scarecrow poetics/essays

[EDITORIAL NOTE: This provocative essay has recently caused a flurry of online responses, most fervidly from Mark Thwaite and Stephen Mitchelmore. Ellis Sharp has also published a response. Although Short Term Memory Loss's sardonic effort had all here at Scarecrow guffawing endlessly. We expect this one to run and run. The views published below are not necessarily those of Scarecrow's Editorial team.]

Two pieces of writing define the poet Paul Celan’s relationship with the philosopher Martin Heidegger. One is his inscription in Heidegger’s guest book, which translates as: “Into the Hütte-book, while gazing on the well-star, with a hope for a word to come in the heart / July 25 1967”. The other is his famous poem ‘Todtnauberg’. Both pieces are reasonably interpreted as obliquely alluding to Heidegger’s relationship with the Nazis. Celan evidently hoped for some kind of acknowledgement of error on Heidegger’s part – an acknowledgement which Celan, as a Holocaust victim, was surely entitled to expect.

Notoriously, Heidegger kept his silence. Heidegger, delighted by ‘Todtnauberg’, seems to have been oblivious to the poem’s inner meaning and its verbal and historical resonance. At the end, Celan wrote of ‘die halb- / beschrittenen Knüppel- / pfade im Hochmoor,’ [‘the half-trodden log-paths through the high moors’]. But as John Felstiner notes in his fine critical biography Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (1995), “in an explosive wordplay, Celan’s term for ‘log’ (Knüppel) also means ‘bludgeon.’ Translating Night and Fog he had used that word for death camp prisoners “ ‘bludgeoned awake’ at 5 a.m.”

The meeting between Heidegger and Celan is both legendary and enigmatic; it is invariably defined from Celan’s perspective. How could it not be? Celan (1920-1970), an East European Jew whose first language was German, is generally regarded as the the major European poet of the period after 1945. His best known poem is “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”), which is probably the finest poem to emerge from the Holocaust. It originated in Celan’s personal experience. During the Nazi occupation of Romania, Celan came home one morning to find that his parents had been taken away. His father died of typhus in a concentration camp; his mother was shot. Celan himself was made to do forced labour in the Romanian camps, but survived. In 1948 he settled in Paris, where he remained until his death, apparently by suicide.

And yet to my mind there is a curious absence in a book such as Felstiner’s, which is Paul Celan’s own complicity in oppression and injustice. It is even more curious bearing in mind that the year in which Heidegger and Celan had their famous encounter is also the year which brings out in Celan’s writing an obtuseness which surely, at some level, parallels that of Heidegger.

Felstiner notes that in 1967 Celan had started to insert Hebrew words into some of his poems. He concludes that “Celan’s poems with Hebrew in them, especially with Hebrew ending them, trace a meridian of Diaspora yearning.” (p. 240) He relates the enigmatic poem “Ziw, jenes Licht”” (“Ziv, that light”) to the deteriorating situation in the Middle East: “By the date of this poem, 10 May 1967, Syrian raids and shelling had been met by Israeli air attacks, terrorists had struck the Galilee, and Nasser’s Egypt was threatening in the south.” (p. 241) Celan then wrote a poem ‘Denk dir’ (translated by Hamburger as ‘Think of It’ and by Felstiner as ‘Just think’) which appears to be a direct response to the Six Day War.

THINK OF IT

Think of it:
the bog soldier of Massada
teaches himself home, most
inextinguishably,
against
every barb in the wire.

Think of it:
the eyeless with no shape
lead you free through the tumult, you
grow stronger and
stronger.

Think of it: your
own hand
has held
this bit of
habitable
earth, suffered up
again
into life.

Think of it:
this came towards me
name-awake, hand-awake
for ever,
from the unburiable.


This is Paul Celan’s poem ‘Denk dir’, taken from the dual language edition published by Penguin Books in 1990, translated by Michael Hamburger. In his critical biography, John Felstiner translates the title as ‘Just think’.

It’s a cryptic, elusive poem, like most of Celan’s verse. Felstiner carefully unpicks the historical and literary threads of the poem, interpreting it as a response to the Six-Day War and to Israel’s victory. The “you” of the poem is the Jewish people. The poem is being about the Jewish “homeland” and the Jewish people. “Now free, they go from strength to strength”, as Felstiner puts it (p. 242). Felstiner notes that an early draft of the poem carried an echo of the words “yad vashem”, which is Hebrew for “hand and name” and the name given to Israel’s Holocaust memorial. Felstiner glosses the last word of the poem as follows: “Finally, Celan’s word ‘unburiable’ fuses the two halves of one idea: Jewish victims who could not be buried and their spirit that will not.” (ibid)

Felstiner supplies the background to the poem. He describes how the Six-Day War broke out, “stirring him to an unambiguous poem. Starting on 7 June, when Jerusalem’s Old City was regained, Celan worked closely on it for two days at the clinic. His title ‘Denk dir’ registered the jolt that Jews everywhere felt”. (ibid) Celan felt an urgency about this poem: it was published straightaway in Zurich and twice in Israel’s German-Jewish press. Celan sent it to the German-born Israeli poet Natan Zach, who published a translation in Israel’s main daily paper. Later in the year it appeared in Germany, and it was the final poem in his next collection Fadensonnen (“Threadsuns”, 1968).

If Felstiner is right, in this poem Celan conflated Jewish identity with the Jewish state. It seems a plausible interpretation. The Jewish “home” is Israel; it is a refuge which has now been “inextinguishably” achieved against “every barb in the wire” – not just Nazi genocide but also, perhaps, Arab aggression. The Jewish people have come “through the tumult” – again, both Nazi genocide and wars with Arabs – and “grow stronger and / stronger”, in the shape of the victorious Jewish state, “this bit of / habitable /earth”.

If Felstiner’s interpretation of the poem is correct – and I see no reason to quarrel with it– it seems to me it indicates an imaginative failure on Celan’s part. Paul Celan was not a Zionist, and preferred to live in Paris rather than anywhere else, but in conflating Jewish identity with Israel and telescoping the Holocaust and the Six-Day War he produced what is surely in essence a Zionist poem. Like most of Celan’s output, ‘Denk dir’ is an oblique, elusive work. But John Felstiner’s plausible reading both of the poem and its context makes it clear that ‘Denk dir’ is, implicitly, under its abstractions and ambiguities, on the side of Israel, and hence of imperialism and sectarian persecution – though Felstiner is incapable of perceiving it in those terms. That the author of “Todesfuge” should be capable of such a poem is, I think, interesting, and worthy of discussion.

What particularly intrigues me are the lines

this bit of
habitable
earth

If I have understood the poem correctly Celan means, in one sense at least, Israel. If he does mean this, then I think the reader is entitled to feel disgust. Firstly, because this land was land stolen by brute force. In 1948, the year Israel was artificially created, no more than 7 per cent of Palestine was owned by Jews. The remaining 93 per cent was held by indigenous Palestinians. Secondly, having stolen more than half of that land the Jewish state then set about seizing the rest, using a pitiless violence steeped in racism and sectarianism – a process which has continued up to the present day. Today only 3 per cent of land in Israel is owned by Palestinians, a land theft of quite staggering proportions. That theft was not simply accomplished by force, however. An essential component was the sectarianism built into the Jewish state. By definition, it exists to promote and prioritize its Jewish citizens.

This is the corrosive legacy of Zionism and the Jewish state to the history and culture of modern Judaism: that Jewish identity must be conflated with the bellicose, blood-drenched, pitilessly sectarian state of Israel. That coarse identification is taken for granted by Felstiner, whose own Zionist bias is revealed when he speaks of the origins of ‘Denk dir’: “Starting on 7 June, when Jerusalem’s Old City was regained, he worked closely on it for two days in the clinic.”

Jerusalem’s Old City “regained”?

*

In the Zionist version of history, Jews in the Middle East are always the victims, never the oppressors. It’s worth looking again at Felstiner’s version of the origins of the 1967 war: “By the date of this poem, 10 May 1967, Syrian raids and shelling had been met by Israeli air attacks, terrorists had struck the Galilee, and Nasser’s Egypt was threatening in the south.”

In reality, Felstiner’s account of what was happening in the Middle East at this time is a meretricious, self-serving one. Israel had signed up to a demilitarized zone (DMZ) between itself and Syria. In the words of Ahron Bregman in his book Israel’s Wars: A History Since 1947 (Routledge, 2003), “The Israelis – who had signed up to this arrangement voluntarily rather than under a Diktat – later regretted this, and attempted to regain control over these lands by provoking the Syrians and then taking advantage of military clashes to expand control over the DMZ.” (pp. 65-66) Israel was the bellicose aggressor, not Syria. What Felstiner is referring to by “terrorists had struck the Galilee” is puzzling. None of the standard histories mentions guerrilla activities in early 1967; perhaps he is alluding to attacks by Fatah on Israeli water pipes in 1965. If so, the word “terrorist” is fairly meaningless in this context, since Fatah guerrillas were legitimately resisting the colonisation of their land by an army of occupation, and their actions were no different to those of the French resistance in the Second World War. The theft of Palestinian water resources by Israel has always been a central aspect of the conflict, though rarely if ever mentioned by the media.

What caused the 1967 war? In his book The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (Penguin, 2001), Avi Shlaim concludes: “Israel’s strategy of escalation on the Syrian front was probably the single most important factor in dragging the Middle East to war in June 1967” (p. 235).

Finally, Felstiner says that “Nasser’s Egypt was threatening in the south.” But this again plays down the reality of Israeli aggression. In 1967 Egypt was in the sphere of Soviet influence. Nasser was firmly told by the Russian prime minister Alexei Kosygin not to attack Israel: “Should you be the first to attack you will be the aggressor…we are against aggression…we cannot support you.” (Cited Bregman, p. 82) The USA was not so scrupulous. Israel was informed by the CIA that the Americans would welcome it if Egypt was attacked. When the Israeli delegate to Washington, Meir Amit, told the Secretary of Defense that he would recommend to the Israeli government that an attack be launched, Robert MacNamara replied: “I read you loud and clear.”

The surprise Israeli attack on Egypt, Jordan and Syria which occurred on 5 June 1967 happened with the advance knowledge and enthusiastic support of the USA and Britain. The extent of British complicity is revealed in Jeremy Bowen’s book Six Days (2003). Shiploads of armoured vehicles, munitions and other weaponry sailed from Felixstowe in Suffolk, where U.S. military police guarded an arms dump. Israeli transport planes ran a shuttle service out of RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire. The Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, had agreed to help Israel, but insisted that “the utmost secrecy should be maintained.” Arms for Israel poured in from the USA. In the surprise attack that followed Israel duly wiped out the air forces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. With complete air superiority, Israel had no difficulty in defeating the land armies of those states. 12,000 Egyptians died in the Israeli offensive. The result was the occupation of the entire Sinai peninsula, the West Bank and the Golan Heights.

In short, Felstiner’s book is both classically orientalist and Zionist in its attitudes.

*

Felstiner’s complacency becomes particularly acute when he describes how in 1969 Paul Celan visited Israel for the first time. Celan made a speech to the Hebrew Writers Association in Tel Aviv on 14 October, in which he said:

I have come to you in Israel because I needed to.

As seldom with such a feeling, I have the strongest sense, after all I’ve seen and heard, of having done the right thing – not for me alone, I hope.

I think I have a notion of what Jewish loneliness can be, and I recognize as well, amongst so many things, a thankful pride in every green thing planted here that stands ready to refresh anyone who comes by; just as I take joy in every newly earned, self-discovered, fulfilled word that rushes up to strengthen those who turn toward it – I take that joy during this time of growing self-alienation and mass conformity everywhere. And I find here, in this outward and inward landscape, much of the force for truth, the self-evidentness, and the world-open uniqueness of great poetry. And I believe I’ve been conversing with those who are calmly, confidently determined to stand firm in what is human.

Celan enjoyed himself in Israel. He said he was “happy to have lived so intensively, more intensively than for a long time… I’m already thinking of coming back.”

Felstiner comments, “Celan was also struck by the memoir a veteran Israeli writer had given him and by how, during Arab attacks on Jews in pre-state Jerusalem, Christians put crosses on their doors for immunity.” (p. 268) Felstiner adds: “Celan wrote to this writer of his ‘anxiety for Israel’.”

And that’s the only way in which Arabs are, very briefly, registered in this book. Aggressive Arab nations make trouble for the Jewish state which is obliged to defend itself. Arabs attacked Jews in pre-state Jerusalem – for reasons not given. In the index of Felstiner’s book you will find 36 references listed under “ant-Semitism” (together with the recommendation to ‘See also Nazism; Neo-Nazism’). But “Palestinians” are not listed; nor is “Arab” or “Arabs”.

As far as I can tell (though there is a vast commentary on Celan in German which has not been translated into English) Paul Celan seems to have had no perception at all of Israel as a chauvinist sectarian state founded on the violent persecution of the indigenous population. The dogged anti-Zionist Mark Elfrecently defined the basic problem of the Jewish state:

Israel exists on the basis of three things: colonial settlement, ethnic cleansing and racist laws. As far as I know it is the only state that exists on that basis. Now recognising Israel's right to exist recognises its right to those three things.

As far as I can tell, Paul Celan lacked the insight of Marek Edelman, recently cited by Elf:

Why did Marek Edelman remain in Poland [after the Second World War) as a doctor when almost all his Jewish political colleagues and people close to him personally left? Edelman used to come, now and then, to Israel, to see old friends, but no one had ever publicly asked him this question, though he had a very good answer: he didn’t like the idea of the ‘new nation’. In fact, Edelman was always very critical not only of Israelis’ attitude to the Holocaust, but also of more sensitive issues – such as our racist laws of citizenship. In a late interview he told a Polish journalist: ‘Israel is a chauvinist, religious state, where a Christian is a second-class citizen and a Muslim is third-class. It is a disaster, after three million were murdered in Poland, they want to dominate everything and not to consider non-Jews!’

Celan is the great poet of the Holocaust and one of his central themes is that of loss – one of his greatest poems is ‘Aspen tree’, about his dead mother. But as far as I’m aware Celan seems to have had no perception that the invention of a Jewish state involved the ruthless sectarian persecution of a people, who also suffered and who also experienced loss. Paul Celan happily accepted the privilege of travelling to Israel, because of his identity as a privileged member of the master religion.

Celan’s complacency needs to be contrasted with what happened to to the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti. After Israel invaded and occupied that rump of Palestine known as the West Bank in 1967 it forbade native Palestinians abroad the right of return to their homeland. It did so for no other reason than racism and the basic ambition of the sectarian Jewish state of combating democracy by artificially maintaining a Jewish majority. The demographic problem was initially dealt with in 1948 by expelling the Arab majority; it was perpetuated in 1967 by the simple device of refusing to re-admit Arabs who lived in the newly occupied territories and who happened to be outside them when the Israeli army took control.

As he describes in his memoir I Saw Ramallah (2004), Barghouti found himself stranded in Cairo. He was not alone. In his words, Israel forbade “hundreds of thousands of young people to return. And the world finds us a name for us. They called us zaiheen, the displaced ones. Displacement is like death. One thinks it happens only to other people. From the summer of ’67 I became that displaced stranger whom I had always thought was someone else.”

And Paul Celan? His personal knowledge of sectarian persecution and displacement was as bitter as anyone’s can be. But he could only perceive Jews as victims, not as racists and persecutors. There was, apparently, not a glimmer of knowledge or understanding of the plight of someone like Mourid Barghouti who, like Celan, became a poet out of his experience of persecution.

Visiting Israel, Celan enjoyed his sectarian privileges as a Jew. Though a total stranger to the Middle East, he was a welcome guest in Israel. While Celan read his poems to admiring audiences, Barghouti was exiled. Barghouti, a native, was banned from his homeland. Barghouti was prevented from going to the places where a foreign Jew like Paul Celan could travel freely. And Barghouti, after 29 years of being excluded, found himself, on his return visit, still persecuted: “The others are still masters of the place. They give you a permit. They check your papers. They start your files on you. They make you wait.”

Mourid Barghouti was born in 1944. In 1996, briefly, he was permitted to return to the land from which he had been excluded in 1967. He was able once again to view the room in which he was born, “four years before the birth of the State of Israel”. He revisited the sites of his younger days. The wood at al-Nabi Saleh, for example. But now everything was changed. “Israel seized the wood and large tracts of the lands surrounding it. It built houses and brought in settlers. The road leading to the wood – like all roads leading to the settlements – is closed to Palestinians and for the use of the Israelis alone.”

On his visit to Israel in 1969, Paul Celan gushed about his “thankful pride in every green thing planted here that stands ready to refresh anyone who comes by”. Anyone? No, not anyone. Celan’s complacency and ignorance is stupefying. Here, he reminds me of nothing so much as a gullible West European Communist in the 1930s, visiting Stalinist Russia and discovering there a workers’ paradise.

Mourid Barghouti’s experience was rather different. On his return to Ramallah he saw that “There is less green now since Israel has been stealing the water since 1967”. The pitiless theft of Arab land and Arab water has always been a central feature of Zionism and the sectarian state it gave birth to. So, too, has the denial of access to water to Israeli Arabas. Even today, 80,000 Israeli Arabs are deliberately denied access to clean drinking water and sanitation. They are forced to rely on contaminated water. Children contract hepatitis and die. And yet Paul Celan, blind to the chauvinism and racism of the Jewish state, could see only delightful and refreshing greenery.

The issues of land and water, touched on by Celan in his poem and in his speech, remain every bit as relevant to day as they did in the late 1960s. Referring to the withdrawal of Jewish colonialists from Gaza, Mustafa Barghouti (no relation to the poet) noted [‘The Truth You Don’ Hear’, 9 January 2006 AL-AHRAM Weekly Online]:

Israel had already exhausted the water resources in Gaza by tapping the flow of underground water east of Gaza resulting in the seepage of seawater into Gaza’s coastal aquifer and through the over-pumping of the existing aquifer by Israeli settlements. As such, Gazans have been left with brackish water resources that cause high rates of kidney failure. The maximum accepted level of chloride in drinking water, as set by World Health Organisation standards, is 250 mg per litre. In most areas of Gaza, the level stands between 1,200 and 2,500 mg per litre.

*

To Paul Celan, Israel’s victory in 1967 was a cause for celebration – a free people, the Jews, going “from strength to strength”. Mourid Barghouti saw it differently:

Our calendars are broken, overlaid with pain, with bitter jokes and the smell of extinction. There are numbers now that can never again be neutral: they will always mean one thing. Since the defeat of June 1967 it is not possible for me to see the number ‘67’ without it being tied to that defeat. I see it in part of a telephone number, on the door of a hotel room, on the license plate of a car, in any street in the world, on a cinema or theatre ticket, on a page in a book, in the address of an office or a house, at the front of a train, or a flight number on an electronic board in any airport in the world. A number frozen in its frame.

John Felstiner’s book on Celan no longer seems to me as admirable as it once did. And neither does Paul Celan. It is dispiriting to perceive how the great poet of loss and suffering was silent about Israel’s victims. And Celan’s silence about Jews as persecutors and their victims appears to be reciprocated by everyone who writes about him.

Ellis Sharp © 2006.