Poetry As Individuality

Poetry as Individuality
The Discourse
of Observation
in Paul Celan
Derek Hillard
Lewisburg
Bucknell University Press
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Hillard, Derek, 1965-

Poetry as individuality : the discourse of observation in Paul Celan / Derek Hillard.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8387-5746-8 (alk. paper)
1. Celan, Paul—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Celan, Paul—Knowledge—
Psychology. 3. Celan, Paul—Philosophy. 4. Individuality in literature. I. Title.
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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

To Sara
Contents
Acknowledgements 9
Introduction 13
1. The Phenomenology of Illusion 26
2. Hallucinations 57
3. Slivers of the Self 75
4. Original Translations 107
5. Mind Matters 130
Postscript 158
Notes 161
Bibliography 171
Index 179
Acknowledgments
This book owes itself to the generosity of many. I am grateful to

my colleagues at Kansas State for all their assistance. I owe special thanks
to Michael Ossar, who encouraged the project in crucial ways, to Rob-
ert Corum for his strong support, and to Brent Maner for conversations
regarding the book’s larger conception and for excellent suggestions
about revisions to the introduction. Emma Betz provided indispensable
aid by patiently responding to my questions and helping me find the
precise word in translating German idioms. This book benefited sig-
nificantly from research conducted at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv
(Marbach) in 2004 and 2007. I thank both Kansas State University for
funding this travel and the archive staff for its kind assistance in locating
materials and creating a peaceful environment in which to work.
I remain indebted to my dissertation advisors, Fritz Breithaupt, In-
geborg Hoesterey, and Bill Rasch, who guided my encounters with
Paul Celan in another era at Indiana University. At the earliest stages
of conceiving the project, both Rochelle Tobias and Amir Eschel made
suggestions and encouraged me. Arno Barnert read material that
formed key parts of the manuscript, and I am grateful for his insightful
suggestions and comments.
My parents, Yvonne and Benjamin, constantly heartened and sup-
ported me in writing this book, for which I am very grateful. I thank
Pamela, Mari, and Michael for their support and for fashioning all
sorts of opportunities for recuperation. There would be no book if it
were not for Sara Hillard—I cannot thank her enough. She has been
the first and constant reader of the manuscript, one who made so many
helpful suggestions; offering indispensable encouragement, she has,
with the greatest of patience, created the life required to envision and
complete the book. Her lovely spirit animates its pages. As for Sophia
and Stella, without their examples of laughing creativity and play, there
would have been no reason to persevere.
9
10 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank Greg Clingham, the humanities editor at Bucknell Univer-

sity Press, and Julien Yoseloff for expertly guiding the manuscript with
care through the various stages of review and production.

Permission is acknowledged to reprint the following poems by Paul
Celan: “Espenbaum,” “Die lezte Fahne,” and “So bist du denn gewor-
den,” originally published in Mohn und Gedächtnis, ” Deutsche Verlags-
Anstalt, München, in der Verlagsgruppe Random House, 1952; “Huhed-
iblu” and “Tübingen, Jänner,” originally published in Die Niemandsrose,”
S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1963; “Ich kenne dich,” “Die
Schwermutschnellen hindurch,” and “Stehen,” originally published in
Atemwende, ” Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1967; “. . . auch
keinerlei” and “Seelenblind,” originally published in Fadensonnen,” Suhr-
kamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1968; “Der von den unbeschriebe-
nen,” originally published in Lichtzwang, ” Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt
am Main, 1970; “Ich trink Wein aus zwei Gläsern,” originally published
in Zeitgehöft,” Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1976; and “Kleine
Silbe,” originally published in Die Gedichte aus dem Nachlaß, ” Suhrkamp
Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1997.
Sections of chapters 4 and 5 appeared in an earlier form as “The
Rhetoric of Originality: Paul Celan and the Disentanglement of Illness
and Creativity,” in the German Quarterly 75, no. 4 (2002); and “Shad-
ows, Scars, and the Unwritten Pages: Paul Celan and the Reality of Vi-
olence,” in Colloquia Germanica 37, no. 3–4 (2004). I thank the editors
for permission to use this material.
Introduction
So bist du denn geworden

wie ich dich nie gekannt:
dein Herz schlägt allerorten
in einem Brunnenland,
wo kein Mund trinkt und keine

Gestalt die Schatten säumt,
wo Wasser quillt zum Scheine
und Schein wie Wasser schäumt.
Du steigst in alle Brunnen,

du schwebst durch jeden Schein.
Du hast ein Spiel ersonnen,
das will vergessen sein.1
[So now have you become,

a you I never knew:
your heart beats everywhere
in a terrain of wells,
where no mouth drinks and no

figure stays the shadows,
where water swells in semblance
and semblance foams like water.
You rise in every well,

you float through every semblance.
You have contrived a game,
that wants to be forgotten.]
Paul Celan’s poem “So bist du denn geworden” (So now have you
become) employs the metaphor of semblance to merge things hidden
with things seen. Because the Schein (semblance) in the poem gets re-
13
14 POETRY AS INDIVIDUALITY
peated, it becomes individualized, which is also to say that it receives

its own time and space. This iterated semblance permits the poem to
draw attention to how it acts at once as a source of individuality and at
the same time as a marker for the extinguished individual. Invested
with qualities of becoming, darkness, appearance, forgetfulness, and
play, the poem’s other can appear only as something hidden within the
semblance of the Schäumen (foam). Not only does the poem compare
semblance to foam, but more abstractly, it also compares the formal
repetition of semblance to its own foaming. While the poem reveals
the other in its singularity, it must do so in a hidden form. This secre-
tiveness is due not to the poem’s caution but to the realization that sin-
gularity can only be made present by repeating it, which is also to say,
by effacing it. In other words the singular source for the individual ap-
pears only in the foaming repetition that shows that this source of ab-
solute singularity is not shown. At the poem’s center lies a trope of lyric
self-reflection called a chiasm, which forms a visual cross with the
poem’s Schein and Wasser (water). By means of the chiasm, the poem’s
things, including the well, mouths, and land are reflected in the water
at the same time that they become what they represent and reflect on
what they have become. The individual entities in the poem rely on
semblance and semblance in turn relies on repetition.
Because Celan’s poetry stretched literature to the limits of meaning
it has become central to our attempts at orienting ourselves in the face
of cultural catastrophe. Over the past four decades leading theorists—
including Theodor Adorno, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Hans-
Georg Gadamer, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Emmanuel Levinas
—have helped to make the case that Celan’s work comprises the most
profound poetic testament to the European experience of the twenti-
eth century.2 His enormously influential texts offer the highest level of
reflection and pursue to the utmost the impulses of modernist aesthet-
ics while questioning those same impulses. So enigmatic have Celan’s
poems been said to be that they have put into question broad claims of
entire disciplines including hermeneutics and traditional literary stud-
ies.3 Critics have contested the poetry’s relationship to reality, the psy-
che, history, and representation as well as whether the poetry even
aims at understanding. They have debated these questions because
Celan’s perplexing poetic figures reveal things in their concealment.
These puzzling figures share a common language of self-observa-
tion. This book investigates the presence of central metaphors for ob-
INTRODUCTION 15
servation and their discourses in Celan’s poetry and prose. These are
Schein (semblance and illusion), Wahn (delusion, madness), and Wunde
(wound), which are derived primarily from the discourses of phe-
nomenology, epistemology, and the psyche. These three figures taken
together are concerned with how phenomena are synthesized for ob-
servers in terms of interpretation, experience, and knowledge. Tradi-
tionally, figures of illusion, madness, and wounds have depended on
the assumed difference between a remote underlying structure and its
sensible representation, be it an illusion that conceals an essence, a
delusion that distorts reality, or a psychic wound that obscures a first
cause. By replacing the distinctions inherent in these concepts with
repetition, Celan’s poems at once radically alter words and at the same
time give them individuality, one that is at stake in the poem. This is
possible because Celan’s poetry draws on the feature of repetition at
work in these three figures.
The poem, for instance “So bist du denn geworden,” locates this
process as a temporal one within itself. Because they repeat, these
metaphors for observation allow the poem to show how what preexists
it is wiped out. Celan’s poetry thus assumes the erasure of the singular
individual while it determines to project individuality into a void. The
dead in question would likely include Leo and Friederike Ancel,
Celan’s parents who perished in the Holocaust.4 The poems may be
said to be silent about the names of the dead because they are no
longer there to be reclaimed. Yet even if this were not so, there would
still be this silence. For the dead inhabit a reality that the poems cannot
represent, a reality that literary discourse can only see—to borrow a
phrase from Niklas Luhmann—out of the corner of its eye.5 Because
figures of repetition are extensions in time, however, they are uniquely
suited for marking individuals that relate at once to the present and at
the same time to the past as well as to the future. In other words, re-
peated images do not leave their antecedents untouched but instead
erase their pure singularity. In this way, figures of repetition in the
poem both show that words and individuals have been wiped out while
they simultaneously craft an emerging individual.
This is possible because the poem, as Celan writes in his speech
“Der Meridian,” is “gestaltgewordene Sprache eines Einzelnen” (GW
3:197–98) [the language of an individual that has become form]. In
each case the individual relates to the singular and distinctive entity.
Individuals do not simply exist. They must be made. An individual can
be person, metaphor, text, or word. In the case of “person,” what is re-

membered is the ancient meaning of the mask that a character uses in a
drama to create individuality. Celan cites the character Lucile from
Georg Büchner’s drama Dantons Tod to demonstrate personhood’s re-
liance on poetry. In his notes for “Der Meridian,” he asserted that po-
etry is the “presence of a person” (die Gegenwart einer Person) that
has “become visible” (Sichtbarwerden) and hence has achieved a finite
form in appearance. Simply put, a person is “die Verendlichung der
Sprache als Erscheinung” (TA: Meridian, 114) [the finitization of lan-
guage as appearance]. In this sense the individual relies on texts to
emerge as singular, distinctive, and visible.
Because a pure form of individuality, that is, an unrepeatable one,
cannot appear in poetry there must instead be forms of repetition. The
physical individual constitutes itself by making a distinction and mark-
ing itself off from what it is not. Yet this individual needs the illusion of
similarity or resemblance to distinguish itself, just as difference must
create sameness to emerge. Gilles Deleuze has commented at length
on the reliance of repetition on illusion.6 I have no need here to repro-
duce his argument, but I wish to mention that a word in a poem can be
said to act like a mask for another word in an endless chain of words,
each of which disguises itself, as it were. Here is where repetition, the
basic rhetorical device upon which poetry has always depended, be-
comes central to Celan.7 This is also to say that here too is where the
figures of illusion, madness, and wounds come into play, figures which
the poems do not simply refer to. Instead, as forms of observing the
world they decide how the poems will construct themselves. The sin-
gularity at the source of the poem needs repetition to show that it con-
ceals what it cannot reveal. By means of the distinction that repetition
can make, an individual can emerge, observe, and constitute itself.
While Celan’s poems remain radically open to formal elements of
repetition, they typically refrain from deploying this word. By way of
exception, a poem that speaks of repetition, “À la pointe acérée” (At
the piercing point), does so only to negate it:
Auf-
gelesene
kleine, klaffende
Buchecker: schwärzliches
Offen, von
Fingergedanken befragt
INTRODUCTION 17
nach—
wonach?
Nach
dem Unwiederholbaren, nach
ihm, nach
allem.
(GW 1:251–52)
[Sel-
ected
small, gaping
beechnuts: blackish
Open, asked by
finger thoughts
after—
after what?
After
the unrepeatable, after
it, after
everything.]
In his long essay on Celan, Derrida remarks that instances of dates in

Celan’s poems must open themselves to their own effacement to appear:
“But to speak of it, one must also efface it, make it readable, audible, in-
telligible, beyond the pure singularity of which it speaks.”8 Borrowing
Celan’s word from “À la pointe acérée,” Derrida claims that “the unre-
peatable” in a date, its “irreducible singularity,” must become repeatable.
Dates, poetry, the experience of language, for Derrida, all submit them-
selves to the necessity that they sacrifice their singularity to be written.
Considering Derrida’s claim that this happens to all instances of
language, which reveals “the sameness of all dating,”9 it is perhaps not
surprising that he leaves unsaid how Celan’s use of dates in this or any
poem differs from every other use. In “À la pointe acérée” the second
instance of nach (after) is the moment where the word becomes an in-
dividual distinct from the first. The effort to reveal the unrepeatable
individual by concealing it, in this case by visually surrounding it on
the page with what can be shown, motivates these iterations of nach.
The Buchecke(r) (beechnuts/book-corner) cannot recall for the poem
the extinguished lives of Buchenland, the region where Celan was born.10
If anything, the Buchecker could only reiterate their extinction. Yet if
Buch reappears in Buchecker, it does so not only to efface Buch’s absolute

singularity, it also, and this is key, distinguishes itself as a word in its
own right. Instead of the void that marks the spot once inhabited by
the singular individual, the Buchecker create an Offen (opening), into
which the individual steps. The very corner of the book (Buchecke/r)
that contains this poem on the page is then held open, or read open
(Auf-gelesen), and asked about the absolute, unrepeatable individual.
Their repeated questioning makes readable an unrepeatable singular-
ity, but one that must remain in a state of unreadability.
If Derrida does not explain Celan’s exceptional use of the date it is
to challenge the notion that a poem can have any choice about whether
its language is repeatable or not. Yet I contend that the Fingergedanken
(fingerthoughts) in “À la pointe acérée” consciously point at the repe-
titions that engender the individual in the context of the Holocaust as
well as alter the meanings of the words that the poem uses. For this
reason the poem borrows terms from the margins and open corners of
books, that is to say from discourses, as sources upon which it reflects,
sources which it then replaces. The individual can perhaps be con-
ceived as the division of the word into what the poem repeats and does
not repeat, or in other terms, what it makes appear and what it makes
disappear. In the case of “So bist du denn geworden” it is the foam,
which is a repetition in semblance, one that shows that its source of
pure singularity is something that it cannot show. The individual arises
out of such repetitions, that is, through its efforts at distinguishing it-
self from other words. The situation out of which the word emerges is
made possible and viewable only in instances of concentrated repeti-
tion, which are the marker for a hidden instance of individuation. This
is possible because the poetic word thus conceived is twofold. Insofar
as it consists of both the word that occasions it and an infinite, produc-
tive reflection on this word, it can in turn provoke a future.
While readers have claimed that Celan’s basic poetic tone is a meta-
physical one, his language is in fact remarkably of this physical world.
In “So bist du denn geworden” this world is clearly present in the well,
water, land, mouth, or, one might say, things concerning technology,
nature, and the human. Metaphysics stresses first principles, the un-
derlying structure of reality. Yet in the poem, metaphors of semblance
and shadow lead us into the realm of the sensible, opinion, becoming,
interpretation, and repetition. Philosophical thought since Plato un-
derstood repetition and reproduction (mimesis) to be aligned with illu-
INTRODUCTION 19
sion and madness. Accordingly, philosophy regarded them with suspi-

cion. By presenting Schein three times, the poem merges its formal el-
ement of repetition with its central metaphor. In this way the poem
states that things must be made repeatable in order to appear. At the
same time the poem draws them away from claims that they are repre-
sentational, ideal, ontological, or independent of interpretation. Far
from denigrated copies of original entities that do not need to be inter-
preted, both the poem’s foam and its sources (Brunnen) are instead acts
of observation. Celan’s decision to draw upon repetition as that which
occupies the source (Brunnenland) has radical implications for the real-
ity of the poetic text.
To inquire into this relationship of poetry to reality, or text to rep-
resentation, is to revisit the essential matter that the literary critic
Peter Szondi first identified in 1971. Szondi was influenced by post-
structuralist analyses of the symbolist poetry of Mallarmé, who can be
viewed as a lyrical precursor to Celan. Szondi distinguished Celan’s po-
etry from Aristotelian aesthetics, which relied on the distinction of
representing and represented entities. He identified the central issue at
stake in Celan’s poetry: “The text is refusing to serve reality, to go on
playing the role that has been assigned to it since Aristotle. Poetry is
ceasing to be mimesis, representation; it is becoming reality. To be
sure, this is a poetic reality: The text no longer stands in the service of
a predetermined reality, but rather is projecting itself, constituting it-
self as reality.”11 In the poem “Engführung” (Narrowing), which is fun-
damental to Szondi’s case, Celan writes of “the blackish field” that in-
scribes the deadly terrain of the extinguished individual:
Geh, deine Stunde

hat keine Schwestern, du bist—
bist zuhause. Ein Rad, langsam,
rollt aus sich selber, die Speichen
klettern,
klettern auf schwärzlichem Feld
(GW 1:197)
[Go, your hour

has no sisters, you are—
are at home. A wheel, slowly,
rolls out of itself, the spokes
climb,
climb on the blackish field]
For Szondi, “Engführung” actually brings into existence the “blackish

field” instead of describing it as a reality that exists independent of its
representation. As Szondi notes, “Engführung” has “forcibly brought”
the reader to the poem’s interior, withholding information, disorient-
ing and placing the reader in the text-terrain, thereby collapsing the
distinction “between the one who is reading and what is being read.”12
The far-reaching nature of Szondi’s claim has been stressed in an
extraordinary study by Rochelle Tobias, who argues that a poem such
as “Engführung” is an embodiment of figures of time and space to in-
clude the camps that it presents: “To the extent that the poem unfolds
as a terrain, it is identical with its utterances.”13 For Szondi too, the in-
dividual entities of the reality encountered in the poem are not preex-
isting ones. Indeed, according to the poem, these entities and their
space must be constructed by drawing distinctions and observing.
While the role of observation is not a stated concern for either Szondi
or Tobias, its significance for this poem and for all of Celan’s output is
stressed in the line: “Lies nicht mehr—schau! / Schau nicht mehr—
geh!” (GW 1:197) [Read no more—look! / Look no more—go!]. Here
an encounter with the poem’s entities through walking is made possi-
ble by their first being read and observed. In this way, the poem brings
forth a world of interacting things, a world that does not claim to usurp
or represent exterior reality, but one that rather relies on observation
to represent itself in its transitoriness.14 Insofar as Celan’s poetry draws
on figures of repetition, it both wipes out while it engenders the reality
at stake in the poem. As Szondi puts it, reality is the poem’s “precondi-
tion” as well as its “end.”15
The “blackish field” in “Engführung” marks the death of the indi-
vidual. Political violence of the Nazis began by extinguishing differ-
ence. Seen in this light the groundwork for terror was laid by the gen-
eration of a language and ideology that assumed and claimed to sustain
a single observer position that could subsume all others, a given reality
independent of interpretation, an epistemologically privileged center,
a guarantor of truth, a metalanguage anchored by the notions of Volk
and a fated historical mission. Alone among postwar poets, Celan con-
fronted head-on the task of writing a poetry that could deny this catas-
trophe the last word. Neither a concealed authenticity nor an innocent
past could be a source for this response. Celan’s early essay “Edgar
Jené” lays out the view, “daß Geschehenes mehr war als . . . ein mehr
oder minder schwer entfernbares Attribut des Eigentlichen, sondern
INTRODUCTION 21
ein dieses Eigentliche in seinem Wesen Veränderndes” (GW 3:156)

[that what had happened was more than . . . an attribute of the authen-
tic, an attribute more or less difficult to remove, but was rather a thing
to change the authentic in its essence]. Celan’s uneasiness at nostalgic
efforts to put poetry at the service of reclaiming an authentic reality
from the extinguished past influenced one of his most profound poetic
decisions. Reminiscent of Nietzsche’s turn toward the concept of “the
semblance of semblance,”16 Celan would figure the iterative form in
Schein, Wahn, and Wunde as the way for observing, that is, for knowing
and experiencing the world.
This attention to distinguishing between perceptions as correct in-
terpretations of the world on the one hand and illusion, delusion, and
wounds on the other is an ancient one in philosophy and literature. A
reader of remarkable breadth, Celan drew on this discussion in texts by
thinkers such as Plato, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, and
Freud. In Celan’s poetry—unlike in the discourses of phenomenology,
epistemology, and psychology—this larger distinction between the
modes of perception and those of illusion is one that is poetically prac-
ticed rather than conceptually posited and scrupulously maintained.
That is to say, Celan’s poetry questions the opposition of perception
versus illusion, and with it the opposition of objective knowledge ver-
sus opinion, navigating its way along them without either overcoming
or affirming them. Instead, he replaces the distinction with the move-
ment of repetition within the text.
By claiming that poetry is not the purview of an “Illuminatentum”
(illuminati),17 Celan implied that his poems would not mystically sub-
late distinctions between either appearance and reality, or hallucina-
tion and perception, or cause and traumatic effect. Celan’s poems do
not attempt to become the unrepresentable silence of singularity,
which is at the source of the individual and the poem. Rather they aim
to become a kind of babble or chatter by immersing themselves in
metaphors of doubling—illusions, delusions, wounds. In this way they
can mark the violence that agitates them at the same time that they
amplify their state of having been agitated. As do all languages, Celan’s
remains an object language that will not liberate itself from this world.
Yet Celan’s poetry distinguishes between our experience of illusionary
phenomena and the gesture toward an authoritative “meta-experien-
tial” point of observation that would decide the matter. Thus in “So
bist du denn geworden,” the water makes an agitated show that as-
sumes an existence independent of what can be objectively confirmed.

Each claim for an authoritative perception, which could collapse all
observer positions into one legitimate position by rooting itself in ob-
jectivity, becomes a further illusion.
For this reason Celan’s poetry is replete with figures drawn from
the discourses of appearance, knowledge, and the mind. Favored
metaphors are entities of self-observation such as a light that deludes
an observer, a wound that refuses to scar over, or a brain that is being
split in two. Each of these discourses is distinguished by traditional op-
positions that are specific to it. These can be understood as appearance
and being, reality and delusion, cause and effect, each of which con-
cerns a modality of observation. Thus the poem aims not primarily at
depicting, as if the challenge in question were to represent authentic
objects, but instead at observing and distinguishing. Insofar as the
poems rely on these figures to construct individuality, their inherent
features set limits and create possibilities for the texts. In turn the
poems do not leave these figures and discourses unchanged. Far from
it, the poems create an archive of altered words from the discourse of
observation as they progress. Celan’s poems thus not only inscribe but
also destroy as well as transform. To read these figures of observation is
to confront poetry as individuality. It is a poetry that repeats so as to in-
vestigate its sources, observe the world’s observations, and expose the
individual.
An Overview
In each of this book’s chapters I explore the efforts at individuation that
the poems pursue. Chapter 1 explores how in Celan’s poems of sem-
blance and madness the question is that of a text as self. These poems
rely on phenomenological notions of semblance to project a future in
place of the effaced individual. A key source for these poems was Niet-
zsche’s notion of semblance. For Nietzsche the task for observation is
not to reach the concealed essence of what he likened to be a destruc-
tive drive, but rather the individual appearances themselves associated
with culture’s productive forces. Nietzsche compared poetic images to
dazzling masks that protect and heal the observer’s gaze from the vio-
lence at the heart of life. This image of the mask becomes in Celan’s
texts a poetic figure of light that shelters the individual. The poem
“Die letzte Fahne” (The last flag) stages a clash between the assertion
INTRODUCTION 23
and the denial of semblance. Poems such as “Die letzte Fahne” and
“Ich kenne dich” (I know you) rely on Nietzschean distinctions to cre-
ate a place that both protects the individual as well as marks the indi-
vidual’s past effacement. In poems such as “Kleine Silbe” (Small sylla-
ble) this thought is adapted to become the ability to ward off the
madness and melancholy that would destroy the individual. Each of
the poems I discuss is embedded in the phenomenological language of
delusion, illusion, and melancholy. In phenomenology melancholy is
understood as an inversion of time, in which the finality of the past and
the openness of the future reverse themselves. In his melancholy
poems Celan exploited this inversion to define the past as contingent.
In Celan’s poetological speech “Der Meridian,” addressed in chap-
ter 2, the concern is with the suddenness with which poetry interrupts
art, which allows the figures for personhood the instant they require to
appear. The discourse of hallucinatory madness provides poetry with
metaphors for both production and interruption. Michel Foucault un-
derstood madness as the other’s stifled speech, which a universal reason
must exclude to ground itself. In his view a rational discussion of mad-
ness can nevertheless access madness in a state uncompromised by the
knowledge that silences it. Arguing against this, Derrida posited that
rational discourse cannot let madness speak under any circumstances
but instead only further denies it. In Celan’s speech, by contrast, mad-
ness offers the poem a resource enabling it both to trace the eradica-
tion of the past individual and to perceive the individual to come. In
the case of Büchner’s literary characters, Lucile and Lenz, the madness
of their words provides the linguistic steps necessary for them to ap-
pear in the body of the speech as individuals. For Celan madness in the
form of silence becomes a source of the poem. It constitutes the ab-
sence out of which the audible word may emerge. Madness is both the
individual in the poem and its effacement.
In Celan’s middle and late poems of madness the concern is with the
destruction and instantiation of the individual through a mimetic pro-
cess within the present of the poem, a process discussed in chapter 3.
This contrasts with the lyric’s traditional association with subjectivity.
As Celan brackets out the subject, the foci of poem and reader fall on
the mechanisms of communication and perception. This poetry claims
for both itself and the sensible world the ability to clothe itself in new
words, with new masks, so to speak, that is, to craft itself. The middle
and late poems expose themselves to the complete surrender to mad-
ness in the form of the breakdown of meaning. Yet they stage their
own process of sense making in the real time of the poem, in which the
time that the poems represent merges with that of their reading. The
poem under discussion is “Huhediblu.” This poem displays how words
are broken apart to expose the most discrete meaningful parts that,
though fragmented, can nevertheless cohere to form an intention. At
the same time, “Huhediblu” draws on metaphors of political madness
to present the politics of the Nazi Wannsee-Konferenz as a hysteria that
effaced individuality. This poetry conceives of madness as secondary
words for an inaccessible one. Absent such a source, Celan was com-
pelled to give words a new body.
Chapter 4 explores how in Celan’s poems of genial madness the
matter is one of giving words an origin in the present in place of one
from an absent past. These are also Celan’s Hölderlin poems “Tübin-
gen, Jänner” (Tübingen, January) and “Ich trink Wein” (I drink wine),
which draw on metaphors of origins to define themselves in terms of
translation. Nowhere is Celan’s notion of poetry as translation more
manifest than “Tübingen, Jänner,” a poem that must retrieve its fig-
ures from oblivion so as to interrogate and assert their existence. Be-
cause words can be uprooted from origins no longer humanly known,
which is also to say they have more than enough meaning, they can
proliferate as individuals. These poems quote with economic precision
historical claims that represent imitation as madness and originality as
poetic inspiration. They quote these to overturn their logic. In the ab-
sence of origins the poems need to become translations of other texts
to be legible as individuals in their own right. In the moment that the
poems gain their existence they demolish claims for authenticity and
mystified origins of the aesthetic.
Celan’s poems of the wound and the psyche deal with the produc-
tion of memory in the present, which is the focus in chapter 5. The sci-
entific discourse of the wounded mind is traditionally concerned with
the split between an inaccessible, violent cause and its effect as repre-
sentation. The cause is said to be inaccessible to conscious memory be-
cause it is vanished, unrepresentable, belated, repressed, or veiled. In
Celan’s case, the cause belongs to an environment that the poetic text
cannot observe. Unable to observe the first cause, Celan’s wound
poems must incorporate both cause as well as effect within their bodies
in the form of repetition, which projects a future in the present rather
than an imagined past. By wounding themselves, as it were, they create
INTRODUCTION 25
a memory in their textual body. I argue that one can distinguish be-
tween various stages of Celan’s wound poems. In the earliest poems the
wound creates a mother figure in the place of the dead. His later
poems transfer wounds from the mother’s body to the poem’s own ma-
teriality in the formal properties of the cut. They mark word and con-
cept with the trace of a violent effacement. Critics have discussed the
methods by which Celan stretched to the brink what poetry can say.
This chapter demonstrates that the qualities of wounds create an
archive necessary for the text while marking as many areas of language
as possible with wounds.
1
The Phenomenology
of Illusion
“Die Strahlen. Sie wehn uns zuhauf. / Wir tragen den Schein,
den Schmerz und den Namen” (GW 1:165) [The rays. They blow us
into heaps. / We bear the look, the pain and the name]—these lines
from the 1959 poem “Weiß und leicht” (White and light) concisely
link Schein to the self and pain. In a poem concerned with a secret,
mystical light, Schein means not any appearance or “look” but one that
is luminous. Drafts for the poem show that Celan wrote Schein in the
published text after “pain” as well as “name” (TA: Sprachgitter, 38).
Semblance thus joins the poem in the final stage of its emergence. In
this way the semblance not only manifests the phenomenon of pain but
also shields the figures in the poem from pain’s full destructive force. In
other words, in its genesis the poem draws on the prophylactic role
provided by Schein to allow the persons in the text to survive the light,
to be.
While these lines are admittedly stinting, the emergence of sem-
blance that they reveal is telling for the whole of Celan’s poetry. In his
earliest published poems appearances provide a shield for singular en-
tities to emerge and survive. This poetic incorporation of Schein has
specific sources in philosophical works of Nietzsche, Plato, Kant, and
Schopenhauer. In Nietzsche’s understanding, semblance affords both
protection from suffering and a productive avenue for mourning.
Celan had read Nietzsche in Czernowitz before the war at the time of
his earliest works, yet his poems, I argue, register the impact of his
readings only later in clear fashion. In the late 1940s and early 1950s
Celan’s work reveals an initial appropriation of Nietzsche’s notion of
semblance. This attention to the figure of Schein changed his work,
which now aimed to give individual entities the semblance that they
26
1 / THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ILLUSION 27
need not only to exist, but also to defend against what threatens to de-
stroy them.
In this chapter I approach the motifs of madness, illusion, and
melancholy in Celan’s poems, focusing on the way in which poems
from both Celan’s early and later period conceive of themselves as
agents that ward off attacks. Delusion, melancholy, the breakdown of
meaning, and the finality of the past are the phenomena against which
the poems take preventive measures. At the same time, these poems
turn toward the notion of illusion and madness as means of protection.
In one poem, the delusional self finds mooring in the reality of the
other. In another, the syllables of words become a kind of secret home
where the other locates itself. In Celan’s poetry of melancholy, the con-
cern is with defending the past against the encroachments of finitude,
which would completely destroy it. In each of these poems from
Celan’s early and later period, language is figured as a kind of doubling,
which emerges as a defensive strategy of the poem. The proximity of
madness and melancholy to the questions of body and mind in Celan’s
works were such that he wrote in a late poem that the stuff of both vi-
sion and sense were drawn from melancholy, which here takes the me-
dieval form of “night gall”: “Schaufäden, Sinnfäden, aus / Nachtgalle
geknüpft / hinter der Zeit” (GW 2:88) [Sight threads, Sense threads, /
knitted from night gall / behind the time].
Masks
Several poems in Celan’s early work investigate madness, deception,

and illusion in terms of both a destructive projection and a covering
that protects the self. Most notable in this regard is the poem “Die let-
zte Fahne” (The last flag). Celan initially published “Die letzte Fahne”
in Bucharest in May 1947 within weeks of the first appearance of his
most famous poem “Todesfuge” [Death fugue] (FW, 262).1 One of his
first postwar poems, “Die letzte Fahne” is marked by the fresh wounds
of the extermination of the Bukowina’s Jewish population. It presents
hunters engaged in an obsessive pursuit of their quarry to the point
that they pierce appearances to reach the core of their own projection
of natural reality. In the poem, this pursuit is their madness. This is to
say that the hunters assume the existence of an authoritative criterion
to distinguish illusion from true perception:
Die letzte Fahne

Ein wasserfarbenes Wild wird gejagt in den dämmernden Marken.
So binde die Maske dir vor und färbe die Wimpern dir grün.
Die Schüssel mit schlummerndem Schrot wird gereicht über
Ebenholztische:
von Frühling zu Frühling schäumt hier der Wein, so kurz ist das Jahr,
so feurig der Preis dieser Schützen—die Rose der Fremde:
dein irrender Bart, die müßige Fahne des Baumstumpfs.
Gewölk und Gebell! Sie reiten den Wahn in den Farn!

Wie Fischer werfen sie Netze nach Irrlicht und Hauch!
Sie schlingen ein Seil um die Kronen und laden zum Tanz!
Und waschen die Hörner im Quell—so lernen sie Lockruf.
Ist dicht, was du wähltest als Mantel, und birgt es den Schimmer?
Sie schleichen wie Schlaf um die Stämme, als böten sie Traum.
Die Herzen schleudern sie hoch, die moosigen Bälle des Wahnsinns:
o wasserfarbenes Vlies, unser Banner am Turm!
(GW 1:23)
[The Last Flag

A water-colored quarry is hunted in the marches’ faint light.
So tie on your mask and color your eyelashes green.
The dish with slumbering shot is served over ebony tables:
from spring to spring here the wine foams, so short is the year,
so fiery the prize of these archers—the rose of strange places:
your errant beard, the indolent flag of the tree-stump.
Cloud and baying! They ride their madness into the fern!
Like fishermen they cast their nets after erring light and air!
They sling a rope around the crowns and invite us to dance!
And wash the horns in the well—so learning the lure-call.
Is it dense, what you chose as a coat, and does it hold the shimmer?
They creep around the trunks like sleep, as if they offered the dream.
The hearts, they hurl them up high, the mossy balls of madness:
o water-colored fleece, our banner on the tower!]
In the poem a voice commands the quarry, the other, to wear a

mask. This mask, along with the semblance, madness, and light, recall
Nietzsche’s Geburt der Tragödie (Birth of Tragedy). It is known that
Celan examined this text in the early 1950s and again in the late 1960s.2
In view of his early interest in Nietzsche in the late 1930s, he most
probably encountered the notion of semblance expressed in this work

at that time. Nietzsche writes of the mask as a technique for establish-
ing and protecting individuality, referring to “those images of light
[Lichtbilderscheinungen] of the Sophoclean hero, in other words, the
Apollonian quality of the mask, the results of gazing into nature’s inner
terrible depths, as it were, radiant patches to heal a gaze seared by
gruesome night” (KSA 1:65).3 In Nietzsche’s work the mask acts at
once as a radiant image or shining appearance that makes individuality
possible and at the same time as a shield against the terrors of nature’s
primoridal unity. As we shall see, Celan appropriates this dual capacity
of semblance. For now it suffices to note that the Wahn in the poem is
a form of imitation that produces and protects but also threatens the
individual.
When the Germans invaded Russia in 1941 Romanian soldiers and
troops of the SS (Protective Squadron) and SD (Security Service) es-
tablished a Jewish ghetto. The Axis powers deported many Jews, in-
cluding Celan’s parents, to German concentration camps in the
Ukraine. By the winter of 1942–43 Celan received news of his parents:
witnesses report that his father died of typhus and that Germans exe-
cuted his mother.4 “Die letzte Fahne” assumes a historically specific
meaning when situated against the background of the destruction of
the Bukowina’s Jews. This context in the poem is submerged in the
story of a hunt. At the same time, the poem presents props, figures, and
scenic aspects deriving from Dionysian myths: the mask, which Diony-
sus is said to wear, the wine, the “hearts,” the fern, and “mossy balls”
proper to the god of wine, pathos, and vegetation.5 Dionysus is also the
god of ecstasy, his followers overtaken by the blind madness of the
dances, those rituals in his name. Dionysus’s best weapon against his
enemies is madness, the permanent curse that is inflicted on those op-
posing his rituals. At the same time, “Die letzte Fahne” draws on both
the myth of the hunt, into which it situates the other, as well as Niet-
zsche’s notion of semblance, in which it shelters this other with the
mask. In other words, the mask enables the other to become an indi-
vidual, while also concealing its singularity from the hunters.
The literary critic Karl Heinz Bohrer has argued that Nietzsche’s
Geburt der Tragödie overturns the Platonic opposition of a surface illu-
sion versus a deeper, concealed reality. The aim is to reach not Plato’s
immutable Ideas, but the appearances themselves.6 An aesthetic ap-
pearance is not simply Schein but der Schein des Scheins [the semblance
of semblance] (KSA 1:39), that is, its self-reflection. Norbert Bolz has
noted that though all is illusion in Nietzsche, art alone is privileged be-
cause it presents itself as this “Schein des Scheins.”7 The Greeks self-
consciously produced semblance in beauty, Nietzsche claims, in reac-
tion to a basic substratum of suffering, mourning, and meaninglessness
characterizing all life. Nietzsche distinguished between the Apollonian
“Schein des Scheins“ and the Dionysian “Schein des Seins” (KSA
7:184) [appearance of being]. While he critiques the scientifically in-
formed, conceptually mediated illusion of naturalism, Nietzsche val-
orizes this Schein des Scheins (KSA 1:112). This is because Nietzsche
views Schein as an essential moment of aesthetic experience and insight
as well as survival. Accordingly the goal in Nietzsche’s inverted Platon-
ism is to reach semblance, which occupies for him a position at the fur-
thest remove “vom wahrhaft Seienden” (KSA 7:199) [from what truly
is]. This Schein is always the “Wiederschein” [repeated appearance] of
an original suffering’s initial appearance (KSA 7:335). Art dwells in a
second-order semblance and does so aware of its artifice, as Nietzsche
writes in notes of 1873: “Kunst behandelt also den Schein als Schein,
will also gerade nicht täuschen, ist wahr” (KSA 7:632) [art treats illusion
as illusion, it thus does not want to deceive, it is true]. By not claiming to
present a veiled primordial truth or existence that could be glimpsed
behind an outer reality, by not asserting a truth for itself that it does
not possess, it does not deceive.
For Nietzsche, the Greeks discovered the substratum of human
suffering and its sublimation in tragedy. Underlying existence are ter-
rors manifested in the Dionysian, which in their purest expression ap-
pear as a vicious illness. To achieve immunity and a measure of protec-
tion from its most destructive effects, the Greeks turned to the
aesthetic appearance of the Apollonian. This is to say that the Greeks
found in the beautiful a productive delusion powerful enough to coun-
teract the destructive fury of Dionysian delusions. In addition to the
Apollonian connection to Schein, the concern with individuality re-
veals the clearest distinction between the two conflicting cultural
drives. While the openly violent Dionysian drive aimed at the destruc-
tion of individuality and the domination of the collective self, the
Apollonian drive aimed at the creation of individuality and Schein in
finely drawn images. Images redeemed and shielded humans from the
abyss of mourning. Confronted with the suffering, the primordial
unity, and the unintelligibility of existence, the Greeks turned to “kräf-
tige Wahnvorspiegelungen und lustvolle Illusionen” (KSA 1:37) [pow-

erful delusions and pleasurable illusions] both to produce individuality
and protect it. For Nietzsche both Schein and Wahn have prophylactic
functions that provide a shield against the ontological sources of
mourning. In “Die letzte Fahne” these images are at stake for the
other who veils itself in them. The mask, the fleece, the coat, and the
maschera provide such images. Nietzsche’s notion of the “shining ap-
pearance” becomes in Celan’s poem the mask and, as we shall see, the
shimmer that the vestments of the other conceal. Through these at-
tempts at individuality the other can not only appear but can also
shield itself from the violence of the hunters. What in Nietzsche was
the ontological violence of nature as such becomes in “Die letzte
Fahne” the cultural violence of these pursuers.
The conflict at the center of “Die letzte Fahne” is one between
“sie” (they), the hunters, and the other, or the quarry. Lines 2, 6, and
11 belong to this other. The last line returns to the “water-colored” of
the poem’s beginning to evoke a fleece, and to construct a collective in
“unser” (our). What was alive and hunted, the Wild (game/quarry) in
the first line is replaced with dead fleece, the skin of the hunted in the
last. In the poem’s logic the other should react to its performative
statements. In the first of these, the Du, or the other, should both con-
ceal and color itself with the mask.
The poem’s key organizing feature is that of imitation and delusion.
This feature appears not only in the mask but also with the “so” in the
poem’s first line:
Ein wasserfarbenes Wild wird gejagt in den dämmernden Marken.

So binde die Maske dir vor und färbe die Wimpern dir grün.
[A water-colored quarry is hunted in the marches’ faint light.

So tie on your mask and color your eyelashes green.]
The “so” connects the first line’s apparently descriptive phrase—that

the game is hunted—to the imperative to act. In this juncture of
Celan’s poem, so can mean three things: as a conjunction, therefore (in
the sense of a logical conclusion); as an interjection, well, or now; or ad-
verbially as in ebenso to mean in such a manner, in this manner, that is, in
terms of similarity or semblance. Yet with the rest of the poem, which
reveals a sharp structure of such semblances and comparisons, this “so”
takes on the third sense of the word, in this manner. In addition, other
conjunctions of comparison dominate, including “wie” (like, as). The

eben (as) of ebenholz (ebony) and als (as) turn Celan’s poem into one of
mimetic comparison, which establishes the meaning of the madness in
this poem.
The Error of the Tree
That the other is the hunted becomes evident through a word in the
poem that links them. The other is said to have an “irrender Bart” (er-
rant beard) from the word irren, to deceive oneself, and in the third
strophe the hunters pursue the other in the form of “Irrlicht” (erring
light) and “Hauch” (air/breath). Irrlicht is a specific deceptive optical
phenomenon, which is usually translated as a “will-o’-the-wisp,” a fiery
wisp of smoke found on moors, but in various folk superstitions it is a
deceptive specter. Irren is a common figure in the early work of Celan.
In this poem it appears to signal the presence of the other, a presence
that reveals itself solely as a visual phenomenon.
Uniting both incidents of irr in “Die letzte Fahne” are thus mean-
ings of deception, uncertainty, deviation, and illusion, which are then
linked with the madness that emerges in the poem. For Nietzsche irren
is not merely to be deceived but it is also to be cognizant of error. It is
the decision to err because of the limited knowledge that perception
provides. Unlike Nietzsche’s notion of irren as a precondition of life
and knowledge, the hunters in the poem apprehend their error as static
fact removed from indices of time, place, and causality. Nietzsche came
to identify the surface phenomenon of appearance as the indistin-
guishability of reality from semblance.8 Appearances reveal empirical
reality to be illusory, while illusion is the only accessible reality. Ac-
cordingly Nietzsche attacked Socrates for regarding all art and ethics
that would claim a truth “without correct and certain insight” [ohne
richtige und sichere Einsicht]—in short, all opinion—as “die Macht
des Wahns” (KSA 1:89) [the power of delusion ].9 In this way Nietzsche
appropriates the denigrated term Wahn and inverts it into the knowl-
edge of the moral and aesthetic realms, the knowledge that error
makes life possible. Nietzsche welcomed the aesthetics of Wahn and
Irren (error) as reflective powers of the imaginary that alone can para-
doxically bring about knowledge: “Life is the necessary condition for
knowledge. Error [Irren] is the condition for life, that is, error to the
very depths. To know of this error is not to be released from it! There
is nothing bitter about this! We have to love and foster error, it is the
womb of knowledge. Art as the fostering of delusion [Wahn]—our
cult” (KSA 9:504).10 Only against the background of error is any
knowledge possible. In the poem, irren is a form of identification or
perceiving the same in difference, which the other does reflectively to
survive and which the hunters do in their pursuit. In this sense neither
pursued nor pursuer escapes error. Yet, the hunters, as I will show, ig-
nore that sameness is an illusion and try to shatter error to reach a
phantom truth at the heart of appearance.
This reality sought after by the hunters is symbolized in the tree
that becomes identical with their projection of the other. As a figure
the tree has often served as proof of the reality of the concrete world
seemingly free from metaphorical contamination. For the poem’s
other the perception of nature in the form of the tree is profoundly
subject to error:
dein irrender Bart, die müßige Fahne des Baumstumpfs.

...............................................
Sie schleichen wie Schlaf um die Stämme, als böten sie Traum.
[your errant beard, the indolent flag of the tree-stump.

..............................................
They creep around the trunks like sleep, as if they offered the dream.]
In his essay “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” Nietzsche

uses the tree to argue for the semblance at work in rhetoric: “We be-
lieve when we speak of trees . . . we know something of the things
themselves and yet we possess nothing but metaphors of things, which
in no way at all correspond to any original entities” (KSA 1:879). In
“Die letzte Fahne,” the tree serves the other as yet another masquerade
required for survival, allowing it to appear as an effect of nature. Yet
the other’s proximity to the tree becomes a marker for the hunters’ at-
tempt to see in it an object beyond perception, which would be beyond
error, and thereby to wipe it out. The case of the tree, which for Niet-
zsche refutes correspondence between word and world, finds different
uses in the context of the Holocaust. Writing in 1944 Adorno noted
the rhetorical challenges of the tree’s beauty, arguing that the “tree that
blossoms lies in the instant in which one perceives its blossoms without
seeing the shadow of horror.”11 In “Die letzte Fahne” the tree as an
embodiment of apparent natural authenticity reveals that its language

is marked by pursuit and survival.
In Celan’s early works the tree is a metaphor for a world that has
been destroyed. By the time the Germans and Romanians decimated
Czernowitz’s Jewish population, Celan’s notion of language and its re-
lationship to an ontological reality became one of radical disjunction.
Celan’s 1948 prose piece Edgar Jené takes a distinctly Nietzschean
turn, whereby the poetic voice ridicules a dangerously naive position:
“Die Vernunft solle walten, den Worten, also den Dingen, Geschöpfen
und Begebenheiten, ihr eigentlicher (primitiver) Sinn wiedergegeben
werden . . . Ein Baum sollte wieder ein Baum werden” (GW 3:156).
[Reason is supposed to prevail, the words, thus the things, beings, and
events should be given back their authentic (primitive) meaning . . . A
tree must be a tree again.] While for Nietzsche language provided
rhetorical semblance, for Celan the imaginary pact between trees and
their words has been shown to be a fraud. Cut free of any connection
between authentic meaning and entity, language and appearances be-
come chains of illusion.
The Decoy’s Call
In the case of “Die letzte Fahne” this view is shown in the figuration of
Wahn as imitation. The hunted, possessing the water’s transparency be-
fore it takes on any taint, has the potential for receiving color and shad-
ings. Owing to the absence of an essential hue, the other’s opaque trans-
parency is capable of imitating a potentially infinite spectrum of colors,
the perception of which is mediated by affective and physical elements.
When the poem’s voice commands the other to “tie on the mask” and
“color your eyelashes green,” the quarry should mask and camouflage
itself. This means that it should appropriate an illusory appearance as a
means of protection. Echoing the prophylactic quality that Nietzsche
attributes to art, the mask’s illusion should protect the hunted. As the
hunters pursue an illusion, so should the hunted turn this illusion into a
shield—hence the so. What this amounts to is that the hunted should
become the imitation of imitation. Other early poems of Celan, for in-
stance “Unstetes Herz” (Unsteady heart) from Mohn und Gedächtnis
(Poppy and memory), offer a similar gesture: “denn nichts / tritt hervor
in eigner Gestalt” (GW 1:71) [for nothing / emerges in its own like-
ness]. Rather than identifying with a given entity the other in “Die let-
zte Fahne” evades the authentic. This Nietzschean figure, the illusion
of illusion, masks, in which something can appear only as something
else, is for the whole of Celan’s poetic output a central principle for
making distinctions, for perception and experience. Its formal equiva-
lent is the technique of repetition.
This motif of imitation is carried forward in the so of the second
part of the first strophe:
von Frühling zu Frühling schäumt hier der Wein, so kurz ist das Jahr,
so feurig der Preis dieser Schützen—die Rose der Fremde:
[here the wine foams from spring to spring, so short is the year,
so fiery the prize of these archers—the rose of strange places:]
The comparative link between “from spring to spring” and “short is the
year” is determined by the common language of time. Yet “so feurig
der Preis dieser Schützen” (so fiery the prize of these archers) has no
determined other term for comparison. It may refer to “von Frühling
zu Frühling” (from spring to spring) as does so kurz (so short), in which
case the quality feurig (fiery) is compared to the action of the flowing
wine. The significance is that it copies the temporal flow. Indeed, so
feurig functions as a comparison with so kurz (so short), which the poem
further compares to time: a chain of imitations, in which one thing,
event, or act appropriates an appearance of another thing to be per-
ceived. The colons linking several lines also establish the dependence
of one phrase on another for each to appear. With the second strophe
more forceful comparisons emerge. The hunters cast their nets after
both this “Irrlicht” (erring light) and the “Hauch” (air; breath) “wie
Fischer” (like fishermen). This rhetoric of comparison and imitation
extends of course to the hunters. They have no identity that the poem
accepts as given. Rather they appear only as comparisons with some-
thing else, like fishermen. These words, so, wie, als, which mean “as” or
“like,” refer not to nature, but to perception.
In this world the quarry is a projection of the hunters. In their effort
to capture it they must learn to imitate it. With their mimetic Lockruf
(decoy call) they imitate the language of the quarry, “Und waschen die
Hörner im Quell—so lernen sie Lockruf” (And wash the horns in the
well—so learning the lure-call). Not only do the hunters masquerade
as fishermen, they also promise a dream that they cannot offer as they
“schleichen wie Schlaf um die Stämme, als böten sie Traum” (creep
around the trunks like sleep, as if they offered the dream). They cannot
offer the dream, which would be the prophylactic, conscious imitation
of a primitive reality that one cannot access, one that perhaps does not
exist, for they believe to inhabit this very reality. Yet this dream is men-
tioned so that its nonrealization becomes visible. As a result the
hunters deceptively appear as both sleep and dream, that is, as redemp-
tive, reconciling, and lulling alternatives to conflict, confusion, and vi-
olence of consciousness.
Hunted Hearts
In one sense, the poem figures the hunters not only as imitators but
also as deceivers. They conceal their assumption of other forms. They
imitate the language of the hunted so as to deceive and capture it. They
offer a truth they do not have, “as if they offered the dream.” In Niet-
zsche’s construct, the Dionysian impulse conflates appearance with
being’s ontological core. In the poem the hunters identify what they see
with essential entities. In contrast to the hunters, the quarry in “Die let-
zte Fahne” displays the awareness that it can achieve individuality only
via the mask. Reminiscent of Apollo as the god of light, dream and ap-
pearance, the other takes on masks and shimmering clothing to protect
itself from the hunters. In the last stanza, the other has chosen a coat
prompting the poetic voice to ask, “und birgt es den Schimmer?” (and
does it hold the shimmer?). Rather than follow Michael Hamburger in
translating “bergen” as “to conceal,” I translate it as “to hold.”12 By
holding the glimmer as a mantel of light, the coat reveals the presence
of the light. In an Apollonian turn, the quarry uses its mask and color-
ful maschera as Schein, as images to engender individuality and give off
phantomlike qualities.
These qualities are the Irrlicht, Hauch, and Wahn, qualities that the
hunters pursue:
Sie reiten den Wahn in den Farn!

Wie Fischer werfen sie Netze nach Irrlicht und Hauch!
[They ride their madness into the fern!

Like fishermen they cast their nets after erring light and air!]
The hunters are possessed of their own illusion. Here Hamburger’s

translation, which has “They ride their madness” for “Sie reiten den
Wahn” supports this reading.13 In this sense they aim to master appear-
ance just as they achieve mastery over natural phenomena of trees and
spring. The hunters “drive” or ride Wahn, that is, they blindly pursue
their quarry. Yet the logic of delusion throws mastery into question: do
the hunters control the illusion (Wahn) of their quarry, or are they
given over to its uncontrollable momentum? There is a double mean-
ing in the phrase, “Sie reiten den Wahn” (they ride madness) which re-
calls the expression, “jemand wird vom Wahn geritten” (to be driven
by madness), an ambiguity over which Wahn constitutively presides.
For within their own field of observation it cannot be clear at which
point the Wild becomes the delusion that pursues them.
As an idée fixe, this notion—the sense in which pathological images
seem to take on their own life and wind up persecuting their subjects
—has become a commonplace in abnormal psychology. Yet its articu-
lation regarding perception and thought is less familiar. By drawing on
this notion the poem further distinguishes the quarry from the
hunters. The quarry assumes an imitative appearance whose only
ground is yet another imitative act. The hunters on the other hand, in
their drive to possess their aim and organize their surroundings, pur-
sue the quarry as objective nature, bestowing on them a certainty not
born out by their illusions. For in aiming to capture the quarry, they
seek to attain a concealed essence behind “Wahn,” “Irrlicht,” and
“Hauch.” They pursue the identity of appearance and essence.
In this moment “Die letzte Fahne” moves from Wahn to Wahnsinn:
Die Herzen schleudern sie hoch, die moosigen Bälle des Wahnsinns
[The hearts, they hurl them up high, the mossy balls of madness]
While the Apollonian quarry draws on the mask to protect itself, the
Dionysian hunters aim to pierce surfaces. For the quarry, appearances
do not correspond to given essences or authoritative perceptions. It
too must move within the world of Wahn in its essential uncertainty:
appearances may be true or deceptive. Yet the hunters seek to tran-
scend the apparent surface of appearances and gain access to an au-
thentic truth behind them. Experience alone cannot distinguish be-
tween illusion/hallucination and real perception.14 Only by resorting to
the existence of an illusory independent reality at the heart of appear-

ances can the hunters reject those appearances as determined illusions.
In other words, for the quarry Wahn is an urgent masquerade as a
fact of survival. It is knowledge and perception that engage in the pos-
sibilities of thought, fiction, doubt, and imagination. By contrast the
hunter’s passage from Wahn to Wahnsinn can be seen as the emergence
of the madness in which the uncertainty accompanying every decision,
the perspectival nature of knowledge, is eradicated by the introduction
of a prediscursive notion of the individual. This passage shows that the
hunters secure a potential projection as objectivity. They begin with a
search for a quarry that may or may not be consistent with their images
of it. Yet this pursuit becomes the impulse to seek out and destroy indi-
viduality, revealed in the image of the torn out hearts. At this moment
the hunters secure appearances and capture them as the authentic
heart of an individual that must be effaced. The association of heart
with madness restates the ancient connection between madness and
pathos, that is, between madness and uncontrollable emotions, be-
tween pathos and the absence or “waning” (wahn) of reason (sinn).
These hearts of the quarry are most interior and concealed. Thus it
is significant that they are exuberantly, violently exteriorized by being
brought to the surface. Piercing the body to get at the heart is a fa-
vored motif in Celan’s early work, seen, for instance, in the poem “Wer
sein Herz” (Whoever his heart), which muses on “Wer sein Herz aus
der Brust reißt zur Nacht und schleudert es hoch” (GW 1:51) [He who
tears his heart from his breast at night and hurls it high up]. Here the
hearts are balls of madness because they reflect the confusion of
primeval nature with appearances. Unlike the quarry, the hunters go
beyond imagining the possibility that the object of their hunt possesses
a pre-discursive ontological individuality. They act on this identifica-
tion of individual and essence. Their Wahnsinn is thus the refusal of il-
lusion as well as the impulse to destroy the individual. While the
quarry imitates the imitative act, the hunters imitate the identity of the
quarry so as to capture a phantasmagorical heart.
Here “Die letzte Fahne” asserts the delusion involved in projection.
The hunters pursue the unattainable: they would capture illusion (Ir-
rlicht und Hauch) and pierce its luminous body to get at the heart of na-
ture. Their breach of the mask by violently piercing the body is also
the attempt to rip out the truth that would secure perception—the un-
mistakable heart of being. In this they have moved from the pursuit of
Wahn (illusion), its appearances and contingence, to the Wahnsinn

(madness) of the latter’s exclusion, the moment of a persecution. Celan
marks the otherness of the hunter’s quarry with his phrase “die Rose
der Fremde”—that is, strange or other, while the rose, an allegory of
its color, points to the poem’s end where violence explodes on the page
in the extracted hearts. The surface of things becomes in the hands of
the hunted a weapon, a weapon that may not save their lives but in-
stead, literally, their skin.
This survival is located in the poem’s image of the fleece. The refer-
ence to the “last” flag in the poem’s title signifies that this flag is the
hunters’ goal to bring an end to illusion. This telos is a metaphor for
the conquest and mastery over appearance. The title under which the
poem was first published, “Ein wasserfarbenes Wild” (A water-colored
quarry), made the text a poem about the hunted. The “last” in the title
as it appears in Celan’s collected works points the reader toward its
end: to figure the pursuers’ ends, which are the end of the mask, which
is the attempt to reach a phantasmagorical core at the heart of appear-
ance. The poem, however, provides a different end in the final line: “o
wasserfarbenes Vlies, unser Banner am Turm!” (o water-colored fleece,
our banner on the tower). Left now with skin, the fleece must itself be-
come the stuff of individuality, ungrounded by the foundation in an
imagined heart-core. As “Die letzte Fahne” shows, this is finally “unser
Banner am Turm” (our banner on the tower), which is a shared condi-
tion. The fleece of Wahn gives us our world. Although the quarry can-
not be saved by this illusion, which is also the source of its individual-
ity, the illusion survives intact in the form of the fleece that allows the
body of the poem to take it on as its vestment. For this early poem
Wahn is both the projection that destroys and a mechanism that offers
defense. In the next poem that I discuss, “Ich kenne dich” (I know
you), Wahn as both threat and protection is at issue again, in particular
as a piercing wound. This poem absorbs a measure of this wound so
that a complete debilitation and collapse of meaning can be warded off.
A Testifying Word
The poems from the 1940s depicted madness as a projection and as a

shield against pursuit. This explicit figure of madness all but vanished
in the 1950s. In its place the poems turn to the figure of Meinung
(opinion) as a dispersion of words, or particles of words, seen, for in-

stance, in the poem “Engführung.” By the 1960s, however, Celan’s in-
terest in Wahn reemerged to change his work. In the case of the vol-
ume Atemwende, Celan initially drafted such titles as “Wahndock”
[Maddock], “Wahnspur” [Madtrace], and “Wahn, Atem” [Delusion,
Breath] (TA: Atemwende, ix). The catalyst for this change was his inter-
pretation of the physicians’ diagnosis of his psyche in terms of Wahn
and Schwermut, or depression. Yet this quickly developed into a reflec-
tion on the relationship of madness and meaning in literature, a matter
which I address most fully in chapter 2. In the most personal sense, as I
will argue shortly in this chapter, his work returns to madness and
melancholy in the 1960s to question this realm as one that could de-
stroy poetry. While illness may ravage the human psyche, it cannot de-
bilitate poetry, which outlives it.
The late, short poem “Ich kenne dich” is first and foremost a poem
of relation, which can be viewed in terms of love and subservience:
(ICH KENNE DICH, du bist die tief Gebeugte,

ich, der Durchbohrte, bin dir untertan.
Wo flammt ein Wort, das für uns beide zeugte?
Du—ganz, ganz wirklich. Ich—ganz Wahn.)
(GW 2:30)
[(I know you, you’re the one bowed so low,

I, the one pierced through, am subject to you.
Where is the word afire that would testify for us both?
You—wholly, wholly real. I—wholly delusion.)]
“Ich kenne dich” presents the notion that a delusional self can subordi-
nate itself to the reality of the other. At the same time it turns at-
tributes of delusion and reality into matters dependent on observation.
The poem is constructed along a principle of oppositions: Ich and du,
which are also respectively the “deeply bowed” and “transpierced,” as
well as “wirklich” and “Wahn.” The Ich is enclosed by madness, the du,
the other, by the real. Celan wrote this poem in 1964. It offers a rare
moment in his work, for it is the only poem linking both the self to
Wahn and the other to reality, as well as the only published poem that
explicitly opposes Wahn to Wirklichkeit.
A well-known user of etymological dictionaries and specialized
handbooks, Celan was familiar with key terminology in the discourse
of abnormal psychology. The entry in Celan’s 1959 copy of Kluge’s

Etymological Dictionary of the German Language defines Wahnsinn not
in psychological but in hermeneutic terms, namely as that which is
“incomprehensible, devoid of understanding.”15 Only distantly related
to its contemporary connotations of mental illness, the word Wahn
long meant Erwartung (expectation), Hoffnung (hope), and Denken
(thought), as well as Verdacht (suspicion) and Meinung (opinion),
which forms the classical opposite of knowledge.16 Most of these
meanings lasted at least well into the 1800s in one form or another
and are present in canonical and popular nineteenth- and twentieth-
century texts. In other Germanic languages Wahn meant Möglichkeit
(possibility), a meaning implicit in earlier German uses. Some etymol-
ogists contend that Wahn is traced to the root vé (glauben/to believe),
to which the modern opposite of Wahn belongs: wahr/true. Thus the
original division of this root into falsehood (wahn) and truth (wahr)
speaks to a shared moment implying a unity of opposites, in which the
one relies on the other for its existence, and in which both can lay
claim to naming the unity of this distinction. Celan draws on etymo-
logical and philosophical meanings of Wahn to uncover its proximity
to reality.
That reality and illusion are linked is a notion that Celan would
have encountered not only in Nietzsche but also in Plato, Kant, and
Schopenhauer. Philosophy has long distinguished the world that ap-
pears to sensible perception—one that Plato terms a kind of delu-
sion—from the true knowledge (Erkenntnis) of immutable and essential
ideas. Following Parmenides, Plato distinguished doxa from episteme—
concepts that caught Celan’s interest in his extensive readings of an-
cient philosophy.17 In The Republic the realm of appearance provides
only illusion, delusion, opinion, and phantasm, “becoming,” as op-
posed to the constant being of knowledge. For Schopenhauer, so influ-
ential for Nietzsche’s Geburt, “this world that appears to the senses has
no true being, but is instead only an endless becoming, it is and is not,
and our conceiving it is not so much knowledge but delusion.”18 The
world of perceivable phenomena available to observers is here inter-
preted as delusion. This notion of Wahn originates as a distorting sem-
blance in ancient thought and mutates into the persistent opposition
appearance/reality. In Schopenhauer’s reinterpretation of the Kantian
system, to take the outer world of appearance at face value—not the
world of constancy but that of “endless becoming”—without distin-
guishing the inner reality behind it, is the delusional deviance of per-
ception. In the history of this word, a psychopathological meaning
from a pseudo-medical discursive field was grafted onto the philosoph-
ical language of perception, aesthetics, and epistemology.19
“Ich kenne dich” appropriates the dependence of delusion on real-
ity not to valorize the real as such but to submit the self to the other.
This also involves giving shape and form to the other. At the same time
the poem alters the status of delusion and reality seen in philosophy to
define them as shifting positions. This can be seen with the elision of
the verb “to be” by means of the dash in the last line. These dashes do
not have the equivalent of standing in for the verb. Instead they reveal
the absence of both verb and successful attribution. The poem asserts
the relation between its two terms, the real and Wahn, but does so not
by a continual verbal concord but instead by a juxtaposition, which dif-
fers from the first two lines. In those first lines it is clear that this text is
capable of grammatical agreement and complete expression. In the
first line, the other is “die tief Gebeugte” (the deeply bowed one). The
second line includes the verb “to be”: “ich, der Durchbohrte, bin” (I,
the one pierced through, am). There is a key difference between the
other and the self but it is not one of semantic opposition (subordina-
tion and piercedness over and against being bowed). It is the grammar
of the self and other. In formal-grammatical terms, the poem juxta-
poses the other with an adjective, the self with a noun, which allows it
to take on a substantive form. That is, the other is confronted with a
quality; the I, with a sort of allegory: I—delusion, as if the I, unlike the
other, has a disjointed relation to the self. The self depends on the
other for its form.
In “Ich kenne dich” the terms of real and delusion are not qualities
that one possesses or entities that one embodies. They are instead
points of observation limiting discourse for the self and other. Wahn
and Wirklichkeit operate according to what is called “dash-logic” by
Adorno, who argued, “dashes command us to stop.”20 For Adorno, the
dash “separates what proximity feigns.”21 “Closeness,” or to improve
on this translation, “connectedness,” would feign the determined attri-
bution of reality/truth and delusion/falseness to subject positions. The
poem makes the attribution of these qualities to subjects into a frag-
mentary speech act. Madness and reality are fragmentary constructs
that can only appear complete insofar as they are fragments. As a result
the poem’s work, which is to draw on madness to construct self and
other, emerges as an endless process. At the poem’s conclusion, there

are no verb forms that constrain by agreeing with a particular subject,
for instance, no are or am:
Du—ganz, ganz wirklich. Ich—ganz Wahn.)
[You—wholly, wholly real. I—wholly delusion.)]
In the moment when the other is closest to the real and the self closest
to madness on the page’s topographical setting, the dashes deny this
neat attribution. Through the liberated logic of the dash, madness and
reality could be written in place of each other and could invert into the
other.
With the capacity for knowledge (kennen) evident in the poem’s be-
ginning, “Ich kenne dich” confounds the attempt to read the self as
mentally delusional. “Ich kenne dich” is the only published poem by
Celan entirely within parenthetical marks. Do they mark the poem as a
private confession, which is to say as an intimate aside, thus collapsing
the apparent distance between text and reader? Or do they bring about
an irony that distances the poem’s confessional from its rhetorical di-
mension? In this case, the parenthesis does both. It offers a confession
of Wahn, which one can seemingly read in literal terms, yet reveals how
shortsighted such a reading of the poem is as a literal record of mental
disorder.
Critics have read this poem and seen: psychotic break. The poem is
noticeably biographical. By the time of “Ich kenne dich,” Celan’s name
and his writing had been interpreted in terms of madness for several
years during which time he had been in and out of clinics. The philo-
sophical and poetic concern with Wahn of the early poetry began to in-
tersect with psychological notions. Readers have interpreted the poem’s
ich and du as masks for Celan and his wife Gisèle Celan-Lestrange. Jean
Firges reads them as veiled references to Celan and his mother.22 It has
been assumed that Celan was writing about mental illness as a patient
might write about his delusions as he slips into delirium. Yet if the
poem expresses the self’s madness, the intricately crafted, carefully sys-
tematized, and arranged construction refutes this. In the first three
lines the iambic pentameter is strictly followed. Only with the last line,
which stresses the first two appearances of ganz (wholly), does the
poem deviate from this meter so as to underline its use of the word. As
an admission of madness, it can only be understood as an ironic state-
ment along the lines of “I am entirely, entirely mad, yet my very struc-
ture refutes my claim.”
Not by chance does this poem that reflects on madness have such a
methodical form. Instead of displaying breakdown, the poem shields
itself against the wounded, delusional chaos that its language suggests.
In other words, the kind of illness that would destroy the work is
warded off. The poem does so by acting as a host that takes into itself a
manageable level of madness to improve its defenses against the most
devastating sort, against the breakdown of all meaning, which would
destroy self, other, and poem. The madness that the poem can absorb
without being destroyed is found not only in the word Wahn, which is
neutralized by being named, but also in the dashes as well as in the rep-
etition of the word ganz.
With the third line “Ich kenne dich” asks the question, where
would a word emerge, flame, which could testify for the other and the
self? While lines one, two, and four each contain a form of the pro-
nouns I and you, this line omits these and turns to the commonality of
“us.” This sought-after word will not gain a fixed form but instead ap-
pear in the constant mutations of the flame. Here is where the logic of
the witness (Zeuge) finds its place in the poem. The self asks about the
location of the word that can observe the I of delusion and the you of
the real and then testify to an observer about this. The incantatory
ganz appearing three times points to an answer. My contention is that
the absent word exists in the gaps between the thrice-written ganz in
the form and sound of their repetition. Its tripartite appearance forms
a chain of words where the second and third incidents observe the pre-
ceding ones, producing positions from which self and other can be wit-
nessed, thereby evoking what the poem mentions with the word ganz,
an intact, whole individual. Because this word is produced by repeti-
tion as a flame, it has its form only for an instant before the flame is ex-
tinguished.
In his theories of language Walter Benjamin writes how “the nexus
of meaning which resides in the sounds of the sentence is the basis from
which something similar can become apparent out of a sound, flashing
up in an instant.”23 In “Ich kenne dich” the repetition of ganz both
speaks for (zeugen) and produces (zeugen) the similarity attaining be-
tween apparent oppositions of delusion and reality. That is, this repeti-
tion speaks not only of the self and other. The poem also creates a
reader as observer who, in Benjamin’s words, will “participate in that
measure of time in which similarities flash up fleetingly out of the

stream of things only to sink down once more.”24 By being enclosed on
the page, like the words that the parenthesis encloses, the word ganz
comes between the pronouns and their attributes of madness and real-
ity: “Du—ganz, ganz wirklich. Ich—ganz Wahn” (You—wholly, wholly
real. I—wholly delusion). At the same time, the use of ganz for each
pronoun and the way the poem places wirklich and Ich right next to
each other, while it places du and Wahn in parallel positions at both
ends of this final line, makes madness and reality into qualities depen-
dent on the positions from which they are observed in the poem. As do
the dashes, the word ganz draws the self and other together while it dis-
tinguishes them. Both self and other depend on this repeated word as a
source from which to emerge in the poem, and this source, along with
the protection against destruction, is the poem’s central concern. The
dialectic of the reality of the other and the self’s delusion and wounded
fragility (“the one pierced through”) provides a unity through which
both can exist. In this way the other becomes real. Reality in this poem
is a movement: it is the other’s gesture of the deep bow, one that dis-
plays attentiveness and self-reflection.
Secret Homeland
The topos of the afflicted self in “Ich kenne dich” is reiterated in the
unpublished 1969 poem “Kleine Silbe” (Little syllable) yet with one
significant difference. In “Kleine Silbe” the other is not a control over
delusion, but is instead the fragile one:
KLEINE SILBE, kurze Heimat,

in der du dich eingeheimnißt verlierst,
der Eine, Viele,

der Nachbar
im beseelten Kristall
fügt dir zehn Tage Nachwahn
zu.
(NL, 285)
[Small syllable, brief homeland,

in which you lose yourself in secrets,
the one, many,

the neighbor
in the animated crystal
inflicts ten days of after-madness
on you.]
“Kleine Silbe” is unusual among Celan’s poems due to its listing of

threats in the form of figures that inflict the other with madness. Yet it
is typical in that it relies on tropes of doubling to depict both this
threat and a kind of security. The other is assailed by three figures: the
one, the many, and, what is most clearly a threat, the neighbor. The
structure of the poem invites us to read its repetitions and oppositions:
the heim (home) in Heimat (homeland) and eingeheimnißt (secreted), as
well as Nachbar (neighbor) and Nachwahn (neigh-delusion). “Nach-
wahn” is not to be found in any dictionary. It could be translated as
neigh-delusion, so as to mark the temporal and spatial registers that are
remembered in the English neigh——. While neigh——would be a
clumsy translation, it manages to capture both the temporal and spatial
resonance of Nachbar and Nachwahn. Of several possible meanings for
Nachwahn are three main ones: a near-delusion, something in close
proximity; an after or late Wahn, understood as a state of lesser delu-
sion, or even post-delusion; and a secondary, a repeated, a copied Wahn
in the sense of the German words Nachbildung or Nachahmung (imita-
tion). Nachirren is a verb meaning to follow a false antecessor or model
in error. Similarly a Nachwahn would be the imitation of a delusion.
The Nachbar is a threat because he turns into a ghostly repeated
person, whose proximity haunts the other with delusion. In his influ-
ential essay “Das Unheimliche” (The Uncanny) Freud defined the un-
canny as the return of something once considered dead, forgotten, and
repressed. Drawing on this notion, the poem imagines the reanimation
of a lifeless crystal, which now possesses a soul, which is also a place for
the neighbor. It figures this as the infliction of madness. What or who
dwells closest, the meaning of neighbor, returns and deludes. Here the
propensity of figures to return threatens the other. According to
Freud, the uncanny is also that which is paradoxically the most famil-
iar, which leads him to his formulation that it is what the psyche at-
tempts to repress but what tends to return in the unconscious. The
“little syllable,” which is a small unit of meaning such as the poem’s
heim, offers a brief homeland. In “Kleine Silbe” repetitions do not ci-
pher the secret source for the other, as they do, for instance, in “So bist
du denn geworden.” Repetitions now provide a home where the other

loses itself in secrets. Despite the secret home that the poem offers to
the other as a defense against incursions, the other is inflicted with
madness by what is closest.
A poem of Atemwende, “Frihed,” writes of a similar doubled Wahn:
“Im Haus zum gedoppelten Wahn” (GW 2:77) [In the house of dou-
bled delusion]. A poem from the 1968 volume Fadensonnen (Threads-
uns), “Umweg- / karten” (Detour- / maps) gives the same word, in an-
other language:
Das Mitgut, zehn
Zentner
Folie à deux
(GW 2:120)
[The shared goods, ten

hundredweight
folie à deux]
Psychological dictionaries explain folie à deux as a double delusion, in

which one person takes over the delusions of another. “Folie à deux,”
“zum gedoppelten Wahn,” and “Nachwahn” are doublings, repetitions
of Wahn. They name the madness that Celan attributed to phenomena
of language and representation, that is, their repetitive nature. Here a
survival tactic of the poetic text, it enables the hope for a future writ-
ing.
Written in the psychiatric clinic, during a final stay from November
1968 to February 1969, “Kleine Silbe” draws on two figurations of
madness and brings them into conflict with each other.25 These are the
clinical and metaphorical concepts of madness and depression. At that
time physicians were treating Celan for “eine nervöse Depression”
(nervous depression), which many handbooks of the 1960s associated
in its acute forms with hallucinatory insanity. Celan considered this
clinical understanding of his psyche to be “simple” for reasons that I
will discuss in a moment. Armed with the insights that writing is fun-
damentally a realm of illusion and imitation, which is also depicted as a
form of translation, Celan developed a late poetry that could shore up
a defense against the psychological breakdown that the psychiatrists
described. In “Die letzte Fahne” imitation or Wahn could be a realm of
protection for the individual against persecution. In the late poems this
realm comes to be viewed as one that will protect poetry itself against
the encroachment of breakdown. Within the poetic text conceived in

Nietzschean terms of Wahnbilder (illusory images), or as Celan writes,
Nachwahn, the other as a figure can find a home where it can outlive
the demise of the psyche.
Celan’s first clear reference to the way in which his texts and name
were received in terms of psychological pressures appears as a quota-
tion, which he began in 1959 to cite in letters.26 In a 1961 letter to
Margul-Sperber, for instance, he wrote the following: “In addition my
‘breakdown’ is being announced, that is, my ‘mad-ness’ [Wahn-Sinn]
(the hyphen is derived from Mr. Apologist, and also—as some caution
is still called for—the quotation marks; as is right and proper, that is all
being ‘philosophically’ propped up via Hegel and Schopenhauer
quotes).”27 In this account, the stamp of madness served as a dismissal
of the poetry. In view of the way in which Celan’s poems present mad-
ness as repetition and similarity, it is telling that the letter notes how
the word madness is set off in quotation marks, which is the punctua-
tion of repetition. Wahn not only names the tendency of language to
repeat itself but also attests to Celan’s realization that he can only bring
writing into accord with this tendency.
Readers have pointed to the motifs of the wounded psyche in
Celan’s work.28 Barbara Wiedemann has identified the plagiarism accu-
sations leveled against Celan to explain their presence.29 Wiedemann’s
extensively researched collection of documents related to the charges
of plagiarism yields interesting contexts for Celan’s poems. Yet I find
problematic the position that the concerns with madness displayed in
Celan’s poems are in effect documentations or confessions of psycho-
logical breakdown. A confessional poem that merely confirms the evi-
dence of biography is superfluous. Celan’s poems by contrast draw on
the language of madness to reflect on the conditions under which indi-
viduals, selves, and others can exist and are wiped out in the poem.
Knowledge that Celan suffered from delusional depression (wahnhafter
Schwermut) suggests that his poems are autobiographical.30 Yet meta-
phors of madness drawn from philosophy and science do not correlate
to psychic states. Attempts to read texts in terms of mental illness re-
veal what Blanchot, in a passage that Celan marked in the essay “Mad-
ness par excellence,” called the puerile effort to uncover the secret of
literature: “One similarly might wonder if all the general conclusions
maintaining that illness influences the work, that it contributes to or
disturbs the work’s development, do not express a childish view of
knowledge: the desire, once and for all, to get behind the enigma and
to dominate it while distancing oneself as far as possible from it.”31
Blanchot’s remark applies to efforts at finding in mental illness the ex-
planation of literature, the key to understand it and at the same time
the means to forget it.
Celan’s poetry changed as a result of his interpretation of the diag-
nosis of depression that was given to him. Yet it changed because it re-
flected on the meaning and interpretation of depression. Indeed, in his
letters and conversations, Celan suggested that he was careful to dis-
tinguish his depression from the issue of literary disputes, which read-
ers have identified as the cause of his illness and changes to his work. In
a letter of 1962, he writes, “they have made life so difficult for me,” and
“among other things [unter anderem], they have understood how to cre-
ate a vacuum around me.” Yet he immediately adds: “In addition [dazu],
an unbearable, psychological pressure came on” (Celan and Solomon,
78, my italics). This “dazu” attributes no causal connection between
political troubles and psychological pressures. Rather it places them in
a series of concerns without a hierarchy or ultimate source to which
they would all trace their causes.
The distance to the interpretation of his illness is again on display a
year later when Celan writes the following to Peter Solomon: “About a
year ago I was rather ill: a nervous depression [nervöse Depression] (to use
the admittedly simplistic expression of the doctor). As for my annoy-
ances with the German phenomenon are concerned, supporters and in-
formers are still the same.”32 Here affairs regarding the business of liter-
ature are juxtaposed with references to his psyche. Yet Celan does not
causally connect these two matters. Instead, he notes them as the two
most serious, albeit distinct, problems with regards to his work and
life.33 This letter to Solomon significantly reveals Celan’s crucial dis-
tance to clinical discourse and diagnosis. As Celan reports it, physicians
diagnose him with a “dépression nerveuse.” Years later in 1968, after a
severe psychological breakdown, Celan was diagnosed with the related
phenomenon of mélancolie délirante (delusional melancholy/wahnhafter
Schwermut).34 In his eyes this expression was “simplifying.” Unable to
account for essential details of what the patient sees, it remained a dis-
course about depression from the knowing gaze of science that excludes
the voice of the patient.35
The causes of Celan’s depression are to be found in the murder of
individuals, the event that gave rise to his work. In a conversation with
the filmmaker Erwin Leiser regarding his psychiatric treatment, Celan

is reported to have said his doctors “could not understand the connec-
tion between his depressions, the experiences in Czernowitz, and his
feeling of guilt toward his parents,” remarking that “they always say
that is too far in the past.”36 If physicians were reluctant to take into
consideration the death of Celan’s parents and his Holocaust experi-
ences then any coming to terms with his illness missed its truth. As a
result, illness becomes the sign of the effaced individual in the face of
scientific discourse’s exclusion of this memory.
Philosophers have viewed madness as forgetting. In Celan’s case it is
the opposite: illness as a mark that takes the place of memory and that
registers the cost of writing. Psychiatry insisted that Celan’s illness had
nothing to do with the murdered of eastern Europe; Celan resisted
psychiatry and defended himself against its forgetfulness. The deter-
mination to project words as individuals becomes the conditional ac-
ceptance of illness. That of course put him in a double bind: health
would be associated with forgetting, illness with a dedication to shel-
tering the dead and the living. Celan could be healthy and, with the
psychiatrists, deny the force of death and loss. Or, he could remain true
to the link between that death and its marker in poetry, yet in doing so,
remain marked by the discourse of illness.
Melancholy’s Clockwork
Considering all the time that Celan spent in and out of clinics, his later
poems reach a stunningly high level of reflection on time, which per-
haps can best be seen in his melancholy poems. One of the most com-
mon motifs in Celan’s early and late poetry, Schwermut (melancholy),
first appeared in poems of 1941.37 It emerges as a central metaphor that
marks the continuing effects of the past while leaving this past obscure,
as in the poem “Beim Wein” (Over wine): “Was meine Schwermut
gelöscht hat im Becher, / brennt und gebärdet sich riesig an dir” [What
doused my melancholy in the goblet, / burns now and hugely carries
on about you] (FW, 99). After 1952 Schwermut nearly completely dis-
appears from his lexicon. It reappears thirteen years later in October
1963. The reemergence of melancholy in Celan’s poetry is due to his
encounter with two things. The first was Celan’s reception of the diag-
nosis of depression, or wahnhafter Schwermut, which compelled him to
investigate the concept of melancholy anew. At the same time, Celan

read Benjamin’s work on baroque German tragedy as well as Ludwig
Binswanger’s idiosyncratic phenomenological writings on melancholy.
This interest, as I will show, changed the character of the past in his
melancholy poetry, from one caught in a form of stasis to one held
open in the manner of the future. The source for the language of the
poems themselves derives primarily from Benjamin’s book on tragedy
and Binswanger’s Melancholie und Manie.
Schwermut, which affirms itself anew in his poems the year after his
first clinical stay, must be read against the backdrop of Celan’s reaction
to the assessment, “simplistic” in his words, of depression, a judgment
that is borne out in his poems.38 By excluding the events in Czer-
nowitz—the loss of parents, friends, and an entire region’s culture and
languages, as well as their memory—from the range of possible causal
connections for the diagnosis, psychiatrists ruled out any links between
depression and the past. In this physician-patient relationship, depres-
sion, as a clinical term, was marked by the injunction against remem-
bering. In the face of science’s denial of the link between history and
psyche, Schwermut becomes a sign of memory.
As time’s possibility and the backdrop against which measurements
are made, Schwermut emerges in the later work related to thinking as
opposed to emotion. In the poem “Schädeldenken” (Skullthinking)
from Atemwende, the third strophe reads:
Die eine, noch

zu befahrende Meile
Melancholie.
(GW 2:84)
[The one, still

to be traveled mile of
melancholy.]
The poem embeds time in the metaphor of the distance of the earth to
be traveled. In “Die Schwermutschnellen hindurch” (Through the
melancholy-rapids), a text which I come to shortly, Schwermut takes on
a certain kind of necessity: without it there would be only a world of
emptiness and pure potentiality. Needed is both the temporal flow of
melancholy’s nondistinction as well as the distinctive markings of spe-
cific actualized moments to make time and memory. In the first line of
“Schädeldenken” a connection with significance for Celan’s later poems

is established between Denken (thinking) and Schwermut: “Schädeld-
enken, stumm, auf der Pfeilspur” (Skullthinking, mute, on the arrow-
trace). Celan’s poem draws on the “Analogienreihe” (analogical series)
that Benjamin uncovered in baroque tragedy and medieval visual arts
between “Denken—Konzentration—Erde—Galle” (thinking—concen-
tration—earth—gall).39 Here, melancholy can only appear at the mo-
ment that cognition (Denken) moves through it, marking it with percep-
tion. Schwermut is the possibility for marking time. Influenced by
conceptions of melancholy not as an emotional but as a cognitive phe-
nomenon in Benjamin and Binswanger, Celan’s poems of Schwermut re-
turn to melancholy’s pre-nineteenth-century meanings of “reflection”
and “concentration” as opposed to neurological and affective meanings,
which, according to German E. Berrios, occurred much later in the
clinical history of depression.40
In his return to melancholy in the 1960s, Celan develops new con-
nections, and more fully develops the connections between Schwermut
and time that previously existed in the history of this discourse.
Die Schwermutschnellen hindurch,

am blanken
Wundenspiegel vorbei:
da werden die vierzig
entrindenten Lebensbäume geflößt.
Einzige Gegen-
schwimmerin, du
zählst sie, berühst sie
alle.
(GW 2:16)
[Through the melancholy rapids,

past the blank
wound-mirror:
there the forty
stripped life-trees are floated.
Sole counter-
swimmer, you
count them, touch
them all.]
The poem “Die Schwermutschnellen hindurch” is Celan’s first to ex-

ploit melancholy as a metaphor for the past as an expanding horizon of
possibility. The “forty / stripped life-trees” floated on “melancholy-
rapids” resemble Binswanger’s notion of melancholy as the commin-
gling of temporal registers.41 Celan’s interest in Benjamin has been dis-
cussed in the scholarship but his reading of Binswanger less so. For
Binswanger, melancholy is the reversal of conventional relationships of
time. Instead of an open future and a closed past, in the case of melan-
choly, “what is open possibility draws itself back into the past.”42 In melan-
choly, possibility is wrested from the future and drawn back into the
past, which opens the past up to the contingency typically associated
with the future.
Yet while Binswanger depicts this past of possibility as melancholy’s
most destructive feature, Celan makes it an attribute of the poem:
Die Schwermutschnellen hindurch,

am blanken
Wundenspiegel vorbei:
da werden die vierzig
entrindenten Lebensbäume geflößt.
[Through the melancholy rapids,

past the blank
wound-mirror:
there the forty
stripped life-trees are floated.]
Celan represents the past in his poem in the wound-mirror and the
metaphor of the “life-trees.” This past as a field of possibilities is ci-
phered in the mirror’s blankness, which is however the open possibil-
ity of reflecting on a past that could not complete itself because it was
interrupted. Binswanger points to the “exchangeability of melancholic
subjects.”43 That is to say, for Celan as for Binswanger, at stake is not a
specific subject matter. Melancholy’s only subject in “Die Schwer-
mutschnellen” is the infinitude of the past, which is revealed in the
mirror. This past shows itself to be blank although it is being viewed
through the lens of wounds. It awaits its definitive image. Yet whereas
Binswanger writes of melancholy as the confusion of the past with the
future, Celan makes the dead, stripped trees of the past a matter of the
present. They continue to move along with the flow of time, captured
in the rapids, a metaphor for time since at least Heraclites.
By drawing on this phenomenological notion of melancholy, Celan
is able to transfer the attribute of chance from the future to the past.
The future, which for Binswanger absorbs the quality of the finite that
the past gives up, plays no role in Celan’s poem. Celan wrote “Die
Schwermutschnellen hindurch” in 1963, the year in which he turned
forty-three, and twenty years after his mother’s death in concentration
camps. Because people and their pasts have been wiped out, the past
must appear as an infinite present, which allows the poem to draw it
into the orbit of its present so as to observe it. The repeated skinned
trees manifest the lives that have been taken in the past while they re-
veal the individual that the poem makes in the present. In order for the
poem to reveal this individual, the past must be suspended. Not only
does the specific significance of the dead remain open to chance but
also the dead themselves.
In terms of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, to which Bin-
swanger resorts and which Celan had read elsewhere, Celan’s poem
presents “actualized” entities as they come into view from their poten-
tial in the moment that they are observed and marked. This poem sees
as its task the production of individuals and the protection against their
possible loss. That there may be nothing but an empty temporal flow
of forgetting haunts the poem. Working against an undifferentiated,
universal flow are the markings, the zig (——ly) in “vierzig“ (forty) and
“Einzige” (only):
Einzige Gegen-
schwimmerin, du
zählst sie, berühst sie
alle.
[Sole counter-
swimmer, you
count them, touch
them all.]
Like the “counter-swimmer,” these markers oppose undifferentiated

temporal flow. In order to register these markers, the “blank wound-
mirror” is required as a cipher for reflection, recurrence, repetition, and
time. Schwermut is not only the event of these trees as distinctive mo-
ments in time. It is also the notion of undifferentiated continuity that

the poem posits as a backdrop for the forty markers. In other words,
Schwermut is the speed and horizontal movement, to which these mark-
ers give measure and distinction. Schwermut allows and tracks the rapid
passage of these forty life-trees; it facilitates the occurrence of time.
The Schwermut poems of the 1940s had already featured motifs of
time in an effort to create a “living melancholy.” The 1946 poem “Das
Geheimnis der Farne” (The secret of the ferns), for instance, has the
reflection of mirrors that is also found in “Die Schwermutschnellen”:
“Blank sind die Klingen: wer säumte im Tod nicht vor Spiegeln? /
Auch wird hier in Krügen kredenzt die lebendige Schwermut” (GW
1:21). [Blank are the blades: who would not linger in death before mir-
rors? / Here too in jugs is proffered the living melancholy.] While
“Geheimnis der Farne” has death looking in the mirror of melancholy,
the poetic voice of the darkly beautiful early poem “Brandmal” (Brand)
struggles with sleeplessness in its violent efforts to produce imaginative
temporal markers:
Wir schliefen nicht mehr, denn wir lagen im Uhrwerk der Schwermut
und bogen die Zeiger wie Ruten,
und sie schnellten zurück und peitschten die Zeit bis aufs Blut
(GW 1:50)
[We slept no more, for we lay in the clockwork of melancholy

and bent the hands like reeds,
and they rushed back and whipped time till it bled]
In this poem (dated sometime before 1949) melancholy makes it im-

possible for the self to sleep because it must grapple with time. The self
tries to bend time to its will but melancholy is able both to resist the
self and to mark time with wounds. In the early poems, such as “Brand-
mal” and “Geheimnis der Ferne,” melancholy was the resistance of
time against sleep or death. In the later poems, for instance, “Die
Schwermutschnellen hindurch,” melancholy turns the past into a field
of open possibilities. This allows the poetry to draw on this incomplete
past to construct the individual in the present of the poem. The trees
offer the poem a metaphor with which it transfers to the past the con-
tingency of the future, a task left to the counter-swimmer, who swims
in reverse against time’s forward momentum, a momentum which en-
gulfs the past.
The poems I have discussed are embedded in the psychical and phe-
nomenological language of delusion, illusion, and melancholy. Niet-
zsche claimed that there were two competing forces in Greek culture.
The one drive aimed at the dissolution of boundaries and the destruc-
tion of the individual. The other aimed at distinction, the production
of appearances, and individuality. The task for human observation is
not to reach the concealed essence of the destructive drive, but rather
the individual appearances themselves. He likened poetic images to
dazzling masks that protect and heal the observer’s gaze from a mean-
ingless and destructive violence at the heart of life. This image of light
becomes in Celan’s poetry the appearance that is the self in its act of
self-concealing, which makes use of the coat in “Die letzte Fahne” and
the flame in “Ich kenne dich.” Poems such as “Ich kenne dich” rely on
this Nietzschean distinction to create a place for the individual, one
that marks the individual’s past effacement. Celan’s poems were in-
formed by the prophylactic function that enables images to offer a kind
of protection against violence. In poems such as “Kleine Silbe” this
thought is adapted to become the ability to ward off madness. Phe-
nomenology viewed melancholy as an inversion of time, in which the
finality of the past and the openness of the future reverse themselves.
In his melancholy poems Celan exploited this inversion to define the
past as a contingent space, a response to psychiatry.
2
Hallucinations
“STIMMEN, INS GRÜN / DER WASSERFLÄCHE GERITZT” (GW 1:147)

[Voices, scratched in the green / of the water’s surface]—the opening
couplet from Celan’s poem “Stimmen” (Voices) shows how a poem can
observe human voices in nature. In this case, observation occurs in a
form that involves scoring, wounding, and inscribing, all actions de-
scribed by the word ritzen. These lines proclaim a relation between
wounds, speech, and writing often encountered in Celan’s works. One
of the most common motifs in Celan’s poetry is the cut. Less common
is the cut that appears in the form of a voice. In these lines the voice in
the water’s surface does not exist prior to the actions of the poem.
Rather the voice is only there because the poem reads and hears it as if
it were a speaker who has something to say. By making it possible to
hear voices in nature, the poem can then hear them as persons. It is
worth pointing out that there is a sort of doubling of the cut in this
image. Even before it is scratched, the surface of water is like a skin. As
such, it already cuts off an outside from an inside. Thus what the poem
divides by a scratch, the water’s surface, is already cut off and distin-
guished from other possible entities. In fact, the poem foregrounds its
cuts insofar as what belongs to the other “tritt / gemäht in ein anderes
Bild” (GW 1:147) [steps / mown into another image].
Once divided by the scratch, the surface can also take the appear-
ance of two lips that open to speak, which is also the shape of a wound.
Of all metaphors for observation, the most well-known is that of the
eye. Yet the metaphor that is at once the most basic and reflective may
be the mark registered by the haptic sense. This is because a cut or a
wound is not merely a metaphor for observation. It is observation it-
self. The line from “Stimmen” expresses the awareness that a world can
only come into being by taking a surface, in this case that of the water,
57
and severing it. This awareness is also on view when “Stimmen” com-
mands, “Wölbe dich, Welt” (Vault yourself, world), so that its voices
echoing the dead can be heard within this vaulted world. The poem’s
aim is to make a cut and thereby let come into being a world that can
be further divided into individuals, individuals with voices who will
step into the void created by those who have been wiped out. By listen-
ing to voices where no one else does, it aims to let the other in its sin-
gularity be heard.
While in “Stimmen” this aim is revealed by what the poetic line
does, it is conveyed very differently in Celan’s speech “Der Meridian,”
namely, in a fashion akin to dramatized personae. Yet the speech and
the poem share an interest, which is perhaps why “Der Meridian”
quotes from “Stimmen,” the only one of Celan’s own poems cited in
the speech. In the early 1960s, Celan’s renewed interest in the question
of madness produced not only poems but also a reflection on the rela-
tionship of madness and literature, a matter that I discuss here. What
interests me in this chapter is the way in which Celan figures the ob-
servation of the voice of the other in “Der Meridian” through recourse
to abnormal perception and the relation of speech to silence, or what
one can also call madness. The role of the voice is crucial to the speech.
In the form of the one who speaks, it disturbs the art that mechanisti-
cally reproduces things while in the voice of the other it reveals the
presence of an individual.
Hearing Voices
“Der Meridian” is concerned with strategies for interrupting art. The
speech’s first line characterizes art as a mechanistic, lifeless marionette,
which must turn everything into an object. This machinery of art can
however be interrupted:
In dieser Gestalt bildet sie den Gegenstand einer Unterhaltung . . . ,

die, das spüren wir, endlos fortgesetzt werden könnte, wenn nichts
dazwischenkäme.
Es kommt etwas dazwischen.
(GW 3:187)
[In this guise it forms the object of a conversation . . . , that, we feel,

could be carried on endlessly, if nothing interrupted it.
Something interrupts it.]
2 / HALLUCINATIONS 59
The notion of the interruption at play in the opening paragraphs of

“Der Meridian” has a specific precedent in the discourse of abnormal
perception, one that Celan in all likelihood encountered in Eugen
Bleuler’s Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie (Textbook of Psychiatry) as well as Karl
Jaspers’s volumes Strindberg und van Gogh and Allgemeine Psycho-
pathologie (General Psychology), all texts upon which he drew while writ-
ing “Der Meridian.” The term in Jaspers is “Abbruch” (interruption)
and appears in a discussion of a profound psychical split that science is
not yet able to grasp.1 In this Abbruch the different spheres of con-
sciousness are not assimilated to each other under a unified personal-
ity. In cases of extreme debilitation the self experiences not only
“Wahnideen” (hallucinations) but also a radical rupture leading to the
“Abbruch der Kontinuität” (interruption to the continuity) in the en-
tirety of life.2 At this point, modes of perception reveal a lack of uni-
fied cognition and feeling, and thought processes do not draw the
most obvious conclusions from given situations.3 In Bleuler the focus
is on “Störungen” (interruptions) to perception, such as visual halluci-
nations and “Gehörshalluzinationen” (acoustic hallucinations). These
hallucinations produce “Gestalten” (figures) and voices that for the
disturbed get embodied in language as “Personen” but appear to no
one else.4
Celan’s interest in the discourse of normal and abnormal perception
is well documented. His notes in preparation for the speech (TA:
Meridian, 212), for example, include references to books by Jaspers and
Bleuler. The relation of “Der Meridian” to Bleuler and Jaspers, how-
ever, is scarcely confirmatory, even if the speech draws on their figures
of hallucination, absurd, and interruption. Celan does not follow
Bleuler’s description of madness as a purely debilitative source for
empty hallucinations. In “Der Meridian” the disruption to perception
does not impede the ability to perceive individuality, whereas for
Bleuler this disruption points to the distressed subject’s incapacity to
make appropriate distinctions:
He can let himself be drawn into a conversation with voices [Stimmen]

but does not need to talk with them out loud, for they answer to his
thoughts. From whichever distance and past all possible obstacles they
connect with him along secret paths, through apparatuses created
specifically to that end. “The voices” not only talk, they electrify him,
poison him, create thoughts for him etc; they become embodied as per-
sons [Personen] who occupy themselves with him.5
Voices read the thoughts of the disturbed. These voices come to this
ruptured self in secret ways, to which he alone is privileged. He brings
them into being. Yet he produces them in the objectifying manner of
technē, which excludes the possibility that it may be his own unique ob-
servation that constitutes them in their distinctive appearance. The
voices take on the form of persons, yet these persons are transformed
into enemies that haunt and destroy the self instead of marking the
strangeness of the encounter, as is the case in “Der Meridian.”
Celan’s speech continues by outlining a dual capacity to interrupt
art and mark off entities in their individuality by observing them.
There is always someone who listens in an off-kilter fashion to the dis-
course about art. This person neither hears nor sees the same things
and in the same ways as do others. She does, though, hear voices, that
is, the “Geheimnis der Gegenwart einer Stimme (Person)” (TA: Merid-
ian, 202) [secret of the presence of a voice (person)]:
Aber es gibt, wenn von der Kunst die Rede ist, auch immer wieder
jemand, der zugegen ist und . . . nicht richtig hinhört.
Genauer: jemand, der hört und lauscht und schaut . . . und dann
nicht weiß, wovon die Rede war. Der aber den Sprechenden hört, der
ihn ‘sprechen sieht,’ der Sprache wahrgenommen hat und Gestalt
(GW 3:188)
[But there always is, when the discourse concerns art, someone who is
present and . . . does not correctly hear.
More precisely: someone who hears and eavesdrops and looks . . .
and then does not know what the discourse was about. But who hears
the speaker, who ‘sees him speaking,’ who perceives language and fig-
ure
The characters in Büchner’s works discuss art and politics but they
overlook the role of personhood and the individual. One figure alone,
Lucile, “one blind to art,” neither listens nor hears the talk about art.
Lucile misconstrues the content of utterances but perceives the life of
the individual who speaks. This perception involves drawing on the
multiplicity of repeatable phenomena to mark off the individual in its
unrepeatability. Lucile points to this capacity to perceive the presence
of individuality precisely there in figures of speech, a notion that Celan
attempted to sketch out in his note asserting that this secret presence
of a voice and person is “das Sinnliche, Sinnfällige der Sprache” (TA:
Meridian, 202) [the sensual, the manifest in language]. In notes to “Der
Meridian” this individual appears as the absent other to whom the

poem gives voice.6 This voice can then take the place of those who
have been wiped out.
The philosopher Émannuel Levinas has argued that “Der Merid-
ian,” which constantly interrupts itself to permit other voices through
quotations, is “not a dialog” but a “counterpoint.”7 In this counter-
point, Büchner’s two sympathetic literary figures of madness have the
most decisive lines. These are Lucile from Dantons Tod and Lenz from
the prose piece Lenz. The full title of Celan’s speech is “Der Meridian:
Rede anläßlich der Verleihung des Georg-Büchner-Preises, Darm-
stadt, am 22. Oktober 1960” (The Meridian: Speech on the occasion of
the Georg-Büchner Prize).8 The occasion of the literary prize did not
first lead Celan to the voices of Lenz and Lucile, for he had already
used the character of Lenz in his text “Gespräch im Gebirg” (Conver-
sation in the mountains). In February 1960 he participated in a seminar
on Büchner’s aesthetic with Hans Mayer, at which time he did not
know that in the fall he would be giving a speech in Büchner’s name.9
Celan’s interest in the disturbed figures of Lucile and Lenz and the re-
lationship of Dichtung to art that he finds in Büchner provoked a sus-
tained reflection on Büchner’s works, a reflection that preceded the no-
tification of the prize. In his speech he draws on the literary and
scientific discourse of madness as disturbance to postulate that poetry
is the genre that interrupts and gives shape to individuality. In Lucile’s
case, she disturbs the totalizing aesthetic and political positions of the
characters Danton and Camille. In Celan’s reading, Büchner treats art
as a form of eloquence aligned with naturalistic representation. The
machinery of its discourse would continue unhindered if one were not
able to give to poetry the contours of a person who can interrupt it.
In Büchner’s play Lucile’s madness helps set her apart: “Mein
Camille! Das ist Unsinn, gelt, ich bin wahnsinnig?” (My Camille!
That’s nonsense, right, am I mad?).10 In line with one of the word’s
etymological meanings, which operate on the logic of deficiency and
abundance, Lucile is “deficient” and “lacking.”11 Celan exploits the link
between hallucination and the other to transform Lucile into the ob-
server, and thereby producer, of personhood. Her deficiency is made
into its opposite, which is abundance of perception. Lucile sees and
hears things to the extent that hallucination circumscribes her. She
perceives “Sprache” (language), “Gestalt” (form; figure), and “Atem”
(breath), the personal and individual emerging in poetic images. Each
is a cipher for the “gestaltgewordene Sprache eines Einzelnen” (GW

3:197–98) [language of an individual taken shape]. For Celan, the poem’s
“Hoffnung” [hope] and aim is “in eines Anderen Sache zu sprechen—
wer weiß, vielleicht in eines ganz Anderen Sache” (GW 3:196) [to speak
on behalf of an other—who knows, perhaps on behalf of an entirely
other]. Accordingly, Lucile’s hallucinations do not poison the self, as
they do for Bleuler and the discourse of abnormal psychology. Instead
they allow it to perceive the entirely other as a person in poetry. This
becomes a kind of defense against the mechanistic drive of art. In this,
Lucile demonstrates a politics of poetry that, instead of dealing with
phenomena as objects, wishes them to become, as it were, persons in
their own right.
Pathos
Michel Foucault has argued that in Western philosophy and poetics

madness constitutes an interruption: “Madness is the absolute break
with the work of art”;12 “by the madness which interrupts it, a work of
art, opens a void, a moment of silence, a question without answer.”13 At
roughly the same time that Celan wrote “Der Meridian” a debate
emerged between Foucault and Derrida centering on madness. This
debate not only illustrated what is at stake in talking about madness,
but also revealed the philosophical context in which Celan’s observa-
tions took place.14 Foucault’s book Madness and Civilization writes the
history of madness in the West since the Middle Ages. Beginning with
Descartes and the cogito, reason encounters madness as the other that it
excludes. Descartes’ subject who thinks and doubts cannot be mad. In
other words, reasoning proves that madness is located outside thought.
This approach to madness undergoes a transformation with the birth
of psychology and the incipient definition of madness as biological ill-
ness around 1800. For Foucault, reason “thrusts into oblivion all those
stammered, imperfect words without fixed syntax in which the ex-
change between madness and reason was made. The language of psy-
chiatry, which is a monologue of reason about madness, has been es-
tablished only on the basis of such a silence.”15 Foucault understood
madness as the other of rationality. He asserted that Descartes spe-
cifically excludes madness no more than any other writer; rather
Descartes excludes the possibility that he is mad. In response to this,
Foucault aims to write “the archaeology of that silence,” to locate the

voice of madness before science can speak for it. An antiphilosophy
will hear the voice of madness and its absolute alterity.
In his essay, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” Derrida formu-
lated a critique of this position. He observed that even an archaeology
of silence is still a science:
All our European languages, the languages of everything that has par-
ticipated, from near or far, in the adventure of Western reason—all this
is the immense delegation of the project defined by Foucault under the
rubric of the capture or objectification of madness. Nothing within this
language, and no one among those who speak it, can escape the histori-
cal guilt . . . which Foucault wishes to put on trial. But such a trial may
be impossible, for by the simple fact of their articulation the proceed-
ings and the verdict unceasingly reiterate the crime.16
Whether in folly’s praise or condemnation, the treatment of madness

proves where it is not. In talking about madness, one begins to control
it, distance it, and step outside it. Derrida argues that Foucault’s book
cannot carry out its task because of language itself. A sentence is by its
nature normal; whether or not its author is, it is not mad.17
Derrida however qualifies what he views as Foucault’s failure: “One
could perhaps say that the resolution of this difficulty is practiced rather
than formulated. By necessity. I mean that the silence of madness is not
said, cannot be said in the logos of this book, but is indirectly,
metaphorically, made present by its pathos—taking this word in its best
sense. A new and radical praise of folly whose intentions cannot be ad-
mitted because the praise [éloge] of silence always takes place within
logos, the language of objectification.”18 The silence of madness cannot
be spoken. Yet through analogy and the metaphor one can encrypt si-
lence as well as madness and reveal it. In this way, Foucault’s treatise
about madness is transferred to an analogous literary style. This in-
cludes its “language without support,” its rhetoric, the numerous ques-
tions it poses without definitively trying to answer them, its rapid shifts
in focus. Because it does not inhabit the syntax of reason, this figurative
pathos metaphorically evokes the madness that the book’s thematic di-
mensions only talk about and thereby exclude.
Yet in all this Derrida concedes a paradox he cannot resolve: that ra-
tionality can contain or coexist with figures for the stifled speech of
madness. Both madness on a metaphoric level and the reason inherent
in philosophy may inhabit the same text, even the same line.19 Derrida
places the Cartesian internment at a different point in Descartes’ argu-
ment than does Foucault. Whether Descartes’ text is taken as either
foundational or exemplary, madness exists not within writing, but
within undetermined thinking, that is, “only in the realm of the possible
and in the language of fiction or the fiction of language.”20 Madness,
instead of being excluded from thought, is merely one case of thought.
Any thinking subject may entertain the idea that it is mad and imagine
madness as a possibility; yet any writing about madness is, like all writ-
ing, a reassurance that no such interruption to art’s mechanistic objec-
tification is present. The exclusion of madness occurs in Descartes’ text
only when Descartes posits god as an authoritative observer. Divine
certainty provides the transcendent ground for our representations and
epistemological truths; through this certainty we can turn our thoughts
into an assured, organized philosophical system; through this certainty
we exclude doubt. We can then reflect on the cogito and represent it for
an other, make it universally binding for all. God is the center that
holds—reason’s proof of sanity. As long as the cogito remains an unar-
ticulated, imagined hypothetical moment, it can be mad. Yet anguish
and doubt persist, against which Descartes posits an organized philos-
ophy so as to control and neutralize the possibility that all may be illu-
sion. Madness is the interruption of the system.
In other words, madness is cognition without an authoritative ob-
server capable of dividing thought into true perception and false illu-
sion.21 It is a metaphor for the moment before the meta-observer ar-
rives on the scene to affirm or deny thinking. If everything is
unsecured, every thought can be madness/illusion. Yet because lan-
guage by its nature consists of linguistic norms, madness as silence
forms language’s limit. To Foucault’s assertion that the thinking I can-
not be mad, Derrida asserts, “whether I am mad or not, Cogito, sum.”22
The cogito is valid and escapes madness despite the illness or the health
of the subject. As an imagination of madness, the constituent uncer-
tainty of cognition and perception may itself be akin to madness: the
possibilities and the potential errors in which representations, percep-
tions, and cognition are not secured.
Celan avoids identifying the madness in “Der Meridian,” but this
avoidance is not due to any timidity on the part of the speech. Rather it
reflects the speech’s awareness, similar to the notion at work in Der-
rida’s essay, that madness is not present in the text on a thematic level.
Derrida’s sense of logos as “the language of objectification” is reminis-

cent of Celan’s references to art. The objective treatment of all that
which a determined reason does not grasp—madness, illusion, poetry,
“the entirely other”—prevents the encounter at which the speech aims.
The text will not remain open to the other by turning it into a dis-
course. Only in metaphors and formal elements can the speech exploit
madness to provoke a clash with instrumental reason. Celan displayed
in many ways awareness that form can gain greater proximity to a con-
cern than theme. In notes written at the time of “Der Meridian,” for
instance, he mentioned this in the context of the cross: “Im Chiasmus
ist das Kreuz näher als im Thema ‘Kreuz’ ” (TA: Meridian, 112) [The
cross is closer in the chiasm than in the ‘cross’ as a theme]. Likewise,
“Der Meridian” is closer to the madness upon which it draws in formal
rather than in thematic terms.
For its strategies of interruption “Der Meridian” borrows not only
the characters of madness from Büchner, but above all else the formal
elements of circularity, repetition, questions, vielleichts, and quotations
familiar from the scientific discourse on madness. The avoidance of
linear language produces a formal pathos in the speech. Playing a cen-
tral role is also the speech’s bewildering multiplicity of voices, for in-
stance those of Benjamin, Lenz, Karl Emil Franzos, Kleist, Karl
Kropotkin, Gustav Landauer, Malebranche, Mandelstam, and Louis
Mercier. Incorporated in the speech are various language games, in
the sense meant by Wittgenstein, including technology, phenomenol-
ogy, cybernetics, aesthetics, politics, and ethics, languages that the
speech marks without trying to subordinate them to a single metadis-
course.23
Madness can then take on a structure analogous to poetry’s as it is
articulated in the Büchner speech. Both poetry and Wahn appear as a
field of effects instead of a discourse about objects. Poetry and madness
are accessible only through writing as effect. This shared structure gets
at the central aims of Celan’s work, to stage a poetic encounter with the
entirely other without reproducing the gesture of a totalizing reason
and representational drive that wipes out difference. In “Der Merid-
ian” the relation of thought to madness becomes an allegory for the
poem’s relation to the entirely other. Reason cannot gain access to
madness through a discourse about it. So too will the poem fail, if it re-
stricts itself to the mode of theme. By way of recitation, by introducing
literary figures of madness, by taking on an emphatic tone, by letting in
a plurality of other voices, the speech draws on madness to conceive it-

self.
Lucile’s “Es lebe der König!” (GW 3:189) [Long live the king!]—as
her lover is guillotined and the revolutionary watchdogs stand nearby
to arrest her—is seemingly mechanical. Yet in “Der Meridian” Celan
understands her words in terms of the “absurd”: “hier wird keiner Mon-
archie und keinem zu konservierenden Gestern gehuldigt. Gehuldigt
wird hier der für die Gegenwart des Menschlichen zeugenden Majestät
des Absurden” (GW 3:190) [neither to a monarchy nor to a preserved
yesterday does one here pay homage. One pays homage here to the
presence and the present of the human-producing and human-testify-
ing majesty of the absurd]. Celan identifies this interruption with Dich-
tung: “Das, meine Damen und Herren, hat keinen ein für allemal fest-
stehenden Namen, aber ich glaube, es ist . . . die Dichtung” (GW
3:190) [that, ladies and gentlemen, has no name fixed for all time, yet it
is, I believe . . . Dichtung]. Lucile’s delusional character has a central
function for Celan, to become the voice of madness, interruption, and
the absurd.
In other words, the speech understands absurd in the etymological
sense: discordance and disharmony,24 which is traced to Latin
absurdus—which also includes cacophonous or deaf. Lucile’s counter-
word, ripped from any original context, interrupts Danton’s speech on
the stage, a speech that offers an authoritative philosophy of history.
Søren Kierkegaard wrote of the absurd decision but did so in terms of
faith. He distinguished the capacity to describe the act of deciding
from the ethical act itself.25 The decision is an absurd madness for
Kierkegaard. Danton’s monologue aims to turn such a disharmonious
and incommensurable ethical decision into a positive fact, which erases
the moment of judgment. In other words, Danton knows; yet Lucile
decides. Her discordant, therefore poetic, line becomes ethical. As an
ethical move, her counterword is “ein Akt der Freiheit” (GW 3:189)
[an act of freedom]. Lucile’s voice not only produces the human but
also disrupts the concern with unity and consensus, the province of art.
For Bleuler, the characteristic expression of the manic psyche is exag-
geration. In its extreme form “however madness tends to immediately
turn into the absurd.”26 Essentially, Bleuler’s notion of the absurd is
megalomania. Celan however stresses that the voice of the absurd
bears witness to, and by observing it, produces the human. “Der
Meridian” crafts itself from a multiplicity of voices and aims to create
the presence of a voice by observing personhood. Lucile begins by

hearing voices and ends with finding her voice. What in the texts of
Bleuler and Jaspers was the disintegration of affect into a series of
meaningless voices and figures becomes in Celan’s speech the chance
for each individual to have what it requires to be observed, that is, a
voice.
Poetry’s Circuitous Path

Art allows one to objectify what is spoken about, written about, and
represented. Poetry, which interrupts this ubiquitous and objectifying
discourse, is predicated on an encounter with the other. The poetic ap-
proach to this other does not constrain what it encounters with its own
horizon, does not press what it encounters into its own pre-existing
narratives. Instead it is a form of interdependence: “Das Gedicht will
zu einem Andern, es braucht dieses Andere, es braucht ein Gegenü-
ber” (GW 3:198) [The poem intends another, it needs this other, it
needs an opposite]. The naturalism of art, by contrast, can freeze indi-
viduals and things into fixed objects in the manner of the Medusa’s
head, objects that can then be dispensed with. In a Nietzschean vein,
Celan’s early poetry turned to images to engender and protect individ-
uality. In “Der Meridian,” despite the necessity of the aesthetic image,
the image can also become a naturalized one.
Art is to discourse and constancy as Dichtung is to interruption and
becoming. Dichtung, the mode of the other, is to art as madness is to
our perceptions of being’s stability. What this means is that mapped
out in Celan’s speech is a mode of writing that bypasses identification
in its encounters with the world. Identification translates the em-
pathized object into terms manageable for the subject, that is, into a
more or less defined image worthy and capable of empathetic atten-
tion. Dichtung, by contrast, is the effort to be attentive to the other as
other—person or a thing—without translating it into the logic and lan-
guage of an instrument. Celan finds in the language of madness a
metaphor for this entirely other—a connection that can come as no
surprise when one considers the way in which instrumental reason ex-
cludes madness. Indeed, poetry speaks on behalf of the other in a way
that thinking cannot speak on behalf of madness. The modalities for
making madness present through interruptions in speaking and for po-
etry to open a space for the other are analogically structured. As a re-
sult of this, Celan can draw on the psychological discourse that under-
stands madness as the other for a metaphor of the other. Because the
other is by essence the indescribable, only by relying on such
metaphors can the poem phrase itself as an address to the other. In
Foucault’s thinking, the stifled speech of silence logically constitutes
the limit of a discourse about it. So too does Dichtung constitute the
limit of art both as a discourse and as a technique of naturalistic repre-
sentation.
In Celan’s view, the character of Lenz goes “a step further” than
did Lucile with her absurd statement. Lenz thereby comes closer to
poetry’s potential to produce differences, to intend toward the other,
to interrupt objectification. The counterwords of Lenz and Lucile
liberate (freisetzen) not only individuality in the poem but also the en-
tirely other from the authorities that would secure artistic represen-
tation. In the first words of his Lenz, Büchner metaphorically fore-
grounded Lenz’s journey over the mountains as a journey into
madness: “Müdigkeit spürte er keine, nur war es ihm manchmal unan-
genehm, daß er nicht auf dem Kopf gehn konnte” (Büchner, 225) [He
did not feel any weariness, only, it irritated him at times that he could
not walk on his head]. For Celan, walking upside down encapsulates
Lenz’s function as a figure for poetry. Celan links this line of Büchner
to one of his most famous remarks: “Wer auf dem Kopf geht, meine
Damen und Herren,—wer auf dem Kopf geht, der hat den Himmel
als Abgrund unter sich” (GW 3:195) [He who walks on his head, ladies
and gentlemen,—he who walks on his head, he has heaven as an abyss
beneath him]. This strange moment of inversion elucidates the role of
poetry, which should figure this experience for the reader: the over-
riding sense that there is no grounding for our depictions.27 The
ground, which would conventionally supply a secure base for lan-
guage and thought, now precariously bears down on us, as we
strangely scuttle across it on our hands; the heavens, whose horizon
should enclose and shelter us, instead stretches out in an unsettling in-
finity.
The speech turns to the metaphor of silence to posit an interrup-
tion prior to the resumption of voice. Lenz’s counterword amounts to
“ein furchtbares Verstummen, es verschlägt ihm—und auch uns—den
Atem und das Wort” (GW 3:195) [a terrible silence, it takes away his—
and our—breath and word]. Silence is the other of a discourse an-
chored by determined reason. Poetry draws on this silence as a source
from which to begin to speak. Art on the other hand reassures the sub-
ject’s sense of the other as object. Because poetry’s terrifying silence of-
fers neither an artistic image of life nor the guarantee that speech will
continue, it becomes the real possibility that there may be no more
speaking, which is also to say, no more individuality. That would mean
that reality is frozen by naturalistic art in its final act of glimpsing the
Medusa’s head, which is also to say that the effort of writing to make
language say what it has not yet said ends.28 Poetry relies on its
metaphors to make present the terrible silence prior to the distinction
of error and certainty, a silence that threatens to stop writing and en-
gulf its subject.
As a result, poetry attempts to meet the challenge posed by the so-
lidification in art by generating an unpredictable and unique phrase.
Celan’s figure of poetry as an “Atemwende” relates directly to this
event. By unpredictably turning and circling “one step further” (GW
3:195), like a turn in a dance, poetry passes through the other and re-
turns to the individual the breath it needs to find a voice that can be
heard. Pure individuality is impossible to hear. For the individual
voice to become audible, it depends on repetition. For this reason, the
rhetoric of the meridian, the circle, the turn, and return, the merging
of beginning and end, the rediscovery of the source for the self, as
Celan puts it, “den Ort meiner eigenen Herkunft” (GW 3:202) [the
place of my own origin], features so prevalently in the speech, so
prevalently to the point that one can say the speech is nothing less
than a metaphor for self-generation through the voice of the other.
If an automatic art reassures the subject that its symbolic produc-
tion and representations correspond to a prediscursive nature, poetry
must step beyond such an art. Relying on breath as a metaphor for an
individual life, Celan asks if poetry must follow what has become art,
moving through and beyond it to become poetry “again and again”:
Vielleicht legt die Dichtung den Weg—auch den Weg der Kunst—um
einer solchen Atemwende Willen zurück? . . . für diesen einmaligen
kurzen Augenblick? . . .
.....................
Vielleicht ist das Gedicht von da her es selbst . . . und kann nun, auf
diese Kunst-lose, Kunst-freie Weise, seine anderen Wege, also auch die
Wege der Kunst gehen—wieder und wieder gehen?
Vielleicht.
(GW 3:196)
[Perhaps poetry covers the distance of the path—also the path of art—
for the sake of such a breathturn? . . . for this unique brief moment? . . .
............................................................
Perhaps from here on the poem is itself . . . and, in this art-less, art-
free way, can now go its other paths, thus also the paths of art—go
again and again?
Perhaps.]
Whereas Lucile’s madness personifies the interruption to art as a dis-

course about objects, Lenz’s madness opens up the abyss of silence that
disrupts the generalization of art as mechanistic representation. In
both cases there is the interruption to naturalism for the sake of the
event of individuality. Because all literature must make use of a gener-
alized object language, poetry is obliged to take the path of an objecti-
fying art in its attempt to prevail over it, what Celan referred to as a
“Wahngang” (GW 2:260) [mad-path]. Along this route, where “die
Sprache stimmhaft wird” (GW 3:201) [language becomes voiced], po-
etry turns to the voice of the absent entirely other.
January 20
This unique individual voice can be located only by making use of gen-
eral, mechanistic language afforded by art, which is meant by poetry
taking the path of art. In other words, poetry must rely on the general
symbolic medium of art for its language of individuality. It is in this
same way that the date in “Der Meridian” must be made applicable to
a great many situations if it is to be able to mark the singular moment.
This singular date must, so to speak, sacrifice its singularity and be-
come repeatable to be written at all. The date cited in the speech is not
any date but rather one that marks the threat of the individual’s death.
As a result, its possible referents get limited to an extent by the nature
of the threat. This date of the twentieth of January in Celan’s speech
emerges out of both the history of Nazi genocide and the history of
madness. It is therefore these events that help shape how poetry will
mark off dates in Celan’s oft-cited question:
Vielleicht darf man sagen, daß jedem Gedicht sein “20. Jänner” ein-
geschrieben bleibt? Vielleicht ist das Neue an den Gedichten, die heute
geschrieben werden, gerade dies: daß hier am deutlichsten versucht
wird, solcher Daten eingedenk zu bleiben?
Aber schreiben wir uns nicht alle von solchen Daten her? Und
welchen Daten schreiben wir uns zu?
(GW 3:196)
[Perhaps one can say that every poem remains inscribed by its “20th of
January”? Perhaps the newness of poems that are written today is just
this: that here, in the clearest fashion, the attempt is made to remain
mindful to such dates?
But don’t we all write from such dates? And to which dates do we as-
cribe ourselves?]
Derrida has tended to see this date “the 20th of January” as one that
emerges from Büchner, yet one that gets emptied of its content and
context in Celan’s speech. For many critics the date is a scarcely veiled
reference to the twentieth of January 1942, the date of the Wannsee-
Konferenz, which, according to historians, reiterated plans for the de-
struction of European Jewry.29 Still others anchor the date in the narra-
tives of Lenz. Each of these competing interpretations—free cipher,
historical referent, or intertextual—focuses on one end, as it were, of
the date. In other words, each emphasizes either the date’s autonomy
or dependence regarding an original meaning. Yet the figure of the cri-
sis that poetry provokes stands not only at the end of the poem as an
aim. This crisis also marks the space out of which the poem orients it-
self. Which is to say that it appears at both “ends” of the poem: in po-
etry’s aim, producing the shock where the self may encounter the en-
tirely other (“human being and thing”); and in a historical-biographical
crisis out of which the poem can begin its work of marking off the ter-
rain of the other. In other words, the twentieth of January as a specific
temporal marker indicates the crisis of the date, one that draws auton-
omy and dependence together. This crisis, provoked through the mad-
ness of Lenz, develops into a different crisis, one that concerns the fate
of European Jewry.
Lenz, Büchner’s tale of madness, provides Celan with a metaphor
which, when taken into the speech, determines the text’s figuration of
dates as an open-ended series of crises. Specifically the significance of
the twentieth of January, as it manifests itself in the character Rhein-
hold Michael Lenz, relates to Celan’s notion of poetry. This can be
seen with reference to Büchner’s text. The edition of Büchner’s writ-
ings that Celan used begins: “Den 20. Jänner ging Lenz durchs
Gebirg” (Büchner 816) [The twentieth of January Lenz went through
the mountains]. Here Büchner quotes the report of Johann Friedrich
Oberlin with whom Lenz stayed in 1778. Oberlin recorded this visit in
an account that provoked Büchner’s fictional text. Oberlin’s narrative
similarly opens: “Den 20. Januar 1778 kam er hieher. Ich kannte ihn
nicht” (Büchner, 966) [On the twentieth of January, 1778, he came
here. I did not know him]. In Oberlin’s account this date marks a sud-
den arrival of a personality as disturbing as he was strange. On the first
day Oberlin moves quickly to narrate Lenz’s strange behavior with the
foreboding summary: “das war für uns Alle der erste Schreck” (Büch-
ner, 967) [For all of us that was the first shock]. The date with its shock
marks Lenz’s crossing into madness. In other words, in both Oberlin’s
and Büchner’s texts this narrative situation helps determine the events
that follow from it. This shock then becomes part of Celan’s text as a
metaphor to convey the startling effect that poetry should have on the
reader as it attempts to transmit the shock to which it owes its pres-
ence.
As a figure for madness Lenz becomes the bearer of shock. “Der
Meridian” not only marks the intersection of crisis, poetry, and Wahn,
but also, by citing Büchner’s texts, connects Lenz to the Jews, mad-
ness, and the self. Celan explicitly partakes with Lenz and “the Jews”
of this date, his own twentieth of January: “Und vor einem Jahr . . .
brachte ich eine kleine Geschichte zu Papier, in der ich einen Men-
schen ‘wie Lenz’ durchs Gebirg gehen ließ. Ich hatte mich, das eine
wie das andere Mal, von einem ‘20. Jänner’, von meinem ‘20. Jänner’,
hergeschrieben” (GW 3:201) [And a year ago . . . I put a little story on
paper, in which I had a human being “like Lenz” walk through the
mountains. I had, in the one and the other instance, written myself
from a “20th of January,” from my “20th of January”]. The self begins
with the discursive markers of decisions. In his “Gespräch” Celan
made comparisons to Jews: “der Jud . . . da ging er also und kam, . . .
wie Lenz, durchs Gebirg” (GW 3:169) [the Jew . . . he walked and then
came, . . . like Lenz through the mountains]; “wir, die Juden, die da
kamen, wie Lenz, durchs Gebirg” (GW 3:173) [we, the Jews, who came
there, like Lenz, through the mountains]. In splicing a quotation of
“Gespräch” into the body of “Der Meridian,” Celan reasserts this con-
nection between Lenz and the Jews. In doing so, he brings the Jews
into contact with disintegration, linking Lenz’s crisis of madness with
the Holocaust.
What these comparisons and intersections amount to is the notion
that poems remember particular dates. Not just Lenz’s, Büchner’s, the
Jews’ or Celan’s twentieth of January are remembered. Celan borrows

the specific date of madness from which to construct a more general
notion of dates as madness. Such dates are neither dependent on a par-
ticular event alone to the exclusion of all others nor are they free to
refer to all dates generally. Instead the date partakes of a common fea-
ture: the crisis, a moment of decision, the confrontation with mortality.
For Lenz, it is madness and exclusion. For “the Jews,” it is the disaster
of Nazi genocide. The shared aspect of the crisis collects them into this
loose yet finally restricted set of dates.
Celan’s question that every poem may be inscribed with its own
twentieth of January means that every poem may be inscribed with its
own crisis, its own madness, political, experiential, biographical, or lin-
guistic.30 While this date retains its reference to Lenz, Wahn, Nazi
genocide, and Celan, these instances do not saturate its meaning. For
the date is both inclusive and exclusive. In other words, it remembers
potentially numerous singular events, yet it remembers only crises.
Thus the “20th of January” as a date of the Wannsee-Konferenz, the date
of madness, and the date of Celan’s poetic-political decisions partake of
a bond. Celan writes in the shadow of this date as a cipher for the
catastrophe of the twentieth century’s totalitarian politics and genoci-
dal anti-Semitism and for the way in which that event makes the poet’s
diligence necessary. Celan links the madness of Lenz with the catastro-
phe of Nazi genocide to create a new twentieth of January: one marked
by the voice of the emerging individual in the void of the voice that has
been silenced.
Through psychiatric metaphors “Der Meridian” is able to conceive of

an entirely other, an individual voice that poetry perceives. By means
of rhetorical devices such as circularity, citation, silence, and repetition,
the perception of this voice in “Der Meridian” interrupts the objective
discourse of a mechanistic art. This voice at once resists the generality
of art and at the same time uses the rhetoric of madness to show the
presence of the individual. These devices derive both from poetry and
the discourse of abnormal psychology. Psychiatric discourse is a matter
of not only madness but also of poetry, for psychiatry has long had to
rely on poetic tropes to describe and distinguish itself from the lan-
guage of madness. This is also to say that psychiatry has not been able
to explain how the language of madness is to be distinguished from
that of poetry. Owing to the absence of sufficient distinctions, poetry
and madness thus get discursively aligned against art and reason.
Celan’s speech exploits this absent distinction to transfer to poetry not
only the enigma of madness but also the confrontation that madness
offers to reason. “Der Meridian” therefore occupies a special position
in Celan’s lifelong attempt to write a poetry that reflects on its ethical
status without limiting ethics by attempting to define it.
3
Slivers of the Self
Celan’s work is replete with motifs of projecting, throwing, and

jetting forth. Often objects are cast forward to suggest an infinite dis-
semination, for instance the flurries in the poem “Engführung”:
Orkane, von je,

Partikelgestöber, das andre,
du
weißts ja, wir
lasens im Buche, war
Meinung.
(GW 1:200)
[Hurricanes, for ever,

particle-flurry, the other thing,
you
know it yes, we
read it in the book, was
opinion.]
Traditionally, atomic particles constitute the opposite of “Meinung”

(opinion), as in the thought of Democritus, from whom Celan is said
to have adopted the phrase: beyond atoms “all else is opinion.”1 The
poem ostensibly follows Democritus in distinguishing its projected
particles from opinion. Yet because particles are also linguistic units,
these too become opinions, which achieve in the poem a perpetual mo-
tion. All this, Celan writes, as if to drive home its allegorical nature:
“wir / lasens im Buche” (we / read it in the book). “Engführung” ex-
plores a fragmentary or splintered universe of perception, writing, and
knowledge. The words “Orkane” (hurricanes) and “Gestöber,” which
could be translated with “storm” or “dusting” in the manner of a tor-
75
nado, have a vertiginous and destructive effect. There are several

meanings of “Partikel” at work here: an atomic, basic unit of matter or
energy; a fragment; the minor units of speech, including interjections,
such as “ja,” conjunctions, and prepositions, as well as near-words.
These are fragments of meaning but also of form, which is to say that
the stanza itself is one fragment in a poem consisting of fragments that
are separated by little fragmentary stars. In this way the poem breaks
words open to offer bodies of meaning wrested from nothingness, bod-
ies that are “for ever” in the hurricane’s flux.
Yet just as present in Celan’s poems are particles that get scattered
so as to take root. My focus in this chapter will be on meaning that
splits into slivers or jets forth to proliferate like weeds, weeds that
nonetheless function as self-sufficient beings in themselves. Through-
out the 1950s Celan’s poems explore the nature of a universe of parti-
cles, opinion, and illusion. The explicit semantics of Wahn nearly dis-
appear from his published poetry during this period. In their stead the
poems turn to the fragment and Meinung.
Judgments
As I have shown, poems from the 1960s frequently figured madness as

well as melancholy as a shield protecting the self. Celan’s interest in the
discourse of psychic abnormality reemerged at this time, becoming
particularly acute in the early 1960s, an interest that had an impact on
the final phases of his poetry. This is because in the discourse of the
psyche Celan found a source for a notion of words as splintered indi-
viduals, a notion that is most notably on view in his 1962 poem “Huh-
ediblu.” In this poem the name and the form of this illusory Wahn re-
turn to offer a renewed onslaught on the reader.
HUHEDIBLU
Schwer-, Schwer-, Schwer-
fälliges auf
Wortwegen und -schneisen.
Und—ja—
die Bälge der Feme-Poeten
lurchen und vespern und wispern und vipern,
episteln.
3 / SLIVERS OF THE SELF 77
Geunktes, aus
Hand- und Fingergekröse, darüber
schriftfern eines
Propheten Name spurt, als
An- und Bei- und Afterschrift, unterm
Datum des Nimmermenschtags im September—:
Wann,
wann blühen, wann,
wann blühen die, hühendiblüh,
huhediblu, ja sie, die September-
rosen?
Hüh—on tue . . . Ja wann?
Wann, wannwann,
Wahnwann, ja Wahn,—
Bruder
Geblendet, Bruder
Erloschen, du liest,
du liest und du,
dies hier, dies:
Dis-
parates—: Wann
blüht es, das Wann,
das Woher, das Wohin und was
und wer
sich aus- und an- und dahin- und zu sich lebt, den
Achsenton, Tellus, in seinem
vor Hell-
hörigkeit schwirrenden
Seelenohr, den
Achsenton tief
im Innern unsrer
sternrunden Wohnstatt Zerknirschung? Denn
sie bewegt sich, dennoch, im Herzsinn.
Den Ton, oh,

den Oh-Ton, ah,
das A und das O,
das Oh-diese-Galgen-schon-wieder, das Ah-es-gedeiht,
auf den alten

Alraunenfluren gedeiht es,
als schmucklos-schmückendes Beikraut,

als Beikraut, als Beiwort, als Beilwort,
ad-
jektivisch, so gehn
sie dem Menschen zuliebe, Schatten,
vernimmt man, war
alles Dagegen—
Feiertagsnachtisch, nicht mehr,—:
Frugal,
kontemporan und gesetzlich
geht Schinderhannes zu Werk,
sozial und alibi-elbisch, und
das Julchen, das Julchen:
daseinsfeist rülpst,
rülpst es das Fallbeil los,—call it (hott!)
love.
Oh quand refleuriront, oh roses, vos septembres?

(GW 1:275–76)2
[Heavi-, heavi-, heavi-

falling on
wordpaths and tracks.
And—yes—
the windbags of the proscriber-poets
lurk and vesper and whisper and viper,
they epistle.
The foreboaded, out
of hand- and fingermesentery, above
scriptfar a
prophet’s name traces, as
at- and by- and behindscript, under the
date of the nevermansday in September—:
When,
when bloom, when,
when do they bloom, hühendiblüh,
huhediblu, yes those, the September-
roses?
Hüh—on tue . . . Yes when?

When, whenwhen,
Wahnwhen, yes Wahn,—
Brother
Blinded, Brother
Extinguished, you read,
you read and you,
this here, this:
dis-
parates—: When
does it bloom, the When,
the Whence, the Whither and what
and who
lives out- and on- and to and from himself, the
axis-note, Tellus, in his
from light-
hearing buzzing
soul’s ear, the
axis-note deep
in the inside of our
star-round dwelling’s contrition? For
it moves, yet, in the heartsense.
The note, oh,

the Oh-note, ah,
the A and the O,
the Oh-these-gallows-again, the Ah-it-grows,
on the old
mandrake’s turf it grows,
as unadorned-adorned strayweed,
as strayweed, as strayword, as axe-word,
ad-
jectival, so go
they for the sake of humans, shadows,
one perceives, was
everything against it—
holiday dessert, no longer,—:
Frugal,
contemporary and lawful
Shinderhannes goes to work,
social and alibi-elbish, and
Julchen, Julchen:
fatwithbeing-there belches,
it belches the guillotine loose,—call it (hott!)
love.
Oh quand refleuriront, oh roses, vos septembres?]
The most oft-repeated motif in “Huhediblu” is located in its dou-

bled word “Wahnwann.” Crucially, it connects the poem’s title to the
questions at the poem’s center as well as to its final line. Through this
final line, “Oh quand refleuriront, oh roses, vos septembres?,”
“Huhediblu” includes a key gesture to a text by the symbolist poet Paul
Verlaine, “L’espoir luit comme un brin de paille dans l’étable” (Hope
gleams like a wisp of straw within a stable), a poem that Celan had
translated in the 1940s before leaving Romania. The “hope” of Ver-
laine’s title catches the etymological meaning of Wahn. The concluding
line of Verlain’s poem, “Ah! quand refleuriront les roses de septem-
bres!” (Oh when will the roses of September bloom again!), becomes
in Celan’s earliest translation “Wann blühen wieder die September-
rosen?” (When will the September-roses bloom again?).3 In “Huhedi-
blu” Celan cited his own earlier translation in the phrase “wann blühen
die,” which Celan reorganized to “hühendiblüh” and “huhediblu.” In
the course of the poem, the question word “wann” merges with Wahn
to reveal the poem’s source.
The motif of Wahn generates the title, which announces the poem’s
capacity to reorganize its parts. In rhetoric this form of linguistic po-
tentiality, which describes the transposition of constituent parts within
a whole, is known as metathesis.4 A case in point is Celan’s own ana-
grammatic name change (from Antschel/Ancel to Celan). In the poem,
the rearrangement of parts proclaims itself as the way in which mean-
ing must be constructed and perceived. This reorganization is a mise-
en-scène of meaning as it emerges from nonmeaning. The poem enacts
this in the various modulations that produce the word and title. Critics
have referred to Celan’s sense of anxiety with his position in France to
explain the poem’s use of French. Yet the specific importations of
French derive from both Verlaine’s poem as well as from the central
motif of madness in “Huhediblu.” The primary effects of this multilin-
gualism are at once individuation and at the same time the creation of
a field of incommensurable languages (French, German, and English).
From the beginning the poem incorporates a babble of words that no
metalanguage can encapsulate. Thus does the poem make its title pro-
grammatic.
“Huhediblu” does not readily lend itself to a formal pattern. It has
nine stanzas of which two consist of one line.5 Consistent with Celan’s
middle and later poems, each word, often divided by hyphenation and
line-breaks, opens itself up to a variety of meanings. It creates an inter-
action with and mutual modification of other words, which is the po-
etry’s tendency to point semantically in many directions. In other
words, and this is crucial, the poem devotes itself to the distinguishing
of units of meaning, which includes words within words. This distin-
guishing logic is the poem’s formal strategy for creating the individuals
in the word. Celan uncovered this logic, as I will show, in the phe-
nomenological discourse on madness. By getting repeated, these words
wipe out absolute singularity on the page. But at the same time they
create the individuality of which poetry is capable.
A tendency of Celan’s later poems is to replace the illusion of poetic
subjectivity with a more complex notion of the written word as a self.
This is one of the ways in which “Huhediblu” in the context of Celan’s
works is a transitional poem that suggests the direction his poetry was
to take in the volumes that follow Die Niemandsrose. The text is there-
fore a case where we can see how world, signification, and a self, which
are caught in ceaseless transformations, emerge through interaction.
Accordingly, there is no Ich in “Huhediblu.” Instead the poem begins
its work of breaking apart words to re-create them with its first stutter-
ing lines that evoke Schwermut: Schwer-, Schwer-, Schwer- / fälliges
auf / Wortwegen und -schneisen (Heavi-, heavi-, heavi- / falling on /
wordpaths and tracks). “Huhediblu” posits that a thing becomes mean-
ingful through its reappearance. The initial result of this repetition is
at once to extinguish the potential absolute singularity of the word and
at the same time to thereby bestow on the word a lost uniqueness. For
this reason the third case of “Schwer” illustrates the potential for a
multiplicity of meanings. It is both a different repetition and the emer-
gence of an entirely different word: “Schwer- / fälliges,” a word that
comments on the poem’s engagement with authenticity as a kind of
falling.
Winfried Kudszus has argued that the linguistic impulses in
“Huhediblu” are no longer subordinated to a firmly grounded con-
sciousness.6 Kudszus’s awareness of the poem’s attention to the disrup-
tions inherent in language is guided by a sense that the poem fears the
loss of a subjective identity, indeed, that it fears “the end of the I.”7 Yet
the fear of loss implies the existence of a subject which fears, thus recu-
perating a subjective presence in the poem, and attributing a sense of
dissolution along with “Verfolgungswahn” (persecution-delusion) to
this subject. Instead of a subject, the concern of the poem is with the
generation and protection of the word as a self. It is the individual that
is threatened with loss in the poem, which is something different from
subjectivity. As Celan brackets out the subject, the focus of poem and
reader fall on the word as a self.
As a result, the second stanza turns to the conflict between meaning
and non-meaning, or order and anarchy, which establishes a powerful
tension. Readers of “Huhediblu” have argued that its Wahn and refer-
ences to “Feme-Poeten,” among other terms, constitute a negative
pole of language,8 one that allows Celan to critique deceptive and inau-
thentic poets and their works:
Und—ja—
die Bälge der Feme-Poeten
lurchen und vespern und wispern und vipern,
episteln.
Geunktes, aus
Hand- und Fingergekröse, darüber
[And—yes—
the windbags of the proscriber-poets
lurk and vesper and whisper and viper,
they epistle.
The foreboaded, out
of hand- and fingermesentery, above]
At first glance the “Feme-Poeten” as well as the onomatopoetics would

seem to amount to a condemnation of inauthentic language. The
poem’s term refers to the Feme, a medieval court of law, while the verb
verfemen means “to judge” or “to condemn” which is why it is trans-
lated here with “proscriber-poets.” Thus this term includes both posi-
tive and negative connotations. “Huhediblu” never provides the reader
with a distanced evaluation of its own dispersed language to the point
that a strict distinction between a degraded, rationalized, and thus
fallen writing (Literaturbetrieb) from a predominantly positive one
emerges.9 For without a determined authentic language to offset the
inauthentic/authentic distinction, this duality cannot take root. Be-

cause this opposition is lacking, the poem confounds interpretations
that see it operating on a dichotomy of an authentic versus a degraded
writing. The stanza may include Celan’s personal or ideological ene-
mies, yet it certainly creates the figure of poets who make judgments
and take on the risk of distinguishing, that is, making decisions. It also
draws on the outlaw poets (verfemt), the poèts-maudits,10 writers who
must use a socially inflected, object language. Celan thereby signals
that it is history, not a fall from redemptive grace or inauthenticity,11
that marks the poem’s language of feme-writers, writers who judge and
are judged.
In an outburst of polyvalent terms from this stanza that neutralize
distinctions of good writing versus bad, poems become “windbags”
(made of animal skins). “Huhediblu” brings an abrasive and critical
presence of animality into a collision with a language suspended be-
tween determined sense and non-sense. The poem uses words that
mark the boundary between meaning and nonmeaning to present the
emergence of sense from white noise, a boundary the poem reveals in
stanza 5 to be madness. “Lurchen,” a verb derived from the word for
amphibian (Lurch), becomes “lurken” (to stutter and stammer). The
word “vespern” (to vesper), which also means to guzzle, points to Latin
vespers, known to be nonsense to all but clerics. “Wispern” (whisper) is
another case of cacophonous, nonsensical buzzing that language re-
claims. The poem is determined to cut into nature and find meaning
there where it previously did not exist. The stanza turns serpent into a
verb, which “vipers,” and in the word “Geunktes” it collapses the frogs’
croaking with meanings of prophecy. These terms (lurchen, vespern, wis-
pern, Geunktes) help to generate a poem that oscillates between deter-
mined sense and non-sense, one that registers the rupture of madness
in the work. This produces a poetic discourse that eludes a pregiven
distinction between meaning and madness. Either as onomatopoetics
(lurchen, vespern, Geunktes) or as shibboleths (vespern, episteln), these
words bring moments of order and anarchy into a clash with each
other. This presents a juridical-ethical moment to the reader requiring
a basic interpretive decision.
At the same time, this conflict dovetails with an almost primitive an-
imality, a greyzone between human language and primordial animality.
The shared i sound is found in both the words denoting writing and
those denoting the animal (wispern, episteln, schrift, vipern). To illus-
trate this further, one can see that “bags,” the animal skin of the
“Feme-Poeten,” carry out actions proper both to language and animal.
This introduces a naturalization of language and places it in a realm
over and against reason that seeks to control it. It shares this ability
with Wahn to confuse efforts at dominating it. In a world consisting of
appearances entrapped in a logic of repetition and variation, there is no
alternative to a writing that both repeats and that may turn against
speakers. This shared field between language and nature establishes an
analogy between two elements that confound order and total control:
on the one hand the potentially limitless alteration of meaning, which
is to say the principle Celan turns to for individuality, and on the other
hand nature as well as the limits of will.
Prophecy in Reverse
The second stanza also evokes the figure of the “prophet,” which in-
troduces the theme of uncertain future. In the constellation of the
“foreboaded” (Geunktes) and “the date,” time occupies a central place.
The prominence of “the prophet’s name” is conveyed spatially through
its placement in a chiasm. Here Celan writes the chiasm, a figure for
reflection, by placing the word “schrift” (script) immediately after
“über” (over) and before “unter” (under) as well as in the reversed,
mirrored sounds that are involved (ei, f, if):
darüber
schriftfern eines
Propheten Name spurt, als
An- und Bei- und Afterschrift, unterm
Datum des Nimmermenschtags im September—:
[above
scriptfar a
prophet’s name traces, as
at- and by- and behindscript, under the
date of the nevermansday in September—:]
This chiasm participates in the contiguous relationship between “the

name of a prophet” and its dual references, which are the foretold and
the date. The hand produces the foretold, the hand that is the instru-
ment of the poet’s text. Though the name appears “schriftfern” (script-
far), it remains a form of writing. By being “schriftfern,” this writing is

distant to itself, doubled and reflexive. What the poem foretells is of
the “Hand- und Fingergekröse” (hand- and fingermesentery), which is
to say, the poem refers to its own efforts at projecting and pointing to
the individual. This prophecy of “hand and fingermesentery,” which
recites the ancient practice of reading the future through an animal’s
entrails, has no prophetic truth.12 Instead it is the entrails of both the
hand and writing, whose prophecy reveals the wiping out of the past by
the present word. It appears as an “Afterschrift” (behind-writing; late-
writing) and pseudowriting, meanings that annul the seemingly
prophetic stance.13 The name of the prophet traces the prophecy; the
name follows it, but does not foretell events. This stanza thus inverts
the notion of prophecy, turning it into a manifestation of the present
and past rather than one of the future. The name of the prophet results
from retracing what has already happened. In other words, prophecy
becomes a way to speak to the other. This other takes the place of what
the poem later announces to be brothers who have been “erloschen”
(extinguished). The “Datum des Nimmermenschtags im September”
recalls those who have been extinguished. The citation of this particu-
lar month from Verlaine’s poem points to the fate of the Jews in Roma-
nia, the place where Celan first translated the poem.
The Madness of When
By breaking and twisting syntax, by fragmenting key words such as

“schwer- / fällig,” by mining language for potential collisions of mean-
ing in homophones such as “Wahnwann,” “Huhediblu” eludes the de-
termined distinction of a dark madness and a lucid reason. In doing so
it exposes itself to the real possibility of meaning’s loss. Yet, without as-
suring us through a reasoned thought grounded in a final principle,
e.g., god, reason, destiny, “Huhediblu” asserts its meaning in the
course of its thoughtful opinion. At this point questions counter
declarative phrases:
Wann,
wann blühen, wann,
wann blühen die, hühendiblüh,
huhediblu, ja sie, die September-
rosen?
Hüh—on tue . . . Ja wann?
[When,
when to bloom, when,
when do they bloom, hühendiblüh,
huhediblu, yes those, the September-
roses?
Hüh—on tue . . . Yes when?]
Not only contingency via the prolongation of questions but also the
unpredictable reorganization of words characterizes this attempt to
carve a line through reason and madness. While it may be the case that
all poetic structures involve unpredictability, “Huhediblu” figures the
reorganization of its title as an instant of such contingency momentar-
ily captured. Only with the poem’s last line is it evident that “wann
blühen die, hühendiblüh” could echo the French of Paul Verlaine’s text
(“Oh quand refleuriront, oh roses, vos septembres?”). Such unpre-
dictability figures the authority of the literary work as an event that is
not determined logos. This is also to say the poem alludes self-con-
sciously to the chance at work in its signification. There is no guiding
principle behind the chance that a translation of Verlaine’s line yields
words that when reorganized produce “huhediblu,” an utterance that
has a chance meaning and that first becomes a word through its repeti-
tion.
In the essay “Valérys Abweichungen” (Valéry’s Deviations) Adorno
discusses a concept he terms a literature of deviation. In this essay,
which he dedicated to Celan, Adorno argues that “chance” is a cipher
for the paradox of art. Art is not identical to rationality. It lives from its
accidental nature. But art also does not entirely evade rationality’s
grasp, for in the idea of the immanent work of art “—which follows
from western art’s overall tendency toward progressive domination of
nature, concretely: toward complete control over their material—
something is omitted.”14 The essay’s dedication to Celan, which came
two years before “Huhediblu,” is itself not chance. The title, “Valéry’s
Deviations,” speaks to a property that Adorno must have found in
Celan’s poems: their own deviations from the determined reason in-
volved in subduing the other.
Celan’s poem occupies this open space, which would be in Adorno’s
terms the “omission.” For Adorno this eludes an unbroken poetic logic
with fantasies of control over its material and the world it appears to
represent. Unlike Adorno’s works, “Huhediblu” does not argue that
the antagonism toward unfettered subjective expression inherent in
chance mimetically mirrors the historical impotence of the subject.
While Celan’s poem does not mention chance, it remains self-con-
sciously open to the contingency that literature cannot eliminate. All
writing is open to a degree of contingency. Yet paradoxically through
this explicit reorganization—the wann-questions and their unpre-
dictable pairing with Wahn—“Huhediblu” can conceive of itself as
contingency, for which Wahn is the key metaphor. While the poem can
thematize chance through naming madness, it must exclude reference
to the stifled speech of the other, the interruption in speaking that the
work qua work excludes. “Huhediblu” metaphorically makes present
the determined silence that can be read only in a ciphered form in the
work, which by its nature depends on hierarchy, organization, forma-
tion, and rationality.
Questions punctuate “Huhediblu,” a poem whose title is the reor-
ganization of a question. The core instance of this is where “Huhedi-
blu” identifies its question word “wann” (when) with Wahn. With the
“wann” of stanza 5 this word’s counterpart of madness appears:
Wann, wannwann,
[When, whenwhen
Wahnwhen, yes Wahn,—]
The spasmodic repetitions and prolongation of vowels (wann to wahn)

characterize this stanza, and indeed, the entire poem. In a significant
shift within the poem madness replaces the question word “wann” and
takes over its function and meaning. The involuntary disruptions and
stutters seemingly prevent the poem‘s voice from producing a meaning
without resistance. In both the phenomenological tradition as well as
in the poetic lineages of Rilke and Hölderlin, the question serves a
number of purposes. It generates dialogue and a multiplicity of voices.
Though questions imply a position (through the selection of what is
asked), they also establish the element of tentativeness. That is, a ques-
tion places the questioner in a paradoxical position. For the questioner
acts by uttering the question, yet at the same time, the questioner im-
plies the inadequacy of a prior statement. It links production to de-
struction. In “Huhediblu” the question exposes the possibility that

nothing may follow, in the same moment that it holds itself open for a
phrase that will follow.
These questions and metaquestions share an affinity with tradi-
tional meanings of Wahn. Their repetitive and stuttering spasms frag-
ment and reorganize the text. According to Grimm’s dictionary, a text
with which Celan was very familiar, Wahn is opposed to knowledge
(Wissen) as an objective fact. Grimm’s stresses that “Wahn is an opin-
ion—though uncertain and perceivable as uncertain—to which one
nevertheless holds.”15 Wahn signifies what is meant by the Platonic no-
tion doxa, which typically denigrated the contingent, phenomenal, and
illusory shadows in contrast to the supersensible, essential, and eternal
ideas. Not simply opinion, Wahn is an opinion whose uncertainty one
may be aware of, yet despite or because of this uncertainty, requires a
singular decision.
The Flight of Language
Stanzas 3 through 5 demonstrate both how “Huhediblu” emerges from

notions of madness and how it uses these notions. The poem draws on
psychiatric descriptions of mania and Ideenflucht (flight of ideas) to
construct the individual through repetition. This effort relies on the
breaking open of meaning to allow words thus newly constructed as in-
dividuals to emerge. To do this Celan also relies on the metaphor of
the bloom, and later in the poem, the weeds that grow from seeds that
are cast forth. At the same time, the reliance on the discourse of mania
shows how the authentic can only be revealed in a ciphered and repeat-
able inauthentic form.
The mania of the poem raises the question of the relationship of
language and the self. The syntactic gaps and juxtapositions in “Huh-
ediblu” bear resemblance to one manifestation of what Binswanger
called “Ideenflucht,” which denotes the stringing together of phrases
without a logical connection. Relying on this metaphor of flight Bin-
swanger linked Ideenflucht with mania. In Melancholie und Manie, he as-
serted that this language of disassociation has its own motivation and
cannot be in itself the proof of madness. Binswanger concedes that one
key linguistic form of mania consists in the breakdown of syntax into
isolated words, interjections, fragments, sounds, and rhymes. Yet he
underscores that the entirety of manic speech also contains patterns of

advanced coherent meaning. David Hume and David Hartley’s associ-
ationist notions of cognition, which Binswanger opposed, saw in this
manic linguistic disintegration into isolated syllables, interjections, and
random sounds merely the basic elements that could be mechanisti-
cally recombined in nearly infinite ways. For associationists, who as-
sumed the absence of a Kantian-inspired rational framework for the
mind, this disintegrated language revealed an equally disintegrated self
reduced to random mechanistic processes. In contrast, Binswanger ar-
gued that a concealed overarching idea or meaning, an understanding
that is consistent in key ways with Celan’s poem, instead guided the en-
tirety of manic speech.
While it draws on both the conventional language of mania and an
overarching meaning as opposed to mechanistic processes, “Huhedi-
blu” abandons the notion of a poetic subject at the core of the poem.
This contrasts with Binswanger’s view, however, in which language was
just the surface level representation of the expressive self, which could
achieve varying degrees of inauthenticity or authenticity, a prime con-
cern for him and the cultural moment in which his existential notions
emerged. As a result, both disassociative and apparently logical lan-
guage can appear as manifestations of mental illness. In a passage from
Melancholie und Manie, which Celan had marked, this view is expressed
as follows: “For the flight of ideas consists . . . not only in the constant
jumping from one idea to another . . . it reveals itself not only in gram-
matical-syntactical idiosyncrasies, in rhymes, sound associations, the
demolition of words, and the preference for parataxis, but can also ex-
press itself in ways that are, linguistically speaking, perfectly correct.”16
Mania is not the descent into a purely destructive and paratactic lan-
guage. Rather it is the coexistence of both conventional and associative
forms.
As examples of manic language Binswanger pointed to statements
characterized by a telegraphic style with verbs appearing in the present
tense, a style that revealed a paucity of syntax and relative clauses.
Under the influence of Heideggerian notions from Being and Time
concerning authenticity, Binswanger described the manic as the
pathological form of modern, distracted, and therefore inauthentic ex-
istence. Accordingly, the modern inauthentic form of Being is trapped
in an unproductive form of curiosity. This is also a distracted and un-
abiding existence that resides nowhere, as opposed to one that is
rooted. Borrowing a Heideggerian term, Binswanger asserts that the

manic self inhabits “the present in the sense of the temporality of
falling [Verfall],” employing a word that connotes decay but also es-
cape and infatuation.17 In Heidegger’s ontological description this fall
tears understanding away from the possibility of projecting authentic
possibilities. Believing it can possess and find everything within reach,
the falling self instead offers up a mere sham of authenticity. While for
Heidegger authenticity was a matter of the ontological condition for
being, for Binswanger it became a key notion of modern life and prac-
tical psychiatry. For this reason, the manic patient manifested the gen-
eral manic style of living experienced by the modern self in its most
extreme, tragic form. Celan’s poem absorbs this manic language with
its ruptured syntax, reliance on present tense (the only tense used in
the poem), interjections (“ja”), fragments (“Hüh,” “Dis- / parates”),
and homophones (“Wahnwann”). At the same time, the poem ignores
Binswanger’s concern with authenticity. Through the absence of any
subject position or voice, the poem disconnects subjective experience
from expression. Taking the language of manic Ideenflucht further, the
poem collapses then reorganizes a phrase to rewrite it finally as an un-
known nonsense word (“huhediblu”) that first receives meaning in its
repetition. All this serves the poem’s strategy of individuation, which
ran contrary to Binswanger’s central argument that mania resulted in a
loss of individuality.
Accordingly stanzas 3, 4 and 5 all fasten onto words in order to crack
them open, that is, to produce slivers of language and release a hereto-
fore hidden level of individuality in signification. For instance, from
“wann blühen die, hühendiblüh” (when do they bloom, hühendiblüh),
which is the question about the time and place of life, the poem moves
to the negation of life in the next line: “Hüh—on tue . . . Ja wann?” Not
only does this introduce in a truncated form the German phrase “ein-
mal hüh, einmal hott” (now this, now that), thus pointing to the un-
avoidability of contradiction, it also situates the life and death of the in-
dividual in the body of the poem. Because language is used to kill and
extinguish, the poem must locate within it a way to exaggerate meaning,
in other words, to cast forward individual words, which is what is done
and explained in stanza 7 with the use of the “adjective” in its original
meaning of jettisoning and projecting. Because Binswanger viewed lan-
guage as the expression of an existential self, he described these lan-
guage slivers as the breakdown and loss of the preexisting, authentic in-
dividual, which is to say, of all that is proper to the self. The primary
fact of the individual gets “zerschlagen” (shattered) into thousands of
fragments that can no longer constitute an I, having become “Split-
terindividuen” (sliver-individuals). Not only are these fragments not I,
they are also not you, we, or they, but instead an “Es” (it) cobbled to-
gether from slivers of shattered persons.18
Such slivering of language is of significance for Celan’s poem in that
it projects individual meaning into the void of the extinguished. Thus
in their splintering, the fragmented words of the poem precisely gen-
erate selves and others in the wake of what has been wiped out. Instead
of objects or empty subjects, what the poem insists be read is the event
of individuation and distinction. Turning to address the figure of the
extinguished brothers, the poem commands that the disparate words
emerging in the poem be read and be read in their place:
du liest,
du liest und du,
dies hier, dies:
Dis-
parates—:
[you read,
you read and you,
this here, this:
dis-
parates—:]
A similar figuration of madness is explored in many of Celan’s later

texts, for instance, the poem “Es wird etwas” (Something will):
Aus dem zerscherbten

Wahn
steh ich auf
und seh meiner Hand zu,
wie sie den einen
einzigen
Kreis zieht
(GW 3:109)
[I stand up
out of the shattered
delusion
and watch my hand,
how it draws the one
only
circle]
Wahn here likewise consists of shards reminiscent of Binswanger’s

Splitterindividuen. But as in “Huhediblu,” this individuation provides
the conditions for the self to emerge. The self in “Es wird etwas” re-
gards its hand, which locates self and other. In this moment the self
sees how the hand draws a unique circle to connect shards of meaning
in a return to the singular, unrepeatable individual, which is revealed in
its ciphered form of the circle.
Winnfried Menninghaus has argued that a concern with “authen-
ticity” is central to the language of “Huhediblu.” In a similar vein, Bin-
swanger saw the language of mania in the context of authenticity.
Ideenflucht corresponds to “the springing, skipping or prancing Being-
in-the-world.” It runs away from an authentic being-with-others only
to exhaust itself “im halluzinatorisch-wahnsinngen” (in a hallucinatory
madness), which is a pointless obsession with others as objects.19 As was
the case with the “Feme-Poeten,” the “Oh-Ton,” the “Beikraut,” as
well as other language from stanzas 2, 5, and 7—all these—would seem
to consist of completely compromised and inauthentic figures. Yet the
manic Wahn-language of the poem actually recalls not only the wiping
out of the “Bruder” but also the projection of life. If authenticity is a
concern of the text, which is not at all certain, then the poem is aware
that absolute authenticity cannot be revealed in a social, thus repeat-
able, language. In other words, the authentic or the singular, requires a
language beyond authenticity in order to appear.
Only in the poem’s repetitions, taken from metaphors of Wahn,
which are at first glance the impossibility of the singular, can the indi-
vidual be glimpsed. Binswanger took care to distinguish between a
state of complete mental breakdown and a linguistic utterance. The
historical, allegorical “language of madness” is not a proof of break-
down but rather the conventional material for its evocation. This
awareness allowed Binswanger to identify a core, expressive self inhab-
iting and to an extent playfully interacting with speech, which is only
apparently mechanistic and dispersed, one which could be shielded
from breakdown. “Huhediblu” retains this distinction between surface
and depth. Yet Binswanger’s core self is replaced in the poem with an
overarching intention, one that draws together the poem’s seemingly
scattered directions: to produce individuals.
Celan’s exploitation of metaphors drawn from the psychiatry of
Binswanger has precedents in German poetry. Adorno argued that in
Hölderlin’s poetry a similar use of psychiatry is to be found. The juxta-
position of questions with assertions that do not logically follow, for in-
stance, provides cases of what Adorno, in his discussion of Hölderlin’s
later poetry, calls the “hiatus.”20 Adorno comments on this tendency of
Hölderlin’s late poetry in what follows:
to mix up eras together, to connect the far-flung and unconnected; the
principle of such associations, which is the opposite of the discursive
principle, reminds one of the sequencing of grammatical parts. Poetry
has gained both of these from the zone of madness [Wahn], in which
the flood of ideas [Gedankenflucht] thrives as does the readiness of many
schizophrenics to see any real thing as the sign of something hidden, to
charge it with meaning.21
The “Gedankenflucht” that Adorno identifies in Hölderlin recalls the

“Ideenflucht” described by Binswanger. According to Adorno, the meta-
phorical madness of Hölderlin’s texts was the insight into the gaps in
the systems of idealist philosophy. Early twentieth-century readers took
the particularities of Hölderlin’s syntax, his use of so-called “Flick-
worte” (patch words), for example, “aber” (but), “nämlich” (namely),
and “denn” (for, because), not as poetry’s exploitation of madness but as
objective evidence of the poet’s descent into derangement.22
Despite their differences, Celan turned to some of the same sourc-
es, namely the historical discourse of pathology, as did Hölderlin to
produce a disruptive language. Unlike Hölderlin and, one might add,
Baudelaire, who juxtaposed the classical with the modern, Celan brings
the past into a clash with the present, for instance, in his inversion of
prophecy in the second stanza. For Adorno, Hölderlin’s later poetry
appropriated pathology, approaching “madness—as a series of disrup-
tive actions against both spoken language and the high style of German
classicism.”23 Like Hölderlin, Celan makes use of the hiatus to fore-
ground inconsistencies. Yet unlike in Hölderlin’s poetry, where the hia-
tus is at work in juxtapositions between general idealist concepts and
particularities on the level of the sentence, such gaps or yawns are pre-
sent in Celan’s poem within the word, for instance in the poem’s title.
This allows the poem to inscribe a meaning that had previously not ex-
isted or had been covered up.
An illustration of this can be seen in the key hiatus from stanza 5,
the form of which could easily pass as a recitation of Hölderlin’s parat-
actic use of language:
Wann blüht es, das Wann,

.......................
im Innern unsrer
sternrunden Wohnstatt Zerknirschung? Denn
sie bewegt sich, dennoch, im Herzsinn.24
[When does it bloom, the When,

.............................
in the inside of our
star round dwelling’s contrition? For
it moves, yet, in the heartsense]
Such conjunctions (“denn,” for, because, “dennoch,” however, yet) con-

ventionally ground an assertion by way of either explanation or the
subordination of one idea to another. However this passage, which al-
ters a famous line purportedly uttered by Galileo, links denn to a ques-
tion. Galileo was reported to have maintained, despite being forced to
assert the contrary, that the earth does indeed revolve around the sun.
“Denn” undoes the word’s function of explanation in the scaffolding of
thought. Contrition (“Zerknirschung”) here takes on a cosmic dimen-
sion, so that the citation of Galileo applies no longer to the earth as an
astronomical body but instead to earthly contrition. The “Herzsinn” is
the meaning given by the heart, the core and the seat of emotion. Con-
trition, the intention to amend, revolves according to and is hidden in
this Herzsinn. The entire passage is guided by the question about when
will all three—time (“das Wann”), place (“das Woher, das Wohin”),
and human life—appear or bloom (“blühen”) within a worldly contri-
tion.
Here the syntactic gap between the question and denn reveals how
glaringly absent are the time and the other essentials required for life.
The incisive question word wann, which syncopates Celan’s poem and
unleashes its dizzying array of questions, moves toward its final itera-
tion: what will they bloom? The poem responds to these questions of
existence, the conditions for the possibility of questions, not with an
answer. The “because” in the next line cannot ground the question
which logically would follow. Rather than one denn-phrase grounding
a logical position, the grounding is withdrawn with the ironic barrage
of questions. Instead of laying out the conditions for life, which denn
would conventionally do, it accentuates the open-ended question. This
is because the appearance of life remains concealed in the interior (“im
Innern”) of a heart that turns inward and doubts.
Brothers
The murdered whose deaths leave the void that the poem attempts
to address are referred to as the extinguished brothers:
Bruder
Geblendet, Bruder
Erloschen
[Brother
Blinded, Brother
Extinguished]
The brother(s) in the published version of the poem is not identified.

Joel Golb has argued that the brother is the figure of the mad Hölder-
lin.25 This recalls Celan’s poem “Tübingen, Jänner,” which ciphers
Hölderlin’s madness and his “Zur Blindheit über- / redete Augen”
(GW 1:226) [Talked into- / blindness eyes]. Yet “Huhediblu,” though it
figuratively encodes a reception of Hölderlin in its citational use of the
“hiatus,” does not name Hölderlin. Instead, the poem’s drafts identify
the Russian poet Ossip Mandelstam and, possibly, the Austrian writer
Arnold Zweig as the brother(s) (TA: Niemandsrose 116). The references
to Mandelstam and Zweig are erased in “Huhediblu”‘s published ver-
sion, and thus the brother, strictly speaking, is free reference.26
In an outstanding study of the poem, Amy Colin has noted that
Mandelstam, to whom Celan dedicated Die Niemandsrose, was said to
have become mentally ill in Siberian deportation, where he died.27 In
his radio-broadcast essay on Mandelstam, Celan remembers the ac-
counts of Mandelstam and his “senseless” laughter: “So kommt es zum
Ausbruch aus der Kontingenz: durch das Lachen. Durch jenes, uns
bekannte, ‘unsinnige’ Lachen des Dichters—durch das Absurde” (TA:
Meridian, 221).28 [It is through laughter that there is a break-out of the

state of contingency. Through that “senseless” and familiar laughter of
the poet, through the absurd.] This comment is to some extent influ-
enced by Mandelstam’s essay “Vom Gegenüber” (Regarding the oppo-
site). Meaningful for Celan, this essay begins with the question why
culture wishes to equate the poet with madness. In his answer Mandel-
stam recites the classical definition of the insane person as one who re-
moves himself from the communicative realm by audaciously choosing
to speak to no one (Niemand): “And they would do right to turn their
backs to the poet as a madman, if his word were really directed at no
one. But that’s not the way that it is.”29 In Mandelstam’s view, poems
are not addressed to specific readers (“jemand”). Instead, in the sense
of Benjamin’s comment about Baudelaire that a certain kind of poetry
creates its own audience—the reading of the poem makes readers.30 As
Mandelstam would write it, the “Gegenüber” (opposite) is coeval with
the text as it finds the reader (Mandelstam uses the metaphor of the
poem as “message in a bottle”). The madness of poetry is not that it
speaks to no one, but that it speaks to an other.
Celan appropriates the “Gegenüber” in “Der Meridian” where it
constitutes the poem’s ethical imperative that it address itself to the
other. Beginning with Mohn und Gedächtnis he claims Mandelstam’s
“niemand” for his poems. This is particularly the case for the poems of
Die Niemandsrose, which can be seen, for instance, in the volume’s title.
Niemand encrypts the poem’s other and the “erloschen” (extinguished)
Jews. As Celan’s poetry increasingly addresses itself to Niemand, it be-
comes a seemingly monological, hermetic corpus that apparently takes
on the mark of madness to which Mandelstam refers, in that it speaks
to no one. Even so, the apparent madness of talking to “no one”
achieves an ironic distance to both symbolism, which Mandelstam cites
as monologic, and to the poetry of Gottfried Benn, who argued for the
poem as a monologue. While Mandelstam theorized the poem as an
address to the other, Celan not only addresses this other but also in-
scribes it in poem. The madness of the poem is that it aims to project
the individual in the word that can step into the absence left by the ex-
tinguished. Celan thus makes a fraternal gesture to Mandelstam in his
attempt to address an indefinable, undetermined other of a self-identi-
cal, determined reason. For this reason the poem travels a certain path
in the direction toward the Gegenüber, which is at once this other and
its time.
This direction is revealed in the questions that the poem poses

about the reappearance of time and the signs of time:
Wann
blüht es, das Wann,
das Woher, das Wohin und was
und wer
sich aus-und an- and dahin- und zu sich lebt den
Achsenton, Tellus, in seinem
vor Hell-
hörigkeit schwirrenden
Seelenohr, den
Achsenton
[When
does it bloom, the When
the Whence, the Whither and what
and who
lives out- and on- and to and from himself, the
axis-note, Tellus, in his
from light-
hearing buzzing
soul’s ear, the
axis-note]
These questions about the direction the poem takes toward the other
must be read in reverse from the central question, revealed in the
poem’s last line, which is about the appearance not of roses but of their
Septembers, that is, not of the signs of time but of time itself. The
question above is at once generated by this final question and at the
same time unleashes the questions that direct themselves to it. It is also
the question that emerges from the transition from wann to Wahn,
which is the poem’s way to reveal its direction, in other words, to pro-
ject the absent individual out of the repetition named by Wahn. In re-
ferring to the direction taken by madness, the poem cites but also al-
ters Heidegger’s notion of madness sketched out in the 1953 essay
“The Language in the Poem.” Celan’s oft-discussed relationship to
Heidegger, though ambivalent, reveals the enduring allure that Hei-
degger’s notions of poetry as well as temporality held for Celan.
In the essay, Heidegger pays oblique attention to “der Andere” (the
other) in the key figure of “der Wahnsinnige” (the madman), who is
also “der Fremde/Fremdling” (stranger). Of central importance for

him is that the stranger’s journey points to “die Frühe” (the dawn) of
the human in a West yet to come, one that is revealed in poetry. Hei-
degger accordingly takes as the beginning for his exploration of this
place selected lines from the poems of the expressionist poet Georg
Trakl. Trakl’s figure of the wandering stranger owes his distinctive ex-
istence to his “Abgeschiedenheit” (apartness; departedness). According
to Heidegger, this figure shows Trakl to be the poet who reflects on
what remains concealed to the spirit or mind of the West, which
amounts to rescuing the human from a purely technē-oriented notion
of experience. Yet for the human and at the same time for the earth to
be rescued from technology, which is also to say from instrumental
reason, required is a direction to be taken, a direction that Trakl’s po-
etry points to in the form of madness. Having departed on his way to-
ward the dawn of a nonobjective relationship with the earth, the mad-
man shows the way to the poet, also called the brother, whose poetry in
turn reveals to the community of humans left behind this time and
place yet to be born. As Heidegger puts it: “the poet becomes poet
only insofar as he follows that ‘madman’ who died away into the time
of the dawn and out of his apartness calls with melodious steps the
brother following him.”31
Heidegger points to several instances of a favored image in Trakl’s
poems, that of madness and the demented, yet focuses in particular on
two lines drawn from the poem “Psalm.” The first is “Der Wahnsin-
nige ist gestorben” (The madman has died) and the second is “Man be-
gräbt den Fremden” (The stranger is interred).32 Drawing these lines
together, Heidegger concludes:
The dead one is the madman. Does this mean a mentally ill person?
No. Madness does not mean a mental sensing that deludes itself with
nonsense. “Wahn” belongs to Old High German wana and means:
without. The madman’s mind senses and he senses as no one else does.
But in all that, he remains without the sense of the others. He is of an
other sensing. “Sinnan” originally meant: to travel, to strive for . . . , to
take a certain direction; the Indo-Germanic root sent and set meant
“way.” The departed one is the madman because he is on the way in an
other direction.33
He is other in that he is at once departed, demented, and at the same

time the stranger. From beneath its common understanding Heideg-
ger extricates earlier meanings of Wahnsinn as a path leading to a dif-

ferent place, which is a way to conceive the advent of the West. Hei-
degger’s place is deferred to a future, but remains an earthly place. To
be the departed is also to be absent while to be demented is to be on
the way to an other place.
“Huhediblu” likewise pursues a singular time and a direction of a
life lived by a person (wer) and also a thing (was). Celan’s poem asks
about the path taken by he who lives in the September that is yet to re-
turn. Remaining in a dialogue with Heidegger’s reading of madness,
the poem posits an earthly time and place for the other but one not
fully present. In contrast to time imagined by Heidegger, however, this
moment cannot be deferred to a coming future that may never be lo-
catable. This time is for the absent, extinguished other. For it to exist at
all it must be located at some moment in the poem. For this reason the
poem’s questions are on the way to this moment.
Madness emerges out of the question wann, which responds to the
poem’s mention of September. September conventionally announces
the beginning of autumn, the month that links the time of nature’s re-
birth with that of its death. Yet the death in Celan’s poem is not one of
nature but of the human, the “Nimmermenschtag” (nevermansday),
which the hoped-for September reencounters in the manner of an an-
niversary, the “Datum des Nimmermenschtags im September” (date of
the nevermansday in September). That this day marks not a natural
death but instead a violent one is revealed in several places in the
poem, most clearly with the line: “Hüh—on tue . . . Ja wann?” The fol-
lowing stanza then shows that he who is killed is the “Bruder.” Mad-
ness is named in the intervening lines between “on tue” and the
blinded, extinguished brother(s). That this murder also implicates a
political madness with its particular time and place is a matter I will
come to shortly. For now suffice it to say that the brother has been
wiped out. In its various inscriptions the repeated question wann blühen
sie pursues the flowering of roses, which is also to say, the extinguished
life. The poem is on the way to this other place, the place of a life lived
by the one “wer / sich aus- und an- and dahin- und zu sich lebt” (who /
lives out- and on- and to and from himself). Only after the poem poses
this question eight times does Wahn appear, which names what the
poem encrypts but also further encrypts, as it were, what it names.
If the roses are signs of time, signs that the poem abandons, then it
does so in order to turn toward time itself. The day of the extinguished
human is marked in the month of September, which is also the time

that the poem asks about in its final question. In other words, at stake
is the reappearance of the extinguished brother ciphered in this month.
The individual brother thus envisioned must have an earth on which to
live, or as the poem puts it, a “Wohnstatt,” which is revealed in the
poem’s earthly metaphors: “Achsenton” (the note that forms the earth’s
axis), “Tellus” (a Roman earth goddess), and the Galileo reference to a
revolving earth. The “Achsenton” whirs (schwirren) absurdly in the ear.
This is also the note on which the poem turns, which is underscored by
its placement directly at its center (line 31 of 62). Absurdly whirring,
this disparate axis-note sounds in a “Seelenohr” (soul’s ear or mind’s
ear).
I would suggest this sound is the word “Huhediblu,” which draws
the poem’s disparate things together, things that the poem commands
be read (“you read”). The poem claims itself as this earthly residence
for the individual who occupies the void of the extinguished other.
This other, which is at once the murdered brother and at the same
time the individual as a possibility, is encrypted above all in the word
“Huhediblu.” This word read in reverse from the poem’s final line, as
it is channeled back to the poem’s title by the chiasm and Wahn, con-
nects beginning to end. For the individual to find a residence in the
word then it must become repeatable and readable, which is also to say,
to allegorically evoke the historical violence done. In its repetitions,
the poem carries out its own effacement of absolute singularity. Yet it
does so in a way that reasserts an individual in the place of the extin-
guished. The word Huhediblu withdraws from surrendering its mean-
ing while it claims itself as a marker for singularity: here the other has
its place and time, one that is not permanent but must be repeated with
each reading.
Wannsee
In “Huhediblu” the question wann generates and names madness

(Wahn). This transition from wann to Wahn reveals the poem’s histori-
cal concern:
Wann, wannwann,
Bruder
Geblendet, Bruder
Erloschen
[When, whenwhen,
Wahnwhen, yes Wahn,—
Brother
Blinded, Brother
Extinguished]
During the Third Reich and immediately thereafter, writers began

using madness both as a metaphor and a clinical tool for understanding
fascism and anti-Semitism. In a shift from a focus on the individual to
the crowd in the era of liberal democracy, critics defined mass totali-
tarian movements and anti-Semitism as a kind of Massenwahn (mass
delusion; mass hysteria) to distinguish it from the delusions of the indi-
vidual ego. As a poetic construct, “Huhediblu” pursues a different dis-
cursive strategy to figure mass madness.
Freud laid the groundwork for theories of Massenwahn. For Freud,
the process of identification and the economy of libido drive mass psy-
chological phenomena. A collectivity is able to exert a contagious effect
on its members, who replace their individual “ideal ego” with the ob-
ject with whom they collectively identify.34 In their essay “Elemente
des Antisemitismus” (Elements of anti-Semitism), Adorno and Max
Horkheimer analyzed anti-Semitism as a form of “false projection.”
The fascist subject projects those negative attributes it will not ac-
knowledge as its own to the victim as object,35 a claim that caught
Celan’s attention in his reading of the essay. Celan’s copy of Adorno
and Horkheimer’s Dialektik der Aufklärung, purchased in1954, reveals
that he read the essay with considerable care. In one key passage that
Celan underlined, the authors contend that fascist politics adapted the
behavior of a projection on a grand scale of persecution as a “Wahnsys-
tem” which then could take on the air of a rational norm.36
In Adorno and Horkheimer’s essay madness is a powerful metaphor
to describe the entirety of anti-Semitic politics and Nazi conscious-
ness. The anti-Semitic self, ensnared “im Größen- wie im Verfol-
gungswahn” (in megalomania and persecution mania), becomes “the
subject at the center, the world a mere occasion for its delusions
[Wahn].”37 Adorno and Horkheimer viewed fascism as the culmination
of humanity’s objectifying, instrumental reason, which they under-
stood as “a special case of paranoiac delusion, which depopulates na-
ture and in the end the populations themselves. In that abyss of uncer-
tainty, which each objectifying act must bridge, paranoia installs it-
self.”38 Paranoia that the individual cannot tolerate is then relieved by a
permitted collective form of Wahn. In the early poems, such as “Die
letzte Fahne” and “Todesfuge,” Celan depicted how a paranoid “objec-
tifying act” reacts to this “abyss of uncertainty.” In “Huhediblu” he
draws the reader into this abyss and does not release him.
I wish to point to how Celan’s “Huhediblu” grafts itself onto this
discourse of Massenwahn, in which a collective political madness be-
comes a metaphor for genocide. In “Huhediblu” the proximity of the
question wann to Wahn—indeed the former generating the latter—es-
tablishes the poem’s crucial historical dimension: Wann as a cipher for
the Wannsee-Konferenz, which took place on January 20, 1942. Histori-
ans view this meeting as the ratification of a central administrative ef-
fort to destroy European Jewry. “Huhediblu” also remembers Celan’s
encounter with a film about Nazi Germany. In 1956 Celan translated
Jean Cayrol’s narration of the Alain Resnais concentration camp film
Night and Fog. Cayrol had written “there is us, we who sincerely look
upon the ruins today, as if the old concentration camp monster [le
vieux monstre concentrationnaire] were dead and buried beneath the
rubble” (GW 4:96). Celan turned to an ineluctable metaphor, replacing
Cayrol’s warning about the “old concentration camp monster” with
one about the return of “Rassenwahn” (GW 4:97) [race-madness] and
the grand narratives of race.
“Huhediblu” carries and remembers this event in its body without
needing to state it in verifiable, positivistic terms. Indeed, it carries not
only the mark of the event. It also enacts the transition from wann to
Wahn, that is, from the uncertain question (wann?) to a determined
delusion accomplished in the objectifying act. “Huhediblu” moves
from the contingency-madness that the poem establishes with its basic
tone of plaintive questions to the occlusion of this contingency in a dif-
ferent kind of madness first articulated in Celan’s early poetry.
“Huhediblu” poetically figures the decisive moment in which the un-
certainty and imagined possibilities about the meaning of differences—
an uncertainty preserved in the question—is erased and becomes,
through the exclusion of the possibility of error, the political madness
remembered by the Wannsee-Konferenz.
“Huhediblu” then dramatizes, as if using the words as personae, a
key moment in the life of an idea. In this moment a perception be-
comes an assured position that pursues its goal, assured of its truth se-
cured by an authoritative perception, despite any evidence to the con-
trary. Celan depicts how an authoritative meta-experiential point of
observation decides our experience of a perception. In the Wannsee-Kon-
ferenz, as cipher for this leap and genocidal act, this historical dimen-
sion dovetails with biography. Celan’s parents both died within months
of this decision at Wannsee. Along with the Jewish-German population
of Czernowitz they were wiped out—as Celan’s poem has it—“brother
/ Blinded, brother / Extinguished.”
The Mandrake
In the final two stanzas the paronomasia and the self-replication of a
language not susceptible to instrumental reason prospers with the
chain of “Bei”-Words:
auf den alten

Alraunenfluren gedeiht es,
als schmucklos-schmückendes Beikraut,
als Beikraut, als Beiwort, als Beilwort,
ad-
jektivisch, so gehn
sie dem Menschen zuliebe, Schatten,
vernimmt man, war
alles Dagegen—
Feiertagsnachtisch, nicht mehr,—:
Frugal,
kontemporan und gesetzlich
geht Schinderhannes zu Werk,
sozial und alibi-elbisch, und
das Julchen, das Julchen:
daseinsfeist rülpst,
rülpst es das Fallbeil los,—call it (hott!)
love.
[on the old

mandrake’s turf it grows,
as unadorned-adorned strayweed,
as strayweed, as strayword, as axe-word,
ad-
jectival, so go
they for the sake of humans, shadows,
one perceives, was
everything against it—
holiday dessert, no longer,—:
Frugal,
contemporary and lawfully
Shinderhannes goes to work,
social and alibi-elbish, and
Julchen, Julchen:
fatwithbeing-there belches,
it belches the guillotine loose,—call it (hott!)
love.]
Through Celan’s word-splitting, the “Beiwort,” which means adjec-

tive, takes on the meaning “throwing” or “jetting,” from the Latin adi-
acere. The poem splits and then throws forward these words to a place
where they can land, take root, and become entities in themselves. Ac-
cording to this stanza, this place is the “Alraunenfluren” (mandrake’s
turf).
With its reference to the mandrake myth this part of stanza 7 inter-
connects sex with mortality and meaning’s production. Paradoxically,
in the mandrake myth dying is also the most potent act; for, in his exe-
cution, the hanged man sprays the field with sperm that then blooms.
Significant for the words that wish to become persons, the resulting
plant resembles the human form of the dead. For this reason the words
in the poem are jetted forward “dem Menschen zuliebe” (for the sake
of the human). As these words take hold and grow in the poem, they
appropriate the human form of the dead. In this manner, those whom
the Holocaust extinguished receive a transformed existence in the
words of the poem whose figures take on their shape.
By producing Wahn in this way, the series of words in “Huhediblu”
enacts this potency. It does so even though it gives rise not to roses but
to something seemingly parasitic (“Beikraut” and “Beiwort”).39 In his
radio broadcast Celan noted approvingly that Mandelstam’s words
tend toward “things”—“zum substantivischen” [the substantive]—and
let the “Beiworte” disappear (TA: Meridian, 216). Yet “Huhediblu”
cannot prevent all words, and this includes its own, from becoming
“ad/-jectives,” words that are jetted forward like particles so that they
can take root as the human. “Huhediblu” displays the awareness that
its words, like weeds, are secondary, which repeat words wrested from
another time and place. Only in this way can the poem give to words
an individual form. To underscore this, the next lines declare that its
terms are “Schatten / vernimmt man” (shadows / one perceives). The
proximity of Beiworte and Schatten is not coincidence, which one sees
when remembering Plato’s equation of shadows with doxa as mere sup-
plements to knowledge.
As shadows, words both destroy and create, powers that Celan rep-
resents almost all too well in “Huhediblu.” Not only do destruction
and creation meet in the poem but so also do the reflective and the vul-
gar. Indeed the poem endeavors to encompass the world of language
and language as world. In the concluding section of the poem death is
treated with a slightly sardonic tone. This is appropriate for it echoes
the source for the poem’s end, Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem “Schin-
derhannes,” which Celan had published in translation. In Apollinaire’s
poem the robber Schinderhannes kills “a rich Jew” (GW 4:789), an act
that “Huhediblu” turns into “gesetzlich / geht Schinderhannes zu
Werk” (GW 4:789) [lawfully / Shinderhannes goes to work]. This work
extends the poem’s references to murder from “on tue,” “Bruder / Er-
loschen,” and the “Galgen” of stanza 6. The poem can state this
“work” as “kontemporan” (contemporaneous) not only because of
Celan’s concern with fascism in his day, but even more so because the
poem’s inscription of the individual in the poem also reinscribes the
original murder.
The poem’s final line—“Oh quand refleuriront, oh roses, vos
septembres?” (Oh when will they bloom again, oh roses, your Septem-
bers?)—remembers the title “Huhediblu.” It thereby returns the
reader by means of the Wahn at the poem’s center to its beginning.
This title functions as an emblem of the poem and its exploitation of
metaphors of madness. From the beginning of the poem as it moves
forward and from the poem’s end in reverse, the instantiations of the
repeated question wann blühen sie pursue the racination and reflower-
ing of the individual in place of the extinguished life, a life ciphered in
the month of September. This is the “mandrake’s turf” where the other
takes root as word, a word that is at once rose and strayweed. From this
vantage point, the function of the chiasm and the prophecy in stanza 2
can be read. What the poem foretold at its beginning was its end, an
end that it had already reached with its title. It foretold the reading of
those who have been extinguished and the reflowering of the other in
the text as its own turf.
“Huhediblu” clothes itself in the phenomenological discourse of mad-

ness, which connects the splintering of words with the splintering of
individuals. The poem absorbs this manic language, that is, its rup-
tured syntax, reliance on present tense, interjections, fragments, and
homophones. It then uses it to locate the individual among the ruins.
In this way the poem can cast forth words in the manner of the “adjec-
tive” according to its original meaning of jetting. This splintering and
jetting provides the poem the metaphors it needs to project meaning
into these ruins. Celan made “Huhediblu” the centerpiece of the
twelve poems forming Die Niemandsrose’s last section, which opens the
door to the structural reduction that begins in earnest with his follow-
ing book Atemwende. By the time of Atemwende, which Celan had ini-
tially entitled Atem, Wahn, readers had already begun to inscribe
Celan’s poetry into narratives of genius and madness. In the next chap-
ter I will examine how for Celan’s poems separating illness from both
literature and ethnicity became a central personal and political con-
cern, and how the poems identified the ideological pitfalls of the pur-
ported links between genius, madness, and poetry only to disentangle
this connection.
4
Original Translations
Both the writings of genius and madness have traditionally

appeared as articulations of an original and irreproducible nature. Be-
cause of these shared features, the concept of origin has been viewed as
central to the cult of the irrational genius. Indeed, originality powers
not only the discrete discourses of madness and writing, irrationality
and creativity, but also the coupling of these notions. The origins of the
work of art have often been considered to be enigmatic, which helps to
lend art the aura of the irrational. This issue is of concern for Celan’s
poems of the 1960s, insofar as they increasingly rely on the opposite of
origins, that is, on imitation and repetition, which frequently draw on
metaphors of translation.
In this chapter I consider the relationship of origin and translation
that is at work in Celan’s poems of the 1960s. Most prominent in this
regard are two poems that bookend this decade. These are “Tübingen,
Jänner” (Tübingen, January) from the volume Die Niemandsrose and
the 1969 poem “Ich trink Wein” (I drink wine). By drawing on
Hölderlin’s place in the discourse of madness, these poems are able to
define themselves as translations of other sources, rather than as enig-
mas. Because they lack an enigmatic origin upon which to draw, the
poems need to become translations if they are to be legible. These
poems quote with economic precision historical claims that represent
imitation as madness and originality as poetic inspiration. They quote
these to overturn their logic and question claims for authenticity and
mystified origins of the aesthetic.
TÜBINGEN, JÄNNER
Zur Blindheit über-
redete Augen.
Ihre—“ein
107
Rätsel ist Rein-

entsprungenes”—, ihre
Erinnerung an
schwimmende Hölderlintürme, möwen-
umschwirrt.
Besuche ertrunkener Schreiner bei

diesen
tauchenden Worten:
Käme,
käme ein Mensch,
käme ein Mensch zur Welt, heute, mit
dem Lichtbart der
Patriarchen: er dürfte,
spräch er von dieser
Zeit, er
dürfte
nur lallen und lallen,
immer-, immer-
zuzu.
(“Pallaksch. Pallaksch.”)
(GW 1:226)
[TÜBINGEN, JANUARY
Talked into blindness
eyes.
Their—“an
enigma is the purely
originated”—, their
memory of
floating Hölderlintowers, seagull-
enswirled.
Visits of drowned joiners to

these
diving words:
Should come
should come a man
should come a man to the world, today, with
the lightbeard of
4 / ORIGINAL TRANSLATIONS 109
patriarchs: he could,
speaking of this
time, he
could
only babble and babble,
always-, always-
againagain.
(“Pallaksch. Pallaksch.”)]
The Original Human
The title is at once the poem’s opening salvo against an ideology of ori-
gins and at the same time the inscription of a time and place for an ab-
sent human, which the poem mentions explicitly in the third stanza. It
critiques a theory of language anchoring readability in original con-
texts that seemingly saturate meaning. By reinscribing Tübingen and
Jänner it evokes the narrative of Hölderlin and its successive regenera-
tions (from early Romantic visitors such as Clemens Brentano to the
writings of Stefan George and Heidegger). The eighteenth-century
myth of the blinded, insane genius was long in the making; it prevailed
until Celan’s “Tübingen, Jänner.”
For eighteenth-century Germans the link between madness and
creativity formed a response to French arguments that classical, ratio-
nally comprehensible models are the true originals that must be emu-
lated. For the classicists, origins offered legitimacy. This view had jus-
tified particular, historically determined forms of politics, society, and
art by elevating them to superhistorical models with privileged origins.
Monarchs ruled because they descended from heroic precursors; soci-
ety took a hierarchical organization because it traced itself back to di-
vine patterns; aesthetic norms prevailed because they derived from
classical models. Yet as eighteenth-century writers such as Johann Gott-
fried Herder noticed, the use of origins for legitimacy becomes absurd
when a plurality of aesthetic, social, and political phenomena exists,
each with its own origin.1
Herder claimed that a proliferation of aesthetic and social models
implies that there cannot be simply one origin. As a result, he had to
explain multiple origins for existing phenomena. The pertinent differ-
ences between local social spheres, the realization that there was no
one given order for art, politics, and society meant that no one privi-
leged origin existed by which observers could distinguish legitimate
from illegitimate political orders or artistic paradigms. Efforts to legit-
imize a particular social-political order or artistic model—by identify-
ing the original source from which others merely deviated—become
pointless when the array of currently existing phenomena is matched
by an equal array of posited origins. Herder’s position that English and
German art had distinct origins turned into a broad assertion that each
distinct artistic or social-political model has its own potential validity.
In “Tübingen, Jänner” the Mensch, who would only be able to imi-
tate with a childlike lalling, recalls what Herder termed “the authentic
human being,” one whom others can only imitate by babbling. Yet
Celan draws on the human not to denigrate him as an imitator but to
expose his presence in the time of the poem, even if his speech can only
be a lalling. The poem then becomes a place where the human can be
constituted through lalling, which is the sound of imitation or transla-
tion. Herder’s authentic human being by contrast becomes necessary
to account for origins. Because of this plurality of origins theorized by
Herder, eighteenth-century Germans relied on the figure of the irra-
tional genius as an explanation for origins. Yet, the most significant fac-
tor in this shift is something different from a plurality of origins: at
stake was the event of originality itself. Poetry took on the role of
positing origins. Herder, comparing the original, authentic poet with
divinity makes this clear:
Er, dem es gelingt, die Natur in ihrer Schöpfungsstätte zu belauschen,
neue Merkmale ihrer Wirkungen auszuspähen und sie durch kün-
stliche Werkzeuge zu einem menschlichen Zweck anzuwenden, er ist
der eigentliche Mensch, und da er selten erscheint, ein Gott unter den
Menschen. Er spricht und tausende lallen ihm nach.2
[He, who succeeds in eavesdropping on nature in her creative work-
shop, spying out new features of her workings, and employing them
through artificial tools for a human purpose, he is the authentic human
being, and because he seldom appears, is a god among humans. He
speaks and thousands babble after him.]
Herder contends that the initially incomprehensible works of the au-

thentic creator explain how culture generates products that cannot be
deduced from models. In Herder’s text the discursive function of the
genius is to establish autonomy and innovation. The naturality of the
genius who brooked no authority but his own, finally, irrational faculty
of imagination, asserted itself in the place of classicist notions of seem-

ingly artificial aesthetic norms. Celan’s poem “Tübingen, Jänner” ex-
ploits this discourse of originality yet does so not to affirm it, but to
question it and at the same time to mark itself as a lalling.
The deduction from models, a process by which each step in a logi-
cal sequence is accounted for, is a fundamental act of ratio, and the ge-
nius interrupts this sequential process. As Herder’s eigentlicher Mensch
demonstrates, the authentic creator claims to reproduce the vital force
of nature in a world of lifeless copies. The cult of originality and irra-
tionality at the heart of the authentic asserts that a subjective indepen-
dence guides production. Herder’s genius not only asserts that he is
free of history and particular meanings, he also denies that there is al-
ready meaning embedded in symbolism. Meaning awaits his arrival on
the scene; he creates it and is untouched by the markings of the past.
Eighteenth-century Germans wanted to attribute to the authentic
human being an autonomy analogous to nature and god. This creative
ideology derives its force from the assumption that there is no human
finitude. Finitude consists partly in that one is not first, that a world al-
ready exists and is not waiting for one’s decree, that one does not enjoy
access to theological origins.
Genial Madness
The connection between creativity and divinely fated, poetic madness
continued in various forms well into Celan’s day and beyond. Pre-Ro-
mantic and Romantic culture was enamored with the myth of the ge-
nius’s madness as a form of divine intervention. This discourse be-
stowed on the creative figure the quality of madness whereby he
derived his singularity. Madness was an enthusiasm or a divine retribu-
tion for having dared to transgress human limitations. In either case,
the mad poet’s link to god is the channel for the world’s enchantment
with a divine presence. To be sure, late eighteenth-century culture had
witnessed the separation of religion and art, the differentiation into
distinct social spheres that Max Weber described. Hamann was per-
haps the last key player in the intellectual scene to cling to the notion
of direct, divine inspiration. Yet, in compensating for the gap left by
this move away from the divine, Germans turned to vague claims of di-
vinely natural powers as a form of genial inspiration. Hölderlin’s first
biographer, Wilhelm Waiblinger, codified a view of Hölderlin that his
poetry scarcely invited but which served a cultural function: “One who
goes mad due to divine intoxication, due to the love and striving for
the divine.”3
This connection between genius and madman owes itself to the
shared self-absorption and independence of each. Autonomous, they
appear to speak to and address either themselves or no one, as Scho-
penhauer wrote of the genius.4 This autonomy however reveals a para-
dox and a price to pay. As seen in works by Goethe, E. T. A. Hoffmann,
and Büchner, the creative individual can only posit itself by liberating
itself from societal constraints, prevailing ideologies, and frustrating
aesthetic norms. Yet madness describes the genius’s fate; for the act by
which he asserts himself also makes him ill. A form of originality,
though standing in contradistinction to the form proper to poetry,
madness is a seemingly empty and perverted form. This results from
the essential function of the genius, which is to supply originality, what
Kant called the genius’s “foremost characteristic.”5 He defines and
makes possible a precious, divinely natural resource, renewable only
through him who can access the source.6 Kant acknowledges the affin-
ity between madness and geniality and that both are joined by the prin-
ciple of originality. Yet because other works will model themselves
after a predecessor—through this repetition actually producing the
original as such—this modeling would distinguish genial poetry from
madness. In other words, the poet would produce works that will later
provide the rules by which coming works of art can be created and
judged. The product of madness, on the other hand, is a freak occur-
rence, an isolated negativity that never becomes a rule.
The age of Goethe already contains the seeds for the nineteenth-
century reinterpretation of creativity in terms of decline. Science
promises the end of the divine ground for art. Yet in a peculiar twist,
the promise is not kept; for the scientific language that assists in sepa-
rating religion from the aesthetic—rather than presiding over the dis-
solution of the discursive field of madness and creativity altogether
—reintroduces the atmosphere of prophecy and myth. This is accom-
plished through scientific rhetoric of pathological decline. In the dis-
course of the time, this separation from life’s vitality, revealed crea-
tivity’s essential intellectual decadence. Max Nordau, for instance,
codified the notion of decadent art, pressing the genius into the turn-
of-the-century narrative of irredeemable cultural decline. This pre-
pared the way for Nazi culture, which coupled what it termed degen-
erate art with the Jews. In Nazi ideology the Jews functioned as the
pathological source of an ethnically debased production. This claim
ran concurrent with assertions by many leading scientists from Jean
Martin Charcot to Emil Kraepelin and Richard von Krafft-Ebing that
the Jews revealed a particularly strong tendency toward mental illness.
Celan’s comparison of Lenz with both himself and the Jews in his
“Gespräch im Gebirge” and “Der Meridian” shifts the Wahn from bi-
ology and psychology to the outcome of a decision.
Celan would have been well informed about cultural associations of
psychological decline with poetry. Czernowitz had at one time become
the center of attention in the debate that powered the discursive link
between insanity and the aesthetic. As Celan was preparing his first
poems to be published, his friend Alfred Margul-Sperber published a
follow-up article to a scandal that had broken out in prewar Czer-
nowitz. Sperber and a physician posted at an insane asylum published a
poem in a newspaper purportedly written by a mental patient. The
work and the article sparked an impassioned defense by Karl Kraus.
While literary madness had often been seen as the sign of creativity in
decline, for Kraus madness preserved—through its biological associa-
tion with the nervous system—the spontaneity that art in an age of in-
tellectuals had all but lost.7
In reexamining the topos of the mad poet in “Tübingen, Jänner”
and, as I will show, in “Ich trink Wein,” Celan critiques the link be-
tween illness and writing/creativity and disentangles this connection.
In these poems the correlation of madness to writing is a cultural con-
struction that enchants writing with a divine aura of prophetic force, or
inversely, turns it into a mechanical product of uncontrollable biologi-
cal urges. Perhaps surprisingly, in disentangling madness from writing,
the poems do not go directly to the late nineteenth-century image of
the decadent artist that biological sciences explained. Instead, by re-
turning to Hölderlin’s madness and his notion of devotion to a poetic
calling, they skirt a scientific explication and reinterpret madness as
precisely the opposite of originality: madness is language’s constituent
feature of imitation.
The End of Genius

Readers have uncovered the critique of prophecy in “Tübingen, Jän-
ner” and hinted at its concern with originality.8 The poem’s reinterpre-
tation of the traditional genius aesthetic, its crucial links to both Wahn
and Celan’s poetic praxis of recitation have gone largely unnoticed. On
the subject of time, to read the poem is to discuss the problem of its
temporal referents and the way time is ciphered but not named. Paul
Coates noted that it “has at least three temporal co-ordinates—the
separate times of Hölderlin, the patriarch, and Celan himself—and
perhaps also a fourth: the apocalyptic time of revelation, which goes
beyond time.”9 However from the temporal markers of the poem itself
it cannot be said with certainty that the time of Hölderlin is present,
for the act of rewriting, like memory, is a feature of the present, in
which the very existence of a past is not certain. Gérard Raulet on the
other hand has argued that the title “expressly refers to the ‘Lenz’-
novella.”10 Yet the text does not mention this. Manfred Geier has
claimed that the poem has abandoned all referentiality and opens itself
to virtually any and all evocations.11 The title’s juxtaposition of “Tübin-
gen” and “Jänner” introduces the problem of time, place, and refer-
ence. Readers maintain that by placing “Tübingen” and “Jänner” to-
gether, the poem either evokes a past moment that is no longer
accessible to cognition or combines this particular city with a multi-
plicity of other places and times.
Yet the poem does not combine the time and place of Hölderlin
with a limited set of others, but uproots the myth. Jänner takes on spe-
cific roles across Celan’s oeuvre in light of “Der Meridian” in which
the 20. Jänner becomes a cipher for the law of the date itself, memory,
madness, totalitarian politics, and biography. The title recites the
month with a regional (Austrian) spelling. Yet because it stands alone
without a specific date beyond the month, it asserts an independence
from the Jänner in the Büchner speech. In this poem, Jänner neither
recites the Wannsee-Konferenz’s date of January 20 (1942), nor evokes
Büchner’s Lenz, from which Celan drew the date (even though the
poem’s penultimate two lines recite Büchner). Instead the reinscription
of Tübingen and Jänner as a temporal marker itself dislodges the time,
place, and situation of Hölderlin. It remains true to the function of the
individual marker in Celan’s poetry: its repetition clashes with a previ-
ous individual word and marks its erasure. This is to say that memory
is a form of wiping out.
The way in which “Tübingen, Jänner” frames numerous, indetermi-
nate, literary recitations and intertextual connections undermines a no-
tion of art as the product of original, mad origins. Beyond the poem’s
sources of Herder and Büchner, it not only recites a passage from

Hölderlin’s poem “Der Rhein” (The Rhine), but also through the quo-
tation marks, highlights the passage as a recitation. The final line fur-
thermore quotes a nonsense word, which Hölderlin was said to utter
during his insanity, “Pallaksch,” which could mean either Ja or Nein.
Readers of Hölderlin have uncovered other possible intertexts.12 Near
its end, for instance, it draws on Büchner’s play Woyzeck, whose lead
character kills his girlfriend in a demented state: immer-, immer- /
zuzu (always-, always- / againagain).
At the core of the ideology of origins lies a claim of authority, and
Celan’s quotation of Hölderlin critiques this core. The first line of
stanza 4 from Hölderlin’s “Der Rhein,” from which “Tübingen, Jän-
ner” quotes, defines the singer’s capability:
Ein Rätsel ist Reinentsprungenes. Auch

Der Gesang kaum darf es enthüllen. Denn
Wie du anfingst, wirst du bleiben,
So viel auch wirket die Not,
Und die Zucht, das meiste nämlich
Vermag die Geburt,
Und der Lichtstrahl, der
Dem Neugeborenen begegnet.13
[An enigma is the purely originated. Even

Song may scarcely disclose it. For
As you began, you will remain,
However need too effects,
And cultivation, the most namely
Birth accomplishes,
And the ray of light that
Meets the newborn.]
In Hölderlin’s text the poet, who is embodied in the river as a figure for
consciousness, emerges essentially fully formed and fated. While cul-
ture and history are important, an original, vital, natural force, which
produces and guides poetry, is the most decisive. As in the first strophe
of Hölderlin’s poem “Der Rhein,” where the poetic self sits, “den
Quell besuchend” (visiting the source), the divine aspect of nature
leads the poet back to his sources.
The key phrase in this section of Hölderlin’s poem is “Ein Rätsel ist
Reinentsprungenes” (A riddle is the purely original). Celan’s recitation
exactly contradicts not this line’s apparent claim of original, divine do-
nation but instead its traditional interpretation.14 However, it is not
clear what the mysterious sentence’s grammatical subject is, that is,
whether the enigma that it refers to is purely original or whether the
category of the purely original is an enigma. As an essentially ambigu-
ous phrase, Hölderlin’s line provides a dubious basis for an especially
strong concept of originality or a poetics of genial self-expression. Any
such concept that attempts to base itself on the poetics of Hölderlin’s
poem includes its undoing.
Celan’s fragmenting of Hölderlin’s apparently prophetic statement
disperses what was a single, gnomic line into three lines of his own
poem:
Ihre—“ein
Rätsel ist Rein-
entsprungenes”—, ihre
[Their—“an
enigma is the purely
originated”—, their]
By fragmenting Hölderlin’s line, “Tübingen, Jänner” incorporates the

paradoxical knowledge contained in its form while at the same time
marking it as a repetition. Celan’s reordering of “Der Rhein” galva-
nizes the subversive potential of the line. By wounding its form, Ce-
lan’s poem answers Hölderlin’s challenge to an aesthetic of origins,
and generates yet another meaning. The typographical change from
the “Ein” to “ein” chops the beginning of Hölderlin’s sentence and
embeds what one could still read as a mystical origin in Hölderlin as a
reconstructed individual text in the body of Celan’s poem.15 In Höl-
derlin’s “Der Rhein” the stress falls on Rätsel, in which the statement
is general, allowing itself to be read as an eighteenth-century intellec-
tual intuition. Yet Celan’s poem stresses the ein. This reversal of stress
explicitly makes Hölderlin’s passage and Celan’s rewriting of it into
specific determined claims, erasing any perceived aura of the given.
The breaking of the verse marks the distinctiveness of Hölderlin’s
poem, historicizing it, calling attention to Celan’s ein as a recitation
and replacement of a prior situation. As does Hölderlin’s poetry, Ce-
lan’s text inverts prophecy to carefully interpret the signs of the past
and present.
By framing Hölderlin’s utterance of purportedly singular origins

with quotes and dashes, “Tübingen, Jänner,” with its repeated pro-
nouns, “ihre,” contradicts in this formal sense the possibility of inter-
preting the line as original procreation. The recited words, which be-
long to eyes that have been blinded by too much speaking, define the
reinterpretation of madness that the poem aims to accomplish: “Zur
Blindheit über- / redete Augen” (Talked into blindness / eyes). Through
the breaking of the word, über-reden, a different meaning—“too much
talk”—emerges and erases the meaning of “to convince.” The eyes
blinded by an excess of speech belong to the Hölderlinian myth of the
mad, prophetic poet. Blindness is not only mythically central to
prophecy; it is also a synonym for madness (madness as a form of blind-
ness; this blindness in turn reinforcing the image of the blind seer). Yet
here, “Tübingen, Jänner” draws on the madness of Hölderlin’s image to
interrupt the notion that a prophetic writing can name and order the
world. In this way, Celan inscribes the topos of too much language into
his poem. The madness of a proliferation of words and languages, what
one could also call a Tower of Babel, is the result of this excess of
speech. This surfeit of cultural, symbolic production is the fall from the
purity that suggests fated, given origins and an original language. That
speech is always too much is the madness of this poem’s time (“von
dieser / Zeit”). Likewise, for Walter Benjamin, in his essay “On Lan-
guage as Such and on the Language of Men” it is precisely this excessive
nature of speech, the “Überbenennung” (overnaming) of things that
causes mourning and brings about the speechlessness of melancholy in
a postparadisiacal age.16 Yet in “Tübingen, Jänner,” this excess provides
the language material necessary for marking off words, which is also to
say, for saving them from oblivion and giving them an origin in the text.
For all the poem’s critique of an ideology of origins, its central accom-
plishment is to create an origin for itself. This origin is not found in a
past to which the poem refers but in its own emergence out of a differ-
ent set of metaphors.
In the turn from blindness to insight that occurs in the topos of the
blind seer (a surface blindness pointing to a deeper vision), words eas-
ily invert to their opposites. The poem’s figure of madness has led
readers to view it as an affirmation of mythological vision. Manfred
Geier points to the poem’s language of diving and drowning as a re-
covery of “the depths of a psychotic sur-reality” attributed to Hölder-
lin. Yet the poem’s reference to diving amounts more to a kind of re-
trieval of words from their effacement. Many readers of “Tübingen,

Jänner” ascribe a visionary capability to the blindness of these eyes.
Bernhard Böschenstein also wishes to use myth critically in the effort
to understand myth, viewing Celan in a lineage with Hölderlin and the
image of the blind prophet, remarking, “this blind man [Hölderlin]
was the most visionary. So too is he who sees him from a distance.”
This reading has established itself in the scholarship and continues to
support interpretations of the poem that view Celan as the modern-
day poet who, like Hölderlin, experiences a linguistic and epistemolog-
ical crisis and must come to terms with writing poetry “in meager
times.”17 Yet this reading tends to press Celan into an existing mytho-
logical frame that the poem resists. Referring to Celan’s Büchner
speech, Geier reads the apparently blinded, yet for him, truly, visionary
eyes as an instance of a Celanian memory of another age through
means other than conventional vision.18 Thus he takes the mythical in-
version of blindness into insight and applies it to the poem. Yet he
seems to forget that Celan’s rewriting of historical moments also
means their destruction, at which moment the door for such a com-
plete recovery closes.19
The rewriting of Hölderlin’s “reinentsprungenes,” then, is the ci-
phered madness in “Tübingen, Jänner.” This is the moment where the
poem goes beyond the effect of decoupling madness in terms of enthu-
siasm or pathology from writing. It posits a new meaning. By replacing
originality and inspiration with mimesis and repetition, “Tübingen,
Jänner” discursively reinterprets madness, creating a new vein of the
German lyric. It is with an eye to what one contends is a fact of lan-
guage, its repeatability, that the ideology of the mad poet is critiqued.
The madness of modernity entails an exposure to the repeatability and
proliferation of language, the unavoidable excess of symbolic produc-
tion, which blinds the eyes in “Tübingen, Jänner.” The blindness is not
a consequence of having drunk from a source of creativity, as in Her-
der’s authentic Mensch. Rather, madness is the constituent feature of
writing to become dispersed into different languages and functions and
be uprooted from fixed contexts and origins, which allows the poem to
root them again. The eyes’ memory, which is a form of repetition itself,
does not recall a singular moment. Rather it names the dispersal of
“schwimmende Hölderlintürme.” This dispersal evokes the many myths
of Hölderlin that are rooted in a prophetic, tragic illness, as well as the
readings of these myths, a babble of memories and interpretations (the
“Turm” itself graduating from Hölderlin’s tower to that of Babel). By

signifying its proliferation of perspectives and languages, Wahn reveals
its ethical dimension. A poetry of Wahn, a Tower of Babel, not only de-
scribes and practices a writing of agonistic languages as a historical con-
dition. It also interrupts totalizing perspectives in art.
The words Blindheit (blindess) and Augen (eyes), of course, move
the poem’s language into a visual discourse. Celan’s poetry commonly
combines a vocabulary that connotes vision with one connoting speech,
reading, or writing. In “Tübingen, Jänner” this combination of reden
and Augen has a specific effect. To the mechanics of perception and
speech (writing and reading) this poem attributes a shared penchant.
Both perception and writing are systems driven by semblance and rep-
etition. Writing is the rewriting of other phrases and not a medium for
attaining access to original phenomena. So too is perception an act by
which the eye observes illusions that provide an imperfect knowledge
about visual phenomena, that is, about other illusions.
It is perhaps no surprise that a poem criticizing origins and proph-
ecy turns to a vocabulary of a paradisiacal age. The repetition of the
subjunctive wish, in which its construction by accumulation is laid
bare, stands in contrast to the statement’s prophetic content:
Käme,
Käme ein Mensch,
Käme ein Mensch zur Welt, heute, mit
dem Lichtbart der
Patriarchen
[Come,
should a man come
should a man come to the world, today, with
the lightbeard of
patriarchs]
In one sense Celan’s Mensch remains a subjunctive and hypothetical

figure. As such he would bear the “Lichtbart” (light-beard) of the pa-
triarchs. As the poem phrases it, he would come or be born (zur Welt
kommen), thus linking the notion of an originary language and the fig-
ures of the newborn as well as the genius marked by their attributes of
intuition and freedom from unnatural norms. The beard of fire func-
tions metonymically for a speech of fire, in which the Mensch would
have the inflamed speech of the original fathers, that is, the patriarchs.
This language of an illuminated law-giving logos (the “Lichtbart” that

echoes and twists Hölderlin’s “Lichtstrahl”) would preserve congruity
between divinely created thing and word, between origin and symbol.
The Mensch of such an imagined moment, one prior to both history it-
self and any struggles against the authority of the patriarchs, contrasts
with the actual situation of heute, in which life is not conditioned by
origins and essences, but by repetition and semblance.
“Tübingen, Jänner” uses the Mensch to argue that words represent
themselves while they refer at the same time to other words. Should
this Mensch appear today and speak of “this” time (the reference of
“dieser” contains both the possibility of the twentieth century and the
time of the patriarchs) he would be permitted only to babble inarticu-
lately like a child: “nur lallen und lallen” (only babble and babble). The
language of the newborn or the genius as newborn is seemingly origi-
nal; the genius goes to a mythical source from which to receive a divine
language.20 Celan’s poem then reinterprets Herder’s concept of der
eigentliche Mensch, who goes to nature to create products of which oth-
ers can only produce a Nachlallen. In the poem, all speaking today is a
Nachlallen. Unlike that of Herder’s, the language of the Mensch in
“Tübingen, Jänner” appears after the fall; it is Geschwätz (chatter; prat-
tle) in Benjamin’s sense, whereby a fallen language is one that commu-
nicates something other than the purity of itself. It is the “birth of the
human word.”21 Lallen reflects the proliferation of languages and various
linguistic categories of limited historically determined knowledge.
This decisive caesura with an imagined paradisiacal past is such that
even the prophetic Mensch in “Tübingen, Jänner” would be exposed to
the conditions of speech heute. From the perspective of an original,
given language, his speech would be another case of chatter. In other
words, he could only communicate in repeatable and incommensu-
rable languages, which also is to say, in languages without a metalan-
guage under which they could be subsumed. Indeed the repetition of
“lallen” describes the conditions of an actual, historical speech in
which a meaning first emerges with repetition and repeatability. This
break with a mythical and original language brings about the current
moment. The poem’s production of semblance defines today as op-
posed to a time of Adamic speech.
At the same time however, and this is central, this hypothetical
human functions as a kind of vestment for the human being that the
poem projects. By repeating the phrase “käme ein Mensch” the poem
is able to incorporate this human. This being has no reason to come,

for he is already there. The poem has situated him by means of the
subjunctive iterations of “would come,” almost as a necessity of gram-
mar. As a result, these words can be discarded, as it were, now that the
human is there. This individual speaks the language of the ancient Jews
but this language too becomes a form of chatter. This lalling might
seem to constitute an imitation of authentic speech yet in the poem it
becomes a word in its own right.
“Tübingen, Jänner” constructs the poem’s final four lines around
the reversal of Hölderlin’s language of a purely original poetry as the
source, as well as madness in terms of genial enthusiasm:
nur lallen und lallen,

immer-, immer-
zuzu.
(“Pallaksch. Pallaksch.”)
[only babble and babble,

always-, always-
againagain.
(“Pallaksch. Pallaksch.”)]
Against both the originality of the genius’s law-giving imagination, as

Kant had defined him, and the aura of madness in terms of a singular,
incomparable utterance, the poem develops a pattern of repetition and
recitation. The last four lines consist almost exclusively of repetitions,
which are the most pervasive rhetorical devices of Celan’s poetry.
“Tübingen, Jänner” cites what are almost certainly the lines of Büch-
ner’s mentally ill figure, Woyzeck, at the moment of his auditory delu-
sions, as he hears voices and makes plans to kill his girlfriend. The
poem’s quotation of Woyzeck excludes the psychological scene and
connotations of Büchner’s drama, transforming this into the madness
of repetition. Not only the rhetoric of recitation is at work; the re-
peated word has the meaning (“immer-, immer- / zuzu”) of the event
of repetition, which conflicts with assertions of enigmatic origins.
The last line is the utterance “Pallaksch,” which is attributed to
Hölderlin by his first biographer, Christoph Theodor Schwab. That
Celan was aware of the legend behind this word is beyond dispute; for
he writes of it to Ilana Shmueli, “which at the time of his madness,
Hölderlin was supposed to have understood simultaneously as Yes and

No.”22 On its own, “Pallaksch” would seemingly be a pure chance
word. Appearing once, it would remain an emphatic evocation of
Hölderlin’s divine, mad utterance. It would become an enchanted
word whose encrypted mystery persists in defiance of a rationalized
world. The poem repeats precisely this word that is so overcoded with
contexts of madness. That which happens once, as the adage goes, is
an accident, twice a coincidence, and three times a pattern. Chance is
typically understood in singular terms. Yet this is only partially true;
the single occurrence may also possess the appearance of what is di-
vinely given.
In this sense, the products of der eigentliche Mensch are seen as un-
predictable, singular and divinely inspired works. The language of
madness on the other hand appears as a meaningless, singular event, or
one whose only meaning is singularity. The repetition of Pallaksch
works against both the singularity of the genial product and the non-
sense of a random utterance that has no conventional meaning. It takes
on meaning only with its repetition. Only in this way can it become a
word, rather than a chance utterance. Celan’s repetition of the word ef-
fectively removes Hölderlin’s words from its entanglements in myth,
national song, and mental illness. Chance, however, is not banished
from the poem. For though Celan repeats the word, by making mean-
ing—which it would not have as a purely chance event—possible
through its repetition, the particularity of its meanings cannot be com-
pletely determined.
Moving against a strong tide of biography, anecdote, and positivism
in Celan scholarship, readers have argued that this poem does not con-
vey a biographical moment.23 Nevertheless, this may miss the mark, for
“Tübingen, Jänner” brings the poem’s moment of composition into di-
alogue with the dates that it encodes. In this case, the title stands in an
inexact correlation to the date of the poem’s writing and situation.
Celan wrote the poem, a variant title of which included “1961,” on
January 29, 1961, after a visit to Tübingen. Celan was in Tübingen to
receive from Walter Jens a written position paper that he believed
might help him in his efforts to respond to the charges of plagiarism
leveled against him by Claire Goll. That Celan begins “Tübingen, Jän-
ner” with a marked quotation of Hölderlin’s “Der Rhein,” a poem that
thematizes originality, is significant in light of the purpose of this visit.
The poem undermines the cult of innovation, its theoretical implica-
tions and underpinnings in terms of authoritative, authorial guardian-

ship of meaning, and becomes an attack on the copyright. It was this
same seemingly innocuous concept of originality and authorial propri-
ety that was used to sabotage Celan’s poetry. “Tübingen, Jänner” calls
into question the author’s proprietary claim to texts. The poem’s anal-
ysis of origins, however, is not only, not primarily, “personal.” Rather,
it levels its critique at the politics of originality.24
Messianic Caesurae
Celan wrote “Ich trink Wein” in November 1969, six months before
his death. While “Tübingen, Jänner” uses repetition to counter the
ideology of originality, Celan’s later poem returns to Hölderlin to un-
dermine messianic notions and at the same time to present its words as
translations of translations of an absent original:
Ich trink wein aus zwei Gläsern

und zackere an
der Königszäsur
wie Jener
am Pindar,
Gott gibt die Stimmgabel ab

als einer der kleinen
Gerechten,
aus der Lostrommel fällt

unser Deut.
(GW 3:108)
[I drink wine from two glasses

and plow away at
the king’s caesura
as that other
at Pindar,
god turns the tuning fork in

as one of the small
just ones,
from the lottery drum falls

our doit.]
The poem offers four stations, as it were, marked by the figures that
emerge: the self (Ich), the other (Jener), god, and a shared condition
(unser). Most of the first stanza is drawn from a remark made about the
“half-crazy” Hölderlin, whose 1804 translations of ancient Greek po-
etry amounted to some as a vain effort: “Hölderlin, der immer halb-
verrückt ist, zackert auch am Pindar” (Hölderlin, who is still half-mad,
plows away at Pindar).25 Hölderlin was working as the court-librarian
to the Landgrave in Homburg when a civil servant wrote the com-
ment in a letter. Celan found the sentence in a Hölderlin biography,
underlining the comment and writing it inside the cover. True to his
practice of reciting key words or phrases from the margins of dis-
courses, he borrowed this word zackern from the letter. Zackern, zacker
gen, as Grimms’ Dictionary notes, is a medieval word to plow. Etymo-
logically and across numerous languages it is central to philosophy,
linked to words such as acre, ackern, agro, agere, to be an agent, to act.
The word is also linked to the word for author, which connects its in-
terests to the charged issue of authorship seen in “Tübingen, Jänner.”
In this sense, Celan’s plowing away is also an “authoring” on the Königs-
zäsur.
Through comparing the poetic voice’s plowing, which is at the same
time an act of translation, with that of a distant subject (“wie Jener”—
like that one), this poem erases Hölderlin’s pure singularity, in other
words, his situation’s incomparability. The poem’s Ich takes the words
written about Hölderlin, whose translations were apparent evidence of
madness, and compares them to its own efforts. It does this not only by
quoting from Hölderlin’s biography, but by organizing the poem struc-
turally around what is at once comparison and at the same time trans-
lation, which the biographical reference announces. The Zackern
(plowing; authoring) of the Ich is a semblance, “wie Jener,” of Hölder-
lin’s Zackern. According to the author of the deprecating comment
about Hölderlin, zackern supposedly manifested madness. The poem
leaves behind the word halbverrückt as well as Hölderlin’s name found
in the original quotation. Yet it retains the action that, for many,
proved Hölderlin’s insanity. For a moment then the poem’s concern is
less about a subject that is “half-crazy” and more about the eradication
or omission of a certain kind of madness, that is, a psychological mean-
ing of insanity.
Yet similar to the case of “Tübingen, Jänner,” the Wahn both of
Hölderlin’s action and Celan’s poem is present though unnamed in the
rhetorical figure of repetition. In Hölderlin’s case the incomprehensi-

ble and irreproducible character of his Pindar translation attests to his
madness as it was for the impending Hölderlin cult to count as his ge-
nius. Gerning’s remark specifically notes Hölderlin’s work on Pindar.
For eighteenth-century Germans Pindar’s works counted as the true
genre of poetry. This reception of Pindar is not incidental. According
to Penelope Murray, Pindar was the first in ancient Greece to view po-
etic talent as both divinely bestowed but naturally received.26 Herder,
for instance, identified Pindar as history’s archetypal genius, and the
young Goethe wrote odes in which a modern poet wrestles with Pin-
dar’s towering image. A purported aspect of Hölderlin’s late poetry as
well as his translations is their originality and incomprehensibility. In
contradistinction to originality, the madness of the self’s Zackern in
“Ich trink Wein” consists in the repetition and the semblance of the ac-
tion.
My contention then is that this word wie, for Celan, is the madness
of this poem. It manifests the claim that we may read and, in philo-
sophical terms of appearance, perceive something only as or in com-
parison with something else within discourse. “Ich trink Wein” is the
attempt to represent the process of representation, by which sem-
blance happens. This can be illustrated and summarized by returning
to the efforts of the poem’s Ich. It encodes its own work at comparison
as madness, just as the incomparability and incomprehensibility of
Hölderlin’s translations provoke Gerning’s comments about Hölder-
lin’s “halbverrückt” translation. This translation seems at first to be the
singular and initial moment of “plowing,” for which Celan’s poem en-
acts the repetition. Yet this cannot be accurate, because the original po-
sition of Hölderlin is proven untenable. His Zackern is itself a transla-
tive semblance of Pindar. Hölderlin too wrote something wie Pindar
who, in an implied chain of translating texts wrote wie another. The
poetic voice of “Ich trink Wein” sees itself and its poem in a lineage of
witnesses who scrupulously care for symbols of the past and their pre-
sent effects. In the absence of the original word the poem produces it-
self by translating.
Since the eighteenth century, originality and untranslatability have
been the key qualities and functions of the irrational poet’s inspired
productions. This follows from the presence of unprecedented cre-
ation, the disregard for norms, and autonomous subjectivity in both
the creative genius and madness. “Ich trink Wein” however turns this
on its head, making madness into repeatability with a difference. Ce-

lan’s transformation of Wahn erases the function of accounting for a
singular cause for events and empties the cult of the genius of its sub-
jective core. One distinction of the genius historically resides in its ca-
pacity to transcend the distance between idea and appearance through
the technique of the symbol.27 Yet the things in this poem, for instance
the two glasses, do not depend on references to representations outside
the text. Instead of with transcendence, their concerns lie with that
which they need to emerge. In this way the poem can provide a chain
of nonidentical semblances that engender distinctions.
This is also to say that Celan’s Hölderlin poems cause a discursive
shift in the history of creativity and its relation to madness. Turning
away from redemption from reality in an aesthetically mediated
world, they separate pathology from the aesthetic and bring to an end
the mourning of poetic subjectivity. The two central models for cul-
turally constructing mad geniality are the Hölderlinian creator who
connects the poles of origin and prophecy on the one hand and the
artist who grows from the negatively tinged soil of ethnic or biologi-
cal decline on the other. In different ways both of these nurtured the
political terror of the twentieth century. The first has its roots in the
Herderian notion of authentic humanity as the mouthpiece of the
Volk’s local, distinctive spirit. This has been conceived as the expres-
sion of a people’s origins as well as its historical destiny. Such an ideol-
ogy established and sustained an image of the specifically German po-
litical genius guided by providence. The second was used by fascist
ideology to stigmatize others whom it culturally coded in terms of ill-
ness and Jewishness. In this context, the task of redefining madness as
imitation and at the same time distinguishing madness from literature
and ethnicity became a central matter. In this way, Celan’s critique of
origins and the link between illness and poetry is political, ethical, and
personal.
“Ich trink Wein” thus employs the compositional technique of sim-
ilarity and semblance as cornerstones in its case against the claim that
appearances and words provide access to secured knowledge. In the
first strophe the Ich is like “Jener.” In the second god appears as one of
many:
Gott gibt die Stimmgabel ab
als einer der kleinen
Gerechten,
[god turns the tuning fork in

as one of the small
just ones]
The reduction of god to an appearance of one of many is accomplished

in the repetitions of G—— in this strophe: Gott (god), gibt (give),
Stimmgabel (tuning fork), and Gerechten (just ones), thus denying and
emptying out the presence of god’s singularity and incomparability. As
a result, god too becomes a metaphor that the poem can draw on for its
task of individuation.
The image of god surrendering the “Stimmgabel,” the tuning fork,
is a signal that language as a system of utterances that tether them-
selves to origins and essential objects is at an end. The “Stimmgabel”
is, as Grimms notes, the tool “to determine and control absolute pitch
and voice.”28 The word takes on an etymological meaning of stimmen:
“to name, to fix something,” “to identify, call, order, and so on, origi-
nally presented as the authentic verbal expression.”29 God abandons
the “naming-fork,” surrendering the means for giving and speaking
the names of things, for ordering, arranging, and identifying the phe-
nomenal world. Language, now out of the range of the divine, is disen-
chanted. What remains are words that we can use to respond to other
words and situations—a series of copies and semblances, repetitions
without given models. As god turns in the “Stimmgabel,” the work in-
volved in reading and interpreting a speaker’s situation now comes to
the fore. Naming was formerly a divine act, and Gabel also referred to
a plow used in cultivation. As a result the poem takes this over itself yet
does so now as an act of marking off or literally furrowing (zackern).
Significantly, this is at once a task of interrupting what is (Zäsur) and
transforming words into works, which is also to say into individuals in
their own right. In this way the poem itself draws on the metaphor of a
text as an earthly field in which readers cultivate meaningful differ-
ences.
Tipping out of the lottery drum in the final lines is not fate (Los), as
one might expect, but the coin or the doit, what has little value, almost
nothing:
aus der Lostrommel fällt
unser Deut.
[from the lottery drum falls

our doit.]
The Deut may evoke Deutung (meaning); yet it certainly signifies the
very potential for meaning. The potential is legible in this complete
word for coin that at the same is the fragmented word for Deutung. Ac-
cording to this poem, individuals, just like words, receive no fate or no
lot. In the place of fate are coins, a circulating medium that we can use
to approximate other coins, other words; but these are words for which
there is no given standard or value, due to the end of a normative con-
ception of meaning.
Returning to the poem’s first stanza, one can now see how it mobi-
lizes the trope of humanity’s separation from a messiah:
ICH TRINK WEIN aus zwei Gläsern

und zackere an
der Königszäsur
[I drink wine from two glasses

and plow away at
the king’s caesura]
The “Königszäsur” is specifically the caesura of the king, which is to

say the interruption of messianic infinitude.30 The two glasses connote
the chain of texts from Pindar to Hölderlin to the poem’s Ich who
drinks from them. Yet in a poem that plows a literary terrain of past
and present, these two glasses also point to the time of Jener and Pin-
dar. One may also link the poem’s concern with the king to the two
glasses of the first line. According to Zbikowski, the two glasses refer
to the Seder evening of the Passover.31 While each person receives a
glass, a second glass is placed in front of the host’s seat, meant for the
prophet Elias, who is a precursor to the messiah. I would briefly extend
this reading to stress that in Celan’s poem, the Ich drinks from both
glasses, emptying the glass that would otherwise signal a messianic age.
The Zackern on the Königszäsur is a doubled cutting away at a cen-
tral and meaningful interruption in a redemptive presence. Playing a
role in this cutting is a letter from the first three lines; the z in zwei, za-
ckere, and zäsur links these words whose meaning or function turns on
division, as does for that matter the word Gabel. In a world in which
the access to the divine or to the ontic reality behind words and images
is barred, the power of semblance and translation prevails.32 This poem
then goes a long way toward answering the question what happens if
aesthetic production is rooted not in creative origins but is driven in-
stead by imitation: a poetry whose task is to mark the illusions that it

inscribes as illusions. The attempt itself cannot be a complete success,
something that Celan seems to have realized in paraphrasing zackern
with “pfuschen,” that is, to bungle.
Nevertheless, words must have their own time. For this reason they
can be extricated from a kind of oblivion, be translated, and receive an
existence in poems. In the Königszäsur the poem ciphers a time that is,
like that of Jener, erased, but also made to appear with the plowing of
the poem. This is also to say that the caesura is at once a suspension and
at the same time a marking or distinguishing. It is then from the van-
tage point of this caesura that a person who acts can be observed. Jener,
that one, thus emerges in the poem after the mention of the caesura. By
going to the field (zackern), the self treats the poem as if it were a space
to be plowed: a field where an other can be glimpsed from the angle of
the furrow and where a shared meaning can fall from a chance en-
counter.
By drawing on constructions of madness associated with Hölderlin, the

poems are able to conceive of themselves as the translations necessary
for the individual to appear. Wahn as opinion, repetition, and transla-
tion defines the world both in its impoverishment and its wealth. The
illusory nature of writing, instead of furnishing us with primitive
meanings, provides imperfect opinions and ways to produce unfore-
seen actual possibilities. Poems such as “Ich trink Wein” rely on the
caesura both to interrupt and create. In a different way, figures of the
wound permit poems to transfer the marks of violence to language.
The mimetic dimension that Celan discovered in the discourses of
madness and illusion are also to be found in his poetry of the wound.
In the final chapter I will examine how this transformation from vio-
lence to poetry occurred and how the wound became the central prin-
ciple of his late poetic style.
5
Mind Matters
“Augenstimmen, im Chor, / lesen sich wund” (GW 1:169) [Eye-voices

in concert, read themselves raw]—these lines from the poem
“Windgerecht” [Windright] declare a connection between wounds and
reading that is indicative of Celan’s work as a whole. Reading here is
not a narration that reports a prior wound. It is the act that wounds. As
such an act, reading constitutes an origin, which allows the wound to
emerge. Frequently in Celan’s poems the wound and actions such as
reading or dreaming are so closely connected that it is not clear
whether reading leads to wounds or an autonomous wound makes
reading possible.
Among the most common motifs in Celan’s work is the wound. The
wound often locates itself in human bodies. This is particularly the
case in the early poems. Yet more common, and especially in the late
work, is a wound that is without a body except that of the text. Instead
it is an autonomous mark that offers a point of observation for the en-
tities around it. In many poems it creates a new space by cutting open a
flat plane such as a wall or a stone. For instance, the poem “Bei Bran-
cusi, zu zweit” [At Brancusi’s, the two of us] reveals that if a stone could
speak, “tät es sich auf, als Wunde” (GW 2:252) [it would open, as a
wound]. Equally prevalent is a wound that does not mark any object at
all but instead results from dreaming, reading, or remembering, for
which the poem “Engführung” is exemplary. Because this poem is cut
off from the external reality of the violent shock it seemingly purports
to represent, it cannot situate wounds there but only in the poem. The
reader then follows the command to read and walk through the poem
to find the “Nahtstellen” (seams) that open there only to grow to-
gether again. In his pioneering study Remnants of Song Ulrich Baer em-
phasizes the presence of traumatic situations throughout Celan’s
work.1 The question of shock, trauma, and the wound is of significance
130
5 / MIND MATTERS 131
in Celan’s poems because it complicates efforts at locating and resolv-

ing the Holocaust as an experience. For Baer the Holocaust is an event
that must be framed without being relegated to historical conscious-
ness.
In this chapter I take a different approach to wounds, focusing on
the ways in which Celan’s poetry projects the event of individuality in
the present through recourse to the discourse of the mind rather than
trying to frame the experience of the past.2 The figure of the wound is
essential for this strategy for it creates a repetition that is required for
individuality to grow from the poem. Celan’s earliest poetry was con-
cerned with marking bodies with wounds. In the 1950s the poetry’s ap-
proach to the wound changed his work, which no longer aimed to sit-
uate the body of the dead as the site of a wound but to present the
wound as both an origin and an aim for the poem.
Mother Wound
In Celan’s most famous poem “Todesfuge” (Death fugue) the reference

to violent wounds to the body are memorably vivid: “er trifft dich mit
bleierner Kugel er trifft dich genau” (GW 1:42) [he hits you with the
leaden bullet he hits you right on]. While this victim is not specified,
the body that is frequently marked by wounds in the early poetry is
that of the mother. The lead that wounds is central in the 1948 poem
“Espenbaum” (Aspentree), a poem which organizes the motif of the
wound around the mother:
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.
(GW 1:19)
[Aspentree, your leaf gazes white into the dark.

My mother’s hair never grew white.
Dandelion, so green is the Ukraine.

My blond mother did not come home.
Rain cloud, you linger at the well?

My hushed mother cries for everyone.
Round star, you twine the golden loop.

My mother’s heart was wounded by lead.
Oaken door, who hove you from your hinges?

My gentle mother cannot come.]
Experience in this poem separates itself into two categories. A benevo-

lent “nature,” which is more or less continuous, runs concurrent with
an “event.” The first line in each couplet begins with a seemingly be-
nign invocation of nature: “Espenbaum“ (aspentree), “Löwenzahn”
(dandelion), “Regenwolke” (rain cloud), “Runder Stern” (round star).
Interrupting this nature is loss, which is made event through the
poem’s fiction. Loss in the poem takes the form of the dead mother,
whom the poetic voice evokes in the second line of each couplet. This
death is a murder, which is made clear by the reference to the lead in
the mother’s heart. After the wound to this heart, an abrupt shift from
nature to technology occurs in the last couplet. This door focuses the
question of a cause: “Eichne Tür, wer hob dich aus den Angeln?”
(Oaken door, who hove you from your hinges?). This question holds
the poem in its grip.
The poem gives the impression of two voices at cross-purposes. In
this way the genre of nature poetry provides the material for a narra-
tive account of the mother’s loss. In other words, the poem seems to be
saying that it does not have or will not use the words proper to the loss
and the mother’s death. In the place of these words referring to reality,
it relies on generic language. This might also be called a reality seen
out of the corner of the eye, for “Espenbaum” cannot apprehend it
through a direct vision.
Cathy Caruth has argued that causes of trauma cannot be deter-
mined because they are beyond representation because of the effects
on the survivor. Caruth claims that only after a period of latency, dur-
ing which an event refuses “to be simply located,” can trauma be in-
cluded in a narrative. Calling this belatedness “an enigma of survival,”

Caruth suggests that trauma is equivalent to a mystery.3 Caruth’s no-
tion of traumatic events is problematic because it tends to confer a
near-sublimity on events and their inscriptions, wherein a traumatic
event amounts to the impossibility of its own memory. For Caruth, lit-
erary references to unrepresentability are in reality references to spe-
cific events, events that are however not specified because they are
themselves unrepresentable. The poem “Espenbaum” raises this ques-
tion as it interrogates not so much the event but the agent. At the same
time it manifests loss as the repetitive naming and evocation of the ab-
sent mother (Mutter appears five times), as well as in the survival of the
poetic voice. Thus the subject of temporality identified by theorists of
trauma is also at issue in Celan’s poem but in a different way. The tem-
porality in the poem is one dependent not on the difference between
past cause and present effect but on that between past mark and pre-
sent iteration. While the poem conceives of itself as the effect of loss,
we cannot answer the poem’s question about agency or specify which
violence causes either the poem’s writing or its wound. This is not to say
that no event has moved the poem’s discourse. Yet beyond evoking the
Holocaust, we cannot say what this event is. That we cannot do so is
not due to any privileged unrepresentability of specific events; it is be-
cause the wound figured by the poem fails to provide a vantage point
from which to observe events that belong to the paradigm of the real.
Other poems by Celan from the mid-1940s inscribe the body of the
mother with wounds while they implicate wounds in dreams. In doing
so, they address the issue of ontological status. Dominique LaCapra
has argued that trauma is to be distinguished between structural and
historical forms. While causes of historical trauma can be determined,
structural trauma by contrast is the condition of possibility for deter-
minable historical causes.4 This view is somewhat at odds with Freud’s
notion of psychic wounds. According to Freud factual experiences
need not be the cause of trauma. Instead the crucial element is the ef-
fect on the mind. As a result explanatory factors include fantasies,
memories, and exaggerated or imagined events.5 Significantly, in his
correspondence with Wilhelm Fließ, Freud goes further to argue that
a patient’s sense of being overwhelmed was due to a gap in the psyche
(psychische Lücke).6 Repetitions and repressions react not directly to a
traumatic cause but to “memory traces” removed from the event by the
gap. In other words, this gap, which could be described as one between
reality and fantasy, made direct access to the original event impossible.
This is also to say that the mind refers to its own autonomous work-
ings. The question then becomes the status of the wound, what it will
be as an independent image or mark. Celan’s wound poems, for in-
stance the early poem “Gesang zur Sonnenwende” (Solstice song), in-
vestigate their identity as texts without relying on an original cause
outside the poem.
“Gesang zur Sonnenwende” addresses the mother and speaks of a
violent “Lanzenstich in dein Herz” (lance’s stab in your heart). From
his early to his late poetry wounds typically appear as an independent
marker with no cause but their own inscription. That is to say that the
wound is a figure from which the poem constructs itself. Thus do
wounds imply dreams, as when this poem states “wem du mittags die
Wunden der Träume schlägst” (GW 3:49) [whom you strike at midday
with wounds of dreams]. This line refers not only to wounds that
would form the distinct content of dreams but more significantly to
how dreams themselves, which is also to say, images and metaphors,
produce wounds. In other words, the wounds of dreams are the poem’s
very images of death and violence. That imagination is implicated in
both the causes and the effects of wounds can also be read in the
poem’s reference to “dein Kind mit dem Flammenhaar der Umnach-
tung” (your child with derangement’s hair of flames). Celan’s wound
poems seem to draw on Freud’s claim that the overwhelmed mind re-
acts not to an original external event but to reminiscences. “Gesang
zur Sonnenwende” attempts to account for itself as a wound that
emerges from a dream, a dream whose effect is the death of the mother
in the poem.
In these early poems the wound and its effects are situated not only
in the death of the mother or the Muttersprache (the mother tongue),
which for Celan was the language of the Bukowina, but also in the self.
The 1944 poem “Nähe der Gräber” (Nearness of graves), for instance,
locates the mother’s wounds on both the map and the body, placing her
heart that “suffers” near the river Bug, where Celan’s parents died:
Kennt noch das Wasser des südlichen Bug,

Mutter, die Welle, die Wunden dir Schlug?
(GW 3:20)
[Does the water of the southern Bug still know,

Mother, the wave, that wounded you?]
In “Espenbaum” as in an early poem that begins “Es fällt nun, Mutter,

Schnee in der Ukraine” (FW, 68) [Snow is falling, mother, in the
Ukraine], the vanished mother is located in the “Ukraine”—the oppo-
site of “home,” Heim. As such it is now home to the mother. Yet in a
key line from “Es fällt nun, Mutter” the home is also unheimlich:
Was wär es, Mutter: Wachstum oder Wunde—

Versänk auch ich im Schneewehn der Ukraine?
(FW, 68)
[What would it be, mother: a growth or wound—

if I too sank in the snows of the Ukraine?]
“Es fällt nun, Mutter” points to an ambivalence of wounds and their

effects. As early as the 1940s, whether death, even the death of the self,
was growth or wound was a question for Celan. The poem leaves
unanswered the question whether wounds are purely negative or
whether they imply a productive dimension in the sense that a poem
participates in the production of the specific thing that it talks about.
Celan’s use of the word versinken implies to be swallowed up by and to
vanish in the snow along with the mother who vanishes. The unex-
pected phrase in the poem’s last two lines thus poses a crucial question
for Celan’s poetry: Would it be a growth or a wound—if I too vanished
in the snow of the Ukraine?
The productive and proleptic concerns of the wound poems are
also evident in Celan’s acceptance speech on the occasion of the Bre-
men Prize for Literature in 1958. There Celan addressed the question
of wounds and reality:
Gedichte sind auch in dieser Weise unterwegs: sie halten auf etwas zu.
Worauf? Auf etwas Offenstehendes, Besetzbares, auf ein ansprechbares
Du vielleicht, auf eine ansprechbare Wirklichkeit. Um solche Wirk-
lichkeiten geht es, so denke ich, dem Gedicht. . . .
...........................................
Es sind die Bemühungen dessen, der, überflogen von Sternen, die
Menschenwerk sind, der, zeltlos auch in diesem bisher ungeahnten
Sinne und damit auf das unheimlichste im Freien, mit seinem Dasein
zur Sprache geht, wirklichkeitswund und Wirklichkeit suchend.
(GW 3:186)
[Poems in this sense too are on-the-way: they head toward something.
Toward what? Toward an open-standing, occupiable something, per-
haps toward an addressable You, perhaps, toward an addressable reality.

Such realities are, I think, at stake in a poem. . . .
.........................................
It is the efforts of someone who, overflown with stars that are
human handiwork, and who, shelterless in this till now unimagined
sense and thus most uncannily in the open, goes with his being to lan-
guage, wounded by reality and seeking reality.]
This reference to “human handiwork” calls to mind Celan’s biography,

specifically, the time spent during the years 1942–44 in labor battalions
created by the German-allied Romanians, and how soldiers of the Todt
Organization were responsible for his parents’ deaths.7 To be wounded
by something, as Celan asserts, is the first step in a complex movement
involving the search for the circumstances that have moved one. As
Celan’s speech shows, the task is not to treat reality as if it could be
mastered. For the poem’s reality is what it has ahead of it rather than
behind it. The Bremen speech’s reference to both a reality that wounds
and one that must be located differentiates two moments. These are at
once the times, places, and names of the extinguished and at the same
time the emerging reality in the poem. The poem offers itself as a
frame or an account for the wounds that it inscribes, which is also to
say for the poem’s own emergence.
This return to wounds was an effort that Celan undertook, as he put
it, “um mir Wirklichkeit zu entwerfen” (to sketch out reality for my-
self). The speech’s word entwerfen includes several possible meanings,
including projecting and outlining yet it can also mean making a pro-
visional framework. Reality had to be at once projected and framed,
because, as Celan writes, “Wirklichkeit ist nicht, Wirklichkeit will
gesucht und gewonnen sein” (GW 3:168) [reality is not simply there, it
must be searched for and won]. This search for the reality of wounds
occurs in the context of having been moved by real events, by “stars
that are human handiwork.”
As far as the poem is concerned, wounds occur in its writing, that is
to say, with the presentation of the wound. In other words, the reality
that has wounded can only be experienced in the language of the
poem; for this reason the voice in the speech seeks reality through lan-
guage. But the poem must do this on its own terms, which are also the
terms upon which it relies to construct itself. That the poem respects
the distinction between the paradigm of real events and that of poetry
can be seen in the way in which the violence signified in Celan’s poems
is present as an evoked narrative rather than a sited account. While one

cannot be sure which real violence the poem registers, without the po-
etry the fact of violence would be inscribed on mortal bodies alone and
vanish along with them.
Wounds of Reading
Celan’s early poetry left open the question whether death was loss or a
form of production. Yet poems of the 1960s produce a response. During
a six-month stay in clinics in 1965 Celan began a posthumously pub-
lished poem with, “Das herzrissige, wuchernde / Trauma” (NL, 148)
[heart-tearing, proliferating / trauma]. Wounds are now at once a de-
structive tearing of the heart and at the same time a growth. For wounds
to become individual entities with their own presence they must be-
come readable. Thus a recurring relationship in Celan’s poems is the
one between reading and wounds. Specifically, reading is a form of
wounding. This connection is perhaps most evident in the second half
of the poem “Dein vom Wachen” (Your from waking) from Atemwende:
Die in der senk-

rechten, schmalen
Tagschlucht nach oben
stakende Fähre:
sie setzt
Wundgelesenes über.
(GW 2:24)
[In the ver-

tical, narrow
dayshaft—the upward
punting ferry:
it carries
the wound-reading over.]
The word “Wundgelesenes” includes a number of possible meanings,

including in the manner of a wound; to the point of being wounded;
read from or out of the wound. However the poem brings specificity to
the plurality of meanings through a different phrase. By combining the
wound with the word “setzt . . . über,” which itself has latent meanings
of both “carrying over” and “translating,” the text collapses the mean-
ings, and allows a different one to emerge, “what is carried over as
translation from the wound.” Derrida has argued that “setzt . . . über”
should not be understood as translating.8 However to interpret setzt . . .
über as “to be read from” the wound, is not a translation in terms of
metaphor or synonym in traditional literary terms. Instead it is the pro-
gressive emergence of a meaning from potentiality to reality, that is
translate out of transport, which is the destruction of a previous mean-
ingful situation and at the same time the production of another. In the
motif of horizontal movement (“senk- / recht”) as an emergence of
meaning, the ferry carries up the transliteration, literally, the “reading”
as repetition of the wound. The poem does not name the wound. For
by reading and being read the poem reads or wounds itself. Thus the
poem carries over the wounds that it cannot name or observe into the
wounds of the text that it can.
According to Freud the melancholic identification with the dead
behaves like an “open wound.”9 Whereas successful mourning consists
in declaring the objects of attachment as dead, the melancholy keeps
the dead alive. “Dein vom Wachen” however is concerned not with
identifying itself with the dead as lost objects, much less with reani-
mating them, but with identifying the objects that the poem transports
to their place. While here Celan pursues a path diverging from Freud,
a point of agreement emerges as regards the causes for wounds. In
“Dein vom Wachen” the wound as an external origin can be dispensed
with yet the wound as a cause originating in the text is maintained, a
notion consistent with Freud’s understanding of how the mind works.
In Jenseits des Lustprinzips (Beyond the Pleasure Principle), a work with
which Celan was very familiar, Freud underscores how the wounded
mind suffers in large part from memories. Dreams and reminiscences
function as works themselves from which readable wounds derive.
While a similar awareness is shown in Celan’s earliest wound poems,
“Dein vom Wachen” and the other poems from the 1950s and 1960s
make explicit how the poem can be read as a translation of original
wounds to which it has no access.
These wounds from “Dein vom Wachen” must be translated be-
cause the ontic wounds are not there to be observed. It does not mean
that the translated wounds possess a special kind of unrepresentability.
Nor does it mean that no such events have occurred. Instead only in
the poem’s repetition can wounds be posited. As a result the external

event has no causal relationship with the poem’s inner workings, which
is to say that it does not determine the poem’s shape. One can see how
far removed this is from maintaining that the literary text’s failure to
represent traumatic events is itself an effect of trauma. By referring to
the metaphor of wounds of reading, the poem marks its body with the
wound which can then be repeated.
“Dein vom Wachen” repeats not only lexically. It also does so for-
mally by splitting itself, for instance in the word senk- / recht. This split
word marks that there have been violent wounds while it also generates
warnings that language carries within it a latent violence. A great many
of Celan’s poems from the 1950s and 1960s reveal such key instances of
formal and lexical wounding, suturing, and scarring. In this way Celan
produces a poetry of wounds, bringing the wound and the formal ele-
ments of the caesura into contact with as many words and languages as
possible, that is, literally wounding them. In other words the later
poems become less concerned with locating wounds in human bodies,
above all, the body of the mother (or mater), than in locating them in
textual bodies, the materiality of words to be read.10
Scars
The 1963 poem “Stehen” (To stand) outlines a wound-narrative in

terms of possible real events and the account that frames them:
STEHEN, im Schatten
des Wundenmals in der Luft.
Für-niemand-und-nichts-Stehn.
Unerkannt,
für dich
allein.
Mit allem, was darin Raum hat,

auch ohne
Sprache.
(GW 2:23)
[To stand, in the shadow

of the scar in the air.
Standing-for-no-one-and-nothing.
Unrecognized,
for you
alone.
With all that has room within it,

even without
language.]
This poem answers three questions: where, why, and how to stand.
Concerning place, this is in the shadow of a Wundenmal, or a scar, in
the air. The poem’s key word besides Wunde is stehen. The word Wun-
denmal consists of two words, wound and Mal, which means a marker,
as in the word Denkmal (memorial).
In “Stehen” we have a shadow of a scar, that is, the trace (shadow) of
a trace (wound) of violence: a reflection twice removed. This real event
that has caused the scar is not perceivable. Instead what is open to per-
ception is the wound as the origin for the text, the text which then
frames the wounding. The shadow echoes the effect of an event to
which the only access is the poem. Yet the poetic voice, the poem, and
the reader cannot be certain what real event this shadow is a reflection
of, for the word shadow introduces the possibility of illusion:
STEHEN, im Schatten
des Wundenmals in der Luft
[To stand, in the shadow

of the scar in the air.]
Freed from a referential attribution the text becomes a condition for

the possibility of reading this standing. We read this standing but find
no evidence that it is proper to any subject. There is standing and there
is one standing: the poem. The possibility for reading this standing is
the poem, and as a phenomenon of standing it comes to its reader as
such. Standing here is not a narrated action distinct from its narration.
At the same time there is a narration. For space to appear there
must be a cut or a distinction. Because the wound is a cut it creates the
poem’s Luft, which is essentially space as such, the first result of the
wound. From this space the wound can cast a shadow, which also im-
plies light. The universe of the poem then grows from this original act
of severance, to which the poem wishes to allude. The poem’s standing
locates itself in the dark space created by the wound, which implies a
temporality. Because a Mal is also a given moment the poem exists in
the shadow of the time of the wound. That the poem stands in the
wound’s shadow means that the poem has limited vision regarding
what it can observe. It is aware of the reality that has moved it, but sees
only the shadow just out of the corner of its eye, as it were. The
shadow reveals an event the poem does not fully see, while the stand-
ing shows that it asserts itself. The event can be assumed by the wound
and its shadow, yet it exists only through the poem. The wound is a po-
etic fact of standing in the face of an event. Unlike the figure of Lenz
who walks inverted on his hands with an abyss beneath him, this
poem’s voice remains on its feet.
By proclaiming that it stands for nothing and no one the poem’s
voice asserts autonomy from the events that have moved it. Yet as the
second stanza shows, the poem itself is not autonomous, because it is in
relation to something else:
Für-niemand-und-nichts-Stehn.
Unerkannt,
für dich
allein.
[Standing-for-no-one-and-nothing.
Unrecognized,
for you
alone.]
Its act of standing does not represent an object, not even itself. It is
simply there. There is no recognition for this standing nor is there
knowledge (“Erkennung”). While the standing is for no one and noth-
ing, it is not without a relation to an other, for which it has emerged in
the first place. For this reason the poem stands for nothing but at the
same time offers itself up, as it were, for the other. That is to say the
poem gives the other the shadow of the wound as a place of shelter. As
a fragmentary lyrical framing of a posited, real, yet unknown (“uner-
kannt”), event the poem establishes the loss of which it speaks.
What is at stake then is not the real violence that has occurred but
rather the act of introducing a wound, an act that at the same time of-
fers to the other the poem as shelter, a space and place, located in the
prepositions für and mit:
Mit allem, was darin Raum hat,

auch ohne
Sprache.
[With all that has room within it,

even without
language.]
The poem’s Raum (space) is the internal space that corresponds to the
external space of air (Luft). While standing is an act unto itself, the
poem exists to provide shadow for the other. At the same time the
poem announces a solidarity with everything in the shadow encom-
passed by “darin” (within) which it however does not reveal. It does
not need to speak of “allem” (everything), which would be a revealing,
because it can only do so in the guise of silence, that is “without / lan-
guage.” Without this poem there would be no standing and no place
for the other. Just as shadow creates light the wound in this poem has
made the “standing.” By the same token, only from this final position
of standing can a wound be posited. Simply put, this poem is the
wound. Because all communication derives from this wound, it could
be said to open like a mouth about to speak for the other. Though it
stops short of an actual language the wound becomes a marker for the
other and everything else in its space.
The Dead Letter

The 1967 poem “Der von den unbeschriebenen” (The from the un-
written) from the volume Lichtzwang (Lightcompulsion) creates the
possibility of a writing to come in the form of the letter:
Der von den unbeschriebenen
Blättern
abgelesene Brief,
der Totstell-Reflexe
grausilberne Kette darauf,
gefolgt von drei silbernern
Takten.
Du weißt: der Sprung

geht über dich, immer.
(GW 2:272)
[The letter
read off of the
blank pages,
the gray-silver chain

of sham-death reflexes upon it,
followed by three silverier
beats.
You know: the leap

goes over you, always.]
The unwritten page from which the letter can be read in this poem has
specific sources, one of which Celan found in Rudolf Bilz’s Die unbe-
wältigte Vergangenheit des Menschengeschlechts (Humankind’s unmastered
past). Bilz describes how a letter is read off (ablesen) an unwritten white
page in a state of alcoholic delirium.11 This is also described as par-
alexia, a form of sensory aphasia in which one word is read in the place
of another. While regarding a blank page, the mind draws written
characters (Schriftzeichen) from a kind of involuntary memory and cre-
atively arranges them to form a letter. Bilz considers this act of reading
a form of displacement activity (Übersprungbewegung), which is also a
reaction to a great shock. This ethological term denotes substitute be-
havior that appears to be out of context and not integrated into estab-
lished patterns and for which causal factors are absent. In the first
stanza of the poem these blank pages refer to a state of loss prior to the
appearance of the poem and the pages of the book in which the poem
is found. As a result the letter can be said to be the poem that has been
read off a blank page. While the poem does not state why the pages are
blank, as pages made of paper they point to a former living state. Their
now blank form also reveals their lifelessness. In other words, the pages
are a life that has been erased. Thus the poem is not merely a letter
creatively imagined on the basis of a blank space. Rather the poem de-
codes the blankness that death leaves while it encodes rearranged and
repeated words that are read in place of the dead. The poem thus exca-
vates characters (Schriftzeichen) at once to efface them and at the same
time to mark their effacement by reading them in place of the inacces-
sible.
The poem as a letter written in place of the dead exploits the notion
of displacement activity that Bilz discusses. For the poem can be read
not as a copy but as a displacement or replacement of what has been
stripped of life. The poem then relies on Bilz’s discussion of shock to

conceive itself. Celan’s late work consistently concerns itself with in-
corporating the textual world. This poem constructs itself almost en-
tirely from scientific terms that deal with the damaged mind, terms
which enable the poem to understand itself as a displacement of the
dead individual. This and other late poems reduce the distance be-
tween themselves and their sources to the narrowest point. On this
point they can then pivot both to mark these sources and enliven them
according to the poem’s own idiom and for its own purposes of pro-
jecting individuality.
The term “unbeschrieben” from the discourse of the mind likely
also derives from Freud, whose texts Celan was intensively reading at
the time he wrote the poem. Specifically this relates to Freud’s descrip-
tion of the “system P-C” (Perception-Consciousness) in the essay “Note
on the ‘Wonder-Tablet.’” To illustrate the relationship between per-
ception and memory Freud used the example of a toy tablet with a
sheet that one writes on. Because this sheet can be lifted and wiped
clean for future writing it stands for consciousness. The malleable ma-
terial beneath it, which is compared to unconsciousness, retains it. The
psychical system linking perception and consciousness, as Freud puts it,
“receives perceptions but preserves no lasting trace of them, so that it
can behave toward each new perception like a blank page (“unbeschrie-
benes Blatt”).12 This demonstrates both the limited capacity of con-
sciousness and the psychical division of archival duties; as consciousness
does not retain memory another system has this as its chore. For con-
sciousness to receive new stimuli it must, as if with an unseen hand, pe-
riodically wipe itself clean. In Freud’s definition of psychic shock in Be-
yond the Pleasure Principle the protective layer (Reizschutz) linking the
mind and the environment performs a similar task. This layer wards off
excessive stimuli that would overwhelm consciousness. Regarding the
unwritten page, consciousness has a kindred function. It provides an
active forgetting maneuver before too much input is allowed into the
mind.
“Der von den unbeschriebenen” thus establishes an analogy be-
tween the blank pages and consciousness, a slate that must be con-
stantly wiped clean so as to receive new stimuli. Only on the basis of
this blankness can the letter be read. The letter emerges from a page
wiped clean, which is protected, as it were, by its own stimulus shield.
Yet for the letter to be read off of the blank page there must be an act
of imagination. For a text cannot be read from nothing. A letter that is

mentioned, without the poem outlining its contents, appears out of a
prior state of emptiness.
In the second stanza the poem connects the figure of the unwritten
letter to a psychological term, “Totstell-Reflexe” (sham death reflex),
which is also taken from Bilz’s text. The psychologist Ernst Kretsch-
mer originally elaborated this notion of a reflex that victims of trauma
display, which includes speechlessness and hypnoid states. This reflex
attempts to describe the way in which a shock is survived by feigning
death; as in a ritual whereby one wards off a danger by acting it out, the
subject preserves and defends itself against death by mimicking death.
One can say that the poem appropriates this gesture, that is, it imitates
death so as to survive.
To the chain of “sham death reflexes” and the beats that follow it
there is a reaction (“darauf”), yet no given event at the heart of this re-
action. Only the possibility of an event is present, found both in the re-
flex, which could also mean “reflection,” and in the blank pages, which
are themselves a type of reaction. It is the memory of something that
must be erased in order to be reinscribed. Remember the Bremen
speech: this is the reality that needs to be “sought out” and projected in
the poem. The repetition that this poem brings about in its structure is
the movement toward another word that marks the difference to a pre-
vious word, as if to show a progression of steps. It accomplishes this
repetition, for instance, in the step from “graysilver“ to “silverier”
(grausilberne to silberner). Of note in this regard is that the poem’s terms
refer to repetition with the three beats (drei Takte[n]), the chain (a rep-
etition of links), and the sham death reflexes (a reflex itself, a type of
repetition).
That the structure of repetition is reality is a position taken by
Kierkegaard in his Repetition, a work Celan is known to have carefully
scrutinized. In a line that Celan marked in his reading of the text,13
Kierkegaard distinguishes repetition from recollection. In contrast to
repetition, recollection or anamnesis was the mode proper to the
Greeks who contended that “all knowing is a recollecting”: both are
“the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recol-
lected has been, is repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is
recollected forward.”14 According to Kierkegaard, repetition, “if it is
possible,” is actuality and the real.15 Kierkegaard is interested in repeti-
tion that takes place individually, through a life lived, not in terms of
natural phenomena. Repetition is actuality, as Kierkegaard writes, “for

that which is repeated has been—otherwise it could not be repeated—
but the very fact that it has been makes the repetition into something
new.”16
The blank pages as well as the letter in Celan’s poem are the poten-
tial for a writing found in repetition: a movement in the face of these
unwritten pages. For a moment, a blank is suspended in the imagina-
tion of the poem. At this moment it invites its recipient, the other, to
read, and by doing so, construct the poem, which is also to say, to re-
ceive the letter and read what follows. This letter echoes the compari-
son in the Bremen speech of a poem with a Flaschenpost (message in a
bottle). The poem sends itself to an addressee whose identity cannot be
predicted. Because it is designed to be sent out, it distances itself from
the pages that have already been written. The letter establishes the pa-
rameters for yet another singular writing. The “chain” of “Totstell-Re-
flexe” is itself an answer to this letter:
der Totstell-Reflexe
grausilberne Kette darauf,
gefolgt von drei silbernern
Takten.
[the gray-silver chain

of sham-death reflexes upon it,
followed by three silverier
beats.]
With the second occurrence of “silbern[ern],” it brings about the rep-

etition which the trio of “beats” names. The “silver” beats that Celan
wrote in the published text, as opposed to the gold beats in the drafts,
suggest a choice for a resonant substance known for its capacity to re-
verberate. It is a forward-looking movement: the letter succeeds the
blank pages.
These lines simulate a break before the poem can carry on with the
leap mentioned in the poem’s final strophe:
Du weißt: der Sprung

geht über dich, immer.
[You know: the leap

goes over you, always.]
Bilz conceived of the type of reading from blank pages described above
as “Übersprung-Lesen” (displacement-reading).17 Literally the term is
translated as a leaping over. This term is broken up in the poem, a kind
of wounding which allows a completely different meaning, which in
turn permits a particular use. The poem’s final stanza exploits this term
so that its last gesture is a “Sprung” (leap) beyond the absent other. In
this leap the poem reveals its aim to project this other by covering it
with the arc of its leap. This “Sprung” is also the “encounter” that
Celan speaks of in “Der Meridian.” In notes of the early 1960s he fa-
vored the Sprung (leap) over metaphor’s bridging over (“überbrücken”),
claiming that “Dichtung ist ein Sprung” (TA: Meridian, 125) [Poetry is
a leap]. The concern of the poem is to carry over the other into the
poem and by deciding to leap. Referring to the poem, Celan wrote,
“Was dich von ihm trennt, überbrückst du nicht; du mußt dich zum
Sprung entschließen” (you cannot abridge what separates you from it,
you must decide to leap). The leap that goes beyond and via the other
is situated in the reading and writing of the letter. This letter becomes
the script of the dead other from the blank pages. It is for the sake of
this letter and this leap that the poem “Der von den unbeschriebenen”
is written.
Voice Networks
In the poem “Seelenblind” (Soulblind) published in the 1968 volume

Fadensonnen, Celan further exposes the dual nature of repetition. By
drawing on the specialized language of a discourse on traumatic ef-
fects, the poem reclaims a vision in the face of a disruption. In the lan-
guage of psychology, the term Seelenblindheit (soulblindness) is the ef-
fect of a traumatic physical blow.18 As a psychophysiological term, it
describes one’s incapacity to correspond visual perceptions with mem-
ory banks:
SEELENBLIND, hinter den Aschen,

im heilig-sinnlosen Wort,
kommt der Entreimte geschritten,
den Hirnmantel leicht um die Schultern,
den Gehörgang beschallt

mit vernetzten Vokalen,
baut er den Sehpurpur ab,

baut ihn auf.
(GW 2:183)
[Soul-blind behind the ashes,

in the holy-meaningless word,
the de-rhymed one comes ridden,
the mind-mantle lightly over his shoulders,
the auditory canal sound-filled

with networked vowels,
he deconstructs the sight-purple,
constructs it.]
The notion of the state of “soulblindness” is something that Celan

drew from Reichel and Bleichert’s “Leitfaden der Physiologie des Men-
schen” (Guidelines of human physiology). Celan found the word em-
bedded within a discourse of a trauma to optical perception. Soulblind-
ness is the loss of the ability to distinguish and recognize things seen.
This state typically results from neurological damage to the temporal
lobes.19 Seelenblindheit, in Jaspers’s Psychopathology, is the failure of what
Kant describes within the system of the cognitive-sensible faculties as
Erkenntnisvermögen (faculties of perception). The soulblind cannot vi-
sually subsume an exemplary object under a general conceptual cate-
gory. Objects exist solely as particulars; the framework into which they
might fit is not available. To be seelenblind is to be incapable of either
making visual distinctions or harmonizing perceptions with memory; it
is the loss of a visual understanding and memory as the result of shock.
Celan’s poem does not display the cause of this soulblindness. In-
stead, the significance of the event that “Seelenblind” posits is in the
networking of what appear to be things remembered or imagined. The
de-rhymed one comes out from behind ashes, that is, from traces.
While the poem suggests a past with its words geschritten and beschallt,
its two verbs are in the present. Time here echoes the understanding of
Seelenblindheit that Jaspers presents, where the soulblind have no access
to past or future. In this way the meaning of the condition is taken into
the temporal markers of the text. Because the de-rhymed one comes
“im heilig-sinnlosen Wort” (in the holy-meaningless word), the poem
posits an absent state of sacral incomprehensibility from which the text
distances itself. Only the ashes of a poetry that can view itself in terms
of this pathos remain. This mobilizes the Romantic motif of exuber-
ance and emptiness, placing the poem’s disjointed subjectivity in an ab-

sent word. The “heilig-sinnlose[s] Wort” is the poetic text through
which the shock comes to the fore. This reference specifically recites a
poem by Mandelstam (“In Petersburg”) that Celan translated (TA:
Fadensonnen, 139), while also echoing Hölderlin’s “Mnemosyne,” “Ein
Zeichen sind wir / deutungslos” (We are a cipher, / without a mean-
ing), a line Celan was fond of remembering to friends.20 Yet Celan’s
poem does not mourn the loss of prophecy or meaning. By its distinc-
tive recitation of Mandelstam and Hölderlin, by placing them “behind
the ashes” of words, it sees through them by looking to the reality of its
textual configuration. Loss marks this poem—in the end of the sacred,
in der Entreimte, as well as in the brain’s coating (Hirnmantel) now dis-
placed to another part of the body, the shoulders. The pallium (Hirn-
mantel) is the site of consciousness, memory, and the will, in short, the
self. The cause for this loss is eviscerated and replaced with the poem’s
networked voices.
The second stanza moves to speech and sound. The de-rhymed
one’s hearing is sounded by or given over to the echo of networked
vowels. Gehörgang, beschallen, and Vokale construct a schematic cluster
around hearing and voice, with Vokale extending the motif of speaking
from holy-senseless word. Celan drew these terms from his copy of
Reichel and Bleichert’s handbook.21 Gehörgang is the auditory canal,
which is a path from exterior sounds to the interior of the eardrum
where the mass of noise is interpreted into perceivable units. In the
handbook Beschallen means to blast an area with sound; the auditory
“Vernetzung” (networking) of the ear’s internal parts can reduce dam-
age to the ear. As a result of this prophylactic network one part of the
ear can suffer loss without this leading to complete deafness. The
handbook shows soundblasting to be a general process in aural percep-
tion. However in the poem the de-rhymed one’s ears are sound-blasted
with “a network of vowels,” that is voiced letters. This Entreimte con-
cerns not the poet but the presence of a person in the poem. That this
other is “de-rhymed” is to say that his voice has been decomposed into
disconnected elements. Because Vokal derives from vox, which is not
only voice but also word, this autonomous network of voices inundates
the de-rhymed one.
At the same time this inundation is a form of recovery. In the hand-
book the resounding (Beschallung), which is similar to a shield against
excessive stimulation, has a role in saving the ears so that they can hear.
The poem incarnates this acoustic figure yet transfers it to its own net-
worked vowels. This network can be heard in the poem, for instance,
in the first stanza’s short i sound connecting “Seelenblind,” “hinter,”
“im,” and “sinnlosen,” the ei in “heilig,” “Entreimte,” and “leicht”; in
the second stanza one hears the network in, for instance, the u of “Seh-
purpur,” the a in “beschallt,” “Vokalen,” and “ab,” and the three in-
stances of au in the last two lines. Thus the patterns consist of sound
clusters: the ee, e, short i-sounds, and ei of the first strophe; the a, u, and
au of the second. In this way the poem establishes a vocal opposition
that is aligned with blindness and the absence of prophecy, on the one
hand (ei/i), and with an optical recovery in the face of a shock (au/a),
on the other. A textual network accompanies the loss that is ciphered in
the term seelenblind, providing a direction for the dislodged self, one
that counters the shock posited but not accessible.
In its last lines “Seelenblind” exploits an anatomy term from Adolf
Faller’s physiology handbook in order to produce a new vision in the
face of damage to the eyes.22 The eye’s light-sensitive receptors contain
“sight-purple” which is dismantled (“abgebaut”) in bright light and
then regenerated so as to see in the dark. This physiology book pre-
sents the way in which the eye sees in the dark as a mechanical move-
ment. In “Seelenblind” this deconstruction and construction of the
sight-purple is turned into a unique act of the person conjured in the
poem. In a dual process the de-rhymed one becomes an active subject
at the poem’s end by dismantling and constructing the material neces-
sary for vision, orienting himself through destruction and then visual
recovery:
baut er den Sehpurpur ab,

baut ihn auf.
[he deconstructs the sight-purple,

constructs it.]
Through the network of voices accomplished in repetition the poem

gives the individual a time to see in darkness, that is, in blindness. The
poem’s network of vowels provides a process, a repetition of sounds
that, though underscoring the poem’s strophic opposition, do not
overcome the visual amnesia. The last two lines show this blindness
and recovery of vision to be an ongoing dismantling and reconstruc-
tion. Regarding a “repetition compulsion,” the network of vowels is all
repetition with no compulsion; for rather than being caught up in the

empty return to a past destruction glimpsed in the ashes, it produces its
final sounds, in which this au—contained by both loss and growth—
becomes central. In this threefold appearance of au (which in the
poem’s semantic scheme of vision suggests Auge/eye) in baut, baut, and
auf, the poem combines the structure of repetition with the meaning of
recovering vision, of undoing—in these specific repetitions—the de-
termined blindness of loss. In this way, the text merges a violence im-
plied in the sketchy narrative of the first strophe with the production of
a new singular vision that is sedimented in the modest direction of the
poem’s sonority.
The Repetition Principle

In “Seelenblind” violence is assumed but the reader’s expectations of a
causal connection and a story to explain this violence is flaunted by the
absence of this cause. This movement that couples a positive with a
negative in the face of a logically asserted but not represented violence
is also at work in the 1967 text “ . . . auch keinerlei” ( . . . and no kind
of), one of Celan’s most famous poems. From February to May 1967
Celan was again in a clinic for a prolonged treatment for depression;
for several months afterward he resided in a Paris hospital while re-
suming his teaching. At this time Celan read key texts of Freud and
carried this reading into several poems. In this poem composed during
his stay in a clinic, Celan rewrites the coordinates of memory and
shock by producing his own version of a seminal piece of trauma liter-
ature, Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle:
. . . Auch keinerlei
Friede.
Graunächte, vorbewußt-kühl.
Reizmengen, otterhaft,
auf Bewußtseinsschotter
unterwegs zu
Erinnerungsbläschen.
Grau-in-Grau der Substanz.
Ein Halbschmerz, ein zweiter, ohne

Dauerspur, halbwegs
hier. Eine Halblust.

Bewegtes, Besetztes.
Wiederholungszwangs-
Camaïeu.
(GW 2:201)
[ . . . and no kind of
peace.
Greynights, preconscious-cool.
stimulus-clusters, otterlike,
over consciousness-gravel
on the way to
memory-vesicles.
Grey-in-grey of matter.
A halfpain, a second, without

lasting trace, halfway
here. A halfpleasure.
The moved, the occupied.
Repetition compulsion-
Camaïeu.]
A cursory reading of the poem reveals that it alters the status of the
mind in psychoanalysis, projecting something very different from
Freud’s notion. Not only is consciousness defenseless against stimuli,
for there is no Freudian protective shield, but also, the “Reizmengen”
(stimulus-clusters) to which Freud refers are able to fragment con-
sciousness in Celan’s poem. This leaves the mind in a state of “con-
sciousness-gravel.”
Critics understand the poem largely as an adherence to the work-
ings of Freudian thought, in which it poetically inscribes the system
P-C. For Rainer Nägele the poem repeats Freud’s articulation of the
Reizschutz as a solid anorganic crust.23 Nägele’s observation holds in
part; Celan’s poem does not violate Freud’s system as a whole. Accord-
ing to Freud the Reizmengen may overwhelm the psychic apparatus if it
exceeds the subject’s ability to discharge them: “The little fragment of
living substance is suspended in the middle of an external world
charged with the most powerful energies; and it would be killed by the
stimulation emanating from these if it were not provided with a pro-

tective shield [Reizschutz] against stimuli.” 24 For the poem “ . . . auch
keinerlei,” it is not consciousness that forms a bubble (Bläschen) but
memory. At the same time, the Reizmengen in the poem shatter con-
sciousness, that is, this protective shield is entirely dispensed with. The
path toward the poem’s fragile “memory-vesicles” (Erinnerungs-
bläschen) is over consciousness that is fragmented by the stimulus that
outstrips it. The “vorbewußt-kühl” introduces the words for the
Freudian system “preconsciousness” (Vorbewußtsein). The preconscious
remains accessible as knowledge and as memories, though not at pre-
sent available.25 According to Freud, preconsciousness forms an acces-
sible archive of memory that will eventually become conscious. In the
poem the greynights are “vorbewußt-kühl,” which gives them the po-
tential for objects of consciousness. As greynights they remain unillu-
minated and can sidestep consciousness to find their way toward mem-
ory. The stimuli shatter consciousness and hence they move toward a
memory fragile as a bubble and alive like an otter. This memory is no
longer concerned with consciousness because both the object and the
act of memory are incised in the text as mind.
In “. . . auch keinerlei” this distinctive memory will be popped,
which means it will disappear and make possible a memory to come. In
this moment consciousness is not a firewall against memory, as it is for
Freud. According to Freud the intact consciousness prevents both
trauma and the transformation of stimuli into durable memory. The
stimuli enter consciousness to become perceptions. In the normal case
consciousness discharges stimuli thus maintaining a “principle of con-
stancy” which formed the forerunner to the “pleasure principle.” The
draft for Celan’s published text shows “Wahrnehmungsbläschen” (per-
ception bubbles), which would have placed these stimuli in the field of
perceptions instead of the memory of the published text. Significantly
this replacement of perception with memory means that the stimulus is
on-the-way to the memory. Whereas for Freud, stimuli vanish from
consciousness as they are perceived and transferred to memory, in
Celan’s poem they reverse this step of distinctive perceptions. At first,
perceptions are inchoate pieces; they look to memory for their clear
production.
As a result Celan inverts the relationship of memory to perception-
images so that memory precedes the images of perception. This mem-
ory follows the violent stimuli of the Reizmengen that have turned con-
sciousness to pebbles. Stimuli are thus preconditions for memory. In

other words memory marks that a shock has taken place. This is also to
say that memory is in the process of being made, which implies an
event powerful enough to be a condition for the possibility of its cre-
ation. Instead of the Freudian pleasure principle, which aims at stabil-
ity and constancy, the poem’s concern is with a “repetition principle.”
That “ . . . auch keinerlei” explicitly mentions this principle is a matter
that I will come to shortly. For now suffice it to say that this is an un-
settling temporal relationship of both establishment and destruction.
“. . . Auch keinerlei” then takes its readers through its passages and
reinterprets this memory as the writing of a shock. Memory fixes an
event in time and place and retains it for the archive. Yet an archive is
where dead matter is stored, which is one reason why memory is a
poor entity to register wounds. There the effects of wounds can be
eradicated. Memory, in the blink of an eye, becomes a nostalgic recol-
lection. In Benjaminian terms, this would be the memory of Erlebnis
(experience), a fixed moment in the life of a subject, as well as the iden-
tity of the experience with its narration. Yet to mark wounds requires a
body, which the poem offers.
This is something essential to the poem: it is on the way toward
memory as the writing of violence as repetition. It sacrifices the capa-
bility to fix spatio-temporal moments of a past outside the poem. It
does so in order to repeat, which is to say, to become the reality that
the poem must yet win. The poem’s clipped and fragmented forms and
semantics, which is a case of Celan’s transference of physical wounds to
wounds of discourse, are like ruins of events whose recollection will
not be achieved by archives of writing, but only made less likely. This
memory is double-edged; for if stimuli are never fully perceived, they
can never be forgotten. In other words, only what the poem com-
pletely takes in can it forget.
Nägele has argued that “ . . . auch keinerlei” operates on the princi-
ple of repetition. Indeed it moves through and beyond its parts by re-
peating them, and its words mark themselves as the recitations of
Freud’s text. In its form and semantics the poem does not content itself
with what it finds or produces. By taking Freud’s text into its own body,
it displaces and dismembers it. It moves and organizes itself through its
carefully place repetitions: keinerlei, ein, Eine; Graunächte, Grau—in
Grau-; vorbewußt, Bewußtsein; otterhaft, Bewußtseinsschotter; unter-
wegs, halbwegs, Bewegtes; halbwegs, Halblust. The differences between
these words have been neglected and they are key. For they are
achieved only via the repetitions. Rather than a textual recollection,
which would be the poem’s attempt to retrieve an extinguished past, the
poem wills a forward motion, “unterwegs zu / Erinnerungsbläschen”
(on the way to / memory-vesicles).
The space after the poem’s first stanza is like a vesicle burst by the
monochromatic line that visually occupies the center, dividing the
poem: “Grau-in Grau-der Substanz” (Grey-in-grey of matter). The
poem’s division makes a seamless transition from the first to the second
half impossible:
Ein Halbschmerz, ein zweiter, ohne
Dauerspur, halbwegs
hier. Eine Halblust.
Bewegtes, Besetztes.
[A halfpain, a second, without

lasting trace, halfway
here. A halfpleasure.
The moved, the occupied.]
While the first half (lines 1–7) owes itself to “fullness” as in the full
shattering of consciousness, the second half constitutes “half mea-
sures.”26 There is a half-pain, which is only “half-way,” as well as a
“half-pleasure.” Whereas Freud writes of the pain that results from a
local breach in the “protective shield,” the poem does not identity the
cause for the “half-pain.”27 At this point the poem continues with its
“Halbschmerz, ein zweiter, ohne / Dauerspur.” Certainly “half-pains,”
like a “half-pleasure,” leave no trace. The experience of “half-ness” dis-
tinguishes these words from the stimulus in the poem’s first half that is
on the way to memory. These half things are already of “Besetztes”
(things occupied, or invested), or, in the language of Freud’s transla-
tors, “things cathected.” In Freudian terms, what is cathected—an
idea, a group of ideas, an object, a thing, a body—is attached to psychi-
cal energy. The act of cathexis binds and masters stimuli so as to dis-
pense with them and restore the pleasure principle, which violent
breaches in the Reizschutz have temporarily disabled. Yet by colliding
the terms “moved” with “cathected” the poem reveals them as adver-
saries much as the first stanza does with “repetition” and “pleasure.”
In other words “. . . auch keinerlei” relies on the discourse of the
mind to present two conflicting moments not of the mind but of the
text. In one, consciousness is overwhelmed and with it its fixed images

are destroyed as exterior stimuli (repetition) strive to become memory.
In the other, which is an ironic “half pleasure principle,” half-pains and
half-pleasures occupied with ideas, objects, and images prevail. This is
an alternation between violent disruptions on the one hand and the
half-pains and half-pleasures of constancy on the other. Neither expe-
rience offers either firm references or a free sublimity unencumbered
by representation. The first is on the way to becoming memory, which
is an ongoing process. In the second a half-pain leaves a trace but no
lasting one. Celan’s poem then opens itself up to a tension between the
shock that wipes out images and a pleasure that is only half because the
images it yields do not satisfy. We see the poem drawn tautly between
these two moments and we can now begin to read the title of Celan’s
poem: no kind of reconciliation, no end to conflict . . . and no kind of
peace.
What “ . . . auch keinerlei” offers instead of peace is revealed in the
final stanza:
Wiederholungszwangs-
Camaïeu.
[Repetition compulsion-
camaïeu.]
According to Freud Wiederholungzwang is the urge to relive what the

subject has forgotten and repressed. The trauma as repetition is a deci-
sive factor in the actual content of the symptom; for a fixation on the
event, in the form of nightmares, for instance, amounts to a repeated
attempt to overcome shock. While it is possible for the subject to for-
get the (real or imagined) event and its effects during waking life, un-
less they are neutralized, Freud asserts, they will return via uncon-
scious channels in a series of compulsive repetitions.
“ . . . Auch keinerlei” will not conjure up what constitutes its forgot-
ten. At the same time, the poem incorporates the figure of Wiederhol-
ungszwang to show that there is a loss but one that it cannot show, for
repetition is a kind of observing that observes that there is something
unobservable. What is lost is indeed inaccessible, yet this is finally not
why the poem cannot show it. It cannot show the lost because the
poem observes itself rather than its origins in the externalities of loss.
What the poem then repeats are not only metaphors from the dis-
course of the mind but also its own emerging matter, for example, the
camaïeu. A camaïeu is a monochrome painting in a color other than
grey. It is a trompe l’oeil that simulates a sculptured texture of colored
material. By disregarding its object’s given properties, such a painting
reveals itself as an illusion. While the poem painted grey matter in its
one-line stanza in the center, it turns at the end to a shock of color af-
forded by the camaïeu. In this way the poem receives the illusion of
depth, that is to say, of a three-dimensional body. Since Hellenistic
times the illusion of a body has been found in cameos, which often
took the form of figurines. Because a cameo is also a device that draws
a literary persona in sharp relief, this final metaphor encrypts a person
and thereby reveals the poem’s primary aim. The camaïeu marks the
emergence of a person out of the poem’s own urge to repeat. Repeated
is not the memory of a wound, although this urge to repeat would not
exist were it not for the existence of such a wound. Instead the poem
transfers the temporal structure of wounds and their remembrance
into its form. It wounds itself so as to repeat and in doing so throws
into relief its words that offer a brief glimpse of the individual that has
been wiped out. “ . . . auch keinerlei” thus goes to the discourse of the
mind to perform its own Wiederholungszwang: a compulsion to incise
itself with wounds, wounds that it then repeats in the form of the word,
the word that grows from the extinguished to mark itself as a person.
Postscript
In this study I have examined the figures of illusion, madness,

and wounds in Celan’s poetry in order to explore the concern with in-
dividuality and observation at work in them. Madness has been largely
neglected in the scholarship on Celan, and while wounds have received
some interest, illusion, which is perhaps the most overarching figure of
observation, remains essentially uninvestigated. Common to the shifts
that take place in Celan’s works of illusion, madness, and wounds is the
turn from the animating forms of the figures to the material marks of
speech themselves, marks which offer the only way for their individu-
ality to survive the destruction that surrounds them.
In Celan’s poems of illusion the concern is with the ways in which
what will appear can do so only in relation to what has already been
observed. The illusion in question is not a simple relationship of ap-
pearance to essence. Instead the poems result from a clash between a
temporal and an immutable entity, one that however gets subjected to
time by its inclusion in a social language. It is not that Celan’s poems of
semblance deny the immutable in their relation to temporal and mate-
rial objects. Yet any figure that gestures toward the immutable enters
the poem only through the temporal object. Thus the only possible
reference of one temporal, that is, material trope is to another, a condi-
tion to which Celan’s poems accede. In the poems of illusion the exis-
tence of a world viewed out of the corner of the eye is suggested by
such entities as opaque light, shadow, and foam. These mark the limits
of the poem’s known world, although the poem acknowledges the exis-
tence of an unknown.
In a similar logic, the early poems of madness construe delusion as a
source for both the creation of individual images and their eradication.
For Celan’s work, delusion is not a misapprehension of a true percep-
tion. Instead, a delusion creates an irreconcilable relationship with the
perceived object in which neither can be conceived without reference
158
POSTSCRIPT 159
to the other but so too can neither emerge as authoritative. In this

manner there remains, as one late lyric begins, “Die Unze Wahrheit
tief im Wahn” (GW 2:128) [The ounce of truth deep in delusion]. In
the early poems delusions seek to offer individuals protection against
the projections that aim to destroy them in the hope of reaching an
essence. At stake in these poems are distinct images that can offer a de-
fense of the self, while in the middle poems, madness is a matter of the
smallest units of speech, units that cling to their individuality so as to
resist the complete loss of meaning. A change takes place with the
poems of Celan’s collection, Die Niemandsrose. Subjects are now inade-
quate constructs to survive let alone thrive. As a result, the poems turn
to fragmented syllables to locate the material for selves that can en-
dure. A final figuration of madness begins with Celan’s volume
Atemwende, in which delusion is seen to craft an encrypted home for
the self and other. Because a poem can domesticate madness with its
images and figures, it can act as a shield against the madness that would
destroy it, a notion captured by Celan’s figure of the “wahnfeste Zeit”
(GW 3:77) [mad-proof time]. “Fest” remembers the word “Festung”
(fortress), and thus Time itself becomes a defensive fortification
against the disintegration of self and meaning. Madness could destroy
the producer, but the text outstrips it.
Celan’s wound poems depart from a straightforward cause and ef-
fect model. Instead, the more or less autonomous wounds are located
in the poem, conceived as a text that observes its own observations.
The shift toward an autonomous wound in the poem as body, a wound
that is a result of reading, represents a departure from the early poems
in which bodies are frequently the bearers of wounds. In the wound
poems of Celan’s late period, the reality of the past is conceived as one
that is unobservable, which requires the poem to construct its own
cause and effect in the present of its materiality. The reality of bodies
and social violence belongs to a different language than that of the
poem. Yet what the poem can do is translate. It translates from the dis-
tinct mark of events into the language of its words. Unable to capture
the violence that has extinguished persons, the poem conceives of its
wound as an allegory for the world of this extinction.
Notes
Introduction
1. Paul Celan, Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden, ed. Beda Allemann and Stefan
Reichert with Rolf Bücher, 5 vols. (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 1986), 1:59. Citations
from Celan’s works are cited parenthetically in the text with the abbreviations listed
below plus volume title or number where necessary and page number. This and all
translations of Celan’s poetry and all other texts are my own unless otherwise noted.
GW: Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden.
TA: Werke; Tübinger Ausgabe, ed. Jürgen Wertheimer, 9 vols. (Frankfurt a/M:
Suhrkamp, 1996).
FW: Das Frühwerk, ed. Barbara Wiedemann (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 1998).
NL: Die Gedichte aus dem Nachlaß, ed. Bertrand Badiou, Jean-Claude Rambach,
and Barbara Wiedemann (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 1997).
2. See especially Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 321–22; Maurice Blanchot, “Last One”;
Derrida, Sovereignties in Question; Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience; Gadamer, Wer
bin ich; Levinas, Proper Names; Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics.
3. For a discussion of the challenges that Celan’s texts pose to Literaturwissenschaft,
see Breithaupt, “Echo.”
4. For a discussion of the deaths of Celan’s parents, see Chalfen, Paul Celan and
Felstiner, Paul Celan.
5. Luhmann, “Cognitive Program.” Luhmann argues that all knowledge is re-
stricted to self-knowledge; yet it can become aware that a condition for this self-
knowledge is the existence of an external world, even if this world cannot be truly ob-
served. This is also the case for poetic discourse. What it can be said to represent are
its own operations and these include operations that come into play as it encounters
reality, or what Luhmann calls “what one does not perceive when one perceives it”
(65).
6. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition. See especially the section entitled “Repetition
and Difference” (1–27).
7. For a discussion of repetition in poetry in ancient times, see Kahane, Interpreta-
tion of Order, and Wills, Repetition.
8. Derrida, “Shibboleth: For Paul Celan,” 11.
9. Ibid., 40
10. For a discussion of the sound buk in Celan’s works, in such words as Büchner,
Buch, Buchstabe, Bukowina, Buchwald, Buchenland, and Bug, see Schestag, “buk.”
11. Szondi, Celan Studies, 31.
161
162 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION AND CHAPTER 1
12. Ibid., 29.

13. Tobias, Discourse of Nature, 5.
14. In “Engführung” the figure of the wound appears in the fourth section: “Naht-
stellen, fühlbar, hier / klafft es weit auseinander” (GW 1:199) [sutures, palpable, here /
cleft wide open]. The “sutures” point to a past event that the poem assumes but does
not portray. In this context, see also Szondi, Celan Studies. He mentions that Celan’s
poem is reluctant about a return to the past, because it is “a past heavy with wounds, a
traumatic past” (46).
15. Ibid., 74.
16. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and
Mazzino Montinari, 15 vols. (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999), 1:39.
Citations from Nietzsche’s works are cited parenthetically in the text with the abbrevi-
ation KSA plus volume and page numbers. Translations of Nietzsche’s texts are my
own.
17. Celan, ‘Mikrolithen sinds, Steinchen,’ 104.
Chapter 1. Phenomenology of Illusion

1. Celan wrote the poem in 1946. It later appeared in his Der Sand aus den Urnen
(The sand from the urns), the volume that he withdrew from publication. It was in-
cluded in Mohn und Gedächtnis. For further information regarding the publication de-
tails, see Emmerich, Paul Celan, 66.
2. In the 1930s Celan conveyed to friends his enthusiasm for Nietzsche’s works,
for instance, Beyond Good and Evil and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, to the point that he re-
ceived the nickname Übermensch. See Chalfen, Paul Celan, 87. The sense that one gets
from reading key poems by Celan—that they carry on an intense dialogue with the dis-
course of Schein in Nietzsche’s works—receives support when one reviews Celan’s li-
brary. The library reveals reading traces in a number of texts, including “On Truth and
Lying a Non-Moral Sense,” Untimely Meditations, Human all too Human, On the Ge-
nealogy of Morals, and The Will to Power, as well as Nietzsche’s correspondence. In most
cases, it is not clear when Celan read the various volumes in his library. An exception is
his dating of Genealogy August 17, 1952. See references to Nietzsche in Celan’s notes
to “Der Meridian” (TA: Meridian, 110, 166). In 1959, the mythological-literary terrain
of Nietzsche-Lenz-Celan takes shape in his prose piece “Gespräch im Gebirg” (Con-
versation in the mountains). Celan also mentions Nietzsche in letters, for instance to
Federmann and to his wife.
3. In Celan’s copy of Messner’s Nietzsche edition, this passage is marked.
4. See Emmerich, Paul Celan, for reference to a 1944 letter of Celan’s to a friend:
“The Germans shot my parents dead. In Krasnopolka along the Bug” (46).
5. Lurker, Wörterbuch der Symbolik, 145–46.
6. Bohrer, Suddenness, 124–25.
7. Bolz, kurze Geschichte des Scheins, 76.
8. “Consisting of and completely trapped in semblance, we are compelled to feel
this semblance to be that which truly is not, that is, a progressive Becoming in time,
space, and causality, in other words, empirical reality” (KSA 1:38–39). For the claim
NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 163
that the “Dionysian condition” reveals “the illusory nature of all ‘reality,’ ” see De
Man, Allegories of Writing, 92. In De Man’s reading, the “Apollonian appearance is the
metaphorical statement of this truth; the actual meaning of the Apollonian appearance
is not the empirical reality it represents but the Dionysian insight into the illusory
quality of this reality” (92). For a critique of De Man’s reading of Geburt see Staten,
“Birth of Tragedy Reconstructed.”
9. For a contemporary attempt to rehabilitate the sophistic concept of opinion/
doxa, see Lyotard and Thébaud, Just Gaming: “And so we must do with a politics of
opinion . . . to grant it the scope of what is called judgment in Kant, that is, the capa-
bility of thinking outside of the concept and outside of habit” (82).
10. “Leben ist die Bedingung des Erkennens. Irren die Bedingung des Lebens und
zwar im tiefsten Grunde Irren. Wissen um das Irren hebt es nicht auf! Das ist nicht
Bitteres! Wir müssen das Irren lieben und pflegen, es ist der Mutterschooß des Erken-
nens. Die Kunst als die Pflege des Wahnes—unser Cultus.”
11. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, 4:26.
12. Celan, Poems, 47.
13. Ibid.
14. For a discussion of how brain researchers argue that the human “incapacity to
distinguish experientially between what we commonly call illusion, hallucination or
perception, is constitutive in us as living systems, not a limitation of our present state
of knowledge,” see Maturana, “Biological Foundations,” 55.
15. Kluge and Götze, Etymologisches Wörterbuch, 849.
16. Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, 27:602, 615, 619.
17. For Celan’s reading notes in philosophy, see Celan, Bibliothèque philosophique.
See for instance the notes copied out by Celan from primary and secondary texts of an-
cient philosophy: “[Socrates] opposed opinion to knowledge” (647).
18. Schopenhauer, quoted in Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, 27:633.
19. For the etymology of Wahn, see Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, 27:621: “from
here it is just a step to conceive of madness as a pathological phenomenon.
20. Adorno, Noten zur Literatur, 106.
21. Ibid., 108.
22. Firges, Den Acheron durchquert ich. Firges sees this as the pieta, “the expression
of his depressive constitution, which now shows symptoms of ‘madness’” (266–67).
23. Benjamin, Selected Works, 2:697.
25. In the “Hôpital Vaucluse” Celan wrote thirty-four poems, which, as late as Jan-
uary 1970, four months before his suicide, he considered unsuitable for publication
(NL 495). That Celan often does not write at all is telling: the trace of psychological
pressures is the absence of writing.
26. For instance, see Paul Celan and Hermann Lenz, Briefwechsel, 111.
27. Celan and Margul-Sperber, “Briefe.” See other, similar, letters by Celan, for in-
stance, one of January 1962, to Siegfried Lenz: “In addition I am, naturally with Hegel-
quotes, called mad. Mr. Schroers has already proclaimed my ‘break-down in Vorwärts’
—now that is being scientifically and philosophically propped up.” Celan, Goll-Affäre,
379, 560. Two incidents are here combined, the one involving Schroers, who wrote of
Celan’s ‘Zusammenbruch,’ the other, via the reference to Hegel and Schopenhauer, de-
164 NOTES TO CHAPTERS 1 AND 2
rives from a 1962 essay by Otto Pöggeler who discusses Celan’s “Meridian” with refer-
ence to Hölderlin and perpetuates clichéd notions of “genial madness.”
28. See Firges, Acheron, 229. In providing his diagnosis of Celan’s Melancholie and
Wahn, he attributes what he takes to be the theme of mental illness in texts to the au-
thor, and supports his reading of illness with reference to Celan’s childhood and the
few reminiscences of childhood friends to construct a psychobiography. For a tentative
suggestion that Celan’s illness is mirrored in his poems, see Lyon “Judentum, Anti-
semitismus,” 187, 201.
29. See Celan, Goll-Affäre. Wiedemann already takes the step of listing many of
Celan’s multifaceted poems under the heading of “documents” in the whole affair, a
framework that delimits their meanings. In this context, Walter Benjamin’s distinction
between criticism and commentary is illuminating.
30. One way to deal with biography is to replace it with the figure of the “home.”
See Celan ‘Mikrolithen sinds, Steinchen’: “True poetry is anti-biographical. The home of
the poet is his poem, his home changes from one poem to the other” (95).
31. Blanchot, “Wahnsinn par exellence,” 9.
32. Celan and Solomon, “Zwanzig Jahre,” 31. The letter is dated January 24, 1964.
33. The plagiarism affair consumed Celan off and on throughout the 1960s. Yet it
had already been a factor for him since the mid 1950s, a good half-decade before his
first hospitalization.
34. See Celan and Celan-Lestrange, Briefwechsel, 2:361.
35. See Celan’s letter to Schmueli, Celan and Shmueli, Briefwechsel: “after all, I was
what one calls, out of defensiveness and helplessness, mad [wahnsinnig]. Only: had I en-
countered more understanding, would I really have become that?” (55).
36. Leiser, Leben nach dem Überleben, 79.
37. Celan’s first Schwermut poem is “Leise, Geliebte, leise” (FW, 32). Schwermut ap-
pears in many other early poems.
38. Solomon claims that Celan told him he felt like being used as “a guinea pig.”
Celan and Solomon, “Zwanzig Jahre,” 28. For suggestive writings on depression, see
Delay, Physcho-physiologie humaine. The director of the clinical department in which
Celan resided for roughly four months in 1966, Delay was an ardent supporter of elec-
tric shock treatment, publishing voluminously on the technology. He described
“melancholics” losing “themselves in remorse about the past,” and praises the magical
efficacy of electric shock, where a few treatments are enough to dispel the patient’s
“demons” (112–13).
39. Celan, Bibliothèque philosophique, 275. He underlined this passage in his copy of
Benjamin’s book.
40. Berrios, History of Mental Symptoms, 299.
41. Binswanger, Melancholie und Manie, 29.
42. Ibid., 27.
43. Ibid., 28.
Chapter 2. Hallucinations
1. Jaspers, Allgemeine Psychopathologie, 320.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., 373–74.
4. Bleuler, Lehrbuch der Psychologie, 36.
5. Ibid., emphasis added.
6. TA: Meridian, 115, 117, 136–37.
7. Levinas, Proper Names, 41.
8. Readers who have commented at some length on “Der Meridian,” include Janz,
Engagement absoluter Poesie, 99–127; Pöggler, Spur des Wortes, 106–64; Schulz, Nega-
tivität, 175–84; Buhr, Celans Poetik; Derrida, Sovereignties in Question; Lacoue-La-
barthe, Poetry as Experience, 41–70; Müller-Sievers, “On the Way.”
9. Mayer, Zeitgenossen, 142–43.
10. Büchner, Sämtliche Werke, 1:47.
11. Kluge and Götze, Etymologisches Wörterbuch, 871.
12. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 287.
13. Ibid., 288.
14. Rather than interpreting Celan’s speech on the basis of Foucault or Derrida, I
choose to situate Celan alongside them, and in important ways, against them. At the
same time, I make use of their discussions of madness to reveal Celan’s poetic accom-
plishments. Celan placed himself in an intellectual environment shared by Foucault
and Derrida. Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and Husserl had influenced Celan, as well
as Foucault and Derrida. Derrida’s essay first appeared in 1964. Celan had finished
“Der Meridian” in May of 1960, one year before Foucault’s book appeared, and three
years before Derrida’s response (Celan was acquainted with Derrida, who also taught
at the École Normale Supérieur, and Celan would have had access to Foucault’s early
book that contains the rough outlines for his later 1954 project on madness: Mental Ill-
ness. Celan’s library contains copies of both Foucault’s book and Derrida’s Writing and
Difference, with the author’s inscription to Celan, a volume that contains extensive un-
derlining.
15. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, x–xi.
16. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 35.
17. Ibid., 54.
18. Ibid., 37.
19. Both madness and reason can appear as or are contained by reason itself—a
paradox suggesting that an inadequate concept of reason is at work, yet a paradox
whose persistence philosophy admits without it negating the philosophical inquiry
upon which it relies. One can therefore better locate the nascent problems and at-
tempted resolutions that launched a “school” of thought—post-Heideggerian and post-
Frankfurt school—in this exchange about rationality and irrationality, rather than lo-
cating it in another famous Derrida essay, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” as is often done.
21. For a cognitive discussion of illusion versus perception, see Maturana, “Biolog-
ical Foundations,” 55.
23. The notes for the speech show that Celan saw the confusion of art with tech-
nology in association with the influence of cybernetics (Norbert Wiener). In place of
art’s “enlargement”—advocated by Mercier—Celan argues for its narrowing (“Veren-
gung”), its limitation to its own field and sphere (GW 3:191; TA: Meridian, 63).
24. That Celan figured the absurd in this way is clear from the drafts of the speech,
where he glosses the absurd with “mißtönend” [disharmonious] (TA: Meridian, 53).
For the etymology of the word, see Kluge and Götze, Etymologisches Wörterbuch, 10.
The word is also linked to English “surd” and Latin susurrus, an onomatopoeic word
connoting, among other things, swarm, buzz, hum and whirr (schwirren, sirren, surren).
All these can be employed as figures for unmarked noise, in-between sounds.
25. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, 37.
26. Bleuler, Lehrbuch der Psychologie, 53.
27. Linking the line from Büchner with an attack on Hegel, Hamacher comments
that this abyss is not a figuration for transcendence, but instead for “the untenability of
the transcendental forms of our representation itself” (“Second of Inversion,” 233).
28. This anxiety about writing’s end is analyzed in Lyotard, Inhuman. In his reading
of the eighteenth-century discourse on the sublime in works of Burke and Kant, Ly-
otard’s interpretation of the Burkean sublime suggests a similar economy at work in
Celan’s poetics, without Celan’s conscious reference to this discourse. In contemplat-
ing or viewing the beautiful, the subject experiences a reassuring sense of “positive
pleasure” (99). The feeling of the sublime however produces a disconcerting mixture
of pleasure and pain, and, decisive for Celan, terror (Furcht). As Lyotard argues: “Ter-
rors are linked to privation: privation of light, terror of darkness; privation of others,
terror of solitude; privation of language, terror of silence; privation of objects, terror of
emptiness; privation of life, terror of death” (99). Celan’s word for this privation—the
sense that poetry may stop, that the only aesthetic mode of experience would be that of
the beautiful, representation, and art—is also terror, “a terrifying silence.” In this con-
text see also Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience, 87–91.
29. Janz, Engagement absoluter Poesie, 105.
30. During a 1968 reading and visit to the Hannover Technical University, with
Hans Mayer present, Celan participated in a discussion with students about his poems.
To one student’s remark about “the lyrical I” of poetry, Celan, according to Mayer, im-
mediately interrupted with: “Let’s say rather: the lyrical I of this poem.” Mayer, Zeit-
genossen, 128.
Chapter 3. Slivers of the Self

1. Szondi, Celan Studies, 53.
2. The line “du liest und du” (line 25), not found in the Allemann edition, is taken
from Celan, Gedichte, 705.
3. Ibid.
4. For a discussion of the phenomenon of metathesis in Celan, see Christoph
Perels, “Erhellende Metathesen,” 127–38.
5. However, if one were to combine the first one-line stanza (“Hüh — on tue . . .
Ja wann?”) with the shorter stanza that precedes it, one can find a somewhat regular al-
ternation of markedly shorter with longer strophes.
6. Kudszus, “Nach der Vor-schrift,” 434.
7. Ibid., 435.
8. For biographical commentary regarding this poem, see Konietzny, “Huhedi-
blu,” and Celan, Gedichte, 705–7. For a reading of “Huhediblu” in terms of an attack
on the practice of fascist language use, see Menninghaus, Paul Celan, 188–89. For an
intelligent discussion of biographical aspects, see Colin, Holograms of Darkness. She ne-
gotiates biographical aspects with Celan’s relationship to poetic tradition, offering a
number of excellent explanations for the appearance of figures in the poem. In her
reading, the poem is an attack on poets whose work is indebted to anti-Semitism (128).
For a discussion of the poem as a gnostically inspired indictment of fallen writing, see
Golb, “Translating Tradition.” See also Püschel, “Exiliertes und Verlorene,” and Sil-
bermann, “Paul Celan: ‘Huhedibluh.’ ”
9. Readers of “Huhediblu” have done a thorough job of interpreting the poem in
terms of a critique of one type of negative writing and the valorization of a positive
type. See Colin, Holograms of Darkness, 122, and Menninghaus, Paul Celan, 188–89. At
the same time, as I argue, Celan does not produce a pure and authentic poetry free of
negativity.
10. See Konietzny, “Huhediblu,” 298. Poèts-maudits is a further nod to the presence
of Verlaine in the poem.
11. See Golb, “Translating Tradition,” 173.
12. See Colin, Holograms of Darkness, 122.
13. Etymologically, “after” also connotes “weiter entfernt” (further distanced).
Thus “Afterschrift” is a repetition with a difference of “schriftfern.”
15. Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, 27:615.
16. Binswanger, Melancholie und Manie, 102. For Celan’s notes on Binswanger, see
TA: Meridian, 211, 249.
17. Binswanger, Grundformen und Erkenntnis, 73. For the discussion on the tempo-
rality of “falling,” see Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 346–49.
18. Binswanger, Ausgewählte Werke, 1:101. For a discussion of authenticity, mania,
and Binswanger, see Lanzoni, “Diagnosing Modernity.”
19. Binswanger, Grundformen und Erkenntnis, 74.
21. Ibid., 479.
22. Jaspers, Strindberg und van Gogh, 166.
24. Celan’s use of parataxis was noted as early as Szondi’s essay on Celan’s Shake-
speare translations.
25. Golb, “Translating Tradition,” 175.
26. Arnold Zweig was the author of Das Beil von Wandsbek (The Axe of Wandsbek), a
novel for which “Huhediblu” contains ciphers (TA: Die Niemandsrose, 116).
27. Colin, Holograms of Darkness, 144.
28. Celan had also noted anecdotes about Mandelstamm’s apparently inappropriate
behavior, leaving contemporaries to ask whether he was mentally ill (TA: Der Meridian,
250). The line “das Woher, das Wohin” is also present in Celan’s text on Mandel-
stamm: “Die Dinge treten zueinander, aber noch in diesem Beisammensein spricht die
Frage nach ihrem Woher und Wohin mit” (ibid., 216) [The things come together, but
still in this togetherness the question of their whereto and wherefrom speaks].
29. Mandelstamm, “Vom Gegenüber,” 201.
31. Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, 73.
32. Trakl, Dichtungen und Briefe, 200.

33. Hedeigger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, 53. For a discussion of Wahn etymologically
in the poem, see Colin, Holograms of Darkness, 124. For a critique of Heidegger’s read-
ing of Trakl and madness, see Kudszus, Poetic Process, 19–35.
34. Freud, Gesammelte Werke, 13:128.
35. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung, 196.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., 199.
38. Ibid., 202.
39. For the claim that Celan attacks language supported by the “misuse” of the ad-
jective, see Menninghaus, Paul Celan, 188–90.
Chapter 4. Original Translations

1. See the essay “Shakespeare” in Herder, Werke, 2:498–521.
2. Ibid., 6:358. A copy of Herder’s Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit
(Ideas Toward a History of Humankind) is in Celan’s library.
3. Waiblinger, Friedrich Hölderlins Leben, 80.
4. Schopenhauer, Metaphysik des Schönen, 79.
5. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 242.
6. For the influential discussion of taste and genius, see Kant, Kritik der Urteil-
skraft. Taste is a requisite for judging works. Genius, however, is the faculty of present-
ing aesthetic ideas or representations of the imagination (e.g., death, freedom), which
cannot be captured in a particular concept, and for which no image can be found in na-
ture. Over and against the romantic genius who remains solitary, one step away from
social exclusion and abnormality, taste preserves a social and therefore consensual ele-
ment for the aesthetic (246).
7. Wicher and Wiesner, In der Sprache der Mörder, 221–22.
8. For interpretations, see Coates, Words After Speech; Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as
Experience; Fioretos, “Nothing,” 295–341; Breithaupt, “Echo”; Raulet, “Logic of De-
composition,” 81–112; and Zbikowski, “Schwimmende Hölderlintürme.” For a partic-
ularly enlightening, detailed, and extensive interpretation, see Barnert, Mit dem frem-
den Wort, 203–78. His comments on the complexity of Celan’s Hölderlin quotation are
illuminating (219–23).
9. Coates, Words After Speech, 146.
10. Raulet, “Logic of Decomposition,” 95.
11. Geier, Schrift, 25.
12. The “Turm” may refer to the word “himmelstürmende” (heaven-towering) in
Hölderlin’s “Das nächste Beste” (The next best). Given the discourse in Celan’s poem
of a divine, originary language, the possible link is interesting because “Das nächste
Beste” includes the evocation of a Tower of Babel. The other possible Hölderlinian
link includes “dürfte” (need) and “Zeit” (time).
13. Hölderlin, Werke, 2:329.
14. This is summed up in Schmidt, Geschichte des Genie-Gedankens: “in German lit-
erature there are scarcely any words that capture the essence of natural geniality
stronger and more concisely than these” (1:405).
NOTES TO CHAPTERS 4 AND 5 169
15. See Zbikowski, “Schwimmende Hölderlintürme,” 194.

16. Benjamin, Selected Works, 1:73
17. This reading is supported by Böschenstein, “Hölderlin und Celan”: “The con-
temporary poet is exposed even more so to this want” (103). For another reading that
follows the established reading of the interpretation in mythical terms, see Bogumil,
“Celans Hölderlin-Lektüre,” 96.
18. Geier, Schrift, 20–21.
19. According to Otto Pöggler, Spur des Wortes, Celan is reported to have said in
conversations regarding history that his life “showed him that traditions do not help.”
According to Pöggler, Celan confessed his inability to write “ein großes Gedicht” [a
great poem], with Celan speculating that “perhaps he did not possess the appropriate
plurivocalism, and perhaps only history could provide this” (407, 408).
20. As the drafts to “Tübingen, Jänner” show, Celan replaced “Kind” [child] with
“Mensch” (TA: Sprachgitter 32). The drafts for the poem “Blume” from Sprachgitter re-
veal that Celan connected lallen with childhood more than once. Yet in that poem as in
this one, the connection is erased with the published poem. What would have func-
tioned in “Tübingen, Jänner” as a seemingly natural attribution of chatter to a child,
becomes a statement about history and origins.
22. Celan and Shmueli, Briefwechsel, 58.
23. See, for instance, Zbikowski, “Schwimmende Hölderlintürme,” 186 and La-
coue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience, 18.
24. For a letter of Celan’s about genius and madness, see Celan, Goll-Affäre: “With
that passage about my ‘breakdown’ and the word ‘genius,’ that god knows I cannot ac-
cept and that people all too happily read together with the ‘breakdown,’ so as to nour-
ish the rumors already circulating, you have unfortunately done me a poor service”
(380).
25. Michel, Leben Hölderlins, 435.
26. Murray, “Poetic Genius,” 15.
27. For a discussion of the symbol, see De Man, Blindness and Insight, 187–228.
28. Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, 10:3117.
29. Ibid., 10:3091.
30. For discussions of the poem, especially as to the questions of the messiah, see
Böschenstein, “Hölderlin und Celan,” 193; Grete Lübbe-Grotthues, “Paul Celans
Gedicht ‘Ich trink Wein,’ ” and Manger, “Die Königszäsur.”
31. Zbikowski, “Schwimmende Hölderlintürme,” 206.
32. As Celan wrote in a letter to Shmueli, choosing words which waver between the
personal and the general: “In the King’s caesura, that’s where we now stand, you and
I.” Celan and Shmueli, Briefwechsel, 58.
Chapter 5. Mind Matters

1. Baer, Remnants of Song.
2. For a phenomenological reading of the wound in Celan’s poetry, see Meinecke,
Wort und Name.
3. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 8, 58.
170 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5
4. LaCapra, “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” 726.

5. See Freud, Gesammelte Werke, 1:429, 432, and 5:154.
6. Freud, The Standard Edition, 1:229.
7. Chalfen, Paul Celan, 149, 154–57.
8. Derrida, “Shibboleth,” 59.
10.The two words, matter and mother, in German, Materie, Material, Mutter, are
closely related.
11. Bilz, Die unbewältigte Vergangenheit, 165–66.
13. Celan, Bibliothèque philosophique, 168.
14. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, 131.
15. Ibid., 131, 133.
16. Ibid., 149.
17. Bilz, Die unbewältigte Vergangenheit, 166.
18. For discussions of Seelenblind and related medical terminology in Celan’s poetry,
see Janz, Vom Engagement absoluter Poesie, 232 and Lyon, “Die (Patho-)Physiologie des
Ichs.”
19. Reichel and Bleichert, Leitfaden der Phsyiologie, 141.
20. See Celan and Wurm, Briefwechsel, 38.
21. Reichel and Bleichert, Leitfaden der Phsyiologie, 181, 191–92.
22. Faller, Körper des Menschen, 243.
23. Nägele, Reading After Freud, 157. Baer, Remnants of Song, sees in the poem an al-
ternative account of experience between Freud’s opposition of memory and repetition,
one that Freud’s theory cannot fully contain (272).
24. Freud, Standard Edition, 18:36.
26. Nägele, Reading After Freud, sees that “nothing is full” (159).
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Index
Adorno, Theodor, 14, 33, 42, 86–87, 93; and Nietzsche, 26, 28, 162 n. 2; and
“Elements of Anti-Semitism” 101–2 Romania 15, 17, 26, 29, 34, 80, 85,
Ancel, Friederike, 15, 29 134, 136
Ancel, Leo, 15, 29 —Works of: “auch keinerlei . . .” (“and
Anti-Semitism, 101–2 no kind of . . . ”), 151–57; “Edgar
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 105 Jené und der Traum vom Traume”
Apollo, 36 (“Edgar Jené and the Dream of the
Art, 58–62, 65, 67, 69 Dream”), 20–21, 34; “Engführung”
Authenticity, 82–83, 88–90, 92, 107 (“Narrowing”), 19–20, 40, 75–76;
“Es fällt nun, Mutter, Schnee in der
Badiou, Alain, 161 n. 2 Ukraine” (“Snow is falling, mother,
Baer, Ulrich, 130–31, 170 n. 23 in the Ukraine”), 135; “Espenbaum”
Barnert, Arno, 168 n. 8 (“Aspentree”), 131–35; “Es wird
Becoming, 14, 18 etwas” (“Something will”), 91–92;
Benjamin, Walter, 44, 117, 120, 164 n. “Gesang zur Sonnenwende” (“Sol-
29; melancholy, 51–52; “On Lan- stice song”), 134; “Gespräch im
guage as Such and on the Language Gebirge” (“Conversation in the
of Men,” 154 Mountains”), 72, 113; “Huhediblu,”
Benn, Gottfried, 96 76–105; “Ich kenne dich” (“I know
Bilz, Rudolf, 143–45, 147 you), 40–45; “Ich trink Wein” (I
Binswanger, Ludwig, 88–93; Melancholie drink wine”), 123–29; “Kleine Silbe”
und Manie, 51–54 (“Little syllable”), 45–48; “Die letzte
Blanchot, Maurice, 14; and influence of Fahne” (“The last flag”), 27–39;
illness on work, 48–49 “Der Meridian,” 15–16, 58–62, 65–
Bleuler, Eugen, 62, 66–67; Textbook of 71, 73–74, 104, 113; Night and Fog,
Psychiatry, 59–60 102; “À la pointe acérée” (“At the
Brentano, Clemens, 109 piercing point”), 16–17; “Schinder-
Büchner, Georg: Dantons Tod, 16, 60–62, hannes,“ 105; “Die Schwer-
66, 70; Lenz, 61, 68, 71, 114; Woy- mutschnellen hindurch” (“Through
zeck, 115, 121 the melancholy rapids”), 52–55;
Burke, Edmund, 166 n. 28 “Seelenblind” (Soulblind”), 147–51;
“Stehen” (“Standing”), 139–42;
Caruth, Cathy, 132–33 “Stimmen“ (“Voices”), 57–58; “So bist
Celan, Paul: and authorship, 122–23; du denn geworden,” 13–15, 18, 21;
and depression, 47–50; and Derrida, “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”), 131;
165 n. 14; and mother, 131–36, 139; “Tübingen, Jänner” (Tübingen, Jan-
179
180 INDEX
uary”) 107–23; “Weiß und leicht” Hölderlin, Friedrich, 87, 93–95, in

(White and light), 26; “Windgerecht” Celan’s poetry, 107–29; “Der Rhein”
(“Windright”), 130; “Der von den (“The Rhine”), 115–16;
unbeschriebenen” (“The from the and translations of Pindar, 124–25,
unwritten”), 142–47 149
Celan-Lestrange, Gisèle, 43 Holocaust, 15, 20, 33, 70–71, 85, 101–4,
Charcot, Jean Martin, 113 114, 131, 133
Colin, Amy, 166–67 n. 8, 168 n. 33, Horkheimer, Max, 101–2
Husserl, Edmund, 21, 54
Dates, 17, 70–73
Delay, Jean, 164 n. 38 Illusion, 21, 30, 158. See also Schein
Deleuze, Gilles: on repetition, 16, (semblance)
161 n. 6 Imitation, 31, 35, 107, 110, 129
De Man, Paul: on the Dionysian, 162– Individuality, 14–16, 18, 58–62, 73,
63 n. 8 84, 90–92, 96, 100, 105, 127, 131,
Derrida, Jacques, 14, 138; on dates, 71; 144, 157
on Foucault’s Madness and Civiliza-
tion, 62–65; and interaction with Jaspers, Karl, 59, 67, 148
Celan, 165 n. 19; on repeatability, 17 Jens, Walter, 122
Descartes, René, 62, 64
Dionysian/Dionysius, 30, 36 Kant, Immanuel, 41, 112
Kierkegaard, Søren, 66, 145–46
Error, 32–33 Kraepelin, Emil, 113
Kraus, Karl, 113
Fascism, 101, 105, 126 Kretschmer, Ernst, 145
Fließ, Wilhelm, 133
Foucault, Michel: Madness and Civiliza- LaCapra, Dominique, 133
tion, 62–64; works of in Celan’s li- Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 14, 166 n. 28
brary, 165 n. 14 Language, 16
Freud, Sigmund, 21, 46, 101, 133–34; Leiser, Erwin, 50
and Celan’s poetry, 138, 151–56; and Lenz, Rheinhold Michael, 71–72
memory, 133–34, 144 Levinas, Émmanuel, 14, 61
Luhmann, Niklas, 15, 161 n. 5
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 14 Lyotard, Jean-François, 163 n. 9,
Genius, 107, 109–14, 116, 121 166 n. 28
George, Stefan, 109
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 112, 125 Madness, 15, 19, 29, 61–67, 70–74,
Goll, Claire, 122 101–2, 107, 109–14, 117–19, 121–22,
124–26, 129, 158
Hallucinations, 59, 61–62 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 19
Hamacher, Werner, 166 n. 27 Mandelstam, Ossip, 95–96, 104, 149
Hamann, Johann Georg, 111 Margul-Sperber, Alfred, 48, 113
Heidegger, Martin, 21, 89–90, 109; and Massenwahn (mass hysteria), 101–3
Trakl’s poetry, 97–99 Maturana, Humberto, 163 n. 14
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 115, 118, Metaphysics, 18
120, 125–26; on genius, 109–11
Hoffmann, E.T.A., 112 Nägele, Rainer, 152, 154
INDEX 181
Nazis, 20, 101, 112–13 Schein (semblance, illusion), 13, 16, 18,
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 21–22; Birth of 21, 26–39, 56, 124–27. See also Illu-
Tragedy, 28–30; “On Truth and sion
Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” 33– Schopenhauer, Arthur, 41
34; and Celan’s readings of, 21–22, Schwab, Christoph Theodor, 121
162 n. 2 Schwermut (melancholy), 40, 48–56
Nordau, Max, 112 Shmueli, Ilana, 121, 164 n. 35, 169 n. 32
Silence, 62–64, 68–69
Oberlin, Johann Friedrich, 71–72 Singularity, 14, 17, 81, 100
Observation, 14, 16, 22, 57, Solomon, Peter, 49
Opinion, 21, 39, 75–76, 105 Szondi, Peter, 19, 162 n. 14
Origins, 107, 109–17, 119–21, 123,
125–26, 128 Tobias, Rochelle, 20
Trakl, Georg, 98
Perception, 21, 35, 41–42, 60–61, 153 Translation, 107, 124–26
Phenomenology, 23, 54–55 Trauma, 130–33, 139, 147, 151
Pindar, 125, 128
Plato, 18, 21, 29, 41, 105 Verlaine, Paul, 80, 85–86,
Poetry, 62, 66–71, 73–74, 96 Voice, 58–61
Psychiatry, 47–50 von Krafft-Ebing, Richard, 113
Psychology, 59–62, 66–67, 148
Wahn (madness, delusion), 31–33, 36–
Reality, 19–20, 40–45, 130, 136, 141 48, 76–80, 82, 84–85, 87–88, 91–93,
Repetition, 15, 18, 35, 44, 46–47, 81, 100–102, 104–6, 159
107, 112, 118–22, 127, 131–33, Wahnsinn, 37–39, 41, 48, 97–99
139, 145–46, 150, 154–56 Weber, Max, 111
Reproduction (mimesis), 18–19 Wounds, 15, 129, 130–57, 159
Resnais, Alain, 102
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 87 Zweig, Arnold, 95, 167 n. 26

Poetry As Individuality - The Di - Derek Hillard

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Associated University Presses

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hillard, Derek, 1965-

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

1. The Phenomenology of Illusion 26

3. Slivers of the Self 75

4. Original Translations 107

5. Mind Matters 130

This book owes itself to the generosity of many. I am grateful to

I thank Greg Clingham, the humanities editor at Bucknell Univer-

So bist du denn geworden

wo kein Mund trinkt und keine

Du steigst in alle Brunnen,

[So now have you become,

where no mouth drinks and no

You rise in every well,

peated, it becomes individualized, which is also to say that it receives

be person, metaphor, text, or word. In the case of “person,” what is re-

In his long essay on Celan, Derrida remarks that instances of dates in

Buch reappears in Buchecker, it does so not only to efface Buch’s absolute

sion and madness. Accordingly, philosophy regarded them with suspi-

Geh, deine Stunde

[Go, your hour

For Szondi, “Engführung” actually brings into existence the “blackish

ein dieses Eigentliche in seinem Wesen Veränderndes” (GW 3:156)

sumes an existence independent of what can be objectively confirmed.

Several poems in Celan’s early work investigate madness, deception,

Die letzte Fahne

Gewölk und Gebell! Sie reiten den Wahn in den Farn!

[The Last Flag

In the poem a voice commands the quarry, the other, to wear a

probably encountered the notion of semblance expressed in this work

tige Wahnvorspiegelungen und lustvolle Illusionen” (KSA 1:37) [pow-

Ein wasserfarbenes Wild wird gejagt in den dämmernden Marken.

[A water-colored quarry is hunted in the marches’ faint light.

The “so” connects the first line’s apparently descriptive phrase—that

conjunctions of comparison dominate, including “wie” (like, as). The

The Error of the Tree

dein irrender Bart, die müßige Fahne des Baumstumpfs.

[your errant beard, the indolent flag of the tree-stump.

In his essay “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” Nietzsche

embodiment of apparent natural authenticity reveals that its language

The Decoy’s Call

Sie reiten den Wahn in den Farn!

[They ride their madness into the fern!

The hunters are possessed of their own illusion. Here Hamburger’s

the existence of an illusory independent reality at the heart of appear-

Wahn (illusion), its appearances and contingence, to the Wahnsinn

The poems from the 1940s depicted madness as a projection and as a

(opinion) as a dispersion of words, or particles of words, seen, for in-

(ICH KENNE DICH, du bist die tief Gebeugte,

[(I know you, you’re the one bowed so low,

of abnormal psychology. The entry in Celan’s 1959 copy of Kluge’s

other, emerges as an endless process. At the poem’s conclusion, there

Du—ganz, ganz wirklich. Ich—ganz Wahn.)

[You—wholly, wholly real. I—wholly delusion.)]

measure of time in which similarities flash up fleetingly out of the

KLEINE SILBE, kurze Heimat,

der Eine, Viele,

[Small syllable, brief homeland,

the one, many,

“Kleine Silbe” is unusual among Celan’s poems due to its listing of