An Unresolvable Dramaturgy

Abstract

This paper proposes that a rich and nuanced understanding of the kinds of ruptures art might be capable of can be achieved through an analysis of Dennis Del Favero's video work Todtnauberg. This work is concerned with the meeting between the Jewish poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger in the Todtnauberg Forest in 1967. Del Favero takes this actual historical event and carefully imagines what might have transpired between the two figures. Through beautifully rendered scenes we see and hear Celan's longing and his repeated appeals to Heidegger to explain (or apologise for) his allegiance with the Nazi regime. As Todtnauberg unfolds its dramaturgy of rupture positions us to reflect upon the concepts of responsiveness and judgment as they pertain to Celan and Heidegger but also to reflect, more broadly, on the significance of the act of responding to the call of the other. This, I argue, is the work's gift to us.

Notes

1 There is very little information about what the two men talked about. However, we do know that Celan wrote to his wife Gisèle Celan-Lestrange shortly after the encounter, stating that he and Heidegger ‘had a very serious conversation in words that were unmistakable’. He also explained that Herr Neumann ‘who was a witness, told me that for him this conversation had an epoch-making aspect to it’ (Celan cited in Lyon 2006: 165, my emphasis).

2 Heidegger was a financial member of the NSDAP from 1933 to 1945.

3 John Felstiner states: ‘Elie Wiesel ranks Celan among “the greatest and most moving Jewish poets of our turbulent time.” George Steiner sets him “at the summit of German (perhaps of modern European) poetry.” … “Among poets of the past, says Helen Vendler, Celan is our greatest poet since Yeats” while Harold Bloom calls him the “astonishing … Celan”’ (Felstiner 2001a: xxii).

4 Living in Bukovina meant that he was exposed to a wide range of languages, including Ukrainian, Romanian, German, Swabian and Yiddish. While he was fluent in Romanian, his mother insisted that he grew up speaking ‘a correct literary German’ at home (Felstiner 2001b: 6). Celan had a deep love of language, reading and translating, and he began to write poetry at about the age of fifteen or sixteen. He had a fairly uneventful childhood, although things began to change for Celan and the people of Bukovina as the threat of war increased in the late 1930s.

5 ‘Todesfuge’ was Celan's first published poem and his first using the name Celan. It was first published in Romanian in 1947, although Celan stated that the poem had been written in 1945. For more information, see Felstiner (2001b: 26–7).

6 See Lyon for a detailed study of this relationship.

7 In an email exchange with the author about this paper, Dennis Del Favero explained that the ‘smiling children in the work are Joseph and Madda Goebbels’ children extracted from the home movie they made for Joseph's 45th birthday in 1942’.

8 For more information on Dennis Del Favero's work, see: Del Favero, (2014).

9 There is in fact a double sense of distance or of missing contact with the figures at play here. We are neither co-present (spatio-temporally) with Heidegger or ‘Heidegger’ nor are we with Celan or ‘Celan’. This double distancing reinforces the sense of the void that opens between the spectators and the work.

10 In 1966 Heidegger gave an interview to Der Spiegel on his views on condition that the interview be published posthumously. In this interview Heidegger does not provide any satisfactory explanation about his involvement in the NSDAP. For a transcript of the interview see Sheehan (1981: 45-67).

11 There is another creative work about the meeting of Celan and Heidegger. It is a radio essay by Jean-Luc Nancy. See Nancy (2011) that reflects on (without providing answers to) the meeting of the two figures.

12 Celan wrote the poem ‘Todtnauberg’ about his visit to Heidegger's hut and he had a bibliophile edition sent to Heidegger. It contains an ‘urgent personal appeal’ to Heidegger to speak about his position in relation to the Holocaust and the NSDAP. The poem expresses a desire for an ‘undelayed coming word in the heart’ (Celan cited in Lyon 2006: 188). Heidegger did respond to this poem by writing his own ‘Foreword to the Poem “Todtnauberg”’ but this work did not contain the explanation that Celan was hoping for. In fact in later versions of the poem Celan removed the word ‘undelayed’.

13 There is an extensive body of writing about Heidegger's refusal to publicly apologize for his membership of the NSDAP. Philosophers including Jürgen Habermas, Emmanuel Levinas, Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida, Hannah Arendt, Jan Patočka and Richard Rorty (among many others) have written on this.

14 I am very grateful to Peta Bowden for helping me to understand (in more detail) Heidegger's notion of Being.

15 From the poem ‘Todtnauberg’ by Celan; see Note 11.

16 In response to a draft of this paper Peta Bowden pointed out that because being is a ‘gift’ (in the sense that it is what is given by Being) for Heidegger, Todtnauberg could be read as a work that ‘responds in Heidegger's receptive creative way to Being’. In this regard then she explains ‘it might be seen as a gift in Heidegger's terms, too, because it brings to light the truth of our ultimate existence.’