Analysis Of Paul Celan's Poem 'Todesfuge'

It was always dark in the ghettos where the Jews were kept. Night fell before anyone knew. Winter arrived and no one was told. The bones chilled in the silent darkness of the cold arctic air. The Jews died. Death came as a master from Germany. The men and women, packed like sardines in the gas chambers, spaceless, could not find their own shadows. They had lost their shadows, they had lost their names, their lord, their everything. Shadows were left only to be spoken about and even thirty years after the end of suffering, the echoes, for some, never went away. Paul Celan was one of them. A survivor, a Jew, a poet who carried the weight of six million shadows till he was not able to bear it any longer. He committed suicide.

In Celan, we have a poet who always “felt a funeral” in his brain. Like Jim Morrison, and Van Gogh (as some critics have pointed out), his was a tormented soul striving for escape in expression. For Celan, like Van Gogh, the sadness lasted forever.

His first published poem “Todesfuge” remains to this day his most anthologized poem. “Fugue of Death”, as it has been translated in English, is poem where silence is shared more than speech is, where the poet fails to punctuate, where he shivers, stammers; it is a poem where language dies. We are offered a glimpse of the most horrendous, the most excruciating, and the most unimaginable of experiences. We are offered to glance at the