The University of Notre Dame

Paul Celan and Martin Buber: The Poetics of Dialogue and "The Eclipse of God"
Author(s): Maurice Friedman
Source: Religion & Literature, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Spring, 1997), pp. 43-62
Published by: The University of Notre Dame
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PAULCELAN AND MARTIN BUBER:THE POETICS OF

DIALOGUE AND THE ECLIPSE OF GOD

MauriceFriedman
The Poetics of Dialogue
MartinBuberinsiststhat "themysteryof the coming-to-beof language
and that of the coming-to-beof man are one." "Thereis no 'word'that is
not spoken;the only being of a word residesin its being spoken."Indeed,
"Everyattempt to understandthe present continuance of a language as
accessibledetached from the context of its actual speakers,must lead us
of Man
astray,"writes Buber in "The Word That Is Spoken" {Knowledge
ch.5). It is from the spoken word, from human dialogue that language
drawsits ontologicalpower.Languagederivesfrom and contributesto the
sphereof "thebetween,"the I-Thou relationship.Languageis a "systemof
tensions"derivingfrom the fruitfulambiguityof the word in its different
uses by differentspeakers.In "The WordThat Is Spoken"Buberfinds the
struggle for shared meaning essential to humanity:"It is the communal
nature of the logos as at once 'word' and 'meaning' which makes man
man, and it is thiswhichproclaimsitself fromof old in the communalizing
of the spoken word that again and again comes into being" {Knowledge
of
Man 105).
The writtenword is never,for Buber,just a monumentto past dialogue.
It calls out for dialogue with the other, the Thou to whom it is spoken.
Buberdistinguishesbetweenfaithfultruthin relationto the realitythatwas
once perceived and is riow expressed, in relation to the person who is
addressedand whom the speakermakespresentto himself,and in relation
to the factual existence of the speaker in all its hidden structure.This
human truth opens itself to one just in one's existence as this concrete
/?<?/,29.1 (Spring 1997)

43

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person who answerswith faithfulnessfor the word that is spoken by one.

"The truthof languagemustproveitself in the person'sexistence"(Knowledgeof Man 110).

To Buber,it is poetry in particularthat witnesses to the "wordthat is

spoken":
Were there no more genuine dialogue, there would also be no more poetry.... For
the poem is spokenness, spokenness to the Thou, wherever this partner might
be.... Poetry... imparts to us a truth which cannot come to words in any other
manner than just in this one. {Knowledgeof Man 101, 108)

Paul Celan, the RumanianJew who afterthe Second WorldWarwrote

in German and lived in Paris,is not only a majorpoet but also an explicitly
dialogicalliterarytheorist.Celan not only conceivesof language as being
essentially dialogical but like Buber views the poem as leading to the
encounter with an essentiallyother reality embodied in the Thou. For
Celan and Buberboth all art is dialogical.Moreover,poetry createsa new
reality by addressing"an addressableThou." For both men finding and
engaging a Thou in dialogue is indispensablefor human existence (Lyon
111,116,119).' For Celan, indeed, it was a cridecoeur.AsJames Lyon has
pointed out, practicallyeveryone of Celan'spoems,both in its content and
its structure,is an "attempteddialoguewhich tries to establisha link with
existence"(Lyon 116).2Everypoem has explicitlyand often repeatedlythe
Thou, even though the Thou is sometimes"onlythe amorphous,unknowable 'other5to whom all Celan'spoems make theirway" (Hamburger30).
John Felstinerlists more than twenty "addressablethous" which Celan's
lyrics seek but ends with "often something indeterminable,present only
because the speakercalls it du.That word is voiced some 1,300 times in
over three decades of verse"(Felstinerxvi).
In addition to this explicit Thou, Celan also saw his reader as a Thou
and hoped, demanded, and expected that his reader would enter into
dialogue with his poems. Thus Michael Hamburgerasserts:"Suchpoetry
demandsa specialkind of attentionand perhapsa specialkind of faith in
the authenticityof what it enacts.""Attentionis the naturalprayerof the
soul," Celan himself quotes Malebranche, as Hamburger points out.
"Celan'scharacteristicprocedures... rest on an extraordinarytrust in his
readers'capacity to respond to the dominant gesture of a poem without
access to the circumstantialdata,"writesHamburger(31).

Celan's Relation to Buber

Celan, like his friend Nelly Sachs, was greatly influenced by Martin
Buber's interpretationand presentationof the life and teaching of the

MAURICE FRIEDMAN

45

Hasidim, as he was by Buber'sphilosophyof dialogue in general. In the

speech that he gave when he received the Bremen LiteraryPrize, Celan
speaksnot only of the EastEuropeanlandscapethatwas home to Hasidism,
but also of "thoseHasidic taleswhich MartinBuberhas retoldfor us all in
German" (Felstiner114). It is no accident that when Celan thought of
Aliyah at the end of the Second World War, he framed it in terms of
arrivingin Jerusalem,going to Martin Buber,and saying, "Uncle Buber,
here I am, now you'vegot me!" (Felstiner42).
The extent to which Celan uses Buber'slanguage and strivesto meet
what Buber calls "the eternal Thou" is astonishing: he invokes the
"Gegeniiber"
[partner,one who is face to face] to which the poem addresses
the
itself,
[dialogue] with the "other" sphere, a
poem as a "Gesprach"
with
it
(Foot207). It is throughthis dialoguethat the
[meeting]
"Begegnung*
be
evokedin the poem, as Celan himself states:
the
other
can
of
presence
"Into this presence its othernessis also broughtwith it by the addressed,
which throughbeing named has become a Thou."3
Celan "consideredhis poems notjust as a vehiclewith which to describe
encounters with a 'Du' but also as being instrumentalin bringing them
about," writes Foot. "The core of the poem is the 'Du*itself which is an
almost tactile entity" (Foot 216-18). Celan's attempts to write in an
"unimagedlanguage"constitutea never-endingsearchfor the "wordthat
comes afterthe image of silence"which will give "theOther"its "Gestalt"
and effect a "meeting"with the "Thou"(Foot219, 260, 266). Celan spoke
of a quatrainthat he wrote in 1956, as encounteringhimself in a kind of
homecomingvia "pathson which languagegets a voice. . . . pathsof a voice
to a perceivingThou" (Felstiner98). In his Bremen Prize Speech Celan
wrote:
A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a
- not
- belief that
always greatly hopeful
message in a bottle, sent out in the
somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems
in this sense too are under way: they are making toward something. Toward what?
Toward something standing open, occupiable, perhaps toward an addressable
Thou, toward an addressable reality. (Felstiner 1 15)

In his prosepiece "Conversationin the Mountains"(a directtakingoverof

the titleof one of Buber'sdialoguesfromhis earlybookDaniel)Celan spoke
of his story's "roundaboutpaths from thou to thou... paths on which
language gets a voice, these are meetings."Later in the same piece he
speaksof "a languagewith no I and no Thou, pure He, pure It" (Felstiner
120-22).4
According to Felstiner,Celan had read and revered Buber since his
youth - for the recoveryof Hasidism, the spiritualconstitutionof dia-

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logue, and his translation of the Bible. Moreover, he found sustenance and
solace in Buber's recognition that the Eternal is brought forth out of
contradiction and that Judaism is imbued with antithesis; for Celan's own
life and work was founded on contradiction. Indeed, according to Celan's
lifelong friend Edith Silverman, Celan "venerated Martin Buber to the
point of rapture" (Felstiner 161).
Yet Felstiner reports the meeting between Celan and Buber in Paris in
September 1960 as essentially a mismeeting:
He took his copies of Buber'sbooksto be signed and actuallykneeledfor a blessing
from the eighty-two-year-oldpatriarch.But the homage miscarried.How had it
felt (Celan wanted to know),afterthe catastrophe,to go on writingin German and
publishing in Germany? Buber evidently demurred, saying it was natural to
publish there and takinga pardoningstance towardGermany.Celan'svital need,
to hear some echo of his plight,Bubercould not or would not grasp.(Felstiner161)

Felstiner even attributes a poem Celan wrote the same day ("The Sluice")
which spoke of "no second heaven" partly to "mischance with Martin
Buber" (Felstiner 163).
One cannot doubt that some sort of mismeeting took place but not for
the reason that Felstiner adduces, namely that Buber took "a pardoning
stance toward Germany" (161). Seven years before this meeting Buber
gave a speech on "Genuine Dialogue and the Possibilities of Peace" after
years of refusing to speak publicly in Germany because the Germans had
become "faceless" to him. In this speech Buber indicted the Nazis and the
Germans who cooperated with them in terms that had never before been
expressed directly to the President and the other officials of the West
German Federation who were present at the speech:
About a decade ago a considerablenumberof Germans - there must have been
many thousandsof them under the indirectcommand of the German government and the directcommand of its representatives,killedmillionsof my people in
a systematicallypreparedand executedprocedurewhose organizedcrueltycannot
be compared with any previous historical event. I, who am one of those who
remained alive, have only in a formal sense a common humanitywith those who
took part in this action. They have so radically removed themselves from the
human sphere, so transposedthemselvesinto a sphere of monstrousinhumanity
inaccessibleto my conception, that not even hatred, much less an overcomingof
hatred, was able to arise in me. And what am I that I could here presume to
'forgive'! [Pointingthe Way232)

What I suspect were behind the "mismeeting" between Celan and

Buber, or "mischance," as Felstiner calls it, were two things: Celan's
overwhelming neediness and the difference between the two authors'

MAURICE FRIEDMAN

47

relation to the German language. Once, Buber told me, a man came to see
him who made him uneasy, and he did not know the reason why until on
leaving the man said to him, "You are the Messiah." "I cannot relate to a
person from above to below," Buber said to me. Celan certainly said
nothing comparable to Buber, but his overwhelming veneration coupled
with his kneeling to receive Buber's blessing - a religious rite totally
- must have made Buber uncomfortable.
foreign to Buber
Martin Buber was a great German writer a quarter of a century before
the Nazis came to power. There is no way he could have associated the
German language simply with the Nazis and what they did to degrade it,
as Celan did. Celan's "Muttersprachfwas also German, but in the midst of
a Rumania where many other languages were spoken. What is more,
Celan came to maturity when Nazism was at its zenith and learned to
wrestle with the German language in order to say what he had to say only
under the shadow of the Shoahin general and of the murder of his parents
in particular. Undoubtedly, he would have liked to have found in Buber's
soul a tension in relation to German comparable to his own, but historical
circumstances and Buber's own life-stance made this impossible. If Celan
and/or Felstiner attributed this to a pardoning attitude on Buber's part
toward the Nazis, it can only be because they totally misunderstood Buber.
A subtler and more ambiguous problem in the relation between Celan
and Buber arises through both men's relation to the great German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Heidegger, as is well known, had been a Nazi
Party member from 193 1 to 1945 and had taken over the Rectorship of the
University of Freiburg in a thoroughly Nazi spirit. When Martin Buber
met Heidegger in 1958 to prepare for their joint presentations on speech at
the Bavarian Academy of Fine Art, I wrote Buber asking how he could
meet him. His reply was that he had already said publicly what he had to
say about Heidegger. Buber was referring to his indictment of Heidegger
in his essay "Religion and Modern Thought" in which he cited Heidegger's
Rectorial Address of May 1933 where Heidegger praised the glory and
greatness of the Nazi insurrection and proclaimed Hitler as "the present
and future German reality and its law" (Eclipseof Godll). Heidegger, as no
other philosopher before him, bound his thought concerning Being to the
hour of Hitler and the Nazis. The editor of Merkur,the distinguished
German periodical in which Buber's essay was first published, wrote
Buber asking him to soften his critique of Heidegger on the grounds that
the "wounds" of the past were now healing. "He is talking about metaphorical wounds," Buber said to me, "whereas I am talking about millions
of real ones."

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Celan, for his part, declined to write a poem in honor of Heidegger's

seventiethbirthday,whichHeideggerhimself had askedfor,and demurred
when a photographerwished to take his picturewith Heideggerbefore his
reading in 1967 at the Universityof Freiburg.On the other hand, Celan
accepted many invitations to read his poetry in Germany and several
German literaryprizes.What is more, he accepted Heidegger'sinvitation
to take a walk with him in the Black Forestthe next day and wrote an
inscriptionin Heidegger'sguest book as well as a poem commemorating
his visit (Felstiner245).
When one adds to this the fact thatCelan read and was influencedin his
poetry by Heidegger's works, one must ask if it was not Celan's own
tension and unclaritythat Celan projectedon Buber,for whom the acceptance of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade was the most important test of conscienceof his life. Buber,for his part, did not like and wrote
severalprofoundcritiquesof Heidegger'sphilosophy.When advisingme
about the preparationof my first book MartinBuber:TheLifeof Dialogue,
Buber explicitly cautioned me against associating his thought with
Heidegger's.After Buber and his wife Paulahad met with Heidegger and
his wife, Buberwrote me, "I like Heideggerbetter than what he writes."
When interviewedby Israeli radio on Independence Day, May 1968,
Celan recalled Gustav Landauer's words - "My Germanness and
Jewishnessdo each other no harm and much good". - and commented:
"Perhaps
they held good [at that time for Landauer (who in 1919 was
murdered
by German soldiers)]but they do not and may not hold
brutally
for any of us, and will never again hold for anyone"(Felstiner258).
Buber,who was a Zionist as Landauerwas not, could never have made
the statement Landauer did even before Landauer's murder and the
Nazis. He held, in contrast,that in Germanyas elsewherein the Diaspora,
or Galut(exile), the Jew was always "on the way" [to Palestine].In 1939
Buberwrote an articleentitled "The End of the German-JewishSymbiosis."In this articlehe pointed out how he and his Zionistcomradeswarned
loud and untiringlyin all thoseyearsagainstthe veryattitudethatLandauer
expressed in the statement that Celan quoted. Buber did not deny that
therewere realvaluesin the symbiosis,Germanas well asJewish ones, that
the Nazis undertookto destroy."Butthe symbiosisitself is at an end and
cannot return"(Derjudeundseinjudentum
646).

The Dialogue with the Absurd

The "Dialogue with the Absurd,"a phrase that I use in severalof my
books, implies that one can find meaning in the struggleand even battle

MAURICE FRIEDMAN

49

with the Absurd without the Absurd itself ever becoming "meaningful"
through inclusion in some larger scheme or framework.5This dialogical
meaning is never that of a comfortablefaithor a harmonic Weltanschauung.
It is tragic at best and more often grotesque.
Celan brings his dialogue with the Thou into the "Dialogue with the
Absurd,"even as he bringshis Dialogue with the Absurdinto his dialogue
with the Thou. Celan's later visions of "the Other" are dominated by
elements of the absurd, Foot points out. Divorcing the imagery of his
poems from normal semanticconnotations,Celan led into the absurd,"in
the hope that out of the resulting meaninglessnessnew meaning will
emerge."In the face of jaded literaryconventionsand an inhumane and
absurd historicalworld, Celan saw it as the task of poetry to present a
"counterword"which would reveal the latency of other aspects of existence hitherto unrecognizedwhich have their being in a secret and uncanny realm (Foot279,28 1).6
Hamburgerpoints explicitlyto "The CircusAnimal'sDesertion,"that
poem of Yeats through which above all I would claim Yeats for the
Dialogue with the Absurd:"Celanwas realistic,too, in doing fulljustice to
'the foul rag-and-boneshop of the heart."'
He wanted poetry to be open to the unexpected, the unpredictable, the
unpredcterminablc.His poems were "messages in a bottle", as he said, which
might or might not be picked up. That element of riskwas as necessaryto them as
the need to communicate.(Hamburger30; cf. 22f, 29)

In human life the absurdis that which does not fit our social harmonies
or world-viewsandjust for that reasonquestionsthe very meaning of our
existence.Although much of Celan'spoetry might tempt us to label him
simply as a poet of the absurd, in almost every one of these poems the
dialogue shines through.

Shoah - The Ultimate Dialogue with the Absurd

In the Shoah[or Holocaust],which I call the ultimateDialogue with the
Absurd,the absurdgoes beyondanythingwith which we are familiarfrom
our ordinarylives. Yet here too a Dialogue with the Absurdis possible, a
meaning reachedin dialogue,as opposed to that subjectiveaffirmationof
affirmedby the Camusof TheMythof Sisyphus
meaning inspiteof theabsurd
of
values
invention
or the
championedby Sartre.This does not mean that
one has a dialoguewith the Shoahas such, in the senseof any sortof mutual
interaction.Still in refusingto evade or deny it or to explain it away by
referringto any larger schema (such as the establishmentof the State of

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Israel), one may find here too a Dialogue with the Absurd in which there is
meaning not in spiteofbut in theface ofmeaninglessness.
The news of the execution of Celan's parents by the Nazis in 1943 left a
deep imprint on his life accompanied by an overwhelming existential guilt
for not having protected them as he might have. This is expressed directly
in only a few of his poems but indirectly in most.
"Death Fugue" from Mohn und Geddchtnis(1952) is Paul Celan's most
famous and most anthologized poem, and it is also the one that deals most
explicitly with the Shookwith its repeated motif of Jews digging their own
graves and the repeated contrast between "golden hair Margarete and
ashen hair Shulamith":
death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue
he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true...
he sets his pack on to us he grants us a grave in the air
he plays with the serpents and daydreams
death is a master from Germany. {Poemsof Paul Celan63)

Far more often Celan's reference to the Shoahis subtle, as in his long
(1959), which bepoem "Engfuhrung" ("Straightening") from Sprachgitter
with
with
"the
unmistakable
continues
stones, wheel,
track,"
grass,
gins
blackish field, the night that needs no stars, nowhere anyone asking after
you, ash, gales, silence, poison, a crafty sky,whirl of particles, "the world, a
millicrystal, shot up," "nights, demixed," "no smoke soul ascends or joins
in," "the rifle-range near the buried wall: visible, once more: the grooves,"
"nothing is lost," and ends as it began with:
Driven into the
terrain
with
the unmistakable
track:
Grass.
Grass,
written asunder. (Poemsof Paul Celan 149)

Another poem "Think of It" from Fadensonnen

(1968) fuses two events
two millennia apart - the last resistance of Bar Kochba and the Jews to
the Romans in the beginning of the Common Era and the first (and only
possible) resistance of the inmates of an early Nazi concentration camp in
or peat bog soldiers (Poems
the form of its famous song of "DieMoorsoldaten"
223, Hamburger 27f.)7

MAURICE FRIEDMAN

51

The Eclipse of God

The "Eclipseof God" is a metaphorof Martin Buber'sthat characterized more than any other his thought and attitudeduring the last part of
his life. As Elie Wiesel has stated, not only the Jews but all mankind
became subject to what Martin Buber calls the eclipse of God when the
Nazi regimeplunged the Westernworld into Night. AlthoughBuber'suse
of the phrasepredatesthe Shoah,it is the Shoahmore than anythingthatled
MartinBuberto the use of the term. In whatwas undoubtedlyan autobiographical statement,Buber wrote in 1951, "Forone who believes in the
living God, who knowsabout Him, and is fatedto spend his life in a time of
His hiddenness,it is very difficultto live"[OnJudaism223). "Eclipseof the
- such indeed is the character of the
light of heaven, eclipse of God
historichour throughwhich the worldis passing,"wroteBuberin the same
period. The typical modern thinker,like Heidegger,who "refusesto submit himself to the effectiverealityof the transcendenceas such - our visa-vis- contributesto the human responsibilityfor the eclipse"{Eclipseof
God223). The eclipseis notjust a processtakingplace in the human spirit,
assertedBuber.It is God hiding his face (Isaiah45. 15), his turningaway in
responseto our turning away.But it is no extinction.The relationshipto
the "eternalThou" lives on in the catacombsawaitingthe day when that
which has stepped between the human and his vis-a-vismay give way.
Meanwhile,"He who is denotedby the name [God] lives in the light of his
eternity.But we, 'the slayers,'remain dwellers in darkness,consigned to
death"{Eclipse
of God22-24, 127-29).
Bubermeant by the eclipse of God a genuine historicalhappeningand
notjust a trendin modernphilosophy.Holderlinand Heideggerwere right
in describingthis hour as an hour of night,Buberdeclaredin Eclipseof God
(22). In his last statementon the eclipse Buberwrote:
No demonic power workshere that we have not rearedourselves.
That is the side of the event knownto us. The other,the divine side, is called in
the holy books of Israelthe hiding of God, the veiling of the divine countenance.
Nothing more than such an anthropomorphicimage seems to be granted us.
One may also call what is meant here a silence of God's or rather,since I
cannot conceive of any interruptionof the divine revelation, a condition that
works on us as a silence of God.... These last years in a great searching and
questioning,seized ever anew by the shudderof the now, I have arrivedno further
than that I now distinguisha revelationthroughthe hiding of the face, a speaking
throughthe silence. The eclipse of God can be seen with one's eyes, it will be seen.
He, however,who today knowsnothing other to say than, "See there, it grows
lighter!"he leads into error.(Schilppand Friedman7 16)

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"Celan's was the silence of the unutterable, his exile a flight from the
unforgivable," writes Katharine Washburn in close consonance with Buber's
image of the eclipse ("Introduction" to Celan, Last Poemsxxxv). "The
anguish, the darkness, the shadow of death are present in all his work, early
and late," writes Michael Hamburger, "including the most high-spirited
and sensuous." This applies not only to the content of his poetry but also to
his very way of writing it. If Celan described his poems as "ways of a voice
to a receptive you," a "desperate dialogue," and "a sort of homecoming,"
this did not gainsay the fact that his poetry was rooted in "extreme
experience that could not be enacted in any manner less difficult than his.
The hiatuses, the silences, the dislocations of normal usage belong to what
he had to say and to the effort of saying it" (Hamburger 22).
Hamburger points to negation as a recurrent theme of Celan's later
poetry in general, linking it to Jewish and Christian mysticism and to the
dialectic of light and darkness that runs all through Celan's work. What is
striking about Celan's poetry is that he holds the tension, keeping yes and
no unsplit, thereby admitting enough darkness into his poems to remain
true to his own dictum that "he speaks truly who speaks the shade" (cited
in Hamburger 29).
The theme of "There was Earth inside Them" (from Die Niemandsrose
[1963]) is the constantly reiterated digging that links the poem to "The
Death Fugue" as does the statement, "They did not praise God, / who, so
they heard, wanted all this, / who, so they heard, knew all this." The
suggestion of the absurdity and futility of everything is strengthened by the
line, "I dig, you dig, and the worm digs too" and by the question, "Where
did the way lead when it led nowhere?" Yet behind all this there is at least
some minimal contact of I and Thou: "O you dig and I dig, and I dig
towards you, / and on our finger the ring awakes" (Poemsof Paul Celan153).
If "There Was Earth Inside Them" continues Celan's Dialogue with the
Absurd, it also compels us to think of the eclipse of God. A God who hears
and knows all this and wants it to happen, as Celan writes, is an indifferent
God, a monstrous God. The God who cares about us is in eclipse.
In "Zurich, the Stork Inn" from the same volume, the Thou becomes
explicit in his dedication of the poem to Nelly Sachs, whom he met at this
place. At this inn Nelly Sachs had a mystic experience of the light of the
sun, which Celan shared. But Celan was still struggling with this 'Jewish
God" in the depths of his being: "Of your God was our talk, I spoke /
against him, I / let the heart that I had hope: / for / his highest, deathrattled, his / quarrelling word - / Your eye looked on, looked away, /
your mouth / spoke its way to the eye, and I heard" (Poemsof Paul Celan

MAURICE FRIEDMAN

53

157). This does not mean that Celan denied God. Yet for him God was
more profoundly in eclipse than for Sachs. In 1959 in one of the many
Buber books that he was always buying and reading, Celan underlined,
"Every name is a step toward the consummate Name, as everything
broken points to the unbroken," and twice he noted Buber's words, "Allof
time is immediate to redemption." On the other hand, on hearing Nelly
Sachs's "Yes, I'm a believer," Celan replied that he "hoped to blaspheme
up till the end" after which she repeated his statement, "One really doesn't
know what counts" (Felstiner 152,156,158). Celan's "addressable Thou" is
also a problematic Thou.8
Something similar is echoed in "So Many Constellations." Although we
are told of Time which stands in that chasm where extinguished things
"splendid with teats" stood, "Time / on which already grew up / and
down and away all that / is or was or will be," nonetheless Celan concludes with an affirmation of the dialogue. Although "we / don't know, do
we?, / what/ counts," still at times when only "das Nichts [the Nothing]
stood between us we got / all the way to each other" (Poemsof Paul Celan
159; Felstiner 159).
Hamburger locates Celan's religion precisely in the task of coming to
grips with his experience of being God-forsaken, with the negation and
blasphemy through which alone Celan could be true to his own experience
"and yet maintain the kind of intimate dialogue with God characteristic of
Jewish devotion" (29).
We need only think of Abraham, Job, Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev,
Martin Buber, and Elie Wiesel to understand the protest of what I call the
"Job of Auschwitz" to which Celan too belongs. This is made explicit in
the poem Celan wrote after his visit with Nelly Sachs at the Stork Inn in
Zurich in 1960. When Celan speaks in that poem, as we have seen, of
God's "death-rattling, his quarreling word," Celan's German original for
"quarreling" is "haderndes"the word used when Job urged God, "Make me
know wherefore Thou contendest with me" (Job 10.2). Celan's very defiance bred assertion. "Bitter yes," Celan said, but he added, "In what's
truly bitter, there is surely the More-than-bitter" (Felstiner 158; 199). It is
precisely this combination of dialogue, or trust, and contending that I
point to again and again when I speak of the biblical Job, the "Modern
Job," and "theJob of Auschwitz."
In "Your / being beyond," from The No One'sRose, Celan repeats the
kabbalistic lore that God is split into two parts - the Ein Sof, or transcendent infinite, and the Shekinah, the part that is scattered in exile. "In the
death / of all those mown down," claims the poet, God "grows himself

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whole." He also claims that "with this half we keep up relations," "this
half" presumably being the scattered one (Poemsof Paul Celan161). Perhaps
in the language of the Kabbalah we could say that Celan shared the
anguish and suffering of God's exile.
The "Psalm" from this same volume is also the origin of the title; for it is
"No One" who "moulds us again out of earth and clay" and "conjures our
dust," and for whose sake "we shall flower toward you... the No One'sRose." "Blessed art thou, No One," says the poem, as the pious Jew says,
"Blessed art Thou, O Lord Our God" [Poemsof Paul Celan175). We bloom
"in thy sight, in thy spite" reads Felstiner'stranslation of the poem (Felstiner
167). This Nothing and No One could be the primordial Nothing of the
Kabbalah. But it could equally well be God in eclipse. It expresses perfectly Celan's vacillation, his standing in the tension between affirmation
and negation. In "Conversation in the Mountains" the Jew Klein also
speaks to and is heard by No One. "In that story and this poem," comments Felstiner, "the absent 'No One' of the catastrophe [the Shoah]masks
the unknowable 'No One' of Jewish mysticism" (153,168) "ANothing / we
were, are now, and ever / shall be," reads "Psalm." This EinMchts, asserts
Felstiner, "again merges mystical with historical nothingness" (169).9
"What Occurred?" carries similar overtones of the kabbalistic Book of
Creation, of darkness and light, heaviness and lightness, of the awakening
of I and Thou, and of the intrinsic relation between language, "co-earth,"
and "fellow planet" (Poems205). We might think here of the kabbalistic
legend according to which God hewed the letters out of stone, weighed
them, switched them around until he found the right order, and only then
created the world.10Celan had known Scholem's work on the Kabbalah
since 1957, and he had met Scholem three times in Paris before he visited
with him in his 1968 trip to Israel. Felstiner aptly summarizes the things in
Jewish mystical lore that engaged Celan and that he gleaned from his
reading of Scholem and Buber:
Kabbalisticspeech theoryand the names of God, divine hiddenness,Creationand
light-apparition,God's self-contractionand nothingness,Sabbath and ensouling,
Isaiah's"I will bring thy seed from the east, and gather thee fromthe west."(43:5),
and above all the Shechinah - God's emanation as mother, sister, and bridge,
symbolizedby the rose or crown, in exile with the people of Israel.(235)

Celan was particularly taken by the image of the Shekinah as Rachel

weeping for her children. In a 1967 poem which begins "Near, in the
Aorta's arch, / in bright blood: / the bright word," Celan writes, "Mother
Rachel / weeps no more / Carried across now / all of the weeping," and
ends, "Ziv, that light." Felstiner traces the "near" back to Celan's ten-year-

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55

earlier poem "Tenebrae" - "Near are we, Lord... clawed into each
other" and from there to Holderlin's "Patmos," where God is "Near by /
and hard to grasp" and from there to the Hebrew Bible: "For the word is
very near to you, in your mouth and in your heart, that you may do it"
(Deut.30.14). Rachel weeping for her children goes back to Jeremiah's
Lamentations (31.15) but also to the fact that the people return to Zion
and God renews his covenant with Jacob, husband of Rachel, which is
taken up by Matthew in the New Testament. But Celan's use of Rachel
lamenting her children as the Shekinah in exile is anticipated by Celan's
own early poem "Aspen Tree" (1945) in which he writes, "My soft-voiced
mother weeps for everyone" (Felstiner 236-38).
Equally important is the fact that "Ziv, that light," which is unbinded
and which concludes Celan's poem, is taken from the chapter on the
Shekinah in Scholem's "On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead," where
God's indwelling presence "can reveal itself in an unearthly brilliance this is often called the light (Ziv) of the Schechinah." Recalling his time
with Nelly Sachs in Zurich when, hoping for God's highest "wrangling,"
or "contending word," they had seen "some gold across the water," Celan
wrote Sachs about the light they had seen together: "Once in a poem,
there also came to me, by way of the Hebrew, a name for it." When Nelly
Sachs recalled it again, he said, "Yes, that light" (Felstiner 239f). Quoting
Celan's statement that "poetry is mysticism," Felstiner concludes:
"Ziv, that light" throws us. back to the pure word and! gestures at something
ineffable - not Saintjohn's logoswhich was "In the beginning... the light of men,"
a radiance attending Israel even in dark exile. (241)
but Ziv haSchechxnah,

Celan found in Ziv a "need-shard," writes Felstiner, referring to the

legend of the Lurian Kabbalah according to which divine light at Creation
shattered the vessels that contained it, leaving to humanity the tikkun,or

restoration,
of theseshards.

Because you (bund the need-shard

in a wilderness place,
the shadow-centuries relax beside you
and hear you think.11

That Celan thus identified with Jewish mysticism and its hidden God
does not mean that he had overcome his earlier ambivalence and vacillation that made him more of a blasphemer and contender than a believer.
In "Thread Suns" (Atemwende1967) Celan speaks of "thread suns" as

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standing above the Odnis, "the grey-black wilderness." "Atree-high thought

tunes in to light's pitch." He does not posit redemption here or hereafter
but concludes: "there are / still songs to be sung on the other side / of
mankind" {Poems227). The tension of this vacillation is not diminished in
Celan's very latest poems, as in "I hear that the axe has flowered" (Schneepart
[1971]) The axe that has flowered is both instrument of destruction and
construction. The hanged man is healed by the bread his wife baked for
him, the bread which looks at him. "I hear that the place can't be named."
People don't talk about the Holocaust any more. We plant flowers in all the
places where the death camps were. "I hear that they call life / our only
refuge," the poem concludes, possibly referring to those who tell Jews to
live in the present not the past or possibly saying that there is no hope in or
after death {Poems323).
Other of Celan's latest poems can only deepen what we have seen
before, as in:
World to be stuttered by heart
in which
I shall have been a guest, a name
sweated down from the wall
a wound licks up. (Poems325)12

A prompter from a cosmic theater helps us to learn the world by heart,

but what we can learn, what we can know and live, is only a stuttering. We
live in the face of the memorial wall in which the image of the flame
sweated down is complemented by that of the wound licking up. Again in
"A leaf" Celan inverts a leafless tree into a treeless leaf as a prelude to
"What times are these / when a conversation / is almost a crime / because
it includes / so much made explicit" {Poems331).
Except for the "Death Fugue" Celan felt he could not and did not want
to speak explicitly. Correspondingly, in "I fool about" the shadows belong
to the truth as well as the light, the shadows which are the echo of what
happened in the past, heard "from every direction, / the incontrovertible
echo / of every eclipse." Here too we cannot help thinking of Buber's
"eclipse of God." But here too the note of dialogue is present: "your
darkness too / load on to / my halved, voyaging / eyes" {Poems339).
The way in which Celan stands with Buber in affirming the eclipserather
than the deathof God is shown, as we have seen, by the "narrow ridge" that
Celan walks between the abysses in which Nothing is at one and the same
time the Absurd and the divine Nothing of the Kabbalah. In "Hour of the
Barge," one of his last poems, Celan speaks of being "rid of death, rid of

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57

God." In "To Speak with Blind Alleys" he writes of speaking about what
we might call variously the partner, the vis-a-vis,the face to face [Buber's
"about its expatriate meaning" (Celan's own exile,
central term Gegeniiber],
the exile of the Jews, the exile of the Shekinah), "to chew the bread with
writing teeth." In "Hail of Stones" Celan speaks of one who stood fast in
his despair and succeeded in far-striding silence. With all of this, he
searches continually for his Thou, which is at the same time the eternal
Thou, as in "Shot Forth" ("Shot forth / in the emerald race, / hatching of
grubs, hatching of stars, with every / keel / I search for you [dich], /
fathomless"). In "My Soul" his soul inclines toward his Thou, "hears you
thundering," learns to sink itself "in the pit of your throat" and "become
true." When the unkissed stone of grief stirs in its fulfillment, Celan says in
"We, Who Were True Like the Bent Grass," "it changes over to us," and
"we hand ourselves on": "to you and to me," with whom ("watch out"!) the
night "is painstaking" (Celan Last Poems100, 1 18, 144, 162, 174, 180).
In full consonance with what we have said above about Celan and the
eclipse of God, Felstiner asks whether Holy Scripture constitutes a void
after what "No One" let happen. "Celan's writing confronts a near-eclipse
of the Word," Felstiner then asserts and illustrates this from Celan's 1957
("empty of writing," "Scripture-devoid" (1.169) followed
coinage schriftleer
in 1961 by a leerthat "could hold divine nothingness - 'Empty almond,
royal blue'" (1.244).
In Celan's 1969 poem "Nothingness" the eclipse of God stands forth
with all possible clarity: "Nothingness [Das Mchts], for our / name's sake /
- , / sets a seal, / the end believes we're / the
beginning,
they gather us in
/ in front of / masters / going silent around us, / in the Undivided, there
testifies / a binding / brightness" (Felstiner 278). Felstiner's comment on
this poem again evokes the eclipse of God:
A strange ingathering occurs. Instead of God guiding us in straight paths "for His
name's sake," it is Nothingness - a presencebothineffableand eclipsed[italics mine] for our names' sake. (278)13

On his forty-fifth birthday, Paul Celan wrote above a list of poems for a
new collection "Reitejiir die Treue."This motto was taken from Buber's
translation of Psalm 45 where, in English, it reads, "Ride for the cause of
the truth" (Celan left out udieSache" which would go over into English as
"Ride for the sake of, the cause of, or in behalf of the truth"). In the Buber
translation this statement is followed in the Psalm by "der beugten
Wahrhafiigkeir("for the meek [or humble] truthfulness"). "Ride for the
cause of the truth" is also the motto which Franz Rosenzweig placed as a

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motto on the title page of his magnum opus The Star of Redemption.Two
years before Celan marked a paragraph on the threatened nature of Jewish
existence in an essay by Emmanuel Levinas on Franz Rosenzweig (Felstiner
228,320n.l0,321n.2).
"For the Cause of the Truth" (as Celan may have known) is also the title
that Martin Buber gave to a memorial essay on Franz Rosenzweig in 1930.
Rosenzweig was almost totally paralyzed for the last eight years of his life
yet worked for years with Buber in translating the Hebrew Bible. "An
unspeakable burden, unspeakable was laid on and carried by him," wrote
Buber. "In those eight years Franz Rosenzweig confirmed in the face of
God the truth that he saw. Lamed in his whole body, he 'rode for the cause
of the Truth"' (Derjude undseinjudentum816).
When in 1954 I immersed myself in Rosenzweig's life and thought in
preparation for an address on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death, I
was so deeply moved that I wrote Martin Buber asking if Rosenzweig was
not a saint. "Saint is too Christian a term for him," Buber replied, "but he
was a suffering servant of the Lord." Celan's suffering cannot be compared
to Rosenzweig's; no one's can.14 Nor would I presume to call Celan a
"suffering servant of the Lord." Yet in his own unique way he was a
suffering witness in the face of the Shoahand of the faceless God whom he
denied and affirmed.
In "Vinegrowers," a poem written on April 13, 1970, a week before
Celan's suicide, what stands out most clearly is the Thou and the Sabbath
(Felstiner 284). On Celan's suicide itself Felstiner speculates that perhaps
Celan felt too alone ("No one / witnesses for the / witness."). Speaking
from his deathbed in America a month later, Erich Kahler, the intellectual
historian, ascribed Celan's suicide to "the terrible psychic burden - the
burden of being both a great German poet and a young Central European
Jew growing up in the shadow of the concentration camps."15
Kahler, who had written on the disintegration of form in the arts, now
testified that "Only in Celan has this process attained an inner and
paradigmatic necessity."16Celan "deconstructed" German not as a result
of a literary theory but out of the very impulse that led him to write poetry.
Accused of obscurity and "encodings," Celan countered with "undissembled
ambiguity":
I try to reproduce cuttings from the spectral analysis of things, to show them in
several aspects and permutations at once ... I see my alleged abstractness and
actual ambiguity as moments of realism, (cited in Felstiner 232)

MAURICE FRIEDMAN

59

To grasp the data which Celan'spoems hold onto asks too much of the
reader,comments Felstiner,yet Felstinerhimself protests,"butwhat is too
much, given this history?"(254).
Celan does not representany tradition.He does not stand within any
community,not even that of Israel, nor, for all of his attachmentto the
Kabbala, Hasidism, and Buber,was he the spokesmanfor any tradition
the way Eliot was for CatholicChristianity.His very existenceas a Rumanian Jewish survivorof the Nazi camps living in Paris and writing in
German left Celan foreverin exile, as MartinBuberwas not. In Celan the
poem goes beyond any backgroundthat the ordinaryreadercould possibly puzzle out by referencesor even scholarship.True to what he and his
contemporaries had experienced Celan could not offer a comfortable
mirror of a less fragmented,less ambiguous,less absurd,or less eclipsed
existence.
San Diego StateUniversity

NOTES
I am indebted to Drs. James Lyon and Heikc Behl and to Eugenia Friedman for their
critical suggestions in response to earlier drafts of this paper.
1. Lyon quotes Celan in this article: "Gedichte... halten auf... cine ansprcchbares Du
vielleicht, auf cine ansprechbare Wirklichkeit" (Bremen Speech, p.ll, cited in Lyon 111).
"Das Gedicht ist cinsam. Es ist einsam und unterwegs. Wer es schreibt, bleibt ihm
mitgegeben. Aber steht das Gedicht nicht gerade dadurch, also schon hier, in der
- im Geheimnisder
Begegnung?Das Gedicht will zu einem Andern, es braucht
Begcgnung
dieses Anderc, es braucht ein Gegenuber. Es sucht es auf, es spricht sich ihm zu" (cited in
Lyon 1 19, n.8). "Das Gedicht [ist] eine Erscheinungsform der Sprache und damit scinem
Wesen nach dialogisch" (cited in Lyon 1 16).
Lyon contrasts Celan's dialogical poetry with modern poetry in general: "The
dialogical impulse evident throughout Celan's poetry flies... in the face of Gottfried
Benn's pronouncement that the modern poem is a monologue. While the intense, sometimes desperate struggle to enter into a dialogue might fail or at least experience frustration, the basic impulse to reach out and establish contact with a higher, more meaningful
reality distinguishes his poems from almost all the poems of the modern tradition which
trace their origins to Baudelaire and Rimbaud" (119). Buber holds that even lyric poetry is
a dialogue between I and Thou, but I do not know whether he would have applied this
dictum to the specific modern, monological strain of poetry to which Lyon refers.
2. "The concept of dialogue... Celan shares with Buber. The same can be said of his
concern with the encounter [or 'meeting,' as Buber preferred to translate Begegnung]as the

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basis for establishing a dialogue, since it involves the elemental experience of 'otherness.'
The desire to break out of the isolation that imprisons modern man and to transform an
indifferent It-world into a personal Thou-world by addressing it concerns both thinkers. . .. A number of radical differences set them apart, one of the most pronounced being
their outlook on reality. Buber wishes to probe a reality which has been neglected by
recent thought, but which nevertheless exists.... In contrast, Celan feels compelled first to
create a new reality through poetry, since the act of creation precedes the possibility of
contact.... Cclan's world is admittedly an internal one of highly personalized experience"
(Lyon 117).
3. Paul Gelan, Meridian [Rede anldsslichder Verleihung
das Georg-Buchner-Preises],
cited in
German in Foot 207 (my translation). It was only after noting the striking resemblance
between Buber's terminology and Celan's that I came across James K. Lyon's "Paul Celan
and Martin Buber: Poetry as Dialogue."
4. In 1958 Celan titled an etching of his wife Gisele's "Rencontre- Begegnung'(meeting). Celan's meeting at that time was with the Russian poet Osip Mandelshtam (18911938), whose work Celan translated into German, seeing himself as Mandelshtam's
"secret addressee." "Only faithless I am true... / I am Thou when I am I," he translated
Mandelshtam in consonance with a love poem he himself wrote in 1948 (Fclstincr
128,133).
5. See Friedman, ProblematicRebel: Melville, Dostoievsky,Kafka, Camus; To Deny Our
Nothingness:Contemporary
Imagesof Man; and The Scandalof theParticular:A Search
for Meaningin
ModernLiterature(forthcoming).
6. Celan himself makes explicit how the movement "ad absurdum" is also a movement
to the here and now, fully present uniqueness of dialogue and the Dialogue with the
Absurd: "Das einmal, das immer wieder einmal und nur jetzt und nur hier
Wahrgenommcne und Wahrzunehmende. Und das Gedicht ware somit der Ort, wo alle
Tropen und Metaphern ad absurdum gefuhrt werden wollen" (cited in Foot 209).
7. 1 am indebted to Dr. Hcike Behl for the interpretation of this poem.
8. "Celan turns most Jewish in struggling with Jewish faith," comments Fclstiner (169).
9. 1 have used both Hamburger's and Felstiner's translation of "Psalm." See Felstiner
168.
James Lyon does not see this ambiguity in "Psalm": "The bitterness at the loss of God
is heard more strongly in 'Psalm' (iv, 23) than in almost any other poem.... |It represents |
a terrible indictment of God; in ['Psalm'] the charge is, ironically, that God does not even
exist:
Niemand kentet uns wieder aus Erde und Lehm,
micmand bespricht unsern Staub.
Niemand.
Gelobt seist du, Niemand....
He fails to create dijemand. Instead of finding the identity he seeks in a Thou, he only
succeeds in finding an anonymous, impersonal Niemandwhere God should be" (Lyon 1 18).
Lyon quotes Siebert Prawer to the effect that Celan is a "natural God-seeker who has
failed to find God, yet cannot leave off calling into nothingness and emptiness in hope of
an answer." This is to fail to understand the meeting with the "eternal Thou" which takes
place through the finite Thous, whether or not one "believes" in God, and it is also to miss

MAURICE FRIEDMAN

61

the positive meaning of the Dialogue with the Absurd. On the other hand, I take a
position very similar to Lyon's in my interpretation above of Cclan's "There Was Earth
Inside Them" as an embodiment of the eclipse of God.
10. I am indebted to Dr. Heike Behl for this and a number of other insights into the
relation between Celan and Jewish mysticism.
1 1. Cclan, cited in Fclstiner 241. In the Lurian Kabbalah actually it is not shards that
are spoken of but the divine sparks that fall into the darkness and arc surrounded by shells
of darkness (Kelipoth).Our uplifting of these divine sparks through our kavanah, or
intention, is tikkun. Celan, however, uses shards. If we are to take the metaphor literally,
shards would refer not to the light that the original vessels contained but to the fragments
of the broken vessels. It is precisely that metaphor that I used a quarter of a century ago in
a speech at ajewish summer camp to denote the double exile of the Jews - not only from
Israel but also from the Covenant that once made them whole so that now one Jew finds
her identity through Jewish food, another through Yiddish, a third through Hebrew, a
fourth through Jewish song, a fifth through Zionism, and a sixth through a watered-down
religiousness unconnected with the Covenant. When a shliach(an American woman who
had made Aliyah and was at the summer camp as a messenger from Israel) protested that
she did not want to be a shard, I pointed out that when we were in Israel four months in
1960 and seven in 1966, most of the Israelis we knew were constantly looking for shards in
archeological digs and the like!
12. 1 am again indebted to Dr. Heike Behl for this interpretation.
13. Among the inscriptions Celan wrote on the end pages in his copy of Kafka's stories
on one of his last stays at the psychiatric clinic, Felstincr found shaddaishaddai,the ineffable
name of God in Hebrew, followed by the Shema("Hear of Israel, the Lord our God, the
Lord Is One"), the watchword of Israel and the martyr's millennial cry (see Felstincr 230).
Andre Neher, the distinguished French Jewish theologian, wrote an impressive essay
on "Shaddai:The God of the Broken Arch (A Theological Approach to the Holocaust)" in
which he implicitly paralleled Buber's metaphor of the eclipse of God about which he has
elsewhere written explicitly. With a paradoxical insistence very close in spirit to that of
Celan, Neher insisted that Shaddai means at once God of the Promise (God of the
Covenant) and God of Silence. What Neher says about the dialogue with the silent God
who is beyond dialogue might be taken as a paraphrase of much of Celan'spoetry:
The God who is sufficient unto himself - Shaddai- is the God who has no need
of men, no more than he needs any being other than his own. He is the God of the
farther slope, of the inaccessible, of the unfathomable, the God who eludes
creation, revelation, communication. This God who is sufficient unto himself is
likewise self-sufficient in his Word: He is the God beyonddialogue.He requires no
partner, neither to whom to address the Word, nor from whom to receive a reply.
He is the God without an echo, without yesterday and without tomorrow, the God
of absolute Silence.
The grave theological point with which we are now confronted is that this God
of absolute Silence persists in speaking even across this Silence; that this God
beyond dialogue provokes man and dares him to take up the challenge of dialogue;
that this God without echo, without yesterday and without tomorrow, imposes his
intolerable presence on the very instant, on the hie et nunc...
[W]e sense [here] the shock-effect of a brutal, experienced reality, the throbbing trace of an event.This event, whose very name is the most tragic invitation to

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an encounter with Shaddai,this new extremity of the history of the covenant, is the
event of Auschwitz. (Neher 155, 158)
14. Felstiner does compare their struggle with language: "Even Rosenzweig, painstakingly translating the Bible up through Isaiah before he died in 1929, could scarcely have
imagined the path of someone like Paul Celan" (252).
15. Erich Kahler, cited in Felstiner 247.
16. Letter from Erich Kahler to Werner Wcbcr, 22 May 1970, cited in Felstiner 287.

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