"Todesfuge/Deathfugue"

The poet Paul Celan was born Paul Antschel in a German-speaking Jewish family in Czernowitz, which at that moment was in Romania. According to John Felstiner, an important translator of his work, Celan probably wrote the poem “Todesfuge” or “Deathfugue” during 1943-1944 when he was in a forced-labor camp. His parents died in the camps during the war. Many consider this work to be an important, perhaps the most important, poem to come from a survivor of the Holocaust. At any rate, it is a seminal work, that is, an art piece that forms the basis for other artistic work. Various twentieth century composers, visual artists, and architects acknowledge the impact of Celan’s poetry and specifically this poem, on their own contributions.

As a poet of witness, Celan fills nearly every line of “Deathfugue” with disjointed verbal material from many sources, including descriptions of specific moments in the camps. Simultaneously, he refers to music, Bach, Wagner, the tango, perhaps, and German drinking songs, to literature including, Genesis, Faust’s blonde heroine Margareta from Goethe, and the Jewish beauty, dark-haired Shulamith, from the Bible’s "Song of Songs." In its earliest published version, in a book discussing his experience translating the poet called Paul Celan: Poet Survivor Jew, Felstiner explains that the first printed version of the poem, originally written in German, appeared in Romanian as “Tangoul Morţii” or “Tango of Death.” There seems to be a strong connection with the poem and music from the camps; often an orchestra would accompany the arrival of people to the camps on trains.

At any rate, Celan changed the musical form mentioned in the earlier title to “Fugue,” an effect that strengthens the reference to the repetitive structure and recurrent motifs of the poem itself, while simultaneously referring to classical German composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who both used the form with its repetitions of an initial musical statement.

Felstiner talks about the minimalism and the lack of accessibility of the poem as a difficulty in translating it to English. Celan himself recognized the need for a sense of encounter for the reader similar to the one that occurred for him as writer (Felstiner xvi). For me, that is always what must happen in the creating of a work and in the communication of that work with the reader or audience. The poem is not so much a representation of the thing, it is a thing in and of itself. The translator of the poem also makes the point that although the poem appears metaphoric on many levels, and no doubt is, at the same time much of it takes as its material actual scenes from the camps that are quite literal.

In looking at lines of the poem specifically, certain images repeat and intensify as the poem accelerates. The poem begins with the following lines that change as the poem progresses, as the theme and variations manifest.

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening
we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink
we shovel a grave in the air there you won't lie too cramped
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margarete
writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are all sparkling,
      he whistles his hounds to come close
he whistles his Jews into rows has them shovel a grave in the ground
he commands us to play up for the dance.

The “black milk”—what is that about? We are in the camps. Celan has directly landed us there. Milk is usually thought of as nourishing: this milk does not nourish. The two words come directly after the title and seems linked inextricably—black milk/deathfugue. As a writer myself, I hesitate to play the game of this-line-means-this. I’m more comfortable talking about what the poem does, how the poet works. Fugue-like, the black milk repeats and repeats throughout the poem as “we drink and we drink,” with its echoes of the German beer hall. Drink what? Death, ash, grief, emptiness? “We shovel a grave in the air.” We shovel and shovel while a “man lives in the house he plays with his vipers.” This line will repeat with variations throughout the poem. This man has power in the camps, “he lives in the house” and writes “your golden hair Margarete.”

Each of these lines will return, each time more horrible, faster, and in bizarre ways more accessible. Each phrase or part of phrase is disjointed, cubistic almost. Yet the whole is clear and black. Felstiner, as translator makes a brave leap with this poem as he moves through it. He translates less and less to English as he trains his reader to read the German. By the end of the poem we are entirely in German and the sense of abomination barely allows us to breathe.

The two women in the poem need another note. Margarete is Goethe’s heroine in “Faust.” Celan places Goethe and Margarete, as the heart of Germany’s enlightenment, blonde here, and a romantic ideal. How indeed to reconcile her presence with Shulamith, the Jewish maiden, now with her ashen hair, who has been transformed from the earlier line, “the stars are all sparkling…he whistles his Jews into rows.” At the end of the poem we have Death as the master. Ashen-haired Shulamith, the final word.

der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland

dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Sulamith

Anselm Kiefer and his "Todesfuge" Paintings

Anselm Kiefer, a German artist born in 1945, developed a series of works based on Paul Celan’s poem “Todesfuge.” These paintings bear the names "Margarete" and “Sulamith.” I first saw images of a couple of these works in an essay by Lisa Saltzman in Barbie Zelizer’s Visual Culture and the Holocaust called “Lost in Translation: Clement Greenberg, Anselm Kiefer, and the Subject of History.” I'd like to spend a little time discussing the essay, but I'd like to say right away that I am having serious trouble with the premise and the reasoning.  On the other hand, I did find the paintings seemed to give themselves up to me in an exciting way and to lead me to a wide range of accompanying thoughts. Let me explain a little of what’s going on in the essay, along with my own responses to it, and then on to the art work.

The essay itself works inductively. Saltzman circles her subject quite a while before finally showing her intent. She expresses a belief that Kiefer ultimately takes a page from Greenbergian criticism and removes historical and biographical concerns from the "Todesfuge" paintings, particularly the cryptlike “Sulamite” which functions for her “as sepulcher…then, as a space not of mourning and memorialization, but of melancholia and forgetting, where the remains of history give way to ashen remainder”(85). Saltzman comes to the convoluted conclusion that Kiefer's "Todesfuge" paintings are removed from history.  Sulamith exists in the painting, not as image, according to Saltzman, but only as a name in the corner of the canvas.  Saltzman goes on to ask, "[D]oes this mean that [Sulamith], and with her, history, is missing as well, that all are, indeed, lost, irrevocably, in translation?"(83)  She comes to this conclusion in a syllogistically-challenged way:  given that Clement Greenberg established an important reputation in the world of art history by eschewing interest in historical reference in artworks to establish a standard in modernism and given that Clement Greenberg translated and published Paul Celan’s poem “Todesfuge” in 1955, therefore an artwork, such as Kiefer's, that takes that poem as subject must also have removed a historical nature from the work.

Saltzman can’t reconcile Greenberg's act of translating such a historically charged piece with his visual art criticism which rejected historical and biographical reference in favor of high modernism. His essays and sponsorship helped build the careers of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko who had left referential art behind. Saltzman can’t seem to get her head around the possibility that Greenberg’s translations of Celan came from a different place in his brain or heart. Therefore, she argues that Anselm Kiefer may well have left history behind, too. Her essay is over-intellectualized and, in ways, unfortunate.

Kiefer’s work from the beginning has explored the ambiguous experience of being a German artist after Auschwitz, after the Holocaust.  The work that first brings him to the attention of the art world is the series of controversial photographs in which he has himself photographed in various locations doing the Nazi salute.  Often as subject for his work he incorporates Jewish mysticism or an interest in the Kabbalah.  Probably a good argument can be made that he works with a symbolic, perhaps personal vocabulary.  Clearly he is not working in a representational manner.  Kiefer was born in 1945.  As he comes to understand anything about the Holocaust, he arrives to the images, often photographs that present the atrocities of the camps.  Those have taken on symbolic valence.  Kiefer seems to incorporate this symbolic mythology into the "Todesfuge" paintings.  All of that argues for me that this series does not abandon historical reference, but uses it to express the never-again imperative.  Despite Saltzman's theory, there is no "lost in translation" sense to these powerful paintings.

All this said, I am excited that Lisa Saltzman’s essay carried me to a new place personally by introducing me to the "Todesfuge" paintings. Anselm Kiefer has been on the edge of my radar with works such as his “Seven Heavenly Palaces.” As I viewed Saltzman’s images from the Todesfuge work, I felt their power.

Above is one of the Margarete paintings.  Kiefer has used straw to stand in for her golden hair.  Fires light the strands.  Below is the Sulamith image that Saltzman imagines has left behind historical reference. Never mind the crematorium-like structure, or crypt with its possible references to a menorah in the structure of the columns.  Kiefer uses ash as material.  That's not even representational.  Ash is ash.

The relationship between Celan's poem and Kiefer's paintings lines up with a long held interest I have had in ekphrasis or the translation of one work of art into another medium. I began thinking about ways that Celan’s “Todesfuge” manifests in visual art, music, and architecture. I turned to John Felstiner’s book, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, with his detailed description of his own experience translating “Todesfuge” to “Deathfugue,” which has become the standard English translation of the poem. The poem and its descendants opened various avenues for me. I am interested in exploring in a future journal entry how “Your ashen hair Sulamith” in the poem transmigrates to the painting.  Also, I am taking a look at Sir Harrison Birtwistle's use of "Todesfuge" in an avant-garde, musical composition Pulse Shadows.  Of course, Daniel Libeskind's use of "Todesfuge" plays an important role in his architecture in the Jewish Museum in Berlin.  Lots to think about here.

“The Artist as Secondary Witness"

The Introduction to Dora Apel’s Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witness

As I read Dora Apel’s introduction to her book(3-8) concerning art of secondary witness, that is, art coming from people who were not direct survivors of the Holocaust, I am struck by what I call the repetitions of patterns of three among the critics. Here’s what I mean by that. Various scholars offer a pair of opposing views by which to investigate the Holocaust. Within a gap or abyss or contradiction separating these comes a suggestion of a third way combining the other two in some paradoxical fashion. This mediated alternative often serves as the place art becomes possible.

For instance, according to Apel, Roger Simon examines ways to preserve remembrance of traumatic history. His first strategy focuses on “strategic practice,” a sociopolitical strategy that looks toward a better future and a sense of never-again with an emphasis to learn to live with and to deal with loss despite proof of continuing genocides around the world. The opposing pedagogical strategy, “difficult return,” recognizing that horrors continue, intends to “bring the dead into presence,” which often leads obsessively to despair. The third way, which often works through art, realizes that meaning changes over time. The telling and retelling of the story and the story of the story become the focus. We have a work like Maus, that moves into the abyss that exists in the lives of both Art Spiegelman and his father, a Holocaust survivor, as the author draws and writes their personal stories to preserve memory.

Also according to Apel, Michael Rothberg offers two mutually exclusive strategies. 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. Again, 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.”

As I read these and other strategies I am struck with a non-pedagogical insight. Although I am capable of considerable detachment and can follow along with scholarly paradigms, my personal viewpoint comes as maker, not critic. I have a sense that the scholars themselves in this introduction come close to the place of abyss, into the idea of paradox, right at the fulcrum of much of art-making itself whether triggered by the Holocaust or by something else.

Art often, not always, comes from obsession and traumatic remembrance. I turn to a favorite artist, Louise Bourgeois, now 98 years old. In a book of writings and interviews, “Destruction of the Father Reconstruction of the Father,” she talks about the role of the unconscious. “There is something very special in being able to sublimate your unconscious, and something very painful in the access to it. But there is no escape from it”(164). My sense is that this is the third way that these scholars are accessing. Often the key is to reside in the heart of paradox, in the inescapable struggle and pain to make art and to understand anything about the nature of personal and artistic reality, where events such as the Holocaust are both knowable and unknowable, rational and horrific in the unconscious mind. Secondary witnesses as artists often do not choose their points of entry or even their responses. We come to their work and enter into the abyss with them. In the strategic paradigms that Apel presents us, the scholars come along, too, into that place.

"Ukraine's Got Talent"

The other day my mother sent one of those pop culture emails making the rounds. This one showed a young woman Kseniya Simonova, who recently won the finals in a TV program named Ukraine’s Got Talent, something of an American Idol knock-off. The woman created sand paintings on a large light-table that featured scenes from German invasion of Ukraine [USSR] during World War II. While it may not be correct to consider this invasion part of the Holocaust, one in four people living in Ukraine at the time of what they locally called the Great Patriotic War died. Watching the video, analyzing its circumstances, and reflecting on its merits either as a work of art or as a moment of witness may prove useful as I move ahead exploring questions to ask concerning ways that art and poetry contribute to the conversation concerning the Holocaust itself.

Here’s what happens in the images Simonova creates in sand. First, a couple in love sits on a bench. The war planes come, he disappears, a tear stains the woman’s cheek, a baby arrives. The chaos of war returns, the woman receives news he is dead. Then we see the face of an old woman, more tears on cheeks and, based on varying interpretations, we next see either Ukraine’s "Monument to an Unknown Soldier" [Sailor] or a marker on the man’s grave. The final scene shows the woman looking out a window with her young child. The image of a sailor, hands pressed against the glass, looks in.

In the video, people in the audience cry. The judges cry. People receiving this online email cry as they watch the beautiful woman in a nunlike black dress choreograph this sand painting that looks almost like an animation. She obviously has talent as an artist and as a performer. The prize, varying by accounts of the contest, ranges from $75,000 to $125,000 US.

As I watched the video, I felt discomfort about the whole experience. Let me try to analyze what I think was going on with the production as a whole and then to separate out my own reaction. At the time that Kseniya Simonova appeared on the reality show in September of 2009, the country was in the middle of what the Guardian.co.uk spoke of as a “fraught presidential election campaign …underway ahead of a vote in January 2010 and a deepening financial crisis.” This video also had much in common with the viral video with the unlikely winner on a sister program Britain’s Got Talent, singer Susan Boyle. The reality show platform requires the winner to be an unlikely candidate to win, Susan Boyle because of her appearance, Simonova because she paints in sand. A dream may be part of the equation. Susan Boyle wants to be a star. Simonova presents a world rocked with war with hope of catharsis, perhaps through having a child. Her images of destruction replaced by those of healing seem powerful. One of the most important aspects of both comes from their dependence on a public vote. People choose the winners based, often enough, on emotional response, not on artistic merit. Both are part of a global franchise called Got Talent. The word franchise signals the selling of goods and services.

I felt grateful to Simonova and to Ukraine’s Got Talent as I watched. I began a list of questions that I feel a work of art, of witness, needs to address. All of these felt lacking in the video I saw. First, I want to see something authentic, real, earned. The images in the sand painting were generic and sentimental. How easy to draw the tear in the eye as the lover goes to war. How obvious the baby in the early moments of the piece, the small child later. I had no sense of whose story this was. Or to what purpose beyond the winning of the contest did the creation of the sand painting lend itself. I am a huge believer in art for art’s sake. Yet, if a work considers itself political, then how and what does it argue. Intent should go beyond the simplistic “War is bad” statement this piece makes. Also I want accuracy. As I surfed the Web concerning the video, I discovered the town portrayed was actually in Romania at the beginning of World War II, not Ukraine. I want to feel that there is a sense of layering, that there is more to discover in the piece, that everything is not right there on the surface and obvious. Perhaps most important for this to be art, I want to feel that the artist herself has put something at risk. I want to feel a sense of danger in the art itself, that the artist has gone way inside to a place of personal discovery. Then, maybe I’ll be able to feel something, too.

"Fascinating Fascism"

In 1975, The New York Review of Books published this review by author and literary theorist Susan Sontag about a new book of photographs by Leni Riefenstahl, the director of the Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will. The new volume, The Last of the Nuba, takes a look at the people of southern Sudan. Rather than examining the photographs first, Sontag discusses Riefenstahl’s biography as presented on the book jacket and an introduction to the book, both “full of disquieting lies.” In the essay itself and in letters to the editor that follow there is much back and forth concerning the facts of Riefenstahl’s life and career that for the most part have not been resolved today. Much of what-did-she-know, who-did-she-know, and when-did-she-know-it is still debated today.

Instead of engaging in those questions and in the possibility of Riefenstahl’s rehabilitation, I am personally more drawn to examining Sontag’s description of a fascist aesthetic. While the Nuba photos portray an aboriginal society dedicated to ritualistic wrestling, Sontag sees various preoccupations in the Nuba photos that work in a continuum from Triumph of the Will. Both sets of images deal with domination and submission within the context of spectacle.

The above image could as well have been taken from Riefenstahl’s work during the Nazi era if not for the race of the wrestlers. We see here domination, submission, and ritual spectacle on the part of the tribal group amassed for the matches. Sontag further defines this fascist aesthetic in part as “the ideal of life as art [and] the cult of beauty."

In this kind of analysis lies Sontag’s strength. She wraps huge ideas into each component. How else to look at the Third Reich if not as a saga of domination and submission? Many would argue that the stakes were never higher. Whether the domination had to do with territory or the conquering of individual human spirit, the Nazis’ aim was total victory. With the movement into country after country until the Germans occupied most of Europe and North Africa, Hitler’s forces seemed insatiable. On a personal or human level, anyone who was different from the Aryan ideal had to flee or submit completely to the Nazi authority which lead to loss of rights, imprisonment, and death. These persecuted people included the mentally retarded, homosexuals, political opponents, and Gypsies, as well as Jews.

Eric Rentschler, in his book, The Ministry of Illusion speaks to Sontag’s next point that top Nazis held to the ideal of life as art: “If the Nazis were movie mad, then the Third Reich was movie made”(1). Ample evidence exists that much of the orchestration and scheduling of the Nuremberg Rallies coordinated with their filming. Rentschler points out that Goebbels successfully used various media to accomplish such ends: film, of course, celebrations, light shows, rallies, and mass extravaganzas filled with “flags, uniforms, and emblems.” Many of the leaders lived lives surrounded by the documentation remained at the heart of the Nazi aesthetic with the intent that these materials would live, along with the regime, for a thousand years.

Sontag is correct that the cult of beauty is central to both Riefenstahl’s work and to the fascist aesthetic. Whatever else critics say about the films, their visual content seems undeniable. Her sense of mise-en-scène, which refers to everything that appears before the camera, the equivalent of scopic regime in photography, is impeccable. Whether she shows men wrestling or repetitions of form seen in workers marching, inherent beauty remains an essential element. When Riefenstahl shows Aryan faces along a parade route, we have a clear picture of this alliance of beauty in art and in the racial beauty prized by the National Socialists.

So, what to make of all this? When I ask myself about my own sense of Riefenstahl’s images, whether of the Nuba tribe or of her films, and about Sontag’s assessment in terms of defining them, I don’t seem to make much progress. I first saw Triumph of the Will in 1985. I still remember where I was personally and the way the airplane came in through the clouds, how Riefenstahl created Hitler as a god, the crowds of people enthralled, beyond thought, a vast machine of people ready to do whatever the regime required. If the filming of that was beautiful, if the destruction that came from the domination and submission of peoples was nearly absolute, if this was a world complete at that moment, I still cannot lose the sense of horror that always accompanies the work. This is work I cannot come to terms with. Sontag helps me analyze elements of that work. The horror I feel has nothing to do with analyis.