Aktualisierte Sprache : Schweigen im Zeichen des Eingedenkens bei Paul Celan

Abstract

The negativistic and multidimensional linguistic phenomenon of "silence" has naturally been commented on in extremely divergent ways in Celan scholarship. Common lines of reception range from accusations of hermeticism in the 1950s to interpretations of silence as commemoration of the dead, in the sense of a mystical language, and later also within the framework of multidisciplinary trauma discourse. In addition, Meret Eliezer demonstrates a silence in Celan's work that is characterized by the commemoration of a past viewed as incomplete and thus by the ethical and moral intention of not wanting to speak any further, in a certain positivist way, because of the "right" of the innocently killed. The poem's ethical and moral claim to remain poetically mindful of the senselessness of suffering and violent death provokes Celan's new, updated language (Celan, The Meridian 1960), in which a silence of meaning and significance increasingly spreads.