Page 20 - GALIET BEAUTY´S LURE: WAR Helen of Troy and Margareta of Germany IV

Argives, “hang over them [the Trojans].”31 Death not only is a Master from Argos, but also a Master from Troy. Argos wars to recover Helen, Troy to preserve her. Both Trojans and Argives must obey their Masters of Beauty and Death 3⁄4 Prince Paris, King Priam and King Menelaus 3⁄4 the supreme autocrats transfixed by Lady Beauty’s terrible sublime gaze. Eichmann’s officials must also obey their superiors, and become allegories for Hitler’s beast-men, the Masters of Death, that “live in the house, that play with their vipers, and write, when it grows dark to “Deutschland your golden hair Margareta.”32 They, too, for Lady Beauty’s sake, must be the beast-men that,
From Stanza 3
“Shout[s] jab the earth deeper you lot there you others sing up and play Grab[s] for the rod in their [his] belt they [he] swing[s] it their [his] eyes are so blue
jab your spades deeper you lot there you others play on for the dancing”
Celan, Death Fugue
In this macabre dance of death, the former suitors and Trojans also participate. Thus, they, too, cast forward their somber, 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. To Trojans, Death is a Master from Argos and from Troy itself: Menelaus must recover Helen, while Paris
31 Il.,7.402.
32 Celan, Paul. “Death Fugue.” Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan. Trans. John Felstiner. New York: W.W.W. Norton, 2001. 31.
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