The Mystery of Encounter: Poetry and Faith After Auschwitz in the Work of Paul Celan and Etty Hillesum

Summary

Abstract

The article constructs a dialogue between Etty Hillesum and the poet Paul Celan. Both writers try to come to terms, poetically and conceptually, with the event of the Shoah. Both find their own respective language to search for the power of the human encounter in the face of existential nothingness and semantic levelling. Thereby Hillesum's work, just as Celan's poems, can be understood as a search for subtle languages that are truly capable of expressing meaning in the face of meaninglessness.

Keywords: Paul Celan, poetry, poetic language, language after Auschwitz, silence, dialogical writing

After Auschwitz: What is left of Language?

In 1949, Theodor Adorno famously remarked: “After Auschwitz, writing poetry is barbaric.” Adorno argued that culture was ineradicably affected by the experience of the Shoah. Auschwitz represents an ultimate historical divide. Adorno claims that not only poetry but all realms of society and culture are affected by this rift. And no part of human culture is able to reclaim a status out of it, as if there was an innocence untouched by the inherent barbarism of human culture as revealed in the events of the Shoah. The political and social circumstances that made Auschwitz possible, leave no part of human culture untouched. If Adorno is right, this applies also to language, especially to the German language. It is this language which was polluted by the Nazis. This language in all its performative power was used to express and organize “the depth of scapegoating anger and hatred that the human soul can fall prey to,” as Charles Taylor puts it. And even more, this language was used again to give cover for this crime in the years after the war:

Not only in its terrible deviancy, but in its blindness to this deviancy, the pollution was contagious, threatening to spread through the whole system.

Therefore, after Auschwitz the question arises: What is left of human language? Can language ever be used again to express meaning?

Etty Hillesum did not live to see the other side of the Auschwitz divide, the time after Auschwitz. She died in Auschwitz. However, she was keenly aware of the deep epochal change that her time was going through.