402 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
shop, had as a child known Nietzsche, he went with Herbert Marcuse to
visit Zuan, who was by then, the early 1960s, into his nineties.
‘We were given a warm welcome in a kind of private office. In fact
Mr Zuan had a good memory. When we pressed him he told us that
Nietzsche used to carry a red parasol, regardless of whether it was
raining or sunny – presumably to provide some protection for his head-
aches. A gang of children, including Zuan, amused themselves smug-
gling stones into the closed parasol so that they all fell on his head when
he opened it up. He would then chase after them, waving the parasol
and uttering threats, but he never caught them. What a terrible situ-
ation for the suffering man, we thought, vainly pursuing his tormentors
and perhaps even thinking they were in the right after all, because they
represented life as opposed to mind.’^180
In August 1959, Adorno should have met the poet Paul Celan in Sils
Maria. The meeting had been arranged by Peter Szondi, who knew both
men well and was aware of the intellectual affinity between the philoso-
pher of determinate negation and the Jewish poet who had been born
in 1920 and who wrote in the language of the murderers, despite his
traumatic experience of the Shoah from which he had barely escaped
with his life. There was potentially a mutual interest, then, as a basis for
a personal acquaintance, but in the event nothing came of the promised
encounter. Celan left the Engadine with his wife Gisèle and his son Eric
and returned to Paris before the Adornos had even arrived.^181 Once
there, he wrote his prose piece ‘Conversation in the Mountains’ and
then entered into correspondence with Adorno.^182 Ever since his poem
Todesfuge,^183 Celan had been looking for a poetic expression for the
unending suffering of the Jews in the death camps. He did not share
Adorno’s consciously provocative verdict of 1951 about the impossibil-
ity of poetry after Auschwitz. Nevertheless his attitude towards Adorno
and his philosophy was one of fundamental sympathy.^184 The hidden
theme of this fictitious ‘Conversation in the Mountains’, an extremely
idiosyncratic text linguistically, unlike any other in the poet’s work as a
whole, was Jewish identity or non-identity, the possibility or impossibil-
ity of art after Auschwitz. At the point when the meeting in Sils Maria
was supposed to take place, Celan was still convinced that Adorno was
a Jew like him. Hence the dialogue between the ‘Jew Big’ and the ‘Jew
Little’:
One evening, when the sun had gone down, and not only the sun,
there went, stepped out of his house, and there went the Jew,
the Jew and the son of a Jew, and with him went his name, the
ineffable one, went and came...
Big came up to Little, and Little, the Jew, told his stick to be
silent in the presence of the stick of Jew Big...
and I know, I know, cousin, I know I met you here, and that we
talked, a lot,... the Jews who came, like Lenz, through the moun-