NITZAN LEBOVIC

Lehigh University

Near the End: Celan, between Scholem and Heidegger1

Paul Celans Nah, im Aortenbogen expressed his reaction to Martin Heidegger and Gershom Scholem, a sense that between the German and the German-Jewish a fissure might divide the wall of words. In 1967 Celan brought his two idols together in a short poem, not even two dozen words long. Here it is:
Nah, im Aortenbogen im Hellblut: das Hellwort. Mutter Rachel weint nicht mehr. Rbergetragen alles Geweinte. Still, in den Kranzarterien, unumschnrt Ziw, jenes Licht. (Gesammelte Werke 2: 202)2

Celan is describing a sick body during its last moments of life. He leads from the specific location of the problem, Near, in the aortas arch, to an image of collective mourning in the second stanza, and in the third to what appears to be a metaphorical, mystical image of the moment just before death vanquishes life. But a close reading reveals a series of tensions that take the poem in a direction that defies the most literal interpretation. The frame story is jettisoned in the last line of the poem: there a Hebrew word is explained by a German phrase: Ziw, jenes Licht. The word Ziw means glow or luster; jenes Licht means simply that light. I believe that Celan signaled in this extremely compressed line his position vis--vis two cultures, which is to say vis--vis Gershom Scholem and Martin Heidegger. But can this German-Jewish finale suggest a set of oppositions at odds with those implied in the first two stanThe German Quarterly 83.4 (Fall 2010)

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2010, American Association of Teachers of German

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zas? Can life and death, mourning and forgetting, the individual soul and the communal convention be understood through the fusion of Hebrew and German? The answer may be found at the grammatical sign that divides two spheres in the last line of Celans poem: the comma that separates the Hebrew from the German, the mystical statement from its literal explanation, is both boundary and binding. I hope to show that this comma occupies a crucial place in the poems intertextuality, not only between languages and texts, but between traditions and images as well. To put it differently, the comma, relational in its very grammatical essence, is the only element capable of bringing together the Hebrew and the German, life and death, mourning and forgetting, the individual and the communal. It incorporates the simultaneity of an opposition and a dialogue. Scholars of Celan have usually referred to it within the framework of a German-Jewish symbiosis.3 A large body of literature has discussed the duality of the and, standing between the German and Jewish. As Paul Mendes-Flohr pointed out, the discussion began with Moses Mendelssohn, and reached a culmination with Franz Rosenzweigs critique of Hermann Cohen. Celans comma expresses an alternative: in contrast to the verbal conjunctive and, it expresses its dual separating-connecting nature through silence, the absence of speech. But one could proceed a step further. Beyond the existingnonexisting, positive or negative value of any given moment of historical symbiosis, this comma is a mark of an ontological and an aesthetic absence, the beginning point for both the separation and fusion of the two traditions. It is signifying the relation between nothingness and the remains of the light. Only when we appreciate that absence and the remains, can the comma also function as a sign of realization and fullness, of the full existence of nothingness, close to the heart of language itself. Celan, in other words, is transcending here the mere choice between the German and the Jewish, not in favor of a third entity, but rather of its lack, a darkness in the middle.4 This is the place his poetry is searching for. In what follows I trace the literal and metaphorical history of the poem. At the end of the day, the true object of Celans poetics is the ontological status of the word itself, even of a mute punctuation mark. This is the sign of time and the breath of life. It is also where the temporality of the poemhistorical, literary, philosophical, and culturalmeets with the temporality of existence, represented by references to an ever-coming end. As will be shown below, there is nothing expected in this shared confluence of words and life; the intertextual dynamic and cultural existence that keeps it moving will never let it rest or allow the two to become one. Much like Zenos paradox, all one can do is come nearer without ever arriving at a point of rest, true meaning, or actual identity. One should note: never arriving at a fixed meaning is not the same as the absence of meaning. In this sense, Near, in the Aortas Arch is a

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paradigmatic poem for Celan; life and death, the word and the comma, a signifier and its different layers of signified, the German and the Jewish, beginning and end, will ever be moving toward each other without being grounded, decided, anchored. This temporal movement, represented by the comma that breaks and reconnects the parts, is the heart of the poem, near its end.

I. Close Yiddish Foremothers: The Second Stanza Many of the themes woven into Celans poem resist a cursory reading. The title of the collection of poems he published in 1968, Fadensonnen indicates a hyperbolic relation between two types of connection.5 The negotiations between Jewish and German, the destroyed and the destroyer, are presented as an endless cycle of mutual attraction and enmity. The movement of the poem itself does not expose this relationship immediately; it starts with a clear individual moment, and slowly broadens the context, in two sequential steps. First, it exposes the broader theme of Jewish mourning in exile, and then frames it within the German-Jewish context, shared by Hebrews and Germans, Jews and Christians. However, the poetic process itself is misleading. What appears to be a quite physical moment is in fact its oppositea spiritual reflection on life. The collective symbols of the second stanza are an ironic remark on the value of tradition, and the German-Jewish conclusion offers no closure at all. Rather, it leads back to its first line, or the first word of the first line: Nah. One then begins a second reading, in which the word near receives a metaphorical dimension lacking from the first readinga dynamic space has opened, never to be grasped. The process of the poem as a whole reveals a negative perspective: it is impossible to set clear spatial forms, to confirm known collective categories, or to draw boundaries. The notion of nearness is similar, semantically, to the function of the comma in the last line of the poem, and it links Celans poem to a Yiddish predecessor. The key to Nah, im Aortenbogen is a different entity. It is the middle part of the poem that marks its birth, in historical terms. In May 1967, still under supervision at the mental hospital, and while preparing for his trip to Totnauberg to meet the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, Celan was reading the Jewish historian of Kabbalah, Gershom Scholem.6 During that period he read both Zur Kabbala und ihrer Symbolik (1960) and Von der mystischen Gestalt der Gottheit (1962). At the bottom of a page in the latter about the feminine shape of the divine (Schechina), Celan jotted down three lines in Yiddish.7 This note, which alludes to both the prophet Jeremiah and Matthews gospel, is the predecessor to Nah, im Aortenbogen. It reads:
Vet di mama Rockhl veynen Vet Meshiekh nit mer kenen Dos geveyn aribertrogen.

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John Felstiner translated thiswithout specifying where it was foundas:

If Mama Rachel starts to weep Messiah cant still bear to keep Us waiting and lamenting so. (Paul Celan 238)

Written shortly afterward, while Celan was intensely preoccupied with Heidegger, Nah, im Aortenbogen follows the internal structure and logic, and recycles some of the terms, found in these three lines. Not only is there the allusion to both Testaments, the Jewish and the Christian, there is also the irony accompanying the religious demand, a long Jewish tradition that commands the mourning of exile and destruction. If Jeremiahs prophecy turns Rachel/Rahel into a sacred symbol of motherhood, consoled in chapter 31 by the voice of God himself, Celans lines turns the prophecy upside down. The middle stanza reads: Mutter Rahel / weint nicht mehr. / Rbergetragen / alles geweinte.8 Celans Yiddish and the German agree: there is to be no more crying. But why? Is there consolation or dark irony in the closure of the last line? In his seminal monograph on Celan, Felstiner traced the continuity between the two poems, claiming they attune Celans lyric to messianic longing (Paul Celan 238). Felstiners interpretation and translation of Nah followed the messianic and collective hopecarried across by the Yiddish aribetrogen and the German herbertragento the redemptive use of Ziw at the end of the poem. He contextualized this redemptive hope in the contemporaneous world, specifically, Israels Six-Day War, which took place in June 1967 and enabled Israel to control all of Jerusalem.9 Felstiners version turns Ziw into the fulfillment of the semantic course, an allusion to the mystical presence of divine forces and their earthly intervention in the historical situation. In other words, he chose a tone of solace and promise, closing the door opened by talk of mere nearness. For him, the next two German words are merely an illustration, a translation and a reference that explains the Hebrew without resisting it. However, the three Yiddish lines Celan jotted down may offer a different meaning from the ideological assumption Felstiner relied on. The marginal note was Celans recollection of a folk song that Moyshe-Leib Halpern paraphrased in his long poem, now a classic of Yiddish literature, (A-Nacht).10 Born in Galicia in 1886, Halpern immigrated to the United States of America after studying painting and German literature in Vienna. He died in New York in 1932, poor and almost unknown. His poetry is marked by personalized motifs of colorful, almost cheerful, apocalypse and death. In an autobiographical poem written in the third person, (What MoysheLeib could tell), the narrator asks,
If Moyshe-Leib were to describe death Not as gray, not as somber, but colorful As revealed to him around ten oclock,

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Alone, between waves and skies, Would anyone believe Moyshe-Leib? (Halpern 95)

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Halperns A-Nacht tells the story of the ultimate stranger, the poor wandering Jew who cannot afford to pay for a nights shelter and must sleep on paving stones, all the while complaining like mame Rachel (mother Rachel) and dreaming of a savior who cannot endure the sound of crying and, unable to sever his bonds, bangs his head against the wall (Halpern 9091).11 The end of the section reads like a mixture of a lullaby and a dirge. He describes an endlessly mourning Rachel who prays to the savior and urges him to turn away:
Vet Meshiakh mer nit kenen, Ihr Gewlat Aribetrogen Ei-liu-liu, liu-liu. Vet er sich von Keiten reisen, Un dem Kap an Stein sich schlagen Mach zsha shoin di Eigelech zu. Ei-liu-liu, liu-liu. (9091)12(Quoted in Noverstern 116) [When the Messiah cannot bear Her continuous cries Ei-liu-liu, liu-liu He breaks his chains And bangs his head against the rock: Close your pretty eyes. Ei-liu-liu, liu-liu.]13

In its final line, the poem tumbles even further into the pure abyss, reflecting back on the close-to-nothing: No one has seen me here; I have never been. The Yiddish that Celan jotted down in the book by Scholem reflects a certain interpretive position vis--vis the long tradition of Jewish mourning, following the consoling lines of Jeremiah, promisingin Gods own voice: Thy children shall come again to their own border (Jeremiah 31.17). You may have noticed a difference between my translation of the word aribetrogen and Felstiners: in Yiddish the word means endure, not carrying across (Felstiner, Ziv 61131).14 Celans Yiddish lines, in other words, are the opposite of a messianic or mystical identification. In fact, they ironize such a position: the Messiah cannot endure the crying, so he turns away. There is nothing in Celan, in short, to justify the collective promise Cannot [] keep us waiting (Felstiner, Paul Celan 238). The Messiah turns his back on Rachel therefore even the German moves from the localized her of the herbertragen to the less conventional rbertragen, conveying quite nicely the irony expressed in the Yiddish.

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Returning to Nah, the function of the second stanza with its collective reference to the Jewish ritual of mourning in exile, does not imply a better futureit mocks those who believe in such a future. In Celan, Jeremiahs prophecy of destruction leads deeper into the ontological nature of language; this is not a prophecy of consolation or redemption. It carries no message of hope, no collective affirmation. If there is a relief in it, it is only the retrospective and individual moment of death. The irony produced by opposing a meta-revelation-story (the biblical promise of return) to the marginal, corporeal and personal individual comprehension of an end, does not open any factual or metaphysical option abiding to Felstiners message of carrying across. If there is a message of return here, it is the return to nearness, a trace, the remains of the light, the left-overs, the after-image.15 The importance of Halperns postwar apocalyptic poem has been discussed at length by Avraham Noverstern, who noted its impact on Yiddish literature from the early 1920s on. Noverstern carefully examined the tendency of the poem to set Christian messianic themes alongside Jewish ones, and the accompanying irony. Later Celan would adapt this approach to his blood metaphors, suggesting a shared legacy of sorrow (621).16 Noverstern emphasized that the idea of apocalypse projected on the narrator a different light, without a doubt expressing a highly sensitive character that stays outside the usual boundaries separating the normal and the abnormal (106). The poem A-Nacht, he said, was on the edge of insanity, focusing on the idea of frozen timea hole in timeand the eternal presence of characters and symbols: the golden chain, the harp, the Messiah, and Jesus. Still, nothing could withstand the ultimate power of death and of nothingness, which is exactly where one finds the glow (Glanz). At the heart of the poem, Jesus rides a white horse into Jerusalem while around him all is being destroyed:
And as in a dream it seems, To be riding dressed in white ........................ Above my head the light glows The sun weaves, a garland gleams. (114)

Is Jesus riding towards messianic life or a painful death? The poem enables both possible interpretations. The narrator describes an act of unity, a mystical fusing with Jesus blood. In this poem, Noverstern writes, Jesus is an untimely symbol of existential loneliness (113). Half a century later, Hans Georg Gadamer would characterize Celans poetry with nearly the same words, referring to the frequent allusions to blood (17475). This raises a substantial question: why would a Yiddish poet who had fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe for exile in New York write about Jesus as a savior? And a more concrete question: why would Celan connect this specific allusion to the metaphysically suffering Jesus and the very physical circula-

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tion of blood? In Nahas in its Yiddish predecessorthe explanation should be given at a philosophical level, and Noverstern informs us that [Halperns] poem is not supposed to calm the reader, but rather to leave him or her in a constant state of embarrassment, sunk in this atmosphere of uncertainty (109). Similarly, Celans Nah leaves little doubt concerning its never-ending search or the ontological absence of any identifiable markers in space. In contrast to the conventional Celan interpretation, it is not about finding ones identity.17 As Eric Kligerman demonstrated in a recent study, Celans own notion of All poets are Yidsowes not to any religious or ethnic understanding, not to mention any national sense of identity, but refers instead to the poem [which] not only begins but also ends in a space of exile (11).18 Between German, Hebrew, and Yiddish, the latter came closer to realizing the embedded essence of exile; the former two met at an intertextual crossroad that left both in exile.

II. From Eckhart to Sefer HaBahir: Preparing for Nah Celans obsession with nothingness is hardly new. But the path he took was not always well documented. An interest in Scholem was brilliantly documented in Joachim Schulzes Celan und die Mystiker (1975), an influential work that clearly left its mark on Felstiners monograph, among others. But Nah contradicts Schulzes argument that putting an end to Mother Rachels crying must have meant the end of exile to Celan (51). Addressing other redeemed Jewish authors in Israel, Celan declared in 1969: Ich glaube einen Begriff zu haben von dem, was jdische Einsamkeit sein kann (GW 2: 203). It is important to note that this statement rejects en face both nationalism and vulgar Messianism, without being pessimistic. Jewish loneliness will be understood here as a hermeneutical stand that acknowledges the very tight space left between the Jewish and German, but also moves beyond it.19 The solution is to trace the intertext between the two and produce a new ur-language, charging an old understanding of absence with the modern understanding of language. Celan found the tension at the root of modern German, in Meister Eckharts language, quoted and reshaped in both Heideggers and Scholems innovative use of language. Nah shapes a process of semantic expansion, yet one directed towards different, even contradictory ends.20 Its refusal to accept traditional boundaries is seen in its insistence on unconventional conjunctions and affiliations. I mean here more than the immediate fusion of German and Hebrew into one poetic language, or its supposed byproduct, the Yiddish offspring. Heidegger and Scholem appear on the more immediate surface, under which one comes across the allusion to Halperns poem and its subversive undercurrent. The message is one of distance/nearness from/to the ur-source of language. The

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final emphasis on light echoes Meister Eckharts neo-Platonist reflections on the birth of language out of the heavenly light of creation (Schulze 12, 27).21 When one thinks of the poem as a bridge between Scholems and Heideggers philosophies of language, between Ziw and that light, Eckhart follows naturally, since both men saw the medieval theologians text as a source for modern German. Let me explain. To begin with the unexpected: Scholems personal library included dozens of volumes by Eckhart. His comments appear occasionally in the margins, and to judge from them, Scholem appears to have been quite excited by a sermon on the creaturely (das Kreatrliche), finitude, and nothingness (spelled Nichil by Eckhart and Nihil by Scholem).22 Scholem did not say much about Eckhart in his writings about the kabbalah, but the rare mentions deserve attention. In Ursprung und Anfnge der Kabbala (1962), for instance, Scholem referred to Eckharts symbolism of the high soul as the equivalent to the symbol of the temple at Sefer haBahir, the early text of the kabbalah and a key work for Celan (Scholem, Ursprung und Anfnge 14).23 In Von der mystischen Gestalt der Gottheit, a copy of which he presented to Celan in April 1967, Scholem described the concept of Ziw. Scholem translated the word as Lichtglanz on the following page to where Celan left his comment (Scholem, Von der mystischen Gestalt 143). In the following pages Scholem moved to discuss the Lichtwesen in relation to the Kreatur (148). [E]in kreatrliches Licht conveyed a metaphysical unity of place and time (149). It was light itself or its expression in the worlda place or a figure. The example Scholem gave of a place was a temple (Mishkan), and he linked it to the creaturely explored by Eckhart in the sermon mentioned above. Scholem explained both Ziw and Lichtglanz or Abglanz as the kabbalistic lower Schechina, a female and earthly divinity, the mother whose Taten wird die Welt licht (161). He was quite clear: das Prinzip dieser Welt und der Abglanz, der vom verborgenen Urlicht, aus dem guten Licht Gottes genommen ist (162). In other words: In der unteren Schechina: von ihr strmt die ungefilterte Kraft Gottes nur noch in sich selbst zurck, prozediert nicht mehr weiter, und was aus ihr austritt, ist nicht mehr Gott, sondern Kreatur (170). And again: Was ist diese Schechina? Sage vielmehr: Das ist das Licht, das aus dem Urlicht emaniert ist. Auch dieses [zweite Licht] umgibt alles []. Da sagte der unterste: Ich will nicht unten wohnen und nicht von dir entfernt sein (167). Near, but not quite there. This feminine creature, a lower mother, sometimes a sister who is the source of life, functions as the kabbalistic lower Sephira, the actual wisdom of God, which borrows its power from God himself, the hidden Nichts or the Ennoia of God. This symbolism is connected by Scholem to the midnight ritual called Tikkun Hazot, or to that part of it devoted to Rachel, Tikkun Rachel, which he calls the true rite of lamentation (Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism 149).24 In his discussion of the relationship between Rachel,

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Mutter Zion, and the Jewish nothingness, Scholem also mentions Pauls letter to the Galatians where Paul uses the ancient tropes when he talks about the upper Jerusalem which is our mother (Scholem Von der Mystischen Gestalt, 290n8). But Celan links itthrough Hlderlin and Rilketo Heidegger. Celan knew about Heideggers obsession with Meister Eckhart since the early 1950s. Specifically, he was interested in how Heidegger read Eckharts notion of Nothingness. Otto Pggeler dated Heideggers initial engagement with Eckhart to early 1915, noting that he returned to the subject after 1945 (81). The mystical motif of Nichts and its tight link to poetic desolation were central to Heideggers ontology in the lectures he gave about Hlderlin in 193435. Specifically, as Pggeler showed, Heidegger talked about Eckharts works as the ur-text of German philosophy, and he developed the idea of the commonality of human finitude out the Eckhartian notion of Nichts (79). John D. Caputo admitted as well: We have it on Heideggers own assurance that Meister Eckhart is to be numbered among the great mystics, and therefore [] akin to thought itself (142). In these lectures, Heidegger ties the poet to the thinker in desolated time (142). The subject was discussed in Karl Lwiths Heidegger, Denker in Drftiger Zeit, which Celan read in 1954 (Lyon 182). In 1952, when he read Heideggers Was ist Metaphysik? Celan underlined a question: How stands it with the Nothing? (Felstiner, Paul Celan 181). He recycled the question, almost verbatim, in his well-known Meridian speech (1960), and I see the idea as one of the principal motifs driving Celans poetry as a whole. The theme of absence [Nichts] was crucial to Heideggers notion of language in general, and repeated in his readings of both philosophy and literature. During the last few decades it won a number of interesting interpretations and commentaries. For our purpose it suffices to mention here Philippe Lacoue-Labarthes work, or the subsequent work by Gosetti-Ferencei; both emphasized the centrality and the violent dimension that was focal to Heideggers hermeneutics, and that Celan was negotiating with.25 During the late 1950s and 1960s, one finds Celan trying to answer some questions Heidegger asked concerning the essence of language, insisting that absence must relate to a German tradition since Eckhart, and the political translation it received in modern German, partially thanks to Heidegger. For example, after discussing Hlderlins and Rilkes poetry: Je mehr es in der Weltnacht bis zur Mitternacht geht, desto ausschliesslicher herrscht das Drftige, dergestalt, dass es sein Wesen entzieht (Heidegger, Holzwege 272). Celans reply incorporated both the tradition of Eckhart and the kabbalah, repeating the same motif of Mittnacht und Mittag und Mittnacht where Wahr spricht, wer Schatten spricht (GW 1: 135). The language of poetry is found where all realms intersect, shade each other, and form a multidimensional universe. When the time and place change, the deeper meaning of the references also

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change. In Unterwegs zur Sprache (1959), Heidegger explained that the task of the poet was to guideeven dominatelanguage: Der Anspruch des Dichters auf die Herrschaft seines Sagens erfllt sich (225). For Heidegger, Gedeihen und Glanz seiner Dichtung warden Gegenwart. Der Dichter ist seines Wortes so sicher wie mchtig (225). In contrast, Celans closure is showing a minor and dim realization, and testifies to the absence of domination and control as much as to its traces. Heidegger found, in every poetic tale, the emancipatory power of Freie der Lichtung (Unterwegs 257) leading to the lichternder Blitz of the poetic gaze, itself located einsam, in der Nhe eines Grabes (267). No doubt Heidegger was playing a dangerous game, but so was Celan. The heart of the abyss, in other words, lay not in the act of mourning or a debate about the concrete shape of the past, but instead in a late battle about its translation to the very structure of poetic language. The Messiahs act of turning away should be read here as an attempt to perceive the act of mourning from a philosophical perspective. If there is no religious redemption, the only redemption possible is the one offered by its remains in language. It is in language, after all, that the past is recalled and the future made possible.

III. At the Threshold of In Betweenness Gershom Scholem, Martin Buber, and Hugo Bergmannall neighbors in Jerusalemmet and discussed Heideggers work during the early 1950s.26 They would have talked about Heidegger with their friend Celan (Felstiner, Ziv 15253). His interest in Heidegger was not without a context, even if moving beyond the mere German-Jewish symbiosis, which Scholem himself rejected in the early 1930s. As Gadamer pointed out, Heideggers allusions to Hlderlins and Rilkes notion of the creaturely were appealing to the German-Jewish notion of relevance, though he would have come to conclusions very different from Scholems and Bubers (172). In his Creaturely Life Eric Santner argued, while discussing Celan, that it was as if secular German Jews had already, at some level, rehearsed the psychicor better, creaturely complexities of life abandoned to the validity or force of law beyond any meaning or signification (41). In Celan, the creaturely was a poetic essence going beyond what is human, as he explained in the Meridian speech; he connected it specifically with Heideggers vocabulary.27 For Derrida, this essence was an inscription of the invisible [] a sort of non-writing (374). More recently, Kristin Rebien has shown that Celan identifies the poem as the place in which all tropes [] [and] all rhetorical figures should contain their own reductio ad absurdum (17576). Rebien concentrates on Celans use of the Kreatrlichkeit in the Meridian speech: Toposforschung? / Gewiss! Aber im Lichte des zu Erforschungen: im Lichte der U-topie. / Under der

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Mensch? Und die Kreatur? / In diesem Licht (GW 3: 199). Vivian Liska analyzes Celans crooked- nosed creatures and his reductio ad absurdum as an attempt to form a new poetic language: By excavating its own ground, Celans language uproots itself (56). These scholars all contrasted such ideas with Heideggers poetic notion of the creaturely. But what about the sophisticated net of references? Dont they suggest a door beyond the dark mirror? The intertextual net, challenging for us, was undoubtedly quite apparent to Celan in his conversations with Scholem, andthrough silence and readingwith Heidegger. Both the kabbalists and Eckhart were obsessed with defining the place of the creaturely, a concern that turned up later in Rilkes poetry and in Heideggers discussion of both Meister Eckhart and Rilke in Holzwege (1950), a book Celan read carefully.28 In Holzwege Heidegger discussed at length Rilkes notion that poetic language is a function of total openness and danger. Here Heidegger elaborated an earlier observation, from the work on Hlderlin, which discussed the open as the realm of the unheimlich (284). That danger is the discovery of the human beyond the animal. The answer to Heideggers investigation in this work is provided when he characterizes poetry, which assumed a new importance after World War II (and Auschwitz?), as the only possible expression for the time and the absence which turned since Hlderlin to the allesmerkenden (271). The abyss finds its proper expression in the total defamiliarization of time and space, which poetry alone could express. Celan finds such observations accurate, and adopts Halperns hole in time to a last-minute reflection on language and life, hanging onto a tiny sign, a comma, a breath-turn, as he called it that same year in his Atemwende (1967).29 But Celan takes the breath-turn a step beyond Heidegger30: If Celan understands the German-Jewish as deeply ingrained with a sense of otherness, something similar could be said about his notion of a breath-turn. In the words of Amir Eshel, Celans terminological terrain, his inversion of anti-Semitic discourse, the moments of turning back, attentiveness, and turning of breath, we can return to his notion that the poem is a figure of the other []. His other is not figured, but rather is present in pauses, intervals, and muted breath coronas (74). In Nah, the comma performs the role of an intertextual Atemwende. For Celan, standing between Scholem and Heidegger, the comma is an expression of temporal suspension, an allusion that conceptualizes the idea of nothingness, and places it in between the Hebrew and the German. If Heidegger sees absence or nothingness in the context of temporality and its set of assumptions about Being, Celan sees here mostly the language and the independent temporality, related as much to an outside non-human temporal order as of the one met by the creaturely and the human. Even as he adopts much of the vocabulary of the philosophers, Celan also identifies the point where his own temporality differs: Nihil, Celan reminds us, is the gray shape of the sister or the creature moving Zwischen Heimat und Abgrund durch/ dein

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Gedchtnis (GW 1: 223). If Heidegger, as Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei shows, inherits his understanding of dwelling from Meister Eckharts notions of detachment (Abgeschiedenheit) and letting-be (Gelassenheit) which denote for Eckhart a detachment (10), Celan sees here the opposite movement: rather than a dwelling-in-detachment, Celan seeks the ever-coming closer, a movement that is carried on the back of a giant called absence, but stillethically and psychologicallycommitted to an affinity and a relation to it, rather than falling into it. The creature signifies the nearness of all things lost, wie alles Verlorene nahe (GW 1: 227). This nearness allows a real outside that has nothing to do with the nature of the Dasein to share its world. A minor gesture separates Celan from both the kabbalistic and the phenomenological. His poetics never quite embraces total absence or a mystical solution. In a poem Celan wrote the following year, Abglanzbeladen, a similar structure appears, but this time in the opposite direction: from an opening glow to death, realized and fulfilled only in the language of incrimination (GW 2: 242).31 In other words, suspending time is suspending Heideggers totality, and with it introducing the otherbe it the world, or a Dasein with a different view of temporalityto language. Furthermore, Celans emphasis on the comma between the Hebrew and the German supplies us with a significant change from Heideggers (and, following him, Gadamers) poetics. The punctuation mark shapes a literary tool that is unutterable, not speakable, graphic rather than phonic. It is, unlike the word, the continuation of communication by other means, signifying a possible break and closeness rather than saying it or giving it any decisive content. Placing the poetic weight on the comma marks a significant disagreement with Heidegger concerning the philosophical word and the phonetic emphasis. If any Heideggerian reading would place the emphasis on the sudden appearance of Ziw, a foreign word popping, exploding, at the near-end of the poem, a poetic reading does not stop there: it extends the effort and asks the reader to reconfigure the implication of another, one last explicatory attempt that binds the two sides of the sentence together, shortly before sending the reader back to the point of beginning, for a second reading. In short, life, the end of life, and the poetics of both, are all coming together in this last breath-turn. Returning to Nah, we are obliged to reconsider our reading of the poem. If we now view the first word differently, as a metaphor, so must we view the last two words, that light, not as a metaphor, but as a literal report concerning the remains of the light. That light is whats left from the light, a report about it, after the last breath is inhaled, after the comma. The German, if we move now back to the metaphorical level, functionsliterally or metaphoricallyoutside the language Heidegger (after Meister Eckhart) sought. It reports; it does not create. It merely talks about the traces left behind by a destroyed world. It is here, and only here, in the Hellblut and the Hellwort (the bright blood and the bright word, in the first stanza), that it is irreplace-

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able. It is the horrible irony of history that only the language of the annihilator reports on the annihilated, but there is no total erasure here, no absolute nihil. In a sophisticated article, Werner Hamacher wrote: Just as the functions of the sign break down in the face of an object such as the abyss, death, or nothingness, conventional units of meaningwords and sentences [] dissolve (233). Nah offers a counter-argument. If it was a dissolving world, it never gave rise to a final end-time, no matter how dark. Rather, absence is used here to support the remainder or the inverted (GW 3: 195). What we are left with, then, is only a negative language of the remainder of time and its language, obliging the poet to react with the following gesture: Wer auf dem Kopf geht, meine Damen und Herren, wer auf dem Kopf geht, der hat den Himmel als Abgrund unter sich (GW 3: 195).

IV. Conclusion: St. Paulus As I have tried to show, the intertextual context changes the way we read Celans poem. Recent scholarship has developed highly sophisticated tools to assess the relationship between Celans poetics and its historical and literary context. According to Rochelle Tobiass discursive reading, it was during the mid- and late 1960s that Celans poetry turn[ed] increasingly to the human body as a network of nerves, cells, and fibers, which together constitute the nervous system (79). Nah falls neatly into this periodization but concludes a process that has begun in the early 1960s, fusing the languages as interrelated intertexts, almost without any internal essence (Baer 161).32 As Nah demonstrates, body and space were increasingly presented by Celan as belonging to the semantics of time holes (Zeitlcher). Tying this emphasis on suspense to the German-Jewish otherness escapes the usual and conventional dilemma of scholars between the Jewish or Heideggerian Celan, or the need to choose and decide between the terminology of blood-libels and those sunk in a world of theological and historical erudition. One of Celans last poems, published posthumously, inverts the sacred Jewish symbol of the rams horn, or shofar. The title of the poem, Posaunenstelle, is a neologism that links two semantic fields, as so often in other space-time poems by Celan. The sound of the horn is part of the Jewish prayer of atonement, symbolizing a plea to open the gates of heaven. In Celans poem the symbols are used to echo only the deep emptiness of the cry: Die Posaunenstelle: tief im glhenden / Leertext, / in Fackelhhe, / im Zeitloch: / hr dich ein/ mit dem Mund (GW 3: 104). As with Nah, the body is used here to mark a strategy of reading that deconstructs its own set of signs and meaning. But the poem does not end in utter darkness. Rather, it ends with the circle of the crying lips, a hollow space that produces a sound, no matter how sad and how endless. This is a time hole,

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but as Derrida has shown, one that still manages to leave traces in space, Engfhrungs ashes. Simply put, as Nah demonstrates, Celan viewed Scholem and Heidegger as mystical mediums. He aspired to reconstruct through them an ur-language, a hidden presence that Heidegger described as flourishing and glowing, but revealed only as it neared nothingness, Nihil, which it both confirmed and transcended.33 Loaded with the heavy weight of Jewish relics and a German language in exile, Celan constructed a system out of nothingness. Not Heideggers nothingness, the hidden presence of creative temporality, but a German-Jewish nothingness in which the nearness to death is reflected from the position of loss and victimhood, of mourning and destruction. Nevertheless, even if for a short while, Scholem, Heidegger, and Celan met along a faultline that both separates and draws them together, where an abyssto use the word both Heidegger and Scholem favored during their contact with Celan constituted the only reference point for radical thought. According to Fynsk, Celan described nothingness (Nichts) as singularity always in relation (176), andFynsk emphasized using Celans words, as a unique, momentary presenteven in this immediacy and nearness, it lets what is most proper to this other, its time, speak along with it (GW 3: 50). This other, this time, stands in for Heidegger and Scholem, looking from two opposite sides of the same relationcloseness to the Nichts. Celan stands in-between, between the Ziw and jenes Licht, in the comma, the place where one takes a breath and opens an unknown door, returning to the near and unlost word that accompanies some hope: Hoffnung, heute, / auf eines Denkenden / kommendes / Wort / im Herzen (GW 2: 255).34 If Celans center and focus is the intertext, it is so in the literal sense. The wordthe one coming from the heart of language, body, and mindis able to kill, or give life. For a German Jew, it must be the word between wordsa neologism, or a comma. There is still much to say about Nah, im Aortenbogen. For example, one must not overlook its references to Nelly Sachs, nor to Hlderlins Patmos and Celans own Tenebrae. In the last, one again encounters a Paulus walking the thin line between the texts. Tenebrae, much like its later sister poem, appears in a different context as well. The word tenebraeLatin for shadows or darknessappears in the title of Meister Eckharts eighth sermon, which begins with the words: St. Paul says: Once you were in darkness [Tenebrae], but you are now a light in the Lord (Selected Writings 136). This is not a simple mystical prediction, but a complicated interpretation of light as a divine form of time:
This is what Paul means when he says: Now a light in the Lord. He does not say, You are a light, but now a light. He means what I have often said, namely, that to know things is to know them in their first cause. [] There is no process of becoming in God, but only a present moment, that is a becoming without becoming. (13738)

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Mysticism, in short, is not a simple answer to complicated questions. Certainly not when thinkers like Celan were playing with it. Gadamer, in his reading of Tenebrae, emphasized the Christian dimension of Celans allusions and dropped them back onto Heideggers lap (173). But his emphasis on the glistening of spilled blood turns, a decade later, in Nah, to the Ziw, or that light, both the signifier of the divine and the moment of death, human finality, and the miracle in the symbol, in memory, in language that lives and reticently expresses its own in-betweenness, at the edge of nothingness, both German and Jewish (174).35 As I tried to show in this article, Celan moves a step beyond the in-betweenness that is so often attributed to GermanJewish culture. His search, leading from nearness to nothingness, and from nothingness to a short moment of suspense, is reflecting about such betweenness from its edges, seeing where it is translated into the creative explosion and violent potential of the Heideggerian language, as of the absolute symbiosis and therefore total loss of the German-Jewish conjunctive and. In contrast to the usual interpretations of Celans poems, which point to single influences, I have tried to show that Celans intertextuality opened some space for the comma, the gasp, the short moment before death arrives, separating a long moment of life into its components. Standing closer to that light would mean here the inherently contradictory notion of nearness, which brings us closer to the word Ziw and farther into its shaded collective history and lonesome individual recurrence. Nearness is the very acknowledgment of walking on the head, or writing about commas. This article is dedicated to Ziva Ben Porata mentor, a rebbitzin, a friend. Notes
I would like to thank Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Vivian Liska, Josef Schwartz, and Elliot Wolfson for reading and commenting on this paper, helping it to become somewhat more manageable. 2 All quotations from Celan are taken from the Gesammelte Werke edition of 1986, abbreviated from here on as GW. 3 The issue of German-Jewish symbiosis will not be discussed here in detail. It is enough to point out that in the early 1930s Gershom Scholem warned against such perceptions, particularly in his comments on Franz Rosenzweigs work. However, Scholem himself continued to write in German, and his writing is rich in references that reflect a necessary relation between the two cultures. For an excellent discussion of this, see Weidner 20331. For a broader understanding of the German-Jewish interaction in Cohen, Rosenzweig, Strauss, Buber, and others, see Myers. 4 Rather, it should be seen as the failed attempt at a third testament, an idea Walter Benjamin developed after Salomo Friedlaender (Steiner 48). 5 The hyperbolic relationhere between the round form of good light and the linear flash of bad lightreturns in other books by Celan, from Sprachgitter (1959) to Niemandrose (1963), Atemwende (1967), Fadensonnen (1968), Lichtzwang (1970), Schneepart (1971), and Zeitgehft (1976).
1

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6 See Celans note to Franz Wurm, admitting he is back to lecturing, schlafe aber einstweilen noch in der Klinik (Paul Celan, Franz Wurm: Briefwechsel 68). A few weeks later, after returning from Germany, Celan reported to Wurm in two positive sentences, about his meeting with Heidegger (88). 7 For the chronology, see Weigel 247 and Felstiner, Paul Celan 22843. For the Yiddish note, see page 166 of the copy of Scholems Von der mystischen Gestalt der Gottheit in Celans library at the Paul Celan Nachlass in Marbach. 8Felstiner translates this as: Mother Rachel / weeps no more. / Carried across now. All of the weeping (Paul Celan 236). 9 The message, Felstiner argues, suits the timing, which was shortly before the Six-Days War. [Celans] lines [] registered the jolt that Jews everywhere felt (Paul Celan 241). 10 Celan might have recognized Halpern from a small anthology of Yiddish poetry, published in Celans hometown, in 1934, in Latin letters (Naje Jidise Dichtung 2028). I would like to thank Prof. Avraham Noverstern for pointing out this possible reference. 11The irony expressed in Yiddish tradition vis--vis God or the Messiah is a common topic in many folk songs. 12

13 My translation. In a more prosaic translation: The Messiah will no longer/ Endure her crying/ Ay liu liu-liu liu./ He will break out of his chains/ And hit his head on a stone,/ So close your eyes/ Ay liu liu-liu liu (Hellerstein 453). According to Hellerstein, the first full version of this poem was published in New York in 1916. 14 Felstiner explained this choice in a separate article dedicated to the translation of this poem (Ziv 61131). 15 In the earlier Die Schleuse (1960), Celan ended two of the stanzas with Hebrew words, in both cases, key concepts of Jewish mourning: ber aller dieser deiner/ Trauer: kein/ zweiter Himmel.// An einen Mund,/ dem es ein Tausendwort war,/verlor -/ verlor ich ein Wort,/das mir verblieben war:/Schwester// An/ die Vielgtterei/ verlor ich ein Wort, das mich suchte:/ Kaddisch. // Durch die Schleuse mut ich,/ das Wort in die Salzflut zurck-/ und hinaus- und hinberzuretten: / Jiskor (GW 1: 22). In this earlier poem, similar in many ways to the later Nahhere as well Celan is framing his discussion of mourning in the context of Jewish mystical symbols of second sky and the sisterand here again he chooses to end the poem with two Hebrew words. However, Die Schleuse uses a similar structure of irony to the one explored later in Nah: The mourning word is searching for the speaker and leaves him with a more private and secular form of recollection, the conditional and unstablemoving back and forthJiskor [shall remember].

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16 Felstiner identified the source for Celans Hellblut as Matt. 26.28: Celans opening stanza carries overtones of New Testament language, but somehow it seems more important that we do not yet know what word this is (Felstiner, Ziv 617). The shared legacy reappears in the allusions to Jewish exile and the persecution of Christians. The different but consistent set of references did not convince Felstiner that Celan meant to create a more equal ground for his philosophical claims, and he concluded his interpretation with messianic fulfillment: For a moment at least, he [Celan, the speaker in Nah] is where he wants to benot distant but close, not displaced but at home (617). 17 There is little space left here to elaborate on the Jerusalem cycle in Zeitgehft. One key element that may illustrate Celans way to handle inquiries about his identity is shown in his choice to answer such wonderings with a poetic emphasis that stresses the other, or in Derridas terms, the Shibboleth. While visiting Jerusalem in 1969 he told the Israeli radio: Jewishness is so to speak a pneumatisch [spiritual] concern []. Rilke was very important to me, and afterwards Kafka (quoted in Felstiner, Paul Celan 267). 18 Kligerman discusses Celans reference to Maria Tsvetaeva (11). 19 Different authors were talking about the In-betweenness that is typical of the German-Jewish culture. Anson Rabinbach defined it in his introduction to BenjaminScholem correspondence: An irreparable condition of exile which is the (GermanJewish) tradition of modernity (xxxii). Writing about the German-Jewish Prague Circle, Scott Spector argued: I will argue that it is in the uniquely charged spaces between identitiessocial identities, but also national, spiritual, and political identitiesthat the creative moment of the Prague circle takes place (5). 20 Ziva Ben-Porat showed that a similar poetic process shaped Uri Zvi Greenbergs BaShaar. Ben-Porat discussed this poem in the framework of a semantic expansion that used contradictory markers of the individual and the group. Similar in their approach to intertextuality, Celan saw the universe as complicated and endless exchanges between past and present, German and Jewish, a post-Babel state of language versus a naked potential that only a perfect languagea translinguistic poetrycould touch. For this reason, Celan, in contrast to Greenberg, saw the Zsur, the Riss, the pure notion of a gap, as the basic principle of his poetics (Ben-Porat 25781). 21 As Joachim Schulze has shown, Celan referred to Eckhart and his metaphors of light in a number of poems. One example is Du Sei wie Du, and while Schulze and others have looked at this poem, none has viewed the reference to Eckhart as part of a negotiation with Heidegger and Scholem. 22 Scholems marginal comments on Eckhart turn up in a variety of spots. For example, in Heinrich Ebelings book, Meister Eckharts Mystik (1941), he wrote the word Nihil next to a long paragraph on Eckharts concept of nothingness. Throughout the book, he left notes near the passages in which Ebeling developed this concept as central to Eckharts theology. Likewise, in his copy of Predigten, Scholem marked the passages relating to nothingness. See for example Eckhart Predigten 210. 23 John Felstiner dates this poem to the second week of May 1961 (Paul Celan 175). Werner Hamacher identified Sefer haBahir and the Psalms as the sources for the images of redemption at the end, characterized by the movement downward (246). 24 Tikkun Rachel, or rite for Rachel, was the true rite of lamentation. In observing it, men participate in the suffering of the Schekhinah and bewail not their own af-

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flictions, but the one affliction that really counts in the world, namely, the exile of the Schekhinah. The mystic, then, should rise and dress at midnight. 25 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthes Transcendence Ends in Politics, a close reading of Heideggers Rector speech, relies on the Kantian concept of Abgrund, the absence that stands as the question of essence or foundation (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 274). In that context see also the chapter The Spirit of National Socialism and its Destiny (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 14856) as well as the more recent exploration in Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (86). 26 The interest these men took in Heidegger took a number of forms. To give an example, for the special festschrift celebrating the eightieth birthday of Martin Buber, Hugo Bergmann translated an extensive article by Walter Kaufmann on Heideggers vision of language, after Rilke and Kafka. 27 For a discussion of this quotation see Anderson 13. 28 Heidegger connects the idea of the Kreatur to medieval notions of balance and danger. 29 Gadamer writes: The poem says to the poet, as well as to all of us, that the stillness is welcome. It is the same stillness heard in the turn of breath, the ever so quiet recurrence of the act of breathing. More than anything, this is the breath-turn, the sensuous experience of the silent, calm moment between inhaling and exhaling. []. As he [Celan] says in the Meridian: Poetry: that can mean a breath-turn [] witness to a last constriction of life and, simultaneously, represent anew its recurring resolution, or better, its elevation to a secure linguistic form [Sprachgestalt] (7374). 30 I would like to acknowledge here Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferenceis helpful comment, which helped me to capture this point more accurately. 31 Abglanzbeladen, bei den / Himmelskfern, / im Berg. / Den Tod, / den du mir schuldig bliebst, ich / trag ihn / aus (GW 2: 242). I would like to thank Dr. Kristin Rebien for reminding me of this poem. 32 Ulrich Baer wrote the following about Heideggers ideas about language: When the dimension of language that exceeds communication and information is thus exposed in poetry as the essence of language, Heidegger argues, poetry also exposes us to a dimension of ourselves as speaking beings that links us to the world in ways that reach beyond empirical ties (161). Nah, im Aortenbogen fits very neatly into this line of thinking. 33 Der Anspruch des Dichters auf die Herrschaft seines Sagens erfllt sich. Gedeihen und Glanz seiner Dichtung warden Gegenwart (Heidegger, Unterwegs 225). As Sigrid Weigel has shown, Heidegger sent Celan this work in November 1959. The marginalia Celan left on this copy show how closely he read it (Weigel 249). The question that most bothered Heidegger as he read Nietzsche and discussed him with Ernst Jnger was whether the Nihil could be transcended or transgressed. Celan seems to try to provide an answer. 34 Todnauberg was written after Celans meeting with Heidegger, in July 1967. 35 Radiance on the edge of an abyss is a part of Ziw itself, as it appears in Biblical, Talmudic, poetic, and mystical tradition. For example, the sixteenth-century Piut Yedid-Nefesh (soulmate) described the light emanating from God himself and its effect on the wise man who approaches, who experiences the Ziw of divine presence and its secret as he comes nearer. Scholem owned the first edition of this text. See his personal archive in the National Library in Jerusalem.

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Anderson, Mark M. The Impossibility of Poetry: Celan and Heidegger in France. New German Critique 53 (1991): 318. Baer, Ulrich. Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000. Ben-Porat, Ziva. Forms of Intertextuality and the Reading of Poetry: Uri Zvi Greenbergs Bashaar. Prooftexts 10.2 (1990): 25781. Caputo, John D. The Mystical Element in Heideggers Thought. Athens: Ohio UP, 1978. Celan, Paul. Gesammelte Werke in fnf Bnden. Ed. Beda Allemann and Stefan Reichert. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986. . Der Meridian. Ed. Bernhard Bschenstein and Heino Schmull. Werke. Ed. Jrgen Wertheimer et al. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999. . Paul Celan, Franz Wurm: Briefwechsel. Ed. Barbara Wiedemann and Franz Wurm. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995. Derrida, Jacques. Shibboleth: For Paul Celan. Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge, 1992. 370413. Eckhart, Meister. Predigten. Die deutschen Werke. Vol. 1. Ed. Josef Quint. Stuttgart: W . Kohlhammer, 1958. . Selected Writings. Trans. Oliver Davies. London: Penguin, 1994. Eshel, Amir. Paul Celans Other: History, Poetics, and Ethics. New German Critique 91 (2004): 5777. Felstiner, John. Ziv, that light: Translation and Tradition in Paul Celan. New Literary History 18.3 (1987): 61131. . Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995. Fioretos, Aris, ed. Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. Fynsk, Christopher. The Realities at Stake in a Poem: Celans Bremen and Darmstadt Addresses. Fioretos 15984. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Gadamer on Celan: Who Am I and Who Are You? and Other Essays. Trans. and ed. Richard Heinemann and Bruce Krajewski. Albany: SUNY P, 1997. Ginninger, Chaim. Naje Jidie Dichtung: Klejne Antologie. ernovits: Seminar Far Jid. Literatur-Un prachkenteni, 1934. Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna. Heidegger, Hlderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language: Toward a New Poetics of Dasein. New York: Fordham UP, 2004. Hamacher, Werner. The Second of Inversion: Movements of a Figure through Celans Poetry. Fioretos 21963. Halpern, Moyshe-Leib. Ed. Mashe Basak, . Ramat-Gan: Hakkbbutz Hameuchad, 1963. Heidegger, Martin. Unterwegs zur Sprache. Tbingen: Neske, 1959. . Holzwege. Frankfurt am Main: Viktorio Klostermann, 2003. Hellerstein, Kathryn Ann. Moyshe Leyb Halperns In New York: A Modern Yiddish Verse Narrative. Diss. Stanford University, 1981. Kaufman, Walter. Heideggers Castle. Trans. Hugo Bergmann. Iyyun: A Hebrew Philosophical Quarterly 9.1 (1958): 76101. The King James Bible. The Official King James Bible Online. Oxford 1769 ed. Web. 3 Oct. 2010.

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Kligerman, Eric. Sites of Uncanny: Paul Celan, Specularity and the Visual Arts. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Retreating The Political. New York: Routledge, 1996. Liska, Vivian. Roots against Heaven. An Aporetic Inversion in Paul Celan. New German Critique 91 (2004): 4156. Lyon, James K. Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: An Unresolved Conversation, 19511970. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006. Mendes-Flohr, Paul. German Jews: A Dual Identity. New Haven: Yale UP, 1999. Noverstern, Avraham. Kesem HaDimdumim: apokalipsah u-meshihiyut be-sifrut yidish. Jerusalem: Magnes, 2003. Pggeler, Otto. Mystical Elements in Heideggers Thought and Celans Poetry. Fioretos 75109. Rabinbach, Anson. Introduction. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem 19321940. Trans. Gary Smith and Andre Lefevere. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992. viixxxviii. Rebien, Kristin. Politics and Aesthetics in Postwar German Literature: Heinrich Bll, Hans Erich Nossack, Paul Celan. Diss. Stanford University, 2005. Santner, Eric. Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. Scholem, Gershom. Ursprung und Anfnge der Kabbala. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1962. . Von der mystischen Gestalt der Gottheit: Studien Zu Grundbegriffen Der Kabbala. Zurich: Rhein-Verlag, 1962. . On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism. New York: Shocken, 1996. Schulze, Joachim. Celan und die Mystiker: motivtypologische und quellenkundliche Kommentare. Bonn: Bouvier, 1976. Spector, Scott. Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka Fin-de-Siecle. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000. Steiner, Uwe. The True Politician: Walter Benjamins Concept of the Political. New German Critique 83 (2001): 4388. Tobias, Rochelle. The Discourse of Nature in the Poetry of Paul Celan: The Unnatural World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006. Weidner, Daniel. Gershom Scholem: Politisches, esoterisches und historiographisches Schreiben. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2003.

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