Margarete and Sulamith

To better understand the effect of “Todesfuge” “Deathfugue” on the Margarete and Sulamith paintings of Anselm Kiefer, Bonnie Roos in her article, “Anselm Kiefer and the Art of Allusion: Dialectics of the Early Margarete and Sulamith Paintings,” prepares an analysis of both women as alluded to in the poem and in the artwork. In exploring the archetypal role each plays in representing both the Holocaust and Romantic narratives leading up to the time of the National Socialists, Roos goes back into earlier literature to position both of them in terms of the symbolic valence that each carries.

Perhaps Sulamith is the easier of the two to understand in terms of the Romantic narrative in place before the Nazi era. Her status as an “earthly ideal” lies at the center of her choice by both Kiefer and Celan. Portrayed as a favorite wife of King Solomon in the Old Testament’s “Song of Songs,” Sulamith, according to Roos, is “typically viewed as a call to the purity and wonder of monogamous, sensual life, with the marriage of the two lovers representing—depending on the interpreter—differences in race, class, and/or religion overcome by means of a passionate, loving marriage.” After having a quarrel, the two lovers reconcile in a garden. Roos sees this historic imaging of Sulamith as a “Romantic investigation of the sublime.” Without a doubt, Celan shatters that context when he portrays Sulamith as a victim of the Holocaust. Other references also come to play in this portrayal of Sulamith. Roos points out the analysis Felstiner makes in his book on Celan that the name Sulamith references her as a Jewish woman who acts as the embodiment of a bridge, as "the loving and merciful means by which differences are overcome."

As a Romantic ideal, Margarete has an even more complicated imaging system to work through. In Goethe’s work Margarete portrays a woman seduced by Faust. In Goethe’s work, Margarete portrays a woman seduced by Faust. She is blonde and an archetypal German. Her love for Faust is tainted. According to Roos, “Margarete inadvertently kills her mother with a sleeping potion, is responsible for her brother's death while defending her (now dubious) honor, and is left pregnant and abandoned by Faust. As final testimony of her corruption, she drowns her own child.” As both victim and perpetrator, Margarete seems ideally located in the Romantic canon for use by Celan and later by Kiefer to take on the role of beloved to the soldier in “Todesfuge.” At the same time that he writes to her, he is capable of brutalizing and murdering Sulamith. Roos suggests that “the same Romantic dichotomies that allow for the fetishization and objectification of Margarete in some measure sanction[s] the dehumanization of prisoners.”

In the partnering of these two women who represent Romantic ideals, Roos asserts that Celan’s poem “blames German masculinity for the atrocities committed during the Holocaust.” She sees both Margarete and Sulamith as victims to the National Socialist agenda. Surely, it is worth noting that Kiefer keeps the two women separated in the art while working on both sets of paintings. Celan partners the two through repetitions of language even as he keeps each on her own separate line. In the case of both Celan and Kiefer the archetypes function inextricably together. The representation of one has little meaning without the other. They are linked, according to Roos, by their "inseparability and express sadness, rather than anger, at the devastation that such a pairing historically has meant to each."

Anselm Kiefer/Paul Celan

Recently I read a review of Andrea Lauterwein's book Anselm Kiefer/Paul Celan: Myth, Mourning and Memory by Kevin Hart that explores the relationship of Celan's poetry to the artworks of Anselm Kiefer.   My plan here is to take a look at the reviewer's comments and combine them with my own thoughts about the the way the uncanny works as a bridge for the two artists. Into the mix, I'll add my choice of images as I sort out  strategies used by both Kiefer and Celan to similar effect.

Clearly, Celan's poem "Todesfuge"/"Deathfugue" had a powerful effect on Kiefer.  Beginning in 1980 and going for more than twenty-five years, the artist names canvas after canvas either Margarete or Sulamit or a variation of those names, referencing the two women from the poem. (I'd like to add a note here that the naming of the Shulamite works, whether in English or in German lacks consistency in my source materials. I'll reflect those variations in the blog.)  Kiefer uses many of the metaphors and devices connected to the uncanny in connection with the Holocaust that we have looked at earlier in this blog: the use of silence or a sense of void in the paintings, a sense of being unhomed, of a disruption to perception or to the senses, and the juxtaposing of unlikely images and materials to create a feeling of danger and peril in the work. 

The early paintings tend to quote the poem fairly literally.  Kiefer lays the final line of the poem, "Dein  aschenes Haar Sulamit," directly onto the canvas. That line, which in English translates as "Your ashen hair Shulamith," speaks to the beloved of King David, who also functions in the Bible's "Song of Songs" as a stand in for the Jewish people.  The ashen hair, a clear reference to the Holocaust with its ovens, appears representationally in these first paintings, both from 1981--Sulamit, a woman with her long hair.

"Dein Aschenes Haar Sulamit," (1981)
oil on canvas, 51 by 67 inches

 Dein aschenes Haar, Sulamit (1981)

Both of these paintings seem to live in the world of the Holocaustal uncanny through paradox, an appropriate vehicle.  Hair and a voluptuous naked body are what we see. Sulamit in these paintings has not been to the camps.  She has her hair and her sensuality in place.  Yet the mark-making of these two paintings addresses the peril to come, the dark letters and dark, thick paint of the background bring a sense of disruption and urgency to the work.  Blood-red pigment defines her body. Kevin Hart contends that in these harsh strokes Kiefer is "showing how the reality of the Shoah manifests itself to him" (50), that is, that the work itself becomes a manifestation of the Shoah, an aesthetic belief we see shared by all the artists we are considering in this blog. Part of the strategy in these works comes from the shifting of context, that is putting one context within another, which disrupts the original sense, as it were, "unhomes" it, a defining basis for the uncanny.    Each iteration embodies the same sense of atrocity in varying media. Hart goes on to express the sense that "[t]ime and again Kiefer tells us that we cannot ever be 'at home' in the world, and that the desire to be 'at home' in a land, a language, and a history, is itself courting of danger" (51).

In order to understand what has been lost by the Holocaust, what has been "unhomed," Kiefer gives us glimpses of the nationalistic mythologies that the Nazis used as propaganda.  In the poem, Celan repeats his lines about Margarete, "your golden hair Margareta," "Dein goldenes Haar, Margarethe."  Kiefer also quotes that line or parts of it in German on several of these painting.  Instead of depicting Margarete as the body of a woman, he uses real straw and depictions of  fields.  This Margarete is Germany, Aryan, golden-haired land, fertile farmland, homeland. Now it has become nothing but straw.  Hart quotes Kiefer about his process.  "My thought is vertical, and one of its planes was fascism.  But I see all its layers.  In my painting I tell stories in order to show what lies behind history.  I make a hole and I go through" (46).   In that hole and that going through, both Kiefer and Celan move into the uncanny to explore ways the Holocaust disrupts and destroys homeland and "unhomes" all concerned, not just victims, but perpetrators.

Dein goldenes Haar, Margarethe (1981) 

The quality of the uncanny we see as silence, void, or absence, manifests in Kiefer in certain of the Sulamith, paintings.  As I noted in an earlier blog, the painting below has what might be seen as a reduced reference to Sulamith, her name relegated to a corner.  The sense of void here, of empty space, is palpable.  We see references to the ovens in the death camps, to crypts, to ash.  The reviewer, Kevin Hart explains that "what was dark has become darker now.  In terms of tonality, the silence of Kiefer's canvases is not that of a world momentarily lifted out of time but of a time after the screams of the dying can no longer be heard...The silence of the works is the silence of mourning" (47-48)
 

 Sulamit 1983

Kiefer used as a model for this painting a photograph of a building by German architect Wilhelm Kreis who made work through various political eras in Germany, including the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the Federal Republic. Kiefer subverts Kreis' Funeral Hall for the Great German Soldiers in the making of the above Shulamit painting.  In a similar way to the shifts in meaning that take place in the Margarete paintings, the war memorial in the photo converts the nationalistic structure in the photograph below to a shrine or void or memory space for those who died in the Holocaust in the painting.

Architect Wilhelm Kreis's Funeral Hall for the Great German Soldiers

For over twenty-five years, Kiefer has created these artworks based on the poetry of Paul Celan.  Below is a sculpture that in 1990 takes Shulamith as subject once again.  Media have shifted from canvas to soldered lead, female hair, and ashes. By this point these images have become layers of detritus, sediment.  The form,  moving ever closer to Celan, is a book.

 Shulamith, 1990.

 Book made from soldered lead, with female hair and ashes
64 pages, 101 x 63 x 11 cm.

The themes all remain in place.  Kiefer continues to reference the Holocaustal uncanny in Celan with its sense of disruption, of "unhoming," of silence and the void, of the creation of the thing itself, not a representation of atrocity.  Kevin Hart describes this process of layering as the gathering of the detritus of human suffering that offers "the very feel of the sediments of our past...[that] rise to a sharp point in horror itself" (51).

The Uncanny Jewish Museum Berlin

To understand a little about the nature of the Jewish Museum Berlin as a representation of the uncanny, it may be useful to look at the way that Daniel Libeskind uses the concept in his design. There are two ways into the notion of the uncanny that Libeskind uses architecturally as manifested in the E. T. A. Hoffman Garden of Exile and Emigration and in the Paul Celan Court.

The E.T.A. Hoffman Garden gains its name from a writer that Sigmund Freud discusses in his definitive essay on the uncanny. Here he explains the concept. “[T]he central factor in the production of the feeling of uncanniness [is] intellectual uncertainty; so that the uncanny would always, as it were, be something one does not know one’s way about in. The better oriented in his environment a person is, the less readily will he get the impression of something uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it” (Young, Jewish Museum, 194).

E.T.A Hoffman Garden of Exile and Emigration

 This garden bench shows the use of the uncanny perceptually.

This garden seems upside down with willow oak trees planted on top of the columns.

The Paul Celan Court explores the holocaustal uncanny instead of Freud’s uncanny where its “representation of presence shifts to that of absence” (Kligerman). In this courtyard Libeskind asked Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, Celan’s widow, to design the paving of the space. She used images to represent Kristallsplitter or crystal fragments to memorialize Kristallnacht.

Celan Court

Celan Court. Windows as slashes of light also resemble glass shards from Kristallnacht. This courtyard capture the sense of absence of the Voids within the museum. At the same time, these windows replicate the lines of connection motif within the context of the uncanny.

Originally, in the design of Celan Court two stones were to be engraved with the words Tod and Meister reference Celan’s line in his poem “Todesfuge” or “Deathfugue.”

Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland

Death is a master of Germany

The entire poem works from a sense of the uncanny that Libeskind adopts for the museum. Throughout there is a sense of working through trauma, of moving through the shock itself.

Inside the museum itself, we can see Libeskind’s development of architectural uncanny. He uses voids, slanted halls, claustrophobic spaces, and disorientation in general much the way that Celan does in his poetry. It is difficult for viewers to orient themselves, to find themselves, as it were, at home.

Eric Kligerman in his essay “Ghostly Demarcations: Translating Paul Celan’s Poetics into Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin explains that holocaust uncanny works in a different way from Freud’s uncanny. “Whereas for Freud it is the uncanny figure of the phantom that crosses the line between the living and the dead to approach the individual, this direction is reversed in the holocaustal uncanny: The artists lure the viewer into the space of the dead” (35).  Kligerman goes on to discuss the ways that terror  and estrangement result when this sense of the uncanny is brought into play and the viewer crosses into that alternative space.

Libeskind explains a little about this sense of the uncanny that he incorporates into his design. “I always remember the words of St. Augustine ‘Everyone is permanently leaving but some are leaving with their ankles and feet, and others are leaving with their hearts and souls’”(58).

Libeskind on Trauma

When Daniel Libeskind was chosen as the architect for the Jüdisches Museum Berlin / Jewish Museum Berlin, he needed to reexamine his thoughts on the trauma that is the legacy of the Holocaust. In an essay from the book Image and Remembrance, edited by Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz, he discusses the ways he has approached his own depictions of trauma in various memorial spaces. For my purposes, I'll look at his comments on his various dilemmas in designing the addition to the Kollegienhaus, a former courthouse, built in the 18th century, to create a new museum dedicated to Jewish history in Berlin.

Kollegienhaus

Libeskind describes some of his thoughts concerning the design and building of the museum, which opened in its new form in 2001. One of the most important questions for him involved ways to portray the changes based on absences in Berlin and in the world because of the Holocaust. Very few Jews were left in Berlin after the Holocaust. Yet, before the Nazi regime they had been active contributors to life and culture in the city. Libeskind decides to use architectural voids throughout the museum to explore that sense of physical and cultural absence that came from the deportations and exterminations. “The void embodies the literal annihilation of culture, the annihilation of the carriers of culture” (Libeskind 46).

One of the voids in the museum

To depict the presence of the Jews in pre-Nazi Berlin as social and intrinsic, he takes a look at lines of connections concerning Jews. Generally this comes about in a symbolic form. Libeskind uses what he considers an irrational star matrix as the shape of the addition to the older building.  He bases this shape on complicated geometric formulas derived from street addresses and events through time “as one looks from one place to another, across [Berlin’s] housing projects, across historical events, across the empty sites of Berlin” (53). The intent of using the star shape is also to reference the yellow star Jews were forced to wear during the 3rd Reich. Libeskind explains, “Through the categories or dimensions of architectural thinking I drew the irrational star matrix that connected Germans, Berliners, and Jews across the absence of light…I took the complexity of this matrix as part of the light that comes into the museum, the light that cuts through the windows which are not regular windows, not just holes that bring light to the collection, but rather lights that fall from deep lines of intermarriage and lines of destiny which are irretrievable” (52-53).

 Addition derived from star-shape

Light cutting through windows

Libeskind understands, as any artist does, that a work of art must be the thing, even more than to represent something. To enter into the space of trauma, the visitor to the museum must be in engaged with the trauma, “be in it” (45).  Libeskind captures this sense of trauma by putting the visitor’s body and psyche into the trauma itself. He does that by disrupting perceptions. In the Garden of Exile, he tilts the plane on which people walk. No one can be sure of where to put their feet.

Garden of Exile (exterior)

Garden of Exile from inside

 At the center of the design of the building there are three axes that cut through the spaces of the museum.

One of the design axes

One of these leads to the Holocaust Tower, which is a space in the museum that dead ends. Within, there is a sense of claustrophobia, of peril, of being unable to connect with life outside the tower. Throughout, the architect creates a “state of instability, of disconnection/connection, of disorder/order will be understood intellectually and kinetically. I always remember the words of St. Augustine in The City of God: ‘Everyone is permanently leaving Babel, but some are leaving with their ankles and feet, and others are leaving with their hearts and souls’” (58).

Holocaust Tower, window view

 Holocaust Tower, floor level

The intent with all of these depictions of trauma is for the visitor to come to an understanding of the Holocaust that cannot be captured in a more typical memorial space. By causing a sense of trauma to the visitor, Libeskind helps extend the larger dialogue concerning the Holocaust and its effects.  Instead of freezing the memorial space, he brings it alive.  Each visitor interacts with the space and brings new meaning to that interaction.

In this blog entry I am discussing physical manifestations of trauma for the visitor. In another, I’ll explore Libeskind’s use of the uncanny as it affects the psychological and emotional states of the person exploring the museum.

The Day I Didn’t Go to Dachau

Certain memories of this day are still clear to me. I remember the subway stairs in Munich where my first husband and my two children left me to head for Dachau. This stairway in my mind is wider than subways are in truth. At least double in width. And black. A gaping hole with no other people in the scene but my family disappearing into the dark. My son Russ says this is a false memory. He didn’t go to Dachau that day either he says. One thing I am sure of. He was 16 that morning in July. When I asked him recently where he went instead, he has no memories of Munich or Dachau. He wasn’t with me, I’m sure of that much.

My daughter Laurel had an obsession with the Holocaust. The only request she had about things to see on our trip in 1988 to Germany, both East and West, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Austria was to see a camp. Her chance came in Munich.

While we were in Budapest I had hurt my leg, torn ligaments in my ankle. I was in an old-fashioned plaster cast that covered my toe and went all the way up to my knee. Although I had found a cane to move around a little, the stairs in the subway were way beyond what I could do. So, everyone else went off to their day and I found a café near the subway. I remember drinking Weissbier, or white beer, or wheat beer, and white sausages called Weißwurst or Weisswurst or white sausage. I was alone and spent the day thinking of many things.

I imagine Dachau was on my mind. I had already seen the film Nuit et brouillard. It was easy enough to substitute the images of Auschwitz for Dachau. Mostly I picture grass and barbed wire and buildings off in the distance. There is always an unused train track in the picture.

All these images come back to me as I read Ruth Kluger’s survivor memoir, Still Alive. Why is there a need to maintain the camps she asks. Maybe I agree with her suspicion that Auschwitz is simply a “lucrative venture for nearby Cracow” (68). Could that be? Today, as I’m thinking about Holocaust memorials, I am immersed in Paul Celan’s uncanny and Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin. I think about their use of voids and silence. I think about Ruth Kluger’s calling forth of ghosts. “To conjure up the dead you have to dangle the bait of the present before them, the flesh of the living” (69).

That’s how it is for me with Dachau with my own timescape. I remember the great open maw of the subway. The quietness of my day. My immobility. My family disappearing. How the wind must be blowing across the ruin of the camp. The horrors I do not see but that are with me still all these years later. How alone I am. The way the juices of hot Weißwurst burst in my mouth. How Weißbier cools my throat. That I am alone, but steady enough. That my family, the four of us, will never again find ourselves together after that day. Not really.

Desperately Seeking Celan

Here’s my story for the week. First off, know my plan was to be multi-tasking, as I was trying to understand Paul Celan’s “Todesfuge” and then ways Daniel Libeskind, the architect for the Jewish Museum in Berlin, channeled Celan in creating that building. My goal this week, I thought, seemed centered around the sense of “soul.” I could search out the “spirit” of the building. My task looked easy enough. I had Eric Kligerman’s article, “Ghostly Demarcations: Translating Paul Celan’s Poetics into Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin” in hand. “Todesfuge” is one of those poems I carry in my heart, so I set off to find the connections. First thing I did was write all over the printout of the essay. I mean, all over every page. It’s not that I don’t understand Kligerman as he connects Celan’s work to the voids and halls and lines of the museum. All of it comes together in a clear way for me. A central concept, that of the uncanny, that literary state of being “unhomed,” familiar and foreign and somehow alone, also resonated for me in a way that was, well, comfortable enough. I’ve read the uncanny poetry of Elizabeth Bishop for years. The place that Celan writes from is terrain I recognize. Sometimes I write from there myself.

At any rate, I realized I wasn’t nearly ready to write about the essay. Maybe, I thought to myself, the problem was the German that came from Celan’s speech as he accepted the Georg Büchner Prize in 1960. I don’t have German, right? So to begin to sort out the article, I printed myself a copy of that speech. I read it and marked it up quite a bit, too. The problem was not a lack of understanding. What Celan says about art lines up in important ways with my own work and understanding about the making of art. The problem here is to force this material into some kind of logical mold. That will happen another day. Another day I’ll compress Kligerman’s article into a scholarly shape. Today I prefer to stay in the abyss, the human but uncanny world where Celan wrote and Libeskind designs. In my last semi-scholarly moment, I note that in the following I am not putting quotations into quotation marks.

Okay, so the first thing we need to do is breathe and travel the distance poetry must cover. This will be a search for liberation, for freeing ourselves while encountering the other. The way to do this is by allowing that poet-self to move into free fall, into the terrifying silence. There’s a feeling here that Celan does not quite explain, but has to do with the uncanny, in ways it hangs on the body. For me, it’s as if my human skin is electrical. It has to do with a certain kind of concentration along with a sense of danger. And being brave enough to stay in that state to record that territory, mindful, Celan might say. It has to do with being in the moment, one moment, always one moment, and paying attention. Attention is the natural prayer of the soul (Walter Benjamin, sorry, I slipped on my pledge.) In a while, we’ll do a breathturn. The poem has become a desperate conversation. The encounter, what the poem knows, what the poem needs. There is only one moment and only one place. The poem is still here.

I read to the end of the speech. I found what Celan that day had called “a meridian,” the imaginary line connecting pole to pole around the world. Because he and I had journeyed for a while on that map, in that realm, I came to that word, “meridian” and nearly cried. That’s how it is when the poem is of that world, of the experience itself, not a description. I felt in familiar territory, yet so nearly lost, with only one thin line, the meridian, to guide me. And I knew that would be enough.

Pulse Shadows

In exploring this song cycle that Sir Harrison Birtwistle based on the poems of Paul Celan, it may be useful to see ways the composer worked as a secondary witness to the atrocities of the Holocaust.  In the essay by Dora Apel that I looked at in an earlier blog, Michael Rothberg offers two mutually exclusive strategies for such a viewing. A realist view presumes the Holocaust is knowable and can be translated into a “familiar mimetic universe”; the antirealist analysis refuses any sense of knowability in terms of representation. We find a third strategy that Rothberg calls “traumatic realism,” which may help bridge the gap between the irreconcilable strategies, again by employing a sense of chronological time through the use of ordinary and extraordinary elements to retell the story while bringing into play “contemporary conditions of the telling.”  Both Birtwistle and Celan work through these "contemporary conditions of the telling" by using a sense of the uncanny, that is, by disrupting the sense of realism for themselves and for their listeners or readers.  These strategies appear over and over for us as techniques of witness whether as primary retellers who have experienced the horror or as secondary witnesses who come to such knowledge through other sources.  These markers of the uncanny appear in all the medial forms I will examine in this blog.  The short list includes a sense of obsessive repetition; an inability to find sure footing in a world gone wrong, that is, a sense of disorientation in an environment where the witness has become "unhomed"; a sense of fragmentation, and one of being lost in the void, in the abyss.

Music has often played an important role as inspiration and structure for Paul Celan in his poetry.  His poem “Todesfuge” references the fugue as a compositional strategy.  An early version of the same poem used the word tango in the title instead, “Death Tango.”  Several musical composers reversed that inspiration and have worked with Celan’s poetry as basis for their own compositions.  Sir Harrison Birtwistle, a modernist, once musical director of the Royal National Theatre in London and later Professor of Composition at King's College London, encountered Celan’s work through the translations of Michael Hamburger.   Eventually he wrote a complex score featuring many of the poems, including the fourth part of what he calls the quartet, “Todesfuge.”  An avant-garde composer, he works atonally to capture a sense of the modernism in Celan’s work.  To hear a little of the music be sure to listen to the YouTube video of Pulse Shadows. The liner notes of the album speak of the attempt by the poet to confront the paradox that "experience with which language cannot cope also necessitates language as a means of reconstructing reality" (5).  Birtwistle responds with a strategy in which “melody attempted is as important as melody achieved, while melody achieved is sometimes followed by melody destroyed” (5), perhaps a paradoxical response.

Birtwistle uses certain elements in his work to respond to Celan.  He has his own versions of structural elements that the poet uses, a sense of cyclical ritual based on rhythm and pulse, of fragmentation, and an evocation of the void.  Celan, of course, uses repetitions through out the poem “Todesfuge” to create an incantation of horror.  Words repeat, phrases transform.  In John Felstiner’s translation, “Black milk” intensifies into a drink of death.  “We drink you at midday Death is a master.”  Like Celan, Birtwistle uses certain subjects or motifs over and over.  These motifs enter one section as brief mention and develop more fully as an inversion in a different section of the composition.  Repetition comes with a fugue and anti-fugue sense according to Stephen Pruslin in the liner notes.  In the “Todesfuge” section Birtwistle introduces two subjects.  Pruslin sees the first of these becoming a “ghost subject” that seems to disappear after being featured only in the harmonics, in something of a “dance of death” (6).

Without going into the complex structure of the whole piece at this point, I can at least comment on the strategy of repeating certain subjects in one section and developing them further in another part of the composition.  This sense of fragmentation, of the composition being “sliced,” as Pruslin says, creates a tension while also pressuring the cyclical vocabulary of the music.  Perhaps, as Pruslin claims at the end of his essay, there is a sense in a “spirit true to Celan, [that there are] more songs, and more quartet-movements silently sounding."  Certainly, we end Celan’s “Todesfuge” with its “Sulamith” vibrating into the void.

The use of this void speaks directly to Birtwistle as he follows Celan's lead into the void we associate in part with the Holocaustal uncanny.  As reviewer Paul Griffiths says about the composer's expedition into that world, "Any encounter with Celan must have to do with death," a given which causes these songs to "come not from piling on the pressure but from looking somewhere else, to where the poet knew songs could be found."  That somewhere else, which Griffiths speaks of in terms of "uncanny riddling," functions differently in terms of representation from other art forms we will look at, perhaps because the composer's entry point comes through in English translation. His first acquaintance with the poems is through Michael Hamburger's translation.  As an act of representation, Birtwistle remains several steps removed from the memory functionally created by the poems.  Language, nationality, and generation separate him from Celan's poetry of witness.  Born in 1934 in rural Lancashire, England, he joined a military band as a child.  His understanding of the poem and of the Holocaust comes as the world, undertook the task of understanding, not as German or Jew.  Musically Birtwistle moves into Celan's world as a secondary witness.  Nevertheless, the uncanny that works through the the composer's atonal phrasings leads him to a place in which the review sees that "Sir Harrison is at once at home and a stranger, on a shore--the poem's shore--where what is anciently familiar is the same as what has just been washed new by the last wave."

This sense of the uncanny, along with the repetitions, and the use of the void, that is, what cannot be said, the people who are gone, the emptiness, and desolation, the use of silence, all of these play an important role in both music and poetry.  In this music of secondary witness, time always plays an integral role.  In Birtwistle’s case he uses it to create a “terrible beauty,” a term the translator Michael Hamburger used to express his feelings about the poetry by Celan that he was translating.  As I listen to the music, I feel disoriented, stressed.  The atonality pressures me as does Celan's language.  There is a story here, but I can't reach the narrative.  There is a grief beyond understanding.

Pulse Shadows won a Gramophone Award for best contemporary album in 2002 in Great Britain.