Poetry after Auschwitz

Abstract

‘It’s not all that simple,’ Paul Celan is said to have responded, when asked about his seeming lack of political engagement in the spring of 1968.1 Oppression, for him, was deeply entrenched in social customs and language. A more just and inclusive political order could not be ushered in overnight, especially not through a violent outburst of rage and rebellious energy. Waves of rising fists, flooding the streets of Paris, seemed visually and acoustically too reminiscent of a recent and rather grim chapter in German history, one that Celan had experienced personally. Not that he was indifferent to the voicing of dissent. His poetry was all about the search for thinking space. Yet, he located revolutionary potential not in heroic upheavals, but in slow and inaudible processes, in the gradual transformation of societal values.