Hamacher. On Celan's Todtnauberg

Wasen: On Celans Todtnauberg
Werner Hamacher, Heidi Hart
The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Volume 57, 2011, pp. 15-54

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Published by University of Toronto Press
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Wasen
On Celans Todtnauberg
Werner Hamacher
Speak, you too
hen Paul Celan declined to contribute to the publication commemorating Martin Heideggers 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 Gnther 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 placeon a list and in a bookwithout 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. Celans refusal 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 ornament 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 unseriousand Heidegger demands seriousness and deliberation.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
demandand indeed also a challengethrough Heidegger, as a thoughtful
1 Celans letter to Gnther Neske is cited in Herzzeit. Ingeborg BachmannPaul Celan: Der Briefwechsel. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2008: 317. The commemorative volume for Heideggers 75th
birthday did not come about.
16
The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Vol. 57
response by a thinker who grasped another thinkers work and attempted

to meet this challenge.
Celans explanation for his refusal, in his letter of 10 August 1959 to Ingeborg Bachmann, held back judgment about Heidegger today, without leaving doubt about his indignation toward the author of the Rectors Address.
Celan wrote, specifically:
Heidegger remains. As you know, I am certainly the last who can gloss over
the Rectors 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 Bll and Andersch, that whoever chokes on his past transgressions, who
doesnt act as if he never made a mistake, who doesnt 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
nowfree in the private and not public sense, since that would stain his
prestigecan 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 Bll []. This, my dear Ingeborg, I see,
I see today.2
What Celan cannot overlook and what he clearly sees in this cautious presumption today, here and now, is that Heidegger has perhaps recognized
a few things, that he doesnt 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 Rectors 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 Heideggers,
he rigorously foreclosed a tie with other contributors to Heideggers birthday volume: He suspected that this or that previously unmentioned name
could be in the commemorative book, about to go to press (even Friedrich
Georg Jnger is not one of the most appealing ), whose company I can
by no means endorse3 The company of such names means for Celan
as much physical as spiritualin his sense of languageagreement 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 September 1957 letter to Heinrich Bll, which he will shortly after disavow, Celan
2 Ibid. 118119.
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 regimes embassy counsel in occupied 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, Sieburgs speech is not, as I told you,Streicher but rather only
Goebbels) And havent I also spoken with Weyrauch, who, yes, as you
told me, wrote a jaunty poem as late as March 45, didnt I speak to him as if
he were my natural ally? Wasnt 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 having 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. Celans 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 ones death, over death through ones own language. And
then, his letter to Bll 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 CelanBriefwechsel mit den rheinischen Freunden. Barbara Wiedemann, ed. Berlin:
Suhrkamp, 2011: 34950. Heidegger apparently sent the Hebel piece to thank Celan for a note
or a book that he had sent him. Heideggers 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 ideology 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 lhumanit et luimme]. 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 Sieburgs speech are quoted in Barbara Wiedemanns commentary on her edition of Celans
Briefwechsel mit den rheinischen Freunden 655).
6 Ibid. 350.
18
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 defined 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 meansthe linguistic and at the same time existential relationshipsare
of the kind that work against themselves and bring each other to silence. The
place Celan investigates is only accessible from another placeor something
beside a placethat keeps at a bounded distance the deadly clichs 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 Horbacher Moor the next day and, while in the area, to visit his cabin near Todtnauberg, 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 Baumann8and spent the morning before the group lunch with Heidegger near Todtnauberg; Baumanns assistant Gerhard Neumann was with
them in Heideggers 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 methe day after my reading I went, with M. Neumann, the friend of Elmar [Tophoven], to Heideggers 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 Baumanns Erinnerungen an Paul Celan. Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1986 and 1992: 5980.
8 Ibid. 68.
9 The text of Celans entry was first made public in an article by Stephan Krass in the Neuer Zrcher
Zeitung on August 2/3, 1997. A reproduction of Celans entry in the hut-book is found in Axel
Gellhaus Seit ein Gesprch wir sind ... Paul Celan bei Martin Heidegger in Todtnauberg, Spuren
60. Marbach: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 2002: 5.
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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 Baumanns Memories of Paul Celan in 1986,

and since the coming to light of Celans guest-book inscription and the publication of his letter to his wife, the poems 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 Heideggers 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 texts 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. Without doubt Celan was deeply struck by Gerhard Neumanns observation, as
the sole witness, that the talk in the back seat of the car with Heidegger had
an epochal aspect. Little in the poems 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
Knppel-/ 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 Celans letters than through the
poem itself. In short, Celans Todtnauberg appears on the surface to recapitulate and recall a historic event, an epochal meeting, and to recognize the
obvious proof of Celans painful disappointment, perhaps also adamant
rejection of Heidegger.11 If it has been treated as an epochal meeting between that epochs poet and thinkerand not as an inconsequential meeting
between a thinker who means something to many people and a poet who
means something to more peoplethen it remains even more inexplicable,
10 Paul CelanGisle 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 Helml : Heidegger war auf mich zugekommen Am
Tag nach meiner Lesung bin ich mit Herrn Neumann, dem Freund Elmars, in Heideggers Htte im
Schwarzwald gewesen. Dann kam es im Auto zu einem ernsten Gesprch, bei dem ich klare Worte
gebraucht habe. Herr Neumann, der Zeuge war, hat mir hinterher gesagt, dass dieses Gesprch [hier
hinzufgen: fr ihn] eine epochale Bedeutung hatte. Ich hoffe, dass Heidegger zur Feder greifen und
einigen Seiten schreiben wird, die sich auf das Gesprch beziehen und angesichts des wieder aufkommenden Nazismus auch eine Warnung sein werden (PCGCL: 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)
20
why the meetings epochal character is not sought in the poem, but rather in
the fragmentary observations of witnesses to the meeting; it remains inexplicable, 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 poemrather than the historically contingent meetingepochal, and whether it is enough for such a poem, in opposition 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 condemnation of Nazi ideology and an energetic, public warning against its reinvigoration 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 overreaching 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 thinkers 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 empiricalhistorical 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. Celans poem speaks first
from this other place; it thinks from there and gives a no less poetically compressed as thoughtfully composed answer to Heideggers thought, in order
to speak to his speech and to his refusal. Only from this other placeand
from something other than a placecan it become clear in what sense Celans 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 provided for publication in Lichtzwang (1970) deviates from the ditions Brunidor
version that appeared in January 1968. This version takes the following form:
Wasen
21
TODTNAUBERG
Arnika, Augentrost, der
Trunk aus dem Brunnen mit dem
Sternwrfel drauf,
in der
Htte,
die in das Buch
wessen Namen nahms auf
vor dem meinen? ,
die in dies Buch
geschriebene Zeile von
einer Hoffnung, heute,
auf eines Denkenden
kommendes
Wort
im Herzen,
Waldwasen, uneingeebnet,
Orchis und Orchis, einzeln,
Krudes, spter, im Fahren,
deutlich,
der uns fhrt, der Mensch,
ders mit anhrt,
die halbbeschrittenen Knppelpfade im Hochmoor,
Feuchtes,
viel.12
12 Paul Celan, Gesammelte Werke, Band 2. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983: 25556 (cited in the following notes as GW with volume and page numbers). English translations of Celans poetry by H.
Hart.
22
TODTNAUBERG
Arnica, eyebright, the
drink from the well with the
star-die above it,
in the
hut,
these lines, in the book
whose name listed
before mine? ,
the lines, in this book,
written of
a hope, today,
for a thinkers
coming
word
in the heart,
forest turf, unleveled,
orchid and orchid, single,
crudeness, later, on the road,
made clear,
the one who drives us, the man
who listens in,
the halftramped, fretted
path in the upper meadow,
soddenness,
much.
Wasen
23
In its eight stanzas, the poem traverses an event, directed from no grammatical subject, aimed at no explicitly addressed you, combining statement
and predication without the syntactic binding of a finite verb. Loose paratactic 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 indicativebound through a clear but slant rhyme [fhrt, anhrt]
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 thinkers 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 poems twenty-six lines and comes forward alone in the third
stanza, determines the poems 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 disintegration (in the upper meadow) and diffusion in uncertainty (Soddenness,/ 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 inim Fahren [on the road or drive], im Hochmoor [in or on
the Hochmoor]as any interior space, directional movement, or stable location. 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.
24
What reveals itself in the poems grammatical movement as a progressive loosening of its relationsespecially its in-structure, and with this the
poems grammatical form as a wholealready becomes clear in the second
stanzas rhythm and sound: in der / Htte. 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 Htte, faltering in an unoccupied 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 beingoutside. 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 [Ri] 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 existential 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 Beings
formal expression of Dasein, which has the human [wesenhafte] constitution
of being-in-the-world.13 With the invisible hiatus between in der and Htte,
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 housefor Heidegger this would be language
as well. The intrinsic [essence- or human-connoting] makeup of the In-Sein
is thus fissured in Celans poetic language, so that the in is exposed to something 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 exteriority. If Heidegger discloses, in the experience of anxiety, Daseins 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 original phenomenon, and being-in-the-world as a mode of the uncanniness
of Dasein14but only in the sense in which Dasein is brought into this
13 Translators note: the term Wesen fluctuates between being as human being or as essence in
Heideggers work. In this translation, Being indicates Heideggers Sein or Seyn. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit. Tbingen: Niemayer, 1967: 54. The chapter that includes this quotation is
titled Das In-der-Welt-sein berhaupt als Grundverfassung des Daseins.
14 Ibid. 189.
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25
uncanniness before a world as world and with which it itself, before itself, as
being-in-the-world.15 Without the possibility that Celans poetry forecloses
such an a priori structure of the In-Sein as In-Sein, the pre-positionality of
in der/ Htte is won only from the exterior position, as much of in der as of
Htte, 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 asnot as being-in-the-worldfails 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 Celans poetry sets outside in every sense of the word,
is further suspended, dismantled, and scattered in the poems next syntactically complex stanza. Before the stanza reaches its grammatically central
noun (Lines) it marks its definite location twice, in emphatic variable repetitionin the book [die in das Buch die in dies Buch]a location interrupted, 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 books 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-placea word as place, written lines as a
place in a place made up of words, the bookthis 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 topos in the non-topos of the interjection, and the noun that marks content
in the place removed from the sentences 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 placeas a written linewithout 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-Seins 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 apartas Celan writes elsewhere16as grass,
written apart out of narrowing after the word, and thus not only as something other than grass but namely gas and casket and grave, just as
15 Ibid. 188.
16 GW 1, 95. [trans. note]
26
the place- and word-vacancy between the written characters lies open. If Being 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 isnt, 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 discussion herebesides the book of life, of law, of destinycan be the one that
sits as a guest book in the / hut at Todtnauberg, and works then, in this
stanza of Celans poem, as a reminiscence of the meeting with Heidegger.
But this bookespecially 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 readers eyes, the one
marked with Paul Celans lines, the one that simply brings to mind every
other book, but not with actual presence, just as this book is only visualized. Heideggers guest book and Celans book of poems, two sharply distinguished 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 difference 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 surrender, rather, into a space that opens up every self and other as repeatable,
displaceable, mobile, and multiple.
Thus Celans 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 another. 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, Heideggers guest book at Todtnauberg, and Celans Lichtzwang 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, Tbinger Ausgabe 51.)
Wasen
27
toward differentiation, from which the one as the other, and one that isnt
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 languagedesignation, 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 itself 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 Denkenden / kommendes / Wortas 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 poems 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/ Htte, in das Buch, in dies Buch and im Herzen) writes itself, in this language coming from non-language, in the speech of Celans poem; every InSein articulates itself in the poems 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 exteriority 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 Celans poem, discreet as always, transforms itself from constitutive to extative, from descriptive to de-scriptive and ex-scriptive. Paul
Celans note dated March 26, 1969 is to be understood in this sense, which
sets aside all immanence and positional logic: La posie ne simpose plus, elle
sexpose [Poetry no longer imposes itself, it exposes itself ].18
A comparison between Celans entry in Heideggers guest book and the
third stanza of Todtnauberg makes clear how far apart the two texts spread,
18 GW 3, 181.
28
despite their nearness to each other. The entry is worded as follows: Ins Httenbuch, mit dem Blick auf den Brunnenstern, / mit einer Hoffnung auf ein
kommendes Wort im Herzen / am 25. Juli 1967 / Paul Celan. [Into the hutbook, 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 parallelism makes one the metaphor for the other and links both in shared phenomenological 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 words 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
thinkers 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 books 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- / gesumt [without delay] kommendes) / Wort and insist,
despite the intensified urgency of the hope, on a structural delay in the un- / gesumt line break.
Cf. Lichtzwang, Tbinger Ausgabe 51.
20 The greatest danger [Das Bedenklichste] is, that we do not yet think [denken]so reads the
often-repeated maxim in Heideggers Was heit 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 bibliothque
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 poems lines reabsorb the guest books words, in part, but also take them back, in the lines
whose name written / above mine? that would appear to link Celans name
with names that stand for the murderous21perhaps with [Horst] Wesse[l]s
and SS-namesa 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, addressing Heidegger as anyone openly acknowledged as the poems 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 conversation 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 himthinking forwardthe decisive task of
being a speaker. It thinks in its poetic unfolding, thinking the thinker forward 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 Heideggers own writings on language and aesthetics stress
again and again, from the 1930s on. For Celans 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 edition of Hlderlins Friedensfeier, (which Heideggers 1936 lecture Hlderlin
and the Being of Poetry had especially elevated) to characterize his conversation with Heidegger, and along with this the conversation between philosophy
and poetry. According to Heideggers quote, the lines read as follows22:
philosophique. A. Richter, P. Alac, B. Badiou, eds. Paris: ditions 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 Martin Heidegger / the thought-master // on the way to the Baie des Anges. (Bphi 409410).
21 Cf. Celans letter to Bll on September 1957, footnote 4.
22 Martin Heidegger. Erluterungen zu Hlderlins Dichtung. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1951: 38.
30

Viel hat erfahren der Mensch.

Der Himmlischen viele genannt,
Seit ein Gesprch wir sind
Und hren knnen 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.
Celans draft reads this way23:

Seit ein Gesprch wir sind,
an dem
wir wrgen,
an dem ich wrge,
das mich
aus mir hinausstie, dreimal,
viermal.
Im Ohr
wirbelnde
Schlfenasche, 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 Hlderlins first two lines (Viel hat erfahren der Mensch. / Der Himmlischen viele genannt) Celans draft only retained Feuchtes, viel, which became the closing cadence in the final version of Todtnauberg: Feuchtes,/
viel. Hlderlins second couplet extends this in variation, concentrating on
the we of the conversations speech, on the act of hearing, and on the span
23 Lichtzwang, Tbinger Ausgabe 49.
Wasen
31
between the word Seit [since] and its last verge or time-limit. Heideggers
commentary equates the Being of humankind in conversation with the unity
of its Being in speech:
Wethe human beingsare 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 essentialas-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 Heideggers commentary is cast out of Celans 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 Hlderlin and Heideggers we as a residue of
speech and of conversation left to choke on, as proof of choking on a common 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, whatbecause we
are this languagecoughs us up, what coughs up every speaking I and, as
the speaker in Celans 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 Celans we choke depicts as disgusting and suffocating, and what
is suffered as such, is not just a particular language or a particular conversationthe one, for example, with Heidegger or with Heideggers Hlderlin
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 beginning, an event that cannot provide any ground to bear our Dasein. These
lines want to reabsorb Celans generous concession, in August 1959, that
Heidegger could wish to be someone who choked on his past errors,25 in
24 Erluterungen zu Hlderlins Dichtung 3839.
25 Cf. footnote 2.
32
that the we of we choke encloses him, too, in the poems eructive gesture;
yet Celans 1967 poem turns resolutely from the thought of the conversations 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 happen 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 notas it is according to Heideggers
interpretation of logosa gathering of speech, but rather the speaking-eachother-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 actions, 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, according to Celans Todtnauberg draftnot 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 languagebut 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-worlds 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 fallingshort 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 structure of conversation, but not in the lines about the choking and whirling
we. Its choking and whirling works, rather, in the cumulative phonetic effect of uvular fricatives and occlusives in the poems opening lines: in Arnika,
Augentrost, Trunk, Brunnen, Sternwrfel, and drauf, glottal stops and choking
sounds, inhibitors of sound and voice, dominate as a non-thematic extension of the conversation about the language of the we and its self-expulsive
structure. At the same time, the poems final version does not move so far
semantically afield from this choking of the we, as it coalesces in Hlderlins lines and in Heideggers concept of the essence of speech and poetry,
in order to spit it out. The two lines that follow the poems 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 Heideggers writings that delineates the relationship between thinking and writing poetry, a correlation that
Celan perceives differently. Waldwesen [forest turf ] is a word that Celan
underlined in Mrikes 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 southern Germany had once indicated a Schindanger or knackers yard where the
so-called Wasenmeister buried animal corpses.28 The words meaning extends
26 Cf. Editors commentary in Lichtzwang. Tbinger Ausgabe 50.
27 Thanks to Bertrand Badiou for the source of this observation. It is drawn from Barbara Wiedemanns richly annotated edition of Paul Celan, Die Gedichte. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003: 807.
28 Cf. Grimms Deutsches Wrterbuch, Band 27, Sp. 2276.
34
from there to peat, swampy ground, mire, silt, and manure, and approaches the northern-German Wrasen, which stands for damp, fume, vapor, sodden earth or simply humidity.29 Celans Mrike marginalia suggest
that Heidegger used the word on their walks together in Todtnauberg. The
word maintains, as noted in other commentaries, the closest phonetic relationship to Heideggers Wesen, used not in the sense of essence but rather
as a verbal substantive that in his terminology signals the occurrence of Being 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 Daseins existence, but also indicating an
essence that is used up in the whole of existential occurrence. If the one
sense of Heideggers sentence lies in the discovery of the unreserved finitude
of Daseins Being, so the other sense of this finitude can still be understood
as reduced to the essential. Heideggers 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
Celans 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 Jantzen 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 attempted a renewed interpretation of the proximity between thought and poetry, which Heidegger had pursued since his Artwork essay and Hlderlin
readings of the 1930s. This small Experience essay invoked Hlderlin 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 Hlderlin 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. Grimms Deutsches Wrterbuch, Band 30, Sp. 1680.

30 Sein und Zeit 42. This sentence is marked in Celans copy, as are the surrounding sentences that
indicate its weight. Cf. Bphi 376.
31 Bphi 338. A facsimile of Heideggers dedication is printed in the book by Hadrien France-Lanord,
Paul Celan und Martin Heidegger: Le sens dun 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 subordinate 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 different kinds of poetry in this Being. Celans Orchid and orchid, single
allows itself to be read as an attenuated reprise of Hlderlins verse about the
neighboring stems that remain unknown to each other. Like the relationship between singing and thinking in Heideggers reflection, so the link
between Orchid and orchid in Celans poem makes clear what it itself has
to do with Being. Yet Orchid and orchid, single, makes a distinction beyond Heideggers, 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 Celans 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 presenceas parousia, ousia
or (human) beingand 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 presence and its modifications stands exactly what stands beside itself in Orchid
and orchid, single, just as correspondence, measurement, and commensurability 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 Hlderlins neighboring
stems but also their interpretation as stems in the forest of poetry, then the
33 GW 2, 76.
34 Sein und Zeit 2526 and passim.
35 Celans notes to Heideggers Einfhrung in die Metaphysik, likely written at the end of 1954, include a thrice-underlined deepen! next to the entry, Para-taxis / in the poem. (Bphi 335.)
36
poetry portrayed in Celans 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 unbinds 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 syntactic 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 (evoking the particularlizing Greek chisma) as sheer separateness from each other,
a plural, polylingual cleft. With this Celans 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 Celans 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 elements 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 appositionorchid 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 Celans language,
with these manifold splits, cannot therefore be subsumed into the concept
of ontological and likewise being-internal difference, because Heidegger interpreted 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 Orchid 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 Celans 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 Being in Heideggers 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 Celans word-trove, perhaps prepared by his
reading of Heidegger, interprets it. Wasen works as paranomasia, as word36 Cf. Martin Heidegger, Identitt und Differenz, 4th ed. Pfullingen: Neske, 1976: 25.
37 Sterbegeklft [death-cleft or -fissure) is a word from Celans poem Schneebett (GW I, 168).
Wasen
37
play, as an other-ing or mis-naming of Wesen. Out of the Wasen, this otherwise-understood Wesen, itself become something other, grow the orchids,
which are for their part a reinterpretation of Heideggers idea of poetry and
its singing and thinking. Here the word Waldwasen, as indeed in Mrikes
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 itself 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, bodies 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 Heidegger 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 poems 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 Orkusthe mythic name of Death, of Non-being and
Never-having-beenand the poems 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 formloosening Wasen, with this metamorphosis-as-deformation, unremembered
and not yet imagined, the geographical image in Celans 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 halfpoetic 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 (Heideggers characterization of thinking this side of ontology) gives to the being of Being its place, then it is the logos of its topos
38 Cf. the authors study of Celans Aus dem MoorbodenHm: Ein Gedicht Celans mit Motiven
Benjamins, in Jdisches Denken in einer Welt ohne Gott: Festchrift fr Stphane Moss. Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2001: 17397.
39 Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens 23.
38
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 speechas the occurrence of speech collects itself anew, now and
then, along the borders of a certain placeallowed 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 assignationprimarily the bare
fact of its Being, its Being-with-others, its Being-toward-deathcan 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 Beings 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 topology 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 being as Presenceand likewise Presence also of what is presentis principally 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 correspondences. 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 autoand tauto-topology.
If Todtnauberg is Celans conversation with Heidegger, not only about
the latters 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 Celans 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 Heideggers 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 authors study Prmessen 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 absurdumand as with the tropes, so
also with the topoi. For Celan, poems run through the movement of a question: a question remaining open, coming to no end, pointing toward the
open and empty and freewe 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 Heideggers
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 Celans 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 determination, 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 Heideggers 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 uncountable 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 outward 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-where42 The word Waldwasen speaks
away the Wesen of the forest, which for Heidegger is poetry; the words plural form suggests beings deformed by paronomasia, unlevelled, multiplied,
and as Wasen therefore, any place that is not itself and itself is not, an atopos 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 between 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 themtoward and from Wesen [being/
essence], wessen [whose], Rasen [grass], Wrasen [vapor], Wahrsein [truth],
Wahnsinn [insanity], Schindanger [knackers yard], Feuchtwiesen [sodden
41 GW 3, 199.
42 GW 2, 123.
40
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 estranged, as many of the words in Celans hoard, once was. Wasen speaksand
in corresponding, un-speaks itselfas Wortwasen, as a word-field. It marks
the place of an ancient putrefaction process, a place of decompositionand
the decomposition, also, of the placeand 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 Heideggers 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 unwhere.
Heideggers 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 question about Wasen and with this stops being a question, and simply becomes
Wasen. If Heidegger writes in Hlderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung: Dichtung
ist worthafte Stiftung des Seins [Poetry is the verbal foundation of Being],
then, as the foundation of poetrys being and of speech, as a historical
being and also as such the single essential being,44 the historical being
in Celans 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 Language], 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 downso 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 Erluterungen zur Hlderlins Dichtung 41, 47.
45 Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache. Pfullingen: Neske, 1959: 19293, 214.
46 Ibid. 216.
47 Ibid. 23637.
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 Celans 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 Heidegger laid out in his Being and time-structurethis 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 temporalization, spatialization, correspondence, and existence that remains inaccessible for Heideggers being-concept, as near as it comes to such an experience. 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 / Daseins hillso it goes in
the poem Spt [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 stylecritical clich, then it can only mean that Celans disagreement with Heidegger 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 philosophical; it is the answer of a thought poetry in exactly that sense Heidegger was
not able to understand. Wasen is the most pregnant wordalong with entwo
[un-where] of this answer. It speaks, both contradicting and corresponding to itself, as an epoch, articulating not only the subjects 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.
42
secures its being or essence),51 but it also speaks as an epoch that still suspends 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 Heideggers de-essentializing of existencewhich Heidegger initiated but did not see throughand 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 probably 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 epoch of the being of Being, Todtnauberg is, as a poem of the epoch
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 following two-line stanza: Krudes, spter, 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 crudeafter
the Latin crudus, meaning bloody, wounded, mangledbut this comingclear is itself crude, and the drive, which destabilizes the topologically fixed
location, completes the gesture clarifying crudeness. In the following stanzader uns fhrt, der Mensch / ders mit anhrt [the one who drives us, the
man / who listens in]the clarification works more as a ride into hearing,
where fhrt and hrt 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 Celans 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 Epoch
when he writes, We can call this lighted self-containment in the truth of its being the epoch
of Being. This word, used in the language of the Stoics, does not take on in this case Husserls
method of exposing thetic acts of consciousness to reification. The epoch of Being belongs to itself. It is thought out of the experience of Beings 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 [koinn, gens], its possibility 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. Heideggers lecture on the pre-essential being
already assimilates this as the Wesen against which it holds itself. Cf. Wegmarken; Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1967: 89.
53 Correspondance I, 550.
Wasen
43
driving and hearing, linking them just once in the poem as an usand
therefore a general usand allowing, just once, in the verbs present tense,
to be in the presence of what is heard. The one who drives us, the man is
a ferrymannot unlike Charon54who translates [bersetzt: literally, sitsover 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 present 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 wes 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 fhrt and hrt and is as such a translator, mediator,
and third witness to the dialogue. Just as, according to Celans report to his
wife, Gerhard Neumann was the witness [le tmoin] 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-presentness 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.
Celans poem staves off, yet again in these verses, every topology that could
locate Being through correspondenceand this is implicit in the word entsprechenor 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 important to Celan that Gerhard Neumann, as the one who drives us, the man/
54 Ren 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 Picassos text does not only translate,
but alsoif I may misuse a Heidegger-wordwants to be translated; he speaks jokingly of his
service as a ferryman. Fremde NheCelan als bersetzer. Marbach: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1997: 399. The Heidegger-word that Celan played on appears in Der Spruch des Anaximander, where the topic is the opportunity to trans-late and translation as a carrying-over of
truth (Holzwege 21718).
44
who listens in, had recognized an epochal aspect [un aspect pochal]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-Gegenwrtigkeit], because it still suspends the epoch (the abiding-with-itself ) of Being,
as Heidegger saw it, of a completely other, crude epoch 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 stanzadie halb- / beschrittenen Knppel- / 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 Heideggers 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 Pggeler, wanted to
send to Heidegger58 in 1957, puts it this way: Wege, halbund die lngsten, // Seelenbeschrittene Fden [Ways, halfand the longest, // soul-crossed
threads]. The proximity of these lines to those in Todnauberg is too obvious for the later lines not to be read as a reprise. Schliere offers an explanation 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
57 Knppel can mean club or a fretted structure laid over sodden ground. [translators note]
58 Cf. Otto Pggeler, 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 poems axial line; this poem is about a star.
Wasen
45
which never has been, Never, which is first reached through the (impossible-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 towardness, 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. Celans 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 silence. Knppel-/ 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 Heideggers 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 seriously enough to break silence about it. Ifand what the lines remember
and extrapolate does allow for thisif 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,
46
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 casualties 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 makefor being and also for its held-back, hidden, and silent nonbeinga 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 Hochmooras in an ear, or Ohrthe phonetic elements
distinguishing the poems 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 Wrfel and Hoffnung, of
Fahren, fhrt, and -pfade, the semantic association of water with Brunnen
[well], the decay of -wasen and -moor, the phonetic of heute, the morphology of Krudes, but most of all the sound- and meaning-complex of Fahren,
/ deutlich. Feuchtes impliesswirled, transformedonce again and with all
the lines 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 ders, 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, fhrt, and Knppel- /
pfade, blood and murderous from Krudesnot 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 significations between heute, Fahren [], deutlich and Feuchtes are as much renamings 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 gestures, so the convergence of the poems 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 words 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 decaypervade each
other and withhold any definition of being. Feuchtes makes clear that the
poems 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, displace 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 poems anachronic, serial movement could be shifted into the past. But viel [much],
not fiel [fell] is the poems last word, evoking and suspending not only the
possibility of falling, of having-fallen, and of Gefallen-finden [to take pleasure in something], but also the continuing effect of Feuchtes with all its connotations, 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 hrst regnen / und meinst, auch dismal / seis
Gott.60 [You hear raining / and think, this time, too, / its 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 soakingwet 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 absolu60 GW 2, 269.
61 GW, 2, 390. Celans entzeigere can connote both un-numbering and un-pointing, as in the finger
of God. [Trans. note]
48
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 genanntso read the
lines from Hlderlins 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. Celans 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 structure, unsteady, suspended as the much of a soddenness, assigned to it
not through flexion but only through paratactic apposition. As in the apposition-structure of Waldwasen, uneingeebnet, / Orchis und Orchis, einzeln,
and Krudes, spter, 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 koinn and
no gnos, 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 stars 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 Hlderlins line, Was bleibt aber, stiften die Dichter63 [but what remains,
the poets offer]. The retraction of this endowment of a remaining being is
what Celans 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 Erluterungen zu Hlderlins Dichtung 41, 45, 47.
64 GW 3, 200. Heidegger misunderstood this passage in Celans talk; his margin note reads, Why
not say finally? Out of what remains? James K. Lyon, Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: An Unresolved Conversation, 19511970. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006: 151. With
the question Out of what remains? he relates Celans formulation to that of Hlderlin and to
his own commentary on it. With the question Why not say finally? he repudiates the thought
that a final-speaking of finitenessnamely of mere mortality and wasteexplains an end of
finiteness and must move into a state of remainder. Celans formulation answers endlessnessand
this also means the finiteness of talk about infinitythrough paradox: Heideggers 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 Heideggers 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 phon, 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 placenor a time- or a modal-designation, without voice and without sense, viel
remains a piece of vocabulary and, more exactly, a grapheme for the withoutbeing held in throwing or falling, for that which singularizes itself from
what is other and from itselfand 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 remains 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 occurrence, 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, singular 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 unregulated, indefinite, and atopical; only thus does it preserve the possibilities
of a just language.
50
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 inclination in the speaking Is existence, that gives it its contour and orientation. 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 Heideggers topology, the additional meaning of polytopia. Because 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 Celans
pros-ontological sense, that reality is not, found its way into his Meridian
speech two years later. Only number- and place-lessness preserves the indefinite manifoldness of places and the precision of their location; only the verortet, 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 answer 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 Celans 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 speaking Is existence, moving quite close to Heideggers 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 Heideggers
language on Wesen (as human-being or as essence); in the Wasen-language
of Celans poetry, it becomes clear, thoughtful, and human.
Heidegger did not allow himself to move toward an open political explanation 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 Todtnauberg, Celan turned to Robert Altmann, the publisher of ditions Brunidor,
65 GW 3, 16768.
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 Ghrasim
Luca, let Altmann publish a special edition of the Atemkristall cycle, with
images by his wife Gisle Celan-Lestrange; in January 1967, a card with
the poem Schlafbrocken and a drawing by Gisle had gone out as a New
Years gift for friends, and in May of that year, Grambeschleunigt, with six
drawings by his wife. On January 12, 1968the same day Celan attended a
lecture by Adorno at the Collge de Francethe Brunidor edition of Todtnauberg 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 excerpted 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 landscape where a thought tried to take a step back into basenessthe 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 Celans poem as encouragement 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 associa66 Correspondance II, 573.
67 More exact information about this editions format and numbering is found along with biographical commentary in Gesamtverzeichnis der Brunidor Editionen, kommentiert von Robert Altmann.
Evi Kliemand, ed. Liechtenstein: Schaan, 2000: 3641. For the publication dates, cf. Chronologie 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. Heideggers letter was first printed in its entirety in Stephan Krass Neuen Zrcher Zeitung article, January 3/4, 1998. Since then it
has also appeared in Paul Celan et Martin Heidegger 24142.
52
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 conversationmost likely the continuation of a private conversation with Celan. With this Celans hope, expressed 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 Heideggers 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 landscapeso Heidegger writes, but Celans poem only names the place in that
he re-names and un-names it, leaving the -berg but not the Bergung (Verbergung or Entbergung connoting mountains, hiding, and unconcealing,
especially in Heideggers 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 Knppel- / 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 knackers 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 basenessso
Heidegger writes, reducing Celans re-turn toward a terror regimes murder
victims into a pilgrimage to a place of thought and Being and its forgottenness, 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 encouragement and warning and which preserves a memento of a Black Forest
day of many moodsso Heidegger writes and thus explains Celans 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 poems paronomasia, heterography, 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,
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 silencing 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 inclusion 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
Heideggers 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, decidedly weaken the poetic and, so I dare speculate, the philosophical, in both
of their grave potentials for responsibility.71 The attitude to which Celan ascribes this weakness could hardly be anything but the reluctance with which
Heidegger met all that Celans 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-sistingI call this capability: 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 Andr, Gesprch von Text zu Text. CelanHeideggerHlderlin. 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. Celans copy of the essay Erinnerungen an Hans Jantzen includes the dedication: For / Paul Celan / with memories / of the cabin / on July 25, 1967 /
Martin Heidegger. (Bphi 338).
54
a long time Ive 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 Celans poetry stands, even now,
furthest aheadas alwaysand holds itself back the least.
Goethe Universitt, Frankfurt am Main
Translated by Heidi Hart

73 Erinnerungen an Paul Celan 5960.

Hamacher. On Celan's Todtnauberg

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Werner Hamacher, Heidi Hart

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

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Speak, you too

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response by a thinker who grasped another thinkers work and attempted

explains that it is impossible for him to write a letter to Friedrich Sieburg

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Vol. 57

Since the publication of Gerhart Baumanns Memories of Paul Celan in 1986,

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Vol. 57

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Vol. 57

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Vol. 57

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Vol. 57

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Vol. 57

an appeal, formulated with the greatest discretion, for Heidegger to disavow

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Vol. 57

Viel hat erfahren der Mensch.

Humankind has learned much,

Celans draft reads this way23:

Since we have been a conversation,

Every single assertion in Heideggers commentary is cast out of Celans verses.

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Vol. 57

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Vol. 57

29 Cf. Grimms Deutsches Wrterbuch, Band 30, Sp. 1680.

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Vol. 57

poetry portrayed in Celans line is an un-poeticizing of any forest; not an

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Vol. 57

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Vol. 57

meadow], Moor [moor]a micro-canto, word of the beside-itself of words,

The juncture of a Da (without Sein) and of an Ungewesen or not-has-been

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Vol. 57

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Vol. 57

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Vol. 57

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Vol. 57

tion, neither dissolution nor conclusion, no precipitation of justice or what

talk of mere mortality and waste].

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Vol. 57

By 1958 Celan had already chosen a word, in response to a survey from

Heidegger left no doubt that he continued his conversation with Celan in

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Vol. 57

tion, in his person or in his thought, with complicity in murderous politics.

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Vol. 57

Translated by Heidi Hart

73 Erinnerungen an Paul Celan 5960.

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