What else could possibly answer to the Holocaust, and the silence of all who were murdered in it? What else, besides silence itself? What else could be the Holocaust’s genuine memorial, what else truly preserve its memory?
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n 1967, just three years before he committed suicide by jumping into the Seine River in Paris, Paul Celan paid his one and only visit to Martin Heidegger, whose writings had had a major impact on Celan’s thinking and his poetry. Celan went to visit Heidegger in the latter’s ski-hut on the slopes above the little Black Forest town of Todtnauberg-im-Baden, the very place where Heidegger wrote most of Being and Time and many later works. There was a little well near Heidegger’s hut, with a star carved into the crosspiece above the opening. Heidegger also kept a guest-book in the hut for visitors to write a line or two in when they visited.
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Remember the Holocaust? If that means never, ever to forget it, then try as we might to remember it, we will keep on forgetting it yet again.
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The God we encounter in Paul Celan’s poems in his Niemandsrose collection, the God to whom such poetry after the Holocaust calls us to pray, would be a God to whom even such “pure” Jews as Sigmund Freud and Jean Améry could pray.
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At one point in “The Meridian,” his acceptance speech for the 1960 Georg Büchner Prize for literature, poet Paul Celan remarks that “the poem today,” which in his case especially means a day that dawned only after the night of the Holocaust (a day that is still passing by us), “shows, as cannot help but be recognized, a strong tendency toward holding its tongue.”
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To remember the Holocaust means to come to dwell in the chaotic no-place of a place that art after the Holocaust creates, and to build together a human home there, the only place such a home can be built any longer today, this day that dawns only “after” the Holocaust.
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As I hear them, the poems of Paul Celan, who survived the Holocaust himself, gives us a definitive example of a poetry that truly comes after the Holocaust both substantively and chronologically.
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The truth of the Holocaust calls upon us to open all our own identities to all who choose—whether under compulsion of external circumstances (as with Améry) or by the experience of free, inner vocation (as with Freud)—to claim those identities themselves, given their own conditions of birth and heritage.
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Art—at least that art that has been purified of all artifice and flashiness, all grandiloquence and gaudiness—can call us back from the sort of forgetting of ourselves that shames us, and into the sort of forgetting of ourselves that honors us. It can call us back from forgetting ourselves negatively and into forgetting ourselves positively—back into forgetting ourselves precisely by honoring our obligations, and paying what we owe.
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Significantly, though he died in 1938, even before the Kristallnacht pogrom let alone the implementation of the “final solution,” and had no tattooed number on his arm, Sigmund Freud said much the same thing as Jean Améry, the Auschwitz survivor, later did.
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