588 Notes to pp. 402– 404
poet ‘discover his own, historically based identity’. Jean Bollack, Paul
Celan: Poetik der Fremdheit, pp. 25 and 208.
182 Adorno and Celan, Briefwechsel, p. 23ff.; Joachim Seng, Auf den Kreis-
Wegen der Dichtung, p. 260ff.; Seng, ‘Von der Musikalität einer “graueren”
Sprache: Zu Celans Auseinandersetzung mit Adorno’, p. 419ff.; Bollack
believes that Celan’s letter to Adorno is not without irony. After all, it
contains the statement that ‘in this text he is represented by a figure that
is very different from him, his opposite in fact, namely a “Jew”, the very
thing Adorno wasn’t. He was neither great as a Jew, nor a great Jew (like
Scholem). Celan may have visited him in Frankfurt in order to explain the
significance of this substitution’ (Bollack, Paul Celan, p. 211).
183 In his biography of Celan, Felstiner describes this poem, which Celan
wrote towards the end of the war, as ‘the Guernica of postwar European
literature’ (John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, p. 3).
184 The seventeen letters that passed between the two men make this quite
clear.
185 Paul Celan, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3, pp. 169 and 172f. (The allusion to
Lenz going through the mountains is a reference – evidently apposite in
the light of the award to Celan of the Büchner Prize – to the first sentence
of Georg Büchner’s Lenz, a story of the mental breakdown of the Sturm
und Drang poet Johann Michael Reinhold Lenz [trans.].)
186 Celan to Adorno, 23 May 1960, Briefwechsel, p. 27f.
187 Dagmar von Gersdorff, Marie Luise Kaschnitz, p. 176ff.
188 Paul Celan, ‘Der Meridian: Rede anläßlich der Verleihung des Georg-
Büchner Preises’, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3, p. 187.
189 Adorno to Celan, 13 June 1960, Briefwechsel, p. 29f.
190 Adorno, ‘Those Twenties’, Critical Models, p. 48.
191 Claire Goll was the widow of the poet Yvan Goll, the friend of Paul Celan
who was younger than him by thirty years. She had publicly accused Celan
of having plagiarized her late husband’s poems. Together with Kaschnitz
and Bachmann, Peter Szondi had leapt to Celan’s defence. He published
a refutation in the Neue Züricher Zeitung. See Barbara Wiedemann, Paul
Celan: Die Goll-Affäre: Dokumente zu einer ‘Infamie’. In the meantime, it
has become clear that Claire Goll staged the entire affair. Celan, who was
unable properly to defend himself against the accusations, experienced
them as a theft of his own identity.
192 See Adorno and Lenk, Briefwechsel, pp. 113f. and 128ff.; see also Adorno
to Celan, 9 February 1968, Briefwechsel, p. 44f. The Aesthetic Theory,
however, contains a lengthy passage on Celan’s poetry; cf. Adorno,
Aesthetic Theory, p. 321f.; cf. Jean Bollack, Paul Celan, p. 190.
193 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 362.
194 Ibid., p. 367.
195 See Petra Kiedaisch (ed.), Lyrik nach Auschwitz?: Adorno und die Dichter,
p. 9ff.
196 See Enzensberger, Einzelheiten, p. 249ff.; Hildesheimer, Gesammelte Werke,
vol. 7, p. 57ff.
197 Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 44.
198 Alfred Andersch (1914–80) had been interned in Dachau as a communist.
After the war he became the editor of Der Ruf, a magazine that was at
first licensed and then banned by the occupation authorities. He founded