The Literature Book

258

See also: The Little Prince 238–39 ■ The Tin Drum 270 –71 ■

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich 289 ■ Death of a Naturalist 277

A

fter the World War II

concentration camp of

Auschwitz was liberated

on January 27, 1945, and the scale

of the atrocities of the Jewish

Holocaust became known, some

thought the events so horrific that

conventional bounds of literature

would be unfit to describe them.

To Jewish authors, however, some

form of expression was essential.

A mournful heritage

The poet Paul Celan (1920–1970)

was born Paul Antschel into a

family of German-speaking Jews in

Romania. He survived a ghetto and

an internment camp to become,

under the pen name Celan, a major

postwar German-language poet.

But, haunted by his experiences,

he eventually committed suicide.

Poppy and Memory, which

contains more than 50 poems,

was Celan’s second collection

and established his reputation.

It includes his most famous poem,

“Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”).

Written in a musical rhythm, the

poem features Death, in the guise

of the camp commandant, making

prisoners dance by their own

graves. The collection also includes

another of his best-known poems,

“Corona,” which has been read as a

reflection on the attempt to achieve

true love without it becoming an

escape from the truth of the world.

Elsewhere in Poppy and

Memory, haunting images of

the Holocaust recur: ash, hair,

smoke, mold, bitterness, shadows,

death, memory, and forgetting.

In exploring these themes, Celan

expresses the mournful heritage

of organized mass murder. ■

DEATH IS A

GANG-BOSS AUS

DEUTSCHLAND

POPPY AND MEMORY (1952), PAUL CELAN

IN CONTEXT

FOCUS

Literature after Auschwitz

BEFORE

1947 In her poetry collection

In den Wohnungen des Todes

(“In the Apartments of Death”)

Berliner Nelly Sachs describes

her own sufferings and those

of the European Jews.

1947 Italian writer Primo

Lev i’s Survival in Auschwitz

is a first-hand account of his

incarceration in Auschwitz.

1949 German sociologist

Theodor Adorno says that “to

write poetry after Auschwitz is

barbaric,” a condemnation not

of the right to expression but of

the society that had allowed

Auschwitz to happen.

AFTER

1971 The Nazi and the Barber,

a novel by German Holocaust

survivor Edgar Hilsenrath,

adopts the perspective of an SS

officer who assumes a Jewish

identity to escape prosecution.

Black milk of morning

we drink you at night.

“Todesfuge”

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