What Does The Hymen Look Like ?

Paul Celan 90

P aul Celan, one of the most important German poet of the postwar period, would now become Ninety. He chose to commit suicide in Paris in 1970

His poem "Death Fugue" is the letters poured in to Adorno's famous paradox simply set to Auschwitz could be no more poetry. For powerful as poetry, it converts the power of the stock but in poetry.

To date, it is perhaps the best known and most impressive poetic lament about the terror, the Primo Levi in his book "This Is a Man?" has characterized as the unspeakable: At the gates of the concentration camp silence the words and the witness. Man, as Giorgio Agamben wrote in relation to Levi, reduced to its zero point: At no words in the decision to be void. Those who survived bear to all of this not to be processed still suffering the burden of it is impossible to witness the horror with the right words.

Celan also can take the "Death Fugue" is not a witness.

"Black milk of morning we drink you at night we drink you at noon
and morning we drink you at evening we drink and drink

a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete your ashen hair Shulamith
he plays with the serpents
He calls plays sweet death, death is a master from Germany he calls
is darker then the strings sweeps you into the air as smoke rises
then you have a grave in the clouds because it is not closely "

Rather, it is lethargy, a disturbing song on the sweet smoke from the furnaces. One circles around the unsayable, not symbolized, it also defies any collection. And yes, "death is a master from Germany": The death of his business. The murder was work, work, and for some even calling. The executioners were masters, acting for small mental rationality, according to numbers and tally sheets. The "banality of evil" was in the smooth functioning of the system and the offender, in the performance of duty. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman

brought a few years ago produced the much-criticized thesis that the rationality of the Shoah as an industrial murder no exception, no falling out of the logic of modernity, but at its worst consequences. Celan's words are to remember that the master can recur, even though his eyes are perhaps no longer blue, that he had always ready, just wait for the call to duty comes again.

Perhaps this realization finally sealed the fate of Paul Celan.

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