glossen: aufsätze Gedicht and Gedächtnis: Convergence and Divergence in the Works of Karl Krolow and Paul Celan. Neil H. Donahue Karl Krolow and Paul Celan figure in literary history as two of too few German-language poets whose work signaled a new direction for the genre in the early postwar period. The work of both poets reflected and refracted German traditions such as Naturlyrik through the prism of European modernism, through French surrealism in particular, and accordingly, both represented a sharp departure from familiar poetic practice and a cosmopolitan openness to new impulses. Both published celebrated volumes of poetry in 1952 with the Deutsche Verlagsanstalt in Stuttgart: Celan's Mohn und Gedächtnis and Krolow's Die Zeichen der Welt, and both poets were also introduced in person to the German reading public also in 1952, along with Ingeborg Bachmann, at the Gruppe 47 meeting in Niendorf: there and then, that trio constituted the 'new wave' of poetry in German for the 1950's. Celan and Bachmann have long been acknowledged as the dominant figures of that period and since their deaths, their work has continued to receive scholarly examination and to gain in critical stature[1]; Krolow (b. 1915), who died in June 1999, continued his prolific career of over half a century through many phases, - though with diminishing influence overall and relatively little serious and sustained critical analysis. But in the 1950's, Krolow's work was regarded with at least equal interest and attention: he was awarded the Büchner Preis in 1956 as the youngest recipient to date, and in that same year, he was also installed in the pantheon of late Modernism as one of few German poets included in Hugo Friedrich's Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik.[2] Oddly, his relation to Celan has received virtually no attention in the vast and detailed literature on Celan, but their relationship is instructive about the tensions in the genre during the postwar period. With an eye on the narrowness of German Naturlyrik, which predominated in Germany during the 1930's and 1940's (for obvious reasons), both poets sought to open that field by drawing new impulses from outside of Germany.[3] Both Krolow and Celan were prolific translators: Krolow had studied Romance philology at the university and then published anthologies of translations from French poetry in 1948 and 1957, and of Spanish poetry in 1962. Like Celan, Krolow was a main conduit into the German language for the postwar influence of French Modernism and surrealism: both poets had a particular appreciation of Apollinaire and Eluard.[4] Their affinity in literary appreciation indeed led to more frequent personal contact, correspondence and then friendship (though an understanding of the exact contours and details of their relations requires further research and reconstruction). However, in a memoir after his suicide in 1970, Krolow recalled Celan's intense privacy, "so etwas wie eine unsichtbare Trennwand zwischen ihm und seinem Partner, etwas schwer zu Überwindendes" (338).[5] This paper addresses the nature of that invisible wall that seems to have separated them all the more, the closer they were drawn together by circumstance.[6] One year after the Group 47 meeting, the two poets met again in 1953 in Paris at the first postwar French-German writers' conference.[7] Later, in 1959, when Krolow received a Unesco grant to live and work in Paris for six months, the two poets met frequently, "fast täglich."[8] Celan even allowed a photograph to be taken then of the two of them together, which was for Celan a significant (and not a casual) act of trust and friendship.[9] Soon thereafter, however, their friendship seems to have suffered, to an uncertain degree, from the fallout of the infamous accusations of plagiarism by Claire Goll.[10] In point of fact, Krolow was Celan's principal advocate in the literary press, and probably also on the selection committee for the Büchner Preis,[11] which Celan received in 1960. The two poets may have also met on the occasion (on October 22, 1960) of the award ceremony in Darmstadt. Krolow signed a public declaration of support for Celan issued by former recipients of the Büchner Preis against Claire Goll's charges of plagiarism. Krolow's sensitive appreciation of Celan's poetry remained steadfast over the years,[12] yet at the core, their understanding of the poem was sharply at odds. Their speeches for the Büchner-Prize, four years apart, reveal the distance between them. Krolow isolates in Büchner's Leonce und Lena (1836) a "Tendenz" (196) that appealed to him very personally: "Es sprang etwas über, Anonymes, Zauber, Geheimnis, Berückung" (196).[13] In effect, each of these qualities (that is, of depersonalization, of magic or mystery, sacralization or secrecy, decentering or displacement) represents an abstraction from prewar and postwar historical reality that Krolow, in a rare moment, addresses directly: es wurde mir in dem Moment wichtig, in dem ich mich von den Bedrückungen zu befreien, von jenem Cauchemar zu lösen versuchte, der als schwerer Schatten über den poetischen Äußerungsversuchen der ersten Nachkriegsjahre lag, ein Schatten, in dem sich ein für allemal alle triste Erfahrung mit der deutschen Szene, alle an Leben und Existenz gehende Widerfahrung gesammelt, verdichtet zu haben schien. Ich wollte mich aus der Umklammerung der Erinnerung befreien, die ich an die Zeit zwischen meinem zwanzigsten und dreißigsten Lebensjahre hatte, damals kurz nach 1945. (196-97) Krolow (born in 1915) stayed in Germany during the Nazi period and the war, but in over 50 years of prolific literary, critical and journalistic activity, he has never described his life during that period which he delicately refers to in French as "Cauchemar" and "triste Erfahrung," whose "schwerer Schatten" still later loomed large. His here enunciated poetics, however, includes that historical experience at its core only as a definite absence, which he deems a sign of liberation from the "Umklammerung der Erinnerung." Krolow advocates in effect an aesthetics of amnesia for the postwar period; immediately after the war, the German poem had tried to register and recover from the shock of recent historical experience, and Krolow already declares this recovery successful: Es hat sich [das Gedicht] in der Tat vom Schock zu lösen vermocht. Die von der Realität überwältigte Vorstellungskraft hat sich bemüht, die Benommenheit abzustreifen. Das geschah mühsam genug, und es hat den Anschein, als wenn nach gewissen barbarischen Ereignissen auch die Lyrik die Realien mehr, als das lange Zeit erwünscht und praktiziert war, in ihre Sprache einbezöge. Sie hat sich dem Verhängnis gestellt und hat gesehen, daß der Schrecken, der den Sensiblen so oft in ihrer Einbildung geläufig gewesen war, greifbare Gestalt annehmen konnte, die alles vorgestellte Maß übertraf. Dennoch mußte das Gedicht wieder darangehen, zaubern zu lernen, mußte es alte, alterslose Fähigkeiten und Fertigkeiten entwickeln, die verlorengegangen schienen. (198) After a therapeutic interlude of documentary description and introspection (he alludes to Trümmerlyrik), the poem need no longer preoccupy itself with the past, but rather now only exercise its freedom to be ahistorical in its ageless facility with words, to perform its own verbal magic (zaubern), a term that links Krolow's poetics in the 1950's back to the "Magic Realism" of literary 'inner emigration' in the Naturlyrik of the 1930's.[14] He describes the free flights of fantasy in the poem as Spiel, Zauber, intellektuelle Heiterkeit, Charme, Grazie des Intellekts, Schwebung, Balance, etc., - all of which amounts to both a coherent poetics and a rhetorical sleight-of-hand to make disappear the past from the postwar poem. Krolow had begun and diligently pursued a literary career under the Nazis with over 100 individual publications of poems, prose vignettes and essays in literary criticism in newspapers and journals ranging from Das Innere Reich to Das Reich. In his Büchner Preis address, Krolow adapted to the postwar period the same aesthetics of "inner emigration" that defined his earlier writings,- without essential changes; historical reflection is "Ballast" that must be jettisoned, since it weighs too heavily upon the poem: "Übrigens gehört ja auch zu den Freiheiten des künstlerischen Spieltriebs, sich von der 'Belastung' durch den Gegenstand zu lösen" (201). That "Gegenstand," that "Belastung," is, however, for Krolow, always the past, from which his poetics and poetry of Leichtigkeit seeks release.[15] Celan's more familiar "Meridian" speech represents the opposite position; he asks: "Die Kunst erweitern? / Nein. Sondern geh mit der Kunst in deine allereigenste Enge. Und setze dich frei" (200).[16] Both poets speak of the poem as a vehicle of liberation, but for Krolow that means freedom from the past, for Celan freedom through the past. For Celan the poem is intrinsically historical: he suggests "daß jedem Gedicht sein '20. Jänner' eingeschrieben bleibt," citing the date of Büchner's Lenz and of the Wannsee conference that planned the "Final Solution" and organized the Holocaust. For Celan the poem always contains and implicates the past to give a multi-layered, complexly striated sense of history. That fundamental distinction in their relation to history dictates the terms of Krolow's reception of Celan: his continual positive attention to Celan's work frames the conceptual breach between them: in effect, Krolow promotes, with utmost sensitivity, but also distorts Celan's work by stripping it systematically of its relation to history. As a literary critic and journalist, Krolow began reviewing Celan's poetry in 1953 and followed his career with, ultimately, close to 40 publications on the poet, his works and on Celan scholarship as it began to appear. As a literary journalist, who lived by his pen, Krolow commonly recycled his texts on Celan, which lends an additional consistency in variation to his commentaries. The frequency of Celan as his topic represents both the demands of the literary marketplace and Krolow's own guarded fascination with Celan, whose poems for him were "von jeher ganz in sich verschlossene Verse, Verse der Einsamkeit," unto themselves, a "Wortwelt,"[17] - but a world of words whose gravity of historical reflection Krolow never ceases to resist. Krolow first commented in print on Celan's work in 1953 in a short review of Mohn und Gedächtnis as "ein Stück Bekenntnislyrik . . ., voller Verse von zarter Schönheit und Tiefe." He makes no mention there of the poem "Todesfuge."[18] In a review of Von Schwelle zu Schwelle in 1955 entitled "Ein Rutengänger der Sprache," Krolow correctly distinguishes Celan from poets (like himself) "die sich in Wandlungen zu bewähren haben," suggesting indirectly a central theme to Celan's unfolding work, - but Celan then appears as a refined postwar version of the Romantic poet, "der Typ des hochpoetischen Märchenerzählers von geisterhafter Sensibilität," in line with the tendencies of 1930's magical realism that Krolow himself had adhered to.[19] In locating the landscape of Celan's imagination in the artistic fairy-tale, Krolow reduces the scope of his work to an "ebenso zärtliche wie ernste, schwermütige Traumwelt." The word "zart" from his first review appears twice here and increasingly signifies for Krolow a distance from historical content. A second review of that same volume (FAZ, Oct. 1, 1955) also emphasizes the autonomy of Celan's "Phantasiewelt," reiterates that word "zart" (again twice) and locates the poems "jenseits von ästhetischen Schocks. . . . im gleichen märchenhaften Land der Celanschen Vorstellungskraft." His poems constitute "das Raunen des Märchenerzählers." In concluding this short review Krolow adds the phrase "die Geisterhaftigkeit der Sprache Paul Celans, die Schattenhaftigkeit ihres Wesens" and introduces two terms that define over many years the ethereal ahistoricism, the disembodied and purely aesthetic sensations that Krolow finds in Celan's work. This latter review builds upon but goes beyond his prior formulations and, in its approach and language, anticipates Krolow's understanding of Celan for years to come. His appreciative but willful misreading finds delicate beauty in the elision of historical content. In 1973 Krolow cited Celan's death to mark the end of an era in the genre of poetry, an era that valued aesthetic qualities over political commitment: "Mit der zunehmenden Politisierung auch des Literarischen nahm dieses 'reine,' vordringlich ästhetische Interesse rasch ab" (1322).[20] Celan's posthumous poems figure as "eine Art Echo-Wirkung. . . . wie das Echo auf das, was gerade eben noch da war, nun aber nicht mehr zulässig erschien" (1322) and he focuses on the "Schattenbeziehung" in his work, its movement, at one and the same time, toward silence and toward "unmittelbarem Daseins-Ausdruck" (1323). Krolow defines in retrospect a sort of categorical imperative in Celan's sensibility that bound him and isolated him as a poet: "Er arbeitete beharrlich und einsam weiter. Er konnte gar nicht anders" but, in an oblique reference that begs clarification, Krolow adds: "Er konnte aus dieser Situation nicht 'auswandern'" (1324).[21] That allusion telescopes into Krolow's presentation of Celan the context of emigration, exile and Holocaust that he otherwise never addresses, and it thus defines the gap in his appreciation and understanding of Celan's work. By the end of that same essay, Krolow indirectly equates Celan with an impasse in the genre that can now be superseded by the inclusion of more realia from everyday life in the form of objects and emotions: "Die suizitäre Lage, in die das Gedicht bei uns schon vor einem Jahrzehnt zu geraten begann, könnte überwunden sein, wenn diese genannte Auffüllung mit Stoffen, mit Gegenständen, mit dem Arsenal von Gegenständlichkeit, wie sie der Alltag aufbietet, durchgesetzt werden und sich halten würden [sic], ohne Rückfälle in die balancierte Lyrik mit all ihrem Stoffschwund" (1327). Krolow fails to recognize the central content of Celan's poetry, its historical substance, and finds in Celan an admirable and exquisite aesthetic refinement of the poem away from the world. For Krolow, it seems, only the immediate and quotidian present counts as historical reality, not the past, and despite close and frequent attention to his work, and personal sympathies, Krolow cannot sound the depths of Celan's poetry, and consigns it to the past: his manifesto for Alltagslyrik announced the transition in his own work. In his survey of German poetry after 1945 for Kindlers Literaturgeschichte der Gegenwart, also 1973, Krolow distills his views on Celan's work and subsumes them under the captions of "Undurchlässigkeit," "reiner Sprachkörper" and "Existenz-Verdünnung" (439-51).[22] Krolow's recollection in 1975 of Celan's Mohn und Gedächtnis[23], which he had reviewed in 1953, brings his reception of Celan full circle, though he continued to comment occasionally on Celan. He emphasizes now the trait of "Gegenstandsflüchtigkeit" (15) that his own Büchner-Preis speech had called for, but which Krolow by 1975 in his own evolution to Alltagslyriker otherwise condemns. For Krolow, Celan's first volume had changed the way poetry was read and written in the 1950's, and signaled the arrival of an elevated sensibility equal to Rilke's in the 1920's, which gave the poem new contours and a certain "Schattenhaftigkeit," a feature Krolow had already highlighted in a sensitive appreciation of the poet shortly after his death in 1970.[24] Indeed, Krolow returns continually to forms of the word "Schatten," but, in effect, only outlines the shadow ("das Gedicht als Schattenriss") and does not address what in Celan's poetry throws the shadow.[25] In fact, the single mention of "Todesfuge" in this long review cites it only as an example of literary-musical technique, of "Fugen-Führung." Though highlighting Celan's importance, Krolow's appreciation of 1975, like his many other commentaries over the years, supplants specific historical realities with a vague existentialism, which remains consistent with his pointed comment from 1959 that Celan's poetry "nichts als Dasein aussagt."[26] Endnotes 1.The dissertation of James K. Lyon ("Nature: Its Idea and Use in the Poetic Imagery of Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan and Karl Krolow," diss., Harvard University, 1962) testifies to the circumstantial validity of this grouping at the time, though Lyon's conclusion separates Krolow fundamentally from the other two in his use and derivation of nature imagery. Cf. also Marlies Janz, "Haltlosigkeiten. Paul Celan und Ingeborg Bachmann," Das schnelle Altern der neuesten Literatur. Essays zu deutschsprachigen Texten zwischen 1968-1984, eds. Jochen Hörisch and Hubert Winkels (Düsseldorf: Claassen, 1985) 31-39. Janz explains the disinterest for Celan and Bachmann in the 1970's, due to their high poetic tone, but acknowledges that those sceptics, however wrongheaded, had recognized something essential about the two poets: "daß sich diese beiden Autoren nicht vereinnahmen lassen: daß ihre Werke auf Distanz gehen" (31). Though she does not include Krolow, her remark helps situate him: in his adaptations to contemporary tendencies, his work sets no barriers to the reader, yet in its accessibility, it nonetheless creates impersonal distance, a central feature of his poetics. Krolow's impersonal adaptation to reigning tastes is tinged with irony that creates distance; hence, critics of his work tend to isolate his technical virtuosity, whether as a positive or negative feature, or both. 2. Friedrich also then wrote an afterword to a selection of Krolow's poetry: "Nachwort," Ausgewählte Gedichte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1962) 49-59. Also included in Walter Helmut Fritz, ed., Über Karl Krolow (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972) 74-84. 3.James K. Lyon notes acutely in his conclusion: "While Bachmann and Celan write from the outset in a larger European tradition for which nature has lost much of its intrinsic meaning (though it still has symbolic value when the poet chooses to work with its images), Krolow begins writing in a uniquely German tradition which affirms nature and uses nature imagery almost exclusively. By 1962, however, Krolow has completely abjured nature as a source of poetry and turned to the larger European tradition, whereas Bachmann and Celan, who have remained much closer to their origins, give nature imagery such a fundamental role in their poetry that one can decipher their central concerns through understanding it. This is not the case with Krolow" (301). 4.Hans Egon Holthusen wrote the first serious and comprehensive article of Krolow's early work with the title "Naturlyrik und Surrealismus: Die lyrischen Errungenschaften Karl Krolows" in Ja und Nein: Neue kritische Versuche ( Piper: Munich, 1954). Also as "Naturlyrik und Surrealismus" in Fritz, W. H. Über Karl Krolow (1972). Holthusen has also figured in the scholarship on Paul Celan for his apolitical appreciation of Celan (see Felstiner, John. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 78-79) and for a later critique of Celan that ignored an allusion to the Holocaust and elicited a sharp rebuke from Peter Szondi (see Felstiner 222-23, and fn. 18, 320). 5.Karl Krolow, "Paul Celan," Jahresring 70/71 (1970): 338-346. 6. For comparison, a real wall, the Berlin Wall, came between Paul Celan and Erich Arendt at a time when their friendship began to intensify, as chronicled in Wolfgang Emmerich's article: "Erich Arendt - Paul Celan; Korrespondenzen und Differenzen" (Celan-Jahrbuch 6 [1995]: 181-206, see page 188). 7. Karl Krolow, "Deutsche Dichter an der Seine: Zum Ersten Deutsch-Französischen Literaturgespräch in Paris," Neue Literarische Welt 11 (June 10, 1953): 9. 8.Karl Krolow, "Zum Tode Paul Celans," Der Tagesspiegel (May 7, 1970): 4. 9.That photograph appears on page 127 in Rolf Paulus, Der Lyriker Karl Krolow. Biographie-Werkentwicklung-Gedichtinterpretationen-Bibliographie (Bonn: Bouvier, 1983). Compare Celan's reaction to the possibility of being photographed with Heidegger on his famous visit to the philosopher's home in the Schwarzwald, as recounted in Gerhart Baumann's recollection Erinnerungen an Paul Celan (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985) 62-63. 10.Though I make no specific reference here to materials contained in the Krolow-Celan correspondence in Paul Celan's estate at the Literaturarchiv in Marbach, Germany, I would like to thank Eric Celan for his permission to consult those materials, which nonetheless reinforced my general sense of their friendship and collegiality. 11. Krolow had been a member of the Darmstadter Akademie der Sprache und Dichtung since 1953. 12.The general consistency of Krolow's support, despite some qualifications and reservations, is clear upon review of his scattered opinions. Bianca Rosenthal (in Pathways to Paul Celan: A History of Critical Responses as a Chorus of Discordant Voices (New York: Peter Lang, 1995) supports this impression and places it in the reception history of Paul Celan's poetry, where Krolow figures as a particularly sensitive commentator (9). With all due appreciation of his merit, I demonstrate the shortcomings and implications of Krolow's views and reviews. 13.Krolow's essay "Intellektuelle Heiterkeit: Rede zur Verleihung des Georg-Büchner-Preises" is included in Karl Krolow, Ein Gedicht entsteht: Selbstdeutungen, Interpretationen, Aufsätze. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973) 195-203. 14. See Doris Kirchner's study Doppelbödige Wirklichkeit: Magischer Realismus und nicht-faschistische Literatur (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1993). 15.Krolow introduces the term "Leichtigkeit" in his 1955 essay on "Intellektuelle Heiterkeit" (in Mein Gedicht ist mein Messer: Lyriker zu ihren Gedichten, ed. Hans Bender [Heidelberg: Wolfgang Rothe, 1955] 58-65), which is essentially a draft of his Büchner Preis address. Cognate terms from the same essay that he will develop later on are "porös" and "offen," though these will reflect his later developments toward Alltagslyrik. Krolow returns to that central idea, however, in an essay ten years later: "Literarische Leichtigkeit" in his Poetisches Tagebuch, 1964-65 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966) 125-29. 16. Paul Celan, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1983, 1986) 187-202. 17. Karl Krolow. "Am äußersten Blickrand - Erlittene Dichtung: Paul Celans Atemwende," Der Literat 10.1. (1968): 4. 18. In a 1959 commentary on Celan and Heinz Piontek ("Paul Celan und Heinz Piontek." Anstöße Nr. 1-2 Hofgeismar [1959]: 5-18), Krolow does speak briefly and inevitably about "Todesfuge" (11), now acknowledged as his most famous poem, but praises it as an artistic "Produkt solchen Kompositionswillens" that demonstrates how the theme of terror and "die Verhängnisse der Epoche gerafft und in der Poesie auf atemberaubende Weise 'erleichtert' werden." What Adorno had feared in the aesthetic treatment of barbarity, Krolow welcomes and extolls! See my discussion of "Adorno's Philosophy of Poetry" in Voice and Void: The Poetry of Gerhard Falkner ( Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1998) 19-34. 19. James K. Lyon makes the following observation: "Though no one could maintain that he [Celan] is a nature poet, the maze of Daseinsentwürfe through which Celan leads a patient reader abounds in nature imagery. Four main groups - images of a darkened landscape, a watery landscape, plant imagery, and stone imagery -- unlock a large number of his poems and reveal his central concern. . . . No stretch of the imagination could bring him close to the naturmagische Schule" (208-9). Though Lyon also writes in his dissertation about Krolow, he is not aware of these early reviews of Celan by Krolow, in which Krolow does seem to make Celan's work resemble that school of "inner emigrants" (such as Loerke, Kaschnitz, Eich, etc.). 20. This passage first appeared in a review of "Schneepart" entitled "Weit ausschreitende Stille" (68-69) in Die Horen 16.83 (1971): 69, and then later, in his "Die neue Situation der Lyrik," Universitas: Zeitschrift für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Literatur 28. 7 (1973): 1321-28. 21. In his earlier (1971) review of Celan's Schneepart: Letzte Gedichte, from which Krolow culled this passage, he had another sentence after "auswandern": Er konnte nicht emigrieren aus der Dichtung, die er bis zum Schluß machte" (Die Horen, 69). 22. Karl Krolow. "Teil III: Lyrik" (347-533) in Kindlers Literaturgeschichte der Gegenwart: Autoren, Werke, Themen, Tendenzen seit 1945 / Die Literatur der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, ed. Dieter Lattmann (München and Zürich: Kindler, 1973). In his review of Klaus Voswinckel's study of Celan (Paul Celan: Verweigerte Poetisierung der Welt, 1975), Krolow repeats, paraphrasing his earlier view: "Das Gedicht wurde bei ihm zum reinen, absoluten Sprachkörper, zur einzigen Instanz" ("Das Dunkel zu erhellen - Eine Untersuchung über Paul Celan." Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Nr. 152 [July 5, 1975]). Krolow's remark aligns Celan with Gottfried Benn (!) and emphasizes, - contrary to Voswinckel, the apolitical and isolated quality of Celan's person and poem. Krolow's view of Celan seems dictated by a distinction between the literary qualities of a text and what what ever else might extend beyond the text into other realms: though he, on the one hand, faults Celan for too little external reference (or for "Stoffschwund"), he speaks of the "Gefahr des Umschlags ins nicht mehr Literarische" in Celan's work. Krolow seems to work his way carefully around the autobiographical and historical content of Celan's poems. Even when he cites a phrase from Adorno's essay on Hölderlin in order to isolate the "Fremde als Gehalt, von der Sprachform ausgedrückt," Krolow removes that strangeness or foreignness, contrary to Adorno, from any relation to a particular historical reality. 23. Karl Krolow. "Erinnerung an einen grossen Gedichtband: Paul Celans "Mohn und Gedächtnis," Die Tat 3 (1975): 15. 24. Karl Krolow. "Paul Celan." Jahresring. 70/71 (1970): 339. 25. In a general portrait of Celan in 1961, Krolow did note, in a paragraph on his biography: "Die nationalsozialistische Ära wurde für ihn und für seine Familie in besonderem Maße zum Schicksal"("Deutsch mit französischem Schliff: Die lyrische Sprache des Dichters und Übersetzers Paul Celan." Das Schönste 7, Nr. 1-2 [München, 1961]: 42-43). In his many reviews, Krolow only indirectly cites the extra-literary content of Celan's poetry (e.g. its relations to the Holocaust, to his past, or to Judaic culture), when such perspectives are raised by other critics, as in Krolow's summary of Marie Luise Kaschnitz' laudatio at the Büchner-Preis ceremony (in Krolow's "Gedichte brauchen Hörer: Paul Celan anläßlich der Verleihung des Büchner-Preises" Neue Rhein-Zeitung [Düsseldorf, October 25, 1960]) and in his summary of Beda Allemann's "Afterword" to Celan's Ausgewählten Gedichten ("Zwischen abgewrackten Tabus." In: DAS. (October 6, 1968): 24). In the latter he notes Allemanns references [Hinweise] "auf die im weitesten Sinn autobiographischen Aspekte und besonders auf die Vertrautheit mit der mystischen Tradition der Chassidim. Auf diesen Punkt ist man meines Wissens bei Celan gar nicht oder genügend eingegangen." That latter comment indicates a welcome openness to such perspectives that had otherwise seemed foreclosed in his readings of Celan. 26. Karl Krolow, "Das Wort als konkrete Materie: Sprachgitter: Gedichte von Paul Celan," Deutsche Zeitung 8 April 1959: 17.