Paul Celans Gedichtband 'Mohn und Gedaechtnis': Allegorien an der Grenze des Sprechens (German text)

Whether poetic language is an appropriate medium to represent the horrors of the Holocaust is a question often posed in the discussion of Paul Celan's most famous poem, “Todesfuge.” Such a discussion immediately raises further issues about the meaning and function of allegory in Mohn und Gedächtnis, of which “Todesfuge” is a part. Despite Celan's use of extremely dark and perplexing imagery, the elements of allegory suggest the most promising basis of interpretation.; A series of close readings of three poems from Mohn und Gedächtnis forms the core of the dissertation. In these analyses, I employ a methodological framework—influenced by theoretical work of Szondi, Benjamin, and de Man—that focuses on the self-reflective aspects of the poems and elicits questions of figurative language and the structure of meaning.; The results of this study call for a correction of earlier research on allegory in Celan's poetry. That research has treated allegory as a means of recovering ‘referential value’ for poems that are seemingly hermetic. Although allegory is used in the poems, a close analysis of their implicit poetics reveals that the use of allegory leads to paradoxical tensions, and these tensions subvert the fundamental principles of allegory. We can no longer read Celan's poetry only in allegorical terms. Rather, to recognize how radically Celan explores the limits of poetic expression in these poems the understanding of this paradoxical result is necessary. Beyond the question of allegory, the investigation offers insights into relationships of the poems to other texts, for example, mythological sources or texts of Kant, Schiller, Opitz, or earlier texts of Celan himself.; The study makes a contribution to an understanding of the implicit poetics of Celan's early poetry. Its conclusions about allegory also help to comprehend a development with respect to Celan's poetic expression in his later poetry. The fact that allegory has been so radically put into question in the early poems helps to explain why the stylistic elements of allegory in the early poetry almost completely vanish in Celan's later work.