Celan, Between Scholem and Heidegger

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NITZAN LEBOVICLehigh University

Near the End: Celan, between Scholem andHeidegger1

Paul Celans Nah, im Aortenbogen expressed his reaction to MartinHeidegger and Gershom Scholem, a sense that between the German and theGerman-Jewish a fissure might divide the wall of words. In 1967 Celanbrought his two idols together in a short poem, not even two dozen wordslong.

Here it is:

Nah, im Aortenbogenim Hellblut:das Hellwort.

Mutter Rachelweint nicht mehr.Rbergetragenalles Geweinte.

Still, in den Kranzarterien,unumschnrtZiw, jenes Licht. (Gesammelte Werke 2: 202)2

Celan is describing a sick body during its last moments of life. He leads fromthe specific location of the problem, Near, in the aortas arch, to an image ofcollective mourning in the second stanza, and in the third to what appears tobe a metaphorical, mystical image of the moment just before death van-quishes life.

But a close reading reveals a series oftensions thattake the poemina direc-tionthatdefiesthemostliteralinterpretation.Theframestoryisjettisonedinthe last line of the poem: there a Hebrew word is explained by a Germanphrase: Ziw, jenes Licht. The wordZiw means glow or luster;jenes Lichtmeans simply that light. I believe that Celan signaled inthis extremely com-pressed line his position vis--vis two cultures, which is to say vis--vis


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zas? Can life and death, mourning and forgetting, the individual soul and thecommunalconventionbeunderstoodthroughthefusionofHebrewandGer-man?

The answer may be found at the grammatical sign that divides twospheresinthelastlineofCelanspoem:thecommathatseparatestheHebrewfrom the German, the mystical statement from its literal explanation, is bothboundary and binding. I hope to show that this comma occupies a crucialplaceinthepoemsintertextuality,notonlybetweenlanguagesandtexts,butbetween traditions and images as well. To put it differently, thecomma, rela-tional in its very grammatical essence, istheonly element capable ofbringingtogether the Hebrew and the German, life and death, mourning and forget-ting, the individual and the communal. It incorporates the simultaneity of an

oppositionandadialogue.ScholarsofCelanhaveusuallyreferredtoitwithinthe framework of a German-Jewish symbiosis.3

A large body of literature has discussed the duality of the and, standingbetweentheGermanand Jewish.AsPaulMendes-Flohrpointedout,thedis-cussion began with Moses Mendelssohn, and reached a culmination withFranzRosenzweigscritiqueofHermannCohen.Celanscommaexpressesanalternative: in contrast to the verbal conjunctive and, it expresses its dualseparating-connecting nature through silence, the absence of speech. But onecould proceed a step further. Beyond the existingnonexisting, positive or

negativevalueofanygivenmomentofhistoricalsymbiosis,thiscommaisamark of an ontological and an aesthetic absence, the beginning point for boththe separation and fusion of the two traditions. It is signifying the relationbetweennothingnessandtheremainsofthelight.Onlywhenweappreciatethatabsenceandtheremains,canthecommaalsofunctionasasignofrealiza-tion and fullness, of the full existence of nothingness, close to the heart oflanguage itself. Celan, in other words, is transcending here the mere choicebetween the German and the Jewish, not in favor of a third entity, but ratherof its lack, a darkness in the middle.4 This is the place his poetry is searching

for.InwhatfollowsItracetheliteralandmetaphoricalhistoryofthepoem.At

theendoftheday,thetrueobjectofCelanspoeticsistheontologicalstatusoftheworditself,evenofamutepunctuationmark.Thisisthesignoftimeandthe breath of life. It is also where the temporality of the poemhistorical, lit-erary, philosophical, and culturalmeets with the temporality of existence,represented by references to an ever-coming end. As will be shown below,there is nothing expected in this shared confluence of words and life; theintertextualdynamicandculturalexistencethatkeepsitmovingwillneverlet

it rest or allow the two to become one. Much like Zenos paradox, all one candoiscomenearerwithouteverarrivingatapointofrest,truemeaning,orac-

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paradigmatic poem for Celan; life and death, the word and the comma, asignifieranditsdifferentlayersofsignified,theGermanandtheJewish,begin -ningandend,willeverbemovingtowardeachotherwithoutbeinggrounded,

decided,anchored.Thistemporalmovement,representedbythecommathatbreaks and reconnects the parts, is the heart of the poem, near its end.

I. Close Yiddish Foremothers: The Second Stanza

Manyofthe themeswovenintoCelans poemresista cursoryreading.Thetitle of the collection of poems he published in 1968, Fadensonnen indicates ahyperbolic relation between two types of connection.5 The negotiations be-

tween Jewish and German, the destroyed and the destroyer, are presented asanendlesscycleofmutualattractionandenmity.Themovementofthepoemitself does not expose this relationship immediately; it starts with a clear indi-vidual moment, and slowly broadens the context, in two sequential steps.First, it exposes the broader theme of Jewish mourning in exile, and thenframes it within the German-Jewish context, shared by Hebrews and Ger-mans, Jews and Christians. However, the poetic process itself is misleading.

What appears to be a quite physical moment is in fact its oppositea spiritualreflection on life. The collective symbols of the second stanza are an ironic re-

mark on the value of tradition, and the German-Jewish conclusion offers noclosure at all. Rather, it leads back to its first line, or the first word of the firstline: Nah. One then begins a second reading, in which the word near re-ceives a metaphorical dimension lacking from the first readinga dynamicspace has opened, never to be grasped. The process of the poem as a whole re-veals a negative perspective: it is impossible to set clear spatial forms, to con-firm known collective categories, or to draw boundaries. The notion of near-ness is similar, semantically, to the function of the comma in the last line ofthe poem, and it links Celans poem to a Yiddish predecessor.

ThekeytoNah,imAortenbogenisadifferententity.Itisthemiddlepartofthepoemthatmarksitsbirth,inhistoricalterms.InMay1967,stillundersupervision at the mental hospital, and while preparing for his trip toTotnauberg to meet the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, Celan wasreadingtheJewishhistorianofKabbalah,GershomScholem.6Duringthatpe-riod he read bothZur Kabbala und ihrer Symbolik (1960) and Von der mystischenGestaltderGottheit(1962). At the bottomofa pageinthe latterabout the femi-nineshapeofthedivine(Schechina),CelanjotteddownthreelinesinYiddish.7

Thisnote,whichalludestoboththeprophetJeremiahandMatthewsgospel,

is the predecessor to Nah, im Aortenbogen. It reads:Vet di mama Rockhl veynen

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John Felstiner translated thiswithout specifying where it was foundas:

If Mama Rachel starts to weepMessiah cant still bear to keepUs waiting and lamenting so. (Paul Celan 238)

Written shortly afterward, while Celan was intensely preoccupied withHeidegger, Nah, im Aortenbogen follows the internal structure and logic,andrecyclessomeoftheterms,foundinthesethreelines.Notonlyistheretheallusion to both Testaments, the Jewish and the Christian, there is also theirony accompanying the religious demand, a long Jewish tradition that com-mands the mourning of exile and destruction. If Jeremiahs prophecy turnsRachel/Rahel into a sacred symbol of motherhood, consoled in chapter 31 bythe voice of God himself, Celans lines turns the prophecy upside down. Themiddlestanzareads:MutterRahel/weintnichtmehr./Rbergetragen/allesgeweinte.8 CelansYiddishandtheGermanagree:thereistobenomorecry-ing.Butwhy?Isthereconsolationordarkironyintheclosureofthelastline?

In his seminal monograph on Celan, Felstiner traced the continuitybetween the two poems, claiming they attune Celans lyric to messianiclonging (Paul Celan 238). Felstiners interpretation and translation of Nahfollowed the messianic and collective hopecarried across by the Yiddisharibetrogen and the German herbertragento the redemptive use of Ziw atthe end of the poem. He contextualized this redemptive hope in the contem-poraneous world, specifically, Israels Six-Day War, which took place in June1967 and enabled Israel to control all of Jerusalem.9 Felstiners version turnsZiw into the fulfillment of the semantic course, an allusion to the mysticalpresence of divine forces and their earthly intervention in the historical situa-tion. In other words, he chose a tone of solace and promise, closing the dooropened by talk of mere nearness. For him, the next two German words aremerely an illustration, a translation and a reference that explains the Hebrewwithout resisting it.

However, the three Yiddish lines Celan jotted down may offer a differentmeaning from the ideological assumption Felstiner relied on. The marginalnote was Celans recollection of a folk song that Moyshe-Leib Halpern para-phrased inhis longpoem,now a classic ofYiddish literature, (A-Nacht).10

Born in Galicia in 1886, Halpern immigrated to the United States of AmericaafterstudyingpaintingandGermanliteratureinVienna.HediedinNewYorkin1932,poorandalmostunknown.Hispoetryismarkedbypersonalizedmo-tifs of colorful, almost cheerful, apocalypse and death. In an autobiographicalpoem written in the third person, (What Moyshe-Leib could tell), the narrator asks,

If M h L ib d ib d h



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Alone, between waves and skies,Would anyone believe Moyshe-Leib? (Halpern 95)

Halperns A-Nacht tells the story of the ultimate stranger, the poor wan-dering Jew who cannot afford to pay for a nights shelter and must sleep onpaving stones, all the while complaining like mame Rachel (mother Rachel)anddreamingofasaviorwhocannotendurethesoundofcryingand,unableto sever his bonds, bangs his head against the wall (Halpern 9091).11 Theend of the section reads like a mixture of a lullaby and a dirge. He describes anendlessly mourning Rachel who prays to the savior and urges him to turnaway:

Vet Meshiakh mer nit kenen,Ihr Gewlat AribetrogenEi-liu-liu, liu-liu.Vet er sich von Keiten reisen,Un dem Kap an Stein sich schlagenMach zsha shoin di Eigelech zu.Ei-liu-liu, liu-liu. (9091)12(Quoted in Noverstern 116)

[When the Messiah cannot bearHer continuous criesEi-liu-liu, liu-liuHe breaks his chainsAnd bangs his head against the rock:Close your pretty eyes.Ei-liu-liu, liu-liu.]13

In its final line, the poem tumbles even further into the pure abyss, reflectingbackontheclose-to-nothing:Noonehasseenmehere;Ihaveneverbeen.

The Yiddish that Celan jotted down in the book by Scholem reflects acertain interpretive position vis--vis the long tradition of Jewish mourning,

following the consoling lines of Jeremiah, promisingin Gods own voice:Thy children shall come again to their own border (Jeremiah 31.17). Youmayhavenoticedadifferencebetweenmytranslationofthewordaribetrogenand Felstiners: in Yiddish the word means endure, not carrying across(Felstiner, Ziv 61131).14 Celans Yiddish lines, in other words, are the oppo-site of a messianic or mystical identification. In fact, they ironize such a posi-tion: the Messiah cannotendurethe crying,soheturnsaway. There isnothingin Celan, in short, to justify the collective promise Cannot [] keep us wait-ing(Felstiner,Paul Celan 238).TheMessiahturnshisbackonRachelthere-

fore even the German moves from the localized her of the herbertragento the less conventional rbertragen, conveying quite nicely the irony ex-

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Returning to Nah, the function of the second stanza with its collectivereference to the Jewish ritual of mourning in exile, does not imply a betterfutureit mocks those who believe in such a future. In Celan, Jeremiahs

prophecy of destruction leads deeper into the ontological nature of language;this is not a prophecy of consolation or redemption. It carries no message ofhope, no collective affirmation. If there is a relief in it, it is only the retrospec-tive and individual moment of death. The irony produced by opposing ameta-revelation-story (the biblical promise of return) to the marginal, corpo-real and personal individual comprehension of an end, does not open anyfactual or metaphysical option abiding to Felstiners message of carryingacross.Ifthereisamessageofreturnhere,itisthereturntonearness,atrace,the remains of the light, the left-overs, the after-image.15

The importance of Halperns postwar apocalyptic poem has been dis-cussed at length by Avraham Noverstern,who noted its impact on Yiddish lit-erature from the early 1920s on. Noverstern carefully examined the tendencyofthepoemtosetChristianmessianicthemesalongsideJewishones,andtheaccompanyingirony.LaterCelanwouldadaptthisapproachtohisbloodmet-aphors, suggesting a shared legacy of sorrow (621).16Noverstern emphasizedthat the idea of apocalypse projected on the narrator a different light, with-outadoubtexpressingahighlysensitivecharacterthatstaysoutsidetheusualboundaries separating the normal and the abnormal (106). The poem

A-Nacht, he said, was on the edge of insanity, focusing on the idea of frozentimea hole in timeand the eternal presence of characters and symbols:the golden chain, the harp, the Messiah, and Jesus. Still, nothing could with-standtheultimatepowerofdeathandofnothingness,whichisexactlywhereonefindstheglow(Glanz). At the heart of the poem, Jesus rides a white horseinto Jerusalem while around him all is being destroyed:

And as in a dream it seems,To be riding dressed in white. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Above my head the light glowsThe sun weaves, a garland gleams. (114)

Is Jesus riding towards messianic life or a painful death? The poem enablesboth possible interpretations. The narrator describes an act of unity, a mysti-cal fusing with Jesus blood. In this poem, Noverstern writes, Jesus is anuntimely symbol of existential loneliness (113). Half a century later, HansGeorg Gadamer would characterize Celans poetry with nearly the samewords, referring to the frequent allusions to blood (17475).

Thisraisesasubstantialquestion:whywouldaYiddishpoetwhohadfledthe pogroms of Eastern Europe for exile in New York write about Jesus as a



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tion of blood? In Nahas in its Yiddish predecessorthe explanationshould be given at a philosophical level, and Noverstern informs us that[Halperns] poem is not supposed to calm the reader, but rather to leave him

orherinaconstantstateofembarrassment,sunkinthisatmosphereofuncer-tainty (109). Similarly, Celans Nah leaves little doubt concerning itsnever-ending search or the ontological absence of any identifiable markers inspace. In contrast to the conventional Celan interpretation, it is not aboutfinding ones identity.17As Eric Kligerman demonstrated in a recent study,Celans own notion of All poets are Yidsowes not to any religious orethnic understanding, not to mention any national sense of identity, butrefersinsteadtothepoem[which]notonlybeginsbutalsoendsinaspaceofexile(11).18 Between German, Hebrew, and Yiddish, thelatter came closerto

realizing theembedded essence of exile; the former twomet at anintertextualcrossroad that left both in exile.

II. From Eckhart to Sefer HaBahir: Preparing for Nah

Celans obsession with nothingness is hardly new. But the path he tookwas not always well documented. An interest in Scholem was brilliantlydocumentedinJoachimSchulzes CelanunddieMystiker (1975),aninfluential

work that clearly left its mark on Felstiners monograph, among others. ButNah contradicts Schulzes argument that putting an end to Mother Ra-chels crying must have meant the end of exile to Celan (51). Addressingother redeemed Jewish authors in Israel, Celan declared in 1969: Ich glaubeeinen Begriff zu haben von dem, was jdische Einsamkeit sein kann (GW2:203). It is important to note that this statement rejectsen face both national-ism and vulgar Messianism, without being pessimistic. Jewish loneliness willbeunderstoodhereasahermeneuticalstandthatacknowledgestheverytightspace left between the Jewish and German, but also moves beyond it.19 The

solution is to trace the intertext between the two and produce a new ur-lan-guage, charging an old understanding of absence with the modern under-standingoflanguage.CelanfoundthetensionattherootofmodernGerman,in Meister Eckharts language, quoted and reshaped in both Heideggers andScholems innovative use of language.

Nah shapes a process of semantic expansion, yet one directed towardsdifferent, even contradictory ends.20 Its refusal to accept traditional bound-ariesisseeninitsinsistenceonunconventionalconjunctionsandaffiliations.Imean here more than the immediate fusion of German and Hebrew into one

poetic language, or its supposed byproduct, the Yiddish offspring. Heideggerand Scholem appear on the more immediate surface, under which one comes

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final emphasis on light echoes Meister Eckharts neo-Platonist reflections onthe birth of language out of the heavenly light of creation (Schulze 12, 27).21

When one thinks of the poem as a bridge between Scholems and Heideggers

philosophiesoflanguage,between Ziw andthatlight,Eckhartfollowsnatu-rally, since both men saw the medieval theologians text as a source for mod-ern German. Let me explain.

Tobeginwiththeunexpected:ScholemspersonallibraryincludeddozensofvolumesbyEckhart.Hiscommentsappearoccasionallyinthemargins,andto judge from them, Scholem appears to have been quite excited by a sermonon the creaturely (das Kreatrliche), finitude, and nothingness (spelledNichil by Eckhart and Nihil by Scholem).22 Scholem did not say muchabout Eckhart in his writings about the kabbalah, but the rare mentions

deserve attention. In Ursprung und Anfnge der Kabbala (1962), for instance,Scholem referred to Eckharts symbolism of the high soul as the equivalent tothesymbol of the temple at Sefer haBahir, theearlytextofthekabbalahandakeywork for Celan (Scholem, Ursprung und Anfnge 14).23 In Von der mystischenGestalt der Gottheit, a copy of which he presented to Celan in April 1967,ScholemdescribedtheconceptofZiw. ScholemtranslatedthewordasLicht-glanz on the following page to where Celan left his comment (Scholem, Vonder mystischen Gestalt 143). In the following pages Scholem moved to discusstheLichtweseninrelationtotheKreatur(148).[E]inkreatrlichesLicht

conveyedametaphysicalunityofplaceandtime(149).Itwaslightitselforitsexpression in the worlda place or a figure. The example Scholem gave of aplacewasatemple(Mishkan),andhelinkedittothecreaturelyexploredbyEckhart in the sermon mentioned above. Scholem explained both Ziw andLichtglanz or Abglanz as the kabbalistic lower Schechina, a female and earthlydivinity, the mother whose Taten wird die Welt licht (161). He was quiteclear:dasPrinzipdieserWeltundderAbglanz,dervomverborgenenUrlicht,aus dem guten Licht Gottes genommen ist (162). In other words: In derunteren Schechina: von ihr strmt die ungefilterte Kraft Gottes nur noch in

sich selbst zurck, prozediert nicht mehr weiter, und was aus ihr austritt, istnicht mehr Gott, sondern Kreatur (170). And again: Was ist dieseSchechina?Sagevielmehr:DasistdasLicht,dasausdemUrlichtemaniertist.

Auch dieses [zweite Licht] umgibt alles []. Da sagte der unterste: Ich willnicht unten wohnen und nicht von dir entfernt sein (167). Near, but notquite there.

This feminine creature, a lower mother, sometimes a sister who is thesource of life, functions as the kabbalistic lower Sephira, the actual wisdomof God, which borrows its power from God himself, the hidden Nichts or theEnnoia ofGod.ThissymbolismisconnectedbyScholemtothemidnightritualcalled Tikkun Hazot, or to that part of it devoted to Rachel, Tikkun Rachel,



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MutterZion,andtheJewishnothingness,ScholemalsomentionsPaulslet-ter to the Galatians where Paul uses the ancient tropes when he talks aboutthe upper Jerusalem which is our mother (Scholem Von der MystischenGestalt, 290n8). But Celan links itthrough Hlderlin and Rilketo Hei-degger.

Celan knew about Heideggers obsession with Meister Eckhart since theearly 1950s. Specifically, he was interested in how Heidegger read Eckhartsnotion of Nothingness.

Otto Pggeler dated Heideggers initial engagement with Eckhart to early1915, noting that he returned to the subject after 1945 (81). The mysticalmotif of Nichts and its tight link to poetic desolation were central toHeideggersontologyinthelectureshegaveaboutHlderlinin193435.Spe-

cifically, as Pggeler showed, Heidegger talked about Eckharts works as theur-text of German philosophy, and he developed the idea of the commonalityof human finitude out the Eckhartian notion of Nichts (79). John D. Caputoadmitted as well: We have it on Heideggers own assurance that MeisterEckhartistobenumberedamongthegreatmystics,andtherefore[]akintothoughtitself(142).Intheselectures,Heideggertiesthepoettothethinkerindesolatedtime(142).ThesubjectwasdiscussedinKarlLwiths Heidegger,Denker in Drftiger Zeit, which Celan read in 1954 (Lyon 182).

In1952,whenhereadHeideggers Was ist Metaphysik? Celan underlined a

question: How stands it with the Nothing? (Felstiner, Paul Celan 181). Herecycled the question, almost verbatim, in his well-known Meridian speech(1960), and I see the idea as one of the principal motifs driving Celans poetryas a whole. The theme of absence [Nichts] was crucial to Heideggers notionof language in general, and repeated in his readings of both philosophy andliterature. During the last few decades it won a number of interesting inter-pretations and commentaries. For our purpose it suffices to mention herePhilippe Lacoue-Labarthes work, or the subsequent work by Gosetti-Feren-cei; both emphasized the centrality and the violent dimension that was focal

to Heideggers hermeneutics, and that Celan was negotiating with.25 Duringthe late 1950s and 1960s, one finds Celan trying to answer some questionsHeidegger asked concerning the essence of language, insisting that absencemust relate to a German tradition since Eckhart, and the political translationit received in modern German, partially thanks to Heidegger. For example,after discussing Hlderlins and Rilkes poetry: Je mehr es in der WeltnachtbiszurMitternachtgeht,destoausschliesslicherherrschtdasDrftige,derge-stalt,dassesseinWesenentzieht(Heidegger,Holzwege 272).Celansreplyin-corporatedboththetraditionofEckhartandthekabbalah,repeatingthesame

motif of Mittnacht und Mittag und Mittnacht where Wahr spricht, werSchatten spricht (GW 1: 135). The language of poetry is found where all

LEBOVIC: Celan 473


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change. In Unterwegs zur Sprache (1959), Heidegger explained that the task ofthe poet was to guideeven dominatelanguage: Der Anspruch des Dich-tersaufdieHerrschaftseinesSagenserflltsich(225).ForHeidegger,Gedei-

hen und Glanz seiner Dichtung warden Gegenwart. Der Dichter ist seinesWortes so sicher wie mchtig (225). In contrast, Celans closure is showing aminor and dim realization, and testifies to the absence of domination andcontrol as much as to its traces.

Heidegger found, in every poetic tale, the emancipatory power of Freieder Lichtung (Unterwegs 257) leading to the lichternder Blitz of the poeticgaze, itself located einsam, in der Nhe eines Grabes (267). No doubtHeidegger was playing a dangerous game, but so was Celan. The heart of theabyss, inother words, lay not inthe act ofmourningora debateabout the con-

crete shape of the past, but instead in a late battle about its translation to thevery structure of poetic language. The Messiahs act of turning away shouldbereadhereasanattempttoperceivetheactofmourningfromaphilosophi-cal perspective. If there is no religious redemption, the only redemption possi-ble is the one offered by its remains in language. It is in language, after all,that the past is recalled and the future made possible.

III. At the Threshold of In Betweenness

Gershom Scholem, Martin Buber, and Hugo Bergmannall neighbors inJerusalemmet and discussed Heideggers work during the early 1950s.26

They would have talked about Heidegger with their friend Celan (Felstiner,Ziv 15253). His interest in Heidegger was not without a context, even ifmoving beyond the mere German-Jewish symbiosis, which Scholem him-selfrejectedintheearly1930s.AsGadamerpointedout,Heideggersallusionsto Hlderlins and Rilkes notion of the creaturely were appealing to theGerman-Jewish notion of relevance, though he would have come to conclu-

sions very different from Scholems and Bubers (172). In his Creaturely LifeEric Santner argued, while discussing Celan, that it was as if secular GermanJews had already, at some level, rehearsed the psychicor better, creaturelycomplexities of life abandoned to the validity or force of law beyond anymeaning or signification (41). In Celan, the creaturely was a poetic essencegoing beyond what is human, as he explained in the Meridian speech; heconnected it specifically with Heideggers vocabulary.27 For Derrida, thisessence was an inscription of the invisible [] a sort of non-writing (374).More recently, Kristin Rebien has shown that Celan identifies the poem as

the place in which all tropes [] [and] all rhetorical figures should containtheir own reductio ad absurdum (17576). Rebien concentrates on Celans use



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Mensch? Und die Kreatur? / In diesem Licht (GW 3: 199). Vivian LiskaanalyzesCelanscrooked-nosedcreaturesandhis reductio ad absurdum asanattempt to form a new poetic language: By excavating its own ground,

Celans language uproots itself (56). These scholars all contrasted such ideaswithHeideggerspoeticnotionofthecreaturely.Butwhataboutthesophisti-cated net of references? Dont they suggest a door beyond the dark mirror?

The intertextual net, challenging for us, was undoubtedly quite apparentto Celan in his conversations with Scholem, andthrough silence and read-ingwith Heidegger. Both the kabbalists and Eckhart were obsessed withdefining the place of the creaturely, a concern that turned up later in Rilkespoetry and in Heideggers discussion of both Meister Eckhart and Rilke inHolzwege (1950), a book Celan read carefully.28 In Holzwege Heidegger dis-

cussed at length Rilkes notion that poetic language is a function of totalopenness and danger. Here Heidegger elaborated an earlier observation, fromtheworkonHlderlin,whichdiscussedthe open astherealmofthe unheimlich(284). That danger is the discovery of the human beyond the animal. The an-swertoHeideggersinvestigationinthisworkisprovidedwhenhecharacter-izes poetry, which assumed a new importance after World War II (and

Auschwitz?), as the only possible expression for the time and the absencewhich turned since Hlderlin to the allesmerkenden (271). The abyss findsits proper expression in the total defamiliarization of time and space, which

poetry alone could express. Celan finds such observations accurate, andadopts Halperns hole in time to a last-minute reflection on language andlife, hanging onto a tiny sign, a comma, a breath-turn, as he called it thatsame year in his Atemwende (1967).29 But Celan takes the breath-turn a stepbeyond Heidegger30: If Celan understands the German-Jewish as deeply in-grained with a sense of otherness, something similar could be said about hisnotion of a breath-turn. In the words of Amir Eshel, Celans terminologicalterrain, his inversion of anti-Semitic discourse, the moments of turning back,attentiveness, and turning of breath, we can return to his notion that the

poemisafigureoftheother[].Hisotherisnotfigured,butratherispresentin pauses, intervals, and muted breath coronas (74).

In Nah, the comma performs the role of an intertextual Atemwende. ForCelan,standingbetweenScholemandHeidegger,thecommaisanexpressionof temporal suspension, an allusion that conceptualizes the idea of nothing-ness, and places it in between the Hebrew and the German. If Heidegger seesabsence or nothingness in the context of temporality and its set of assump-tions about Being, Celan sees here mostly the language and the independenttemporality, related as much to an outside non-human temporal order as of

the one met by the creaturely and the human. Even as he adopts much of thevocabulary of the philosophers, Celan also identifies the point where his

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Gedchtnis (GW1: 223). If Heidegger, as Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei shows,inherits his understanding of dwelling from Meister Eckharts notions ofdetachment (Abgeschiedenheit) and letting-be (Gelassenheit) which denote for

Eckhart a detachment (10), Celan sees here the opposite movement: ratherthan a dwelling-in-detachment, Celan seeks the ever-coming closer, a move-ment that is carried on the back of a giant called absence, but stillethicallyand psychologicallycommitted to an affinity and a relation to it, ratherthanfallingintoit.Thecreaturesignifiesthenearnessofallthingslost,wieallesVerlorenenahe(GW1:227).Thisnearnessallowsarealoutsidethathasnothing to do with the nature of the Dasein to share its world.

A minor gesture separates Celan from both the kabbalistic and the phe-nomenological. His poetics never quite embraces total absence or a mystical

solution.InapoemCelanwrotethefollowingyear,Abglanzbeladen,asimi-larstructureappears,butthistimeintheoppositedirection:fromanopeningglow todeath,realizedand fulfilledonlyinthelanguageof incrimination (GW2: 242).31 In other words, suspending time is suspending Heideggers totality,andwithitintroducingtheotherbeittheworld,oraDaseinwithadifferentview of temporalityto language. Furthermore, Celans emphasis on thecomma between the Hebrew and the German supplies us with a significantchangefromHeideggers(and,followinghim,Gadamers)poetics.Thepunc-tuation mark shapes a literary tool that is unutterable, not speakable, graphic

ratherthanphonic.Itis,unliketheword,thecontinuationofcommunicationbyothermeans,signifyingapossiblebreakandclosenessratherthansayingitor giving it any decisive content. Placing the poetic weight on the commamarks a significant disagreement with Heidegger concerning the philosophi-calwordandthephoneticemphasis.IfanyHeideggerianreadingwouldplacethe emphasis on the sudden appearance of Ziw, a foreign word popping, ex-ploding, at the near-end of the poem, a poetic reading does not stop there: itextends the effort and asks the reader to reconfigure the implication of an-other, one last explicatory attempt that binds the two sides of the sentence

together, shortlybeforesending thereaderbacktothe point ofbeginning,forasecond reading. In short, life, the end of life, and the poetics of both, are allcoming together in this last breath-turn.

Returning to Nah, we are obliged to reconsider our reading of the poem.Ifwenowviewthefirstworddifferently,asametaphor,somustweviewthelast two words, that light, not as a metaphor, but as a literal report concern-ing the remains of the light. That light is whats left from the light, a reportabout it, after the last breath is inhaled, after the comma. The German, if wemove now back to the metaphorical level, functionsliterally or metaphori-

callyoutside the language Heidegger (after Meister Eckhart) sought. Itreports; it does not create. It merely talks about the traces left behind by a



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able.Itisthehorribleironyofhistorythatonlythelanguageoftheannihilatorreportsontheannihilated,butthereisnototalerasurehere,noabsolute nihil.In a sophisticated article, Werner Hamacher wrote: Just as the functions of

thesignbreakdowninthefaceofanobjectsuchastheabyss,death,ornoth-ingness, conventional units of meaningwords and sentences [] dissolve(233). Nah offers a counter-argument. If it was a dissolving world, it nevergave rise to a final end-time, no matter how dark. Rather, absence is used hereto support the remainder or the inverted (GW3: 195). What we are leftwith, then, is only a negative language of the remainder of time and its lan-guage, obliging the poet to react with the following gesture: Wer auf demKopf geht, meine Damen und Herren, wer auf dem Kopf geht, der hat denHimmel als Abgrund unter sich (GW3: 195).

IV. Conclusion: St. Paulus

As I have tried to show, the intertextual context changes the way we readCelans poem. Recent scholarship has developed highly sophisticated tools toassess the relationship between Celans poetics and its historical and literarycontext. According to Rochelle Tobiass discursive reading, it was during themid- and late 1960s that Celans poetry turn[ed] increasingly to the human

body as a network of nerves, cells, and fibers, which together constitute thenervoussystem(79).Nahfallsneatlyintothisperiodizationbutconcludesaprocessthathasbegunintheearly1960s,fusingthelanguagesasinterrelatedintertexts, almost without any internal essence (Baer 161).32As Nah dem-onstrates, body and space were increasingly presented by Celan as belongingto the semantics of time holes (Zeitlcher). Tying this emphasis onsuspense tothe German-Jewish otherness escapes the usual and conventional dilemma ofscholars between the Jewish or Heideggerian Celan, or the need to chooseanddecidebetweentheterminologyofblood-libelsandthosesunkinaworld

of theological and historical erudition.One of Celans last poems, published posthumously, inverts the sacred

Jewish symbol of the rams horn, or shofar. The title of the poem, Posaunen-stelle, is a neologism that links two semantic fields, as so often in otherspace-timepoemsbyCelan.ThesoundofthehornispartoftheJewishprayerofatonement,symbolizingapleatoopenthegatesofheaven.InCelanspoemthe symbols are used to echo only the deep emptiness of the cry: Die Po-saunenstelle:tiefimglhenden/Leertext,/inFackelhhe,/imZeitloch:/hrdich ein/ mit dem Mund (GW3: 104).

As with Nah, the body is used here to mark a strategy of reading thatdeconstructs its own set of signs and meaning. But the poem does not end in

LEBOVIC: Celan 477


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but as Derrida has shown, one that still manages to leave traces in space,Engfhrungs ashes.

Simplyput,asNahdemonstrates,CelanviewedScholemandHeidegger

asmysticalmediums.Heaspiredtoreconstructthroughthemanur-language,a hidden presence that Heidegger described as flourishing and glowing, butrevealed only as it neared nothingness, Nihil, which it both confirmed andtranscended.33 Loaded with the heavy weight of Jewish relics and a Germanlanguage in exile, Celan constructed a system out of nothingness. Not Hei-deggers nothingness, the hidden presence of creative temporality, but a Ger-man-Jewish nothingness in which the nearness to death is reflected from theposition of loss and victimhood, of mourning and destruction. Nevertheless,even if for a short while, Scholem, Heidegger, and Celan met along a faultline

that both separates and draws them together, where an abyssto use theword both Heidegger and Scholem favored during their contact with Celanconstituted the only reference point for radical thought. According toFynsk, Celan described nothingness (Nichts) as singularity always in rela-tion (176), andFynsk emphasized using Celans words, as a unique,momentary presenteven in this immediacy and nearness, it lets what ismost proper to this other, its time, speakalongwithit(GW3: 50). This other,this time, stands in for Heidegger and Scholem, looking from two oppositesides of the same relationcloseness to theNichts. Celan stands in-between,

between the Ziw and jenes Licht, in the comma, the place where one takes abreath and opens an unknown door, returning to the near and unlost wordthat accompanies some hope: Hoffnung, heute, / auf eines Denkenden /kommendes / Wort / im Herzen (GW2: 255).34 If Celans center and focus isthe intertext, it is so in the literal sense. The wordthe one coming from theheart of language, body, and mindis able to kill, or give life. For a GermanJew, it must be the word between wordsa neologism, or a comma.

There is still much to say about Nah, im Aortenbogen. For example, onemust not overlook its references to Nelly Sachs, nor to Hlderlins Patmos

andCelansownTenebrae.Inthelast,oneagainencountersaPauluswalk-ing the thin line between the texts. Tenebrae, much like its later sisterpoem, appears in a different context as well. The word tenebraeLatin forshadows or darknessappears in the title of Meister Eckharts eighthsermon, which begins with the words: St. Paul says: Once you were in dark-ness [Tenebrae], but you are now a light in the Lord (Selected Writings 136).This is not a simple mystical prediction, but a complicated interpretation oflight as a divine form of time:

ThisiswhatPaulmeanswhenhesays:Now alightintheLord.Hedoesnotsay,Youarealight,butnow alight.HemeanswhatIhaveoftensaid,namely,thatto know things is to know them in their first cause [ ] There is no process of



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6See Celans note to Franz Wurm, admitting he is back to lecturing, schlafe abereinstweilen noch in der Klinik (Paul Celan, Franz Wurm: Briefwechsel 68).Afewweekslater, after returning from Germany, Celan reported to Wurm in two positive sen-

tences, about his meeting with Heidegger (88).7For the chronology, see Weigel 247 and Felstiner,Paul Celan 22843. For the Yid-dishnote,seepage166ofthecopyofScholems VondermystischenGestaltderGottheitinCelans library at the Paul Celan Nachlass in Marbach.

8Felstinertranslatesthisas:MotherRachel/weepsnomore./Carriedacrossnow.All of the weeping (Paul Celan 236).

9 The message, Felstiner argues, suits the timing, which was shortly before theSix-Days War. [Celans] lines [] registered the jolt that Jews everywhere felt (PaulCelan 241).

10Celan might have recognized Halpern from a small anthology of Yiddish poetry,

published in Celans hometown, in 1934, in Latin letters (Naje Jidise Dichtung 2028). Iwouldlike tothankProf.Avraham Noverstern forpointingout this possiblereference.

11TheironyexpressedinYiddishtraditionvis--visGodortheMessiahisacommontopic in many folk songs.

12

13 My translation. In a more prosaic translation: The Messiah will no longer/ En-durehercrying/Ayliuliu-liuliu./Hewillbreakoutofhischains/Andhithisheadona stone,/ So close your eyes/ Ay liu liu-liu liu (Hellerstein 453). According toHellerstein, the first full version of this poem was published in New York in 1916.

14Felstiner explained this choice in a separate article dedicated to the translation ofthis poem (Ziv 61131).

15IntheearlierDieSchleuse(1960),CelanendedtwoofthestanzaswithHebrewwords, in both cases, key concepts of Jewish mourning: ber aller dieser deiner/Trauer: kein/ zweiter Himmel.// An einen Mund,/ dem es ein Tausendwortwar,/verlor -/ verlor ich ein Wort,/das mir verblieben war:/Schwester// An/ dieVielgtterei/ verlor ich ein Wort, das mich suchte:/ Kaddisch. // Durch die Schleusemut ich,/ das Wort in die Salzflut zurck-/ und hinaus- und hinberzuretten: /Jiskor(GW1:22).Inthisearlierpoem,similarinmanywaystothelaterNahhereaswellCelan is framing his discussion of mourning in the context of Jewish mystical symbols

of second sky and the sisterand here again he chooses to end the poem with twoHebrewwords.However,DieSchleuseusesasimilarstructureofironytotheoneex-plored later in Nah: The mourning word is searching for the speaker and leaves him


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LEBOVIC: Celan 481

16 Felstiner identified the source for Celans Hellblut as Matt. 26.28: Celansopening stanza carries overtones of New Testament language, but somehow it seemsmore important that we do not yet know what word this is (Felstiner,Ziv 617). The

shared legacy reappears in the allusions to Jewish exile and the persecution of Chris-tians. The different but consistent set of references did not convince Felstiner thatCelan meant to create a more equal ground for his philosophical claims, and he con-cluded his interpretation with messianic fulfillment: For a moment at least, he[Celan, the speaker in Nah] is where he wants to benot distant but close, notdisplaced but at home (617).

17 ThereislittlespaceleftheretoelaborateontheJerusalemcycleinZeitgehft.Onekey element that may illustrate Celans way to handle inquiries about his identity isshown in his choice to answer such wonderings with a poetic emphasis that stressesthe other, or in Derridas terms, the Shibboleth. While visiting Jerusalem in 1969 he

toldtheIsraeliradio:Jewishnessissotospeakapneumatisch[spiritual]concern[].Rilkewasveryimportanttome,andafterwardsKafka(quotedinFelstiner,Paul Celan267).

18 Kligerman discusses Celans reference to Maria Tsvetaeva (11).19 Different authors were talking about the In-betweenness that is typical of the

German-Jewish culture. Anson Rabinbach defined it in his introduction to Benjamin-Scholem correspondence: An irreparable condition of exile which is the (German-Jewish) tradition of modernity (xxxii). Writing about the German-Jewish PragueCircle, Scott Spector argued: I will argue that it is in the uniquely charged spacesbetween identitiessocial identities, but also national, spiritual, and political identi-

tiesthat the creative moment of the Prague circle takes place (5).20 Ziva Ben-Porat showed that a similar poetic process shaped Uri Zvi Greenbergs

BaShaar.Ben-Poratdiscussed this poem intheframeworkofa semanticexpansionthat used contradictory markers of the individual and the group. Similar in theirapproach to intertextuality, Celan saw the universe as complicated and endless ex-changes between past and present, German and Jewish, a post-Babel state of languageversusa naked potentialthat only a perfect languagea translinguisticpoetrycouldtouch.Forthisreason,Celan,incontrasttoGreenberg,sawtheZsur, theRiss,thepurenotion of a gap, as the basic principle of his poetics (Ben-Porat 25781).

21As Joachim Schulze has shown, Celan referred to Eckhart and his metaphors oflight in a number of poems. One example is Du Sei wie Du, and while Schulze andothers have looked at this poem, none has viewed the reference to Eckhart as part of anegotiation with Heidegger and Scholem.

22 ScholemsmarginalcommentsonEckhartturnupinavarietyofspots.Forexam-ple,inHeinrichEbelingsbook,Meister Eckharts Mystik (1941),hewrotethewordNihilnext to a long paragraph on Eckharts concept of nothingness. Throughout the book,he left notes near the passages in which Ebeling developed this concept as central toEckhartstheology.Likewise,inhiscopyofPredigten, Scholemmarkedthepassagesre-lating to nothingness. See for example Eckhart Predigten 210.

23

JohnFelstinerdatesthispoemtothesecondweekofMay1961(Paul Celan 175).Werner Hamacher identified Sefer haBahir andthePsalmsasthesourcesfortheimagesof redemption at the end characterized by the movement downward (246)


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flictions,buttheoneafflictionthatreallycountsintheworld,namely,theexileoftheSchekhinah. The mystic, then, should rise and dress at midnight.

25 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthes Transcendence Ends in Politics, a close reading of

Heideggers Rector speech, relies on the Kantian concept ofAbgrund, the absence thatstandsasthequestionofessenceorfoundation(Lacoue-LabartheandNancy274).Inthat context see also the chapter The Spirit of National Socialism and its Destiny(Lacoue-LabartheandNancy14856)aswellasthemorerecentexplorationinJenniferAnna Gosetti-Ferencei (86).

26TheinterestthesementookinHeideggertookanumberofforms.Togiveanex-ample, for the special festschrift celebrating the eightieth birthday of Martin Buber,Hugo Bergmann translated an extensive article by Walter Kaufmann on Heideggersvision of language, after Rilke and Kafka.

27 For a discussion of this quotation see Anderson 13.28 Heidegger connects the idea of the Kreatur to medieval notions of balance and

danger.29 Gadamer writes: The poem says to the poet, as well as to all of us, that the still-

ness is welcome. It is the samestillness heard inthe turn of breath, the ever so quiet re-currence of the act of breathing. More than anything, this is the breath-turn, the sen-suous experience of the silent, calm moment between inhaling and exhaling. []. Ashe[Celan]saysintheMeridian:Poetry:thatcanmeanabreath-turn[]witnesstoalast constriction of life and, simultaneously,representanew itsrecurringresolution, orbetter, its elevation to a secure linguistic form [Sprachgestalt] (7374).

30 I would like to acknowledge here Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferenceis helpful com-

ment, which helped me to capture this point more accurately.31 Abglanzbeladen, bei den / Himmelskfern, / im Berg. / Den Tod, / den du mir

schuldig bliebst, ich / trag ihn / aus (GW2: 242). I would like to thank Dr. KristinRebien for reminding me of this poem.

32 Ulrich Baer wrote the following about Heideggers ideas about language: Whenthe dimension of language that exceeds communication and information is thus ex-posedinpoetryastheessenceoflanguage,Heideggerargues,poetryalsoexposesustoadimensionofourselvesasspeakingbeingsthatlinksustotheworldinwaysthatreachbeyond empirical ties (161). Nah, im Aortenbogen fits very neatly into this line ofthinking.

33 Der Anspruch des Dichters auf die Herrschaft seines Sagens erfllt sich.Gedeihen undGlanzseinerDichtung wardenGegenwart (Heidegger, Unterwegs 225).As Sigrid Weigel has shown, Heidegger sent Celan this work in November 1959. ThemarginaliaCelanleftonthiscopyshowhowcloselyhereadit(Weigel249).Theques-tion that most bothered Heidegger as he read Nietzsche and discussed him with ErnstJngerwaswhethertheNihil couldbetranscendedortransgressed.Celanseemstotryto provide an answer.

34 TodnaubergwaswrittenafterCelans meeting with Heidegger, inJuly 1967.35 RadianceontheedgeofanabyssisapartofZiw itself,asitappearsinBiblical,Tal-

mudic, poetic, and mystical tradition. For example, the sixteenth-century PiutYedid-Nefesh(soulmate)describedthelightemanatingfromGodhimselfanditsef-fectonthewisemanwhoapproaches whoexperiencesthe Ziw ofdivinepresenceand


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