Anti-Art Poetics: Paul Celan’s “Meridian” Speech

Abstract

Paul Celan’s speech the “Meridian” addresses the fundamental question of how poetry can be possible in a world “after Auschwitz.” In contrast to the Platonic aesthetic system and classical art traditions, Celan draws upon Büchner’s concept of “Hostility to Art.” Amid the paradox of “the impossibility of writing” and “the loneliest loneliness,” Celan embraces the mission of “struggling with the German language,” speaking through a wounded mouth to reclaim a lost home for art. He employs a “grayer language” that distrusts beauty and turns toward truth, approaching a “meridian” of language in a way both “art-less” and “art-free.” On this “meridian,” Celan engages in a secret dialogue of poetry and thought with Others such as Mallarmé, Adorno, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, seeking to return to a realm that is at once uncanny and oriented toward the human.

1. Introduction

The “Meridian”1, Paul Celan’s poetic manifesto, offers a concentrated and comprehensive reflection on his poetic philosophy and is widely regarded as one of the foundational texts of twentieth-century poetics (Lyon 2006). Through a profound dialogue between poetry and thought, Celan confronts a fundamental question: how can poetry remain possible in a world “after Auschwitz,” where both the paradigms of Enlightenment and aesthetic modernity have been undermined? Following the historical perspective articulated by Walter Benjamin, Celan suggests that the angel of poetry, if it exists, would turn its face toward the past, gazing upon mountains of wreckage and shattered language, much like the angel of history. In the face of the civilizational and semantic crisis brought about by this absolute catastrophe, Celan grapples with the problematic nature of both silence and speech. Nevertheless, as both a survivor and a poet, he felt compelled to undertake the mission of articulating the unutterable.

For Celan, in the face of absolute loss, language remained the sole tangible and accessible medium. However, this very language had been profoundly corrupted by the atrocities. Celan contended that, for a poet, “it is far better to mutilate his own language than to glorify inhumanity with his talent or indifference.” Thus, his poetic mission became the critical reconstruction of the very language used by his parents’ murderers, forging a new poetic idiom. In an era when the legitimacy of poetry itself was called into question, the traditional language of poetic beauty could no longer suffice. Celan adopted the concept of “hostility to art” from Georg Büchner, seeking to articulate the unutterable through a language that deliberately distrusts aesthetic beauty and instead turns toward truth. In this respect, Celan’s work transcends the German Romantic poetic tradition and should be considered within the lineage of “poetry of thought” (Steiner 2011, p. 33), which originated in ancient Greece.

This paper, grounded in the “Meridian,” explores Paul Celan’s poetic writing within its broader literary, philosophical, and intellectual contexts. It aims to clarify the specific traditions Celan inherited and critiqued, as well as the unique directions he took them. The study further examines the innovative thought and poetic practices he pioneered. Ultimately, this analysis seeks to present and interpret the concept and implications of “hostility to art” within Celan’s poetics.

2. Revisiting the Path of Art: Büchner’s “Hostility to Art”

Among the figures with whom Paul Celan engages in dialogue within the “Meridian”, Georg Büchner (1813–1837) holds a seminal position. He is the sole individual referenced throughout the entire speech, and all subsequent dialogues with other figures are mediated through interpretations of Büchner’s works.

It should be noted that Celan’s sustained engagement with Büchner’s corpus is not merely a matter of elective affinity. As the Georg Büchner Prize acceptance speech, the “Meridian” belongs to a well-established genre in which the laureate is expected, by convention, to engage substantively with the works and legacy of Georg Büchner himself. This tradition was inaugurated in 1951 when the prize was reconstituted as a purely literary honor by the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung. The first recipient under this new dispensation, Gottfried Benn, devoted his acceptance speech to reflections on Büchner’s literary and philosophical significance. Subsequent laureates, including Ingeborg Bachmann, Marie Luise Kaschnitz, and Elias Canetti, similarly structured their speeches around Büchner’s legacy. What distinguishes Celan’s “Meridian” from these predecessors is the degree to which Büchner’s texts are not merely invoked but strategically deployed as a critical instrument—a “hostility to art” that Celan turns against the dominant poetics of his own time.

Consequently, the continuation of Büchner’s literary lineage and the critical engagement with his corpus constitute a central theme in the “Meridian”2. In his reflection on the crucial function of art, Büchner employed the Greek mythological figure of Pygmalion as a metaphor for art itself. Celan opens his speech by invoking this metaphor, thereby situating his discourse on art within the Greek tradition while keenly capturing the implied attitude of “hostility to art.”

Building upon this critique, Celan seeks to formulate a response—through both his poetic practice and his theoretical exploration—to the fundamental and terrifying question of how beauty, poetry, and art remain possible “after Auschwitz.” This inquiry is situated within a world saturated by mortality and devoid of intrinsic meaning, an era characterized first by “cybernetic lyrics” and, ultimately, by the even more horrifying specter of “lyric cybernetics” (Gellhaus et al. 1997, p. 398). In Celan’s view, the death factories of the concentration camps perpetrated genocide through the cold efficacy of modern technology and industrial processes. Art, referred to chillingly as the “master from Germany,” and manipulated by the principle of death, was consequently reduced to a form of cybernetics. In his notes for the “Meridian” Celan asserts in unambiguous terms:

What is hostile to art—thus not sworn to an unfolding but to an involution—in Büchner: this belongs doubtlessly to what speaks to us.

Art, that is the artful, artificial, synthetic, the made: it is the creaking of the automatons, far from the human and creaturely: it is, here already, cybernetics, turned to reception puppets, it is man on this and that side of himself: the cosmonaut born from the womb of technology, for whom language means a relapse into a pre-existence.

(Celan et al. 2011, p. 149)3

This excerpt underscores that the concept of “hostility to art” Celan derives from Büchner critiques art that is fundamentally dehumanized and regresses to a pre-existential state. A key distinction, however, resides in their intent: Büchner’s “hostility to art” tends toward a rejection of idealistic art and an advocacy for realism, while Celan is neither an advocate of realism nor a proponent of aestheticism or Romanticism, the latter of which championed “art for art’s sake.” Given the historical catastrophe and civilizational disaster Celan directly confronted, any artistic endeavor to aestheticize or poeticize the atrocity would constitute a double betrayal of both history and the ethical demands of art.

It is within this framework of historical betrayal and ethical imperative that Celan opens the “Meridian” with a provocative definition of art: “Art, you will remember, is a puppet-like, iambic, five-footed thing without—and this last characteristic has its mythological validation in Pygmalion and his statue—without offspring.” (GW 3:187). This definition, drawn from Camille’s speech at the start of Act II, Scene III in Büchner’s Danton’s Death, is highly significant. At the moment Robespierre prepares to send Danton and others to the guillotine, Camille anachronistically delivers a discourse on art, comparing it to a puppet and invoking the Pygmalion myth: “The Greeks knew what they were saying when they told the story of Pygmalion’s statue, which had come to life but had no children.” (Büchner 1978, p. 38). Camille sees the puppet as the modern equivalent of the Pygmalion statue, essentially serving as a metaphor rooted in the Platonic tradition. The ideal world Pygmalion is obsessed with is manifested in the art object—the lifelike statue—making his affection for it a Platonic love for the Idea. Though the statue is granted life by divine power, it remains merely a limited imitation of ideal beauty. Moreover, the text suggests that “perfect ideal beauty does not exist in nature,” and, crucially, that this companion, which embodies the Idea, is “without offspring,” having abandoned the natural body and been reduced to a puppet manipulated by the tenets of identity, pure reason, and the absolute spirit. This critique directly targets the Platonic aesthetic system and the classical artistic category that Celan’s “hostility to art” seeks to oppose.

Camille exclaims with irony, “Ah, this is art!” (Büchner 1978). Consequently, Büchner advocates for a reversal of this artistic trend, asserting that art must validate the body and affirm natural sensation. This reversal is exemplified in his novel Lenz, where the protagonist wishes “to walk on his head,” opting to stand upon the earth rather than under the sky. This realization makes the heavenly realm of ideas, previously looked up to, transform into an abyss (Abgrund). Celan repeatedly refers to poetry’s journey in the “Meridian” as “a path,” “a detour,” and “a shortcut”. The key to this path, echoing Lenz, is walking “on its head:” Celan quotes the line twice: “A man who walks on his head, ladies and gentlemen, a man who walks on his head sees the sky below, as an abyss” (GW 3:195). The image of the “upside-down” posture is pervasive in Büchner’s work. Celan further links the abyss to the Medusa’s head and the automaton: “The abyss and Medusa’s head, the abyss and the automaton” (GW 3:196), suggesting that they, alongside Pygmalion and the puppet, inhabit an “uncanny realm” (unheimlichen Bereich) where art resides (GW 3:192). This implies that the “uncanny realm” is the abyss. Leonce’s existential gamble against the grains of sand effectively declares the bankruptcy of Pascal’s bet of faith. The upside-down posture confirms that the realm of ideas to which art submits is a groundless abyss. The groundlessness of the abyss is twofold: it signifies both the inaccessibility of the Idea and, more critically, the fate of art once it follows the path of technique (techne). Under this technological approach, the abyss becomes the “womb of technique” from which the childless beings—Pygmalion’s statue and the puppet—are generated. Whether through imitation of the Idea or the desire to capture “nature as nature” (GW 3:192), the technological approach neutralizes the natural difference in beings, propelling art towards a self-defeating expansion that culminates in the split between being and appearance. While Lacoue-Labarthe suggests Celan’s return to this ancient condemnation of mimesis seeks “the end of art” (Lacoue-Labarthe 1999, p. 47), Celan’s approach is distinct. He chooses instead to set poetry on the path of art in an “art-less” (Kunst-lose) and “art-free” (Kunst-frei) manner (GW 3:196).

Acknowledging Büchner’s fundamental critique of modernity’s groundlessness, Celan nevertheless introduces a critical nuance. He posits that the poem, “like man, does not have sufficient ground (Grund)… Maybe also: the poem has its ground in itself; with this ground it rests in the groundless (Grundlosen).” (The Meridian: 88). This radical plunge into the Grundlosen with poetry constitutes the central preoccupation of the “Meridian”. As Antti Salminen argues in Falling Upward: Paul Celan’s Poetics of the Abyss, Celan’s “abyss” serves a dual function: it acts as a metaphor for the collapse of meaning and value, while simultaneously operating as a structural fissure within language that enables the poem’s unique composition (Salminen 2012, p. 238). Celan thus confronts the abyss through the dialectical tension between Grund (ground) and Abgrund (abyss), allowing poetry to pursue the path of art in a manner consistent with “hostility to art.” Rather than seeking an “end of art,” this approach aims to establish a new foundation for art.

The scope of Celan’s “hostility to art,” however, extends beyond the literary and philosophical traditions discussed above to encompass the visual arts—a dimension that becomes visible in his earliest published prose work, Edgar Jené und der Traum vom Traume (GW 3:155–161). Written as an introduction to an exhibition of surrealist paintings by the Saarbrücken-born artist Edgar Jené, this text represents Celan’s only sustained critical engagement with visual art as such. In it, Celan describes Jené’s painting Das Blutmeer geht über Land in terms that already anticipate the “Meridian”: “Depopulated and gray are the hills of life. On naked feet the specter of war wanders throughout the land” (GW 3:160). The “gray” landscape—later to become the programmatic “grayer language” (grauere Sprache) of the Bremen speech—emerges here for the first time in response to a visual representation of catastrophe.

Celan’s relationship with surrealism was complex and ultimately critical. As Charlotte Ryland has demonstrated, Celan’s early engagement with surrealist aesthetics was far from superficial, involving translations of Éluard, Césaire, and Desnos, and culminating in the co-authorship with Jené of the surrealist manifesto “Eine Lanze” (1948) (Ryland 2012, esp. pp. 15–17).4 Yet Celan’s involvement with surrealism was always marked by a tension between the movement’s aspiration to liberate the image and his own insistence on the ethical weight of the word. By the time of the “Meridian,” this tension had resolved itself into a decisive critique: surrealist art, like Symbolist poetry, risked aestheticizing catastrophe by subordinating historical experience to the autonomous play of images. The puppet, the automaton, and Medusa’s head—the constellation of figures through which Celan articulates his “hostility to art” in the “Meridian”—can thus be understood as encompassing not only the literary tradition from Pygmalion to Mallarmé, but also the broader artistic paradigm in which the image aspires to a life of its own, severed from the breath and body of human suffering. In this light, Celan’s early encounter with Jené’s surrealism constitutes a formative episode in the genesis of the “Meridian”’s anti-art poetics.

Anchored by this poetic restructuring, Celan proceeds to engage in a direct dialogue with the Others who populate the conceptual space of the “Meridian”, beginning with the tradition of German Idealism. The poetic exploration of the upside-down world of “walking on one’s head”—and the concomitant demonstration of the inherent unreliability of conceptual constructs such as the Absolute and the Infinite—is a central theoretical concern in Celan’s early poetic practice. Although German Idealism and German Romanticism exhibit differences in epistemology and aesthetics (ranging from the “philosophical absolute” to the “literary absolute,” and from the “absolute spirit” to “absolute poetry”), both fundamentally prioritize the Absolute as the ultimate principle of literature and philosophy. In striving for an idealistic “beauty,” they chase the illusion of aesthetic aura, thereby succumbing to the illusion of identity. Celan’s subsequent critique of Mallarmé’s “absolute poetry” in the “Meridian” is a direct extension of this theoretical preoccupation.

3. Critique and Reconstruction of “Absolute Poetry”

In Danton’s Death, a minor character, Lucile, Camille’s wife, is afforded seminal significance by Celan. Following the execution of her compatriots, Lucile’s climactic, suicidal shout of “Long live the King” from the Place de la Révolution conventionally concludes the play. For Celan, however, this utterance signifies the commencement of “a unique and fleeting moment” (GW 3: 196). In this instance, the puppet’s strings are severed, and poetry is consequently liberated from the constraints of “art,” thereby setting out on its autonomous path in an “art-less” and “art-free” manner (GW 3: 196).

Lucile’s declaration, “Long live the King,” is inherently an act of irony; it serves not as an act of homage to monarchy but as a defiant address to mortality. Celan characterizes Lucile as someone “blind to art,” whose action dismantles the ideological schisms—specifically, “the gulf between sign and signified” and “the contradiction between being and appearance”—that plague Camille and Danton (The Meridian: 93–94). Crucially, for Lucile, language is perceived as “tangible and like a person” (GW 3: 189), embodying “form, direction, and breath” (GW 3: 194). It is within this embodied and unmediated function of language that Celan claims to encounter poetry itself—a poetry that is neither subservient to any ideology nor a puppet, but which possesses inherent vitality, capable of breathing, living, and being on the way.

Building upon this analysis, Celan aligns Lucile’s act with Lenz’s desire “to walk on his head,” viewing the latter as a step that surpasses Lucile’s action. Lucile’s ironic outburst denotes “homage to the majesty of the absurd, which bespeaks the presence of humanity” (GW 3:190). The “majesty of the absurd” is instantiated by King Peter in Leonce and Lena, who transforms the prince and princess into “two world-famous automatons” (Büchner 1978, p. 137). This monarch, who inspires the prince’s existential inquiry, “I have to think about how it might be possible for me to look at myself upside down. Oh, if only one could look at oneself upside down!” (Büchner 1978, p. 109), embodies an absurdity akin to the Pygmalion myth. While Pygmalion is imprisoned by the world of Ideas, King Peter personifies an idealism articulated in his self-referential dictum: “the substance of a thing is the thing in itself, that is to say me…the thing-in-itself is in itself…free will stands there quite openly” (Büchner 1978, pp. 112–13).

The assertion that this majesty “bespeaks the presence of humanity” is critical. Celan’s reference here primarily engages with Kant’s aesthetics, which establishes the epistemological foundation for aesthetic judgment on the notion of universal humanity (common sense). This foundation relies on the law-bound free interplay between imagination and understanding, guaranteeing the universal communicability of aesthetic emotion and affirming its non-conceptual universality, thus pointing toward moral ideals. However, while Kant attempts to define the realm of the ideal, Celan aligns more closely with Nietzsche’s subsequent critique, which exposed the “human, all too human” dimension of Enlightenment reason, bordering on psychosis. Nietzsche suggests that the over-cultivation stemming from “the sum of sensations, items of knowledge, experiences” of the Enlightenment “has become so great that an over-excitation of the nervous and thinking powers is now a universal danger; indeed, the cultivated classes of Europe have in fact become altogether neurotic” (Nietzsche 1996, p. 116). This judgment found its grim confirmation in the Nazi atrocities. Hannah Arendt’s description of Adolf Eichmann further crystallizes this danger: Eichmann’s evil was not motivated by profound ideological conviction or blind anti-Semitism, but by the “most mundane, and petty considerations”—a terrifying manifestation of the “all too human” (Bernstein 2002, p. 220).

José Ortega y Gasset shares this concern regarding the fragility of modern subjectivity. He argues that the optimism of aesthetic modernity, predicated on Enlightenment reason’s establishment of the subject as the sole source of meaning, failed to prevent the regression of Western civilization. On the contrary, he observed a crisis where civilization threatened to devolve into barbarism within the barbaric masses. In The Dehumanization of Art, Ortega contends that Romantic art is a form of mass art, while Modernist art, in opposition to mass culture, can be characterized by “dehumanization”. Modernist art, he claims, “is dominated by a distaste for human elements in art very similar to the feelings cultured people have always experienced at Madame Tussuad’s” (Ortéga y Gassét 1968, p. 29). Analogous to Pygmalion’s statue, the wax figure’s humanized exterior cannot mask its inherent sterility—its lack of offspring. In this critical dimension, Celan’s poetry is undeniably situated within Ortega’s modernist framework.

Celan refines the concept of humanity, asserting that it is not the essential trait of the humanist; rather, “The humanists are those who look beyond the human being toward the noncommittal side of humanity” (The Meridian: 89). Lenz’s surpassing of Lucile is achieved precisely because he takes a strategic step “out of humanity” (GW 3:192). Crucially, however, Celan remains equally cautious of any art that abandons the human entirely and regresses to the aforementioned pre-existential state. Therefore, this move “out of humanity” is a paradoxical maneuver, ultimately designed as a roundabout strategy to “move toward the uncanny realm of the human” (GW 3:192). Even in a state of spiritual exile, the possibility of an encounter with the Other must be preserved, preventing a mere substitution of one form of inhumanity with another. While Nietzsche viewed the confrontation with the “uncanny” as a call for self-transcendence into the Dionysian realm, Celan adopts the notion of stepping “out of humanity” but redirects its trajectory. He interprets the “uncanny realm” not as a domain beyond the human, but as one pointing “toward humanity,” signaling a potential return. This distinction mandates an initial departure from the poisoned nexus of “humanity-inhumanity,” where both human existence and art are compromised. Paradoxically, it is this very distinction that leads Ortega to praise Mallarmé, whose poetry rejects natural material and human nature to create an artificial poetic fantasy (Ortéga y Gassét 1968, pp. 31–32). Celan, reflecting on the profound failures of Enlightenment reason, adopts a more critical stance toward Mallarmé.

Lenz’s “long live the king” transcends a mere vocal outburst or monologue. It functions as a definitive negation of language and a rejection of the infinity and absolute proclaimed by Idealism. When the “absolute” is elevated to a speculative idea detached from sensory experience and knowledge, its metaphysical realization risks becoming a disaster of pure reason. Applied to aesthetics, art proceeding from “the pre-given and the absolutely presupposed” (Vorgegebenen und unbedingt Vorauszusetzenden) (GW 3:193) inevitably precipitates the catastrophe of beauty. This dynamic is savagely satirized in Leonce and Lena, where the absurd king insists on “celebrating the wedding symbolically” despite the bride and groom being automatons (Büchner 1978, p. 138). This critique is directed at German Idealism and Romanticism, whose legacy is continued by Symbolism. Symbolism, emerging from figures like Baudelaire and Poe, champions “art for art’s sake” and “poetry for poetry’s sake”. By the time of Mallarmé and Valéry, the aspiration for “pure poetry” or “absolute poetry” necessitated that the poet renounce agency, surrendering the poem’s representative role to the autonomous play of signifiers. Celan, however, views Symbolism as merely the “swan song” of Romanticism (Herbert 1971, p. 59). He explicitly stated that his motivation for translating Valéry’s celebrated poem La Jeune Parque was to secure “the right to say something against art” (Joris 2005, p. 17). While poetry in that tradition functioned as a theater for the dance of ideas, that era is definitively over. It is Büchner’s legacy of “hostility to art” that ultimately grants Celan the critical authority, even as a translator, to make such a radical assertion (The Meridian: 154).

Celan seeks to delineate a possible trajectory for poetry by embracing Büchner’s “questioning of art” (In-Frage-Stellung der Kunst) (GW 3:192–193)—a challenge that he believes all contemporary poetry must confront. In response, Celan poses a critical question: does confronting this challenge entail proceeding from certain “pre-given and absolute presuppositions,” essentially starting from a predetermined concept of “art” itself? The answer is definitively negative. Celan explicitly refuses to endorse Mallarmé, criticizing him not as “human, all too human,” but as “artistic, all too artistic.”

However, the significance of Celan’s critique of “absolute poetry” (das absolute Gedicht) in the “Meridian” cannot be fully grasped without attending to a more immediate and politically charged interlocutor: Gottfried Benn. It was Benn who, in his 1951 lecture Probleme der Lyrik—delivered at the University of Marburg and widely received as a manifesto for postwar German poetry—gave the concept of das absolute Gedicht its most influential contemporary formulation. Drawing upon Mallarmé’s legacy, Benn defined the “absolute poem” as one capable of operating “without time, as the formulas of modern physics have long done”; it was, he insisted, “the poem without faith, without hope, the poem addressed to no one” (Benn 1951, pp. 22–23). This conception of poetry as “monological art” (monologische Kunst) stood in direct opposition to everything Celan would formulate in the “Meridian”: the poem’s dialogical vocation, its address to the Other, its rootedness in historical time, and its refusal to detach from the breath and body of lived experience.

The personal and historical dimensions of this opposition were profound. Benn had been the very first recipient of the reconstituted Georg Büchner Prize in 1951—the same prize that Celan would receive in 19605. During the Third Reich, Benn had publicly supported the National Socialist regime in its early phase, most notoriously in his 1933 radio address responding to Klaus Mann, before retreating into what he termed “inner emigration” (innere Emigration) within the German military medical service, where he remained for the duration of the war. He was a controversial figure who chose not to go into exile—a fact that could hardly have been lost on Celan, a Holocaust survivor whose parents had been murdered by the very regime under which Benn served. The contrast between these two laureates of the Büchner Prize encapsulates one of the central tensions of postwar German literary culture: Benn’s aestheticist withdrawal into the autonomy of form versus Celan’s insistence on the ethical and dialogical obligations of poetic language. When Celan declared that “the absolute poem—no, it certainly doesn’t exist, it cannot exist!” (GW 3:199), he was addressing not only a Symbolist tradition stretching back to Mallarmé, but more pointedly the postwar German literary establishment that had embraced Benn’s monological poetics as its guiding paradigm6.

This context also clarifies why Mallarmé functions in the “Meridian” as a proxy figure. The selection of Mallarmé as the named target for this critique is motivated by the frequent, albeit superficial, comparisons critics draw between the two poets’ works.

Critics often note that major Celan poems, such as Death Fugue (Todesfuge) and Stretto (Engführung), recall Mallarmé’s aesthetic project through their pursuit of “musicality,” their enigmatic modes of expression, and their resultant obscurity—qualities that appear to strive for purely objective signs and the transfiguration of art beyond the human (Cameron 2014, pp. 67–68). Consequently, Celan’s poetry, seemingly detached from lived experience, has been categorized alongside Mallarmé’s as “hermetic poetry”.

However, Celan insists that such a comparison is fundamentally inappropriate. As Gerhard Baumann points out, Celan neither adheres to authoritarian Symbolism nor pursues the pure self-consciousness of language. Furthermore, Celan maintains a belief in realities external to language and adamantly refuses to sacrifice reality for the sake of absolute form. Theodor W. Adorno suggests that if Celan’s poetry is deemed “hermetic,” its experiential root differs profoundly from Mallarmé’s. Celan’s work, instead, constitutes an attempt to articulate the “inexpressible fear,” thereby transmuting its truth-content into a negative quality. This negativity becomes prominent in his later output, where the conventional correspondence between signifiers and referents is irrevocably fractured. Celan ceases to pursue a direct linkage between word and object. Instead, he endeavors, within the very fracture of language, to bear witness to catastrophe, deploying a lexicon of dead matter and inorganic things to confront suffering that art can neither endure nor sublimate. In a world where death has been stripped of all meaning, the language of the lifeless offers the last possible consolation (Adorno 1973, p. 477). In essence, Celan’s verses never detach from historical events; his writing is never a neutral, objective monologue but is, from its initial conception, “set up as a dialogue, a ‘message in a bottle’” (Baumann 1970).

Mallarmé’s concept of “absolute poetry” (absolute Gedicht) fundamentally suspends empirical reality, taking the “concept of essence” as its object. It foregrounds the independence and musicality of the poetic text, creating a literary self-contained space through the play of differential signifiers. Within this space, reality is purged of its impurities, allowing for the seizure of “absolute purity” and the pursuit of infinite meaning. Mallarm writes: “I say: a flower! And, out of the oblivion where my voice casts every contour, insofar as it is something other than the known bloom, there arises, musically, the very idea in its mellowness; in other words, what is absent from every bouquet” (Mallarmé and Johnson 2007, p. 210). Here, the correspondence between sign and signified is severed; the word no longer points to an external referent. “What is absent from every bouquet” is a non-existent entity, manifesting solely as the “idea” of the flower in the Platonic and Hegelian sense.

In direct contrast to this idealist project, Celan’s poem “Flower” (Blume) (Celan 2001, pp. 104–5)7 critically reconfigures the Mallarméan symbol.

Der Stein. Der Stein in der Luft, dem ich folgte. Dein Aug, so blind wie der Stein. Wir waren Hände, wir schöpften die Finsternis leer, wir fanden das Wort, das den Sommer heraufkam: Blume. Blume—ein Blindenwort. Dein Aug und mein Aug: sie sorgen für Wasser. Wachstum. Herzwand um Herzwand blättert hinzu. Ein Wort noch, wie dies, und die Hämmer schwingen im Freien.

The stone. The stone in the air, which I followed. Your eye, as blind as the stone. We were hands, we scooped the darkness empty, we found the word that ascended summer: flower. Flower—a blindman’s word. Your eye and my eye: they take care of water. Growth. Heartwall by heartwall adds on petals. One more word like this, and the hammers will be swinging free.

Celan transmutes Mallarmé’s flower of the “idea” into “a blindman’s word.” The “flower” which is “absent from every bouquet” is rendered as hard and inert as “stone.” The blind speaker, whose eyes are “as blind as stone,” must first “scooped the darkness empty” to locate the word “flower.” The subsequent care for water signifies a desperate attempt to nurture a source for this word, allowing it to “ascend summer”—to move toward light and bloom. The process culminates in the word adding “petals” between the heartwalls.

The fundamental difference lies in the nature of this process: for the blindman, the blossoming of the word is not an aesthetic achievement but a violent necessity. The potential bloom is directly linked to the moment the “hammer” will “swing free” to shatter the stone that obstructs vision. Thus, in Corona, Celan articulates a related imperative: “It is time the stone consented to blossom.” The subsequent blossoming leads to the fruit of reality, as depicted in the image of “autumn”: “we shell time from the nuts and teach it to walk:/time returns into its shell” (Celan: 28–29). Here, time, externalized like an infant, is taught to move but simultaneously fears the world, seeking a return to its origin. If the flower of the “idea” shatters its hard core to bear the fruit of reality, the danger remains that, should time regress to its source and fail to turn back, the fruit will petrify into “the word that was undying.”

The culmination of this trajectory—the fate of the petrified word—is explored in the later poem, “WHERE DID THE WORD…”

WOHIN MIR das Wort, das unsterblich war, fiel: in die Himmelschlucht hinter der Stirn, dorthin geht, geleitet von Speichel und Müll, der Siebenstern, der mit mir lebt. Im Nachthaus die Reime, der Atem im kot, das Augen ein Bilderknecht— Und dennoch: ein aufrechtes Schweigen, ein Stein, der die Teufelsstiege umgeht.

WHERE DID THE WORD, that was undying, fell? into heaven’s ravine behind my brow, led by spittle and dreck, there goes the sevenbranch starflower that lives with me. Rhymes in the night house, breath in the muck, The eyes a thrall to images— And yet: an upright silence, a stone evading the devil’s staircase. (Celan:194–195)

The “word, that was undying,” descends into the abyss of the “heaven’s ravine,” accompanied by “spittle and dreck” and “breath in the muck.” In this nightscape, the eyes are no longer “blind as stone” but become “a thrall to images.” The “absolute poem’s” immortal word, having fallen back into the source of time, petrifies in this abyssal region, a regression exacerbated by the accompanying degradation (“spittle and dreck”), which Celan suggests are byproducts of the kind of art he challenges (Cameron 2014, p. 99). The only element retaining vitality is the “sevenbranch starflower” (Siebengestrin, or the Little Dipper) that “lives with me.” The survival of this starflower, a celestial constellation, is essential for the final comparison with Mallarmé.

Mallarmé’s canonical work, A Throw of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance (Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard), concludes with the image of a constellation:

•   what should be
•      the Septentrion or North
•               A CONSTENLLATION
•      cold from neglect and disuse
•               yet not so much
•               that it does not count
•        on some empty and superior plane
•               the next collision
•                     sidereally
•        of a final reckoning in the making
• watching
•      doubting
•           revolving
•                 blazing and meditating
•                      before it halts
•                at some final point which consecrates it
•                All Thought emits a Throw of the Dice
(Mallarmé 1999, p. 165)

In this poem, as a ship founders, the “Master” casts dice, attempting to generate a unique numerical outcome—a password to the “earlier heaven” where “beauty” flourished (Mallarmé 1999, p. 19). This desired “earlier heaven” is the “absolute world,” the locus where “PERHAPS/at so distant a place/that it fuses with infinity” (Mallarmé 1999, pp. 164–65). The abolition of chance through the cosmic act of the dice throw is required for this absolute world to materialize “at so distant a place” and allow “a constellation” to arise. This “place-less place” (ce lieu sans lieu) and “moment without time” (cet instant sans temps) is synonymous with the abolition of chance (Lyotard 2011, p. 61). The constellation’s stars collide on “some empty and superior plane,” forecasting a “final reckoning in the making”.

The difference between the poets is crucial: Mallarmé’s Master casts his own “dice” at the moment of sinking, seeking to impose a final, Absolute order upon chance. Similarly, the poet casts his own words. For Celan, however, the estrangement is doubled: the poet’s dice has already fallen, petrified into silent stones. If the constellation represents that “absolute world,” both Mallarmé’s Master and Celan’s speaker are alienated from it. However, while Mallarmé seeks to bridge the distance through an intellectual act of negation (abolishing chance), Celan’s fallen, silent, and petrified word signifies an acceptance of the wound, focusing instead on the small, living starflower that accompanies the speaker through the muck of the abyss. This distinction is the core of Celan’s “hostility to art”—a rejection of Mallarmé’s absolute, intellectualist solution in favor of a fragmented, embodied, and dialogical poetic existence.

Celan’s poem No More Sand Art (Keine Sandkunst mehr) constitutes a direct rejoinder to Mallarmé’s A Throw of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance. The poem begins with a categorical refusal of Mallarméan ideals:

Keine Sandkunst mehr, kein Sandbuch, keine Meister. Nichts erwürfelt. Wieviel Stumme? Siebenzehn. Deine Frage---deine Antwort. Dein Gesang, was weiss er? Tiefimschnee, Iefimnee, I---i---e.

NO MORE SAND ART, no sand book, no masters. Nothing on the dice. How many mutes? Seventeen. Your question—your answer. Your song, what does it know? Deepinsnow, EEpinnow, E---i---o. (Celan: 250–251)

The term “sand art” serves as a direct metaphor for Mallarmé’s absolute poetry, while the “master” unequivocally alludes to the “Master” casting the dice in Mallarmé’s poem. The pronouncement “no more sand art, no sand book, no masters” is a declaration that “a throw of the dice is all void.” Mallarmé’s attempt, through which “all thought is cast,” ultimately fails to “abolish chance.” Instead, the vast blank spaces between the lines devolve into states of emptiness and muteness. This poetic coup de dés is functionally equivalent to the handful of sand that Leonce tosses and gambles upon in Büchner’s work (Büchner 1978, p. 109).

The cost of Mallarmé’s abstraction is deemed prohibitively high. As Lyotard suggests, such writing “has cut all ties to its other” and the sensible world, creating discourse that can only achieve the “essential notion” by excising objective reality (Lyotard 2011, p. 61). When both the other and the thing are absent, the poet’s “question,” “answer,” and “song” are rendered insubstantial and are ultimately buried beneath a dead, silent abstraction—the “deepinsnow.” John Felstiner interprets seventeen mutes as an allusion to the absence of the missing benediction in the central Eighteen Prayer of Judaic liturgy, or simply for “18”, which in Hebrew spells “alive” (Felstiner 1995, p. 220). Furthermore, the term “Sand art” (Sandkunst) in German can also denote “geomancy,” thus suggesting a type of “funerary rite”. Consequently, Celan implies that Mallarmé’s absolute poetry, in its evocation of the flower of the “idea,” the “absolute world,” and the “essential notion,” ultimately degenerates into its own funeral.

The interpretation of Keine Sandkunst mehr as Celan’s decisive confrontation with Mallarmé’s poetics has been the subject of extensive scholarly inquiry. Jean Bollack’s pioneering study offered a close reading of the poem within the context of Celan’s systematic deconstruction of Symbolist aesthetics, arguing that the rejection of “sand art” constitutes not merely a negation of Mallarmé but a positive reformulation of the relationship between poetic language and historical experience (Bollack 1987, pp. 113–53)8. Herrmann (2016) study devoted an entire chapter (Chapter IV: “Keine Sandkunst mehr: Spuren im Schnee”) to the poem, offering the most comprehensive interpretation to date. Herrmann demonstrated the extent and specificity of the poem’s intertextual engagement with Mallarmé by identifying a dense network of motival correspondences—far exceeding the commonly noted dice-throw motif—between Keine Sandkunst mehr and both Un Coup de dés and the Igitur fragment: the “Meister” and Mallarmé’s “LE MAÎTRE,” the “Siebenzehn” and the Septentrion constellation, the “Stumme” and Mallarmé’s “muet rire,” the whiteness of snow and Mallarmé’s “blancheur rigide” (Herrmann 2016, pp. 120–35). Crucially, Herrmann argued that Celan’s poem does not merely negate Mallarmé but articulates an “objection on behalf of mortals”: where Mallarmé’s Igitur pursues the presence of the Absolute at the cost of annihilating the living figure—culminating in the “substance du Néant”—Celan insists on the poem as a living speech act rooted in dialogical encounter and historical time, which refuses to be absorbed into absolute form (Herrmann 2016, pp. 128–24). Furthermore, Herrmann situated this confrontation within a broader contrast between Celan’s dialogical poetics and the “monological art” of Gottfried Benn’s Probleme der Lyrik, demonstrating that Celan’s late poetry explicitly positions itself against Benn’s conception of the poem as self-sufficient artifact operating “without time,” in favor of a poetry that seeks the Other and “does not catapult itself out of time” but rather finds “its very own present in dialogue with the respective Other, the reader” (Herrmann 2016, pp. 42–44, fn. 339). Petra Leutner’s comparative analysis provided additional insights into the semiotic dimensions of the Celan–Mallarmé relationship (Leutner 1994). The present analysis builds upon these contributions while focusing specifically on the implications for Celan’s concept of “hostility to art.” This leads to Celan’s core assertion: “The absolute poem—no, it certainly doesn’t exist, it cannot exist!” (GW 3:199).

This negation is further explored in the poem Etched Away By (Weggebeizt vom), where Celan invents the term Genicht (non-poem)—created by modifying Gedicht (poem)—to label the absolute poetry that “cannot exist.”

WEGGEBEIZT vom Strahlenwind deiner Sprache das bunte Gerede des An- erlebten---das hundert- zungige Mein- gedicht, das Genicht. Aus- gewirbelt, frei der Weg durch den menschen- gestaltigen Schnee, den Büsserschnee, zu den gastlichen Gletscherstuben und-tischen. Tief in der Zeitenschrunde, beim Wabeneis wartet, ein Atemkristall, dein unumstössliches Zeugnis.

ETCHED AWAY by the Radiant wind of your speech the mostly gossip of pseudo- experience—the hundred- tongued My- poem, the Lie-noem Whirled- Winded, Free, A path through human- shaped snow, through penitent cowl-ice, to the glacier’s welcoming chambers and tables. Deep in the time crevasse by honeycomb-ice there waits, a Breathcrystal, your unannullable witness. (Celan: 246–247)

The task assigned to the “you” in the poem is to restore to light what is buried in the “deepinsnow.” Through a language charged with “radiant wind,” the “you” chemically etches away the superficial “colorful gossip” of absolute poetry. This process sweeps away the “human-shaped snowdrifts” piled up by Mallarmé’s intellectual coup de dés. Beneath the snow emerges the Büsserschnee9. To penetrate this deeper accumulation, one must enter the “honeycomb-ice,” signifying a plunge “deep/in the time crevasse”.

It is here that the “breathcrystal” (Atemkristall) is found, which functions as the “unannullable witness.” The “breathcrystal” reveals the essence of the “wind of your speech”: it is the breath itself. Poetic language, therefore, necessitates breath (respiration), and it is in the “unique and fleeting moment” of the breathturn (Atemwende) that breath itself “crystallizes” into the poetic object.

The “breathcrystal,” crystallized in the instant of the Atemwende, becomes the witness for the “you” precisely because this brief pause summons an “Other.” As stated in the “Meridian”, this is a moment of waiting “for an encounter with an ‘Other’ who is not remote but close at hand.” Poetry, knowing this, “directly heads toward an ‘Other,’ which it believes it can reach, free, or perhaps empty” (GW 3:197). As Jacques Derrida confirms, “The poem speaks, even if none of its reference is intelligible, none apart from the Other, the one to whom the poem addresses itself and to whom it speaks in saying that it speaks to it” (Derrida 2005, p. 33).

Celan emphasizes that poetry does not passively reside in the encounter but is “always on the way” toward the Other. He elevates this dynamic into a universal principle: “Everything, every person, is a poem, moving toward the Other, being the form of this Other” (GW 3:198). Consequently, poetry becomes an inherent dialogue, even if often one of despair:

Only within the space of dialogue can the object of speech take shape, gathering around the “I” that speaks and names it. Yet the object of speech, and what becomes “You” through naming, also brings its alterity into the present, just as it always did.

(GW 3:198)

This dialogical imperative allows Celan to transcend the established parameters of Büchner’s themes. Agreeing with Martin Buber’s assertion that there is no absolute “I,” but only an “I” within the relational I–Thou or I–It structure, Celan concludes: “Poetry desires to reach the Other. Poetry needs this Other, an opponent. Poetry seeks it and speaks with it” (GW 3:198). It is in this dialogical interstice—the space of respiration and encounter—that Celan turns toward a critical, secret dialogue with three summoning “Others” in his thought: Adorno, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.

4. The Inversion of the Other and the Writing of Catastrophe

In I and Thou (Ich und Du), Martin Buber introduces two “primary words” (Grundworte): “I–Thou” and “I–It,” which delineate two fundamental modes of relating to the world. For Buber, in the “I–Thou” relationship, the “I” possesses a privileged ontological status over the “Thou,” for “whoever says ‘Thou’ does not have something; he has nothing except ‘Thou’” (Buber 1979, p. 8). Since the “Thou” is disclosed exclusively through the “I,” it necessarily appears as an epistemological reflection of the “I.” This dynamic leads to the relationship of “I” and “Thou” manifesting as a dialectic of the singular and the multiple, resulting in the particular “Thou” becoming, sequentially, the “Other,” and ultimately an “It”.

Celan, however, fundamentally reverses Buber’s account of the I-Thou relation, assigning the “Thou” a more primordial status. He posits that it is more accurate to view the “I” as the mirror image of the “Thou,” because the “I” cannot be directly experienced. The “I” is always first apprehended as “Thou” before it can become self-aware as “I.” Consequently, it is the “Thou,” and not the “I,” that possesses the capacity to encompass and expand toward the “It.” It is precisely from the “Thou” as the “Other” that individual identity is received and constituted.

This perspective emphasizes the world’s openness to the encounter: “As if/it awakens there! As if/the world opens, passing/through us!” (GW 1: 219) The recurrent pronominal “It” (es) in Celan’s poetry does not function as a direct object of observation or action, but rather as the ontological ground of existence itself. The world opens in dialogue with the Other “for an encounter coming from—perhaps self-conceived—distance or foreignness” (GW 3: 195). By substituting “the Other” for “stranger” (Fremd), the movement of “stepping out of the human and toward the uncanny realm of the human” comes to be understood as a movement toward the uncanny realm of the “Other”.

The historical and philosophical gravity of the proposition “after Auschwitz” renders Theodor W. Adorno the most critical and unavoidable pole in Celan’s mutual reflection with the Others. In this dialogue, Celan’s adoption of Büchner’s concept of “hostility to art” profoundly resonates with Adorno’s project of “non-aestheticization.” Simultaneously, Celan assumes the formidable task—with extraordinary, though inherently impossible, resolve—of writing the catastrophe in a lifeless, inorganic language (Adorno 1973, p. 477), thus responding to Adorno’s urgent question regarding the continued possibility of poetry after Auschwitz.

In the “Meridian”, Celan directly references a pivotal moment of self-encounter linked to Adorno:

And a year ago, in memory of a missed encounter in the Engadine Valley, I put a small story to paper in which I let a man “like Lenz” walk through the mountains.

Both times, I had written from a “20th of January,” from my own “20th of January”.

I had… encountered myself.

(GW 3: 201)

The “missed encounter” refers to an occasion with Adorno, which was later addressed in Celan’s story Conversation in the Mountains. Crucially, the 20 January date, marking Lenz’s journey in Büchner’s work, is inscribed by Celan into his own poem and prose as the moment of his self-encounter. As Derrida contends, this requires a “resituation of the question of transcendental schematism, of the imagination, and of time, as a question of the date…” (Derrida 2005, p. 10). The poetic mise-en-oeuvre is the act of making a date specific to the poet also the date of the Other. However, Celan’s ultimate concern is to trace the meridian back from the date of the Other to his own proper date, thereby attempting to determine the perennial questions of “where he comes from” and “where he is going”.

Indeed, this crucial date, 20 January 1942, historically marks the Wannsee Conference, where the “Final Solution” against the Jews was finalized. This historical context is essential: as a Holocaust survivor and a German-speaking Jewish poet, Celan carried an intolerable burden. Faced with the profound spiritual crisis of the twentieth century—the death of God, the self-devouring of reason, and the bankruptcy of modernity—his poetry was compelled to gaze into the abyss and speak the unspeakable.

In Bauman’s view, the Holocaust, in which Celan’s parents and millions of other Jews perished, was not merely a “aberration”, “deviation” or an “antithesis” of Western civilization. Rather, it was an integral part of modernity and modern society itself, born from Western civilization. The Holocaust was not a failure of modernity but the very product of modernity itself (Bauman 2000, pp. 5, 7). Celan’s survival after the camps was predicated not on a triumphant overcoming but on what Blanchot termed “the writing of the disaster”—a mode of existence in which poetry becomes the sole remaining medium for articulating an experience that resists all conventional forms of expression (Blanchot 1995, p. 11). He decided to “set out to explore the forbidden realm of evil, whose most recent flowers, dangerously beautiful, he is supposed to discover and pluck” (Călinescu 1987, p. 54).

However, the stone finally failed to bloom, and what bloomed instead were the “flowers of evil” in the concentration camps. In the end, Celan chose to drown himself in the Seine. The spiritual crisis that drove Celan to leap from the Pont Mirabeau was at the same time the spiritual crisis of Western civilization. In the face of such a millennial-scale catastrophe and crisis, how beauty can sustain itself, how poetic writing can continue, and ultimately, how poetry itself is possible all become questions. For this reason, Adorno utters his controversial lament, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” At the very beginning of Aesthetic Theory, Adorno states plainly, “It became self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore—neither within art itself nor in its relation to the whole, not even its right to exist” (Adorno 1973, p. 9).

Faced with this dilemma, Adorno proposed an aesthetic solution of “non-aestheticization,” arguing that after Auschwitz, art must prove its legitimacy precisely through non-aestheticization. Celan’s poetry, to a large extent, carries out this very solution. In the “Meridian”, through his attempt to interpret Büchner’s “hostility to art,” Celan proposed a kind of “meta-aesthetic.” (The Meridian: 150) Adorno later revised his statements several times, even partially retracting the claim, “it may have been wrong to say that no more poetry could be written after Auschwitz.” Yet immediately shifting his argument, Adorno added, “but it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether it is still possible to live after Auschwitz” (Adorno 1966, p. 353). Although Adorno’s inquiry was addressed to those “who happened to escape and by rights should have been killed” for survivors like Celan, the question became even more pressing. One may say that, in the postwar period, Celan survived by writing poetry. After Auschwitz, writing poetry was not only possible but necessary. Yet, it could no longer be written in the language of “beauty,” as especially beginning with Baudelaire, the era of poetry lyricism had gone forever. For Celan, when everything was utterly lost, language alone remained tangible, approachable, and graspable, while language itself had been gravely polluted: “it is better for the poet to mutilate his own tongue than to dignify the inhuman either with his gift or uncaring” (Steiner 1998, p. 54). Hence, reshaping the language of the executioners who killed his parents, and critically creating a poetic language became Celan’s mission. Celan chose a “grayer language” (grauere Sprache) that no longer radiates “aura” nor trusts in “beauty” but rather attempts to move toward “truth”; it “does not romanticize or poeticize” (Celan 2000b, vol. 3, p. 167). Instead, it resembles an immaterial meridian traversing the earthly world, crossing the tropics, and passing through the poles to return upon itself. “It names and defines, attempting to measure the realm of the given and the possible” (Celan 2000b), however, a poem does not exist outside of time. It aspires to eternity, yes—but not by escaping time. Rather, it seeks to move through time, to find its infinity within the flow of time itself (Celan 2000a, vol. 3, p. 186).

Celan’s commitment to seeking “true” writing through a “grayer language” is fundamentally an act of wounded writing, frequently characterized as “fledged by wounds” (flügge von Wunden) (Celan 2000d, vol. 1, p. 288). Jacques Derrida asserts that Celan’s specific date, 20 January, functions simultaneously as the signature of his poetry and the manifestation of his wound—a hiatus that remains open, described as a “ring-shaped gaping” (Derrida 2005, p. 166). This profound inscription of the wound is evident in the phrase “Deep/in the time crevasse,” suggesting that his writing speaks through this very fracture.

Consequently, Celan’s wounded writing is understood as a corporeal and spiritual struggle with the German language itself (Derrida 2005, pp. 100, 168–69). Celan’s relationship to the German language was defined by what Jacques Derrida has described as a constitutive wound: the language of his Czernowitz upbringing—the language of his mother’s Heine readings and of his early poetic formation—was simultaneously the language in which the bureaucratic apparatus of genocide operated, as his 1946 letter to Max Rychner attests (GW 3:177) (Gossens and Patka 2001, p. 101). This devastating duality is encapsulated in a letter where he expresses the existential weight of his fate:

How heavy a burden it is for a Jew to write poetry in German. When my poems are published, they too will find their way into Germany—and allow me to tell you something terrible: the very hand that opens my book may once have held the hand of the executioner who murdered my mother. […] And yet my fate is sealed—I must write my poems in German10.

This profound linguistic dilemma was not Celan’s alone; it historically defined the existential and literary crisis of “Jewish German writing.” Franz Kafka famously articulated this predicament as a confluence of three linguistic impossibilities: the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in German, and the impossibility of writing in another language. Immediately, he compounded this with a fourth impossibility:

The impossibility of writing arises because this despair cannot be soothed through words; it is the adversary of both life and writing. Writing, in this sense, is but a desperate measure—a last will prepared before one hangs himself—an act that may endure for a lifetime. Thus, it is a literature that is impossible from every angle, a kind of Gypsy literature that steals the German child from its cradle and hurriedly relocates it, for someone must dance on the tightrope (though not even that German child is truly dancing). In truth, it is nothing at all. People simply say someone is dancing.

(Kafka 1958, pp. 337–38)

Kafka reduced writing to a mere emergency measure, a testament prepared before self-destruction, capable only of enduring for a lifetime.

Confronted by this structural impossibility of writing, stemming from the dual uncertainty of language and identity, Celan’s declaration in the “Meridian” is a radical, almost paradoxical acceptance: “to be on this impossible way, the way of the impossibility itself” (GW 3:202).

This existential path finds a profound parallel in Friedrich Nietzsche’s metaphor of the tightrope walker in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The tragic fall of the walker embodies the precarious, uncanny predicament of human existence: “Human existence is uncanny (unheimlich) and still meaningless: a buffoon can become its ruin” (Nietzsche 1988, vol. 4, p. 23). In this sense, Celan’s literary production is not a transcendence of humanity but a writing out the failure of humanity, in such failure’s intensity (Blanchot 1995, p. 11).

Celan’s writing, therefore, advances toward the uncanny realm of human existence not to succumb to it, but to seek out a home for humanity, a writing that is, in the uncanny, “alienating back into the truth” (The Meridian: 88). While every human being may indeed be an abyss, “someone must dance on the tightrope.”

Ultimately, for Celan, the metaphorical rope suspended high above the abyss is not the simplistic Nietzschean line binding the human between the animal and the Übermensch. Instead, it is the meridian of language, on which poetry traverses time. By standing on the meridian of language—a non-spatial, temporal axis—Celan acquires a unique meta-perspective that allows him to conceive a meta-aesthetics, positioning his work beyond the reach of conventional aesthetic judgments and historical catastrophe.

5. The Decline of the West and the Redemption of Solitude

At the conclusion of the “Meridian”, Celan announces his return to the origin, confirming the circular trajectory traced by the meridian:

Enlarge art?

No. On the contrary, take art with you into your innermost narrowness. And set yourself free.

I have taken this route, even today, with you. It has been a circle.

(GW 3: 200)

Celan’s strategy of “hostility to art” is fundamentally manifested in his rejection of Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s opposing slogan, “Expand Art” (Elargissez l’Art). He is neither deterred by Adorno’s concern regarding the shrinking of art nor by the theoretical difficulties, choosing instead to confront the unavoidable “aporias (that) should not be lacking” (The Meridian: 94). His response is to “take art with you into your innermost narrowness” (allereigenste Enge), embracing the lifelong wound and seeking to fly with the wound.

This acceptance of the wound is tragically foreshadowed in the poem Und mit dem Buch aus Tarussa (And with the Book from Tarussa):

Von der Brücken- quader, von der er ins Leben hinüber- prallte, flügge von Wunden,—vom Pont Mirabeau. Wo die Oka nicht mitfließt. Et quels amours! (Celan 2000d, vol. 1, pp. 288–89)

Of the bridge’s broadstone, from which he bounced across into life, full-fledged by wounds—of the Pont Mirabeau. Where the Oka doesn’t flow. Et quels amours! (Celan 2005b, p. 95)

These lines function as a chilling, self-written oracle of fate, anticipating the poet’s eventual self-destruction.

Celan viewed the historical trajectory from Athens to Auschwitz as a tragic continuity, a fulfillment of the logic of Western civilization that announced its decline. This crisis generated not only personal loss but a profound cultural and civilizational orphanhood, manifesting as the “loneliest loneliness.”

This condition finds a haunting metaphor in the short tale from Büchner’s Woyzeck, where a poor child, having found the celestial bodies (moon, sun, stars) to be mere decayed imitations, returns to an earth that has become an “overturned pot” (umgestürzter Hafen) (Büchner 1978, p. 162). This child’s absolute solitude encapsulates the core of Celan’s crisis: the fate of the absolute stranger. His path to self-redemption lay in returning to the overturned pot, tracing the secret meridian upon its surface, and seeking out the secret of encounter. In a letter to Otto Pöggeler, Celan wrote:

Another “Meridian” event occurred after I had sent you my letter: on page 292 of Martin Heidegger’s Nietzsche, I read these words spoken by Zarathustra, “not only one sun has set before me.” And on pages 300 and 301, how vivid is the thought of “the loneliest loneliness!” Do you still remember the Conversation in the Mountains? And, also the passage in the “Meridian”, where I recalled that missed—yet by no means accidental—encounter in the Engadine, that is, in Sils-Maria?

(Pöggeler 1986, pp. 156–57)

He highlights the line: “not only one sun has set before me” (Nietzsche 1988, vol. 4, p. 198), which comes from Part III of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in the section “The Vision and the Riddle,” which recounts Zarathustra’s ascent along a mountain path at dusk. Heidegger’s interpretation of the line goes no further than noting that it emphasizes that it is toward evening (Heidegger 1996, vol. 6.1, p. 259). Celan, however, takes this very line as the opening of Conversation in the Mountains. And a note of the “Meridian” shows that this image carries a much deeper significance:

[Poetry] builds, from the direction of death, at the countercosmos of the mortals.

Artistic and word-art-that may have the feeling of something occidental, evening-filling.

Poetry is heart-grey, heart- and heavens-grey, breath-marbled language in time. Ultimately it also saved, word-art into its drift and decline; survival means in no way “everything” for it.

(The Meridian: 110)

At sunset of the West, likewise, more than one sun has set before Celan’s eyes. In the “Meridian”, Celan embarks on a journey around the world, but beauty does not reappear. Art has the feeling of something “occidental, evening-filling,” evoking the hour of the West’s decline—a symbol of the decline of Western civilization as a whole. The artistic nature of the art of beauty and poetry as the “art of the word,” accordingly fell into decline and faced a predicament of homelessness, for “God is dead,” “man is dead,” and even the puppet has died.

Celan chose an impossible way, the way of the impossible. Along this way, he discovered “something---like language---immaterial yet earthly, terrestrial, in the shape of a circle which, via both poles, rejoins itself and on the way serenely crosses even the tropics.” He found “a meridian”. (GW 3: 202) Celan chose to explore along this meridian, where he encountered Büchner, Lenz, Mallarmé, Kafka, Mandelstam, and also Buber, Adorno, and Heidegger. The list of such “Others” could be extended much further. Yet Celan “did not thereby stop, stopped here, stopped at the moment of encounter—stopped at the secret of encounter,” because Celan and art alike had become strangers in exile. Thus, his dialogue with the Other is always a “desperate dialogue,” and the poem born within it is likewise lonely. It travels “alone on the way. Whoever writes poetry stays with it,” (GW 3:198) alone on the way with poetry, in “the loneliest loneliness”.

Poetry, having survived death itself, now walks alone upon the desolate road and, amidst the overturned cosmos of ruins and ashes, must once again lay a new foundation for the survivors. This task is undoubtedly fraught with increasing difficulty. Survival, however, does not equate to redemption; poetry turns “heart-gray” (herzgrauen). This term originates from Paul Celan’s poem Speech-Grille (Sprachgitter) (Celan, 106–107), which begins with “speech” and ends with “silence.” In this poem, two “strangers,” once standing together “under one trade wind,” now find themselves separated by an unbridgeable barrier. They face one another wordlessly; their eyes are “dreamless and drab,” seemingly filled with tears that eventually fall upon the flagstones and form two “heart-gray puddles.” The sky of faith has dimmed to gray, and this same color is mirrored in the eyes and hearts of the faithful—so much so that one could speak of a “heart turned to ash.” Yet the barrier is not absolute; light still filters through it, and across this threshold passes a “breath-marbled language in time”—a “grayer language.” This glimmer of communication signifies that Celan still harbors a hope for dialogue. Hence, he expresses a deep concern with Nietzsche’s notion of “the loneliest loneliness” and refers to his encounter with Nietzsche as another “Meridian event”.

This formulation derives from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, sec. 341, in the well-known passage on “The greatest Weight” (Nietzsche 1974, pp. 273–74). Heidegger interprets it as Nietzsche’s first articulation of the doctrine of eternal recurrence (ewige Wiederkunft). Scholars have observed that Celan was profoundly influenced by Nietzsche’s thought, particularly in his later poetry, and that the “meridian” itself may be read as a metaphor for recurrence (Heynders 1995, pp. 106–10). As early as his high school years, Nietzsche posed the question: “And where is the ring that still encircles him in the end? Is it the world? Is it God?” (Heidegger 1996, vol. 6.1, p. 230). Nearly twenty years later, he answered this inquiry through the doctrine of the “eternal recurrence of the same”: “Oh, how could I not lust for eternity, and for the wedding ring of rings,—the ring of recurrence!” (Nietzsche 1988, vol. 4, p. 288).

Reflecting on the circular and ever-recurrent structure of Celan’s the “Meridian”, one may discern an analogous pattern: Celan continually returns to the point of origin only to set forth anew. Just as Nietzsche, after two decades, encountered his earlier self, Celan undertakes a detour—departing before himself in order to seek himself—searching within the “projection of Dasein” for “a dwelling place” (GW 3: 46). Ultimately, he discovers the meridional circle, the “ring of the meridian,” along which poetry weaves its threads, engenders encounters, and inscribes the dimensions of space and time. Poetry refuses the temptation of enlarged art and instead enters the Enge—the narrow passage—that leads toward the circular path, wherein liberation becomes possible. This notion finds a more precise expression in Celan’s long poem Stretto (Engführung), which structurally recalls Death Fugue (Todesfuge). The German title Engführung11 literally means to guide something through a narrow passage or defile, and this mode of entry is embodied in the poem’s circular composition: its opening and closing lines echo one another, forming a configuration akin to a meridian.

The positive significance of Nietzsche’s “loneliest loneliness” lies in its manifestation when “man stands within the most essential relations of his historical Dasein among the totality of beings” (Nietzsche 1988, vol. 4, p. 244). Heidegger further contends, at this moment, “eternity is in the instant (Augenblick)” (Nietzsche 1988, vol. 4, p. 278). The “instant” is not a fleeting present but rather the site where the present and future collide upon the meridian, allowing the instant to come into its own through this very collision Celan interprets this collision as the moment when Medusa’s head shrivels, automatons wind down, and the puppet’s strings are severed. In this moment of breathturn (Atemwende), poetry occurs—for this unique and transitory instant, the “I” attains freedom. From this point onward, “the poem is itself… and now able, in an artl-ess and art-free manner, to take other paths—including the path of art—again and again” (GW 3: 196).

6. The “Meridian” and Heidegger’s Fourfold of Heaven, Earth, Gods, and Mortals

Another “Other” dwelling on the “Meridian”—Martin Heidegger—stands as one of the most prominent figures in contemporary philosophical discourse. In The Poetry of Thought: From Hellenism to Celan, George Steiner observes that the ancient Greeks defined humanity as a zoon logon echon—a “linguistic animal”—and regarded the capacity to use language to name and distinguish entities as the essential characteristic of human existence. This conception possesses primordial significance for the entire trajectory of Western thought. Given the foundational role of language, philosophical language should not be understood as a mere technical idiom but rather as a literary one. Consequently, philosophy and poetry share an a priori kinship. Philosophy naturally tends toward poetic expression, while poetry often seeks resonance in philosophical reflection, as exemplified by Baudelaire’s engagement with Maistre, Mallarmé’s dialogue with Hegel, and Heidegger’s influence on Celan (Steiner 2011, pp. 21–22).

Within this context, several scholars argue that one of the most profound achievements of the “Meridian” lies in its synthesis of two major currents in German intellectual tradition: the realism embodied by Büchner and the historical idealism represented by Heidegger (Cooper 2020, pp. 82–83). Celan’s encounter and mutual intellectual exchange with Heidegger thus constitute a significant episode in the history of modern thought. Compared with Adorno, Celan’s attitude toward Heidegger—who had been associated with National Socialism—was markedly more complex. Although Heidegger’s philosophical thought accompanied Celan throughout much of his creative life, Celan maintained a notably cautious stance toward explicit references to Heidegger, employing what has been termed a mode of esoteric writing. Nevertheless, the dialogue between poetry and philosophy—between Celan and Heidegger—cannot ultimately be obscured or silenced.

In his seminal study Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: An Unresolved Conversation, 1951–1970, the American scholar James K. Lyon provides a detailed examination of this intellectual relationship. Lyon characterizes the “Meridian” as a tacit dialogue between Celan and Heidegger, revealing numerous traces of Heideggerian thought and implicit conversations within the text. These are manifested, for example, in the deployment of key Heideggerian concepts such as Dasein, Entwurf (projection), Gegenwart (presence), Entsprechung (correspondence), and Sterblichkeit (mortality) (Lyon 2006, pp. 121–34).

Building upon Lyon’s analysis, the present study seeks to extend the discussion by tracing a line of thought largely absent from his account—namely, the implicit presence and significance of Heidegger’s later concept of the “Fourfold” (das Geviert): heaven, earth, gods, and mortals, as reflected in the “Meridian”. Although Celan never explicitly invokes this notion in his writings, both the idea of the “meridian” itself and the key conceptual motifs within the text of the “Meridian” point toward its underlying influence. Furthermore, the manuscript of the “Meridian” provides the most direct evidence of this intellectual thread. There, Celan explicitly references the chapter 25 of Tao Te Ching (《道德经》): “the poem has only itself” (The Meridian, 95). Chapter 25 reads as follows:

故道大，天大，地大，王亦大。 域中有四大，而王居其一焉。 人法地，地法天，天法道，道法自然。(Wang 2008, p. 64)

Τhe Tao is great. The heaven is great. Earth is great. The king is also great. There are the four great powers of the universe, and the king is one of them. The immortal follows earth; earth follows heaven; heaven follows the Tao; The Tao follows its own nature.

Pöggeler has extensively addressed the influence of Laozi’s thought on Heidegger, particularly exploring the relationship between the four great powers in Tao Te Ching and Heidegger’s concept of the Fourfold (Pöggeler 1987, pp. 47–78). In addition to his scholarly contributions, Pöggeler was a mutual acquaintance of both Heidegger and Celan, and he facilitated numerous communications and meetings between them. Consequently, it is plausible that Pöggeler might have introduced this idea to Celan. However, even in the absence of Pöggeler’s direct involvement, the textual evidence in the “Meridian” strongly supports the interpretation that Celan’s reference to this passage from the Tao Te Ching implicitly alludes to Heidegger’s Fourfold. The analysis presented here seeks to explore this connection within the specific framework of Celan’s discourse in the “Meridian”.

To begin with, the “Meridian” consistently presents a terrestrial perspective, one that gazes down from the heavens above, with the concept of the “meridian” itself serving as a metaphor for an opening that reveals itself. This metaphor encapsulates the central theme of Celan’s poetry: a space, both literal and figurative, in which poetry emerges as an expression of existential truth.

Moreover, Celan’s engagement with the historical catastrophes and tragedies of his time prompted him to critically reflect on the illness of culture and the crisis of civilization. In particular, Celan offers a direct critique of Kant’s philosophical anthropology, which replaces theodicy with an anthropodicy of the transcendental, thus enabling the despotism of Enlightenment reason and the subsequent disaster of pure rationalism. Celan perceives the secularization process ushered in by Enlightenment modernity as having led to an excessive disenchantment with the world, which aligns with modernist art’s adoption of a strategy of “dehumanization.” In stark contrast, Celan’s poetry continuously reaffirms the human dimension, seeking not to alienate but to revive humanity itself. His ultimate aim is the restoration of human dignity, especially within the context of an ongoing dialogue with the Other. Celan’s poetic vision presents this dialogue as “an endless conversation of the mortal as such with the void” (GW 3: 200), within which he seeks a return to “the uncanny realm oriented toward the human,” endeavoring to reclaim the lost dwelling of the mortal. As Celan remarks, “The poem always, even where it steps outside the human, takes man with it” (The Meridian: 89).

Furthermore, Heidegger’s concept of “earth,” which becomes central to his later philosophy, resonates with themes explored in the “Meridian”. This concept transcends Heidegger’s earlier work in Being and Time, and in the “Meridian”, it appears in various incarnations, one of which is the notion of “place” (Ort). Celan reflects: “Perhaps we can now find that place, that strange place, where a man, as an—estranged—I, grants himself freedom? Will we find such a place, such a step?” (GW 3: 195). For Celan, poetry becomes precisely such a place (Ort), where allegories and metaphors are stripped of their conventional meanings and are reduced to absurdity (GW 3: 199). This questioning of the Western tradition of topos, coupled with Celan’s proposition of an alternative “topology,” as well as his reflections on “U-topie,” invokes Heidegger’s understanding of “earth.” Alongside this concept is the idea of the “abyss,” which encapsulates Celan’s desire to “walk on his head,” in which “the sky becomes the abyss,” marking the process of the sky’s self-disclosure and the earth’s simultaneous self-concealment.

Finally, Celan’s exploration of the divine dimension emerges through his engagement with the concept of the “Other.” He proposes the notion of the “wholly Other” (das ganz Andere) and contemplates the encounter between the “Other” and the “wholly Other.” Celan writes, “Perhaps this ‘wholly Other’—I am here using a familiar term—and an encounter with an ‘Other’ that is not remote but close at hand, becomes conceivable—conceivable again and again” (GW 3: 196–197). The “wholly Other” is a concept that was first introduced by the German theologian Rudolf Otto in The Idea of the Holy, where he characterizes the numinous as an absolute Befremden, a mysterious, incomprehensible force. In its religious context, the numinous refers to the “wholly Other,” a reality that exceeds the ordinary and the familiar, transcending even the hidden realm (Otto 1963, p. 29). This concept finds a parallel in Martin Buber’s I and Thou, where God is described as the “wholly Other,” who is simultaneously “the wholly Same, the wholly Present.” God, as the “Mysterium Tremendum” (tremendous mystery), is both ever-changing and ever-present, pervading the universe while remaining closer than the “I” (Buber 1937, p. 79). By synthesizing Otto’s and Buber’s ideas, Celan’s “wholly Other” can be understood as referring to a divine or sacred dimension.

In the subsequent sentence, Celan employs the uncommon term verhoffen, which further corroborates this interpretation. Celan writes, “A poem’s lingerings (verweilt) or longings (verhofft)—a word related to the creature—touch such thoughts.” (GW 3: 197) Verhoffen is an obscure German word traditionally used in the context of a hunter pausing during a chase to sniff the air, listening intently for the presence of prey. Celan’s use of verhoffen in this context, alongside his reference to the “Meridian”, underscores the idea that poetry, in its most profound form, pauses and listens for the divine. This act of “sniffing” out meaning is analogous to the breath of mortals, which is renewed through the encounter with the “wholly Other.” In this sense, Celan’s poetry serves as an existential search for the transcendent, aligning with Heidegger’s, Otto’s, and Buber’s ideas on the sacred, while asserting that the divine dimension can never be entirely abandoned.

The term’s distinctive nature is noteworthy, and it also appears in Heidegger’s Building, Dwelling Thinking (Bauen Wohnen Denken): “Mortals dwell in that they await the gods as gods. In hope, they hold up to the gods what is longed for (das Unverhoffte)” (Heidegger 2000, vol. 1, p. 152). Heidegger continues in a footnote on “das Unverhoffte” by stating that mortals, in their act of longing, “let longing occur” (“Verhoffen lassen”) (Heidegger 2000), thus allowing a form of restrained self-disclosure that is both secretive and revealing.

“Mortals” await “the gods as gods” and in their hoping they present to the gods “what is longed for”. The “Other” encounters the “wholly Other,” for the poem’s lingerings and longings becomes conceivable. This uncommon word appears again in one of Celan’s poems:

DAS STUNDENGLAS, tief im Päonienschatten vergraben: Wenn das Denken die Pfingst- schneise herabkommt, endlich, fällt ihm das Reich zu, wo du versandend verhoffst. (GW 2: 50)

THE HOURGLASS, buried deep in the peony’s shadow: When thinking comes down the Whitsun-clearing, finally, the realm falls to it, where you, turning to sand, still long.

The imagery of this poem resonates with the conclusion of Georg Büchner’s dramatic work, Leonce und Lena. In this denouement, Prince Leonce and Princess Lena transform their inherited kingdom into a realm populated by automatons (or mechanical figures), thus establishing a peculiar type of anti-utopia. They issue a decree that “all clocks be smashed, all calendars forbidden, and that time be reckoned only by the floral clock, that is, solely by the times of blossoming and of bearing fruit.” (Büchner 1978, p. 140). Following the abolition of mechanical timekeepers and calendars, the hourglass, a traditional symbol of linear time, is also destined to be interred, buried deep within the shadows of the peonies. The populace of this realm yearns to recline in that cool shade, petitioning: “we shall lie down in the shade and ask God for macaroni, melons and figs, for musical throats, classical bodies, and a comfortable religion!” (Büchner 1978).

From the utopian premise of “all clocks be smashed, all calendars forbidden,” thinking descends onto the “the Whitsun-clearing” and assumes the inheritance of the kingdom. This act constitutes a re-inheritance of the Prince and Princess’s domain, for the kingdom of the mortal still persists there, drifting within the hourglass’s sands of time. It is within this enduring realm that the mortals breathe, regain their breath, and, through their very act of longing, find their vitality renewed.

“A comfortable religion” is the final line of Leonce and Lena. Celan’s the “Meridian”, as well as his interpretation of Büchner’s work, likewise comes to rest upon this very line. Celan urges that one must “pay special attention” to those two words, for it is here that he declares, “I have reached the end.” (GW 3: 201) Crucially, Celan did not merely quote the line; rather, he persistently returned to an editorial error made by Karl Emil Franzos, the editor of the first critical edition of Büchner’s collected works. Franzos mistakenly transcribed the German word kommod as Kommendes (Büchner 1987, p. 87), thereby transforming “a comfortable religion” (eine kommode Religion) into “a coming religion” (eine kommende Religion). Celan, however, deliberately chose to preserve and utilize this misreading.

Confronted by the catastrophe of Auschwitz, the devastations of the two World Wars, and the diasporic fate of the Jewish people, the perceived absence of divine grace led Celan to profoundly question the established faith systems of both Christianity and Judaism. Specifically, in his later poetry, the overt Jewish element increasingly receded from view. To a certain extent, Celan’s personal crisis of identity and crisis of faith can be situated as integral parts of the broader crisis of Western civilization.

Nonetheless, in the concluding trajectory of the “Meridian”, thinking ultimately arrives at that “the Whitsun-clearing,” and poetry, too, lingers there, longing for “a coming religion.” This persistent act of longing heralds the renewal of the mortals’ breath, thus revealing that the inherent human call to the transcendent, divine dimension can never be fully abandoned.

7. Conclusions

As an orphan whose parents perished in the concentration camps, Paul Celan assumed the status of a homeless, uncanny stranger (unheimlich). Consequently, he dedicated his life to the quest for “his own place of origin” and a “homecoming” (Heimkehr) (GW 3: 201). However, a return in the Nietzschean sense, to the position of “good Europeans, the rich, oversupplied, but also overly obligated heirs of thousands of years of European spirit” (Nietzsche 1974, p. 340), was no longer tenable for Celan. This impossibility is rooted in the realization that “concentration camps, annihilation camps, [are] emblems wherein the invisible has made itself visible forever. All the distinctive features of a civilization are revealed or laid bare” (Blanchot 1995, p. 81). The pursuit of absolute identity culminates in absolute disaster; indeed, the foundational principle of the philosophy of absolute identity is death itself. Auschwitz, in this analysis, must be viewed as an intrinsic component of modernity and the modern society nurtured by Western civilization. As George Steiner lamented, such a civilization that has carried out and condoned such inhumanity must provoke the fundamental question: Does it still retain the right to possess art, that indispensable luxury of civilization? (Steiner 1998, p. 53).

In the “Meridian”, the terms Unheimlichkeit and unheimlich together reveal art’s condition of having no “home” (Heim) to which to return; art itself has been rendered a stranger. Celan observes that “Art, that is to say, Medusa’s head, the mechanical apparatus, the automaton, those uncanny things (das Unheimliche) so difficult to distinguish from one another—perhaps, in the end, only a stranger—art that survives” (GW 3: 200). Art not only survived but also sought its own immortality. Such surviving art, in this guise, transcends the human and advances toward that uncanny, human-oriented realm, drifting within it like a specter while paradoxically proclaiming it as home (GW 3:192).

Immediately following this reflection, Celan punctures this illusion with Lucile’s ironic cry, “Long live the king!” and Lenz’s resolve to “walk on his head.” When art persists under the guise of automatons and puppets, poetry registers its fundamental opposition, for poetry is “the endless discourse of pure mortality and nothingness” (GW 3: 200). Poetry, originating from the direction of death and passing through a detour of dehumanization, ultimately turns toward the human:

The darkness of the poem = the darkness of death. The humans = the mortals. Therefore, the poem, remaining mindful of death, counts among the most human side of man.

(The Meridian: 89)

The poem’s mindfulness of death, its act of speaking for death, necessitates a struggle with both death and language. Death strips life of its right to exist and negates the very possibility of speech. Yet, mortals remain mortal precisely because they are mindful of death; thus, death retains meaning. The ultimate deprivation of life by death does not entail the deprivation of meaning. The fundamental task of speech is to open the possibility of meaning: even when confronted with the silence of the unspeakable, speech persists. Silence, in the absolute sense, is impossible; even remaining silent is a form of speech. As Celan stated: “The stone is silent, yet silence is never silence. No word or syllable comes to rest. There is only an interval, a fissure in language, a blank space where you see all the syllables gathering around.” (GW 3: 170)

For Celan, after all that was solid had dissolved into air, only language remained tangible and approachable. “In spite of everything that has happened, the language remained intact. But it had to pass through its own lack of answers, pass through terrible muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of death-bringing speech” (GW 3: 185–186). Though “nothing grew,” and language was “misinterpreted,/charred, rotted, watered” (GW 2: 364), Celan’s answer to the void at the point of linguistic shattering was the antithesis of absence: “Everything is presence, nothing is emblem” (Celan 2017, pp. 98–99). What sprouts from the soil of Auschwitz are signs of nothingness, yet after the rupture between sign and signified, between word and thing, everything comes back to life. In the breaking of words, everything is present.

Thus, even in the condition of wounded writing, Celan consciously chose to struggle with the German language, taking upon himself the mission of its purification and reconstruction. However, that formerly poetic and beautiful language had already been reduced in the crematoria of Auschwitz to the ashes of meaning.

Consequently, Celan adopted a “grayer language” suspended between clarity and obscurity. Adorno described this as “the language of the dead, of stone and star.” In casting off the last remnants of organic life, Celan fulfilled the task proposed by Baudelaire, which, according to Benjamin, meant that poetry is possible without aura (Adorno 1973, p. 477). This is what constitutes Celan’s greatness as a poet.

There is a hidden and invisible meridian no longer radiates the “aura” of art but rather accomplishes its disenchantment. Celan’s grayer language resembles a rusted nail, an arrowhead-like thought directed towards the circle of the world formed by the meridian, while also sinking into the earth, taking root there, for the meridian is not suspended high above the heavens but “something of the earth, on the earth.” (GW 3: 202) Auschwitz enabled Celan to fulfill the wish that Lenz had left unrealized: “walking upside down, so that the sky becomes an abyss.”

If there were an angel of poetry in the vision depicted by the “Meridian”, then, like Walter Benjamin’s “New Angel” (Angelus Novus), it, too, would turn its back on the future and its face to the past, gazing upon the ruins that rise toward the sky from the abyss. Celan, standing inverted at the edge of the abyss, embodies a downward posture; even flying with the wounds is a descent, much like Zarathustra’s initial fall and Socrates’ choice to “go down” (κατεβην) in the opening of The Republic (Plato 2013, p. 2). Thus, Celan’s tragedy also lies in the fact that, at the twilight of the West, his beginning was already a fall. Celan, as a stranger, continues to fall along the meridian of language inscribed on its surface, confirming in his desperate dialogue with the Other the subjection of language to history. This very decline has its own history: decline is history in truth, not an end (Heidegger 1996, vol. 6.1, p. 251). It is out of this decline that poetry rises—“The heaviest rising is/here./I am here” (Celan 2005a, p. 515).