German Life and Letters 56:2 April 2003

0016–8777 (print); 1468–0483 (online)

THE DEUKALION AND PYRRHA MYTH IN PAUL CELAN AND

CHRISTOPH RANSMAYR

SCOTT G. WILLIAMS1

ABSTRACT

This article examines the rewriting of Ovid’s version of the Deukalion and Pyrrha
myth by Paul Celan and Christoph Ransmayr. The myth relates how Jupiter
destroys the world by deluge and how Deukalion and Pyrrha repopulate the earth.
This myth of destruction and renewal finds resonance in the poetry of Celan and
the novel Die letzte Welt by Ransmayr, one at the start of the literature of the post-war
years, the other closing the second half of the century. In the case of Celan, this
article highlights a connection to the classical tradition little noticed in the critical
literature. In turn, it also helps lift a corner of the veil on some of his enigmatic
poetry. Ransmayr’s version of the myth is embedded in his rewriting of Ovid’s Meta-
morphoses. The analysis of that version also elucidates the sparse reference to the
Holocaust in the novel. There are similar metaphoric responses to the myth in both
contemporary writers. Furthermore, the critical response to both writers reflects
the tumultuous relationship of German-language literature and history since 1945.

Abtrünnig erst bin ich treu.

Ich bin du, wenn ich ich bin.
Paul Celan2

In Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers Walter Benjamin states that the original does
not remain static but undergoes a metamorphosis; it becomes something
new in translation because

keine Übersetzung möglich wäre, wenn sie Ähnlichkeit mit dem Original
ihrem letzten Wesen nach anstreben würde. Denn in seinem Fortleben, das so
nicht heißen dürfte, wenn es nicht Wandlung und Erneuerung des Lebendigen
wäre, ändert sich das Original.3

1
I would like to thank Kirsten Belgum, Ruth Gross, and Louis Mackey for their help at different
stages of this research. A version of this was read at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference.
2
John Feltsiner, in his excellent biography of Celan, aptly chose these lines to characterise the
translation activities of Celan himself: Paul Celan, Poet, Survivor, Jew, New Haven/London 1995,
p. 133. All Celan poems are quoted according to the Gesammelte Werke, ed. Beda Allemann and Stefan
Reichert, Frankfurt a.M 1983, henceforth cited as ‘GW’ followed by the volume and page numbers.
Furthermore, since the title and organisation of poems changed in subsequent publishings, the title
of the original volume of poetry with the respective subsection is given for additional clarification.
In the case of this quotation: ‘Lob der Ferne’ in GW I, p. 33 (Mohn und Gedächtnis/Der Sand aus den
Urnen); GW III, p. 56 (Der Sand aus den Urnen/Mohn und Gedächtnis).
3
Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften IV. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser,
Frankfurt a.M. 1980, p. 12.
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
 DEUKALION AND PYRRHA IN CELAN AND RANSMAYR 143

Such statements in this essay by Benjamin form points of embarkation for

the task of analysing the transcreation of texts. Indeed, the field of Trans-
lation Studies offers many metaphors with which to approach not only
translation in the traditionally narrow sense, but any kind of rewriting, and
thus provides a framework for dealing with issues of intertextuality.4 In this
article I shall examine two modern rewritings of the Deukalion and Pyrrha
myth in German-language literature after 1945.
Ovid’s Metamorphoses provides us with the version of the deluge story in
classical mythology that has had the most literary currency (the other
being from Apollonius). Deukalion and Pyrrha survive the great flood let
loose upon the earth by Zeus/Jupiter, who is outraged at the debased
human race. In the figures of Deukalion and Pyrrha there is, in Biblical
terms, a combination of Adam and Eve with Noah’s ark. In the classical
myth, the burden of repopulation falls to these last two people alive after
the great flood. They are given the curious task of throwing stones upon
the earth. Each stone Deukalion threw became a new man and each that
Pyrrha threw became a woman.
This myth of renewal finds a poignant afterlife in post-1945 German-
language literature, namely in the novel Die letzte Welt by Christoph
Ransmayr 5 and Paul Celan’s poetry. I shall be examining the expression of
the myth by Ovid, Celan, and Ransmayr in order to understand key elements
in Ransmayr’s novel as well as to reveal an early interest in the classical
tradition in some of Celan’s poetry. In each case the modern writers react
to Ovid in interestingly similar ways.
Ovid’s Metamorphoses has been for many centuries the most famous
collection of Greco-Roman myths sharing the unifying theme of transfor-
mation. In AD 8 Augustus exiled Ovid to Tomi (modern Romania) on the
Black Sea. An unintentional connection to the German-writing Jewish poet
Paul Celan is that he was born in Romania in 1920 (in Czernowitz, which is
now in the Ukraine). Arguably the most important German-language poet
in the latter half of the twentieth century, Celan was able to survive the war,
although his parents died in concentration camps. He committed suicide
shortly after Passover in April 1970, in Paris, where he had lived for most of
the post-war years. The connection made in this article between Celan and
the classical tradition has gone largely unnoticed in the critical literature,
in part perhaps because Celan himself used the classical tradition only
selectively in his poetry and references to it are not always easily identified.
In one case, Celan actually altered the title of a poem that had originally
indicated the influence of the Deukalion and Pyrrha myth.

4
Cf. Susan Bassnett, Translation Studies, 2nd ed., London/New York 1992; Theo Hermans, ‘Images of
Translation: Metaphor and Imagery in the Renaissance Discourse’, in The Manipulation of Literature:
Studies in Literary Translation, ed. Theo Hermans, London/Sydney 1985, pp. 103–35; André Lefevere,
Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame, London/New York 1992.
5
Christoph Ransmayr, Die letzte Welt, Frankfurt a.M. 1991. Henceforth all passages from this book will
be identified with page numbers in parentheses at the end of the quotation.
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003.
144 DEUKALION AND PYRRHA IN CELAN AND RANSMAYR

In contrast, the classical influence on Die letzte Welt by the Austrian writer
Christoph Ransmayr (b. 1954) is quite apparent. The genesis of the book
was a suggestion to Ransmayr by Hans Magnus Enzensberger that he create
a modern prose version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The fruit of his labour,
however, was a novel originally published in 1988. It met with almost
immediate, widespread media attention. Given the task of rendering
Ovid’s work into modern prose, Ransmayr could not just stick to the text as
such. In an interview, Ransmayr said:

Man setzt sich mit den festgelegten Figuren der Mythologie an den
Schreibtisch, aber diese stehen eine nach der anderen auf, und am Schluß
sitzt man allein da. . . . Plötzlich habe ich in den antiken Figuren Menschen
aus meiner Umgebung mit ihrer Liebe, Trauer und Wut wiedererkannt.6

The result was a novel about a young Roman named Cotta who, on hearing
rumours of Ovid’s death and the burning of the only copy of the Meta-
morphoses, travels to Tomi to find a copy of the poem and possibly the poet
as well. Cotta, like a detective, interrogates the villagers, getting a slightly
different story from each one. Ransmayr further complicates his text by
introducing the circumstance of an author exiled by an autocrat repre-
sented by a massive self-perpetuating bureaucracy acting in his name and
supposed interest. The novel articulates fundamental questions of history,
art, and authority. When a contemporary German-language author
addresses such issues, it is from a standpoint that perforce refracts the
author’s gaze through the National Socialist past. Although some of the
negative criticism focuses on passages relating to, for instance, gas chambers,
this is not a ‘Holocaust novel’ by any means.
Concerning the Metamorphoses, Theodore Ziolkowski notes that there are
three main reasons for the recent increase in attention to it by writers,
namely that ours is an age newly fascinated by myth ( Jungian psychology
and Joseph Campbell), by fictionality (postmodernism), and by spiritual
and physical transformation (including advertisements for weight loss, hair
gain, etc.).7 Though the myths in Ransmayr serve the representation of
fictionality, it is a fictionality, I would maintain, that does not disregard its
own specific socio-political context. One could add to Ziolkowski’s list the
fascination with authority positions and art, exemplified in the exiled poet
Ovid and the dictator Augustus.
Although widely lauded, Ransmayr’s novel also met with negative criti-
cism. To some extent, one can understand some of the initial reaction to
Ransmayr’s novel if one considers the historical context in which it

6
Michaelson, Stern, 48 (1988), 264–5C. In subsequent interviews, Ransmayr has distanced himself
from any reference to his treatments of Ovid as ‘Übersetzung’, at least in the narrow sense. Cf.
Barbara Vollstedt, Ovids ‘Metamorphoses’, ‘Tristia’ und ‘Epistulae ex Ponto’ in Christoph Ransmayrs Roman
‘Die letzte Welt’, Paderborn 1998, pp. 25–8.
7
Theodore Ziolkowski, ‘Modern Metamorphoses of Ovid’, CML, 17(1997), 341–66, here 345.
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003.
 DEUKALION AND PYRRHA IN CELAN AND RANSMAYR 145

appeared. For instance, there were two relevant events centred around the
year 1987, the year prior to the publication of Ransmayr’s book. The first event
was the revelation that the Belgian Paul de Man, the leading proponent of
deconstruction in the United States, had expressed racist and nationalist
views in pro-Nazi newspaper articles published in Belgium during the war.
The other event in 1987 was a re-examination of Heidegger’s complicity in
Nazi policies. The basic facts were long known, but the book by Victor
Farias, Heidegger et le nazisme, brought all these facts together. It resulted in
a great debate that attracted major figures like Derrida, who had himself
drawn heavily on the ideas of Heidegger. Add to this the fact that the
‘Historikerstreit’ was in full swing by the time Ransmayr’s novel appeared.
One of the major points of contention in the ‘Historikerstreit’ was the
equivocation of conservative historians as regards Nazi atrocities, leading
to the criticism that, by obscuring the singularity of the Holocaust, German
culpability was also reduced.8 This is echoed in critiques of Ransmayr; for
instance that by Volker Hage, who wrote (in an otherwise rather positive
review):

Ransmayr könnte zwar mit gutem Recht für sich reklamieren, daß die so
unterschiedlichen – aber historisch zu trennenden, nicht zu verschleifenden –
Greueltaten in unserem Kopf ohnehin verschwimmen, daß er also nur
heutiges Bewußtsein abbilde und daß die Verbrechen der jüngeren deutschen
Geschichte in diesem Roman dem Leser doch ganz unvermutet und schockartig
begegneten. Trotzdem sind Bedenken anzumelden, wenn diese unvergleichlichen
Morde unseres Jahrhunderts so widerstandslos in den Reigen der neuen
Metamorphosen eingehen.9 [my italics]

In the case of Ransmayr’s novel, its association with postmodernism often

goes hand in hand with the criticism of the way the Holocaust finds expression
in the book.10 Postmodernism has been far more suspect philosophically in
German-speaking countries than among intellectuals elsewhere, such as
the United States.11
In these treatments of the Deukalion and Pyrrha myth, Celan and
Ransmayr employ similar metaphoric expressions. In Ransmayr’s novel,
Thies is the gravedigger in the town of Tomi, to which Ovid had been
exiled. He is a German who originally came to the area as a soldier.
A horse has trampled his chest so badly that the ribs protecting his heart

8
One anthology of the debate, originally published in 1987, is ‘Historikerstreit’: Die Dokumentation der
Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung, Munich 1989.
9
‘Mein Name sei Ovid’, in Die Erfindung der Welt: Zum Werk von Christoph Ransmayr, ed. Uwe
Wittstock, Frankfurt a.M. 1997, pp. 92–9 (originally in Die Zeit, 7 October 1988).
10
Although several articles address aspects of the postmodern in the text, for a good summary see
Thomas Anz, ‘Spiel mit der Überlieferung: Aspekte der Postmoderne in Ransmayrs Die letzte Welt’,
ibid., pp. 120–32.
11
This is well discussed in Robert Holub, Crossing Borders: Reception Theory, Poststructualism, Deconstruc-
tion, Madison 1992.
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003.
146 DEUKALION AND PYRRHA IN CELAN AND RANSMAYR

area have had to be removed. He suffers from nightmares about the atrocities
he witnessed during an unspecified war. Thies states that ‘Der Mensch ist
dem Menschen ein Wolf’. He is homesick, but cannot bear to go home.
Ransmayr derives the name ‘Thies’ from ‘Dis,’ which is a Roman name for
Pluto, god of the underworld, and underscores the symbolism of Thies’s
job as a gravedigger.
The title of Celan’s poem ‘Das ausgeschachtete Herz’12 (published
twenty years prior to Die letzte Welt) reminds us here of the image of the
exposed, the unprotected heart that Ransmayr employs to characterise Thies.
Thies’s association with Pluto is reminiscent of a phrase repeated in
Celan’s ‘Todesfuge’: ‘der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland’. The
question of guilt and the burden of the past arise particularly in the pre-
sentation of the gravedigger Thies in Ransmayr’s novel. In Thies’s night-
mares, one image in particular haunts him. Thies recalls in these dreams
that during the war he once opened the heavy door to a room packed with
the decaying bodies of gassed victims. Each time he would wake up screaming,
and his fiancée would assure him that it was only a dream and that the
blackness that surrounded him was just the night, not death. She would tell
him ‘daß dieses Tor Vergangenheit war und nun für immer offenstand’
(p. 263). Even though Thies himself did not round up the villagers into
that room, nor did he himself pump in the poison gas, the discovery of it
renders him a perpetually tortured exile whose heart is dangerously
exposed. Indeed, Ransmayr has Thies suffer his own form of post-traumatic
stress disorder.
Whereas Ransmayr’s connection to Ovid is obvious, direct reference to
classical antiquity in Celan is infrequent and often unclear. I shall be con-
cerned chiefly with poems in the original Vienna version of the collection
Sand aus den Urnen from 1948. A few years later he reissued the poems in
a volume entitled Mohn und Gedächtnis, in which he reorganised, slightly
altered, added, or elided poems.13 One poem that he cut completely was
‘Der Pfeil der Artemis’,14 which illustrates an early interest in classical
myths. Also in that 1948 collection is one poem that uses figures from
a myth that appear, too, in Ovid and later Ransmayr: ‘Deukalion und
Pyrrha’. This was the original title as it appeared in the 1948 Viennese
edition of the collection Sand aus den Urnen; those familiar with Celan’s
poetry know it under the later title ‘Spät und Tief’. The limited number of
classical references in Celan makes this link all the more significant in the
history of his development, while it also explains some of the phrasing in
this particular poem.

12
Celan, GW II, p. 150 (Fadensonnen II).
13
‘Mohn und Gedächtnis’ had been the name of a subsection of the original volume Sand aus den
Urnen while in the later volume entitled Mohn und Gedächtnis he included a subsection ‘Sand aus den
Urnen’.
14
From GW III; originally Der Sand aus den Urnen/An den Toren.
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003.
 DEUKALION AND PYRRHA IN CELAN AND RANSMAYR 147

A closer look at the three different versions of the myth helps interpret
the role of Thies in Ransmayr’s novel. It shows that Ransmayr is not merely
translating directly from Ovid’s text, but rather reacting to Ovid’s text in
a very similar fashion to Celan in his poetry. Translation, rewriting, is not
about two texts exhibiting a relationship engendered in blissful isolation,
but rather indicates the transcreation of one or more texts into another
entirely new context. Like the Metamorphoses, Die letzte Welt has fifteen chap-
ters. Ransmayr’s rendition of the Deukalion and Pyrrha myth occurs in
roughly the middle of the novel, namely in chapter seven, just short of the
middle. Altogether the book has some 317 pages. Echo begins to relate her
recollection of Ovid’s version of the myth on page 161, just past the
middle. An interesting point of conjuncture between the versions of Ovid,
Celan, and Ransmayr is the act of repopulating the earth by throwing
stones upon the ground, which would then sprout up into humans. In
other words, stones in this story ‘spawn’ as, for instance, in the poem
‘Gemeinsam’ by Celan (written after his own ‘Deukalion und Pyrrha’):

Sondern, es rollt übers Meer

der Stein, der neben uns schwebte,
und in der Spur, die er zieht,
laicht der lebendige Traum.15

A stone, which would of course sink in water, rolls and floats across the sea.
In its wake, a dream spawns.16 In ‘Am letzten Tor’, Celan employs phrases
like: ‘ . . . finster, ist die Welt versteint’ and ‘Laß den Stein die Wolke, mich den
Kranich sein’.17 Celan evokes the imagery of a dark world turned to stone.
Also, in that last line there is a wish for a type of metamorphosis: he to be a
crane, and a stone to be a cloud (perhaps allowing each a means of escape).18
Although this imagery of petrifaction plays a significant role in Ransmayr’s
novel, not even a word for ‘stone’ appears in the poem ‘Deukalion and
Pyrrha’, though there might be some oblique reference in the phrases ‘die
heiligen Schwüre des Sandes’ and ‘den Staub zu vermählen dem Staube’.
However, in the poem ‘Corona’ Celan uses the phrase: ‘Es ist Zeit, daß der
Stein sich zu blühen bequemt . . . ’.19 This poem was written just after

15
Celan, GW I, p. 88 (Von Schwelle zu Schwelle/Sieben Rosen später).
16
A liminal state is evoked throughout the poem, e.g. through terms like ‘Schwelle’, ‘Schatten’ and
‘Traum’. Similarly, in the novel, Cotta’s experiences are very much like a bizarre dream: Ransmayr
uses phrases like ‘Schwebezustand’ (Ransmayr, LW, p. 231) to describe Cotta’s feelings about his own
state, and ‘Zwischenwelt’ to describe Tomi (Ransmayr, LW, p. 220).
17
Celan, GW III, p. 27 (Der Sand aus den Urnen/An den Toren).
18
This line also evokes the beginning of Brecht’s poem ‘Die Liebenden’, which refers to fleeing one
life to another. Although the poem is often considered in its own right, it was also integrated into
Brecht’s play Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny as a duet between Jenny and Paul. In this context,
it undercuts the romantic without eliminating the melancholy and the longing.
19
Slightly different variations of the poem exist. In the case of this line only the end punctuation
changes (a comma in one, a semi-colon in the other). Celan, GW I, p. 37 (Mohn und Gedächtnis/Der
Sand aus den Urnen); GW III, p. 59 (Der Sand aus den Urnen/Mohn und Gedächtnis).
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003.
148 DEUKALION AND PYRRHA IN CELAN AND RANSMAYR

‘Deukalion und Pyrrha’ and indeed appears as the poem just following it
in the 1948 collection Sand aus den Urnen.20 The process of petrifaction is
pervasive in Ransmayr’s novel and is itself almost organic in nature, in that
the stones seem to grow and proliferate like plants.
Ransmayr’s imagery often echoes Celan’s. For instance, Ransmayr’s Die
Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis, the novel preceding Die letzte Welt,
recalls the pervasiveness of snow and glaciers in Celan’s poetry. Even more
than in the case of Die letzte Welt, Ransmayr’s first novel depicts a world that
eerily contrasts light and dark. The title of the novel following Die letzte
Welt, Morbus Kitahara (1995), refers to a disease that causes one’s vision to
recede slowly into darkness (the English title misses this: The Dog King).
Celan makes frequent use of the eye as an image (and vision that is somehow
impaired), as well as images of light and dark. Although there are many
examples throughout Celan’s oeuvre, I shall name just a few from the 1948
Vienna addition of Der Sand aus den Urnen. In the poem ‘Dunkles Aug im
September’ there are phrases like ‘ . . . der blinden Freunde des Himmels
sternklare Inbrunst’ and ‘Ins Naß ihres [referring to: ‘die schmale
Wandergestalt des Gefühls’] Auges tauchst du das Schwert’.21 In the very
next poem, ‘Der Stein aus dem Meer’,22 Celan contrasts ‘die Schwärze des
Meers’ with ‘das weiße Herz unsrer Welt’. In ‘Todesfuge’, Celan contrasts
the golden hair of ‘Margarete’ with the ashen hair of ‘Sulamith’. Celan
also relies on the inversion of light and dark for the impact of the first
words, ‘Schwarze Milch der Frühe . . . ’, in the same poem.
In both versions of Celan’s poem (‘Deukalion und Pyrrha’ and ‘Spät
und Tief’), the damning sin that comes may be announced in the lines:
‘Ihr mahlt in den Mühlen des Todes das weiße Mehl der Verheißung,/ihr
setzet es vor unsern Brüdern und Schwestern – ’. Given the earlier title
referring to the myth, one can more easily see in this a reference to the
story Ovid has Jupiter tell the other gods before he floods the world (Ovid
Met. I, 209–39): namely that Lycaon (also a figure in Ransmayr’s novel),
whom Jupiter punished by turning him into a wolf, had murdered a prisoner
and prepared him as a meal to set before Jupiter. The flood can be seen as
a punishment for the depravity of mankind, hence Celan’s lines in the
penultimate stanza:

Es komme die Schuld über uns aller warnenden Zeichen,

es komme das gurgelnde Meer,
der geharnischte Windstoß der Umkehr,
der mitternächtige Tag,
es komme, was niemals noch war!

20
Celan, GW III, p. 58 (Der Sand aus den Urnen/Mohn und Gedächtnis). The version ‘Spät und tief’ is
in GW I, pp. 35–6 (Mohn und Gedächtnis/Der Sand aus den Urnen).
21
GW I, p. 26; GW III, p. 51.
22
GW I, p. 27; GW III, p. 52
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003.
 DEUKALION AND PYRRHA IN CELAN AND RANSMAYR 149

Within the strict confines of the myth, the final line of the stanza,
‘es komme, was niemals noch war!’, may be calling down the unprece-
dented flood. However, it may also refer to an all too present guilt and
thus would recognise that the potential cruelty of human to human
illustrated in the Lycaon myth still exists (for which the Judgment Day is
still pending?).
The final line differs in the two versions of Celan’s poem. The flood
story comes early in Ovid’s Metamorphoses23 and represents the manner in
which Jupiter destroyed the ‘bad’ humans and then through Deukalion
and Pyrrha created a better race. Whereas Ovid’s rendition emphasises at
the end that the new race (the present race) is now harder and tougher
(having retained that aspect of the stone), the final stanza of the earlier
version of this poem by Celan, consisting of just one line, invokes the coming
of a human with a flower (‘Es komme der Mensch mit der Nelke’), holding
out a faint hope of a gentler race yet to come, though in the final line of
the later version under a different title (‘Es komme ein Mensch aus dem
Grabe’), the reference may be on the one hand, to Christ, on the other to
the ghosts of his parents and others murdered in the Holocaust that
haunt Celan.
In Ransmayr’s novel, the woman Echo is one of the people Cotta interro-
gates about Ovid. She thinks that Ovid had written a ‘Buch der Steine’
because all the stories she had heard (i.e. that Ovid had told her from the
Metamorphoses) ended in some type of petrifaction. However, the story of
Deukalion and Pyrrha was the sole one that deviated from that pattern.
Indeed, it reversed the process in that stones turned into people.
Ransmayr’s version emphasises the wet marshland character of the place
where Deukalion and Pyrrha are stranded. Ovid, in contrast, indicates that
there is more solid ground: Jove once again ‘showed the land to the sky’
and the surviving human pair walks to fetch water from a stream flowing
within its old borders (Ovid Met. 369–70). In Ovid the two throw the stones
behind them onto mother earth (‘magna parens terra est’: Ovid Met. 393),
while Ransmayr envisages the pair tossing the stones into the murky water.
The stones then ‘spawn’ or ‘bloom’ as in some of Celan’s other poetry. The
way in which Ransmayr describes the stones growing utilises metaphors
strongly suggestive of Celan. Ransmayr (again evoking Celan) associates
snow with a swampy landscape. Ransmayr’s Deukalion looks out upon a
fist-sized stone thrown into the watery mire:

. . . der aber nicht tot und reglos blieb, sondern zur Hälfte aus dem Wasser
ragend, von einer unsichtbaren Kraft gestoßen über den weichen Grund
rollte, sich wälzte, bewegte und auf seiner verschlungenen Bahn an Umfang
zunahm wie die Schneekugel auf einem Abhang . . . (p. 168)

23
Ovid, Met. I, 313–415.
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150 DEUKALION AND PYRRHA IN CELAN AND RANSMAYR

The stone almost appears, as in one of Celan’s poems, to be floating as it

rolls in the watery muck (e.g. the poem ‘Gemeinsam’), and it grows in size
like a snowball. ‘Snow’ of course is a recurring image in Celan’s poetry.24
In Ovid, the story recalls the creation of his own post-deluge race of
stone, better than the one prior to the flood. In neither Ransmayr nor
Celan, however, is the race of stone positive. As with Celan, the new race in
Ransmayr’s novel retains the same rapacious cruelty. Whereas Ovid
describes the new race as hard enough to be tough survivors, Ransmayr
takes the analogy to stone even further; the new human represents

eine Brut von mineralischer Härte, das Herz aus Basalt, die Augen aus Ser-
pentin, ohne Gefühle, ohne eine Sprache der Liebe, aber auch ohne jede
Regung des Hasses, des Mitgefühls oder der Trauer, so nachgiebig, so taub
und dauerhaft wie die Felsen dieser Küste. (pp. 169–70)

In the phrase ‘ohne eine Sprache der Liebe’, one is reminded of a funda-
mental problem for writers using the German language after 1945. How
can one use this of all languages, the language of the butchers? Deukalion
and Pyrrha were stranded upon a stony cliff. At first they were, in Ransmayr’s
novel, ‘unfähig zu einer Geste des Schmerzes, unfähig zu handeln; sprachlos’
(p. 167). Celan’s poem ‘Deukalion and Pyrrha’ reminds the reader of the
similarity to the story of Adam and Eve in the line: ‘Wir essen die Äpfel der
Stummen . . . ’. Thus, there is a space of silence, the inability to speak, that
comes towards the beginning of each of these versions. To be sure, there is
a moment of silence in Ovid’s version too, namely after the oracle says to
the couple that they should cast the ‘bones of the great mother’ behind
them. The rather cryptic demand results in the couple’s amazed silence,
which Pyrrha breaks (‘ostipuere diu, rumpitque silentia voce/Pyrrha
prior . . . ’, Ovid, Met. I, 384–5). Taking the oracle literally, she did not want
to defile the bones of her own poor, dead mother. Yet even for Celan the
language remained, despite the fact that it had to pass through its own
‘Antwortlosigkeit’ through a ‘furchtbares Verstummen’ and ‘die tausend
Finsternisse todbringender Rede’.25 Despite all that the Germans had done
to his family, his friends, to him, he chose to express that ‘silence’ in German.
However, it would be a mistake to take the story within the story in
Ransmayr’s novel as entirely reliable. Echo, the character who tells the story
to Cotta, only knows a selection of Ovid’s stories, a deficiency that leads her

24
There have been attempts to explain the role of snow, for instance, in Celan’s poetry. See, for
example, Kerry J. Cox, who sees the imagery as a positive representation of language: ‘“Um das Wort
ballt sich der Schnee”: Paul Celan’s Use of Snow, Ice and Glacial Imagery in his Lyric Poetry’, Master’s
Thesis, Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages, Brigham Young University, August 1995.
(Published on a web site at <http://quasi.ksl.com/kerry/thesis/intro.html_>.) He also notes that
snow and stones seem to be often interchangeable in Celan’s usage; cf. the section entitled ‘Stony
Images of Snow and Ice’: <http://quasi.ksl.com/kerry/thesis/chap3.html#Stony> (30 Oct. 2001).
25
‘Ansprache anläßlich der Entgegennahme des Literaturpreises der Freien Hansestadt Bremen’,
GW III, pp. 85–6.
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 DEUKALION AND PYRRHA IN CELAN AND RANSMAYR 151

to draw false conclusions about the Metamorphoses (i.e. that it is just a ‘Buch
der Steine’). She interprets it as a prediction about the future rather than
as a story about the genesis of present day humans (as in Ovid).26
Echo’s retelling begins with the flood and does not include the story of
Lycaon and Jupiter. However, Echo, too, could attest to the cruelty of her
fellow humans. Cotta had built up a Platonic friendship with her, but only
after he had raped her. She worked part-time for the rope maker, a man
named Lycaon, and she was also the town prostitute. In relating Ovid’s
story, she referred to it as the prophecy of doom, ‘das Ende der wölfischen
Menschheit’ (p. 162, my italics). The new ‘true’ humankind would emerge
from the compost of the old, dead race: ‘aus dem Schlick eines an seiner
wölfischen Gier, seiner Blödheit und Herrschsucht zugrundegegangenen
Geschlechts’ (p. 169, my italics).27 This brings us full circle to the story of
Thies again, whose experience in war led him to believe that ‘der Mensch
ist dem Menschen ein Wolf’ (p. 266). In other words, to understand the
function of Thies’s story in the novel, one needs also to understand the
role of the Deukalion und Pyrrha narrative.
Echo had a strange skin ailment that caused patches to flake away; she
was beautiful except for these spots that came and went all over her body.
After she had finished telling Cotta the story, her hand slid off his shoulder
brushing him on the arm. This almost tender gesture is contrasted to
Cotta’s reaction as he saw one of her patches and was repulsed by it.

Er sah ihren Handrücken von grauen Schuppen bedeckt, Flocken

abgestorbener Haut, sah ihre Hand wie aus Glimmerschiefer oder grauem
Feldspat, aus Kalk und grobkörnigem Sand, eine zierliche Skulptur aus
einem Konglomerat brüchiger Steine. (p. 170)

Her flaking revealed her as already a member of the race of stone, though
her body seems to resist it. Far from being cold and emotionless, she
empathises with the loneliness of the forlorn couple as she relates their plight
just after the flood (p. 166). None the less, the message that Ransmayr is
conveying is that the race of stone has already arrived, and that we, as part
of it, have not yet rid ourselves of the cruelty that doomed our ancestors.
The savagery, far from having disappeared, has taken on the character of
cold, emotionless calculation exemplified by Thies’s gas chamber, reminding
us ‘daß dieses Tor Vergangenheit war und nun für immer offenstand’.
Felstiner has noted that the early Celan ‘was casting about among
traditions’ (p. 16) including medieval literature and, of course, the Bible.
The tradition that came to permeate his poetry was understandably that of

26
Cf. Barbara Vollstedt, Ovids ‘Metamorphoses’, ‘Tristia’ und ‘Epistulae ex Ponto’ in Christoph Ransmayrs
Roman ‘Die letzte Welt’, Paderborn 1998, pp. 66–75.
27
Also, one of the other poems in the original Mohn und Gedächtnis section of Sand aus den Urnen
(1948), and later cut, is ‘Ins Dunkel getaucht’, which ends with the line: ‘In Gottes wölfischem
Schoß.’
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Scripture. Felstiner suggests that Celan needed to ‘test whether Scripture

holds good anymore’ (p. xviii). However, what seems to have gone largely
unnoticed is that, in the search for rejuvenating metaphors, Celan also
turned to classical antiquity, only later substantially to obfuscate that
connection in his early poetry by dropping whole poems or changing titles.
Certainly one can see in other writers after the war a similar questioning
of traditions that had been hitherto a bulwark of Western culture. For
instance, Thomas Bernhard in his poem ‘Ave Vergil’28 and Günter Eich in
‘Fußnote zu Rom’ (‘Ich werfe keine Münzen in den Brunnen/ich will
nicht wiederkommen’)29 use references to antiquity in order to bid farewell
to the heritage of classical modernism. Alfred Andersch, in his novella
Der Vater eines Mörders, goes even further. He asks, ‘schützt Humanismus
denn vor gar nichts?’30 as he relates the autobiographical story of how a
headmaster – Himmler’s father – uses a Greek lesson to terrorise a school
class. Ransmayr, in contrast, chooses to embrace the classical tradition, albeit
for his own purposes. In this he is similar to others such as Dürrenmatt,
Handke, more recently Michael Köhlmeier and Sten Nadolny, as well as
some playwrights (e.g. Heiner Müller) and a number of poets from both
East and West Germany.31
Celan had experienced at first hand mankind’s wolfish violence. In
contrast to Celan, Ransmayr’s life has been less traumatic. However, Ransmayr
has also had the added task of dealing with the National Socialist period
through the complexities of several decades of post-war history. A generation
removed, Ransmayr still has the need to work through all that past but
chooses to employ the classical tradition more fully and directly in an
enterprise of mounting difficulty. For some critics, of course, the looming
presence of Ovid overwhelms Ransmayr’s text. To Salman Rushdie, for
instance, the ‘intimate network of allusions and references that connect

28
Cf. the discussion by Theodore Ziolkowski, Virgil and the Moderns, Princeton 1993, pp. 230–1.
29
Reprinted in Bernd Seidensticker and Peter Habermehl (eds), Unterm Sternbild des Hercules,
Frankfurt a.M. 1996, p. 177. Also in this anthology are the two Celan poems ‘Der Pfeil der Artemis’
(p. 131) and ‘Im Schlangenwagen’ (p. 173).
30
Alfred Andersch, Der Vater eines Mörders, Zürich 1982, p. 136.
31
Although there is a fairly large body of relevant literature, there are few anthologies, notably:
a special edition of Dimension2 3.3 on ‘The Classical Tradition’, ed. Scott G. Williams, as well as
the poetry collection ed. Bernd Seidensticker and Peter Habermehl (mentioned above). For an
introduction to the critical literature see Scott G. Williams, ‘“Antikerezeption” in German-Language
Literature after 1945: The Roman Tradition’, Diss. Univ. of Texas at Austin 1999 (in this context,
particularly the two chapters on Ransmayr); Bernd Seidensticker, ‘Antikerezeption in der deutschen
Literatur nach 1945’, Gymnasium, 98 (1991), 420–53; ‘Exempla: Römisches in der literarischen
Antikerezeption nach 1945’, Gymnasium, 101 (1994), 7–42; and ‘The Political Use of Antiquity in the
Literature of the German Democratic Republic’, Illinois Classical Studies, 17.2, 347–67; and in English
particularly ‘The Classical Greek and Roman Tradition in Contemporary German-language Litera-
ture,’ Dimension2 3.3, 302–11. Also Volker Riedel, Antikerezeption in der Literatur der Deutschen Demokra-
tischen Republik, Berlin 1984; ‘Stabilisierung, Kritik, Destruktion. Überlegungen zur Antikerezeption
in der Literatur der DDR’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 1 (1994), 105–16; and Riedel’s
most recent, comprehensive book Antikerezeption in der deutschen Literatur, Stuttgart/Weimar 2000.
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the two works’ (that is, the myths) only attests to the fact that the ‘power’ of
the novel is borrowed from Ovid’s text.32 Although he pays considerable
attention to the Ovidian tradition in his article on Die letzte Welt, Schmidt-
Dengler sees in the novel a farewell to themes limited to Austria alone:

Ich meine, daß Ransmayr zunächst einmal etwas geleistet hat, was in der
österreichischen Literatur doch als singulär zu gelten hat: Er hat sich – mit
der Hilfe Ovids, zugegeben – von der Obsession durch österreichische
Themen gelöst und sich schlicht wieder in weltliterarische Verbindlichkeiten
begeben; hier hat Ransmayr Zuständlichkeiten benannt, die offenkundig uns
allen nahegehen.33

Another critic, Ralf-Peter Märtin, sees the novel’s many anachronisms (e.g.
references to a bus stop or a movie projector) as a way to break the illusion
striven for in the genre of the historical novel: ‘Ransmayrs Rom ist “wahr”
in dem Sinne, daß sein Autor mit gekonntem Einsatz aller sprachlichen
Mittel den einen, ihm wichtigsten Strang herausarbeitet: die Mentalitätsbe-
schreibung der Diktatur’.34 This is a point that is particularly clear in an
interview with Ransmayr by Volker Hage, three years after Hage wrote the
article mentioned earlier. Hage quotes Günter Grass’s criticism of young
authors, namely that they are not interested in politics and that their texts
are playful in a postmodern sense without any connection to the world.
Ransmayr does not accept that criticism of himself. If he wanted to address
current issues, he would not necessarily write a novel, but rather could turn
to other forms of writing, such as journalism. The political effect of his
novel, however, is not dependent on his own personal agenda alone:

Ich habe zum Beispiel in der Letzten Welt mit meiner Gestalt des Naso
versucht, eine politisch-literarische Karriere darzustellen, ohne deshalb
gleich alle zur politischen Gegenwart gehörenden Begriffe oder Konzern- und
Politikernamen zu verwenden. Im Rumänien Ceausescus aber wurde
beispielsweise ein Vorabdruck des Romans von der Zensur verboten. In der
Begründung stand, daß darin zu deutlich auf die rumänischen Verhältnisse
und die Rolle des großen Conducators Bezug genommen werde. Also:
Werfen Sie ein und dasselbe Buch in fünf verschiedene Systeme, und es wird
hier gefeiert, dort verboten, einmal als harmloses Stück Poesie und dann
wieder als ärgerliche oder gar gefährliche Provokation.35

32
Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, London 1991, p. 293.
33
Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, ‘Christoph Ransmayr: Die letzte Welt’, Bruchlinien, Salzburg/Vienna
1995, pp. 520–32.
34
‘Ransmayrs Rom: Der Poet als Historiker’, in Die Erfindung der Welt: Zum Werk von Christoph
Ransmayr, ed. Uwe Wittstock, Frankfurt a.M. 1997, pp. 113–19.
35
‘ . . . eine Art Museum lichter Momente’ (Gespräch mit Volker Hage über Die letzte Welt, Hamburg
1991), ibid., pp. 205–12.
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154 DEUKALION AND PYRRHA IN CELAN AND RANSMAYR

By saying ‘my figure Naso’, Ransmayr clearly signals that this is a construction
of his own and not some historical fact. Furthermore, he seems quite aware
that the conditions of the reception of a book constitute its political effect
as much as anything he himself could have specifically intended. Even
Hage, now in the years after unification, calls Ransmayr’s depiction of the
state apparatus ‘hellsichtig’. Speaking to Ransmayr, Hage states: ‘Wenn
man jetzt die Stasi-Akten liest, etwa von Reiner Kunze oder Erich Loest,
wenn man sieht, was über sie für Dossiers angelegt worden sind, kann man
Ihren Roman bestaunen.’36 As mentioned earlier, Hage had initially
reacted to the novel through the traditional historical eyes of a typical
post-’45 critic. However, after the events following 1989 he even points out
that if the book had been written by an East German, it would immediately
have been viewed as highly political. Ransmayr may write from an Austrian
standpoint, but he is able to identify and address problems common to
peoples beyond his borders.
Ransmayr’s and Celan’s rewritings of Ovid are expressions of the changing
historical circumstances in which the respective authors produced each
text. As Günter Grass points out in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech,
writers after the war were faced with Adorno’s verdict ‘Nach Auschwitz ein
Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch . . . ’. The passage from Adorno is often
seen as criticism of Paul Celan. When in 1965 Adorno republished the
essay from which the quotation derives, it was certainly used to criticise
Celan’s poetry, not only in the Adorno-friendly Merkur, but even in the
weekly Die Zeit.37 Grass, for one, chose to regard Adorno’s statement as a
warning, not an interdiction:

Nur so konnte das Schreiben nach Auschwitz – ob Gedicht oder Prosa –

fortgesetzt werden. Nur so, indem sie zum Gedächtnis wurde und die
Vergangenheit nicht enden ließ, konnte die deutschsprachige Nachkriegsli-
teratur die allgemeingültige Schreibregel ‘Fortsetzung folgt . . . ’ für sich und
gegenüber den Nachgeborenen rechtfertigen. Und nur so gelang es, die
Wunde offen zu halten und das gewünschte wie verordnete Vergessen durch
ein beharrliches ‘Es war einmal . . . ’ aufzuheben.38

None the less, the debate that the passage from Adorno typifies is ongoing.
Yet even as one fully acknowledges the atrocity to which he reacts, it is
important to refine the analysis of that debate as it is recast against evolving
historical circumstances. Contemporary authors and critics share that
horrible history referred to by Adorno, but also subsequent history, political
and aesthetic. It is also important to consider the effect of the debate on
itself as time goes by. Those early attacks on Celan and others are now often

36
Gespräch mit Hage 1997, p. 209.
37
Felstiner, p. 225.
38
The speech is available online in different languages through the Nobel organisation at
<http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/1999/lecture-g.html> (15 October 2002).
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incorporated into a critique of any literature associated with postmodernism,

like the novel Die letzte Welt. To hark back to our opening quotation from
Benjamin, translation ensures that the past has an afterlife in the present,
or in Celan’s words: ‘es komme, was niemals noch war!’

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003.