Page 31 - GALIET BEAUTY´S LURE: WAR Helen of Troy and Margareta of Germany IV

their darkness seeks to be deciphered.48 “There is a muted silence,” says Gadamer, in their crypticism.”49 Yet, amidst their self-seclusion, and the ungraspable, they reveal in its poetic silences, or absences, in the liminal space between philosophy and poesy, their secret hiddenness, hesitantly at first, and pregnant with sense, afterwards. It is not just potentially Himmler, or Mengele, the Doctor of Death, who elusively allude to Celan’s mysterious Master of Death, and commandant.50 It is not just the man or commandant who plays with his vipers who writes to his golden-haired Margareta. Its riddle reveals the unspeakable name, the unspeakable metaphor for a grim Meister, Hitler, the supreme Master of Death of Germany’s Nazism. It is Hitler, too, the man who plays with his vipers and shoots, and writes, and daydreams of his ideal beloved goldenes Haar Margarete emblemized in Celan’s Deathfugue.
In his youth, Hitler composed countless hymns to a beautiful blond-haired maiden, Stefanie, his eternal Beloved.51 “He often gazed at her longingly,” always daydreaming and fantasizing about her, never “making the slightest effort to meet
48 Gadamer, Hans. Gadamer on Celan. Trans. Heeinemann and Krajewski. New York: State University of New York Press, 1997. 11.
49 Gadamer, Hans. Gadamer on Celan. Trans. Heeinemann and Krajewski. New York: State University of New York Press, 1997. 67.
50 To Felstiner, the “Meister of Death” may signify God, Christ, high priest, teacher, a labor camp or crematorium overseer (like Himmler), master of race (Like Hitler), or Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister and Wagner’s Meister Singer von Nuremberg, which carries overtones of the 1935 Nuremberg racial laws and the post-war trials. Felstiner, John. Paul Celan. Poet, Survivor, Jew. London: New Haven, 1995. 39.
51 Shirer, William. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. A History of Nazi Germany. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960. 15.
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