“Celans Gedichte wollen das äußerste Entsetzen durch Verschweigen sagen

Reviewed by: “Celans Gedichte wollen das äußerste Entsetzen durch Verschweigen sagen:” Zu Paul Celan und Theodor W. Adorno by Kim Teubner Francis Michael Sharp Kim Teubner, “Celans Gedichte wollen das äußerste Entsetzen durch Verschweigen sagen:” Zu Paul Celan und Theodor W. Adorno. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2014. 603 pp. The controversy among poets, literary critics and historians, philosophers and scholars about the fate of German lyric poetry in the aft ermath of the Second World War has probably att racted more commentary and discussion than any other contemporary literary topic. Kim Teubner examines the history of this controversy not only by looking at the arguments of its primary participants but also by sketching the broader sociological background of a defeated and shamed nation that began to see view signs of redemption in its postwar “economic miracle” while ignoring the strong current of anti-Semitism that undermined this hope for moral renewal. In the first few chapters of her examination, Teubner lays out the fundamental contentious issues of this debate as formulated by its central figures, Theodor Adorno and Paul Celan. For the sociologist, philosopher, and musicologist Adorno, writing lyric poetry in German after Auschwitz had become a “barbaric” act of disrespect for its victims. The language of Goethe, its [End Page 116] capacity for the expression of humankind’s loftiest thoughts, had been irreparably tainted by National Socialism. For Celan, however, who had lost both parents to the Holocaust, writing poetry in their memory as well as that of many hundreds of thousands more, had become an existential imperative. He considered only one language—the German language—capable of carrying this inner truth into the future. According to a biographer of his youth, Celan once put it: “Nur in der Muttersprache kann man die eigene Wahrheit aussagen, in der Fremdsprache lügt der Dichter” (216). From his perspective in exile, Adorno, however, had been made suspicious of such apparent subjectivism and individuation by the totalitarian Nazi regime’s near-obliteration of any individual’s “own truth.” In his eyes, any poet who spoke in such terms belonged to an irretrievable past. Teubner casts a wide net of inquiry in her attempts to pinpoint and differentiate the poet’s attitudes toward his own work from Adorno’s more general socio-historical pronouncements about the possibilities of artistic achievement in his own era. After explicating individual theoretical texts of both Celan and Adorno and then subjecting them to comparative analysis, she demonstrates how Arnold Schönberg and Samuel Beckett were for the sociologist illustrative examples of artists whose works he could accept as valid for his historical times. Auschwitz served his critical theory as the deterrent example for the society that had survived the apocalypse: “Darin, den Menschen diesen Weltuntergang vor Augen zu führen, damit sie niemals vergessen und so etwas nicht noch einmal geschieht, liegt aber auch nach Adorno die Bedeutung von Kunst nach Auschwitz, von Kunst, die er noch gelten lässt” (476). Celan’s private library of Adorno’s books and essays, profusely underlined and annotated, give abundant evidence of his desire for a face-to-face dialogue about their fundamental disagreement on the nature of post-Holocaust lyric poetry. A planned meeting in 1959 in Sils Maria never took place although the missed opportunity became the impetus for a personal correspondence. Along with his first letter to Adorno, Celan also sent his short prose narrative “Gespräch im Gebirge,” a narrative that he considered a kind of substitute for the dialogue—in the form of an inner monologue—which he had hoped for in Sils Maria. Teubner devotes a long chapter to a close reading of this prose text, a text often mentioned in the scholarship about the relationship between the two men but never before in such thorough detail. She cites numerous snippets of text followed by an enlightening commentary, identifying [End Page 117] the two figures, “den Juden Klein” and “den Juden Groß” (477), respectively, with Celan and Adorno. Despite the poet’s deeply felt desire for a personal dialogue—a “Begegnung” in the sense that his poetry seeks in its reader—never took place. In his posthumously published Ästhetischen Theorie, Adorno

Art · Art history · German · Literature · Nazism · Poetry · The Holocaust · Theology · German History and Society · Literature and Cultural Memory · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy