Memory and Mystical Detachment in Paul Celan’s Eckhart-Poems

In late 1967, shortly after having been released from a Parisian psychiatric hospital, the poet Paul Celan turned his attention to the Middle High German writings of the speculative mystic Meister Eckhart. Celan's engagement with Eckhart's work resulted in the final three poems of the final volume of poetry that Celan was able to submit for publication before drowning himself in the Seine in 1970. These three poems thus might be said to mark a certain culmination of Celan's own work, although, for those familiar with the latter, this idea might seem strange. What does a late-medieval Dominican have to do with a post-Holocaust Jewish poet? Celan, who bridges and challenges numerous traditions and languages in his poetic activity, would have been drawn to the mediating work of Eckhart's corpus. Eckhart is the only major theologian of the Middle Ages whose oeuvre survives substantially in both Latin and the vernacular, and Eckhart combines and transforms various movements with consummate linguistic creativity and ease: scholasticism and mysticism, Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism, Maimonidean exegesis and Beguine metaphorics, to name a few. However, Celan was also disturbed by Eckhart's central concept of abegescheidenheit (Modern German Abgeschiedenheit) or "detachment," especially in the wake of the Shoah. In this paper, I will survey Celan's critical appropriation of Eckhart by offering brief commentaries on his three Eckhart-poems. I will focus on the themes of memory and detachment.