Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany

Toward a Public Discourse on the Holocaust

Sonja Boos

• Publisher: Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780801471940
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia tedesca

Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany is an interdisciplinary study of a diverse set of public speeches given by major literary and cultural figures in the 1950s and 1960s. Through close readings of canonical speeches by Hannah Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno, Ingeborg Bachmann, Martin Buber, Paul Celan, Uwe Johnson, Peter Szondi, and Peter Weiss, Sonja Boos demonstrates that these speakers both facilitated and subverted the construction of a public discourse about the Holocaust in postwar West Germany. The author's analysis of original audio recordings of the speech events (several of which will be available on a companion website) improves our understanding of the spoken, performative dimension of public speeches.While emphasizing the social constructedness of discourse, experience, and identity, Boos does not neglect the pragmatic conditions of aesthetic and intellectual production—most notably, the felt need to respond to the breach in tradition caused by the Holocaust. The book thereby illuminates the process by which a set of writers and intellectuals, instead of trying to mend what they perceived as a radical break in historical continuity or corroborating the myth of a "new beginning, " searched for ways to make this historical rupture rhetorically and semantically discernible and literally audible.

Part I

IN THE EVENT OF SPEECH

Performing Dialogue

1

MARTIN BUBER

In Germany the preacher alone knew what a syllable weighs, or a word, and how a sentence strikes, leaps, plunges, runs, runs out; he alone had a conscience in his ears.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

On September 13, 1960, Martin Buber and Paul Celan, two central—if fundamentally dissimilar—intellectual figures of the German-speaking Jewish diaspora, had a brief, dissonant encounter (this was the only time they met).¹ Their dispute revolved around the possibility and legitimacy of engaging in a dialogue with Germans.² Having accompanied Celan to the meeting, which took place in the lobby of a Paris hotel, Jean Bollack recalls how deeply disappointed his friend was by the much-revered scholar-philosopher Buber, whose viewpoints struck Celan as injudicious, even naive: “Did Buber grasp the tragic nature of the stories he was divulging in Germany? Did he grasp that his contradictory and (to Celan’s mind) theological work implied that he repudiated everything, even his own language? Celan addressed Buber’s contradictions by speaking of his own. His solidarity and his questions transformed into accusations.”³

Ignorance, denial, self-contradiction—Celan’s impetuous language suggests the extent to which the subject under discussion was loaded for him. The poet objected strongly to Buber’s confidence in the peacemaking power of dialogue and his amicable engagement with Germany’s public sphere. Buber at first refused to return to Germany, to be sure, but when he finally went in 1953 to accept the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, he promoted his unflagging faith in a possible future of German-Jewish relations.⁴ A pioneer of reconciliation, Buber gave his Peace Prize address the telling title Über das echte Gespräch und die Möglichkeit des Friedens (Genuine Dialogue and the Possibilities of Peace), even though his appearance in Germany occurred at a time when the 1951–52 retribution debate had only barely receded from public view:⁵ at that time not a few Israelis were opposed to the idea of accepting monetary retribution from the federal government, insisting that this would bestow an undeserved sense of redemption on West Germany.⁶ In the eyes of his Israeli critics, Buber’s candor with regard to current political issues, and, more concretely, his readiness to accept two major awards from public institutions in Germany, amounted to perfidy.⁷

Both Buber and Celan repeatedly visited Germany during the 1950s and 1960s, yet Celan went with a greater degree of reluctance; he had experienced his first visit in 1952, which was occasioned by an invitation from the Gruppe 47, as a personal failure.⁸ According to Celan’s account, the audience had sneered at his poem Todesfuge (Death Fugue, 1949), and one group member had commented to him that his pathos-filled inflection reminded him of Josef Goebbels’s.⁹ Although the group members’ criticism was directed against the chant-like style of Celan’s prosody—his markedly unironic performance seemed sibylline, almost enraptured—they certainly were equally perplexed by the formal features of Celan’s poetry, the broken syntax and radical minimalism of which proposed that signification and meaning had collapsed in the post-Holocaust world. Where the Gruppe 47 sought realistic storytelling that would help society “cope with” the Nazi past, Celan’s poetry abjured narrative cogency. And while the former vowed to modernize the German language to arrive at a new, simpler, and more direct way of telling history, the latter carefully examined each and every word, especially those tainted by the euphemistic vocabulary of National Socialism, mulling over its incommensurability and negativity and finally substituting German terms with enigmatic synonyms and neologisms that would each communicate its unique history of violence and suffering while at the same time refusing to perpetuate the language of the perpetrators. Constantly reflecting on the question of what it meant to write poetry after Auschwitz, Celan’s poetry always raises the possibility of poetic failure because it is imbued with the trauma inscribed in the German language.

Despite their exile, both Buber and Celan wrote in German and hence for a German-language readership. Yet while Buber’s writings are marked by the expressionist diction emblematic of the first decades of the twentieth century and a truly imposing, pathos-filled rhetoric, Celan’s poetry is self-reflexive and hermetic, always bordering on, indeed performing, what Celan once tagged “a terrifying silence” in the face of “what happened” in National Socialist Germany.¹⁰ Celan, who had been deported to a labor camp by a rather willing Romanian government in 1942, was a deeply skeptical thinker who displayed what Arendt once characterized as the émigré’s “fundamental distrust of everything merely given.”¹¹ In Celan’s case this includes not only “all laws and prescriptions, moral and social” but also “the sources of authority of law [and] the ultimate goals of political organizations and communities”—most notably the discursive hegemony of National Socialism.¹² The meeting with Buber, unsatisfactory as it seemed, pushed Celan to revisit his own stance on the question of what it meant for a Jewish exile to address an audience of a variety of Germans—made up of former bystanders, victims, and perpetrators, of members of the first and second generations, of individuals, too, who downplayed the significance of the Cologne synagogue desecration in 1959, and of others who came to Celan’s defense against Claire Goll’s plagiarism charges.¹³ In a letter to Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann had expressed her concern that “having entered a room full of people one has not chosen oneself, whether one is still prepared to read for those who do want to listen, and are ashamed of the others.”¹⁴ There was no easy answer to this dilemma. But in his Büchner Prize address, titled Der Meridian (The Meridian), which Celan gave only a few weeks after his encounter with Buber, on October 22, 1960, in Darmstadt, Celan clearly demonstrates that he found Buber’s reconciliatory position toward the Germans untenable.¹⁵

Although Celan decided to deliver his Büchner Prize address in Germany and accept this German award, his accusations against Buber are inscribed in his speech, if in an inconspicuous and oft-overlooked manner. One of the passages that most resonates with Buber’s thought, a paragraph that defines the poem as dialogue, dates from the final writing stage; Celan added it after his meeting with Buber and just days before he delivered the final version of the speech.¹⁶ In addition to redirecting some of his aesthetic questions concerning the ontological possibility of poetry and language as well as the dichotomy between art and reality into the realm of ethics, Celan here articulates an unfavorable response to Buber, even if this response is never made explicit. Charged with Buber’s idiosyncratic vocabulary, Celan’s Büchner Prize address carefully gauges and examines the philosopher’s prodialogic stance but ultimately rejects it, along with Buber’s optimistic pledge to renew a long-lost German-Jewish tradition. Contrary to Buber’s Peace Prize address, then, which optimistically embodies a “genuinely dialogical” and politically committed commencement, The Meridian is punctuated by interjections that fail to address any potential listeners. Evoking a series of textually self-referential signs, the speech is ultimately a self-recursive monologue reaffirming the historical caesura implied by the cipher of “Auschwitz.” Bachmann, the third speaker to be considered in the first part of this book, shares Buber’s deliberate and strategic use of the relational space between speaker and audience, yet while Buber employs it in the affirmative sense of promoting a German-Jewish dialogue, Bachmann uses it to challenge the psychological status quo that has been reached in Germany. Her 1964 Georg Büchner Prize address, Deutsche Zufälle (German Contigencies), not only considers the psychosocial health of the Germans—it revolves around the theme of “insanity” in Büchner’s prose fragment Lenz—but also constitutes a deliberate response to Celan’s reflections on Büchner.¹⁷ For Bachmann both eludes and self-reflectively reinscribes her role as an unstable dialogic partner in her Darmstadt address. By thus mirroring Celan’s resistance to any form of public dialogue in a German context, she demonstrates her solidarity with the Jewish poet, who had been publicly defamed around the time he gave his Büchner address.

Based on an understanding of the “public sphere” as a social site where meaning is negotiated through dialogic exchange, this chapter inquires into the qualitative dimension of public speech as a distinctive form of dialogue that can create oppositional, subaltern spheres of influence within the dominant sphere of public life. Despite their great differences in details of form and intent, the discursive interactions between Buber, Celan, and Bachmann and their respective audiences generate a counterpublic that challenges the dominant mode of reality within West Germany’s public sphere. Of course this kind of contact comes at a great sacrifice. Reflecting on the challenge of articulating subjective experience in a public dialogue, the speakers sometimes unwittingly reproduce the structures that they confront. This is especially the case with Celan and Bachmann, who, by critically revisiting Buber’s notion of dialogic relations, exert a modicum of pressure on themselves and/or their interlocutors.

Speech as Dialogue

“I do not philosophize more than I must,” Buber once stated in response to critics who disapproved of his unconventionally “optimistic” and “concrete” approach to philosophy.¹⁸ Although he was a scholar, and as such was confronted with the rules and conventions of academic discourse, Buber was opposed to logical elaboration in its detached, erudite form. His teachings, so he insisted, needed to be “transmittable”; contrary to scientific treatises, they had to be persuasive and universally engaging: “My philosophy serves, yes, it serves, but it does not serve a series of revealed propositions. It serves an experienced, a perceived attitude that it has been established to make communicable.”¹⁹ With this statement, Buber not only recapitulates his discontent with respect to what he saw as the self-absorbed logicizing practiced in the academy, but he also sums up his own philosophical mission, namely, his continuing effort to reach out to a general public—in Buber’s language, the Gemeinschaft (community)—rather than addressing university professors or other independent scholars like himself. Buber was a constructive thinker who took his sociopolitical role as a public intellectual and teacher extremely seriously; he was not only the foremost advocate but also an eminent practitioner of communication: “I am not teaching a lesson,” Buber thus informed his interlocutors, “but I carry on a conversation.”²⁰

Buber habitually used public speech as a means to promulgate his dialogical philosophy.²¹ It allowed him to convey and clarify speculative lines of argument for his often nonacademic audiences. But more importantly, Buber favored the genre of public speech because of its compatibility with the very essence of his philosophy, as this form of spoken communication provided him with the adequate means to demonstrate, indeed perform, the most fundamental principle of his philosophical thought: that human existence is inherently dialogical in nature. Privileging intersubjective relations between the self and the other over all other kinds of relationalities (i.e., between the self and the world or the absolute, respectively), Buber’s philosophy is deeply concerned with the anthropological and ontological dimension of spoken language. Buber indeed considered the primary form of language its concrete spokenness and not its capability to signify.²² Opposed to conventional theories of language that define words as containers of logos—that is, meaning, cosmic reason, a divine plan—Buber conceived of words as empty shells whose primary function was not to transmit ideas, but to function as a medium. Words, when spoken out loud for the sake of genuine dialogue, could engender intersubjective encounters regardless of what they said. Hence in Buber’s view truth resided not in the words or communicative content of such dialogues but in the process—in the event—of language itself: “[Dialogue] is completed outside contents, even the most personal, which are or can be communicated. Moreover it is completed not in some ‘mystical’ event, but in one that is in the precise sense factual, thoroughly dovetailed into the common human world and the concrete time-sequence.”²³

In the treatise Das Wort, das gesprochen wird (The Word That Is Spoken), first published in 1960, Buber defined this dialogical event as aktuelles Begebnis (actual occurrence), referring to the spokenness of language in the event of spontaneous communication.²⁴ Contrary to other, less genuine modalities of language—namely, präsenter Bestand (present continuance), which includes all that which is sayable at a given point in time, and potentialer Besitz (potential possession), which comprises all that which has ever been said insofar as it can still be recuperated—aktuelles Begebnis denotes language that is realized in the form of spoken, interpersonal dialogue—its real occurrence in human life. As Buber elaborates, “Existence and possession, presuppose an historical acquisition, but here nothing else is to be presupposed than man’s will to communicate as a will capable of being realized. This will originates in men’s turning to one another; it wins gesture, vocal sign, the word in the growi...