“Todtnauberg” by Paul Celan: An Attempt of a Talk Between Philosophy and Poetry

The article discusses a problem that relates to the epistemological value of the poetic text and therefore belongs to the category of complex interdisciplinary issues. Its solution requires the involvement of the methods and resources of various humanities fields. The material for the demonstration of the productive collaboration of philological and philosophical research is “Todtnauberg”, one of the most commented (along with the “Fugue of Death”) poems by Paul Celan, which came to existence as an echo of the meeting of the poet with the famous thinker Martin Heidegger. As well as in many others Celan's texts initiated by biographical events, in the phantasmagoric space of this verse real facts are completely transformed and receive a special, supra-individual meaning. In the first part of the article, an attempt is made to reconstruct the chronology of this meeting and the context of the poem's creation, so far as “Todtnauberg” appears in the role of a symbolic address of poetry to philosophy. The biographical method is combined with the hermeneutic approach developed by Heidegger himself in the late period of his work. Declared by Heidegger, the kinship of poetry and philosophy fueled Celan's faith in the possibility of a working partnership that would reanimate the ontological power of language lost in view of the war and the Catastrophe. Despite of Celan's disappointment with Heidegger and the unwillingness of the thinker to talk, “Todtnauberg” can be regarded as a kind of a meaning-generating topos, in which the horizons of philosophical and poetic thinking converge. In the second part of the article, the poem itself is analyzed in detail. The “slow reading” method and reference to the poem's most authoritative and original interpretations are used. The purpose of such a review is to demonstrate how a separate lyric piece becomes an occasion for a fruitful cultural dialog and effective interaction between philosophy and poetry. Along with the interpretations of such prominent experts in Celan's works as Alex Gellhaus, Jean Bollack and Anja Lemke, the article reflects on the arguments of philosophers who took different ideological lines: Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Otto Poggeler. In addition, the “literary workshop” is involved in the analysis, namely, interpretations of “Todtnauberg” in the novels of such eminent writers as Gunther Grass, Jorge Semprun, and Claudio Magris. As a result of the comparison and collision of different points of view and research strategies, the complicated semantic structure of Celan's text is revealed, and the general picture of the grandiose poetic project is formed, in which the existential themes of guilt, responsibility, human tragedy, memory and forgiveness are combined.

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