Senselessness in Paul!Celan's 'Mohn und Gedachtnis'

This article proposes the concept of senselessness as a way of understanding the poems in Paul Celan's Mohn und Gedachtnis (1952) and as a model which might usefully be extended to the whole of his poetry. The terms 'poppy' and 'memory' are thematically significant for an understanding of Celan's traumatic remembrance of death and suffering during the Holocaust, as well as informing the process of negation of sensuous memory within individual poems. Celan's rendering senseless of Christian meaning gives important emphasis to the Jewish suffering wrought by the Holocaust. The model of senselessness is upheld in Celan's accounts of his own poetics in his acceptance speeches for the Bremen and Georg Buchner prizes (1958, 1960). Senselessness is one way of characterising the ineffable space beyond the boundaries of the poem, with which Celan's poetic language is always in dialogue. Jean Francois Lyotard and Wolfgang Welsch develop notions of aesthetics with close parallels to this idea of senselessness. A consideration of their notions of the sublime and 'anaesthetics', respectively, forges a closer understanding of Celan's work, in which sensory memory is always threatened by the catastrophic knowledge of the Holocaust, and the resulting tension sustains the paradoxical operation of senselessness.