Page 32 - GALIET ILLUSION: Rousseau IV

In this macabre dance of death, the former suitors and Trojans also participate. Thus, they, too, cast forward their sombre, tyrannical shadows upon Hitler’s fascism and Celan’s Death Fugue. Todesfugue’s most wretched verse, Death is a Master from Germany, or der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland, abysmally mirrors and allegorizes the sufferings of Homer’s Iliad and of Kafka’s The Trial. To Trojans, Death is a Master from Argos and from Troy itself: Menelaus must recover Helen, while Paris must preserve her, and hence, both shall obstinately war for her. By contrast, to German- Jews, Death is a Master from Deutschland: Hitler must recover Margareta and exterminate and not preserve, in the spirit of Rousseau’s Social Contract, the other for her labyrinthine sake. Both epics thus sing, as if in a unified dirge collapsing centuries and place, of the death throes and wailing lamentations of “black milk of daybreak” drunk for beautiful Helen of Troy’s and for Margareta of Germany’s sakes:
From Stanza 5
“Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at midday Death is a master aus Deutschland we drink you at evening and morning we drink and we drink this Death is ein Meister aus Deutschland his eye it is blue”
Celan, Death Fugue
Death fugue’s eerie song mourns and mourns for the ashen dead, as Homer’s Troy mourns and wails for dead Hektor and its valiant heroes, dead. It weeps and mourns for the atrocities and scorching wastelands endured for lovely-haired Helen and golden-haired Margareta’s sakes. Transfixed by her seductive, beautiful yet deadly
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