Introduction

As a younger man, I remember watching you one day walk to the bus stop after a seminar and I noticed the way you walked. It was energetic, upbeat. I dare say, you were light and happy. And I thought to myself, the work of reading and teaching is giving you energy. You have found a relationship to it that is healthy and joyous. No mean feat. I had recently come back from Europe, and I had seen so many of us suffering, myself included, maybe unconsciously using the work as an alibi for this suffering.

This was perhaps a projection, a fiction I created for myself. But it has inspired me deeply. This bound me to you, as if you had a secret. You, who have experienced more adversity than most in life, whose mortal survival will have been due, you told me once, to sheer chance, who have lost – a lot, and lived so close to death, you have found some alliance with life, with pleasure, sensuality, eroticism through the reading of so many poems and books. Who ever knew there was so much poetry?

I remember sitting in your seminar with a poem in front of me, as if it were a primal scene. Sitting with confusion learning to read, to listen and speak with curiosity and pleasure.

How does one thank a teacher? By thinking, I’m told. But you will have been more than a teacher, I have been blessed also with a closeness. Am I allowed to say that I had a bit of a crush?

I never received what is called an academic appointment, which is often the destination of good students, even while I remember you telling me once that some of your best students didn’t continue in the profession. As we all know, there are not enough jobs. Despite never having succeeded in joining the profession, I still feel a responsibility for scholarship and the values that sustain it. It lives in me, like so many ghosts.

But how does one even manage to do scholarly work today without institutional support? How even to access scholarly articles, if not by subterfuge, by using a friend’s login details?

While remaining in the institution for over forty years you admirably resisted managerial coercion. You did not submit to the contract: publish or lose your job. And you were not fired. You had trouble sleeping, you told me, for a long time. We can’t sleep when we don’t feel safe. What I thought as a young man concerning the promise of an academic career was perhaps a mistake, that is, that you could have the security of a job and do what you believed to be most important. In his draft for the University of Berlin at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Wilhelm von Humboldt defined the modern idea of the university as a sanctuary (Freistätte), a refuge both from the state and market forces. He wrote:

As compromised and improbable as Humboldt’s “inherently lovely and beneficial”2 idea has become in the twenty-first century, at what cost today do we give up on it? You told me once you could not have grown into the scholar and teacher you became without the supportive conditions of continuous employment.

Keeping Promises

As a young man you told me you had once written to Patrick White, asking him if one could be both a writer and a literary critic. He wrote back a long letter to you, ultimately saying: “No, one has to choose.” This is not a view that Friedrich Schlegel or Friedrich Hölderlin would have accepted. For me, your scholarship, while remaining rigorous, is also very artistic. When asked if he thought it necessary to make a firm distinction between literature and literary criticism, Jacques Derrida responded once:

Whether or not we can keep our promises, Derrida says elsewhere, the promise itself is an affirmation, a commitment (engagement) to the future:

It took me forever to finish my PhD. But I always thought I had this responsibility to you (and others) to finish it, even though you were not my advisor or even worked in the same field. I was also accountable to you. That it could take a long time and that it was okay that it took a long time. I am still accountable. The credit account is still open.

Unlike the others, you acknowledged and took interest in the erotics of teaching, even, dare I say, in its homoerotic and sadomasochist aspects. Scrupulously ethical and never crossing the line of physical contact or professional boundaries, you gave hospitality to erotic play in and as the study of literature. Never too much, but in a manner that was honest about what may be going on psychically between teachers and students, or supervisors and supervisees. This hospitality to erotic play tickled me and even made me feel safe, because you acknowledged what is so often unspeakable. To illustrate what a supervisor sometimes has to do, I remember once that during an induction for doctoral candidates you rather theatrically put on some leather.

While undoubtedly there are possibilities of abuse if boundaries are crossed in hierarchically-structured workplaces, I think it is also dangerous not to acknowledge erotic dynamics and play, because doing so feeds into the shame, fear and ignorance about sexuality that remains so prevalent in our culture and its institutions. How does one acknowledge such dynamics and their diverse effects, while also emphasising that for good reason professional boundaries remain?5

Babbling with Heidegger and Paul Celan

After failing to finish a PhD in philosophy at the University of Sydney, in my early thirties I received a grant to enrol in another PhD program in the German department at New York University. I learned German and eventually wrote a dissertation, which became a book entitled The Forgiveness to Come: The Holocaust and the Hyper-Ethical.6 You scrupulously read and commented on the dissertation and also helped me through the publication process. The book was concerned with the impasses of forgiveness, especially in relation to the legacies of Nazi crimes against humanity. I tried to articulate a thought of forgiveness that would not imply closure of the infinite wounds of the past, that would not amount to any kind of “moving on” or amnesia. I wrote:

This thought of leaving empty the empty place was inspired by a line from the twentieth-century author and literary theorist Maurice Blanchot, who in The Writing of Disaster wrote counter-intuitively:

In the book I decided not to include a reading of Paul Celan’s famous poem “Todtnauberg” (1970), which bears witness to his meeting with Martin Heidegger in the philosopher’s cabin in the Black Forest in 1967. But because the topos of this meeting was so closely related to my project’s, at the very least I had to justify this decision in a footnote. I gave the excuse that I felt I have nothing to add to the fine studies which already exist. But even if one has nothing to add, maybe the path and the pain through the encounter with this poem is ineluctable, if one wants to study German poetry and philosophy responsibly.

Several contemporary readings of the poem, including that of Jacques Derrida, have questioned the priority given to the theme of the poet’s disappointed expectation for a word from Heidegger about the Shoah and have focused rather on the motif of the gift of the poem as of a forgiveness asked for, granted and/or to come. For Derrida, there is already a gesture of forgiveness inscribed in the act of addressing oneself and speaking to another, just as there is one also inscribed in the act of listening. “Forgiveness”, he says, “is implied in the very first speech act. I cannot perform what I would like to perform. That is why things happen.”9 From this point of view, the poet’s expectation must have been disappointed, even if Heidegger had made a public declaration repudiating the resurgence of Nazism. Derrida says I cannot perform what I would like to perform because language – or what he calls “trace” and later “cinders” also in memory of the Holocaust – do not permit self-identity and self-presence. The trace, cinders or ash differ and defer themselves. They are iterable. As a consequence, what I consciously wish or intend to perform is never what I do perform, there will always be differance: spacing and temporisation.10 Speaking, writing, reading and listening are never identical with themselves, and thus in a sense never take place as something that I, as a subject, can simply perform. In order for things to happen, therefore, there is always implicitly, silently, a forgiveness requested and/or granted. This event of forgiveness happens, as it were, automatically, without the subject consciously intending it and, moreover, as something that is undecidedly equivocal, heterogenous to the order of presentable knowledge in the present.

Now the question this thinking leaves open is whether an experience of forgiveness is inscribed not only in speech, but also in silence? Can silence be addressed to the other as a promise, affirmation, commitment, pledge? Can silence be a cinder of forgiveness asked for, granted, and/or to come?

Maybe the first thing to say about the poem “Todtnauberg” is what it does not say. It does not give a transparent and univocal narration of what happened, if such were possible. Even while it mentions “Krudes, später, im Fahren, deutlich” (“crudeness later clearly while on the road”12), it does not name what this crudeness refers to or who utters it. The proximity of the two words “crudeness” and “clearly” even suggests that clarity may itself be crudeness in this context. The letter of the poem and its ellipsis complicate any simple narrative such as the form: “Celan came, Heidegger did not ask the Jews for forgiveness in the name of the Germans. Celan who was waiting for a word of forgiveness left disappointed and he made a poem of it. He recorded it.”

Even to the point where it is scarcely intelligible, Celan’s language resists the logic of univocal representation. This is probably one of the reasons why his poetry is so important in relation to the questions I raised above. I would even go so far as to suggest that it is possible to read Celan’s poetry without necessarily referring to the Holocaust, that the poetry is legible without this reference, such that in its dialogue with Hölderlin, for example, it could have been written in the nineteenth century, even if the Shoah had never happened.

In relation to the letter and ellipsis of the poem, many scholars have sought to determine its meaning by referring to the biographical details and testimonies given in correspondence with Celan, including that of Martin Heidegger. This witnessing is probably indispensable to the reading of the poem, but it is also supplementary inasmuch as the poem still speaks without it. There is a double imperative, reminiscent of those who testified to the camps: “Know what happened, do not forget, but at the same time never will you know.”13 A lot of Celan’s poetry is similar in this regard. In his famous reading of Paul Celan’s “Du Liegst”, a poem on the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, Peter Szondi argues that if one was not a witness at the exact time and place in which the events happened, one will never know to what the poem is exactly bearing witness.14

In the summer of 1967 Paul Celan visited Martin Heidegger in his cabin in the Black Forest. The previous night 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 sat in the first row as Celan read. 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.15

Celan, who during their meeting before his reading had brusquely refused to be photographed with Heidegger, reluctantly accepted the invitation.  It was, as he explained to Baumann, difficult for him to come together with a man whose history he could not forget. He spent the morning before the group lunch with Heidegger near Todtnauberg. Baumann’s assistant, Gerhard Neumann, was with them both in Heidegger’s 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:

Just a few days after this visit, on 1 August, 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, 2 August, Celan reported to his wife:

Against this backdrop, the poem can be read as a fixing of impressions that struck Celan during the morning gathering at Heidegger’s cabin. It appears on the surface to recapitulate and recall an historic event, an epochal meeting, and to recognise the “obvious proof” of Celan’s “painful disappointment, perhaps also adamant rejection of Heidegger”.

On 2 November 1967, three months after the transcription of “Todtnauberg”, Celan turned to Robert Altmann, the publisher of Éditions Brunidor, and proposed that the poem appear in a single, limited edition. On 12 January 1968 the Brunidor edition of “Todtnauberg” appeared in an edition of fifty copies, the first of which was sent to Heidegger. Two weeks later, in a letter to Celan, Heidegger responded:

The rare verb in Heidegger’s letter, zuschweigen, is hardly translatable; it corresponds to zusprechen and zusagen, which both mean various forms of addressing the other (to promise or to affirm, to speak forwardly and so on), but zuschweigen means to address silence to someone; not exactly to address something by silence to someone, but to address silence to someone.

Celan read again in Freiburg several months after Heidegger’s 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.

 

Bibliography