Hamacher. on Celan's Todtnauberg

Wasen: On Celan’s “Todtnauberg”

Werner Hamacher, Heidi Hart

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Volume 57, 2011, pp. 15-54(Article)

Published by University of Toronto Press

For additional information about this article

Access provided by New York University (21 Jan 2014 18:13 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cgl/summary/v057/57.hamacher.html

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cgl/summary/v057/57.hamacher.html

WasenOn Celan’s “TOdTnauberg”

Werner Hamacher

Speak, you too

When Paul Celan declined to contribute to the publication com-memorating Martin Heidegger’s seventieth birthday in 1959, his refusal did not apply to the philosopher whom the book would

honor. It was meant for the editor and publisher Günther Neske, who had not asked Celan himself for permission to include his name on the list of contributors; it had to do with the attempt to fix his name and his language in a place—on a list and in a book—without the named having agreed; and it applied to the impertinent demand to provide on short notice a poem that, as Celan wrote, “could appear in the Heidegger volume.” Celan’s re-fusal was a response to the misuse to which his name, his language, its place and time, would have been subjected, and it had to do with the double misunderstanding through which his poetry could be tossed off as an orna-ment for the celebration of a philosopher who read lyric verse in his spare time. “Also, I cannot do hackwork,” as Celan explained in a letter to Neske (with an expression that implies ‘to start a quarrel’), “really, no, that would be completely unserious—and Heidegger demands seriousness and delibera-tion.”1 The poem that the publisher expected from Celan and that he had in mind for the next seventy-fifth birthday edition was to be an answer to a demand—and indeed also a challenge—through Heidegger, as a thoughtful 1 Celan’s letter to Günther Neske is cited in Herzzeit. Ingeborg Bachmann—Paul Celan: Der Brief-

wechsel. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2008: 317. The commemorative volume for Heidegger’s 75th birthday did not come about.

16 The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Vol. 57

response “by a thinker” who grasped another thinker’s work and attempted to meet this challenge.

Celan’s explanation for his refusal, in his letter of 10 August 1959 to Inge-borg Bachmann, held back judgment about Heidegger “today,” without leav-ing doubt about his indignation toward the author of the Rector’s Address. Celan wrote, specifically:

Heidegger remains. As you know, I am certainly the last who can gloss over the Rector’s Address and other missteps; but I also tell myself, especially now, since I have had the most personal experience with such patent anti-Nazis as Böll and Andersch, that whoever chokes on his past transgressions, who doesn’t act as if he never made a mistake, who doesn’t hide the stain that sticks to him, he is better than the one who established, with utmost comfort and advantage, irreproachability in his time (and was it, I really must and with good reason ask, was it in every way irreproachability?), so that he, here and now—free in the “private” and not public sense, since that would stain his prestige—can play the most blatantly dirty tricks. In other words: I can tell myself that Heidegger may have recognized a few things; I see how much malice can lurk in an Andersch or a Böll […]. This, my dear Ingeborg, I see, I see today.2

What Celan cannot overlook and what he clearly sees in this cautious pre-sumption “today, here and now,” is that Heidegger “has perhaps recognized a few things,” that he “doesn’t hide his stain,” that he “chokes” on his past errors, and that therefore a judgment on him is not permissible. With this reluctance to judge, Celan concedes that Heidegger “today,” 1959, is perhaps someone other than he was at the time of the Rector’s Address, that at the time he might have been someone different, namely someone who would have wanted to be the person he may be now; Celan allows for the modest possibility that Heidegger could have had a real encounter with himself in his own history, that he could have been open to something other than his own will to power.

While Celan hardly had qualms about linking his name with Heidegger’s, he rigorously foreclosed a tie with other contributors to Heidegger’s birth-day volume: He suspected that “this or that previously unmentioned name could be in the commemorative book, about to go to press (even Friedrich Georg Jünger is not one of the most appealing …), whose company I can by no means endorse…”3 The “company” of such “names” means for Celan as much physical as spiritual—in his sense of language—agreement with what these names advocate or have advocated; it means as much to him as a handshake or an alliance with what they carry and with the past and present events their actions, attitudes, and writings have condoned. In a Septem-ber 1957 letter to Heinrich Böll, which he will shortly after disavow, Celan

2 Ibid. 118–119.3 Ibid. 121.

Wasen 17

explains that it is impossible for him to write a letter to Friedrich Sieburg after reading his 1941 speech at the Nazi regime’s embassy counsel in oc-cupied Paris. Celan would be “ashamed of [himself ] …completely at sea,” ever to have stood next to Sieburg. “The reason (among others): How many hands have I already shaken that have written (and carried out) death orders? (Besides, Sieburg’s speech is not, as I told you,“Streicher” but rather “only” Goebbels…) And haven’t I also spoken with Weyrauch, who, yes, as you told me, wrote a jaunty poem as late as March ’45, didn’t I speak to him as if he were my natural ally? Wasn’t I gratified when Martin Heidegger sent me his speech on Hebel a few months ago?”4 The shame and dread of touching hands “that had written death orders,” of speaking with deadly enemies, and of coming into close contact with their names, is the shame and dread of hav-ing unknowingly acted in common with those who had made every touch a fatal collision and every dialogue a lethal confrontation. If speech were for Celan a non-binding instrument of communication, he would not have considered it impossible to write to Sieburg; but because Sieburg had used language merely as an instrument, and thereby as a weapon in the service of a murderous regime,5 Celan had to recoil even from the thought of speaking with him, as well as from the very memory of having spoken with him. The Nazis had used language as a tool of murder, they had murdered speech itself, and those who, as official Party members, as lenient conformists or, later, as trivializing apologists, continued to use words as they once had, committed murder on speech and on all those who speak. Celan’s dread is the dread of being murdered, his shame the shame of having spoken the same language as murderers and through this, with them, to have acted against himself. This is guilt over one’s death, over death through one’s own language. “And then,” his letter to Böll goes on, “(passing over something, no, over a lot): Can I succeed, with all that is unanswered in me, in finding a place where things are clearly defined and speak for themselves?”6 Because Celan feels at sea and his questions find no answers in himself, he wishes, without actual

4 Paul Celan—Briefwechsel mit den rheinischen Freunden. Barbara Wiedemann, ed. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011: 349–50. Heidegger apparently sent the Hebel piece to thank Celan for a note or a book that he had sent him. Heidegger’s “Conversation with Hebel,” which Celan received in September 1956, was accompanied by an author photograph with the dedication, “For / Paul Celan / with heartfelt thanks and greetings / Martin Heidegger” (ibid. 656). It is not known what Celan had sent to Heidegger, but it is not unlikely that these were his poems.

5 In his 1941 speech in Paris, Sieburg had said, “France already senses this deep truth: that the ide-ology of the New Germany, the National Socialist worldview, automatically transforms itself into a weapon [se transforme automatiquement en arme] if one denies it the right to express itself.” And regarding the “justification” of this “right”: “Our own destiny had taught us that one day a people must choose between humanity and itself [un peuple, un jour, doit choisir entre l’humanité et lui-même].” Thus: the National Socialist language is a weapon against humanity, and also against the humanity of those who speak it; it is a language that murders language. (The decisive statements in Sieburg’s speech are quoted in Barbara Wiedemann’s commentary on her edition of Celan’s Briefwechsel mit den rheinischen Freunden 655).

6 Ibid. 350.


language, to bring about a decision between speaking and not speaking, life and death, to leave behind the initiative of “things, things that are clearly de-fined and speak for themselves.” The “place” in himself where this might be possible is inaccessible for Celan as he writes this letter, because the “things” he means—the linguistic and at the same time existential relationships—are of the kind that work against themselves and bring each other to silence. The place Celan investigates is only accessible from another place—or something beside a place—that keeps at a bounded distance the deadly clichés and the infamous names on lists and in books. For him this other place, far removed from all known places, is the poem.

On July 24, 1967, Celan gave a poetry reading at the invitation of Gerhart Baumann, Ordinarius for Germanistik at Freiburg University, in an auditorium packed with well over a thousand listeners. Heidegger, whose writings he had been studying with close attention for more than thirteen years and with whom he had been exchanging letters and books for over eleven years, greeted him before the reading in the company of Baumann; he sat in the first row as Celan read, and afterwards at dinner, when Celan expressed the wish to see the nearby moorland, invited him to see the Hor-bacher Moor the next day and, while in the area, to visit his cabin near Todt-nauberg, a Black Forest village southeast of Freiburg.7 Celan, who during their meeting before his reading had brusquely refused to be photographed with Heidegger, reluctantly accepted the invitation —it was difficult for him to come together with a man whose history he could not forget, he explained to Baumann8—and spent the morning before the group lunch with Hei-degger near Todtnauberg; Baumann’s assistant Gerhard Neumann was with them in Heidegger’s cabin and on a walk on the moor, soon interrupted by wet weather. During their time in the cabin, Celan inscribed these lines in the guest book: “Into the hut-book, with the view of the well-star / with hope for a coming word in the heart. / On July 25, 1967 / Paul Celan.”9 Just a few days after this visit, on August 1, Celan wrote the poem titled “Todtnauberg” in Frankfurt; it contains an almost word-for-word rendering of the words he had written in the guest book. Returning to Paris the next day, August 2, Celan reported to his wife:

Heidegger approached me—the day after my reading I went, with M. Neu-mann, the friend of Elmar [Tophoven], to Heidegger’s cabin in the Black Forest. Afterwards there was a serious conversation in the car, with very clear words on my part. M. Neumann, who witnessed this, told me afterwards

7 This account follows the narrative in Gerhart Baumann’s Erinnerungen an Paul Celan. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986 and 1992: 59–80.

8 Ibid. 68.9 The text of Celan’s entry was first made public in an article by Stephan Krass in the Neuer Zürcher

Zeitung on August 2/3, 1997. A reproduction of Celan’s entry in the “hut-book” is found in Axel Gellhaus’ “Seit ein Gespräch wir sind ...” Paul Celan bei Martin Heidegger in Todtnauberg, Spuren 60. Marbach: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 2002: 5.

Wasen 19

that the conversation held an epochal aspect for him. I hope that Heidegger takes up his pen and writes some responsive, warning pages that repudiate the resurgence of Nazism.10

Since the publication of Gerhart Baumann’s Memories of Paul Celan in 1986, and since the coming to light of Celan’s guest-book inscription and the pub-lication of his letter to his wife, the poem’s material content has been known in its broad strokes and in its most substantial details, despite some gaps. Against this backdrop, the poem, as its countless and often controversial commentaries since then suggest, can be read as a fixing of impressions that struck Celan during the morning gathering at Heidegger’s cabin. Still, these impressions, listed in the poem like stations on an itinerary, are so spare that only the repetitions and questions in the third of the text’s eight stanzas, only the line breaks with their emphatic hesitation, reveal the urgency with which the poem emerged from him: a poem against the poetic, won from the double resistance against picturesque re-telling and oppressive silence. With-out doubt Celan was deeply struck by Gerhard Neumann’s observation, as the sole witness, that the talk in the back seat of the car with Heidegger had “an epochal aspect.” Little in the poem’s sparse lines appears to confirm this judgment, however, which would have held more than personal significance in what was witnessed as an “ephocal” meeting, a summit-conference of thought and poetry, a drama that tore open a new world horizon. The poem hints, with hesitant certainty and only in the two words Krudes [‘crude’] and Knüppel-/ pfade [‘paths fretted with club-like pieces of wood’], at a theme that might have stood at the center of the meeting, and that develops more clearly through contemporary witnesses and Celan’s letters than through the poem itself. In short, Celan’s “Todtnauberg” appears on the surface to reca-pitulate and recall a historic event, an epochal meeting, and to recognize the “obvious proof” of Celan’s “painful disappointment, perhaps also adamant rejection of Heidegger.”11 If it has been treated as an epochal meeting be-tween that epoch’s poet and thinker—and not as an inconsequential meeting between a thinker who means something to many people and a poet who means something to more people—then it remains even more inexplicable, 10 Paul Celan–Gisèle Celan-Lestrange: Correspondence I. Edited and with commentary by Bertrand

Badiou with the cooperation of Eric Celan. Paris: Seuil, 2001: 550. The cited passage reads as follows in the German translation by Eugen Helmlé : Heidegger war auf mich zugekommen —Am Tag nach meiner Lesung bin ich mit Herrn Neumann, dem Freund Elmars, in Heideggers Hütte im Schwarzwald gewesen. Dann kam es im Auto zu einem ernsten Gespräch, bei dem ich klare Worte gebraucht habe. Herr Neumann, der Zeuge war, hat mir hinterher gesagt, dass dieses Gespräch [hier hinzufügen: für ihn] eine epochale Bedeutung hatte. Ich hoffe, dass Heidegger zur Feder greifen und einigen Seiten schreiben wird, die sich auf das Gespräch beziehen und angesichts des wieder aufkom-menden Nazismus auch eine Warnung sein werden (PC–GCL: Briefwechsel, Band I. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001: 479).

11 At first Baumann judged the situation this way, but after referring to the “painful disappointment, perhaps also […] adamant rejection,” he goes on matter-of-factly, “The meetings [between Celan and Heidegger] will nevertheless be continued and in no way interrupted.” (Ibid. p. 78)


why the meeting’s epochal character is not sought in the poem, but rather in the fragmentary observations of witnesses to the meeting; it remains inexpli-cable, too, why the poem is not created to express its biographical impetus, but rather the biography works to elucidate the poem; inexplicable, how the disillusionment in nineteenth-century Romanticism should be offered as a standard for understanding a poem of the terrible twentieth century; and unexplained, in what sense a disappointment or “perhaps” a rejection can be epochal at all. Above all, it remains unclear in this widespread appraisal whether one can claim to call the poem—rather than the historically contin-gent meeting—epochal, and whether it is enough for such a poem, in oppo-sition to the “thinking man” it portrays, to take the attitude of non-thought, helpless hope, and passive disappointment: for the poem not to demand to be understood as its own, eminent, thinking poem, one that moves beyond and against every conventional understanding of thought and poetry, against their careless hierarchization no less than their equally careless leveling.

Without a doubt, Celan expected from Heidegger a clear, public con-demnation of Nazi ideology and an energetic, public warning against its re-invigoration at the time of their visit. In the letter to his wife, he named both expectations unequivocally, just as he formulated both in his poem, with words that, however spare, were not to be misunderstood. At first glance, however, his poem does not deal with these expectations but with an over-reaching hope. It speaks of that which such a condemnation and such a warning could, before all else, provoke: a “coming word,” a poetic word weighted with the authority of the thinker’s own “coming word,” allotted a place and a verbal facticity to which that hope alone could correspond. The real meeting between the poet and philosopher was not the empirical-historical meeting between Celan and Heidegger but rather their encounter in the poem. The conversation between them happens in “Todtnauberg,” not in Todtnauberg. If the poem repeats the lines written in the guest book with significant changes, it does this as lines in another book, placed in another cabin, written as something other than “the cabin,” in another place and in language that, however close, is actually far distant. Celan’s poem speaks first from this other place; it thinks from there and gives a no less poetically com-pressed as thoughtfully composed answer to Heidegger’s thought, in order to speak to his speech and to his refusal. Only from this other place—and from something other than a place—can it become clear in what sense Cel-an’s meeting with Heidegger in “Todtnauberg” denotes the epochal, in what sense it denotes a drastic change in the language of philosophy and of poetry, a change in language sans phrase.

In some of its lines, the last version of “Todtnauberg” that Celan pro-vided for publication in Lichtzwang (1970) deviates from the Éditions Brunidor version that appeared in January 1968. This version takes the following form:

Wasen 21

TODTNAUBERGArnika, Augentrost, derTrunk aus dem Brunnen mit demSternwürfel drauf,

in derHütte,

die in das Buch – wessen Namen nahms aufvor dem meinen? –,die in dies Buchgeschriebene Zeile voneiner Hoffnung, heute,auf eines DenkendenkommendesWortim Herzen,

Waldwasen, uneingeebnet, Orchis und Orchis, einzeln,

Krudes, später, im Fahren,deutlich,

der uns fährt, der Mensch,der’s mit anhört,

die halb-beschrittenen Knüppel-pfade im Hochmoor,

Feuchtes,viel.12

12 Paul Celan, Gesammelte Werke, Band 2. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983: 255–56 (cited in the follow-ing notes as GW with volume and page numbers). English translations of Celan’s poetry by H. Hart.


TODTNAUBERGArnica, eyebright, thedrink from the well with thestar-die above it,

in thehut,

these lines, in the book – whose name listedbefore mine? –,the lines, in this book,written ofa hope, today,for a thinker’scomingwordin the heart,

forest turf, unleveled, orchid and orchid, single,

crudeness, later, on the road,made clear,

the one who drives us, the manwho listens in,

the half-tramped, frettedpath in the upper meadow,

soddenness,much.

Wasen 23

In its eight stanzas, the poem traverses an event, directed from no gram-matical subject, aimed at no explicitly addressed ‘you,’ combining statement and predication without the syntactic binding of a finite verb. Loose paratac-tic logic lists a subject- and predicate-less catalog of names, related within the individual stanzas by conjunctions and participial constructions, missing any obvious connections between the stanzas and between the names listed there. The catalog that calls up these names without grammatical links ranges from “Arnica, eyebright, the / Drink” in the first stanza, through “Lines” in the third, “Forest turf, orchid and orchid” in the fourth, to “Crudeness… the man… fretted / path” and “Soddenness” in the four following stanzas. There is no verb that leads this whole paratactic construction; the only two verbs in present indicative—bound through a clear but slant rhyme [fährt, anhört]—appear in the third to last stanza, in relative phrases commenting on “the man: who drives us / who listens in.” While the names, just like the stanzas, follow each other without junctures, connective prepositions emerge within the individual stanzas and in the amplification of naming. These prepositions dominate in the first two stanzas (“Drink from the well with the / star-die above it, // in the / hut”), culminate in the third and longest stanza (“in the book… before mine… in this book… lines of / a hope… for a thinker’s… in the heart”), and appear then, drastically diminished, only once in the fifth and seventh stanzas with the destination markers “on the road” and “on the upper-meadow.” In contrast to these nominal elements’ stasis, and more than aus, auf, vor and mit, the direction- and place-preposition in, which appears six times in the poem’s twenty-six lines and comes forward alone in the third stanza, determines the poem’s movement. Its language is that of positional naming in a web of prepositional relations, which in the axial lines of the long third stanza (“the lines, in this book / written of / a hope, today,”) coalesces and then collapses. Along with the prepositionally determined relations, the homogeneity of names also collapses (“forest turf, unleveled), the identity of the nominal entities is one of separateness (“orchid and orchid, single”), the time- and place-assignments become just as directionless a crossing (“on the road”) as a broken-off movement (“the half- / tramped, fretted / path”) of dis-integration (“in the upper meadow”) and diffusion in uncertainty (“Sodden-ness,/ so much”). The structure of the prepositions, particularly that of in, whether as a movement inward or a dwelling in an inner space, progressively loses its determining power and opens itself toward vague unrelatedness, in the sense of in—im Fahren [“on the road or drive”], im Hochmoor [in or on the Hochmoor]—as any interior space, directional movement, or stable loca-tion. This in is just as unhinged grammatically as it is semantically, slipping from a fixed spatial orientation: im Hochmoor can mean “in the area called the upper meadow” and “on the meadow” as it can “inside” and “under the surface of the moor.”


What reveals itself in the poem’s grammatical movement as a progres-sive loosening of its relations—especially its “in”-structure, and with this the poem’s grammatical form as a whole—already becomes clear in the second stanza’s rhythm and sound: in der / Hütte. Here in certainly signals an inner space, delayed, however, in its semantic movement by the line-break, which also suspends the prepositional intention before it reaches the noun position, in which it would first find its meaning as a preposition. Due to the break, the in der remains outside, in fact outside the Hütte, faltering ‘in’ an unoccu-pied in-between zone without the character of a physical space, at least not of an interior space, any ‘being-in’ starkly prohibited and turned into a ‘being-outside.’ Through this invisible suspension of verbal movement in the line break, the topology of intended meaning, of word- and place-sense, linked by the preposition in, undergoes a rip [Riß] which can no longer contain a topos and which cannot be oriented toward any particular signification, be it grammatical, intentional, or existential. In order to draw the existen-tial meaning of In-Sein out of the categorical sense of place-relationships between objects-in-themselves [Vorhandenen], Heidegger recalls in Being and Time the origin of the preposition in: “‘in’ stems from innan-, wohnen, habitare, to be located […]. The expression bin [‘am’] is linked to bei [‘at/with’], ich bin connotes, as mentioned, I live, I am located in… the world, familiar to so-and-so. Sein as the infinitive form of ich bin [‘I am’] can be understood existentially as living with… familiar to… In-Sein is then Being’s formal expression of Dasein, which has the human [wesenhafte] constitution of being-in-the-world.13 With the invisible hiatus between in der and Hütte, an empty space, or more accurately, a space-emptiness, intervenes into the In-Sein Heidegger characterized as the constitutive ground of Dasein; this emptiness disperses any topos/topic that could give Dasein a firm hold, or allow Being a ‘there,’ a hut or a house—for Heidegger this would be language as well. The intrinsic [essence- or human-connoting] makeup of the In-Sein is thus fissured in Celan’s poetic language, so that the in is exposed to some-thing besides itself, with its implied Sein and ‘[human] being’: an exteriority that is no longer the outside of an ‘in,’ but is rather an outside of any verbally fixable existential-topographical correlation between interiority and exterior-ity. If Heidegger discloses, in the experience of anxiety, Dasein’s isolation in being-in-the-world, then this also signifies isolation as being-in-the-world. Certainly the In-Sein comes into the existential ‘mode’ of “not-at-homeness,” and certainly this “not-at-homeness” becomes conceptualized as the “origi-nal” phenomenon, and being-in-the-world as “a mode of the uncanniness of Dasein”14—but only in the sense in which Dasein is brought into this 13 Translator’s note: the term Wesen fluctuates between ‘being’ as ‘human being’ or as ‘essence’ in

Heidegger’s work. In this translation, ‘Being’ indicates Heidegger’s Sein or Seyn. Martin Hei-degger, Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Niemayer, 1967: 54. The chapter that includes this quotation is titled “Das In-der-Welt-sein überhaupt als Grundverfassung des Daseins.“

14 Ibid. 189.

Wasen 25

uncanniness “before a world as world and with which it itself, before itself, as being-in-the-world.”15 Without the possibility that Celan’s poetry forecloses such an a priori structure of the In-Sein as In-Sein, the pre-positionality of in der/ Hütte is won only from the exterior position, as much of in der as of Hütte, and therefore any incipience of the In-Sein, of the prior-In, and, in this sense, of Un-Sein [‘non-Being’], any incipience of phenomenality and form, “not-at-homeness” as exposure to a space that simply cannot be realized in the mode of ‘as’—not “as being-in-the-world”—fails to fit a topology of “in or before the being of Dasein.” In-Sein is a derivative of no Being; every ‘pre-’ of a position springs from an ‘ex-’ to which it does not belong.

The In-Sein, which Celan’s poetry sets ‘outside’ in every sense of the word, is further suspended, dismantled, and scattered in the poem’s next syntac-tically complex stanza. Before the stanza reaches its grammatically central noun (“Lines”) it marks its definite location twice, in emphatic variable repe-tition—“in the book” [die in das Buch… die in dies Buch]—a location inter-rupted, parenthetically, by the only question in the poem, which calls into question this place and what it holds (“whose name listed / before mine?”) so that, coming back to what the place called “book” contains, the stanza finally reaches its governing noun in geschriebene Zeile. Zeile marks not only the grammatical but also the mathematical center of the stanza, as well as of the book’s contents, the place-within-a-place that contains and retains all that has been named and located until now; it signifies exactly the place whose proximity the parenthetical question has just suspended and called into question. The place-within-a-place—a word as place, “written lines” as a place in a place made up of words, the “book”—this word as a verbal topos, as the central thesis and content of the whole nominal clause that the stanza creates, stands then in the structural position suspended by the parenthesis: the word that marks this thesis actually stands in the parenthesis, the to-pos in the non-topos of the interjection, and the noun that marks content in the place removed from the sentence’s binding. The topology described from the first part of this stanza suspends both topos and logos along with the place and the word, and leaves the word, along with the place—as a “writ-ten line”—without power, sets it outside itself without assigning it another place in a circumscribed set of coordinates. In this parenthesis, repetition is a calling-back. The language of the In-Sein’s topology, announced in the line die in das Buch, is, through interruption and doubling, an exterior script without interior, the “lines in the book” both twofold and split; it can be read as a di-topography without a fixed place and without a secure word, a di-atopography “written apart”—as Celan writes elsewhere16—as “grass, written apart” out of “narrowing” after the word, and thus not only as some-thing other than “grass” but namely “gas” and “casket” and “grave,” just as 15 Ibid. 188.16 GW 1, 95. [trans. note]


the place- and word-vacancy between the written characters lies open. If Be-ing is always Being-in-a-world, if it should be called Being-in-selfhood and self-Being, then the language of this In-Sein disclaims it, speaking not only as something broken, doubled, and scattered structurally from itself, but also as something distanced from every word and place, marooned in space, opened to nameless vacancies, contained by no world, not as it-self is and isn’t, and with which therefore, something other than speech, than language itself, something other than Being speaks its otherness.

While the “written line” appears as a place inside another place, the book, this book can at the same time be seen as twofold and distinguished from itself, or perhaps also as two different books; the place of this “line” and that “line” shifts from one to two separate places. The book under discus-sion here—besides the book of life, of law, of destiny—can be the one that sits as a guest book “in the / hut” at Todtnauberg, and works then, in this stanza of Celan’s poem, as a reminiscence of the meeting with Heidegger. But this book—especially when marked with the emphatic demonstrative ‘this,’ which provides its second designation with an articulated accent17—this book can likewise signal the one right before the reader’s eyes, the one marked with Paul Celan’s lines, the one that simply brings to mind every other book, but not with actual presence, just as this book is only visual-ized. Heidegger’s guest book and Celan’s book of poems, two sharply dis-tinguished books, irreducible from each other, and yet in communication with each other, are bound by contract and compressed, in a single two-fold book called by the same name, pulled together by this “written line”; all at once book and line, word and place resound against each other. The same book is another, the same line is distinct from it, but sameness and differ-ence surrender first through their written materiality, from the movement of speech into a script-space not confined to Being-in-itself or complementary Being-in-difference, to In-Sein or corresponding being-outside; this is a sur-render, rather, into a space that opens up every ‘self ’ and ‘other’ as repeatable, displaceable, mobile, and multiple.

Thus Celan’s poem speaks two languages in one; it is only a poem because its two languages address each other. It is a poem because it questions its own poetics and because it can open what counts for its language toward an-other. The double determination that the syntagm die in das Buch undergoes through its displaced repetition in the line die in dies Buch, constitutes this and that book, Heidegger’s guest book at Todtnauberg, and Celan’s Lichtz-wang that contains the poem “Todtnauberg.” One changes into the other, displacing the place of the lines held there; the poem itself does not speak of this place or another, does not write this line or the other, but rather performs its displacement and writes itself as displacement: as a movement 17 In the Brunidor edition of “Todtnauberg,” lines 7 and 10 read the same: die in das Buch. Paul

Celan, Lichtzwang, Tübinger Ausgabe 51.)

Wasen 27

toward differentiation, from which the one as the other, and one that isn’t this other, emerges first and foremost. The poem writes itself in this “line” in this “book” as a difference in place and therefore as a place-designation that itself contains no previously given place, as suspension and therefore also as a time-designation referring to no as-yet-measured time, and as a language-designation, from which the differences between languages first yield up their congruences and divergences. The speech of this poem is the speech of difference, which will not allow itself to be reduced to differences between givens, because it makes possible all disparate designations and speaks to it-self all that arises from the difference. Primarily because of this, the poem sets out die geschriebene Zeile as Zeile von einer Hoffnung / heute, / auf eines Denk-enden / kommendes / Wort—as lines not about a hope, but rather of and from a hope, and indeed such a hope that is not the anticipation of something already known or foreseeable, but is rather an opening “toward” a “coming word.” The “line,” whether in that book or in this one, is a line of hope, an “upward” and openly written line, one of hope in an unwritten, placeless, self-opening word, and a line also written from what opens in language, what is not yet written. The line speaks, not from a somehow measurable distance from that which is hoped for, but rather out of its clear difference from that without time-space or linguistic place. If the word can be a “coming” without being forced, freely “coming” then therefore (the mathematical line-break at the poem’s center makes this clear) it is an unforeseeably delayed ‘coming/word.’ From this language, open to its own unspokenness, still language even in its difference from itself, and yet lacking a ‘coming/word’ and a definable place, from this language every name and every definition of an In-Sein (in der/ Hütte, in das Buch, in dies Buch and im Herzen) writes itself, in this lan-guage coming from non-language, in the speech of Celan’s poem; every In-Sein articulates itself in the poem’s prepositional phrases and nominal units, writes itself toward what is not written, toward that distance from speech that cannot be fixed in any ‘in’ and that veers from any Being, as far as it is defined as present-in-one-place. There is no ‘is’ in this poem. All constitutive and descriptive structures that refer to an In-Sein hesitate at an exit or exteri-ority that leads beyond any verbally fixable opposition between inward and outward, an exterior beyond an exterior in language, an exterior for which the language of Celan’s poem, discreet as always, transforms itself from con-stitutive to extative, from descriptive to de-scriptive and ex-scriptive. Paul Celan’s note dated March 26, 1969 is to be understood in this sense, which sets aside all immanence and positional logic: La poésie ne s’impose plus, elle s’expose [“Poetry no longer imposes itself, it exposes itself ”].18

A comparison between Celan’s entry in Heidegger’s guest book and the third stanza of “Todtnauberg” makes clear how far apart the two texts spread, 18 GW 3, 181.


despite their nearness to each other. The entry is worded as follows: Ins Hüt-tenbuch, mit dem Blick auf den Brunnenstern, / mit einer Hoffnung auf ein kommendes Wort im Herzen / am 25. Juli 1967 / Paul Celan. [“Into the hut-book, with the view of the well-star / with hope for a coming word in the heart. / On July 25, 1967 / Paul Celan.] The parallel construction of the syntagms mit dem Blick auf […] and mit einer Hoffnung auf […] suggest that “look” and “hope” be understood as parallel gestures whose lines correspond to each other and could be substituted for each other: the Brunnenstern and ein kommendes Wort thus illuminate and resound in each other, as their paral-lelism makes one the metaphor for the other and links both in shared phe-nomenological space. The poem contains no other such parallels that could assimilate das kommende / Wort into the realm of the visible, foreseeable, and comparable. Its other formulations insist on the word’s incomparability with what is already given; they speak with an emphasis that the prose lines of the guest-book entry lack, on the hope not of a “coming word” but of a ‘coming/word,’ one held back in its hesitation to come.19 They speak not “with a hope” but rather “of / a hope,” and thereby deliver, if ambiguously, the initiative of speech to hope and its still outlying word. They speak, aside from speaking as a guest-book entry, not just of a “coming word,” but rather more certainly of the word “of a thinker,” and suggest that the thinker who hosted Celan is meant here, and that, at the same time, a “thinker” need not even be a certain historical person from whom the word is hoped. With the doubling of the book in das and in dies book, the recipient of “lines of / a hope” has become generalized, not as the owner of the hut-book but rather as “a thinker.” Even an undesignated thinker could, as the poem reads, say any not-yet-said word, and through this, that he says it, could manifest as a thinker. The “lines” of the poem address, without respect to profession, anyone who has not yet said any word, any possible reader and therefore also anyone suggested by the “lines / written in the book.” If, therefore, a thinker’s ‘coming/word’ is hoped for, then so is that of a thinking poet, and if the poem is a conversation, then it is a poem about that which does not come into conversation, as long as the ‘coming/word’ remains out of reach as much for the thinker as for the poet, as long as the thought remains just a thought that “we do not yet think,”20 and as long as writing remains just the act of writing what is not yet a poem. The guest book’s lines can be read as

19 In the Brunidor version of “Todtnauberg,” the lines speak von / einer Hoffnung, heute [“today”], / auf eines Denkenden/ kommendes (un- / gesäumt [“without delay”] kommendes) / Wort and insist, despite the intensified urgency of the hope, on a structural delay in the un- / gesäumt line break. Cf. Lichtzwang, Tübinger Ausgabe 51.

20 “The greatest danger [Das Bedenklichste] is, that we do not yet think [denken]”—so reads the often-repeated maxim in Heidegger’s Was heißt Denken? [“What Is Thinking?”] Celan had studied and annotated this 1951/52 lecture by September 1954; Heidegger gave him a copy from the 1961 edition after his visit to Todtnauberg, with this dedication: “For / Paul Celan / with thanks for the reading / on July 24, 1967 / Martin Heidegger.” Paul Celan, La bibliothèque

Wasen 29

an appeal, formulated with the greatest discretion, for Heidegger to disavow his support of the Nazi regime with unambiguous words, and to counter, with these words’ authority, a relapse into its horrors. The poem’s lines re-absorb the guest book’s words, in part, but also take them back, in the lines “whose name written / above mine?” that would appear to link Celan’s name with names that stand for the murderous21—perhaps with [Horst] Wesse[l]’s and SS-names—a list from which his name could be taken, taken back, and erased; he transfers these lines with his name into a “line” in his poem in his own book, which publicly and blatantly voices hope for a completely other word, not recorded in any book, a word that is actually unrecordable and unforeseeable. Not only does the poem expand the circle of the unspoken and amplify its private admonition into a public call for anyone, address-ing Heidegger as anyone openly acknowledged as the poem’s “Heidegger,” but this poem itself, in this book, does not say the ‘coming/word’ of and from which it writes. Through this poem, the conversation with Heidegger has become a conversation with any conceivable “Heidegger,” a conversation with an unnamed “thinker,” a monologue with an exterior self, and a con-versation with the anxiety of speech, with forbidden speech, and with all the modalities of silence. The poem speaks with all of these, without removing itself from or conflating itself with them, but rather it speaks with them and speaks for another, coming, but not-yet-come language. It also speaks for the “thinker” and intends for him—thinking forward—the decisive task of being a speaker. It thinks in its poetic unfolding, thinking the “thinker” for-ward in thought itself. Thus it inverts not only the generational relationship between Heidegger and Celan but also the prevailing rational and idealistic hierarchy of philosophy and poetry, and affirms the primacy of poetry over philosophy, which Heidegger’s own writings on language and aesthetics stress again and again, from the 1930s on. For Celan’s poem, this place is, however, not already topologically fixed but can arise only from a ‘coming/word,’ not as a given but as a suspended ectopia. The potential meaning of poetry and thought, and the conversation between them, defines (and un-defines) itself only according to the other-worldly and other-wordly.

In an early draft of “Todtnauberg,” Celan seized on verses from the draft edi-tion of Hölderlin’s “Friedensfeier,” (which Heidegger’s 1936 lecture “Hölderlin and the Being of Poetry” had especially elevated) to characterize his conversa-tion with Heidegger, and along with this the conversation between philosophy and poetry. According to Heidegger’s quote, the lines read as follows22: philosophique. A. Richter, P. Alac, B. Badiou, eds. Paris: Éditions Rue d'Ulm, 2004: 392. Cited in the

following notes as Bphi with page numbers.) The notes Celan made after reading the 1954 edition of the lecture include this draft of a dedicatory text, the most recent version of which reads: “This sign of veneration / from a small distance / wishing-to-be-sounded-through / neighborhood / Herr Mar-tin Heidegger / the thought-master // on the way to the Baie des Anges. (Bphi 409–410).

21 Cf. Celan’s letter to Böll on September 1957, footnote 4.22 Martin Heidegger. Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1951: 38.


Viel hat erfahren der Mensch. Der Himmlischen viele genannt, Seit ein Gespräch wir sind Und hören können voreinander.

Humankind has learned much, named many of the heavenly ones, since we have been a conversation and have been able to hear face to face.

Celan’s draft reads this way23: Seit ein Gespräch wir sind, an dem wir würgen, an dem ich würge, das mich aus mir hinausstieß, dreimal, viermal.

Im Ohr wirbelnde Schläfenasche, die eine, letzte Gedankenfrist duldend,

Feuchtes, viel

Since we have been a conversation, on which we choke, on which I choke, that I cough up, three times, four times.

In the ear whirling skull-ashes, that endure one, last thought-verge.

Soddenness, much.

From Hölderlin’s first two lines (Viel hat erfahren der Mensch. / Der Him-mlischen viele genannt) Celan’s draft only retained Feuchtes, viel, which be-came the closing cadence in the final version of “Todtnauberg”: Feuchtes,/ viel. Hölderlin’s second couplet extends this in variation, concentrating on the “we” of the conversation’s speech, on the act of hearing, and on the span 23 Lichtzwang, Tübinger Ausgabe 49.

Wasen 31

between the word Seit [‘since’] and its last “verge” or time-limit. Heidegger’s commentary equates the Being of humankind in conversation with the unity of its Being in speech:

We—the human beings—are a conversation. The Sein of human-being grounds itself in speech; but this actually happens only in conversation. This not just a way in which speech fulfills itself, rather speech is only essential-as-being [wesentlich] as conversation. […] We are a conversation, this always means the same thing: we are a conversation. Yet the unity of a conversation persists in the openness, each time, of the one and the same, on whose ground we are united and so authentically ourselves, within the integral word. The conversation and its unity bears our Dasein.24

Every single assertion in Heidegger’s commentary is cast out of Celan’s verses. Though admittedly they speak of a conversation that “we are,” they treat this conversation not as human “Being” [das Sein der Menschen] but as the minimum verbal occurrence articulated in the collective pronoun “we,” a “we” that steers the poem, the pronoun referring to this conversation. In his line “we choke,” Celan reads Hölderlin and Heidegger’s “we” as a residue of speech and of conversation left to choke on, as proof of choking on a com-mon language, experienced as suffocating, and as a fragment of a language that still attempts to say something besides “we,” something other than what a language of “we,” than what a conversation could be. “We”: this means, “we choke,” we suffocate on speech and are, whenever we speak, on the edge of vomiting. “We” means: language is what we cough up, what—because “we” are this language—coughs us up, what coughs up every speaking “I” and, as the speaker in Celan’s poem puts it, language “that I / cough up / three times, / four times,” likewise many times since we have been a conversation, and not only once and for all, but again and again, because and as long as “we,” as language, is a movement of self-expulsion.

What Celan’s “we choke” depicts as disgusting and suffocating, and what is suffered as such, is not just a particular language or a particular conversa-tion—the one, for example, with Heidegger or with Heidegger’s Hölderlin—but is rather all language, as far as it is conversation; this is what, along with himself, one who speaks throws up, diffuses, and exiles from language and its community. Unlike the conversation proposed by Heidegger, this “we”-talk is not a conversation that opens up “the one and the same, on whose ground we are united and so authentically ourselves,” but rather an event much more dispersed from itself, cast off from each and every selfhood from the begin-ning, an event that cannot provide any “ground” to bear “our” Dasein. These lines want to reabsorb Celan’s generous concession, in August 1959, that Heidegger could wish to be someone who “choked” on his past errors,25 in 24 Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung 38–39.25 Cf. footnote 2.


that the “we” of “we choke” encloses him, too, in the poem’s eructive gesture; yet Celan’s 1967 poem turns resolutely from the thought of the conversa-tion’s “unity,” from the interpretation of “the openness, each time, of the one and the same, on whose ground we are united and so authentically ourselves, within the essential/as-human-being [wesentlichen] word,” from the thought of the conversation as the unified being [Wesen] of speech; with this the poem also enacts a turning-back in the conversation between philosophy and poetry. This turn takes place not because the conversation does not hap-pen or falls short, but rather because, as it occurs in these lines, it is suffered as “choking,” as the self-expulsion of speech and of every unified “being” [Wesen]: it drives poetry and philosophy apart and allows neither to survive as itself. Because the conversation is not—as it is according to Heidegger’s interpretation of logos—a gathering of speech, but rather the speaking-each-other-apart of language and of that which it speaks, poetry and philosophy must also split from each other and from themselves, and even from the way they, in the dissociation of their common ground and their own separate ac-tions, articulate their (verbal) being.

If hearing or listening also belong to this conversation of the “we” (since we have been a conversation / and have been able to hear face to face”) then the experience of speech as a fatal danger must also relate to hearing. “We,” the conversation, become therefore “whirling / skull-ashes in the ear,” ac-cording to Celan’s “Todtnauberg” draft—not the “ground” in which “human Being is grounded,” not the stable “unity” in the “essential word,” of which Heidegger writes, not that which “bears our Dasein”; this “we” is rather the vortex of ashes from a gunshot to the temple, driven into the ear. What we hear is our death. Yet this death is not ‘natural,’ it is a death by words, a murder-by-speech that those who speak meet, even when it is simply ‘what is heard,’ met as something other, whether near or far away, met as any and in every single word. We “are” only as those who die of language and who hear our death as “whirling / skull-ashes.” The “thought-span” means the “one, / [the] last,” not because every second passing second hurts, but because every one is terminal, a second in which conversation kills the “we.” This limited time span allowed to thought is exactly this always-the-last one, its own end, its already-no-longer-thought and its incapacity to undergo experience. Its “Being,” the “human Being” in the suffocating talk and whirling sound of the “we,” is (transitively) its “not-Being” [Nicht-Sein]. To ‘think it’ signifies even this thinking as expulsed, non-collective, radically scattered from the “we”; it also reveals this thinking as answerable to its particularity and to its unthinkable otherness; and it implies therefore a bringing-to-speech of the respective non-thought of thinking and non-speech of a common lan-guage—but only to a kind of speech other than its own conversation, to the language of the otherness of language, to a speech that “others” language.

Wasen 33

And with all of this it also connotes the following process: to press language into poetry, from the difference of language toward language, yet at the same time to write not through contraction and collection of disparate elements into unity, but rather through intensified dissociation and dispersal of the speech-world’s events. The withholding of thought before its own (already no longer its own) ends, and the “thought-span,” the vanishing time of this thought, “since we have been conversation,” in which to approach another, differentiated form of speech, comes to thought no less than to poetry; but where thought falters before its groundlessness and affirms it is “one and the same” as the “ground” and the “being” of Dasein in the “essential word” of conversation, then it comes to poetry alone to think thought in its falling-short and to speak toward any other speech that would be neither its own conversation nor its falling-silent.

In “Todtnauberg,” Celan has extended the conversation about the struc-ture of conversation, but not in the lines about the choking and whirling “we.” Its choking and whirling works, rather, in the cumulative phonetic ef-fect of uvular fricatives and occlusives in the poem’s opening lines: in Arnika, Augentrost, Trunk, Brunnen, Sternwürfel, and drauf, glottal stops and choking sounds, inhibitors of sound and voice, dominate as a non-thematic exten-sion of the conversation about the language of the “we” and its self-expulsive structure. At the same time, the poem’s final version does not move so far semantically afield from this choking of the “we,” as it coalesces in Hölder-lin’s lines and in Heidegger’s concept of the “essence” of speech and poetry, in order to spit it out. The two lines that follow the poem’s book-stanza (they are the last found and were probably first included between August 17 and 25, 1967),26

Waldwasen, uneingeebnet, Orchis und Orchis, einzeln,

forest turf, unleveled, orchid and orchid, single,

alter a concept and a configuration from Heidegger’s writings that delin-eates the relationship between thinking and writing poetry, a correlation that Celan perceives differently. Waldwesen [“forest turf ”] is a word that Celan underlined in Mörike’s Maler Nolten, noting in the margins Wasen: Heidegger in Todnauberg [sic].27 Wasen and Rasen [‘lawn’], Feuchtwiesen [‘marsh’], Auen [‘wetlands’] or Anger [‘village green’]; this last word used primarily in south-ern Germany had once indicated a Schindanger or ‘knacker’s yard’ where the so-called Wasenmeister buried animal corpses.28 The word’s meaning extends

26 Cf. Editor’s commentary in Lichtzwang. Tübinger Ausgabe 50.27 Thanks to Bertrand Badiou for the source of this observation. It is drawn from Barbara Wiede-

mann’s richly annotated edition of Paul Celan, Die Gedichte. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003: 807.28 Cf. Grimm’s Deutsches Wörterbuch, Band 27, Sp. 2276.


from there to ‘peat,’ ‘swampy ground,’ ‘mire,’ ‘silt,’ and ‘manure,’ and ap-proaches the northern-German Wrasen, which stands for ‘damp,’ ‘fume,’ ‘va-por,’ ‘sodden earth’ or simply ‘humidity.’29 Celan’s Mörike marginalia suggest that Heidegger used the word on their walks together in Todtnauberg. The word maintains, as noted in other commentaries, the closest phonetic rela-tionship to Heidegger’s Wesen, used not in the sense of “essence” but rather as a verbal substantive that in his terminology signals the occurrence of Be-ing understood, for its part, through language. One of the most prominent formulations in Being and Time explains definitively, “The being’ [Wesen] of Dasein lies in its existence.”30 Thus the concept of Wesen is ambivalent, in one sense pointing to the occurrence of Dasein’s existence, but also indicating an “essence” that is used up in the whole of existential occurrence. If the one sense of Heidegger’s sentence lies in the discovery of the unreserved finitude of Dasein’s Being, so the other sense of this finitude can still be understood as reduced to the essential. Heidegger’s Wesen marks the point in the history of philosophy at which the essentialization of Being seeks one last indication that something remains of this essence. It is this residue of Being from which Celan’s Wasen is unbound.

That Celan speaks of Waldwasen could find an explanation in, among other possible sources, the mention of the forest in “Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens” [“From the Experience of Thinking”]. Heidegger had given him this short essay, already drafted in 1947 and published for the first time in a 1954 Neske-Verlag edition, together with his talk “Dem Freunde Hans Jant-zen zum Andenken” [“A Friend Remembers Hans Jantzen”)] as a gift during their visit together in Todtnauberg. His dedication reads “For / Paul Celan / in remembrance / of the visit to the cabin / on July 25, 1967 / Martin Heidegger.”31 The last pages of this collection of aphorisms and poems at-tempted a renewed interpretation of the proximity between thought and po-etry, which Heidegger had pursued since his “Artwork” essay and Hölderlin readings of the 1930s. This small “Experience” essay invoked Hölderlin as well. A passage on its last page reads:

Singing and thinking are the neighboring stems of poetry.They grow out of Being and reach into its truth.Their relationship renders to thought what Hölderlin sings of the trees in the forest:“And they remain unknown to each other,So long as they stand, the neighboring stems.”32

29 Cf. Grimm’s Deutsches Wörterbuch, Band 30, Sp. 1680.30 Sein und Zeit 42. This sentence is marked in Celan’s copy, as are the surrounding sentences that

indicate its weight. Cf. Bphi 376.31 Bphi 338. A facsimile of Heidegger’s dedication is printed in the book by Hadrien France-Lanord,

Paul Celan und Martin Heidegger: Le sens d’un dialogue. Paris: Fayard, 2004. [German edition, Freiburg: Rombach, 2007: 266.]

32 Martin Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, 4th ed. Pfullingen: Neske, 1976: 25.

Wasen 35

Thinking is thus itself a form of poetry, and it stands, certainly not sub-ordinate to but next to singing, which is its own form of poetry. If these “neighboring stems of poetry” resemble the forest, then this forest is poetry for Heidegger; and if its stems “grow out of Being,” then they ground dif-ferent kinds of poetry in this “Being.” Celan’s “Orchid and orchid, single” allows itself to be read as an attenuated reprise of Hölderlin’s verse about the “neighboring stems” that remain unknown to each other. Like the relation-ship between “singing and thinking” in Heidegger’s reflection, so the link between “Orchid and orchid” in Celan’s poem makes clear what it itself has to do with Being. Yet “Orchid and orchid, single,” makes a distinction be-yond Heidegger’s, not between “singing and thinking,” but between plants with the same name from the same family of orchids, and (as orchis means ‘testicle’ in Greek) between identically named genital organs; it distinguishes likewise between ‘same’ and ‘same’ and allows it to split from itself, doubled and isolated against itself, removed not only from others but also from itself. What is “single” signifies not only through its differences from everything else but also through its difference from its own kind: it is what stands aside from itself and from its Being, and, doubled, standing outside its Being, is at the same time less and more than itself, less and more than its Being. With an almost-definitive turn, this can mean, in Celan’s poem “Cello Entry”: “all is less, than / it is, / all is more.”33 No ‘is’ situates “Orchid and orchid” in what Heidegger characterizes in Being and Time as “presence”—as parousia, ousia or (human) being—and thereby also as the temporal sense of Being to which classical metaphysics assigns it, but rather this ‘is’ is neither surveyed nor elaborated in terms of “presence.”34 Yet over and beyond the horizon of pres-ence and its modifications stands exactly what stands beside itself in “Orchid and orchid, single,” just as correspondence, measurement, and commensura-bility are at the same time turned back from this horizon, themselves in the time of Being, and yet in state of a difference between their and any Being. “Orchid and orchid” are therefore not already present or nullified (then they would be just the existent negations of their Being); they are not timeless, nor do they refuse their presence; but in their paratactic orientation toward each other and to themselves, they are structured as par-ousias, as para-ousias, displaced at the furthest border of presence and open to that which is simply other than these and other than ‘is,’ not timeless, but rather timely in the extreme, para-chronias, and as such para-chronias ever the singular axial turn of time: “Orchid and orchid.”35

If “Orchid and orchid, single” answers not only Hölderlin’s “neighboring stems” but also their interpretation as stems in the forest of poetry, then the

33 GW 2, 76.34 Sein und Zeit 25–26 and passim.35 Celan’s notes to Heidegger’s Einführung in die Metaphysik, likely written at the end of 1954, in-

clude a thrice-underlined “deepen!” next to the entry, “Para-taxis / in the poem.” (Bphi 335.)


poetry portrayed in Celan’s line is an un-poeticizing of any forest; not an approach between neighbors, but a distancing between those who remain unknown as the self-displacement of sameness, as the self-differentiation of thought, as themselves, in fact, as the self-suspension of a “singing” that un-binds itself from itself as a gesture of individuation: a plant or a reproductive organ only exists as it protrudes from organic-genetic Being, from Being as emergence, consummation, and Presence of that which is present. “Single” speaks as adjectival apposition to “Orchid and orchid,” without closer syn-tactic binding, without synthesis, without a verbal complement that would orient it in the area or in one of its modifications. Its name calls it (echoing the French or, hors, and dehors) as mere exteriority without essence and (evok-ing the particularlizing Greek chisma) as sheer separateness from each other, a plural, polylingual cleft. With this Celan’s line backs rigorously away from what Heidegger means as poetry, characterized as “singing and thinking,” in his thinking of Being. The diversity of splits in Celan’s language will not allow itself to be reduced to the ontological difference between Being and being(s), Presence and presence(s), since the divisions between nominal ele-ments and the partitioning of these elements do not suspend themselves at the horizon of Presence but rather are separated, one after another and from each other, through iteration and apposition—“orchid and orchid, single”—a paratactic sequence of beings beside and outside their Being, presences beside and outside their Presence: a para that first and foremost yields an ousia, but also something other than this. The structure of Celan’s language, with these manifold splits, cannot therefore be subsumed into the concept of ontological and likewise being-internal difference, because Heidegger in-terpreted these as diaphora, or ‘repetition,’ and emission, or ‘carrying-out.’36 Nothing “carries” or “carries out” here. The pair “orchid and orchid” remains, separated, un-paired, simply on the verge of procreation. With the line “Or-chid and orchid, single,” the poem speaks, below and beyond all Being, as more- and between-speaking, as a more-than-verbal fissure.37

As “Orchid and orchid” remain single, the same, but also set aside from each other, so are the Waldwasen in Celan’s poem uneingeebnet or ‘unleveled’: not unified, equated, or ‘brought into line,’ but rather preserved in their unevenness and difference. If this “forest turf,” as the relationship between lines in the fourth stanza of “Todtnauberg” suggests, is a wet meadow on which the “orchid” grows, then it occupies the very place allocated to Be-ing in Heidegger’s Erfahrung essay. There the “neighboring stems” appear as follows: “They grow out of Being…” The Wesen or ‘essence’ of Being, Being in its Wesen lies in the Wasen, as Celan’s word-trove, perhaps prepared by his reading of Heidegger, interprets it. Wasen works as paranomasia, as word-36 Cf. Martin Heidegger, Identität und Differenz, 4th ed. Pfullingen: Neske, 1976: 25.37 Sterbegeklüft [‘death-cleft’ or ‘-fissure’) is a word from Celan’s poem “Schneebett” (GW I, 168).

Wasen 37

play, as an other-ing or mis-naming of Wesen. Out of the Wasen, this other-wise-understood Wesen, itself become something other, grow the “orchids,” which are for their part a reinterpretation of Heidegger’s idea of poetry and its “singing” and “thinking.” Here the word Waldwasen, as indeed in Mörike’s earlier novella, is a poetic compression, and yet since this compression is at the same time an act of thinking, and both not only grow out of Being, as Heidegger writes, but also reach outward “in [their] truth,” this “truth” of Being asserts itself in the word Wasen, as the sense of “Being” asserts it-self here and displays, through the introduction of a slight graphic-phonetic unevenness in the normally level language of thought, a completely altered understanding of Being. Wasen indicates marshy, moldy terrain without firm boundaries or solid ground, a place where living things are not so much composed as decomposed, an amorphous sink of rot and growth in which animal corpses and, as Celan could imagine, human corpses also decay, bod-ies whose being, in the sense of Dasein, is not, never has been, and will never be. In this swampy ground of the Wasen, Wesen as human-being, which Hei-degger confines to the realm of Dasein and its possibilities, encounters that which anticipates and lies in wait for it as the absolutely im-possible. Both are related to this moorland, brought close to the poem’s Hochmoor, in whose name Celan might have heard the French word mort, for ‘death.’38 In this para-semantic context, in this continually unfolding para-text, “orchid” takes on the connotation of Orkus—the mythic name of Death, of Non-being and Never-having-been—and the poem’s title turns the name into a mountain, as Todtnauberg, in this sense doubly “unlevelled”: as a Black Forest village, and a ‘village green,’ linked to death and to the Underworld, renamed and garbled into recognition as Waldwasen, uneingeebnet.

With the transformation of the Wesen of Sein into a formless and form-loosening Wasen, with this metamorphosis-as-deformation, unremembered and not yet imagined, the geographical image in Celan’s lines changes into a verbal picture-puzzle of Being and of the poetry that should reach into its truth. Heidegger speaks of this place in Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, in the passage that contains his reflections on “the neighboring stems” of poetry:

The poetic character of thought is still veiled.Where it shows itself, it resembles, for a long time, the utopia of a half-poetic mind.But thinking poetry is in truth the topology of Being.It speaks to Being the location of its being [Wesen].39

If “thinking poetry” (Heidegger’s characterization of thinking this side of on-tology) gives to the “being” of Being its place, then it is the logos of its topos 38 Cf. the author’s study of “Celans Aus dem Moorboden—Häm: Ein Gedicht Celans mit Motiven

Benjamins,” in Jüdisches Denken in einer Welt ohne Gott: Festchrift für Stéphane Mosès. Berlin: Vor-werk 8, 2001: 173–97.

39 Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens 23.


and as such the “topology of Being”. This also means that thinking is always a form of entitlement, because the awarding of this Being-articulated thought is, through speech—as the occurrence of speech collects itself anew, now and then, along the borders of a certain place—allowed to linger there, defining the place each time this way: as idea, ousia, substatia or cogitatio, as will or as ‘will to power.’ Thinking is therefore always topical thinking, in which it suspends its own and all surrounding occurrences through its language, bringing its experience into a certain place through its self-understanding, assigning itself a direction and thereby locating this experience of events. Still, what is situated beyond its potential for assignation—primarily the bare fact of its Being, its Being-with-others, its Being-toward-death—can only be understood and delimited, in thought, as a fact of its potential and a limine of its own “possibility of impossibility of existence.”40 Since thinking is not given an ‘objective’ indication of its Being’s purpose, independent of its own history, it can only imagine itself as the form of compression that is poetry, and can only characterize the structure of this thought-as-poetry as a “topol-ogy of Being.” Heidegger puts it this way: “[Being/Seyn] speaks the location of its being [Wesen].” The “topology” determines this location, however, only in that language already assigned from “being” to Being, and since this “be-ing” as Presence—and likewise Presence also of what is present—is princi-pally capable of location, the “topology of Being” can correspond to nothing other than this “being”: it is self-correspondence and self-location of Being in its particular language and only as such “in truth.” Despite all efforts to free himself from the concept of truth-as-correspondence, and to reach a broader, pre-predicative idea of truth through “altheic” un-concealment, Heidegger thought of the “topology of Being” according to the schema of correspon-dences. This is the correspondence of the topical language of thought with itself, as the “‘being’ of Being” [Wesen des Seyns]. The topology of Being is auto- and tauto-topology.

If “Todtnauberg” is Celan’s conversation with Heidegger, not only about the latter’s silence about his Nazi involvement, but also about his philosophy of language and what is still un-thought in it, and if this conversation relates not only to what was said during the Todtnauberg meeting but also to what is written in the book that Heidegger gave him on the way, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, then the pages on the “topology of Being” and the closeness of thought and poetry can hardly have escaped Celan’s attention. Celan, likely familiar with the book since the 1950s, had in fact already answered them. His “Meridian” address of October 1960 poses the question of the poem as “topos research,” probably with a look back into Heidegger’s formulations in the Erfahrung essay rather than into historical rhetoric in Curtius’ sense. And Celan answers: “But certainly in the light of what is to be discovered: 40 Cf. Sein und Zeit 262. See also the author’s study “Prämessen“ in Entferntes Verstehen. Frankfurt:

Suhrkamp, 1998: 36 sqq.

Wasen 39

in the light of U-topia.” The poem is for him “the place where all tropes and metaphors want to be extended ad absurdum”—and as with the tropes, so also with the topoi. For Celan, poems run through the movement of a ques-tion: “a question ‘remaining open,’ ‘coming to no end,’ pointing toward the open and empty and free—we are far outside. / The poem seeks, I believe, this place as well.”41 This place appears in the “Meridian” speech as the “open and empty and free,” as the “far outside,” and, whether paradox or absurdity, as an atopical place, as “U-topia”; yet as such, pulling against Heidegger’s “topology” and auto-topology of Being, it is a place of something completely Other, as a place, that is not a place of Being, that is not itself and that itself is not. This place of its own non-Being can therefore maintain, instead of its own name that corresponds to it, only another, othered, name: an un-name. Celan writes “U-topia” with a dash and a ‘rest,’ thus distinguishing it from the established concept of heterotopical ‘utopia.’ Heidegger, who knew the “Meridian” speech, did not recognize in it Celan’s answer to his thoughts on the topology of Being and betrayed his lack of understanding through the gift of exactly the text from which Celan had distanced himself. If in “Todtnauberg” Celan insistently thematized the place, its prepositional de-termination, and its In-Sein, and if he opened it to a having-been-there and an outside-without-being, then it is also likely that the poem functioned as a second answer to Heidegger’s topology, following the observations in the “Meridian” speech and extending the barely-begun conversation with heightened urgency.

The u-topian place in “Todtnauberg” is not one; it does not lie in the realm of the measurable, of thought-with-itself, but rather in the uncount-able abundance of that where it is not. It is a U-topia of language, and its places are those of words, every one of which speaks against itself and out-ward beyond itself, and at the same time corresponds to itself. These words follow a logic (or more exactly, an a-logic) displayed in “Your eyes in the arm — placed, un-worded, // un-where…”42 The word Waldwasen ‘speaks away’ the Wesen of the forest, which for Heidegger is poetry; the word’s plu-ral form suggests beings deformed by paronomasia, “unlevelled,” multiplied, and as Wasen therefore, any place that is not itself and itself is not, an a-topos of ‘Otherness’ and an Other-than-Being; this is not a word that names or signals, but one that un-names, takes back its signs and meanings, as in the book-stanza, the Name nahmen [“the names took”]. Wasen, wavering be-tween singular and plural, plural and singular at once, speaks as a word still in use, still found in the dictionary, but at the same time as a word from other words, behind or in front of them—toward and from Wesen [‘being/essence’], wessen [‘whose’], Rasen [‘grass’], Wrasen [‘vapor’], Wahrsein [‘truth’], Wahnsinn [‘insanity’], Schindanger [‘knacker’s yard’], Feuchtwiesen [‘sodden 41 GW 3, 199.42 GW 2, 123.


meadow’], Moor [‘moor’]—a micro-canto, word of the beside-itself of words, that in this beside-itself does not be or exist, but rather, half obsolete and es-tranged, as many of the words in Celan’s hoard, once was. Wasen speaks—and in corresponding, un-speaks itself—as Wortwasen, as a ‘word-field.’ It marks the place of an ancient putrefaction process, a place of decomposition—and the decomposition, also, of the place—and exposes itself at the same time, outside- and pre-existent, without a clear sense of direction, to the possibility of working as ex-composition, as existential extension and scattering at once. It does not speak to Being “its place”, as Heidegger’s “thinking-as-poetry” does, but rather it un-places this “being” and with it Being, it transfers its incapacity to locate, its groundlessness, its un-Being.43 It postulates, however, that every Wesen be thought out of this Wasen, Being out of Other than itself and toward this Other, its place and its word out of and approaching an “un-where.”

Heidegger’s question on the sense of Sein and its “being” remains, as long as it is not taken seriously, or answered, as it flows (and this happened in his own work) into the correspondence between “thought-as-poetry” and the occurrence of Being; it remains a question as long as it is unanswered, unable to push up against the anti-word, in which it changes itself into the ques-tion about Wasen and with this stops being a question, and simply becomes Wasen. If Heidegger writes in Hölderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung: Dichtung ist worthafte Stiftung des Seins [“Poetry is the verbal foundation of Being”], then, as the foundation of poetry’s ‘being’ and of speech, as a “historical being” and also as such “the single essential being,”44 the “historical being” in Celan’s poem is not newly grounded in the Wasen, its Being is not newly endowed or founded in the word, but rather it is delivered up to something without stock or supply, something older than old, exposed to what has not yet come, something newer than new, something that cannot be grasped in any word, something that still (or already) belongs to Being. If Heidegger thinks, two decades later in his Unterwegs der Sprache [On the Way to Lan-guage], of the being of Being as its dispossession and the “being of language” as what finds correspondence not in the “language of being” but only in its breakdown, then this collapse also remains an occurrence of Being, even the actual “experience” of its being, the giving-over of Being.45 “An ‘is’ resigns itself, where the word breaks down”—so reads the final conjecture in his discussion of Das Wesen der Sprache [The Being of Language].46 Because “the word, the saying, has no Being” and is “not a kind of Being,”47 and because “the word for the being/essence of words [...] is not granted,” only through 43 Un-Sein as distinguished from Nicht-Sein or ‘non-Being’ [trans. note].44 Erläuterungen zur Hölderlins Dichtung 41, 47.45 Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache. Pfullingen: Neske, 1959: 192–93, 214.46 Ibid. 216.47 Ibid. 236–37.

Wasen 41

this does it remain and exist as that “gathering that what is present first brings into its presence.”48 On the contrary, Wasen speaks as the word granted “for the being of the word,” in which it carries out not the “gathering” but rather the scattering and decomposition of this word and this being; it brings not that-which-is-present but rather the never-has-existed into a presence that is not its own and is always only more and only less than being, namely a mere coming back and forth from presence. More discursive than the single word Wasen, a substantial parenthesis in Celan’s poem “Windgerecht” from the 1959 collection Sprachgitter speaks of the structure of a Dasein without being:

Ungewesen und Da, beides zumal, geht durch die Herzen.49

Has-not-been and there, both at once, goes through the hearts.

The juncture of a Da (without Sein) and of an Ungewesen or ‘not-has-been’—from which departs any relationship with the constitutive elements Hei-degger laid out in his Being and time-structure—this juncture lets any Da lapse into a still-never and nowhere, any has-not-been into a now, here, and otherwise, and defines here an experience of radical, even infra-radical tem-poralization, spatialization, correspondence, and existence that remains inac-cessible for Heidegger’s being-concept, as near as it comes to such an experi-ence. In Waldwasen any Ungewesen touches the (verbal) being or essence of Sein and leaves it behind, “unlevelled”: namely unreduced to a being unified in and congruent with itself. “Not to even out / Dasein’s hill”—so it goes in the poem “Spät” [“Late”], four months after the meeting in Todtnauberg.

“(I am also, God knows, no ‘shepherd of Being…’)”50 If this parenthetical statement in the September 7, 1959 letter to Bachmann is more than a style-critical cliché, then it can only mean that Celan’s disagreement with Hei-degger was, first and foremost, a disagreement about his philosophy, with his question about Being and his thoughts on language and poetry, and therefore also with his Nazi-rectorship and his silence about it. The answer that Celan gave with “Todtnauberg” is not at first glance moral but rather philosophi-cal; it is the answer of a “thought poetry” in exactly that sense Heidegger was not able to understand. Wasen is the most pregnant word—along with entwo [‘un-where’] —of this answer. It speaks, both contradicting and correspond-ing to itself, as an epoché, articulating not only the subject’s subjectivity and not only that of Being itself (which keeps its truth to itself and thereby

48 Ibid.49 GW 1, 169.50 Herzzeit 121.


secures its being or essence),51 but it also speaks as an epoché that still sus-pends the onto-topological self-entrustment of Being, and reduces this to the continued non-being52 detached from Being and being, the denial of ground, the helplessness to find a place, the impossibility of being. Waldwasen means inertia before and during the experience of being, Ur-world, failed word. It radicalizes Heidegger’s de-essentializing of existence—which Heidegger initi-ated but did not see through—and loosens the “uncanniness of Dasein” from its imprisonment in an In-Sein, in which its residue remains. It is directed to anyone it allows to speak, but it has shied away from listening; it is prob-ably directed to him and to another, without expecting that this address will reach its vase communicant without obstacles. Just as Waldwasen is a word of the epoché of the being of Being, “Todtnauberg” is, as a poem of the epoché of the “being of poetry,” ‘epochal’ in a much broader sense than the mere biographical.

What Waldwasen discreetly implies takes on a sharper contour in the fol-lowing two-line stanza: Krudes, später, im Fahren / deutlich,— [“crudeness, later, on the road, / made clear—”] In his letter to his wife, Celan comments on these lines: “on the drive, in the car, a serious talk, with clear words on my part.”53 But the lines say more than this. “Clear” becomes “crude”—after the Latin crudus, meaning ‘bloody,’ ‘wounded,’ ‘mangled’—but this coming-clear is itself crude, and the “drive,” which destabilizes the topologically fixed location, completes the gesture clarifying crudeness. In the following stan-za—der uns fährt, der Mensch / der’s mit anhört [“the one who drives us, the man / who listens in”]—the clarification works more as a “ride” into hearing, where fährt and hört illuminate each other semantically with slant rhyme, and at the same time sound as a kind of hearing that works as experience [Er-fahren]. “The one who drives,” according to Celan’s report to his wife, was Gerhart Baumann, who had facilitated the meeting between Celan and Heidegger; in these lines “the man / who listens in” is likewise he who brings together two speakers, or one speaker and one who is silent, through their

51 To characterize the self-concealment of Being, Heidegger reaches back to the concept of Epoché when he writes, “We can call this lighted self-containment in the truth of its being the epoché of Being. This word, used in the language of the Stoics, does not take on in this case Husserl’s method of exposing thetic acts of consciousness to reification. The epoch of Being belongs to it-self. It is thought out of the experience of Being’s forgetfulness.” Martin Heidegger, Der Spruch der Anaximander. In Holzwege. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1950: 311.

52 It is important to note, with regard to the word Un-Wesen or ‘non-being,’ that in his 1930/43 essay Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, Heidegger writes: “The actual non-being of truth is the secret. Here non-being means not-yet-seceded to being in the sense of the generic [koinón, genós], its possibil-ity and its ground. Here non-being still remains, in all of these senses, and in its way, essential to its being, and it never becomes inessential in the sense of indifference.” The question posed in this statement must evidently ask how “non-being” can be “essential” to being, if “non-being” lies in exactly what keeps being withheld as a secret. Heidegger’s lecture on the “pre-essential being” already assimilates this as the Wesen against which it holds itself. Cf. Wegmarken; Frankfurt: Klos-termann, 1967: 89.

53 Correspondance I, 550.

Wasen 43

driving and hearing, linking them just once in the poem as an “us”—and therefore a general “us”—and allowing, just once, in the verb’s present tense, to be in the presence of what is heard. “The one who drives us, the man” is a ferryman—not unlike Charon54—who translates [übersetzt: literally, ‘sits-over’ or ‘-across’] between the two and, through his driving and hearing, also ‘translates’ them into another region.55 If the reference to “crudeness” suggests the earlier echo of Orchis and Orkus and the following evocation of the Hochmoor and its homophony with the French word mort, then the drive is a journey into the land of the dead; the emphatically repeated present tense in these lines and the reference to hearing also make clear that this drive leads into the present —but into the present of speech about what is crude, the present of crude speech, the bloody and murderous present. This pres-ent is the present of that which destroys it, it is the present of death and also that of what it itself is not. Its witness is “the man,” insofar as he makes this single, equally monumental and monstrous present, simply non-present; this “man,” so these lines imply, is he only then and only so long as he experiences their crude present-against-presentness. His hearing can only be the hearing of the already-no-longer-hearing of a language that thus only speaks in the present, because it is the speech of the already-no-longer-speaking of crudity, of bloodiness. The complex expression of the “we”s in the draft version “In the ear / whirling / skull-ashes” and the “last / thought-span” becomes in these simpler lines the actual movement of the poem: this itself becomes the ferryman between fährt and hört and is as such a translator, mediator, and third witness to the dialogue. Just as, according to Celan’s report to his wife, Gerhard Neumann was the witness [le témoin] to the conversation with Heidegger, so is the poem its own witness [testis] in the text, and through it every reader “who listens in” becomes a witness to the over- and against-pres-entness of “crudeness,” every reader becomes a translator of blood-stained speech, hearing, and silence, every one a ‘Celan,’ every one a ‘Heidegger,’ and every one an other, an other-er.

Celan’s poem staves off, yet again in these verses, every topology that could locate Being through correspondence—and this is implicit in the word ent-sprechen—or affirm the possibility that there is a human, speaking Being that keeps to one place in order to protect itself from non-Being. It was impor-tant to Celan that Gerhard Neumann, as “the one who drives us, the man/ 54 René Char, a friend of Heidegger as well as of Celan, who translated his work, was a mediator

between the two.55 Celan occasionally writes about a Picasso-translation; in a letter to Peter Schifferli, head of the

Arche publishing company on April 1, 1954, he notes that Picasso’s text “does not only translate, but also—if I may misuse a Heidegger-word—wants to be translated”; he speaks jokingly of his service as a “ferryman.” Fremde Nähe—Celan als Übersetzer. Marbach: Deutsche Schillergesell-schaft, 1997: 399. The “Heidegger-word” that Celan played on appears in Der Spruch des Anaxi-mander, where the topic is the opportunity to “trans-late” and translation as a carrying-over of truth (Holzwege 217–18).


who listens in,” had recognized an epochal aspect [un aspect épochal]56 in the conversation. This aspect, and more than the mere aspect, the poem carries without reserve. But it is epochal because it translates Being, restrained in the topos and chrono-topos of presence, into the movement from and to what it is not, as more-than-presence and presence-against-itself [Gegen-Gegenwärtig-keit], because it still suspends the epoché (the abiding-with-itself ) of Being, as Heidegger saw it, of a completely other, crude epoché and gives it a blow that no Being allows to remain with itself or to deny itself, so that it bleeds from every word.

The lines of the second-to-last stanza—die halb- / beschrittenen Knüp-pel- / pfade im Hochmoor [“the half- / tramped, fretted / path in the upper meadow]—have been linked in various commentaries to the broken-off walk in the Hochbacher Moor, to Heidegger’s Holzwegen (the title of his book Holzwege, often translated as “Off the Beaten Track”), and to bludgeoning deaths in concentration camps.57 But these paths refer not only to what has already happened, not only to themes outside them, but also to the paths of the poem itself, those in the Hochmoor, traveled again and again in the poem. They refer to “the half- / tramped,” not only recalling an interrupted walk, but also breaking themselves off to cross the meadow only halfway, because to walk it in its complete length and depth (the moor mort, ‘dies’) is not to cross it. The reference to death is aporetic, it is a road in the roadless, a way that is necessarily one and none, and therefore always only half. The poem “Schliere” [“Streak”], which Celan, according to Otto Pöggeler, wanted to send to Heidegger58 in 1957, puts it this way: Wege, halb—und die längs-ten, // Seelenbeschrittene Fäden [“Ways, half—and the longest, // soul-crossed threads]. The proximity of these lines to those in “Todnauberg” is too obvi-ous for the later lines not to be read as a reprise. “Schliere” offers an explana-tion for this ‘half-ness’:

von den Blicken auf halbem Weg erschautes Verloren, Wirklichgesponnenes Niemals, widergekehrt.59

from the looks on the half way seen Lostness real-spun Never, turned back.

The paths lead not into that-which-is-lost, that which once was, available, seen or spoken of, but rather into “Lostness” itself, and likewise into that

56 Correspondance I, 550.57 Knüppel can mean ‘club’ or a fretted structure laid over sodden ground. [translator’s note]58 Cf. Otto Pöggeler, Spur des Worts. Zur Lyrik Paul Celans. Freiburg, Suhrkamp, 1986: 153, 248.59 GW 1, 159. As in “Todtnauberg,” the word Schliere is set into an elevated position, with the und

nun in the poem’s axial line; this poem is about a “star.”

Wasen 45

which never has been, “Never,” which is first reached through the (impossi-ble-to-pass-through) way of the “real-spun,” of the language-woven text. The “half- / tramped, fretted / paths in the high meadow” are nothing other than the “ways” from which “streaks” speak, they are longer than any measurable length, because they are ways in what is not, never has been, and in the time of present Being never could have been. Because they do not lead through the chrono-topologically definable places of presence, their at- or toward-ness, these threads or paths of speech must be drawn along a presence not yet imagined or imaginable, and thus they can only be half and unending, indefinitely finite, in every sense aporetic paths in an a-topical zone, ways out of a “strange / time for a stranger Always”: a time broken open, where no time (no actual time, only a time-estranged) is, opened so that the time of Always remains a Never, the semi- and hyperchronicity of a time that never belongs to presence or its modifications.

Through this an-archic and ana-chronic time run “the half- / tramped, fretted / paths in the Hochmoor.” They go through the non-time of death and of the dead, through the “moors” in all of their connotations, and through the Wasen that correspond to no Wesen or its Anwesen or ‘presence’. As paths of language, they do speak, but only Wege, halb, ‘halfway’ and at the same time, in this immeasurability, not about anything spoken as thing or fixed as idea. Their language is at once semi- and hypersemiotic, since they must speak with the mute: with what not only remains silent but does not ever come to speech, with this as an inorganic medium of language, and with it as something toward or against which it can never become a medium and which withdraws from all mediation. Celan’s poetry is not only “on the way to language,” it is on the way to a language that has no language, toward what is in no sense a language. But it is also on the way to the muteness violently robbed of speech, from which speech has been withdrawn and withheld, toward a muteness from which speech has been cast out, and to the silence of what must speak, even if it “chokes” on the words, of this muteness and si-lence. Knüppel-/ pfade are those that, after a murder, speak of this murder and never stop. If “Streaks” can be read as the manifesto of the transitus, halfway in the wayless, and likewise as an early answer to Heidegger’s being-language, then the lines in “Todtnauberg” about the “half- / tramped, fretted / paths” can be read, with the reprise from “Schliere,” as an exhortation to Heidegger (and not only to him) to take the “Never” of speech more seriously than his lecture on the Wesen of language allows, and to take its “Not-yet” seri-ously enough to break silence about it. If—and what the lines remember and extrapolate does allow for this—if Heidegger cannot speak about what Celan, in his letter to Bachmann, called his missteps, if he cannot speak about those murdered under the Nazi regime, then he must still speak about his inability to speak, about his personal incapacity and, over and above that,


the impossibility of any speech. This speech about the incapacity of speech, the response to and against the impossibilities of speech, can only and ever be “half,” another and an altered speech, one that denies neither its casual-ties nor its “Lostness” and “Never.” Only from this half-speech, this speech of un-speaking as correspondence, can what Heidegger called, in Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, the “utopia of a half-poetic mind,” can any U-topia of human language grow, as Celan puts it in his “Meridian” speech: it grows in and toward the poem. Only the language of the u-topian and its a-topia can make—for being and also for its held-back, hidden, and silent non-being—a just language: this would only be the language of poetry, which no longer seals itself against its finitude but reveals itself as thought, which also discloses itself in the act of self-dis-covery.

In the -moor of Hochmoor—as in an ear, or Ohr—the phonetic elements distinguishing the poem’s words and their semantic connotations echo (-trost, vor, kommendes, Wort, Orchis) and these connect with the echoes of the French mort and hors or dehors. The final cadence of the last stanza

Feuchtes, viel.

Soddenness, much.

takes up, again, and all at once, the fricative of Würfel and Hoffnung, of Fahren, fährt, and -pfade, the semantic association of water with Brunnen [‘well’], the decay of -wasen and -moor, the phonetic of heute, the morphol-ogy of Krudes, but most of all the sound- and meaning-complex of Fahren, / deutlich. Feuchtes implies—swirled, transformed—once again and with all the line’s suggestions and connotations: Krudes, […] im Fahren, / deutlich [‘clear’]. The -es of Feuchtes resonates with the various -es, -is, and -as sounds in the text (das, wessen, dies, eines, kommendes, -wasen, Orchis, Krudes, uns) together with the elisions of the ‘e’ in nahms and der’s, so that Feuchtes, can be heard as an echo of the poem in the poem, as its internal and at the same time externalizing reduplication. Feuchtes gathers the associative meanings—‘wet’ and ‘enlivening’ from Brunnen, ‘decay’ from Waldwasen and Hochmoor, ‘danger’ [Gefahr] and ‘violence’ [Gewalt] from Fahren, fährt, and Knüppel- / pfade, ‘blood’ and ‘murderous’ from Krudes—not in a distinct, semantically aligned form, but rather as a kind of translation into a word as elementary as it is uncertain, a word that illuminates the earlier words and word-particles and that takes on no less meaning than they carry. Still, the shifting signi-fications between heute, Fahren […], deutlich and Feuchtes are as much re-namings as they are suspensions of definition, relocating and withdrawing all certainty into the vague element of unstable, manifold potential meanings. As the syntagms of “Todtnauberg” do not anywhere complete themselves

Wasen 47

in a closed syntactic system but rather adhere in a paratactic string of ges-tures, so the convergence of the poem’s elements remains connected in the one word Feuchtes; at the same time, the word implies elements linked in a diffuse and fluctuating system. That the word is Feuchtes characterizes these elements and lets them flow into each other: it is the word’s collective and yet singular meaning, among various meanings, that answers the question of Wesen, what it then might be. But Feuchtes does not imply condensation, in which its being is compressed and could be stabilized as a solid presence, but rather it implies a fluctuating uncertainty whose antagonistic characters—water and blood, the lively and the deadly, clarity and decay—pervade each other and withhold any definition of being. Feuchtes makes clear that the poem’s language represents a ‘speech-Wasen,’ a slippery aggregation, through the articulation of its overdeterminacy, in which the elements of non-being and hindered being, of pre-being and of un-being, as in decomposition, dis-place and subsume any clear definition in a state of limbo, without achieving a closed form in the form of a statement or judgment.

Celan has arranged the two last words of his poem so that they withhold the predicative clause that they suggest. Feuchtes, / viel: only the homophone Feuchtes fiel [‘soddenness fell’] hinted at here would yield a clause, a closed statement, a preterite-determined judgment, in which the whole poem’s ana-chronic, serial movement could be shifted into the past. But viel [‘much’], not fiel [‘fell’] is the poem’s last word, evoking and suspending not only the possibility of falling, of having-fallen, and of Gefallen-finden [‘to take plea-sure in something’], but also the continuing effect of Feuchtes with all its con-notations, leaving it “unlevelled” in its disparity. Though fiel is clearly denied by viel, it refers even here to the very possibility that the poem revokes: the possibility of solution and absolution, of dissolution and conclusion. In “Die entsprungenen,” a poem published in the same month as “Todtnauberg,” the last stanza reads as follows: Du hörst regnen / und meinst, auch dismal / sei’s Gott.60 [“You hear raining / and think, this time, too, / it’s God]. The last stanza of “Hochmoor,” written on July 20, 1968, almost exactly a year after the Todtnauberg meeting, reads, Schwingmoor, wenn du vertorfst, / entzeigere ich / den Gerechten61 [“Quagmire, if you turf over / I un-designate / the just”]. Both of these closing stanzas allude to the church chorale whose last verse reads Thauet, Himmel, den Gerechten! / Wolken! regnet ihn herab! [“Heaven, send righteousness one like dew! / Clouds, pour him down!”] and refer, along with this, to the subtext in the final “Todtnauberg” line; its soaking-wet Feuchtes implies a raining-down of God or of the just, only to bluntly disappoint this expectation. Feuchtes does and did not ‘fall,’ it remains viel not condensed into water, allowing for no Messiah, no solution or absolu-60 GW 2, 269.61 GW, 2, 390. Celan’s entzeigere can connote both un-numbering and un-pointing, as in the finger

of God. [Trans. note]


tion, neither dissolution nor conclusion, no precipitation of justice or what one might hope for it to be.

Viel hat erfahren der Mensch. / Der Himmlischen viele genannt—so read the lines from Hölderlin’s Friedensfeier draft, whose continuation Celan answers in the draft version of his poem with a variation on the conversation “that we are” or “have been.” Celan’s poem does not refer to den Himmlischen [‘the heavenly’] with viel [‘much’], but rather to what is experienced as earthly, moor-like, and crude, only an uncertain “much”; nothing is redeemed in its naming, nothing settled. It is not, this viel, it has no solid Being and no being, but rather it remains, both in its logical and its ontological struc-ture, unsteady, suspended as the “much” of a “soddenness,” assigned to it not through flexion but only through paratactic apposition. As in the ap-position-structure of Waldwasen, uneingeebnet, / Orchis und Orchis, einzeln, and Krudes, später, im Fahren, / deutlich, so that of Feuchtes, / viel is realized in an a-position and an ad-position, which do not characterize being, as the essence or substance of something, but rather their contingency. For these existences, their respective singularities held together with no koinón and no génos, Heidegger had used the concept of Geworfenheit [‘thrown-ness’] in Being and Time; Celan refers, with the “star-die” construction in the first stanza of “Todtnauberg” to the star’s contingency, to which Heidegger urges approach in Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, when he writes, Auf einen Stern zugehen, nur dieses62 [“to approach a star, only this”], and takes up, also in the last stanza, this “star-die,” this thrown die that raises “much,” not fallen, hope. This star-die is thrown but does not fall, it remains in its arc, in the movement of its contingency and appositionality, and thus, at the same time, in a movement that cannot locate it in any “topology of Being” and deprives it of any being-as-essence that does not lie in its pre-being or un-being: it remains, as named by the uncertain “much,” what does not remain, to offer ground or indicate direction. This was the project that Heidegger understood in Hölderlin’s line, Was bleibt aber, stiften die Dichter63 [“but what remains, the poets offer”]. The retraction of this endowment of a remaining being is what Celan’s viel is about. The poem implies, it takes note; what does not remain: much. It is, according to the formulation in the “Meridian” speech, the Unendlichsprechung von lauter Sterblichkeit und Umsonst64 [“this endless 62 Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens 7.63 Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung 41, 45, 47.64 GW 3, 200. Heidegger misunderstood this passage in Celan’s talk; his margin note reads, “Why

not say ‘finally’? Out of what remains?” James K. Lyon, Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: An Un-resolved Conversation, 1951–1970. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006: 151. With the question “Out of what remains?” he relates Celan’s formulation to that of Hölderlin and to his own commentary on it. With the question “Why not say ‘finally’?” he repudiates the thought that a ‘final-speaking’ of finiteness—namely of “mere mortality and waste”—explains an end of finiteness and must move into a state of remainder. Celan’s formulation answers endlessness—and this also means the finiteness of talk about infinity—through paradox: Heidegger’s questions work toward an abatement of finiteness, toward a state of remaining in contrast to “mere mortality.”

Wasen 49

talk of mere mortality and waste”]. Feuchtes, / viel contains a protest against Heidegger’s Topologie, insofar as

it is a mono-topology and phono-topology as discreet as it is decisive, and in that it suspends the fall of any and every die. Viel and fiel are, because they sound identical, only differentiated graphically. Through that which has no voice and is not definable through any phoné, and likewise through that which is marked, neither by its sound nor a corresponding silence, but rather through the mute zone of writing and the comma-signaled pause, Feuchtes, / viel speaks (or more exactly, writes) as any movement that withholds itself from solidity and substantialization and preserves the multiplicity that, in this movement, keeps concepts from any unity or evening-out. Viel is so little a de-finition of Feuchtes, the word cannot signify any place of origin or certainty of place, no goal and no end that it could reach in its thrown-ness, or in a fall into a standstill, into a predetermined or accidental location; in this word, unlike in fiel, there is no given goal-directed movement or sense of direction at all, and with it, unlike in the preterite-indicative fiel, there is no given temporal dimension in which it could locate itself. Neither a place- nor a time- or a modal-designation, without voice and without sense, viel remains a piece of vocabulary and, more exactly, a grapheme for the without-being held in throwing or falling, for that which “singularizes” itself from what is other and from itself—and as this kind of singleness, constitutes viel with self and other. This being-without-being Feuchtes, / viel, the dispersion before all being and Being, can be inscribed in no “Topology of Being” that speaks to it “the location of its Being.” It says nothing and is not silent; it re-mains mute as written speech; it speaks not as “topology” but as topography. This is not one but viel, which takes in markers from other languages as well: the French vie or ‘life,’ vil or ‘vile,’ fil, ‘thread,’ and the Greek phil, the philia of every affinity, also linked with the terms philologia and philosophia. This ‘much’ is multilingual, from and toward many places; without this polyglot quality, this viel could be included in only one language and in one totality of place. Because this place is missing its viel, it is therefore poly-topography and poly-atopography: not that of the Being to which “the place speaks its being,” but rather such a Being, that remains not one, not a coherent occur-rence, no being-as-essence but one of polysemic and poly-asemic distortion into the un-being [Un-Wesen] of Wasen of Fahren, of deutlich and Feuchte. The last lines in “Todtnauberg” write themselves on this side of Being, singu-lar and plural without possible totalization (leaving at a distance the French sense of verser as pouring or raining down) and thus locate the whole poem toward the place of death. The poem does not pronounce judgment, lays down no law, but rather insists on that which remains undirected and un-regulated, indefinite, and atopical; only thus does it preserve the possibilities of a just language.


By 1958 Celan had already chosen a word, in response to a survey from the Flinker Library, to characterize the polytopical and atopical aspect of his poetry: Vielstelligkeit, a state of multiplicity implying many figures or digits. “This language works toward precision,” he wrote, “with every multiplicity of expression […] This is certainly never the language itself, the language simply in the work, but always only one among the particular angles of in-clination in the speaking I’s existence, that gives it its contour and orienta-tion. Reality is not, reality wants to be sought and won.”65 If in this case Vielstelligkeit means, with reference to multiple digits, primarily the precise enumerating of a size or amount, then the word can take on, with a critical view toward Heidegger’s topology, the additional meaning of ‘polytopia.’ Be-cause this aims at reality, however, a reality that is not, but is rather “sought and won,” this polytopia means more precisely poly-atopia, even more so, the more questionable its contour and orientation in reality must become, if they are won through the destruction of the real. This implication, in Celan’s pros-ontological sense, that reality is not, found its way into his “Meridian” speech two years later. Only number- and place-lessness preserves the indefi-nite manifoldness of places and the precision of their location; only the ver-ortet, entwortet, // entwo […] preserves the freedom of a verbal occurrence still beyond the firmly defined word and its topoi and tropes; only the Wasen and its a-topia preserve the experience of an event that still retreats from its place. From here, the placeless and fore-worldly, outward, and from every hope for something “coming” that moves beyond all worldly order and orientation, Celan formulates his poetic and philosophical answer to Heidegger; this an-swer allows him to utter what is “crude” and un-essential: that which the philosopher, insufficiently thoughtful and ineffectively political as a human being, had not brought clearly to speech. In Celan’s “Todtnauberg,” a human experience of thought and speech articulates itself, as in his other poems, but in another way, “among the particular angles of inclination in the speak-ing I’s existence,” moving quite close to Heidegger’s “step back,” but further back than this, over and beyond it, into what is only half-traversable. This experience, insofar as it is an experience of thought, will not allow itself to congeal in philosophical concepts; it interprets itself as volatile in Heidegger’s language on Wesen (as ‘human-being’ or as ‘essence’); in the Wasen-language of Celan’s poetry, it becomes clear, thoughtful, and human.

Heidegger did not allow himself to move toward an open political expla-nation in his conversation with Celan. The echo that Celan had expected, in answer to his clear and probably “crude” words, remained a warning of Nazi tendencies in present-time Germany; Heidegger did not pick up the thread. On November 2, 1967, three months after the transcription of “Todtnau-berg,” Celan turned to Robert Altmann, the publisher of Éditions Brunidor, 65 GW 3, 167–68.

Wasen 51

and proposed that the poem appear in a single, limited edition.66 In 1965 Celan had already, after having met Altmann through his friend Ghérasim Luca, let Altmann publish a special edition of the Atemkristall cycle, with images by his wife Gisèle Celan-Lestrange; in January 1967, a card with the poem “Schlafbrocken” and a drawing by Gisèle had gone out as a New Year’s gift for friends, and in May of that year, “Grambeschleunigt,” with six drawings by his wife. On January 12, 1968—the same day Celan attended a lecture by Adorno at the Collège de France—the Brunidor edition of “Todt-nauberg” appeared in an edition of 50 copies, the first of which was sent to Heidegger.67 More copies of poems were sent to him, more or less related to the Todtnauberg meeting68: with this the poem became an open letter to Heidegger. It contained a warning that its addressee might easily not have recognized, but it remained above all a poem, not created as this warning, and not understood as such by Heidegger.

The three most important lines in the poem, in every sense a challenge contained in the gift, were answered by Heidegger two weeks later and ex-cerpted by Celan in these words to Robert Altmann on February 2:

“Dear Mr. Altmann, let me just quote three lines from the letter from Martin Heidegger on January 30: “The word of the poet who says ‘Todtnauberg,’ who names place and land-scape where a thought tried to take a step back into baseness—the word of the poet, which is at once encouragement and warning and which preserves a memento of a Black Forest day of many moods, … Since then we have left much unsaid to each other. I think that there is still a day in which to talk about the unspoken.” If we, as I hope, see each other next week, I will bring you the letter. With sincere greetings, Your Paul Celan. 2 Februrary 1968.”69

Heidegger left no doubt that he continued his conversation with Celan in silence; he also left no doubt that he understood Celan’s poem as “encourage-ment” and “warning” not to leave it at this, as having “much unsaid to each other,” but rather to break the silence and publicly speak against any associa-66 Correspondance II, 573. 67 More exact information about this edition’s format and numbering is found along with biograph-

ical commentary in Gesamtverzeichnis der Brunidor Editionen, kommentiert von Robert Altmann. Evi Kliemand, ed. Liechtenstein: Schaan, 2000: 36–41. For the publication dates, cf. “Chronolo-gie” in Correspondance II.

68 A list of the recipients of this first edition of “Todtnauberg” is printed in Paul Celan et Martin Heidegger 240.

69 Correspondance II, 576, and Paul Celan et Martin Heidegger 244. Heidegger’s letter was first print-ed in its entirety in Stephan Krass’ Neuen Zürcher Zeitung article, January 3/4, 1998. Since then it has also appeared in Paul Celan et Martin Heidegger 241–42.


tion, in his person or in his thought, with complicity in murderous politics. He left, likewise, little doubt that for him such a public statement did not come into the picture, and that what he meant by “still a day in which to talk about the unspoken” could only be a “conversation”—most likely the con-tinuation of a private conversation with Celan. With this Celan’s hope, ex-pressed in his guest-book entry and in his letter to his wife, that “Heidegger takes up his pen and writes some responsive, warning pages that repudiate the resurgence of Nazism,”70 here this hope in Heidegger, voiced at least twice, was disappointed. But Celan does not seem to have been disappointed only in his political hope; he must have been disappointed and embittered that Heidegger had not understood his poem, that it had not been understood as a poem or as a philosophically considered protest against any “topology of Being.” The unabridged citation of the first of the “three central sentences” in Heidegger’s letter indicates that Celan found these, and not only the two following, those about silence and conversation, offensive.

“The word of the poet that says ‘Todtnauberg,’ that names place and land-scape”—so Heidegger writes, but Celan’s poem only names the place in that he re-names and un-names it, leaving the -berg but not the Bergung (Ver-bergung or Entbergung connoting ‘mountains,’ ‘hiding,’ and ‘unconcealing,’ especially in Heidegger’s lexicon) and pointing out to him “crudeness” and “clarity” instead. Todt- is not cited as a mere component of a place-name but is rather displaced in a -moor and marked with the Knüppel- / pfaden as a violent death, as murder. The -au- does not evoke an idyllic spot in a poetics of forest and meadow, but rather a open green or knacker’s yard, a Wasen, in which, with the Wesen (‘essence,’ ‘human’) of Being, also its name, its place, and its cumulative status is deranged, displaced, and dispersed. “Place and landscape […], where a thought tried to take a step back into baseness”—so Heidegger writes, reducing Celan’s re-turn toward a terror regime’s murder victims into a pilgrimage to a place of thought and Being and its forgotten-ness, reducing him to “a step back into baseness” where Celan meant only the “half- / tramped, fretted / paths,” and reducing him, exactly where Celan speaks from an irreducible unforgettableness of what is other than thinking and other than Being, to just these two. “The word […] which is at once en-couragement and warning and which preserves a memento of a Black Forest day of many moods”—so Heidegger writes and thus explains Celan’s poem as an impressionistic mood-piece, whitewashing the ‘multiplicity’ that the poem takes pains to expose in the difference between viel and fiel, just as he covers with “mood” the silence that, in the poem’s paronomasia, heterogra-phy, and pauses, speaks against the speech of its denotation. “Since then we have left much unsaid to each other,” writes Heidegger; but Feuchtes, / viel does not remain silent, it brings forward the silence of Wasen and -moor, 70 Correspondance I, 550.

Wasen 53

the silence that conceals death and blood-stains, and still in Feuchtes (as the unarticulated feu, the French word for ‘fire,’ as verstorben or ‘deceased’) the speechlessness of language reveals itself in language, brings it forth as silenc-ing and silence, as forced muteness and as a completely different, unavoidable silence, and does with this exactly what Heidegger refuses to do. Contrary to what Heidegger wants to take as truth, he and Celan have not left much unsaid “to each other.” Heidegger wants to have left much unsaid. Celan has a poem, a very large, written-out poem, that does more than simply speak; he has made it public, first through a limited edition, then through the in-clusion of a public and in every sense open letter in Lichtzwang, addressed not only to one, but rather to an Everyone and in this Everyone to No One. Heidegger has not understood the gift made to him, has not absorbed or answered it. The words he uses to characterize it are exactly those that the poem disclaims.

Despite his resentment, Celan read again in Freiburg several months after Heidegger’s letter, in June 1968, and undertook another excursion on the moor with Heidegger. Two years later, in March 1970, when Celan was more ill than ever, a third and final meeting between the two occurred in Freiburg; they made arrangements for another in Donautal. A month later, in April, Celan took his own life in the Seine. After his death, an unfinished letter to Heidegger was found among his papers; it can be read as an answer to the tentative thank-you letter for “Todtnauberg.” In this fragment, Celan speaks not only as a historically and philosophically thoughtful person, but also, expressively, as one concerned as much with the responsibility of thought as with that of poetry. The short text reads, “that you, in your attitude, decid-edly weaken the poetic and, so I dare speculate, the philosophical, in both of their grave potentials for responsibility.”71 The attitude to which Celan as-cribes this weakness could hardly be anything but the reluctance with which Heidegger met all that Celan’s poem called Waldwasen, Krudes, Hochmoor and Feuchtes, / viel. It was the gesture of that which he held firm, the answer to that which threatened to withdraw his foothold; he refused to slip free of it and disavowed responsibility... for the inability to take responsibility.

In the second essay that Heidegger gave to Celan as a gift with Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, the memorial piece on the art historian Hans Jantzen, this kind of reluctance appears as a “rare kind of ek-sisting—I call this capa-bility: the anticipation in holding back.”72 A month before the meeting, on June 23, 1967, Heidegger had written in a letter to Gerhart Baumann: “For 71 First quoted in Robert André, Gespräch von Text zu Text. Celan—Heidegger—Hölderlin. Hamburg:

Meiner, 2001: 226. Since then also in Correspondance II, 598; and Paul Celan et Martin Heidegger 249.72 Cited here after Martin Heidegger, Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges. Gesamtausgabe

Bd. 16. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2000: 687. Celan’s copy of the essay Erinnerungen an Hans Jant-zen includes the dedication: “For / Paul Celan / with memories / of the cabin / on July 25, 1967 / Martin Heidegger.” (Bphi 338).


a long time I’ve wished to meet Paul Celan. He stands furthest ahead and holds himself the furthest back. I know everything about him […].”73 The fantasy Heidegger nurtured about Celan corresponded to his idea not only of a “rare” but also of the highest “kind of ek-sisting”: that which befitted denkenden Dichten [“thinking poetry”]. But Celan’s poetry stands, even now, furthest ahead—as always—and holds itself back the least.

Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main

Translated by Heidi Hart

73 Erinnerungen an Paul Celan 59–60.

Documents

Hamacher. on Celan's Todtnauberg