Black Milk In Paul Celan's Deathfugue

The image of “black milk” dominates Paul Celan’s poem “Deathfugue”. It occurs at the beginning of each stanza and conveys a very powerful symbol within the poem, particularly because of its connotations in the historical and political context of the Holocaust. First, we can understand it as an inversion or a perversion of milk. While normal milk is white, this “black” milk can be imagined to signify the exact opposite of whatever connotations “white” milk has, from the nourishment that a mother gives to a child in his first weeks, to the description of Israel in Jewish sacred scriptures as a “land of milk and honey,” meaning, a land of abundance, or a “heaven on Earth.” These meanings are connected to the notion of white milk, and their inversion …show more content…
On the other hand, there is the black milk as a representation of the Nazi ideals of race and how to conserve it: a glorification of the Aryan race represented by Marguerite and transmitted through Nazi discourse and propaganda. The prisoners, however, seem to be drinking from a different kind of black milk, since they don’t seem to participate in the enjoyment of violence or in the veneration of a physical ideal opposite to theirs. Their black milk is more closely related with the “grave in the air” that is repeated throughout the poem as well. While the speaker of the poem and the speaker of certain lines within it are difficult to differentiate, we can be fairly certain that the person introducing the idea of the graves in the air is the SS officer. He commands the prisoners to “shovel” a grave in the air and that they will not be too cramped once they are there. He is presenting death as a better alternative to the life they lead in the camp; even when they will not have a proper Jewish burial, they will be cremated and will “rise as smoke to the sky” to their new resting place, their graves in the air. He emphasizes the fact that they won’t be too cramped there, as opposed to their extremely crowded conditions in the camps, which is his way of portraying death …show more content…
Perhaps the black milk itself represents death, or the notion of death. The prisoners feed from it both by bearing witness to the multiple instances of violence that occur in the camp, and by eventually becoming convinced that death would be a preferable alternative to whatever they are going through. The SS officers, on the other hand, feed on death as a way to perpetuate the ideal spread by the Nazis at the time. Death and violence have become their obsession and while they could’ve once been considered well-read and maybe even intellectual and cultured men, they have become so consumed by their need of violence that they have become monsters. Just like the man dreams with a fictional character in Margareta, the officers are all in love with the illusion that by bringing death to all the prisoners they will achieve their ideal race. In the end, all that’s true and all that matters is that “Death is the master of