Nouns speak volumes if we can understand what they say, and if, from words, we make “names.” The place, named in the title, heralds the opening that will be brought about through language. The mountain (-berg) guards, it generates and hides, protects and preserves the “meadow of the dead,” the site of a descent into hell (Todtnau, Totenau), the place of an inescapable destiny, that of a modern katabasis, a plunge into the underworld. It is into this infernal place that the owner of the cottage will be led by his visitor, who will unlock the secret of the swamps. The visitor has the necessary credentials for taking him there. All is ready, right up to the ferryman, the guide and witness appointed to take them there together. That was the purpose of the ride in a car.

The mountain has revealed its secret to the visitor, emitting its signs from the very first words. The flowers are the messengers of the chthonian depths: first, on the side of history, the yellow star, the visitor’s history, the history of the Jews; and then, on the side of death, the euphrasy (eyebright), beneficial for the eye, where poetry is revitalized in the light of a new gaze. It can say what this history has been. The mark of a color, the yellow flower, has as its counterweight the benefits the word implies. The eye clears, far from the inherited hymns and in their embrace, the senses, which have been adjusted to the stain of infamy. The balm of another light, rising from the funereal meadows, Totenau, turns into “eyebright” (Augentrost). Language seizes the topography, it remakes the site, recovers it, shows that it covers and uncovers it, leaving it covered also in its initial opacity.

The water that flows and that we drink is made of words. The poem draws on another source. The gesture can be interpreted; it lends itself to interpretation: “What you see me doing has its own meaning, which perhaps escapes you; however, what I come to ask, by agreeing to drink from this fountain, your fountain, is clear. The expected reply will no doubt be denied me. One can fear so. But let there be no mistake: I shall already have obtained it, during this visit. I shall have turned the denial to my advantage.” Interpreters have been mistaken or have been unwilling to read it this way; they have not wanted to make this visit such a funereal occasion, the response to a denial of murder.

The poetic text to be analyzed is clearly written, without equivocation or ambiguity, without any possible means of escape. Hope, at the moment of writing (“today”), lives on thanks to an expectation. In the course of a journey that has already been mapped out, thought becomes what it should never have refused to be. Like the book, the guide driving the car doubles as a witness, in a role that the context assigns him. Driver when it is time for a drive, he becomes the involuntary guide on an infernal journey. The punning on Namen / nahms (“names” / “registered”) does not stress the reality of the signatures, but refers to the transfer of the world of those inscribed in the book, the brigades of the persecutors, into the register of the Last Judgment that is now being compiled. The names must appear before Celan’s, because the poet, through the meaning given to the inscription of his name, provides a counterweight. An act of real resistance is connected to a person. The name: “mine” (next to what others?) implies an incriminating neighborhood. The question addressed to the book also designates the very place of poetry, a habitual and constant place, a component of liberation. The cohabitation is experienced as something always imposed—impossible but imposed.

The lines that follow (stanza 3, lines 8–10) reproduce, with some significant differences, the sentence in the book, which was written a week later. It is evasive and revelatory. At first glance, a superficial reader would read it as a friendly compliment to his host. This is how it has often been interpreted. But this kind of reading takes no account of the meaning of the words. In fact, the relation between the two levels of language is comparable to the relation that might exist between the sculptured cube with the star and the function it assumes in its context. Thus, the term “thinking man” (Denkenden) might make one think of Heidegger the thinker; however, in his work Celan uses it only in reference to recollection and commemoration; in the same way, the word “heart” (Herz) is commonly conceived as an organ of memory, and this semantic orientation determines the meaning of the other words. Hope, if one stays close to the moment as reconstituted, relies on a distancing from all that the names in the album represent; it remains attached to the present day; in turn, the present boils down to what the book has become in this text: a book that writes, and re-writes.

Finally, the epithet “coming” (kommendes) concerns less the speech of the future than a declaration that will be actualized, will “happen,” and will go to its addressee. The expectation formulated by Celan will not come to pass, but it is no less important for the understanding of the whole to consider the fact that {375|376} it has been expressed. This is the way the poet retains the fault: the philosopher will not say what the poet may have come to ask him to say, that he suggests he say, but the poet already knows that the philosopher will not comply. In response to this absence, the second part of the text confirms the reasons that keep him from doing so. Speech is actualized in an open acknowledgement, revealing the continuity of an attachment to the past.

The five stations of the excursion construct a descent into Hell. The first visit is to the torture sites, and their victims’ graves, in the middle of the Black Forest. The confession wrenched from the thinker comes after the visitors turn back. They go first to the realm of the dead. They need a witness to hear the confession of the unthinkable, the thing that the poet succeeds in making the thinker say. After the judgment of the underworld, they return to the surface of the earth, and the confession is made as an offering to the victims of the extermination camps. All that remains is to display the ritual scene of mourning in the shedding of tears.

The initiatory rite of saturation under pressure (stanzas 5 and 6) entails a movement of departure and a fit of anger, like a whirlwind, perhaps. The {376|377} circles open onto the abyss. The stage is surrounded by two other more horizontal visions, along similarly stagnant lines. The opening (stanza 4) prepares for the journey. The summoned victims are there: the soul of each one of the dead blooms by itself, individually, with its own little candelabra. Each one has its own power of resistance, a virile force concentrated in the tubers of the orchis (“the boys’ plant,” Knabenkraut), in the form of testicles. A legion rises up, uncountable; each blossom has its genitals. Domination seems irrepressible. So the journey will take place, and it has some chance of succeeding.

The content of the text would justify the hypothesis of a transposition of the title of Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain into Celan’s title, at least through the word “mountain” (-berg): it could well be a subverted form of a Zauberberg, of the dark site of an “unveiling,” for the workings of black magic—as black as the Forest so praised by Heidegger. We know people who never went back there.

If this text were describing concrete facts, “the person who is driving us” would be that person, the car’s driver, the guide whose identity we know. Obviously, we cannot settle for this. The real point of departure has been maintained and, transferred into another domain, opens up in the dimension of speech. As journeys go, this one quickly takes them far from the plateaus of the Forest. The occupant of the cottage has been drawn by his guest into the kingdom of darkness. Both are escorted in their descent or voyage (“journey in Hades,” Hadesfahrt, or “journey into the Underworld,” Unterweltsfahrt, and so on) and in their exploration by a being who has a man’s name. Neither priest nor God nor poet, but a man, a figure of ordinary humanity, showing the way among the victims of inhumanity.

Now, the magician was Celan; he worked on assignment, his own. He set himself the project, and with a magician’s artistry he produced the confirmation he was expecting.

Now the mountain’s peat bogs take the place of the wooded meadows. This is where the killing took place. In the circular composition of the second part of the poem (stanzas 4 to 8), the poet, following the infernal discussion, recovers his own language; the “paths” (Pfade) are the passages that open up in his own poems. They lead to the paths of cudgels; here, the prisoners were beaten with those clubs. We remain within the framework of the constitution of the idiom. The words bear traces of the blows.

Once down on this lower level, one stops at a point that leads not to the world of the dead, but further back, to the sites of suffering and torture, to the swamps where the camps had been set up. The clubs one walks on to avoid sinking in the mud recall the brutality of the treatment the prisoners endured. One steps on their suffering, “half-treading,” so as to leave the weight of that suffering there, like a flag at half-mast (auf Halbmast). To do this is to abandon time, to leave it to the truth of tears (stanza 8). {381|382}

I did well to wait some fifteen years before publishing my own interpretation. It was not that I had failed to see immediately that I needed to interpret the elements of the background and to capture their intellectual significance, and I certainly knew how to go about it. But before the late 1980s, I had been convinced that Celan, as he more or less allowed us to believe or state, expected Heidegger to express an opinion. To better understand the situation, I needed to penetrate to the core of an analysis of the constitution and the power of language. The text that follows, revised in 1991, was presented in Gerald Stieg’s seminar at the Austrian Institute in Paris, on January 8, 1992.

Memory takes care of the rest. The heart remembers. It has the strength for it. Hope rests on it; it cannot cut itself off from continuity. The word rises, it springs up at the horizon of its language, “in the hope of the heart”; it has the virtue of opening up to what is to come (ein kommendes Wort). If one confines oneself to this logic, it cannot be the case of awaiting a declaration, or of some kind of justification on the part of the host. Rather it anticipates the confession that will be wrung out of the host. The survival of the past, of the initial act, evokes an implicit contradiction, by the mere fact of being uttered. The confession-­confirmation will serve as a lever for the production of a terrible denial. Nothing is merely described. Everything is transferred. The descriptions involve a passage to the interior of language, preventing the negation of the values that are associated with it at this site. The cottage and its well are spoken again like the book, the heart that remembers.

In the poem, the phases are apportioned, distinct: first the well, outside, then the indoor space of the cottage, which is organized around the book, to the extent of being confused with it, and with the line of writing traced in this book. The inscription written in it now gives way, with the narrative distance of the poem, to the gesture of a presentation and a doubling. The book, still his, is written from one poem to another, from one note to another; but it is enriched once more, in enemy territory, with the names and the language of the adversary, on the tracks of an incursion, always already programmed. To slip under the skin of the beast; the book will be that book, with all the names of the Nazis. {390|391}

The repetition of the sentence from the guest book—a form of auto-interpretive intertextuality—introduces the present tense of a recollection. It is the present of this day, “today,” highlighted. This day (heute), the story of the encounter will be inscribed; it has been extended to the murderers in the book, in the land of death, so much so that the “philosopher” of the Black Forest has begun, against his will, to think about the memory he rejects. The more he rejects, the less he renounces, and the more his thought is led to draw from itself the power to turn against itself. The “philosopher” in the counter-language has become an other. Nihilism has changed into memory of the annihilation. The future will open up if it is the depositary of that history.

My friend Kostas Axelos, whose thought was greatly influenced by Heidegger (he was one of the recipients of the Vaduz edition), was at the Austrian Institute in 1992 when the interpretation proposed here was presented. He admitted to me that it was extremely coherent, but he still wondered if others just as coherent might exist. The future is open. One should maintain the possibility in principle. In this case, the construction would not have the same necessity or, {391|392} more precisely, it would be merely one “construction” that was stronger than another. Herein lies the problem. Reading opens up; it is in search of a meaning that can always be made more precise and profound, but not exchanged for another, unless it is an erroneous one. Otherwise, this would just be a game; it is conceivable that some play it.

We are bathed here in the light of reconciliation. Of the two flowers seen on arrival, one is for bodily health, the other for healing the soul. It is the “soothing” that the sick poet hoped to find; he went there seeking it. The roles are reversed. The cottage is Mecca: he wanted to “reconcile himself with his own past.” He found in the water of the fountain this other “thou,” whom he addresses so often. It is the terrible testimony of a necessary reading, dialogical and internalized. Remorse leads to forgiveness, forgiveness to salvation; but the attempt failed.

The poet was thought to have come with good intentions, to make peace. It was fruitless. In the car, Heidegger is relaxed, talking cheerfully. He obliterates an earlier, more serious conversation that had taken place in the cottage (the poem, however, does not mention this). In the second part of the journey, Celan notes some impressions of the Black Forest, making use of an antidote to overcome his disgust in the face of such nonchalance. These impressions will remain fixed and will serve as a refuge, by virtue of their consoling function. The poet’s good will has been abused. He had come to make peace.

This is perhaps the right moment to point out that Heidegger, according to his son, was unaware that Celan was Jewish. This seems hardly credible, but possible nonetheless, and it provides real evidence of insensitivity, of non-recognition and a denial of identity: “According to my mother’s account, it was only after [Celan’s] death that my father learned that your friend was Jewish, and of the fate he had suffered in his family” (… welches Familienschicksal er erlitten hatte, in his letter to Gisèle Celan, cited above).

The idea of reconciliation was quite alien to Celan’s mentality. At least the project preserves a moment, and in the offense he felt one can see the passage of the shadow of a failure, without elevating it, as Baumann does, to the level of an inevitable necessity. So many others have rehabilitated the man and the pilgrimage.

Everything must be swathed in the desired atmosphere; everything must fit back into the German order. The flowers are part of the philosopher’s retreat. They exist in the meadows. If the orchids are separated, it is because botanical observation is precise (why would it not be?). If we hear shocking words in the philosopher’s mouth, it is the usual coarseness of his writings—which Celan, during the conversation in the car, “must have experienced,” as had many others among his readers and interlocutors. Nothing is allowed to take on a different meaning. Nothing remains to be found. We know everything “hermeneutically”: the plants and the thoughts of the time and of all times.

The cube-star above the fountain “unites the opposites,” Pöggeler reminds us. Depth is controlled. It does not occur to him that the figure guiding Celan in his poems might recall the star of David or the yellow star the Jews were obliged to wear; no, in this place, they did not exist; these heights had no desire for them. It was true nearby, where the Jews lived. The idea that the yellow flower evokes this reality, or that the cube might be something else, has no place here. The word Würfel refers, of course, to a cube where we find Mallarmé’s die that is thrown and that indicates a number.