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.

"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.