SubStance

Given the recent scholarly writing on trauma resulting from September 11, the publication of Remnants of Song. Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan one year prior may help to put events in their proper historical perspective. In an "Editor's Column" of the PMLA (October 2004), Marianne Hirsch discusses the implications of witnessing and mediating the destruction and carnage from September 11. Central to her discussion is Art Spiegelman's comic book account of events entitled In the Shadow of No Towers, which she compares to its predecessor, Maus. In both performances of "an aesthetics of trauma," according to Hirsch's argument, the depiction is "fragmentary, composed of small boxes that cannot contain the material, which exceeds their frames and the structure of the page" (1213). In terms of Baudelaire, and Celan's poetry, Ulrich Baer's argument concerning the relationship between the two poets' use of language to frame experience would appear analogous. Often what is left out is the most painful or traumatic of the experience.

As Baer points out, the Shoah is never explicitly mentioned within Celan's poetry, but its presence is not any less felt by the power of language. In like manner, Baer draws the parallel that Holocaust survivors avoid articulating the most traumatic elements of their experiences. The parallel between September 11 and the Holocaust ends, though, the moment one begins to speak of scale. If Hirsch talks of traumatized millions as "collateral damage" stemming from the collapse of the Twin Towers, she explains that these are the millions who witnessed the images through various media. Baer bases his discussion on Holocaust trauma and its linguistic implications for the literature of survivor testimony and for Celan's uncanny foreshadowing of Holocaust memorial parks at Buchenwald and Treblinka in his poem "Projection of a Landscape." As Celan expresses the jolting transition in "Straightening," for the poet, the romantic notion of landscape becomes "terrain," as in the terrain of war. Today, as Hirsch spells out in her commentary, the euphemistic use of the same "collateral damage," to describe the unintended killing of civilians, and the use of "abuse," to [End Page 180] refer to torture, illustrate all too well how even the concept of "terrain" has shifted from a modern to a post-modern usage. As cases in point, "Home Front" refers to anywhere and nowhere, and terrorism has found a new battleground in "Cyberspace."

Using a section suggestively entitled "Straightening," Ulrich Baer divides Remnants of Song into two parts. These are "The First Modern Poet" and "The Last Modern Poet" dedicated to Baudelaire and Celan respectively. Baer's "Straightening," of which more will be said later, elucidates Baudelaire's legacy and influence on Celan. Since Baer makes no mention of the poem itself in this section, ordered without Roman or Arabic numerals, the title may also conjure the image of an hourglass with its two separate parts connected by a straitened tube. Such an image would only reinforce Baer's contention that Baudelaire's work, like Celan's, needs be "historicized."

Overall, Remnants of Song sheds light on two seminal poets' modes of expression in connection with their troubled, turbulent, and catastrophic environments. According to Baer, the "first" and "last" modern poets are both marked by their respective histories/experiences in what they are and are not able to articulate. In the annals of literary figures, there are hardly any other two figures more disturbed and disturbing than Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan. Baer emphasizes the historical grounding of both poets' lives and works, and hence what accounts for the traumatic nature/quality of their poetry. He also touches upon fragments of their private lives and how these influence and seep into poetical expression.

Thus, in the first chapter on Baudelaire, "The Experience of Freedom," Baer analyzes what can be seen as the poet's alienation relating to the rise of nineteenth-century capitalism...