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Art, Trauma, and the Aesthetics of Paul Celan
Tania L. Abramson & Paul R. Abramson
The epiphany surfaced while visiting curated memorials (including, The Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial, The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and The National Memorial for Peace and Justice). The convergence of art and trauma, we realized, had effectively transformed these monuments into riveting sites of brutal illumination.
But it wasn’t simply the carefully arranged historical remnants, or the sculptural artifacts, that were exerting their aesthetic and emotional power. It was, instead, the added presence of documentary evidence, in both written and pictorial form. The latter supplied the indispensable backdrop to the stories being told. The strength of which we then reified into a single adage: narration impacts perceptions acutely.[1]
The merging of these three elements–art, trauma, and expository narrative–was no less evident in our evaluations of individual artworks that had also been conceived in the wake of inexorable traumas, David Wojnarowicz’s oeuvre being a case in point. Impressions of his extraordinary output, which includes paintings, sculpture, video, photography, music, and so much more, have been inescapably transfigured by absorbing the scope of his relentlessly traumatic life. That Wojnarowicz also left behind (he died in 1992, at the age of 37, from AIDS-related complications) a vast archival record–in the form of diaries, essays, correspondence, lyrics, and court transcripts–has also proven to be an especially revealing chronicle for grappling with his artistic production. Awareness, once again, impacts perceptions acutely.[2]
This dictum, however, is obviously not limited to visual images or representations. Billie Holiday’s song, “Strange Fruit,” clearly demonstrates that the historical framework (the legacy of lynching) is essential to listeners’ appreciation of and engagement with this song. The same is no less true of poetry. It’s hard to avoid perceiving Sylvia Plath’s writings without allusions to her struggles with mental illness and her suicide.
Perhaps the best example of the merging of art, trauma, and poetry is the work of Paul Celan, whose 1945 poem, “Deathfugue,” has been described as an encounter between art and atrocity. One could, of course, draw this analogy to many of his other poems, but it is especially evident in a fourteen-line published work, that was originally labeled, “Berlin, December 22/23, 1967,” but is now generally known as “Eden.”[3]
The critical question for Peter Szondi, a literary scholar and close associate of Celan’s, was not how to interpret this poem, but instead whether knowledge of the real-life referents that prompted this composition are crucial to how we understand and engage with it. Szondi, clearly a forerunner to our axiom narration impacts perceivers acutely, also believed that the backstory was necessary, particularly in this case, because it provided an entryway into the poem’s genesis. Almost every passage, he noted, was an allusion to a recorded event, the knowledge of which assuredly illuminated the trajectory that led from the indirectly referenced ghastly ordeals to their reshaping in the poem itself.[4]
Take, for example, the following verse.
The man became a sieve, the woman
The sow, had to swim,
For herself, for no one, for everyone.
In actuality, the poem references the brutal murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebneckt, who were assassinated in Germany because of their pro-soviet political ideology. Those murders, as it so happened, took place in proximity to the Eden Hotel. Liebneckt was shot full of holes–hence the reference to “sieve”–and Luxemburg was shot once in the head, and her body was later thrown into the Landwehr Canal. One of the murderers purportedly remarked that “the old sow [Luxemburg] is already swimming.”
The poem was conceived in December of 1967. Celan had been taken by Szondi along the historical trail of these assassinations. The actual murders, however, happened in January of 1919. The only references to these killings in Celan’s poem are oblique, at best.
Has Szondi’s narrative increased the aesthetic power of “Eden”? Will it influence how readers perceive and engage with this poem? Will it impact their perceptions acutely? Those answers, we believe, are self-evident. The same, undoubtedly, would also result from learning that Celan, a survivor of the Holocaust, committed suicide in 1970. Where the aesthetics of art and trauma are concerned, the narrative surely matters.
Tania L. Abramson
tanialabramson@g.ucla.edu
Tania L. Abramson, MFA is a visual/conceptual artist, as well as a lecturer in the Honors Collegium at UCLA and Feminist Studies at UCSB. She is the author of three art books, Shame and the Eternal Abyss, Concern, and Truth Lies, and the co-creator and co-instructor of the UCLA Art & Trauma class.
Paul R. Abramson
abramson@psych.ucla.edu
Paul R. Abramson, PhD. is a professor of psychology at UCLA. He is also the lead singer and lyricist of the band Crying 4 Kafka.
Published February 14, 2025.
Cite this article: Tania L. Abramson & Paul R. Abramson, “Art, Trauma, And the Aesthetics of Paul Celan,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Volume 23 (2025), accessed date.
Endnotes
[1] Tania L. Abramson and Paul R. Abramson, “Art and Trauma: An Aesthetic Journey,” in The Oxford Handbook of Mental Health and Contemporary Western Aesthetics, ed. Martin Poltrum, et al. (Oxford University Press, 2023).
[2] Paul R. Abramson and Tania L. Abramson, “David Wojnarowicz and the surge of nuances. Modifying aesthetic judgement with the influx of knowledge,” Aesthetic Investigations 3, no. 1 (2019): 148-157.
[3] John Felstiner, Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan (W.W. Norton, 2001).
[4] Peter Szondi, Celan Studies (Stanford University Press, 2003).
Illustration caption:
Sketch of Paul Celan by Paul R. Abramson, 2024.