Dr.

Karin Doerr
Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
April 2018

Paul Celan’s “Aspen Tree” in the Twenty-first Century

“A poem is not timeless”
Celan 1
“Poetry … is the human voice,
And are we not of interest to each other?”
“Loss is not felt in the absence of love.”
Elizabeth Alexander 2

Abstract

After decades of extensive Holocaust research and thousands of accounts, it is perhaps

advantageous to concentrate on just one individual who was impacted by German National Socialist
history. This personalized approach brings the genocide into sharper focus, particularly for the young
generation of Germans who have been turning away from their country’s dark past. They feel it is
unduly haunting them after all these decades and affecting their identity as Germans.
Paul Celan’s unresolved anguish about his mother’s coldblooded murder, sustained fear for his
own life, then finally the flight into exile, brought him lasting nightmares, anguish, and memories of
horror. With his extraordinary poetic gift, he used the German language to convey how, post-trauma
and post-catastrophe, he endured surviving the Holocaust.
I wish to offer re-entry to Celan’s early poem “Aspen Tree” by means of a close focus on his
particular use of the German language and idiom, that (for the most part) is significant for German
speakers. Notably, it is reflected also in the poet’s references to botany. All this, together with his
choice of words and grammar, signal his main theme, the judeocide.
This poem raises familiar questions, such as what does it mean for an individual to lose a loved
one, a family, a home, a country? In reference to the difficulty of articulating the substance of
genocide, “Aspen Tree” alludes to these questions of personal loss as it circles the cruelest truth: the
perpetrators of the Holocaust intended to eliminate all those whom they deemed unworthy of life.

Article

From the distance and perspective of the twenty-first century, the post-Holocaust poetry of

Paul Celan offers insights into the suffering of one person as a consequence of genocide. This is

particularly pertinent for young Germans who still need to acquire in-depth knowledge of their

country’s dark past. Many have benefited from Holocaust education to the point that they wish to be

freed from its continuing embrace. Theirs is often a non-verbalized resentment rooted in feeling

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stigmatized as young Germans. Many prefer to bury Germany’s crimes safely in the dustbin of history

while resenting a world which continues to define their country precisely by them.

With the words of one poet’s voice, I wish to bring the genocide into sharper focus and to

“turn the numbers back into people.” 3 The hope is that by reading Celan’s poem “Aspen Tree,” young

people will find the life story of one survivor evocative and affecting. Through him the reader may ask

what it means to lose one’s mother suddenly, to lose an entire family, and to be deracinated from a

once sheltering home and country. A mother’s death, whatever the cause—be it accident, sickness or

old age—is difficult to bear at all times. In genocide, however, the intent of the enemy to kill the

beloved (mother) for the “crime” of existence causes deep despair as well as rage. Deprived of the

comfort of the social rituals of mourning, the bereft is left in a state of helplessness. And since the

community was destroyed as well, there was no recourse to the denial of solace. The lingering effect

was increased anguish and enduring traumatic memories. Moreover, in the perilous world of the

Holocaust, the survivor had a justifiable fear of persecution and threat to his own life. For the

fortunate few, survival signaled a dangerous flight into exile.

Paul Celan suffered all these traumas and, adrift in a foreign land after the war, used his

extraordinary poetic gift to convey to us what it means to survive these calamities. Or did he? It is

with “Aspen Tree” that I hope to answer some of the pertinent questions raised above. He wrote it in

1944 with feelings and scars of the ordeal still fresh in his consciousness. Although Theodor Adorno

maintains, “Celan’s poems wish to express an acute horror by remaining silent,” 4 we can, with close

examination, locate the historical and personal actuality behind the screen of metaphor.

In order to grasp the larger theme that emerges from his deeply private verse, the reader must

bring to it the knowledge of the Holocaust. Young Germans have acquired that knowledge but they

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must also inquire about the specificity of the poet’s life, since "reality is not simply there; it must be

searched for and won." 5 Here, they need to know that Celan was born Paul Antschel in 1920 as the

only child of German-speaking Jews from Czernowitz, in Northern Bukovina, then part of Romania and

now the Ukraine. This most eastern place of the Habsburg monarchy contained a now vanished

German-Jewish culture that is palpable today only in its literature and poetry.

While the young Celan was briefly absent from home in 1942, the Germans deported and then

murdered his parents. After the war and exiled in Paris, he lived in the perpetual shadow of this

personal loss and suffered pain to the point of paranoia until his suicide in 1970. His French-sounding

name “Celan” reflects his then new country and is the anagram of his Jewish birth name in Romanian,

Ançel. Celan’s actual name, Antschel, disappeared with the transport that carried his parents to their

death and with it, the life he had known. In a similar gesture, the German-Jew, Hanns Chaim Mayer,

writer and Holocaust survivor, chose the French name Jean Améry to efface his German origin.

Conventional literary criticism tends to emphasize the aesthetic and linguistic dimensions of

Celan’s poetry, which, if widely analyzed and interpreted, sometimes appears to have been at the

expense of the poet’s wounded voice. 6 By contrast, some German artists and writers have tried to

engage seriously with his verse as a means to assume the weight of responsibility for the historical

past. For example, in “Death Fugue" (Todesfuge), the renowned painter Anselm Kiefer has created

more than thirty works that refer in their titles, inscriptions, and depictions to Celan’s principal poetic

testament to the judeocide. From this work, Kiefer has inscribed “Your golden hair Margareta/ Your

ashen hair Shulamith” (“Dein goldenes Haar Margarete/ dein aschenes Haar Shulamit”) on these

particular paintings as cryptic messages to those who try to decipher them.

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 This poem, having been integrated into the German school curriculum and featured on

commemorative occasions, may have lost its intended impact when it first addressed the perpetrator

nation. Kiefer seems to lift it out of its ritualized state with a visual juxtaposition of two iconic women,

Margarete and Shulamith. These names carry a commanding presence in German and Jewish

tradition respectively. The artist symbolizes the "golden hair" of Margarete, the heroine in Johann

Wolfgang von Goethe’s (1749-1832) Faust, with the synecdoche of dry yellow sheaves of wheat.

While wheat is sustenance, straw is dead texture and may here stand for the hollow German cliché of

Nordic perfection. By contrast, Shulamite, the “maiden” from the Bible’s “Song of Songs,” is depicted

as a figure with dark hair in a desolate surrounding. These images on Kiefer’s canvases embody the

contrasting realities of German life and Jewish death during the Holocaust, which the artist hopes we

will recognize. This counteracts the widely-held German interpretation of Celan’s “Death Fugue" as a

symbiosis of German and Jew and/or as a sign towards reconciliation. This is despite the fact that

Celan’s verse mimics how Germans once mocked the plight of the suffering Jews, of whom he was

once one, with the words,

he whistles his Jews out has them dig a grave in the ground
he orders us start up the dance music now

er pfeift seine Juden hervor läßt schaufeln ein Grab in der Erde
er befiehlt uns spielt auf nun zum Tanz 7

This underscores the poet’s much broader statement that “Death was a master of Germany” (for

millions of Jews).

While Celan deals with the larger view of the Holocaust in “Death Fugue," in “Aspen Tree,” the

focus is on one life lost in the genocide and what this entails for the person left living with this mental

burden. In this poem, Celan relies primarily on German idiom, language, and structure. Yet German

Studies’ use of didactic methods tends to turn this individual life event and what it entails in German
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collective memory, into the general, i.e. the loss of a mother. Although the universal is always present

when we deal with matters of life and death, my argument centers on the genocidal aspect of the

death of Celan’s beloved mother who was shot by the Germans who deemed her unfit to work. 8 I

shall show how the poet’s use of language and form in this early poem encapsulates the essence of

his anguish and immense, helpless frustration at what Germans had done. As the sole surviving family

member, guilt about his escape from death formed part of his agony.

But first, when dealing with Celan’s poetry, we must consider his famed acceptance speech,

“Meridian,” upon receiving the prestigious Georg Büchner Prize in Germany, in 1960. 9 It is filled with

wordplays, allusions, historical reminders, references to German literature—all intended to gesture

toward the Holocaust or, to “that which happened,” as he preferred to call it cryptically. An informed

audience does not fail to recognize this pervasive subject in his speech, which is also the hallmark of

his poetry even if it was masked by encoded images and recollections. Celan as Holocaust survivor,

spoke foremost to Germans in the guise of sceptical historian, exile, and Jew. Once deciphered, his

poetic utterances are informed by post-catastrophe thought and personal trauma.

The reason for his emphatic use of the German language is not only because it is “infused with

the experience, the consciousness of the Holocaust” 10 but also because he insisted on German as his

mother tongue. This is unlike Eli Wiesel, Auschwitz survivor from the same area, who “wrote in French

as a gesture against the language of the perpetrator.” 11 Celan, in his “Meridian” speech, said

famously, “It, language, remained unlost, yes, in spite of everything. But it had to pass through … the

thousand darknesses of death-bringing speech.” 12 In the words of scholar Barbara Galli, “Celan had

faced the evil itself and stretched the German language … into the speech of the murdered and of the

survivors.” 13 Norman Ravvin adds that Celan’s “poetry raises the major question of postwar German

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culture: what to do with the language of the killers; how can one fashion life, a literature, using the

words that justified and organized mass murder?” 14 Celan was up to the task.

The German language of that era, Nazi-Deutsch, whose alphabet spelled murder, consumed

his mind in the postwar era. He had experienced the “death-bringing” words of National Socialism

where the German Jude, Jew, stood for a “collective term for all Jews in ideological contrast to ‘der

Deutsche,’ the German.” 15 Postwar, he wanted to use German differently, as a “poetic portrayal of

the new human reality in the world, the Holocaust, not as such, not as description, but as a new

speech in the world, an utterance uttered, [if not] stuttered, for reception.” 16 As a poet, he wrote in a

1947 letter, he could not give up writing, “not even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is

German.” 17 As well, it meant for him writing against Adorno’s famous dictum and as “a setting free”

through the poetic encounter, the moment that occurs between the poet’s word and the receiver that

he called “breathturn,” Atemwende. 18 More than anything, he wanted “reception” in the form of

dialogue and understanding, even after his language had become undeniably idiosyncratic and

difficult to read. He indicated as much in his “Meridian” speech with the metaphoric message in a

bottle sent on its way with the hope of arrival, somewhere, sometime.

Therefore, “Aspen Tree” comes in Celan’s aggrieved poetic voice, in his German mother

tongue, with which he remembers both his mother and German culpability for her death. Almost

asking her forgiveness for using this tainted language, but also recalling good times, he wrote in 1944,

“And can you bear, Mother, oh [now] as then, the gentle, the German, the painful rhyme?” 19

Adorno’s conviction of Celan’s remaining silent in “acute horror” manifests itself in “Aspen Tree,” but

only seemingly. 20 Upon closer reading of this poem, we can glean the German historical and cultural

signals—some overt and others concealed.

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ASPEN TREE, your leaves glance white into the dark.
My mother's hair never turned white.

Dandelion, so green is the Ukraine.

My blond mother did not come home.

Rain cloud, do you linger at the wells?

My quiet mother weeps for everyone.

Round star, you wind the golden loop.

My mother's heart was wounded by lead.

Oaken door, who lifted you off your hinges?

My gentle mother cannot come. 21

Let us first consider how Celan uses form in this short work of five stanzas of two lines each.

The poem is known by its beginning words, “Aspen tree,” since there is no title that could point us in a

thematic direction or toward a subject. A lack of rhyme and the change of rhythm by way of mixing

trochaic and iambic meter and more, do not permit a fluent reading. Galli puts it aptly, as Celan

emerging from the “darkest past [in history] …. must be [the] one who breaks … meter, breaks

rhythm, breaks sense, all in order to make sense of the world, to refract its fractures through the

prism of the keener eye who sees what isn’t and what is, with one glance.“ 22

How do we make sense then of this mode of conveying, of references to botany, and word

repetitions? The poem’s nouns, verbs, and adjectives seem at first simple and clear. However, we find

them in unusual combinations that upon closer examination reveal double meanings and diverse

allusions that accentuate mood in accordance with emerging connections. First, Celan refers to

Nature with leaves, trees, cloud, and wells, which he pairs untypically with adjectives we commonly

attribute to them. Therefore, green dandelions point to the toothed leaves (perhaps echoing the

serrated leaves of the aspen mentioned before) rather than the yellow blossoms or the round white

seed heads. “Lions’ teeth,” Löwenzahn, is the word for this plant both in German and English,

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although softened and alienated in English by its French origin and sound, dandelion. Further, its stem

contains toxic, bitter “milk” which perhaps references the oxymoron “black milk” in Celan’s “Death

Fugue.” Also, in early German (and Flemish) paintings of the Crucifixion, the often present dandelion

represents an emblem for bitterness and grief. 23

In all cases, the characteristics of this plant point toward suffering and may signal in Celan’s

poem danger and harm brought by the Germans to Eastern Europe (and his homeland) during World

War II. Celan repeats “green” in “So green is the Ukraine,” a descriptive reference to a defined

geographical location, perhaps intimating the lush grassland of the steppes of his lost fatherland. 24

But we may hear an ironic undertone in the emphatic “so green” because Ukraine is also the area of

the Nazi labor camp, in which his parents perished.

The beginning and end of a literary work, especially a short poem such as “Aspen Tree,” are of

utmost importance. Celan commences with the botanical name “aspen,” which is not necessarily a

word in daily use, unless the subject is trees. However, for Germans, it undoubtedly triggers

association with a widely known simile, “Shaking like a [aspen] leaf” (zittern wie Espenlaub). The

characteristic of a quaking aspen, or Populus tremoloides (Zitterpappel), is that its leaves, on their long

flat petioles, catch even the slightest breeze and thus all quake individually. 25 The American poet

Charles Simic uses this shaking metaphorically as an image of transmissible fear, “As one leaf passes

its shudder/ To another/ All at once the whole tree is trembling,” so the fear passes from man to

man. 26 He spells out what Celan does not verbalize but most likely assumes we recognize in light of

the familiar German expression.

In another association, in accordance with French folklore, the True Cross was made of aspen,

and since then its leaves have never ceased to tremble. 27 A hint at the age-old fact of Jewish

persecution by Christians for having killed Jesus may not be too far-fetched here. Within the larger

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historical context of the Holocaust, we can make the connection to victims and survivors who, during

contact with the German, experienced a fundamental fear for their life, of being rounded up and

taken away to exile or murder. The expression “Jew fright” (Judenangst) was coined then because the

fear for one’s life was written on Jewish faces, upon which they were often recognized and

denounced. Celan’s aspen, which “glance white into the dark” may refer to the greenish-white bark of

that tree and makes a fitting symbol for being devoid of vision and visualizing emptiness or death.

We can carry the possible connections to this tree even further. Seen positively, the aspen has

the ability to rejuvenate after fire (in spring or summer). Even if the original tree is destroyed, its

suckers, sent out far from the trunk, will grow again. Can we see Celan himself as such an offshoot, a

“tree survivor,” since he took root in France, far from his home country, and after he was severed

from the family stem (with the death of his parents)? If this seems stretched, we need to recall that,

in other poems, especially in “Todtnauberg,” Celan demonstrates his knowledge of botany, its

symbolism, and references to folklore and herbal medicine. Taking these varied meanings of aspen

into consideration, Celan’s poem opens up a wide range of interpretation and allusion of which we

must not pin down one in particular. But the evocation of the atmosphere of fear with the beginning

word “aspen” sets the tone for the poem.

His emblematic use of trees and association with German idiom also manifests itself in the last

stanza with “oaken door.” “Oak” is highly connotative in German language, lore, and politics, and a

few examples can solicit the following facts: The “German oak” is seen as literally and figuratively

rooted in the German fatherland, harkening back to Germanic times, and standing for endurance,

strength, and steadfastness. The nineteenth-century Prussian Medal displayed a red eagle, the Grand

Cross, swords and oak leaves; likewise, a wreath of oak leaves adorned the Iron-Cross medal of WWI;

the oak on the five-Mark coin of the Weimar Republic evoked unity, justice and freedom. In all cases,

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the oak referenced German fortitude and pride; 28 and not to forget, oak leaves decorated the lapels

of SS officers. Hence, “oak” can conjure up many different associations and meanings for Germans,

although, again, Celan may not have had one single connotation in mind.

Significantly, Goethe planted an oak tree in his favorite retreat, the beech forest outside the

city of Weimar, where the poet lived and worked. During the Nazi period, the area was cleared for the

Buchenwald concentration camp but Goethe's oak was left standing. In 1944, an Allied bombing raid

killed it [Image: Goethe's oak at Buchenwald]. Nazi officers, known to be well educated and with an

penchant for German literature, preserved the oak stump and fenced it in in reverence and memory

of their great poet. It is still there today on the Buchenwald memorial site [Image: oak stump]. In the

wake of the Holocaust, we are confronted with the dilemma of how to do justice to Goethe’s famous

moral imperative, “May man be honorable, caring, and good” (“Edel sei der Mensch, hilfreich und

gut!”). It seems that today this message stands only in conjunction with its horrific violation after

which the truncated “Goethe-Eiche” may stand as a wounded symbol for German literature, culture

and language.

Celan’s seemingly rhetorical question, at the end of the “Aspen” poem, “Oaken door, who

lifted you off your hinges?” hints at the German expression “to unhinge a door” (Die Tür aus den

Angeln heben), which means to do something difficult (inversely, “unhinged” in English refers to

losing one’s reason). Celan turns the original German inference into a question that for him implies

many things, such as, ‘How could you steadfast Germans, you lovers of reason, principles, nature, and

the arts, unhinge the twentieth-century world? Unhinge your country’s culture, your language, and,

even undo the philosophy and humanism of the great Goethe?’ Celan, no longer a Jew trembling with

fear but now poetically empowered in postwar safety, can hurl—like the force of the wind of history

in Paul Klee’s drawing “Angelus Novus”—a devastating question at Germans: “What have you

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wrought?” More specific and personal, he seems to inquire, “How could you unhinge my life?” This

silent scream also asks with incredulity, “How could you kill my dear, innocent mother?” This all-

encompassing last stanza can be seen as the crux of the poem.

Hence, as bookends of “Aspen Tree,” beginning and end stanzas contain commanding

statements, each one centering idiomatically on trees; their meaning moves from the fear of the

victim in the first stanza, to the deeds of the perpetrator in the last. Celan counts on German

recognition of these facts and their repercussions for him as survivor. He hopes for a response to his

verse, even though the catastrophe of the Holocaust is beyond comprehension. As one survivor said,

“There is nothing to understand. You only have to know it because it’s simply what happened. We

were no longer allowed to exist….” 29 Or Celan may suggest, with the words of Rainer Maria Rilke,

“Don’t search for the answers …. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future,

you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” 30 This is certainly hoped

for from Germany’s young generation.

While many of the possible connections are not specifically articulated in Celan’s poem,

references to his mother are apparent. They are stated simply and almost matter-of-factly in the

second line of each stanza. They echo the sonnets written less than ten years earlier, when he was

still a boy. In 1936 and 1939, he professed his earnest, if sentimental, love in Mother’s Day poems,

“ [You] … are stillness, Mother, shimmer from the deep” [1936]; and in 1939, “The mother, softly

healing, keeping near,/ whose gentle evening fingers brush our skin.” It is not difficult to see

resonances of these adoring words in “Aspen Tree,” which he wrote shortly after he had emerged

from the horror.

For easier reference, I have contracted here, in the sequence of the poem, the lines from each

verse that refer to his mother:

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 My mother's hair never turned white.

My blond mother did not come home.

My quiet mother weeps for everyone.

My mother's heart was wounded by lead.

My gentle mother cannot come.

Traditionally, one finds expression of the special connection of mother and child in lullabies, in

which we hear the mother’s soothing voice. Mothers are also remembered in verse, such as in the

nineteenth-century poem “Night Thoughts” by Heinrich Heine whose work Celan knew well. Heine

reminisces about his mother while in exile, also in Paris, because he has not seen her for sixteen years

and fears she may die before he can visit her again. His German fatherland had driven him away.

Heine wrote this poem in his famed ironic stance but with personal sentiments. It ends with his

French wife greeting him in the morning and chasing away the sad thoughts of the night. Not so in

Celan’s “Aspen Tree” that otherwise shares some parallels with Heine’s poem, such as the longing for

the mother and references to “typical German” trees, here the oak and the linden (Eichen, Linden).

However, the fundamental difference is that of a much grimmer German history in Celan’s time, one

of killers of mothers.

As we have seen throughout the poem, Celan’s words can have multiple or contrary

implications and allusions. Although “rain cloud,” “wells” and “green” point to lushness, fertility, and

life, in relation to “mother weeps” and “did not come home,” they suggest sadness and longing. The

adjectives he uses for her are two hair colors, “white” and “blond,” and two attributes, “quiet” and

“gentle”; the verb is “cries,” weint. In Celan’s short poem of ten lines, he repeats the word “mother”

five times, that is to say, in each stanza. This evocation is unlike the impetus to repetition

(Wiederholungszwang) where, according to Freud, individuals in trauma are trying to retrieve

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experiences and hidden memories from their unconscious. In Celan’s case, the memory of the absent

mother is in his conscious mind and he has to conjure up the beloved image with words to fill the void

of her absence. It is with this circular and repetitive nature of grieving that he recalls her from the

past with the repeated word “mother” in his German mother tongue, “Mutter.” 31 This is his name for

her in his memory; her given name and person were extinguished with her anonymous murder. All

that is left to him is to retrieve her presence through representation in the repeated word. To this,

Adorno mentions, “Our memory is the only help that is left to [the dead]. They pass into it.” 32

There are sweet memories as well, expressed in another poem, in which Celan recalls her

reading to him from German literature and poetry. But this recollection is made painful by the tragedy

of her death and expressed in one of his most moving couplets, “And can you bear, mother, as you

did then at home, / The gentle, the German, the painful rhyme?” ("Und duldest du, Mutter, wie einst

daheim, / den leisen, den deutschen, den schmerzlichen Reim?"). He addresses his mother directly and

with the archaic word einst suggests “a long time ago; daheim is a comforting reference to home

(instead of the more neutral zu Hause). However, in “Aspen Tree” he speaks of her in the third

person. It is, therefore, a narration with which he tells the story of his mother.

His mentioning that she “did not come home” seems odd in the face of death. We find a

similar sentiment expressed by the nineteenth-century poem by Friedrich Rückert that Gustav Mahler

set to music in his famous song cycle with the stark title Kindertotenlieder, “Songs on the Death of

Children.” Rückert emphasizes his disbelief at the death of his two children of scarlet fever, “I often

think: they have only just gone out, and now they will be coming back home.” 33 He cannot fathom his

never seeing them walk through the door again. Celan does not verbalize as much but we sense the

pain of the mourning son who will never see his mother return.

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 It seems at first strange that Celan would mention here the color of his mother’s hair, “My

blond mother did not come home.” We can interpret this to be a deliberate hint at the tragic irony

that she, as many other Jews, did not look different from a German (woman). It was the Nazi race

laws that turned her into the negative image of a Shulamith that denied her the right to life. And

further, when he says, “My mother's hair never turned white” (“Meiner Mutter Haar ward nimmer

weiß”)—again a referring to hair color—he points to the sad fact that old age was denied her by her

premature death through murder.

In the fourth stanza we read, “My mother's heart was wounded by lead” (“Meiner Mutter Herz

ward wund von Blei”). In this and the previous mother line, Celan uses archaic phrasing with the

genitivus absolutus. It stands out and brings emphasis to each of the individual words. Archaic is also

“ward” instead of the more modern “wurde,” “turned,” “became.” In common parlance and

particularly in poetry, pain and sorrow wound or break a heart, figuratively. We find a similar example

in a line of a nineteenth-century poem, “People caused me pain and my heart was wounded” (“Ich litt

an Menschen und mein Herz ward wund”). 34 But in Celan’s case, the meaning is very literal in that he

intimates the lethal lead bullet that caused the wound in his mother’s heart and thus her death. In

reality, he was not witness to this fatal incident, but he is imagining it in this poem. This is akin to a

traumatic flashback of an experienced event in the past, but here it is a created visualization by the

son. We can imagine that he replayed it over and over again in his mind, each time feeling the pain

anew.

With “Ukraine,” Celan provides a concrete geographical reference to the location of the

murder. This name punctuates as a singular time and place that repeatedly strikes and wounds only

him, the surviving son. It is etched in his mind and repeated in other poems as the only named place,

such as in “Mother, snow is now falling in the Ukraine” (“Es fällt nun, Mutter, Schnee in der Ukraine”).

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Behind this seemingly neutral meteorological reference we can recognize the suggestion of cold,

desolation, and absence of life. It may also suggest that the seasons repeat themselves, no matter

what happens. We find a more specific and much grimmer, unmasked and even more precise

reference in the 1959 poem “Lupine” (“Wolfsbohne”): “world, in Michailowka, in∕the Ukraine,

where∕they killed father and mother. 35 With the flower name “Lupine,” refers to the dangerous wild

and animal, the wolf, and presents a parallel to the lion’s teeth of “green dandelion” in “Aspen Tree.”

How do we interpret Celan’s suppressed emotion and the understated cruel reality in “Aspen

Tree”? In the last line, “My gentle mother cannot come,” he describes her nature. The phrase is soft in

tone, yet more definite than mother “did not come home.” For Celan, like Rückert as mourner, there

is no closure because no amount of time can take away the sting of death of the beloved. Yet it is with

utmost linguistic economy that Celan states the fact behind his mother`s inability to “come” [back]—

ever—because she is dead. His ultimate control of language leaves the space to be filled with what we

ought to know and what we should learn about him and the circumstances at the time.

Theodor Adorno finds such “coldly muted phrasing” the infinite “discretion of Celan’s

radicalism.” 36 This said, in “Aspen Tree,” there is also suppressed rage at German culpability, which

the poet hints at with the twisted German idiom regarding the “oaken door” noted above. His

mother’s death was not natural, it was not even a “simple” murder. It was a genocidal death that

followed the order, “Die.” It was an abject death that took place in the absence of family and

community. It robbed the son of burial of and a grave for his mother. These facts are part of the

Holocaust happenings and the suffering of survivors. Therefore, Celan’s “poetic portrayal of the new

human reality in the world, the Holocaust … [must be seen] as a new speech in the world, an

utterance uttered, stuttered, for reception.” [Galli, 67]

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 To his dismay, he witnessed his early and most accessible poems, such as “Aspen Tree,”

passing into German literature more as works of Holocaust art and esthetic, creative commodities.

Solemn readings of his poems at commemorative ceremonies, at best, solicit sadness, which causes

the listeners to focus on their own feelings at the moment rather than on the other’s painful reality in

the past. Celan had not aimed for this self-reflexive response. Neither had he intended a cathartic

effect for his listeners. Rather, he wanted them to search in his verses for that which ”happened” and

to recognize in them (their) history, the suffering of the persecuted, and the slaughter of the victims.

It is after decades of unearthed Nazi history and survivors’ accounts that his poetry still

demands (German) attentiveness to guide us to his message and to what it meant to have survived

the Holocaust. He does not look for pity or sympathy, rather for the realization of the crucial fact of

being a Jew meant grappling with the deathly exclusion that led to Auschwitz, under the motto, “Thou

shalt not dwell among us!” 37 Thus, having been a Jew in genocidal times, a simple identification with

his suffering as a son who lost his mother is not possible. Our serious engagement with the poet’s

word, the evocations of the inexpressibility of Holocaust suffering also forbids clichéd utterances and

the rhetorical repetitions of “never again,” although “never again” is precisely desired for the future.

Celan speaks solely as witness and survivor of the German past with a gesture to the post-Holocaust

ethical imperative “Remember!”

With this recognition, Celan is still important today, and so is the soul-searching Holocaust

engagement of the postwar generations, such as that of Anselm Kiefer. At this point I wish to draw

attention to the painter again who, as recently as 2005, referred to Celan’s “Aspen Tree” in a canvas

entitled “Espenbaum für Paul Celan.” It depicts a desolate landscape in which there is nothing left of

trees except sticks on parched earth. They resemble the old runic alphabets of Germanic languages.

From their gathering and arrangement derived the German word “lesen,” to read. Kiefer thus invites

16
us yet again to “read” his landscape that spells destruction, as is often the case in his paintings with

Holocaust references. It is his interpretation of Celan’s message, depicted in the “Aspen Tree” poem

that we should carefully re-read and then ask ourselves why, in this century, is Kiefer still engaged

with Celan? By turning to this early poem, he may want to go back as closely as possible to the time of

the German disaster and bring the poet and the tragic events closer to us.

As we see, Celan’s commanding poem comes in the voice derived from the horrors of the

Shoah/Holocaust and reaches into the twenty-first century. It brings us back to the messenger and

hence the human condition as basis of attention to the word and a life. As our contemporary world is

numbed by almost daily horrific deeds, in a perpetrator nation such as Germany, each generation

must work through anew its own difficult history. Retrieving the dead through representation and to

listen to one wounded voice is to think of many. For the generations (of Germans) to come, “though

the speaker of the word may die, the seeking remains alive, the seeking of that particular word of the

particular speaker from a particular point in time,” 38 and with this, his anguish, his injured life. As one

scholar states, the “retelling of the Holocaust story is an homage to the victims … [and] also a gift to

future generations of rememberers.” 39 Younger audiences of Germans have to continue the journey

into the past because they need to learn and recognize what was at stake and what is at stake in

human terms for all of us now and in the future. Only this receptiveness offers “a measure of

resistance against the erasure of the Holocaust both from collective memory and from our hearts,”

and particularly from the hearts of young Germans. 40

1
Paul Celan, Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983) 3:186.
2
Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World: A Memoir (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2015) 3. And Elizabeth
Alexander, “Ars Poetica no. 100: I Believe.” Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990–2010 (Minneapolis, MI:
Graywolf Press, 2010) 1.
3
Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (London: The Bodley Head, 2015). Quoted in Boris
Zabarko, “Historic Inheritance of Holocaust survivors in Ukraine,” in The Hidden Child (New York Hidden Child Foundation,
vol. XXV: 2017) 31-37.

17
4
Quoted from Rolf Tiedemann, ed., Aesthetic Theory in Theodor W. Adorno, Can One Live After Auschwitz? A Philosophical
Reader. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003) Fn 12, 473). Further references to this work under Adorno.
5
Quoted from the cover text of Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan, A Bilingual Edition,
trans. Pierre Joris (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).
6
Del Caro, Adrian, The Early Poetry of Paul: In the Beginning was the Word (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State
University Press, 1997) 3. Further references to this work under Caro.
7
All trans. from the German, Karin Doerr.
8
His mother, Friederike Antschel, was murdered in the concentration camp of Michailowka near Gaissin in the Ukraine in
Winter 1942/43.
9
„Der Meridian,“ Paul Celan: Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden, dritter Band, Prosa, Reden (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp,
1992). Further references to this work under “Meridian.“
10
Caro, 18.
11
Caro, 18.
12
“Meridian.“ “Sie, die Sprache, blieb unverloren, ja, trotz allem. Aber sie musste nun hindurchgehen durch ihre eigenen
Antwortlosigkeiten, hindurchgehen durch furchtbares Verstummen, hindurchgehen durch die tausend Finsternisse
todbingender Rede.“ trans. modified. 3:185-186.
13
Barbara Ellen Galli, On Wings of Moonlight: Elliot R. Wolfson’s Poetry in the Path of Rosenzweig and Celan (Montreal:
McGill-Queens University Press, 2007) 73. Further references to this work under Galli.
14
Norman Ravvin, “Paul Celan: When Reading is Difficult,” Review of Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry
of Paul Celan, trans. Pierre Joris, in The Canadian Jewish News, July 21, 2015.
15
Robert Michael and Karin Doerr, Nazi Deutsch/Nazi German: An English Lexicon of the Language of the Third Reich
(Newport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002).
16
Galli, 67
17
Quoted in John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven: Yale university Press, 1995) 56. Further references
to this work under Felstiner.
18
Galli, 71.
19
Und duldest Du, Mutter, wie einst ach daheim den leisen, den deutschen, den schmerzlichen Reim? Quoted in Felstiner,
24.
20
Adorno, 473.
21
Espenbaum, dein Laub blickt weiß ins Dunkel.
Meiner Mutter Haar ward nimmer weiß.

Löwenzahn, so grün ist die Ukraine.

Meine blonde Mutter kam nicht heim.

Regenwolke, säumst du an den Brunnen?

Meine leise Mutter weint für alle.

Runder Stern, du schlingst die goldne Schleife.

Meiner Mutter Herz ward wund von Blei.

Eichne Tür, wer hob dich aus den Angeln?

Meine sanfte Mutter kann nicht kommen.
Trans. into English, Karin Doerr.
22
Galli, 66.
23
Hugo Bekker, Paul Celan: Studies of his Early Poetry (Amsterdam, New York: Editions Rodopi, 2008) 138, 139.
24
Galli,71.
25
Collin Tudge, The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees are, How they Live, and Why they Matter (New York: Crown
Publisher, 2005) 308. Further references to this work under Tudge, The Tree.
26
“Fear”/ Fear passes from man to man / Unknowing, / As one leaf passes its shudder / To another. / All at once the whole
tree is trembling / And there is no sign of wind.” Charles Simic, “Fear,” in The Harvard Book of Contemporary American
Poetry, ed. Helen Vendler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994) 350.
27
Tudge, The Tree, 308.
28
Ursula Kampmann, “German oaks and national sentiments,”
29
18
H.G. Adler, The Journey (New York: Random House, 2008) Further references to this work under Adler, The Journey, 245.
30
Rainer Maria Rilke quoted in Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise (New York: Penguin Press, 2016) 30.
31
I thank psychologist Ariel Stravynskj for an exchange on this point (Nov. 5, 2016).
32
Adorno mentioned this in 1936 in a reference to Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder. Quoted in James Wood, ”The Other Side of
Silence: Rereading W.G. Sebald.”The New Yorker (5 & 12 June 2017):90-97.
33
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindertotenlieder
34
“Ich litt an Menschen und mein Herz ward wund.”/ Aufjubelnd hab' ich's in die Welt getragen./ Wie still ich heimkam,
will ich keinem sagen …. Ludwig Jacobowski. https://www.aphorismen.de/zitat/218308
35
http://www.worldcat.org/title/wolfsbohne-wolfs-bean/oclc/38554607
world, in Michailowka, in
the Ukraine, where
they killed father and mother: what
was in bloom there, what
was in bloom there? Which
flower, mother
hurt you there
with its name?
Mother, you
Who said wolf’s bean, not:
Lupine.

Welt, in Michailowka, in
der Ukraine, wo
sie mir Vater und Mutter erschlugen: was
blühte dort, was
blüht dort? Welche
Blume, Mutter
tat dir dort weh
mit ihrem Namen?
Mutter, dir
die du Wolfsbohne sagtest, nicht:
Lupine.

36
Quoted from Rolf Tiedemann, ed., Aesthetic Theory in Theodor W. Adorno, Can One Live After Auschwitz? A
Philosophical Reader. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003) Fn 12, 473). Further references to this work under
Adorno.
37
Adler, The Journey, 8.
38
Galli, 134.
39
Dorota Glowacka, Disappearing Traces: Holocaust Testimonials, Ethics, and Aesthetics (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 2012) 128. Further references to this work under Glowacka.
40
Glowacka, 215.
I wish to thank Gary Evans for his support and help with this manuscript.

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