–45; Why does a dream still pursue me?  / I smell lilacs in my sleep.  / Abandon me, blue lilac tree! / It is not good fortune that made us meet // Can it be spring here any more?). Her childlike, romantic, psychotic boundlessness has been exchanged for the barest of existences.2 Ausländer’s poetry is a distant echo of this shock, and tries to sublimate it. While Celan makes a radical break with prevailing modernist thought, Rose Ausländer still clings to certain aesthetic and metaphysical traditions. In this respect she resembles Nelly Sachs. While Sachs, using a transcendental approach focusing on the forms of language (down to the level of the letter) and on verbal esotericism, works toward a mystic conception of the Shoah,3 Ausländer advocates a (seemingly more conventional) mythical return to topoi of the unthinkable. Their common trust in language results in different poetic strategies. In the following essay, I will argue that Ausländer’s project, a somewhat naïvely epigonal4 poeticization of a personal history and prehistory that is less ambitious than that of Sachs, tends to displace problems of metaphorical transfiguration rather than solve them. Ausländer’s writing, influenced by neo-Romantic, Expressionist, and modernist literary traditions, appears to be characterized

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by a highly contradictory escapism.5 If her poetic project consists in a redistribution of old elements in new configurations (GW 3:286), it mainly employs  — and this is my thesis  — procedures of partial resignification without full designification. In this approach, the words do not lose their original signification but do become charged with additional meaning. To “invent a new alphabet” involves confronting the reader, not only with the fundamental ambivalence of any poetic landscape (see Mein Turm [My Tower], GW 1:277; Die Quelle II [The Source 2], GW 1:245), but also with a gesture of affirmation that introduces elements of undecidability. Against the epistemological background of recent theories on the complex concept of the figure, I intend to analyze discursive and rhetorical procedures involving configurations and refigurations. How is trauma, in the paradoxical logic of its temporality, to be overcome by writing conceived of as a means of survival? In this context, the problem arises whether deconstructive readings are compatible with a psychoanalytical view of subjectivity, specifically with the symptomatic inscription of contingency in the text. Ausländer’s representations of loss and identity, of femininity and motherhood (for instance, Immer die Mutter [Always Mother], GW 5:66; Jungfernjoch II [Old Maid Yoke 2], GW 6:368; Innengeburt [Inner Birth], GW 7:43) are also of central interest from the perspective of literary gender studies.

Translating Transference If “writing the Shoah” necessarily leads to a “poetics of failure” (Lehmann xxv), Ausländer’s lyrical work calls into question the status of poetry “after Auschwitz.” Approaching the unthinkable in a rather indirect, symbolist way, as in the Gettomotive poems written during the period of persecution, she insists on the one hand upon the universal dimension of the Shoah in the light of human values, on the other upon her personal experience of exile. Although memories of the past recur frequently, they are not necessarily functionalized in reference to a politics of remembrance. Ausländer’s optimistic affirmation of life as a cosmic whole counterbalances her melancholia, the “interminable mourning of an ungrievable loss,”6 and therefore seems close to Walter Benjamin’s Eingedenken (remembrance)  — a sort of counter-memory spanned by oblivion.7 Ausländer’s literary production, which is not accompanied by explicit metapoetic expression as poetic theory, manifests an underlying tension between her mythical conception of the word and a certain awareness of the philosophical debates on the crisis of language at the beginning of the twentieth century. Whereas the event of the Shoah  — in its specific singularity  — raised new questions, the answers given were not capable of resolving what became an onerous “double bind”: the ethical and ontological problem of the German mothertongue’s having become the idiom of murderers.8 “Schreiben war Leben.

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Überleben [. . .] während wir den Tod erwarteten, wohnten manche von uns in Traumworten — unser traumatisches Heim in der Heimatlosigkeit” (GW 3:286; To write was to live. To survive [. . .] while we were waiting for death, some of us inhabited dream-words — a home in our trauma, our homelessness). As she always insisted on the autobiographical dimension of her work, traces of trauma in her poetry should be examined as evidence of a process of transposition between collective and individual history. The author of around five thousand poems, Ausländer (1901–88) grew up in an assimilated Jewish middle-class family in Czernowitz, the capital of Bukovina, situated on the eastern border of the Austrian empire. She thrived in the multi-cultural intellectual atmosphere of her home town,9 a cultural melting-pot of Jewish, German and Slavic populations. (Paul Celan later punned on the region’s name: Bukovina was a place where “books and people lived.”10) Charmed by her father’s Hassidic background, she was even more fascinated by the vitality of Constantin Brunner’s holistic pantheism, which combined Eastern spiritual and Western rationalist thought. Brunner was a pro-assimilationist Jewish philosopher who was popular in academic circles at Czernowitz. Basing his beliefs on the metaphysical opposition between mental creativity and physical reproduction, he argued that all human beings were united within a universal Oneness.11 Rose, a rather intellectual “modern woman” who called herself a “Spinozist atheist” but was also temporarily attracted by Zionist, Jewish revivalist, and leftist movements, worked for many years as a bank clerk in the United States. During her first American exile in the 1920s, after her father’s sudden death, Rose Ausländer wrote in German; but after her mother’s death in 1947, an event at which Rose was not present, she suffered a deep depression and stopped writing in German for a decade. By claiming that the foreign language simply forced itself onto her, later vanishing as mysteriously as it had come, she underlines the passivity of her role in what might seem a repressive choice: Ende 1946. Existenzkampf. Umorientierung. [. . .] Nach mehrjährigem Schweigen überraschte ich mich eines Abends beim Schreiben englischer Lyrik. Einer meiner ersten Englischtexte fing an: “Looking for a final start.” [.  .  .]. Warum schreibe ich seit 1956 wieder deutsch? Mysteriös, wie sie erschienen war, verschwand die englische Muse. Kein äußerer Anlaß bewirkte die Rückkehr zur Muttersprache. Geheimnis des Unterbewußtseins. (GW 3:287) [Late 1946. Struggle for existence. Reorientation. [. . .] After having been silent for several years, I caught myself one evening writing poetry in English. One of my first English texts began with the sentence: “Looking for a final start.” [.  .  .] Why have I written in German again since 1956? My English muse disappeared as mysteriously as it came. No outside event caused the return to my mother tongue. Mystery of the subconscious.]

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Although the linguistic switch could be explained by her traumatic Holocaust experience, her personal crisis, and her exile situation, it seems plausible that a phenomenon of psychological transference was at work in the semiotic operation of “translation,” a kind of “othering” that transcends metaphysical oppositions. Alternative explanations, for example a psychological rationalization that regards the switch away from the mother tongue as a mere reaction of despair or resistance, fail to take into consideration the difference between symbolic introjection (as unconscious identification) and dimensions of imaginary projection (the product of a process of differentiation). One might say that even when she went back to writing in German, Ausländer never returned to the same Muttersprache, even if she denies a change of identity: Ich habe mich In mich verwandelt Von Augenblick zu Augenblick in Stücke zersplittert auf dem Wortweg Mutter Sprache setzt mich zusammen Menschenmosaik (GW 3:104) [I turned myself Into myself From one moment to the next broken into fragments on the word-path Mother language puts me together a human mosaic.12]

The tautological metamorphosis (of oneself into oneself) is followed by a destabilization of the subject and its reintegration by means of a communicative medium that evokes a subliminal “partial object,” the mother’s voice, replacing the “lost object”13 and thus preserving narcissism from the threat of symbolic triangularization  — that is, the interruption of dyadic mirroring by the intervention of a third element.

Saved from, Saved by the Mother Tongue It is interesting that Ausländer’s language switch was accompanied by a poetological turning-point: Rhyme “broke down,” “the words all had to be

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replaced.”14 Ausländer, influenced partly by Anglophone modernism — for instance by E. E. Cummings, who treated grammatical categories as material objects15 — shifted away from neo-Romantic mannerism toward free verse, syntactic fragmentation and reduction of metaphor; she also owed much to Paul Celan, who rejected “Bilderknechte” (slaves of the image),16 and the French literary avant-garde with which he was connected. It was no longer the demons of the big city or modern life, which had haunted Ausländer’s early Expressionist poems, but instead feelings of loss and melancholy that dominated her lyrical output from the 1950s on (Lajarrige 7). Existential anxiety was purged of pathos, because formal reduction favored a reflexive, even ironical distance. As her poetry became increasingly selfreferential, a series of sublimated “lost objects” (parents, native country, trust in humanity) came to be substituted by language itself. But does this process of de- and refiguration necessarily assume “a kind of maternal quality,”17 as Kathrin M. Bower thinks? Does the oral quality of language provide compensation for the loss of the “first Other,” the mother? Although Rose Ausländer and her mother both survived the Holocaust, by chance, her mother’s death shortly afterwards amounted to a repetition of the catastrophe on a personal level, abruptly ending the mother-daughter-symbiosis that had existed between them. In a comparable situation, Nelly Sachs dreamt of holding “the infant body of her [. . .] deceased mother in her arms” (Bower 105). Ausländer’s homeland had always been an imaginary “motherland,” merging the maternal and the verbal into a personal variant of popular matriarchal myths, for instance in her Eva-Gedichte.18 Although the transmission of Jewish identity passes through the maternal body, only the letter, Holy Scripture, represents the divine law; Ausländer rejects this gendered dichotomy, favoring pantheism (One = all) and a Spinozist equation of God and nature,19 realized in her evocation of the “green mother” of the Bukovina.20 The “black Sappho of the East,” as Alfred Margul-Sperber called Ausländer,21 was using philosophical discourse as a strategic master-trope. Back in Europe since the early 1960s, and writing poems in German since 1956, Ausländer did not encounter much popular interest in her work until she met her later editor, Helmut Braun, in 1972.22 The formal compromises and nostalgic themes of her prize-winning poetry23 seemed obsolete in the atmosphere of 1968. Unlike politically engaged writers, who treated nature lyric with derision (Günter Eich wrote nature poetry himself, but was aware of the problems it posed; Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s position was clearer), Ausländer did not reject her Romantic inheritance. She used Eichendorff’s nightingale motif as an emblem in a nostalgic fairytale scene: Meine Nachtigall Meine Mutter war einmal ein Reh

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Die goldbraunen Augen Die Anmut [. . .] Jetzt ist sie eine Nachtigall Nacht um Nacht höre ich sie Im Garten meines schlaflosen Traumes [. . .] sie singt das alte Österreich sie singt die Berge und Buchenwälder [. . .] (GW 2:317) [My Nightingale My mother was a deer once the golden brown eyes the grace [. . .] Now she is a nightingale Night after night I listen to her in the garden of my sleepless dream [. . .] She sings the old Austria she sings the mountains and the beech groves24]

Still identifying deeply with German culture, Ausländer finally chose Düsseldorf as her last place of refuge, retiring into care at Nelly Sachs, a Jewish home for the old, after a strenuous wandering life. “I don’t lodge, I just live,”25 she would say, claiming language was her only true home;26 she never even defended her return to writing in German. Thus, Ausländer’s approach to language differed from that of Paul Celan. Celan’s poems, by calling German language into question and undermining its “tropisms”27 from within, enact the personified resistance of symbolic processes not as a structural or functional, but as a differential and thus virtually self-deconstructive potentiality.28 Ausländer, in contrast, does not comment on problems of imprinting or deformation. She seems to retain a vitalist confidence in the magic power of verbal creation. For Ausländer, language is not so much its own meta-language as a performative medium, which she often compares to breathing — a recurrent metaphor referring to the Lurian cabbala and in particular to the unceasing impulses of divine emanation and retreat (Beil 346). Ausländer’s productivist conception of language as an originary force of creation, both in the biblical and mystical sense (Beil 41), remains within the tradition of Hamann, Herder, Novalis or Wilhelm von Humboldt, but also anticipates postmodern connotations of construction and playfulness. Unlike Celan, who undertook a search for designifying verbal material, Ausländer retained most of her prewar motifs. Although her syntactic ellipsis (taken together with her renunciation of rhyme and meter) enhances semantic ambiguity, she reinvests it with an autobiographical auto-referentiality that still gives it a minimal message: “Nicht ich // Wer mich kennt / weiß / daß ich nicht / Ich bin // nur eine / verschwiegene Stimme // Mein Wort / du solltest es / besser wissen” (GW 4:24; Not I

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// Who knows me / knows / that I am not / I / I am // only a / taciturn voice // My word / you should know it / better). Ausländer’s last poem summarizes her project in one sentence: “Gib auf // der Traum / lebt / mein Leben / zu Ende” (GW 7:380; Give up / the dream / lives out / my life / to its end). The semantic point of gnomic arguments lies in the syntagmatic polyvalence of noun and verb phrases, which change sense according to their reference to either preceding or subsequent elements. Insofar as lexical analogy takes precedence over syntax, including the syntactically flowing borders of the verse-lines, there is still a residual meaning within the open texture of these poems.

Moderate Modernism As “anxiety therapy,”29 Ausländer’s lyrics undergo an aesthetic purification through ellipsis, but do not dispense with figuration. In the end, this “infects” the letter, and commemoration becomes a parable for writing: Vom A zum B ist ein endloser Weg Zwischenraum Atome Der Atem ein Zug durch die Luft es geht von Adam zu Ade Äonenweg letztes Alibi Amen (GW 7:22) [From A to B goes an endless way intermediate space atoms The breath one gasp through the air from Adam to adieu path of eons last alibi amen]

The alliterative declination of the first letter of the alphabet (Aleph in Hebrew) produces a thematic network of seven culturally relevant and epoch-making keywords (atom, air, Adam, adieu, eon, alibi, amen), the constellation of which limits the abundant potential of meaning. The infinitesimal continuum of nonsignificant discrete terms is never fully exploited by Ausländer’s lexical associations, which in retaining significance allegorize the activity of generating infinite sense from a finite, arbitrary set of elements.

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Ausländer’s writing therefore belongs to the moderate current of modernism.30 Even if her late poetry radicalizes fragmentation, undecidability, and juxtaposition of the heterogeneous, it is not so much hermetic as hermeneutic, eager to decipher itself as it proceeds. It has even been argued that linguistic reflection and poetic construction maintain a “symbiotic relationship” in Ausländer’s case (Köhl 323). In her short essay Alles kann Motiv sein (Everything Can Be a Motif), Ausländer explains aesthetic changes against the background of socio-historical events, even taking on board the distortion of psychic temporality, its après coup effect: “Was später über uns hereinbrach, war ungereimt, so alpdruckhaft-beklemmend, daß — erst in der Nachwirkung, im nachträglich voll erlittenen Schock — der Reim in die Brüche ging. Blumenworte welkten” (What was later to crash down upon us was so completely without rhyme or reason, so oppressively nightmarish, that — but this only kicked in later, after the shock had been fully realized — rhyme broke down. The flower words withered). Although “Auschwitz,” as a point of no return, might be conceived of as a paradoxical rupture, a historical caesura that breaks with history and thus eludes itself, Ausländer’s interpretation of some of its effects as a trigger for an aesthetic turning point still retains elements of mimesis.

Traversing the Mirror Even if we can divide Ausländer’s poetry into an early (traditional) and a late (modernist) phase, there are a certain number of redundant motifs or topics that persist throughout her work (for example, the mirror, the mother), but certain figurations of space and time also recur. I am suggesting here that these core figures are evidence of phantom limbs, supplements to the “lost object” whose only existence consists in the fact of its having been displaced. Whereas, in Ausländer’s lyrics, memory and remembrance are closely linked to the fictional construction of geographical, cultural, or imaginary spaces (atmospheric childhood places, mythical landscapes), the phenomenon of time is represented by instruments of measuring or by its visible effects, for instance ageing. Subjectivity as self-consciousness, from introspection to narcissistic showmanship, is often staged in “mirror scenes.” These topoi sometimes cluster and overlap, as in the following lines: Die Mutter und der Bruder waren Mythen geheimnisvolles Gut im kühlen Schrank Aus Kellern flog ein Duft von dunklen Blüten Und wo ich stand war Zentrum (GW 1:219) [The mother and the brother were myths a mysterious store within the cool cupboard

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From cellars below rose a scent of dark flowers And where I stood was the center] Ich trete durch das Goldportal Der Sonne in mein stilles Zimmer Die Zeit wohnt in der Welt der Zahl Ich werde nicht ihr Eigentümer. Die Wände richten sich nach mir Nach allen Richtungen. Ich spüre Die stumme Demut ihrer vier Körper und die Gunst der Türe Das Fenster ist die Gnade, der Kontakt mit Straße, Stern und Kühle. (GW 1:284) [I step through the golden portal of the sun into my silent room Time lodges in the world of numbers I won’t become its owner. The walls follow my directions in all directions. I feel the mute humility of their four bodies and the door’s good will The window is grace and favor, my contact with street, star and fresh air.]

On the whole, Ausländer represents space referentially, but she employs mannered rhetorical procedures, for example qualitative quantification, in order to illustrate her quite linear concept of time. Brunner, her monist “guru,” understood time and space as elements of the same cosmos, and conceived of movement as the unifying principle of being. One of her poems of the sixties, “Perspektiven der Zeit” (GW 2:90–91; Perspectives of Time), contains a list of metaphorically attributed diminishing unities, from years (“ein Wettrennen mit dem Tod” [a race with death]), months (“langsame Wiederholung” [slow repetition]), weeks (“Warten [. . .] auf die Traumhast” [waiting [.  .  .] for the haste of dreams]), through days (“zerbröckeln” [crumbling]), hours (“Der böse und schöne Trug” [bad and beautiful deception]), and minutes (“zu früh [. . .] oder zu spät” [too soon, [. . .] or too late]), to the mystical nunc stans (“Nur der Moment ist ewig” [Only the moment is eternal]). But her poetry also subsides into conventional synecdoche (“In allen Hallen plappern Uhren  / das dividierte Gesicht des Zifferblatts” [GW 2:236; Clocks are chatting in all the halls / the divided face of the clock]), facile contradictions (“Die Zeit ist nicht. Wir sind die Zeit” [GW 3:179; There is no time. We are time], Zeit I [Time 1]), or into popularization of philosophical problems (“[Zeit] ist da / vergeht und bleibt” [GW 3:74; Time is there, passes and

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stays]). The spatialization of linear temporality, for instance, is dramatized in terms of a fight in “Die Uhr” (The Clock): “ich ringe um Raum / mit der zwölffingrigen / Null [. . .] Bäume wachsen [. . .] mein Papierfleisch // Die Uhr ist ein Wiederkäuer  / frißt mir Blatt um Blatt  / aus der Hand” (GW 3:101; I am struggling for space / with the twelve-fingered zero [. . .] Trees grow [. . .] my paper flesh // The clock is a ruminant / eats one leaf after the other / out of my hand). As a rhetorical medium, the mirror that produces unequivocal copies of its referent31 turns out to be a hostile device. Ausländer wrote about three dozen mirror poems; only the earliest, “Die Spiegel” (The Mirrors), dating from 1939, celebrates a neo-platonic harmony between the microand the macrocosm: the shining sky reflects the world by looking at it, and the human eye mirrors the earth as it glitters in a thousand lookingglasses.32 Later on, Ausländer hints at the phenomenological split between gaze and picture,33 the blind spot of the visual field. Not capable of seeing himself seeing, the observer must recognize that what he perceives are not his eyes, but their reflection in the mirror, as in “Spiegelungen” (GW 2:80; Reflections). The subject not only follows the other’s gaze in a picture, in “Du und dein Bild” (GW 2:114; You and Your Image), but feels regarded in “Die Spiegel” (GW 1:96; The Mirror) by the “ewig aufgeschlagnen Blick” (open[ed] eyes) of the world — in German, the verb “aufschlagen” also refers to the opening of a book. Terrified by the glassy abyss in “Spiel im Spiegel” (GW 2:157; Mirror Play), “die Zwillinge  / finden sich wieder / schwesterlich” (the twins / get together again / as sisters). As a counterpart of the mirror image, the shadow — for example, in “Schatten im Spiegel” (GW 3:42; Shadow in the Mirror) — likewise evokes the old occidental suspicion of mere illusion (see also GW 2:237, GW 2:241). But the mirror also serves as a medium of self-recognition,34 as in “Spiegelbild” (Mirror Image): “Nimm / deinen Körper / zur Kenntnis // Du blickst  / dich an  / und fragst  / wer bin ich // Du bist nicht / du wirst / älter / alt” (GW 4:124; Take / notice of / your body // You regard / yourself / and you ask / who am I // You are not / you are getting / older / old). Self-appropriation requires self-confrontation. If multi-layered cross-over sometimes leads to peaceful coexistence, as in “Doppelt” (Double): “Der Spiegel / gibt mich / mir wieder [. . .] Hier steh ich / Ich an Ich” (GW 3:46; The mirror / gives me / back / to myself [. . .] Here I am / I to I), it can also turn into aggressive rivalry or even dueling and revenge.35 In an allusion to the Hegelian dialectic of master and slave, the talking mirror of “Überholt II” (Surpassed 2) inverts the power structure: “Verwandelt / vertauscht // Ich war einmal anders / sagst du dem Spiegel // er glaubt dir nicht” (GW 8:79; Metamorphosed, exchanged // I was different before / you tell the mirror / he does not believe you). Similarly, Death observes itself, a self-loving, but decadent figure. “Von Rosenblättern umrieselt / lächelt der Tod / und

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schaut ins Wasser / ein selbstverliebter Narziß” (GW 5:152; In a shower of rose-buds / Death smiles / and stares into the water / a self-amorous Narcissus). Or, in a later version, “Glaswald” (Forest of Glass): “Im  / Glaswald verirrt  / das Gesicht verloren  / Narziß // Wiederholung im See” (GW 7:371; Forlorn in the glassy wood / his face lost / Narcissus // Repetition in the lake). One of Ausländer’s early English poems, “The Mirror,” reifies the riddle of Eros and Thanatos: “Soul of glass in whose limbo / things live untouchable / separate and lonely together.”36 In the late sixties, another poem seems to start with the Lacanian mirror stage, the constitution of the Self from the position of the Other. In a dialogue with the lyrical ego, in “Verrat II” (Betrayal 2), the mirror denies that the reflected person has an identity (“you are not you”). The person tries to negotiate, but the mirror remains unyielding: “Ich bitte ihn / verrat mich nicht  / ich schenk dir einen  / feinen Rahmen [.  .  . Spiegel:] ich bin dein Rahmen / du bist / mein Bild” (GW 3:205; I beg it / don’t give my secret away / I’ll give you a / nice new frame [. . . Mirror:] I am your frame / you are / my picture). If we assume that the frame is the transcendental condition of the picture,37 the medium corrects the optical illusion of its user. In contrast to Ausländer’s mirror images, most of Nelly Sachs’s somewhat more enigmatic mirror images are charged with mystical connotations. In her mystery play on the Shoah, the mirror is a witness of murder, enriched with allusions to Ovidian myth, Grimm’s fairytales, and Rilke’s poems (“Sternbild Reiter”). In “Sternverdunkelung,” one of the poems dedicated to her mother, though, the tone has changed: “aber in den beiden Spiegeln  / deines weißen Gesichts  / hat sich der Sommer erhalten” (but in the two mirrors  / of your white face  / the Summer has survived).38

(De-)Figuration of Word as “Motherland”? If maternal and paternal images in Holocaust literature function as “polysemous tropes spanning cosmic, terrestrial, and temporary realms” and serve as “representations through which the poets strove to recover a sense of [.  .  .] equilibrium” (Bower 57), there is one striking disproportion where parental figuration in Ausländer’s poetry is concerned. Whereas only a few poems are devoted to her father, “mother” occurs as a signifier in about fifty poems. Its rhetorical use ranges from passing references to longer narratives. Identifying mother as the “locus of origin” and “the embodiment of refuge,” Bower interprets “Motherland” and “mother tongue” as a “surrogate home.”39 But already in Gettomotive the two syllables of the invoked magic formula “MUT-TER” are forlorn and lost (GW 1:154).40 Mourning over her mother’s death, Ausländer dedicates two requiems to her, the first, “Requiem I. Meiner Mutter” (Requiem 1: My Mother), consisting of a single rhymed trochaic strophe:

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Aber sie war größer als ihr Sterben [. . .] bis aus ihrer durchsichtigen Gabe jäh ihr Bild erstrahlte und der Platz war hinfort ein unerhörter Schatz Ihr Erscheinen hing als ein Geschmeide in der Luft — und wurde Trauerfreude (GW 1:298) [But she was bigger than her death [. . .] until out of her transparent gift suddenly her picture shone and that place was henceforth an unheard-of treasure Her appearance hung like jewelry In the air — turned into mourning joy]

Compared with the echolalic second requiem (“Requiem II,” GW 1:301) with its lullaby-rhythm and soft internal rhymes  — “Mutter, Wesen, das um mich gewesen  / wie die Luft und der Atem rein” (GW 1:301; Mother, being that had been all round me  / pure as air and pure as breath), “Requiem I” sublimates emotions more densely, with contradicting affective results. In another versified poem (“Nur diese Gabe”) the “die Gabe der allgemeinen Mutter” (GW 1:298; gift of the universal mother) is revered by the orphan as if it were a substitute for the paternal law. The universalization contrasts with the sensual mood it evokes. Ich habe keine Habe, nur die Gabe der allgemeinen Mutter Ihren intimen Rhythmus sommerlicher Pfade In meiner Stube — O unverdiente Gnade! (GW 1:298) [I have no possession except for the gift of the universal mother her intimate rhythm of summery paths in my parlor — Oh undeserved grace!] The bulk of Ausländer’s mother poems could be classified by their formal structures as well as by semantic effects. The realistic poems, less numerous, invite biographical readings — for example, “Nur die Mutter” (Only Mother), “Heimat I” (Homeland 1), and “24 Stunden” (24 Hours) — and can be distinguished from the symbolist lyrics, in which the “mother

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trope” tends to have a meta-poetical status. In the first category, it appears as a “nurturing force, ensuring peace and life” (Bower 64): Nur die Mutter blieb mild auch im Tod Alle anderen sind wild zwicken deinen Atem, wollen deine Not, hassen dein warmes Blut. Nur die Mutter blieb gut. (GW 1:297) [Only mother was mild even in death. All the others are wild pinch your breath, want your distress, hate your warm blood. Only mother remained good.]

Whereas the lyrical ego longs for the impossible resurrection of a dead mother (Kristensson 233), it is the idealized maternal image itself that interrupts the regression into fantasy in a kind of double bind: “Mich trösten kindliche Träume / [. . .] die Mutter sagt / Liebling / vergiß” (GW 7:52; Infantile dreams console me / [. . .] my mother tells me: / Darling / forget). On the other hand, the “guardian of memory and suffering” seems to be “a barrier to the child’s painful acquisition of autonomy” (Bower 64), at least from the point of view of ego psychology; if one reduces psychoanalysis to a science of the self (as consciousness), the ambivalence of narcissistic bonding refers to a “fantasy of incestuous fulfillment” as well as to a pre-oedipal “desire for union” (Bower 72). In “Trauerblumen” (Mourning Flowers), a “Muttermal” (GW 8:181; birthmark) is juxtaposed with a “blossoming wound.” The poem “Irrsinniger” (The Madman) focuses on the dark side of symbiosis: “Er mordet die Mutter  / sie lebt weiter  / im Traum  / und küßt ihn  / aufs Herz” (GW 8:113; He murders the mother  / she lives on  / in dreams  / and kisses him / on the heart). If the fixation on the mother leads to psychotic transgression, a symbolic matricide can be conceived of as the condition of creation.41 As the sign implies the absence of the thing, the “daughter poet” has to renounce her “mother muse” (Bower 72). In a poem from the 1920s, “Herbst in New York” (Autumn in New York), Ausländer expresses feelings of separation: “Mutter strömt ins Gefühl” (GW 1:25; Mother is streaming into my feelings). Ten years later, she finds emotional intensity in melancholy: “Nur aus der Trauer Mutterinnigkeit strömt mir das Vollmaß des Erlebens ein” (GW 1:66; Only from the motherly tenderness of

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mourning does the fullness of experience stream into me). Overcoming the “schwarze Mutter  / die meine Bilder gebärt” (GW 5:139; the black mother / who gives birth to my images) involves replacing the wise, dead mother42 by the mother tongue, taking one’s lyric out of the dead mother’s sleeve: “Aus dem Ärmel der toten Mutter hol ich die Harfe” (GW 3:119; From my dead mother’s sleeve I fetch my harp). As exile becomes home, “Mutterworte” (Motherwords — see Zeit II [Time 2], GW 5:80 and GW 6:27) become in “Widmung” (Dedication) simply words: “Worte / Mütter und Väter / meiner [. . .] Kinder” (GW 8:186; Words / mothers and fathers / of [. . .] my children). The rhetoric of (re)birth as a metaphor for creation43 is anchored in a performative act, the unconscious (re)affirmation of the founding signifier, in this case projected onto the first Other, in a spectacular inversion that is reminiscent of late medieval mysticism: Mai mein Monat da habe ich meine Mutter geboren Sie sang JA zu mir (from “Mutterlicht,” GW 4:152) [May month of mine when I gave birth to my mother She sang YES to me (from “Motherlight”)]

Exposing the act of entry into the symbolic order as a positive answer that is not spoken but sung, the approval by the M/Other draws attention to its imaginary, narcissistic primacy. Hence, in her poetic credo, Ausländer rejects realism under a Romantic premise: “Ich habe, was man Wirklichkeit nennt, auf meine Weise geträumt, das Geträumte in Worte verwandelt und meine geträumte Wortwirklichkeit in die Wirklichkeit der Welt zurückgeschickt” (I have dreamt what is called reality in my own way, and then transformed the dream into words, and I have sent the word-reality of my dreams back into the reality of the world).44 One of the mainstays of Ausländer’s hybrid position between tradition and modernity has been described as the use of an “innovatory semantic mixture between the abstract and the concrete” (Lehmann 32), or as mediation between the conceptual and the figurative (Vogel/Gans 155). Ausländer confirms this opinion in a remark directed against hermeticism:

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“Das allzu Dichte ist auch nicht immer das Beste  — denn da geht die Anschaulichkeit verloren  — das Gedicht wird trocken, abstrakt” (Vogel/ Gans 129; Too much compression is not always a good thing — it means the visual gets lost — the poem gets dry, abstract). But it is precisely those literary critics who think of her as an epigone that accuse her of resemantization by a technique of escapist condensation, found in hybrid compounds like “Sonnenwort” (sun word), “Vogelwort” (bird word), etc. (Colombat 349). Outside of formalist options such as conceptual art or the postmodern re-evaluation of the figurative, beginning with Lyotard’s diacritics of psychoanalysis,45 the recent “aisthetic turn” of aesthetics, promoted by technological media,46 is still founded in sensualist imagery. If Niklas Luhmann overcomes the modernist opposition between abstract and concrete47 by a conception of ornamental form, organizing space and time as an infrastructure of the evolution of representation,48 the tenacious epistemological dichotomy between concept and figure — ultimately, between word and image (metaphor, etc.), has been deconstructed from several points of view. From a historical perspective, it has been stated that arguments equal figures, insofar as logic might be said to be founded in rhetoric, so that the a priori of saying and showing would be a reciprocal one.49 Furthermore, the romantic undecidability of the literal and the figurative has been reread by Paul de Man as the double movement of sense-generating figuration and its defiguring exposure as something arbitrary and contingent. Beyond rhetorical convention, allegory in Walter Benjamin’s sense50 itself allegorizes the insurmountable gap between the signifier and the signified. The consequence is: If figuration entails defiguration, language can no longer be understood as its own meta-language, and if every concept derives from “dead” tropes (see Jean Paul, Nietzsche51) that, as such, bring with them their own cognitive functions, there is no longer any essential difference between theory and literature, arts and science. Whether one rejects or accepts this position, grounded on the double movement of the reciprocal deconstruction of the elements of a binary opposition,52 the problem can be displaced one more time. Under the assumption that a theory of meaning should go together with a theory of subjectivity, breaking with the primacy of consciousness, the production of meaning (and literature) would have to be reconsidered in the framework of a psychoanalytic topology that takes into account the symptomatic traces of signifying processes, without neglecting their discursive, intertextual, and aesthetic embedding. One persistent difficulty, I admit, lies in the heterogeneity of the two verbal modalities concerned, literary discourse as a fixed text and as an object of historical, philosophical, and theoretical reconstruction, on one hand, and the dynamic living speech of the subject (performed, for example, in the context of psychoanalytic therapy) on the other. In any case, iteration (to use Derrida’s or Judith Butler’s understanding of the word53) remains “open,” but not to just “any interpretation,” as Lacan states.54

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In illustration of this point, I would like to give Rose Ausländer the final word in her English poem “Mother,” in which the binary meaning of a word-pair, linked and kept apart by the voicing and devoicing of the phonemes /v/ and /f/, gliding from soft to hard, seems rather telling to me. But you are veiled. Your face, eclipsed by shade, grows thin and pale. You and my letters fade. [. . .] I am unworthy to describe you. I have failed. I spell you with a tear, a sigh. (Forbidden Tree 112)

Notes Epigraph. In Gesammelte Werke in sieben Bänden und einem Nachtragsband, ed. Helmut Braun (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1985–90), 4:227. Subsequent references are cited in the text using the abbreviation GW, followed by the volume and page number. Unless otherwise indicated, German translations into English are by Annette Runte. 1

Rose Ausländer, “Ghettomotive,” in Gesammelte Werke in sieben Bänden und einem Nachtragsband, ed. Helmut Braun, 1 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1985–90), 149–85. Subsequent references are indicated as GW, followed by the volume and page number.

2

According to Giorgio Agamben, the reduction of human existence to a “living substance (process)” by modern biology led to the degradation of human existence to mere “bare life” as an object of totalitarian “bio-politics” (Michel Foucault). Homo sacer: Die souveräne Macht und das nackte Leben (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002 [1995]), 13–17, 93, 100, 120). 3

Gisela Bezzel-Dischner, Poetik des modernen Gedichts: Zur Lyrik von Nelly Sachs (Bad Homburg /Berlin: Gehlen, 1970), 22. 4

See, for example, Helmut Braun, Rose Ausländer: Materialien zu Leben und Werk (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1991), 245, and Annette Jaël Lehmann, Im Zeichen der Shoah: Aspekte der Dichtungs- und Sprachkrise bei Rose Ausländer und Nelly Sachs (Tübingen: Stauffenberg, 1999), 136. Subsequent references to the latter book are indicated as Lehmann, followed by the page number. 5

Rémy Colombat, “Les images poétologiques de Rose Ausländer,” Études Germaniques 2 (2003): 339–61; here, 358–61. Subsequent references are indicated as Colombat, followed by the page number. 6

Sigmund Freud, “Trauer und Melancholie” in Gesammelte Werke: Chronologisch geordnete Werke aus den Jahren 1913–1917, ed. Anna Freud, E. Bribing, W. Hoffer, E. Kris, and O. Isakower, vol. 10 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1999 [1946]), 427–46; here, 429, 431–38.

7

Walter Benjamin, “Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hans Schweppenhäuser, vol. 1, bk. 2 (Frankfurt am

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Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 693–704; here, 704; see also “Das Passagen-Werk,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5 bk. 1, 589. 8

Victor Klemperer, Lingua Tertii Imperii (Berlin, Ost: Aufbau, 1947).

9

Andrei Corbea-Hoisie, “Vom Bildungsbürger zum Intellektuellen: Zum Profil der ‘Czernowitzer Zivilisation,’” in “Wörter stellen mir nach. Ich stelle sie vor”: Dokumentation des Ludwigsburger Symposiums 2001 (Hohengehren: Schneider, 2001), 33–54; here, 50. 10

“Es war eine Gegend, in der Menschen und Bücher lebten.” Paul Celan, “Ansprache anläßlich der Entgegennahme des Literaturpreises der Freien Hansestadt Bremen,” in Der Meridian und andere Prosa (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), 37. The German poet Annette von Droste-Hülshoff already suggested the proximity of the two signifiers, “Buche” (beech tree) and “Buch” (book). 11

Gerhard Reiter, “Das Eine und das Einzelne: Zur philosophischen Struktur der Lyrik Rose Ausländers,” in “Wörter stellen mir nach,” 154–97; here, 170. 12

Translation by Michael Shields.

13

See Alain Vannier, Lacan (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2003), 71.

14

Der Reim “ging in die Brüche,” das “Vokabular mußte ausgewechselt werden” (GW 3:286). 15

The American Tradition in Literature, ed. Sculley Bradley et al. 4th ed. (New York: Grosset & Dunlap [distributed by W.W. Norton], 1974), 1036. 16

Jacques Lajarrige, “Avant-propos,” in Gedichte der Rose Ausländer, ed. J. Lajarrige and Marie-Hélène Quéval (Nantes: Éditions du Temps, 2005), 317–38; here, 336. Subsequent references are indicated as Lajarrige, followed by the page number.

17

Kathrin M. Bower, Ethics and Remembrance in the Poetry of Nelly Sachs and Rose Ausländer (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000), 107. Subsequent references are indicated as Bower, followed by the page number. 18

See Maria Behre, Eva, wo bist du? Wirkungsmacht des Weiblichen im Werk Rose Ausländers (Berlin: AphorismA, 2005), 79–83.

19

Jean Firges, “Die jüdische und chassidische Tradition in den Gedichten Rose Ausländers,” in Gedichte der Rose Ausländer, 43–68; here, 67–68. 20

Andréa Lauterwein, “Cocon chlorophylle. Notes sur Rose Ausländer et la poésie lyrique de la nature,” in Gedichte der Rose Ausländer, 159–68; here, 162. 21

Claire de Oliveira, “Images de la féminité dans l’oeuvre de Rose Ausländer,” Études Germaniques 2 (2003): 265–81, 265n1. 22

In a letter to Hans Bender (26 August 1976), she still states that her lyrics are little known: “noch immer sind meine ‘Kinder’ recht unbekannt geblieben,” quoted in Hans Bender, “‘Ich habe ein freundschaftliches Gefühl für Sie’: Beim Wiederlesen der Briefe von Rose Ausländer,” in Mutterland Wort: Rose Ausländer 1901–1988, ed. Rose-Ausländer-Dokumentationszentrum (Düsseldorf: Rose-Ausländer-Gesellschaft e.V., 1996), 117–22; here, 119. 23 For instance: the Droste-Preis in 1967, the Ida Dehmel-Preis in 1977, or the Roswitha-Medaille of Bad Gandersheim. See Helmut Braun, “Ich bin fünftausend

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Jahre jung.” Rose Ausländer: Zu ihrer Biographie (Stuttgart: Radius, 1999), 204– 5. 24

Translated by Julia Samwer. Plantagenet. (accessed 26 March 2008). 25

Jutta Kristensson, Identitätssuche in Rose Ausländers Spätlyrik: Rezeptionsvarianten zur Post-Shoah-Lyrik (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2000), 173. Subsequent references are indicated as Kristensson, followed by the page number. 26

Claudia Beil, Sprache als Heimat: Jüdische Tradition und Exilerfahrung in der Lyrik von Nelly Sachs und Rose Ausländer. Hamburg: tuduv, 1991), 199. Subsequent references are indicated as Beil, followed by the page number. 27

In the sense of Nathalie Sarraute. See Tropismes (Paris: Minuit, 1990 [1939]).

28

Stéphane Mosès, “1952. Autumn. Poetry after Auschwitz.” A New History of German Literature, ed. David E. Wellbery and Judith Ryan (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004), 856–59; here, 859. 29 Norina Procopan, “Poetologische und selbstreflexive Topoi in Rose Ausländers später Dichtung,” in Gedichte der Rose Ausländer, 169–82; here, 171. 30

Gabriele Köhl, Die Bedeutung der Sprache in der Lyrik Rose Ausländers (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1993), 314. Subsequent references are indicated as Köhl, followed by the page number. 31

Umberto Eco, “Über Spiegel,” in Über Spiegel und andere Phänomene (München: Beck, 1988 [1985]), 26–62; here, 34. See also 27, 52. 32

“Das ist ein Wiederstrahlen ohne Ende! / Dort leuchtet grenzenlos des Himmels Spiegel, / und saugt in seine silberweißen Wände / die tiefe Welt, und preßt auf sie sein Siegel.  / Da flackern mystisch Myriaden Sterne  / aus seinem ewig aufgeschlagnen Blick; / sie dringen in die abgewandt’ste Ferne / und schleudern mächtig sie als Bild zurück. // Und über unsrem rollenden Planeten  / fängt hoch ein goldnes Aug’ sein Bildnis auf, / [. . .] In tausend Spiegel schaut erstaunt die Erde: / [. . .] Doch ungeteilt empfängt die ganze Runde / der reine, linsenkleine Augenspiegel” (GW 1:96). 33

See Jacques Lacan, Die vier Grundbegriffe der Psychoanalyse: Das Seminar, Buch XI. 2nd ed. (Olten: Walter, 1980), 80, 270. 34

August Langen, “Zur Geschichte des Spiegelsymbols in der deutschen Dichtung,” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 28 (1940): 269–80; here, 270. 35

“Vom Spiegel fordere ich / Aug um Aug / Zahn um Zahn” (“Antwortlos,” GW 4:168). 36 Rose Ausländer, The Forbidden Tree: Englische Gedichte (1948–1956), ed. Helmut Braun (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1995), 106. Subsequent references are indicated as Forbidden Tree, followed by the page number. 37

See Jacques Derrida: La vérité en peinture (Paris: Flammarion 1993 [1978]).

38

Nelly Sachs, Das Leiden Israels. Eli. In den Wohnungen des Todes. Sternverdunkelung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996 [1964]), 150. 39 See Cilly Helfrich, “Es ist ein Aschensommer in der Welt.” Rose Ausländer: Biographie (Weinheim / Berlin: Quadriga, 1995), 65.

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In Zwei Silben verirrt (GW 1:154).

41

Julia Kristeva, Histoires d’amour (Paris: Denoël, 1983).

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42

Rose Ausländer, “Ich spiele noch”: Brief aus Rosen. Gedichte, ed. Helmut Braun. 5th ed. (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2004), 179. 43

Kunst — Zeugung — Geburt: Theorien und Metaphern ästhetischer Produktion in der Neuzeit, ed. Christian Begemann and David E. Wellbery (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2002). 44

Quoted in Harald Vogel and Michael Gans, Rose Ausländer/Hilde Domin: Gedichtinterpretationen. 2nd ed. (Hohengehren: Schneider, 1997). Subsequent references are indicated as Vogel/Gans, followed by the page number. 45

Jean-François Lyotard, Discours, figure (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971).

46

Aisthesis: Wahrnehmung heute oder Perspektiven einer anderen Ästhetik. Essais, ed. Karlheinz Barck, Peter Gente, Heidi Paris, and Stefan Richter (Leipzig: Reclam, 1990). 47

Claudia Öhlschläger, Abstraktionsdrang: Wilhelm Worringer und der Geist der Moderne (München: Fink, 2005). 48

Niklas Luhmann, Die Kunst der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), 181.

49

Dieter Mersch, “Argumentum est figura. Bemerkungen zur Rhetorik der Vernunft,” in de figura: Rhetorik — Bewegung — Gestalt, ed. Gabriele Brandstetter and Sibylle Peters (München: Fink, 2002), 101–26; here, 107. 50

Anselm Haverkamp and Bettine Menke, “Art. Allegorie,” in Ästhetische Grundbegriffe: Historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden, ed. Karlheinz Barck et al. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000), 40–104; here, 70–79. 51

Jean Paul: “Daher ist jede Sprache in Rücksicht geistiger Beziehungen ein Wörterbuch erblasster Metaphern,” in Vorschule der Ästhetik, nach der Ausgabe von Norbert Miller, hg. von Wolfhart Henckmann (Hamburg: Meiner 1990), 184; Friedrich Nietzsche: “Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne” (1873) in Nachgelassene Schriften: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli/ Mazzino Montinari, 2nd ed. (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 1999), 875–91. 52

Ingo Berensmeyer, “Gestus und Geltung: Zur Rhetorik der Theorie (de Man / Miller),” DVJS 3 (2001): 491–539; here, 528. 53

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, New York and London, 1990).

54

François Dosse, Geschichte des Strukturalismus, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1999 [1992]), 243.

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5: On the Fringes: Mistrust as Commitment in the Poetics of Ilse Aichinger Marko Pajević

I

AICHINGER MADE HER FIRST APPEARANCE in the German-speaking literary landscape in 1946 with her short prose text Aufruf zum Mißtrauen (Incitement to Mistrust), at the age of twenty-five. It was striking. She presented her appeal as a homeopathic remedy: the individual should call him- or herself into question, in order to avoid going astray on greater questions. “Der Klarheit unserer Absichten, der Tiefe unserer Gedanken, der Güte unserer Taten! Unserer eigenen Wahrhaftigkeit müssen wir mißtrauen!” (We must mistrust the clarity of our intentions, the profundity of our thoughts, the goodness of our deeds! We must mistrust our own truthfulness!) One might ask: What is wrong with clarity, profundity, goodness, and truthfulness, especially in a historical situation where the people had just been liberated from a mystifying and disastrous ideology? But Aichinger is probably referring precisely to this problem of judgment, since to the people who believed in National Socialist ideology, it seemed to be just that: clear, also profound, good, and truthful. That was the case even for some of the sharpest minds. Gottfried Benn, to name but one, justified himself in his famous Antwort an die literarischen Emigranten (Answer to the Literary Emigrants) of 19331 by invoking precisely the same qualities that Aichinger called into question. Aichinger does not propose to start off by mistrusting other people (not that mistrust was in short supply at that time; nor does she speak of the gullibility of the Austrians and Germans who fell into the trap set by the Nazis. Instead, the certainties are what seem fatal to her. People who claim to know are the ones who lead to disaster. She concludes: “Werden wir mißtrauisch gegen uns selbst, um vertrauenswürdiger zu sein!” (Let’s become more mistrustful toward ourselves in order to be more trustworthy!)2 Aichinger has never renounced this private approach in the face of social and political aberrations, and has repeatedly been reproached for it by the critics — but isn’t it simply the approach of art in general? This question is clearly not the same as that concerning the relative artistic merits of private and public orientation in works of art.

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In the following I wish to pursue the question of how this mistrust of one’s own truthfulness manifests itself formally in Aichinger’s literature. How does it take shape in its poetic form? And what is really the status of hermeticism and privacy in Aichinger’s literature? To answer these questions, we must first scrutinize a literary text: How far does this poetically realized mistrust represent a form of commitment in Aichinger’s sense?

Analysis of the Poem “Gebirgsrand” As an object of detailed analysis I have chosen the poem “Gebirgsrand”3 since it seems to me to be particularly pertinent in our context, but also because it has received intense academic attention4 and is one of Aichinger’s best-known poems. It is no coincidence that I chose a poem, as in my opinion the poetical principle I wish to put forward works best in poetry.5 It was written in 1958 and published for the first time in 1959. Gebirgsrand Denn was täte ich, wenn die Jäger nicht wären, meine Träume, die am Morgen auf der Rückseite der Gebirge niedersteigen, im Schatten. [Mountain Fringes Because what would I do, if it wasn’t for the hunters, my dreams, that — in the morning at the back of the mountain ranges — descend, in the shadow.]

In order to better understand this poem, it is necessary to be familiar with Aichinger’s poetic language before engaging in a close reading of the text; parallels in her work are of the utmost importance and an invaluable aid to interpretation. Without them, the reader can easily take a wrong turn since commonly accepted terminology is often used in unexpected ways: “Schatten” (shadow) and “Jäger” (hunter), for instance, are not necessarily negatively charged terms here. This poem has a strong connection with her recurrent theme of light and darkness, a theme that is of essential significance for our topic of the poetic form and its possibilities of commitment. This will become clearer in what follows. The title consists of a composite noun, rather unusual but far from astonishing. It might designate a landscape at the foot of a mountain range, between the mountains and the plains. It is preferable to put the title aside for the moment and come back to its meaning at the end of our analysis.

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The poem consists of a single sentence with a relatively clear structure: it is a full sentence with two appositions, simple vocabulary, and a relatively consistent rhythmic pattern. Formally it represents a clearly delimited unit. This first impression, however, is already countered by the first word: Since the poem starts with a causal or consecutive “Denn” (because), it appears to refer to something preceding that is not named. What follows in the poem is the consequence of something unstated; the cause remains unspoken. Syntactically, it is also possible to consider the word “Gebirgsrand” as the (elliptically verbless) preceding part of the sentence. The first line suggests a question, more precisely a question concerning an action, even if it is a hypothetical action (“täte” — would do), and it is the speaker’s own action, as is underlined by the emphatic final position of the word “ich” (I). In this way, every reader while reading must ask the question him- or herself; already in the first line Aichinger imposes her claim that every individual has to question him or herself.6 The question “Denn was täte ich . . . wenn” (Because what would I do if) implies that, if ever the condition (of there being no hunters) were fulfilled, there would be nothing to be done; one would be absolutely helpless. The rest of the poem now gives these circumstances: “wenn die Jäger nicht wären” (if it wasn’t for the hunters). The existence of the hunters is therefore the condition for the survival of the lyrical “I” who would not know how to carry on living without them. The sonic link between the vertically adjacent “Denn” and “wenn” (Because/if) also establishes a formal connection; the introductory question is closely linked to what follows. Before allowing the poem to define these “hunters” more closely, we should consider two parallel texts that are obviously intertextually linked to our poem and that deserve to be mentioned, at least briefly. The first is the poem “Winterrichtung” (in Verschenkter Rat 46), written on 16 December 1960: Winterrichtung Ich lasse mich von den Jagdhörnern aus meinen Schlupfwinkeln jagen, hin zu der Morgenröte unterm Schnee, zum vergilbenden Gras. Mit meinen Händen erreich ich schon die Gelübde der Alten, die mich rasch aufwärts ziehen, hol mir den winkligen Mond.

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[Winter direction I let myself be chased from my hiding places by the hunting horns, toward the dawn under the snow, toward the yellowing grass. With my hands I already reach the vows of the elders who rapidly draw me upwards, I fetch for myself the angled moon.]

Hunter, morning, and upward-movement — as opposed to the downwardmovement in “Gebirgsrand”  — should suffice here to demonstrate the intertextuality. What counts for us is the function of a wake-up call that is attributed to the hunters and that is clearly positively charged in this poem since it leads the lyrical “I” of the poem to activity and awareness. Even more significant in our context seems to be the short prose text “In das Land Salzburg ziehen” (Moving to the District of Salzburg).7 In spite of the fact that this text was published only in 1982 and refers to an autobiographical experience (Aichinger’s move to a new house) that took place later than the writing of the poem “Gebirgsrand,” we are confronted with what is in my opinion a later explanation — or at least confirmation — of the earlier poem. Aichinger describes in this text her reading experience of Hermann Broch’s story “Der Berg” (The Mountain), in which a hunter disappears for some time on a mountain and, after his return, speaks only of the Barbarossa myth without any further explanation of his experiences. Soon he stops talking altogether. He only confesses to the bishop, which leads the bishop to renounce his office and fall into silence himself. Soon after, both of them die peacefully. Aichinger claims that she has been accompanied by this hunter ever since — “von meinem Jäger” (by my hunter), as she writes. She comments that this hunter does not carry a rifle, that he has possibly left it in the depths of the mountain as a consequence of what he saw there. Aichinger too wants to know what the hunter does not tell, but, as she says, without wanting to be told. Broch’s hunter obviously does not represent violence here (he does not have a rifle), but on the contrary represents an insight into deeply hidden truths, and Aichinger strives toward the same insight. The following interpretation will show to what extent we have to understand the hunters in our poem in the same way. It is important to note that Aichinger suspects in her text that the hunter had seen Doomsday in the

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depths of the mountain — a day that is described as being the brightest, and this brightness together with the absence of darkness is associated with fear and cold. She claims that only few people know about such eternal light, as opposed to the experience of the eternal night that had been “schon öfter um uns” (already around us more often). She continues: “Aber der hellste Tag ist dem jüngsten Tag gemäßer als die finsterste Nacht. Wie sollte man auch im Dunkeln verhandeln und verurteilen können?” (KMF 37; But the brightest day is more appropriate to Doomsday than the darkest night. How could one, after all, negotiate and judge and condemn in the dark?). Doomsday as the last judgment of the world represents the final truth; however, it is a condemning truth, one that puts an end to life on earth. In Aichinger’s work, brightness and day are always ambivalent as they are associated with terror and harshness. Bearing that in mind, we continue our reading of the poem. The hunters are designated in the same line by means of an apposition as “meine Träume” (my dreams), the “ä” underlining in German a link between action (“täte”), hunters (“Jäger”), and dreams (“Träume”). Dreams play a major role in Aichinger’s work and earlier interpreters have accentuated the obvious link between this first and the last poem of the collection (VR 106): In einem Und hätt ich keine Träume, so wär ich doch kein anderer, ich wär derselbe ohne Träume, wer rief mich heim? [In one And if I didn’t have dreams I would still not be someone else, I would be the same person without dreams, who would call me home?]

This poem caused some unease among Aichinger scholars since it seems to be opposed to all other tendencies in her work, denying the dreams any significance for the lyrical “I.” However, this can be resolved when one realizes that the last line could be read in the conditional (this is the reading favored in the above English translation), thereby indicating that, without dreams, the “I” would not be called home, would have lost her home. We have already seen that the hunters in “Gebirgsrand” do not necessarily need a rifle, but the question remains: What do they hunt (with or without a weapon), since they are dreams and since — in connection with this image of being called home, and underscored by the phonetic connection between “Gebirge” (from Berg, mountain) and the German word

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“Geborgenheit” (safety, shelter, from bergen, to safe) — we can suppose that they are on the trail of some form of home or feeling of security. This linguistic relationship receives some confirmation in the dreams, and it is worth noting that Aichinger writes “der Gebirge” (of the mountain ranges) in the plural, when it would be more usual and logical to use the singular (“des Gebirges” instead of “der Gebirge”), since there can hardly be more than one mountain range. This lends an allegorical dimension to the range: It seems to stand for something elevated, of difficult access, as well as — activating the word-play between “Gebirge” and “Geborgenheit” — for something safe and secure. The hunters/dreams descend “am Morgen” (in the morning). This is surprising, since hunters normally go out early in the morning whereas dreams take place at night and would be over by then. So they would have spent the night in the mountains and come down only now to the “Gebirgsrand” (mountain fringes). If they are regarded as dreams, they have spent the night on the heights and in the morning they approach human settlements; as hunters they would have hunted overnight, not really appropriate for hunters but quite possible for dreams. One could also imagine that they come down to human life to hunt for material. That they go down (“niedersteigen”) to hunt deserves some attention, since it could point to a hunt in lower spheres of consciousness, or simply in earthly matters. Apparently the sun has risen in the morning since “auf der Rückseite der Gebirge” (at the back of the mountain ranges) is shadow. In this shadow, the hunters/dreams come down again while  — as implicitly stated  — they went up on this side in the evening, logically also in the shadow that seems to be their element. The enjambment links the shadow closer to, and emphasizes the downward movement of “niedersteigen” (descend); this refers again to depth and also implies an approach to the human beings that live at the foot of the mountain rather than on top of it. The positive associations of shadow in Aichinger’s work have already been mentioned. In the poem “Mägdemangel” (VR 19; Lack of Maids), shadows are characterized as “diese Tröster” (these consolers); in “Rauchenberg” (VR 23) we read “die erneuerte Spur der Schatten / reicht mir den Weg” (the renewed trace of the shadows / offers me the way.) And also in the poem “Neuer Bund” (VR 87; New alliance), the lyrical I prefers the shadows to the sun. Staying in the shadows is clearly Aichinger’s preferred state. Our entire poem can be interpreted in such a way that it is especially this moment when the hunters/dreams go down in the shadow that is crucial for the speaker. That would then suggest that it is this in-between state where some (but not too much) light already shines in the shadow where we can reach our dreams. They are no longer out of reach high in the mountains; they come down to us, protected by

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the mountains from too much light. In the morning, immediately after waking up, we are still close to the dream sphere, our consciousness is on the border between waking consciousness and the unconscious. It is no coincidence that there are so many stories by Kafka — to whom Aichinger is often compared  — that start out in this intermediate state of mind immediately after waking up, for instance, Der Prozeß (The Trial) or Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis). At this stage we can return to the title of our poem: the “Gebirgsrand” (mountain fringes) would be exactly this liminal sphere between the mountains and the plains where we have access to both. This poem ultimately deals with the connection between two spheres or, to be more precise, it deals with the support of the dream sphere for social reality that would be unreal without it. In reality, without this other dimension of realness, the human being would have lost his or her meaning.

The Poetics of Ilse Aichinger We have seen that Ilse Aichinger’s poetics stand for the conviction that too much light, blinding clarity, does not correspond to reality; the shadow, the nuances, the realm of in-between, on the other hand, offer the possibility of accessing realness. Aichinger’s mistrust aims at the clear certainties, at the linear logic, at the technical vision of the world in general. Martin Heidegger’s much criticized Bremer Vorträge (Bremen Lectures), which draw a parallel between agricultural technologies such as factory-farming hen houses and extermination camps,8 is far from playing down the Churban.9 On the contrary, it recognizes the essential horror of the mindset that is at the root of both phenomena. It is the horror of uncaring functionalism that eliminates all contradictory complexity. Realness is more than functioning reality; in this understanding, the dream is for Aichinger closer to realness than everyday life and its automatisms. This connects with the radical individuality of life that Karl Krolow evoked in his eulogy of Ilse Aichinger, saying: “Nichts ist so unwiderruflich individuell wie Geträumtes, nichts so boden- und bedingungslos auf die Person bezogen, die träumt” (Nothing is so irrevocably individual as what is dreamt, nothing so groundlessly and unconditionally focused on the dreaming person).10 But defining this attitude as a “träumerische Revolution [. . .] gegenüber dem dingfesten Leben, gegenüber der Resolutheit des Sichtbaren, Erkennbaren, Beweisbaren” (dreamy revolution against factual life, against the resoluteness of the visible, the knowable, the provable)11 seems ambivalent since it implies an escape into the dream world, and that is not at all what Aichinger has in mind. In a conversation with Hermann Vinke she refers to the “Exaktheit der Träume, ihre Präzision” (exactness of dreams, their precision) and she confirms the opinion of her interviewer when he formulates: “Das wäre

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ein Stück Wirklichkeit in der Unwirklichkeit” (That would be a piece of realness within the unreal). She reacts: Ja, ein Stück viel größerer Wirklichkeit, als die Wirklichkeit damals und heute zu geben imstande ist. Die Wirklichkeit ist nicht imstande, ohne Gegenleistungen zu geben. Sie kommt nur hervor, wenn man sie kontert, wenn man sie nicht anerkennt, wenn man sich nicht anpaßt.12 [Yes, a piece of much greater realness than realness is and was capable of giving. Realness cannot give anything without reciprocity. It does appear only if you counter it, if you do not acknowledge it, if you do not adapt.]

The dreams are consequently not a counter-world to which to escape from reality, they are more precise realness,13 whereas it is reality that is unreal. Realness becomes a more intense form of being than the one normally allowed by social life. A reference to the philosophy of being is unavoidable here, but I do not wish to refer to Heidegger, whose thinking on language contains essentializing and mystifying tendencies. Martin Buber’s Das dialogische Prinzip (The Dialogical Principle),14 on the other hand, ties the access to an intense form of being — which is designated as “Wirklichkeit” (realness) as opposed to “Realität” (reality) — to an Ich-Du-Beziehung (I-thou relationship) as opposed to an Ich-Es-Beziehung (I–it relationship), where the other is considered as an object. In an I-thou relationship, a direct relation is created between two poles with a linking in-between, which leads from the everyday mode to a more deeply felt perception of realness, and consequently to realness itself. The basis of this thinking is grounded in a very concrete mutual relationship with the surrounding world. This conception can be applied to Aichinger for whom a “Kontern” (countering), as she puts it, a nonacceptance, is indispensable in order to reach this intense relationship with realness. This should probably be understood as questioning the given, which leads to an awareness that would be lost if one swam with the mainstream. To pursue this metaphor: You have to swim against the current in order to feel the resistance of the water and become aware of yourself. This awareness of life represents for Aichinger the meaning of life: “Nicht suchen, sondern das Suchen suchen. Das kommt mir als das Ziel vor”15 (Not searching, but searching for searching. That seems to me to be the goal). In this questioning, in this searching, life loses what is simple and matter-of-course and has to be lived consciously. What is at stake here is resistance to the unquestioning acceptance of life: “Ich schreibe gegen das Konsumieren, gegen das Konsumieren des Lebens überhaupt”16 (I write against consuming, against consuming life in general).

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In this connection, a scene from the novel Die größere Hoffnung (The Greater Hope)17 is telling: Adolescent Ellen is questioned in a military guardroom, but her subtle answers disturb the orderly procedure, make the questioners question themselves, and uncover the absurdity and unrealness of the military function that is equated, in a reversal of the situation, with sleep, death, and captivity. She wants to awaken the guards to the state of dreaming. In the end the colonel, who loses control of the situation, sums up the narrowness of the military life. He wants to prevent the dream and therefore needs his own limitedness and oblivion: Gebt euch zufrieden mit Namen und Adresse, hört ihr, es ist genug. Wißt ihr nicht mehr, wieviel es bedeutet, ordnungsgemäß gemeldet zu sein? Wißt ihr nicht mehr, wie wohl es tut, in Reih und Glied zu gehen? [. . .] Faßt die Saboteure, wenn die Nächte hell sind, schaut nicht zuviel in den Mond! Der Mann im Mond bleibt allein, der Mann im Mond trägt Sprengstoff auf dem Rücken. Es tut mir leid, wir haben keine Macht, ihn einzuliefern. Aber wir haben Macht, ihn zu vergessen. [Content yourself with name and address, do you hear me, that is sufficient. Don’t you know any more how significant it is to be officially registered? Don’t you know any more how calming it is to march in rank and file? [.  .  .] Seize the saboteurs when the nights are bright, don’t look too much at the moon! The man in the moon stays alone, the man in the moon carries explosives on his back. Regretfully, we don’t have power to arrest him. But we do have the power to forget him.]

Consequently he accuses Ellen of a “Sabotage des Fragens und der unerwünschten Aussagen” (sabotage of questioning and of making unwanted statements). The links with Ilse Aichinger’s poetological program are obvious. Her heroine reacts to these accusations with a simple confirmation: “Ja” (Yes). The paradox, a widespread principle in Aichinger’s poetics, results in a “subversiven Erweichung von Verknöcherungen” (subversive softening of ossifications).18 What is at stake here is a form of authenticity that can only be reached by countering; the act of writing against the languages of science and of everyday life is resistance to a system formation (Šlibar 58) that, of course, is identified with automatism, hence unawareness, hence unrealness. The commitment to the word, just as Viktor Šklovskij presented it in Russian Formalism in his Resurrection of the Word, aims at awareness and at the conscious return to truly lived realness as opposed to unconscious functioning in practical constraints. Aichinger opposes determined and archivable knowledge with her intuitions that  — seen from the perspective of

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the intensity of life  — are in fact more precise. Her literature consists of permanent subversion, permanent because for such an attitude nothing can ever be secure, since security already signifies system and automatization. For Aichinger, it is essential to resist this, to speak from a marginal position, a position on the fringes, and to counter.19 This is why Ilse Aichinger again and again insists that the privatism of her writing signifies exactly the opposite of what critics wish to suggest by the use of this term: it is precisely through privatism that she gains commitment. This is so since private signifies, according to the dictionary, “relating to the individual,” and realness can only be perceived individually.20 Consequently for Aichinger, language is always individualized language; she adheres to Wilhelm von Humboldt’s thinking on the subject when he called language a “todtes [sic] Gerippe” (dead skeleton) as long as it is not vivified in the context of the particular speech.21 “Sprache ist privat” (Language is private), says Aichinger.22 Sprache ist, wo sie da ist, für mich das Engagement selbst, weil sie kontern muß, die bestehende Sprache kontern muß, die etablierte Sprache, weil sie fort muß aus dem Rezept der Wahrheit in die Wahrheit, weil sie das Gegenteil von Etabliertheit sein muß, aus sich selbst.23 [For me language is, when it is really present, the incarnation of commitment because it has to counter, it has to counter the existing language, the established language, because it has to flee the method of truth and go into truth itself, because it has to be the contrary of establishment.]

Truth, once it has become method, is not truth any more; the same is true for realness. That then also affects the idea of commitment: A commitment that proposes to change the system in a direct way, by means of a putatively clear communication of objectives, has already betrayed its objective, has already betrayed the human being since it is merely operating another system, with empty shells of words. This is the dilemma of commitment — that it can only change a particular form, not the essential. Aichinger’s commitment aims at being more radical in the original meaning of the term: It wants to start at the root — and this means for her, in the individual itself, hence in thinking, hence in language. Aichinger’s idea of mistrust is consequently also directed against the putatively clear communicability of realness. Mistrust equals the mistrust of language expressed in language. This explains the extraordinary importance of silence in Aichinger’s poetics, a silence that is clearly far from lack of expression; on the contrary, it is more significant than speech, and, as such, has to be integrated into speech. Writing is for her the best way of being silent, she says.24 It is also the expression of elements that otherwise

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would be lost. Writing, and consequently the reading of what has been written, allows one to perceive things that otherwise are more difficult to mediate. This implies therefore a mistrust toward the traditional notion of communication. We enter the field of the “ineffable,” a significant theme of German postwar literature.

The Commitment of So-Called “Hermetic Poetry” in the Context of the History of Ideas after National Socialism; Adorno and Arendt In this context we have to address the entire complex issue of Adorno’s so-called verdict that after Auschwitz it is barbaric to write a poem. The reception of this quotation has been very mixed, but it has mostly been shaped by a misinterpretation rooted in abbreviation.25 For this reason I should like to give first of all the full quotation: Je totaler die Gesellschaft, um so verdinglichter auch der Geist und um so paradoxer sein Beginnen, der Verdinglichung aus eigenem sich zu entwinden. Noch das äußerste Bewußtsein vom Verhängnis droht zum Geschwätz zu entarten. Kulturkritik findet sich der letzten Stufe der Dialektik von Kultur und Barbarei gegenüber: nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch, und das frißt auch die Erkenntnis an, die ausspricht, warum es unmöglich ward, heute Gedichte zu schreiben. Der absoluten Verdinglichung, die den Fortschritt des Geistes als eines ihrer Elemente voraussetzte und die ihn heute gänzlich aufzusaugen sich anschickt, ist der kritische Geist nicht gewachsen, solange er bei sich bleibt in selbstgenügsamer Kontemplation.26 [The more a society is total, the more the mind is reified and the more paradoxical is its endeavor to escape this reification by its own force. Even the most extreme awareness of fatality risks being distorted into verbiage. Cultural criticism is brought face to face with the final phase of the dialectics of culture and barbarism: to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric and this also taints the insight that expresses why it has become impossible to write poetry today. As long as it remains by itself in self-sufficient contemplation, the critical mind cannot stand up to the absolute reification that presupposes the progress of the mind as one of its elements and that today prepares to completely suck it in.]

Aichinger’s efforts to promote mistrust, and the form of her writing, are inseparable from the Zivilisationsbruch (rupture in civilization)27 that Auschwitz represents. Adorno’s thoughts on the cultural situation after Auschwitz are therefore parallel to Aichinger’s poetics, which they can elucidate.

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We must consider Adorno’s sentence in the framework of his general cultural criticism resulting from the Auschwitz experience, and “Gedicht” (poem) is a code for culture here. It is therefore not so much the poem that is called in question, but rather the dialectics of culture and barbarism, hence whether it is possible at all, for art in general, to reflect Auschwitz. We should not forget that “Auschwitz” represents for Adorno only the final step, the climax of a long process, that it is inseparable from the entire cultural history since the Enlightenment. After this event, art can only exist for Adorno in incorporating this event, obviously not necessarily in a direct way. Adorno already implies a claim to commitment in art in the last sentence of the above quotation. Unfortunately, as Adorno together with Horkheimer have shown in their Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectics of Enlightenment),28 enlightened commitment is dialectical by nature and hence brings with it from the start new mythologies and opposing processes. This is so because enlightenment as a form of control itself needs coercion against itself; insight is instrumentalized, cultivation always also implies suppression.29 Adorno then condemns the German assiduity in cultural matters after 1945 as a discourse of repression that denies the fundamental rupture in civilization caused by National Socialism.30 This is summarized by Sven Kramer: “Die Beschwörung des Geistigen verdecke vielmehr das dem Geist Inkommensurable”31 (On the contrary, the conjuring up of the spiritual sphere rather covers up what is incommensurable with the spirit). That means that it is not possible any more to fight barbarism with traditional humanistic ideas of culture; instead these would in the final instance become the accomplices of barbarism by camouflaging what has happened. We are faced with a dilemma: The appeal to cultural forces becomes itself a part of that barbarism that one wants to work against. The only conceivable solution for Adorno is to develop a notion of culture that is capable of incorporating in itself what has happened. It has to be a notion of culture that eludes any form of integration and manageability, a notion that consists of refusal. Culture can only be critical, claims Adorno, insofar as it opposes any institution or generalization; any integration into an institution would make it controllable and range it among the mechanisms of suppression that are affiliated to barbarism.32 Taken that way, the activity of writing poems — probably chosen as the epitome of the cultural — would also be part of a cultural industry that belongs to barbarism. Adorno sees little hope of escaping this. As late as in his Negative Dialektik (Negative Dialectics) he writes: Wer für Erhaltung der radikal schuldigen und schäbigen Kultur plädiert, macht sich zum Helfershelfer, während, wer der Kultur sich verweigert, unmittelbar die Barbarei befördert, als welche die Kultur sich enthüllte. Nicht einmal Schweigen kommt aus dem Zirkel

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heraus; es rationalisiert einzig die eigene subjektive Unfähigkeit mit dem Stand der objektiven Wahrheit und entwürdigt dadurch diese abermals zur Lüge.33 [Whoever makes a plea for the conservation of the radically guilty and shop-soiled culture becomes an accomplice, whereas whoever refuses to take part in it is directly supporting the barbarism that culture proved to be. One can not even escape the circle by being silent; this simply rationalizes one’s own subjective incapacity by referring to the position of objective truth, and thus degrades it once again into a lie.]

Adorno then develops a method of countering this dilemma in the form of the essay, which for him implies that all definition is but tentative and fallible; direct commitment is impossible in art. Adorno says of art: “helfen könnte nur, wenn sie nicht sich gebärdet, als ob sie ihm [dem Menschen] hülfe” (the only thing that could help would be for it to not act as if it wanted to help him [the human being]).”34 Silence, which Adorno rejects as an option in the above quotation, is finally just as valid an attempt to reflect on the Churban, provided it is integrated into poetic speech and thus given form. It is, then, a natural consequence that those postwar poets who deal in the most intense and aware way with the Churban — Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, Nelly Sachs, and last but not least Ilse Aichinger  — have made silence a constitutive element of their poetics. I clearly do not intend this as a refutation of Adorno’s statement, but rather as a demonstration that the poetic possesses a capacity of reflection that — much as in philosophy Adorno had postulated reflective powers for the tentative essay form — can open up a possibility of dealing with Adorno’s still valid insight. In contrast to Adorno, for whom the aporia resulting from Auschwitz also affects the arts, Hannah Arendt believed in the possibility of speaking of Auschwitz in literature. Indeed, she even calls for it, even if this writing cannot lead to anything but mourning and despair.35 Admittedly, at a later date, Adorno also concedes to the arts a non-barbaric possibility of utopian existence: as fulfillment of art in real life.36 For Arendt, however, History (if memorable) consists of disruptions. These are in the first instance merely “Stoff der Geschichte” (the material of History) and only become historical by their poetical transformation.37 This is summarized by Thomas Schestag: “erst die erzählten Geschichten sind Geschichte” (only told stories are History).38 And he develops Arendt’s thought: Geschichtlich ist erst das Gedicht. Und zwar einzig und allein jenes Gedicht, das der geschehenen Unterbrechung entspricht. Diese Entsprechung geschieht nicht dadurch, daß in konventionellen sprachlichen Formen von unerhörten außerordentlichen Begebenheiten

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erzählt und berichtet wird, sondern die Entsprechung geschieht — entsprechender — als Einbruch eines unerhörten sprachlichen Artefakts in den geläufigen pragmatischen Umgang mit Sprache.39 [It is the poem that is historical. More precisely, what is historical is solely that poem which corresponds to the disruption that came to pass. This correspondence does not occur by letting conventional speech forms narrate and report unheard-of, extraordinary events, but instead occurs — dis-respondingly — as an irruption of an unheard-of speech artifact into the current pragmatic practice of language.]

The disruption therefore has to take place also in the form of speech in order to break through the habitual, from the fringes. It is precisely because it is unheard-of that it creates remembrance, and consequently History. Does this not take us too far from Aichinger’s poem, which, after all, does not narrate a historical event? It is only at this point, it seems to me, that we really encounter the poem, because it is precisely in its inaccessibility that it represents a rupture with the “pragmatic handling of language.” It is by this rejection of clearly situable communication that it achieves the historical disruption that Arendt called for. It provokes thought because it cannot easily be taken in. Only as such a poem does it do justice to what must be narrated as something unheard-of. Such a procedure is historically conditioned, of course, and this fact has been acknowledged. The Göttingen research group on Group 47 refers to Walter Höllerer’s preface to his important anthology Transit of the year 1956, where he identifies the most individual expression with the most objective one. Höllerer explains this claim by the fact that the “truth of the lyrical moment” in its essentially present nature clashes with the rigid structures of time. The poem therefore is a naming of tendencies that have not yet risen above the threshold of consciousness.40 The research group comments on this: Gerade indem also die Lyrik am utopischen Anspruch von Literatur festhielt, wurde sie in dem Maße in die Abstraktion gedrängt, in dem die Gesellschaft sich verschloß. Die Lösung vom Gegenständlichen, von der deutbaren Metapher, wurde begriffen als ein Akt der Befreiung.41 [Precisely by maintaining the utopian claim of literature, poetry was forced into abstraction to the same extent that society closed itself off. The dissociation from the concrete, from the interpretable metaphor, was understood as an act of liberation.]

Poetry then was the most appropriate means of breaking up the system, it represented resistance to the freezing-over of society — which also explains

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its blossoming in the fifties. Aichinger’s poetry is consequently genuinely radical in its historicity, as Aichinger has always claimed, and this fact can now be acknowledged. The Göttingen research group sums up: Esoterik, Verweigerung von Kommunikation durch monologische Lyrik, Rückzug in Abstraktion und Entgrenzung der Möglichkeiten von Sprache  — eine radikalere Kritik an der alltäglichen Realität durch Literatur mochte in den fünfziger Jahren kaum möglich gewesen sein.42 [Esotericism, refusal to communicate in monologic poetry, retreat into abstraction and delimitation of the possibilities of language — a more radical criticism of everyday reality by literature was hardly possible in the fifties.]

This shows that poetic speech can be eminently political. Schestag stresses this: Das Ziel sprachlichen Handelns, Inbegriff des Politischen, ist die Poetisierung des handelnden Worts, die Risse durchs Milieu kommunikativen Handelns legt, weil sie das Wort aus allen Handlungs-, Gebrauchs- und Verweiszusammenhängen herauslöst und zum Erinnerungsstück verdichtet.43 [The goal of speech action, which is the epitome of the political, is the poeticization of the word in action, that sends fault-lines through the milieu of communicative action by dissociating the word from all correlations — of action, of usage, and of reference — and condenses it to a work of remembrance.]

This protest against the dominant discourse, however, also implies the danger of becoming incomprehensible and detached  — and therefore placed poetry in a paradoxical position. It is precisely in its commitment that it could be perceived as mere “Sprachartistik” (verbal gymnastics).44 This is not a simple dismissal of W. G. Sebald’s criticism of postwar literature. In opposition to all tendencies to deny the experienced horrors, Sebald represents the ideal of truthful and unpretentious sobriety. Poetry is opposition, is being unexpected. Being unheard-of is an essential element of the poetic. As long as this stands in opposition to the standard discourse of its era, it can clearly also take the form of a crystal-clear realism. And as every era is multilayered, there is no room for Manichaeism in respect of the poetic. Sebald affirms: Umgekehrt ist die Herstellung von ästhetischen oder pseudoästhetischen Effekten aus den Trümmern einer vernichteten Welt ein Verfahren, mit dem die Literatur sich ihrer Berechtigung entzieht.45

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[On the other hand, the creation of aesthetical or pseudo-aesthetical effects out of the rubble of a destroyed world is a procedure by which literature relieves itself of its own legitimacy.]

This objection has to be taken seriously, but it does not acknowledge the legitimacy of placing another form of real life in opposition to reality — of creating something — which in the final instance is what poetics signifies: poiein (making). And therefore it is precisely this so-called privatist poetry that has the potential to act on reality, to shape it instead of suffering it; far from being a denial of reality, it is the reverse. Aichinger’s privatist poetry consequently does not turn its back on reality, it is rather a way of confronting the affirmation of the cultural industry that destroys culture. This makes it a genuine commitment against the confusion of the time, a commitment that, in its situation in cultural history, can take place only from a fringe position, in an exchange with the mountains.

Notes This chapter has been published in a German version as “Am Rand. Misstrauen als Engagement in der Poetik Ilse Aichingers,” in Ilse Aichinger: Misstrauen als Engagement, ed. I. Rabenstein-Michel, Fr. Rétif, and E. Tunner (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2009), 37–52. 1

Gottfried Benn, Doppelleben, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 5, Stuttgarter Ausgabe, ed. Gerhard Schuster (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1991), 87, 91–94, 97. All translations in this essay are my own. 2

Ilse Aichinger, “Aufruf zum Mißtrauen,” in Ilse Aichinger: Materialien zu Leben und Werk, ed. Samuel Moser (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1990), 16–17.

3

Ilse Aichinger, Verschenkter Rat: Gedichte, Taschenbuchwerkausgabe in acht Bänden, ed. Richard Reichensperger (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1991), 13. Subsequent quotes from this edition will appear in the text as VR with the page number. 4

In her study of Aichinger’s poetry (Sprache als Widerstand: Anmerkungen zu Ilse Aichingers Lyrikband ‘Verschenkter Rat’ [Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1992], 229–31), Vera Neuroth provides an excellent formal analysis of many poems, and I can add but little to it on the formal level; her interpretation however does not always convince me, though it does seem considerably more coherent than the completely opposing interpretation offered by Dagmar Lorenz in Ilse Aichinger (Königstein im Taunus: Athenäum, 1981), 216, in spite of the same formal analysis.

5

Hilde Spiel contrasts her appraisal of Aichinger’s poems with a criticism of her prose, judging the latter to be too remote from outer reality, so that she cannot follow the author any more (“Eh die Träume rosten und brechen,” in Ilse Aichinger, ed. Moser, 246–50). 6

It is essential to base an interpretation at this level on the German text, not the translation.

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7

Aichinger, Kleist, Moos, Fasane, ed. R. Reichensperger, 34–38. Subsequent quotes from this edition will appear in the text as KMF with the page number.

8

Martin Heidegger, Bremer Vorträge 1945, Das Ge-Stell, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 79 (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1994), 24–45; here, 27: Durch solches Bestellen wird das Land zu einem Kohlenrevier, der Boden zu einer Erzlagerstätte. Dieses Bestellen ist schon anderer Art als jenes, wodurch vormals der Bauer seinen Acker bestellte. Das bäuerliche Tun fordert den Ackerboden nicht heraus; es gibt vielmehr die Saat den Wachstumskräften anheim; es hütet sie in ihr Gedeihen. Inzwischen ist jedoch auch die Feldbestellung in das gleiche Be-Stellen übergegangen, das die Luft auf Stickstoff, den Boden auf Kohle und Erze stellt, das Erz auf Uran, das Uran auf Atomenergie, diese auf bestellbare Zerstörung. Ackerbau ist jetzt motorisierte Ernährungsindustrie, im Wesen das Selbe wie die Fabrikation von Leichen in Gaskammern und Vernichtungslagern, das Selbe wie die Blockade und Aushungerung von Ländern, das Selbe wie die Fabrikation von Wasserstoffbomben. [Such a tilling transforms the land to a coal-mining area, and the soil to a mineral deposit. This tilling is of a different nature than that of the farmer tilling his field in former times. The farming activity did not challenge the soil of the fields; on the contrary, it commits the seed to the forces of growth; it guards them in their thriving. But meanwhile also the tilling of the field is transformed into the same kind of tilling that bases the air on nitrogen, the soil on coal and ore, the ore on uranium, the uranium on atomic energy, and this on orderly, orderable destruction. Tillage has now become a motorized alimentary industry, in its essence the same thing as the fabrication of corpses in gas chambers and annihilation camps, the same thing as the blockade and starvation of countries, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.]

Heidegger already criticized technology for these reasons under the Nazi regime; see Silvio Vietta, Heideggers Kritik am Nationalsozialismus und an der Technik (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1988). 9

This is a term used by Manès Sperber — as by many Jews immediately after the Second World War for what in English is mainly called the Holocaust. “Holocaust,” however, means “burnt offering” and is therefore inappropriate. The term “Shoah,” used mainly in the francophone world, is not much better, signifying a natural catastrophe. “Churban,” on the other hand, is a man-made catastrophe. This term is used more and more in Israel and should be adopted worldwide. 10

Karl Krolow, “Laudatio zur Verleihung des Nelly-Sachs-Preises 1971,” in Ilse Aichinger, ed. Moser, 83–89; here, 84.

11

Ibid., 87.

12

“Gespräch mit Hermann Vinke, 1980,” in Ilse Aichinger, ed. Moser, 30–35; here, 32–33.

13

In a conversation with Brita Steinwendtner, Ilse Aichinger rejects the label fantasy to describe her literature: “Already as a child I hated the word fantasy. I didn’t

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want fantasy, I wanted precise realness, as precise as possible.” Quoted in “Ein paar Fragen in Briefen. Gespräch mit Ilse Aichinger,” in Ilse Aichinger, ed. Kurt Bartsch and Gerhard Melzer (Graz: Droschl, 1993), 7–13; here, 12. 14

Martin Buber, Das dialogische Prinzip (Heidelberg: Verlag Lambert Schneider, 1973). 15

Quoted in Luzia Stettler, “‘Stummheit ist immer wieder in Schweigen zu übersetzen, das ist die Aufgabe des Schreibens,’” in Ilse Aichinger, ed. Moser, 36–40; here, 38. 16

Ibid., 36.

17

Ilse Aichinger, Die größere Hoffnung (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2005), 206– 11. 18

That is Neva Šlibar’s formulation in her article “‘Definieren grenzt an Unterhöhlen’: Ambiguisierte Paradoxie in Ilse Aichingers Gedichten (Zdenko Škreb zugeeignet in dankbarem Gedenken).” in Ilse Aichinger, ed. Bartsch and Melzer, 55–87; here, 55. Subsequently abbreviated in the text as Šlibar, with page numbers. 19

Šlibar, 77–78: “In the sense of a ‘permanent subversion,’ defining and the precise intuitions become the topic and the poetical program, valid as long as refusal, opposition, and life on the margins, exist as options and are functionalised.” 20

Ilse Aichinger, in Ilse Aichinger, ed. Moser, 25–29; here, 25.

21

Wilhelm von Humboldt, “Ueber die Verschiedenheiten des menschlichen Sprachbaues” (1827–29), in Werke in fünf Bänden, vol. 3 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1979]), 144–367; here, 186. 22

Ilse Aichinger in Heinz F. Schafroth, “Gespräche mit Ilse Aichinger,” in Ilse Aichinger, ed. Moser, 25–29; here, 25.

23

Ibid., 29.

24

Ibid., 26: “It [writing] means for me an attempt to be silent; maybe that is the reason why I write, because I don’t see any better possibility to be silent.” 25

For the history of its reception, background, and context, see Peter Stein, “‘Darum mag falsch gewesen sein, nach Auschwitz ließe sich kein Gedicht mehr schreiben.’ (Adorno). Widerruf eines Verdikts? Ein Zitat und seine Verkürzung,” in Weimarer Beiträge 4 (1996): 485–508. Also: Sven Kramer, “‘Wahr sind die Sätze als Impuls . . .’ Begriffsarbeit und sprachliche Darstellung in Adornos Reflexion auf Auschwitz,” DVfLG 3 (1996): 501–23. Concerning the consequences of this fact for poetry, see Günther Bonheim, Versuch zu zeigen, dass Adorno mit seiner Behauptung, nach Auschwitz lasse sich kein Gedicht mehr schreiben, recht hatte (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002). 26

Theodor W. Adorno, Prismen: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10 bk. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 11–30; here, 30. 27 “Zivilisationsbruch” is a term coined by Dan Diner for his edited volume Zivilisationsbruch: Denken nach Auschwitz (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1988). 28

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1991).

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29 This is very close to what Sigmund Freud explains so well in his Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, Studienausgabe 9 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1989), 191–269. 30

See Adorno, “Die auferstandene Kultur,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 453–64. 31

Kramer, “‘Wahr sind die Sätze als Impuls . . .’” 506.

32

Adorno, “Kultur und Verwaltung,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 8 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 122–46.

33

Adorno, Negative Dialektik in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 6 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 7–412; here, 359. 34

Adorno, “Engagement,” in Noten zur Literatur, vol. 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1965), 133. Again, see Peter Stein for the development of Adorno’s ideas against the backdrop of the debate surrounding his verdict. 35

Hannah Arendt, “Das Bild der Hölle,” in Nach Auschwitz: Essays & Kommentare, ed. E. Geisel and Kl. Bittermann (Tiamat: Berlin, 1989), 51. 36

Adorno, Negative Dialektik, 353–55.

37

Hannah Arendt, “Natur und Geschichte,” in Zwischen Vergangenheit und Zukunft: Übungen im politischen Denken (Munich: Piper, 1994), 61–62. 38

Thomas Schestag, Die unbewältigte Sprache: Hannah Arendts Theorie der Dichtung (Basel: Engeler, 2006), 52. 39

Ibid., 52.

40

Walter Höllerer, Transit: Lyrikbuch der Jahrhundertmitte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1956), X: Die Wahrheit des lyrischen Moments will kein verschlafenes, unverwandeltes Zurück zulassen, keinen Ausverkauf an die Vergangenheit. Das Gedicht stößt sich dabei an entgegenstarrenden Vorgängen ringsum. — Der individuellste Ausdruck wird so der objektivste. Denn es besteht eine, wenn auch oft komplizierte, Beziehung des Gedichts zu dem, was nicht nur vom Dichter, sondern von seiner Zeitgenossenschaft als erreichbarer Bewußtseinshorizont geahnt wird, der aber außerhalb der Dichtung noch nicht mit Worten benannt ist. 41

Die Gruppe 47, Sonderband Text + Kritik, ed. H.L. Arnold, 2004, 111.

42

Ibid.

43

Schestag, Die unbewältigte Sprache, 87.

44

Die Gruppe 47, 112: “Solcher Protest der Lyrik gegen die Realität war ein Protest der beweglichen Sprache gegen die Erstarrung. Er mußte sich dem Vorwurf stellen, daß er zu bloßer Sprachartistik führe” (Such protest of poetry against reality was a protest of flexible language against rigidification. It had to face the reproach that it leads to mere verbal gymnastics). 45

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6: Nazi Terror and the Poetical Potential of Dreams: Charlotte Beradt’s Das Dritte Reich des Traums Hans-Walter Schmidt-Hannisa

Dreams Dictated by Dictatorship Ich träumte, daß ich nur noch von Rechtecken, Dreiecken, Achtekken träume, die alle irgendwie wie Weihnachtsgebäck aussehen, weil es doch verboten ist zu träumen.1 [I dreamt I was dreaming of nothing but rectangles, triangles, and octagons, all of which somehow looked like Christmas cookies  — you see, it was forbidden to dream.2]

T

HIS SIMPLE BUT INTRICATE META-DREAM, about dreaming in defiance of a prohibition against dreams, was dreamt by an anonymous young man in Germany in the summer of 1933. Its starting point is, as it seems, the fear that dreams might be forbidden. It is hardly surprising that such an idea should emerge in a document coinciding historically with the establishment of a totalitarian regime. However, the man’s dream expresses both the fear that dreams may be forbidden and the knowledge that dreams cannot be forbidden, that it is impossible to stop them.3 The compromise offered here is a form of dreaming implementing a selfcensorship that reduces the dream content to abstract geometrical shapes, thus erasing and blocking all mimetic qualities normally characteristic of the dream process. Ironically, even such a precaution does not prevent the occurrence of an element of desire. The resemblance of the geometrical forms with Christmas cookies indicates that the dreamer is occupied with pleasures to be found in the empirical world. More important than such details is the general significance of this remarkable dream. It draws the reader’s attention to the critical potential of dreaming. Dreams cannot be forbidden, but if it were an option to forbid them, totalitarian political systems would most likely do so, and with good reason. Dreams can indeed have subversive power; they can reveal unwanted truths about the society and the social and political systems, in

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that the dreamer lives and about the way he or she is treated by those who are in power. The young man’s meta-nightmare is included in a unique collection of dream records published by the Jewish journalist Charlotte Beradt in 1966 under the title Das Dritte Reich des Traums (The Third Reich of Dreams). Before she had to leave Germany and went into exile to New York in 1939, Beradt had been systematically collecting dream records from the early 1930s on. Her concern was to investigate and to document what impact the coming to power of the totalitarian regime in Nazi Germany had on people’s dreams. In pursuing this aim, Beradt’s study develops an innovative approach that integrates historical, sociological, psychological, and literary perspectives. Thus, the resulting book is not only a significant historical document, but can also be read as a unique study in the socio-political psychology of dreaming, and as a literary anthology. Das Dritte Reich des Traums contains a selection of examples from a corpus of about 300 “von der Diktatur diktierte Träume” (D 10; dreams the dictatorship dictated, T 10). Most of them were recorded by Beradt herself after she had interviewed the dreamers; some were passed on to her by friends. Beradt, for example, mentions a medical practitioner who, in order to support her project, asked his patients to report remarkable dreams. Beradt was not interested in dreams from loyal Nazis or from people sympathizing with Hitler but focused on dreams that Jews, dissidents, and critics of the regime shared with her. Without exception, all the dreams included in the volume are nightmares confronting the dreamers with scenes of humiliation, persecution, and loss of privacy, identity, confidence, and dignity. However, in order to explore the specific historical situation of the Third Reich, dreams focusing on physical violence were left aside as Beradt was anxious that they might be expressions of a more generic fear. Beradt presents the selected dreams in eleven chapters corresponding to thematic categories. They are accompanied by comments, interpretations, and reflections, and form part of a comprehensive theoretical analysis, both of the nocturnal dimensions of Nazi terror and of the dream as a privileged poetic medium with the potential to reveal aspects of the regime that could not be analyzed otherwise.4 The multiple perspectives of her study, taken in conjunction with her multi-dimensional concept of the dream, definitely constitute one of the merits of Beradt’s project. The book attracted international attention and was translated into several languages, and historians and psychologists alike have highlighted its significance and uniqueness. However, it has been overlooked insofar as the dream records, the core content of Das Dritte Reich des Traums, are perceived as “literary” texts. Even if one may question whether it is justifiable to consider dream records as a literary genre, it is clearly Beradt’s

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intention to place her collected material in a literary context. Repeatedly she praises aesthetic and poetic qualities of the dreams under discussion, arguing that “sie könnten . . . in der Gegenwartsliteratur durchaus bestehen” (D 15; They could hold their own as contemporary literature). The reason Beradt gives for her deliberate association of dreams and literature is that both dreamers and contemporary writers are engaged in a “Kampf um eine Ausdrucksform für das Unausdrückbare” (D 15; a struggle for a form of expression for that which cannot be expressed). This links her project to one of the central poetological issues of the postwar era, the debate whether, and if so in what way, the totalitarian terror that had shocked Europe in its different manifestations could be adequately represented. Das Dritte Reich des Traums was written with the distinct intention of demonstrating that dream records can express at least as much truth about certain aspects of Nazi terror as literature.

A Political Poetology of Dreams Beradt’s extraordinary confidence in the poetical and the political potential of dreams is even more surprising when her work is taken in the wider context of debates about the artistic status of dream records as they took place in the first half of the twentieth century. Therefore it is necessary to outline briefly the main relevant trends concerning the relationship of dream and literature. As the experience of dreams, for the dreamer, resembles the experience of a film or a play, one might argue that dreams are a sort of “natural” literature, or, as Jorge Luis Borges puts it, the oldest and most complex literary genre. However, this experience of the dream as a performative process cannot be shared with any fellow human being and therefore does not qualify as a cultural entity. To become accessible to others, a dream must first of all be remembered and then expressed in its recollected form and communicated through a textual or visual medium. Although the aesthetic and poetic qualities of dreams had been praised since the Renaissance and before, it was not until the twentieth century that dream records were considered to be a literary genre. It is likely that, in previous times, authors quite frequently integrated dream records into more complex literary works, and in some cases there is evidence that this actually happened. However, these dream texts only achieved the status of literature after being inserted into a textual whole conceived by an author whose authorship was based on awareness, intentionality, and conscious control of the creative process. A turnaround came about at the threshold of the twentieth century when Friedrich Huch5 published a selection of dreams, titled simply Träume (Dreams, 1904), encouraged and inspired by Ludwig Klages and the esoteric Schwabing circle of the so-called Kosmiker, centered around

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Stefan George. Although Huch avoided explicitly labeling his texts as literature, it becomes clear that they are meant to be artistic creations. Here, for the first time, dream records flagged as authentic and unmodified were edited without any further pretext or context. It was understood that the spontaneously captured texts bore their aesthetic value and their significance within themselves and needed no further justification. This revolutionary attitude was accompanied by a profound transformation of the concept of authorship. Huch no longer understands himself as a self-determined author but rather as a medium for the revelation of something that has its origin somewhere other than in his consciousness. In the following years, a number of authors published their dream records, among them Isolde Kurz, Wieland Herzfelde, and Walter Benjamin, and a new literary genre was born.6 Publications like Die Träume der Dichter (The Dreams of Poets, 1912), by Wilhelm Stekel, a member of the circle around Sigmund Freud, and in particular Ignaz Ježower’s Das Buch der Träume (The Book of Dreams, 1928), a comprehensive anthology of authentic dream narrations including a lengthy chapter presenting dreams by contemporary writers, fostered interest in the specific qualities of poets’ and writers’ dream records. Although in Germany the new literary genre remained rather marginal, in France the surrealists were much more enthusiastic and radical in propagating dream records, together with écriture automatique, as the most effective methods to explore the poetic dimensions of the unconscious. Inspired by psychoanalysis, Louis Aragon, André Breton, Michel Leiris, and others published dream records in great numbers with the aim of establishing a new form of literary communication from the unconscious of the writer to the unconscious of the reader.7 Such naïve trust in the aesthetic potential of texts recovered from the experience of dreams prompted Walter Benjamin to write his polemical squib Traumkitsch (Dream-Kitsch, 1927), in which he criticizes the surrealists for having misunderstood the dream: Es träumt sich nicht mehr recht von der blauen Blume. Wer heut als Heinrich von Ofterdingen erwacht, muß verschlafen haben. . . . Der Traum eröffnet nicht mehr eine blaue Ferne. Er ist grau geworden. . . . Die Träume sind nun Richtweg ins Banale. . . . Die Seite, die das Ding dem Traume zukehrt, ist der Kitsch.8 [Nobody really dreams of the “blue flower” any more. Anyone who awakes these days as Heinrich von Ofterdingen has overslept.  .  .  . The dream no longer opens out into a blue endlessness. It has turned grey. . . . Nowadays dreams are a pointer to the banal. . . . The side of reality that presents itself in dreams is kitsch.]

With regard to surrealist practice, Benjamin explicitly denies that recording dreams is a poetic process per se: young people thought they had

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discovered dreams as a wellspring of poetry, but in reality these prevented poetic creativity.9 Since the inflationary production of dream records results in banal texts meaningful only to their authors, Benjamin then refers to dreams’ enormous potential for historical and political significance. They could even have a crucial impact on historical processes: “Das Träumen hat an der Geschichte teil.  .  .  . Träume haben Kriege befohlen und Kriege vor Urzeiten Recht und Unrecht, ja Grenzen der Träume gesetzt”10 (Dreaming is part of history. Dreams have issued commands in wars, while wars have dictated, since time immemorial, what is right and wrong, and set limits upon dreams themselves). Beradt’s book can be understood as a response to Benjamin’s verdict, demonstrating that dreams need not be confined to privacy, that they are not inevitably grey and banal, but may carry an eminent historical and political significance even in the twentieth century. Beradt’s intention is to demonstrate that the realm of dream can be a political battlefield, in the sense that even when dreaming, citizens are affected and subjugated by political power. To mark this, Beradt quotes Robert Ley, a high-ranking Nazi official: “Der einzige Mensch, der in Deutschland noch ein Privatleben führt, ist jemand, der schläft” (D 5; The only person in Germany who still leads a private life is the one who is asleep, T 3). Used as a motto for the book’s first chapter, this statement seems to credit the Nazi regime with a degree of totalitarian control that can hardly be surpassed. However, Beradt cites Ley to show that even the Nazis themselves had underestimated the reach and the effectiveness of their system of mental infiltration. Das Dritte Reich des Traums disproves Ley’s statement. Shockingly, the dreams (or rather, nightmares) collected by Beradt document the penetration of Nazi reality into the unconscious, into the most private spheres of the human psyche. Under the conditions of a totalitarian system, even sleep is poisoned. Reinhart Koselleck sums this up in the afterword of Beradt’s book: “Die erzählten Traumgeschichten bezeugen — als fiktionale Texte — den Terror, zugleich aber sind sie Vollzugsweisen des Terrors selbst. Der Terror wird nicht nur geträumt, sondern die Träume sind selber Bestandteil des Terrors. Sie werden in den Leib diktiert” (D 127; The dream stories told here are a documentation — as fictional texts — of terror, but they are also part of the terror, dictated upon the body). People in a completely helpless and vulnerable state of mind are haunted by dreams through which they are haunted by Nazi politics, and there is no way to escape. Das Dritte Reich des Traums reassesses the political status of dreams, but it also redefines the dream record both as a political and as a literary genre. Three aspects that are of particular relevance in this regard can be found at the core of Beradt’s poetological conception: the collective authorship of the presented material, its authenticity, and its viability as literature.

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The first aspect refers to the fact that Das Dritte Reich des Traums anthologizes the dream records of a large number of people. Since it has not just one single author, it does not run the risk of generating meanings of purely private significance. As it presents contributions from a wider community, it can claim legitimately to give an insight into the dream activities of a certain social milieu. The assumption of a “collective authorship” (a term studiously avoided throughout the text) is underpinned by Beradt’s observation that different people had reported very similar dreams. In such cases, just one each of these is reproduced in the book, where it is tagged as “typical” or “exemplary.” The second aspect, the authenticity of the displayed material, is also due to the specific form of authorship. Dreams are not created intentionally or evoked by a subject’s will but emerge spontaneously. They are involuntary and “natural” reactions of the psyche, transforming internal and external stimuli into a kind of fiction that, paradoxically, is not produced by a conscious and controllable process. They rather impose themselves on the dreamer’s mind. It was precisely this aspect of unconscious authorship that made dreams so appealing to the surrealists. But whereas the surrealists welcomed the experience of unsolicited aesthetic creation, the dreamers interviewed by Beradt and her helpers experienced dreaming as a sort of unwanted authorship. Usually they felt haunted and overwhelmed by their nightmares, and unequipped to protect themselves against them. As dream-fictions are never arbitrary, in the sense that their actual manifestation is a product of deliberate decisions, they can claim a truth of their own. Dreams never lie. Whereas diaries give an account of the writer’s social reality, which is obviously formed and selected by his interests, intentions, and reflections, dream narratives, unless produced by people who deliberately set out to manipulate them, are considerably more authentic. As the dream-producing capacities of the unconscious have the potential to react to threatening stimuli and symptomatic details from the empirical world that might be ignored, suppressed, or underestimated by the conscious mind, dreams are meaningful indicators of social and political conditions and effective seismographs (D 10) for change. In fact, a number of the nightmares presented by Beradt seem to be predictions of things to come, so that one might be tempted to call them “prophetic.” Although the majority were collected in the early years of the Third Reich, before the terror and the barbarism of the regime had reached its peak, these dreams anticipate, sometimes in an amazing manner, details of the totalitarian control and its suppressive measures long before they became reality. However, as Beradt points out, “es ist also durchaus keine Prophetie, was oft so aussieht. Ihre Metaphern werden wahr, weil unsere Träumer, mit durch Angst und Abscheu geschärfter Sensibilität in der Überfülle der Tagesereignisse  .  .  . Symptome wahrnehmen, die kaum wahrnehmbar sind” (D

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14; What often appears as prophecy is in fact nothing of the kind. Their metaphors turn into reality because our dreamers, rendered more sensitive by their fear and loathing, detect otherwise barely discernible symptoms in the multitude of daily events, T 16). Finally, the third aspect to be discussed concerns the readability of the dreams and their specific poetic qualities. Analyzing the process of dreamwork specific to the “dreams under dictatorship,” the way in which the psyche converts mainly external stimuli into an inner vision, Beradt comes to the conclusion that the meaning of these dreams can be easily understood. They are immediately readable as responses to a particular political and social reality. Unlike the surrealist’s dreams, they do not require a Freudian reading and a hermeneutical approach incorporating an assumed underlying latent meaning, but can be understood thanks to their manifest references to collective historical experiences.11 “Sie sind nahezu Bewußtseinsträume,” Beradt writes. “Was auf ihrer Oberfläche liegt, liegt ihnen zugrunde. Keine Fassade verbirgt Zusammenhänge, und niemand muß die Herstellung der Beziehung zwischen Traumeinfall und Existenz für den Träumer leisten” (D 14; They are almost conscious dreams. What lies on their surface lies also at their root. There is no façade to conceal associations, and no outside person need provide the dreamer with the link between dream image and reality, T 15).12 This does not mean that the mechanisms of dream-work as described by Freud, such as condensation, displacement, and symbolism, are suspended. Beradt acknowledges that the dreams in her collection often lack coherence, that they resemble a mosaic or even a surrealistic composition (D 14). However, their symbols and alienations of reality are conceived as an enrichment that does not disrupt their straightforward and effortless readability. Beradt compares the clarity of the dream imagery with caricature and political cabaret (D 10) and highlights its potential to convey “Doppeldeutiges trotz Deutbarkeit” (D 15; ambiguities . . . that nonetheless remain explicable, T 17). If dream scenarios seem to be unreal, readers will understand that they reflect a changing reality that grows more and more distorted and loses what has been familiar and valuable to the dreamers. Beradt’s comments on the specific language of the dreams in Nazi Germany finally lead to a discussion of their poetic status. It is clearly one of her prior intentions to demonstrate not only the parallels between the dreams and literature but also their equality in terms of aesthetic value. As already indicated above, these parallels are rooted in the fact that both the dreams and literature are likewise manifestations of the “Kampf um eine Ausdrucksform für das Unausdrückbare” (D 15; the struggle to express the inexpressible). A comparison of the dreams with postwar literature about the Nazi past shows, according to Beradt, that both make use of very similar “Ausdrucksmittel” (expressive means), as both are dealing with the same historical situation, which cannot be expressed satisfactorily

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using realistic means (D 15). Given this affinity, Beradt argues, it is not surprising that formal simulations of dreams and nightmares are so common in literature and art of the twentieth century. Although the author does not engage in a thorough analysis of the literary and rhetorical strategies of dreams, she uses literary references to frame them in a way that suggests a specific reading of the material presented. This framework, which is derived from a canon of “modern” authors, consists of mottos (usually two) positioned at the beginning of each of the eleven chapters, along with references within the chapters. Franz Kafka is by far the most frequently cited, followed by Bertolt Brecht and George Orwell. Other authors who receive mention are Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot, André Breton, and the Munich comedian Karl Valentin; some mottos are taken from nineteenth-century authors, notably Goethe and Dostoyevsky. There are two reasons for the prominent role allocated to Kafka. On the one hand, more than any other author of the twentieth century, Kafka stands for a radically antirealist modernist “dream poetics.” In a famous entry from his diary, Kafka himself describes his own writing as a depiction of his dreamlike inner life.13 On the other hand, Beradt makes reference to an understanding of Kafka that highlights his texts as anticipating descriptions of totalitarianism (D 15). It was one of Charlotte Beradt’s friends, Hannah Arendt, who among others had developed such an interpretation in her seminal study The Origins of Totalitarianism.14 The chapter entitled “Bürokratische Greuelmärchen” (bureaucratic horror stories) in Das Dritte Reich des Traums, on nightmares of comprehensive control and surveillance, uses a quotation from “In der Strafkolonie” (In the Penal Colony), one of Kafka’s most political stories, as a motto. Beradt refers to this text again when she is discussing dreams dealing with undefined guilt feelings generated by the “system.” One of these dreams includes a line that is an almost literal echo from Kafka’s text, as she points out: “Die Schuld kann nicht bezweifelt werden” (D 25; The/Your guilt cannot be doubted, T 30). Kafka’s key concept of a “guiltless” guilt — think for example of Der Prozess (The Trial), in which the accused protagonist K. is unable to ascertain what crime he is accused of, right down to the moment of his execution — is also central for Beradt. For her the “paradoxical” sense of guilt, which she finds articulated in numerous dreams, is a fundamental element of the psychological terror of a totalitarian system that configures every deviation from conformity as transgression, a system whose omnipresent surveillance apparatus misses nothing, and that ultimately regards every expression of individuality as an offense. Generally speaking, Beradt’s references to canonical authors serve the purpose of specifying the literary profile of the dream records. The names employed fall into groups corresponding to three of their major features. Authors such as Kafka, Beckett, Breton, and Karl Valentin are

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mentioned in relation to dreams based on antirealistic forms of representation that can be described as absurd, surreal, paradoxical, or even Kafkaesque (D 62). For example, Beradt matches a dream by an employee in the public service who “träumte zahlreiche Parodien auf sich selbst” (dreamt of numerous parodies of himself), in which the dreamer rings the police headquarters in order to make a complaint but does not speak a single word, with Karl Valentin’s famous remark “I sag gar nix — des werd man doch sagen derfen” (D 47; I’m saying nothing — that much I will say). Canonical critics of totalitarianism such as George Orwell and Aldous Huxley are cited for comparison purposes when Beradt is discussing specific content of dreams, such as surveillance or propaganda. The third literary feature of the collected dream records — associated in this case with one name — is their use of word play. In one dream, a chain of word associations leads from “Stacheldraht” (barbed wire) through the evocative nonsense words “Krachelstaat” (noisy state) and “Drachelstaat” (dragon state) to “Drachensaat” (dragon seed, a reference from Germanic mythology); Beradt discovers analogies here with James Joyce’s distortion of words (D 49). In another dream, a housewife sees a poster displaying the slogan “Wasserleitung tropft — Winterhilfe eintopft” (water tap drips — winter aid pops it into economical stew). Beradt interprets this as a parody of Nazi propaganda, arguing here in more general terms that the wordplay and nonsense verses found in such dreams are typical for modern literature (D 33); the valorizing intention is evident.

Kind Man Hitler: Some Exemplary Dreams It is not possible here to discuss more than a representative sample from the wide thematic range of dreams selected by Beradt. It is worth emphasizing that Beradt was principally concerned with presenting “political” dreams, that is, dreams that could be read as allegories of the social, and above all psychosocial, conditions of their time. The richness and diversity of the collection is intended to delineate the physiognomy of totalitarian power by indirect means, taking as its point of departure the uncontrollable nightly image sequences that the totalitarian system prompts in the minds of those affected by it. At the same time, however, these dreams unmask the modus operandi of the suppression mechanism, rendering visible the traumatization and psychological scarring caused by the everyday life of the totalitarian state. This double perspective corresponds to a tendency of the material to display two complementary (but not always entirely distinct) reactions to encounters with the totalitarian regime. On the one hand, there are dreams that focus on the power of the system and on the repressive methods it inflicts upon the largely helpless subject; on the other, there are dreams that are primarily concerned with the reaction of the dreamers

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and with strategies of survival and self-defense. A typical example of the first tendency is the dream that opens the collection, the “Modelltraum” (D 10), dating from the third day after Hitler seized power in Germany. The dreamer is a sixty year-old factory owner. Goebbels kommt in meine Fabrik. Er läßt die Belegschaft . . . antreten. Dazwischen muß ich stehen und den Arm zum Hitlergruß heben. Es kostet mich eine halbe Stunde, den Arm, millimeterweise, hochzubekommen. Goebbels sieht meinen Anstrengungen wie einem Schauspiel zu, ohne Beifalls- oder Mißfallensäußerungen. Aber als ich den Arm endlich oben habe, sagt er fünf Worte: “Ich wünsche Ihren Gruß nicht,” dreht sich um und geht zur Tür. So stehe ich in meinem eigenen Betrieb, zwischen meinen eigenen Leuten, am Pranger, mit gehobenem Arm. Ich bin körperlich dazu nur imstande, indem ich meine Augen auf seinen Klumpfuß hefte, während er hinaushinkt. Bis ich aufwache, stehe ich so. (D 7) [Goebbels enters my factory. He has all the workers line up. . . . I have to stand in the middle and raise my arm in the Nazi salute. It takes me half an hour to get my arm up, millimeter by millimeter. Goebbels shows neither approval nor disapproval as he watches my struggle, as if he were watching a play. When I finally manage to get my arm up, he says just five words — “I don’t want your salute” — then turns and goes to the door. There I am, standing in my own factory, arm raised, pilloried right in the midst of my own people. I am only able to keep from collapsing by staring at his clubfoot as he limps out. I go on standing like this until I wake up. (T 5)]

This nightmare about the cynical celebration of power is performative in two senses: firstly, it takes the form of a dream theater representing the process of personality transformation that marks the subjugation of the subject; secondly, the act of dreaming is itself an important part of the process of transformation. The dream parades, quite literally, the power of the new system, insofar as it is a form of punishment against which there is no possible defense; at the same time, the dream is the medium that brings changes in personality into consciousness. The dream’s insightfulness is apparent in the fact that the dreamer has clearly understood how the subjugation of the subject is intensified when the loss of selfhood and self-respect is arranged as a public spectacle: the loss of self, represented here as a paradigmatic “Initiationsritus in die totale Welt” (D 8; rite of initiation into the totalitarian scheme, T 7), is a defining part of the totalitarian system. Another dream that can be read as an allegory of the exercise of totalitarian power deals with the violent and unlimited imposition of a public sphere, in other words with the radical destruction of privacy:

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Während ich mich nach der Sprechstunde, etwa gegen neun Uhr abends, mit einem Buch über Matthias Grünewald friedlich auf dem Sofa ausstrecken will, wird mein Zimmer, meine Wohnung plötzlich wandlos. Ich sehe mich entsetzt um, alle Wohnungen, soweit das Auge reicht, haben keine Wände mehr. Ich höre einen Lautsprecher brüllen: “Laut Erlaß zur Abschaffung von Wänden vom 17. des Monats.” (D 19) [It is nine o’clock in the evening. My consultations are over, and I am just stretching out on the couch to relax with a book on Matthias Grünewald, when suddenly the walls of my room and then of my apartment disappear. I look around and discover to my horror that as far as the eye could see no apartment has walls any more. Then I hear a loudspeaker boom, “According to the decree of the 17th of this month on the Abolition of Walls . . .” (T 21)]

Here, the state has revealed itself as a surveillance state, as a force that will brook no retreat into privacy and whose ideal is that of complete transparency. In this “Big Brother” scenario, the obedient citizen is completely exposed and at the mercy of the utter non-privacy of power. Everybody and everything seems suspicious, so that even the contemplation of religious art leads to a guilty feeling of having been caught. Of the numerous dreams dealing with the theme of surveillance, many are far more radical than this, culminating in one case in the idea of a “Gedankenkontrollmaschine” (D 22; thought-control machine, T 26) that knows the dreamer has been guilty of associating Hitler with the devil when the latter is mentioned during a performance of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. The nightmare of a life without walls casts light on the outer preconditions for the control of the individual and for his transformation into a standardized member of totalitarian society — or, to rephrase from the point of view of those affected, the preconditions for his complete regimentation and self-alienation. This is the theme of many other dreams that shift the emphasis away from the phenomenology of power and onto the repertoire of possible reactions on the part of the victims. There is a striking variety of dreams based on the invention of laws and interdictions designed to destroy privacy, and going beyond privacy to erase completely all trace of subjectivity and individuality. One example of these is the dream of a sign that replaces forbidden street signs; on it are listed twenty words that the people are forbidden to speak. The first of them is the English word “lord,” but the last is the first-person pronoun “Ich” (D 20; T 23). In nightmares such as these we see dreamers reacting to an intensifying climate of fear. They anticipate further acts of de-individualization while simultaneously envisaging their own subjection to future measures imposed by the system. If the dictatorship can see even the use of the word “I” as a potential threat against which counter-measures must

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be adopted, then it is hardly surprising that dreaming itself, as the uncontrollable expression of subjectivity par excellence, becomes the object of a fictitious ban (see above, as well as D 19); in the dreams the interdictions are obeyed, or at least taken seriously, despite their absurdity. It is clear from these dreams that the dreamers sense the extent to which the system curbs their freedom, imposing self-alienation, personality changes, and ultimately complete self-renunciation. The all-butschizophrenic extent of this self-alienation is articulated in the following example. Ich träume, daß ich im Traum vorsichtshalber Russisch spreche (das ich gar nicht kann, außerdem spreche ich nicht im Schlaf), damit ich mich nicht verstehe und damit mich niemand versteht, falls ich etwas vom Staat sage, denn das ist doch verboten und muß gemeldet werden. (D 41) [I dream I am talking in my sleep, and to be on the safe side I speak Russian (which I don’t know, and anyway I never talk in my sleep) in order not to understand myself and so that no-one else can understand me, in case I should say anything about the state, for that, of course, is not permitted and must be reported. (T 52)]

As Beradt correctly observes, in this dream there is clearly a kind of Babylonian confusion of languages at work within the consciousness of one single person. However, here the confusion of tongues is a metaphor for the splitting of the subject into a conformist, self-abasing self and a uncontrollable self whose subversive or even rebellious potential cannot be eliminated. This split, which the dreaming subject clearly perceives as a contradictory plurality of voices within itself, is summed up metaphorically as the inability to understand itself. The conformist part of the subject retreats, as it were, into an inability to understand what is being said by its recalcitrant other part, whose expressions are as little controllable as those articulated in the language of the dream. Another group of dreams that is equally informative deals with power in human form, incarnate in the figure of Adolf Hitler. Here we find the conflicting alternatives of conformity and resistance articulated most strongly. However, Beradt is only able to refer to one manifestation of the fantasy of the “Tyrannenmord,” a “Traumattentat” on Hitler (D 85; dream in which an attempt on Hitler’s life is made, T 111). In contrast, her collection provides plenty of material that transforms Hitler into a friendly or even sexually attractive character. In one dream a Jewish doctor is proud of having cured Hitler, as he was the only one in the Reich able to do so. Following this, Hitler engages in a conversation with his savior.

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“Was wollen Sie für meine Heilung haben?” fragt Hitler. “Kein Geld,” antworte ich. Darauf ein großer Blonder aus Hitlers Umgebung: “Was, du krummer Jud, kein Geld?” Darauf Hitler im Befehlston: “Natürlich kein Geld. Unsere deutschen Juden sind nicht so.” (D 99) [“How much do you want for curing me?” asks Hitler. “No money,” I tell him, whereupon a tall blond in Hitler’s entourage snaps, “What! you crooked Jew — no money?” But Hitler says in a commanding tone, “Of course, no money. Our German Jews are not like that.” (T 130)]

In this dream the collusion with power pursues a double strategy. On the one hand it is founded on the argument, believed by extensive sectors of the German population, that Hitler himself was in reality a good and well-intentioned person whose heinous deeds were attributable to the intrigues of party functionaries. On the other hand, the dream refutes the idea of the supposedly Jewish racial characteristic of greed for money, which together with other “characteristics” formed the basis for the stigmatization and exclusion of the Jews. The longing for Eindeutschung (inclusion in the community of Germans) is promptly fulfilled by the Führer himself. The dreams in which Hitler is idealized erotically go further: many dreams narrated by women document the seductiveness and erotic fascination of power and (by association) of the holder of power. All of the fantasies about flirting with Hitler, being touched by him, dancing with him, share the desire to become the object of, and subject themselves to, the desire of the most powerful. These samples show what it is that makes Das Dritte Reich des Traums such a unique phenomenon. Unlike the eyewitness reports of, for example, oral history projects, Beradt’s dream material is a documentary collection of narrative texts that do not claim to be depictions of empirical reality or of events that happened. Instead, the dream records share the “unreality” of their mode of portrayal with the “modern” literature that Beradt takes as her point of orientation. Confronted with the failure of realism in the face of the challenges presented by totalitarianism, the war, and the Shoah, literature of necessity turns to allegory, parable, or dream-like forms of expression, while dreams conversely attain to an exceptional status as hyper-reality. Like the poetics of documentary literature that gained wider currency from the 1960s on, the underlying poetics of Beradt’s dream collection subverts the traditional distinction between literature and document. The dreams transport the dreamers’ empirical experiences of reality to the plane of a fictionality that is “natural,” one that is generated out of itself.

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Notes 1

Charlotte Beradt, Das Dritte Reich des Traums, mit einem Nachwort von Reinhart Koselleck (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 42. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation D and page number.

2

Charlotte Beradt, The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation 1933– 1939, trans. Adriane Gottwald, with an essay by Bruno Bettelheim (Wellingborough, UK: Aquarian Press, 1985), 53. Subsequent references to the translation are cited in the text using the abbreviation T and page number. Passages omitted in the published English translation, and other adjustments to the English translation — notably the narration of dreams in the present tense rather than the preterit — have been added without comment by the editor, M. Shields. 3

As Beradt points out, variations of the dream paradigm “Es ist verboten zu träumen, und doch träume ich” (D 10; It is forbidden to dream, but I still dream, T 10) occurred frequently. 4

An extensive study of the significance of dreams as a source of information about the third Reich has recently been published by Nadja Lux: “Alptraum: Deutschland.” Traumversionen und Traumvisionen vom “Dritten Reich” (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2008). Studies of dreams recorded in concentration camps have particular significance in this context; compare Zenon Jagoda, Stanisław Klodziński, and Jan Masłowski, “‘Nächte gehören uns nicht . . .’ Häftlingsträume in Auschwitz und im Leben danach,” in Die Auschwitz-Hefte: Texte der polnischen Zeitschrift “Przegląd Lekarski” über historische, psychische und medizinische Aspekte des Lebens und Sterbens in Auschwitz, vol. 2 (Weinheim, Basel: Beltz, 1987), 189– 239. In his autobiography Se questo è un uomo (1958), Primo Levi dedicated a chapter to dreams in the camp. 5

Friedrich Huch (1873–1913), the cousin of Ricarda Huch, was a well-known and esteemed writer of novels (now forgotten) in fin-de-siècle Munich. His funeral eulogy was held by Thomas Mann. 6

See Hans-Walter Schmidt-Hannisa, “Zwischen Wissenschaft und Literatur. Zur Genealogie des Traumprotokolls,” in Das Protokoll: Eine Textsorte und ihre kulturellen Funktionen, ed. Michael Niehaus and Hans-Walter Schmidt-Hannisa (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2005), 135–64. 7 See Susanne Goumegou, Traumtext und Traumdiskurs: Nerval, Breton, Leiris (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2007). 8 Walter Benjamin, “Traumkitsch,” in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, vol. 2 bk. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 620. English translations of Benjamin are by the editor. 9

Ibid., 621. As mentioned earlier, however, Benjamin himself had published a number of dream records in various contexts. A comprehensive collection of these literary texts (Walter Benjamin, Träume, ed. Burkhardt Lindner [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008]) was recently edited, together with Benjamin’s theoretical comments on dreams. 10

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Ibid., 620.

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11

However, attempts have been made to approach the book from a psychoanalytical perspective. See, for example, Kelly Bulkeley, “Dreaming in a Totalitarian Society: A Winnicottian Reading of Charlotte Beradt’s The Third Reich of Dreams” in Visions of the Night: Dreams, Religion, and Psychology, ed. Kelly Bulkeley (Albany: State U of New York P, 1999), 47–58. 12

To describe the nature of these dreams, Beradt also quotes Jean Paul, calling them “durchsichtige Scheinträume” (D 14; transparent pseudo-dreams, T 15). 13

On 14 August 1914, Kafka writes: “Von der Litteratur aus gesehen ist mein Schicksal sehr einfach. Der Sinn für die Darstellung meines traumhaften innern Lebens hat alles andere ins Nebensächliche gerückt” (From the point of view of literature my mission is very simple. My sensitivity to the representation of my dreamlike inner life has rendered everything else secondary). Franz Kafka, Kritische Ausgabe: Tagebücher, ed. Hans-Gerd Koch et al. (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1990), 546. The significance of dreams for Kafka and his writing is documented in Franz Kafka, Träume: “Ringkämpfe jede Nacht,” ed. Gaspare Giudice and Michael Müller. With an afterword by Hans-Gerd Koch (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1993). See also Manfred Engel, “Traumnotat, literarischer Traum und traumhaftes Schreiben bei Franz Kafka. Ein Beitrag zur Oneiropoetik der Moderne,” in Träumungen: Traumerzählungen in Literatur und Film, ed. Bernard Dieterle (St. Augustin: Gardez! Verlag, 1998), 233–62. 14

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951). See also Irmela von der Lühe, “Träume vom Terror. Charlotte Beradts Traumbuch und Hannah Arendts Totalitarismustheorie,” in Dichterisch denken: Hannah Arendt und die Künste, ed. Irmela von der Lühe and Wolfgang Heuer (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2007), 243–57.

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Part II: Tradition and Transgression

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7: Between Kahlschlag and New Sensibilities: Notes toward a Poetics of Thought after Gottfried Benn Rüdiger Görner

O

NE MAIN POETIC,

philological, and, in parts, philosophical project after 1945 was the “purification” of the ideologically corrupted German language. From Victor Klemperer’s Lingua tertii imperii to Karl Jaspers and Dolf Sternberger’s periodical Die Wandlung (1945–49; The Transformation) to the latter’s Aus dem Wörterbuch eines Unmenschen (1957; From the Dictionary of an Inhuman Person), the common aim was to enable German to regain its linguistic credibility. Their aim was not only to rid German of its Nazi jargon but also to shed light on the language’s darker zones from which this jargon had emerged. The question that troubled these intellectuals was whether the ideological vocabulary of National Socialist ideology was inherent to German or just a temporary aberration. The poetic equivalent to those attempts at a forensic analysis of the German language was the so-called Kahlschlag-Dichtung (clear cutting poetry), of which Günter Eich is perhaps the best-known proponent. At the same time, Paul Celan began to develop an alternative poetic register in German, hitherto unheard of in its uncompromising approach to overturning linguistic convention. One common denominator of these linguistic and poetic endeavors to work with and through a highly compromised language was the underlying, or implicit, assumption that a linguistically conscious form of cultural discourse — be it in literary criticism, philosophy, philology, or indeed poetry — can have a moral message, if not an ethical imperative. Or to modify Rilke: Du mußt deine Sprache ändern (you have to change your language), suggesting that it was possible to change one’s intellectual and social behavior by changing one’s language use. This assumption informed many a reflection on language and its usage after 1945 in a politically liberated but morally and physically ruined Germany. Interestingly, it was arguably only after two ideologically driven world wars that discourse on language shifted from discussing its origins to its usage. The only prominent exception to this was Martin Heidegger, whose distinctly idiosyncratic contribution to postwar poetics will be looked at later. This said, Günter Grass in a recent interview with The Guardian argued that such “purifying endeavours” were ill-conceived; for

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“one cannot punish the language for having been abused. Even though I had the greatest anger for my fatherland, the unbreakable link is the language. I wanted to go back to its richness.”1 In his Minima moralia (1951), Adorno devoted one section to deliberating the impact of free verse on poetic aesthetics. He argued that free rhythms allow the relics or, as he graphically put it, “Trümmer” (rubble/ ruins), of artistic but unrhymed classical poetry to speak.2 Such poetry, with its alien form, would be able to express its own fragility and the sense of alienation better than any other form of linguistic articulation. Moreover, he claimed, the type of syntax chosen determined whether language would simply become untruthful and commercial, or whether it could retain a quasi metaphysical dimension. This passage contains, too, and perhaps surprisingly coming from Adorno, a repudiation of the excessive sobriety of Kahlschlag (clear-cutting) and Stunde Null (zero-hour) rhetoric. In any case, this argument about free rhythms seems at first glance unrelated to Adorno’s controversial thesis, formulated only shortly afterwards, positing the barbarity of writing poetry after Auschwitz.3 But his critique of corrupted language in Minima moralia paved the way to his verdict on “absolute Verdinglichung” (absolute reification), which was, after all, the basis of his Auschwitz-dictum.4 Adorno saw this as the final stage in the dialectics between culture and anticulture with which the intellectual must engage. In this state of utmost emergency, free artistic choice ceases to exist. At the heart of Adorno’s reflections was his profound unease at the way in which tradition had been reinstrumentalized after 1945, be it in the shape of Benn-inspired syntactic formalism in writing or, perhaps worse, an uncritically reinvented Romanticism. Adorno captures these points in the opening sentence of his essay on Eichendorff written in 1957: “Die Beziehung zur geistigen Vergangenheit in der falsch auferstandenen Kultur ist vergiftet” (The relationship with the spiritual and intellectual past in a wrongly resurrected culture is poisoned).5 It is telling that Adorno uses the sacred concept of resurrection, confirming that any art that was worthwhile from his point of view needed to be aware of its sacred origins, as he had stated in the Minima moralia. Clearly, Adorno wanted to see poetry engage with language’s critical potential. According to him, poetic and intellectual experience should consist of a fusion of tradition and yearning for Otherness (Noten zur Literatur, 69). At a recent poetry festival in Frankfurt, an installation was devoted to Emily Dickinson’s poem “I dwell in possibility / A fairer House than Prose / More numerous of Windows / Superior — for Doors —,” once famously translated by Paul Celan and subsequently by a whole raft of contemporary German poets, in seeming gratitude for Dickinson’s disarmingly simple but comforting statement that suggests a poetics of open doors and windows that never closes on the invention of a new phrase.6 Admittedly, this seems a far cry away from our main concern, the poetics of thought as a motif of postwar poetic discourse, but if taken together

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with distinctly performance-driven lyrical activities like slam poetry, which blends rap and the bardic tradition, and all those traditions determined by a desire for beat and rhyme, improvisation and premeditation, sophistication and crudity, these phenomena amount to the most drastic rejection of Gottfried Benn’s ultimate belief in static poetry and Celan’s quasi-existentialist verbality with its tendency toward silence. After German poetry’s rediscovery in the early 1970s of what was then called “new subjectivity,” the mid 1990s saw a distinct tendency toward poetry that sought to enter into dialogue with the recipient. But, some forty years after 1968, German poetry has not managed to achieve any real political momentum, even though prose writers like Michael Kumpfmüller, Ulrich Peltzer, and Ingo Schulze have undoubtedly contributed to a renewal of literature’s political relevance.7 One hallmark of German poetry after Benn, however, has remained its self-reflexivity. Benn’s legacy though is more complex than that and, in poetological and psychological terms, distinctly paradoxical. This paradox is linked to the legacy of modernism in poetry in general and revolves around the nature of poetic subjectivity. The striving for objectivity in poetic expression, as epitomized by T. S. Eliot, and indeed the later Gottfried Benn, camouflages the poet’s desire to take center stage and explore himself to the full. While Benn was engaged in formulating his Statische Gedichte (static poems), he argued, for instance in his Erwiderung an Alexander LernetHolenia (Response to Alexander Lernet-Holenia), in favor of the poet’s establishing his very own verbal morphology. His creed was: Find expressions for your own Ich (I) and you will communicate, if not pass on, your lonesomeness to society.8 To put it differently, isolation and silence lend themselves to being communicated effectively in poetry. Or as Terry Eagleton argued only quite recently (2008): “One must speak while preserving in one’s words a core of silence, in homage to the millions whose tongues have been stilled.”9 This points toward the assumption that texts of quality will hover between introspection and self-centeredness while also reflecting the desire to overcome this egotistical moment. I would like to comment further on Benn’s legacy by looking at one particular example of Benn’s poetic aftermath that, to my knowledge, remains largely undiscussed, namely Ernst Meister’s poem “Après Aprèslude,” probably written in the late 1950s. Brandenburgs Sand tat sich auf. Einmal die Freundlichkeit, einmal die Pein vorbei und: Ende mit Satzbau. Totsein an und für sich nicht erfahrbar dem Ich. Worte vom Vaterhaus sind mir genehm.

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Gönnt nun Vorüberziehn Ton und dem Krach der Welt: Marschbumms — ne Menge Blech — Tambour, mit Tripper, grüßt. Ah, nun ein Evergreen, Efeulied, Benn in den Schlaf, danke verbindlichst, und jetzt . . . eine Rosenphalanx.10 [Brandenburg’s sands opened up. // Once away with friendliness / once with torment  / and the end with syntax. // Being dead in principle / not to be experienced by the Self. / I can take / Words from home. // Grant the world in passing  / Sound and noise  / military bands, lots of brass / the trumpet major greets with syphilis. // Now just an evergreen /an ivy-song, Benn in sleep  / I thank profusely, and now . . . // a phalanx of roses.]

This poem contains Benn motifs in abundance, from the reference to the mere meaningless “syntax,” to syphilis, sleep, and phalanx, suggesting a quasi-military formation of things. “Brandenburgs Sand” provides the geographical basis for a dubious solidity with the Berlin poet Benn and his followers; it is as ambivalent as the expression “Ende mit Satzbau,” which alludes to Benn’s poem “Satzbau,” in which he addressed the key question of why is it that we express anything at all. Ernst Meister’s line suggests an end to using syntax or an end to syntax. Both meanings are implied. The poem points at the limitations of comprehension and, with them, at the very sphere of death. Furthermore, it engages with Benn’s medical and poetic preoccupation, syphilis, which has in Meister’s poem penetrated the military with all its absurd paraphernalia to which the martial travesty of rhythm belongs. The final stanza refers to Benn’s liking of light music, but also to the poet’s legacy that has inspired poetic transformations of the most unusual metaphoric kind, as epitomized by the word “Rosenphalanx.” But Meister does not address the issue of language corruption, or reflect on the fact that much of his own language-material required some form of “purifying treatment.” At a different level, Meisters’s Benn poem asks whether and how Benn’s style of writing can be overcome or whether its instantly recognizable tone, the laconic Benn sound, has made an indelible impact on German poetry writing as such. We need to refer back to the poem’s title: “Après Aprèslude,” which plays on Benn’s last collection of poems and addresses the essential question of what comes after the afterlude. As it happens, Benn and Meister anticipated one of the prime concerns of postmodernism and indeed our attempts to orientate ourselves after postmodernism. It is the issue of time after time, and speech after everything

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has been said, seen and heard, an issue almost overamplified in the works of Thomas Bernhard. By the same token, Meister’s poem deals with the problematic concept of Kahlschlag, as indeed most of his poetic work does. This is a concept that has long been challenged by critics including Frank Trommler, Hans Dieter Schäfer, Stephen Parker, Peter Davies, and Matthew Philpotts. Back in the 1970s Trommler and Schäfer for instance argued that, in aesthetic terms, a restorative shift had taken place after the Second World War, thus providing a continuity of aesthetic conservatism between 1930 and the early 1960s.11 They all, regrettably, forgot to mention the impact of Concrete Poetry, which was at the vanguard of the Kahlschlag movement, and took the concentration on the poetic material itself to a new extreme. The question arises what literary restoration entails, especially in the context of a writer who was once intimately associated with the avantgarde, like Benn. His movement toward static relativism in poetry and prose was connected with stunning productivity, as Hans Carossa observed in a letter to Ernst Bertram in September 1955.12 Carossa must surely be seen as one of the main advocates of critical engagement with himself as poet and his own Goethe- and Rilkeoriented form of creative retrospection. One feature of poets’ desire to break through the mold of periodization and their own creative phases is a tendency to publish selections of their own poetry that do not give any indication of when they were written, or their place in relation to or within previous collections. Carossa and Meister, along with many others, engaged in this decontextualizing practice; in Benn’s case it was his literary executor, Marguerite Schlüter, who published poems as part of the poet’s so-called “main oeuvre,” deliberately denying these poems their original thematic and temporal context. In all cases only some poems, often only one or two, bear actual dates. Carossa, for example, provided dates for the poems “Gestreift vom Todeswind” (1943) and “Die Gefangene und der Alte Mann” (1943), indicating the genuinely time-bound circumstances under which they were written. The much-discussed Goethe renaissance after 1945, which peaked around his bicentenary in 1949 and included Austrian poets like Alexander Lernet-Holenia and Max Mell, had hardly any lasting effect, however, with the one possible exception of Benn’s essay “Goethe und die Naturwissenschaften,” which is an intriguing example of taking Goethe’s concept of science, transposing it, and applying it to contemporary concerns. As far as his post-1945 essayistic comments on Goethe and Nietzsche were concerned, Benn knew that there was stiff competition from others, most notably Thomas Mann. But when it came to his reflections on poetry, modernism, or, in particular, the concept of the avant-garde, Benn succeeded in monopolizing the discourse, turning into the new poetry’s elderly trendsetter and gatekeeper.13 Elisabeth Kampmann makes the

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point that many of the young poets in the immediate postwar period only knew about the international avant-garde and its historical roots in Expressionism through Benn,14 who kept emphasizing at every possible opportunity that he was the last representative of this once-rich tradition. One of the fundamental dichotomies in Benn’s concept of the poet was that he advanced his own position as a public persona in matters of poetry with surprisingly accomplished media skills, which he pretended to despise at the same time. But while adopting this public role as praeceptor poeticae, he advocated, with reference to Marinetti, the destruction of the ego in and through poetry. The single most influential reflection on the condition poétique until the mid 1960s  — aside from Hugo Friedrich’s seminal study Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik,15 published, coincidentally or not, the year Benn died  — was Benn’s Marburg lecture, Probleme der Lyrik (1951), which contained Marinetti’s maxim: “détruire le Je dans la littérature” (to destroy the I in literature).16 Nevertheless, it was through this speech that Benn reconstituted his own position as the almost unchallenged patron of a restorative avant-garde. When he cites Marinetti in 1951, it is as though he had never given his notorious lecture on this champion of Futurism in 1934, a lecture in which Benn advocated a new liaison between the state and art under the auspices of a self-andtime-transcending form.17 It is noteworthy that Friedrich concluded his study with an interpretation of Benn’s 1930 poem “Immer schweigender” (More and more silent) as well as four other Benn poems written in or after 1945, framing them with poems from the international avant-garde by Apollinaire, Perse, Lorca, Alberti, Ungaretti, and Eliot. In more ways than one, Friedrich’s study essentially reiterates Benn’s fundamental thesis that the transcendency of creative desire is the perfect expression of a renewed avant-garde that subscribes to the supremacy of artistry. Such poetic expressiveness may involve artistically well-orchestrated silence but rejects responsibility for anything that happened in real terms and time. But, paradoxically, Benn, a poet of engagement-inciting resignation and artistically charged nihilism who argued in favor of falling silent in the face of the formidable challenges of time and reality, turned out to be one of the most meticulous witnesses of radical political change, albeit mainly in his letters.18 Critics who regard 1960 as a watershed in terms of a shift in literary consciousness in the postwar period have one argument on their side, of which, however, they rarely make use. For it was at this time that the Frankfurter Poetikvorlesungen (Frankfurt Lectures on Poetics) were launched in response to the Benn-inspired demand for theoretical reflection on the process of poetic writing. In what remains the most distinguished lecture series to date featuring poets reflecting on poetics, the first speaker was Ingeborg Bachmann. In her second lecture (“On Poems”) Bachmann famously argued that, while poets had made their fair

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share of catastrophic errors of judgment during what was then only the recent past, the question now was what their part in the creation of a new truth would, and could, be.19 Bachmann saw a certain moral urgency in the project of new writing. It would have to address the question, once again and with renewed vigor, of whether writing constituted reality or had to be satisfied with creating a semblance of the world. Arguably, Bachmann’s Poetikvorlesungen amounted to a sustained attempt to emancipate herself from the influence that Heidegger’s philosophy had had on her, an influence so strong that she had written a dissertation on his existential philosophy (“Die kritische Aufnahme der Existentialphilosophie Martin Heideggers,” 1950). To get a feel for Heidegger’s “poetological turn” that formed part of his own attempt to distance himself, in his case from the Nazi regime, and began with his lectures on Hölderlin in 1935/36, and in order to assess the significance of the poetological turn after 1950, it is worth revisiting his short poetological reflections, first written in 1947, and published seven years later under the title Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens (From the Experience of Thought).20 The collection’s first aphorism is the closest Heidegger gets to allowing the immediate past to affect his pursuit of “pure thought”: “Die Verdüsterung der Welt erreicht nie das Licht des Seyns” (ED 7; The world’s darkening never attains to the light of Being, BW 91), meaning that the “Seyn” remains untouched by the “darkening” of the world; in other words, the shadows or intellectual blackouts of National Socialism.21 He states that “Seyn” expresses itself in the shape of a poem. But this “poem” is Man, “Der Mensch” — in other words, an anthropological objectivation. Man, however, does not have thoughts; rather thoughts visit him (ED 7; BW 11). Heidegger’s most fundamental statements on the poetics of thought in this collection read as follows: “Der Dichtungscharakter des Denkens ist noch verhüllt. Wo er sich zeigt, gleicht er für lange Zeit der Utopie eines halbpoetischen Verstandes. Aber das denkende Dichten ist in der Wahrheit die Topologie des Seyns” (ED 23; The poetic character of thought is still concealed. When it shows itself, it is likened for a long time to the utopia of a half-poetic understanding22). If the poetic nature of thought is still “veiled,” its unveiling would reveal the ambiguity within the thinking process as something poetic and inspired by reason. Heidegger ascribes to the poetic an independent form of thinking that he associates with the “topography of Seyn,” meaning the delineation of distinctly poetic “places” — in other words. poems, where pure Being in its artistically most appropriate objectivation can be encountered. It is interesting to find that, just prior to the beginning of her Frankfurter Poetikvorlesungen, Bachmann exchanged some views on Heidegger with Paul Celan. The occasion for this exchange was that they had been invited to contribute to a Festschrift for Heidegger, an invitation they both ultimately declined. Surprisingly, Bachmann comes across as less

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willing to pardon Heidegger’s “politische Verfehlungen” (political misdemeanors) than Celan. She calls them “indiskutabel” (unworthy of discussion), while Celan argues “daß Heidegger vielleicht einiges eingesehen hat” (that Heidegger has perhaps understood a few things), unlike those “patentierte Antinazis wie Böll oder Andersch” (patented anti-Nazis like Böll or Andersch).23 Be this as it may, Bachmann shared her moral concern about language and its poetic renderings not only with Celan but also with Adorno and the young Peter Szondi. While Adorno continued his investigations into the self-reflexivity of poetry with extended reference to Hölderlin (in his essay “Parataxis,” which was dedicated to Szondi), Szondi explored Valéry, Rilke, Benjamin, Proust, and soon Celan, in order to gain parameters for what Proust’s expression “alliance de mots” (alliance of words) could possibly mean after the Shoah. Was that an alliance against the author and in favor of the text that was in the process of emancipating itself from its biographical origins? Or did this “alliance of words” provide the main means for poetry to assume priority over all other genres? According to Szondi the “alliance of words” secured some autonomy for the poetic text, even consistency, as he explained in his first study on Celan and the latter’s translation of Shakespeare’s sonnet 105, in which constancy is elevated to a main poetic theme in a similar fashion to the European baroque tradition.24 The frequent repetition of words in this sonnet suggested to Celan, according to Szondi’s reading, skepticism about the expressiveness of language.25 Therefore, any pursuit of truth in poetry cannot be but an illusion. Poetry deals with intentions, probabilities and possibilities. Poetic words express likelihoods and approximations to phenomena. However, this does not mean that the word itself can be perceived as a phenomenon in its own right, least of all a static one in the sense of Benn’s understanding of the word. Szondi’s acute sense of the tragic suggests, however, another dimension to this discussion: Contemporary poetry, and Celan’s in particular, exposes the tragedy of language. Words themselves have become tragic, particularly given the events of recent history. In “Parataxis” Adorno argued that Hölderlin’s late poetry, which was after all developed alongside the poet’s own increasing preoccupation with tragedy, suggested that the mind can perceive itself as a form of nature through self reflection.26 Whether this was still the case with “schwarze Milch der Frühe” (black milk of dawn), an expression of a perverted form of nature, is quite a different matter. Adorno’s point that poetry requires philosophy in order to realize its entire intellectual potential was mocked even before it found expression, curiously, in Benn’s poem “Der Gedanke,” which begins: “Der Gedanke — / anderthalb Meter reicht er, / eine Dose Daten erschleicht er,  / aber sonst —?”27 (The thought  / reaches oneand-a-half meters deep / gets a tin of data by devious means / but what

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else . . .?) Admittedly, this is not the grandest of Benn’s openings, but it works as a parody of his own intellectualism. It implies the rationing of information proportional to the number of ideas one has got and the reality, if not materiality, of the very depth of an idea; but it also suggests the futility of such measuring. It is telling that Szondi, too, was preoccupied with the notion of depth when translating Paul Valéry’s aphorism profondeur that suggested that depth meant two different qualities simultaneously: namely, the transformation of an object of thought and the energy required to accomplish that transformation. Both resulted, according to Valéry and Szondi, in a particular impact of specific words  — the latter being a different concept for Benjamin’s “aura.” The poetic, if not poetological, implications are obvious: Words contain transformations and transitions; they possess a certain energy that is responsible for their impact. This “energy” influences their usage that is itself subject to change. Such intensive reflections on the poetic material led to what Peter Horst Neumann called the loss of the song-like quality of lyrical works in German poetry, which had characterized it since early Romanticism.28 One also could argue, however, that it had taken German poetry more or less until after 1950 to undergo what music had been experiencing since 1908/1910, which was the breaking up of harmonies and “song” in the form of traditional tonality — with a major exception to this in the poetic sphere being, of course, the Dada-movement and the verbal disturbances of late Expressionism and the poetry of the trenches.29 According to this way of thinking, music seems to have anticipated ideologically conditioned ruptures in the sociocultural fabric while poetry was somewhat slower in expressing and reflecting them. It required the experience of existential extremism for poetry to break with its long-cherished principles of verbal tonality and discover poetic atonality, most dramatically, arguably, in the works of Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan. The almost demonstrative self-reflectivity of German poetry after 1950 seemed to have overcompensated the blatant lack of such reflection before; after all, even poetry written in the concentration camps betray a strong sense of traditional form through which the suffering poets hoped to resist barbarity. German-language poetry insisted on rhyming even when other forms of supposed coherence had already disintegrated. The legacy of the George circle, Rilke, and Hofmannnsthal remained formative in the literal sense of the word, and suggested to poets between 1930 and 1950, whether in exile, inner emigration, or indeed the camps that their calling was to mobilize tradition. Ironically, though, it was George’s poetry that had once inspired Schönberg to break with (musical) tradition and emancipate nontonal structures from harmonic contexts. It is, perhaps, significant in this context that the late Robert Gernhardt, who, in turn, insisted on the emancipation of rhyme from the broken-up harmonies after the Shoah, suggested pairing “Vernichten” with “dichten,” thus implying an intrin-

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sic interconnection between (poetic) creation and annihilation.30 When considering Gernhardt’s point we are reminded of the fact that, as late as December 1952, Günther Anders, who had returned from exile, found — in Freiburg, to be precise — that destruction can make things look more beautiful and that ruins represented an edifying pathos in the face of the nothingness that surrounded everything.31 The resilience and persistence of traditional form, which tends to be particularly strong in poetry, as other more recent and non-German examples like those of Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcott, and Seamus Heaney illustrate, does not necessarily signal an antireflective mood. Such poets question form through form, and challenge traditions by establishing alternative ones.32 In summary, it is noteworthy that, after 1950, the poetological reflections of German-speaking poets reached a state of advancement that they had not had since early Romanticism, outperforming by far contemporary scholarly poetologies like those of Emil Staiger, Hugo Friedrich, and Roman Ingaarden, both in terms of the radicality of approach and assessing the various possibilities for salvaging at least some aspects of poetic Modernism. The poetry written by the young generation of German-speaking poets and their poetological statements made after 1950 amount to documentary evidence of a traumatic or posttraumatic condition. The much-discussed notion of the “barbarity” of post-Auschwitz poetry implied that the poet needed to come to terms with a state of barbarism caused by the final collapse of metaphysics and transcendence. The poet himself, or the once divinely inspired word, were no longer able to point toward a sacred world beyond suffering. Instead, poetological reflections on the conditions of poetry generated texts that were more engaging than the poetry itself. As epitomized by Benn and Heidegger in different but complementary ways, thought itself had become an agent and object of poetic writing after 1945 in West Germany  — almost against all sensitivities. This included the semantics of the thinking process itself, the supremacy of reflection over sentiment, or rather a developing sensitivity toward the moral pitfalls of seemingly “pure” reflection. Or was it that abstract thought had become an excuse for lack of moral responsibility? Was “pure thought” morally thoughtless? However we may view this, after 1950 critical thought itself, even though tending to be on the side of Heideggerian Existentialism with disturbingly little moral liability, had turned harshly lyrical.

Notes Maya Jaggi, “A Life in Writing: Günter Grass,” Saturday Guardian, 30 October 2010, 12–13. 1

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2 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 426 (No 142: “Dem folgt deutscher Gesang”). 3

Theodor W. Adorno, “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft,” in Gesellschaftstheorie und Kulturkritik, 65 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975). 4

For a more detailed and contextualizing discussion of Adorno’s dictum, see Elaine Martin’s contribution to this volume. 5

Quoted in Adorno, ed. Rolf Tiedemann et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 69. 6

Documented in Neue Rundschau (2008), Heft 1, 119.

7

Thomas David, “Über die Gegenwart nachdenken. Ein Gespräch mit Michael Kumpfmüller und Ulrich Peltzer,” in Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 26 April 2008. 8

Gottfried Benn, Prosa und Autobiographie: In der Fassung der Erstdrucke, ed. Bruno Hillebrand (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1984), 486. 9

Terry Eagleton, “Determinacy Kills: On Detlev Claussens’s intellectual biography Theodor Adorno: One last Genius,” London Review of Books, 19 June 2008, 9. 10 Ernst Meister, Ausgewählte Gedichte 1932–1979: Erweiterte Neuausgabe (Darmstadt und Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1979), 18. 11

Frank Trommler, “Emigration und Nachkriegsliteratur: Zum Problem der geschichtlichen Kontinuität,” in Exil und innere Emigration: Third Wisconsin Workshop, ed. Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1972), 173–97; Hans Dieter Schäfer, “Zur Periodisierung der deutschen Literatur seit 1930,” in Nachkriegsliteratur: Spurensicherung des Krieges, ed. Nicolas Born and Jürgen Manthey, Literaturmagazin 7 (1977): 95–115. A modified version of these views can be found in Stephen Parker, Peter Davies, and Matthew Philpotts, The Modern Restoration: Re-thinking German Literary History 1930–1960 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004). 12

Hans Carossa, Briefe 3, ed. Eva Kampmann-Carossa (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1981), 506.

13

Elisabeth Kampmann, “‘Form, isoliert, ist ein schwieriger Begriff’: Erfolgsbedingungen und Karriere von Benns Poetologie der Form in den 1950er Jahren,” in Gottfried Benn, ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold, 3rd ed. Text + Kritik 44 (2006): 206–20. 14

Ibid., 210.

15

Hugo Friedrich, Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik: Von der Mitte des neunzehnten bis zur Mitte des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts (1956), Erweiterte Neuausgabe, 8th ed. (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1977). 16

Gottfried Benn, “Probleme der Lyrik,” in Benn, Sämtliche Werke in sieben Bänden, ed. Gerhard Schuster, vol. 6 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2003), 9–44. 17

Benn, Sämtliche Werke 4, 117–20.

18

Joachim Dyck, Der Zeitzeuge: Gottfried Benn 1929–1949 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006). See also Christian Schärf, Der Unberührbare: Gottfried Benn — Dichter im 20. Jahrhundert (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2006). The first major study on Benn published two years after the poet’s death is still worth consulting: Dieter Wellershoff,

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Gottfried Benn: Phänotyp dieser Stunde (München: dtv, 1976), esp. “Kunst und Macht,” 130–65. 19

Ingeborg Bachmann, Probleme zeitgenössischer Dichtung: Frankfurter Vorlesungen (München: Piper, 2000). 20

Martin Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954). Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text with ED and the page number. Translations are from Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings: From Being and Time to The Task of Thinking, ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 1977). Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text with BW and the page number. 21 One is tempted to read another of Heidegger’s aphorisms in this collection as an autobiographical statement: “Wer groß denkt, muß groß irren” (ED 17; Who thinks big must make big mistakes) in the perspective of his welcoming National Socialism in 1933 in an act of self-delusion and temporary loss of his critical faculties. 22

Translation from John D. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought (New York: Fordham UP, 1986) 235. 23

Herzzeit, Ingeborg Bachmann  — Paul Celan, Der Briefwechsel, ed. Bertrand Badiou, Hans Höller, Andrea Stoll, and Barbara Wiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008), 117. 24

Peter Szondi, Schriften 2: Essays, ed. Jean Bollack with Henriette Beese, Wolfgang Fietkau, Hans-Hagen Hildebrandt, Gert Mattenklott, Senta Metz, Helen Stierlin (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), 321–44. See also Leonard Olschner, Im Abgrund Zeit: Paul Celans Poetiksplitter. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2007, esp. chapter 6: “Constantia,” 103–24. 25 See Christoph König (with Andreas Isenschmid), Engführungen: Peter Szondi und die Literatur. marbacher magazin, 2nd ed. (Deutsche Schillergesellschaft Marbach am Neckar, 2004), 66. 26

Adorno, Noten zur Literatur, 488.

27

Benn, Das Hauptwerk 1, 365.

28

Peter Horst Neumann, “Wie der deutschen Lyrik das Singen verging. Von Eichendorff zu Paul Celan,” Schweizer Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft 25 (2005): 81–92. 29 There is compelling evidence, however, that the young Paul Celan already had grown suspicious of traditional form. See John Zilcosky, “Poetry After Auschwitz? Celan and Adorno Revisited,” DVJS 79 (2005): 670–91; here, 672. 30 Quoted in Jochen Hörisch, “Gedichte nach Auschwitz  — Überlegungen zu einem berühmten Diktum T. W. Adornos,” in Protestantismus und Dichtung, vol. 2, ed. Petra Bahr (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2008), 121. 31

In Günther Anders, Tagebücher und Gedichte (München: Hanser, 1985), 214.

32

See Harald Hartung, Masken und Stimmen: Figuren der modernen Lyrik (München: Hanser, 1996), 25.

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8: “Barely explicable power of the word, that separates and conjoins”: Gottfried Benn’s Problems of Poetry and Its Poetology of Existence Stefan Hajduk

G

BENN’S OEUVRE is important for the history of German postwar poetics not least because it exemplifies the relationship between crisis and creativity that marks the period. In Benn’s own crisis period of inner emigration after 1934, culminating in 1938 with the Nazi ban on publishing his work, a ban that was continued under Allied occupation until 1948 because of Benn’s initial support of National Socialism, continuities, interruptions and new beginnings are discernible in the content, form, and particularly the poetics of his work. In terms of continuity, for instance, poetic subjectivity occupies a central position during this period at the level of both textual aesthetics and the aesthetics of production. Subjectivity remains central despite an internal shift in emphasis from the Dionysian, prelogical nature of the ecstatic self toward a static consciousness of the Other in Apollonian melancholy.1 Discontinuity, however, determines Benn’s Expressionist, onesided concentration on the poetological aspects of dissolution of the self, “Wirklichkeitszertrümmerung” (smashing of reality), and the grandeur of loss. Coincidentally, Benn’s outline of his project “Phase II,” with its double perspective of neo-avant-garde and neo-renaissance, hints at a renewal of the dynamics of modernism.2 This poetics, which anticipates postmodernism,3 was developed during the fifth year of the Second World War when Benn, then serving as a medical officer, once more turned his existential crisis into poetic creativity in deserted barracks on the Eastern Front, facing the military disasters of the summer of 1944. In the following I shall cast light on some incongruities of Benn’s poetology, incongruities that are due to his ambiguous orientation toward the German tradition of philosophy of spirit, on the one hand, and toward the artistic avant-garde on the other. As will be shown, these incongruities in theoretical approach made it impossible to develop poetological consistency but did not prevent Benn from being immensely influential in the literary scene after 1945. OTTFRIED

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My examination begins by observing a theoretical unrest within the entire oeuvre that parallels developments within Benn’s poetry, but undermines its poetological basis. This is particularly obvious in the famous presentation Probleme der Lyrik (Problems of Poetry), which formed the basis of the lectures Benn gave in Marburg and Hanover in August and October 1951. These lectures contain the core of Benn’s poetological thinking, particularly after 1945. My examination, however, also includes a review of Benn’s theory of poetry from the twenties and thirties, with brief references to poetological statements he made in his autobiographical essay Doppelleben (Double Life) and in his Roman des Phänotyp (Novel of the Phenotype). Benn scholars either react skeptically to the theoretical part of his oeuvre because of its demonstrable contradictions, or attempt to redeem it by seeing in it a supposed intellectual logic.4 I have decided to concentrate on an aesthetical and theoretical problem that characterizes Benn’s poetological concept. It centers on Benn’s unsatisfactory definition of correlations in that dynamic energetic field that has existed ever since Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of Judgment) between aesthetic subjectivity and objectivity. The issue at stake here is the fact that the object of aesthetic reflection is created by the subject of this reflection, but also the other way around: that this subject and its reflection are affected by the outer world of “Dinge an sich” (things in themselves). In his 1943 “Provoziertes Leben” (Provoked Life: An Essay on the Anthropology of the Ego), the dualistic thinker Benn casts a psycho-historical eye over the separation of self and world and what he calls the schizoid catastrophe that is the “abendländische Schicksalsneurose” (the Occident’s fate neurosis).5 He submits without struggle to this “Wirklichkeit” (EuR 373; reality) and molds his thinking accordingly. The poetological thinker Benn, however, deals with the subjective as supra-historical agency of art production, as creative self, and as self-creating (in the sense of an artistic Selbstentwurf or act of self-projection), and with the objective as historically saturated linguistic matter, as self-supporting form, as autonomous word-art. At first his subjectivation of conditions of consciousness seems to suppress all outer real experience, and yet the “Aura des Worts” (SuS 309; aura of the word) moves the material world from its outside position into the foreground of perception. This conceptual wavering between the poles of subject, self, inside, psyche on the one hand and object, world, outside, as well as language on the other hand, never disappeared from Benn’s theoretical writing. However, as he grew older there was an increasing tendency to shift the theoretical priority from the former pole to the latter. And yet he neither reflected properly on this shift, nor did he defend it.

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Benn seems to have underestimated the set of general problems resulting from this dualism less with respect to their philosophical meaning than to their poetological implications.6 To a great extent his lyric oeuvre is thus sustained by a criticism of rationality and of the subject,7 criticism that goes in Benn’s view back to Nietzsche and the Romantics, and that reflects the cultural costs of an epistemic dualism hardened since the Enlightenment. At the same time, Benn’s theory of poetry holds on to existential subjectivity as its legitimate basis and gives up the idea of exteriority of phenomena. The resulting fixation on the creative self’s self-reflectivity as well as on the emptiness of a nonhistorical material world prevented Benn from developing a theoretically functioning concept that did justice to his own poetry, which is indeed organized in a manner open to sensual apprehension. Here one should not be deterred by the metaphor of the “Nüstern” of horses (EuR 529; nostrils), borrowed from Nietzsche, and quoted by Benn to suggest the exceptional “sensual apprehension” of an artist of genius. Benn, however, subsequently adds to this sensory metaphor an intellectual meaning. We will see how Benn’s poetological reflection converts all sensual perception into the creativity of the spiritual sphere, and how he suspends all “materielle” (material) dialectics in favor of “ideelle Dialektik” (EuR 529; ideal dialectics). This could be explained at least partly by Benn’s intellectually formative years and their ideological context, which cannot be reconstructed here. I would contend, however, that the problem is Benn’s lack of poetological categories that prevents an appropriate description of literary-aesthetical processes. Benn only mentions such useful terms as ambivalence or mood, for example, either in anecdotes or in passing, and in both cases without giving them any distinctive meaning and distinguishing function, failing to articulate their relationship to aesthetic objectivity. The resulting pseudomystical extension of aesthetical subjectivity  — so my argument continues — paradoxically leads to an absolutizing of the language matter, as can be seen in his excursus on the aura of the word (SuS 309) and on the “Wort real und magisch, ein moderner Totem (SuS 223; the word as real and magical, a modern totem).

“Verweilen Sie vor dem Unvereinbaren” (SuS 124; Linger before the Incompatible): The Theory-Deficit in Benn In this section I will attempt to shed light on the theoretical discrepancies in Benn’s Problems of Poetry, of which he was probably aware but which he was more inclined to disguise than to make visible. Their treatment would have required a media-theoretical concept of subjectivity, as

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his “Phänotypik der Existenz” (AvS 143–44; phenotypology of existence) was intended to be. In Benn’s theory of poetry, however, the emphasis on creative force stands in the way of such a concept being developed. From the central position of the creative self, one can hardly develop anything other than idealistic concepts of mediation between self and world or inside and outside. As these remain unproductive in their tendency toward psychological monism — particularly in poetological terms — the subject position suffers a reduction in its power, which is claimed by the concept of existence. The “Existenzielle” (PuS 153; existential) paves the way to inwardness, a path that leads artistic practice into the “world of expression,”8 and programmatically transcends the historical world of social reality. Benn understands existence in terms of fate determined by lifelong crisis, adding in obsessional creativity as a tragic component with reference to the artist, but failing to comprehend existence as historically saturated, shaped or determined.9 However, Benn conceives of words as historically formed, the product of the sedimentation of innumerable layers of meaning over time. They are not only filled up with the history of their meaning, but they also carry the whole material world within them as the fragments of life. As such they are the only material that can reach the lyrical self.10 This word material makes up the true outside that is already inside when poetically distilled into absolute form. The existence of the decentered self lost in language corresponds to the “latente Existenz” (latent existence) of the word aesthetically acting “als Zauber” (EuR 520; as magic). The essay Problems of Poetry reveals objectivity’s growing poetological significance in the case of the absolute poem via the “Transformation von Objekten in Wortzauber” (PuS 192; transformation of objects into word-magic). This implies a reduction of the poetological significance of subjectivity. But instead of stating these facts, Benn’s essay conceals them both in its rhetorical drift and in its argumentative contradictions. As a result, poetological inconsistencies abound, such as the simultaneous adherence to consciousness-centered subjectivity and to its decentering through the magic of words.

“In die Spannungssphären Bewußtsein und Geist” (EuR 531; Into the Conflicting Spheres of Consciousness and Spirit): An Analysis of Benn’s Poetology To explain these contradictions it is not necessary to revisit the historical contexts that explain Benn’s hidden reduction of the subject and its influence on aesthetics. For the purposes of this analysis of poetological thinking it is sufficient to focus on the lecture Problems of Poetry, taking

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into account Benn’s intellectual environment. His generation received its crucial impulses from Nietzsche’s critique of reason and the subjective sphere.11 Benn positions Nietzsche within the history of aesthetics as mediator, between French and German, as well as between ancient and modern aesthetics. Benn moves Nietzsche’s idea of “Artistik” (artistry) from the realm of the philosophy of life into that of art theory, thus enabling it to bring together heterogeneous poetical approaches into a common European perspective. Benn suggests that British Aestheticism, French Realism, and both German Romanticism and Classicism all share a clear drift toward an aesthetic objectivity that, once started, demands a transgression of subjectivity. As evidence of a line of development leading from Goethe through Nietzsche’s “Olymp des Scheins” (Olympus of Semblance) to the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century, Benn quotes the following passage from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Travels): “Auf ihrem höchsten Gipfel scheint die Poesie ganz äußerlich; je mehr sie sich ins Innere zurückzieht, ist sie auf dem Wege zu sinken” (EuR 511; at its highest point Poetry seems quite outward  — the more it withdraws into the Inner, the more it is on its way to decline12). The insight that a restitution of the transcendent in a perfect work of art becomes possible through something external like poetry and only by relinquishing idealistically cultivated internal qualities is linked by Benn to a vitalistic turning point in nihilism. Finally, the Dionysian demolition of the principium individuationis in a state of aesthetic enthusiasm becomes reminiscent of a metaphysical rejoining of the fragments of being: “Sein inneres Wesen mit Worten zerreißen, der Drang sich auszudrücken, zu formulieren, zu blenden, zu funkeln auf jede Gefahr und ohne Rücksicht auf die Ergebnisse — das war eine neue Existenz” (EuR 510; To tear apart one’s inner self with words, the urge to express oneself, to formulate, to blind, to sparkle without caring about the dangers or the results — that was a new existence). What Benn welcomes here as new existence beyond the borders of reason is something he also refers to as the “Verhängnis” (doom) of Nietzsche. It was as if the collapse of reflective subject-centered philosophies, along with their phantasms of the autonomy of an absolute self, left only an artistic crossing of the threshold of consciousness as a way of venturing into potentially transcendent being. The assumed reality of this transcendent being coincides with olympischer Schein (Olympic appearance) and this hints at a historical function ascribed to art: it is to be a compensation for a former religiously intact divine setting. This corresponds to Benn’s idealistic characterization of terms used almost synonymously such as spirit or mind, form and art  — especially the lyrical word. Together they form the inventory of what, according to Benn, makes up the aesthetical in the sense of autono-

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mous art in the form of the absolute poem. This is for Benn nothing less than the metaphysical realm of what he refers to as “Unbewegtes” (the inert), a kind of final idealism of oneness: “eine Sphäre, die ruht, die nie aufgehoben werden kann, die abschließt: die ästhetische Sphäre” (AvS 159; a sphere that rests, that is never superseded, that contains: the aesthetic sphere). What Benn calls the “Wort von antikem Klang: Verhängnis” (EuR 510; word with an ancient ring to it: doom) on an existential level in reference to Nietzsche, he considers a “Zwang zur Integration” (compulsion toward integration) when examining it from the perspective of aesthetic history (EuR 511). He means “Entwicklung” (EuR 511; development) in the sense of progressing toward an aesthetic objectivity in its different historical manifestations, which all found their conclusion with Nietzsche. Of course, this does not mean, according to Benn, that with Nietzsche the problematic nature of the expressive world (EuR 510) can be seen as theoretically resolved and that one can subsequently proceed to a rule-based practice (techné) in the sense of applied poetics. Nonetheless, it remains true that no one can go back to before Nietzsche. This means that the “Problematik der Ausdruckswelt” (EuR 510; problematic nature of the world of expression) cannot be resolved by reducing the aesthetic to the subjective. Yet Benn fails to draw precisely this conclusion, although he does hint at it at a certain point in the 1951 lecture. The weak point in his inconsistent theory (where he seems, in fact, to be trying to avoid being exact) is that he plays with the idea of an “objective” aesthetics of the word while falling back on subjectivity when it comes to drawing his conclusions. However, he seems to have embraced post-Nietzschean aesthetics when in his lecture he cites the above-mentioned passage of Goethe’s that claims that at its highest point, poetry seems totally external or outward. I believe there is a simple reason for this inconsistency on Benn’s part: looking back, he realized that he had deliberately avoided coming to this conclusion for a long time — not so much in his literary practice but more so in his theory. This is evident, for example, in his “Zur Problematik des Dichterischen” (Problematic Aspects of Poetry),13 an essay from 1930 in which he refers to Indian meditative culture and its yoga-tradition, and the idea of the poetological supremacy of prelogical inwardness. This idea is conveyed by the notion of physical and mental unity, the latter being envisioned as both mystical and biological. Considered phylogenetically in terms of the brain, this poetic inwardness, which is understood as both cerebral (in a physiological sense) and existential, represents the ancient source of creativity, and leaves “Dasein (Da-sein), [erstarrt in] Bewusstheit, ewig sinnlos, ewig qualbestürmt” (SuS 154; existence [exsistence], [frozen forever] in consciousness without importance and under the eternal siege of misery). Only the possibility of a Dionysian

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submersion of existence in the “Verlöschen im Außersich des Rausches oder des Vergehens” (extinction in the rave of delirium or dissolution), what Benn refers to as “hyperämische Metaphysik” (hyperaemic metaphysics), seems to remain, allowing Benn to resist what he sees as the tendency of modern consciousness toward the anaemia of the logical concept through what he calls “südliche Zermalmung” (SuS 154; southern destruction). In this early idea of consciousness-smashing  — or “Wirklichkeitszertrümmerung” (reality-smashing)  — poetry, and in accordance with Benn’s hyperaemic sense of aesthetic subjectivity, the lyrical self takes priority or holds sway over language as pure material, as mere matter.14 At the same time, however, the “südliche Wort” (SuS 153; southern word) has to trigger this poetic ecstasy, thus initiating the process of aesthetic production. A theoretical inconsistency is already apparent here, as this “southern word” with its attendant ideas of delirium and “Wallung” (seething), which are supposed to trigger the process, finally itself becomes the linguistic product of the aesthetic production process, word material. For only as a pure component of a linguistic work of art can it come into being as the “assoziatives Motiv” (SuS 153; associative motif) it was credited with having unleashed. Against the background of his own work or even the work of Nietzsche, Benn avoids a genuine clarification of the inside-outside correlation in the binary gyre of ideological and poetological thought that occurs in Problems of Poetry. After all — as Benn puts it in a slight generalization — the poem alone is the “Schauplatz” (theater) where all such conflicts, or “Seinskämpfe” as he calls them, have to take place (EuR 511). In the modern poem, “Probleme der Zeit, der Kunst, der inneren Grundlagen unserer Existenz” (problems of time, art, the internal grounds of our existence) connect with the question of the I, “die Frage nach dem Ich,” and, in Benn’s terms, all the sphinxes and images of Sais are mixed into the answer: “alle Sphinxe und Bilder von Sais mischen sich in die Antwort ein” (EuR 511). Following his list of four characteristics that disqualify a poem from being “exorbitant,” which he sees as the main criterion of poetry, inasmuch as it should originate from the poet’s tragic self-experience, Benn finally arrives at the “Vorgang beim Entstehen eines Gedichts” (EuR 514; procedure that brings a poem into being). The initial phase of this coming into being is supposedly structured in two ways: It must have “1. einen dumpfen schöpferischen Keim [und] 2. Worte” (1. a slumbering creative core [and] 2. words), somehow familiar to him although still only in the process of “becoming.” In other words, poetry needs “eine psychische Materie” (psychic matter) on one hand, and linguistic matter on the other. Thirdly, there must be a golden thread leading out of the labyrinth of this bipolar tension, “einen Ariadnefaden, der ihn aus dieser

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bipolaren Spannung herausführt” (EuR 514). What prompts the accomplishment of this task is the same mysterious force, “das Rätselhafte,” that spun the golden thread and yet remains unexplained, the navel of the poem in Freudian terms. Instead of an explanation of the precise nature of this mysterious force, it is merely couched in terms of an “inner guidance,” and likened by Benn to Friedrich Schiller’s idea of “Freiheit am Bande der Notwendigkeit” (freedom bound to necessity). Since the circumstances of a poem’s genesis as Benn has described them here are, he himself admits, “merkwürdig” (strange), in his further explanation of the process, he divides it into two consecutive steps: Irgendetwas in Ihnen schleudert ein paar Verse heraus oder tastet sich mit ein paar Versen hervor, irgendetwas anderes in Ihnen nimmt diese Verse sofort in die Hand, legt sie in eine Art Beobachtungsapparat, ein Mikroskop, prüft sie, färbt sie, sucht nach pathologischen Stellen. (EuR 515; my italics) [Something within you thrusts out some verses or moves itself forward carefully by means of a few verses, while something else within you picks up these verses right away, places them into some kind of observational apparatus, a microscope, assesses them, dyes them, seeks out pathological spots.]

Despite all his experimental scientific metaphors, what exactly this mysterious something is, or indeed the actual nature of the two steps by which it generates the poem, remains vague. These deficits are most likely due to the fact that the entire process is located in an only partially differentiated interior space: Ist das erste vielleicht naiv, ist das zweite ganz etwas anderes: raffiniert und skeptisch. Ist das erste vielleicht subjektiv, bringt das zweite die objektive Welt heran, es ist das formale, das geistige Prinzip. (EuR 515) [If the first is, perhaps, naïve, the second is something totally different: shrewd and sceptical. If the first is perhaps subjective, the second brings the objective world about, it is the formal principle, the mental principle.]

Remarkably this inner course of action also includes — after the first step of creative outburst a moment of what might be described as (pseudo-) empirical practice. The unprocessed and obviously as yet not even written verse-material has been made objective, but only to a point, enabling it to be reflected on in a testing or examination procedure. However, although it exists in this limited objective sense, it has not yet fully come into being as an actual poem, as it were. This whole process is taking place, after all,

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inside poetic subjectivity, in the Innerlichkeit of a poetic consciousness. One would have to understand its “space” in terms of a gradual process of opening up to the outer sphere. Thus the “objektive Welt” (objective world) is, ironically perhaps, brought closer or attained by an opening up of the subjective sphere, into which the objective can then penetrate. However, carrying out poietic activity means opening up in both the passive and active senses, a co-creation of the same world of the word by a mutual interpenetration of these two spheres. The process of the poem’s formalization (the second, “technical” stage of the aesthetic process) lifts the barrier between self and world. Benn’s description of the poetic process is perhaps too generalizing to be truly illuminating. The same applies to his ensuing remarks on form, which he describes as that which makes “der menschliche Bestand” (the general human condition) into poetry by making its content “autochthonic” (giving its proper or appropriate grounds), ferrying it (in the sense of ushering in by metaphor), and using it to generate fascination out of words: “[was den] Inhalt autochton macht, ihn trägt, aus ihm mit Worten Faszination macht”; referring to Emil Staiger, a prominent literary scholar at the time, Benn even goes so far as to consider form itself to be “der höchste Inhalt” (EuR 516; the highest content of all). If Benn’s audience expected him to make an innovative case for poetic formalism at this point, or had hopes of an explanation of a poem’s design that departed from the hoary old chestnuts of subjectivity versus objectivity, they would have been disappointed. Still, right at the beginning of his lecture Benn dismisses the commonly held view that a poem arises from a melancholy mood brought on by, say, looking at heath or a sunset (EuR 505). He insists on a fundamental difference between “das neue Gedicht, die Lyrik” (the new poem, poetry) and “Gedichten der Gelegenheit und der Jahreszeiten” (occasional and seasonal poetry) in order to distinguish his artistic concept of modernism from the layman’s sentimental approach to romanticism (EuR 505–6).15 In fact, Benn considers the product of the poetic process, the “Kunstprodukt,” to be at the opposite end of the spectrum from what he calls “das Emotionelle, das Stimmungsmäßige, das Thematisch-Melodiöse” (EuR 506; the emotional, the atmospheric, something based on a melodic theme), resulting rather out of “Bewusstheit, kritischer Kontrolle [einschließlich] introspektiv-kritischer Tätigkeit” (EuR 506; deliberateness, critical control [including] introspective critical activity). Although Benn sees lyrical production in terms of a rationally controlled process, it is, apparently, simultaneously a result of attributing to the word a barely rational or logical, almost sacral quality. In the case of real poets (as opposed to, Benn says, novelists, or other creative writers), the word vibrates with the movement of the poet’s very existence, “nimmt . . . die unmittelbare Bewegung seiner Existenz auf” (EuR 507).

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The existential moment, which Benn here suggests is crucial, sheds very little light, however, on the entire procedure in terms of poetics. Nevertheless, Benn’s elaborations always revert to conventional ideas of the lyrical self as the ontopoetical creator of form when the theoretical search for objective knowledge of a poem’s make-up finds itself unable to progress. Expressing his opposition to the notion of an “isolierte Form, eine Form an sich” (isolated form, form in itself), Benn claims that form itself is existence, the existential mission of the artist, his goal: “Sie [Form] ist das Sein, der existentielle Auftrag des Künstlers, sein Ziel” (EuR 516; Form is Being, the existential task of the artist). To reach this goal, he suggests using a conventional three-phase model. The artist first witnesses in a commons-or-garden fashion, for example, an autumnal scene in a park, which then, in the second instance, becomes  — through perception  — an object of consciousness, that finally, in a third step, finds expression through form. Stefan George, whom Benn cites as an examplary artist in this sense, “ist sich seiner Gefühle bewusst, beobachtet sie und schreibt” (is aware of his feelings, observes them, and writes them down), using the words that he knows have been allocated to him: “er kennt die ihm gemäße Zuordnung der Worte, formt mit ihnen” (EuR 516). This led, in George’s case, to one of the most beautiful and formally fascinating autumn- and garden-poems of our time, written in three four-line stanzas whose form fascinated his contemporaries (EuR 516). In the process just described, all the notable phenomena take place inside  — in other words, in the reflected treatment of perceived mood and its conversion into poetry. However, how sensory impressions develop into feelings, which in turn become consciousness and finally take form — all this remains as vague as Benn’s claim that the resulting form is able to fascinate so enduringly. While aspects of the aesthetics of reception remain almost entirely disregarded, Benn, in his concentration on the aesthetics of production, hardly goes beyond acclaiming form; elements connected with action (the production or execution of the actual poem) and the empirical continue to refer back to inspiration-oriented ideas of creativity. Regardless of Benn’s self-inscription into symbolist, expressionist, surrealist and aestheticist16 strands of modernity, in the end his poetological thinking fails to steer clear of the pull of the idealistic gravitational field of German aesthetics of genius and the tradition of inwardness. Around 1950, Benn’s criticism targets stereotypical German high expectations regarding aesthetics where “immer alles sofort tiefsinnig und dunkel und allhaft sein [soll]” (EuR 516; immediately everything always has to be deep and dark and all-encompassing). Aside from these pronouncements, other polemical comments such as “als ob ein Gedanke kein Gefühl ist” (EuR 534; as if a thought were not a feeling) might have gone on to trigger poetological reflection on emotion, enabling its emancipation from

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mood as the focus of poetry of experience. But, while Benn declares the poem to be “ein so komplexes Gebilde, daß es in allen seinen Kettenreaktionen zu übersehen, wirklich sehr schwierig ist” (EuR 534; so complex a chain of reactions that it is difficult to comprehend totally), the intellectual opportunities inherent in such suggestive claims remain not fully explored and appreciated. Similarly, banishing “das Stimmungsmäßige” (EuR 506; atmospherics) to the sphere of trivial literature forfeits the possibility of using the term in any analytical description of the making of poetry that goes beyond the idea of emotional subjectivity common in the history and theory of aesthetics. This the poetologist Benn could only have accomplished by lending an ear to the semantic echoes arising from the long buried connotations of the noun Stimmung (EuR 505), quite familiar to the poet Benn: Worte, Worte  — Substantive! Sie brauchen nur die Schwingen zu öffnen und Jahrtausende entfallen ihrem Flug  .  .  .  — aller Leichtsinn, alle Wehmut, alle Hoffnungslosigkeit des Geistes werden fühlbar aus den Schichten eines Querschnitts von Begriff. (EuR 520) [Words, words  — nouns! They have but to spread their wings and millennia fall out of their span  .  .  .  — all the carelessness, the grief, the hopelessness of the spirit become palpable from the layers exposed by a cross-section of concept.]

Benn’s poetic use of terms implies clearly that Stimmungen (moods) can be encoded and decoded. His claim that fascination results from form is founded on the possibility that feelings can be linguistically deciphered, first by perception, and then conscious reflection. Using George’s frequently quoted poem “Komm in den totgesagten Park und schau!” (Come into the park they say is dead and look!), Benn (re)constructs the mood-experience, casting it not as just mood but as experience, and hence not merely something exclusively internal. According to generic expectations, it consists of a garden, a park, “Herbst, blauer Himmel, weiße Wolken, etwas Wehmut über den Triften, ein Abschiedstag” (EuR 516; autumn, blue skies, white clouds, some melancholy cast over the meadows, a day of parting). In their references to landscape and season, the mood-elements of the poem are “objective,” defining at first an external field of perception. Only after that does its conversion take place, making it into a proto-structural field for the “dumpfen schöpferischen Keim” (slumbering creative core), transforming melancholic feelings into fascinating words (EuR 517). The Stimmungen cast in words by George’s and Benn’s poetry and mainly delineated by the outward space are thus induced by sensory perception.17 As phenomena, moods exist prior to feelings, afterwards as consciousness, and then their poetic formalization sets in and they become feasible as verse, rhyme, or rhythm.

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In this regard, however — that is, as phenomenal data that inform the language-material, Stimmungen are not considered in Benn’s poetological reflection. Their primary poetological position has been transcended, even though it is precisely here that we find the perceptively and sensually charging force of words that appears so “faszinierend” (EuR 518) in the form of poems. Only the second step, whereby consciousness observes feelings, receives poetological attention: “Das Bewußtsein wächst in die Worte hinein, das Bewußtsein transzendiert die Worte.  .  .  . Das Wort ist der Phallus des Geistes, zentral verwurzelt” (EuR 518; Consciousness grows into the words, consciousness transcends the words. . . . The word is the phallus of the spirit, centrally rooted). While word’s objective existence qua manifest moods in external space is played down here, the subjective dimension of poetry is blown up beyond all proportion as expressive libido-centered conscience. Benn centers his poetology of the spirit on consciousness  — even with regard to the aesthetics of words and the logic of symbols. Yet he has to grant priority to mental over linguistic substance where his poetology conflicts with a modernity that he admires and that focuses on the autonomy, purity, and materiality of word-art; according to Benn, this starts with the French school (including Poe) and progresses via Hofmannsthal all the way through to Eliot.18 In the face of an exaggerated idealization of poésie pure, Benn not only proclaims the indestructible sediment of mental matter in poetry, he even goes so far as to declare it poetry’s central premise, claiming that: Hinter jedem Gedicht ja immer wieder unübersehbar der Autor steht, sein Wesen, sein Sein, seine innere Lage, auch die Gegenstände treten ja nur im Gedicht hervor, weil sie vorher seine Gegenstände waren. . . . Im Grunde also meine ich, es gibt keinen anderen Gegenstand für die Lyrik als den Lyriker selbst. (EuR 517) [Behind every poem the author always remains clearly visible, his essence, his being, his inner situation — even the subjects that show up in a poem only do so because they were his before. . . . What I basically mean is: poetry has no other subject than the poet himself.]

With this thesis about the ineradicable and inextricable sym-presence of author-in-poem, an explanation of the “Beziehung des lyrischen Ich zum Wort” (EuR 518; relationship between the lyrical “I” and the word) becomes even more urgent). Ultimately, for Benn words are not just a matter of self-representation, or mere vehicles for meaning: “sie sind einerseits Geist, aber haben andererseits das Wesenhafte und Zweideutige der Dinge der Natur” (EuR 518; on the one hand they are spirit, but on the other they share in the essence and ambiguities of nature). Benn however disregards at this point exactly this natural physical essence or natural

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materiality of words in a new version of his Flimmerhaar metaphor of poetry of the 1920s, whereby the poet, imagined covered in tiny sensory hairs, feels his way to words. But, rather than explain how exactly the “Buchstaben” (separate letters) in these felt words ring “akustisch und emotionell in unserem Bewusstsein” (acoustically and emotionally in our consciousness) as items of nature in a kind of natural semantics, he then directs our attention toward their artefact-like qualities and the individual letters’ perceptible form as “schwarze Letter,” black marks on the white page (EuR 518–19). As such, they form a “Zwischenschicht zwischen Natur und Geist” (intermediate  / intermediary layer between nature and mind); they no longer function as a medium for moods (Stimmungen) arising from experiencing — for example, moon, bush, and vale as they were experienced two hundred years ago (EuR 519). Rather, the medial quality of words is restricted to communication of the mind (or spirit) with itself, whereby the word is “ein Kunstprodukt, . . . etwas selber erst vom Geist Geprägtes, technisch Hingebotenes” (EuR 519; an art-product, . . . something itself first coined by the spirit only, technically submitted), thus serving the self-referentiality of the spirit/mind within monologist poetry). The ascription of nature and ambiguity to words is implied by their art-character as “Chiffre” (cipher), allowing the spirit to decipher itself as creator of a second nature, namely art (EuR 519). These dialectics — concealed half-heartedly by Benn’s zoological metaphors  — show, as Benn suggests himself at the end of his presentation, more of Hegel’s influence19 than one might at first suspect, given his adherence to Nietzsche’s gospel for artists. Benn’s absolute poem corresponds to Hegel’s absolute spirit. The spirit’s phenomenology  — fleeing this world into the world of the idea — corresponds to the spirit’s poetology — fleeing the outer world for the inner, neither of which allows a ready comparison to seaorganisms covered with tiny sensory hairs as a metaphor for poets made susceptible to words. In the context of the 1951 presentation, the focus is not primarily on the self, intoxicated with words in all its existential crisis of “Zusammenhangsdurchstoßung” and “Wirklichkeitszertrümmerung” (EuR 519; context-puncturing and reality-smashing). Compared to 1923, the “Spezialthema” (EuR 517; special topic) of the word is more clearly accentuated, but Benn’s poetology has not developed accordingly, remaining preoccupied with the idea of poetic subjectivity. Language is compared to the dark “Umwelt des Meers” (thalassic realm), a futile environment, feasible only inasmuch as the poetic self is imagined with tactile hairs that reach out toward the “herangetasteten Worte” (words contacted), growing poetically dense and semantically charged (EuR 518–19). This apparently blind subject who tentatively feels for poetic meaning has power to illumine the linguistic deeps by metaphysical action and to turn it into

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a habitable environment perhaps not for ordinary people, but for the lonely servants of “Gegenglück” (anti-happiness) and “Geist” (spirit):20 because, to speak after Nietzsche, the world is real here only as aesthetic occurrence. Having looked at Benn’s increasingly dualistical and hardened worldview and how it is connected to an aesthetics that prefers subjectivity to objectivity, spirit to nature, and the self to language,21 we will turn to the question of whether this onesidedness (imprisonment in the subjective sphere) is based on certain philosophical underpinnings the relevance of which to his poetology Benn fails to recognize because of their non-aesthetic provenance and their logic that is considered antithetical to “art.” Benn’s conceptual incorporation of elements of philosophical theories of spirit and reflection from German idealism into his poetological thinking appears to me neither sound nor justified by his arguments. He speaks about the “Probleme der Lyrik” while already presenting — without extensive consideration  — what are only apparent solutions. Yet he fails to make concrete the relationship between word, form, and language on one hand, and existence, self, and consciousness on the other — nor does he produce a convincing, theoretically satisfying exposition of the making of poetry. It remains unclear why the subject must be imagined as depersonalized and subordinated to the objective principle of his/her artistic work. One central problem of poetry — namely, how we should imagine the passage from a reality outside of language to a reality inside language is ignored — or carelessly passed over. To me this seems symptomatic of Benn’s mental fixation on terms such as spirit (Geist) and consciousness, overburdened by philosophical tradition and combined by Benn unsystematically into essayistic form, and used interchangeably with terms such as Being, Existence, or Inner Situation. By contrast, his incisive image of sensory hairs (“Flimmerhaare”) clearly puts the main emphasis on the physical, natural, and animalistic rather than on mental concerns. It is not, however, the thoughtful or the “brain-animal” that is portrayed here, as is the case in Benn’s Double Life, but rather a sensual organism, feeling with its entire body, that is now the model for the poet. We might expect this to lead to a poetology of the senses rather than of the spirit. This sensory-hair covered organism, an “animalische[s] Sinnesorgan vor der Differenzierung in gesonderte sensuelle Energien” (EuR 518; animalistic sensual organ prior to any differentiation into separate sensual energies) holds a great deal of unrealized potential, with its suggestion of a sensorium commune, initiating the lyrical process. This active aesthetic mood — prior to any differentiation into distinct perceptive spheres (inside/outside)  — is particularly important for the lyrical self, the lyrical “I” with antennae, as it were. Sensory hair is, according to Benn, “das allgemeine Tastorgan, die Beziehung an sich zur Umwelt des Meers” (the general tactile organ, the original connection

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to the thalassic sphere) and, correspondingly, mood is the synaesthetic medium of perception, connecting the lyrical I to the world (EuR 518). This also means: connecting it to language. However, moods include nonlanguage references to the world as well as the prereflective self-references of the lyrical “I,” and make perceptible the transitory fields connecting language and existence, word and consciousness, or form and self. Benn repeatedly invokes these “sinn- und stimmungsgeschwängerten, seltsam geladenen Worte” (EuR 524; strangely charged words, soaked with meaning and mood;) as the material of poetry, but fails to come to terms with them poetologically. Yet a possible poetology of mood on a sensual basis employing the sensory-hair model is not compatible with a philosophical dialectics of the spirit, as Benn assumes it, nor does it fit into poetological traditions of internal subjectivity with their pastorals of the heart. Benn does not follow the paths opened up by the idea of the sensory-hairs reaching out for meaning that might lead beyond a poetology centered on consciousness. His failure to do so may reveal the enduring impact of idealist philosophy in literary aesthetics throughout the twentieth century. However, the way to avoid these subjective philosophical traps in poetological thought would lie precisely in an engagement with language of the kind successfully exercised by analytic philosophy.22 Benn seems to hesitate, as if standing at a crossroads, when he speaks at the beginning of his presentation about “die modernen Lyriker [, die] uns geradezu eine Philosophie der Komposition und eine Systematik des Schöpferischen [bieten]” (EuR 507; modern poets who present what amounts to a philosophy of composition and a systematized concept of creativity). Considering himself to be a modern poet, Benn places himself in the symbolist tradition, actively resisting post-avant-garde tendencies toward what he dubbed “Neutönerei” (new-sound-invention) and “Lettrismus” (letterism), which stipulated that “das Wort von jedem extrapoetischen Wert gereinigt werden muß und die in Freiheit gesetzten Buchstaben eine musikalische Einheit bilden sollen” (EuR 509; the word be cleansed of all extrapoetic significance and the liberated letters form a new musical unity). Only when these poetics evolve into a new lyrical diction that falls into the hands of one who permeates it “mit seinem großen Innern” (with his great inner substance), can it result in “strahlende Schöpfungen” (EuR 509; radiant creations). In Problems of Poetry his theoretical interest in words only reaches the point where they correspond to his formal scheme and “Systematik des Schöpferischen” (EuR 507; systematics of creativity). The keyword of this system for Benn is the word existence. Existence is fundamental to every poem. It is integral to its words. It brings the language material to poetic life. In the context of existence, he even refers to “Flaubert, den der Anblick einiger Säulen der Akropolis ahnen ließ,

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was mit der Anordnung von Sätzen, Worten, Vokalen an unvergänglicher Schönheit erreichbar wäre” (EuR 510; Flaubert, who at the sight of some pillars of the Acropolis, envisioned all the immortal beauty made possible by the arrangement of sentences, words, and vowels). With these words, Benn is actually quoting himself in an earlier passage from his Double Life called “Absolute Prosa” (Absolute Prose). Benn continues to move here toward a poetology with a basic structure already drafted by Pascal, including word-aesthetic elements such as rhythm, sound, and the “Wiederkehr von Vokal und Konsonant” (recurring vowels and consonants) and aiming at achieving “Vollkommenheit durch die Anordnung von Worten” (AvS 132; perfection through the arrangement of words). Benn also propounds his idea of a desubjectivated consciousness here, using a poetologically revised version of the idea of the Phenotype. With this theory, Benn’s poetological thinking turns away from subjectivity — as imagined by the philosophy of reflection — seeing subjectivity as fundamentally medially constructed: Der Phänotyp ist das Individuum einer jeweiligen Epoche, das die charakteristischen Züge dieser Epoche evident zum Ausdruck bringt, mit dieser Epoche identisch ist, das sie repräsentiert. (AvS 143–44) [The Phenotype is the individual of any given period, clearly expressing the characteristics of this period, and identical with this period, which it represents.]

Through its supraindividual representative function, the phenotype develops into what Benn calls “den Existentiellen” (PuS 155, AvS 133; the existential one). Due to a lack of inner substance and psychological coherence, it embodies its time and acts according to the aesthetical imperative: “be absolute in every sign in every word. That is the crisis!” (Benn, quoted in Keith-Smith 147). By experiencing the loss of the outer linguistic world as the initial momentum of the poetic process, the “existential one” turns artistic: the crisis is transformed into creativity. Benn thus idealizes the phenotype, which is already estranged from all things moral and emotional, as well as from anything “was nach Stimmung aussieht” (that looks like mood): “Die Existenz ist die Stimmung, die ihn bewegt und die er fordert, hart und unaufhörlich” (PuS 152–53; Existence is the mood that moves him and that he relentlessly demands). Consequently, the phenotypic, that is the transsubjectivity that constitutes the mood of existence, explicitly forms the poetological center of Benn’s absolute prose, but is only implicitly the category of existence in the Problems of Poetry.23 This becomes evident if we accept that existence is based on the phenotype that gives collective experience form and configures historical constellations, and by consequence functions as objective mood. Thus, this phenotype existence is incompatible with any arguments based on the

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subject. Precisely this line of reasoning however runs through the Problems of Poetry, which takes refuge in solutions based on idealist concepts of spirit-mind, consciousness, and creation. This is perhaps somewhat weakened by Benn’s invoking a power inherent to language itself, and the “schwer erklärbare Macht des Wortes, das löst und fügt” (EuR 520; barely explicable power of the word, that separates and conjoins). Here the quality of aura (inherent to poetic language) forms  — but, only at first glance paradoxically — the otherness that exists in juxtaposition to the lofty autonomy of the lyrical self. The magic objectivism of language arises in contradistinction to a poetological subjectivism, partly lifting off into the sphere of creation, partly subordinating itself to the power of the word (EuR 520). Words obtain a fetish-character particularly in Benn’s poetology of existence. Here they are a medium of mystic participation in either the lyrical self with its onto- and phylogenetic layers, or in the prosaic phenotype with its attendant epoch, or in self-transcendent consciousness. According to Benn, words by themselves have a latent existence that: auf entsprechend Eingestellte als Zauber wirkt und sie befähigt, diesen Zauber weiterzugeben. Dies scheint mir das letzte Mysterium zu sein, vor dem unser immer waches, durchanalysiertes, nur von gelegentlichen Trancen durchbrochenes Bewußtsein seine Grenze fühlt. (EuR 521) [affects like magic those who are appropriately attuned to them, enabling them to pass on this magic. This seems to me the ultimate mystery where our consciousness, ever wakeful, imbued with analysis, and rarely interrupted by trance, senses its limits.]

Conclusion Benn’s ideologically grounded poetological dualism aims for the “Umspannung zweier Pole, dem Ich und seinem Sprachbestand” (EuR 524; encompassment of two poles, the self and its language material). The lyrical self “arbeitet an einer Art Wunder, einer kleinen Strophe . . ., an einer Ellipse, deren Kurven erst auseinanderstreben, aber dann sich gelassen ineinander senken” (EuR 524; works on a type of miracle, a little stanza . . ., on an ellipse whose curves initially move apart, then descend calmly toward each other). Radically transcending the poetic subject into decentered “Bewußtseinszustände” (conditions of consciousness), is connected with “unmotivierte Stimmungswechsel” (unmotivated changes of mood) and with aesthetic intoxications: “Berauschung durch Melodien, Nichtschlafenkönnen, Abstoßungen, Übelkeiten” (EuR 525; musical delirium, insomnia, expulsions, nausea).

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These rationally insoluble “Krisen des Bewußtseins” (crises of consciousness) are confronted by the “schwer erklärbare Macht des Wortes, das löst und fügt” (barely explicable power of the word, that separates and conjoins) at the level of consciousness as well as at the level of speech (EuR 520). The postmetaphysical “Wirklichkeiten und Überwirklichkeiten” (EuR 524; realities and suprarealities) of the lyrical self correspond to the postreligious integrative power and transcendence of poetic language. The late Benn tends toward a prioritizing of the material, by ascribing those sacral moments to words. To this extent his poetological thinking is hugely important to the decades after 1945. Due to Benn’s auratic upgrading of the single word, he advocates an opening up of poetic language to “Slang-Ausdrücke, Argots, Rotwelsch, von zwei Weltkriegen in das Sprachbewußtsein hineingehämmert, ergänzt durch Fremdworte, Zitate, Sportjargon, antike Reminiszenzen” (EuR 524; slang expressions, argots, thieves’ cant, hammered into minds and their speech by two world wars, supplemented by foreign terms, quotations, expressions from sports, ancient reminiscences). This postmodern direction, inspired by avant-garde concepts of modernity as montage, self-dissolution, and linguistic self-reflection, is of course typical only for a small part of his poetry and late prose. It is sustained poetologically only by scattered passages and ideas, such as the “Menschen in Anführungszeichen” (human beings in quotation marks), the “Roboterstil” (robotstyle), his “Phase II” or remark about the “unsägliche Leere unserer Roboterexistenz” (unspeakable emptiness of our robot-existence) — none of this however is explained systematically in Benn’s discourse (AvS 153, 162–67). This discourse remains fundamentally faithful to an idealist tradition, with its primary focus on poetological subjectivity, arguing in favor of a “Fanatismus zur Transzendenz” (AvS 235; fanatacism for transcendence) and the dualism of life and spirit. As a consequence, Benn’s oeuvre is arguably of diminished significance for those looking for innovative literary aesthetics after the Second World War. In terms of the history of poetics, the Problems of Poetry belongs more to the period before 1945; its impact on the subsequent development of German poetry and its theory was quite limited.24 Nevertheless, Benn’s presentation of the question, so pressing to him, of the possibility of a poetologically grounded Transzendenz capable of combining aspects of poetic inwardness with material aspects of language, remains an important contribution to postwar poetics.

Notes 1

Facing the futility of world history and human suffering, Benn’s poetry is characterized by a melancholic stance after 1934. An Apollonian consciousness of form in the Statische Gedichte replaces the Dionysian gesture of dissociation that

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had prevailed in earlier phases of Benn’s oeuvre. This poetry collection was published in 1948 after the ban on publishing Benn’s works was withdrawn; it would establish his second, post-Expressionist reputation. 2

Gottfried Benn, Gesammelte Werke in vier Bänden, ed. Dieter Wellershoff, 4 vols. (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1989), 4:164. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using abbreviations and page numbers as follows: vol. 1, Gedichte (G); vol. 2, Prosa und Szenen (PuS); and vol. 4, Autobiographische und vermischte Schriften (AvS). Translations by Stefan Hajduk. 3

See Peter Uwe Hohendahl, “Zwischen Moderne und Postmoderne: Gottfried Benns Aktualität,” Studi Germanici 23 (1985): 47–63. See also Gottfried Willem, “Benns Phase II und die Problematik einer Postmoderne,” in Gottfried Benn 1886 bis 1956: Referate des Essener Colloquiums, ed. Horst Albert Glaser (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1989), 9–30. 4

Agis Sideras, Paul Celan und Gottfried Benn: Zwei Poetologien nach 1945 (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005). 5

Gottfried Benn, Gesammelte Werke in der Fassung der Erstdrucke, 4 vols., critically revised and edited by Bruno Hillebrand (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1989), 3:373. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using abbreviations and page numbers as follows: vol. 3, Essays und Reden (EuR); and vol. 4, Szenen und Schriften (SuS). Translations by Stefan Hajduk. 6

In a letter to Oelze dated 2 October 1947, he sees here a cultural-historical and generational problem: “For our generation, the outward/inward problem has undoubtedly been very imminent, visibly and invisibly pervading my latest manuscripts. But perhaps for us it was only a historically stigmatized problem. [.  .  .] After all, Goethe did not experience this conflict. [. . .] In short: if my indications are correct, we are not dealing with a primary problem but rather with a historical one, centering on civilization” (quoted in Regina Weber, Gottfried Benn: Zwischen Christentum und Gnosis [Frankfurt am Main: Lang], 62–63). 7

See Silvio Vietta, “Gottfried Benns Subjektkritik und sein politischer Fehlschritt,” in Gottfried Benn 1886 bis 1956, 229–42. 8

“Ausdruckswelt” is the title Benn used for his essays written during his period of inner emigration and published in 1949. This is pointed out by Jürgen Schröder, who convincingly portrays Benn’s survival during the Third Reich in the sense of an artistic resistance to National Socialist barbarism (“‘Es knistert im Gebälk’: Gottfried Benn  — Ein Emigrant nach Innen,” in Aspekte der künstlerischen Inneren Emigration 1933 bis 1945 [Munich: edition text+kritik, 1994], 31–52). Harald Steinhagen interprets the world of expression as retreat (“Die Kunst als eigentliche Aufgabe des Lebens: Gottfried Benns Rückzug in die Ausdruckswelt,” in Gottfried Benn 1886 bis 1956, 75–98, and “Probleme der Poetik oder Die Kunst als eigentliche Aufgabe des Lebens,” in Gottfried Benn: The Galway Symposium, ed. Paul Foley Casey and Timothy J. Casey [Galway: Galway UP, 1990], 12–30). 9

Wellershoff deals with the term existence in biographical terms and in reference to Benn’s contemporaries (Dieter Wellershoff, Gottfried Benn: Phänotyp dieser Stunde: Eine Studie über den Problemgehalt seines Werkes [Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1958], 139–69). For an overview of the current state of research on

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Benn, including the issue of existence, see Christian Schärf, Der Unberührbare: Gottfried Benn — Dichter im 20. Jahrhundert (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2006). 10

Bernhard Sorg (Das lyrische Ich: Untersuchungen zu deutschen Gedichten von Gryphius bis Benn [Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1984]) and Eva M. Lüders (“Das lyrische Ich und das gezeichnete Ich: Zur späten Lyrik Gottfried Benns,” Wirkendes Wort 15 [1965]: 361–85) refer to Benn’s lyrical self/“I” from the point of view of the terminology of literary criticism. 11

See Bruno Hillebrand, Artistik und Auftrag: Zur Kunsttheorie von Benn und Nietzsche (München: Nymphenburger, 1966) and “Gottfried Benn und Friedrich Nietzsche,” in Nietzsche und die deutsche Literatur, ed. Bruno Hillebrand (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1978), 185–210; and Theo Meyer, “Affinität und Distanz. Gottfried Benns Verhältnis zu Nietzsche,” in Gottfried Benn 1886 bis 1956, 99–128. 12

Translation from The Dublin Review (1923): 122.

13

On this text, see the detailed interpretation in Thomas Ehrsam, Spiel ohne Spieler: Gottfried Benns Essay “Zur Problematik des Dichterischen” (Zürich: Artemis, 1986). 14

Oskar Sahlberg analyzes the poetics of the early oeuvre, focusing on regression and self-dissolution and their physiological and spiritual aspects (“Gottfried Benns Ekstasen,” in Gottfried Benn zum 100: Geburtstag, ed. W. Müller-Jensen et al. [Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1988], 122–33). 15

“No, this is not how a poem occurs. A poem generally occurs very rarely — a poem is made. If you subtract the mood elements from the rhymes, whatever is still left — if anything is left — is then perhaps a poem” (EuR 505–6). 16

André Lottmann looks at Benn in terms of the tradition of aestheticism as well as in terms of mystery (“Investitionen ins Geheimnis. Zur Ökonomie eines Topos im Spätwerk Gottfried Benns,” PhiN 44 [2008]: 20–34). 17

On this, see also Benn’s remark in his autobiographical writing Double-Life: “Landscape around me — I have always sensed it as a necessary prerequisite for the production of poetry” (AvS 97).

18

“Words are everything [.  .  .] Most famous is the statement by Mallarmé: a poem does not originate from feelings but from words” (EuR 517). 19

Benn concludes by quoting a “great sentence of Hegel’s: ‘Not the Life that fears death and would preserve itself from destruction, but the Life that bears it and maintains itself in it, is the Life of the Spirit’” (EuR 535). Translation from James Hutchinson Stirling, The Secret of Hegel. 2 vols. (London: Longman, 1865), 138. Online edition: http://books.google.ie/books?id=D_AGAAAAc AAJ&pg=PA138&dq=Hegel+%22it+is+the+life+of+the%22&ei=9FZ0SvzKOab UyQS7s5H9Ag#v=onepage&q=Hegel%20%22it%20is%20the%20life%20of%20 the%22&f=false (accessed 01 August 2009). 20

See Benn’s famous poem “Einsamer nie” (G 140; Never More Lonely).

21

See Weber, Gottfried Benn: Zwischen Christentum und Gnosis, for an analysis of Benn’s dualism in terms of religious history, albeit without a poetological account.

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22

Elsewhere Benn himself after all maintains that “der Glaube, es vermöchte sich auch nur die allergeringste geistige Leistung oberhalb der Wortwurzel zu vollziehen, könnte nur auf Unkenntnis beruhen” (SuS 211–13; the belief that even the slightest intellectual achievement is possible beyond the root of the word could only be the result of ignorance). 23

See Sideras, who refers to “Benn’s false use of the term of the existential” (Paul Celan und Gottfried Benn, 96). His view seems to me to surrender the term of existence to the authority of existential philosophy. 24

It should however be noted that the poet Norbert Hummelt, one of the generation of poets born after 1960, considers Benn to have a continuing influence in contemporary literature. Norbert Hummelt, “Mein Onkel Gottfried Benn,” in Lyrik des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Ludwig Arnold (München: edition text+kritik, 1999), 125–37; here, 133.

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9: Concrete Poetry Chris Bezzel das uneindeutige ist das konkrete. [concrete is what’s ambiguous.] — Franz Mon

1

A

S LATE AS 1985, BUT STILL BEFORE he had won the Nobel prize, Günter Grass, who was growing up while the Nazi ban on so-called entartete Kunst (degenerate art) was in force, publicly declared his contempt for abstract art.1 Already as early as 1960, when he was freshly famous after the appearance of Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) in 1959, Grass had termed the avant-garde poet Franz Mon a “laboratory poet.” That was in a speech on poetry held at a writers’ conference held in Berlin.2 Grass’s remark was an allusion to Gottfried Benn, who had spoken favorably in 1954 of a “wordlaboratory.” Grass did not mean to be complimentary when he compared a poem of Franz Mon’s with a German children’s word game that involved repeating one word, for example Blumenkohl (cauliflower), twenty-five times, until it had lost all meaning. In spite of Grass’s criticisms and, later, those of the proponents of engagierte Literatur (politically committed literature), Concrete Poetry flourished in the sixties in Germany. Some authors, such as Helmut Heißenbüttel and, considerably later, Ernst Jandl, were marketable; so was the Wiener Gruppe (Vienna Group), and concrete poems were widely broadcast on radio. However, interest in Concrete Poetry declined after about fifteen years. This was not so much a result of hostile opposition from engagierte Literatur (which is itself now out of fashion) as of the failure of audiences to understand. As Georges Braque said, art is meant to confuse, and Concrete Poetry was highly successful in this regard before its market failure (that is, until the authors could no longer find publishing houses). At the moment, it is impossible to find anything on the market that could be described as provocative or confusing in an aesthetic sense; it would appear that for some time now genuine lyric poetry has been at an impasse,

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even if literary production of a sort continues. There are, however, a few interesting younger poets (by whom I mean people such as Ulrike Draesner or Marion Poschmann), and these few are influenced by Concrete Poetry. In the following, I will focus on describing the poetological principles of Concrete Poetry; however, I cannot provide a complete overview here, or an in-depth criticism of individual poems. It goes without saying that, as with any art movement, the quality of poetry can vary, especially since its radicalism involves greater risk-taking. But I would like (firstly) to outline the basic principles of Concrete Poetry, before (secondly) showing that Concrete Poetry has adopted the legacy of “traditional” poetry (after its termination with Paul Celan), transforming and renewing it particularly in its exploitation of the material qualities of the sign. The artistic avant-garde, as we know it, was not only the innovation of a younger generation, but also a reaction to a societal and cultural crisis; perhaps it is precisely those who speak of an artistic crisis today that would have been talking about “degenerate art” had they been around in the Germany of the thirties. Concrete Poetry is the extension of an art revolution that has been happening since the 1900s. Like other literary movements before it, it has, since the forties, adopted international art movements and transformed them into the medium of poetry.

2 One of the significant achievements of twentieth-century thought was the establishment by Ferdinand de Saussure of a stringent linguistic theory of nonrepresentational signs. At the time, it was legitimate to postulate, as he did with a kind of clairvoyant omniscience, a clear and disembodied concept of the sign that was capable of describing the paradoxical “mechanism of language” in its dualism, the fact that language is not itself “Wesen” (essence). Starting with Saussure’s students, the editors of the Cours de linguistique générale,3 linguistics then effectively proceeded to neglect what can be called the dialectics of langue and parole. Saussure clearly notes that a word realizes its existence by a combination of givens within the oral cavity (faits buccaux) with a mental operation, which is of quite another order.4 This means that every oral communication involves the material word, its phonetic structure in the act of speaking, starting with the voice and its qualities. This combination of “oral” and “mental” becomes more significant the less “speaking” is defined in terms of pure transmission of information: for example, — in relaxed conversation — in mimetic behavior (for example in parodies of other people) — in verbal criticism at both phonetic and lexical levels — in plays on words and jokes.

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In remembered or automated speech, its materiality is hardly ever felt, while in written language it is substituted by a graphic medium involving other associations. Physically, acoustic patternings are what form the material basis of the linguistic sign. No matter how the phoneme boundaries of a spoken language are defined, they must be physically articulated and heard. Saussure hesitates to use the term “signe” (sign) for the dualism of signifier/signified, because his concept is distinct from the Aristotelian tradition of the representational sign. Moreover, with the dialectics of langue and parole he implicitly postulates the existence of a “full sign” that is more than the “complete sign” of langue discussed in the Cours de linguistique générale (II, 4.4). Full signs (my term) are no longer only concerned with the meaning of the signified, but with the “sense” of words, phrases, and texts, unifying langue and parole. And this overall sense has the subjectively felt impulse of material sound at its core, comprising both its acoustic and its articulatory properties (I use the term “impulse” to avoid the concept of “meaning”). Saussure calls the signifier, which together with the signified constitutes the bipartite sign, an image acoustique (acoustic image) only with reference to langue. But the “full sign” of language used as real communication (whether in poetry or elsewhere) is always dependent on the audible sensation of the sign (or, in writing, on a graphic sensation).

3 Die Sprache ist ein musicalisches Ideen Instrument. Der Dichter Rhetor und Philosoph spielen und componieren grammatisch. Eine Fuge ist durchaus logisch und wissenschaftlich  — Sie kann auch poëtisch behandelt werden.5 [Language is a musical instrument for expressing ideas. Poets, philosophers and rhetoricians play and compose grammatically. A fugue is perfectly logical and scientific — It can also be treated poetically.]

Applying Saussure’s theory to poetry, we reach the following formulation: Unlike other linguistic speech acts, poetry is not just performance of the mental signs, but simultaneously a realization of phonetic impulses: it is a traditional, highly developed way of aesthetically realizing a balance between the faits buccaux and the signifieds. In poetry, the phonemes interact in such a way that a “symbolism” hidden unconsciously in their articulation is noticed and felt, hence, that the semantic meaning of the signified is reinforced (or acted against) by the impulse of their articulation (not just by the image acoustique of

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langue). Poetry makes the words speak for themselves. Everyday speech is mainly about information. The sounds of the words can play a certain role but are usually not important; we can rephrase an utterance at any time (for example, if the hearer has not understood the first time). Poetry as we know it so far allows the text itself to speak, and in a specific audible form. What the words say in a poem is dependent on their acoustic shape. This is why poetry is what gets lost in translation. It is only in rational discourse that the semantic meaning counts exclusively; in everyday conversation, as in poetry, the phonetic physicality of speech plays an active role, though it is not patterned poetically. A sound poem is a phonetically idiolectal entity. It gives access to a potential individual language system (the poet’s heightened idiolectal langue), but only via parole. It is a kind of symbolism, a complex of sound-impulses is in a state of tension with normal language. Nonconceptual meaning is crucial to poetry in its final stage. It is generated — by the sound — through metaphor — by the pictorial designation of language itself, from which the discourse is abstracted and textually overdetermined. (Even in successful poetical prose, nonconceptual signification plays a role.) So Grass’s 1960 remark is only true in a formalist sense: if one repeats Blumenkohl (cauliflower) several times in succession, it will become desemanticized, but the sound acquires a nonconceptually signifying value in the process, one that is an additional expression of meaning and can be assigned an aesthetic function.6 This describes an underlying poetic structure common to classical poetry and Concrete Poetry. It is part of the legacy of European culture that poetry is an emphatic art. “Emphatic” does not mean that it dramatizes, or that it indulges in pathos or sentimentality. Western poetry (since Sappho) is not just rhythmically patterned word-information; in essence, it is meaning in sonorous form, meaningful music. It is not focused on the depiction of reality by means of signs, but on their “performance,” the re-enactment out loud of what the poet “articulates,” in both senses of the word. This is true during the recital and (later on) in the silent but acoustic re-enactment of the reading in the reader’s inner ear. If we accept this description of poetic articulation, virtually all poetry (including classical poetry such as Goethe’s) is “concrete” in a wider sense, but its concreteness becomes particularly active in the twentieth century, in Dadaism and the poetry of the thirties and forties such as that of Brecht, Jiménez, or Ungaretti. Let me give a straightforward classic example: in the case of Goethe’s well-known poem “Wandrers Nachtlied,” it is easy to paraphrase its literal content, which is (as so often in poetry) fairly trivial.

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Wandrers Nachtlied Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh. In allen Wipfeln spürest du kaum einen Hauch. Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde. Warte nur, balde ruhest du auch. [Wanderer’s Night Song / Over all mountain peaks / is rest. / In all tree-tops / you feel / scarcely a breath. / The small birds are silent in the wood. / Just wait, soon / you will be resting too.]

The text is poetry not only by virtue of its hidden symbolic meaning (dealing with themes of rest and death) but also because of its patterning of phonetic articulations; speaking the sounds i, ü, u, and au involves a downward shift of the tongue within the oral cavity, analogous to the poem’s descriptive progress from the mountain heights and treetops toward the ground. The classic poetic sign is subjective, mimetic and idealistic. The sign in Concrete Poetry is anti-subjective, anti-mimetic, and focused on its realization in performance. While both kinds of poetry are very different, they both agree on the central role of poetic form. In poetry, articulation involves going beyond the phonetic and cognitive-semantic articulating function as Humboldt saw them; it involves a return to the zero level of language, in other words to silence. Every word, every phoneme is an acoustic or graphic construct arising anew from a subjective impulse; it is more concrete than the traditional “idea,” since it is its own content. It is radically subjective, but it is not subjectivistic because it does not arise from a concept of “Ich” (ego). It is, however, spontaneous revelation, affirmation of a material that may come from anywhere. This metasubjectivistic tendency is reflected when Franz Mon declares “Ich befinde mich in einem Kraftfeld von vielem” (I am in a force field of many things).7 No linguistic entity can be without meaning, but meaning that can be separated from the phonetic form cannot be poetic. Therefore, lyric poetry is essentially not translatable. I think that the combined efforts of linguistics and semiotics can lead to a critical poetics that shows European lyrical poetry to be historically coherent. As can be shown in the history of art, modern and abstract art developed from their more traditional antecedents; in much the same way, Concrete Poetry is a consequence of the evolution that began (as far as records show) with Sappho. The debate between representational and abstract art is being resolved at a higher level (see section 5, below), and the same can be said for the dualism of traditional and Concrete Poetry: genuine poetry of both types is “concrete.”

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4 After the catastrophic twentieth century, with its two world wars and its genocides (sic), any uncritical continuation of the literary tradition, particularly in Germany, had become impracticable. After 1945, the need for poetry to criticize history and society became manifest. It became an imperative to shake off the burden of traditional literature. In my view, the only poetry to have drawn the necessary consequences of the crimes against humanity in the twentieth century was that which was, more or less, concrete by virtue of its efforts to avoid bourgeois emotionalism, subjectivism, and idealistic or ideological propaganda. By clinging to the official language of a society that has become entfremdet (alienated), traditional literature can no longer achieve what it wants to: it cannot react critically to the world, or show new possibilities beyond ideology. Theodor W. Adorno, in his famous dictum about the barbarism of writing poetry “after Auschwitz,”8 did not go far enough in his radicalism: he was only referring to the traditional lyrical tone of poetry. Because of his attachment to bourgeois tradition, he did not attack mimetic language itself. (In fact, Paul Celan’s later position is considerably more radical and comes quite close to the materialistic reductionism of Concrete Poetry.) While affirmative worldviews had traditionally predominated in literature, this became impossible after 1945. So-called Kahlschlagliteratur (“clear-cutting” literature) was a first response to the catastrophe of the Second World War. It went to some lengths to show, for example in the poem “Inventur” (Inventory) by Günter Eich,9 that anti-ideological, anti-subjectivistic deconstruction was a necessary prerequisite for a new start. However, in the process it developed a social and psychological “realism” that was itself ideological. Only the adoption of abstract art (already around since 1900) and Concrete Poetry were able to lead to real innovation despite their shortcomings. Critical mannerism (in the style of Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum) did not offer a way out, Gottfried Benn marked an end rather than a beginning, and Paul Celan was only partially innovative. The aim was to avoid the horror of barbarism, rather than trying to describe what cannot be described. Aesthetically, only the play of words, language as game, including linguistic reflection and a distant look at language, parody and satire, were feasible. So-called “realism” had become obsolete. Concrete Poetry began as a movement in the German-speaking world in the early fifties, promoted by the Vienna Group. It is now an international artistic movement with members in Brazil, Canada, the United States, England, France, and Italy. Concrete Poetry can be defined as follows: A “Concrete poem communicates its own structure: structure-content. Concrete Poetry is an

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object in and of itself, not the interpretation of an exterior object. . . . It is word material (sound, visual form, semantic change).”10 The clearest and most uncompromising definition of Concrete Poetry is given by Claus Bremer: “die konkrete poesie ist ihr material. ihr inhalt ist restlos form. ihre form ist restlos inhalt. nicht tüte, nicht hülse” (Concrete Poetry is its own material. Its content is completely form, its form completely content. Not bag, not wrapping).11 Concrete Poetry is social criticism in the form of language criticism, and this makes it political. At the same time, it is semiotic reflection and does not use language just as an instrument: It still remains committed to a concept of autonomous Geist (spirit). Concrete Poetry favors construction over representation, reduction over narration, designation over description, process over product. According to Claus Bremer, it always delivers the “process of finding.” Behind its much-criticized concept of materiality lies an aesthetic materialism that transforms the false opposition of play and seriousness into pleasure, as classical poetry does. The central means to this end involves an alternating emphasis on different linguistic components, a balance of phonology, syntax, and semantics. Concrete Poetry does not transform thoughts into form, as traditional, thematic poetry does; instead, it takes the material (words and phrases) as its point of departure. One important effect of this is that it puts an end to the lyric “I.” The author, inspired by random linguistic material, handles it playfully and examines it critically for its expressive potential. Concrete Poetry set to work on linguistic material under the heading of well-known topics and titles: a word “contains the meaning of its common social use.”12 It follows that the material will either become its own theme, or polythematic texts will emerge, especially where montage and collage are employed (aleatory composition methods were already used in Dada). The meaning of a concrete poem necessarily follows from the perception of words as material. As a construction material, language is not politically neutral but articulated and historically formed, it is never neutral terrain for the play of art. Franz Mon speaks of a “Zusammenfallen von Material und Form” (coincidence of material and form) in successful poems (Mon 27). Concrete Poetry, being realistic, takes coincidence and contingency into account. Beyond subjectivism and fatalism, coincidence as the ruling principle of the world is its topic and content — again in response to the situation after the disaster of two world wars. Concrete Poetry ratified the demise of strictly defined literary genres, which had been heralded by Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein. Long before the linguistic pragmatics of the seventies, it used the word “text” for poetic utterances. In the techniques of collage and montage used by Concrete Poetry, all linguistic registers are potential material.

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It is clear that the poem (Gedicht), defined strictly in traditional genre terms, was already nearing its end with Rainer Maria Rilke; Gottfried Benn can be regarded as a nostalgic reprieve. By the time we get to Hans Arp’s later poetry, it has become possible to speak of an “open text.” The reductionist poems written during the war by Brecht (for example, “Radwechsel”), or Günter Eich’s first postwar poems, both reflect the historic crisis and represent an attempt to start afresh in terms of a new form. They are precursors of Concrete Poetry (as are Helmut Heißenbüttel’s first poems). Collage as practiced in Concrete Poetry was a new form of realism insofar as it corresponded to technical and social reality by recreating the modern practice of skimming texts, as we do when reading a newspaper, or when compelled to read names and slogans as they pass us by in the street. As a poetic practice, pragmatic realism leads to valuable insights into the intertextuality of language. Concrete Poetry assumes that every word, every sentence, every text is intertext. Concrete Poetry does not ignore the given use of language, but it rejects the fiction that language exists in a vacuum. Language is in every instance a realization of the current state of linguistic affairs, or, as Marcel Proust put it, a large part of what we say involves repeating an already existing text.13 Despite its break with the old, the Concrete Poetry of the sixties and seventies is still aware of the great European lyrical tradition. Though it seems to have left behind the structural unity of modern European poetry,14 it retains the idea that poetry should be an act of lyrical creation (poiein), an idea that has been at the heart of lyric poetry since Sappho. These practices are “movements in freedom” (Mon 39); politically, they coincide with German democracy since 1949. When Günter Grass talks of the “Mief der Adenauerzeit” (stuffy atmosphere of the Adenauer era), as he has been doing for decades, he is one-sidedly failing to understand the achievements of the period because of his personal fixation on his cultural upbringing under the Nazi dictatorship. These achievements include the resurrection of international, especially abstract, art movements from the earlier twentieth century.

5 Engagierte Literatur was negation at an abstract level; it merely confronted the establishment with critical and socialist ideas. But, naively, it did so using traditional means. At a formal level, it only employed reductionist techniques where it needed to avoid subjectivism and gossip. At no time did it achieve the level of sophistication found in Brecht’s short poems from the forties. Tragically and ironically, the motivation for the criticisms of Concrete Poetry in Germany during the sixties, seventies, and eighties can be found in its unconscious continuation of the Nazi

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campaign against so-called “degenerate art.” Attitudes to abstract art only changed very slowly during the fifties in Germany. For example, the first Kandinsky exhibition in Nuremberg only took place as late as 1955, and had a strongly polarizing effect on viewers. By shifting the theater of action away from cultural criticism and ideology to the zero point of language, to what lies before language, Concrete Poetry expands what can be called linguistic “competence.” Starting from a zero-base, it allows the emergence of new language, potentially before or beyond regulated syntax. In practice it starts out by working with the fundamental textuality of speech, and is not afraid to use what has been written and spoken as material; it is constructed intertextually. The current concepts of art always transcend any given earlier concepts. Art is a paradox. Therefore, successful art can be misunderstood, but it cannot be reified. Art cannot be “used up.” Adorno would say: “Der Verbrauch ist ihr äußerlich” (Using up art is foreign to the nature of art). There is no end to the process of “reading.” There is a suspicion that, after the long odyssey of mimesis theory, using the notion of mimesis is quite risky. Already in Quintilian it had been downgraded to mere imitatio (imitation), while in Aristotle “mimesis tes praxeos” (imitation of action) does not really refer to language mimesis but to dramatic performance of plot. Initially, the notion does not appear to be transferable either to Concrete Poetry or to abstract art. In the case of abstract art, the struggle for and against it was resolved when it became clear that there is no artificial presentation without mimetic elements; the aesthetic function always comprises both mimetic and nonmimetic art. It is not the competence of a classical portrait that constitutes its art character (a good likeness is a question of technique, not art). It is a commonplace of perception theory that awareness is linked to the ability to disentangle similarity and dissimilarity. Art, put very briefly, always involves a “change of aspect,” as Wittgenstein later put it. This is why art is deictic, why it does not say, but points.

6 In everyday speech it is normal, and useful, to neglect phonetic form and its impact on rational language, though it can sometimes become impossible to ignore phonetics when they cause comprehension difficulties. Sound shape and voice quality also play an important role in other communication situations (and not just for the identification of the speaker). Social relationships are also established via kindred phonation, or through difference — for example, the difference between one’s native accent and a foreign accent. At the beginning of the Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa writes that reading aloud confers “full objectivity” upon the subjective enjoyment

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of reading.15 Taking pleasure in poetry is like enjoying an object: It is material, sensual. This pleasure is a product of Western poetic reading traditions, which today seem to have gotten lost in the digitalized pseudomaterial of cyberspace (but may perhaps return). Traditionally, reading culture worked by bringing sentences to the ear and, even when engaged in “silent” reading, reading with the tongue.16 Today this reading culture is disappearing into the era of the “audio book.” Reading, which for Wittgenstein was “ein unwillkürliches Sprechen in der Vorstellung” (an involuntary speech act of the imagination),17 is increasingly becoming a mere decoding act. The practice of inwardly silent reading bypasses the material articulation of the text; it privileges a purely informational communication in language. In the literary reception of poetry throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, we find a progressive disappearance of the practice of reading out loud, which means that there is less and less reason to compose acoustically sophisticated texts. What counts is the statement, not the wording. The majority of poetry published today has lost the connection with its great acoustic tradition, and has ceased to exploit the poetic possibilities offered by the transcending of genres and the expansion of the concept of text. By and large, poems now lack the crucial balance of phonetics, syntax and semantics. They do without the traditional materiality of the poetic sign, and without its generative power. Something essential (the expressionists called it, obscurely enough, the unity of meaning and form) is lost in descriptive poetry and the poetry of engagierte Literatur. This has been quite obvious for many years now in the poems that feature in the literature supplement of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In terms of communication theory, informationism is an off-shoot of consumerism that tends to take everything, starting with neurophysiological cell processes, as “information.” In literature, this corresponds to documentarism, a psychological realism that sets down narrative principles as absolute. For these -isms, reflection on the material structure and form of the “information,” essential to any aesthetic reception, becomes obsolete. The fact that marketable literature comes closer and closer to using purely informational or documentational language is not only an expression of a society caught up in rationalism, it is part of a new cult, it is fetishism. For lyric poetry, which is presumably now at an end, it means that what Adorno postulated in his famous dictum is being heeded today — with excessive efficiency. Today it is no longer unusual or daring to claim that alienation as well as more obvious forms of consumerism have — under the rules of exchange value  — penetrated marketable literature. If we set aside the issue of profitability for publishers and authors, the reader does not look for real poetic enjoyment, but for consumption. Literary consumerism is abstract

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materialism, because it is not really about material pleasure (that of the gourmet), but about an act of incorporation (the greed of the gourmand), which is regarded as exciting. In the context of exchange value, Dieter Mersch speaks of “Verbrauchswert” (the disposability value of objects). The current inflationary use of the audio book — even aesthetically insignificant books are now available as audio books — is no argument against this, since clearly they are used by consumers in situations that militate against aesthetic reception — for example, while driving a car. They are fast food. Today’s marketable literature can be called “semanticistic,” it is dominated by content and by the so-called exciting plot. This trend cannot be reversed by purely stylistic adjustments to improve readability. What I have called “full sign” literature no longer plays any role. The consumerist pseudo-concreteness of our current civilization is, in reality, abstract and alienated from a creative “concrete” aesthetic reception of literature; it is unconsciously dominated by a trend toward “idealization” in the literal sense  — people conform increasingly to market ideas alone. There is, of course, no problem about translating the literature of such a marketplace into any language, because its linguistic form has become irrelevant.

Notes Epigraph. Quoted in Eugen Gomringer, konkrete poesie (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1972), 172. 1

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 16 August 2006.

2

The speech was reprinted in Akzente (1/1961): 41.

3

Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, ed. Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1968 [1916]). English translation by Roy Harris: Course in General Linguistics (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1983). 4

Ferdinand de Saussure, Linguistik und Semiologie: Notizen aus dem Nachlass, Texte, Briefe und Dokumente, ed. Johannes Fehr (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 414. 5

Novalis, Das philosophisch-theoretische Werk, Werke, Tagebücher und Briefe, vol. 2, ed. Hans-Joachim Mähl (München: Hanser, 1978), 597. 6

This is the case, for example, in Claus Bremer’s poem “immer schön in der reihe bleiben” (don’t step out of line), which consists of this single sentence repeated 120 times, or — differently — in Ernst Jandl’s reductionist Naturgedicht (Nature poem), which consists of two monosyllabic words: “heu / see” (hay / lake), the isolated poetic articulation of which suggests other possible meanings.

7

Franz Mon, Texte über Texte (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1970), 95.

8

Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 353.

9

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Günter Eich, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 35.

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10

Augusto de Campos, Decio Pignatari, and Garaldo de Campos, “Plan pilota para poesia concreta,” Noigandres 4 (1958): 24. 11

Thomas Kopfermann, ed., Theoretische Positionen zur Konkreten Dichtung (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1974), 7. Additional positions are discussed in the treatments by Weiss, de Campos, Cotten, Fabian, Gappmayr, Gomringer, Krüger, Linschinger, Penzkofer and Schaffner listed in the bibliography. 12 Franz Mon, Akzente: Zeitschrift für Dichtung 1 (1961): 41. Subsequently cited as (Mon), with page numbers. 13

Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 5 (La Prisonnière). Here based on the German translation: Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), Werke vol. 2, bk. 5, 2891. 14

Hugo Friedrich, Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1968), 13. 15

Fernando Pessoa, Das Buch der Unruhe des Hilfsbuchhalters Bernardo Soares (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1987), 14. English translation: The Book of Disquiet, transl. Alfred Mac Adam (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1991), 12. 16

Pascal Mercier, Nachtzug nach Lissabon (München: Hanser, 2004), 469.

17

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 168.

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10: Heiner Müller: Discontinuity and Transgression Renata Plaice

H

MÜLLER BELONGS TO those writers who were strongly influenced by the poststructuralist critique of metaphysics. The absence of a positive ideal and value system to which literature could relate impacted not only the aesthetics of Müller’s works, but also his reflections on history. Living in the GDR, he could observe the crisis of dialectics. In a situation of lost origins, the dialectical process of revolution can no longer mean progress but is instead presented by Müller, as we will see, as a constant deconstructive cycle of revolution and counterrevolution, leading to perpetual violence. Heiner Müller’s works find themselves on the ashes and rubble of a deconstructed reality. They consist of stories, elements, events and characters of recycled history, and are a performance of this deconstruction. In a commentary to his play Die Hamletmaschine (The Hamletmachine), Müller writes: EINER

Mein Hauptinteresse beim Stückeschreiben ist es, Dinge zu zerstören. Dreißig Jahre lang war Hamlet eine Obsession für mich, also schrieb ich einen kurzen Text, Hamletmaschine, mit dem ich versuchte, Hamlet zu zerstören. Die deutsche Geschichte war eine andere Obsession, und ich habe versucht, diese Obsession zu zerstören, diesen ganzen Komplex. Ich glaube, mein stärkster Impuls ist der, Dinge bis auf ihr Skelett zu reduzieren, ihr Fleisch und ihre Oberfläche herunterzureißen. Dann ist man mit ihnen fertig.1 [My main interest when I write plays is to destroy things. For thirty years Hamlet was for me an obsession, so I wrote a short text, Hamletmachine, with which I tried to destroy Hamlet. German history was another obsession, too, the whole complex. I think my strongest impulse is to reduce things down to their skeleton, to tear off their skin and their flesh. After that I’m finished with them.2]

Coming from the ruins of fragmented reality, Müller’s works become a field of continuity and discontinuity, destruction and deconstruction

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of the past and of the present that always takes the form of a recycled, repeated, deconstructed history. But literature as simple (if critical) repetition of the past and as mere rewriting that is itself soon to be deconstructed again, questions its own credibility and the very conditions of its survival. It is suspended in a cycle of continual, repetitive, inescapable death where positive utopia is annulled by negativity. However, Müller’s works embody the survival of literature in and despite that vicious cycle of writing; this does not take the form of an attempt to escape into the illusion that positivity and creation are still unproblematically possible. It is a survival that is precisely due to the deconstruction and discontinuity that enable transgression. Müller’s literature and its creativity survive as a performative act of transgression. One of the most prominent examples of such writing is Müller’s text Bildbeschreibung (Explosion of a Memory/Description of a Picture),3 a postdramatic theater play that consists of a piece of prose describing what one could call a stage design. Not only does the described “picture” become the action of a play in itself due to constant changes in the content of the picture, but the writing, the text, becomes a place where the action of the design of its own setting takes place. The text embodies the transformations and changes within a picture, it becomes, as Müller describes it in the postscript, “Übermalung,” an “overpainting”4 of the picture, and, as a result, it consists of the exchange of images and meanings that build a never-ending chain of signifiers. The disappearing images become what could be called “fragments of a gesture.”5 The structure of a chain is especially visible at the syntactic level: the text consists of a single sentence. This encourages the reader to focus on the horizontal construction where the vertical link of reference to the signified is lost. As Lacan points out, in the signifying chain, the subject exists only as an absence, as something that is not there, but that is necessary for the dynamic movement of the chain.6 It is precisely because the subject is represented as something lacking, as “the missing signifier,” that the restructuring of the signifying chain in Müller’s text was possible. In the commentary on his text, Müller writes: “Die Handlung ist beliebig, da die Folgen Vergangenheit sind, Explosion einer Erinnerung in einer abgestorbenen dramatischen Struktur”7 (The action is optional since its consequences are past, explosion of a memory in an extinct dramatic structure, Explosion 102). The arbitrariness of the action is not the result of postmodern relativism, but rather a consequence of the end of time and history. When the history reaches the point of its death, its “Auschwitz,” in order to survive, it sets out on the journey backwards. The only history possible after the death of history, therefore, is a movement of return and repetition, which paints over the preceding picture, deconstructing and substituting its elements. In the process of “overpainting”

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that Müller’s text performs, every change in the picture means a destruction of its old form and, as a result, its own destruction and deconstruction. This structure is therefore shaped by a discontinuity that, ironically, as repetition, guarantees continuity. Therefore, the woman on the picture is always already dead and the action is the recurrence of the past, her constant resurrection from the dead: “vielleicht ist die Frau schon auf dem Rückweg in den Boden, schwanger von Sturm, dem Samen der Wiedergeburt aus der Explosion der Gebeine” (Bildbeschreibung 117; perhaps the woman is on her way back to the ground, pregnant by the storm, seed of the rebirth from the resurrection of corpses, Explosion 101). In Erotism (and later in The Tears of Eros), Georges Bataille explains death, birth, and sexuality in terms of the relation between continuity and discontinuity. Reproduction is a transition from two beings in a discontinuous state into the continuum of the oneness of the sexual act, which results in a further discontinuity in the form of a single separate being. The act of sexual reproduction is, for Bataille, the act of continuity, and, as a loss of bodily boundaries, it is also a moment of death and an act of violence. “In essence, the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence, of violation.”8 What this theory suggests is that death is a guarantee of continuity; however, not as immanence and eternity but rather as a moment of transition between continuity and discontinuity. The death of history, God, the death of metaphysics and of the transcendental signified cannot be understood as a single event leading to permanence or presence after death. It is a daily death and resurrection — “the daily murder” (Explosion 101). Similarly in Quartet, another of Müller’s plays, the protagonist says: “Was ist das Leben ohne den täglichen Tod”9 (What is life without its daily death10). The moment of transition that is death is a return to the remains and debris of deconstructed reality and history. When history, culture, and literature reach their limit, in other words, when continuity moves toward discontinuity, it is always also the beginning of a continuous pendulous or recurring movement — and “only violence can bring everything to a state of [constant] flux in this way, only violence and the nameless disquiet bound up with it” (Bataille 17). Death is at the same time a resurrection, and moments of violence and murder are also the sexual act of reproduction, and in this way part of continuity, or, as Erika Fischer-Lichte puts it, writing about Bildbeschreibung: “The theatre perpetuates the past for all time through continual repetition of the ever-same act of violence.”11 This permanent cycle of birth and death, of destruction and deconstruction, is, of course, inspired by Heraclitus’s idea of universal flux, which also enjoyed such later reincarnations as Nietzsche’s eternal return and Sigmund Freud’s concept of the death drive.12 Imprisonment in this cycle of endless repetition and constant deconstruction becomes a tragedy for Müller’s protagonists. In this way Müller

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captures the emptiness of so-called post-history and questions the sense of any (social or cultural) revolution that must, by this logic, inevitably lead to the repetition of its own failure. In Description of a Picture, Heiner Müller presents an angel of despair, a reference to Walter Benjamin’s reflections on Paul Klee’s painting “Angelus Novus” in his essay “Thesis on Philosophy of History.” Benjamin sees the course of human history as a path of accumulating destruction that the angel of history views with horror but from which he cannot turn away. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.13

Building on this image of history, Müller stresses the impossibility of escaping the past and its perpetual destruction. Benjamin’s angel is facing the destruction of history from which he cannot turn away, forced to face the dead past but at the same time unable to remain in it and repair it. The storm of history, blowing him backwards into the future, as Laurie Anderson rephrased it, makes the angel a spectator of constant death. A hopeful gaze toward the future is no longer possible in the violence of deconstruction.14 Witnessing the death of history, literature must also necessarily question its own sense and purpose. This becomes a moment of crisis of creativity in a landscape beyond death where everything that is said and written is always a rewriting or, in Müller’s terms, an “overpainting.” The cycle of continuity and discontinuity is a captivity from which there is no escape, life is a repetitive act of death — a continuity of dying and violence that is expressed by Ophelia in Müller’s The Hamletmachine, the one “the river didn’t keep”: Ich bin Ophelia. Die der Fluß nicht behalten hat. Die Frau am Strick. Die Frau mit den aufgeschnittenen Pulsadern. Die Frau mit der Überdosis AUF DEN LIPPEN SCHNEE Die Frau mit dem Kopf im Gasherd. Gestern habe ich aufgehört mich zu töten.15 [I am Ophelia. The one the river didn’t keep. The woman dangling from the rope. The woman with slit arteries. The woman with the overdose SNOW ON HER LIPS. The woman with the head in the gas oven. Yesterday I stopped killing myself. (Hamletmachine 89)]

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In the same sense, Valmont in the play Quartet, itself a return, an adaptation, or revisiting of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, expresses a longing for a break from the perpetual cycle and Heraclitian river: “Wer die Uhren der Welt zum Stehen bringen könnte: Die Ewigkeit als Dauererektion” (Quartett 49; If we could only stop the clocks of the world. Eternity as an everlasting erection, Quartet 108). In Description of a Picture/Explosion of a Memory the constant deconstruction of the past in the present shifts the focus of the text from the created onto the moment of transition itself: wenn das zerbrochene Glas sich zusammensetzt aus den Scherben und die Frau an den Tisch tritt, am Hals keine Narbe, oder wird es die Frau sein, der durstige Engel, der dem Vogel die Kehle aufbeißt und sein Blut aus dem offenen Hals in das Glas gießt. (Bildbeschreibung 116) [when the broken glass reassembles its shards and the woman steps to the table, no scar on her throat, or will it be the woman, the thirsty angel, who bites the bird’s throat and pours its blood into the glass from the open neck. (Explosion 99)]

In Müller’s text, as it is not possible to have a static image of stage design, described instead are the constant shifts and transformations, the dynamis or power of the picture. Since the transformations are a movement backwards, the act of “overpainting,” the correction of the preceding, “the reassembling of the broken glass,” it is not the dynamic of an evolving story line that would have a creative effect. When, in the constant self-metamorphosis of the text, every created construct is instantly deconstructed, what remains at the end is not a product of artistic creation, but the fragmenting of mimesis in a perpetual process of metamorphosis. The writing in Explosion of a Memory does not transcend or transgress into something else; it becomes the act of transgression itself. In this sense, discontinuity is not only linked to continuity but also to transgression. If discontinuity is a moment of reaching the limit and the boundary of the continuous, it is also the moment of the transgression of that limit. In Preface to Transgression, Michel Foucault defines transgression as: an action which involves the limit, that narrow zone of a line where it displays the flash of its passage, but perhaps also its entire trajectory, even its origin; it is likely that transgression has its entire space of the line that it crosses. The play of limits and transgression seems to be regulated by a simple obstinacy: transgression instantly crosses and uncrosses a line which closes up behind it in a wave of extremely short duration, and thus it is made to return once more right to the horizon of the uncrossable.16

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The concept of transgression differs, then, from modern concepts of the dialectic with its contradictions; its roots are outside any concepts of ground and origin. It manifests itself as a violent act of sexuality  — as in the writings of the Marquis de Sade. For de Sade it is sexuality that endlessly crosses and re-crosses the line of life and death. Sexuality as a moment of transgression is the space of the borderline between the Sacred and the Profane, the threshold between life and death, and between the Self and the Other. In the space of such transgression, divisions and strict limits are deconstructed and exchanged. This is why transgression opens the space of the limit rather than situates itself outside the closed border, and, by this opening, enables creativity. Chris Jenks takes this idea of transgressive creativity even further, claiming: “The transgression is a component of the rule. Seen in this way, excess is not an abhorration nor a luxury, it is rather dynamic force in cultural reproduction — it prevents stagnation by breaking the rule and it ensures stability by reaffirming the rule.”17 The underlying thesis here is that the permanent cycle of repetition of birth and death enables the return of things to their prior, inorganic state, which is where the creative potential has its origin. Baudrillard explains Freud’s concept of the death drive in similar terms. The death drive: dissolves assemblages, unbinds energy und undoes Eros’s organic discourse by returning things to an inorganic, ungebunden, state. . . . It is thus always as a repetitive cycle that death comes to dismantle the constructive, linear or dialectical finalities of Eros. The viscosity of the death drive and the elasticity of the inorganic is everywhere victorious in its resistance to the structuration of life.18

By defining the sphere of transgression, Foucault delineates a space for literature beyond its death, literature as transgression. It is that “narrow zone of the line,” of the boundaries and limits of literature and the zone that is opened up at the moment when literature reaches its crisis, where the play of transformations, the play of crossing the line and the play of differences take place. The limitless and endless explosion of pictures in Müller’s Explosion of a Memory is possible only in a space that “opens at the heart of the limit” (Foucault 33). The creativity in Müller’s texts is based on the constant transgression of a broken and fragmented reality that takes place at its outer limits. It can be reduced to the creative play of differences between the signs of the text, between the pictures and their “overpainted” form.19 The differences in Explosion of a Memory are creative in the sense that they enable infinite movements within the space of the limit, infinite transformations. In this sense, Foucault writes of “an affirmation of division” (Foucault 36). The differences in Müller’s text are the product of excess, a surplus that remains after the death of history. “Overpainting”

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has therefore the characteristics of Derrida’s “supplementing”20 rather than just connotations of transformation and exchange. The supplement guarantees creativity in a cycle of permanent transformation where the transitive movements between continuity and discontinuity would otherwise just lead to mutual annulment, a motionless state of the repetition of the same in which the differences between life and death, between beginning and end, would merge into one and consequently vanish. The supplement and the difference produce fictive limits and thus open up a space where transgression can take place. In The Hamletmachine, the residue in the cycle of the construction and deconstruction, the surplus in the exchange of signifiers, materializes itself in the figure of Ophelia. At the end of the play Ophelia, transformed (or even transgressed) into Elektra, says: Hier spricht Elektra. Im Herzen der Finsternis. Unter der Sonne der Folter. An die Metropolen der Welt. Im Namen der Opfer. Ich stoße allen Samen aus, den ich empfangen habe. Ich verwandle die Milch meiner Brüste in tödliches Gift. Ich nehme die Welt zurück, die ich geboren habe. (Hamletmaschine 554) [Here speaks Elektra. In the heart of darkness. Under the sun of torture. To the metropols of the world. In the name of the victims. I discharge all the sperm I ever received. I transform the milk from my breasts into deadly poison. I take back the world which I gave birth to. (Hamletmachine 94)]

Ophelia embodies the energy of violence that accumulates at the threshold of death. “It belongs to the attributes of the victim that it cannot effectively defend itself and that its death, due to its powerlessness, cannot lead to any further acts of violence.”21 Ophelia becomes a figure in which the process of substitution and constant deconstruction no longer takes place; she is what Derrida and Levinas call the irreducible exteriority,22 or, in other words, an accumulation of the violence that remains at the limit of death. Ophelia is a figure of the victim, where the sacrifice is the surplus of the violent energy that can no longer be reduced and suppressed in the cycle of continuity and discontinuity; it is what remains at the end of the line as residue. Here, in the aftermath of the play’s intertextual exchange of signifiers, there remains a residue that can no longer be substituted and reduced: “Ophelia bleibt auf der Bühne, reglos in der weißen Verpackung” (Hamletmaschine 554; Ophelia remains on stage, motionless, in a white muslin wrapping, Hamletmachine 94). For that reason, Ophelia as a victim becomes a figure in which the salvation from perpetual deconstruction and substitution is possible, she becomes a figure in which history can survive. Ophelia’s sacrifice

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happens in the ritual, ritual embodying the transgressive character, the space of the limit that is opened between life and death, between continuity and discontinuity. The ungraspable space of the threshold, of the ritual, is the gap in between; it is the space of the difference between the sacred and the profane. The possibility of survival of history in Ophelia’s sacrifice is due to the possibility of materialization and accumulation of the deconstructive movement. “Through the aggressive union of the society against the chosen victim, the society liberated itself for a limited period of time from its internal and inherent violence” (Gebauer and Wulf 175). Ophelia is in this sense the materialization of the deconstructing energy, and, on the other hand, is — as a figure of accumulation that escapes the exchange of signifiers — the possibility of stopping that movement. The victim is a moment of presence. In Explosion of a Memory, the call for redemption and survival and the hope of breaking the cycle of continuity and discontinuity, as well as the hope of escaping continual and perpetual deconstruction and death, is a call for a victim of this kind. It is a call for capturing permanent and repetitive transgression in a motionless state. The rupture of the cycle of death and life, of perpetuated deconstruction, would mean grasping the very energy of creation that enables the transformation. It would mean the possibility of creation in a time of lost transcendence and metaphysics. This moment of presence is no longer present but simply a moment of irreducible exteriority that manages to escape deconstruction; it is a presence that constantly disappears because its very nature is transgression. The creativity that is found in this space of transgression affirms the lack of the opposition between presence and absence and between the continuous and discontinuous; it no longer signifies and no longer represents. It is a creativity of transgression that has no essence. Redemption can only come from breaking the continuous cycle of the repetition of the same: “gesucht: die Lücke im Ablauf, das Andre in der Wiederkehr des Gleichen, das Stottern im sprachlosen Text, das Loch in der Ewigkeit, der vielleicht erlösende FEHLER” (Bildbeschreibung 118; wanted: the gap in the process, the Other in the recurrence of the Same, the stammer in the speechless text, the hole in eternity, the possibly redeeming ERROR, Explosion 101). Redemption, thus, comes from disruption of the relentless continuum, from a moment of violence. The redeeming error, the mistake, is “the distracted gaze of the killer,” as Müller writes, a moment of “Zögern vor dem Schnitt” (Bildbeschreibung 118; hesitating before the incision, Explosion 101), women’s laughter, something that would pause and prevent the death and yet another failed revolutionary act. The text ends with a metaphor of the end of history: “ICH der gefrorene Sturm” (Bildbeschreibung 119; I the frozen storm, Explosion 102), again, of course, a reference to Benjamin. The “I” makes clear that in the disruption of repetitive history, in the gap between the

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transformations where the storm freezes, a lost identity for literature can be found, the otherwise annulled voice of Müller’s post-dramatic theater. For Foucault, the space of the limit is the new-found place of wordless language. This is therefore the new place for the survival of literature. Foucault writes: our efforts are undoubtedly better spent in trying to speak of this experience and in making it speak from the depths where its language fails, from precisely the place where words escape it, where the subject who speaks has just vanished, where the spectacle topples over before an upturned eye — from where Bataille’s death has recently placed his language. (Foucault 40)

This new-found identity for literature is nothing more than a fantasy and a hope, of course; it is a literature of the rupture that creates the limit and enables permanence of transgression, a literature of the upturned eye rather than of a reflecting subject. This wordless literature is literature of mistake rather than of positivity, of a silent scream rather than a meaning, of discontinuity, disruption and transgression rather than continuity. It dwells in the space of the limit where the redemption of literature becomes a momentary immanence.

Notes 1

Heiner Müller, “Mauern. Gespräch mit Silvère Lotringer,” in Heiner Müller, Rotwelsch (Berlin: Merve 1982), 49–86; here, 81. 2

Heiner Müller, “The Hamletmachine,” in Theatremachine, ed. Marc von Henning (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995), 86. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text as Hamletmachine with page number.

3 The original title Bildbeschreibung (literally translated as “Description of a Picture”) was changed by Müller during his collaboration with Robert Wilson, in which Müller’s text was a prologue to Wilson’s staging of Alcestis by Euripides in 1986. The author preferred “Explosion of a Memory” as the title for the English translation. The text in Carl Weber’s edition from 1989 thus contains the double title. 4

Heiner Müller, “Explosion of a Memory/Description of a Picture,” in Explosion of a Memory, ed. Carl Weber (New York: PAJ Publications, 1989), 102. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using Explosion and page number.

5 Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture,” in Means without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000), 55. 6

Jacques Lacan, The Seminars of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: 1959–1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1992), 224. 7

Heiner Müller, Bildbeschreibung, in Prosa, Werke 2, ed. Frank Hörnigk (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), 119. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using Bildbeschreibung and page number.

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8

Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality (San Francisco: City Lights, 1986), 16. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using Bataille and page number.

9 Heiner Müller, “Quartett,” in Werke 5, Die Stücke 3, ed. Frank Hörnigk (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), 61. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using Quartett and page number. 10

Heiner Müller, “Quartet,” in Theatremachine, ed. Marc von Henning (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995), 117. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using Quartet and page number. 11

Erika Fischer-Lichte, History of European Drama and Theatre (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 350.

12

The concept of the death drive, introduced by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, is understood as the energy force of death that directs life toward its primary state of destruction, an instinct of return to the state before birth, and hence also cyclical. 13 Walter Benjamin, “Thesis on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Shocken Books, 1969), 257–58. 14

The metaphor of the angel of history already occurs in Müller’s drama “Der Auftrag,” translated into English as “The Mission” or “The Task,” a play also based on dislocation of space and time. 15

Heiner Müller, Die Hamletmaschine, in Werke, vol. 4. Die Stücke 2, ed. Frank Hörnigk (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 547. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation Hamletmaschine and page number. 16

Michel Foucault, “Preface to Transgression,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977), 34. Subsequent references are cited in the text using the abbreviation Foucault and page number.

17

Chris Jenks, Transgression (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 7.

18

Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage, 1993), 149.

19

In Erotism, Bataille points out that the play of differences between continuity and discontinuity produces eroticism, and therefore transgression (Bataille 15). 20

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976), 141. 21

Gunther Gebauer and Christoph Wulf, Spiel. Ritual. Geste: Mimetisches Handeln in der sozialen Welt (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1998), 175. Translated by the author. Subsequent references are cited in the text as Gebauer and Wulf. 22

Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” in Writing and Difference (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980), 93.

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11: Let’s Begin, Again: History, Intertext, and Rupture in Heiner Müller’s Germania Cycle Barry Murnane

I

AUSCHWITZ IS, to quote (again) Adorno’s seemingly timeless dictum, barbaric, then Heiner Müller’s Germania cycle is, arguably, more barbaric than most.1 From the early poem “LACH NIT” (Laugh Ye Not) to the posthumously published Germania 3 Gespenster am Toten Mann (Germania 3 Ghosts at/on the Dead Man), these texts are populated by violent cannibals, petrol-slugging dictators, vampires, ghosts and murderers.2 Müller espouses a form of barbaric creativity as a response to barbaric German history. This group of texts and themes, which Müller periodically revisited and amended from the early 1950s until 1995, seems to take Adorno’s critical concept literally, turning it into an almost homeopathic poetological model to engage with the barbarity of German history that has allegedly rendered poetry untenable, addressing historical barbarity with aesthetic barbarity. When read in the context of standard narratives of post–1945 writing, the Germania cycle is thus highly provocative: it takes the much commented-upon German barbarity of the Third Reich and turns it into a core component of a postwar poetics of spectral returns from the past within individual instances of history. What is provocative that seems to reject the very concept of an “after Auschwitz.” Auschwitz may function as the historical aporia of the twentieth century, but Müller’s texts suggest that Auschwitz is not actually over at all, but rather lives on in the continuing presence of the political, rational, industrial and economic models of modernity that produced Auschwitz in the first place. For Müller it is clear that 1945 does not mark a real caesura in Germany’s history, and, accordingly, his plays focus, among other things, on the haunting returns of the National Socialist past in the GDR: F WRITING AFTER

Das Problem besteht darin, daß in der DDR die Illusion genährt worden ist, daß man mit der Beseitigung der entsprechenden Institutionen auch den Faschismus beseitigt hätte. So hat sich der Faschismus tradiert als politische Verhaltensform, als gesellschaftliches Krebsgeschwür. (GI2 134–35)

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[The problem is that the illusion was fostered in the GDR that fascism had been eradicated by removing the relevant institutions. This enabled fascism to continue unabated as a political habitus, as a social cancer.]

Furthermore, if one reads fascism and the Second World War as repetitions, as just the most shocking recent incidents in a long line of German violence and mutilation stretching back to Arminius and the Varus-Schlacht (Battle of the Teutoburger Wald), as Müller’s Germania Tod in Berlin (Germania Death in Berlin) does, then the concept of a rupture becomes even more problematic. In other words, the Germania cycle demands a critical reconsideration of traditional accounts of writing “after 1945” inasmuch as these texts reject the concept of a Zivilizationsbruch, the idea of a rupture in civilization most notably proposed by Dan Diner, who in turn was drawing on various scattered comments and essays by Adorno and Horkheimer.3 For Müller, this rupture cannot be taken as a given; indeed, his writings develop a cyclical model of history that revolves around a series of repetitions, and hence contains no definitive caesura: Das Tote ist nicht tot in der Geschichte. Eine Funktion von Drama ist Totenbeschwörung — der Dialog mit den Toten darf nicht abreißen, bis sie herausgeben, was an Zukunft mit ihnen begraben worden ist. (GI2 64) [The deceased is not dead in history. One function of drama is the séance  — the dialog with the deceased cannot be broken off until they let go of the future that is buried with them.]

By employing intertexts, which become the literary equivalent or media of such historical repetitions and hauntings, the Germania cycle develops a poetics that allows Müller to both address and speak critically about this German history and simultaneously find a new and productive mode of writing within, despite, and precisely through these eternal barbarous repetitions. Rather than focusing on Diner and Adorno’s sense of rupture, Müller highlights an underlying desire for such ruptures that serve to “ground,” as it were, the unsettling nature of modernity and modern German experience in particular. This is expressed most directly, perhaps, in the final incantation from Bildbeschreibung: “gesucht: die Lücke im Ablauf, das Andre der Wiederkehr des Gleichen, das Stottern im sprachlosen Text, das Loch in der Ewigkeit, der vielleicht erlösende FEHLER”4 (sought after: the rupture in the order, the Other of the return of the same, the stammer in the speechless text, the hole in eternity, the mistake that may possibly bring salvation). In constructing Germania as pertaining to questions of German identity, violence and also

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to questions of speaking for and with the victims of German violence in poems such as “LACH NIT,” Müller’s poems, prose and plays from the 1950s onwards can be read as being preoccupied with questions of writing within a barbarous German modernity, of which 1945 is merely one further instance. The three key concepts at the heart of Müller’s work on Germania are history and its repetitions, intertextuality as a literary mode of representing this history, and a carnivalesque search for a rupture in history through which one might start all over again. The dialogue with the dead and a dialogue with the traumatic remnants of previous historical epochs at the heart of Müller’s works are part of a ghostly poetics of repetition and haunting returns from the past, and suggest that — in literature at least — no epistemic break ever occurred. The poem “Neujahrsbrief 1963” links this literary model to the intertextual haunting of the poet’s minds and words, according to which the author is never without predecessors and never stands outside of history: “IM PARK DIE PAPPELN SCHWIRRN / WER HAUST IN MEINER STIRN” (G 169; In the park the poplars buzzing / Who is living in my head). These are principles that also apply to Müller’s own works, something that he makes explicit by constant and foregrounded reference to the earlier texts on which he draws. His intertextual references and reproductions of earlier dramas cast the literature of the past as a quarry for that of the future. Indeed, particularly in the later works, Müller recycles, combines, and varies earlier sketches, individual scenes, and poems, which then become the skeleton of later more substantial projects. His habit of revisiting and reusing older texts, including sources from his own oeuvre, allows Müller to reject any significant division of his works into phases, claiming that any “Idee der Periodisierung kompletter Unfug [ist]” (GI 96; the idea of periodization is utter rubbish). This is especially true of the Germania cycle, to which Müller returned throughout the 1950s and 1960s before finally finishing the first Germania play, Tod in Berlin, in the early 1970s. Then, in the late 1970s and throughout the following decade, Müller repeatedly hinted in interviews at work on a further Germania project dealing with the Stalinist legacy of the GDR. Germania 3 Gespenster am toten Mann then contains not only those core ideas articulated over fifteen years,5 but also returns to anecdotes and shorter sketches that Müller claimed to have been working on since the 1950s. The Germania cycle, or so it seems, was one of Müller’s key projects for over forty years and, as such, reflects in nuce his entire postwar poetics. One of the first texts to be viewed in these terms is the poem “LACH NIT”: LACH NIT ES SEI DANN EIN STADT UNTERGANGEN (Grobianus) ICH WILL EIN DEUTSCHER SEIN

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(Eintragung im Schulheft eines elfjährigen jüdischen Jungen im Warschauer Ghetto) DER TERROR VON DEM ICH SCHREIBE KOMMT NICHT AUS DEUTSCHLAND ES IST EIN TERROR DER SEELE (Edgar Allan Poe) DER TERROR VON DEM ICH SCHREIBE KOMMT AUS DEUTSCHLAND (G 8) [Laugh ye not, unless a city has fallen. / (Grobianus) / I want to be a German / (Entry in a schoolbook by an eleven year-old Jewish boy in the Warsaw Ghetto) / The terror of which I write comes not / from Germany it comes from my soul  / (Edgar Allan Poe)  / The terror of which I write comes from / Germany.]

The text is barely identifiable as a poem at all. Its extreme form of free verse seemingly negates formal poetic conventions, embracing instead the palimpsest or collage, and even incorporating a form of in-text citation of sources that interrupts the main thematic assembly of intertexts. Beginning with a quote from Friedrich Dedekind’s sixteenth-century Grobianus, which Müller has altered to include Georg Scheidt’s marginal commentary on the passage, the poem creates a narrative of German history that revolves around catastrophe and violence.6 The quote in the first line, in which Dedekind’s and Scheidt’s texts are fused, appears to be afforded import only as a sarcastic aphorism on humanity’s long history of self-destruction. Juxtaposed with the Jewish child’s wish to be a German in lines 3 and 4, however, line 1 is instantly transformed into a reference to the collapse of the Third Reich. If line one translates horror into sarcasm, then line two suggests an incorporation of German horror and violence within the (non-German) human subject: the wish to be German rips through the subject and transforms its self-integrity into a form of auto-aggression — the wish to be one’s enemy oneself. Finally, the transformation of Poe’s famous doctrine provides, on the one hand, Müller with his own poetical statement of intent (to actually address the barbarity of German history rather than write the Aufbauliteratur, or construction literature, demanded by the GDR’s official aesthetic doctrine), while also revealing the indebtedness of this poetic model to its precursors. Müller also links the horror of the mind invoked in the image of the Warsaw Jew and Poe with the historical instance of terror in the Second World War. The poem reveals a circular structure insofar as the grammatical amendment of “eine Stadt” to “EIN STADT” (a city/a state) in line one becomes linked with Germany that is perceived as the source of this horror in the final line. This grammatical confusion of city and state, an instance of autographic hypertextuality in Gérard Genette’s model of intertextuality,7 also points toward the role of Berlin as a privileged site for portraying German history in the later works in the cycle.

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What emerges from this poem is the intense link between the present and the past: the horrors of Jewish suffering remain present in the writing act after Auschwitz. This is marked at a formal level by the use of intertexts, which, among other things, articulate the continuing presence of German barbarity despite the caesura implied by what Adorno, Horkheimer, and Diner synecdochally termed “Auschwitz.”8 Although this demands a reconsideration of Diner’s terms of engagement with the rendering defunct of a “Mindestmaß vorausgesetzten Urvertrauens” (minimum of presupposed original trust) in rational modernity, it should correctly be pointed out that the early-modern Grobianus is not yet rational modernity.9 Nor need Müller’s writing be seen as completely apposite to the debates on “after Auschwitz” even if it does negate Diner’s conclusion that “Sprachgebrauch und Begriffsbildungen” (“Aporie” 32; language use and terminology) have catastrophically self-imploded after Auschwitz. Where Diner obviously draws on Adorno here, he also neglects one key element of the original text: Adorno went on to say “one cannot write well about Auschwitz” (Über Auschwitz läßt sich sprachlich nicht gut schreiben)10 since culture — in the sense of the modern culture industry  — has become little more than barbaric rubbish (see Adorno Kulturkritik). But not being able to write (as Diner claims) and not being able to write well are two different matters entirely; Müller seems to be more obviously related to Adorno’s less terminal view of “after Auschwitz” than Diner’s definitive break. In combining and juxtaposing the texts in “LACH NIT,” Müller aims to show that the dead are not “tot in der Geschichte” (dead in history) while simultaneously finding a new way of “writing well,” discovering a new “Sprachgebrauch” that takes us beyond this mere juxtaposition of barbarity and writing well. Both these steps are inherent to the Germania cycle, as becomes clear in the scene “Brandenburgisches Konzert 2” from Tod in Berlin: A bricklayer from the Stalinallee, declared a “Held der Arbeit” (Hero of the Workforce) and invited that same day by President Pieck to celebrate the occasion, arrives in Potsdam. He is offered caviar, “den kriegst du nur hier” (you only get that here), and a cold buffet; die “Diktatur des Proletariats auch in der Küche” (GTB 338; proletarian dictatorship is in the kitchen too). The president, “ein Arbeiter wie wir” (GTB 329; a worker like us), is installed in the castle, taking the place of the absolutist Prussian monarch; the bricklayer is honored for dismantling the sculpture of Friedrich I on Unter den Linden, “weil der uns in der Sonne stand” (GTB 338; because he was blocking our sunlight). Finally, the bricklayer sits down on a French empire chair, a symbolic enthronement of the proletariat as the origin of the GDR, and gets to eat his pork chops and drink his beer. German history, understood as “deutsche Misere” (German misery), encapsulated in the dual symbols of Potsdam and Friedrich, has been symbolically dismantled and is presented as a closed chapter. This represents the

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supposed historical rupture of 1949 around which the Gründungsmythos (founding myth) of the GDR as a socialist, democratic break with the past was founded.11 Significant here is, firstly, the shift from 1945 to 1949, complicating discussions of Müller in terms of writing “after 1945” — as a GDR-writer he was, of course, part of a tradition for which 1949 and not 1945 was the decisive historical or epistemological break. In aesthetic terms, this Gründungsmythos was enshrined in the principles of the Bitterfelder Weg and the infamous Traktorenlyrik. The connection between literature and industry, between Kopfarbeit and Handarbeit (headwork [intelligentsia] and handwork [tradesmen]), and the concomitant rejection of “formalist,” that is, modernist, poetics as products of imperialist, capitalist culture, resulted in a much-reduced model of realist poetics that avoided the issue of post-Auschwitz writing altogether. Müller’s Germania is less clear cut: If official state ideology spoke in Marxist terms of 1949 as the caesura between prehistory and history, that is to say, between the pre-socialist-capitalist-imperialist historical epoch and the communist present, then Müller sets about actively deconstructing this historical model. The rupture is conceived as a performative act of deconstruction: the bricklayer is entrusted with the active dismantling of the Prussian past for the president and his party, suggesting that the rupture with the past in 1949 is a performative, rather than a naturally occurring, event. Finally, the seemingly positive implication of “Brandenburgisches Konzert” is undermined by a key stage direction: “Friedrich der Zweite von Preußen als Vampir” (GTB 339; Frederick the Second of Prussia as a vampire). German history reveals itself as a bloodthirsty, undead supplement that survives in spite of the active deconstruction of the past, in spite of the mantra of a postwar caesura. The act of deconstructing the material remnants of the past on the streets, and the historical caesura that this seeks to establish, is undermined by a ghostly return of this very past, as the Prussian King Frederick II re-appears as a vampire: “Friedrich der Zweite geht ihm [dem Maurer] an die Kehle” (GTB 340; Frederick the Second goes for his [the bricklayer’s] jugular). Even if the bricklayer can provisionally defend himself from this vampiric model of history — Friedrich disappears — Müller makes it clear that the rupture with the past is not complete: after all, the vampire may disappear but, as living dead, can always return as a supplemental presence or trace in another context. Müller’s response to the official doctrine of rupture and subsequent new communist beginning is therefore highly provocative: if the bricklayer can only partially suppress a vampiric past (the undead vampire is merely chased away and not annihilated), then this always already provisional suppression of history runs to the very heart of the GDR state, with implications for the aesthetics it espouses. In the second scene in Tod in Berlin, “Die Straße 2,” a loudspeaker declares “Es lebe die Deutsche Demokratische Republik!” (long live the GDR!), an announcement

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that is greeted with “Beifall aus dem Lautsprecher” (GTB 328; applause from the loudspeaker/canned applause). When the citizens of this new democratic state engage automatically in acts of violence (one man cries “Russenstaat” [Russian state] and another attacks him), the play seems to undermine the performative announcement of the historical break by reproducing the violence of old in the supposedly democratic utopia of the GDR. This habitual return of violence is a recurring structure in Müller’s works: Meine Stücke spielen in Deutschland, und in Deutschland existierte der Faschismus. . . . Und ich empfand es immer als einen Mangel, daß größtenteils in unserer Literatur die Helden keine Biographien haben, daß man also lediglich mit dem Jahr 1945 einsetzte. (GI 10) [My plays are set in Germany, and fascism existed in Germany. . . . I always found it a weakness that most of the heroes in our literature had no biographies, that we always only began with the year 1945]

Müller’s Germania cycle includes a panoply of such “biographies”: whether revolutionaries or fascists, soldiers or prostitutes, Hitler or Stalin — they all continue to ghost through the present despite the official break with the past. As the scene entitled “Der Gastarbeiter” in Gespenster am toten Mann demonstrates, this simultaneity of past and present, life and death is a core component of Müller’s later writings too. In a “Geisterschloss” (GTM 271; castle of ghosts/haunted castle), the widows of three executed German officers ask a Croatian SS soldier to kill them to avoid capture by the approaching Russians. When all four go into the house, a stage direction states: “Wenn es wieder hell wird, sitzen am Küchentisch die drei toten Männer der Witwen” (GTM 273; When the stage is lit again, the three widows’ dead husbands are sitting at the table). These ghosts are later joined by those of their widows (GTM 274) before a final break in the scene shows “Zwei junge Männer” in “Mode 1990” (two young men in 1990s fashion) who have inherited the “Geisterschloss bei Parchim” (haunted castle near Parchim). “Wenn wir Glück haben, spuken sie noch” (GTM 276; If we’re lucky the ghosts will still be active) states one of these visitors, thereby suggesting that the revolution, like 1945, is not a rupture, a break with barbarity. Instead, it is a constant return to the same old barbarity, da capo al fine. The idea of endless repetition and historical (and barbarous) continuity is also central to individual scenes: in “Die Brüder 1” in Tod in Berlin, Müller quotes a passage from Tacitus’ Annals in which Arminius, the first German according to Müller’s reconstruction of German lore, and his brother Flavus attack each other verbally, identifying cyclical violence and fratricide as the core of German history. In the scene immediately following the passage from Tacitus, we have another, later example of the

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same unaltered and unaltering principle: two brothers, one a communist, the other a fascist, meet in prison on 17 June 1953. The fascist still carries the knife wounds inflicted by his brother, whom he had betrayed to the Gestapo. Now they meet again in prison as Soviet tanks suppress the revolution outside. Germania’s structure reflects this principle of repetition and parallelism: for most historical or mythical scenes, we also have a scene that is its binary partner and is set in the contemporary GDR. In these two scenes of fraternal strife, one historically remote and one recent, the Arminius-legend and its afterlife are invoked firstly in order to explain communism’s failure to suppress fascism before 1933, and secondly in order to portray the Volksaufstand of June 1953 as, in part, at least, a problem caused by the presence of reactionary ex-fascists in the GDR (GTB 364–72). In Gespenster am Toten Mann, this idea is captured most succinctly in Stalin’s declaration: “In jedem Menschen steckt ein Hitler, ein / Kapitalist, Kulak Saboteur” (GTM 258; There is a Hitler in everyone, a / Capitalist, kulak saboteur). In Hommage à Stalin 1 the battle for Stalingrad becomes the scene of a further ghostly re-apparition in the historical continuum: a young soldier is attacked by three cannibalistic Wehrmacht soldiers (GTB 340–44). Then Gunther, Volker, Gernot, and Hagen, the Nibelungen, appear as ghostly manifestations chasing “imaginary” Huns, the suggestion being that Stalingrad is only one apparition of a German drive toward (self-) destruction. Encased in the violent Nibelungen-myth, German identity and indeed history become an unproductive repetitive cycle of automatized self-mutilation: “Ich will nicht jede Nacht sterben. Ich finde es langweilig” (I don’t want to die every night. I find it boring), says Gernot, while the other three Nibelungen attack him and masturbate together (GTB 343). In Gespenster am Toten Mann, Müller returns to the Nibelungen, this time quoting at length from Hebbel’s nineteenth-century play Kriemhilds Rache. Here Stalingrad is a repetition of a repetition of a repetition: Müller’s cannibalistic Wehrmacht soldiers refer back not only to the scenes in Tod in Berlin, but also to Hebbel’s retelling of the Nibelungen centered on Kriemhild and Hagen following Siegfried’s murder. The Nibelungen legend runs to the core both of the Germania cycle and German history for Müller, insofar as violence, murder, fratricide, and hopeless “Selbstopferung” (self-sacrifice) in the course of failed revolutionary opportunities become the ever-recurring core of German civilization.12 Here Germany is no more than a necrophilic concept, a constant act of exorcising and conjuring up of corpses and spirits. Germania, as Müller’s model of Germany, always already implies the kind of horrific repetition of self-destructive ruptures in the form of multiple traumatic historical events that he identifies in a palimpsest of layers of German history stretching from antiquity into the present. The intertextual self-reflexivity of the references to the Nibelungen and

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Tacitus point toward the importance of language in general, and textuality in particular, as the medium in which history is recorded, transmitted, and repeated. Such reflections on the role of language in the making of history occur throughout Müller’s interviews: “Sprache ist Geschichte. Und unsere Beteiligung an der Geschichte verläuft über die Entwicklung der Sprache” (GI2 132–33; Language is history. And our participation in history takes place via the evolution of language). Although the “unser” (our) here seems to refer to people in general, the context in which these comments occur  — a 1988 interview with Flavia Foradini — makes it clear that Müller is referring in particular to the citizens of the GDR: East Germany is just a case of history repeating itself, he implies, and this is so because East Germany cannot step outside the German language as the medium of historical experience. As eternally recurring, compulsive repetition of violence, Müller’s mythological historiography appears thus to be pessimistically foreshortened: history becomes an unavoidable process of repetition that ignores “das Real-Politische” (for Müller this means actual politics in the narrower sense and not the standard sense of practical diplomacy) and collapses real historical events to the status of timeless concepts. History becomes little more than a “Schlachthaus” (slaughterhouse) from which — Bettina Gruber holds — there is no escape.13 To speak with Werner Frick, this “mythical method” of re-actualization and transformation of older mythological or mythical models in order to analyze contemporary society runs to the core of Müller’s writing.14 Whether located within the recurrent violence in German history or widened to include Western society as a whole through mythological figures such as Medea, Oedipus, or Philoctetes, Müller is concerned with the “Formulierungen kollektiver Erinnerungen” (formulations of collective memories), which remain relevant in the present because the condition humaine has “sich in den letzten Jahrhunderten ganz wenig verändert” (GI 149; has changed little in recent centuries). In this timelessness, the collapsing of historical progression into a timeless moment that deforms linear temporality, Müller’s texts create a ghostly effect: in Tod in Berlin, Friedrich appears as a vampiric presence; in Gespenster am Toten Mann, the ghostly figure, STIMME BRECHT (voice Brecht), emerges from nowhere at the end of the scene “MASSNAHME 1956” to announce: Aber von mir werden sie sagen er Hat Vorschläge gemacht Wir haben sie Nicht angenommen Warum sollten wir Und das soll stehn auf meinem Grabstein und Die Vögel sollen darauf scheissen und Das Gras soll wachsen über meinen Namen

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Der auf dem Grabstein steht Vergessen sein Will ich von allen Spuren im Sand. (GTM 288) [They will say of me that he  / Made suggestions We did not  / Accept them Why should we / And that should be written on my gravestone and / The birds should shit on it and / The grass should cover over my name / On the gravestone To be forgotten is / what I want traces in the sand.]

This ghostly voice, quoting first from a Brecht poem of the 1930s and then amending it, is of importance for three reasons: firstly, it shows the close link between intertextuality and repetition in Müller’s mythological historical model, drawing on older texts as forms of iteration that are equally valid in the present. Secondly, it ties this intertextual model into a spectral mode of writing, in which history, intertext, and historical rupture are conjoined in a disturbed model of space and time that Derrida has termed hauntology:15 “One cannot speak of generations of skulls or spirits . . . except on the condition of language” (Derrida 9). The ghost is, for Jacques Derrida, always “repetition and first time,” just as Brecht here appears in the ghostly re-apparition of his poetry quoted by STIMME BRECHT (Derrida 10). History, it seems, is not just a “Schlachthaus,” but one in which the ghostly remnants live on theatrically as reminders and remainders of the barbaric past. “LACH NIT” and both Germania plays suggest that the Second World War and the Holocaust are only an extreme form of this repetition. They are by no means a decisive, rupturing Sprung, or crack, in the process of historical mirrorings at the core of German identities, not an Ursprung (moment of initiation) of something new, but another Sprung in a historic line of Sprünge. As has already been suggested, however, the importance of the ghostly anachronism for Müller is distinctly utopian: it is an attempt to find the “Lücke im Ablauf” (rupture in the order) of these repetitions. If writing is on the one hand a “Totenbeschwörung” (séance), then the confrontation of the living with the dead in this literary séance also contains a critical potential that Müller calls “exorcism”: Andererseits findet eine Art Exorzismus statt, was eine weitere Funktion des Theaters ist.  .  .  . Es ist an der Zeit, die Toten unter dem Teppich hervorzuholen und sie auf die Bühne zu bringen. . . . Jede Epoche, die abgeschlossen ist, muß begraben werden. Das ist jetzt die Aufgabe. Die Toten müssen begraben werden, bevor weitergemacht wird. Und darum will ich mich in der DDR noch mehr engagieren. (GI2 135–36) [On the other hand, a form of exorcism takes place, which is another function of the theater.  .  .  . It is time to drag the dead out from

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under the carpet and onto the stage.  .  .  . Every epoch which has drawn to a close must be buried. That is the task now. The dead must be buried before we can go on. And that is why I wish to be even more active in the GDR.]

Writing here becomes an act of mourning that at once incants and aims to exorcise the past. Writing is simultaneously a séance and exorcism in an attempt to construct a new social order: it is a séance inasmuch as it employs intertexts as media (in the material and ghostly sense) that allow the past to re-appear, and it is an exorcism inasmuch as the confrontations with ghostly traces make moving on from that past possible. This conjuring-exorcising approach might be summed up in the programmatic and paradoxical statement: Let’s begin — again. It strikes me that Müller’s pairing of séance and exorcism with the goal of “making something new” runs to the very heart of the project of modernity itself, hence undermining both Adorno’s and Diner’s central dictum that one must find a new and critical manner of writing. The irony involved in arguments about the need for a new, critical poetical language following the rupture in modernity that was/is Auschwitz is that such a poetological demand to “make it new” is at least as old as the concept of an aesthetic avant-garde and is central to the project of modernity itself. At least since the querelle des anciens et modernes, modernity has had a dynamic of crises and breaks with tradition around which every generation has constructed myths of origin or originality. Moreover, in each period the myth of a rupture is considered as violent as that in generations before. Thus, Adorno’s demand that one learn to speak critically all over again is an extreme form of a modernist aesthetics dating back at least to the seventeenth century. As Jean-Michel Rabaté has suggested, the wish to repudiate the past, of which Nietzsche’s invectives against antiquarianism in the “Zweite Unzeitgemäße Betrachtung” (Second Untimely Meditation) are just one radical example, goes hand-inhand with a constant grappling with the past and series of ghostly returns of that which has been pronounced dead.16 For Rabaté modernity is an act of constant mourning, a repeated performance of declaring the past to be past; the claim of the rupture, the Sprung, either into or out of modernism, is always linked to a Sprung from something, an imagined point of origin that must at once be invoked and negated in order to conjure up one’s sense of modernity. Exorcising the past actually invokes the repetitive structures already highlighted by Kierkegaard in 1843: Kierkegaard speaks (quoting, ironically, Hamann and in German) “mit mancherlei Zungen  .  .  . und die Sprache der Sophisten, der Wortspiele der Kreter und Araber, Weißen und Mohren und Creolen” (I speak with many tongues mixing the language of Sophists with the punning of Cretans, and Arabs, whites and blacks and mulattoes).17 Speaking in new ways,

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in other words, by no means ensures that one is not just repeating other people’s utterances. The mourning process of “making it new” reveals itself as systematically haunted by voices from the past (Rabaté xv). The attempt to banish the remnants of the past, central to modernist poetics, is undermined by the ongoing reliance on, and hence presence of, texts/voices that must first be invoked by each new generation in order to define its specific program of modernity in differentiation to that which has gone before. There can be no exorcism (“making it new”) without first actively summoning the texts of the past from which one wishes to distance one’s self, as Müller’s poetics of the “Totenbeschwörung,” or séance, suggests, “WER HAUST IN MEINER STIRN” (WHO IS LIVING IN MY HEAD). If one follows this model, then, the idea of a Zivilisationsbruch (rupture in civilization) and a concomitant aesthetic rupture and necessary process of renewal is itself to be understood as part of what Bildbeschreibung declared to be the active pursuit of a rupture in the historical pattern of repetitions, even as this pursuit enables that which is declared obsolete to exist as an uncomfortable supplemental trace. Friedrich II as a vampire would be one exemplary instance of this haunting structure. One consequence of this would be that the postmodern rhetoric of a Zivilisationsbruch might also be nothing more than another instance of searching for a rupture in order to exorcise itself from the not-yet-banished remnants of the past. While Auschwitz may be a distinct historical event (just as the November Revolution of 1918, Stalingrad, or the declaration of the GDR state are historical events), Adorno’s, Horkheimer’s, and Diner’s  — or indeed any  — attempt to employ the rhetoric of rupture in relation to Auschwitz in order to articulate the need to develop a new mode of lyrical expression can be seen to adhere to the modernist demand of “making it new.” Accordingly, theories of a Zivilisationsbruch and the concept of a poetics “after 1945” would still adhere to precisely that aesthetic tradition of modernism viewed with distrust by Horkheimer and Adorno. Writing after 1945 for Müller, on the other hand, is not so much defined by the search for a form of articulating a historical rupture; it is not writing about or after Auschwitz in the terms set out in the previous paragraph. Rather, his poetics is dominated by the search for a rupture in modernity itself (of which Auschwitz is simply one incarnation); it is a search for a form of remembering and articulating “Auschwitz” in critical terms and is, in fact, more closely related to Adorno (less so to Diner) than at first seemed to be the case. Müller shares Adorno’s oftenforgotten goal of writing after Auschwitz understood as the quest to find a new  — and critical  — “Sprachgebrauch und Begriffsbildung” (“Aporie” 32; language use and terminology), and thus moves away from the popular understanding of Adorno as having declared the impossibility of literature per se.18 Writing well (to speak with Adorno) and not being

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able to write at all are two different matters entirely. Müller’s Germania cycle thus at once refuses to adhere to the foreshortened interpretation of Adorno’s dictum central to most readings of “after 1945” and is aware of the modernist position implied by the search for a rupture both in his own and in Adorno’s writings. How, then, does Müller — or indeed any postwar writer — “make it new” without only making it new again and only ever conjuring the same ghosts that postmodern philosophy and historiography themselves invoke? History as a pattern of recurring violence seems to deny the drive for and possibility of newness. And yet this pattern is not simply a pessimistic eternal return of the same; here repetition is newness. In this Müller returns to Kierkegaard’s 1843 dictum: “Die Wiederholung ist die neue Kategorie, welche entdeckt werden soll” (Kierkegaard 22; Repetition is the new category that shall have to be discovered). While the discovery of repetition on the one hand suggests an element of novelty and newness and in turn an element of creativity, Kierkegaard simultaneously points toward a poetics of supplementarity that unsettles precisely this sense of originality. History and literature reveal themselves for Müller as forms of eternal repetition, and this revelation seems to me to be far more central to concepts of creativity after 1945 than it may at first seem. As a reader of Marx’s works, Müller will have been aware of a further dimension of repetition: the comical. Marx’s famous opening passage from Der 18te Brumaire des Louis Napoleon (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon) of 1852 agrees with Hegel’s claim that all events occur twice, but adds that the first time is tragedy, while the second is farce. This idea of repetition as comedy, taken up later by Bergson in “Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic,” seems central to Müller’s poetics of ghostly collage. He fuses scenes from different historical periods, creating an uncanny doubling that demands the viewer to combine and contrast each piece, and in which the second scene is often a comical repetition of the first. This is particularly evident in the scenes “Tod in Berlin” 1 and 2. In the first scene, Müller reproduces the final two stanzas of Georg Heym’s “Berlin III,” including the lines “Stein an Stein / die Toten schaun den roten Untergang  / aus ihrem Loch” (GTB 373; Stone on stone  / the dead observe the red decline / from their holes). In Heym’s poem it seems that those who had sung the “Marseillaise” are now dead, and revolutionary hopes are dashed. Müller seems to read the poem’s title in connection with the “red decline” as a reflection on the incomplete revolution in Germany in 1918. In connection with the first scene, “Tod in Berlin 2” shows how the failed revolution has repeated itself in the GDR, which has become, at best, a cancerous growth: “Wir sind eine Partei, mein Krebs und ich” announces the model socialist bricklayer Hilse (GTB 374; we are of one party, my cancer and I). On his death-bed Hilse (himself a

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ghostly apparition from Hauptmann’s Die Weber) may be able to imagine seeing Rosa Luxemburg, a harbinger of the socialist utopia of “rote . . . Fahnen über Rhein und Ruhr” (red . . . flags on the Rhine and Ruhr), which could conceivably be seen positively. However, the collage effect in Müller’s text undermines this positive utopian moment. When read alongside the dead revolutionaries in Heym’s poem, “roter Rosas” (red Rosa’s) supposed ghostly return from the “Schauhaus” (GTB 376–77; morgue) is anything other than the revolutionary ghost/spirit that Marx had conjured in The Communist Manifesto. In fact, she is not even a ghost in the proper sense of the word; she is a whore and a symbol of disappointed revolutionary hopes that merely takes the outward form of Rosa Luxemburg in order to calm Hilse in his final death throes. Rosa’s return ends in farce: an all-too-corporeal prostitute mimes a ghostly return (but not a real return of the revolutionary spirit) and merely repeats the words her young companion whispers into her ear. Here Müller seems to have taken Kierkegaard’s repetitive mimicry of other voices to heart, employing it to produce a Grand Guignol theater, a literature of ghosts, vampires, and uncanny re-apparitions (377). Müller’s “Totenbeschwörung” is a compelling instance of what Mikhail Bakhtin described as the dialogic nature of literature: he employs the literary tradition — and his own writing — as a quarry from which to mine, sift-through, and recombine material. The repetition occurs in a framework that is not simply brutal, but also thoroughly carnivalesque — that other pole of Bakhtin’s dialogic model (see GI3 88). This juggling of history and texts mirrors Bakhtin’s empowering and liberating mixture of “das Geheiligte mit dem Profanen, das Hohe mit dem Niedrigen, das Große mit dem Winzigen, das Weise mit dem Törichten”19 (the sacred with the profane, the high with the low, the large with the small, the intelligent with the silly), that is the core of the carnivalesque. Müller’s works feature numerous examples of Bakhtin’s “profanierende[m] und dekouvrierende[m] Doppelgänger” (Bakhtin 54; profaning and de-masking Doppelganger), which both cite and re-iterate their historical and textual sources: Friedrich I as vampire, Rosa Luxemburg as prostitute, Goebbels as Hitler’s pregnant wife, Hilse as cancer-ridden wreck. The Germania cycle more explicitly foregrounds the comical side of repetition in the figures of two clowns in “Brandenburgisches Konzert 1” (GTB 332–38), with stage directions that clearly indicate that the scene takes place in a circus-ring. In retelling the story of the “Müller von Potsdam” (Miller/Müller from Potsdam  — Clown 1 plays King Friedrich, Clown 2 plays the Miller), Müller connects the Miller’s story with problematic German identity and suggests that the birth of modern German national identity reneges on precisely those Enlightenment principles invoked by Friedrich (“denn ich spreche französisch und bin sehr aufgeklärt” (GTB 333; because I speak French and am thoroughly enlightened) at the start

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of the scene. The play subsequently deconstructs this with the lowest form of toilet humor: CLOWN 1 announces “Ich bin der König [Friedrich] von Preußen, (I am the King of Prussia), who has built his castles in Potsdam and Berlin “damit ich meinem Volk besser dienen kann, denn ich habe Hämorrhoiden und das Rheuma von den Kriegen, die ich führen mußte in Schlesien, Böhmen und Sachsen für die Ehre Preußens und die sehr berühmt sind” (GTB 332; so that I can serve my people better, because I suffer from hemorrhoids and rheumatism from the wars I had to fight for Prussia’s honor in Silesia, Bohemia, and Saxony and which are very famous). The juggling of source texts in the mouths of clowns acquires a concrete political and social significance in its critique of Germany’s Prussian heritage: the carnivalesque thus becomes one way of provoking a “Lücke im Ablauf” of historical repetitions and of uncovering the remnants of the Prussian legacy in “Brandenburgisches Konzert 2” immediately following. What appears to be missing in this response is that which Agamben has termed the “Zusammenbruch jeder Ethik der Würde” (the collapse of all ethics of dignity) that emerges as the “entsetzliche Kunde” (terrible message) from Auschwitz.20 Müller all but ignores Diner, Adorno and Agamben’s ethical challenge to cultural history in his series of eternal repetitions here. In so doing, his writings do not so much negate the concept of historical caesura as sidestep the issue, avoiding the challenge of Auschwitz by focusing on such ruptures as the haunting ground of ghosts within a cyclical-mythological German history. One should not ignore the fact, however, that Müller also claimed that “die Grundfrage des Jahrhunderts ist es, eine Alternative zu Auschwitz zu finden. Es gibt keine Alternative zu Auschwitz bis jetzt” (GI2 161; The basic question of this century is to find an alternative to Auschwitz. There is no alternative to Auschwitz to date). In short, his rejection of Diner’s idea of a Bruch notwithstanding, Müller sees the question of Auschwitz and its legacy as a central concern of his age, just not necessarily as a rupture. It can be argued that these concerns are central to the Germania cycle from the poem “LACH NIT” onwards. The poem contains a remarkable testimonial fragment from the perspective of a Jewish victim of German history, and thus highlights one of the central questions connected to this “alternative”: how to develop a mode of writing that will enable that which seems impossible, namely, to testify authentically on behalf of the victims of Auschwitz without slipping back into what Adorno called uncritical “Sprachgebrauch”: “ICH WILL EIN DEUTSCHER SEIN / (Eintragung im Schulheft eines elfjährigen jüdischen Jungen im Warschauer Ghetto).” On the one hand, Müller seems to subsume the boy’s testimony into his own poem, thereby cannibalistically consuming the victim’s words for the purposes of formulating his own poetic program — as the threefold repetition of “Ich” in lines 3, 6, and 9 suggests.

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Müller does not simply speak for or about the victim, however. He presents the boy’s words as foreign testimony, distinguishing clearly between the different “Ichs” (I) by intertextual markings. So the poem speaks with and through the testimony it presents, and not on behalf of or in place of the testimonial subject himself. Language knows a subject and not a person, to invoke Barthes’ timeless phrase. Through combining and opposing three different instances of the linguistic shifter “Ich,” the poem marks the site of a newness that arises from the combination of intertextual and historical repetitions, transforming the “Ich” into what Agamben, with Ingeborg Bachmann, has called a “Versuchsfeld” (Auschwitz 99; site of experiment). This combination does not ignore the gaps between individuals and individual statements but is rather critically aware of these gaps. “LACH NIT” may seem to deconstruct the traditional formal elements of the poem, yet it also perceivably upholds poetical form: the possibility of enjambment, the imposition of a metrical break within syntactic units (identified by Agamben as the sole defining characteristic of poetry) is still visible in Müller’s text, as, for instance, in “kommt nicht  / aus Deutschland” (comes not  / from Germany).21 In these gaps between individual Ichs and their statements, Müller points toward a “Sichtbarkeit des Wortes” (Prosa 119; visibility of the word), a self-consciousness of the poetic act that further highlights the impossibility of becoming the literary archive for those who have died, yet also simultaneously records the problem of Jewish identity. If, as Agamben has suggested, neither “Gedicht noch Gesang eingreifen [können], um das unmögliche Zeugnis zu retten” (Auschwitz 32; poem nor song can intervene in order to save the impossible testimony), then Müller does not disprove this. His poem is, however, suggestive of Agamben’s hope, that the “Zeugnis, vielleicht, die Möglichkeit des Gedichts begründen [kann]” (Auschwitz 32; testimony can, perhaps, create the possibility of poetry). If, as Lyotard has stated, the victims of Nazi death camps have been so radically silenced as to render impossible any hermeneutic discourse about Jewish victims, then Müller’s technique of intertextual hauntings seems to sidestep this problem.22 While he avoids engaging in the discourses of “on Auschwitz” and “after Auschwitz” (or “after 1945”), he does not forget the events completely, allowing a silenced voice to become a disturbing presence in his text. If one wishes to find Müller’s utopian “Lücke im Ablauf” of German barbarity, which breaks the continuities and repetitions, then this poem — the first text identifiable as part of the Germania cycle — seems to be such a moment. Writing here is a form of “Totenbeschwörung,” a ghostly incantation of voices long since erased, and hence an example of language’s power to at least name, if not to articulate that which Agamben has termed the “Unsagbare” (Prosa 105; unspeakable): the “Unbegreifliche” (unfathomable), the “leerer Ort, an dem sich Bilder, Hauch und Worte” (empty place in which images, breath, and words) at the core

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of thinking, “sich erst ereignen können” (Prosa 11; can first take place). The poem goes beyond the mere séance in order to engage with the Jewish boy as one of the voices living “in meiner Stirn,” problematizing the issue of and partially voicing the “Unbezeugtes” (un-testified) of Auschwitz’s dead (Auschwitz 34). “LACH NIT” suggests a poetics that points the way beyond the configurations of historical anachronisms and juxtapositions explored in Tod in Berlin. This idea is revisited in Gespenster am Toten Mann, in which Müller conjures up the ghosts of the entire twentieth century in order to question the role(s) of capitalism, socialism and National Socialism, and to ask whether the violence of Tod in Berlin is not an inherent component of politics itself. Nowhere is this more evident than in the scene “Siegfried eine Jüdin aus Polen.” Fusing together quotes from Hölderlin’s Empedokles, Kleist’s Der Prinz von Homburg and Hebbel’s Kriemhilds Rache, the scene uses Müller’s by-now-familiar montage-style in order to offer three variations of the Second World War based around the battle of Stalingrad. Drawing on Alexander Kluge’s Schlachtbeschreibung, and hence located firmly within discourses of ethics and memory surrounding Auschwitz, the first and second sequences portray the suffering of Russian and Wehrmacht soldiers, while the final sequence revisits the images of cannibalism and mythical violence of the Nibelungen in Tod in Berlin. The montage of different textual images offers less a coherent narrative or memory of events, than eclectically combines different political and ethical considerations that Müller connects with Stalingrad. These include the problematic relationship between law and lawlessness, human and animal, and the rational and the barbaric: “Das war der letzte Knochen Und ich will / Nicht wissen ob er vom Pferd war oder ICH HATT EINEN KAMERADEN” (GTM 264; That was the last bone And I do  / Not wish to know if it was from a horse or whether I HAD A COMRADE).23 These questions of barbarity, politics and lawful/-lessness are all inseparable from the ethical and moral considerations of Jewish suffering, as the “Jüdin aus Polen” (Jewess from Poland) in the scene’s title suggests, and hence the scene revisits the questions of testimony and articulating the “Unbegreifliche” (unfathomable) seen in “LACH NIT.” The contextual and linguistic confusion inherent to the title opens up a number of lines of interrogation: “Siegfried eine Jüdin aus Polen” (Siegfried a Jewess from Poland) confusingly combines in herself that arch-symbol of Germanness, Siegfried, with a Jewish victim identity, blurring the seemingly straightforward distinction between perpetrator and victim, German and Jew, echoing the Jewish boy’s self-destructive wish to be German in “LACH NIT.” In the collection “Explosion of a Memory,” Müller makes it clear that the “Jüdin aus Polen” is synonymous with Kriemhilde here, and Kriemhilde’s appearance in a Russian uniform within the scene is to be understood as Rosa Luxemburg, who was, for

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Müller, the first Jewish victim of National Socialism that “Siegfried” here epitomizes.24 Likewise, the indefinite article suggests that Rosa herself is merely representative of the anonymous victims of the Polish ghettos, who were the focus of the earlier poem, and hence her case is representative of the central ethical questions relating to any, or all, anonymous Jewesses from Poland, and beyond, that suffered in German death camps. In the form of an intertextual collage (Kleist, Hebbel) Kriemhilde/ Rosa — as the devoiced voice(s) of Jewish victims of German barbarity — is given a voice with which she condemns Hagen. And yet, mirroring the confusion of Siegfried/eine Jüdin, she speaks her condemnation through the medium of canonical German texts. The “Totenbeschwörung” thus employs various German texts critically and in a new order to give the “Unbezeugtes” (un-testified) a voice, albeit a ghostly one. Müller refuses to produce a simple form of memorial “after Auschwitz,” seeking rather to connect the victims of the Holocaust with the political and economic conditions responsible — namely the loss of Rosa Luxemburg as the head of German socialism. This does not necessarily fulfill the promise of “LACH NIT”: it does not give voice to the victims of German barbarity. By combining the poles of victim and perpetrator, Müller confronts and conjoins German nationalist discourse directly with its victims without falling into the pathos of uncritical writing about the dangers of which Adorno warned. While refusing to conform to traditional modes of culture (that which Adorno defined as barbarous post-Auschwitz cultural rubbish), in his palimpsests Müller produces a mode of writing after 1945 that is critical, self-reflective, self-problematizing, and poetic.

Notes 1

Theodor W Adorno, “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft,” in Gesammelte Schriften in zwanzig Bänden, vol. 10.1, 11–30. 2

All quotes will be taken from the critical edition of Heiner Müller’s works: Werke, ed. Frank Hörnigk (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001–5). The following abbreviations of frequently cited works will be used: Germania Tod in Berlin (GTB); Germania 3 Gespenster am Toten Mann (GGTM); Die Gedichte (G). In addition the interview collections: Gesammelte Irrtümer: Interviews und Gespräche. Hrsg. von Gregor Edelmann und Renate Ziemer (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren, 1991, 2. Auflage) will be referred to subsequently in the text as (GI), and Gesammelte Irrtümer 2: Interviews und Gespräche. Hrsg. von Gregor Edelmann und Renate Ziemer (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren, 1990) as (GI2). All translations are my own. 3

Dan Diner, “Aporie der Vernunft: Horkheimers Überlegungen zu Antisemitismus und Massenvernichtung,” in Zivilisationsbruch: Denken nach Auschwitz, ed. Dan Diner (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1988), 30–53. Subsequent references will appear in the text as “Aporie” with the page number.

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4

Heiner Müller, “Bildbeschreibung,” in Heiner Müller Material, ed. Frank Hörnigk (Berlin: Aufbau, 1989), 13.

5

Müller makes frequent reference to the experience of Stalingrad and Stalin’s “Kessel”-tactics, which is at the heart of Germania 3, the earliest instance I have found being in a 1978 interview (GI, 52). These references recur throughout Müller’s work on Wolokolomsker Chaussée up to his announcement in 1988 that his “nächster Text wird unter anderem in Berlin und Stalingrad spielen, und einer der Protagonisten wird Stalin sein” (next text will play among other places in Berlin and Stalingrad and one of the protagonists will be Stalin, GI2 136). The scene “DIE MASSNAHME 1956” seems to have preoccupied Müller since he began work on DER LOHNDRÜCKER and DIE UMSIEDLERIN (see Krieg ohne Schlacht. Leben in zwei Diktaturen: Eine Autobiographie. Werke 9, ed. Frank Hörnigk. Redaktionelle Mitarbeit: Christian Hippe, Kristin Schulz, Ludwig Haugk und Ingo Way (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 179–82. 6

Markus Kreikebaum, Heiner Müllers Gedichte, 231–32.

7

See Gerard Genette: Palimpseste: Die Literatur auf zweiter Stufe, 75–76.

8

See Detlev Claussen, “Nach Auschwitz. Ein Essay über die Aktualität Adornos,” in Diner, Zivilisationsbruch, 54–68, 55: “Schon 1948 begann Adorno, der weltgeschichtlichen Katastrophe, die im Universum der Konzentrations- und Vernichtungslager kulminierte, den Namen Auschwitz zu geben.” Emphasis in original. 9

Dan Diner (ed.), Zivilisationsbruch: Denken nach Auschwitz (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1988), Vorwort 7–8, and Aporie 32.

10

Theodor W. Adorno, “Stichworte. Kritische Modelle 2,” in Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 19: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 597–99; here, 597. 11 Wolfgang Emmerich, Kleine Literaturgeschichte der DDR: Erweiterte Neuausgabe (Leipzig: Gustav Kiepenhauer, 1995), 29. 12

Joachim Schmitt-Sasse, “Die Kunst aufzuhören. Der Nibelungen-Stoff in Heiner Müllers Germania Tod in Berlin,” in Die Nibelungen: Ein deutscher Wahn, ein deutscher Alptraum, ed. Joachim Heinzle, Anneliese Waldschmidt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1991), 370–96; here, 376. 13

Bettina Gruber, “Politik und Mythos. Heiner Müller als Gespensterdramatiker,” in Heiner Müller: Probleme und Perspektiven. Bath Symposion 1998, ed. Ian Wallace, Dennis Tate, Gerd Labroisse (Amsterdam, Atlanta GA: Rodopi, 2000), 89–98; here, 94–95. See also Nikolaus Müller-Schöll, “Ersetzbarkeit: Zur Erfahrung des Anderen in Heiner Müllers ‘Germania 3. Gespenster am Toten Mann,’” in Das Politische im literarischen Diskurs: Studien zur deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur, ed. Sven Krämer (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1996), 228–51. 14

Werner Frick, Die mythische Methode”: Komparatistische Studien zur Transformation der griechischen Tragödie im Drama der klassischen Moderne (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1998), 45. 15

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. by Peggy Kamuff (New York, London: Routledge, 1994), 10. Subsequent references are indicated as Derrida, followed by the page number.

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16

Jean-Michel Rabaté, Ghosts of Modernity (Gainesville, FL: UP of Florida, 1996), ix–xii. Subsequent references are indicated as Rabaté, followed by the page number. 17

Søren Kierkegaard, “Repetition,” in The Kierkegaard Reader, ed. Jonathan Rée and Jane Chamberlain (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 108–50; here, 23. English translation by editors.

18

This is by no means the conclusion that Diner draws from Adorno’s fragments; in his commentary on Adorno and Horkheimer Diner seems to take the collapse of “Sprachgebrauch” as being more terminal than Adorno seems to me to imply. 19

Michail M. Bachtin, Literatur und Karneval: Zur Romantheorie und Lachkultur (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Wissenschaft, 1990), 49. 20

Giorgio Agamben, Was von Auschwitz bleibt: Das Archiv und der Zeuge (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, Edition Suhrkamp, 2003), 60. Subsequent references are indicated as Auschwitz, followed by the page number. 21

Giorgio Agamben, Idee der Prosa (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003 [orig. 1985]), 21. Subsequent references are indicated as Prosa, followed by the page number.

22

Jean Lyotard, “Streitgespräche, oder: Sätze bilden ‘nach Auschwitz,’” in Das Vergessen(e): Anamnesen des Undarstellbaren (Vienna 1997), 43; and Nicolas Pethes, “Gebrauchen, Kritisieren, Verraten. Poetologische Anmerkungen zu einem Rechtsstreit um die Rolle des Zitats und die Stimme Brechts in Heiner Müllers ‘Germania 3,’” Zeitschrift für Germanistik 10 no. 2 (2000): 331–48; here, 346.

23

See Müller-Schöll 39–40.

24

Heiner Müller. “Der Wald von Baselitz.” In Explosion of a Memory Heiner Müller DDR: Ein Arbeitsbuch, ed. Wolfgang Storch, 180–81; here, 181.

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12: Rupture, Tradition, and Achievement in Thomas Kling’s Poetics and Poetry Aniela Knoblich

W

HEN DID THE POSTWAR ERA END? Well, that depends, might be the most appropriate answer — it depends on the interests of whoever is answering the question, whether we are talking about politics, economy, culture, etc. Possible answers may range from the opinion that we are still dominated by postwar paradigms to the conviction that it is not, in fact, valid, to speak about a postwar era as such. When it comes to literature, we are accustomed to applying the term “Nachkriegsliteratur” (postwar literature) to literary texts that were written after 1945 and deal either with the atrocities of the Second World War or with living (and, particularly, writing) conditions after the war or both. As the starting point of this literary era is marked by a political caesura, it is an epoch that can be more clearly defined than others. The question of when it ends or whether it has already ended is, however, much more difficult. Is another political change needed to bring about the completion of a literary era which has been initiated by political change? And, if so, can the GDR and German reunification be regarded as the beginning of a new literary era? What makes these considerations more complicated is the fact that epochs, of course, are construed ex post. Although Blumenberg’s statement that there are no witnesses to the changing of eras has since been qualified (by Hans Robert Jauß, for example), it remains undisputed that there is a certain danger of what Wilfried Barner calls “Epochenillusion”: “Die Möglichkeit von Epochenillusion ist Konsequenz aus der Perspektivität aller Epochenerfahrung”1 (The possibility of the delusion that a particular period seems to be an epoch is a consequence of the fact that any experience of epochs is necessarily a question of perspective).2 Indeed, it has been argued that postwar writers who heralded the beginning of a new era at the so-called Stunde Null (zero hour) were mistaken (Tradition 38). This leads to a crucial point when it comes to dealing with contemporary literature: It should not be taken for granted that what, for the time being, looks and “feels” like a rupture, like the start of a new epoch (the original meaning of the Greek epoché being breaking point), will, in fact, turn out to actually have been a new epoch when considered retrospectively from a certain historical distance.

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Poetry after 1945 is particularly afflicted both by an awareness of crisis and by a desire to write in spite of the catastrophe. And while Adorno’s hypothesis concerning poetry “after Auschwitz” has provoked plenty of disagreement, objections, and counter-evidence, the fact that the validity of the dictum is still being discussed in our time, not least in this volume, may be seen as proof of the postulate that writing poetry still needs to be justified. It is, of course, symptomatic of literary crises that they are affirmed and denied at the same time: “Insofern Literatur als ästhetische Äußerungsform zum Gegenstand traditionsnegierender Programmatik wird, geschieht dies im Zeichen eines Paradoxon” (Tradition 43; Inasmuch as literature, as an aesthetical mode of expression, becomes the object of a program that rejects tradition, this happens in a paradoxical manner). Only recently Günther Bonheim was spirited enough to carry out a “Versuch zu zeigen, daß Adorno mit seiner Behauptung, nach Auschwitz lasse sich kein Gedicht mehr schreiben, recht hatte”3 (attempt to demonstrate that Adorno was right to claim that no poem could be written after Auschwitz). The question of the possibility of writing poetry after 1945 is one that is highly relevant to the work of Thomas Kling, one of the most acclaimed contemporary German poets: not only does he write contemporary poetry but also deals with problems of writing in his (and our) time, as well as in previous epochs, including the postwar period. It would therefore seem doubly instructive to analyze his views on poetry and the conditions of writing in a time when the legitimacy and usefulness of poetry is still being called into question: first, his essays provide us with a poet’s perspective on postwar writing, and, secondly, Kling claims of himself that he is writing in a postwar or post-postwar era.

Kling on Recent Literary History Thomas Kling died in 2005 at the age of forty-seven, leaving behind him a body of several hundred poems and numerous essays. Although this seems to be a sizeable oeuvre, Kling does state certain difficulties in what to say or how to write, yet rather with recent German poetry in general than with his own writing. In his eyes, German poetry from the 1950s onwards is boring and lowbrow, and in one of his most relevant essays, Zu den deutschsprachigen Avantgarden (On the German-speaking Avantgardes, 2001), he particularly condemns the “Alltagsgedicht” (everyday poem), which “im Aschenbrödelfetzen [.  .  .] längsschleicht, depressiv, schlecht gearbeitet, sprachschlampig, sackförmig schlackernd in ostentativer Schlechtdraufität”4 (sneaks about in Cinderella’s rags, depressed, badly done, in sloppy language, dangling sack-like in ostentatious moroseness). Both East and West German poetry, he says, is of poor quality; the only thing worth reading and hearing are the lyrics of punk bands of the 1970s

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(Botenstoffe 25–26). This less-than-satisfactory situation is, according to Kling, “geradezu Anlaß für meine Generation, die in den 70er Jahren das Gedichtschreiben begann, andere Wege einzuschlagen, andere, als die von der Gruppe 47 abgesegneten Traditionen, aufzugreifen” (Botenstoffe 28; virtually what caused my generation of writers, who started writing poetry in the seventies, to take different lines, to adopt different traditions from those rubber-stamped by the Gruppe 47). So, Kling suggests that German poetry has undergone a relatively recent change initiated by “his generation.” Aside from himself, he mentions Peter Waterhouse, Franz Josef Czernin, and Bert Papenfuß (Botenstoffe 26). Interestingly, he does not seem to care about what accounts for the difficulties faced by his predecessors’ writing: He does not refer at all to 1945 and the Second World War as possible reasons for or explanations of a poetic crisis in Adorno’s sense. His diagnosis is restricted to a rather subjective reading and judgment of the texts themselves. In other words, Kling talks about literary history without talking about history. This is important for more than one reason: Ostentatiously ignoring Adorno, and thus calling into question the idea that 1945 required a rupture in poetics, Kling is obviously not interested in arguments that posit a special situation for writers after the Second World War. Nevertheless, he implicitly admits that there was a rupture after 1945 when, on the one hand, he judges his predecessors’ poetry to be inferior and, on the other hand, aligns himself with the expressionist poets of the First World War era, who are, in his eyes, neglected by contemporary poets. While the Second World War is almost completely disregarded, the First World War is focused on several times, and even serves him as a topic for his poetry, especially and most obviously in his cycle Der Erste Weltkrieg,5 but not only there. Characterizing the poetry of Waterhouse, Czernin and Papenfuß as an “Einschnitt,” a break or incision, Kling announces a second rupture in the early 1980s, but one which only becomes palpable at the beginning of the 1990s: “die ersten Lyrikbände der heute Vierzigjährigen [. . .] [wurden] nicht wirklich als Einschnitt begriffen [. . .]. Das änderte sich, langsam, erst ab ziemlich genau 1989; ab Anfang/Mitte der 90er Jahre wird ein Interesse an zeitgenössischer [. . .] Lyrik im deutschsprachigen Raum scheinbar größer” (Botenstoffe 26; the first poetry books by poets who are in their forties today were not really recognized as a caesura. This, however, began to change slowly, starting pretty much exactly in 1989; since the beginning or middle of the nineties, interest in contemporary poetry seems to have increased in the German-speaking area). Once more Kling declares a rupture in literary history without tracing it back to any historical or political origin — except in the sense that it is impossible to mention the year 1989 (or 1945) without simultaneously and immediately calling to mind major historical events. However, he obviously does

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not intend to trigger such associations; the political background of contemporary poetry is not central to his poetological thought at all. In this respect, he differs from other contemporary poets such as Durs Grünbein, whom he  — nota bene  — does not list as one of the poets who caused the “Einschnitt.” Kling’s way of dealing with the date 1989, the facts that he chooses to mention, and those he omits, almost suggest that it was a poetic and in no way political caesura. However, the poetry written by GDR authors of Kling’s generation before and after the Wende suggests the contrary: in spite of the political changes, there does not, in fact, seem to have been a new beginning in poetry.6 Similarly, it has often been argued that 1945 was not as decisive a poetic rupture as it was considered by authors and literary criticism of the postwar era alike. But, the less plausible Kling’s declaration of rupture seems, the more tempting it is to examine his own poetry. I will analyze Kling’s work in terms of the supposedly new mode of writing that, in his opinion, was established, among others, by him.

One or Two Poems by Kling The question of which specific text — poem or prose piece — best serves as an example of Kling’s contribution to postwar poetics is not an easy one to answer. For one thing, he deals with the subject of writing in his era in a number of different texts. But hardly any of these texts can be isolated from the surroundings in which they are embedded. As, in most cases, the interpretation of a particular poem or essay depends heavily on the context in which it is embedded, that is the other texts in the volume or even those in other volumes, choosing any one of these texts for individual analysis is a questionable approach. The elaborate embeddedness of texts, as I would like to show in this paper, is symptomatic of Kling’s way of writing; it seems to be constitutive for his compositional principle. My considerations, however, are based on one text which already reveals itself to be poetological at first glance. It is the opening poem of a cycle called “Greek Anthology. Nach Kenneth Rexroth” (Greek Anthology. After Kenneth Rexroth) from the volume Sondagen (Sondages) published in 2002.7 It consists of six verses in the form of a direct address by the Delphic oracle to a supplicant. Die letzte Äußerung des delphischen Orakels I Geh sag dem könig die dädalischen Mauern sind zur erde gestürzt Phoibos hat kein heiligtum keinen Prophetischen lorbeer keinen Sprechenden quell mehr. das plaudernde Wasser zuletzt ist versiegt. (Sondagen 121)

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[The Final Utterance of the Delphic Oracle I Go tell the king the daedal Walls have fallen to the earth Phoibos has no sanctuary no Prophetic laurel no Speaking spring. the garrulous Water has dried up at last.8]

This text is a translation of a translation, of Kenneth Rexroth’s English version of the last statement of the Delphic oracle of which we know,9 dating back to AD 362. It is reportedly the oracle’s prophecy to a physician named Oreibasios, who, on behalf of the emperor Julian Apostata, had asked whether the oracle would endure in a Christianized world.10 In Rexroth’s English translation of the 1960s, the Greek hexameter was translated into English and arranged in six verses without meter: “Go tell the King: The daedal / Walls have fallen to the earth / Phoibos has no sanctuary, / No prophetic laurel, no / Speaking spring. The garrulous / Water has dried up at last” (Rexroth, unpaginated).11 In short, all Kling has done in his German version is adopt the English structure, provide it with a title, and integrate it into his volume of poetry. Can this actually be called a Kling poem? Obviously, it is a poetological poem since the name of the god Phoibos, an epithet of Apollo, as well as the phrases “Sprechende[r] quell” (line 5) and “das plaudernde  / Wasser” (line 5–6), references to the Castalian Spring, which is situated in the oracle district, unmistakably evoke the notion of poetry. The end of the Delphic oracle is thus linked with the end of poetic inspiration; the fountain  — in any sense of the word — has run dry. It is obvious that the poem indicates a rupture: it deals with the impossibility of further writing due to a lack of inspiration.12 The rather plain, sober style  — apart from the word order, perhaps  — thus seems to correspond to the content. Interestingly, Kling does not choose one of the available German translations of the dictum in which traditional hexameter is used. His version is more like a prose text with some rather arbitrary enjambments, a style that is typical of poetry of the 1960s, that he, however, rejects in his essays. Moreover, the text is anything but typical for Kling: it lacks the orthographic license and phrases of dialect that had already become his signature long before the publication of Sondagen. The most remarkable feature of the poem, in my eyes, is its title “Die letzte Äußerung des delphischen Orakels I.” The numbering points forward in the cycle of poems, suggesting that there must be a second such item somewhere, and at the same time is, of course, a paradox since, by nature, a “final utterance” should not initiate a series. What we have here is not a poem composed by Kling but a version of a text he has encountered and placed in a specific context, and it is this that makes it peculiar. “Die letzte Äußerung des delphischen Orakels I”

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cannot be completely understood without its sequel, “Die letzte Äußerung des delphischen Orakels II.” Die letzte Äußerung des delphischen Orakels II geht übern sender. aus der ekstasehöhle eine frauenstimme, richtig krass. „geh, erzähl“ – letztes statement, originalton nachgesprochen – „erzähl dem könig“, wozu bespannung stark vibriert. der stoff erzittert, das magische auge, bei jedem wort. der stoff bewegt sich, während die dädalische mauer ins wanken gerät. geh erzähl! knarzt es, geh übern sender. wie von unterhalb gesprochen, von unten gesprochenes, bevor sie voll abdreht: delphis benommene stimme. fading, schwund, wellengetriller. steingepolter übern sender. und das wars. ein abgedrehtes wimmern – so gehts über; wie aus exotenschnäbeln schrille pfiffe, knister-knister folgt – aus das rauschen, stäuben, rieseln. nur noch ein sickern, helles tröpfeln grenznah dir ins ohr. an sound das allerschmalste nur. das wars dann, leute. letzte quelle, die versiegt. (Sondagen 122) [The Final Utterance of the Delphic Oracle II is being broadcast. out of the cave of ecstasy a female voice, absolutely awesome. “go, tell” — final statement, original sound repeated — “tell the king,” while lining is vibrating heavily. the cloth is palpitating, the magic eye, with every word. the cloth is moving, while the daedal wall starts trembling. go tell! it creaks, go and be broadcast. as if spoken from underneath, something spoken from below, before she goes totally insane: delphi’s dizzy voice. fading, vanishing, waves trilling. rumbling of stones being broadcast. and that’s it.

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an insane whining being switched off — that’s the way it is; like strident whistles from exotic beaks, then crack-crack — end of hissing, dusting, rippling. just a trickling, clear dripping close to the limit into your ear. very little sound left only. that’s it, folks. last fountain drying up.]

This second poem, then, is a description of the very final utterance of the Delphic oracle. Parts of the first poem are quoted, albeit with slight modifications: “‘geh erzähl’” (lines 3, 9), “‘erzähl dem könig’” (line 5). Yet most of the poem deals with the sound of the oracular statement, a sound reminiscent of a radio broadcast. This is indicated by the introductory verse “geht übern sender,” which can be read as a continuation of the title: “Die letzte Äußerung des delphischen Orakels geht übern sender.” The ancient, prophetic voice is being communicated by means of modern media, suggesting that the ancient voice is still audible, albeit not very clearly. There are several background noises and the loudspeakers appear to be rather decrepit: “knarzt es” (line 9), “knister-knister” (line 17), “wozu bespannung stark  / vibriert. der stoff erzittert” (lines 5–6). Obviously, the equipment in use is rather dated. On the other hand, the difficulties in transmission might equally have something to do with an extraordinary power of the ancient voice and the prophetic message, a kind of supernatural power that seems to overwhelm the technical equipment. We do not learn definitively whether the interference in the transmission is caused by the weakness or the power of the voice, but the description “eine frauenstimme, richtig krass” (line 2) seems to suggest that it is rather a case of the latter. Moreover, the broadcast reveals the paradoxical character of the oracular statement: proclaiming its own end, it is still existent. However, this is a preserved existence rather than an animated one, an “originalton nachgesprochen” (line 4). By allowing the Delphic oracle to be broadcast on the radio, Kling associates the ancient psychic medium with the recent broadcast medium of radio. This association is condensed into the phrase “bevor sie voll abdreht” (line 11), where the word abdrehen means both to switch off (a radio, for example) and, colloquially, to go insane. By playing with the ambivalence of the word, Kling suggests a certain continuity between antiquity and the present. The ruptures between and changing of eras did not manage to silence the voice, or, more precisely, the tradition of the voice, although “Die letzte Äußerung des delphischen Orakels I,” which refers to the end of the most important cult site in Greece for over a millennium, apparently must also be interpreted

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as the end of any kind of inspired speech. The outlasting of the voice, which has always been communicated by a medium in one form or another, is facilitated by modern media now, even though the content of the Pythia’s words is now barely there and overwhelmed by background noises like “rauschen, stäuben,  / rieseln” (lines 18–19): the medium has become the message. This subordinate role of the content together with a focus on pure sound and references to antiquity link the poem to Gottfried Benn’s poetics, which are, in turn, influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, both of which influences are expressed here by the signal word “rauschen.”13 However, Kling does not simply reproduce Benn’s “Nietzschean” way of writing. He even distances himself from Nietzsche’s characterization of the poet as a “berauschte[r] Schwärmer” (enraptured enthusiast) in his late text “Projekt ‘Vorzeitbelebung,’” in which he quotes from Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, 1872), commenting on it with an ironic undertone: „So können wir jetzt  .  .  . uns in folgender Weise den Lyriker erklären.“ Herr Nietzsche versucht was. „Die Geburt der Tragödie“ mit ihrer berühmt-fatalen Kategorisierung in dionysisch und apollinisch ist nichts weiter als die Entmündigung des lyrischen Dichters zum rein inhaltsfrei „berauschten Schwärmer“. Nietzsche postuliert den von ihm noch so hellenischnett genannten „lyrische[n] Genius“: Er fordert ihn als Musikbox. Das ist hauptsächlich die Ästhetiklektüre in Sachen Nietzsche, von der die Generation Benn (Text) und Ball (Performativität) über Jahrzehnte, das erste Drittel bis in die erste Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts, sich infiziert gezeigt hat.14 [“Thus we can now . . . understand the lyrical poet as follows.” Mr. Nietzsche tries something out. “The Birth of Tragedy” with its famous and fatal categorization into the Dionysian and the Apollonian is nothing but the incapacitation of the lyrical poet, transforming him into an insubstantial, “enraptured enthusiast.” Nietzsche posits the type of poet he calls in a Hellenic-friendly manner “lyrical genius.” He postulates him as a jukebox. This is mainly the aesthetic way of reading Nietzsche, which has influenced the generation of Benn (text) and Ball (performativity) for decades, from the first third to the first half of the twentieth century.]

As this passage illustrates, then, it is not advisable to draw general conclusions from one single Kling poem or cycle: Considering the Nietzschean notion of “rauschen” in light of Kling’s reservations about Nietzsche may decisively change our reading of the Delphi poem. Both the emphasis on sound and a critical attitude toward any “enraptured” sound-based

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poetry come to the fore, although this may seem contradictory: “aus das  / rauschen, stäuben,  / rieseln” (lines 17–19) reads like a programmatic statement rejecting “rauschen” in favor of a new way of writing poetry, while the poem itself does actually benefit from such a soundscape. The poem is thus symptomatic of a way of writing that works by both imitating and dissociating. It is not, in short, a condensed expression of Kling’s poetics but needs rather to be assessed in the broader context of his writing. Kling’s second Delphi poem responds to the first one by updating and contradicting it. This implies that more recent ruptures in literary history were even less able to damage prophetic inspiration: neither 1945 nor 1989 could seriously endanger poetry, just as little as Christianization and the abolition of the Delphic oracle  — otherwise it would not have been possible to write a second Delphi poem.15 The description of sounds, spoken language, and fragmentary utterances is one of Kling’s favorite poetic modes. It can be found in almost all of his poems and is often cited as a typical feature of his poetry. The statement of the Delphic prophetess therefore makes an ideal subject for the poet. In “Die letzte Äußerung des delphischen Orakels II,” there are numerous instances of this way of writing: the omission of letters, as in “übern” (line 1), colloquial expressions like “richtig krass” (line 2), “das wars dann, leute” (line 22) and onomatopoetic words like “knarzen” (line 9) and “knister-knister” (line 17). It cannot be denied that what we have in front of us is a readily identifiable Kling poem, and, as such, demonstrates his ability to write in the aftermath and in spite of all ruptures that have hitherto threatened poetry. The poem provides evidence that it is still possible to write poetry and at the same time suggests how this can be done — the words “so gehts” (line 15) can be understood as “this’s the way it works” — that is by focusing on sound and orality and, paradoxically, tradition. One might argue, it is true, that what Kling writes is not poetry at all, and, in fact, some scholars have done so (for instance, Bonheim 100–102, 118–19). Without getting too involved in the complex question of how to define a poem or poetry, I will briefly comment on this problem later on. Returning to the poem, another significant detail is that both Delphi poems start with the same verb, gehen. In the first poem, the word occurs as an imperative, and, while in the second poem this imperative is repeated several times as a quotation from the first poem, the first word here is an indicative. The message that was accompanied by the request “Geh sag” or, respectively, “geh, erzähl” is now broadcast (“geht übern sender”). In this sense, the second poem can be understood as a fulfillment of the task posed by the oracle: It passes on the oracular statement, fulfilling the responsibility for tradition, a responsibility that, according to a certain view of poetry, rests on the poet as such: Sagen and Erzählen have always been seen as the original tasks of a poet. This reading is

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confirmed by the sentence “der stoff bewegt sich” (line 7), which not only refers to the vibration of the cloth covering of the loudspeakers but also metaphorically describes the poetic technique of telling and retelling, of transforming and adopting traditional subjects and texts. Kling’s poem is thus not just a reference to or reception of the ancient text but reflects the current condition of poetry and its relationship to tradition. Appropriately, then, even the second “final utterance” of the Delphic oracle does not mean that inspiration has come to an end: There are seven more poems in the cycle. It is significant that the fountain that has run dry by the end of “Die letzte Äußerung des delphischen Orakels II” springs forth again in the following poem: “Hier mögen müde menschen ausruhn von der reise / Bei meiner kalten sauberen flüsternden quelle” (Sondagen 123, lines 4–5; Here tired men may rest from travel, / By my cold, clean, whispering spring, Rexroth 21). Although it is not possible to analyze in detail each of the seven texts, I will briefly glance at another poem that lends itself to a closer analysis in relation to postwar poetics. Leonidas II Hier ist Klitos kleine bude Hier sein kleines handtuchfeld Hier sein winziger weinacker Hier ist sein waldstückchen Hier hat Klito achtzig jahre verbracht. (Sondagen 128) [Here is Klito’s little shack. Here is his little cornpatch. Here is his tiny vineyard. Here is his little woodlot. Here Klito spent eighty years. (Rexroth 53)]

Another very simple, short poem, consisting of five anaphoric verses, the last of which is a kind of summary. With its plain diction and strong emphasis on deictic and possessive pronouns it is reminiscent of a stocktaking list, and thus its reference to what is arguably the most prominent German postwar poem, Günter Eich’s “Inventur,” is unmistakable. There is a decisive difference, though. Unlike “Inventur,” “Leonidas II” is situated in ancient Greece. Kling overtly draws on the epigrammatic tradition of Leonidas of Tarentum, who wrote countless poems about peasants delivering the tools of their trade to some god at the close of their lives, and became a forerunner of epigrammatic poetry in the third century BC.16 Leonidas’s epigrams are extant in the so-called Greek Anthology or Anthologia Graeca, also known as Anthologia Palatina, a collection of Greek poems from antiquity to the Byzantine Empire. In the sixth book

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of the anthology, there is a direct model for Kling’s “Leonidas II.” The work in question will be quoted in German here in order to illustrate Kling’s way of treating the model. Kleiton gehört die Hütte, gehört auch der dürftige Acker, gleichfalls das Fleckchen mit Wein, ganz in der Nähe, dazu dieses Gestrüpp, das ihm Brennholz verschafft. Dies Wenige freilich hat ihn redlich genährt bis in sein achtes Jahrzehnt.17

By simplifying and reducing the structure and wording of the Greek epigram, following, once more, Rexroth’s English version of the poem, Kling manages to align himself with ancient Greek poetry and Günter Eich at the same time. The most striking parallel between Eich and Kling here is probably the figurative use of the word “Handtuch,” which occurs in Eich’s last stanza: “Dies ist mein Handtuch”18 (This is my towel), but neither in the Greek original nor in Rexroth’s translation. Kling’s alignment with Eich by way of ancient Greek poetry is particularly remarkable because Eich’s poem has often been (mis-)interpreted as inaugurating a completely new way of writing and as the most important programmatic poem of Kahlschlagslyrik (clear-cutting poems), as a poetic monolith, as it were. While critics have already shown that there is more than one example of “Inventur” in literary history,19 this by no means diminishes the importance of the poem for postwar poetics. In fact, Eich’s achievement could be considered to be even more outstanding since he managed to seem to be writing a new poetry of the zero hour while simultaneously adopting a tradition. What makes Kling’s “Leonidas II” singular, then, is not merely its alignment with epigrammatic tradition, nor is it just the discovery that Eich too is engaging with a certain tradition. What makes the poem singular is rather the implied poetological statement that writing after a caesura by necessity cannot absolutely refrain from tradition and has to, by necessity perhaps, refer to what came before: after the alleged Kahlschlag, Günter Eich drew on examples that can be traced as far back as the third century BC and Leonidas. Kling himself, after a period of what he considers inferior poetry and a caesura he regards as necessary, tries to establish a new way of writing — which, of course, requires a caesura. This new way, however, consists in his displaying a dependency on tradition. I do not intend to reveal every single precursor involved here but do want to comment on another prominent pre-text. Kling’s cycle of poems, opening with a Greek oracular statement and containing versions of and allusions to Greek poetry in different stages of intertextuality, is entitled — in English, nota bene — “Greek Anthology,” which, given the references to the Anthologia Graeca, seems quite a suitable title. The question why Kling chooses an English title is immediately answered by the subtitle: “Nach Kenneth Rexroth.” Rexroth, the founder of the so-called San Francisco Renaissance, translated a number of poems

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from the Greek Anthology into English and called them exactly that: Poems from the Greek Anthology. Kling thus aligns himself with the Anthologia Graeca as presented by Kenneth Rexroth, yet at the same time he, in a way, dissociates himself from both Rexroth and the ancient anthology, since he does not write “poems from the Greek Anthology,” but his own “Greek Anthology,” as it were. Moreover, the title suggests that he does not so much adapt or translate Rexroth as write “nach Kenneth Rexroth” in the sense of stylistic imitation, as well as chronological succession and therefore updating. One might say that the process of associating with and dissociating from other poems and poets by the titling and subtitling of poems and cycles goes to the very core of Kling’s poetics. The multiple references to heterogeneous traditions within his poems can be understood and (re)appraised only if their titles and positions within the cycle or volume are taken into account. A reader who does not know any of Kling’s poems except “Die letzte Äußerung des delphischen Orakels I” or “Leonidas II,” for example, will not only be unable to get an adequate impression of Kling’s way of writing, but he or she is likely to be utterly bewildered, not knowing how to interpret or appreciate the poem in question. The specific arrangement, structure, and composition of poems, cycles and volumes, together with alignments, allusions, and references as well as rejections and dissociations, give rise to a rereading of texts from antiquity to the twentieth century. But Kling’s poems not only refer to his predecessors’ poems, they also refer to and comment on one another. In other words, there are very close connections between individual texts, to the extent that it is sometimes impossible to distinguish where one poem ends and another begins.

Final Utterances An interesting question is whether it is helpful to speak about contemporary poetry in cases where most of an author’s poems deal with the (im)possibility of writing poetry in his or her time. Günther Bonheim has his doubts when it comes to the legitimacy of poetry in the twenty-first century: Indem sie sich als die Lyrik unserer Epoche präsentieren, machen sie eindrücklich darauf aufmerksam, daß es Lyrik in unserer Epoche (nimmt man als Maßstab für diese Etikettierung die Entwicklung bis hin zu den „Nachkriegs“-Autoren) so nicht mehr gibt, daß es sich bei dem, was gleichwohl unter diesem Namen noch läuft, inzwischen schon mehr um eine Art von Survival handelt. (118–19) [Inasmuch as they [contemporary poets] present themselves as the lyrical poetry of our epoch, they clearly demonstrate that there is no lyrical poetry anymore (if we take developments up to and including

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“postwar” writers as the criterion for this label) and that what still goes by the name of lyrical poetry is rather a kind of survival.]

This statement is problematic because it implies that poets should not write for their own time but for a timeless reality. In addition, the claim is apparently directed at postwar poets only, and, in this sense, it is inconsistent. Moreover, Bonheim analyses one Kling poem and rejects it because it seems to him “als ob hier einer seinem eigenen, zugegeben hohen, Anspruch nicht gewachsen wäre” (Bonheim 102; as if the author could not cope with his own, albeit ambitious, standards). Yet it is, as I have illustrated, not advisable in Kling’s case to confine oneself to the analysis of one poem in isolation. And arguably it is a matter of individual taste whether a poet’s awareness of literary crisis is a sign of quality or rather a limitation. Thomas Kling, at any rate, has become an example for a younger generation of poets, not least due to the important role played by sound and orality in his poetry — and, indeed, what could be more appropriate for a poet named Kling? He adopts and perpetuates modes of oral, prophetic speech by means of written poetry. His poetological attitude is thus oscillating between originality and dependency: On the one hand, he presents himself as an innovator, on the other hand he overtly displays his dependency on several precursors. However, the traditions and examples he draws on are carefully selected and, in most cases, are not part of the canon. Kling generally prefers authors of any era who have, in his opinion, been wrongly neglected by literary history, avoiding his immediate predecessors, however, in order to distinguish himself as an innovator. Indeed, this is probably also the reason why he does not comment on the problems and questions writers had to face after the Second World War. It is significant that many of the forerunners he chooses can themselves be considered innovators of poetry, like Rexroth or Leonidas. Kling thus positions himself in a tradition of innovation. Wilfried Barner shows that even authors who are often referred to as postwar writers par excellence, namely Alfred Andersch and Wolfdietrich Schnurre, did not totally refrain from references to tradition in their poetic concepts but preferred “suspensive Negation” (suspensive negation), which “läßt das überlieferte Bedeutende als solches einstweilen stehen und verlagert alle Innovation in die noch ausstehende ‘Entscheidung’” (Tradition 39; allows meaningful traditions to stand for the time being, and postpones any innovation until a “decision” that has yet to be made). According to Andersch, it cannot be decided yet which parts of literary tradition may be useful and what should be rejected: “Nicht einmal Andersch beschreitet, angesichts des ‘Grauens’, den Weg der Totalnegation. Vielmehr arbeitet er stellvertretend auf, analysiert und wertet mit dem Postulat, daß es für das epochale Neu-Werden ‘keine Muster und Vorbilder gibt’” (Tradition 39; Not even

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Andersch, in the face of the “horror,” takes the line of absolute negation. Rather, he processes, analyzes and evaluates, claiming that “there are no patterns and examples” for the renewal of an epoch). Kling, one may continue now, has made his decisions. His poetics are affected ex negativo by postwar writers, and in his opinion another rupture is necessary to highlight his and his generation’s achievements, which he refers to as an “Einschnitt” (Botenstoffe 26). But does his self-fashioning as an innovator appear plausible? Emphasizing sound and orality is anything but new. Kling focuses on the outstanding position of the poet as inspired prophet, with the sound of language rather than a deity as the source of his inspiration. His way of confronting antiquity with everyday life in the twenty-first century may be seen as an enhancement of and, likewise, a dissociation from how earlier poets like Hugo Ball and Ernst Jandl dealt with orality. Kling’s alignments with heterogeneous traditions can be and have been regarded as trend-setting by poets of his own and, indeed, following generations (for instance Marcel Beyer, Ulrike Draesner, Barbara Köhler). His orality-centered speech, it is true, sometimes appears arbitrary. It is also debatable whether self-fashioning as an innovator and peculiar spelling bring about a poetic renewal. Yet it can also be argued that it is precisely these peculiarities that make Kling an interesting poet. The emphasis on transformation in the sense of media and media change adds a self-referentiality to his poems which can be considered innovative. His own final utterance, written shortly before he died of lung cancer, at a point when he could no longer speak, is a cycle about sibyls (Flugdaten 155–68), demonstrating that prophetic speech does not even end with the death of a twenty-firstcentury poet.

Notes 1

Wilfried Barner, “Zum Problem der Epochenillusion,” in Epochenschwelle und Epochenbewußtsein, ed. Reinhart Herzog and Reinhart Koselleck (München: Fink, 1987), 517–29; here, 517. See also Wilfried Barner, “Über das Negieren von Tradition. Zur Typologie literaturprogrammatischer Epochenwenden in Deutschland,” in Epochenschwelle und Epochenbewußtsein, 3–51: “Träfe H. Blumenbergs Satz zu: ‘Es gibt keine Zeugen von Epochenumbrüchen’, so wären die Protagonisten der [. . .] traditionsnegierenden Bewegungen per definitionem solche, die nicht ‘Epoche gemacht’ haben. Oder anders gewendet: das, wovon sie Zeugnis geben, war kein Epochenumbruch” (If H. Blumenberg was correct in saying that “There are no witnesses to the changing of epochs,” this would imply that the principal agents of movements that rejected tradition did not shape an epoch. In other words: what they witnessed was not a rupture in epochs), 41–42. Rejecting tradition, these authors claim to be the beginning of a new epoch. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation Tradition and page number.

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All translations, unless otherwise stated, by Aniela Knoblich.

3

Günther Bonheim, Versuch zu zeigen, daß Adorno mit seiner Behauptung, nach Auschwitz lasse sich kein Gedicht mehr schreiben, recht hatte (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002). Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation Bonheim and page number. 4

Thomas Kling, Botenstoffe (Köln: DuMont, 2001), 28. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation Botenstoffe and page number. 5

Thomas Kling, Fernhandel. Gedichte (Köln: DuMont, 1999), 9–30. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation Fernhandel and page number. 6

Hermann Korte, “Energie der Brüche. Ein diachroner Blick auf die Lyrik des 20. Jahrhunderts und ihre Zäsuren,” in Lyrik des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. HeinzLudwig Arnold (München: edition text + kritik, 1999), 63–106; here, 95–96. 7

Thomas Kling, Sondagen: Gedichte (Köln: DuMont, 2002). Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation Sondagen and page number. 8

Translation from the Greek original by Kenneth Rexroth, Poems from the Greek Anthology (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1962) unpaginated (with slight modifications in punctuation and line breaks in Kling’s version). Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation Rexroth and page number. 9

Herbert William Parke, and Donald Ernest Wilson Wormell, The Delphic Oracle: Volume II: The Oracular Responses (Oxford: Blackwell, 1956), No. 476. 10

Marion Giebel, Das Orakel von Delphi: Geschichte und Texte. Griechisch/Deutsch (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2001), 111. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation Giebel and page number. 11

The poem is printed on the first page of Rexroth’s volume, before the foreword, the title, and any other poem, indicating the programmatic status that Rexroth attributes to it. 12

There are examples of this motif in German poetry: in one of his most renowned poems, “Brot und Wein,” Hölderlin laments the divine spirit of ancient Greece: “Aber die Thronen, wo? die Tempel, und wo die Gefäße, / Wo mit Nektar gefüllt, Göttern zu Lust der Gesang? / Wo, wo leuchten sie denn, die fernhintreffenden Sprüche? / Delphi schlummert und wo tönet das große Geschick?” (But where are the thrones? Where the temples, the songs, / The vases full of nectar for the pleasure of the gods? / Where are the oracles that shine for miles and miles? / Delphi sleeps, and where does great Fate resound?; Sämtliche Gedichte, ed. Jochen Schmidt [Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2005], 287, v. 59–62. Later on in the poem, the status of the poet in his time is called into question: “und was zu tun indes und zu sagen / Weiß ich nicht und wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?” (not knowing what to do or say / In the meantime. What use are poets in times of need?, 290, v. 121–22). (Translation by James Mitchell, Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin: The Fire of the Gods Drives Us to Set Forth by Day and by Night, 2. ed. [San Francisco, California: Ithuriel’s Spear, 2007], 13 and 19). 13

For Benn’s reception of Nietzsche, particularly regarding sound and “Rausch,” see Neymeyr.

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14

Thomas Kling, Auswertung der Flugdaten (Köln: DuMont, 2005), 78. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation Flugdaten and page number. 15

Interestingly, the status and stability of the oracle were already called into question during its existence: in a treatise on the question “Why the Pythia does not prophesy in verse any longer,” Plutarch discusses whether the fact that the prophetess speaks in prose in his day, that is to say, between the first and second centuries AD, should be understood as a decline in her prophetic powers (Plutarchus, Pythici dialogi, ed. Wilhelm Sieveking and Hans Gärtner, [Stuttgart: Teubner, 1997]). Important to note is, however, the fact that we do not know if there was ever divination in verse at any time. It may be more likely that priests serving in the sanctuary put the Pythia’s words into verse (see also Giebel 24–27). 16

It is interesting that Leonidas’ poetry deals with giving up one’s possessions while Eich’s “Inventur” emphasizes the desire of the survivor of war to keep safe what remains to him. Then again, the poems equal one another in their attitude of thankfulness. These parallels and differences between poems that might be subsumed under the genre of dedicational poetry mirror a development in poetic attitudes which might be worth a closer analysis. The perspective within each poem reveals the poetological and ideological positions of the respective author and his or her time. 17

Dietrich Ebener, Die Griechische Anthologie in drei Bänden. Erster Band: Buch I–IV (Berlin: Aufbau, 1981), 225. 18

Günter Eich, Gesammelte Werke in vier Bänden. Bd. I: Die Gedichte. Die Maulwürfe, ed. Axel Vieregg (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 36, v. 27. 19

Gerhard Kaiser refers in this context to Richard Weiner’s Czech poem “Jean Baptiste Chardin” (1916) (Gerhard Kaiser, “Günter Eich: Inventur. Poetologie am Nullpunkt,” in Poetologische Lyrik von Klopstock bis Grünbein: Gedichte und Interpretationen, ed. Olaf Hildebrand, 268–85 [Köln: Böhlau, 2003]). In addition, Klaus Gerth highlights striking parallels with Siegfried von der Trenck’s “Volk und Führer” (1941). Eich’s “Inventur” has itself now been imitated several times, for instance by Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s “nänie auf den apfel” (1962) and Robert Gernhardt’s “Inventur 96 oder Ich zeig Eich mein Reich” (1996). (Klaus Gerth, “Inventur  — das ‘lyrische Paradepferd des “Kahlschlags”’?” Praxis Deutsch 22 [1995]: 52–57). As far as I know, the reference to a tradition of simple, unadorned epigrammatic poetry has not yet been taken into consideration by criticism.

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Part III: Comparative Explorations in European Poetics

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13: Sartre and His Literary Alter Ego Mathieu in Les Chemins de la liberté (1938–49): From the Roads to an Abstract Freedom to the Roads of Authenticity Manuel Bragança La guerre a vraiment divisé ma vie en deux . . . C’est là, si vous voulez, que je suis passé de l’individualisme et de l’individu pur d’avant-guerre au social, au socialisme. C’est ça le vrai tournant de ma vie: avant, après. Avant, ça m’a mené à des oeuvres comme La Nausée [1938] . . . et après ça m’a mené lentement à la Critique de la raison dialectique [1960] [War really divided my life into two parts. . . . It is then, if you want, that I went from individualism and the pure individual that I was before the war to the social, socialism. That was the turning point of my life: before, after. Before, it led me to works like La Nausée . . . after, slowly, to the Critique de la raison dialectique.] — Jean-Paul Sartre Mathieu . . . qui [est] moi. [Mathieu . . . who [is] me.] — Jean-Paul Sartre

P

HILOSOPHER, NOVELIST, PLAYWRIGHt but also political theorist and literary critic, Sartre (1905–80) is the major intellectual figure of postwar France and one of the most influential twentieth-century thinkers. Critics have long established that an autobiographical dimension can be found in most, if not all his work.1 However, apart from his autobiographical essay Les Mots (Words),2 it is undoubtedly in the trilogy (or unfinished tetralogy) Les Chemins de la liberté (The Roads to Freedom) that Sartre identifies himself most clearly with his main character, Mathieu.3 Published posthumously, the second quotation of the epigraph demonstrates that

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Sartre admitted this identification in a work that spans the period of the war, a period that he defined as the turning point in his life. Yet, few studies have considered Sartre’s radical change in the writing of the trilogy in the light of his philosophical change, the attention of the critics being diverted by the monumental philosophical essay L’Être et le néant (Being and Nothingness)4 which he was writing at the same time. The trilogy having been conceived before the war, in 1938, Mathieu was supposed to explore the concept of freedom in a context of peace;5 but like Sartre himself, he does so in a context of war, the backdrop of the trilogy. Because of the war, the first two volumes were only published in 1945 at the same time; the third volume was published in 1949, while the last volume was definitively abandoned about 1952. Following Isabelle Grell’s study, we can establish the following table. Title

Written

Published

1938–mid-1940

1945

Le Sursis (The Reprieve)

1942(?)–1944

1945

La Mort dans l’âme (Iron in the Soul)

1946(?)–1949

1949

L’Âge de Raison (The Age of Reason)

The aim of this article is to explore how Sartre’s philosophical changes affected the writing of his literary alter ego Mathieu, volume by volume. These changes will be assessed in the light of two crucial contemporary texts, published posthumously, in which Sartre reflects lengthily on his writing of the trilogy: Les Lettres au Castor,6 containing his daily correspondence with his partner and main literary critic, Simone de Beauvoir, during the Phoney War,7 while he was on the French eastern front as a military meteorologist; and his Carnets de la drôle de guerre,8 his war diaries, also written during the Phoney War, where Sartre reflects more openly on his changing perception of literature and philosophy — both being always linked for Sartre9 — during this turning point of his life.

“The age of reason” of Mathieu and Sartre: In Search of a Metaphysical Freedom The whole story of the first volume, L’Âge de raison,10 takes place in Paris, during three nights and two days. Its linear plot is quite simple as it follows the main character, Mathieu, in his quest to find the money that he needs for the abortion — then illegal — of his mistress Marcelle, the solution they had agreed upon in such a case in order to preserve their freedom, defined by Mathieu as having no ties with others. Most of the novel is about Mathieu’s quest and the characters — friends and family — that

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he meets in order to raise the money that he needs. The outside world — the threat of war, including the Spanish Civil War — is present, but only in the background of the novel with the evocation of German and Jewish refugees and with the presence of Gomez, a Spanish republican, or recognizable only by a few other “irrelevant details”11 (such as the exchange of a Madrid stamp, in the incipit, quoted hereafter) which increase the realism of the novel by setting it in the vaguest and seemingly superfluous historical context. Because these details do not have any direct function in the plot, they precisely exemplify how the outside world, barely present, does not affect Mathieu, fully engrossed as he is by the quest for the money that he needs to preserve his personal freedom.

The Age of Reason, Not Feelings The reason why Mathieu is not affected by the outside world is because he finds no reasons to get involved with it. However, his distance is not indifference, since he constantly demonstrates a certain sensitivity toward the other characters that he meets, as can be seen right from the incipit, when Mathieu gives some coins to a tramp who, in return, wishes him happiness and finally offers him a Madrid stamp: “Eh bien, je te souhaite du bonheur, dit le type. . . . C’est pas assez, le bonheur, dit-il d’une voix mouillée, c’est pas assez. . . . J’ai trouvé ce que je vais te donner. Je vais te donner un timbre de Madrid.” . . . Mathieu le regarda: le type avait l’air ému et faisait des efforts violents pour exprimer sa pensée. Il y renonça et dit seulement: “Madrid. . . . Je voulais y aller je te jure. Seulement ça ne s’est pas arrangé.” Il était devenu sombre, il dit: “Attends,” et passa lentement le doigt sur le timbre. “Ça va, tu peux le prendre.” “Merci.” . . . Il était plaisant. Il a eu envie d’aller se battre en Espagne. Mathieu hâta le pas, il pensa avec agacement: “En tout cas nous n’avions rien à nous dire. . . . Il l’a touchée plusieurs fois avant de me [la] donner, parce que ça venait de Madrid.” Il se rappelait le visage du type et l’air qu’il avait pour regarder le timbre: un drôle d’air passionné. Mathieu regarda le timbre à son tour sans cesser de marcher puis remit le morceau de carton dans sa poche. Un train siffla et Mathieu pensa: “Je suis vieux.” (L’Âge de raison 9–11) [“Well, l wish you happiness. There! . . . Happiness isn’t enough,” he said in a sodden voice: “not nearly enough. . . . I know what I’ll

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give you. I’ll give you a Madrid stamp.” . . . Mathieu looked at him: the man seemed excited, and was plainly struggling to express what was in his mind. He gave it up and merely said: “Madrid. . . . I wanted to get there, and that’s the truth. But it couldn’t be fixed.” A gloomy look came over his face, and he said: “Wait a moment,” and he slid a finger over the stamp. “All right. You can have it.” “Thanks.” . . . The fellow had looked decent enough. He had wanted to fight in Spain. Mathieu quickened his step, and he thought irritably: “Anyway, we hadn’t anything to talk about. . . . He kept on fingering it before giving it to me, just because it came from Madrid.” He recalled the man’s face, and the look with which he had eyed the stamp: an oddly ardent look. Mathieu in his turn eyed the stamp as he walked on, and then put [it] back in his pocket. A railway engine whistled, and Mathieu thought: “I’m getting old.”12]

The external focalization does not interfere with what is described — the reactions of the characters rather than the characters as such — and does not judge, or add any comments. Because this scene is described from Mathieu’s point of view, the tramp is not described as “being” emotional but as being “perceived” to be emotional by Mathieu. In complete conformity with Husserl and phenomenology, Sartre chooses not to tell but to show and therefore multiplies the verbs of perception, especially the ones linked to the sense of sight. However, Mathieu himself is not insensible to the tramp’s feelings. When on his own, he reflects on this scene with a confused emotion: Since it is confused for him, the transcription of his stream-of-consciousness remains a blur for the reader who does not have any alternative points of view. Similarly, later on in the novel, Mathieu refuses to join his childhood friend Brunet in the Communist Party. Even though he shares his political and social views, he finds no reason to become a member of the Communist Party. His freedom is a burden; he is free for nothing as he tells Brunet: Ma liberté? Elle me pèse: voilà des années que je suis libre pour rien. Je crève d’envie de la troquer contre un bon coup de certitude. . . . Je ne peux pas m’engager, je n’ai pas assez de raisons pour ça. (149) [My freedom? It’s a burden to me; for years past I have been free, for nothing. I simply long to exchange it for a good sound certainty. . . . I can’t join, I haven’t enough reasons for doing so.]

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The parallel with the scene of the tramp can easily be grasped: The tramp became a tramp because he did not act. Mathieu would like to act, and to join the Communist Party, but he does not find any reasons for doing so. Being an intellectual, he needs to understand: As the title of the novel states, he is in his “age of reason” and is suspicious of his emotions. The parallel with the uncommitted Sartre of the 1930s is clear. Sharing a similar disengagement from the world and despite his sympathy for the French workers and for the Popular Front in Spain, Sartre decided not to become involved in historical events evoked in the two encounters described above. As Simone de Beauvoir noted later: “Nothing could divert us from our non-political stance.”13 Like Mathieu at the start of the trilogy, the freedom that Sartre was looking for in the 1930s was an individual one. These examples elucidate Sartre’s process of writing Mathieu: He writes Mathieu as a “Sartre back-in-time,” a process in line with previous writings such as his teenage short story Jesus la Chouette (1922),14 and one which will be confirmed throughout the trilogy, as we shall see. Through the act of writing his alter ego’s story, Sartre acknowledges his personal changes. By focusing on Mathieu, one can therefore assess Sartre’s own changes.

The Writer Is Not God In L’Âge de raison (1945), Sartre puts into practice the main literary rules that he had started to define as a literary critic and that he would develop in Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (What is literature?).15 The narrative coincides with his philosophy as he rejects the use of an omniscient narrator as a kind of God who simply unfolds stories already written. In February 1939, he vigorously attacked one of the most renowned French writers at the time, François Mauriac, in a now-famous article entitled “M. François Mauriac et la liberté” (Mr. Mauriac and Freedom).16 Criticizing the lack of freedom of Mauriac’s characters, this article finishes with a harsh comment: “Dieu n’est pas un artiste. M. Mauriac non plus” (God is not an artist; neither is Mr. Mauriac). On the contrary, Sartre argues for the use of the stream-of-consciousness technique in order to stress the freedom of the characters through the doubts and hesitations of their thought processes; he also favors narrow focalized points of view, concentrating on individual characters in order to highlight their subjectivity, a technique that he admired in American writers, especially William Faulkner and John Dos Passos, whom he praised in different articles and re-read during the Phoney War.17 In other words, Sartre’s conception of literature matches his philosophy: For him, there is no God, no “revealed truth” and no “truth to reveal”; the plot cannot be anticipated as it depends on the choices that the characters will make.

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“The reprieve” of Mathieu: From the “Age of Reason” to the “Age of Doubt” Sartre is on the French eastern border during the Phoney War at the beginning of 1940 when he announces to Simone de Beauvoir that the first volume of Les Chemins de la liberté is finished. However, he immediately evaluates what he has written as “flimsy,” as an insincere and “gratuitous lie,” admitting that the novel had probably suffered, “not from the war, but from the change of [his] points of view on everything” (Lettres II, 9 January 1940).18 Acknowledging his own lack of historical sense in this same letter, Sartre rapidly shifts this statement to his alter ego Mathieu: Only three months later, his disappointment focuses on the fact that the characters of the novels are not set in time, especially Mathieu who “ne s’historialise pas” (Lettres II, 26. April 1940; does not historicize himself), as Sartre writes, borrowing this expression from Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) which he is re-reading at the time (Carnets 1 February 1940). Through this refreshed contact with Heidegger, who is frequently mentioned after 1 February 1940 in his war diaries, Sartre discovers his own “historicity,” the fact that, whether he wants it or not, he is in situ and that he cannot escape from his time, from his past or from present events. Thereafter, the lack of historicity is seen as a major flaw in the general conception of Les Chemins de la liberté, and Sartre goes through a real philosophical and — therefore — literary crisis. Wondering if he should rewrite parts of the novel or not,19 he resolves to write a “prologue” to the trilogy in order to introduce the same characters ten years before, convinced that “il faut prendre les héros depuis l’enfance” (Lettres II, 26 April 1940; one should start the main characters’ story at childhood). In other words, fictions should follow the course of life in order to be believable. One cannot simply get rid of one’s past or define oneself against one’s own past. Finally, Sartre abandoned the rewriting of L’Âge de raison, finding instead the antidote to his philosophical and literary crisis in an editorial strategy: He insisted on publishing the first two volumes of the trilogy at the same time so that the reader could see “where [he, Sartre] was going.” He first suggests this idea to Simone de Beauvoir on 1 January 1940 and reiterates it on 31 May of the same year (Lettres II). Sartre’s rediscovery of Heidegger profoundly influenced his philosophy and brought a first crisis in his creativity: After L’Âge de raison, a non-historical novel, Le Sursis,20 could be defined as a “hyperhistorical” novel in which Mathieu  — like Sartre during the Phoney War  — is overwhelmed by events and his individualistic philosophy is shattered by the war.

Mathieu, Overwhelmed by Events In Le Sursis, like Sartre when he writes L’Âge de raison, Mathieu is caught in a war that he cannot justify on moral grounds. Discovering the weight

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of history through his mobilization, Mathieu realizes that he is caught up by forces beyond “human scale” (Le Sursis 363). “If the novelist only exists in language, then style is identity,” claims Lennard Davis;21 putting this more specifically, several major literary changes in the writing of Le Sursis reinforce the emergency of the situation and the change of focus in Sartre’s philosophy. First, Mathieu fades into the background of the novel due to its much wider geographical scope and number of characters. Indeed, unlike the action of L’Âge de raison, the action here does not take place exclusively in Paris but in various places in France, Europe, and North Africa. More significantly, the number of characters rises from a dozen in L’Âge de raison to over fifty in Le Sursis, among whom the reader discovers the twenty or so main historical characters involved in the Sudetenland crisis of September 1938  — including, of course, Hitler, Chamberlain, and Daladier22 — which provides the historical context of the novel. So many characters, in so many different locations, make the plot quite difficult — if not impossible — to summarize; whereas the first volume had a linear plot, Le Sursis has no clear plot. Time hangs over the characters, who simply share their (mis)understandings of the crisis while anxiously awaiting its outcome. Mathieu is no exception: Absorbed in the masses, overwhelmed like the others but not (yet) with the others, his personal freedom is under threat, but he still does not find any reason to act. The title of the novel  — “The reprieve”  — clearly implies that the crucial event of the trilogy is still to come. In addition, Sartre also introduces two stylistic novelties that help to “historicize” Mathieu, to use Sartre’s own terminology. First, Sartre multiplies the description of historical documents, such as posters and newspaper articles, and even inserts a long extract from Hitler’s Sportpalast speech of 26 September 1938, which spreads over nearly twenty pages (355–73). The inclusion of these historical documents, prompted by the influence of American writers — especially Dos Passos, considered by Sartre for a time as “the greatest contemporary writer”23 — reinforces the “veracity” of the novel and sets it in its time. Also, significantly, while the chapters in L’Âge de raison are numbered but untitled, each chapter in Le Sursis is named after a day of the crisis — the first being “Friday, 23 September,” the last being “Friday, 30 September” — as if it were a diary or a chronicle; the chapter titles also remind the reader of the march of time and the war to come, after the reprieve. Unlike La Nausée — which was the diary of a single man, as emphasized in the title it was later given in English, The Diary of Antoine Roquentin — Le Sursis reminds one more of the diary of the Europeans, waiting and commenting on a crisis from different partial perspectives.24 Influenced by American writers like Dos Passos and Faulkner, Sartre explores to its limits the use of simultaneism.25 The thoughts of the

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characters are still presented in a subjective way, with no omniscience and little external focalization, but they are presented in an accelerated rhythm as the novel progresses. Polyphonic and even cacophonic at times, several voices spanning places across Europe are often heard in the same paragraph, sometimes in the same sentence. The transitions, present at the beginning of the novel, progressively disappear, affecting the transparency of the text.26 A direct comparison of two extracts from the incipit and from the end of the novel is revealing: “A quinze heures trente, Mathieu attendait encore, au bord d’un horrible avenir; au même instant, à seize heures trente, Milan n’avait plus d’avenir” (Le Sursis 6; At three-thirty, Mathieu was still waiting, on the threshold of a dreadful future: at the same time, at four-thirty, Milan no longer possessed a future). The repeated use of the word “future” creates a cinematographic transition that brings the reader from Paris to the Sudetenland. Furthermore, the transition “at the same time” triggers the mental process which makes the readers realize that the moment is the same but the time different  — it is 3:30 in Paris and 4:30 in Czechoslovakia  — because of the time difference. Of course, this sentence also conveys the idea that both fates are linked and not far apart: what separates Mathieu’s from Milan’s fate is merely a matter of time. As the text goes on, the progressive disappearance of transitions renders the text very hectic and difficult to read at times, the reader being sometimes unsure about the identity of some voices. In this second example, an extract taken from the end of the novel, all transitions have disappeared: “Je ne comprends pas alors arriva ma revendication de Nuremberg. Cette revendication fut complètement nette: pour la premi il m’arrive que je pars pour la guerre,” se dit-il.  .  .  . Je ne laisse rien, je ne regrette rien, pas même Odette, pas même Ivich, je ne suis personne. Restait l’événement lui-même. Je déclarais que maintenant le droit de libre disposition devait enfin, vingt ans après les déclarations du président Wilson, entrer en vigueur pour ces trois millions et demi d’hommes . . . (Le Sursis 363) [“I don’t understand then came my claim in Nuremberg. This claim was clear: for the fi what’s happening is that I am going to war,” he thought. . . . I’m not leaving anything, I don’t regret anything, not even Odette, not even Ivich, I am nobody. There remains the event itself. I declared that, 20 years after President Wilson’s demands, it was time to apply the right for these three and half million men to choose . . .]

Despite the use of italics to visually separate the two narrative voices, they remain difficult to identify since they both use the first person “I” and since the switch between both voices is abrupt and does not even respect the integrity of the words; the word “première” (“first”) in the

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original French version is reduced to the two first syllables (“premi”). It is only progressively that the reader can identify the first narrator as Mathieu, due to the references he makes to some other characters. The voice of Mathieu is constantly and abruptly interrupted by an intrusive and authoritarian second voice (in italics), which the reader can almost immediately identify as Hitler’s, due to its portentous (and populist) public speech rhetoric, Hitler being omnipresent in the novel  — his name appears over sixty times in Le Sursis — as he certainly was in the readers’ minds, in 1945. This stylistic technique not only increases the sense of emergency and confusion that runs throughout the novel, it also emphasizes the interdependence of all the events and thoughts. Finally, as well as setting the novel in its own time, anticipating the definition he will later give of “committed literature” — a mirror of the world whose aim is to get the reader involved (Qu’est-ce que la littérature?) — these literary techniques also stress that, for Sartre, the real emergency was before the events: It is then that Hitler could/should have been stopped.

“War as an Illness” Unable to find a moral justification for the war, Mathieu finds a refuge in stoicism when he is mobilized. A parallel reading of Sartre’s letters to Simone de Beauvoir and of his war diaries shows that Sartre not only accepted the war with the same stoicism as Mathieu, but that the wording of the novel is directly inspired by his written philosophical thoughts. In the novel, among numerous examples of Mathieu’s stoicism, Sartre writes: “Ils [les Français] prennent la guerre comme une maladie. La guerre n’est pas une maladie, pensa-t-il [Philippe, un “militant” pacifiste] avec force. C’est un mal insupportable parce qu’il vient aux hommes par les hommes.” Mathieu poussa le portillon . . . La guerre est une maladie, pensa-t-il; mon affaire c’est de la supporter comme une maladie. Pour rien. . . . Je serai un malade courageux, voilà. Pourquoi la faire? Je ne l’approuve pas. Pourquoi ne pas la faire? Ma peau ne vaut même pas qu’on la sauve. (Le Sursis 292–93)27 [“[The French] regard war as an illness. War is not an illness,” he [Philippe, a pacifist militant] thought emphatically. “It’s an abomination, because it comes to men via men.” Mathieu swung the barrier open . . . War is an illness, he thought: my business is to bear it like an illness. For nothing. . . . I shall be a brave patient, and that’s it. Why make war? I don’t approve of it. And equally, why not? My skin isn’t even worth saving.]

Precisely this comparison of war with illness can be found in Sartre’s war diaries. However, interestingly, this text demonstrates that Sartre expresses

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his new stand through Philippe and not Mathieu: “La guerre . . . est un fait humain, créé par des volontés libres. Il est impossible de le considérer comme une maladie douloureuse contre laquelle le stoïcisme simple est de rigueur” (Carnets 14 September 1939; War . . . is a human fact, created by free wills. It is impossible to conceive it as a painful disease against which stoicism is the solution). This stoical attitude — or is it fatalism? — first suits Sartre and Mathieu as it allows them to think of themselves as free, despite the events. This not only confirms that Sartre writes Mathieu not as he, Sartre, is but how he was, but also demonstrates how the philosophical thoughts written in the war diaries directly feed into the writing of the trilogy. These thoughts are present and asserted but via another character, Sartre managing thus to express his ideas without having to compromise or modify (yet) Mathieu’s character. Like Sartre, it is only during the Phoney War, in the last volume of the trilogy La Mort dans l’âme,28 that Mathieu will realize that stoicism only allows him to live in a pseudo-freedom since it makes him into a puppet in the hands of events triggered by others. In the line of the conception of literature that he had developed in Qu’est-ce que la littérature?, Sartre gives up his stylistic experiments in the last volume and focuses on its philosophical content by exploring further the notions of “authenticity” and “historicity” he had discovered in 1939–40 through Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit.

Mathieu’s final stand in La Mort dans l’âme: From the road to abstract freedom to the roads of nihilism? What does “being authentic” mean? For Sartre, to be authentic simply means to assume one’s historicity, to be “engagé,” committed to one’s time, which means not to be, but to act. As he writes in his war diaries, highlighting the crucial influence of Heidegger on his philosophy: “La sagesse est intemporelle. L’authenticité, au contraire, ne peut s’obtenir que dans et par l’historicité. C’est à peu près ce que dit Heidegger” (Carnets 17 October 1939; Wisdom is atemporal. Authenticity, on the contrary, can only be obtained in and via historicity. That is roughly what Heidegger says). Further, Sartre adds: “Être authentique, c’est réaliser pleinement son être-en-situation” (Carnets 27 November 1939; To be authentic is to accomplish fully one’s being-insituation). Atemporal wisdom presupposes abstraction, which means to be nothing, as Brunet puts it to Mathieu in L’Âge de Raison: “Mais à quoi ça sert-il, la liberté, si ce n’est pour s’engager? . . . Tu vis en l’air, tu as tranché tes attaches bourgeoises, tu n’as aucun lien avec le prolétariat, tu flottes, tu es un abstrait, un absent (L’Âge de raison 146; What is your freedom for, if it is not to commit yourself? . . . You live in the air, you

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have cut your bourgeois ties, you don’t have any link with the workers, you float, you are abstract, absent). In many letters or entries in his war diaries, Sartre compares himself to Mathieu, sometimes very explicitly; in one example Sartre notes: La liberté que recherche Mathieu n’est pas une liberté pour agir, mais une liberté pour être. Il faut qu’il existe-libre, simplement. Bien caractéristique que, dans la Psyché, j’aie longuement analysé les émotions, sentiments, la conscience pure et que je me sois ensuite aperçu que j’avais oublié la volonté et les actes. (Carnets 1 October 1939) [The freedom that Mathieu is looking for is not a freedom to act, but a freedom to be. He simply needs to free-exist. It is characteristic that, in Psyché, I lengthily analyzed emotions, feelings, pure conscience only to realize then that I had forgotten the will and the actions.] Je ne suis solidaire de rien, pas même de moi-même; je n’ai besoin de personne ni de rien. Tel est le personnage que je me suis fait, au cours de trente-quatre ans de vie. . . . Je n’ai aucune sympathie pour ce personnage et je veux changer. (Carnets 6 March 1940) [I live in solidarity with nothing, not even with myself; I don’t need anybody or anything. Such is the character I was in the last 34 years. . . . I don’t have any sympathy for him and I want to change.]

In this first quotation, not only does Sartre explicitly compare himself with Mathieu by switching from the third person to the first-person singular, he also cross-references and links his Psyché29 to the trilogy, juxtaposing the philosophical essay and the first novel of the trilogy where, as we have seen, Mathieu observes emotions (right from the start of L’Âge de raison, with the episode of the tramp) but does not act. Unlike Mathieu in the first volume, Sartre realizes that searching for a metaphysical freedom is an act of self-delusion, since to base one’s life on permanent abstractions is to be abstract, to be free for nothing when the world that one is part of is permanently changing. The discovery of his own historicity changed his perception of freedom and therefore of the “roads” taken to reach it.

The Importance of “Authenticity” After several months on the front, Sartre’s conviction that freedom is nothing without authenticity is so strong that he even considers the possibility of changing the title of the trilogy since, as he writes to Simone de Beauvoir, the real subject is “plutôt . . . l’authenticité que . . . la liberté” (Lettres II, 28 April 1940; authenticity rather than freedom). In some other letters, he expresses his very deep disgust of himself and his will to

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change, to be authentic and to refuse what he calls “les situations fausses” (Lettres II, 23 February 1940; false situations)30 with a sudden moral stiffness that nonplussed Simone de Beauvoir at the time (Beauvoir 549). And indeed, “authenticity” becomes a prerequisite of freedom in Sartre’s new philosophical approach and an omnipresent theme in the third volume of the trilogy, through the presence and the reflections of Mathieu on Jews, on French identity  — notably through the Alsatian characters — and on himself.

Mathieu’s Final (and First) Act In the light of the parallels and divergences made between Sartre and Mathieu, we would like to reassess Mathieu’s last scene, where, alongside other French soldiers, he fires at German soldiers from a bell tower in order to delay the German advance. It remains unclear why Mathieu finds himself there. Despite being tired of “waiting since [his] childhood” (La Mort 61), Mathieu first seems to agree with the vast majority of the soldiers who want to surrender. Yet, immediately after, in a last turnaround and without any further explanation or comment, Mathieu finds himself at the top of a bell tower with other French soldiers: Il s’approcha du parapet et se mit à tirer, debout. C’était une énorme revanche; chaque coup de feu le vengeait d’un ancien scrupule. Un coup sur Lola que je n’ai pas osé voler, un coup sur Marcelle que j’aurais dû plaquer, un coup sur Odette que je n’ai pas voulu baiser. Celui-ci pour les livres que je n’ai pas osé écrire, celui-là pour les voyages que je me suis refusés, cet autre sur tous les types, en bloc, que j’avais envie de détester et que j’ai essayé de comprendre. Il tirait, les lois volaient en l’air, tu aimeras ton prochain comme toi-même, pan dans cette gueule de con, tu ne tueras point, pan sur le faux jeton d’en face. Il tirait sur l’Homme, sur la Vertu, sur le Monde: la Liberté, c’est la Terreur . . . les balles sifflaient, libre comme l’air, le monde sautera, moi avec . . . il tira sur le bel officier, sur toute la Beauté de la Terre, sur la rue, sur les fleurs, sur les jardins, sur tout ce qu’il avait aimé. . . . Il tira: il était pur, il était tout-puissant, il était libre. (La Mort 244–45) [He made his way to the parapet and stood there firing. This was revenge on a big scale. Each one of his shots avenged one of his old scruples. One for Lola whom I dared not rob; one for Marcelle whom I ought to have left in the lurch; one for Odette whom I didn’t want to fuck. This for the books I never dared to write, this for the journeys I never made, this for everybody in general whom I wanted to hate and tried to understand. He fired, and the tablets of the Law crashed about him — Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself — bang! in that

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bugger’s face — Thou shalt not kill — bang! at the scarecrow opposite. He was firing on his fellow Men, on Virtue, on the whole World. Liberty is Terror. . . . The bullets whistled, free as the wind. The world is going up in smoke, and me with it. . . . He fired at that smarty officer, at all the Beauty on the Earth, at the street, at the flowers, at the gardens, at everything he had loved. . . . He fired: he was cleansed, he was all-powerful, he was free.]

The collapse of the bell tower immediately after this scene can be read as a radical plunge by Mathieu into nihilism, and contrasts dramatically with Sartre’s declared intention of seeing Mathieu join the French resistance in the unfinished fourth volume, La Dernière Chance (The Last Chance). Yet, a close reading of this final act — and especially of what Mathieu fires at — demonstrates, on the contrary, that Sartre allows Mathieu to evolve in much the same way as he himself did. Indeed, Mathieu fires firstly at what he did not dare to do when he wanted to: In Sartre’s words, he fires at his own past, at all the times whenever, out of cowardice, he was not authentic and therefore not free. But he also fires at abstract and “ready-made” values: Beauty, Man, Virtue, World. Through Mathieu’s final act, Sartre dramatically announces where his philosophy is going, toward authenticity and action: Mathieu refuses to wait and he acts among the group of French soldiers to which he belongs. Furthermore, since the action takes place on 18 June 1940, this last scene can also be seen as an act of resistance against the armistice that Pétain had requested of Hitler the day before: after all, Mathieu is firing “in reality” at German soldiers. Even if Mathieu’s final act is a destructive one, the world he wants to reduce to nothingness is his own world, his past life in which he was free for nothing. Mathieu can thus also be seen as a negative exemplum, as “a cautionary figure [who] shows the reader what one must not do, or be.”31 Finally, the fall of the bell tower can itself be seen as a recurrence in Sartre’s work, the fall being the moment when one discovers that one’s past life was built on sand, on illusions (Gomez-Muller 13–35). In La Nausée this happens when Roquentin realizes the nonexistence of God and, consequently, the world’s radical contingency; in Sartre’s biography of Jean Genet, Saint Genet comédien et martyr,32 the fall happens when Jean Genet is seen as a thief; in Flaubert’s biography, L’Idiot de la famille,33 it is when Flaubert is perceived as an idiot because he cannot read and write at the age of seven; and in Les Chemins de la liberté, we believe that it is when Mathieu fires at the Germans, at his passive past and at deceptive abstract values. Also, as Isabelle Grell remarks (251), this episode mimics Drieu La Rochelle’s Gilles,34 a work that Sartre read with “nausea” during the Phoney War (Lettres II, 24 January 1940): Gilles dies in similar conditions during the Spanish Civil War, fighting alongside the fascists, so that

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Mathieu’s final act can also be seen as a literary response to Drieu and a criticism of fascism, which is “Terror,”35 action without reason. In other words, Mathieu’s final act also illustrates what Sartre claimed to be during the Occupation, not a résistant who was writing but a writer who was resisting.36 But whereas Sartre acted through his writing, Mathieu — defined by Contat as “Sartre moins l’écriture” (Sartre minus the writing)37 — had no other solution than to throw himself directly into action.38 Paradoxically, then, by doing so, Mathieu’s final act is simultaneously the closest to and the furthest from Sartre’s own stand.

Conclusion The writing of Les Chemins de la liberté spans Sartre’s major philosophical and literary crisis, induced by the Second World War. Through the writing of its main character and partial literary alter ego, Sartre found an alternative — and probably freer, since “fiction protects”39 — way to express the changes that affected him during these crucial years. Sartre’s increasing concern for the others is clearly reflected by the way the trilogy unfolds in which the main character, Mathieu, is caught by history like his fellow Frenchmen and women and like the other Europeans. The “necessity of freedom”40 remained on Sartre’s agenda, but metamorphosed from the necessity of an abstract and personal freedom to the necessity of a concrete and collective freedom through concrete action and not only through literature. Sartre’s roads to authenticity were drifting away from egotistic fiction and Les Chemins de la liberté would remain unfinished. In the aftermath of the war, Sartre’s priority was no longer to write the life of his alter ego Mathieu but to throw himself into the world in order to change it, using his “pen as a sword” (Les Mots 212).

Notes Epigraph. Situation X (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 180; and Carnets de la drôle de guerre, entry for Thursday 14 March 1940 (Paris: Gallimard, 1995). 1

Recently, Jean-François Louette demonstrated that even L’Être et le néant (1943), Sartre’s most famous philosophical essay — a genre a priori far from the autobiography  — contains an obvious autobiographical dimension. See “Éclats autobiographiques dans L’Être et le néant,” in Les Temps modernes 641 (nov.-dec. 2006): 168–96. 2

Paris: Gallimard, 1964.

3

Mathieu, like Sartre at the time, is a thirty-eight-year-old Parisian philosophy teacher, living in a hotel, going to the same cafés, and sharing a similar individualistic philosophy of life, similar also to that of Roquentin, the main character of La Nausée (Paris: Gallimard, 1938), Sartre’s first literary success.

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Paris: Gallimard, 1943.

5

Isabelle Grell, Les Chemins de la liberté de Sartre: genèse et écriture (1938–1952) (Bern: P. Lang, 2005), 21. Subsequent references are indicated as Grell, followed by the page number. 6

2 vol., Paris: Gallimard, 1983. Subsequent references are indicated as Lettres, followed by the volume and date.

7

The Phoney War (or Drôle de guerre) ran from September 1939 to spring 1940. Although France and England had declared war on Germany (after its attack on Poland), neither side launched a significant attack during this period. 8

Paris: Gallimard, 1995. Subsequent references are indicated as Carnets, followed by the date of the entry. 9 Alain Flajoliet, “Literature and philosophy in Sartre’s early writings,” Sens Public (January 2007). http://www.sens-public.org (accessed 20 July 2008). 10

Paris: Gallimard 2006.

11

Roland Barthes, “L’Effet de réel,” in Littérature et réalité, ed. Roland Barthes et al. (Paris: Seuil, 1982), 81–90. 12

Many thanks to Peter Tame for his help in the translation into English of this article, including the quotations of the trilogy which are based on the following English translations: The Age of Reason (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961 [1947]); The Reprieve (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974 [1963]); and Iron in the Soul (London: Penguin, 1984 [1950]). 13

Simone de Beauvoir, La Force de l’âge (Paris: Gallimard, 1998 [1960]), 129. Subsequent references are indicated as Beauvoir, followed by the page number. 14 See Alfredo Gomez-Muller, Sartre: De la Nausée à l’engagement (Paris: Félin, 2004), 43–87, for an autobiographical reading of this relatively unknown work. Subsequent references are indicated as Gomez-Muller, followed by the page number. 15

Paris: Gallimard, 1948.

16

Jean-Paul Sartre, Situation I (Paris: Gallimard, 1978 [1947]), 33–52, first published in La Nouvelle Revue française (February 1939). On this topic, see Paulina Sperkova, “Mauriac et Sartre, la liberté des personnages,” in Sens public (April 2008). http://www.sens-public.org (accessed 20 July 2008). 17 Both writers are mentioned repeatedly in Lettres au Castor. Significantly, these two writers are the only ones that he names when he writes to Simone de Beauvoir that he had lent a number of books to a military comrade who was interested in literature (Sartre, Lettres au Castor et à quelques autres [2 volumes], [Paris: Gallimard, 1983]. Lettres II, 2 February 1940). 18

“Je viens de finir L’Âge de raison:  .  .  . je le trouve maigre, bien maigre.  .  .  . Enfin, voilà, j’en suis mécontent, j’aurais voulu que ce soit bien et sincère. . . . Et il me semble que tout le roman est un peu un mensonge gratuit.” 19

One cannot exclude the possibility that it is then that he included the “irrelevant [historical] details” (Roland Barthes, “L’Effet de réel,” 81). 20 Paris: Gallimard, 2006. Subsequent references are indicated as Le Sursis, followed by the page number.

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21

Lennard J. Davis, Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987), 159.

22

See Benoît Denis, “Le Sursis,” in Dictionnaire Sartre, ed. François Noudelman and Gilles Philippe (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004), 481–82. 23

“Je tiens Dos Passos pour le plus grand écrivain de notre temps,” Jean-Paul Sartre, “À propos de John Dos Passos et de 1919,” in Situation I (Paris: Gallimard, 1978 [1947]), 14–24; here, 24, first published in La Nouvelle Revue française (August 1938). See also Adrian Van den Hoven, “A propos de John Dos Passos,” in Dictionnaire Sartre, ed. François Noudelman and Gilles Philippe (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004), 39.

24

The subjective and intertwined points of views of the various characters are a clear illustration of what Sartre calls a “detotalized totality” in L’Être et le néant (242), a concept fully developed later in Critique de la raison dialectique (Critic of dialectical reason, Paris: Gallimard, 1960). The character Mathieu makes this explicit when he states that “war is the totality [of all the characters’ thoughts, speeches and acts] but nobody is present to sum them up” (Le Sursis 367). 25

One can wonder to what extent Sartre is also influenced by Jules Romains’ Verdun (1938), a war novel that Sartre praised in private (Lettres II, 24 January 1940). A study on the intertextuality of Les Chemins de la liberté remains to be written.

26 See Damien François, “Montage, simultanéité et continuité dans Le Sursis de Sartre,” in Cinémas 8 no. 3 (Spring 1998): 75–103. 27

See also Le Sursis 98 and 238, for additional examples.

28

Paris: Gallimard, 2007. Subsequent references are indicated as La Mort, followed by the page number. 29

Unfinished work published as Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions (Paris: Hermann, 1939).

30

See also Lettres II, 24 February 1940 and Andrew Leak, “On Writing, Reflection, and Authenticity in Sartre’s ‘Carnets de la drôle de guerre,’” The Modern Language Review 93 no. 4 (October 1998): 972–84, for reservations on Sartre’s authenticity in matters of love. 31

Susan Rubin Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel As a Literary Genre (New York: Columbia UP, 1983), 86.

32

Paris: Gallimard, 1952.

33

Paris: Gallimard, 1971–72.

34

Paris: Gallimard, 1939.

35

The reference to Hegel is made explicit by Sartre in an interview published in Paru 13 (December 1946), quoted by Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, Les Écrits de Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 115. On the complex dialogue between Sartre and Hegel, see Pierre Verstraeten, “Hegel and Sartre,” in The Cambridge Companion to Sartre, ed. Christina Howells (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988), 353–72.

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36

Unpublished interview with John Gerassi (1973), quoted by Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, in Jean-Paul Sartre, Oeuvres romanesques, ed. Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1981), LVIII.

37

Quoted in Catherine Poisson, Sartre et Beauvoir: du je au nous (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 138. Sartre himself seems to realize this only during the rewriting process of L’Âge de raison (see Carnets 14 March 1940). 38

Compare Denis Hollier, Les Dépossédés: Bataille, Caillois, Leiris, Malraux, Sartre (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1993), 44. Of course, one cannot fail to remark that Sartre actually never physically fought the Germans as he was “only” a meteorologist soldier during the war. Thus, one can also wonder to what extent Mathieu’s final act is not a “wish fulfilment” for Sartre.

39

Annie Ernaux, “Vers un je transpersonnel,” R.I.T.M. 6, ed. Serge Doubrovsky, Jacques Lecarme, and Philippe Lejeune (Nanterre: Université Paris X, 1993), 219–221; here, 219.

40

We borrow this expression from Christina Howells, Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988).

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14: André Malraux and Oswald Spengler: The Poetics of Metamorphosis Peter Tame

T

HE TWENTIETH CENTURY experienced two world wars that caused an enormous loss of human life. The First World War traumatized participants to the extent that the nations involved in the conflict emerged fundamentally changed from the experience. It was this trauma that prompted Oswald Spengler to write his monumental Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West),1 the first edition of which appeared in 1918, a revised edition following in 1922. The Decline of the West is ostensibly a work of cultural history; however, the fact that parts of it are written in a lyrical, semi-poetic style, and that there are hints that some transmission of knowledge, values, and concerns from one culture to another might be possible, suggests that it may have more in common with André Malraux’s highly original autobiographical work, Antimémoires (1967–72) than is generally supposed.2 Spengler’s morphological survey of cultures and civilizations from the Egyptian pre-cultural period of 3400 BC to AD 2200 casts a generally pessimistic look at the way in which, according to the author, the values of one “culture,” defined as the “actualizing and form of a single, singularly constituted [einzigartig] soul,” cannot be understood or transmitted to another (Untergang I, 169/Decline I, 129):

Denn jede Kultur hat ihre eigne Zivilisation. Zum ersten Male werden hier die beiden Worte, die bis jetzt einen unbestimmten Unterschied ethischer Art zu bezeichnen hatten, in periodischem Sinne, als Ausdrücke für ein strenges und notwendiges organisches Nacheinander gefaßt. Die Zivilisation ist das unausweichliche Schicksal einer Kultur. Hier ist der Gipfel erreicht, von dem aus die letzten und schwersten Fragen der historischen Morphologie lösbar werden. Zivilisationen sind die äußersten und künstlichsten Zustände, deren eine höhere Art von Menschen fähig ist. Sie sind ein Abschluß; sie folgen dem Werden als das Gewordene, dem Leben als der Tod, der Entwicklung als die Starrheit, dem Lande und der seelischen Kindheit, wie sie Dorik und Gotik zeigen, als das geistige Greisentum und die steinerne, versteinernde Weltstadt.

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Sie sind ein Ende, unwiderruflich, aber sie sind mit innerster Notwendigkeit immer wieder erreicht worden. (Untergang I, 43) [For every Culture has its own Civilization. In this work, for the first time the two words, hitherto used to express an indefinite, more or less ethical, distinction, are used in a periodic sense, to express a strict and necessary organic succession. The Civilization is the inevitable destiny of the Culture, and in this principle we obtain the viewpoint from which the deepest and gravest problems of historical morphology become capable of solution. Civilizations are the most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion, intellectual age and the stone-built, petrifying world-city following mother-earth and the spiritual childhood of Doric and Gothic. They are an end, irrevocable, yet by inward necessity reached again and again. (Decline I, 31)]

We shall firstly examine the circumstances in which André Malraux was introduced to Spengler’s work; we shall then analyze the language and discourse of the two writers to demonstrate the similarities, as well as the differences, in their literary styles and ideas, focusing in particular on Malraux’s concept of metamorphosis, or theory of continuity in a chronological flux. In comparing extracts from Malraux’s Antimémoires with Spengler’s more historical essay, we shall attempt to demonstrate that the two writers had common concerns, despite their different philosophical approaches and their very different conclusions. Finally, we shall attempt to define Malraux’s “new humanism,” a component in the writer’s poetics that was in part formed in reaction to the pessimism of Spengler. One of the aims of this article is to demonstrate that Malraux may have obtained, or been given, a distorted view of Spengler’s thought, and that he, either knowingly or unwittingly, misconceptualized what the German philosopher was actually trying to say. In particular, the concept of metamorphosis is one that can be found in the works of both writers, although it remains at the level of a repeated suggestion in The Decline of the West, whereas André Malraux developed the concept into an elaborate theory that he applied to the whole of human life and artistic creativity. In 1945, the reaction to the horrors of the war led Theodor Adorno to formulate his own pessimistic appreciation of the role that poetry (and art in general) was destined to fulfill in the postwar era. We shall demonstrate that his outlook proved to be unduly pessimistic, in the light of artistic works like Malraux’s Antimémoires that emerged after World War II. In the following extract from Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes, an existential “Angst” makes itself clearly felt as being an integral part of the human condition. Generally speaking, André Malraux’s

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work is frequently concerned with a similar “anguish” or “angoisse” at the heart of the mystery of being human: Betrachte die Blumen am Abend, wenn in der sinkenden Sonne eine nach der andern sich schließt: etwas Unheimliches dringt dann auf dich ein, ein Gefühl von rätselhafter Angst vor diesem blinden, traumhaften, der Erde verbundenen Dasein. Der stumme Wald, die schweigenden Wiesen, jener Busch und diese Ranke regen sich nicht. Der Wind ist es, der mit ihnen spielt. Nur die kleine Mücke ist frei; sie tanzt noch im Abendlichte; sie bewegt sich, wohin sie will. Eine Pflanze ist nichts für sich. Sie bildet einen Teil der Landschaft, in der ein Zufall sie Wurzel zu fassen zwang. Die Dämmerung, die Kühle und das Schließen aller Blüten  — das ist nicht Ursache und Wirkung, nicht Gefahr und Entschluß, sondern ein einheitlicher Naturvorgang, der sich neben, mit und in der Pflanze vollzieht. Es steht der einzelnen nicht frei, für sich zu warten, zu wollen oder zu wählen. Ein Tier aber kann wählen. Es ist aus der Verbundenheit der ganzen übrigen Welt gelöst. Jener Mückenschwarm, der noch am Wege tanzt, ein einsamer Vogel, der durch den Abend fliegt, ein Fuchs, der ein Nest beschleicht  — sie sind kleine Welten für sich in einer andern, großen. (Untergang II, 557–58) [Regard the flowers at eventide as, one after the other, they close in the setting sun. Strange is the feeling that then presses in upon you  — a feeling of enigmatic fear in the presence of this blind dreamlike earth-bound existence. The dumb forest, the silent meadows, this bush, that twig, do not stir themselves, it is the wind that plays with them. Only the little gnat is free — he dances still in the evening light, he moves whither he will. A plant is nothing on its own account. It forms a part of the landscape in which a chance made it take root. The twilight, the chill, the closing of every flower — these are not cause and effect, not danger and willed answer to danger. They are a single process of nature, which is accomplishing itself near, with, and in the plant. The individual is not free to look out for itself, will for itself, or choose for itself. An animal, on the contrary, can choose. It is emancipated from the servitude of all the rest of the world. This midget swarm that dances on and on, that solitary bird still flying through the evening, the fox approaching furtively the nest  — these are little worlds of their own within another great world. (Decline II, 3)]

Spengler’s language is poetic and even biblical, creating literary effects such as alliteration and musical tones in the original German (some of which unfortunately disappear in the English translation), as in the following

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sentence, for example: “Es steht der einzelnen nicht frei, für sich zu warten, zu wollen oder zu wählen.” A further poetic effect is created by rhythms in sentences, particularly those that involve an accumulation of details, as in the list of animals toward the end of the extract above. Moreover, there are gentle allusions such as the lonely bird flying through the dusk (“Abend”), an allusion to the title of the work itself, and perhaps an echo of Hegel’s famous image of the owl of Minerva that flies out only at dusk.3 Allusive and lyrical as it is, Der Untergang des Abendlandes also contains a great deal of what one might call serious content and substantial theoretical thought. André Malraux, born in 1901, took Spengler’s work seriously enough to spend much of his life refuting, or trying to refute, the German philosopher’s gloomy conclusions about the decline of Europe. However, Malraux, who did not read German, had the essence of the work translated for him by his German-born wife, Clara. According to Christiane Moatti, the Malraux specialist and biographer, the young couple discovered Spengler’s work in Berlin in 1922.4 It is possible that Malraux might have read the French translation later, either when it was published in 1926, or perhaps a few years after that. At any rate, his was a long life that allowed him to write six novels in the early stages of his career and to engage in active service in the Spanish Republican cause in 1936 before abandoning fiction to turn his creative attention to producing books on art and his autobiography, essentially comprising Le Miroir des limbes, in two volumes, Antimémoires (1967–72) and La Corde et les souris (1976).5 It should be noted that Malraux’s interpretation of Spengler’s thesis as being one of discontinuity is not entirely correct. For example, while on the one hand Spengler writes of every philosophy as “the expression of its own and only its own time,” he does admit the possibility of some continuity of thought: Im höchsten Falle kann sie [die Philosophie] den ganzen Gehalt einer Zeit erschöpfen, in sich verwirklichen und ihn so, in einer großen Persönlichkeit verkörpert, der ferneren Entwicklung übergeben. (Untergang I, 58) [At highest, the philosophy may absorb the entire content of an epoch, realize it within itself and then, embodying it in some grand form or personality, pass it on to be developed further and further. (Decline I, 41)]

Nevertheless, Spengler is ambiguous on this point, as we can see in the following extract from the introduction to Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Jede Kultur hat ihre neuen Möglichkeiten des Ausdrucks, die erscheinen, reifen, verwelken und nie wiederkehren. Es gibt viele, im

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tiefsten Wesen völlig voneinander verschiedene Plastiken, Malereien, Mathematiken, Physiken, jede von begrenzter Lebensdauer, jede in sich selbst geschlossen, wie jede Pflanzenart ihre eigenen Blüten und Früchte, ihren eignen Typus von Wachstum und Niedergang hat. Ich sehe in der Weltgeschichte das Bild einer ewigen Gestaltung und Umgestaltung, eines wunderbaren Werdens und Vergehens organischer Formen. Der zünftige Historiker aber sieht sie in der Gestalt eines Bandwurms, der unermündlich [sic] Epochen “ansetzt.” (Untergang I, 29) [Each Culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen, decay, and never return. There is not one sculpture, one painting, one mathematics, one physics, but many, each in its deepest essence different from the others, each limited in duration and selfcontained, just as each species of plant has its peculiar blossom or fruit, its special type of growth and decline. I see world-history as a picture of endless formations and transformations, of the marvelous waxing and waning of organic forms. The professional historian, on the contrary, sees it as a sort of tapeworm industriously adding on to itself one epoch after another. (Decline I, 21–22)]

The author leaves the reader in little doubt here in the first few lines as to his belief in the mortality of cultures. Yet, his organic view of the growth and passing of cultures leaves some room for a different interpretation, particularly in the last two sentences of the quotation. There, the word “Umgestaltung” (transformation) suggests a distinct possibility of metamorphosis of all forms of life, including culture. Indeed, given such ambiguity, coupled with the simile of the tapeworm, one wonders whether the author was not frequently as much concerned with the poetry, the imagery, and the style of his presentation, as with its intellectual argument and content. Malraux also displays this kind of ambiguity, arguably to a greater extent than Spengler. In her study of Malraux’s Le Miroir des limbes, Karen Levy characterizes the author’s language as dynamic, open, and poetic. In the light of Julia Kristeva’s study of poetic language, she finds, somewhat surprisingly, that the type of dialogic, non-exclusive, and “decentered” discourse in Malraux’s autobiographical work betrays a “specifically feminist orientation or position which undercuts the either/or, true/false, presence/absence exclusivity associated with patriarchal discourse.”6 According to Levy, this turning away from egocentric emphasis on the importance of the individual or personal concerns to focus on a much broader field of issues . . . will work through . . . the logic of “non-synthetic reunion” toward a vision which will be more “communal” (i.e. focus on general relationships rather than individual entities).7

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It should also be noted that, as we have seen above, there is a good deal more of this “communal” vision, with its accompanying multi-faceted discourse and poetic ambiguity, in Spengler’s work than some critics have claimed. As for Malraux, this sense of communion and fraternity play vital roles as components of his concept of a “new humanism.” The chronological scope of these two works by André Malraux and Oswald Spengler is impressive. The former adopted an ambitious global overview of world history similar to that presented by the latter who claims in his introduction to be adopting a “Copernican” system applied to the “historical sphere,” contrasting with the “Ptolemaic system” which would have given a “West-European scheme of history” and therefore a biased view (Decline I, 18). A crucial difference, however, between the approaches of the two writers lies in the fact that Malraux’s antimemoirs are quintessentially a-chronological, whereas Spengler follows a much more traditional linear structure in The Decline of the West. Indeed, Malraux outdoes Spengler, perhaps intentionally, as for example in his recurring references to the cave-paintings of Lascaux, which become a leitmotif in the Antimémoires, in particular by mentioning in the closing pages of the text the approximate date of 20,000 years BC. As we have seen, Spengler’s work begins more recently, ostensibly around 3400 BC. Malraux also adopts a literary approach that is very different from Spengler’s methodical morphological history. He takes the tradition of autobiography and revolutionizes it by deconstructing his life, allowing a massive and significant interpenetration of the lives and destinies of others (some fictitious, some real), and introducing leitmotifs such as resistance, death, and evil that recur frequently in the text of Antimémoires, thereby investing it with values and concerns that cross cultural frontiers and that hold good from one culture to another. He mixes carefully chosen extracts from his earlier novels with autobiographical accounts of experiences, but the traditional linear form of autobiography or memoirs is abandoned in favor of a de-chronologized form that the author calls “antimemoirs.” In reaction to Spengler’s rigid compartmentalization of “Cultures” and “Civilizations,” Malraux presents the reader with a cosmic kaleidoscope of eras that slide impressionistically in and out of the narrative as well as in and out of the focus of the reader, leitmotifs that function more or less as they do in Wagner’s operatic work, and with a general crossing of boundaries, including those of literary genres, that subverts autobiography with the intention of demonstrating a universality of human experience in a decompartmentalized, even “deconstructed” network, the loose structure and allusiveness of which appear, at first sight at least, to verge on the anarchic. One has the impression of a far freer creative spirit than one finds in Spengler. The concentration on the boundaries, margins, and transition points in history in Malraux’s narrative is reflected in the overarching title of the two-volume memoirs, Le Miroir des limbes.

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Not for Malraux the story of one man’s “misérable petit tas de secrets” (the miserable little heap of secrets), as one of his fictitious characters describes most autobiographies that tend to adopt a Freudian perspective in order to reveal tasty morsels of information about a particular personality, something that the same fictitious character describes as “la psychologie-au-secret” (Antimémoires 25; covert psychology). The account of Malraux’s own life is intricately woven into those of others, to the extent that the individual André Malraux disappears in order to become one of a cast of hundreds, who in turn become part of a cosmic tapestry in a revolutionary new literary genre that, paradoxically, has produced no followers. Furthermore, adapting for a modern audience Aristotle’s advice on tragedy, which encourages the mixing of invented characters with real characters, fictitious characters from Malraux’s novels appear in the antimemoirs as if they were real people whom he had met in the course of his life.8 Real historical personalities like de Gaulle, Nehru, Mao, on the other hand, are presented in a semi-fictitious or mythical fashion. This paradoxical treatment of characters confirms that, on one level at least, the Antimémoires and The Decline of the West are not comparable, since the former is clearly a literary work while the latter strives to present a cogent historico-philosophical argument. The former contains extended flights of fancy in a kind of aesthetic kaleidoscope, whereas the latter adopts a generally didactic tone with the intention of persuading the reader of the correctness of the unified theory of cultures and civilizations presented. However, as we have already seen, this amounts to making a rather simplistic and tendentious distinction between the two works.

Regeneration and Metamorphosis It is significant that two episodes from Les Noyers de l’Altenburg (1943), Malraux’s last novel, are reproduced almost verbatim, with only a few omissions and variations, in his Antimémoires. The first episode that Malraux chooses to insert into the autobiography features the conference at Altenburg in Alsace at which a German philosopher, Möllberg, who physically resembles Oswald Spengler and is intellectually reminiscent of the ethnologist Leo Frobenius, argues that little or nothing of a particular “Culture” or “Civilization” can be passed on to the next culture or civilization. The second episode narrates a French tank attack on German lines in Flanders in 1940. It is likely that Malraux selected these two episodes in order to show, first of all, the (Spenglerian) theory, as presented by Möllberg, that posits that each “Culture” begins afresh, as it were, with little or nothing inherited from a previous “Culture,” only then to refute this same theory in the form of a practical illustration taken from a war in which Malraux himself participated in 1940.

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In the first episode, the fictitious conference at Altenburg assembles a group of freethinking intellectuals in an old priory in Alsace on the eve of the Great War. Their topic: “the permanence of man from one civilization to another” (Antimémoires 31). Möllberg is an ethnologist, like Frobenius, whose arguments impress the narrator, Berger, who is the author’s mouthpiece in this part of the novel. Möllberg’s arguments consist principally of demonstrations, with many examples taken from his anthropological research, that human beings of different cultures and different times have little in common (Antimémoires 32–34). The discussion takes place in the priory library, which is decorated with carved wooden sculptures whose substance and forms intrigue Berger. After a fairly intense intellectual debate, he leaves the library and walks through the fields of the surrounding countryside. Here, he sees apple trees and, above all, the walnut trees that give the novel its title, Les Noyers de l’Altenburg. The centuriesold trees symbolize the constant renewal of nature, of man too, and the seemingly endless possibility of regeneration and metamorphosis. The Strasbourg cathedral, in the background, represents man’s ever-patient labor, an image of work eternal. It is a counterdemonstration, aimed at refuting the Procrustean theories of Möllberg (Spengler/Frobenius). La plénitude des arbres séculaires émanait de leur masse, mais l’effort par quoi sortaient de leurs énormes troncs les branches tordues, l’épanouissement en feuilles sombres de ce bois, si vieux et si lourd qu’il semblait s’enfoncer dans la terre et non s’en arracher, imposaient à la fois l’idée d’une volonté et d’une métamorphose sans fin.  .  .  . le bois convulsé de ces noyers, au lieu de supporter le fardeau du monde, s’épanouissait dans une vie éternelle en leurs feuilles vernies sur le ciel et leurs noix presque mûres, en toute leur masse solennelle au-dessus du large anneau des jeunes pousses et des noix mortes de l’hiver . . . et les faces des saints ravagées de ferveur gothique s’y perdaient comme l’esprit, comme tout ce que mon père venait d’entendre  — ensevelis dans l’ombre de cette statue indulgente que se sculptaient à elles-mêmes les forces de la terre, et que le soleil au ras des collines étendait sur l’angoisse des hommes jusqu’à l’horizon. (Malraux, Antimémoires 37) [The fullness of the centuries-old trees emanated from their mass, but the effort with which the twisted branches thrust forth from their enormous trunks, the burgeoning into dark foliage of the wood, so old and so heavy that it seemed to sink into the earth rather than tear itself away from it, imposed the idea of a ceaseless will and metamorphosis . . . the tortured wood of those nut-trees, instead of shouldering the burden of the world, burgeoned into life eternal with their leaves as they shone against the sky and their ripening nuts, with all their solemn mass above the wide circle of young

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shoots and dead nuts of winter . . . and the faces of the saints ravaged with Gothic fervor melted away, along with intellect, and all that my father had just heard — engulfed in the shadow of that kindly statue sculpted by the forces of Nature herself and the sun as it slanted across the hills, spreading its rays over man’s anguish as far as one could see.]

The sight of the nut-trees, together with the environment as a whole, wipe the academic discussion from Berger’s mind, filling it instead with the weighty dominance of Nature’s own “arguments.” Malraux’s aim is clearly to convince the reader of the existence of a natural continuity that includes mankind. The recounting of the tank attack in Flanders in 1940 occurs later in the text, placed in an initially disconcerting position since it interrupts Malraux’s lengthy musings on India and its religious spirit. However, he explains the link by an introductory comment on how the spirituality of India reminds him fleetingly of the army chaplain with whom he escaped from a German prisoner-of-war camp in France in 1940 and who died fighting the Germans in the Vercors in 1944. This link, or leitmotif, actually constitutes the incipit of the Antimémoires, recurring subsequently at points in the text in order to remind the reader of the eternal themes of resistance and death. But there is a third theme, that of regeneration, that, together with the concept of resurrection, forms an important part of Malraux’s meditations on oriental religions, in particular Hinduism and Buddhism. His account of the tank attack is reproduced in the Antimémoires in order to, among other things, illustrate metamorphosis and a renewal of life, in a similar way to the funeral rituals that he describes taking place on the banks of the Ganges at Benares in India. The illustrations are clearly “anti-Spenglerian” in spirit since they argue for a kind of continuity of human life, even across the cultural “phases” or “seasons” that Spengler establishes, and for the existence of a certain permanence for mankind. After a traumatic night spent in a tank-trap into which their tank had fallen and stuck fast, four French soldiers discover the world anew. One of them, Pradé, meets an old couple in the nearby village the next day. The old peasant-woman is described thus: Accordée au cosmos comme une pierre . . . Elle sourit pourtant . . .: par-delà les tourelles des chars brillants de rosée comme les buissons qui les camouflaient, elle semblait regarder au loin la mort avec indulgence, et même . . . avec ironie. . . . Portes entrouvertes, linge, granges, marques des hommes, aube biblique où se bousculaient les siècles . . .! Qu’avec un sourire obscur reparût le mystère de l’homme, et la résurrection de la terre n’était plus que décor frémissant.

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Je savais maintenant ce que signifient les mythes antiques des êtres arrachés aux morts. A peine si je me souvenais de la mort; ce que je portais en moi, c’était la découverte d’un secret très simple, intransmissible et sacré. Ainsi, peut-être, Dieu regarda le premier homme.  .  .  . (Antimémoires 239–40) [In harmony with the cosmos like a stone.  .  .  . She smiled, all the same . . .: beyond the turrets of the tanks that were shining with dew like the bushes that hid them, she seemed to look indulgently, even ironically, into the distance at death. . . . Half-open doors, washing, barns, signs of mankind, biblical dawn where centuries jostled together.  .  .! With an enigmatic smile, the mystery of man appeared once more, and the resurrection from the earth merely quivered in the background. I understood now the meaning of the ancient myths of people snatched from the dead. I scarcely remembered death; what I carried within me was the discovery of a very simple, sacred secret that I could not share. Thus it was, perhaps, that God looked at the first man.]

The “resurrection” to which Malraux refers here is only one illustration of an age-old myth of renewal and continuity. Death, ever-present in his writing, does not spell the end of man, merely of individual men and women.

Why Antimémoires? In the context of “poetics after 1945,” one question that requires a tentative answer is why André Malraux developed this particular form of writing, a form that has intrigued critics since the publication of the first version of his Antimémoires in 1967. “L’homme est ce qu’il fait” (Man is what he does) is a favorite maxim that recurs frequently in Malraux’s writing.9 Several years before JeanPaul Sartre made existentialism fashionable in the post-1945 era, Malraux’s characters were already demonstrating the basic tenets of atheistic existentialism. He therefore suffered the fate of all pioneers: too early, too far ahead of his time, it was not he but others who were credited with having introduced this adapted form of a philosophy for modern times. It is in this way that the extracts from his novels, juxtaposed with the autobiographical narration such as it is, contribute to illustrating Malraux’s existentialism by showing the actions of his fictitious heroes in the heat of conflict, adversity, crisis, and trauma. What makes the Antimémoires truly innovative and pioneering, however, is their form. By juxtaposing the accounts of personal experiences

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undergone by a small group of French survivors from the death camps in Eastern Europe, for example, with a tribute to Jean Moulin, the leader of the internal French resistance who was tortured to death by the Gestapo, together with a mysterious evocation of the caves at Lascaux, Malraux obtains an impressionistic and diachronic overview of the human condition, from prehistoric times to the present. The overview mixes together inextricably the themes of suffering and death with those of glory and heroism. This could be described as a “new humanism,” to use Malraux’s own words, or a new form of humanism, secular and aspirational.10 This humanism is a “humanisme universel,” a world-wide humanism, as Charles Blend has described it.11 André Malraux’s Antimémoires was first published in the year preceding the revolutionary events of May 1968. As so often in his life, the author seems to have had a premonition of social, political, and cultural change. His book of memoirs, or rather “antimemoirs,” is in some ways similarly subversive and indicative of a “rupture” with a certain type of traditionalism. He was to see in the events of May 1968, with the student riots that expressed deep dissatisfaction with society as it then was, a “crise de civilisation” (La Corde 648; crisis of civilization). This backdrop against which Malraux was writing is reminiscent of Spengler’s deterministic “end-of-culture” theory, which points more broadly at the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a period of “Civilization,” meaning that, in his scheme of things, they marked the “organic” end of a long and fruitful period of “Culture” (Decline I, 39). On the question of religion and spirituality, Spengler labels his century, the twentieth century, “irreligious,” coinciding as it does “exactly with the idea of the world city — . . . a time of decline” (Decline I, 44). He writes of a recurrent “spell of a ‘second religiousness’” that descends on a culture in its last phase, that of “civilization,” a turning to the practice of cults (Decline I, 108). For his part, Malraux predicted, in a much more nuanced fashion, that the twenty-first century would see a new type of spirituality, without venturing further into details.12 Malraux certainly appears to be seeking a new sort of spirituality in his work, either through the experience of “fraternity” in conflict, in art or elsewhere. The middle section of his Antimémoires presents the reader with a kaleidoscope of images from India. This subcontinent, which clearly fascinated Spengler too, becomes here the heart of the textual, geographic, and spiritual journey that Malraux makes in the book.13 Situated halfway between Europe and the Far East, Malraux’s ultimate destination in his epic cruise, during which he began to write the Antimémoires, India was regarded by Spengler as the world’s first civilization and, above all, an ahistorical culture. It is possible that Malraux was trying to create this effect of a-temporality in his Antimémoires by introducing the allied notion, announced by Spengler, of anonymity that reigned

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in Indian culture. As narrator, Malraux moves to include other narrative “voices” — a favorite polyphonic technique of his — which lead to the ahistorical center of the world, the cradle of our civilizations, that is India. The author’s “centrifugal technique,” as Geoffrey Harris calls it, finds its counterpart in a centripetal movement which brings the reader to the a-temporal center of world civilization, the quiet epicenter of the Antimémoires (see diagram).14

India is seen by Malraux as a place in which metamorphosis, particularly in mysticism and religion, is clearly illustrated, for example in the burning ghats of Benares and the belief in metempsychosis. Spengler, for his part, believed that “cultures are organisms.” He goes on to say that they “follow upon one another, grow up with one another, touch, overshadow, and suppress one another” (Decline I, 104). The ambivalent picture that he paints of the succession of cultures, however, does not preclude them from the possibility of bequeathing some of their aspects and qualities to their “successor-culture.” And this is basically the idea that lies at the heart of Malraux’s theory of metamorphosis. However, it must be admitted that the differences between the world views of Malraux and Spengler are probably greater than the similarities. For example, although Spengler and Malraux both frequently resort to the image of trees to illustrate the notion of organicism and growth of a culture, the German philosopher compares what he calls “the inner possibilities” of a civilization, that may occasionally manage to extend its existence beyond the time-span allotted to it, to “a wornout giant of the primeval forest” that thrusts its “decaying branches toward the sky for hundreds or thousands of years.” Like an old man pretending to be young again, this aged canopy robs the younger cultural shoots below “of light and air” (Decline I, 106). For Malraux, however, trees  — like the apple tree in his novel of the Spanish Civil War, L’Espoir, or the walnut trees of Altenburg — represent regenerative life forces, renewal, and a Nietzschean “eternal recurrence.” In the fine passage in L’Espoir describing the descent of the wounded Republican airmen from the mountains near Linares, the novelist’s principal

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character in this episode, Magnin, is clearly as interested in the windfall apples that surround the base of the apple tree that will allow for the growth of more apple trees as he is in the tree itself. For Magnin, the squadron leader responsible for rescuing his injured airmen, the apples that lie rotting in a ring around the foot of the tree illustrate the notion, and express the hope, of rebirth and regeneration, playing their part in a natural organic cycle of de- and re-composition. Similarly, Spengler’s fundamental determinism, however freely and ambiguously it might be expressed, has no real counterpart in Malraux’s cosmogony. It is true that Spengler writes (confusingly) of the mixture of predestination and “incident,” as he calls it, in world history (Decline I, 139). Furthermore, the notion of the unpredictable, chance, or “incident” does find an echo in one of Malraux’s concepts, expressed particularly forcefully in his last work, L’Homme précaire et la littérature, namely that of “l’aléatoire” (uncertainty or randomness). This, he argues, is compatible with the notion of metamorphosis, for there will always be an unpredictable element in the transmission of ideas, concerns, or art; this unpredictability, which Malraux frequently mentions in his work on art, does not, therefore, invalidate his concept of metamorphosis itself, which is far more fluid than Spengler’s taxonomic approach to the classification of world cultures and civilizations.15 This fluidity is enhanced by the looseness of the chronological structure of the Antimémoires, which contrasts with the more rigid, linear chronology followed by Spengler in The Decline of the West. However, it must be said that, as we have seen, Spengler’s work does occasionally suggest that some things can be transmitted. At the end of volume I of The Decline of the West, for example, he writes of a science that is “the grand legacy of the Faustian soul to the souls of Cultures yet to be, a bequest of immensely transcendent forms that the heirs will possibly ignore” (Decline I, 428). This ambivalent conclusion to the first volume is echoed, albeit often faintly, elsewhere in the treatise.

Conclusion Theodor Adorno’s controversial statement implying that the writing of poetry after Auschwitz could be considered as “barbaric” is in one sense a challenge that has fortunately been taken up by much work that effectively and aesthetically commemorates the Second World War.16 Poetry and poetics after 1945 have proven themselves to be equal to expressing the horrors of such a war. Many writers and artists have risen to the challenge of trying to depict both the horrors and the positive values that were involved in this experience and in its aftermath. André Malraux is one of these. His “new humanism” constitutes his response to the Second World War and to its “inexpressible” atrocities;17 and because he had

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been engaged from early on in his career in proving Spengler wrong, this was, in some respects, his response to the First World War as well. The immediate postwar era in France saw the return of prisoners and deportees from the camps in the east of Europe. One of the closing scenes in Antimémoires features a conversation between those returning and Malraux who, although he has not experienced the same apocalyptic trauma as they have, is able to identify with their sufferings in a common humanistic spirit. However, this new humanism is, as we have seen, principally an “aesthetic humanism,” as William Righter has termed it, and also comprises an understanding and appreciation of the notion of continuity in flux that Malraux encapsulates in his theory of metamorphosis, particularly as developed in his writings on art.18 Another critic, Joseph Hoffmann, has noted how Malraux’s humanism evolved particularly in conjunction with his work on art.19 Jean-Claude Larrat observes that Malraux developed a notion of a “universal style” in aesthetics to which all artists subscribe and which constitutes the basis of his new humanism.20 His Antimémoires are in some respects, as a number of critics have said, an extension of his novels, which were for the most part written before the Second World War. Stylistically innovative, the antimemoirs represent a new approach to memoir writing, to commemoration, and to depicting, in disorientingly novel spatial and temporal perspectives, twentieth-century civilization’s characteristic features such as confusion, fragmentation, and, of course, its wrestling with the eternal problem of evil. For Malraux, moreover, there is something, whether it be “le sacré” (the sacred), as he sometimes calls it, or art, or something else, that outlives cultures and civilizations, and that is transmitted by the process of metamorphosis from one generation or one culture/civilization to the next. Metamorphosis, moreover, is at the heart of Malraux’s poetics, as W. M. Frohock has cogently shown. Writing of Les Voix du silence, Malraux’s study of art and artists through the ages, Frohock describes the work as “a poem in which death is swallowed up in victory.”21 Each culture/civilization will therefore not necessarily see the same values in a work of art, for example, as those that were nurtured and cherished by its predecessor; each will not react in the same way to a literary work. But the work continues to live, just as man continues to live, in an ongoing process of metamorphosis from generation to generation. Unlike Spengler, Malraux insists that there is a form of continuity in mankind over the ages and in the succession of cultures/civilizations, to use Spengler’s terminology. There are values — in his work, Malraux frequently favors the use of the expression “valeurs suprêmes” (highest values), of which clearly literature and art were two — that survive from one culture to another. To conclude, I should like to offer an explanation of the difference between the viewpoints of Oswald Spengler and André Malraux in cultural

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terms: Malraux the universalist, as opposed to Spengler the historicist and relativist, was bound to disagree with the latter’s world view, given his cultural background. It is not so much a question of the difference in the generations to which they belonged. Although Spengler was born in 1880, was a philosopher and historian, and clearly believed that his responsibility was to produce an erudite, methodical synopsis of world history, while Malraux’s approach to writing was refreshingly modern in many respects, influenced as he was by the Surrealists for example, these details are not what crucially sets the two writers apart. Ultimately, the difference of opinion is cultural, epistemological, and subjective, or, to put it another way, it is a difference of perception, since it is impossible to determine objectively whether there is an element, or elements, of continuity that are transferred from one culture/civilization to another, or whether we should regard each culture/civilization as marking a rupture in a continuum, an end to an identifiable cycle, as Spengler generally argues. If this explanation of the two views is acceptable, then evaluating the two writers’ contributions to our perspectives on world history depends rather on the degree of persuasiveness in the arguments of the two writers, on what one might call rhetoric, no doubt on poetics also, and, perhaps, on a kind of personal “foi” (faith). This is a word that the agnostic André Malraux often used in his writing on culture and art, since the work of the artist was for him a “sacred” task, elements of which were undoubtedly transmitted down the ages, subtly metamorphosed by the passage of time, but nevertheless with a remarkable continuity of presence. The essential difference between the poetics of Malraux and Spengler resides in the fact that the former’s poetics display an intuitive and lyrical humanism that is a defense against the absurd, while the latter propounds a scientific (or quasi-scientific), methodical, and traditionally chronological survey of world cultures and civilizations. It is true that Spengler frequently resorts to lyricism and poetic effect, but this was common among nineteenth-century authors who wrote on scientific subjects. Written in the early twentieth century, Spengler’s prose no doubt appeared dated, even at the time of publication of The Decline of the West, whereas Malraux’s writings retain a freshness and a modern, poetic flavor, even in the twenty-first century. As Jean-Claude Larrat has shown, in Malraux’s eyes, poets are the true “creators” of civilization. They alone can claim to speak in the name of a new humanity.22

Notes 1 Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Munich: dtv, 1983), 2 vols; English translation, The Decline of the West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), 2 vols. Subsequent references are indicated as either Untergang or Decline, followed by the volume and page number.

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2

For example, Michel Cazenave adopts the opposition, traditionally accepted by most scholars, between Malraux’s concept of continuity by “metamorphosis” and Spengler’s theories on cultures that are “impermeable” to one another in a recent article, “Malraux, l’art et le sacré,” Revue des deux mondes (Mai 2008): 89. 3

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorrede to Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, in Hegels Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 6 (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1930), 17.

4

Moatti, Christiane: Les Personnages d’André Malraux: le Prédicateur et ses masques (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1987), 52. 5

André Malraux, Antimémoires and La Corde et les souris in Oeuvres complètes d’André Malraux, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 1996). Subsequent references are indicated as either Antimémoires or La Corde, followed by the page number. 6

Karen Levy, “Malraux, the Self, and the Covertly Feminine: Displacing the Mirror of Transcendence,” Revue André Malraux 25 no. 1/2 (1994–95): 2–20; here, 9. 7

Levy is quoting here from Evelyn Zepp, “The Criticism of Julia Kristeva: A New Mode of Critical Thought,” Romanic Review 73 no. 1 (1982): 83–84. 8

Aristotle, Poetics, in Aristotle on the Art of Fiction: An English translation of The Poetics, ed. L. J. Potts (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1962), chapter 9. 9 See, for example, his famous novel La Condition humaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1946), 229, where Ferral asserts this belief in conversation with Gisors in order to justify (and boast of) his financial exploits in China: “Un homme est la somme de ses actes, de ce qu’il a fait, de ce qu’il peut faire. Rien autre” (A man is the sum of his actions, of what he’s done, of what he can do. Nothing else). 10

Derek Allan, Art and the Human Adventure: André Malraux’s Theory of Art, Faux Titre Series (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 341. 11

André Malraux, Les Voix du silence (Paris: La Galerie de la Pléiade, 1951), 631, and La Corde et les souris, 28. The dignity of man is another important component of Malraux’s new humanism, as Charles Blend points out (André Malraux: Tragic Humanist [Ohio: Ohio State UP, 1963], 71). Geoffrey Harris includes in the concept of Malraux’s “tragic humanism” the need, as Malraux saw it, for man’s “actions in an absurd world” to be an important component in the writer’s “new humanism” (André Malraux: A Reassessment [London: Macmillan, 1996], 4).

12

L’Homme précaire et la littérature (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 321–31.

13

See Marius-François Guyard, Notice to Le Miroir des limbes, in Oeuvres complètes d’André Malraux, 1125.

14

Geoffrey Harris, André Malraux: A Reassessment (London: Macmillan, 1996), 202–11.

15

The most illustrative examples of this “aleatory” element in the transmission of art can be found in Malraux’s monumental three-volume La Métamorphose des dieux (1957–76), Ecrits sur l’art II, in Oeuvres complètes d’André Malraux, vol. 5. 16

Theodor Adorno, Prismen: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft in Gesammelte Schriften (1951), vol. 10.1 (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1977), 30. He modified his view fifteen years later. See Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1966), 353.

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Adorno’s word is, literally, the “unsayable” (“das Unsagbare”). Ibid., 11.

18

William Righter, The Rhetorical Hero: An Essay on the Aesthetics of André Malraux (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), 75–78. 19

Joseph Hoffmann, L’Humanisme de Malraux (Paris, Klincksieck, 1963), Chapter 4, “La Quête d’un nouvel humanisme,” 103–9. 20 Jean-Claude Larrat, André Malraux (Paris, Librairie Générale Française, 2001), 141–60. 21

W. M. Frohock, “The Voice of the Poet,” André Malraux: Metamorphosis and Imagination, ed. F. Dorenlot and M. Tison-Braun (New York: New York Literary Forum, 1979), 12. 22

Jean-Claude Larrat, “André Malraux contre les poétiques de l’ordre,” Ordre et désordre: schème fondamental dans la vision et l’écriture d’André Malraux, ed. Yves Moraud (Crozon, Les Editions Buisonnières, 2005), 24. Malraux’s biographer, Olivier Todd, also confirms the importance of poets and poetry for Malraux, who recognizes in them “un savoir supérieur” (a superior wisdom). Olivier Todd, André Malraux, une vie (Paris, Gallimard, 2001), 157.

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15: Freud’s Brain in the Snow: Catastrophe and Creativity in the Poetics of Danilo Kiš Tatjana Petzer Every creative act — in art, science or religion — involves a new innocence of perception, liberated from the cataract of accepted belief. — Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers

I

such as the Shoah, poetry assumes the functions of memory, communication and the creation of meaning within the trauma’s topographies of the “unspeakable.” It supersedes other symbolic systems that are unable to cope in such contexts. In order to shed light on the precise impact of catastrophe on literary creativity,1 this article looks at the post-Auschwitz poetics of Danilo Kiš (1935–89), a Yugoslav writer of Hungarian-Jewish-Montenegrin descent whose work engages in a search for new aesthetic forms of remembering the Jewish past.2 The following will outline the artistic techniques which Kiš applied or developed to express the Jewish experience in his writing, inscribing it into the memory of literature itself. The focus will be on two of Kiš’s novels: Hourglass (Peščanik, 1972),3 a novel that draws a psychological “map” of a Jewish survivor of the so-called Novi Sad raid in January 1942, demonstrating just how closely imbricated catastrophe and creativity are, and A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča, 1976)4 which shows Kiš’s work to be constructed as a “mnemo-poetic”5 palimpsest. N THE FACE OF CATASTROPHES

Defamiliarization — A New Way of Seeing In Hourglass, the Jewish protagonist, Eduard Sam, only appears as the initials E.S. (an abbreviation which can, significantly, be read as Es, the Freudian Id).6 He is the author of a letter dated “Kerkebarabaš, 5th April 1942,” written just a couple of months after the Novi Sad raid in which Hungarian police mass-murdered civilians, most of whom were Jews and Serbs.7 About 1300 victims were forced to line up on the bank of the

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Danube, where they were killed and pushed through holes in the ice in the frozen river. E.S., the author of the story’s letter, survives this pogrom only to be sent to a ghetto and to vanish in Auschwitz a few years later. If Kiš’s book is read in the Hebrew way, starting at what we usually perceive as the end and working backwards from the last page to the first, this letter serves as the novel’s table of contents. And indeed, Kiš invites us to read against the grain like this, entitling this end section slightly ambivalently “Letter or Contents.” Moreover, the letter included is authentic, a piece of Holocaust evidence, written by the author’s own father (see figure 1).8 In the novel, a postscript is added to the letter, a quotation from the Baba Qamma of the Babylonian Talmud: “It is better to be among the persecuted than among the persecutors” (Hourglass 274). The letter itself provides an account of how E.S. fled the Voivodina together with his wife and children to stay with his relatives in an Hungarian village, how they were denied hospitality in their critical situation, had to live in a stable and borrow to survive while the relatives lived a life of comparative ease. Even though the Jewish letter-writer is convinced of the epistle’s futility at the very moment of writing — a futility that reflects that of his own existence  — the letter will nevertheless be posted as a message in a bottle, bearing witness to that time of persecution. The novel consists of sixty-seven segments organized into four chapters, or registers, entitled “Travel Scenes,” “Notes of a Madman,” “Criminal Investigation,” and “A Witness Interrogated.” The content of the letter is gradually extracted and expanded upon in these sections, or, to

Fig. 1. Eduard Kiš’s letter to his sister Olga, dated Kerkarabaš, 5 April 1942; first and last page.

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put it in other words, they serve as the prism through which the past is refracted. As in the Talmudist tradition, Kiš’s novel gives us the original document, the letter, with commentaries on and interpretations of this central document — in the novel’s segments — arranged around it. In its tripartite narration Kiš’s approach follows the Jewish hermeneutic tradition of passing on (Tanakh), elaboration, and exegesis (Midrash). These make up the different strata of what functions as a multi-layered text, storing and condensing historical fact and its clastic fragments, thus overwriting and revealing pre-texts including the letter document, and stratifying it into a complex deposit of memory. Or in slightly different terms, the text is a mnemo-poetic palimpsest which mediates the complex relationship between history and memory.9 Working back (or forward) from the letter original, the narrative traces the Jewish protagonist’s psychological state in the aftermath of the Novi Sad pogrom. This investigation is, interestingly, told from the perspective of the central character himself in the chapter “Notes of a Madman,” which is written in diary style. This section gives us to understand that E.S., while waiting his turn to be executed by the Danube, suffered a schizophrenic shock: Confronted with this untenable situation, his head split into the place of the “I” and the place of the “non-I,” which reminds us of Lacan, becoming a brain-duality, two brains situated in one and the same monstrous skull, or two skulls that have grown together, fusing into one single grotesque cranium containing two brains, side by side but heading, as it were, in different directions (Hourglass 147). From this point on, E.S. is a Janus-faced being, self-diagnosing his monstrous skull as hydrocephalous, a Wasserkopf, referring simultaneously to those people with disabilities who became victims of the Nazi euthanasia program,10 as well as presumably to the memory failure that is a symptom of hydrocephaly. From the moment of almost-death onwards, existence is always perceived by the survivor not only from the perspective of the living, but also from the perspective of no longer being alive. It is this double coding of perception arising out of the near-death experience which dominates Kiš’s work. The image of a white hourglass on a black background included in the novel’s prologue is a visual representation of this duality, where the black field configures the white and the white the black. The image in question, the famous face-vase figure devised by the Danish Gestalt psychologist Edgar Rubin, is not only shaped similarly to the titular timepiece of the novel, the hourglass, and thus acts as a kind of memento mori figure, but is simultaneously an optical illusion — the viewer alternately sees two black symmetrical profiles mirroring and facing each other, or a white goblet or vase against a black background. The optical illusion also reveals a fundamental principle of (selective) human perception: Where two fields have a common border, and one is seen as the figure and the other as the ground, our perception tends to concentrate more, or indeed

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exclusively, on one of the two fields, bracketing out the other, as though we were constitutionally incapable of focusing both. The auto-referential discourse on creativity in Kiš’s novel takes its starting point in the brain, the center of perception, knowledge and action. The brain is an object of investigation both in terms of pathology (deformation) and ingeniousness (creativity), and is the target of violence as well as the control center of survival. The biological function of human creativity, which is to utilize all cognitive powers of survival in a situation of crisis, finds its literary equivalent in (or becomes transformed in literature into) the act of symbolic creation in the face of catastrophe. In one of the scenes from “A Witness Interrogated,” E.S. is questioned about his acquaintance Dr. Freud. He testifies that the last time he saw Freud it was actually only Freud’s brain he saw, forming a little island in the snow on the corner of Miletić and Greek School Street (Hourglass 200). In this scene, the human brain catapulted out of its skull is not merely presented as a historical detail from the 1942 pogrom in Novi Sad. E.S.’s perception de-familiarizes the scenario of violence, making it almost beautiful: The brain of Dr. Freud, the surgeon [original: gynecologist]. A chunk of frozen, gelatinous pulp, perfectly intact, looking like a lamb’s brain served whole (at the Danubius Restaurant in Vienna, 1930). The snow, trampled all about by heavy soldier’s boots, seemed only slightly melted around the brain, whose convolutions, comparable to those of a walnut, and network of fine capillaries were clearly visible. The brain lay in the snow at the corner of Miletić Street and Greek School Street, and I heard someone say to whom, that is, to whose skull, it had belonged. So this was the brain of Dr. Freud, the surgeon: a small snowy island between paths trampled into the snow, an intelligence torn from its cranial husk as a mollusc is torn from its emerald shell, a trembling, throbbing mass, lying in the snow as in a refrigerator. But (seeing as how I knew whom it belonged to) it was nothing like the brain of an idiot in a glass container; it was the brain of a genius, preserved and protected in nature’s incubator, so that inside (the incubator), freed from its corporeal shackles, a dark pearl might develop, the pearl of thought at last materialized, crystallized. (Hourglass 57–58)

First, the passage secures the evidence of the crime, naming the offenders (those who wore heavy soldier’s boots), the witnesses, and the victim. There follows a localization of the crime scene and an anatomically detailed description of the corpus delicti (a brain, a network of fine capillaries) and its condition (a trembling mass, perfectly intact, frozen pulp). So far, so factual. But E.S.’s testimony is far from standard. To this corpus of evidence, strange commentaries are added that make the

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scene unfamiliar, thereby precluding the possibility of automatic perception. The brain is compared to a “lamb’s brain served whole,” making of the brain’s owner a holy, sacrificial animal.11 And the watery site of the crime, the Danube River that swallowed the victims’ corpses, becomes the Danubius Restaurant where the lamb’s brain is served up. Here Kiš applies poetic language to normal (or, at least, in the case of violence, factual) experiences in order to defamiliarize them, an artistic technique that the Russian Formalists dubbed ostranenie.12 Curiously, however, this process of defamiliarization involves a kind of familiarization: The brain in the snow is indeed displaced, but its new home is the all-too-normal context of a plate in a restaurant. It is only in the familiar setting of the dining room, where the brain is detached not only from the body but from the previous scene of violence, that the aesthetic shock effect comes into being. The representation of brutality not in its own terms and “natural” habitat, but in beautiful language (“as a mollusc is torn from its emerald shell”) and transposed to a familiar setting, means that this account of violence is not meant to be understood as (just) itself. It is rather designed to make us see things as if for the first time. For Kiš this device of making strange or new is not just a continuation of those concepts developed by the Russian Formalists. He goes even further, defining Judaism itself as an effect of defamiliarization.13

Bisociation — The Premise of Creativity The brain that formed a little island in the snow after the pogrom does not, of course, belong to Sigmund Freud, but to the gynecologist Maxim Freud from Novi Sad. In the novel’s “Criminal Investigation,” the writings and approaches of the psychoanalyst Freud, however, dominate the interpretation of E.S.’s dreams. In one dream, for instance, he is chased by bloodhounds, finally falling prey to them, becoming their “ritual victim” (Hourglass 38). Here the witches’ Sabbath, part of medieval antisemitic stereotyping, turns into “a dog sabbath, a ghoulish canine carnival” (Hourglass 38), of which E.S. becomes the victim. E.S., who himself has to interpret the symbolism of the dreamt “canine carnival,” traces the source of his dream back to an article in a magazine that he had read before going to sleep about dogs mimicking their masters’ war psychosis. Having linked the dream to his bedtime reading, E.S. criticizes Sigmund Freud’s failure to take account of such pre-sleep reading in his “dream book” (Hourglass 43). So, to cope with traumas and their afterlife in the subconscious, E.S. does not follow Freud, but rather suggests a biconvex lens or distorting mirror — in his own words “ES-brand magic glasses” (Hourglass 39) — to turn perception upside down. E.S. elaborates in his philosophical “Treatise on the Potato” on the experience of the Jews, including their perception through antisemitic eyes:

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The time has come when we must think of ourselves from the standpoint of life and death, not as self-seeking individuals, but as representatives of our entire race, that divine weed, scattered over all the continents of the earth, just like the lowly potato (Solanum tuberosum), whose origins, like our own, reach back to the dark depths of history and the earth, but whose existence will not, like ours, be called into question as long as the earth endures and there are hungry mouths to feed. (Hourglass 49–50)

This comparison of the potato and the Jew plays with stereotyped images of the latter. The potato, also known as “earth apple,” is a lumpy tuber, an earthly tumor, asymmetrical and lacking the perfect roundness of the apple or the tomato (“Paradiesapfel, that other heavenly fruit,”). In short, the potato is the symbol of “earth-made man, [.  .  .] without heart or essence [original: brain] [. . .] a regular homunculus [. . .] just like a man, a man without soul” (Hourglass 50). In Spain, the “Treatise” goes on, where further travels of the Wandering Jew took place, there was a fateful meeting between man and potato, even a pact between “the hooked Sephardic nose and the imperfect bumpy tuber” (Hourglass 50), after which they went out into the world together, to end up on the table or spread over the entire earth. In another second segment the potato features in a scene that, according to E.S., inspired Mohammed to compose the law forbidding the consumption of pork: One day young Mohammed saw a pig eating something truly disgusting, ripping up a cadaver or eating a rotten potato that looked like a human turd. Mohammed, who had just filled his belly with roast pork, then remembered that what he had eaten was pig meat, and began to vomit. He stuck his finger down his throat as drunkards do and vomited into the sand by the seashore. Then he hurried home, picked up the book of laws which he was writing at the time and which he would later call the Koran, and added the words: Don’t eat pork, for it will make you vomit. (Hourglass 52)

In other words, according to E.S., some fanatical prophet ate spoiled meat, felt disgust, and out of this individual experience made “sacred ordinance, a law, a divine commandment” (Hourglass 52). Going even further, the hyper-conscious E.S. puts forward the general thesis that the entire “history of religions (prohibitions, taboos, kashruths [Jewish dietary laws], etc.) [. . .] is the product of individual experience” (Hourglass 50). After his near-death experience, unusual associations and the synthesis of disparate, seemingly incompatible materials characterize E.S.’s mental activity. In its linking of issues and phenomena that are completely different, the novel embodies a certain way of thinking where the thought

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processes, madness, and ingenuity converge. If these incompatible elements were not linked, the incommensurable matrices from which the divergent components were drawn would never meet. However, by uniting the unsynthesizable, both matrices are suddenly perceived and recognized in and at the same time, like two separate frames of reference now fused together. In other words, the two matrices are bisociated, and, as a result an entirely new matrix emerges. While ordinary association (habit) operates within a single, preexistent matrix, creativity (originality, including artistic) operates by a “transitory juxtaposition of matrices.”14 The term bisociation was coined by Arthur Koestler (1905–83), a journalist, essayist, and writer of Hungarian-Jewish descent, in whose book The Act of Creation (1964) creativity is seen in terms of the ability to conjoin previously unrelated ideas or things resulting in a new synergy or, respectively, a qualitatively different connection (see figure 2):15 I have coined the term “bisociation” in order to make a distinction between the routine skills of thinking on a single “plane,” as it were, and the creative act, which, as I shall try to show, always operates on more than one plane.16

According to Koestler, his theory of creativity applies equally to humor, science, and the arts. In the arts, bisociation involves elements from aesthetically neutral contexts abruptly being transferred to previously unconnected contexts, the clash of the disparate generating surprise and creating new aesthetic meaning that affects the reader emotionally. However, Arthur Koestler not only defined the premise of creativity. For Kiš, Koestler represents the prototype of a Central-European Jewish intellectual, and his hero E.S. has many attributes of Koestler’s life and

Fig. 2. The perceiving of an idea (L) in two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference (M1 and M2).

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writings. Thus, E.S. continuously has creative if not strange thoughts. His “Jewish” way of thinking is “double-minded,” by which is meant not the δίψυχος of James 4:8, who is divided in his loyalties between God and the world, but rather a “transitory state of unstable equilibrium where the balance of both emotion and thought is disturbed.”17 In his work on creativity, Koestler cites Newton’s bisociation of the fall of the apple with the planetary orbits as an example of this double-mindedness, leading in this particular case to the legendary discovery of gravity; yet, who but a madman or genius would correlate a simple fruit, falling from a tree, with the motions of the planets? In Kiš’s novel, the same example undergoes an ironic retelling, with the introduction of motion of quite a different kind to Newton’s process of discovery. As in the excursus on the Jew-Potato, E.S. rejects the mythical apple, replacing it in this instance with Newton’s excrement, or in E.S.’s words: “I am inclined to believe that Newton owed his discovery of the law of gravity to shit” (Hourglass 60). According to E.S., Newton’s discovery came to him while he was sitting beneath an apple tree, brooding there for an entirely different reason, which he later wrote out of the narrative, thus producing a big historical lie. In this re-telling, as in the story of the wandering Jew-Potato and disgorging Mohammed, Newton’s apple undergoes a semantic shift that could only be attributed to a madman, or, from a psychological perspective, to a tortured man in mental crisis. To return to Freud’s brain in the snow, a similar shift can be found in the claim that this “brain of a genius” does not belong to a psychoanalyst but to the gynecologist. This shift from mind to reproductive organ is linked to the fact that, in addition to the imagined hydrocephalous deformation of his head, E.S. suffers from another biological deviation: He admits that his heart menstruates. This male menorrhea is a “manifestation of the Jewish, feminine principle,” the bleeding heart evidence of his (and his people’s) pregnancy with the seeds of death and Weltschmerz (Hourglass 26).18 E.S. is thus not only figured as Janus-faced but as a homo duplex — a hermaphrodite, a human being with a male and a female head (and heart), fusing contradictory forces. Furthermore, the bleeding heart of the Jew is an expression of being sacer, for in this state, he is as untouchable as menstruating women. However, as Freud noted, like altus, the Latin term sacer contains at its root antithetical meanings, indicating both “sacred” and “damned.”19 And it is in this way that the figure of the menstruating Jew and bloodshed in general asks to be read in Hourglass.

Muro/Judeomancy: The Wall/Mosaic Reading of Catastrophe For the purposes of his anatomical-geological investigation into the persecution of Central European Jews, Kiš not only structures his works in

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the form of the palimpsest, he also introduces the idea of a new method of deciphering as well as divination. The idea that memory is a reliable and unlimited store from which nothing can be erased that cannot later be retrieved (as with an ancient parchment that has been reused) was propounded by Thomas de Quincy in his essay “The Palimpsest of the Human Brain” (1845). The result was the application of archaeological and criminological reading practices to the spoken or written words of memory. In Kiš’s novel, the homo creativus E.S. is credited with a new method of deciphering called “muromancy” (zidomantija), the so-called science of reading the spots on walls, or “wall reading.” It is a reading method for which the terms judeomancy (židomantija) or “Mosaic reading” (Hourglass 102) are suggested as more appropriate alternatives. This new kind of mantic procedure is part of a Biblical tradition of interpretation dating back to the doom inscribed illegibly on Belshazzar’s wall and interpretable only by Daniel. However, here, unlike in the Book of Daniel where it is the fall of Babylon that is foretold on the wall, it would seem that the wall spots are bisociated to spots of Jewish blood, for in these spots the Jews’ fate is inscribed as “irrevocably as in the scroll of the holy Torah” (Hourglass 102), and, one might add, as irrevocably as on the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Muromancy, however, is not only derived from these traditions, but draws equally on modern scientific practices, clearly also referring to the Rorschach technique or inkblot test, a projective personality assessment based on the test taker’s reactions to inkblot pictures. Ironically co-labeled muro/judeomancy, a pun that is more evident in the Serbo-Croatian (zidomantija/židomantija), this method is also designed to reconstruct the vanished world of Central European Jewry. Kiš’s work is structured in such a way that the persecution that was part of this world reads not as a personal but as a shared history. In a text found in his literary remains,20 Kiš called this approach the construction of “parallelisms” (paralelizmi). Semantic correspondences between different situations would be revealed by slight adjustments to the facts of particular cases, as in the following example: After the pogrom in Novi Sad, E.S. escapes from death for a second time when a house collapses at the very moment he leaves it with the last piece of furniture.21 During his interrogation, he associates the collapsing roof beam with the ice pick that pierced the skull of Lev Davidovich Bronstein, alias Trotsky. Had the beam hit him, he, E.S., would have suffered the same fate as Trotsky. On another occasion, the ice pick is associated with the malleus iudeorum (Judenhammer), which stands metonymically for the whole tradition of anti-Judaic and antisemitic writing that encouraged the persecution of, and pogroms against, the Central European Jews. Correspondences between the fates of Jews persecuted by different regimes become even more evident (legible) when the central character of Hourglass is compared to Boris Davidovich Novsky, hero of

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the eponymous tale in A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, a collection of short stories based for the most part on the lives of historical figures from the show trial period in Stalinist Russia.22 Novsky, derived from the Russian word novyj (new), who is born after the forced “baptism” of his Jewish father in the frozen river Dnjepr, represents the new mankind, and, as such, is a conglomeration of attributes taken from different historical figures, including Lenin, Lunacharsky, Stalin, and Trotsky. Like E.S., Novsky is interrogated during his arrest, tortured to cause mental disorientation, and then forced to confess. Just as during E.S.’s interrogations, the case of Freud’s brain in the snow is recalled, Novsky is confronted with a smashed skull and traces of cerebral matter on the wall — traces of a brain that once belonged to a young revolutionary who resembles Novsky, who is, in the end, forced to confess his conspiracy against the state. But Novsky’s own brain is also concerned here. As far as he belonged to the new elite, his brain is likely to be found among those brains of Soviet geniuses that were preserved in the so-called “pantheon of brains.” The investigation of these brains, especially that of Lenin, by the German neuropsychologist Oskar Vogt and his Russian collaborators at the Moscow Brain Research Institute, was the cornerstone of Soviet research on human genius which aimed at creating the so-called “new human.”23 The story “Dogs and Books” (Psi i knjige), which functions as a miseen-abyme of the titular story, does not focus on the brain but on a bloody heart, itself providing a link back to E.S. in Hourglass. During a pogrom in medieval Provence, Baruch David Neumann, whose name (literally “new man” in German) and fate correspond to those of Novsky, is confronted with a Jewish heart, torn out of its body and displayed on a stone in front of a church. The horrible sight of this bloody ball of meat makes him convert to Christianity. However, he later recants and undergoes a medieval version of the interrogation/torture to which Novsky and E.S. were subjected, in this case the Inquisition. This story, like the others in the volume, and indeed like Hourglass, builds on historical fact: According to an interrogation protocol from the fourteenth century, Rabbi Neumann really existed, but all records ceased in 1337. Kiš builds his discourse on the fate of the Jews (and rebuilds their story almost forensically) from the organic remains which function as their metonymic substitutes. Starting with Freud’s brain in the snow, intelligence torn from its cranial husk has left trails of blood throughout his narrative palimpsests. The new science of muro/judeomancy, the art of bringing the mute bloody traces left on the blank pages of walls into language, demonstrates that literature may engender creative acts of reading (and thus remembering), and can store indices of violence and read these traces with the help of criminologically inspired investigation techniques, and that, by so doing, literature helps to re-construct the

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past and to bear witness. His literature also seeks to demonstrate that from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards, the brain, physical incarnation of the idea, is the target of total extermination, and that this extermination includes the soul and spirit of the Jewish people. For the so-called “Seele” is, according to Kiš, no longer housed in the chest, in the bloody human heart, and apparently no longer distinguished from “psyche,” but “what you call ‘soul’ [.  .  .] is [now found] in the slimy brain matter beneath the skull.”24

Conclusion The evoking of “Freud’s brain” — as perceived and described by the double-minded schizoid E.S. — indicates an ironic shift away from Sigmund Freud’s understanding of creativity as akin to neurosis, and from psychoanalytic theories of the interconnectedness of art and creativity in general.25 For Kiš, writing the catastrophe is not an act of sublimation based on individual or family pathology. His concept of creativity refers rather to techniques which not only transgress symbolic systems but counterbalance deconstructive and constructive forces through the economy of affects. This writing of the catastrophe is designed to avoid appropriation of the Holocaust in stereotyped forms and to subvert explanations which, according to Kiš, make the reader into a Pavlovian dog, trained to salivate at the danse macabre of the Auschwitz orchestra, in which he saw a real danger that springs from literature itself (Čas Anatomije 73). In Kiš’s writing, the devices of defamiliarization, bisociation, and muro/judeomancy are components of a new ars memoriae or paradigm of creative remembering in literature. These new literary mnemo-techniques have regenerative potential that can creatively master trauma, and, interestingly, are shown by Kiš to form part of the Jewish textual tradition. They are simultaneously semi-criminological reading techniques that can secure historical evidence and decipher traces of violence in the text. But in these texts, historical facts and individual testimony are formed into a new multi-layered, multi-perspective textual order. Kiš’s work is a mnemo-poetic palimpsest whose layers and spaces bear witness and become signifiers of the apperception of antisemitism and the persecution of the Jews throughout history. The creative act of writing, the languageguided approach to catastrophe, is complicated and refined to make the “unspeakable” visible as well as to avoid a pathetic and automatic perception of the persecution of Jews in the twentieth century. This ethical writing,26 Kiš’s post-Auschwitz poetics, activates the awareness that creativity (or a sort of lucid madness in E.S.’s case) is as important for the continuation of life after surviving a catastrophe as the traditional Jewish notion of zahor, the imperative to “remember.”

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Notes Epigraph. Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe (London: Hutchinson, 1959), 519. 1

The question of how Jewish culture was affected when catastrophe struck has been especially investigated for the Middle Ages and the Renaissance epoch; see, for example: Haym Soloveitchik, “Catastrophe and Halakhic Creativity: Ashkenaz — 1096, 1242, 1306 and 1298,” Jewish History 12 (1998): 71–85; Benjamin R. Gampel, ed., Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World (New York: Columbia UP, 1997). 2

See Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, “Hourglass as the Scene of Writing,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 14 no. 1 (1994): 147–60, for an insightful analysis, as well as Tatjana Petzer, Geschichte als Palimpsest: Erinnerungsstrukturen in der Poetik von Danilo Kiš (Pegisha — Begegnung: Jüdische Studien 6, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2008); this paper rests mainly upon parts of chapter 4.

3 Danilo Kiš, Hourglass, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990); Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using Hourglass and page number. 4

Danilo Kiš, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, trans. Duška Mikić-Mitchell, with an introduction by Joseph Brodsky (New York: Penguin Books, 1980).

5

We are following here Harald Weinrich who, referring to the term “mnemopoetics,” described the “immense edifice of memory” that comes from the depths of forgetting in Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. See Harald Weinrich, Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting, trans. Steven Rendall (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2004), 148. 6

For the potential meaning of the initials E.S. see Katharina Wolf-Grießhaber, “Sein, Schornstein. Danilo Kišs Roman Sanduhr,” Schreibheft 46 (1995): 68–77. 7

The Novi Sad raid is documented in The Crimes of the Fascist Occupants and Their Collaborators against Jews in Yugoslavia, ed. Zdenko Löwenthal (Belgrade: Federation of Jewish Communities, 1957). 8

For the original letter written in Hungarian, which was translated for the novel by the author himself, see Danilo Kiš, Ostavština (Legacy), ed. Mirjana Mioðinović (Beograd 2001 CD-Rom), here: Arhiva/Porodiðna dokumenta/Eduard Kiš/ Pisma (Archives/Family documents/Eduard Kiš/Letters), 1–10. The translation into Serbo-Croatian provided in the novel only contains minor changes to the original. 9

As shown in Petzer 2008, this modus operandi is applied throughout Kiš’s oeuvre.

10

The ten-thousandth person killed in Hadamar suffered from hydrocephaly; the death of this “milestone” victim was macabrely celebrated by the murderers in the crematorium itself. See Ernst Klee, “Euthanasie” im NS-Staat: Die “Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens” (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1983), 336, cited in Katharina Wolf-Grießhaber, “Erinnern als Ausgraben und Rekonstruieren: Nationalsozialistische Vernichtungspolitik in Danilo Kišs Roman Peščanik,” in “Zerstörer des Schweigens”: Formen künstlerischer Erinnerung an die nationalsozialistische Rassen- und Vernichtungspolitik in Osteuropa, ed. Frank

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Grüner, Urs Heftrich, and Heinz-Dietrich Löwe (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2006), 263–76; here, 268. 11

See Renate Lachmann, “Faktographie und Thanatographie in ‘Psalam 44’ und ‘Pešðanik’ von Danilo Kiš,” in Mundus narratus: Festschrift für Dagmar Burkhart zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Renate Hansen-Kokoruš and Angela Richter (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2004), 277–91; here, 286. 12

Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as technique” (1917), in Russian Formalist Poetics: Four Essays, ed. and trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska P, 1965), 3–24. 13 See Danilo Kiš, Čas Anatomije (The Anatomy Lesson), in Sabrana dela Danilo Kiša, vol. 8 (Beograd: BIGZ, 1995), 56. Subsequent references are indicated as Čas Anatomije, followed by the page number. 14

Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (London: Hutchinson, 1964), 658.

15

Koestler, Creation, 35 (figure 2).

16

Lenk, Hans, Kreative Aufstiege: Zur Philosophie und Psychologie der Kreativität (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, 2000), 138–73, discusses Koestler’s bisociation theory as a “multi-association” method. 17

Koestler, Creation, 36.

18

This can be read as an ironic allusion to Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character (1903), which associated Jewishness with the female principle; see also Katharina Wolf-Grießhaber, “Der zerstückelte und gemarterte Körper in Danilo Kišs “Pešðanik,” Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 57 (2006): 243–56; here, 248. See also the psychoanalytic approach to creativity of Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art: A Study in the Psychology of Artistic Imagination (Berkeley: U of California P, 1967), whose formula of a three-phased creative process includes a metaphorical pregnancy: 1. the initial schizoid fragmentation of reality, 2. the “manic-oceanic” fusion of these fragments in a “receiving womb” within the artist’s unconscious, and 3. the eventual re-integration of fragmented reality into a new structure on a higher level of consciousness, which may result in the creation of art. 19

See René Girard, Das Heilige und die Gewalt, trans. Elisabeth Mainberger-Ruh (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, 1999), 54–61. Girard elaborates on the link between impurity and violence. For the discussion of the homo sacer from the perspective of totalitarianism and bio-politics, see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998). Both consider the relation between the ambivalence of the sacred and establishing taboos that Freud points out in “Totem and Taboo” (1913). 20

See “Paralelizmi,” http://www.kis.org.yu/web/Dogled/A/C/index.htm.

21

The collapse of the house is also a reference to Simonides of Ceos (c. 557–467 and the birth of the ancient ars memoriae or mnemo-technique; see Stefan Goldmann, “Statt Totenklage Gedächtnis. Zur Erfindung der Mnemotechnik durch Simonides von Keos,” Poetica 21 (1989): 43–66. BC)

22

For a particularly insightful reading of A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, see Katharina Wolf-Grießhaber, Des Iltisses Kern: Zur Sinnproduktion in Danilo Kišs “Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča” (Münster: Johannes Lang, 2001).

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23

See also Michael Hagner. “The pantheon of Brains,” in Making Things Public, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 126–31. 24

Danilo Kiš, “Preludij za ludnicu” (1977; Prelude to the madhouse), Sabrana, vol. 8, 155–65; here, 156. 25

Freud’s psychoanalytic depiction of creativity in writing — e.g., in “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming” (1908) — emphasizes the sublimation of biological drives.

26

Kiš also wrote poetics as po-ethics, defining poetic writing as a fusion of poetics and ethics. His volumes Po-Ethics (Po-etika) und Po-Ethics, Second Book (Po-etika, druga knjiga), published in 1972 and 1974 respectively, include essays and interviews on general issues of poetics, especially in relation to the novel.

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16: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and the Aesthetics of Ohnmacht Gert Hofmann

T

HE “AESTHETICS OF NON-POWER” of the title is a reference to the idea and discourse of an aesthetic or poetic theory of human trauma, a theory that pursues the idea of the purely aesthetic manifestation of a new radical humanism. This process necessitates investigating the aesthetic means available to the human subject to survive the attacks on, or indeed annihilation of, its cultural, intellectual, and physical existence.1 As the subject of Ohnmacht (non-power), it escapes the violent grip of power, including the power of knowledge, and asserts and re-affirms itself through an aesthetic reflection upon the experience of trauma and the reality of death, to which power and knowledge themselves must eventually succumb. It configures itself aesthetically, for example in syncopic structures, not as a knowing subject, but as a survivor. The subject of non-power is able to realize the moment of annihilation, of death, by leaping over it. It re-affirms itself by producing elliptical figures: figures of its own absence or failure, and of elision, caesura, and reduplication, that is in tropological structures of citing and translating, in gestures of hymnic dedication, of prosopopoeia and mask play, through the dynamics of tragic accident and erotic mania, in utterances of moaning and screaming. Poststructuralist discourses of the human subject treat it as an aesthetic subject focused on the phenomena of its disappearance, one which investigates the vague forms of a receding subjectivity. But the disappearing subject, it seems, persistently haunts the discourse of its dissolution and remains effective in a subversive way. According to Derrida, a language “without subject” still produces sedimentary forms of human subjectivity, for example in the language of the poem. Here, the subject deconstructs any subject-controlled logos, reiterates its own dissipation and ventures beyond logos, into the sphere of the in-humane, from where it will hardly ever be re-integrated into the order of the subject.2 The language of the poem is never just self-articulation and re-affirmation of the subject, it is genuinely contaminated and hybridized with its “beyond,” with silence. But what would be the subject of this silent sub-talk of the poem, this deconstruction of its loudness, this

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dissipation of its explicitness? What would that “Without-Subject” of Derrida’s be, the subject that speaks without uttering itself in a linguistic way, but rather hides itself behind silence, as a sort of im-potentia, which undermines the potentia3 of the logos precisely while succumbing to it (Schweigende Tropen 2)? Or we might think with Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben about the anonymity of an “absolute immanence”4 and the “enigmatic signature of naked, biological life” with its bare potentiality, which communes with its decomposing reality, and which manifests itself precisely at the moment of its death struggle. The “immanence” of life dissipates the transcendental and categorical elements of subjectivity and reunites them as a loose conglomerate of contingent clusters, in a pragmatic patch-working process that can be reiterated infinitely: “Not even a puzzle, whose pieces when fitted together would constitute a whole, but rather a wall of loose, uncemented stones, where every element has a value in itself but also in relation to others: isolated and floating relations, islands and straits, immobile points and sinuous lines.”5 Truth takes the stage only in a harlequin’s disguise, showing off his patchwork costume — but who is wearing it? Our answer would be that the subject of human truth is in itself the disguise that conceals while showing off; it is essentially tropological, an insoluble permeation of substance and sign; essentially non-genuine, genuinely devoid of essence. It is articulated non-power, where consciousness in a state of absence, as a syncope, is still there as an intermittent, subliminal awareness between absence and presence, still forming an underlying “subjectivity” as the decomposing perseverance of its naked life, but without ever being identifiable in terms of assertive representation. The term syncope has both physiological and aesthetic (rhythmical) connotations. In either case it refers to an impulse that corrupts an existing regular continuity (heartbeat, stream of consciousness, metrical rhythm), interrupting it, but also possibly, in an erratic, irregular way, provoking a new pattern of connection. How can this be applied to Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah? I would suggest that the link lies precisely in the syncopic characteristics — ohnmächtig (powerless), subjective, disruptive, of fading presence, non-representative, falling silent  — of the surviving witness,6 who features as the core image of Lanzmann’s film. The non-power of the annihilated subject of the survivor corresponds (in its intermittent presence) to the objective presence of absolute violence in the extermination camp. This is, for Lanzmann, the starting point: One must start with the naked violence and not, as usually done, with the bonfires, the singing, and the blond heads of the Hitler Jugend . . . nor from the series of anti-Jewish laws that, beginning

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in 1933, gradually made life for German Jews impossible. Not from the Kristallnacht. The chronological account . . . would not be false, strictly speaking, but it would be miserably shallow and one-dimensional. No, in creating a work of art, one deals with another logic, another way of telling the story.7

What is the logic of Shoah? It is the presence of what cannot be represented in an image (because the Shoah evokes the “ultimate crisis of representation”8), and which therefore “forbids itself or is forbidden to itself” as a tool of representation.9 It is the image and presence of what is genuinely absent: the reality of death in absolute violence. Death must be present at the very outset of the story, it must mark every episode, be the sole measure of the words, silences, actions, refusals to act, and the blindness that made the death possible. (Lanzmann 34)

The logic is to jolt into presence that which cannot be represented: absolute violence, the complete annihilation of the subject of representation itself (as Primo Levi puts it: the true witnesses  — that is, the “submerged”), and of those who, as survivors, bear witness on their behalf. Because it is a trauma that affects the human subject as such and therefore involves the ultimate “crisis of representation,” its presence cannot be converted into memory, argument, or communicable knowledge. Lanzmann insists that “in no case” can this ultimate experience become “a memory.” To emphasize this, he invokes the infamous remark by an SS guard in Auschwitz, quoted by Primo Levi, that epitomizes the impossible reality of the camp or the reality of its impossibility: “Hier ist kein Warum” (Here there is no Why).10 We have to keep in mind that memory does not just provide an archive of everything that has been “real” in the past, but also the conceptual and imaginary paradigm for everything that seems to be a possibility for our approach to our present reality. One consequence of Lanzmann’s truly radical approach is that it makes the logic of his film seem to unfold the anti-logic of any intelligible approach to the real and to what is present. It does not matter whether the intention of such an approach is hermeneutic and sense-oriented, or simply explanatory and rationalizing in technocratic sociological and psychological terms. Its poetics unleashes the destructive force of the non-poetics of trauma-images from an unintelligible past, images that persistently interfere in a disintegrating way with our attempts to perceive the present as a meaningful, intellectually and emotionally inhabitable reality. Nevertheless, these (self-)destructive trauma-images must be thought of as images that hold out hope of provoking, eventually, some epiphany of a non-representational image that, even within the modality of failure, communicates

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the non-communicable experience of the Shoah, the trauma of absolute annihilation of the human subject. Non-representation is not an option. Commentators from Adorno to Lanzmann and Nancy have asserted as much. “Je ne veux pas entendre parler de Shoah, mais je ne veux pas non plus entendre le silence sur elle. Dès qu’on n’en parle pas, le silence retentit, angoissant” (I do not want to hear talk of the Shoah, but I don’t want to hear the silence about it either. As soon as there is no talk about it, the silence resonates horrifyingly).11 Having recourse to the Shoah is an ethical imperative. The only way to do this is to resuscitate the past and make it present, invest it with a timeless immediacy (Lanzmann 35). According to Lanzmann, the “resuscitating” image emerges from a kind of negative poetics: The whole artistic enterprise of the film is meant to be no image at all, but rather a figure tracing a living presence — the re-living of the trauma itself. Such an image bluntly and without compromise completely refutes the imaginative and image-engendering process of the artistic fabrication of a film as a piece of art, it appears bang in the middle of the filmic mise-en-scène as something utterly incompatible, as a rupturing presence, as a syncope that cannot be subject to poetics in terms of intentional fabrication, but rather escapes the controlling power of human artifact. Lanzmann’s image of the subject of non-power in this sense, and his image of the human subject being subjected to absolute violence, is the bare human face unveiling its ultimate naked presence in moments of total disintegration of all superimposed narrative and discursive identity constructions. Under the impression of the Shoah, and starting from the premise of “murder,” as if murder would inflict the ultimate meaning of death upon the universe, Emmanuel Levinas developed the phenomenology of the human face as a starting point of his radical ethic of the human condition, initiating the “humanism of the other human being,”12 understood in the most strict sense as the one who can never become an object for an ethical subject-ego. Facing the face of the Other, the human ego, alienated from itself, obsessed with the Other, and restless, becomes a hostage, particularly in the manner of its relating to itself as an ego that relentlessly fails to meet itself (Humanismus 100). This is, I would suggest, the anti-logic, the negative poetic of Lanzmann’s film. The face of the Other — Simon Srebnik, Abraham Bomba, and Filip Müller are its most prominent representatives — becomes the membrane of an ethically unconditional exposure to the reality of the trauma, insisting on the confrontation with this reality as an ongoing presence. According to Levinas, the presence in the face of the Other remains essentially unidentifiable. It is the reality of what he calls an “actus purus”

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that defies all appropriating acts of conceptualization and identification precisely because of its open, non-referential character. In the human face there is no separation between the act of facial expression and what is being given expression to, so that the “imperialism of Self and Ego” is forced to stop.13 Lanzmann was aware that the filmic image of the human face of the survivor would be able to provide both: the living presence of the human subject, giving itself in its untouchable integrity, and the disintegrating presentation of an open absence within the given image itself, a representation of the unrepresentable par excellence, of the “crisis of representation” and of the Shoah, the ultimate human trauma. The film acts as the rhetorical frame for a broken mirror, exposing the trauma of a human face losing its countenance. One can only do justice to the presence of the human face through an act of “exposing” oneself to its violent otherness, through a barely touching, but never grasping, act of “pure saying” (in Levinas’s terms) that never actually asserts anything. Lanzmann’s images force the viewer into such an exposure to the immediate and violent face of the trauma, prior to any mediating and communicating act, and unaffected by the pragmatic viewpoint of our linguistic mindset. In this ethically significant exposure, the Other speaks through incidents of a derailing or failure of language, through acts of silence or total “breathlessness” of language14  — “smothered words” (Sarah Kofman), “un souffle” (Jean-Luc Nancy), or “Atemwende” (Paul Celan)  — which in an elemental sense correspond to the overwhelming, violently totalizing experience of the trauma itself. This is Lanzmann’s legacy: All religious, ontological, and transcendental certainties, any references to truth beyond the pure immanence of the traumatic experience, have to be converted into a human relationship, “from face to face.”15

Notes 1

Gert Hofmann, Schweigende Tropen: Studien zu einer Ästhetik der Ohnmacht (Tübingen: Francke, 2003). Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text as Schweigende Tropen and page number. 2

Jacques Derrida, “Che cos’è la poesia?  — Was ist Dichtung?” in Auslassungspunkte: Gespräche, ed. Peter Engelmann (Vienna: Böhlau, 1998), 303. 3

I.e., the potential and potentia (Latin) the power of it.

4

Gilles Deleuze, “Die Immanenz: ein Leben,” in Fluchtlinien der Philosophie, ed. Joseph Vogl (München: Fink, 1996), 29–33; here, 30. 5

Gilles Deleuze, “Bartleby; or, The Formula,” in Essays Critical and Clinical (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997), 86. 6

The “witness,” emphasizing the presence-character of the event, has become a crucial concept in the discourse on Holocaust-representations, and particularly in discussions about Lanzmann’s film. See Shoshana Felman, “In an Era of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah,” in Yale French Studies: Literature and

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the Ethical Question 79 (1991): 39–81; Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (London: Routledge 1992). The philosophical branch of the discourse peaks in Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999). 7

Claude Lanzmann, “From the Holocaust to the ‘Holocaust,’” in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah: Key Essays, ed. Stuart Liebman (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007) 27–36; here, 34. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text as Lanzmann and page number.

8

Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image (New York: Fordham UP, 2005), 34.

9

I borrow this formulation from Jean-Luc Nancy. See his chapter on “Forbidden Representation” in The Ground of the Image (28–50; here, 48). It is the crucial insight of Jean-Luc Nancy that it is the genuine potency of the image (and especially of the artistic image) to invoke the presence qua openness that just “gives itself” (26), of something that defies representation in principle (thus operating “beyond the whole order of signs” [26] that is only able to represent the objectcharacter of things). 10 Claude Lanzmann, “Hier ist kein Warum,” in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, 51–52; here, 51. 11

Jean-Luc Nancy, “Un Souffle / Ein Hauch,” in Shoah. Formen der Erinnerung: Geschichte, Philosophie, Literatur, Kunst, ed. Nicolas Berg, Jess Jochimsen, Bernd Stiegler (München: Fink, 1996), 122–28; here, 122–23. 12

Emmanuel Levinas, Humanismus des anderen Menschen (Hamburg: Meiner, 2005). Subsequently referred to as Humanismus with page number.

13

Emmanuel Levinas, Die Spur des Anderen. Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Sozialphilosophie, trans. Wolfgang Nikolaus Krewani (Freiburg: Alber, 1999), 199.

14

Emmanuel Levinas, Jenseits des Seins, oder anders als Sein geschieht, trans. Thomas Wiemer (Freiburg: Alber, 1992), 36. 15

Emmanuel Levinas, Totalität und Unendlichkeit. Versuch über die Exteriorität, trans. Wolfgang Nikolaus Krewani (Freiburg: Alber, 1987), 109.

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Contributors CHRIS BEZZEL is Professor Emeritus in Linguistics at the Seminar für Deutsche Literatur und Sprache, Hanover University, and Dean of Literary and Linguistic Studies. He was a member of the Bielefelder Colloquium Neue Poesie, and was awarded the State of Lower Saxony’s artists’ scholarship in 1987. A widely published author, his literary publications include grundrisse (1968), die freude kafkas beim bügeln, die freude mozarts beim kegeln, die freude bismarcks beim stricken (1972), 99 gedichte (1987), Lezzebs und Relleks (1997), and kit. eine kindheit (2007). Among his academic books are Natur bei Kafka: Studien zur Ästhetik des poetischen Zeichens (1964), Kafka-Chronik: Daten zu Leben und Werk (1975), Wittgenstein zur Einführung (1988), and Wittgenstein (2007). MANUEL BRAGANÇA, PhD, is a Teaching Assistant at Queen’s University Belfast. His doctoral research examined the perception of Germans and Germany in post-Second-World-War French literature. He is the author of two recent articles, “Le ‘bon Allemande’ dans le roman français de l’immediat après-Seconde Guerre mondiale: une erreur de casting?” (2010), and “French memories of Germans in Sartre’s Les Chemins de la liberté” (2010). GISELA DISCHNER is Professor Emeritus at Hanover University. She has published widely on literature, the history of ideas, and cultural history. Her monographs include Bettina. Bettina von Arnim: Eine weibliche Sozialbiographie aus dem 19. Jahrhundert (1977), Die Stimme des Fremden (1992), “. . . bald aber sind wir Gesang”: Zur Hölderlin-Linie der Moderne (1996), and Das Sichtbare haftet am Unsichtbaren: Mystische Spuren in Kunst und Moderne (2005). RÜDIGER GÖRNER is Professor of German Literature and Director of the Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations at Queen Mary, University of London. He is also a literary critic and writer, contributing regularly to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Welt, and Die Presse. His recent monographs include Nietzsche Kunst: Annäherungen an einen Denkartisten (2000), Rainer Maria Rilke: Im Herzwerk der Sprache (2004), Thomas Mann: Der Zauber des Letzten (2005), Wenn Götzen dämmern: Formen ästhetischen Denkens bei Nietzsche (2008), and Die Pluralektik der Romantik. Studien zu einer epochalen Denk- und Darstellungsform (2010).

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STEFAN HAJDUK, PhD, lectured in German at the University of Limerick and is adjunct lecturer in Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. He researches on the poetics of ‘Stimmung’ and aesthetic hermeneutics. Selected publications include Die Figur des Erhabenen: Robert Musils ästhetische Transgression der Moderne (2000), “Experiment und Revolution: Zur ästhetischen Theorie des historischen Naturalismus” (2005), and “Identität und Verlust: Der Wandel des Familienbildes und die Dynamik der Geniuspsychologie in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre” (2009). GERT HOFMANN lectures in German, Comparative Literature, Drama, and Film at the National University of Ireland in Cork (UCC). Selected book publications include Dionysos Archemythos: Hölderlins transzendentale Poiesis (1996), Schweigende Tropen: Studien zu einer Ästhetik der Ohnmacht (2004), and Figures of Law: Studies in the Interference of Law and Literature (2007). Current research projects include the construction of literary subjectivity in contemporary writing, and topographies of arrival (pilgrimage as ritual, theater, and literature). ANIELA KNOBLICH is a PhD candidate at the University of Freiburg, where she works as a research assistant at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS). Her research is on the reception of antiquity in contemporary German poetry. Publications include “Raoul Schrott: Auswahlbibliografie” (2007), “‘Luftstrom aus alten Städten’: Geschichte und Erfahrung des Dichters bei Durs Grünbein” (2010), and “bibliotheken sind meine abgezogenen häute.” Identität und Intertextualität in Barbara Köhlers Gesängen “Niemands Frau” (2010). RACHEL MAGSHAMHRÁIN lectures in German Studies, Film, and Comparative Literature (Adaptation Studies) at University College Cork. She is a translator for New German Critique, and co-editor of Germanistik in Ireland. Publications include a first English translation and annotated edition of Kleist’s Die Herrmannsschlacht (2009). Her monograph Where Truth Lies: Uncertainty in the Work of Heinrich von Kleist will be published in 2011, the bicentenary of Kleist’s death. She has also written on Holocaust representation, the Armenian genocide, aphorisms and riddles, and the construction of national heroes in German literature. MARTON MARKO is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Montana in Missoula. His fields of study have included German, theater, education and geography. In addition to his research on Bachmann and other Austrian authors, Marko is also currently authoring a book on Peter Handke, focusing on the reception of both the USA and Yugoslavia in Handke’s work. Further areas of publication and research include representations of nature and technology in literature and film, travel and the

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exotic in the German literary tradition, as well as transatlantic cross-currents in postmodern and postcolonial literature, film, and cultural theory. ELAINE MARTIN is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. She is currently researching the colonial discourse in interwar Germany. Her publications include articles on Theodor W. Adorno, Nelly Sachs, Rose Ausländer, Fanny Lewald, and Kathrin Röggla. Minor projects currently in progress include articles on Inke Parei’s Die Schattenboxerin and Judith Hermann’s Alice. Her doctoral dissertation will be published as a monograph in 2011 under the title Nelly Sachs: The Poetics of Silence and the Limits of Representation. BARRY MURNANE is Assistant Professor in German Studies at the MartinLuther-University Halle-Wittenberg. His publications include Verkehr mit Gespenstern: Gothic und Moderne bei Franz Kafka (2008), “‘Ein Gespenst ist ein Gespenst’: Zum Gespenstischen in Kafkas Betrachtung ‘Unglücklichsein’” (2007), “Tragödie der Wirtschaft? Urs Widmer und Dea Loher” (2010), and “Ungeheuere Arbeiter: Moderne Monstrosität am Beispiel von Gregor Samsa” (2010). MARKO PAJEVIĆ is a Lecturer in German at Queen’s University Belfast, a member of the Research Center on Germany and Austria (CR2A) at the Université de Rouen, and a member of the International Research Center on Central Europe (CIRCE) at the Université de Paris IV–Sorbonne. He has published widely on twentieth-century German literature, literature and music, and literary aesthetics. His book publications include Zur Poetik Paul Celans: Gedicht und Mensch — Die Arbeit am Sinn (2000), Poésie et musicalité: Liens, croisements, mutations (2007), and Kafka lesen (2009). TATJANA PETZER is a Research Associate at the Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL), Berlin, and Assistant Professor at the University of Zurich. Her research interests include Eastern and Southeastern European literatures and cultures. She has published on Russian and Yugoslav cultural history, literatures, and the arts. Recent publications include the monograph Geschichte als Palimpsest: Erinnerungsstrukturen in der Poetik von Danilo Kiš (2008), and, as co-editor, Namen: Benennung — Verehrung — Wirkung. Positionen der europäischen Moderne (2009). RENATA PLAICE, PhD, worked as a part-time lecturer in German at the National University of Ireland, Cork (UCC) until 2009. Her thesis on the aesthetics of game and play in contemporary German literature (Thomas Bernhard, Heiner Müller, Botho Strauß) was published with

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Königshausen & Neumann in 2010. She has recently published “Das Spiel als das Dynamische: Der Begriff des Spiels zwischen Moderne und Postmoderne” (2009). ANNETTE RUNTE is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Siegen, and is a member of the French research group Centre de Recherches sur l’Autriche et l’Allemagne (CR2A) at the University of Rouen. Her research focuses on German and Austrian literature from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, including Romanticism, the Biedermeier, (Viennese) modernism, autobiographical writing, theories of discourse, narratology, and gender studies. Recent publications include Biographische Operationen: Diskurse der Transsexualität (1996), Lesarten der Geschlechterdifferenz: Studien zur Literatur der Moderne (2005), Über die Grenze: Zur Kulturpoetik der Geschlechter in Literatur und Kunst (2006) and, as co-editor, Feminisierung der Kultur? Krisen der Männlichkeit und weibliche Avantgarden (2007). HANS-WALTER SCHMIDT-HANNISA is Professor of German at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His research interests include dreams and literature from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, German Enlightenment and Romanticism, historical and intercultural aspects of reading, and media theory. His publications include Erlösung der Schrift: Zum Buchmotiv im Werk Clemens Brentanos (1991), and, as co-editor, Unzurechnungsfähigkeiten: Diskursivierungen unfreier Bewußtseinszustände seit dem 18. Jahrhundert (1998), Lesekulturen (2003), and Money and Culture (2007). He has also published German translations of major contemporary French philosophers, including Derrida. MICHAEL SHIELDS is a Lecturer in German at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His research interests include postwar and contemporary German literature and culture, medieval and renaissance studies, and translation theory. Recent articles include “Belated Prolegomena to a Translation of Flann O’Brien” (2007), and “Klischees und ihre Schatten: Zur Darstellung von Dunkelmännern und zu den impliziten Bildern von Humanisten bei Erasmus und Michael Lindener” (2008). Forthcoming articles and book chapters deal with thirteenth-century political song in Germany, France, and Italy, incest motifs in Frauenlob’s Marienleich, and analysis of the post–1945 reception of Albrecht Dürer by the graphic artist Caspar Walter Rauh. PETER TAME is Reader in French Studies at Queen’s University, Belfast. He has been awarded the Académie Française’s Prix Hervé Deluen (2007) for the promotion of French language, literature, and culture abroad. He is also Vice-President of the Association des Amis de Robert

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Brasillach. His research contributes to ongoing critical debate on the inception, development, and decline of political ideologies in the context of twentieth-century French literature, in particular in the interwar years (1919–39), the Second World War, and during the Occupation of France (1939–45). His books include La Mystique du fascisme dans l’oeuvre de Robert Brasillach (1986), and The Ideological Hero in the Novels of Robert Brasillach, Roger Vailland, and André Malraux (1998). He is also author of a fully annotated and edited English translation of Brasillach’s memoirs of interwar Paris and France (2003). Other publications include the proceedings of an international conference on André Malraux and spiritual values, published in the Revue André Malraux/ Review (2 vols., 2008 and 2009).

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Index absurd, the, 96, 115, 118, 128, 250, 251 acmeism, 35–36, 50 Adorno, Theodor W., 1–14, 19–34, 36, 42–44, 47, 49, 51, 55, 66, 98–100, 105–6, 126, 132, 163, 166–68, 180–84, 190–95, 197–99, 201–3, 214, 237, 248, 251–52, 270 Adorno, Theodor W., works by: Dialektik der Aufklärung, 7, 99, 105; Minima moralia, 22, 33, 126, 135; Noten zur Literatur, 4–5, 13, 24, 33–34, 42, 51, 106, 126, 136; Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft, 2, 5, 12, 14, 21, 33, 55, 66, 98, 105, 126, 135, 180, 184, 197–98, 248, 251; Negative Dialektik, 3, 5, 13–14, 22–23, 25, 33, 99, 106, 168, 248, 251; “Parataxis,” 132, 136 aestheticism, 9, 20–24, 32, 103, 141, 146, 156, 249 Agamben, Giorgio, 194, 268 Agamben, Giorgio, works by: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 9, 15, 84, 260, 265; Idee der Prosa, 195, 199; Notes on Gesture, in Means without End: Notes on Politics, 178; Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, 15, 272; Was von Auschwitz bleibt: Das Archiv und der Zeuge, 194–95, 199 Aichinger, Ilse, 9, 88–106 Aichinger, Ilse, works by: Aufruf zum Mißtrauen, 88, 103; Gebirgsrand, 89–94; Die größere Hoffnung, 96, 105; “In das Land Salzburg ziehen,” 91; “In einem,” 92–93; Kleist, Moos, Fasane, 91–92, 104;

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“Mägdemangel,” 93; “Neuer Bund,” 93; “Rauchenberg,” 93; Verschenkter Rat, 90–93, 103; “Winterrichtung,” 90–92 Akhmatova, Anna, 35 Alberti, Rafael, 130 alienation, 43, 55, 62, 113, 117–18, 126, 163, 167–68 ambiguity, 9, 20, 61, 70, 74, 76, 105, 113, 131, 137, 148–49, 158, 240–41, 248 Anders, Günther, works by: Tagebücher und Gedichte, 134, 136 Andersch, Alfred, 132, 212–13 Andersch, Alfred, works by: Der Vater eines Mörders, 8, 14 anguish; angoisse; Angst, 32, 108, 112, 117, 237–38, 243–44 annihilation. See extermination Anthologia Graeca; Anthologia Palatina, 209–11 antisemitism, 197, 257, 261, 263 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 130 Apollonian, the, 137, 154, 204, 207 aporia, 5, 7, 20, 24, 26, 29, 32, 100, 180, 184, 191, 197–98 aposiopesis. See speechlessness, 28–29, 34, 58, 61 Aragon, Louis, 110 Arendt, Hannah, 98, 100–101, 106, 114, 121, 179 Arp, Hans, 165 artistry; artistic practice, 4–5, 8, 19–21, 24, 109–10, 130, 139–41, 145–46, 150, 156, 253, 257, 265. See also Sprachartistik Aufbauliteratur, 183

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Auschwitz, 1–25, 30–34, 36, 42–44, 55, 66, 70, 76, 86, 98–100, 105–6, 120, 126, 134–36, 163, 171, 180, 184–85, 190–91, 194–99, 201, 214, 248, 253–54, 263, 269, 272 Ausländer, Rose, 9, 69, 71–72; comments on her own work, 82–83 Ausländer, Rose, works by: “24 Stunden,” 80; Alles kann Motiv sein, 76; “Antwortlos,” 86; “Doppelt,” 78; “Du und Dein Bild,” 78; EvaGedichte, 73; Forbidden Tree, 84; Gettomotive, 69–70; “Gib auf,” 75; “Glaswald,” 79; “Heimat I,” 80; “Herbst in New York,” 81; “Immer die Mutter,” 70; “Innengeburt,” 70; “Irrsinniger,” 81; “Jungfernjoch II,” 70; “Mein Turm,” 70; “Meine Nachtigall,” 73–74; “The Mirror,” 79; “Mother,” 84; “Mutterlicht,” 82; “Nicht ich,” 74–75; “Nur die Mutter,” 80; “Perspektiven der Zeit,” 77; “Die Quelle II,” 70; “Requiem I,” 79–80; “Requiem II,” 80; “Die Spiegel,” 78; “Spiegelbild,” 78; “Spiel im Spiegel,” 78; “Sternverdunkelung,” 79; “Trauerblumen,” 81; “Überholt, II,” 78; “Die Uhr,” 78; “Verrat II,” 79; “Vom A zum B,” 75; “Widmung,” 82; “Zeit I,” 77; “Zeit II,” 82 authenticity, 4, 11, 58, 96, 110–12, 194, 228–32, 234, 254 autobiography, 52, 71, 74, 91, 120, 136, 138, 198, 219, 232–33, 236, 239–42, 245 automatic writing, 110 autonomy, 5, 14, 64, 81, 132, 138, 141–42, 148, 153, 164 avant-garde, 4, 10, 55, 73, 129–30, 137, 141, 151, 154, 158–59, 190, 201, 219 Bachmann, Ingeborg, 7, 9, 14, 53–68, 100, 132, 195 Bachmann, Ingeborg, works by: “Abschied von England,” 64–66;

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“Ausfahrt,” 61–64; Frankfurter Poetikvorlesungen, 100, 130–31, 136; “Früher Mittag,” 55–58, 61, 67; Die gestundete Zeit, 55, 58–61; Die kritische Aufnahme der Existentialphilosophie Martin Heideggers, 54; letters to Celan, 136; Literatur als Utopie, 64, 68 Bachtin (Bakhtin), Mikhail, 193, 199 Ball, Hugo, 207, 213 ballad, 55, 64 barbarism; barbarity, 1, 2, 4, 12, 20–21, 42, 44, 55, 98–100, 112, 126, 133–34, 155, 163, 180–86, 189, 195–97, 248 Barbarossa myth, 91 Barner, Wilfried, 200, 212–13 Barthes, Roland, 195, 233 Bataille, Georges, 172, 178–79, 235 Baudrillard, Jean, works by: Symbolic Exchange and Death, 175, 179 Beauvoir, Simone de, 220, 223–24, 227, 229–30, 233, 235 Beckett, Samuel, 114 Benjamin, Walter, 36, 83, 132–33 Benjamin, Walter, works by: “Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen,” 70, 84, 173, 177, 179; “Das Passagen-Werk,” 85; Träume, 120; “Traumkitsch,” 110–11, 120 Benn, Gottfried, 9–10, 35–37, 125– 36, 137–57, 158, 163, 165, 207, 214 Benn, Gottfried, works by: Hillebrand edition [Fischer] vol. 1 Prosa und Autobiographie, 127; vol. 3 Essays und Reden, 137–57; vol. 4 Szenen und Schriften, 138–39, 142–43, 155, 157; Wellershoff edition [Klett-Cotta] vol. 1 Gedichte, 156; vol. 2 Prosa und Szenen, 140, 152, 155; vol. 4 Autobiographische und vermischte Schriften, 140, 142, 152, 154–56; individual works: Antwort an die literarischen Emigranten, 88; Doppelleben, 88, 103, 138; Erwiderung an Alexander Lernet-Holenia, 127; “Der Gedanke,” 132–33;

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INDEX Goethe und die Naturwissenschaften, 129; “Immer schweigender,” 130; Probleme der Lyrik, 130, 135, 137– 57; Provoziertes Leben, 138; Roman des Phänotyp, 138; “Satzbau,” 128; Statische Gedichte, 127 Beradt, Charlotte, 9–10 Beradt, Charlotte, works by: Das Dritte Reich des Traums, 107–21 Bernhard, Thomas, 129 Beyer, Marcel, 213 Bible; the biblical, 35, 45–46, 51, 74, 238, 244–45, 261 biological, the, 11, 84, 142, 256, 260, 266, 268 bisociation (component of creativity), 11, 257, 259–60, 263, 265 bleeding heart, 260 Blumenberg, Hans, 200, 213 Böhme, Jakob, 44–45 Bomba, Abraham, 270 Bonheim, Günther, 105, 201, 208, 211–12, 214 Braun, Helmut, 73–74, 84–87 Brecht, Bertolt, 2–3, 55, 114, 161, 188–89, 199 Brecht, Bertolt, works by: “An die Nachgeborenen,” 55, 66; Lesebuch für Stadtbewohner, 59–60, 67; “Radwechsel,” 165 Breton, André, 110, 114, 120 Broch, Hermann, works by: Der Berg, 91–92 Brodsky, Joseph, 134, 264 Brunner, Constantin, 71, 77 Buber, Martin, works by: Das dialogische Prinzip, 95, 105 Butler, Judith, 63, 67 cabbalism, 38, 41, 44, 46, 74 caesura, 11, 267 carnivalesque, the, 10, 182, 193–94, 257 Carossa, Hans, 129 Carossa, Hans, works by:“Die Gefangene und der Alte Mann,” 129; “Gestreift vom Todeswind,” 129; letters, 129, 135

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catastrophe, 24, 53, 66, 73, 104, 138, 163, 173, 183, 201, 253, 256, 260, 263–64 Celan, Paul, works by: “Aber,” 47–50; Atemwende, 36, 51, 271; “Ein Wurfholz,” 46–47; “Engführung,” 40; Fadensonnen, 39, 51; Gespräch im Gebirg, 42, 51; Lichtzwang, 49–50; “Mandorla,” 45; Der Meridian, 35, 38, 50, 85; Die Niemandsrose, 7, 44, 46; “Psalm,” 44–45; Sprachgitter, 38, 40, 51; “Todesfuge,” 43, 56; “Todtnauberg,” 45; “Weggebeizt,” 37–41; “Weissgeräusche,” 48; “Die zweite Nesselnachricht,” 39 Churban, 94, 100, 104 civilization, 7–11, 62, 85, 98–99, 105, 155, 168, 181, 187, 191, 236–37, 241–43, 246–50 classicism, 57, 126, 161–62, 164, 166; German classicism, 141 close reading, 89–94, 211, 215, 231 collage, 164–65, 183, 192–93, 197 commitment, 4–5, 36, 88–89, 96–103 conceptualization, 2, 12, 25, 271 Concrete Poetry, 9–10, 129, 158–69 condition humaine, 3, 145, 188, 237, 246, 251, 270 consciousness; Bewußtsein, 4, 21, 54, 76, 81, 83, 93–94, 101, 106, 110, 113, 116, 118, 130, 138, 140–55, 213, 265, 268 consumerism, 1, 167–68 continuity, 10, 129, 137, 170–79, 186, 206, 237, 239, 244–45, 249–51, 268 creativity, 6–8, 10, 71, 111, 137, 139–40, 142, 146, 151–52, 173, 175–77, 180, 192, 224, 253, 256– 57, 259–60, 263–66 cultural criticism, 2–4, 7, 12, 14, 21, 33, 98–99, 139, 166, 184 cultural industry, 7, 10, 99, 103–4, 184–85 Cummings, E. E., 73 Czernin, Franz Josef, 202 Czernowitz/Chernivtsi, 71, 85

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Dadaism, 133, 161, 164 Davies, Peter, 129, 135 de Man, Paul, 83, 87 death drive, 172, 175, 179 death of history, 25, 171–75 deconstruction, 83, 163, 170–77, 185, 267 Dedekind, Friedrich, 183 defamiliarization; ostranenie, 11, 253, 257, 263 defiguration. See disfiguration degenerate art; entartete Kunst, 36, 158–59, 166 Deleuze, Gilles, 268, 271 Derrida, Jacques, 10, 83, 86, 176, 179, 189, 198, 267–68, 271 desire, 64, 81, 107, 130, 181 destruction, 8, 10–12, 62, 104, 116, 130, 134, 143, 170, 172–73, 179, 183, 187 dialectics, 2–5, 7–8, 10, 13–14, 21–23, 78, 98–99, 126, 139, 149, 151, 159–60, 170, 175, 219, 234 Dickinson, Emily, 126 Diner, Dan, 7, 14, 105, 181, 184, 190–91, 194, 197–99 Dionysian, the, 137, 141–42, 154, 207 discontinuity, 10, 137, 170–79, 239 disfiguration, 26, 69, 79, 83 documentary, 119, 134 doomsday, 91–92 Dos Passos, John, 223, 225, 234 Draesner, Ulrike, 159, 213 dreams; dreaming, 9–10, 56, 62, 69, 71, 74–75, 77, 81–82, 89, 92–96, 107–21, 238, 257, 266 Drieu La Rochelle, Pierre, 232 Drieu La Rochelle, Pierre, works by: Gilles, 231 Eagleton, Terry, 127, 135 écriture automatique, 110 ecstasy, 143, 205, 156, 205 Eich, Günter, 23, 73, 125, 163, 165, 168, 209, 210, 215 Eich, Günter, works by: “Inventur,” 163, 209, 210, 215

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Eliot, T. S., 114, 127, 130, 148 engagement, 5, 13, 36, 51, 53, 58, 66, 67, 97, 103, 106, 129, 130, 151, 184, 223; disengagement, 233 engagierte Literatur, 158, 165, 167 enjambment, 93, 195, 204 enlightenment; Aufklärung, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 99, 139, 155 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 33, 42, 73, 215 erotic, the, 48, 119, 172, 179, 267 escapism, 70 euthanasia, 255, 264 excess, 126, 167, 175 exile, 62, 70–72, 82, 86, 108, 133–35 existentialism, 45, 134, 245 exorcism, 189, 190–91 expressionism, 130, 133 exteriority, 139, 164, 176–77, 272 extermination; annihilation, 2, 5, 8, 11, 31, 94, 104, 134, 185, 263, 267–70 eyewitness, 119 fascism, 9, 22, 36, 53–54, 60, 181, 186–87, 231–32, 264 Faulkner, William, 223, 225 fetish, 153, 167 fictionality, 119 figuration, 69, 75–76, 79, 83 Flaschenpost; message in a bottle, 9, 35, 40–41, 46, 48–50, 254 Foucault, Michel, 84, 174–75, 178–79 Foucault, Michel, works by: “A Preface to Transgression,” 179 fragmentation, 26, 32, 55, 73, 76, 249, 265 Frankfurt poetry lectures, 64, 130–31 Freud, Sigmund, 84, 106, 110, 113, 144, 172, 175, 179, 242, 253, 257, 263, 265–66 Freud, Sigmund, works by: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 179; “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” 266; Totem and Taboo, 265; “Trauer und Melancholie,” 84; Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, 106 Friedrich, Hugo, 130, 134–35, 169

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INDEX Friedrich, Hugo, works by: Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik, 130, 135, 169 functionalism, 19, 94 futurism, 130 García Lorca, Frederico, 130 gender studies, 22, 70, 73, 87 Genet, Jean, 231 Genette, Gérard, 183, 198 George, Stefan, 110, 133, 146–47 George, Stefan, works by: “Komm in den totgesagten Park und schau!,” 147 Gernhardt, Robert, 133–34, 215 ghosts, 30, 180, 182, 185–97, 199. See also hauntology Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 14, 34, 57, 67, 114, 129, 141–42, 155, 161 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, works by: Faust, 57; “Wandrers Nachtlied,” 161; Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, 141 Grass, Günter, 125, 134, 158, 161, 163, 165 Grass, Günter, works by: Die Blechtrommel / The Tin Drum, 158, 163 Grünbein, Durs, 203, 215 Gründungsmythos (founding myth), 185 Gruppe 47 (Group 47), 53, 61, 67, 101, 106, 202 Gumilev, Nikolaj, works by: Letters on Russian Poetry, 35 Günther, Sigmund, 37, 38, 51 Günther, Sigmund, works by: Physikalische Geographie, 37, 51 hauntology (Derridean term), 189 Heaney, Seamus, 134 Hebbel, Christian Friedrich, 187, 196, 197 Hebbel, Christian Friedrich, works by: Kriemhilds Rache, 187, 196 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 4, 5, 14, 46, 78, 149, 156, 192, 234, 239, 251 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, works by: Grundlinien der

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Philosophie des Rechts, 251; Philosophie der Geschichte, 14 Heidegger, Martin, 36, 45, 48, 52, 54, 66, 94,-5, 104, 125, 131–32, 134, 136, 224, 228 Heidegger, Martin, works by: Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, 136; Basic Writings, 52, 136; Bremer Vorträge, 94, 104, 136; Sein und Zeit, 52, 228 Heißenbüttel, Helmut, 158, 165 Heraclitus, 172 hermeneutics, 4, 10, 76, 113, 195, 255, 269 hermeticism, 76, 82, 89, 98 Herzfelde, Wieland, 110 Heym, Georg, works by: “Berlin III,” 192–93 Hitler, Adolf, 36, 54, 108, 115–19, 186–87, 193, 225, 227, 231, 268 Hofmannnsthal, Hugo von, 133 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 37–38, 43, 51, 131–32, 196, 214 Hölderlin, Friedrich, works by: “Brot und Wein,” 51, 214; Empedokles, 196 Höllerer, Walter, works by: Transit, 101, 106 holocaust, 1, 2, 5–9, 11–14, 19–20, 23, 25–26, 33–34, 44, 58, 62, 72–73, 79, 104, 189, 197, 254, 263, 271–72 Horkheimer, Max, 4, 7, 99, 105, 181, 184, 191, 197, 199 Huch, Friedrich, 109–10, 120 humanism, 8, 237, 241, 246, 248–52, 267, 270, 272 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 74, 97, 105, 162 Husserl, Edmund, 222 Huxley, Aldous, 114–15 hybridity, 82–83, 267 idealism, 10, 53, 68, 140–42, 146, 150–54, 162–63 idiolect, 161 imaginary projection, 72 immanence, 172, 178, 268, 271

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incompatible, the, 139, 152, 258–59, 270 India, 142, 244, 246–47 ineffability, 98. See also unspeakable, the Ingaarden, Roman, 134 initiation rites; initiation process, 36, 43, 116, 189 Innerlichkeit; inwardness, 61, 140, 142, 145–46, 154–55, 167 inspiration, 146, 204, 208–9, 213 intertext; intertextuality, 10, 83, 90–91, 165–66, 176, 180–84, 187, 189–90, 195, 197, 210, 234 iteration; repetition, 10, 13, 23, 28, 73, 77, 79, 83, 132, 171–73, 175– 77, 181–82, 186–95, 199 Jandl, Ernst, 158, 168, 213 Jandl, Ernst, works by: “Naturgedicht,” 168 Jaspers, Karl, works by: Die Wandlung (periodical), 125 Jauß, Hans Robert, 200 Ježower, Ignaz, works by: Das Buch der Träume, 110 Joyce, James, 114–15, 164 Judeomancy, 260–63 Kafka, Franz, 94, 114–15, 121 Kafka, Franz, works by: Kahlschlag, 125–26, 129, 163, 210, 215; Der Prozess / The Trial, 94, 114; Tagebücher, 121; Die Verwandlung / The Metamorphosis, 94 kaleidoscope, the, 241–42, 246 Kampmann, Elisabeth, 129, 135 Kierkegaard, Søren, 190, 192–93, 199 Kiš, Danilo, 11, 253–66 Kiš, Danilo, works by: Čas Anatomije / The Anatomy Lesson, 263, 265; Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča / A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, 253, 264–65; Peščanik / Hourglass, 253–66; Preludij za ludnicu / Prelude to the madhouse, 266 Klages, Ludwig, 109 Kleist, Heinrich von, 104, 196–97 Kleist, Heinrich von, works by: Der Prinz von Homburg, 196

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Klemperer, Victor, works by: Lingua tertii imperii, 85, 125 Kling, Thomas, 9–10, 200–215 Kling, Thomas, works by: Auswertung der Flugdaten, 213, 215; Botenstoffe, 202, 213–14; “Der Erste Weltkrieg,” 202; Fernhandel, 214; Greek Anthology. Nach Kenneth Rexroth, 203–4, 210–11; “Leonidas II,” 209–11; “Die letzte Äußerung des delphischen Orakels I,” 203–8, 211; “Die letzte Äußerung des delphischen Orakels II,” 205, 208–9; “Projekt ‘Vorzeitbelebung’,” 206; Sondagen, 203–5, 209, 214; “Zu den deutschsprachigen Avantgarden” / “On the German-speaking Avantgardes,” 201 Kluge, Alexander, works by: Schlachtbeschreibung, 196 Klüger, Ruth, 30, 34 Koestler, Arthur, 11, 253, 259–60, 264–65 Koestler, Arthur, works by: The Act of Creation, 259, 265; The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe, 264 Kofman, Sarah, 6, 14, 271 Köhler, Barbara, 213 Kosmiker, 109 Kristeva, Julia, 87, 240, 251 Krolow, Karl, 94, 104 Kumpfmüller, Michael, 127, 135 Kurz, Isolde, 110 Lacan, Jacques, 79, 83, 85–86, 171, 178, 255 language: incommensurateness of, 28; failure of, 271 Lanzmann, Claude, works by: Shoah, 11, 267–72 Leiris, Michel, 110, 220, 235 leitmotif, 241–44 Lernet-Holenia, Alexander, 127, 129 Lettrismus, 151 Levinas, Emmanuel, 9, 15, 176, 270–72 Ley, Robert, 111 liberalism, 55 Luhmann, Niklas, 83, 87

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INDEX Luxemburg, Rosa, 193, 196–97 Lyotard, Jean, 83, 87, 193, 199 lyrical ego, 35, 79, 81 Malraux, André, 11, 237, 239–52 Malraux, André, works by: Antimémoires, 236–37, 239, 241–49, 251; La Corde et les souris, 239, 251; L’Espoir, 247; L’Homme précaire et la littérature, 248, 251; Le Miroir des limbes, 239–41, 251; Les Noyers de l’Altenburg, 242–43 Mandelstam, Ossip, 35, 38, 46, 52 Mandelstam, Ossip, works by: On the Nature of the Word, 35 Mann, Thomas, 120, 129 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 130 Marx, Karl, works by: Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Napoleon, 192; Das Kommunistische Manifest, 193 Mauriac, François, 223, 233 Mayer, Hans, 49 medium: dream, 108, 110, 116; intertext, 197; language, 24, 26, 47, 55, 72, 188, 207; psychic, 151, 206; radio, 206; visual, 79, 109; written text, 19, 36, 78, 109, 149, 153, 159–60 Meister, Ernst, 127–29, 135 Meister, Ernst, works by: “Après Aprèslude,” 127–28 Meister Eckhart, 44–45 melancholy, 73, 81, 137, 145, 147 Mell, Max, 129 memory, 1, 11–12, 45, 69–70, 76, 81, 171, 174–75, 177–79, 196, 199, 253, 255, 261, 264, 269. See also remembrance Mersch, Dieter, 87, 168 message in a bottle. See Flaschenpost metamorphosis. See transformation metaphysics, 45, 134, 143, 170, 172, 177, 179 mimesis, 8, 76, 166, 174 mirror, 48–49, 76, 78–79, 193, 215, 227, 251, 257, 271 mnemo-poetic layering, 253, 255, 263 modernism, 37, 55, 57, 73, 75–76, 127, 129, 134, 137, 145, 190

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modernity, 7, 14, 37, 82, 146, 148, 154, 180–82, 184, 190–91, 199 Mon, Franz, 158, 162, 164–65, 168–69 montage, 154, 164, 169 mood, 80, 134, 139, 145–53 mortality, 36, 240 mosaic, 72, 113, 260–61 Mosaic reading, 260 mother, the, 70, 73–74, 76, 79–84 mother tongue, 71–72, 79, 82 mourning, 69–70, 79–82, 100, 190– 91, 198 Müller, Filip, 270 Müller, Heiner, 10, 170–79, 180–89, 191–99 Müller, Heiner, works by: Bildbeschreibung, 171–72, 174, 177–78, 181, 191, 198; Brandenburgisches Konzert, 184–85, 193–94; Germania, 180–82, 184–87, 189, 192–95; Germania 3 Gespenster am Toten Mann, 180, 182, 186–88, 196–99; Germania Tod in Berlin, 181–82, 184–88, 192, 196–98; Die Hamletmaschine, 170, 173, 176, 178–79; Hommage à Stalin 1, 187; “Lach nit,” 180, 182, 184, 189, 194–97; “Neujahrsbrief 1963,” 182 Müller, Wilhelm, works by: “Der Lindenbaum,” 57 muromancy; zidomantija, 261 muteness, 29, 32, 43 mystical, the, 44, 74, 77, 79, 136, 142 mysticism, 45, 82, 247 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 6, 8, 14, 270–72 National Socialism, 7, 37, 53, 57, 98–99, 131, 136, 137, 197–97 nature, 39, 53, 58, 63, 66, 73, 85, 132, 148–50, 168, 238, 243–44, 256 neo-romanticism, 55 Neumann, Peter Horst, 133, 136 neurosis, 138, 263 new humanism, 237, 241, 246, 248– 49, 251 Newton, Isaac, 260 Nibelungen legend, 187, 196, 198

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308



INDEX

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 58, 67, 83, 87, 129, 139, 141–43, 149–50, 156, 172, 190, 207, 214 Nietzsche, Friedrich, works by: Also sprach Zarathustra, 58; Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, 207 nightmare, 108, 111–12, 114, 116– 17, 120 nihilism, 20, 130, 141, 228, 231 non-power, 11, 267–68, 270 objectivity, 127, 138–42, 145, 150, 166 Ohnmacht, 11, 267–68, 271; powerlessness, 176 onomatopoeia, 208 Ophelia, 173, 176–77 oracle, 203–6, 208–9, 214–15 organicism (cultural model), 247 organisms, 149, 247 ostranenie. See defamiliarization Orwell, George, 114–15 Other, the, 79, 137, 175, 177, 181, 270–71 other, the, 95 othering, 72 palimpsest, 183, 187, 197–98, 253, 255, 261–64 pantheism, 71, 73 Papenfuß, Bert, 202 paradox, 3–4, 21, 26, 29–30, 32, 41–42, 44, 70, 76, 96, 98, 102, 105, 112, 114–15, 127, 130, 139, 153, 159, 166, 190, 201, 204, 206, 232, 242 parallelism, 187, 261 Parker, Stephen, 129, 135 partial object, 72 Peltzer, Ulrich, 127, 135 Perse, Saint-John, 130 Pessoa, Fernando, works by: Book of Disquiet, 166, 169 phenotype, 138, 152–53 poésie pure, 148 poetic atonality, 133 poetic register, 125

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poetics: of collage, 164–65, 183, 192–93, 197; of figuration, configuration, defiguration, disfiguration, refiguration, 26, 69–70, 73, 76, 79, 83, 196; of metamorphosis, 11, 236; modernist, 186, 191; of non-power, 11, 267–68, 270; of resistance, 5, 7–9, 104, 155; of silence, 19; pogrom, 254–57, 261–62 Poschmann, Marion, 159 post-dramatic, the, 178 post-history, 173 postmodern, 74, 83, 154, 171, 191–92 postmodernism, 128, 137, 155 powerlessness. See under Ohnmacht presence, 5, 8, 29–32, 172, 177, 180, 184–85, 191, 195, 240, 250, 268–72 privacy, 10, 89, 108, 111, 116–17 privatism, 97 profane, the, 175, 177, 193 Prometheus, 56, 67 Proust, Marcel, 132, 165, 169, 264 psychoanalysis, 5, 81, 83, 110, 178, 272 punk lyric, 201 Quintilian, 166 Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 190–91 realism, 119, 141, 163, 165, 167 realness, 94–97 redemption, 177–78 regeneration, 242–44, 248 reification, 21, 24, 98, 126 religion, 38, 46, 141, 154, 171, 244, 246–47, 258, 271 remembrance, 1, 2, 69, 70, 76, 101–2 repetition. See iteration representation: crisis of, limits of, ban on, 1, 2, 6, 8, 19, 20, 22, 24, 26, 29, 32, 83, 115, 164, 257, 268–69, 271; non-representation, 159, 269– 70; self-representation, 148 resurrection, 81, 96, 126, 165, 172, 244–45

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INDEX revolution, 94, 159, 170, 173, 177, 186–87, 192–93; events of May 1968, 246; November Revolution, 191 Rexroth, Kenneth, 203–4, 210, 212 Rexroth, Kenneth, works by: Poems from the Greek Anthology, 209, 211 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 37, 79, 125, 129, 132–33 romanticism, 126, 133–43, 141, 145 Rubin, Edgar, 255 rupture, 55, 101, 133, 177, 181, 185–87, 189–92, 194, 204, 213, 246, 250; in civilization, 7, 9, 11, 98–99, 181, 191; in history, 76, 182, 185, 189, 191, 200, 202, 206, 208; in language/poetics, 26–27, 178, 181, 202–3 Sachs, Nelly, 9, 19–20, 26, 28–29, 32, 37, 38, 42, 44, 55, 69, 73, 79, 100, 133 Sachs, Nelly, works by: “Chor der Geretteten,” 31–32; “Sie schreien nicht mehr,” 30; Suche nach Lebenden, 29; “Szene aus dem Spiel ‘Nachtwache’,” 27 sacred, the; le sacré, 126, 134, 175, 177, 193, 245, 249, 250, 258, 260 sacrifice, 176–77; self-sacrifice, 187 Sade, Marquis de, 175 Sappho, 73, 161–62, 165 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 45, 219–20, 222– 23, 245 Sartre, Jean-Paul, works by: L’Âge de raison, 220–25, 228–29; Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 219–20, 224, 228–29; Les Chemins de la liberté, 11, 219, 224, 231–32; L’Être et le néant, 220; Jesus la Chouette, 223; Les Lettres au Castor, 220; La Mort dans l’âme, 220, 228, 230; Les Mots, 219, 232; La Nausée, 225, 231; Qu’est-ce que la literature?, 223, 227–28; Saint Genet comédien et martyr, 231; Situation X, 219; Le Sursis, 220, 224–25, 227 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 159–60

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Saussure, Ferdinand de, works by: Cours de linguistique génerale, 159–60 Schäfer, Hans Dieter, 129 Scheidt, Georg, 183 Schiller, Friedrich, 144 Schlegel, Friedrich, 38 Schlüter, Marguerite, 129 Schönberg, Arnold, 133 Schulze, Ingo, 127 Schulze, Joachim, 45 séance, 181, 189, 190–91, 196 Sebald, W. G., 102 self, 53, 61–62, 79, 81, 116, 118, 128, 130, 137–38, 140–41, 145, 149–51, 153, 175, 271; lyrical self, 140, 143, 146, 150, 153–54; selfalienation, 117–18; self-censorship, 107; self-consciousness, 76, 195; self-deconstruction, 74; self-determination, 64, 110; self-dissolution, 154; self-recognition, 78; selfreferentiality, -reflection, -reflectivity, -reflexivity, 20–21, 24, 26, 53, 73, 127, 132–33, 139, 149, 151, 154, 187, 197; self-renunciation, 118; self-representation, 148; selfresistance, 4; self-transcendence, 46, 153 selfhood, 116 sensorium commune (undifferentiated sensory organ), 150 sexuality, 172, 175 Shoah, 19, 20, 22–24, 26, 28, 30–32, 43–44, 69–70, 79, 119, 132–33, 253, 270–71 Shoah (film), 11, 267–70. silence (of victims), 20, 28–30, 32, 43, 55, 58, 61, 64, 91, 97, 100, 127, 162, 195, 206, 267–71. See also under poetics simultaneism, 225 Šklovskij, Viktor, 11, 96 speechlessness, 28–29, 34, 58, 61 Spengler, Oswald, 11, 236–50 Spengler, Oswald, works by: Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 236– 37, 239

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310



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spirituality, 244, 246 Sprachartistik (language artistry), 102 Srebnik, Simon, 270 Staiger, Emil, 134, 145 Stalin, Josef, 36, 186–87, 198, 262 Stalingrad, 187, 191, 196 Stein, Gertrude, 164 Stekel, Wilhelm, works by: Die Träume der Dichter, 110 Sternberger, Dolf, works by: Aus dem Wörterbuch eines Unmenschen, 125; Die Wandlung (periodical), 125 Stunde Null, 1, 126, 200, 210 subconscious, the, 62, 71, 257 subjectivism, 55, 153, 163–65 subjectivity, 10, 21, 24, 31, 70, 76, 83, 117–18, 127, 137–43, 145, 147, 149–52, 154, 223, 267–68 sublimation, 263 subversion, 96–97, 107, 118, 246, 267 surrealism, 55, 57, 110, 112–13, 115, 146, 250 surveillance, 114–15, 117 Susman, Margarete, 35, 43 symbolic introjection, 72 symbolism, 35, 37, 58, 113, 160–61, 257 syncope, 268, 270 Szondi, Peter, 132–33 terror, 10, 55, 92, 107–9, 111–12, 114, 183, 231–32 testimony, 1, 6, 9, 194–96, 256, 263. See also remembrance; witness theatre, 116, 143, 171, 178, 189, 193 totalitarianism, 36, 107–9, 111–12, 114–17, 119 traditionalism, 2, 20, 24, 32, 36–37, 53, 76, 99, 154, 162–65, 195, 197, 209, 241, 246 Trakl, Georg, 37 transcendence, 45–46, 62–63, 134, 154, 177 transference, 70, 72 transfiguration, 24, 69 transformation; metamorphosis, 11, 41, 53–54, 62, 64, 72, 94, 100,

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110, 116–17, 125, 128, 133, 140, 161, 174–78, 183, 188, 213, 236– 37, 240, 242–44, 247–49, 251–52 transgression, 10, 81, 114, 123, 151, 171, 174–78 translation, 36–38, 44, 48, 65, 70, 72, 92, 108, 133, 161–62, 168, 204, 210–11, 238–39, 267 transsubjectivity, 152 trauma, 2, 6, 11, 54, 57, 70–71, 115, 134, 182, 187, 236, 245, 249, 253, 257, 263, 267, 269–71 Trommler, Frank, 129 unconscious, the, 10, 94, 110–12 Ungaretti, Giuseppe, 130, 161 unspeakable, the, 30, 44, 57, 64, 154, 195, 253, 263. See also ineffability utopia, 64, 131, 171, 186, 189, 193 utopianism, 10, 53, 57–58, 62–63, 100–101, 193, 195 Valentin, Karl, 114–15 Valéry, Paul, 132–33 vampire, 180, 185, 191, 193 violence, 8–9, 11, 91, 108, 170, 172– 73, 176–77, 181–83, 186–88, 192, 196, 256–57, 262–63, 268–70 Walcott, Derek, 134 Waterhouse, Peter, 202 Wiedemann, Barbara, 44, 49 Wiener Gruppe, 158 Wirklichkeitszertrümmerung, 137, 143, 149 witness, 1, 6, 10, 32, 79, 130, 200, 254, 256, 263, 268–69. See also eyewitness; testimony Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 54, 166, 167 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, works by: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 54–55 Woolf, Virginia, 164 zero hour, 1, 126, 200, 210 zidomantija. See muromancy Zivilizationsbruch. See rupture Zohar, Book of, 38, 45

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famous dictum that writing poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric has haunted discourse on poetics, but has also

given rise to poetic and theoretical acts of resistance. The essays in this volume discuss postwar poetics in terms of new poetological directions and territory rather than merely destruction of traditions. Embedded in the discourse triggered by Adorno, the volume’s foci include the work of Paul Celan, Gottfried Benn, and Ingeborg Bachmann. Other German writers discussed are Ilse Aichinger, Rose Ausländer, Charlotte Beradt, Thomas Kling, Heiner Müller, and Nelly Sachs; concrete poetry is also treated. The final section offers comparative views of the poetics of European literary figures such as Jean Paul Sartre, André Malraux, and Danilo Kiš and a consideration of the aesthetics of Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah. Contributors: Chris Bezzel, Manuel Bragança, Gisela Dischner, Rüdiger Görner, Stefan Hajduk, Gert Hofmann, Aniela Knoblich, Rachel MagShamhráin, Marton Marko, Elaine Martin, Barry Murnane, Marko Pajevi´c, Tatjana Petzer, Renata Plaice, Annette Runte, HansWalter Schmidt-Hannisa, Michael Shields, Peter Tame. Gert Hofmann is a Lecturer in German, Comparative Literature, Drama, and Film, and Rachel MagShamhráin is a Lecturer in German, Film, and Comparative Literature, both at University College Cork; Marko Pajevic´ is a Lecturer in German at Queen’s University University of Ireland, Galway.

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German and European Poetics after the Holocaust Crisis and Creativity

Edited by

The Denkmal zur Erinnerung an die Bücherverbrennung (Monument in Remembrance of the Book Burning) on the Bebelplatz, Berlin. Photograph by and courtesy of Tina Stephan. Cover Design: Frank Gutbrod

Hofmann, MagShamhráin, ´ and Shields PajeviC,

Belfast; Michael Shields is a Lecturer in German at the National

German and European Poetics after the Holocaust

C

risis presents chances for change and creativity: Adorno’s

Edited by

Gert Hofmann , Rachel M ag Shamhráin , ´ , and Michael Shields Marko PajeviC

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