“Deathfugue” was written in 1944 and 1945, and this poem has drawn more passionate attention than any other poem from the war, according to Felstiner. “Deathfugue” is one of some 800 poems that Celan wrote from 1938 to 1970. His poems spoke of himself, his mother, wife, or sons, a friend, and nature. Celan also wrote about the Jewish dead and their religious faith, such as in the poem, “Psalm,” written in 1961 that explores the Jews’ post-war relationship to God, and alludes to scripture. (Katz 2)

What also connected me to Else, and her Jewish ethnicity, was the fact that from three months of age, I was raised as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. And, Jehovah’s Witnesses were among the few other groups of people who were persecuted under the Nazis, and some were executed or died in the Holocaust. I had heard such horrific stories from an early age of the suffering in the concentration camps. A brother who was in the Nazi concentration camps wrote one song that we sing at the Kingdom Halls, titled “Forward, You Witnesses”. During that time, Jehovah’s Witnesses in Germany suffered brutal, systematic, and prolonged persecution under both of the major totalitarian regimes in Europe (Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc. 3)

One main theme that was constant in my years with Else was the subject Death. Knowing all the facts of how she escaped the Holocaust, and the fact that I deal daily with a life and death health problem is sobering. I guess one can say we all endure or escape our own Holocaust sometimes. Yet, death takes us even so; Else had begun her battle with breast cancer in the spring of 2002, and I lost contact with her in 2007.

The poem “Deathfugue” is a vivid reminder of how those in the concentration camps died. Paul Celan says in the poem “he whistles his Jews into rows has them shovel a grave in the ground” and then later says, “Your ashen hair Shulamith we shovel a grave in the air / where you won’t lie too cramped.” This may be a reminder of his mother who had already been executed in another concentration camp. Humiliating deaths! Yet, each one will be remembered. Else once told me a Jewish saying, “One never dies if there is someone who remembers them.”

I remember sitting in Else’s office one day after I had been hospitalized for getting Salmonella food poisoning, and then while in the hospital ended up having a psychotic break. I became afraid to die, and even became afraid to sleep.

I asked Else, “Do you ever think of dying?”

She replied, “Yes! Do you?”

I said, “I feel fearful of dying asleep in death.”

She sighed and said, “What a peaceful way to go!”

And she said she thought of death and sometimes wondered how much longer she has to live, maybe twenty years or so. At the time, I thought, “I just want five or ten.” That was in 1992. We’ve both been through a lot since then and have overcome many obstacles.

The poem “Deathfugue” is so sad, and I can actually hear Paul Celan speaking in the rhythmic way the poem has been translated:  “Black milk of day break we drink it at evening / we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night / we drink and we drink.”

As for Celan, how severe the Holocaust affected him became clear. “The poems themselves get more ruptured and wracked by his efforts to speak the truth, an unspeakable truth,” Felstiner says. Felstiner speaks in regard to Celan’s chronic mental illness, which led Celan to commit suicide at age 49 by drowning in the Seine River. Despite his life marked by tragedy, Celan managed to see heroism and epiphany in the world around him. (Katz 3)

Black milk—a flagrant metaphor (like “Black Flakes”)—takes metaphor, our figure of speech that asserts something contrary to the fact, to convey a fact. This metaphor is extreme, bittersweet, nullifying the nourishment vital to humankind. But, Felstiner says that maybe there is no metaphor. Maybe camp inmates were given a liquid they called “black milk” simply by way of description. (Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew by John Felstiner, pg. 33)

Both Otto Dix and Paul Celan witnessed the most awful wars of our times. They experienced the pain and suffering that is shown in their works of art. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Dix was among the first artists to suffer at their hands. He was a teacher at the Art Academy in Dresden, but was dismissed from his post, and banned from exhibiting. About two hundred and sixty of his works were seized from museums and galleries and either sold or destroyed. Many of the paintings by Otto Dix figured prominently in the shows of “Degenerate Art” at Dresden and Stuttgart. The Social Realism that Hitler adopted was a cliché-ridden art that portrayed a sentimentally idealized world, and the New Objectivity with its commitment to exactitude was punished severely as exemplifying gross materialism. (Franc 84)

“Deathfugue” ends with the following lines:  “dein goldenes Haar Margarete / dein aschenes Haar Shulamith.” Margarete is the blond-haired German girl—the romantic ideal drawn from the Goethe’s poetry—of whom the SS executioner tenderly daydreams. Shulamith is no “ash blond but the ‘black and come maiden in the Song of Songs . . .’ Shulamith is the beloved par excellence and is seen as the Jewish people itself,” writes Celan’s biographer John Felstiner (Volf 762). At the end of Felstiner’s comments on “Deathfugue” Volf notes that when Celan twins Shulamith with Margarete, “nothing can reconcile them.” Volf explains:  “If Celan leaves Margarete and Shulamith unreconciled side by side as symbols of the unbridgeable gulf between the Jews and the Germans created by unspeakable evil, who can blame him? When Celan wrote “Deathfugue” the ovens that sent millions of his compatriots, including his parents, to their “grave in the air” had barely cooled down.”

When I had my psychotic break in the spring of 1992, I felt that I was being persecuted. In 1986, I had fallen in love with and eventually married a man from Haiti in 1990. He had gotten deeply involved in the Nation of Islam whose leader is Farrakhan, and I had been told a lot of propaganda and things that threw me over. I believed that there would be a war between Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Although most of my feelings towards Else at the time were benevolent, I had a strong feeling that I distrusted her because she was Jewish and also German, and I was raised in a Christian religion. However, I had a lot of reconciling to do.

In the book, Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, Translated by John Felstiner, he brings out a very good point. He asks, “Would we, if somehow this were possible, trade Anne Frank’s diary for her life, give up those salvaged pages to let her survive unscathed, in her seventies now? And would we forgo Charlotte Salomon’s Life or Theater?, her 1941 autobiography in 760 watercolors, if in exchange she were not to perish in Auschwitz? Would we, in effect, do without such indispensible human documents, relinquish them so as to secure the undeflected lives their creators might have lived?” (Felstiner Preface 19)

Or what about the poems of Paul Celan or paintings by Otto Dix or Vincent Van Gogh or writings of Virginia Woolf? Would we trade them happy lives in sacrifice of their mark on the world?

“Why yes!” Felstiner defiantly says, “It goes without saying. But the question involves something more. We cherish these creators specifically because of the diary or the paintings that an atrocious history impelled them to create. Undo that history, rewind the reel, and Anne Frank and Charlotte Salomon would not be quite the persons we wish to redeem.”