Paul Celan’s Dark Poems

Paul Celan is one of the many poets out there that took their experiences and expressed them in their writings. Paul Celan was born in a German-speaking Jewish family in Romania in 1920. His original name was Paul Antschel but later was changed into Ancel, so he came up with the anagram, Celan as his pen name. At the beginning of his adulthood, he studied medicine in Paris. During that time, Celan also began writing poetry but returned to Romania (now Ukraine) shortly before World War II. Since he was a Jew, he was selected to work in the labor camps set up by the Nazi regime. During the war, his parents both died of disease and the inability to do labor. He was able to escape from the labor camps in 1944 and work as a temporary nurse in a mental hospital. After that, Celan resided in Bucharest where he remained until 1947. He spent his time as a translator and a poet. He was familiar with six languages and was fluent in French, German, and Russian. His many poems included: “Corona”, “Death Fugue”, “From Threshold to Threshold”, and many others. Sadly, he committed suicide by drowning on April 20, 1970.

One of Paul Celan’s famous poems is “Death Fugue”. This poem depicts the scene of the holocaust during World War II. At the beginning of the poem, the narrator talked about being trapped as a prisoner in the camps. The prisoners were forced to drink black milk, more like a toxic substance. This could be a symbol of the suffering lives of those who lived under the dirty roof of concentration camps. Then later in the poem, the narrator described the scenes about a guard and how he went on with life.

“A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes, he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Marguerite, he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are all sparkling”.

The man is the Nazi guard who ran the camps. He has a sinister side, “viper”, this word can represent all the evil things like betrayal, sin, and loss of innocence. At night, the guard would be a different person, a person with a Romantic side. The verse about sparkling stars, the guard, and the aura of the scene seemed messed up since the stars were floating under the devastating camps. A humane person wouldn’t enjoy the scenery during a time like this. So, it made sense that the guard was twisted. The narrator added popular stories and legends into the poem, in order for people to depict and understand the scenes more clearly. For instance,

“…he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margeurite, your ashen hair Shulamith we shovel a grave in the air there you won’t lie too cramped”

The guard is thinking about a girl with blonde hair, (Margeurite) and this could symbolize the way Nazi viewed race. Their ideal type would be the “Aryan race.” Then the guard thought of Shulamith, a Jewish ideal type. Again, this is referring to how the guard viewed the Jews. When he is not thinking about Margeurite, when he thought of Shulamith, he tortures the Jews. Throughout the poem, most of the lines repeat themselves, especially,

“Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night, we drink you at morning and midday we drink you at evening, we drink and we drink”.

This line probably defines the title of the poem significantly. “Death Fugue” as Celan puts it, means death song. Celan was influenced by the German musician, J.S Bach, and the title could mean both the music played by the prisoners and the repetitive form that is used throughout the poem.

Paul Celan was a recognized poet; he wrote poetry about the experiences he had while he was a victim of the events that happened during the Holocaust. He went through many hardships and struggled to survive this far and was able to write it all down for the world to see. Throughout his career as a poet, he won two awards: The Bremen Literature Prize and the Georg Buchner Prize. Even though he may not be the greatest poet, he had a voice. He once said, “There is nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German.”