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.
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