27. The Mountain of Death: The Meaning of Celan’s Meeting with Heidegger*

The name “Todtnauberg,” the place in the Black Forest that gives the poem its title, needs to be broken down into its component syllables. Such an analysis can give us Toten-Au, the “meadow of the dead”; and the “mountain,” Berg, can be linked to the verb bergen, which here refers more to the act of sheltering and preserving than to that of merely hiding. Our reading also suggests that the first syllable, Todt-, can be linked to the Nazi Todt organization, which was probably responsible for the death of Celan’s parents, [2] and that the syllable –au recalls the presence of the extermination camp of Auschwitz.

Nouns speak volumes if we can understand what they say, and if, from words, we make “names.” The place, named in the title, heralds the opening that will be brought about through language. The mountain (-berg) guards, it generates and hides, protects and preserves the “meadow of the dead,” the site of a descent into hell (Todtnau, Totenau), the place of an inescapable destiny, that of a modern katabasis, a plunge into the underworld. It is into this infernal place that the owner of the cottage will be led by his visitor, who will unlock the secret of the swamps. The visitor has the necessary credentials for taking him there. All is ready, right up to the ferryman, the guide and witness appointed to take them there together. That was the purpose of the ride in a car.

The first verse might be considered a prologue to the lyrical adventure. We are indeed talking about a little epic: a stranger arrives at a lonely chalet, like Odysseus at the house of Eumaeus; a subsequent journey leads to the underworld. Just as in a Homeric poem, the essentials of the narrative event are announced beforehand. First comes the historical past, with the star of the yellow flower designating the stain of Jewishness. Next to this reference, another flower name symbolizes the language of poetry, the language that has become capable of {371|372} recounting these events. The word Augentrost (solacium oculorum) [3] can, in fact, be analyzed: the eyes, representatives of the senses, have imprinted in the verbal matter a response to the experience of disappearance. It is a gift of eyes. Consolation is not offered to them, as it is by the healing plant; it is the eyes that are able to broadcast this comfort. With these instruments of abstract vision, one has the means to draw up water from the depths of the well. The draft drunk from the well defines the flow of a dark matter; in the throw of the dice, it gets properly organized in an orderly way, oriented by the star. The die is stellar, a starwort. The depths of the abyss have as their counterpoint this pinnacle of a vertical line that they themselves thrust up to the heights. Language is found in this place, deciphered and read.

The mountain has revealed its secret to the visitor, emitting its signs from the very first words. The flowers are the messengers of the chthonian depths: first, on the side of history, the yellow star, the visitor’s history, the history of the Jews; and then, on the side of death, the euphrasy (eyebright), beneficial for the eye, where poetry is revitalized in the light of a new gaze. It can say what this history has been. The mark of a color, the yellow flower, has as its counterweight the benefits the word implies. The eye clears, far from the inherited hymns and in their embrace, the senses, which have been adjusted to the stain of infamy. The balm of another light, rising from the funereal meadows, Totenau, turns into “eyebright” (Augentrost). Language seizes the topography, it remakes the site, recovers it, shows that it covers and uncovers it, leaving it covered also in its initial opacity.

The problem of biographism, of reference, anecdotal at first—reality encountered, left in place, then interpreted, turned into its meaning—finds its aesthetic solution in the double movement of a reconstitution and a moving beyond that intersect and overlap. Heidegger’s country is the terror of the Black Forest. His celebration of this pan-Germanic nature before students in 1933 blackens pseudo-poetry forever. Now a poet has come to introduce the philosopher to his own forest and, more than that, to impose on him the truth of a place by remaking it de profundis. What is perceptible vanishes before the truth of words. The “die” will be the figure decorating the well, but it will also have become the star that guides the poet continually, from one poem to the next, shaping biographical chance, its throw of the dice, a new adaptation. One will {372|373} be in a familiar region. The fountain is the right one, the one in the poem … “the fountain murmurs.” [4] The first flower was the right one too, auspicious, familiar: Arnika, the yellow flower, recalls the persecutions and perpetuates the presence of the victims, perpetuates the calamity, lest the dead be forgotten.

The water that flows and that we drink is made of words. The poem draws on another source. The gesture can be interpreted; it lends itself to interpretation: “What you see me doing has its own meaning, which perhaps escapes you; however, what I come to ask, by agreeing to drink from this fountain, your fountain, is clear. The expected reply will no doubt be denied me. One can fear so. But let there be no mistake: I shall already have obtained it, during this visit. I shall have turned the denial to my advantage.” Interpreters have been mistaken or have been unwilling to read it this way; they have not wanted to make this visit such a funereal occasion, the response to a denial of murder.

As in the other poems, the relation of the linguistic organization to the external reality to which it refers, a reality less reproduced than reconstituted, is problematic. The well near Heidegger’s cottage exists, and the figure carved in the wood above the fountain is that of a star etched in a cube. No precision in the evocation of objects impedes the complete reworking. The second scene takes place in the house: we are in the cottage, the “hut” (Hütte). The prepositional phrase has a particularly expressive force in a purely substantive setting, throughout the eight stanzas of the candelabra. [5] The stress of the repeated two-syllable line: in der / Hütte (“in the / hut”), envelops the whole prologue in its own ambience, and means that Celan, with the language—his language—that he has introduced into this place, has taken over the interior of the home. He has a magic lever that allows him to bring up vast distances. The powers named in the prologue are all ensconced in this place, in the nocturnal domain of the cottage. The inner sphere of the dwelling can, for this reason, be represented by a book. And first of all it is a book as such, as a place and as an object where what is written is received, as one speaks of the Bible, as Mallarmé speaks of his impossible project. [6] But in a second stage, which becomes clear in the parenthesis, the book turns into another book, a very distinctive one that is opened only in this poem. In reality, as conveyed anecdotally, it is an album in which Celan has written his name. The sentence inscribed in it is known. [7] Celan makes a distinction between the lines he has written and those of other houseguests: in other circumstances he would not have agreed to leave his signature next to theirs. In this place, its presence was important and significant; it defined an intellectual and political horizon.

Where are we now? In the philosopher’s cottage, which was called a Hütte, [8] or in another place, in a utopian thatched cottage (“peace to the cottages”) to which Celan is referring, following Büchner? [9] The passage by way of utopia surely leads to the “hope” the poet harbors, inscribed in the book, before the imposition of the dead, the hope for a future shaped by devotion to the memory of the victims. The book will not be an object in which visitors inscribe their names, but will have been transformed by the line the poet has traced in it. He has the power to transform it, such as it is, despite all it contains—“that book”: the very book that must open onto its own integrated past and onto a future of freedom that will be based on that memory. What has the poet been doing all along, if not reconverting German by Judaizing it? No matter that the other, the thinker, did not say what was expected of him; the thing will have been said for him and as an expectation. The future is formulated and inscribed forever in a “thought” that cannot be subtracted from memory (Gedenken), if it aspires to be “thought” (Denken) and “word” (Wort), at the request of a “heart.” [10] The speech of horror looms; it is brought to the brink of this advent that expectation bears. {374|375}

The poetic text to be analyzed is clearly written, without equivocation or ambiguity, without any possible means of escape. Hope, at the moment of writing (“today”), lives on thanks to an expectation. In the course of a journey that has already been mapped out, thought becomes what it should never have refused to be. Like the book, the guide driving the car doubles as a witness, in a role that the context assigns him. Driver when it is time for a drive, he becomes the involuntary guide on an infernal journey. The punning on Namen / nahms (“names” / “registered”) does not stress the reality of the signatures, but refers to the transfer of the world of those inscribed in the book, the brigades of the persecutors, into the register of the Last Judgment that is now being compiled. The names must appear before Celan’s, because the poet, through the meaning given to the inscription of his name, provides a counterweight. An act of real resistance is connected to a person. The name: “mine” (next to what others?) implies an incriminating neighborhood. The question addressed to the book also designates the very place of poetry, a habitual and constant place, a component of liberation. The cohabitation is experienced as something always imposed—impossible but imposed.

The lines that follow (stanza 3, lines 8–10) reproduce, with some significant differences, the sentence in the book, which was written a week later. It is evasive and revelatory. At first glance, a superficial reader would read it as a friendly compliment to his host. This is how it has often been interpreted. But this kind of reading takes no account of the meaning of the words. In fact, the relation between the two levels of language is comparable to the relation that might exist between the sculptured cube with the star and the function it assumes in its context. Thus, the term “thinking man” (Denkenden) might make one think of Heidegger the thinker; however, in his work Celan uses it only in reference to recollection and commemoration; in the same way, the word “heart” (Herz) is commonly conceived as an organ of memory, and this semantic orientation determines the meaning of the other words. Hope, if one stays close to the moment as reconstituted, relies on a distancing from all that the names in the album represent; it remains attached to the present day; in turn, the present boils down to what the book has become in this text: a book that writes, and re-writes.

Finally, the epithet “coming” (kommendes) concerns less the speech of the future than a declaration that will be actualized, will “happen,” and will go to its addressee. The expectation formulated by Celan will not come to pass, but it is no less important for the understanding of the whole to consider the fact that {375|376} it has been expressed. This is the way the poet retains the fault: the philosopher will not say what the poet may have come to ask him to say, that he suggests he say, but the poet already knows that the philosopher will not comply. In response to this absence, the second part of the text confirms the reasons that keep him from doing so. Speech is actualized in an open acknowledgement, revealing the continuity of an attachment to the past.

The next episode takes place outdoors, outside the cottage. The drive through the Black Forest follows a precise scenario planned in advance. Gerhard Neumann, a young assistant to Gerhart Baumann, a professor of German literature in Freiburg, [11] was driving the two men in his car. The route was organized in such a way that it was already part of the not-yet-written poem. Perception adopts this selective form.

The five stations of the excursion construct a descent into Hell. The first visit is to the torture sites, and their victims’ graves, in the middle of the Black Forest. The confession wrenched from the thinker comes after the visitors turn back. They go first to the realm of the dead. They need a witness to hear the confession of the unthinkable, the thing that the poet succeeds in making the thinker say. After the judgment of the underworld, they return to the surface of the earth, and the confession is made as an offering to the victims of the extermination camps. All that remains is to display the ritual scene of mourning in the shedding of tears.

The initiatory rite of saturation under pressure (stanzas 5 and 6) entails a movement of departure and a fit of anger, like a whirlwind, perhaps. The {376|377} circles open onto the abyss. The stage is surrounded by two other more horizontal visions, along similarly stagnant lines. The opening (stanza 4) prepares for the journey. The summoned victims are there: the soul of each one of the dead blooms by itself, individually, with its own little candelabra. Each one has its own power of resistance, a virile force concentrated in the tubers of the orchis (“the boys’ plant,” Knabenkraut), in the form of testicles. A legion rises up, uncountable; each blossom has its genitals. Domination seems irrepressible. So the journey will take place, and it has some chance of succeeding.

The content of the text would justify the hypothesis of a transposition of the title of Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain into Celan’s title, at least through the word “mountain” (-berg): it could well be a subverted form of a Zauberberg, of the dark site of an “unveiling,” for the workings of black magic—as black as the Forest so praised by Heidegger. We know people who never went back there.

A great many camps were set up in marshy regions. The meadows (Wasen) were not only wetlands, but also cemeteries where some elevated sections can be seen, so many tombs surviving in memory, one beside the other. [12] Each one is marked by the shape of an orchid candelabra. The flowers are fires that burn. Nature is transformed into intelligence, forced to remember.

An alert reader, led by memory or chance, will discover at the same time, on the horizon of an unsuspected intertextuality, the very audible if not explicit negation of a classic leveling out of cemeteries, which can be read as a terrible prefiguration, a parable of the future destruction of cemeteries. In Goethe’s Elective Affinities, Charlotte decides to replace the uneven ground of the graves in the churchyard with a bed of clover, and thus suppresses the differentiations that the raised earth, borders, and stones create between the dead. The episode of the argument in the first chapter of the second part of Goethe’s novel comes to mind here. In a way, the discussion allows Celan to take sides against the position preferred by the architect who acts as arbiter in the novel, and perhaps by Goethe himself. “Unleveled” in the place of “leveled” introduces an oppositional “-un,” a “not”: it is not what Charlotte wants and imposes (against the wishes of the neighbor and her lawyer: “the space thus vacated had been levelled.” [13] The historical vision drawn from reality, rewritten with natural turf (Wasen), says the opposite. The erasure of a violent unification in anonymity will {377|378} not take place (“no, it is not that kind of leveling, un-ein-ge-eb-net” [each syllable is stressed in turn]).

The remembered dialogue is reconstituted, taking on the aspect of a tragic revolt. Celan rereads the words, his own notes, in his Goethe. He discovers them in the mouth of the young scholar, a well-read jurist, defending the cemetery: first of all, the term “no one,” which we know from “The Meridian” and which allowed Celan to re-interpret in a similar way a “himself” (er selbst) from Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, and then, too, the “presence” (Gegenwart) of the dead. That presence is transferred into the order of language. In Goethe, the survivors gather together “as if around a boundary stone” (the German is very eloquent: “wie um einem Markstein”); they keep the enemies away from this rallying sign. If we needed a proof of the legitimacy (or necessity) of the connection, it is provided by the importance attributed to the enclosure that is distinguished, and repeated, in the first version of the poem, by the adjective ungesäumt (without a border). [14] Celan’s reader passes spontaneously from the sense of “incessant” to that of “without a border.” [15] Reading the Affinities where the word is used in conversation by the architect (ungesäumt vergleiche, [16] a comparison of equality and non-distinction) offers the possibility of fitting it in with the core of the nihilistic erasure in the philosopher’s speech. In any case, Goethe is presented as a forefather of this depersonalization. One can imagine the interest and the irony of the interlocutor, who knew how to “make people speak,” faced with the Goethean professions of faith from the Freiburg Germanist. [17]

When we read the two lines of stanza 4 while relying on the materials available, we encounter, first, something humid, a sign of verbal abundance, pre-structured in the tear (see Celan’s poem “Flower” [18] ), and, in a more material sense, in the orchid, in the male plant, the testicular flower, a figure of the {378|379} revolt that lives on in each of the deceased. In death every man is for himself, and fights, even in his annihilation, for himself alone, beyond the beliefs and conventions that caused his death.

By burrowing under the graves, we discover the root of these beliefs. Proclamations led to murder. While conversing with the philosopher in the car, Celan, after this visit to the dead, goes back to the very origin. The journey leads to the depths of the abyss. The word “late” (spät), in Celan’s language, situates a word—one that lies on the horizon of a truth—close to the departed souls and death. [19] The violence of the words proffered “later” (später), so close to a bloody and abyssal aptness, indicates the shocking subject of the conversation during which Heidegger had been led by the poet to speak “in plain language” about the murders, because his words were as precise as his interlocutor could have wished.

I think that the word “clearly” (deutlich) must also be analyzed. It does not mean only “distinctly,” for the German word used here includes the characteristics of exegesis (deuten, “”to interpret”). The suffix -lich could take on a sinister meaning here as elsewhere, [20] and might remind us of the German word for corpse (Leiche). [21] The detours surrounded this object. The path of the philosophical discourse is interpreted, and so it is “revealed.”

In the meadows, amidst the ponds, the poet initiates his hosts, and leads them from earthly spirituality to the tonalities of belated truths (see the expression “seven roses later” in the poem “Kristall” [22] ), knowing how to draw from the depths the distinct accents of cruelty, as the infernal journey gains speed. The transmission has worked. The signs were clear, and the host was unable to ignore them; he could not have remained indifferent to the evidence offered all around him. The third person, the driver, “the man,” vested with supreme authority by his presence among the graves, bears witness in an almost juridical and constraining way. The guide listens to what he must have heard during the journey of initiation. He is the guarantor, through the magical power of a ritual, of what the other, the interviewee, should he be questioned one day, will never be able to deny without committing perjury.

The oft-celebrated encounter with “poetry” (Dichtung) has this power and these inevitable effects, like the waters of the Styx in mythology. [23] Nothing {379|380} more will ever protect Heidegger, if he does not admit that he has spoken these words before a witness. According to the express terms of the poem, he remains doomed, delivered up to one who has initiated speech. The ordeal takes place in front of the guide, a man in the land of inhumanity. On this journey, the driver represents a community of survivors for whom the message of the confession is intended. The witness listens to what is said (anhört) “with” (mit: “with,” “at the same time as”) the others. The word mit has particular weight. It is responsible for recording the monstrous speech.

If this text were describing concrete facts, “the person who is driving us” would be that person, the car’s driver, the guide whose identity we know. Obviously, we cannot settle for this. The real point of departure has been maintained and, transferred into another domain, opens up in the dimension of speech. As journeys go, this one quickly takes them far from the plateaus of the Forest. The occupant of the cottage has been drawn by his guest into the kingdom of darkness. Both are escorted in their descent or voyage (“journey in Hades,” Hadesfahrt, or “journey into the Underworld,” Unterweltsfahrt, and so on) and in their exploration by a being who has a man’s name. Neither priest nor God nor poet, but a man, a figure of ordinary humanity, showing the way among the victims of inhumanity.

The transitive use of fährt (“drives,” “leads”) does not describe the actual situation of the car driven by Gerhard Neumann, but rather the journey, according to the terms of poetic transposition. The difference between Fahrer (driver) and der uns fährt (who drives us), following im Fahren (in passing) in the preceding verse, is important. Stress is placed on the load that is being transported (compare the noun die Fuhre, “cart load”), the cargo carried off by a coachman or a wondrous boatman. Celan explained to André du Bouchet that “to convey” (voiturer) would be an equivalent; [24] the meaning and the orientation of this information become clear. The conveyer is responsible for carrying far away, right to the point where it is borne, the burden produced by the conversation between the two passengers. At the same time, he maintains contact with the other shore: he is a man. His role is to remain human in the domain of the inhuman. The pronoun “we” is detached in this adventure, producing a “him” and a “me” who are just as irreconcilably separated as the orchids (einzeln, “separate”). Celan speaks from his side: he hears what his interlocutor says to {380|381} him, from the side where he is sitting and where he has chosen to be (Celan did the same thing with Martin Buber in 1960, when we visited him together in a Paris hotel, and again with Nelly Sachs, the same year). [25] The same process is repeated three times. One speaks bluntly, to induce and record the response. This needed to be said, by Heidegger.

The first time it happens (im Fahren), the internal dynamics of Celan’s language—internal, as in intertextuality—promotes the great migratory movements, of the stars or the birds. One witnesses a departure, in the order of verbal imagination, the impulse of an unbridled acceleration. [26] Nothing offers resistance, everything comes to light, emerges from the dark in this flight. It is the contrary of what has usually been written. Hans-Georg Gadamer, in particular, cannot imagine that the overly brutal words of the master were aimed at an inadmissible self-evidence: at stake must have been a depth that Celan began to understand only later, “once he got home.” [27]

Now, the magician was Celan; he worked on assignment, his own. He set himself the project, and with a magician’s artistry he produced the confirmation he was expecting.

Now the mountain’s peat bogs take the place of the wooded meadows. This is where the killing took place. In the circular composition of the second part of the poem (stanzas 4 to 8), the poet, following the infernal discussion, recovers his own language; the “paths” (Pfade) are the passages that open up in his own poems. They lead to the paths of cudgels; here, the prisoners were beaten with those clubs. We remain within the framework of the constitution of the idiom. The words bear traces of the blows.

Once down on this lower level, one stops at a point that leads not to the world of the dead, but further back, to the sites of suffering and torture, to the swamps where the camps had been set up. The clubs one walks on to avoid sinking in the mud recall the brutality of the treatment the prisoners endured. One steps on their suffering, “half-treading,” so as to leave the weight of that suffering there, like a flag at half-mast (auf Halbmast). To do this is to abandon time, to leave it to the truth of tears (stanza 8). {381|382}

They are now four (Gerhart Baumann had rejoined the group). They walked a short distance on a log trail with marshy ground on either side. Celan did not have the right shoes for the swampy terrain. They gave up on their walk. [28] However, they had really been there. The concrete details coincide precisely with the event, just as it happened and just as it was read, poetically; that is, newly arranged for reading. The event assumes its meaning; it is transferred with precision into the appropriate semantic universe.

The eternal question of biographism, raised by Gadamer and other hermeneuticists, along the lines of phenomenological presuppositions, keeps on coming up, countering Peter Szondi’s interpretation of the poem “Du liegst” (“You lie”) in the early 1970s. [29] We know that the walk along the log trails across the marsh was interrupted by the rain. “Half- / trodden” can thus be explained, but we have no need of this knowledge (inessential knowledge, “backstage chatter,” for Otto Pöggeler, although no less Heideggerian for all that). [30] However the transposition, if it has a factual basis, presupposes another fact, one inherent in language, but no less historical; the initial, constitutive reference is already biographical. In principle, there is no difference between the Eden guest-house in Berlin in the poem “You lie” and the repetition of a passage from Meister Eckhart in “You be like you” (“Du sei wie du” [GW 2:327]) [31] or here, in the interruption of a hike. A primary meaning, if it is factual, takes on a meaning that is primary in a different way; this is the case for “half” (“half- / trodden”), which is elevated to the status of a rallying sign and a signification newly given but not yet acknowledged. It is the serious play of enigma.

Precision is recognized by interpreters as long as it contributes to the inventory of reality, but not when it allows one to grasp a reference created by reflection in poetry. The interpreters prefer to move on to the “symbolic,” which is universally known: the marsh is water; one might say that in Celan’s work, it is poetically “the water of life.” [32] There can be no divergence between expectation and reading. The horizons “merge.” The problem of the relation of {382|383} purely descriptive elements with their textual interpretation is always posed in the same way. The walk may have been interrupted on account of the rain. But the “half” makes it clear that the steps have been conveyed towards the shadows, just as “high” marks a point on an ascending line: the more distant the depths to which the journey has led, the more powerful the force of a new representation of what happened. The swamp rises upwards. Thus tears make the words grow, as in the poem “Flower” (“Blume”); they are boundless. Their mass is contained in the compact element of moisture. The water of the meadows and of the marshes has been transferred into this neutral expression Feuchtes (“dampness”).

I note here with some emotion the content of the dossier of photocopies about this poem that Gisèle Celan was kind enough to put together for me in 1981, and then to complete, after a conversation on the improper appropriations of the text that I had discovered. This took place as I was starting work on Paul Celan (cover letters from Gisèle Celan from January 14 and 23, 1981):

• Several versions of the manuscript (together with the preparatory pages of the critical edition, sent to me at that time by Rolf Bücher and Stefan Reichert). [34]
• Gisèle Celan’s correspondence with Heidegger’s son Hermann, on the topic of the sentence in the guestbook, the request dated November 8 (or 10), and the reply of December 10, 1980.
• A list made by Paul Celan of fourteen people to whom he had given a copy of the separate edition of this poem, published in Vaduz (Brunidor) in 1968, with some responses (Kostas Axelos, Heidegger).
• Letters from Gerhard Neumann (October 17, 1967, and January 16, 1968) and from Robert Altmann (February 5, 1968). Altmann is the editor of the non-commercial publication in Vaduz of 50 copies {383|384} (from Altmann, in addition, a reply to Beda Allemann, published April 17, 1977 in a journal of the Principality of Liechtenstein). [35]
• The French translations by Jean Daive, in Études germaniques 25.3 (1970):243–249, and in Terriers (1979):9ff., by André du Bouchet, Poèmes de Paul Celan, 1978 (later published in Poèmes, 1986:28ff.); see also Marc B. de Launay, below.
• Several studies that appeared later in French, from the Heideggerian vantage point: Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Misère de la littérature (Paris, 1978), 67–69; a booklet: “Todtnauberg, by way of Truinas” (the name of the place where du Bouchet had a house); Les Fleurs, by Jean-Michel Reynard, published by Thierry Bouchard (Losne, 1982), 11–14, with the German text and du Bouchet’s translation; Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Le rayonnement de Heidegger,” with the poem translated by Marc B. de Launay, in the Cahier de l’Herne devoted to Heidegger (no. 45 [1983]:138–144).

I did well to wait some fifteen years before publishing my own interpretation. It was not that I had failed to see immediately that I needed to interpret the elements of the background and to capture their intellectual significance, and I certainly knew how to go about it. But before the late 1980s, I had been convinced that Celan, as he more or less allowed us to believe or state, expected Heidegger to express an opinion. To better understand the situation, I needed to penetrate to the core of an analysis of the constitution and the power of language. The text that follows, revised in 1991, was presented in Gerald Stieg’s seminar at the Austrian Institute in Paris, on January 8, 1992.

Celan had come to see me before his departure for Freiburg. He told me that he was going to meet Heidegger when he did a reading there. He thought that I would be disappointed or astonished, given all the conversations we had had about Heidegger during the preceding months and weeks. “He will be obliged [or: “I will oblige him”?] to speak to me.” I told Celan that Heidegger would do no such thing. I was thinking of an explanation of his behavior during the Nazi period, such as others had tried to obtain from him. Celan must have shared my skepticism, but he did not reveal his stratagem to me. I had no idea of the way he had chosen to make Heidegger speak. On his return from Germany, Celan very quickly came to report that he had, in fact, seen Heidegger, and that indeed he (Celan) had “done nothing,” meaning: nothing I might imagine; Celan did not {384|385} tell me that he had done something else. It took some time for me to understand what had happened, despite the precedents that I knew about. One should take the magic of art literally. Making the spoken word speak brings with it a terrible power. I knew that he had had no intention of going there to pay homage to Heidegger. [36]

Gerhart Baumann describes all the elements of the strategy in his account of the visit. One has to have understood Celan’s poem to recognize the game that was played, in part without the knowledge of the protagonist or the witnesses involved. One can infer nothing, neither from the poem nor from the half-unconscious account, which unveils and masks. When, in Paris in the spring of 1988, Celan gave Baumann a copy of the Vaduz edition, he had added: “Please read it soon. You’ll be surprised.” [37] He knew it would not be read for a while. Baumann was not ready to understand.

The narrator Baumann reduces the content to a dialogue that could have developed but that did not occur, between two geniuses whose contradictions, and particularly those of the Freiburg professor, should be respected. Such contradictions belonged to them and testified to their greatness. The event has no effect on this dialectic of the mind. When it is well thought out, philosophical nihilism embraces the history of Nazism and situates it as a necessary, inevitable event. Moreover, one can plead that it is hard to understand today what it must have been like at the time when German professors made their regrettable decisions and the Jews were dismissed from their academic chairs. We judge from a distance. “Are we right to do so, for all that?” [38] History itself, which unveils, is stripped of its reason. That is a bit much.

The account mentions all the explicit and public manifestations of the distance that Celan intended to keep. He did not want his photograph taken with Heidegger: “His reluctance was insurmountable”; [39] “He found it hard to {385|386} meet a man whose past he could not forget.” [40] And even less so because he had not been acquainted with that past beforehand. Celan also resented that he had once placed his trust in Heidegger, reading him without any background knowledge. The relation between Heidegger’s work and his past had only dawned on him later. Baumann cannot understand him. A reproach, perhaps an ill-founded one, makes Baumann see in Celan “suspicion” and “rancor.” [41] He chose his side. History could not have this weight.

At the same time, Celan accepted the philosopher’s compliments and engaged in conversation with him on the subjects they had in common, on the landscape, on the flora and fauna of the Black Forest. [42] Indeed, he needed to express a certain freedom and trust, the appearance of conviviality, for his project to succeed. And afterwards, everything had been said. Celan felt free. He had liberated himself. But at the same time, as if to situate his decision, he immediately expressed remorse for it. He was crossing a divide and made it known. He might have had some doubts about the outcome of his action. There is a perfect logic in the contradiction of the two successive gestures of saying yes while meaning no, and then a definitive no. He expressed the fundamental duality of his task.

Should one not explore the psychology of the victims? For a while the philosopher’s presence had dissipated Celan’s reserve: the poet had surrendered to an obvious power, in Baumann’s view; this reserve would then reassert itself, regain the upper hand. Baumann could not explain the fleeting moments of good humor other than by feeling their effect, even though he himself revealed its limits. The poet, he believed, had been thrust back in time to his old ordeals, being no longer confronted with the hardness of granite. “How many times has Celan trodden the painful path from Death Fugue to Todtnauberg,” he writes in black and white, “without attaining his goal?” [43] Namely, the extermination camps in their Germanic grandeur and depth. Wandering and failure were the lot of the Jewish poet; they had nothing to do with the Germans, who had been chosen for another destiny. This is the conviction to which Celan, in fact, succumbed.

The poet expressed his desire to see the marshes close to the cottage. His companions suggested the Horbach area. On the way they could stop by the {386|387} legendary house at Todtnauberg. We know that Celan settled on this itinerary ahead of time. He knew where he was going and where he was going to take Heidegger; nothing was unexpected. Baumann was not present during the discussion in the cottage. He rejoined the group later in the morning, for the visit to the marshes: he had come in his own car, which explains why he did not hear the second, more decisive conversation between Celan and Heidegger, in the car Neumann was driving. However, thanks to him, we have the story of the interrupted walk on the log trail. [44]

The script was programmed. Germanic mists and grey skies accompany it, as if by magic. [45] Celan had achieved his ends. He was visibly satisfied with the way things had worked out. His success was such that it dispelled his usual melancholy. Baumann was struck by Celan’s serenity when he met up with the two men in the town of Sankt Blasien, in the valley of the Black Forest, halfway through the trip. The visit to Heidegger’s house had already taken place. [46] He was surprised, as was Marie Luise Kaschnitz in Frankfurt, where Celan wrote the poem a few days later. She did not recognize him; he seemed so reinvigorated. [47] She also did not know why—never imagining that it was because his action had succeeded, by making the event conform to its profound truth.

In the first of the letters he sent to Celan more than two months after the meeting, Gerhard Neumann recalls, in a rather conventional way, the conversations that took place in his presence in the car (letter of October 17, 1967). In the meantime, Celan had spoken with him on the telephone. He apparently mentioned the poem he had written, and thus indirectly the role he had made Neumann play in the infernal scenario; it was a distinction the meaning of which the young Neumann could not have understood. He responds emphatically: “I will never forget this conversation; without doubt something like it can occur only once in several decades.” But he adds a more precise reference to the events of the past, even though it remains particularly vague—or perhaps confused: “I did some soul searching, in view of the fact that I was able to be present during this conversation; believe me, I try to continue this search, in my own mind.” He must have been acting by way of a transference, interposing {387|388} himself, as if Celan had asked him to take responsibility for the accusation himself. Later, when he receives the Vaduz book with the poem, his reaction is in some ways even more uneasy: “I was bowled over (literally), and I realize that the appeal formulated in the poem is also addressed to me [which is not the case, not in that way]; I have reasons to fear that I am not equal to the appeal [which was the case]. I beg your indulgence; please continue to think kindly of me.” He seems to be asking permission to withdraw, and to escape the consequences of an affair in which he had no desire to be involved. [48]

In his memoir, [49] Baumann reports that during a meeting with Celan that took place on May 24, 1970, shortly before his death, the poet regretted that he had not received Neumann’s article on the “absolute metaphor.” [50] His curiosity must have been aroused. We can understand how Celan, later in the evening, flew into a towering rage when he found out about it. He learned that the metaphorical decomposition in his poetry did not succeed in capturing the real. The author was thinking about such a depraved reality that it evaded the possibility of any meaningful apprehension. The verbal explosion translated the decomposition of the world. Neumann thought this was an example, in one of its various manifestations, of the doctrine of technological degradation that figured so frequently in Heidegger’s work, and he thought he could base his argument on that premise. It featured prominently in a whole section of the interpretations he put forward of Celan’s work. Relations between Celan and Neumann were thus irreparably damaged. The lack of comprehension revealed a lack of solidarity. “The man” in the poem was not a man; he was not the incarnation of the non-human. Baumann, in recounting the incident, sides implicitly with his young assistant: in his study, he had put his finger on the unintelligible character of an art to which the poor poet remained attached. The decomposition that he re-translated was the expression of his absurd destiny. This is still another trend in the history of the reception accorded to Celan’s work. He had tried to utter the unutterable with more or less success. His illness bears witness to a transgression. The mystery cannot be denied. {388|389}

If, in one of the variants, Celan reverted to “stone” (Steinwürfel) instead of “star” (Sternwürfel), the passage to the order of poetry should be marked more globally and clearly (for this purpose, see for example the poem “Erratic” (Erratisch). [51] The star is an element of the system; the star that guides the traveller, and the mark of infamy. The “stone” of the poems translates the transfer into words. With Sten, which he had written without the r, the choice remained to be made.

The process led, through the integration of the crime, to the advent of a word for the future, and was made explicit in the first version by the addition of a parenthesis: The hic et nunc of a word standing in for the weakness of another was accentuated. Again, the variant supports an interpretation that needs to have been made in order to appreciate it, and that one makes without it. One follows the path of a meaning.

The adverb ungesäumt (“without delay”) certainly does not mean (as Baumann would have it [53] ) that a statement on Heidegger’s part had seemed to Celan, at a certain point, to be probable or imminent. Superimposed on “incessant” one can hear: without an edge, without a border, openly (based on Saum, “hem,” and not on säumen, “to delay, hesitate”). He knew what he was going to do and obtain. What he was considering was endless and unfettered. [54]

We can read the sentence Celan actually wrote in the guest book at Heidegger’s house on July 25, 1967. He refers to it a week later, in the poem he dates from Frankfurt, on August 1: {389|390}

The poetic writing is transferred into the sphere of economic poverty, repression, and insurrection. For him, “the cottage guest book” is just that (Friede den Hütten [“peace to the cottages”]). [56] The sentence is inscribed in the book; it is his first impulse (ins), before the invocation to the supports of art (mit). The gaze then moves outside towards the vertical, which rises from the shadows of the well and looms up to its other pole stemming from the night. This is already the site of the conversation that will follow, and the glow of the star under which it will be placed. The poet makes sure that this prerequisite is present, the actual object, which is there and which serves the transposition.

Memory takes care of the rest. The heart remembers. It has the strength for it. Hope rests on it; it cannot cut itself off from continuity. The word rises, it springs up at the horizon of its language, “in the hope of the heart”; it has the virtue of opening up to what is to come (ein kommendes Wort). If one confines oneself to this logic, it cannot be the case of awaiting a declaration, or of some kind of justification on the part of the host. Rather it anticipates the confession that will be wrung out of the host. The survival of the past, of the initial act, evokes an implicit contradiction, by the mere fact of being uttered. The confession-­confirmation will serve as a lever for the production of a terrible denial. Nothing is merely described. Everything is transferred. The descriptions involve a passage to the interior of language, preventing the negation of the values that are associated with it at this site. The cottage and its well are spoken again like the book, the heart that remembers.

In the poem, the phases are apportioned, distinct: first the well, outside, then the indoor space of the cottage, which is organized around the book, to the extent of being confused with it, and with the line of writing traced in this book. The inscription written in it now gives way, with the narrative distance of the poem, to the gesture of a presentation and a doubling. The book, still his, is written from one poem to another, from one note to another; but it is enriched once more, in enemy territory, with the names and the language of the adversary, on the tracks of an incursion, always already programmed. To slip under the skin of the beast; the book will be that book, with all the names of the Nazis. {390|391}

The repetition of the sentence from the guest book—a form of auto-interpretive intertextuality—introduces the present tense of a recollection. It is the present of this day, “today,” highlighted. This day (heute), the story of the encounter will be inscribed; it has been extended to the murderers in the book, in the land of death, so much so that the “philosopher” of the Black Forest has begun, against his will, to think about the memory he rejects. The more he rejects, the less he renounces, and the more his thought is led to draw from itself the power to turn against itself. The “philosopher” in the counter-language has become an other. Nihilism has changed into memory of the annihilation. The future will open up if it is the depositary of that history.

Beda Allemann methodically ruled out any political or factual references. He saw in the word “hope” an eschatological expectation, the arrival of the poet of the future that Kleist evokes in a letter to his sister Ulrike on October 5, 1803. [57] Doctrinal positivity triumphed. The publisher Robert Altmann reintroduced the political dimension, but he failed to see that the hope for an explanation still expressed a reaction that was too positive, respectful, and almost beseeching. [58] He believed that the sadness of the marshes revealed the doubt Celan still harbored. [59] The meeting of two great minds, between two equally “absolute” (!) languages, should continue to remain at the center of the poem, for the sake of literature. Otherwise, what meaning did the thing have, in such beautiful attire? Would the example of the bottle cast into the ocean, dear to so many readers and interpreters, not be the in-depth decoding, still to come? [60] The fact that, whenever he could, Celan personally distributed copies without trusting the book to the mail system, reserved the meaning to an open future. Each recipient would do as he liked with it.

My friend Kostas Axelos, whose thought was greatly influenced by Heidegger (he was one of the recipients of the Vaduz edition), was at the Austrian Institute in 1992 when the interpretation proposed here was presented. He admitted to me that it was extremely coherent, but he still wondered if others just as coherent might exist. The future is open. One should maintain the possibility in principle. In this case, the construction would not have the same necessity or, {391|392} more precisely, it would be merely one “construction” that was stronger than another. Herein lies the problem. Reading opens up; it is in search of a meaning that can always be made more precise and profound, but not exchanged for another, unless it is an erroneous one. Otherwise, this would just be a game; it is conceivable that some play it.

Heidegger, as is clear from his own letter (dated January 30, 1968), either understood nothing, or did not want to understand anything: “My own wishes? That at the appointed time you would hear the language in which the poetry to be written would be addressed to you.” [61] One can see a certain lack of sensitivity here, but also (if there is any difference) some impertinence, a retort to the sentence in the guest book. Celan had got his revenge in advance. In his lecture in Athens the same year (1967), [62] Heidegger quotes a sentence from Nietzsche: “Man is an animal which has not yet been certified.” [63] He concludes that man’s existence is not assured. Celan, in their conversation, made him speak the inhuman, before a representative of the human species.

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe asserts that, for Celan, the dialogue with Heidegger, “at least in reference to the essence of poetry” (das Wesen der Dichtung), was decisive, and that that was why the meeting “had assumed … such importance.” [64] But when, in Celan’s work, has “poetry” been, even in its shortest syllables, separated from the persecution of the Jews? His relentless pursuit of erasing the opposition, the gulf continually being retraced between the two worlds, is as infinite as the chasm.

Certain readers speak of the poet’s expectation as if it were a condition of the inevitable experience of failure. They cannot deny the existence of an appeal, and one cannot find a direct expression of the homage one would like to see, without the detour of an unfulfilled wish. So they read in it a confession “that tears apart the horizon of the world.” [65] One can understand the sorrow {392|393} of the Jew—the word “Jew” is scarcely uttered; it is avoided, or replaced by “foreigner” or “someone from far away.” The Jew cannot understand that the German philosopher was determined to remain loyal to his origin and to his fatherland, [66] to bear the weight of his past commitment all by himself, without having to account for himself to anyone, [67] and to protect the logic of his work, which could not be called into question on account of his personal conduct. In light of this mission, the Jews did not count for much. Heidegger had not acted in his own name, but on an official mission, for a higher and thus trans-historical reason. [68] The question Celan posed could not find an answer. Perhaps he had a vague suspicion of this himself. The question concerns neither the past nor the future; it is focused on an opening; by its very essence, it cannot be answered. [69] Heidegger’s silence bears witness to an essentially higher experience embodied in German thought. It is a truth of another order. We have to admit that the celebrated encounter did not take place. Because of a fundamental divergence, which determines the status of history and memory, interpretations will remain condemned to operate in a vacuum. In this confrontation, Celan bears witness to his own weakness.

Everything can be euphemized and toned down. Ill fortune dogs Celan, who however tones down nothing. He writes poetry; consequently, one does not expect to find in him something so unpoetic. Christoph Schwerin may well mention the disappointment felt by the poet during the visit, but to no avail. [70] He too euphemizes from beginning to end. The word “Jew” is not uttered here either. {393|394}

We are bathed here in the light of reconciliation. Of the two flowers seen on arrival, one is for bodily health, the other for healing the soul. It is the “soothing” that the sick poet hoped to find; he went there seeking it. The roles are reversed. The cottage is Mecca: he wanted to “reconcile himself with his own past.” He found in the water of the fountain this other “thou,” whom he addresses so often. It is the terrible testimony of a necessary reading, dialogical and internalized. Remorse leads to forgiveness, forgiveness to salvation; but the attempt failed.

The poet was thought to have come with good intentions, to make peace. It was fruitless. In the car, Heidegger is relaxed, talking cheerfully. He obliterates an earlier, more serious conversation that had taken place in the cottage (the poem, however, does not mention this). In the second part of the journey, Celan notes some impressions of the Black Forest, making use of an antidote to overcome his disgust in the face of such nonchalance. These impressions will remain fixed and will serve as a refuge, by virtue of their consoling function. The poet’s good will has been abused. He had come to make peace.

This is perhaps the right moment to point out that Heidegger, according to his son, was unaware that Celan was Jewish. This seems hardly credible, but possible nonetheless, and it provides real evidence of insensitivity, of non-recognition and a denial of identity: “According to my mother’s account, it was only after [Celan’s] death that my father learned that your friend was Jewish, and of the fate he had suffered in his family” (… welches Familienschicksal er erlitten hatte, in his letter to Gisèle Celan, cited above).

The idea of reconciliation was quite alien to Celan’s mentality. At least the project preserves a moment, and in the offense he felt one can see the passage of the shadow of a failure, without elevating it, as Baumann does, to the level of an inevitable necessity. So many others have rehabilitated the man and the pilgrimage.

According to Otto Pöggeler—and to Lacoue-Labarthe, as well—Celan merely developed or explicated Heidegger’s assertions. Thus Pöggeler hypothesizes, through a projection that is easy to analyze but incomprehensible in itself, that the trails made of logs—which are actually cudgels—mark the path laid out by the philosopher. Celan follows him. Heidegger taught him how to walk on these paths, to seek danger and to hold fast. In 1980, the doctrine is very much alive: to “seek out” danger, but how? “Where danger lies, therein lies the remedy” (“Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch”: this Hölderlin reads like Ernst Jünger). I quote: “it is to this end, to prepare this resistance, that Heidegger’s {394|395} thought had chosen its path.” It is true that the meeting was interrupted halfway through. Here the reason given is that the poet did not have the strength to endure the philosopher’s language, which was too raw and too coarse for his sorrow. In the same way, Pöggeler hears Heidegger give a powerful lesson in existential philosophy: “During the walk, which is at the same time (etymologically) a shared experience [one can hardly believe one’s eyes], a well-known coarseness takes shape”; the pupil hears the master. [71] “The life-giving water,” after all, brings to mind the swamps, and the tonality of the word Moor has “a deadly and menacing” feel to it. [72] This would be the same danger to which Heidegger had taught us to expose ourselves fearlessly.

Everything must be swathed in the desired atmosphere; everything must fit back into the German order. The flowers are part of the philosopher’s retreat. They exist in the meadows. If the orchids are separated, it is because botanical observation is precise (why would it not be?). If we hear shocking words in the philosopher’s mouth, it is the usual coarseness of his writings—which Celan, during the conversation in the car, “must have experienced,” as had many others among his readers and interlocutors. Nothing is allowed to take on a different meaning. Nothing remains to be found. We know everything “hermeneutically”: the plants and the thoughts of the time and of all times.

The cube-star above the fountain “unites the opposites,” Pöggeler reminds us. Depth is controlled. It does not occur to him that the figure guiding Celan in his poems might recall the star of David or the yellow star the Jews were obliged to wear; no, in this place, they did not exist; these heights had no desire for them. It was true nearby, where the Jews lived. The idea that the yellow flower evokes this reality, or that the cube might be something else, has no place here. The word Würfel refers, of course, to a cube where we find Mallarmé’s die that is thrown and that indicates a number.

In a 1988 article titled “The Walk in the Marshes,” [73] Pöggeler returned to this presentation of things. He now wrote more clearly; it was after the explication of the text that I presented at the seminar-colloquium that he had organized at Bochum, July 2, 1985: “Heidegger had not the least idea of the thoughts that preoccupied Celan when they were sinking into the marshes.” He does not say (and does not see) what those thoughts were, but he admits the existence of a ditch: “The word must at the same time [at the same time as something else] have referred to 1933.” I had said that the clearing, which for Heidegger was the {395|396} figure of the non-harboring [74] of Being, was for Celan, in the word Waldwasen, the site of torture containing human remains.

In this article, Pöggeler made partial and unfortunately partisan use of some elements that I had gathered in opposition to his interpretation. They could have been integrated; “nothing obstructs,” according to the end of the poem “You lie.” [75] Presumably, in his eyes, one acknowledges the emendations made by other scholars by referring to them and incorporating their ideas. This form of “eternity” has no scruples about accepting still another truth, better adapted.

Water was life; but it can just as well be the sign of catastrophes, provided that one encompasses them all in a great cataclysm, in the image of universal nature. Rain brings additional moisture from the sky. “The region and the peat bogs need it; but too much water reminds us of the deluge, even the sulfurous showers of Sodom and the ‘yellow tide,’” so Pöggeler insisted on making clear to us in a seminar he gave in 1984. [76] Thus all is (sub)merged, life in death, and death in cosmic threats. {396|}