Poetry is capable of an incredibly wide range of emotional impact; it can be beautiful, it can reveal dark truths, it can illustrate loss, etc. In the poem Death Fugue, Paul Celan takes full advantage of the emotional impact of poetry by constructing ingenious ways to reveal a collective trauma of the Jewish victims of Nazi concentration camps, even without any explicit mention of the Holocaust. Although transforming the horrendous events of the Holocaust into an art form may seem inappropriate or even barbaric, Paul Celan’s use of metaphors and images that have both figurative and literal references to experiences in the Nazi concentration camps allow readers to more deeply understand the Jews’ collective trauma. To begin, the perspective
…show more content…
Literally speaking, Margarete is a character from a play called Faust by the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Margarete is a pious woman, and also the love interest of the main character of the play, Heinrich Faust. On the other hand, Shulamith literally refers to a princess from the “Song of Songs,” an erotic poem in the Hebrew Bible. These two characters are integral characters of a significant part of each respective culture, thus becoming representations of their respective countries; Margarete represents Germans, and Shulamith represents Jews. The crucial difference between the two, however, is that Margarete possesses desirable characteristics, such as golden hair, whereas Shulamith has the less attractive ashen hair. This alludes to the Nazi ideal of blue eyes and blonde hair that eventually became the basis for the Nazi goal to create an entire human race that possesses those characteristics. Anyone who deviated from this ideal was put into concentration camps and eventually cremated, which explains the ashy quality of Shulamith’s hair. Celan’s description of the physical attributes of Margarete and Shulamith, who serve as representations of Germans and Jews, reveals a collective trauma of the Jews being reduced to ashes because of their “unfavorable” physical
Literally speaking, Margarete is a character from a play called Faust by the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Margarete is a pious woman, and also the love interest of the main character of the play, Heinrich Faust. On the other hand, Shulamith literally refers to a princess from the “Song of Songs,” an erotic poem in the Hebrew Bible. These two characters are integral characters of a significant part of each respective culture, thus becoming representations of their respective countries; Margarete represents Germans, and Shulamith represents Jews. The crucial difference between the two, however, is that Margarete possesses desirable characteristics, such as golden hair, whereas Shulamith has the less attractive ashen hair. This alludes to the Nazi ideal of blue eyes and blonde hair that eventually became the basis for the Nazi goal to create an entire human race that possesses those characteristics. Anyone who deviated from this ideal was put into concentration camps and eventually cremated, which explains the ashy quality of Shulamith’s hair. Celan’s description of the physical attributes of Margarete and Shulamith, who serve as representations of Germans and Jews, reveals a collective trauma of the Jews being reduced to ashes because of their “unfavorable” physical