Page 34 - GALIET BEAUTY´S LURE: WAR Helen of Troy and Margareta of Germany IV

Golden-haired Margareta symbolizes both, the creative and destructive principles. She synthesizes both Classicism’s greatness and Romanticism’s storm and stress. She emblemizes the ideals of beauty of spirit and industriousness and purity that Hitler strives for in his classical ideology. Yet, she also symbolizes, to a lesser extent than Faust, Hitler’s passion and fury. She bears a child and murders it. In so doing, she becomes the terrible sublime: “black milk.” The Jews drink her black milk just as the Trojan dead symbolically drink her black milk, just as the Argives, too, and German Nazis, too, drink her black milk in mise en abyme. Bruno Bettelheim interprets black milk as “the image of a mother destroying her infant.”62 Hence, Lady Beauty, as if a Valkyrie, symbolizes the power to annihilate her heroes and children. Lured by her majesty, Paris and King Priam destroy their own heroes and child, Troy; Hitler exterminates the other’s child, Israel, and also his own child, Germany. Thus, Lady Beauty’s quintessential eternal feminine, by causing death, bears a tragedy and a ruin 3⁄4 a holocaust. As insinuated by Faust’s Eternal Feminine and Eternal Abyss, she is both, altitude and precipice. She draws humans on high, but plunges them unto strife and nothingness, for she is beyond tangible grasp.63 Beneath her gaze, Faust’s heavenly Chorus Mysticus descends to an infernal Death Fugue. Celan’s last couplet, too, alludes to two eternal feminine. Unlike Margarete, Shulamith is the true savior, the true beloved of the Song of Songs.64 She is the one whose hair is no longer golden, but ashen. She symbolizes
62 Felstiner, John. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven, 1995. 34-35. 63 Goethe. Faust. Trans. Walter Arndt. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. 490. 64 Felstiner, John. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven, 1995. 34-40.
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