Modes of Musicality in Paul Celan's Die Niemandsrose

seminar 45:2 (May 2009)

Modes of Musicality in Paul Celan’sDie Niemandsrose

AXEL ENGLUND Columbia University

In an often quoted answer to an inquiry posed by the Paris bookshop Flinker in 1958, Paul Celan stated the following:

Die deutsche Lyrik geht, glaube ich, andere Wege als die französische. Düsteres im Gedächtnis, Fragwürdigstes um sich her, kann sie, bei aller Vergegenwärtigung der Tradition, in der sie steht, nicht mehr die Sprache sprechen, die manches ge-neigte Ohr immer noch von ihr zu erwarten scheint. Ihre Sprache ist nüchterner, faktischer geworden, sie mißtraut dem “Schönen,” sie versucht, wahr zu sein. Es ist [...] eine Sprache, die unter anderem auch ihre “Musikalität” an einem Ort angesiedelt wissen will, wo sie nichts mehr mit jenem “Wohlklang” gemein hat, der noch mit und neben dem Furchtbarsten mehr oder minder unbekümmert ein-hertönte.1

In the following year, Celan wrote the first poems of the collection Die Nie-mandsrose, published in 1963. In this book, music and musicality seem to play a significant role: not only does every fifth poem explicitly thematize music, but many poems seem deliberately to foreground the auditory aspects of their language. In the statement quoted above, Celan expresses the need to abandon the romantic conception of euphony without giving up poetic musicality as such and the need to distance his work from its questionable surroundings, while nonetheless allowing it to remain mindful of the tradition in which it stands. The aim of this article is to suggest a way of reading Celan’s own work as an answer to these demands and in this way to contribute to the relatively neglected topic of Celan and music. After a brief survey of the critical discourse on this topic and of the historical context of the role of music in German literature, it will proceed with some comments on “Todesfuge,” a crucial poem in this context, and then address its main examples, the poems “Es war Erde in ihnen” and “Anabasis” from Die Niemandsrose. The main objective of this analysis is to show that these poems cannot be thoroughly understood without consideration of their critical engagement with notions of poetic musicality.

1 Celan, Gesammelte Werke, III:167. All further references to this edition will be given in parentheses in the text.

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As yet, no longer studies have been devoted to the topic of Celan and music, with the exception of the immense commentary on “Todesfuge” and, to some extent, “Engführung.” Theo Buck expresses a widely held view when he claims that “[s]eit dem Ende der fünfziger Jahre verzichtete [Celan] bewußt auf jegliches ‘Musizieren’ mit Worten. Konsequent verbannte er deshalb Gestaltungselemente wie [...] Klangschönheit zunehmend aus seiner dichterischen Arbeit” (“Todesfuge” 11). This opinon – which this article hopes to disprove – might stem from superficial readings of statements such as the answer to the Flinker inquiry above, or of Hugo Huppert’s recollections of a conversation with Celan, in which the poet is to have said the following: “Auch musiziere ich nicht mehr, wie zur Zeit der vielbeschworenen Todesfuge, die nachgerade schon lesebuchreif gedroschen ist. Jetzt scheide ich streng zwischen Lyrik und Tonkunst” (320). Taken out of context, this statement can be interpreted as a categorical refutation on Celan’s part of any kinship between music and his poetry. But if related to the poems themselves, such a conclusion proves untenable. In the light of his frequent return to music as a theme, even in the later collections, these negative statements underscore how central an issue Celan felt this to be and how strange it is that the extensive criticism on his work has paid so little attention to it. A few essays have acknowledged the problem and made attempts to approach it from different directions. Peter Horst Neumann has situated Celan at the endpoint of a German tradition that uses the motif of song as a means of poetological reflection, his main examples being four poems from “Atemkristall,” the cycle opening the collection Atemwende of 1967. Above all his historicizing perspective has served as an incentive to the present article. Moreover, Otto Pöggeler has emphasized relations to music as a de-sideratum of Celan research and demonstrated the persistence of musical motives in Celan’s late work, specifically in two poems related to Mozart: “Müllschlucker-Chöre” and “Anabasis,” the latter of which is discussed below. Joachim Seng has touched upon Celan’s conception of music when dealing with the intricacies of his relation to Theodor W. Adorno, with a view to the latter’s famous caveat on poetry after Auschwitz, thus reading the Flinker statement, the poetological speech “Der Meridian,” and “Engführung” as an Auseinandersetzung with the philosopher. The musicologist Martin Zenck has read the poem “Stimmen” on musical terms, emphasizing the importance of taking Celan’s oral performances into account and interpreting the tension between isolation and integration arising from Celan’s use of a multiplicity of voices as analogous to musical counterpoint. Continuing from these previous attempts, the analysis of the two poems offered here attempts to examine Celan’s use of the music theme as it recurs and develops in his poetry and to consider how it relates it to the broader context of the interplay of word and music in the German literary tradition that links words and music, poet and singer, Gedicht and Lied. Noting the combination in Celan of a conscious dialogue with tradition, a strong inclination to metapoetic reflection, and a

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frequent use of music and song as a thematic element, it will take up and pursue above all Neumann’s suggestion that Celan can be regarded as the last exponent of German musico-literary tradition, carrying it beyond its own borders and thus estranging the song motif from its own roots (768). The connection of literature and music is prominent in works of poets since romanticism, and includes major inspirational influences on Celan. When formulating their poetic ideals, whether in poetry or prose, nineteenth-century writers regularly referred to music as the paragon towards which the other arts must strive, and M. H. Abrams speaks of the “melomania” of German poetry and criticism in the late eighteenth century, holding that its ideas “cannot be understood without some reference to the discussions of music” (91). For in-stance, there was the fascination with the Volkslied that started with Johann Gottfried Herder’s collections and was carried on by Clemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim, and, with some degree of estrangement, Heinrich Heine. Such writers emphasized the importance of the sense of hearing and the organ of the voice, looking for natural, primordial, or artless – albeit artfully feigned – qualities in poetry (cf. Di Stefano; Zeuch). While this musical ideal turned to the warble of the nightingale, the fiddling of the layman, or the song of the child, another one, which includes writers such as Jean Paul and E. T. A. Hoffman, inclined towards the more complex orchestral music growing increasingly important at the time (Maier, 15). Some poets focussed on the purportedly absolute quality of music – music as sounding forms in motion, to quote Hanslick’s definition. Thus Novalis, half a century before Hanslick, “erhebt [das Musikalische] zu einer Grenzbestimmung zwischen Sprache als reiner Form und Sprache als Inhalt” (Naumann 160). This notion can also be traced in symbolist writers, especially in Mallarmé, who purportedly sought to dispel reference to reality from his work, famously claiming that ”Je dis: une fleur! et, hors de l’oubli où ma voix relègue aucun contour, en tant que quelque chose d’autre que les calices sus, musicalement se lève, idée même et suave, l’absente de tous bouquets” (368; ‘I say: a flower! and, outside of the oblivion into which my voice relegates any contour, as it is something else than the known calyces, the sweet idea itself, that which is absent from every bouquet, musically ascends’; translations by the author). Celan’s Flinker statement could be read as directed critically both at the German tradition of poetic musicality – “[die] Tradition, in der [die deutsche Lyrik] steht” – and at the French symbolist tradition, above all Mallarmé (“andere Wege als die französische”; III:167). The poems commented later on in this article shed some light on both these references. A discussion of poetry and music might also mention two of Celan’s principal sources of inspiration: Friedrich Hölderlin and Rainer Maria Rilke, the former a poet to whom music appears as the sign of a divine cosmic order, drawing on the Pythagorean concept of a harmony of the spheres (Kreutzer), and the latter addressing music as, among other things, “du Sprache wo Sprachen/enden” (111). This line of Rilke’s points to a characteristic shared by almost all conceptions of music hitherto mentioned: they situate music as

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an “other,” something numinous or transcendental, be it associated with the hidden depths of our soul, with our most primordial emotions, or with a cosmic divinity. According to this view, which has been described as a “logic of alterity,” the essence of music appears to be isolated from worldly matters and can never be captured by verbal language (Kramer) – but in this impossibility lies also the attraction of the attempt. Celan’s works prior to Die Niemandsrose deserve attention in this context – “Ein Lied in der Wüste,” “Brandung,” “Argumentum e Silentio,” “Stimmen,” “Windgericht,” “Engführung,” for example. But above all “Todesfuge” has considerable bearing on the present topic. Because the critical discourse on this poem is extensive – important studies include those by John Felstiner (“Paul Celan’s ‘Todesfuge’”), Leonard Olschner (“Fugal provocation”), Theo Buck (Muttersprache, Mördersprache), and Wolfgang Emmerich (“Paul Celans Weg”) – I shall offer only some brief remarks on the poem’s use of music. First, one of the poem’s central images is a musical one, based on a gruesome historical fact: in the Nazi death camps Janowska and Lublin one group of the condemned Jews were forced to perform music accompanying grave digging, torture or executions (Felstiner, Paul Celan 28). Second, in the nexus of the line “Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland” and the title “Todesfuge” we find J. S. Bach, arguably the archetype of a German master. This points to an important aspect of the poem, namely the close connection between death and art, particularly as an equation of mastery in these activities (Emmerich, “Paul Celans Weg” 366). Third, the structure of the poem has frequently been claimed to display similarities to that of a musical fugue (cf. for instance Buck, “Todesfuge” 16; Olsen). Also, the poem contains traces of a euphonically oriented conception of poetic musicality, with its frequent repetitions, its long elegiac lines in regular meter, and even a single rhyme on “blau” and “genau.” Apart from these aspects of the poem itself, its complex critical reception in Germany can shed light on subsequent poems engaging with music. Felstiner and Emmerich have both shown that “Todesfuge” gave rise to numerous inter-pretations that would have been exceedingly painful for Celan, mainly by claiming that the poem privileges aestheticism at the expense of its ties to historical reality (cf. Emmerich, “Paul Celans Weg”; Felstiner, “Paul Celan’s ‘Todesfuge’” 251–55). What is most important in the present context is the fact that this misjudgment often hinges upon the poem’s musicality. In a review of Mohn und Gedächtnis, for example, Hans Egon Holthusen implied that the fact that “‘Todesfuge” “ist im Stile einer Fuge komponiert” is the reason why Celan succeeds in praising in song (“besingen”) the “massenhaften Verbrennungstod der Juden in deutschen Konzentrationslagern, in einer Sprache [...], die von der ersten bis zur letzten Zeile wahre und reine Dichtung ist” (390). To choose in this context the verb “besingen,” a German word undeniably connoting appraisal and glorification, is unfortunate to say the least. These notions of song and fugal composition are immediately followed by a passage echoing

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familiar topoi of the German tradition of thought on music: “indem er [das Thema] [...] in einer träumerischen, überwirklichen, gewissermaßen schon jenseitigen Sprache zum Transzendieren gebracht hat, so daß es der blutigen Schreckenskammer der Geschichte entfliegen kann, um aufzusteigen in den Äther der reinen Poesie” (Holthusen 390). Similarly, in a review in Neue literarische Welt, Helmut de Haas stated that “Celan hat surrealistische Züge, das ist gewiß: [...] da ist in der ‘Todesfuge’ der Abhub alles Gegenständlichen, der saugende Rhythmus, die romantisierende Metapher, die lyrische Alchimie,” thus associating the conspicuous sonic patterns of the poem with its purported transcendence of the objective world. Finally, on 11 October 1959, the Berlin journal Tagesspiegel published a review of Sprachgitter by Günter Blöcker, where he wrote the following:

Zwar arbeitet der Autor gern mit musikalischen Begriffen: die vielgerühmte “Todesfuge” aus “Mohn und Gedächtnis” oder, in dem vorliegenden Band, die “Engführung.” Doch das sind eher kontrapunktische Exerzitien auf dem Notenpapier oder auf stummen Tasten – Augenmusik, optische Partituren, die nicht voll zum Klang entbunden sind.

Understandably, Celan took such criticism very hard and often discerned anti-Semitic dispositions behind it, as is evident from his correspondence. In a letter to the feuilleton section of Tagesspiegel, he responds with acrid irony to Blöcker’s remarks, quoting and emphasizing his wordings: “Auschwitz, Treblinka, Theresienstadt, Mauthausen, die Morde, die Vergasungen: wo das Gedicht sich darauf besinnt, da handelt es sich um kontrapunktische Exerzitien auf dem Notenpapier” (Celan, Mikrolithen 111; emphasis in the original). Writing to Nelly Sachs some days later, Celan speaks distressfully of Blöcker’s anti-Semitism (Celan/Sachs, Briefwechsel 24–26), and in a letter to Paul Schallück, who had written the first review of Mohn und Gedächtnis after its appearance in 1953 (Felstiner, “Paul Celan’s ‘Todesfuge’” 253), he even compares Blöcker’s text with an overly positive review with which the Nazi propaganda film Jud Süß was met in the Third Reich in 1940 (Celan, Mikrolithen 549). These readings of “Todesfuge” are based on the notion of music suggested by the historical sketch above: Music is a vehicle of transcendental experience, a realm of aesthetic purity and the absolute, a realm entirely separate from worldly and historical events. The deep rootedness of this conception of music in German culture, it might be argued, is what allows the critics to misread “Todesfuge” as over-aestheticized and otherworldly. From this perspective, it is hardly surprising that Celan felt the need to distinguish sharply between “Lyrik und Tonkunst” (Huppert, 320), but it is all the more intriguing that he kept returning to music as a theme. The opening poem of Die Niemandsrose reads:

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1 ES WAR ERDE IN IHNEN, und 2 sie gruben.

3 Sie gruben und gruben, so ging 4 ihr Tag dahin, ihre Nacht. Und sie lobten nicht Gott, 5 der, so hörten sie, alles dies wollte, 6 der, so hörten sie, alles dies wußte.

7 Sie gruben und hörten nichts mehr; 8 sie wurden nicht weise, erfanden kein Lied, 9 erdachten sich keinerlei Sprache. 10 Sie gruben.

11 Es kam eine Stille, es kam auch ein Sturm, 12 es kamen die Meere alle. 13 Ich grabe, du gräbst, und es gräbt auch der Wurm, 14 und das Singende dort sagt: Sie graben.

15 O einer, o keiner, o niemand, o du: 16 Wohin gings, da’s nirgendhin ging? 17 O du gräbst und ich grab, und ich grab mich dir zu, 18 und am Finger erwacht uns der Ring. (I:211)

If we take into consideration Celan’s rejection of “Wohlklang,” the euphonic character of the last two stanzas is more than a little surprising, especially since this poem was written no more than a year after the Flinker statement was published. How should one understand this dissonance? An answer to this question must start at the formal level of the poem. A quick look at the poem reveals a gradual development from a relatively free verse into the constraints of a regular one, and this development can be traced as follows: Despite its being a conjunction, which would normally be pronounced as unstressed, the isolated placement of the word “und” between the caesura and the end of the first line allows it to be perceived as stressed, resulting in a three foot line of two anapests and an iamb. The second line, consisting of a single amphibrach, has only one stress, thus giving the first stanza the pattern 3–1. The second stanza, at the beginning of which a fairly regular meter of iambs and anapests is established, still displays an irregular number of feet, 3–5–4–4. In line 5, the rising movement is thwarted by the emphatic relative pronoun “der,” which forces the meter into a falling pattern of trochee – dactyl – dactyl – trochee. From the third stanza on, the rising meter is preponderant, but the lines still display an irregular number of stresses (3–4–3–1), as if something were hindering the regularity. Line 10 in particular, being a repetition of line 2, gives the impression of being sent back to the beginning, just when a regular, flowing metre was about to be realized. The speaking voice, in other words, cannot seem to progress past the digging. In the fourth stanza, the regular pattern

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of 3–4–3–4 is reached, and a rhyme is inserted at the end of lines 11 and 13 (“Sturm”-“Wurm”). By the fifth stanza, where the pattern is 4–3–4–3, the poem has metamorphosed into an a–b–a–b rhyme scheme with a regular rising meter alternating between iambs and anapests. In spite of the reservations expressed in the Flinker inquiry, then, Celan inserts a meter that epitomizes the traditional, euphonic notion of musicality: the ballad stanza. This stanza, also known as the Chevy-Chase stanza after Joseph Addison’s famous poem – translated by Herder – consists of four lines in rising meter, alternating between three and four stresses, with exclusively masculine cadences. As is common with folk-song meters, the number of unstressed syl-lables varies. The most common rhyme scheme is a–b–c–b, but there are also numerous examples of the a–b–a–b variant used by Celan. Originating in the English folk songs of the Middle Ages, the use of this stanza in German poetry dates back to the 1770s, when Klopstock and Gleim were the first to make use of it. It was appropriated by the Sturm und Drang poets by way of Percy’s collections of English ballads (Kayser, 66–67), and it plays a significant part in Herder’s Volkslieder (cf. Herder 76, 110, 116, 125, 127, 161, 195, 247, 284, 307, 331, 369, 395, 403, 414). It was taken up by Schiller and Goethe (who famously employed it in “Der Fischer”) and used in a number of later folk song collections, such as Des Knaben Wunderhorn by Arnim and Brentano. The folkish origin as well as the simple regularity of this kind of stanza – and others of similar structure – was suitable for the endeavour of Herder and Goethe to create verses with intimate relations to the folk song. It complied with the preromantic fascination for the roots of national culture and identity as well as the notion of song as the essence of poetry – “Das Wesen des Liedes ist Gesang,” as Herder puts it in the foreword to the second volume of his Volkslieder (246). Celan lets his verses strive toward, and finally reach, a meter usually meant to be sung rather than read. Arguably, the acknowledgement of these connotations – the semantics of the form, it might be called – is absolutely vital to the understanding of this poem. This is underscored by the fact that Celan was in all probability occupied with this particular genre of literature and its implications when writing the poem. In the autumn of 1959, about a month after he wrote “Es war Erde in ihnen,” he began his work at École Normale Supérieure, where he taught, among other topics, Volkslieder and metrics (Celan, Mikrolithen 551). In a poetological notebook entry, possibly written in November 1959, he associates the predilection for the equation of “Poesie” and “Lied” with the conception of “Volkspoesie” as “Gewachsene” in contrast to “Kunstp[oesie]” as “Gemachtes,” “wobei ‘Lied’ nicht nur das ‘Musikalische’ ausdrücken soll, sondern eben das ‘Urtümliche’” (Mikrolithen 112). He goes on to a somewhat sarcastic evaluation of this tendency:

Das Künstliche, besser: artifizielle Am-Leben-Erhalten des Volkstümlichen, das seinen musealen Charakter auch dann nicht verliert, wenn es im von Trachtenträgern umtanzten Jahrmarktszelt gezeigt wird.

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Ebenso artifizielle, d. h. je nach der Opportunität neu aufgefüllte Begriff “Volk” vgl. neuerdings Steinitz, Demokr[atische]. Volksl[ieder]. (112)

Since “Es war Erde in ihnen” employs a paradigmatic example of a Volkslied metre, an interpretation of this poem has to be very aware of what Celan took this literary genre to implicate. Neumann’s suggestion that Celan is the last in a long lineage of German poets who employ the song motive as a means for poetological reflection is of obvious relevance here (770). Yet Neumann limits himself to Celan’s use of song as a theme, and he takes no interest in poems that, like “Es war Erde in ihnen,” engage with the stereotypically musical forms of the tradition at the end of which he is seeking to situate Celan. Neither does Klaus Weissenberger, even though he focusses on rhythm in Celan’s œuvre. Considering Celan’s work through the categories of “partikularistisches” and “ganzheitliches” rhythm re-spectively, the former of which refers to the individual use of preestablished metric forms, Weissenberger discusses such metric allusions only in respect to Celan’s earlier collections. Winfried Menninghaus has discussed a similar phenomenon in connection to the poem “So bist du denn geworden” from Mohn und Gedächtnis and “Eis, Eden” from Die Niemandsrose. These poems use three-foot lines alternating between feminine and masculine rhymes, the church song stanza in which “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” and “Es ist ein Ros entsprungen” were written (Menninghaus, “Zum Problem des Zitats” 171–72, 188–90). The metric allusion of “Es war Erde in ihnen” differs from the poems discussed by Men-ninghaus in at least two respects. First, since the associations are directed at the Volkslied rather than at the church song, the connotations resulting from the meter are different ones. The intimacy of music and poetry was located at the very centre of Herder’s Volkslieder, and is thus is actualized by the ballad stanza, but not by the church-song stanza. Second, whereas “So bist du denn geworden” and “Eis, Eden” are written in a regular meter from the first line to the last, “Es war Erde in ihnen” acquires the ballad stanza only by way of a painstaking process. This movement, the gradual appropriation of meter and rhyme, is in itself a signal of distancing. The historically charged structure has far-reaching implications for the un-derstanding of “Es war Erde in ihnen.” The poem tells of a collective agent, a “they” performing the action of digging through the earth located inside them. Their world is nothing but the earth inside and around them, and their existence seems to be defined solely by the digging. Why are they digging? Apart from ordinary soil and loam, the Erde can also be read as signifying the earthly and worldly, thereby generalizing the situation to the existential conditions of humanity. The bitter reference to God’s knowledge and approval of their situation tells us that it is an outer force, rather than a will of their own, that impels them to carry out the drudgery. Slavery and labour camps come to mind at once, and John Felstiner has pointed out the closeness to the grave-digging

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in “Todesfuge” (Paul Celan 151), as has Irene Fußl (104). Apart from the use of music as a theme, the intertextual relation is also undergirded by the metric structures, which display many analogies: the rhythm of phrases like “wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften,” “er befiehlt uns spielt auf nun zum Tanz,” and “dein aschenes Haar Sulamith” (I: 41–42) is very close to that of the final stanza of “Es war Erde in ihnen.” The fourth stanza brings a sudden change. The claustrophobic atmosphere evanesces, at least temporarily, with the insertion of large-scale natural phen-omena – a stillness and a storm arrive, followed by the seas. After this, the digging continues in the present tense, while the collective agent dissolves into three grammatical persons: I, you, and it. This appears to allow for a new direction in the digging: in the last stanza, the I is able to apostrophize the you and dig towards it. This is where the poem ends, with the mysterious awakening of the ring. Felstiner has suggested the ring of the Nibelungen as one possible reference – and the rings pulled off the fingers of Holocaust victims as another. But he also, perhaps more convincingly, points to the ring as the symbol of bonds such as a marriage or a covenant (152). Fußl, interpreting the poem against the intertextual background of Jewish mysticism, associates the ring with circumcision and reads the sought encounter as an encounter with God (103–04), while Peter Szondi – who, according to Jean Bollack’s appendix to the seminal Celan-Studien, claims that the last stanza leaves no doubt about the status of the I and the you as a loving couple – seems to endorse the interpretation of the ring as a matrimonial bond (437). How, then, does this story interact with the structure of the poem? To begin with, both levels perform a gesture central to the German romantic tradition: a collocation of language and music and, by extension, of poet and singer. In line 8–9, we are told that “they” invented neither song nor language, which entails a failure to grow wise (the inverted causality is of course equally imaginable). In line 14, the collocation is repeated, when the poem tells us that “das Singende dort sagt” – the singing says. Next, the words become music – metaphorically, of course – with the insertion of the ballad stanza, thus creating the same collocation on a structural level. The grammatical subject, which, at the beginning of the poem, was not able to invent a song, has now started singing. This song is perhaps an attempt to speak the language of das Singende, an attempt that was not yet possible in the third stanza. Not only does the development in the structure of the poem correspond to the song thematized in the third and fourth stanzas, but the last stanza can actually be read as the referent of the word “Lied” – the concluding ballad is that song. But at the same time, the deictic adverb “dort” clearly marks a distance between this song and the “ich” of the third stanza, suggesting the presence of an ironic rift in the texture of the poem. Previous interpretations of the poem’s development are worth noting here. Szondi, for instance, sees only unambiguous optimism. He speaks of an “Erreichung des ‘Telos,’” and claims that the poem shows “keine Prob-

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lematisierung der Synthese” (437–38). Menninghaus shares his view, claiming that the earth is to be read as “Metapher einer wie immer gearteten positiven Substantialität, einer utopischen Kraft der Vereinigung” (Paul Celan: Magie der Form 105). Granted, the poem does allude to a transfiguration through love, and its use of the ballad stanza contributes to this allusion. But that a poet like Celan would have utilized a traditionally “musical” form to express nothing but positive substantiality and unproblematic uniting of a loving couple seems more than unlikely. Furthermore, if “Todesfuge” is taken as a relevant intertext to “Es war Erde in ihnen,” Szondi’s and Menninghaus’s readings become still more untenable. How could a poem mirroring so closely both the musical thematics, the collective digging, and the rhythmic phrases of “Todesfuge” possibly be described as “Erreichung des ‘Telos’” or “Metapher einer wie immer gearteten positiven Substantialität”? In fact, the problematic status of songful verse in German after the Shoah is brought up in an early poem from Celan’s Der Sand aus den Urnen entitled “Nähe der Gräber,” which, like “Es war Erde in ihnen,” is closely linked to folk song. The poem is unmistakably imbued with Celan’s experience of losing his mother in the Holocaust, and the last lines ask: “Und duldest du, Mutter, wie einst, ach, daheim, / den leisen, den deutschen, den schmerzlichen Reim?” (III:136). Not only do these bitter lines ambiguously invoke the homesick nostalgia often found in folk song, but their form is borrowed from the Doina, a rhymed two-line stanza with an elegiac content very common in Romanian folk music (Celan, Die Gedichte 597). In this context, Romanian folk music carries quite different associations than German. Even so, the very last syllable of these lines harbors a subdued yet intense conflict: in the very same moment that the “pain-laden German rhyme” is being put into question, Celan creates a rhyme on “daheim” and “Reim.” This line certainly undergirds the notion that the rhymes of “Es war Erde in ihnen” renders impossible a reading of the poem as a synthesis without problematization. “Es war Erde in ihnen” is related to the earlier poem on another level as well. It, too, takes place in the vicinity of graves. First, all the different forms of graben resound with the word Grab. Especially in verse 17, where the first person singular grabe has lost its e in order to conform to the meter, thus resulting in “ich grab, und ich grab.” The line might even be understood as something like “I grave myself through to you” rather than “I dig,” as if the structural constraints of euphonic musicality have turned the action of digging into an object, the grave. The direction obtained in the digging of the last stanza becomes, as it were, a death wish. Second, the third party in line 13 clearly supports the notion of the earth being a burial ground: the worm is an agent of decomposition, especially since the earth in which it digs is located inside “their” body. Interestingly, the worm enters the poem as the first rhyming word and is thereby intimately associated with the poetic euphony. Hence, the songfulness of the rhyme is inseparably melded with putrefaction and death and the moment in which the song begins is the moment where life ends.

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Even without the Flinker statement and the intertextual ties to “Todesfuge,” this would be sufficient to refute a reading of the poem “unter dem eindeutig positiven Vorzeichen des abschließenden Vereinigungsbildes” (Menninghaus, Paul Celan: Magie der Form 105). The problematic status of musicality is present in poems such as “Nähe der Gräber” and “Todesfuge” as well, and, in part, these poems address the same issue. But in “Es war Erde in ihnen” euphony is not the uppermost framework, but one of several modes: while the older poems are at rest in one euphonically oriented idiom, this one marks its distance to its own musicality by approaching the stereotypically musical ballad stanza through a gradual process at the met-ric level of the poem. This gesture emphasizes the metareflective potential of intermedial collocations and places the music problem in focus. Poetic musicality is sought for, tried, and at the same time questioned. In the light of reception of “Todesfuge” in Germany, one is tempted suggest that this de-velopment might have been triggered by Celan’s frustration regarding these critical misunderstandings. We have seen the linear development of the structure in “Es war Erde in ihnen,” from fragment and attempt into full-blown song, and the direction im-plied by the digging “through to you.” This is what might lead one to speak of the reaching of a telos. But superimposed on this development is a different one, a nondevelopment: the digging that goes on and on, after the arrival of storm and sea, even after the worm has started to devour the other grammatical agents. This is a circular movement rather than a linear one, and its epitome is of course the ring, with which the poem ends. The answer to the riddle-like question in line 16 – “Wohin gings, da’s nirgendhin ging?” – points to the present situation, which is best described in terms of the dissolving of linear time, eternity, or death. Seen in this livid light, the change from past to present tense need not be interpreted as an overcoming of the labors in the first half of the poem. While the past tense presupposes two distinct points in time – the moment of description and the moment of the described – the present tense fuses these points into one, thus disintegrating time itself and ending up in an eternal now in which, again, nothing but digging exists. This is what makes the interpretations by Szondi and Menninghaus seem problematic: the dissonance between the linear and the circular movement and, above all, the dissonance between the suggestions of death and the euphonic singing render any unambiguously positive interpretation dubious. If one listens to the overtones of death that permeate the poem, the musicality of the ballad stanza can be interpreted only as a grimly ironic idyll and the invention of a song as the perversion of a horrid truth. The echoes of romantic transfiguration through death – or, if one accepts the ring as a symbol of erotic union, even of a Wagnerian Liebestod – must thus be read as sarcastic and unheimlich. When read against the background of the Flinker inquiry and Celan’s notes on the Volkslied, this becomes even clearer: in spite of these statements, written less than a year before the poem, Celan intertwines a stereotypically musical

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verse with hints of slavery and murder, thereby letting, to use his own words, a euphony resound with and alongside the most horrible things. As opposed to the “Wohlklang” he questions, however, this resounding is certainly a far cry from untroubled. Some pages later in Die Niemandsrose we find a poem whose interplay with music is quite different from “Es war Erde in ihnen”:

ANABASIS

1 Dieses 2 schmal zwischen Mauern geschriebne 3 unwegsam-wahre 4 Hinauf und Zurück 5 in die herzhelle Zukunft.

6 Dort.

7 Silben- 8 mole, meer- 9 farben, weit 10 ins Unbefahrne hinaus.

11 Dann: 12 Bojen-, 13 Kummerbojen-Spalier 14 mit den 15 sekundenschön hüpfenden 16 Atemreflexen -: Leucht- 17 glockentöne (dum-, 18 dun-, un-, 19 unde suspirat 20 cor), 21 aus- 22 gelöst, ein- 23 gelöst, unser.

24 Sichtbares, Hörbares, das 25 frei- 26 werdende Zeltwort:

27 Mitsammen. (I:256)

Much like “Es war Erde in ihnen” this poem stages a development from one kind of diction to another, which is reached in a climactic moment in the fourth stanza. As is commonly mentioned by Celan critics (but not as often actually considered in the interpretation itself) this stanza also contains one of Celan’s

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few direct references to a specific musical work: the words “unde suspirat cor” (‘whence our hearts sigh’) are a quotation from the text of Mozart’s motet for soprano and orchestra KV 165, entitled “Exsultate, Jubilate” (Pöggeler, 68). The first stanzas of the poem move us from a narrow room between walls and out into the vast spaciousness of the unnavigated sea, where, in the fourth stanza, something like an epiphanic moment takes place. In the first and second stanzas, the surroundings are associated with elements of language: the true but (almost) impassable is “geschriebne,” and the mole signalling the arrival at the shore is a “Silben- / mole.” In the fourth stanza, music replaces language in the description of the surroundings: the buoys are depicted with elements of sound – “Leucht- / glockentöne” – leading up to the Mozart quotation. When, in the fifth and sixth stanzas, this moment has passed and language returns in the shape of the tentword “Mitsammen,” which has the look of a neologism but is actually a dialectal synonym for “Zusammen,” it does so together with sight and sound, the word being defined as “Sichtbares, Hörbares.” In the concluding stanzas, we are faced with a rather optimistic mood, and Pöggeler has even sug-gested that the final stanza be read as a transition from mourning to joy that is a common property of the two prematurely deceased artists, “ausgelöst durch Mozarts Motette, eingelöst durch Celans Gedicht” (75). The experience of the written word, true yet traversable only with difficulty, is what enables one to transcend the confines of the cramped space and reach a vast marine landscape, charged with freedom and beauty, which Celan chooses to depict in terms of musical experience. It is not altogether improbable that the imprisoned situation should be regarded as the physical reality of the whole poem: the first stanza opens with an emphatic “Dieses,” thus suggesting that it constitutes the here and now of the poem, whereas the succeeding stanzas take place “Dort” and “Dann” and thus at a point in time and place distinct from the present. If one accepts this, the events of the following stanzas would have to be read as something going on in the mind of the reading person, who mentally walks along the pier of poetic language – the syllable-mole – stretching out into uncharted aquatic territories. The experience of music, represented by the Mozart motet, becomes a metaphorical image of what the experience of poetry can become. It is the fourth stanza, which contains the references to music, that will be the centre of attention here. Given the musical framing of this stanza, the word “sekundenschön” is endowed with two simultaneous connotations. First, it emphasizes the fundamental temporality of the experience of musical beauty. Second, “sekunden” has a specifically musical meaning in that it signifies the smallest intervals of our tonal system. In his article “Musik – Sprache – Raum,” Hans-Michael Speier discusses this poem in connection with Rilke’s conception of poetic space, which, according to Speier, Celan adopts and radicalizes. In some respects, Speier’s article tends to underestimate the role of music in this poem. The title is generally taken to refer either to Xenophon’s “Anabasis,” telling the story of the Greek marching to Persia to aid Cyrus, or the epic poem “Anabase,” written by Saint-John Perse, particularly the introduction by Hugo

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von Hofmannsthal (Mackey 306; Speier 56). But “Anabasis” is also, as Speier points out in a footnote, a term used in the musical rhetoric of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (85). As such, the term denotes a melodic figure of stepwise ascent. Speier shrugs off this allusion, acknowledging that it verifies “den Vertikalismus der Textbewegung,” yet concluding: “darüber hinaus dürfte der musikteoretische Terminus für die Interpretation nicht weiter relevant sein” (85). This statement appears to be based on two mistakes. For one thing, Speier interprets the seconds of “sekundenschön” as harmonic/simultaneous intervals rather than melodic/successive ones. Thus he understands them as signifying dissonance and states that: “Für den Sinnzusammenhang ist dies insofern von Belang, als das Dissonante hier in einem Konnex mit dem Schönen erscheint, was für das Verständnis der Funktion des musikalischen Zitats (v. 19, 20) von entscheidender Bedeutung ist” (71). However, if the “sekundenschön” is interpreted as a musical term (in addition, of course, to its temporal denotation), it is likely to be associated with the second as a successive interval rather than a simultaneous one. This is a result of the connection to the musical connotations of the title, which describes a rising figure consisting precisely of this interval: the second. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, Speier overlooks a fundamental aspect of the musical term anabasis: the referential content of the figure. This is important for two reasons: First, the central point of the elaborate musical rhetoric of the baroque was that the different musical figures were actually taken to signify emotions and thereby to induce these emotions in the listener. The Affektenlehre, as advocated by Zarlino, Mattheson, Monteverdi, and others, was in itself an eloquent apologia for the referential capability of music. Thus anabasis is a term emphasizing the linguistic properties of music, used to signify a poem that thematizes the musical properties of language. Second, the figure of anabasis was used to represent that which was joyous, pleasant, and good (Krones 829). This is of great importance to the understanding of Celan’s poem, since it underlines and foregrounds the joyous moods actualized in the last stanza: the poem concludes in a very positive state of mind, by implying the possibility of a human encounter in the word “together,” along with the audibility, visibility, and liberation of this word. The Mozart quotation and the referential content of anabasis as a musical figure closely connect this possibility to music. By splintering its words into phonemes and morphemes, the poem moves along the border between sound with and without semantic content. In the last word of line 17, the border is finally crossed and the poem becomes almost pure sound: “dum-, / dun-, un-, / unde.” The permutation of a small number of letters can be regarded as a densification of the kind of assonant and alliterative elements found in the first stanzas, such as “Hinauf und Zurück” – “herzhelle Zukunft,” and “mole, meer-.” The alliterative opening words of the stanzas – “Dieser,” “Dort,” “Dann” – in combination with “unwegsam,” “Unbefahrne,”

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“Kummerbojen,” and “sekundenschön” could even be heard as the specific linguistic material out of which the subsequent stuttering sounds are molded. The poem seems to undertake a crossing of its own ontological borders by turning itself into an approximation of pure, sounding form. The only reference found in the “dum-, / dun-, un-” is directed towards music, by way of the onomatopoetic relation to the sound of the lightbells (“Leucht-Glockentöne”) mentioned in the preceding lines. As soon as this state of language is reached, Celan emphasizes its affinity with music by inserting the Mozart-quotation – “unde suspirat / cor.” The italics, as well as the sudden change of language from German to Latin, serve to underscore the alien nature of the phrase, as if it were trying to call attention to its own hailing from a foreign medium. After this brief musical moment, the poem once again returns home, by way of a few hesitant syllables, to its original state of being. In a passage from “Der Meridian,” Celan states that “das Gedicht be-hauptet sich am Rande seiner selbst; es ruft und holt sich, um bestehen zu können, unausgesetzt aus seinem Schon-nicht-mehr in sein Immer-noch zurück” (197). This can be taken as a model for the motion described by “Anabasis”: the poem moves from logocentric language to phonocentric nonlanguage and back again, and this journey, this movement, is what ensures its existence. The state of Immer-noch reached after the Mozart quotation is, however, markedly different from the one preceding it. Whereas the first state is fraught with the laboriousness of a journey between narrow walls, along the impassable yet true writings, the second is one of release, freedom, and above all togetherness. The Schon-nicht-mehr, in which the poem finds itself for a brief moment between these states, is intimately connected with music. This is, of course, not to say that literature literally becomes music – it can only pretend, or metaphorically assert that it is, since a poem consisting solely of sounding forms in motion would be permanently situated in its own Schon-nicht-mehr, without the possiblity of fetching itself back. “Das absolute Gedicht,” says Celan, “– nein, das gibt es gewiß nicht, das kann es nicht geben!” (III:199). Readers might note that Stéphane Mallarmé has slowly but surely found his way into these deliberations. His influence on Celan is an often debated issue that deserves attention in this context. The ambiguous question that Celan poses in “Der Meridian” – “sollen wir, um es ganz konkret auszudrücken, vor allem – sagen wir – Mallarmé konsequent zu Ende denken?” (193) – is central to this discussion, as is Celan’s already quoted comment on differences between French and German poetry with reference to their musicality. The phrasing “konkret auszudrücken” can be understood as a reference to the school of con-crete poetry in vogue in the early sixties, a school to which Mallarmé could be considered a forerunner and of which Celan was highly critical (Huppert 320). Menninghaus seems to discard the possible influence of Mallarméan poetics on Celan altogether (Paul Celan: Magie der Form 15, 23), whereas Szondi discerns an unbroken lineage between their conceptions of language (338,

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344). Ulrich Baer interprets Celan’s question as a direct suggestion to think Mallarmé through to the end, but backwards in time, thus ending with the “dark zone” of Baudelaire (6). The Mallarmé-Celan relationship has also been discussed by Felstiner (“Here we go round the prickly pear”) and Bogumil-Notz (“Celan und Mallarmé”). Without the ambition of providing a complete answer to this complex question, one might shed some light on it by regarding it from the angle of “Anabasis.” While none of the abovementioned discussions on Celan’s relation to Mallarmé has done so, Cindy Mackey notes some analogous phrasings in this poem and Mallarmé’s poetological essay “Crise de vers,” from which she quotes the following passage:

L’œuvre pure implique la disparition élocutoire du poëte, qui cède l’initiative aux mots, par le heurt de leur inégalité mobilisés; ils s’allument de reflets réciproques comme une virtuelle traînée de feux sur des pierreries, remplaçant la respiration perceptible en l’ancien souffle lyrique ou la direction personnelle enthousiaste de la phrase. (Mackey 98)

The pure work entails the elocutionary disappearance of the poet, who cedes the initiative to the words, mobilized by the collisions of their imbalances. Like a virtual streak of fire across jewellery, they are set aflame by reciprocal reflections, thus replacing the perceptible puff of the old poetic breeze or the private, enthusiastic direction of the phrase.

Mackey connects the “reflets réciproques” to the “Atemreflexen” and stresses the difference between the texts, the most important of which, according to her, is Celan’s emphasis on the human, the personal, and the individual through keywords as “breath” (Atem) and “heart” (cor). “‘La respiration perceptible’ has certainly not disappeared,” she writes, “it has ensured the existence of the poem” (310). Although vital to Celan’s poetics, these aspects are not the only links between “Anabasis” and “Crise de vers.” What is arguably the most salient feature in Mallarmé’s text is wholly ig-nored by Mackey: the use of musical metaphors as a description of the road along which the French verse should be led out of its crisis. Throughout his essay, Mallarmé almost incessantly uses musical terms to describe his ideal of poetic language: “toutes les combinaisons possibles, entre eux, de douze timbres” (‘all the possible combinations and interrelations of twelve pitches’), “savantes dissonances en appellent à notre délicatesse” (‘skillful dissonances appealing to our sensitivity’), “quiconque avec son jeu et son ouïe individuels se peut composer un instrument, dès qu’il souffle, le frôle ou frappe avec science” (‘who, with his idiom and his individual ear, is able to compose his own instrument, as long as he blows, strokes, or beats it with knowledge’), “Toute âme est une mélodie, qu’il s’agit de renouer; et pour cela, sont la flûte ou la viole de chacun” (‘Every soul is a melody, to which one must reconnect; and for this, each has his flute or viola’; 362–63).

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His conclusion is, in fact, that literature must appropriate the music hitherto possessed by ordinary instruments: “ce n’est pas de sonorités élémentaires par les cuivres, les cordes, les bois, indéniablement mais de l’intellectuelle parole à son apogée que doit avec plénitude et évidence, résulter, en tant que l’ensemble des rapports existant dans tout, la Musique” (367–68; ‘it is not from the elementary sonorities of horns, strings and woodwinds, but un-deniably from the intellectual word at its apogee that music, with wealth and clarity, with the sum of universal relations, must arise’). Considering the prominent part assigned to music in “Anabasis,” the poem might be read as a dialogue with “Crise de vers,” in which the connections between music and language – or, more precisely: music as a metaphorical model for the experience of poetic language – are placed in focus. Just as in Mallarmé’s essay, the music of “Anabasis,” although re-presented by Mozart’s motet, is a textual one. It is generated on the one hand by the written word of which Celan speaks in the first stanza, which carries its reader across the existential walls, on the other hand by the written words of the poem itself, which turn into pure sound at the climax of the fourth stanza. The dialogic relationship emerges in two other passages as well. Mallarmé advocates the literary mode of allusion, which delivers a spirit who cares for nothing but universal musicality: “A cette condition,” he states, “s’élance le chant, qu’une joie allégée” (366; ‘Under these conditions, the song thrusts itself upward like a relieved joy’). Here we find, apart from the metaphorical con-nection between poetry and music, several motives that recur in “Anabasis.” The song, which Celan actualizes with the Mozart quotation; the exaltation, which is the overall mood of the poem; and above all the ascending movement, which is present – although simultaneously countered – in the line “Hinauf und Zurück / in die herzhelle Zukunft,” as well as in the title, the musical meaning of which encompasses both the ascending melody and the jubilant mood that it signified according to the Affektenlehre. Another passage that more or less sums up Mallarmé’s message reads thus: “Ouïr l’indiscutable rayon – comme des traits dorent et déchirent un méandre de mélodies: ou la Musique rejoint le Vers pour former, depuis Wagner, la Poésie” (365; ‘Hear the indisputable rays – like streaks gilding and piercing a meandering melody: where Music reunites with Verse to form, after Wagner, Poetry’). The synaesthetic impression of the rays of light that are to be heard rather than seen, the gilding of meandering melodies, is rephrased by Celan in the “Leucht- / glockentöne,” of which the onomatopoetically rendered bell sounds and the Mozart quotation serve as an illustration, as well as in the liberated word that is at once “Sichtbares” and “Hörbares.” In the utopian state of poetry, which Mallarmé ascribes to Wagner, verse and music are melded into one, which is precisely what happens at the musical climax of “Anabasis.” There is no doubt that “Anabasis” can be understood as a flirtation with poesie pure. But, much as was the folk song element in “Es war Erde in ihnen,”

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Mallarmé’s aesthetic is approached from the outside. The poem gradually makes its way towards a musical state that, once reached, is immediately abandoned in a motion of “Hinauf und Zurück.” As opposed to “Crise de vers,” in which literature is encouraged to appropriate, or even misappropriate, the music hitherto possessed by the elemental sonorities of ordinary instruments, “Anabasis” ascends to a musical realm, but returns, although altered by the journey, to itself. Celan merely passes the border into music, thereby sketching the outlines of poetic language. It is this contact with the other art that triggers the words “aus- / gelöst, ein- / gelöst, unser.” That which is set off, that which is released and regained and thus becomes “ours” again through the encounter with music, is poetry. Poetry has, in accordance with the poetics of the “Meridian”-speech, taken its position at the edge of itself, more precisely the edge that is the borderland between literature and music. In crossing and recrossing that border, in calling itself back from its Schon-nicht-mehr to its Immer-noch, it has redefined and repossessed itself by becoming intensely aware of its own contours. This discussion has tried to show how “Es war Erde in ihnen” and “Ana-basis” can be usefully interpreted as critical engagements with the traditions of poetic musicality. A common trait among the two poems, which is also what most clearly separates them from the music-making of “Todesfuge,” is the fact that their rhythmic structures can be described in terms of processes. Neither of them is at rest in one single metric idiom; rather, both appear to be searching and evolving as the poem progresses. The target idioms at which the poems eventually arrive – without having in any way reached a secure and stable position – are, in two different ways, connected to music and poetic musicality. Notably, whereas “Es war Erde in ihnen” comes to a full stop within the musical idiom, “Anabasis” passes through it and lets poetic language return to itself on the other side, thus perhaps allowing for a more optimistic conclusion. In “Es war Erde in Ihnen” the text gazes back at the German poetry of the mid-eighteenth century, specifically the ballad stanza, which betokens song, folk music, and the poetic appropriation of those phenomena. The connection between meter and music is underscored by the explicit thematization of song, acting as a signifier aimed at the acoustic structure of the poem. That this should be understood as an ironic or uncanny gesture rather than an unproblematically affirmative one is indicated by the echoes of graves, putrefaction, and slavery and further supported by Celan’s poetological statement on poetic musicality printed by Librairie Flinker. In “Anabasis,” on the other hand, the rhythmic structures are those of fragmentation and stuttering, prompting increased attention to the auditory aspects of the poem at the expense of their semantic meaning, thus pushing the diction towards what might be metaphorically labeled musical. As in “Es war Erde in ihnen,” this metaphorical labelling is carried out by the poem itself, in a self-reflective thematization of music and musical poetry involving the Mozart quotation as well as the intertextual dialogue with Mallarmé’s “Crise de vers.”

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These musical modes, then, both rely on an interaction between rhythmic structure – in the widest sense of the term – and explicit musical thematics. These two elements support each other and enable the poems to enter into a dialogue with the musical vein of the tradition in which they stand. In these poems, music and musicality are certainly not, as was the case in the writings of the romantics, unambiguously depicted as the universal goal toward which all other arts must strive. Nevertheless, the relation between music and poetry can still be employed as a point of departure for poetological considerations, as an “other” with which to comply or which to oppose, and as a powerful means of attaining a better understanding of poetry by sketching out, moving alongside, and occasionally crossing the borderline between these arts.

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