scholarly journals Leçons de Tenebrae: Brian Cherney, Paul Celan, and a Music of Witness

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-179
Author(s):  
Anton Vishio
Keyword(s):  
Natural Extension ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Paul Celan ◽  
The Holocaust

In several compositions, Brian Cherney has reflected on the Holocaust and its impact, exploring how music can respond to such tragedy; his recent engagement with the poetry of Paul Celan is a natural extension of these preoccupations. This article offers a close reading of Cherney’s choral setting of Celan’s Tenebrae. The composer incorporates several additional texts that create a genealogy of the poem, from biblical passages to fragments of Dante and Hölderlin to accounts of the Holocaust itself; he arranges these texts to highlight semantic and sonic features of Celan’s work. Perhaps Cherney’s boldest move is his insertion of Hebrew letters, linking his composition to the long tradition of Lamentations settings—a link cemented by a quotation from Couperin’s Leçons de Ténèbres, which provides important motivic material. Through these additions, Cherney turns the poem towards us, inviting us to respond to its call for reflective witness.

„In den Lüften liegt Man nicht eng“. Anmerkungen zur unauflösbaren Tragik des Dichters Paul Celan

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 9-34
Author(s):  
Horst Samson ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Paul Celan ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Personal Tragedy

"“In the Air Where You Won’t Lie Too Cramped.” Notes on the Irresolvable Tragedy of the Poet Paul Celan. Paul Celan's work is characterized by reflections on the power and possibilities of language and poetry in general in processing personal tragedy and painful borderline experiences, especially the experience of the Holocaust. These experiences range from the persecution of Jews, the deportation and murder of his parents, to the ""Goll Plagiarism Affair"" or to mental illness in the last years of his life. These experiences of persecution and extermination of the Jews and Celan's involvement in the tragedy of his people are reflected in many of his poems, especially in Todesfuge. Keywords: Celan, Shoa, modern German poetry and language, tragedy "

Crossing Borders in the Summer of 1935: Fritz Fürstenberg’s Photographs of Persecution in National Socialist Germany

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-89
Author(s):  
Christoph Kreutzmüller ◽  
Theresia Ziehe
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
The Holocaust

Abstract While there are hundreds of written accounts of the Holocaust, there are only a few photographs known to document the fate of the persecuted from their own point of view. This article presents the case study of a photographic series taken inside Germany by Jewish businessman Fritz Fürstenberg in order to provide evidence of National Socialist persecution beyond its borders. After a close reading that reveals where and under which circumstances Fürstenberg took his photographs, the article broadens its scope to discuss how the images were eventually used in the Netherlands as a means of documenting National Socialist persecution. In the process, the article’s authors add another layer to the ‘integrated history’ famously advocated by Saul Friedländer, and call attention to the astonishing fact that research into such private photographs is still a desideratum—and as such a promising field for future research.

Paul Celan, Poet of the Holocaust

Worldview ◽  
1976 ◽  
Vol 19 (12) ◽  
pp. 24-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luitgard N. Wundheiler
Keyword(s):  
Special Treatment ◽  
German Language ◽  
Final Solution ◽  
Paul Celan ◽  
Public Address ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Pass Through ◽  
The One ◽  
Native Tongue

The Jewish poet, Paul Celan, was born in Czernovitz, Rumania, in 1920 and committed suicide in Paris in 1970. His native tongue was German. He wrote eight volumes of poetry, all in German, although he spent almost half his life in France and was fluent in several languages. In a public address delivered in Bremen in 1958, on the occasion of being awarded a literary prize, he spoke of the German language as the one possession that had remained "reachable, close, and unlost in the midst of losses…although it had to pass through a thousand darknesses of deathdealing speech." German is the language of Holderlin, Biichner, and Rilke, all of whom Celan admired, but also the language in which the words Endlösung (final solution), Sonderbehandlung (special treatment), and judenrein (cleansed of Jews) were coined.

Manifestations of the Holocaust: Interpreting Paul Celan

Books Abroad ◽  
1972 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 25
Author(s):  
Jerry Glenn
Keyword(s):  
Paul Celan ◽  
The Holocaust

The vernacular as method for memory and time: A philological and cultural exploration of Filipino concepts for Memory Studies

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 833-847 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jocelyn S Martin
Keyword(s):  
Current Trend ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Trauma Studies ◽  
Group Culture ◽  
The Third ◽  
Cultural Concepts ◽  
Linear Dimensions ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Disappeared

This article proposes the vernacular as a discursive methodological entry point to Memory Studies. A bottom-up approach, this article theorizes memory and time starting from a close-reading of signifiers from the Filipino language, thus allowing its culture to be considered in its own terms first. The first part of the essay examines a set of terms that show equivalences with Western conceptions of memory. The second set of signifiers—( ma)tandà(an), agam, limot/limót and panahon—reveal that they are actually more illustrative of the current trend of movement in Memory Studies; and that they translate more accurately both the non-linear and linear dimensions of time. The third part of the article considers cultural concepts namely, kapwa, utang-na-loob, bayanihan, Manilaner, and desaparesidos, which challenge and enrich Trauma Studies’ Freudian and Holocaust-based history. With a perspective of memory and time from the Global South, this study also demonstrates how one can share space and time with (the wrath of) nature in a society of impunity while emphasising the importance of spirituality, humour, group culture, and hospitality. The existence of the Manilaners and the desaparecidos also shifts the perspective and experience of the Holocaust and the disappeared to a Filipino context.

Nachwirkungen des Nationalsozialismus. Mechanismen der Schuldübertragung auf die Kinder der Täter und ihre erinnerungskulturellen Funktionen in Martin Walsers Drama Der Schwarze Schwan

2012 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Caroline Welsh
Keyword(s):  
Second Generation ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Childhood Memories ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Mass Murders

AbstractThe paper analyses the link between the National Socialist Euthanasia-Programme, the Holocaust and the effect of these mass murders on the children of perpetrators as depicted in Martin Walser’s Der schwarze Schwan. First performed during the Frankfurter Auschwitz-Process, the drama prefigures later psychoanalytical theories on the transmission of guilt to the second generation. A close reading of the drama reveals the importance of childhood memories and contrasts them with Walser’s statements on the effect of the holocaust on his childhood memories.

S(c)hibboleth

Shibboleth ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 86-99
Author(s):  
Marc Redfield
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
The Other ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Tower Of Babel ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
The Dead

Language, Celan says, is the only thing that remains un-lost (unverloren) in the wake of the Holocaust. Celan opens language to this un, rendering as poetic thought what Derrida calls the monolingualism of the other. Shibboleth is the mark of the (m)other-tongue-speaker that is the other of and in language. It is the mark of an otherness that, as a close reading of the Tower of Babel story suggests, inheres in language even before the Lord descends to mix it. The Pentecost story in Acts provides a similar lesson: the New Testament story that redeems Babel introduces another kind of confusion. Poetry bears witness to the survival of language in withdrawing into its secret, speaking of, to, and from the dead, as an early draft of Celan’s “Schibboleth” affirms.

How to Dance After Auschwitz? Ethics and Aesthetics of Representation in John Cranko's Song of My People—Forest People—Sea

2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 5-26
Author(s):  
Liora Bing-Heidecker
Keyword(s):  
Paul Celan ◽  
Dance Company ◽  
The Holocaust

John Cranko's only ballet for the Batsheva Dance Company in Israel, Ami-Yam, Ami-Ya'ar (Song of My People—Forest People—Sea, 1971) is described in a program note as “A Nation and Man Move in Parallel Cycles from Death to Regeneration.” It has remained unique in Cranko's choreographic corpus and in the Batsheva repertoire. Based on recently discovered film evidence, I reread Cranko's largely forgotten project and discuss its problematic and controversial reception in Israel and abroad, in light of Adorno's statement that “writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbarism.” I situate it as a landmark in tackling the Holocaust in dance in Israel as of 1971. I problematize the ethics and aesthetics of representation in Cranko's ballet on the grounds of Giorgio Agamben's discussion of testimony and in reference to Jacques Derrida's reading of Paul Celan.

scholarly journals Hearing the Form: Breath and the Structures of Poetry in Charles Olson and Paul Celan

2021 ◽  
pp. 409-434
Author(s):  
David Fuller
Keyword(s):  
American Poetry ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
First Century ◽  
Paul Celan ◽  
Charles Olson ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
Post War

AbstractThis essay examines the ways in which the American poet Charles Olson, and the German-speaking Romanian Jewish poet Paul Celan, each in relation to specific post-war cultural circumstances, experimented with new ways of structuring poetry in relation to the breath: Olson in response to new global scientific, political, and intellectual currents; Celan in response to the Holocaust. The essay discusses not only how the poets wrote but also how they realised the printed forms of their poetry in performance, contrasting Olson’s literal performance of his theories with the different relation of print to performance of his contemporary and associate William Carlos Williams. It argues that Olson’s experiments, polemically formulated in his manifesto Projective Verse, while they have influenced central currents of American poetry since the 1950s, have remained largely American, whereas Celan’s, tentatively intimated in his anti-manifesto Der Meridian, and inimitably personal in their specific forms, can also be seen as modelling ways in which a wide range of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry can be realised in reading aloud.

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