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Tuesday
Reader Patty R alerted me to a World War II poem that, at the moment, has an ironic second meaning given what is currently happening in Israel and Gaza (more on that in a moment). The Free Press’s Douglas Murry, after voicing the common wisdom that the second world war did not produce great poets in the way the first world war did (Wilfred Owen above all but also Siegfried Sassoon, Alan Seeger, and Rupert Brooke), refutes it by pointing to a poem by Romanian Jewish poet Paul Celan.
Written in 1944 by one who barely escaped death in the camps that claimed the lives of his parents, “Death Fugue” sets up two perspectives that (as in a fugue) work contrapuntally. One the one hand, there is the “man in the house,” the camp commander, who “gifts us a grave in the air” (the cremated bodies) and who idealizes the “golden hair Margarete,” symbol of German womanhood. On the other, there are his prisoners, who are forced to dig their graves in a dance of death. Shulamit, the beloved in the Song of Songs, mourns her people, covering her hair with ashes. Meanwhile milk, which should sustain us when we awake in the morning, has turned black and treacherous, and the prisoners are forced to drink it at all times of the day and night.
I find the poem ironic since Israel is currently meting out death itself in Gaza. I say this knowing full well that Israel has the right to defend itself against Hamas’s terror attacks, that Hamas fully desires to wipe Israel off the map, and that Israel’s current actions are a far cry from Hitler’s methodical extermination of the Jews. There are checks against genocide within Israel, a democracy, that are not to be found within its enemies. But those important qualifiers aside, I also know that, just as the United States lost more than it achieved in the way it struck back at Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, so Benjamin Netanyahu’s overreach is blackening Israel in the eyes of the world. And that’s not even to mention how he’s turning a blind eye to increasingly militant Israeli settlers in the West Bank.
But we don’t have to take sides in the current conflict to acknowledge the universal message in “Death Fugue.” When horror is meted out to innocent civilians, whether Israeli or Palestinian, they all drink black milk.
Death Fugue
By Paul Celan
Trans. Pierre JorisBlack milk of morning we drink you evenings
we drink you at noon and mornings we drink you at night
we drink and we drink
A man lives in the house he plays with the snakes he writes
he writes when it darkens to Deutschland your golden hair Margarete
he writes and steps in front of his house and the stars glisten and he whistles his dogs to come
he whistles his jews to appear let a grave be dug in the earth
he commands us play up for the danceBlack milk of dawn we drink you at night
we drink you mornings and noontime we drink you evenings
we drink and we drink
A man lives in the house he plays with the snakes he writes
he writes when it turns dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margarete
Your ashen hair Shulamit we dig a grave in the air there one lies at easeHe calls jab deeper into the earth you there and you other men sing and play
he grabs the gun in his belt he draws it his eyes are blue
jab deeper your spades you there and you other men continue to play for the danceBlack milk of dawn we drink you at night
we drink you at noon we drink you evenings
we drink you and drink
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamit he plays with the snakesHe calls out play death more sweetly death is a master from Deutschland
he calls scrape those fiddles more darkly then as smoke you’ll rise in the air
then you’ll have a grave in the clouds there you’ll lie at easeBlack milk of dawn we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Deutschland
we drink you evenings and mornings we drink and drink
death is a master from Deutschland his eye is blue
he strikes you with lead bullets his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his dogs on us he gifts us a grave in the air
he plays with the snakes and dreams death is a master from Deutschlandyour golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamit
A passage from W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” which Murray wrote about a few weeks ago, comes to mind here as I think of the attack and counterattack we have been witnessing in the Middle East:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Murray objects to the sentiment since he believes it removes accountability from the perpetrator. Was Germany justified in invading Poland because of the Treaty of Versailles, he asks. People who desire bloodshed, however, can always look into the past to find reasons. Bosnian Serbs justified slaughtering Srebrenica Muslims because Turks had slaughtered Serbs in the 1389 Battle of Kosovo.
But as a fact rather than a justification, it’s hard to argue with what we all know: as often as not, evil acts trigger reciprocal evil acts. After 9-11, the U.S. engaged in torture and extra-judicial imprisonment while members of its military committed war crimes. Following its own 9-11, Israel is in danger of going down a similar path.