Paul Celan's Todesfuge

Last year we looked at John McCrae's In Flanders Fields, a poem that has become a wildly popular anthem, revived at every Armistice Day, despite its many serious defects.

Today we are going to look at Paul Celan's Todesfuge, 'Death Fugue', which has become a widely quoted and disseminated Holocaust anthem, despite its many serious defects. Just as with McCrae's shambles, in the case of Celan's Todesfuge, readers project their internal feelings of horror on to the surface of this inadequate poem.

The main difference between the two poems is that McCrae chose an inappropriate and demanding verse form, a form which overtaxed his poetic skills; Celan devised his own organic form of repetition and suggestion, a form which also overtaxed his poetic skills. We'll discuss this further in the summary at the end of this piece.

The English translation given here is the usual rough and ready literalism that readers of this website have come to expect. With so much of the poem imprecise or indistinct, with so many unknowns, it is, of course, a nightmare for translators. Lukas Schwab applied some processing power to four translations of Todesfuge in English with impressive and very interesting results.

Analysis

We know there may be trouble ahead when we first glance at this poem of 370 words and 41 lines and notice that it has no punctuation. Our troubles even begin at the title, Todesfuge, 'Death Fugue'.

Generations of German literary mandarins have worn their pencils down explaining the 'fugue structure' in Todesfuge. After much scribbling, they have to admit that there is not the slightest trace of the very strict structure of the musical fugue in the poem; there are, however, repetitions and variations which – on a good day with the wind behind us – might just be considered to be 'fugueish', as long as we are not too fussed about structure, that defining characteristic of the musical fugue. However, just repeating bits of text doth not a fugue make.

The whole fugue fantasy collapses completely when we consider that Celan first titled his poem Todestango, 'Death tango', so at the time he wrote the poem he himself did not see it as being a fugue. As we get into the poem we may get the idea that Todestango might have been a much better title: the Commander orders the inmate-band to play dance music (er befiehlt uns spielt auf nun zum Tanz). This would also have echoed the 'dance of death' theme that has been popular for centuries.

Well, now we have finally got past the title, let's take the first lines of the poem proper:

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends
wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts
wir trinken und trinken

Black milk of the early morning we drink it in the evening, wir drink it at midday and in the mornings we drink it at night we drink and drink.

I have no idea what 'black milk' signifies – nor does anyone else if truth be told. There is a suggestion that it was borrowed from another poet, but that knowledge helps us not a bit. When we know the Holocaust background to the poem, we might take it to be a metaphor for death or some other horrible thing, but a metaphor has to have some analogic connection with the thing it represents: the reaper with the scythe is a metaphor/symbol for death that everyone can grasp; 'black milk', apart from sounding rather disgusting, has no connection with anything.

Even if we swallow the 'black milk', we are brought to a halt by der Frühe, which is conventionally translated as some variant of 'of the early morning'. I have never seen an explanation of the meaning of 'black milk of the early morning' – and I am pretty sure that I never will.

Whatever this 'black milk of the early morning' is, 'we keep drinking (it)' We are puzzled that drinking this horrible stuff seems to be a completely voluntary act; there is no sense of having to drink it. Never mind, move on.

wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng

We dig a grave in the winds you do not lie crowded together there

Digging a grave in the winds (or in the air): I have no idea what that means and there is more confusion about grave digging to come. In the still unspecified context of a concentration camp, we might take the 'grave in the winds' to be the smoke from the incinerators.

Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt
der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland

A man lives in the house he plays with the snakes he writes/is writing he writes when it gets dark to Germany

I told you at the beginning of this piece that this was a Holocaust poem, which at least set the framework in which we have been reading it. If I hadn't done that, the innocent reader of the poem would have been even more baffled. Now we have arrived at some unspecified house in which some unspecified man lives who plays with snakes and writes letters in the evening for someone in Germany.

dein goldenes Haar Margarete

your golden hair Margaret

There is no punctuation to guide us – a colon here would have been a help – so we can only assume that 'your golden hair Margaret' is a phrase contained in the letter 'to Germany'. That phrase, 'to Germany', strengthens our suspicion that the poem is perhaps something to do with the Holocaust, since most of the camps were located far in the east, beyond the German border.

After knowing nothing for the previous lines it's a bit of relief to stumble over the name of a person we might know something about. Such relief is premature.

Most critics have assumed that the Margarete referred to here is an allusion to Heinrich Faust's love interest Margarete – 'Gretchen' – in Goethe's Faust. However, this identification throws up more problems than it solves.

Goethe does not tell us what colour hair Margarete had. I performed a very rapid overflight of the many illustrations of Gretchen down the ages. In roughly a third of them she is blonde, in the remaining two-thirds brunette to black. If Celan just wants the archtype of a blonde, Germanic woman, Margarete is a poor choice.

Leaving hair colour aside as a relatively trivial problem, Gretchen is seduced and impregnated by Faust (with the help of Mephistopheles) and comes to a bad end in a dungeon, awaiting execution for the alleged murder of their child.

Celan's text does not even hint at the tragic Gretchen, just presents her as some blonde woman loved by someone we presume is a concentration camp commander. Of all the German female names he could have used, Celan chose Margarete. In doing this he opened up a Pandora's box of troubling associations in his poem. If we are aware of the fullness of the Gretchen character in Faust, this overwhelms her cardboard cutout blonde in Todesfuge.

er schreibt es und tritt vor das Haus und es blitzen die Sterne

He writes it and goes out of the front of the house and the stars are glittering

It is not clear to what the 'it' that the man writes refers; we can only presume that it is 'your golden hair Margaret'. Nor are we told what the glittering stars have to do with anything – in this poem of repetition they pop up here, never to be mentioned again.

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

He whistles for his dogs to come he whistles for his Jews to appear has a grave dug in the ground he commanded us play some dance music.

Right, now we know: this is a concentration camp and the German(?) person writing is the Kommandant. For the first time we have an explicit alignment between the Commander's dogs and 'his' Jews. However, we have no idea what the dogs are doing there and we have no idea why a grave is being dug in the middle of the night.

The Austrian (not German) Kommandant of the concentration camp at Płaszów, near Kraków in Poland, Amon Göth, had a villa next to the camp, kept a couple of huge dogs which he set upon prisoners. He was fond of shooting prisoners at random from his balcony for his morning entertainment (cf. the 'lead bullet' that we will encounter in a moment). He became known as the Butcher of Płaszów. He was also a music lover – but there were a lot of cultivated chaps like him running the camps.

The lack of punctuation makes it difficult to parse this line with confidence. We face even more confusion: a few lines ago we were digging ein Grab in den Lüften, 'a grave in the winds'. Now we are digging a physical grave in the ground. For whom is this grave? We would expect the bodies of the inmates of the concentration camps to be incinerated and not buried, hence the 'grave in the winds'. It's all a bit of a jumble.

The next section is an almost identical repeat from the first section

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts
wir trinken dich morgens und mittags wir trinken dich abends
wir trinken und trinken
Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt
der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland
dein goldenes Haar Margarete
Dein aschenes Haar Sulamith

Black milk of the early morning we drink you at night we drink you morning and midday we drink you in the evening we drink and drink a man lives in the house he plays with the snakes he writes/is writing he writes when it gets dark to Germany your golden hair Margaret your ashen hair Sulamith

One of the small variations is that Celan now addresses the black milk as 'you' instead of 'it'. Why, I don't know. Perhaps it is some fugue thing going on. The female Jewish name Sulamith seems to be used as a counterpoint to the Aryan Margarete. There is no direct hint in the poem that Sulamith refers to the biblical figure in the Song of Songs, the lover and later wife of King Solomon, but we have to take that for want of anything better. Whatever the colour of her hair it was cremated to ash in the ovens of the death camps. The message seems to be that Sulamith, the archetypical Jewish woman, gets murdered and cremated whereas Margarete, the archetypical German blonde, lives happily ever after with her Kommandant. A superficial knowledge of Goethe's Faust will tell you that this is not true.

Unlike the original Sulamith, the original Margarete is a tragic figure. Being kind, we might think that if the Commander is writing to his Gretchen, we could think of him as a thuggish Faust figure, but I suspect Celan would reject this idea ferociously.

Then come more repetitions, with small additions:

wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng
Er ruft stecht tiefer ins Erdreich ihr einen ihr andern singet und spielt
er greift nach dem Eisen im Gurt er schwingts seine Augen sind blau
stecht tiefer die Spaten ihr einen ihr anderen spielt weiter zum Tanz auf

we are digging a grave in the winds there you do not lie crowded together he shouts dig deeper into the earth you there you others sing and play he reaches for the dagger in his belt he swings it his eyes are blue push the spade deeper you there you others keep playing for the dance.

The capitalisation of Er ruft appears to be an error. We should note here Celan's strange orthographic mess: He does not punctuate; he ignores (usually) capitalisation of sentence beginnings; he strictly observes capitalisation of nouns (e.g. Erdreich); his line endings are erratic and inconsequential. He doesn't seem to have thought through the demands of representing a fundamentally oral text. He is no e e cummings, one of the great exponents of modernist free-form poetry: 'the queer/old balloonman whistles/far      and      wee/and bettyandisbel come dancing//from hop-scotch and jump-rope and//it's spring. The modernist master of text iconicity in the service of meaning was of course Ezra Pound, whose skills we have explored numerous times on this website. In comparison, Celan has a lot to learn.

Eisen im Gurt probably refers to a dagger, the soldier's Feldmesser.

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts
wir trinken dich mittags und morgens wir trinken dich abends
wir trinken und trinken
ein Mann wohnt im Haus dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Sulamith er spielt mit den Schlangen

Black milk of the early morning we drink you at night we drink you midday and morning we drink you in the evening we drink and drink a man lives in the house your golden hair Margaret your ashen hair Sulamith he plays with the snakes

The reader may come to terms with Celan's repetitions, but the reordering of the elements is more difficult to understand. Here, for example, the impact of Celan's opposition of the two women, Margaret and Sulamith, is sabotaged by the repeat of 'he plays with the snakes' immediately following, one of Celan's weakest and most incomprehensible elements.

Er ruft spielt süßer den Tod der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
er ruft streicht dunkler die Geigen dann steigt ihr als Rauch in die Luft
dann habt ihr ein Grab in den Wolken da liegt man nicht eng

he shouts play death more sweetly death is a master from Germany he shouts play the violins darker after which you are going to rise into the air as smoke.

Analysts have many suggestions about the meaning of the seemingly simple der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland, none of them very convincing. The simplest solution would take Meister as meaning 'a master of his trade' (ein Meister seines Faches), rather than someone possessing the qualification Meister , meaning someone licensed to train apprentices. We can rule out associations that arise from the English term 'master race'; the main German term for this concept is Herrenrasse, that is, no 'Meister' is to be found here.

In Celan's complicated hands, even such a straightforward word such as Meister presents us with a conundrum.

streicht dunkler die Geigen lacks any kind of everyday sense such as volume or pitch.

The German word dann is also a worry. Probably its best meaning in the present context is einen in der nahen Zukunft liegenden Zeitpunkt, nachher, etwas später, 'a moment in the near future, afterwards, somewhat later'. I offer this reading, however, with less confidence than the result of the 2:30 at Goodwood – hope springs eternal!

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts
wir trinken dich mittags der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
wir trinken dich abends und morgens wir trinken und trinken
der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland sein Auge ist blau
er trifft dich mit bleierner Kugel er trifft dich genau
ein Mann wohnt im Haus dein goldenes Haar Margarete
er hetzt seine Rüden auf uns er schenkt uns ein Grab in der Luft
er spielt mit den Schlangen und träumet der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Sulamith

Black milk of the early morning we drink you at night we drink you at midday death is a master from Germany we drink you in the evening and in the morning we drink and drink death is a master from Germany his eye is blue he shoots you with a lead bullet he shoots you accurately a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete he sets his dogs on us he presents us with a grave in the air he plays with snakes and dreams of death is a master from Germany your golden hair Margaret your ashen hair Sulamith

In the final round of repetition most of the elements encountered so far are repeated. There are several new or extended elements: sein Auge ist blau, 'his eye is blue'; er trifft dich mit bleierner Kugel er trifft dich genau, 'he shoots you with a lead bullet he shoots you accurately'; er hetzt seine Rüden auf uns, 'he sets his dogs on us'; er schenkt uns ein Grab in der Luft, 'he presents us with a grave in the air', an ironic gift; [er] träumet der Tod, '[he] dreams of death'.

The bad things

We readers find it difficult to forgive Celan for his obstinate obscurity: the 'black milk', the 'playing with snakes', the golden-haired Margarete. There is a fine line between allusiveness and obscurity – the poet has to leave the reader with some hope of resolution. Goethe is often allusive – the reader often has to have a little think about things – but a resolution is almost always within reach.

T.S. Eliot learned the art of allusiveness from the French Symbolists and in his early masterpiece The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915) revolutionised English poetry. Unfortunately, he fell under the influence of Ezra Pound, who specialised in making things as obscure for his readers as he possibly could, in the firm belief that they could see inside his head.

Pound took Eliot's next major work The Wasteland (1922) and edited and condensed it, that is, put it through his obscurity mangle. As a result, the poem's initial publication in literary magazines caused such consternation and incomprehension that Eliot had to add pages of notes to the first book edition. The motto is always and everywhere: if your poem needs notes, there is something wrong. Pound's own work, magnificent in many ways, has spawned an industry of explainers.

Perhaps a better comparison is the work of W.H. Auden, whose 1932 poem The Witnesses we discussed in 2018. Auden is the master of the deep Freudian-Jungian allusion:

When the green field comes off like a lid,

Revealing what was much better hid -

Unpleasant:

And look, behind you without a sound

The woods have come up and are standing round

In deadly crescent.

The bolt is sliding in its groove;

Outside the window is the black remov-

-ers' van;

And now with sudden swift emergence

Come the hooded women, the hump-backed surgeons,

And the Scissor Man.

Odd, disturbing – yet utterly comprehensible.

The good things

Despite all my tedious grumbling about Todesfuge, certain very good things have to be acknowledged.

Firstly, that fugue thing does the poem a disservice by the attempt to find some structure – any structure – where none exists. The USP of this poem is its lack of structure, which, in turn, reflects the desperation of the concentration camp prisoner. The poem rushes along, skips from one thing to another, repeats itself – this is not an orderly disquisition on the organization and management of such camps. It is frantic, worried, with some grim humour (for example, the roominess of your graves in the sky).

The point of view of the poem is largely that of the inmates of a camp. Having the status of worthless vermin, to be tolerated only by their slave labour, they are not in any sense inducted into their prison, they are a low-information rabble. Their Kommandant is just 'the man in the house'. It is unlikely that the prisoners even know his name – why should they? In their situation, they receive only fragments of knowledge and incomplete images. They are facing a horrible death that could arrive in the next minute or two.

This point of view becomes particularly apparent when we compare it with a poem about a much smaller but still terrible event, the execution of the Irish Nationalist insurgents in 1916 as memorialised in Yeats' poem Easter 1916. This poem offers an intellectual and quite magnificent analysis of the uprising from the viewpoint of the poet. As with all of Yeats' poetry, it is carefully structured and rigorously reasoned.

'Carefully structured and rigorously reasoned' are the last things we could say about Todesfuge; disorganization is the view of the victim, organization and analysis the view of the historian. The voice(s) in the poem are the frantic terrified voices of the camp inmates themselves: 'we'. In their helplessness nothing made sense to them; nothing could be the subject of analysis.

The poem comes to us without context. To be fair to Celan, as the poem progresses through extensions and modifications of initial phrases, a basic level of meaning emerges. The predicate is that we have to know enough about the Holocaust in order to be able to stick the fragments back in the collage where they belong.

Listen to Celan reading Todesfuge. Even if you don't understand German, Celan's performance is illuminating. I have repeated the text as a whole so that you can follow it easily.

Todesfuge

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends
wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts
wir trinken und trinken
wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng
Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt
der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland
dein goldenes Haar Margarete

er schreibt es und tritt vor das Haus und es blitzen die Sterne
er pfeift seine Rüden herbei
er pfeift seine Juden hervor läßt schaufeln ein Grab in der Erde
er befiehlt uns spielt auf nun zum Tanz

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts
wir trinken dich morgens und mittags wir trinken dich abends
wir trinken und trinken
Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt
der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland
dein goldenes Haar Margarete
Dein aschenes Haar Sulamith

wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng

Er ruft stecht tiefer ins Erdreich ihr einen ihr andern singet und spielt
er greift nach dem Eisen im Gurt er schwingts seine Augen sind blau
stecht tiefer die Spaten ihr einen ihr anderen spielt weiter zum Tanz auf

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts
wir trinken dich mittags und morgens wir trinken dich abends
wir trinken und trinken
ein Mann wohnt im Haus dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Sulamith er spielt mit den Schlangen

Er ruft spielt süßer den Tod der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
er ruft streicht dunkler die Geigen dann steigt ihr als Rauch in die Luft
dann habt ihr ein Grab in den Wolken da liegt man nicht eng

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts
wir trinken dich mittags der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
wir trinken dich abends und morgens wir trinken und trinken
der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland sein Auge ist blau
er trifft dich mit bleierner Kugel er trifft dich genau
ein Mann wohnt im Haus dein goldenes Haar Margarete
er hetzt seine Rüden auf uns er schenkt uns ein Grab in der Luft
er spielt mit den Schlangen und träumet der Tod ist ein Meister aus
Deutschland

dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Sulamith

Coda

Todesfuge's first major public outing was at a gathering of the famous association of German writers Gruppe 47 in May 1952, at which Celan read the poem to the assembled literati.

It is quite a task for any difficult poem to be understood without preparation at first hearing. It would have been a miracle if any of the literary crowd which made up the audience had even half-understood Todesfuge, but, of course, none of the assembled greats would probably want to play the role of the little boy in The Emperor's New Clothes.

The founder of Gruppe 47, Hans Werner Richter, gave us a faux pas for the ages when he stated that he found it difficult to concentrate on Celan's reading because holocaust survivor Celan's speaking voice reminded him of Josef Goebbels. Many of the others there found Celan's performance either inaudible or incomprehensible. Those of you that have listened to the audio recording of Celan reading Todesfuge will understand what they meant. Despite all the difficulties, Todesfuge came third in the voting and Celan found a reputable German publisher in that very meeting.

Nevertheless, it took some time for Todesfuge to get some traction. Friends and literary types wrote to Celan, asking him to explain arcane points or to give them a heads up about what it all meant. This fact supports my argument, that on its face the poem is incomprehensible and relies on meaning projected into it by its readers. Finally, the narrative emerged that the poem was 'about' the Holocaust, which at that time was just emerging into official recognition for the unspeakable horror it had been.

On the back of the wave of Holocaust sympathy and despite all the reservations about it, the poem ascended to the empyrean of 'Holocaust literature'. The entry devoted to it in the German Wikipedia is an immensely long academic trudge in the best Teutonic manner – that is to say you will be no wiser at the end of it; the article has been added to the 'list of excellent articles', illustrating the German Kulturbetrieb at work in all its deadening magnificence.