Adorno

Gaining Recognition for Critical Theory 403

tains, you Big and me Little, you the prattler and me the prattler,

both of us with our walking-sticks, with our names, the ineffable

ones, we with our shadows, our own and the strange ones, you

here and me here.^185

In this ‘Conversation in the Mountains’, Celan hoped to discover himself
through the imagined counterpart of the other. He sent it to Adorno after
learning from Hermann Kasack, the president of the German Academy
for Language and Literature, that he was to receive the renowned
Büchner Prize for that year. In his letter to Adorno, Celan wrote:
‘Here... comes the little prose piece of which I told you in Frankfurt,
ogling its way up to you in Sils Maria.... Even the title is “Jewish
German”... I would really like to know whether you like it.’^186 Shortly
before he wrote this letter, he and Adorno had finally met in person in
Frankfurt. Celan may have come to Frankfurt in order to hear the
poetics lectures that were being given that year by Marie Luise Kaschnitz,
with whom he had been friendly for years.^187 This was an annual course
of lectures initiated in part by Helmut Viebrock. Kaschnitz was giving
the second series in the summer of 1960, after Ingeborg Bachmann had
given the first set in the previous winter semester. That Adorno’s philo-
sophy meant a lot to Celan can be seen from the fact that his literary
response to the ‘failed meeting in the Engadine’ formed part of his speech
of thanks for the award of the Büchner Prize on 22 October. Here he
defended the view that poetry must become a ‘calling into question’, it
must tend towards a ‘falling silent’, and a poem must assert itself ‘at its
own margins’.^188 All these ideas fitted in with similar ones in the essays
in Adorno’s Notes to Literature. Months before Celan’s speech of thanks
Adorno had responded positively to Celan’s prose text. He quoted from
his interpretation of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in the last chapter of his
monograph. In doing so, he wished to indicate that the dialogical struc-
ture of the controversial exchange in ‘Conversation in the Mountains’
had not escaped his notice: ‘It seems to me that a musical element really
has made its way into poetry.’ At the same time, he congratulated Celan
on winning the Büchner Prize: ‘Of all the German literature prizes, it is
more or less the only one that really means anything.’^189
When Adorno gave three lectures at the Collège de France in spring
1961, he arranged for Celan to be given a personal invitation. Celan
was in fact present at the first lecture on 15 March on the subject of
‘Le Besoin d’une ontologie’. During his week’s stay in Paris, Adorno
also tried to introduce Celan to Beckett, but without success, and
undoubtedly to his disappointment. For these were the two artists he
undoubtedly had in mind when he wrote in an essay that he published
in the Merkur in 1962:

The concept of a cultural resurrection after Auschwitz is illusory

and absurd, and every work created since then has to pay the