Hell and Hopelessness: Deathfugue and the Effects of the Holocaust Experience on Faith Courtney Murdoch College

Celan’s Deathfugue is a haunting description of the day to day realities of a Jewish person being held prisoner inside a work camp during the Second World War. Having been one of those prisoners himself, this poem appears to serve as an outlet for Celan to express the atrocities he witnessed which were too horrible to write in plain language. The result it a captivatingly tragic commentary on the inexplicable injustices and cruelties that Jews and other marginalized members of society were subjected to within camps. Through various analogies and poetic irony, Celan highlights the godlessness of the situation and the improbability that it is part of a larger plan or the path towards something better. Deathfugue paints an image of hell on earth, in which the promise of eternal paradise and even the existence of God are called into question.

The opening lines of this poem are striking, and the author returns to them while adding variations throughout the poem, as would be expected of a composition following a fugue format. In these first three lines, Celan describes the feeling one experiences while being held in a work camp by writing; “Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening / we drink it at midday and morning we drink it...