Er ruft spielt süsser den Tod der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland er ruft streicht dunkler die Geigen dann steigt ihr als Rauch in die Luft dann habt ihr ein Grab in den Wolken da liegt man nicht eng He shouts play death more sweetly death is a master from Germany he shouts scrape darker the strings then you rise like smoke into the air then you have a grave in the clouds one lies there not straitened

The German language is essential to Celan's vision, and it is still his native tongue (John Felstiner's translation derives its power from letting successively longer parts revert to the original). As such, it provides a possible site of German-Jewish "dialogue," if that is what is desired. One recalls that a German artist does engage in dialogue with Celan's poem: Anselm Kiefer's paintings encode onto gigantic canvases the women in the poem, the Biblical beauty Shulamith, rendered ashen-haired, prematurely aged by hatred, burnt by the crematorium, desexualized, killed, turned to smoke, and Goethe's golden-haired young Margarethe, forever stigmatized and stained by connection to the SS officer writing home to her, by her Aryan-ness, her beauty and youth themselves an accusation now against her. Kiefer's flames and dark, arched halls, desolate fields, skies of lead, physically brutalized canvases, make the same unimaginable reality visible that Celan perceived as the unspeakable, and managed to put into words.

It is not that there cannot be a German-Jewish dialogue. It is not even a matter of breaking taboos. The fact is that Benjamin Geissler is simply banal, mediocre: he cannot rise to his subject, so he descends to scandal. In the end, his is a totalitarian art: flat, strident, mendacious, titillating, boring.

4.     Return

The frescoes from Drohobycz, or as much as them as could be recovered, are where they should be. But the wandering of Bruno Schulz' spirit continues, to the extent that his life and art are exploited by opportunists for whom he has become suddenly a Polish writer whose Jewish identity is relevant only to the manner of his murder, by ideologues of the new anti-Semitism who manipulate his memory to exculpate Germany and delegitimize Israel, and by Arab and other apologists of a universal Diaspora, for whom the history of Eastern European Jewry is read, perversely, as an argument for the perpetuation of Jewish homelessness and powerlessness. I understand how a person habituated to reason who, beset by a seemingly endless and ubiquitous hatred, might concede against all evidence that he must be somehow guilty; how when his most generous responses fail to achieve reconciliation, he may conceive a death wish. The fallacy is plain: reason cannot encounter unreason.

Thus it is appropriate and reasonable for a good man take up arms and fight the monsters engendered by the sleep of reason. Hasbara and hagana: speak the truth and defend yourself! If a man does not do this, then his mind has already been defeated, and the destruction of his life must inevitably follow. To the extent that I and my colleagues fail to confront ceremonies of hatred and historical distortion like the evening at Harvard, we join the company of cowards. It is our ignominious silence, or, worse, our self-effacing concessions to unreason and violence, that enable the death fugue to grow louder, and louder. Posle draki ne mashut kulakami, a friend said to me later: "Don't shake your fist after the fight's already over."

I wonder, Bruno Schulz, had you lived, would you have scrawled the Shema' onto the endpapers of a notebook and drowned yourself a few years later in the Seine, like Paul Celan? Let the name and memory be erased of those who played their Harvard death fugue over your bones. How I want to see you alive and your exile at an end, painting murals of your fairy tales at an art school, in a nursery, in a country I have seen, of blue skies and golden stones, where the lemon trees bloom, for your children. They laugh with delight, and, with love, you walk with them all around you, and treat them to hamburgers.

[1]       [2]       [3]       [4]       5 Upper image: Anselm Kiefer, Dein goldenes Haar, Margarethe (1981) Lower image: Anselm Kiefer, Dein aschenes Haar, Sulamit (1981)

James R. Russell is Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard University.

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