Liberties

In the spring of 2024 I taught a comparative literature class at Columbia University called Unland: Writing Utopias. The word Unland is a neologism of the German-Jewish poet Paul Celan, from his poem “Hawdalah” from 1963. Unland, in my reading, could refer to a decimated postwar geography that is no longer recognizable as itself. It could refer to the ghoulish moral transformation of a polity like Germany, whose population had become “unpeople” (Unmenschen) — people who commit heinous acts and deny them, who are haunted by their crimes. The German word alludes to the Greek etymology of utopia, ou topos, a no-place that is ever-emergent, unconnected to any existing political entity. Unland struck me as connoting a tentative “not yet,” a place in formation, like the nascent State of Israel in 1963 and perhaps more aptly like poetry, a place where one exists as if “dreamed.” Here one can convene with murdered friends and family, parlay with an inscrutable divinity, hold and cherish words independent from their worn-out everyday use. Through this sacred intentionality the post-Shoah poet grasps for scraps of healing in the face of unspeakable loss. The poet in the rubble strives for new realms, where contradiction hangs together, where life and justice are honored, while at the same time casting critical, even satirical aspersions at the apocalyptically failed politics of the present. 

In other classes I taught, Celan appeared in the context of German postwar writers, in a larger arc of German-Jewish writing from the Enlightenment to the present. But in this class I relished the opportunity to place Celan in a culturally heterogeneous and transhistorical context, in which science fiction mingled with highbrow literature. We read speculative writers whose depiction of reality was touched by dystopian or utopian alterations, who found refuge in writing itself as a realm suspended from the invariable violence of the real world to which they respond. Touching off from Celan’s poem, we read The Castle by Franz Kafka, “Uqbar, Tlön, Tertius Orbis” by Jorge Luis Borges, and works by Georg Büchner, Shakespeare, Theodor W. Adorno, Italo Calvino, Ursula K. Le Guin, Stanisław Lem, Samuel Delany, and Donna J. Haraway. 

I found the syllabus to be one of the most rewarding and intriguing I had ever taught, and I had a sensitive and highly engaged group of eighteen students representing many academic disciplines and countries of origin. After teaching in Columbia’s Core curriculum I found it gratifying to work closely with texts by Kafka and Celan, paying careful attention to the violent antiJewish context that shaped their writings, while also engaging both of them as “world” writers who set formal and thematic precedents for writers in many languages. Celan, as I was coming to see him, offered a unique link between canons that were deeply Jewish and deeply Western. He was not a Jew who had shed his “accidental” biography in order to join a wider discourse; rather, the precision and subtlety of his Jewish references, the delicacy of his language, and the necessity for clear context about the Holocaust seemed to make his writing more rather than less universal. 

Yet the spring of 2024 was one of the most challenging and painful semesters I ever spent in a university setting. As the war between Israel and Gaza worsened in the Middle East, Columbia’s campus became a global flashpoint for its vociferous protest movement, whose organizers possessed a newfound faith, in the wake of the brutal Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, that “anti-colonial” violence was not only justified, but a most effective tool for bringing a just future to Israel-Palestine. In addition to the protest movement, the university’s administration was under scrutiny for its failure to set a tone of civil, compassionate, and informed discourse, at a moment when students connected to all sides of the war were in deep pain. They pursued a strategy of police crackdowns that incensed the university community and escalated the conflict between protesters and the administration. 

On April 30, 2024, this escalation came to a head when activists forcefully occupied Hamilton Hall, the home of my department at the time, draping a banner that renamed the building for Hind Rajab, a six-year-old girl who had been killed by the Israeli military in January. Banners were unfurled from all sides of the building, including “Free Palestine” written in English and Arabic, “Intifada,” and “Glory to the Martyrs: Tortuguita Vive, La Lucha Sigue,” referring to the police killing of Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, an environmental activist in Atlanta. The police presence was high around campus, and an atmosphere of chaos, confusion, and joy spread through Morningside Heights. There was a feeling that the orderly rule of the university had been breached and, for a short while, the protest movement had wrested control. 

Around 3 PM that afternoon, I stood at the corner of Amsterdam Avenue and 116th Street, steps from my office in Deutsches Haus, and looked on dumbstruck as a crowd of some three hundred protesters congregated at the base of Hamilton Hall outside the campus gates and erupted in ecstatic cheers as a masked protester appeared on the roof with a billowing Palestinian flag. Helicopters circled above and dozens of newscasters documented (and helped to comprise) the spectacle. 

That evening the New York Police Department was called in for a massive evacuation, with many hundreds of officers in full riot gear. Students who came to see me later in the week expressed deep fear, even trauma, from having witnessed a swarm of police envelop the campus and the SWAT team break down the doors to Hamilton Hall, throwing flash grenades and — as we later found out — accidentally firing a bullet. Around this time of the semester we had been reading The Futurological Congress by Stanisław Lem, a dystopian satire of totalitarian police violence in the face of earth’s crippling overpopulation, including bombing campaigns that drop drugs to neurologically wire the population to experience happiness. 

From this point onward, the social and infrastructural fabric of campus was so torn that it was impossible to teach as usual. Classes had been moved to Zoom and many students were no longer coming to campus. The precarity of my position as a fixed-term postdoctoral lecturer was intensifying as I navigated the anemic job market: I hesitated greatly, given my conflict-averse temperament and my disappointment in the university, to lead a frank or revealing discussion with my class about the conflict in the Middle East and on campus. Events featuring Israelis and Palestinians in conversation had been vigorously protested. A few months earlier the Boycott Divestment Sanction movement had called for the boycott of a prominent grassroots movement of Palestinian Israelis and Jewish Israelis organizing in opposition to the war in Gaza, the occupation of the West Bank, and the Hamas captivity of Israeli hostages in Gaza. Friends seeking to bring members of this group to Columbia decided to do so only on an unadvertised, invitation-only basis, out of fear that a publicized event would attract disruption and condemnation. 

I held several strange “hybrid” sessions, with a group of students on the screen and a group at the table in our windowless basement classroom. Around this time one of the leaders of the most active protest group, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, was expelled from campus for one of its members saying, on camera, “You’re lucky that I’m not just going out and killing Zionists.” It was then that I decided, reluctantly, no longer to avoid the subject and to hold a discussion with my class, to share some of my own views, which I had not often seen expressed by faculty or campus leaders. I knew I had students in the course with a range of perspectives — some active in the protest movement and some not. After the encampments had been created one student wrote to me to plead that we move the class to Butler lawn in solidarity (“It’s time to take a stand,” he exhorted). I felt respect, admiration, and even affection for this eclectic group, and for the seriousness they had brought to our discussions of challenging, often abstract texts. 

With reference to Kafka and Celan, I tried to explain the metaphysical and political significance that the creation of the State of Israel holds for most Jews, including me, while also expressing my profound reservations about the way that Israel was conducting the war, and my anger toward the cynicism, opportunism, and religious extremism that propelled the governing coalition. I expressed concerns with the protesters’ explicit and implicit appeals to violence, and I emphasized that refusing to stand in solidarity with them does not mean that one is complicit with war crimes in Gaza, or that one doesn’t care. I emphasized that the language used by protesters is consequential; that I felt the need to cultivate a new and productive language — perhaps connected to the poetic dimension of Unland — that can allow roughly seven million Jews and seven million Palestinians,  in some configuration, to peacefully share a land. In my view, the callous language from Columbia protesters risked inflaming and entrenching the wounds of violent conflict. 

I was surprised by how sensitive and open my students were, how genuine their questions and observations were, as if they had begun to absorb our writers’ delicate approach to language. A Jewish student thanked me profusely for my words, particularly on the importance of careful nonviolent language. I was approached by several students who had been involved with the protests, including the person who had implored me to “take a stand” but had become increasingly disillusioned by the movement’s militant tone and incendiary actions. My words seemed to have opened up a space for them to voice their discomfort. One student expressed dismay that in order to enter the protest encampment, guards demanded that visitors pledge that they “are not Zionists” and that they are “committed to the liberation of Palestine.” She was thinking especially about the exclusion of Zionist-identifying friends who she strongly disagreed with but valued as interlocutors. Some of the students, I am sure, were confused or angered by what I had said. But my general perception was that it was a relief (rather than another burden) to air and discuss these issues.  

It was disconcerting to me that even with the multiyear humanities Core Curriculum, and with some of the world’s leading experts on Israel-Palestine on faculty, members of the Columbia community seemed to hold such a flat understanding of the historical and cultural meaning of Zionism. Columbia takes pride in the rigor, the nuance, and the heterogeneity of its discourse, and in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in 2020 the humanities underwent a period of profound self-reflection, resulting in a commitment to greater representation, context, and sensitivity toward oppressed and marginalized peoples. As much as I learned during that period — and as much as I appreciated the attempts at greater inclusivity — I harbored reservations that the charge toward representational parity was being conducted with a sense of moral panic, even cynicism. At their worst, the sweeping interventions in the humanities approached literature as a flat conduit for sociological and historical information. The preoccupation with categorizing texts by their author’s identity — something we know, and that we know we know — risks losing touch with facets of the text that we continuously do not know: their multifariousness, their emergent and retrograde tendencies which reveal themselves across time, their fundamental mystery. 

Throughout those years, Jewish experience, the history of the Shoah, and the intellectual history of Zionism were not considered worthy subjects for inclusion or “rehabilitation.” Outside Jewish studies, the concept of Zionism was not allotted anything close to the wild multifariousness that, for instance, Derek Penslar elaborates in his fine book Zionism: An Emotional State — as an ideology that continues, like many ideologies, to shift meaning over time, and can simultaneously span from far-left binationalism and Jewish fascism, fervent religiosity and staunch secularism, political and cultural forms of self-determination, and often odd mixtures of these poles. 

I was also not confident that students had a robust understanding for the massive and violent antisemitism that Zionism developed alongside in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Throughout my years as a graduate instructor at Columbia, I felt increasingly less confident that students would come into my classes on German language and literature or my first-year Core Humanities classes knowing basic details about the murder of European Jews during the Holocaust. My subjective impression was that this knowledge was decreasing during the roughly ten years I taught at Columbia, from 2015 to 2024. 

This knowledge gap felt especially conspicuous in Core Humanities classes where, in 2021, significant syllabus changes had been instated to remediate the “Great Books” with representation by female, LGBTQ+, African American, Asian American, Latin American, and Arabic Islamic authors (a strategy that I felt was at once necessary and dubious). Kafka, added as a representative of “East European Jewry,” was included in the overstuffed syllabus, but many instructors remarked that they did not understand why he had been chosen and that they were dropping “The Metamorphosis.” An executive decision soon followed to drop Kafka, leaving this version of the class with no Jewish authors, and no reference to the Shoah. (And, of course, no Kafka!) In 2020 a faculty petition that helped to catalyze these sweeping revisions bore down on the “Judeo-Christian” bias of the curriculum, a sentiment that I believe was common, in spite of the fact that the course sequestered the Hebrew Bible as a precursor text to Christian and Western literature. In my experience, the Core provided instructors-in-training and their teaching community with only a few resources to identify and engage with anti-Judaism, specifically in readings from the New Testament and Augustine, and generally in relation to the supersessionist teleology of the syllabus, which synthesizes the Greek tradition with the Hebrew Bible. 

Over the four years I taught Literature Humanities, I added Celan’s poem “Death Fugue,” from 1948, which, in its grave juxtaposition of two women, the Aryan-Germanic-Greco Margarete and the Hebraic Shulamit, and in the historical context necessary for studying it, was the only text that challenged and undermined the christological Greco-Hebrew synthesis. In the late spring of 2024, as I navigated topical discussions with my upper-level Unland seminar, I also played Celan’s haunting recitation of “Todesfugue” for my first-year students in the Core, which ends with the unforgettable lines: 

your golden hair Margarete

your ashen hair Shulamit

 

dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Sulamith

Shulamit, a stand-in for the Hebraic tradition, finally and ironically, in the wake of unfathomable death, gets the last word. Celan referred to the poem as an “epitaph,” a grave for those who had none, including his mother. Yet in my reading — and one that especially emerged with my Core students, who had studied both the Song of Songs and Goethe’s Faust: Part One — the story of Margarete and Shulamit is not closed. The absence of punctuation makes us think about what could have been between these female-personified traditions, and what could yet be. 

By including Celan’s poem — perhaps the greatest work of literature to emerge from the Shoah — I hoped to render legible the violence that had been committed against Jews in the catastrophe, and the legacy of antisemitism, but also to ask about how we can rewrite the relation between the Greco-Christian and Jewish traditions. Is there any way that Margarete and Shulamit can come into relation in a manner that is not determined through violent hierarchy? Can one find the possibility for an authentic relationship between these traditions, one that now must frankly acknowledge the mass violence committed against Jews? The figures of Margarete and Shulamit echo the centuries-old anti-Jewish archetypes Ecclesia and Synogoga, two women incorporated into Christian iconography from at least the fifteenth century onward to reinforce the inferiority of Judaism. Synogoga is typically depicted as a promiscuous ugly woman, often with a broken staff, bending against the crowned, glowing, and golden-haired Ecclesia, representing the righteousness of Christianity.

Faust: Part One and the Song of Songs were two other texts that had been taken out of the curriculum, but I continued to teach them, at least in part for how they set up our reading of Celan. Margarete, in Faust: Part One, is of course a female victim of male violence, someone who is catastrophically manipulated and misled by Faust. Shulamit of the Song of Songs is also a female character who is abused, who is beaten by the “watchmen of the walls” of Jerusalem, whose sexual chastity is smugly policed by her brothers. Both texts can plausibly be interpreted as sympathetic portraits of women striving for sexual autonomy in the face of brutal and hypocritical male chauvinism, which operates on a personal and social level.

These literary connotations invite links between the Jewish Shulamit and the German Margarete; they indicate a shared thread, one that invites new points of connection. The histories of these women hint at a female solidarity that cuts across violently imposed racial and ideological categories, suggesting alternate ways that stories can be told; connections that can be broken or linked. Like the geographical metaphor of “Meridian” that Celan later took up, the women are points that can be brought into relation variously. However much the poem rebukes the canon, represented by grim references to Bach, Goethe, and the Bible, at a moment of seemingly irrevocable historical violation, the ending leaves a gaping ambiguity — a faint sense that the attempt to hold these archetypes in relation cannot and must not be in vain. 

“Don’t Split off No from Yes,” Celan would later write, a sentiment that is perhaps already incipient in “Death Fugue,” which accompanies its resounding rebuke of anti-Judaic canonicity with an aura of uncertainty, a refusal to give up on tradition as a site for ever new relationships, ever new (and perhaps ever unfulfilled) connections. The poem lays bare the violent governing binary of German and Jew, yet it also refuses to capitulate to this binary, tentatively imagining different ways in which these identities could be (or could have been) configured. 

My German department was not much stronger than the general curriculum in its engagement with the Holocaust, the history of anti-Judaism, and the rise of Zionism in the German-speaking sphere. The Jewish German experience was not always but frequently subordinated to the Marxist and anti-fascist tradition, the legacy of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German humanism, or discourses such as affect studies, media archaeology, and, increasingly, environmental humanities. Over my years of doctoral study there I was mentored by professors who modeled delicate close reading, made the pleasure of reading and critical thinking feel contagious, and indelibly conveyed how much literature matters. Yet I was concerned that, as a whole, the department tended toward a redemptive reading of German culture, regarding the Nazi era either as noncentral to their intellectual interests or an aberration from an intact German critical theory-humanist legacy. My readings of Celan, whose writings are anything but intact — fragile, skeptical, in a shaken multilingual German — drew me ever further afield from the department, and from a coherent German language tradition. My feeling was that positive Jewish theology was frowned upon; Judaism was invited when it fit into existing canons and agendas, often as an identity-card that lent moral weight to the critique of fascism, or anti-humanism.

A figure such as Gershom Scholem, the German-Jewish-Israeli scholar of Jewish mysticism and a titanic cultural thinker and critic, was never taught, in spite of having produced an extensive body of German-language philosophical, theological, and literary-critical writings. However Zionistic or theological his ideas, Scholem in my opinion should be considered as part of the same intellectual milieu as his friends and interlocutors Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, rather than an aberrant appendage on this club. I was told by a professor whose perspective I valued immensely that Benjamin’s late-life turn to theology was a metaphor, not to be taken literally, and perhaps also a sign of his despair, an implied intellectual lapse. Benjamin and Adorno were figures who were embraced at Columbia, and with abandon, as long as they were engaged as predominantly secular, left-associated Jewish critics. By leaving Scholem out of our syllabi, our faculty missed an opportunity not least to explore a crucial aspect of Benjamin’s writings; and more largely to understand how Zionism and a commitment to Jewish tradition emerged within the context of German literature and thought. 

By the time the department’s graduate students had erupted into a fevered, hectoring anti-Zionism in the spring of 2024 — demanding statements and petitions from their faculty — I couldn’t help but feel that this was a volatile return of the repressed, the politicized eruption of a taboo topic. Had Jewish perspectives, including a frank and nuanced account of the cultural history of Zionism, been more thoroughly integrated into the curriculum — perhaps a responsibility for German Studies — we might have found pathways to a more constructive and inclusive mode of activism in the aftermath of October 7, and amid ongoing Israeli violence.

After the police raid on Hamilton Hall, emails from the administration about university policies were scattered and incoherent. No one knew if we were supposed to cancel finals or keep them. For the last seminar of my Unland course, I decided to hold class as a picnic in Morningside Park. While it was not originally on the syllabus, I taught selections from Paul Celan’s posthumous volume Zeitgehöft, or Homestead of Time, from 1976. My intuition was that these poems could contextualize aspects of Zionism but also model a different mode of political and interpersonal discourse, one that relished slowness, allowed pain to resonate, and invited space for contradiction. Zeitgehöft includes poems written in the aftermath of a trip to Israel in October 1969 and in reference to the love affair that had taken place on this trip with Ilana Shmueli, an acquaintance from his native Czernowitz whose family escaped Romania for mandatory Palestine in 1944. Several of my students had already left New York City. It was a still Thursday morning with a clear blue sky. After eating fruit and bagels, we sat in a circle and quietly started to work through the packet of poems. 

Celan’s oeuvre is marked by at least two historically and politically resonant extramarital affairs, one, toward the beginning of his career, with the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann, the daughter of an early member of the Austrian National Socialist Party, and later, shortly before his death, with the Israeli poet Ilana Shmueli. Celan’s correspondence with each of them, published posthumously, reveal the great extent to which his poetry was composed in the intimate context of these relationships. In an early poem dedicated to Bachmann, “In Ägypten” (“In Egypt”), the speaker seems to suggest that an erotic connection to a “stranger woman” is necessary for memorializing murdered Jewish women, represented by the biblical names “Ruth, Noemi, Miriam.” Now, in preparation for his trip to Israel, Celan explores what kind of memory — what kind of poetry — is (or is not) possible in an endogamous romance with an Israeli woman from his birthtown of Czernowitz. 

Shmueli and Celan reconnected in preparation for his trip to Israel, his only one, where she served as a metaphysical and touristic host, especially in their walks around Jerusalem. Their letters, and the poetry they exchanged, reveal a powerful yearning, but are marked by a sense for the relationship’s inherent impossibility. Writing shortly after returning to Paris from Israel, Celan suggests an oscillating ability to give himself over to their love: “I wanted to start a longer letter, to warn you, about me and about us — but then your face appeared, as I saw it in Jerusalem and in Neve Avivim, and I know: what brought us together is a first and primary thing — Your face, Ilana. Your Jewish face. Your face.” Perhaps an indication of his mental unwellness, he conveys longing matched with reticence.  

Celan’s reservations echo Adorno’s concerns about whether someone can “live after Auschwitz,” erotic passion serving as a metonym for life itself. Giving oneself over fully to love could be understood as a betrayal of the murdered dead. On the other hand, this formulation to Shmueli, emphasizing an Erstes und Vorerstes, a “first and primary thing,” indicates exactly the kind of singular Jewish affiliation that a thinker such as Adorno (or Derrida) would eschew. Both of them challenge a unified “first thing,” Jewish or otherwise — something that Celan clearly longs for, even if he is incapable of embracing it. 

As several scholars have noted, Shmueli becomes for Celan a proxy for the State of Israel itself. His hesitancy in regard to their relationship can perhaps be understood as analogous to a general hesitation toward Israel as a site of Jewish manifestation. In formulations that, at worst, essentialize myriad modes of Judaism, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has argued that the advent of the State of Israel is a betrayal of the longstanding Jewish orientation toward withheld messianic promise. “Exile,” he writes, “is what distinguishes Jew and Christian, indeed the Jew who is loyal to his exile negates the claim that the world has entered into the age of Grace and salvation…choosing to be a Jew is the same as choosing exile.” In such a view, the Jewish state erroneously reconfigures a perennial messianic horizon as the material and historical present. For Raz-Krakotzkin and the other post-Zionist and anti-Zionist “exilists,” “choosing exile” is an essential imperative of Judaism. From this perspective, the mainstream Jewish embrace of political Zionism could be seen as a betrayal of something fundamental about Jewishness. This is an ideology that tips Judaism closer to Christianity. 

In his attraction to Shmueli, and to the terrain of Israel, Celan reveals the strong appeal, even the importance of manifestation. Even if Celan tends towards “choosing exile,” his poetry also explores post-exilic Zionist Judaism as a legitimate mode of expression. This understanding is apparent in expressions like “your Jewish face,” written to Shmueli, but also in words like Sabbatglanz (Sabbath-radiance) and Wimpel (pennant), a German-Yiddish wordplay that connotes the orienting, tentatively national masthead pennant of a ship, as well as the Jewish ritual cloth band that swaddles a circumcised infant or a Torah scroll. An affinity for Jewish nationalism can also be heard in his taciturn address to the Hebrew Writer’s Association in Tel Aviv, which expresses “a thankful pride in every green thing planted here that’s ready to refresh anyone who comes by” and “joy in the newly earned, self-discovered, fulfilled word that rushes up to strengthen those who turn toward it.” 

Celan’s writing thus entails an unusual and interesting ideological ambiguity. Its various articulations of irrevocable exile make his poetry appealing to strong critics of Zionism, such as Derrida. At the same time it has a decided interest in Jewish materiality; it engages with, even partakes in the symbolic imagination of Zionism in ways that distinguish it from a principled, coherent embrace of Jewish diasporism. 

Poetry, for Celan, is a site that holds contradictions. In regards to the Zionist imagination, Celan sought to uphold the figurative and liturgical potential of Jerusalem, in accompaniment to its political rebuilding. As a poet, Celan is not apophatically committed to the figurative Jerusalem (and the withheld messiah), against the materialism of Zionism — the position that has become increasingly popular among American Jewish Studies academics and Diasporist critics. His inclinations are oscillating, and he finds room for multiple paradigms simultaneously.

In the context of conversations about Zionism in the aftermath of October 7, 2023, I see this as an unusual, and unusually valuable approach, one that honors the Jewish attraction to Zionism while also keeping in mind the dangerous and corrosive effects of tipping a theological paradigm of the withheld messiah into one of manifest reality. What seems most salutary to me is Celan’s passion for unresolved attraction rather than firm conviction — for impulses, thoughts, feelings, tendencies, explorations, hauntings, wavering along a spectrum, rather than hardened, didactic principles. The poetry is remarkable for the way that it combines thinking with feeling, conviction with not-knowing. 

However much there is to praise about Celan’s approach to the notion of Zion, his writing to and for Ilana Shmueli is flagged by the same male prerogative that wounded Ingeborg Bachmann, and which she protested in several strident unsent letters. Here his writing takes on an especially problematic dimension, as the male question of whether the divine promise of “Israel” can ever be embodied is pursued with Shmueli’s female body as conduit. Responding to Celan’s lines in a love poem — “es stehn / die Geträumten für / die Mitternachtsziffer (the dreamed ones stand for / the midnight numeral)” — Bachmann asks, “Sind wir nur die Geträumten? (Are we only the dreamed ones?),” possibly reading: don’t we also have bodies? Are we not selves whose boundaries remain intact, in spite of so much poetic dissolution? Are you not obligated to attend to me as a woman, as a human being, as a writer? In the case of Bachmann and Shmueli one wonders if a particular woman, the object of Celan’s creative imagination, can withstand the pressure to stand in for any independent metaphysical anchor that affirms life. Is there room for Ilana as a complete, human interlocutor — one who shares the male lyric subject’s boundlessness — or can she only ever serve as a metaphysically charged foil for the poet?  

The poem “Die Pole,” translated here by John Felstiner, was written in November 1969, part of a suite of poems composed in Paris after Celan’s return from Jerusalem. Felstiner interprets the poles as “all the opposites pulling at [Celan] — female/male, sexual/sacred, present/past, Israel/France, passion/reason, love/loss, free/unfree — ” In German as in English, poles connote charged opposites, in electricity and magnets, but also of course the (magnetically charged) nodes of the planet, which are crucial for navigation and orientation. These poles seem to create an untenable tension, one that is “insurmountable,” yet poles in the plural also connote balance, a dialectical force. This balance is impossible to configure “while we’re awake,” in the conscious world, the world of deliberate action and literal language, of “light” that pressures phenomena into complete knowability. But Celan implies that these wrenching poles — personal, political, and psychological — hang together with some kind of balance in the sleep-world of Jerusalem. 

The sleep that allows “the dreamed ones” to be dreamed is now associated with the Unland of Jerusalem, especially the Gate of Mercy, Sha’ar Ha’Rachamim in Hebrew, a stone-shut gate on the eastern wall of Jerusalem’s Old City that is associated with the arrival of the messiah in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic tradition. It is the filled-in gate that you see clearly from across the top of the Mount of Olives. The Gate of Mercy is a bizarre site that is at once indelibly physical — such that it can be fought over and won — and metaphysical, as in several traditions it links the world as it is to the world beyond. Christians and Muslims generally believe that this is the gate through which Jesus arrived to Jerusalem in the lead-up to his crucifixion, on a donkey, to the adulation of Jerusalemites. In the Islamic tradition, there is an association between the eastern wall of Jerusalem and the “Last Day.” The Arabic name for the gate, Bab al-Rahmah, symbolizes a gate in paradise, or an entry to Mercy. An alternate Arabic name means “The Gateway to Eternal Life.” In the Jewish tradition, this is the gate through which the messiah will enter when he arrives in Jerusalem. The historian and geographer Zev Vilnay mentions, in his Legends of Jerusalem, the famed Jewish traveler Petahiah of Regensburg, who visited Jerusalem in 1187 and left a Hebrew account of his travels.

At Jerusalem there is a gate, and its name is the Gate of Mercy. The gate is full of stone and lime. No Jew, much less a gentile, is permitted to go there. One day the gentiles wished to open this gate, but the whole of Palestine shook from one end to the other, and there arose a great tumult in the city until they ceased. There is a tradition among the Jews that the divine Presence first departed through this gate, and that by the same gate the divine Presence will return…

In the story of Rabbi Petahiah — his name means “God opened” — the Gate is associated with the precursor and successor of historical time; it is a means through which our entire temporal framework is bracketed. 

In a way that echoes parables of Kafka or Agnon, the story indicates a rumbling, violent power associated with an untimely attempt to open the gates. Humans, the story seems to suggest, must not hubristically dismantle the blockages. They comprise our worldly existence, which is altogether threatened when we attempt to clear them. And yet this is a physical location that implies an end to the order of the world as it is; in which the imagination of divine Mercy, a Paradise that is unattainable in the world as we know it, becomes so palpable as to form a presence, one that can shake reality at its foundation. In Celanian fashion, the gate is a stoppage that paradoxically implies an opening, and vice versa. The Gate takes us up to the limits of human experience, exhorting us to hold multiple realities in simultaneity. These realities are blocked from one another yet abut one another so closely that slippage could occur unexpectedly, even unknowingly. 

Celan’s odd use of prepositions and lineation emphasize a blockage that is never, almost, and always an opening. “Wir schlafen hinüber, vors Tor;” “we sleep across, up to the Gate.” The German adverb hinüber implies a passage over, a crossing to the other side. This is also the etymology of the Hebrew word ivrit, which became the name for the language itself, related to avar, a crossing or a traversal, which could refer to Abraham as a migrant who constitutively crosses over the Euphrates river. Hinüber colloquially is associated with a passage into death, an appropriate connotation given the Gate of Mercy’s connection with the “Last Day” and the end of times. 

Celan’s Hinüber unavoidably implies crossing, yet the successive preposition vors indicates a motion up to the seemingly blocked gate. Here we have been merely taken to the gate’s edifice — the crossing of hinüber was perhaps a crossing that preceded the Gate, that only took us to its edge. The combination of the two prepositions leaves us with the strange impression of the Gate remaining both blocked and crossed. This is accentuated by the enjambment of Tor / des Erbarmens, as if Mercy almost does not come. The splitting of the two prepositions echoes the Gate of Mercy’s two blocked doors, which are traditionally the Gate of Repentance and the Gate of Mercy, implying a procession in and out of this Gate to Paradise; a ritual rhythm for crossing the uncrossable. 

Shmueli and Celan avoided visiting the Western Wall of the Temple Mount complex. She writes that Celan referred to “too much sacredness” in regard to the sites that they did not visit, including the Western Wall. Celan’s reference to the Gate of Mercy strikes me as a surrogate reference to the Western Wall, whose symbolism risks a dangerous conflation of liturgy and territorial nationalism. Yet the Gate of Mercy is nevertheless a physical holy site located in post-1967 occupied East Jerusalem. Celan shifts the onus from locations that are fraught with Jewish national significance to one that has an array of messianic symbolism in all the Abrahamic traditions. The Gate of Mercy is material and political, yet it offers room for the messianic to remain withheld. The implied shift from the Western Wall to the Eastern wall of the city betrays a different orientation from mainstream Jewish nationalism, one perhaps associated with a rising, unknown possibility that crosses between Abrahamic faiths.

Reading with my Columbia students in our exterritorial classroom in Morningside Park,  the poems were not mere cultural documents of Zionism, used to expand students’ historical understanding of this movement at a time when it was grievously, even perniciously maligned (although perhaps they did serve this function in that they allowed students to understand, experientially, the spiritual significance of the state of Israel for a Holocaust survivor who finds few scraps of hope and meaning in the postwar period). As deeply ambivalent poetic documents, the texts are not an endorsement of Zionism, neither from the 1920s of Celan’s childhood in Romania, the late 1960s of his visit to Jerusalem, nor the war-torn 2024 in which we encountered them. Celan circles around Zionistic images, seeking nourishment and buoying solidarity, while also eyeing them with suspicion. 

These poems, and perhaps “The Poles” in particular, simply do not fit into the binary categories that were constructed daily on campus that spring: Zionist/anti-Zionist, terrorist/genocidaire, antisemite/social justice fighter. Students had been encouraged to see Zionism and anti-Zionism as a simple matter of right and wrong. The poems open the possibility for multiple simultaneous timelines, multiple simultaneous narratives of suffering. They invite and model how to hold a belief but also to step outside of it, to counter it, to approach a phenomenon from several angles at once, with varying degrees of proximity and sympathy. Moreover, like the tentative solidarity implied between Margarete and Shulamit, the poems beckon for threads that cross between poles and allow for configurations that eschew today’s broken dyads.

Reading against the backdrop of the raging, lethal, and seemingly unceasing bombardment of Gaza, and the seemingly hopeless fate of the scores of Israelis held hostage, I was inclined to treat the poem as offering a messianic alternative to worldly Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian suffering. Like Yehuda Amichai’s poem “Why is Jerusalem Always Two?,” “The Poles” is today impossible to read without thinking about East and West Jerusalem, Israeli and Palestinian Jerusalem. Writing about another poem in the series that plays with the image of the Gate of Mercy, Galili Shahar suggests that references like the Gate of Mercy are shadowed by the Israeli “security barrier” that bisects Palestinian villages and segregates Palestinians and Israelis. “The cry of the poem, the prayer for an opening…is now also associated with these fences and barriers.” Shahar has described the unspoken “third person” of Arabic that appears when German and Hebrew are at play, implying that Celan’s work — so attuned to presences and absences — holds a latent invitation to consider the Palestinian perspective, one that must now be fulfilled.

The messianic dream world that Celan associates with the Gate of Mercy demands a poetic imagination, one distinct from the world of waking thoughts — of statements, arguments, the will to semantic fixity. This is a world of “wandering words,” of words that hold open their capaciousness — their capacity for hope, for refuge, for endogamy, for exogamy, to be weaponized, to have magic and healing. These are words that we find when we sleep hinüber, when we sleep across to the other side. These are words that cross divides and poles, but they remain within a determinate political state — the territorial location of the Gate of Mercy. Yet Israel-Palestine and specifically East Jerusalem could well be deemed an indeterminate political state, one associated with Abrahamic mythology. The Gate triggers a religious imagination in which tribal and historical distinctions are maintained but can dissolve into ever new formations. 

The poles “are in us”: they are in our human communities, our tribes, but they are also in each of us readers. They can be insurmountable, even the prerequisite for violence, if we think only in the logic of separateness, of the daytime, of wakefulness. But there is a mysterious and poetic capacity for them to mingle, through a closed gate that is not really a gate. The gate is associated with God’s mercy, a mercy that allows the violence of human distinction to be released. The Gate allows us, somehow, to maintain the aspect of distinction that gives us meaning, while relieving the aspect of distinction on which violence is propagated and received. Like Celan’s neologism Atemwende, or Breath-turn, a breath that returns, waking and sleeping must continuously circle and accompany one another. The goal cannot be to only live awake, or to only live in possibility, asleep, but for the shadow of each realm to challenge and accompany the other. 

In the aftermath of October 7, 2023, I see these poems as subtly (yes, too subtly) imagining a shared Palestinian and Israeli society. This shared society is a possibility that is as tangible and present as stone, yet as closed shut as the gate of Mercy.  Another poem that refers to the Gate is “Der Königsweg” (“The Kings Way”), translated into Hebrew as Derekh HaMelekh. In addition to its monarchical association, the Hebrew connotes an ideal way of living, perhaps in the sense of the Tao Te Ching, an ancient mystical Chinese text that Celan read closely in German translation. Like the elusive Tao, the King’s Way is “hinter der Scheintur,” or “behind the shine-door, or apparent-door” — meaning it is perennially inaccessible, blocked behind the bricked Gate of Mercy. Yet “behind the door” could also indicate just over there, almost present, about to be with us. 

THE KING’S WAY behind the shine door, 

in front, deathed

round by its counter-

sign, the Lion sign,

 

DER KÖNIGSWEG hinter der Scheintür,

das vom Gegen-

Zeichen umtodete

Löwenzeichen davor, 

The “Scheintür” is a door that appears to exist (and does not), but it is also a “shining” door, a royal door poised at the threshold of new realms, and new secrets. The King’s Way, in its Taoist sense, has many connotations, of holding memory and presence bound together, of a speech that does not “split off no from yes.” It also connotes a polity where the distinctions that predicate Israeli and Palestinian violence have softened. The realm of poetry, love, and memory is, through the Gate of Mercy, woven into an interdenominational hope that the world as it is, ravaged by violence, can be otherwise. Life must find a “counter- / sign [Gegen- / Zeichen] ” —  another realm to accompany it, to enrich and to goad it, to not let it sink into the merely literal. 

While there is disagreement about dating the present-day Gate of Mercy, it is generally thought to have originated in the late Byzantine or early Umayyad period, in the sixth or seventh century. The standing structure is presumably sited on a similar location as the gate that holds messianic significance for Christians of the Second Temple period, and to Jewish legend preceding that time. One archaeologist has argued that the current structure is sited on top of another gate that could be seen if the entire area was excavated. The notion of a (closed) Gate with messianic associations that covers over another unknown gate could uncannily echo the layers of language in Celan’s poetry, where German often stands on top of or adjacent to Biblical and modern Hebrew. This relationship is oppositional and obfuscatory, but the archeological proximity could imply a connective point, a site of confluence. 

The Gate of Mercy archaeologically echoes Celan’s irritating yet productive polysemy. It is indeed a double gate, whose messianic doubling is mirrored in two material portals. In the case of Celan’s Jerusalem poems, I believe that Christian and Islamic messianism, and Christian and Islamic claims to Jerusalem, are invoked as a co-presence with the Jewish claim, in a way that invites new models for political cohabitation and new orientations that move beyond sacred ownership. The messianic realm is associated with a poetic language that both allows for and abrogates distinction. The line “als könnten wir ohne uns wir sein,” or “as if without us we could be we”, often seen in an erotic context, could also be understood as a reorientation toward tribal identities — a hypothetical in which we lose our distinguishing marks yet keep them. 

Celan acknowledges the human importance, even the existential necessity, of both cherishing identity and remaining aware of how identity propagates violence. In a poem that is regarded as his most Zionistic, “Denk Dir,” or “Just Think,” written after the Israeli victory in 1967 and broadcast on Israeli radio, Celan uses the problematic German word Heimat, which connotes a territorialistic sense of home. “Just think: / the Peat-Bog Soldier of Masada / makes a homeland [Heimat] for himself, most / ineffaceably,” Here ostensibly Hebrew soldiers are praised for recovering Heimat, a celebration of Israeli victory that has unavoidably ominous Germanic overtones.

Celan is too aware of the pernicious connotations lingering in nearly all words, and the lingering residue of the Third Reich across the entire German language, to use a word such as Heimat in a Jewish nationalist sense without keeping in mind its link to the most murderous instantiations of German nationalism. This is not to say that Celan compares Israelis to Nazis in a one-to-one, literal way as his acquaintance Erich Fried did (something he greatly took issue with), or in the manner one finds common on anti-Israeli activist posters after October 7.  He creates a set of unresolved associations around words which connote their different possibilities, one of which, in the case of Israeli Heimat, is the possibility for identitarian and territorialistic violence. Few writers that I am aware of were able to follow the Zionist imagination so deeply, to partake in a sense of Zionist political and metaphysical refuge, while also remaining outside it — not only with ambivalence, but with suspicion, even grave fear, of what nationalism can devolve into. The frame of mind that these poems cultivate is not one of righteous and indignant anti-nationalism, nor can it be one of tribalistic pride and belonging. The poetry has meanings that are both manifest and withheld. It takes on new resonance in relation to the beliefs of its interlocutors, and in relation to an unfolding legacy of European and Middle Eastern violence. 

Celan’s poems attempt a language where contradiction remains possible, and, hopefully, from this language, a reality where contradictions can coincide. But as with the Scheintür, it is not clear if such a language can ever be siphoned into in the real world or if it must remain a painful, tantalizing dream. 

In their slow, cryptic style, as the sun shone on our circle in Morningside Park, the poems enabled a different discourse, one attuned to the sacredness and the consequentiality of language. This was, if only very briefly, an instantiation of the King’s Way that lies behind the Scheintür — a way that I found my young students leading. The King’s Way, in Morningside Park at least, occurred in a circle, with the poems seemingly shining out of the middle, through everyone’s different, confused questions; we peeled off lines, almost like the delicate layers of an onion. The discussion was nonlinear in its spatial blocking but also in the sense that the poems were not “accessed;” they were ambiguous configurations that we skewed in different ways. This group included students who had participated in the Gaza encampments and others who had been disturbed by language emanating from the protest movement.

In a creative reflection, one student described the experience of reading Celan in the park, using a roman numeral dating taken from Lem’s Futurological Congress — a dating that chronicles the protagonist’s journal entries after his brain has been surgically inserted into a new body, which wakes up years into to the future.

2 V 2024: Jess and I walk to Morningside for our make-up class where we are discussing selected poems by Paul Celan. The weather is perfect. Warm, summery, and picturesque. After a quick bite, we all gather on the picnic blanket, and Professor Parks has printed out the poems for us to look at. I sit, listening, chiming in when I feel like I have something to say, but most of all just existing. It is the first time I’ve felt truly present in weeks (months?). It’s my first time in Morningside Park and it’s beautiful. There’s a slight breeze and not a single cloud in the sky. The commotion from the previous days seems to have faded in this moment and things are still. I don’t understand a lot of what Celan’s writing about, but I don’t think that matters too much. If you had asked me what I thought or perhaps hoped Columbia was going to be like when I was first accepted, I believe an image like this one would’ve come to mind.

This was the last class I taught at Columbia. The student’s reflection corroborates my profound belief in the capacity of poetry to create experience at a moment when the university gates were literally locked. What happened around the poems felt like a small opening, a window into what study, community, and reading can be. The gathering embodied Celan’s notion of a “missed encounter,” between a semester that was and a semester that could have been, or could yet be.

Celan’s poems did not pick a gated lawn, did not take a side at Columbia in 2024. But neither were they silent. They were attuned to the unprecedented scope of Israeli and Palestinian suffering and loss in 2023-2024, and to the Jerusalem of seemingly insurmountable divides. They were documents of Zionism, demonstrations of what Israel meant to someone who survived unthinkable catastrophe and arrived there in 1969, looking for threads of life to hang on to. The poems challenged us to expand and rethink the scope of how we approach Jerusalem; to invite many co-present Jerusalems, sacred and profane, material and figural, Jewish and Palestinian.

The lived, relational dimension of teaching, of reading in a circle: in the classroom beneath the sky, history is present but it does not overdetermine the poetry’s meaning. We keep trying to figure out what’s going on, keep finding possibilities for words that seem to speak in ever new ways. This is a poetry that calls its readers into a sustained not-knowing as a mode of experience. At the same time it calls us into a relation of commitment — to ourselves, to others, to healing the ongoing wounds of history.