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VERJUDE DOCH! Paul Celan and the German-Jewish Language

Tue, December 18, 2:30 to 4:00pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Cityview 2 Ballroom

Abstract

This paper seeks an answer to a yet-to-be-asked fundamental question on the poetry of Paul Celan: namely, what is the language of that poetry? Is it indeed a ‘standard’ modernist-poetic German, mixed at times with foreign elements; or rather, as the paper will suggest, a distinctively ‘foreign’ German, carefully constructed in a poetic process termed by Celan as VERJUDUNG (‘Judaizing’) and determined by what may be termed his ‘Jewish Affinities’.
The inexhaustible scholarly output on Celan in recent decades can be roughly divided into attempts at understanding his extraordinary use of language, and attempts at re-tracing the footsteps and fingerprints of Judaism or ‘Jewishness’ in that language. The former approach is exemplified in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s seminal essay on Celan, WER BIN ICH UND WER BIST DU? (1967), while the latter is encapsulated in John Felstiner’s monography/biogrpahy, PAUL CELAN: POET, SURVIVOR, JEW (1995). As the two approaches rarely meet, attempts to characterize the Jewish element in Celan mostly focus on interpreting the figurative language suggestive of the Holocaust so distinctive of his TODESFUGE (‘Deathfugue’) and a handful other poems; such attempts, however, stop short at explaining how the greater part of his oeuvre - lacking such suggestive language -, relates to his Jewish Affinities. Nevertheless, as with Kafka, there is a rather wide agreement that Jewishness is omnipresent throughout Celan’s work, that it somehow inherently permeates his poetry in an elusive, non-essentialist manner.
The paper will take issue with this elusive Jewish desideratum by turning the spotlight on language itself. It will demonstrate how Celan utilizes the unique characteristics of German syntax, morphology and semantics to manipulate the language and inject it with Jewish registers, most notably that of Yiddish, thus undermining its self-perception of unity and purity and creating a new ‘foreign’ (read: Jewish) German. In relying on Celan’s self-reference to his peculiar means of linguistic production with the anti-Semitic terminology of “Judaizing” and “crooked-nosed” (in his notes to the MERIDIAN), the paper re-formulates the twin core-questions of Celan’s language and Jewishness as a single, wider question concerning the creation of Jewish registers as a constitutive act of literary production.

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