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."