Question

Analysis of death fugue

Answer 1

The first stanza is an exposition of the time, space, and place of the death camp. The poem’s narrator speaks for a collective and condemned “we” who dig graves from morning to night. The repetitiveness of time is revealed in the first two lines of the poem: “daybreak” is followed by “sundown,” which is followed respectively by “noon,” “morning,” and “night” again. Time has ceased to flow with distinction for these workers of the death factory. Meanwhile, the officer who is responsible for keeping the gravediggers in line is seen writing letters home to Germany. That he corresponds nightly with the motherland indicates that the camps are outside Germany.

Each subsequent stanza reveals the cruelly civic and barbaric nature of the camps. Every image presented is “answered” by an opposing one. The golden hair of Margarete from Germany, for example, contrasts with the “ashen” hair of the Jew Shulamith. Daybreak soon becomes dusk or “sundown”; the sound of the spades hitting dirt is juxtaposed against the sound of Jews forced to sing and dance as they dig; the “black milk of daybreak” that characterizes the sky under which the Jews dig is contrasted with the starry and brilliant night under which the officer writes home.

The sharp distinctions between the condemned Jews and the Germans in the opening stanzas emphasize the relationship between the victims and their oppressors. As the poem progresses, the relationship intensifies. The officer “calls out more darkly” and demands that the condemned “jab deeper into the earth.” The swifter the commands, the more quickly the condemned must act in their movements toward death. In order to hasten their final annihilation, the officer steps out of his house and moves closer to the condemned; he stops and gives himself the necessary distance to fire his “leaden bullets” at any who disobey him. The rest will be gassed to death in the crematorium.

In the last stanza, the separation between the dead and those responsible for death is expressed in the even number of lines describing each. The first half of the stanza reiterates the scene of the gravediggers, while the second half cruelly crowns death as “a master from Germany.” This phrase is repeated as the speaker faces the point of death (signified by the point of the gun). The last lines shift back to contrasting the hair of Margarete with that of Shulamith; with the striking contrast of each with regard to life and death, this image expresses the final tendrils of death.

The musical structure, as well as the allusion to music within the poem, belies the anguish of death, particularly the mass deaths in the concentration camps. Some have objected to the poet’s “aestheticizing” the death camps, charging Celan with the audacity to write lyric poetry after the Holocaust. Others perceive that the death of Celan’s parents in Transnistria compelled the poet to transpose personal anguish into art, as this early poem suggests.

In fact, the systematic repetition and the musical aspects of the poem indicate that the condemned are no longer in control of life. Their activities are as mindless as their forced and mechanized behavior is soulless. They “speak” and “think” in run-on phrases, and the poem literally reflects their mental and physical deterioration. They dig graves and are forced to sing and dance even as they prepare for death; in the final coup de grâce, they beg for death so they can disappear into nothingness. Ironically, they sing for death in order to escape from death.

With the exception of stanzas 3 and 5 (which serve as the “counterpoint” in the musical fugue structure), the second half of each stanza shifts from the viewpoint of the condemned to the officer and what he represents—Nazi Germany. These sections reinforce the oppressiveness of the concentration camp. Each is as repetitive as the first section, but with a difference, since here, the officer acts as an agent of death. His power over the condemned can be seen in the variety of terrors he is capable of causing: “whistles his Jews,” “commands us strike up for the dance,” “grabs his iron,” “plays with the serpents,” “strikes you with leaden bullets,” and “sets his pack on us.” If the condemned have only one course available to them, it is the task of the officer to both hasten and torment them toward this end.