Paul Celan is a survivor of the Holocaust and his experiences at the hands of the Nazis inform all of his poetry. His poems belong in a group of poems that are great, informative, and absolutely terrifying all at the same time, and he is mentioned in the same breath as other survivor authors such as Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel. Although both of these men wrote novels about their experiences in the Nazi death camps, Celan's poems also dealt with the same subject matter. "Deathfuge" is about a group of Jewish prisoners in a death camp who are forced to dig mass graves, whilst other prisoners play music. They are given orders by a guard whose sadism stands out even in a camp run by sadists; for his part, the guard thinks he is a man of sophistication and breeding. The prisoners are executed by the guard as soon as they have finished digging the grave; it turns out that they were digging their own.
The unusual title, "Deathfugue", refers to the music that the prisoners were forced to play whilst other prisoners worked and were murdered. A fugue is a type of instrumental music originating in Germany, and it was played as a prelude to an unspeakable act of mass killing. The poem, when written in its original Romanian tongue, was called 'Death Tango" but when Celan translated it into German, the title became "Deathfugue". It remains a difficult poem to translate into English.
Deathfuge is important in two main ways - historically and in a literary context. As an historical text, it details Paul Celan's own experiences and what he himself has witnessed as a prisoner. Celan was born in Romania and he was separated from his parents when the war began; they were taken to Nazi death camps where they perished. Celan himself spent over a year in a labor camp witnessing unspeakable evil. He began to write poetry after the war, and "Deathfugue" was his first, published in 1948. It is the work he is best known for. Celan tried to embark upon a normal life; he became a teacher, continued two write, but was plagued by his experiences in the war and was unable to come to terms with the Holocaust. The act of writing poetry was in of itself an attempt by Celan to understand and unpick his feelings and emotions, but ultimately it was unable to help him. He became another of the death camps' victims when he committed suicide.
