Death Fgue Poem Analysis

Paul Celan is perhaps the greatest German-Jewish poet in the twentieth century. He was born in 1920 in Czernowitz, in the Kingdom of Romania (now a part of Ukraine). He was raised in an educated German-speaking Jewish family. He studied medicine at the age of 18 in France, but left early when the German occupied Austria in 1938. He then changed his course of study to learn Romance languages. When the danger spread all over Europe, he tried to warn his family, but it was too late for them to escape the imminent evil of the Nazi regime. He then was enlisted to serve at a labor camp and miraculously survived; his parents, however, did not. Immediately after the end of the war, Paul wrote his masterpiece, Death Fugue in 1945 and it was published later in 1948. This poem is one of a handful that received …show more content…
The poem is a postwar work “that examine[s] the problem of representing an event as horrific as the Holocaust with a language that was corrupted by the Nazis” (Dillon 33). The haunting refrain of “black milk” is very essential to the overall meaning of the poem. The speakers in the poem are Jewish prisoners in a death camp. They tell their story of drinking “black milk,” a metaphor for the malnourishment at a concentration camp, a reference perhaps to Auschwitz. The images of digging up the graves or the executions of the prisoners are just a few examples of the “black milk.” It is universally known in almost all cultures that the white color is associated with life, however, this poem challenges our perception with the blackness color. Therefore, “black milk” is the dominant metaphor in the whole poem. Celan’s “metaphors are used to redefine words, and these definitions change depending on where they are located in the poem” (35). We immediately conceptualize that “black milk” is something deadly and poisonous that those prisoners are forced to live with and feed themselves until they