Todesfuge

"Todesfuge" (translated into English as Death Fugue and Fugue of Death) is a German language poem written by the Romanian-born poet Paul Celan probably around 1945 and first published in 1948. It is "among [Celan's] most well-known and often-anthologized poems". The poem "combines mysteriously compelling imagery with rhythmic variations and structural patterns that are both elusive and pronounced". At the same time it has been regarded as a "masterful description of horror and death in a concentration camp". Celan was born to a Jewish family in Cernauti, Romania (now Chernivtsy, Ukraine); his parents died in a camp during the Second World War, and Celan himself was a prisoner for a time in a work camp.

The poem is 36 lines long, with breaks after lines 9, 15, 18, 23 and 26, which would seem to divide it into six stanzas. However critics typically regard it as being in four sections, each of which begins with the image "Schwarze Milch der Frühe" which can be translated as "Black milk of dawn." The speaking voice in the poem is mostly a collective "We". The structure of the poem has been said to reflect that of a musical fugue in that phrases are repeated and recombined, comparably to the musical genre.

The "we" of the poem describes drinking the black milk of dawn at evening, noon, daybreak and night, and shovelling "a grave in the skies". They introduce a "he", who writes letters to Germany, plays with vipers, whistles orders to his dogs and to his Jews to dig a grave in the earth (the words "" (dogs) and "Juden" (Jews) are assonant in German), and commands "us" to play music and dance. "He" uses the phrase "your golden hair Margarete", (hair, like the "black milk" becomes a recurrent theme of the poem); this may possibly in the letter that he writes to Germany, although the wording leaves this unclear.

The poem repeats many of the images of the first section, but with some changes of word-order. The golden hair of Margarete is now counterpointed with "your ashen hair Shulamith", and "he" now grabs his gun, and is described as blue-eyed, while issuing his orders.

Again the images are counterpointed and extended. "He" is now associated with the phrase "Death is a master from Germany", and in his orders to play music threatens "you'll rise to the sky like smoke, you'll have a grave in the clouds".

In a further reworking of the themes and images of the poem so far, it emerges that "Death is a master from Germany, his eyes are blue", and the "he" shoots his victims with leaden bullets, and sets his dogs on the victims, leading to their "grave in the sky." The final two lines of the poem counterpose "your golden hair, Margarete/your ashen hair Shulamit."

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