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Paul Celan and Martin Buber: The Poetics of Dialogue and "The Eclipse of God"Author(s): Maurice FriedmanSource: Religion & Literature, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Spring, 1997), pp. 43-62Published by: The University of Notre DameStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40059685 .Accessed: 02/06/2011 03:10

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PAUL CELAN AND MARTIN BUBER: THE POETICS OF DIALOGUE AND THE ECLIPSE OF GOD

Maurice Friedman

The Poetics of Dialogue

Martin Buber insists that "the mystery of the coming-to-be of language and that of the coming-to-be of man are one." "There is no 'word' that is not spoken; the only being of a word resides in its being spoken." Indeed, "Every attempt to understand the present continuance of a language as accessible detached from the context of its actual speakers, must lead us astray," writes Buber in "The Word That Is Spoken" {Knowledge of Man ch.5). It is from the spoken word, from human dialogue that language draws its ontological power. Language derives from and contributes to the sphere of "the between," the I-Thou relationship. Language is a "system of tensions" deriving from the fruitful ambiguity of the word in its different uses by different speakers. In "The Word That Is Spoken" Buber finds the struggle for shared meaning essential to humanity: "It is the communal nature of the logos as at once 'word' and 'meaning' which makes man man, and it is this which proclaims itself from of old in the communalizing of the spoken word that again and again comes into being" {Knowledge of Man 105).

The written word is never, for Buber, just a monument to past dialogue. It calls out for dialogue with the other, the Thou to whom it is spoken. Buber distinguishes between faithful truth in relation to the reality that was once perceived and is riow expressed, in relation to the person who is addressed and whom the speaker makes present to himself, and in relation to the factual existence of the speaker in all its hidden structure. This human truth opens itself to one just in one's existence as this concrete

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person who answers with faithfulness for the word that is spoken by one. "The truth of language must prove itself in the person's existence" (Knowl- edge of Man 110).

To Buber, it is poetry in particular that witnesses to the "word that is spoken":

Were there no more genuine dialogue, there would also be no more poetry.... For the poem is spokenness, spokenness to the Thou, wherever this partner might be.... Poetry... imparts to us a truth which cannot come to words in any other manner than just in this one. {Knowledge of Man 101, 108)

Paul Celan, the Rumanian Jew who after the Second World War wrote in German and lived in Paris, is not only a major poet but also an explicitly dialogical literary theorist. Celan not only conceives of language as being essentially dialogical but like Buber views the poem as leading to the encounter with an essentially other reality embodied in the Thou. For Celan and Buber both all art is dialogical. Moreover, poetry creates a new reality by addressing "an addressable Thou." For both men finding and engaging a Thou in dialogue is indispensable for human existence (Lyon 1 1 1,1 16,1 19). ' For Celan, indeed, it was a cri de coeur. As James Lyon has pointed out, practically every one of Celan's poems, both in its content and its structure, is an "attempted dialogue which tries to establish a link with existence" (Lyon 1 16).2 Every poem has explicitly and often repeatedly the Thou, even though the Thou is sometimes "only the amorphous, unknow- able 'other5 to whom all Celan's poems make their way" (Hamburger 30). John Felstiner lists more than twenty "addressable thous" which Celan's lyrics seek but ends with "often something indeterminable, present only because the speaker calls it du. That word is voiced some 1,300 times in over three decades of verse" (Felstiner xvi).

In addition to this explicit Thou, Celan also saw his reader as a Thou and hoped, demanded, and expected that his reader would enter into dialogue with his poems. Thus Michael Hamburger asserts: "Such poetry demands a special kind of attention and perhaps a special kind of faith in the authenticity of what it enacts." "Attention is the natural prayer of the soul," Celan himself quotes Malebranche, as Hamburger points out. "Celan's characteristic procedures... rest on an extraordinary trust in his readers' capacity to respond to the dominant gesture of a poem without access to the circumstantial data," writes Hamburger (31). Celan's Relation to Buber

Celan, like his friend Nelly Sachs, was greatly influenced by Martin Buber's interpretation and presentation of the life and teaching of the

MAURICE FRIEDMAN 45

Hasidim, as he was by Buber's philosophy of dialogue in general. In the speech that he gave when he received the Bremen Literary Prize, Celan speaks not only of the East European landscape that was home to Hasidism, but also of "those Hasidic tales which Martin Buber has retold for us all in German" (Felstiner 114). It is no accident that when Celan thought of Aliyah at the end of the Second World War, he framed it in terms of arriving in Jerusalem, going to Martin Buber, and saying, "Uncle Buber, here I am, now you've got me!" (Felstiner 42).

The extent to which Celan uses Buber's language and strives to meet what Buber calls "the eternal Thou" is astonishing: he invokes the "Gegeniiber" [partner, one who is face to face] to which the poem addresses itself, the poem as a "Gesprach" [dialogue] with the "other" sphere, a "Begegnung* [meeting] with it (Foot 207). It is through this dialogue that the presence of the other can be evoked in the poem, as Celan himself states: "Into this presence its otherness is also brought with it by the addressed, which through being named has become a Thou."3

Celan "considered his poems not just as a vehicle with which to describe encounters with a 'Du' but also as being instrumental in bringing them about," writes Foot. "The core of the poem is the 'Du* itself which is an almost tactile entity" (Foot 216-18). Celan's attempts to write in an "unimaged language" constitute a never-ending search for the "word that comes after the image of silence" which will give "the Other" its "Gestalt" and effect a "meeting" with the "Thou" (Foot 219, 260, 266). Celan spoke of a quatrain that he wrote in 1956, as encountering himself in a kind of homecoming via "paths on which language gets a voice. . . . paths of a voice to a perceiving Thou" (Felstiner 98). In his Bremen Prize Speech Celan wrote:

A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the - not always greatly hopeful - belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense too are under way: they are making toward something. Toward what? Toward something standing open, occupiable, perhaps toward an addressable Thou, toward an addressable reality. (Felstiner 1 15)

In his prose piece "Conversation in the Mountains" (a direct taking over of the title of one of Buber's dialogues from his early book Daniel) Celan spoke of his story's "roundabout paths from thou to thou... paths on which language gets a voice, these are meetings." Later in the same piece he speaks of "a language with no I and no Thou, pure He, pure It" (Felstiner 120-22).4

According to Felstiner, Celan had read and revered Buber since his youth - for the recovery of Hasidism, the spiritual constitution of dia-

46 Religion & Literature

logue, and his translation of the Bible. Moreover, he found sustenance and solace in Buber's recognition that the Eternal is brought forth out of contradiction and that Judaism is imbued with antithesis; for Celan's own life and work was founded on contradiction. Indeed, according to Celan's lifelong friend Edith Silverman, Celan "venerated Martin Buber to the point of rapture" (Felstiner 161).

Yet Felstiner reports the meeting between Celan and Buber in Paris in September 1960 as essentially a mismeeting:

He took his copies of Buber's books to be signed and actually kneeled for a blessing from the eighty-two-year-old patriarch. But the homage miscarried. How had it felt (Celan wanted to know), after the catastrophe, to go on writing in German and publishing in Germany? Buber evidently demurred, saying it was natural to publish there and taking a pardoning stance toward Germany. Celan's vital need, to hear some echo of his plight, Buber could not or would not grasp. (Felstiner 161)

Felstiner even attributes a poem Celan wrote the same day ("The Sluice") which spoke of "no second heaven" partly to "mischance with Martin Buber" (Felstiner 163).

One cannot doubt that some sort of mismeeting took place but not for the reason that Felstiner adduces, namely that Buber took "a pardoning stance toward Germany" (161). Seven years before this meeting Buber gave a speech on "Genuine Dialogue and the Possibilities of Peace" after years of refusing to speak publicly in Germany because the Germans had become "faceless" to him. In this speech Buber indicted the Nazis and the Germans who cooperated with them in terms that had never before been expressed directly to the President and the other officials of the West German Federation who were present at the speech:

About a decade ago a considerable number of Germans - there must have been many thousands of them - under the indirect command of the German govern- ment and the direct command of its representatives, killed millions of my people in a systematically prepared and executed procedure whose organized cruelty cannot be compared with any previous historical event. I, who am one of those who remained alive, have only in a formal sense a common humanity with those who took part in this action. They have so radically removed themselves from the human sphere, so transposed themselves into a sphere of monstrous inhumanity inaccessible to my conception, that not even hatred, much less an overcoming of hatred, was able to arise in me. And what am I that I could here presume to 'forgive'! [Pointing the Way 232)

What I suspect were behind the "mismeeting" between Celan and Buber, or "mischance," as Felstiner calls it, were two things: Celan's overwhelming neediness and the difference between the two authors'

MAURICE FRIEDMAN 47

relation to the German language. Once, Buber told me, a man came to see him who made him uneasy, and he did not know the reason why until on leaving the man said to him, "You are the Messiah." "I cannot relate to a person from above to below," Buber said to me. Celan certainly said nothing comparable to Buber, but his overwhelming veneration coupled with his kneeling to receive Buber's blessing - a religious rite totally foreign to Buber - must have made Buber uncomfortable.

Martin Buber was a great German writer a quarter of a century before the Nazis came to power. There is no way he could have associated the German language simply with the Nazis and what they did to degrade it, as Celan did. Celan's "Muttersprachf was also German, but in the midst of a Rumania where many other languages were spoken. What is more, Celan came to maturity when Nazism was at its zenith and learned to wrestle with the German language in order to say what he had to say only under the shadow of the Shoah in general and of the murder of his parents in particular. Undoubtedly, he would have liked to have found in Buber's soul a tension in relation to German comparable to his own, but historical circumstances and Buber's own life-stance made this impossible. If Celan and/or Felstiner attributed this to a pardoning attitude on Buber's part toward the Nazis, it can only be because they totally misunderstood Buber.

A subtler and more ambiguous problem in the relation between Celan and Buber arises through both men's relation to the great German phi- losopher Martin Heidegger. Heidegger, as is well known, had been a Nazi Party member from 1 93 1 to 1 945 and had taken over the Rectorship of the University of Freiburg in a thoroughly Nazi spirit. When Martin Buber met Heidegger in 1 958 to prepare for their joint presentations on speech at the Bavarian Academy of Fine Art, I wrote Buber asking how he could meet him. His reply was that he had already said publicly what he had to say about Heidegger. Buber was referring to his indictment of Heidegger in his essay "Religion and Modern Thought" in which he cited Heidegger's Rectorial Address of May 1933 where Heidegger praised the glory and greatness of the Nazi insurrection and proclaimed Hitler as "the present and future German reality and its law" (Eclipse of Godll). Heidegger, as no other philosopher before him, bound his thought concerning Being to the hour of Hitler and the Nazis. The editor of Merkur, the distinguished German periodical in which Buber's essay was first published, wrote Buber asking him to soften his critique of Heidegger on the grounds that the "wounds" of the past were now healing. "He is talking about meta- phorical wounds," Buber said to me, "whereas I am talking about millions of real ones."

48 Religion & Literature

Celan, for his part, declined to write a poem in honor of Heidegger's seventieth birthday, which Heidegger himself had asked for, and demurred when a photographer wished to take his picture with Heidegger before his reading in 1967 at the University of Freiburg. On the other hand, Celan accepted many invitations to read his poetry in Germany and several German literary prizes. What is more, he accepted Heidegger's invitation to take a walk with him in the Black Forest the next day and wrote an inscription in Heidegger's guest book as well as a poem commemorating his visit (Felstiner 245).

When one adds to this the fact that Celan read and was influenced in his poetry by Heidegger's works, one must ask if it was not Celan's own tension and unclarity that Celan projected on Buber, for whom the accep- tance of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade was the most impor- tant test of conscience of his life. Buber, for his part, did not like and wrote several profound critiques of Heidegger's philosophy. When advising me about the preparation of my first book Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue, Buber explicitly cautioned me against associating his thought with Heidegger's. After Buber and his wife Paula had met with Heidegger and his wife, Buber wrote me, "I like Heidegger better than what he writes."

When interviewed by Israeli radio on Independence Day, May 1968, Celan recalled Gustav Landauer's words - "My Germanness and Jewishness do each other no harm and much good". - and commented: "Perhaps they held good [at that time for Landauer (who in 1919 was brutally murdered by German soldiers)] but they do not and may not hold for any of us, and will never again hold for anyone" (Felstiner 258).

Buber, who was a Zionist as Landauer was not, could never have made the statement Landauer did even before Landauer's murder and the Nazis. He held, in contrast, that in Germany as elsewhere in the Diaspora, or Galut (exile), the Jew was always "on the way" [to Palestine]. In 1939 Buber wrote an article entitled "The End of the German-Jewish Symbio- sis." In this article he pointed out how he and his Zionist comrades warned loud and untiringly in all those years against the very attitude that Landauer expressed in the statement that Celan quoted. Buber did not deny that there were real values in the symbiosis, German as well as Jewish ones, that the Nazis undertook to destroy. "But the symbiosis itself is at an end and cannot return" (Derjude undseinjudentum 646). The Dialogue with the Absurd

The "Dialogue with the Absurd," a phrase that I use in several of my books, implies that one can find meaning in the struggle and even battle

MAURICE FRIEDMAN 49

with the Absurd without the Absurd itself ever becoming "meaningful" through inclusion in some larger scheme or framework.5 This dialogical meaning is never that of a comfortable faith or a harmonic Weltanschauung. It is tragic at best and more often grotesque.

Celan brings his dialogue with the Thou into the "Dialogue with the Absurd," even as he brings his Dialogue with the Absurd into his dialogue with the Thou. Celan's later visions of "the Other" are dominated by elements of the absurd, Foot points out. Divorcing the imagery of his poems from normal semantic connotations, Celan led into the absurd, "in the hope that out of the resulting meaninglessness new meaning will emerge." In the face of jaded literary conventions and an inhumane and absurd historical world, Celan saw it as the task of poetry to present a "counterword" which would reveal the latency of other aspects of exist- ence hitherto unrecognized which have their being in a secret and un- canny realm (Foot 279,28 1).6

Hamburger points explicitly to "The Circus Animal's Desertion," that poem of Yeats through which above all I would claim Yeats for the Dialogue with the Absurd: "Celan was realistic, too, in doing full justice to 'the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart."'

He wanted poetry to be open to the unexpected, the unpredictable, the unpredcterminablc. His poems were "messages in a bottle", as he said, which might or might not be picked up. That element of risk was as necessary to them as the need to communicate. (Hamburger 30; cf. 22f, 29) In human life the absurd is that which does not fit our social harmonies

or world-views and just for that reason questions the very meaning of our existence. Although much of Celan's poetry might tempt us to label him simply as a poet of the absurd, in almost every one of these poems the dialogue shines through.

Shoah - The Ultimate Dialogue with the Absurd

In the Shoah [or Holocaust], which I call the ultimate Dialogue with the Absurd, the absurd goes beyond anything with which we are familiar from our ordinary lives. Yet here too a Dialogue with the Absurd is possible, a meaning reached in dialogue, as opposed to that subjective affirmation of meaning in spite of the absurd affirmed by the Camus of The Myth of Sisyphus or the invention of values championed by Sartre. This does not mean that one has a dialogue with the Shoah as such, in the sense of any sort of mutual interaction. Still in refusing to evade or deny it or to explain it away by referring to any larger schema (such as the establishment of the State of

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Israel), one may find here too a Dialogue with the Absurd in which there is meaning not in spite ofbut in the face ofmeaninglessness.

The news of the execution of Celan's parents by the Nazis in 1 943 left a deep imprint on his life accompanied by an overwhelming existential guilt for not having protected them as he might have. This is expressed directly in only a few of his poems but indirectly in most.

"Death Fugue" from Mohn und Geddchtnis (1952) is Paul Celan's most famous and most anthologized poem, and it is also the one that deals most explicitly with the Shook with its repeated motif of Jews digging their own graves and the repeated contrast between "golden hair Margarete and ashen hair Shulamith":

death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true... he sets his pack on to us he grants us a grave in the air he plays with the serpents and daydreams death is a master from Germany. {Poems of Paul Celan 63)

Far more often Celan's reference to the Shoah is subtle, as in his long poem "Engfuhrung" ("Straightening") from Sprachgitter (1959), which be- gins with "the unmistakable track," continues with grass, stones, wheel, blackish field, the night that needs no stars, nowhere anyone asking after you, ash, gales, silence, poison, a crafty sky, whirl of particles, "the world, a millicrystal, shot up," "nights, demixed," "no smoke soul ascends or joins in," "the rifle-range near the buried wall: visible, once more: the grooves," "nothing is lost," and ends as it began with:

Driven into the terrain with the unmistakable track: Grass. Grass, written asunder. (Poems of Paul Celan 149)

Another poem "Think of It" from Fadensonnen (1968) fuses two events two millennia apart - the last resistance of Bar Kochba and the Jews to the Romans in the beginning of the Common Era and the first (and only possible) resistance of the inmates of an early Nazi concentration camp in the form of its famous song of "DieMoorsoldaten" or peat bog soldiers (Poems 223, Hamburger 27f.)7

MAURICE FRIEDMAN 5 1

The Eclipse of God

The "Eclipse of God" is a metaphor of Martin Buber's that character- ized more than any other his thought and attitude during the last part of his life. As Elie Wiesel has stated, not only the Jews but all mankind became subject to what Martin Buber calls the eclipse of God when the Nazi regime plunged the Western world into Night. Although Buber's use of the phrase predates the Shoah, it is the Shoah more than anything that led Martin Buber to the use of the term. In what was undoubtedly an autobio- graphical statement, Buber wrote in 1951, "For one who believes in the living God, who knows about Him, and is fated to spend his life in a time of His hiddenness, it is very difficult to live" [On Judaism 223). "Eclipse of the light of heaven, eclipse of God - such indeed is the character of the historic hour through which the world is passing," wrote Buber in the same period. The typical modern thinker, like Heidegger, who "refuses to sub- mit himself to the effective reality of the transcendence as such - our vis- a-vis - contributes to the human responsibility for the eclipse" {Eclipse of God 223). The eclipse is not just a process taking place in the human spirit, asserted Buber. It is God hiding his face (Isaiah 45. 1 5), his turning away in response to our turning away. But it is no extinction. The relationship to the "eternal Thou" lives on in the catacombs awaiting the day when that which has stepped between the human and his vis-a-vis may give way. Meanwhile, "He who is denoted by the name [God] lives in the light of his eternity. But we, 'the slayers,' remain dwellers in darkness, consigned to death" {Eclipse of God 22-24, 127-29).

Buber meant by the eclipse of God a genuine historical happening and not just a trend in modern philosophy. Holderlin and Heidegger were right in describing this hour as an hour of night, Buber declared in Eclipse of God (22). In his last statement on the eclipse Buber wrote:

No demonic power works here that we have not reared ourselves. That is the side of the event known to us. The other, the divine side, is called in

the holy books of Israel the hiding of God, the veiling of the divine countenance. Nothing more than such an anthropomorphic image seems to be granted us.

One may also call what is meant here a silence of God's or rather, since I cannot conceive of any interruption of the divine revelation, a condition that works on us as a silence of God.... These last years in a great searching and questioning, seized ever anew by the shudder of the now, I have arrived no further than that I now distinguish a revelation through the hiding of the face, a speaking through the silence. The eclipse of God can be seen with one's eyes, it will be seen.

He, however, who today knows nothing other to say than, "See there, it grows lighter!" he leads into error. (Schilpp and Friedman 7 1 6)

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"Celan's was the silence of the unutterable, his exile a flight from the unforgivable," writes Katharine Washburn in close consonance with Buber's image of the eclipse ("Introduction" to Celan, Last Poems xxxv). "The anguish, the darkness, the shadow of death are present in all his work, early and late," writes Michael Hamburger, "including the most high-spirited and sensuous." This applies not only to the content of his poetry but also to his very way of writing it. If Celan described his poems as "ways of a voice to a receptive you," a "desperate dialogue," and "a sort of homecoming," this did not gainsay the fact that his poetry was rooted in "extreme experience that could not be enacted in any manner less difficult than his. The hiatuses, the silences, the dislocations of normal usage belong to what he had to say and to the effort of saying it" (Hamburger 22).

Hamburger points to negation as a recurrent theme of Celan's later poetry in general, linking it to Jewish and Christian mysticism and to the dialectic of light and darkness that runs all through Celan's work. What is striking about Celan's poetry is that he holds the tension, keeping yes and no unsplit, thereby admitting enough darkness into his poems to remain true to his own dictum that "he speaks truly who speaks the shade" (cited in Hamburger 29).

The theme of "There was Earth inside Them" (from Die Niemandsrose [1963]) is the constantly reiterated digging that links the poem to "The Death Fugue" as does the statement, "They did not praise God, / who, so they heard, wanted all this, / who, so they heard, knew all this." The suggestion of the absurdity and futility of everything is strengthened by the line, "I dig, you dig, and the worm digs too" and by the question, "Where did the way lead when it led nowhere?" Yet behind all this there is at least some minimal contact of I and Thou: "O you dig and I dig, and I dig towards you, / and on our finger the ring awakes" (Poems of Paul Celan 1 53).

If "There Was Earth Inside Them" continues Celan's Dialogue with the Absurd, it also compels us to think of the eclipse of God. A God who hears and knows all this and wants it to happen, as Celan writes, is an indifferent God, a monstrous God. The God who cares about us is in eclipse.

In "Zurich, the Stork Inn" from the same volume, the Thou becomes explicit in his dedication of the poem to Nelly Sachs, whom he met at this place. At this inn Nelly Sachs had a mystic experience of the light of the sun, which Celan shared. But Celan was still struggling with this 'Jewish God" in the depths of his being: "Of your God was our talk, I spoke / against him, I / let the heart that I had hope: / for / his highest, death- rattled, his / quarrelling word - / Your eye looked on, looked away, / your mouth / spoke its way to the eye, and I heard" (Poems of Paul Celan

MAURICE FRIEDMAN 53

157). This does not mean that Celan denied God. Yet for him God was more profoundly in eclipse than for Sachs. In 1959 in one of the many Buber books that he was always buying and reading, Celan underlined, "Every name is a step toward the consummate Name, as everything broken points to the unbroken," and twice he noted Buber's words, "All of time is immediate to redemption." On the other hand, on hearing Nelly Sachs's "Yes, I'm a believer," Celan replied that he "hoped to blaspheme up till the end" after which she repeated his statement, "One really doesn't know what counts" (Felstiner 152,156,158). Celan's "addressable Thou" is also a problematic Thou.8

Something similar is echoed in "So Many Constellations." Although we are told of Time which stands in that chasm where extinguished things "splendid with teats" stood, "Time / on which already grew up / and down and away all that / is or was or will be," nonetheless Celan con- cludes with an affirmation of the dialogue. Although "we / don't know, do we?, / what/ counts," still at times when only "das Nichts [the Nothing] stood between us we got / all the way to each other" (Poems of Paul Celan 159; Felstiner 159).

Hamburger locates Celan's religion precisely in the task of coming to grips with his experience of being God-forsaken, with the negation and blasphemy through which alone Celan could be true to his own experience "and yet maintain the kind of intimate dialogue with God characteristic of

Jewish devotion" (29). We need only think of Abraham, Job, Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev,

Martin Buber, and Elie Wiesel to understand the protest of what I call the "Job of Auschwitz" to which Celan too belongs. This is made explicit in the poem Celan wrote after his visit with Nelly Sachs at the Stork Inn in Zurich in 1960. When Celan speaks in that poem, as we have seen, of God's "death-rattling, his quarreling word," Celan's German original for "quarreling" is "haderndes" the word used when Job urged God, "Make me know wherefore Thou contendest with me" (Job 10.2). Celan's very defi- ance bred assertion. "Bitter yes," Celan said, but he added, "In what's truly bitter, there is surely the More-than-bitter" (Felstiner 158; 199). It is precisely this combination of dialogue, or trust, and contending that I point to again and again when I speak of the biblical Job, the "Modern Job," and "the Job of Auschwitz."

In "Your / being beyond," from The No One's Rose, Celan repeats the kabbalistic lore that God is split into two parts - the Ein Sof, or transcen- dent infinite, and the Shekinah, the part that is scattered in exile. "In the death / of all those mown down," claims the poet, God "grows himself

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whole." He also claims that "with this half we keep up relations," "this half" presumably being the scattered one (Poems of Paul Celan 161). Perhaps in the language of the Kabbalah we could say that Celan shared the anguish and suffering of God's exile.

The "Psalm" from this same volume is also the origin of the title; for it is "No One" who "moulds us again out of earth and clay" and "conjures our dust," and for whose sake "we shall flower toward you... the No One's- Rose." "Blessed art thou, No One," says the poem, as the pious Jew says, "Blessed art Thou, O Lord Our God" [Poems of Paul Celan 1 75). We bloom "in thy sight, in thy spite" reads Felstiner's translation of the poem (Felstiner 167). This Nothing and No One could be the primordial Nothing of the Kabbalah. But it could equally well be God in eclipse. It expresses per- fectly Celan's vacillation, his standing in the tension between affirmation and negation. In "Conversation in the Mountains" the Jew Klein also speaks to and is heard by No One. "In that story and this poem," com- ments Felstiner, "the absent 'No One' of the catastrophe [the Shoah] masks the unknowable 'No One' of Jewish mysticism" (153,168) "A Nothing / we were, are now, and ever / shall be," reads "Psalm." This EinMchts, asserts Felstiner, "again merges mystical with historical nothingness" (169).9

"What Occurred?" carries similar overtones of the kabbalistic Book of Creation, of darkness and light, heaviness and lightness, of the awakening of I and Thou, and of the intrinsic relation between language, "co-earth," and "fellow planet" (Poems 205). We might think here of the kabbalistic legend according to which God hewed the letters out of stone, weighed them, switched them around until he found the right order, and only then created the world.10 Celan had known Scholem's work on the Kabbalah since 1957, and he had met Scholem three times in Paris before he visited with him in his 1968 trip to Israel. Felstiner aptly summarizes the things in Jewish mystical lore that engaged Celan and that he gleaned from his reading of Scholem and Buber:

Kabbalistic speech theory and the names of God, divine hiddenness, Creation and light-apparition, God's self-contraction and nothingness, Sabbath and ensouling, Isaiah's "I will bring thy seed from the east, and gather thee from the west." (43:5), and above all the Shechinah - God's emanation as mother, sister, and bridge, symbolized by the rose or crown, in exile with the people of Israel. (235)

Celan was particularly taken by the image of the Shekinah as Rachel weeping for her children. In a 1967 poem which begins "Near, in the Aorta's arch, / in bright blood: / the bright word," Celan writes, "Mother Rachel / weeps no more / Carried across now / all of the weeping," and ends, "Ziv, that light." Felstiner traces the "near" back to Celan's ten-year-

MAURICE FRIEDMAN 55

earlier poem "Tenebrae" - "Near are we, Lord... clawed into each other" and from there to Holderlin's "Patmos," where God is "Near by / and hard to grasp" and from there to the Hebrew Bible: "For the word is very near to you, in your mouth and in your heart, that you may do it" (Deut.30.14). Rachel weeping for her children goes back to Jeremiah's Lamentations (31.15) but also to the fact that the people return to Zion and God renews his covenant with Jacob, husband of Rachel, which is taken up by Matthew in the New Testament. But Celan's use of Rachel lamenting her children as the Shekinah in exile is anticipated by Celan's own early poem "Aspen Tree" (1945) in which he writes, "My soft-voiced mother weeps for everyone" (Felstiner 236-38).

Equally important is the fact that "Ziv, that light," which is unbinded and which concludes Celan's poem, is taken from the chapter on the Shekinah in Scholem's "On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead," where God's indwelling presence "can reveal itself in an unearthly brilliance - this is often called the light (Ziv) of the Schechinah." Recalling his time with Nelly Sachs in Zurich when, hoping for God's highest "wrangling," or "contending word," they had seen "some gold across the water," Celan wrote Sachs about the light they had seen together: "Once in a poem, there also came to me, by way of the Hebrew, a name for it." When Nelly Sachs recalled it again, he said, "Yes, that light" (Felstiner 239f). Quoting Celan's statement that "poetry is mysticism," Felstiner concludes:

"Ziv, that light" throws us. back to the pure word and! gestures at something ineffable - not Saintjohn's logos which was "In the beginning... the light of men," but Ziv haSchechxnah, a radiance attending Israel even in dark exile. (241)

Celan found in Ziv a "need-shard," writes Felstiner, referring to the legend of the Lurian Kabbalah according to which divine light at Creation shattered the vessels that contained it, leaving to humanity the tikkun, or restoration, of these shards.

Because you (bund the need-shard in a wilderness place, the shadow-centuries relax beside you and hear you think.11

That Celan thus identified with Jewish mysticism and its hidden God does not mean that he had overcome his earlier ambivalence and vacilla- tion that made him more of a blasphemer and contender than a believer. In "Thread Suns" (Atemwende 1967) Celan speaks of "thread suns" as

56 Religion & Literature

standing above the Odnis, "the grey-black wilderness." "A tree-high thought tunes in to light's pitch." He does not posit redemption here or hereafter but concludes: "there are / still songs to be sung on the other side / of mankind" {Poems 227). The tension of this vacillation is not diminished in Celan's very latest poems, as in "I hear that the axe has flowered" (Schneepart [1971]) The axe that has flowered is both instrument of destruction and construction. The hanged man is healed by the bread his wife baked for him, the bread which looks at him. "I hear that the place can't be named." People don't talk about the Holocaust any more. We plant flowers in all the places where the death camps were. "I hear that they call life / our only refuge," the poem concludes, possibly referring to those who tell Jews to live in the present not the past or possibly saying that there is no hope in or after death {Poems 323).

Other of Celan's latest poems can only deepen what we have seen before, as in:

World to be stuttered by heart in which I shall have been a guest, a name sweated down from the wall a wound licks up. (Poems 325)12

A prompter from a cosmic theater helps us to learn the world by heart, but what we can learn, what we can know and live, is only a stuttering. We live in the face of the memorial wall in which the image of the flame sweated down is complemented by that of the wound licking up. Again in "A leaf" Celan inverts a leafless tree into a treeless leaf as a prelude to "What times are these / when a conversation / is almost a crime / because it includes / so much made explicit" {Poems 331).

Except for the "Death Fugue" Celan felt he could not and did not want to speak explicitly. Correspondingly, in "I fool about" the shadows belong to the truth as well as the light, the shadows which are the echo of what happened in the past, heard "from every direction, / the incontrovertible echo / of every eclipse." Here too we cannot help thinking of Buber's "eclipse of God." But here too the note of dialogue is present: "your darkness too / load on to / my halved, voyaging / eyes" {Poems 339).

The way in which Celan stands with Buber in affirming the eclipse rather than the death of God is shown, as we have seen, by the "narrow ridge" that Celan walks between the abysses in which Nothing is at one and the same time the Absurd and the divine Nothing of the Kabbalah. In "Hour of the Barge," one of his last poems, Celan speaks of being "rid of death, rid of

MAURICE FRIEDMAN 57

God." In "To Speak with Blind Alleys" he writes of speaking about what we might call variously the partner, the vis-a-vis, the face to face [Buber's central term Gegeniiber], "about its expatriate meaning" (Celan's own exile, the exile of the Jews, the exile of the Shekinah), "to chew the bread with writing teeth." In "Hail of Stones" Celan speaks of one who stood fast in his despair and succeeded in far-striding silence. With all of this, he searches continually for his Thou, which is at the same time the eternal Thou, as in "Shot Forth" ("Shot forth / in the emerald race, / hatching of grubs, hatching of stars, with every / keel / I search for you [dich], / fathomless"). In "My Soul" his soul inclines toward his Thou, "hears you thundering," learns to sink itself "in the pit of your throat" and "become true." When the unkissed stone of grief stirs in its fulfillment, Celan says in "We, Who Were True Like the Bent Grass," "it changes over to us," and "we hand ourselves on": "to you and to me," with whom ("watch out"!) the night "is painstaking" (Celan Last Poems 100, 1 18, 144, 162, 1 74, 180).

In full consonance with what we have said above about Celan and the eclipse of God, Felstiner asks whether Holy Scripture constitutes a void after what "No One" let happen. "Celan's writing confronts a near-eclipse of the Word," Felstiner then asserts and illustrates this from Celan's 1957 coinage schriftleer ("empty of writing," "Scripture-devoid" (1.169) followed in 1961 by a leer that "could hold divine nothingness - 'Empty almond, royal blue'" (1.244).

In Celan's 1969 poem "Nothingness" the eclipse of God stands forth with all possible clarity: "Nothingness [Das Mchts], for our / name's sake / they gather us in - , / sets a seal, / the end believes we're / the beginning, / in front of / masters / going silent around us, / in the Undivided, there testifies / a binding / brightness" (Felstiner 278). Felstiner's comment on this poem again evokes the eclipse of God:

A strange ingathering occurs. Instead of God guiding us in straight paths "for His name's sake," it is Nothingness - a presence both ineffable and eclipsed [italics mine] - for our names' sake. (278)13

On his forty-fifth birthday, Paul Celan wrote above a list of poems for a new collection "Reitejiir die Treue." This motto was taken from Buber's translation of Psalm 45 where, in English, it reads, "Ride for the cause of the truth" (Celan left out udie Sache" which would go over into English as "Ride for the sake of, the cause of, or in behalf of the truth"). In the Buber translation this statement is followed in the Psalm by "der beugten Wahrhafiigkeir ("for the meek [or humble] truthfulness"). "Ride for the cause of the truth" is also the motto which Franz Rosenzweig placed as a

58 Religion & Literature

motto on the title page of his magnum opus The Star of Redemption. Two years before Celan marked a paragraph on the threatened nature of Jewish existence in an essay by Emmanuel Levinas on Franz Rosenzweig (Felstiner 228,320n.l0,321n.2).

"For the Cause of the Truth" (as Celan may have known) is also the title that Martin Buber gave to a memorial essay on Franz Rosenzweig in 1 930. Rosenzweig was almost totally paralyzed for the last eight years of his life yet worked for years with Buber in translating the Hebrew Bible. "An unspeakable burden, unspeakable was laid on and carried by him," wrote Buber. "In those eight years Franz Rosenzweig confirmed in the face of God the truth that he saw. Lamed in his whole body, he 'rode for the cause of the Truth"' (Derjude undseinjudentum 816).

When in 1 954 I immersed myself in Rosenzweig's life and thought in preparation for an address on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death, I was so deeply moved that I wrote Martin Buber asking if Rosenzweig was not a saint. "Saint is too Christian a term for him," Buber replied, "but he was a suffering servant of the Lord." Celan's suffering cannot be compared to Rosenzweig's; no one's can.14 Nor would I presume to call Celan a "suffering servant of the Lord." Yet in his own unique way he was a suffering witness in the face of the Shoah and of the faceless God whom he denied and affirmed.

In "Vinegrowers," a poem written on April 13, 1970, a week before Celan's suicide, what stands out most clearly is the Thou and the Sabbath (Felstiner 284). On Celan's suicide itself Felstiner speculates that perhaps Celan felt too alone ("No one / witnesses for the / witness."). Speaking from his deathbed in America a month later, Erich Kahler, the intellectual historian, ascribed Celan's suicide to "the terrible psychic burden - the burden of being both a great German poet and a young Central European Jew growing up in the shadow of the concentration camps."15

Kahler, who had written on the disintegration of form in the arts, now testified that "Only in Celan has this process attained an inner and paradigmatic necessity."16 Celan "deconstructed" German not as a result of a literary theory but out of the very impulse that led him to write poetry. Accused of obscurity and "encodings," Celan countered with "undissembled ambiguity":

I try to reproduce cuttings from the spectral analysis of things, to show them in several aspects and permutations at once ... I see my alleged abstractness and actual ambiguity as moments of realism, (cited in Felstiner 232)

MAURICE FRIEDMAN 59

To grasp the data which Celan's poems hold onto asks too much of the reader, comments Felstiner, yet Felstiner himself protests, "but what is too much, given this history?" (254).

Celan does not represent any tradition. He does not stand within any community, not even that of Israel, nor, for all of his attachment to the Kabbala, Hasidism, and Buber, was he the spokesman for any tradition the way Eliot was for Catholic Christianity. His very existence as a Ruma- nian Jewish survivor of the Nazi camps living in Paris and writing in German left Celan forever in exile, as Martin Buber was not. In Celan the poem goes beyond any background that the ordinary reader could possi- bly puzzle out by references or even scholarship. True to what he and his contemporaries had experienced Celan could not offer a comfortable mirror of a less fragmented, less ambiguous, less absurd, or less eclipsed existence.

San Diego State University

NOTES

I am indebted to Drs. James Lyon and Heikc Behl and to Eugenia Friedman for their critical suggestions in response to earlier drafts of this paper.

1. Lyon quotes Celan in this article: "Gedichte... halten auf... cine ansprcchbares Du vielleicht, auf cine ansprechbare Wirklichkeit" (Bremen Speech, p.ll, cited in Lyon 111). "Das Gedicht ist cinsam. Es ist einsam und unterwegs. Wer es schreibt, bleibt ihm mitgegeben. Aber steht das Gedicht nicht gerade dadurch, also schon hier, in der Begcgnung - im Geheimnis der Begegnung? Das Gedicht will zu einem Andern, es braucht dieses Anderc, es braucht ein Gegenuber. Es sucht es auf, es spricht sich ihm zu" (cited in Lyon 1 19, n.8). "Das Gedicht [ist] eine Erscheinungsform der Sprache und damit scinem Wesen nach dialogisch" (cited in Lyon 1 1 6).

Lyon contrasts Celan's dialogical poetry with modern poetry in general: "The dialogical impulse evident throughout Celan's poetry flies... in the face of Gottfried Benn's pronouncement that the modern poem is a monologue. While the intense, some- times desperate struggle to enter into a dialogue might fail or at least experience frustra- tion, the basic impulse to reach out and establish contact with a higher, more meaningful reality distinguishes his poems from almost all the poems of the modern tradition which trace their origins to Baudelaire and Rimbaud" (119). Buber holds that even lyric poetry is a dialogue between I and Thou, but I do not know whether he would have applied this dictum to the specific modern, monological strain of poetry to which Lyon refers.

2. "The concept of dialogue... Celan shares with Buber. The same can be said of his concern with the encounter [or 'meeting,' as Buber preferred to translate Begegnung] as the

60 Religion & Literature

basis for establishing a dialogue, since it involves the elemental experience of 'otherness.' The desire to break out of the isolation that imprisons modern man and to transform an indifferent It-world into a personal Thou-world by addressing it concerns both think- ers. . .. A number of radical differences set them apart, one of the most pronounced being their outlook on reality. Buber wishes to probe a reality which has been neglected by recent thought, but which nevertheless exists.... In contrast, Celan feels compelled first to create a new reality through poetry, since the act of creation precedes the possibility of contact.... Cclan's world is admittedly an internal one of highly personalized experience" (Lyon 117).

3. Paul Gelan, Meridian [Rede anldsslich der Verleihung das Georg-Buchner-Preises], cited in German in Foot 207 (my translation). It was only after noting the striking resemblance between Buber's terminology and Celan's that I came across James K. Lyon's "Paul Celan and Martin Buber: Poetry as Dialogue."

4. In 1958 Celan titled an etching of his wife Gisele's "Rencontre - Begegnung' (meet- ing). Celan's meeting at that time was with the Russian poet Osip Mandelshtam (1891- 1938), whose work Celan translated into German, seeing himself as Mandelshtam's "secret addressee." "Only faithless I am true... / I am Thou when I am I," he translated Mandelshtam in consonance with a love poem he himself wrote in 1948 (Fclstincr 128,133).

5. See Friedman, Problematic Rebel: Melville, Dostoievsky, Kafka, Camus; To Deny Our Nothingness: Contemporary Images of Man; and The Scandal of the Particular: A Search for Meaning in Modern Literature (forthcoming).

6. Celan himself makes explicit how the movement "ad absurdum" is also a movement to the here and now, fully present uniqueness of dialogue and the Dialogue with the Absurd: "Das einmal, das immer wieder einmal und nur jetzt und nur hier Wahrgenommcne und Wahrzunehmende. Und das Gedicht ware somit der Ort, wo alle Tropen und Metaphern ad absurdum gefuhrt werden wollen" (cited in Foot 209).

7. 1 am indebted to Dr. Hcike Behl for the interpretation of this poem. 8. "Celan turns most Jewish in struggling with Jewish faith," comments Fclstiner (169). 9. 1 have used both Hamburger's and Felstiner's translation of "Psalm." See Felstiner

168. James Lyon does not see this ambiguity in "Psalm": "The bitterness at the loss of God

is heard more strongly in 'Psalm' (iv, 23) than in almost any other poem.... |It represents | a terrible indictment of God; in ['Psalm'] the charge is, ironically, that God does not even exist:

Niemand kentet uns wieder aus Erde und Lehm, micmand bespricht unsern Staub. Niemand. Gelobt seist du, Niemand....

He fails to create dijemand. Instead of finding the identity he seeks in a Thou, he only succeeds in finding an anonymous, impersonal Niemand where God should be" (Lyon 1 18). Lyon quotes Siebert Prawer to the effect that Celan is a "natural God-seeker who has failed to find God, yet cannot leave off calling into nothingness and emptiness in hope of an answer." This is to fail to understand the meeting with the "eternal Thou" which takes place through the finite Thous, whether or not one "believes" in God, and it is also to miss

MAURICE FRIEDMAN 6 1

the positive meaning of the Dialogue with the Absurd. On the other hand, I take a position very similar to Lyon's in my interpretation above of Cclan's "There Was Earth Inside Them" as an embodiment of the eclipse of God.

10. I am indebted to Dr. Heike Behl for this and a number of other insights into the relation between Celan and Jewish mysticism.

1 1. Cclan, cited in Fclstiner 241. In the Lurian Kabbalah actually it is not shards that are spoken of but the divine sparks that fall into the darkness and arc surrounded by shells of darkness (Kelipoth). Our uplifting of these divine sparks through our kavanah, or intention, is tikkun. Celan, however, uses shards. If we are to take the metaphor literally, shards would refer not to the light that the original vessels contained but to the fragments of the broken vessels. It is precisely that metaphor that I used a quarter of a century ago in a speech at ajewish summer camp to denote the double exile of the Jews - not only from Israel but also from the Covenant that once made them whole so that now one Jew finds her identity through Jewish food, another through Yiddish, a third through Hebrew, a fourth through Jewish song, a fifth through Zionism, and a sixth through a watered-down religiousness unconnected with the Covenant. When a shliach (an American woman who had made Aliyah and was at the summer camp as a messenger from Israel) protested that she did not want to be a shard, I pointed out that when we were in Israel four months in 1960 and seven in 1 966, most of the Israelis we knew were constantly looking for shards in archeological digs and the like!

1 2. 1 am again indebted to Dr. Heike Behl for this interpretation. 1 3. Among the inscriptions Celan wrote on the end pages in his copy of Kafka's stories

on one of his last stays at the psychiatric clinic, Felstincr found shaddai shaddai, the ineffable name of God in Hebrew, followed by the Shema ("Hear of Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord Is One"), the watchword of Israel and the martyr's millennial cry (see Felstincr 230).

Andre Neher, the distinguished French Jewish theologian, wrote an impressive essay on "Shaddai: The God of the Broken Arch (A Theological Approach to the Holocaust)" in which he implicitly paralleled Buber's metaphor of the eclipse of God about which he has elsewhere written explicitly. With a paradoxical insistence very close in spirit to that of Celan, Neher insisted that Shaddai means at once God of the Promise (God of the Covenant) and God of Silence. What Neher says about the dialogue with the silent God who is beyond dialogue might be taken as a paraphrase of much of Celan'spoetry:

The God who is sufficient unto himself - Shaddai - is the God who has no need of men, no more than he needs any being other than his own. He is the God of the farther slope, of the inaccessible, of the unfathomable, the God who eludes creation, revelation, communication. This God who is sufficient unto himself is likewise self-sufficient in his Word: He is the God beyond dialogue. He requires no partner, neither to whom to address the Word, nor from whom to receive a reply. He is the God without an echo, without yesterday and without tomorrow, the God of absolute Silence.

The grave theological point with which we are now confronted is that this God of absolute Silence persists in speaking even across this Silence; that this God beyond dialogue provokes man and dares him to take up the challenge of dialogue; that this God without echo, without yesterday and without tomorrow, imposes his intolerable presence on the very instant, on the hie et nunc...

[W]e sense [here] the shock-effect of a brutal, experienced reality, the throb- bing trace of an event. This event, whose very name is the most tragic invitation to

62 Religion & Literature

an encounter with Shaddai, this new extremity of the history of the covenant, is the event of Auschwitz. (Neher 1 55, 1 58) 14. Felstiner does compare their struggle with language: "Even Rosenzweig, painstak-

ingly translating the Bible up through Isaiah before he died in 1929, could scarcely have imagined the path of someone like Paul Celan" (252).

15. Erich Kahler, cited in Felstiner 247. 16. Letter from Erich Kahler to Werner Wcbcr, 22 May 1970, cited in Felstiner 287.

WORKS CITED

Buber, Martin. "The Dialogue between Heaven and Earth." On Judaism. Ed. Nahum N. Glatzer. New York: Schocken, 1967.

. Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation of Religion and Philosophy. Ed. Maurice Friedman, et al. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities P International, 1988.

. Derjude und sein Judentum. Gesammelte Aufsatze und Reden. Koln: Joseph Melzer Verlag, 1963.

. The Knowledge of Man: A Philosophy of the Interhuman. Ed. Maurice Friedman. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities P International, 1988.

. Pointing the Way: Collected Essays. Ed. and trans, by Maurice S. Friedman. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities P International, 1990.

. "Replies to My Critics. In The Philosophy of Martin Buber, trans. Maurice rnedman.

. "The Word That Is Spoken." In The Knowledge of Man: A Philosophy of the Interhuman, trans. Maurice Friedman.

Celan, Paul. Last Poems. A Bi- lingual Edition. Trans. Katharine Washburn and Margaret Guillemin. San Francisco: North Point P, 1986.

. Poems of Paul Celan. Trans. Michael Hamburger. London: Anvil P Poetry, 1988. Felstiner, John. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven: Yale UP, 1955. Foot, Robert. The Phenomenon of Speechlessness in the Poetry of Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Guenter Eich,

Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan. Studien zur Germanistik, Anglistik und Komparatistik. Ed. Armin Arnold and Alois M. Haas. Vol. 110. Bonn, Germany: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1982.

Friedman, Maurice. Problematic Rebel: Melville, Dostoievsky, Kafka, Camus. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1970.

. To Deny Our Nothingness: Contemporary Images of Man. 3rd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978.

Hamburger, Michael. Introduction to Poems of Paul Celan. Kahler, Erich. The Inward Turn of Narrative. Trans. Richard and Clara Winston. Princeton:

Princeton UP, 1973. Lyon, James K. "Paul Celan and Martin Buber: Poetry as Dialogue." PMLA 86 (1971):

110-120. Neher, Andre. "Shaddai: The God of the Broken Arch (A Theological Approach to the

Holocaust)." In Confronting the Holocaust: The Impact of Elie Wiesel, eds. Alvin H. Rosenfeld and Irving Greenberg. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978 .

Schilpp, Paul Arthur and Maurice Friedman, cds. The Philosophy of Martin Buber. The Library of Living Philosophers. LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1967.

Article Contentsp. 43p. 44p. 45p. 46p. 47p. 48p. 49p. 50p. 51p. 52p. 53p. 54p. 55p. 56p. 57p. 58p. 59p. 60p. 61p. 62

Issue Table of ContentsReligion & Literature, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Spring, 1997)Front MatterSoul-Making: Art, Therapy and Theology in Keats, Hillman and Bakhtin [pp. 1-15]The Call to Prayer from the Cypress Tree: Modernity and Redefining the Spiritual in Persian Poetry [pp. 17-42]Paul Celan and Martin Buber: The Poetics of Dialogue and "The Eclipse of God" [pp. 43-62]Negative Capability and the Mystery of Hope in Malamud's "The First Seven Years" [pp. 63-94]Book ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 95-101]Review: untitled [pp. 103-108]Review: untitled [pp. 109-116]

Book NoticesReview: untitled [pp. 117-118]Review: untitled [pp. 119-122]Review: untitled [pp. 123-124]

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