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the promise and Davidic covenant for Jews to return to Zion. She is the presence, the Shekinah, who wonders with Israel everywhere.65 Unlike German Margarete, beloved Shulamith is the sublime-sublime to the Jews; in her there is no terrible- sublime, no holocaust, no abyss, no descent, only the spirit of true life, glory and salvation. If the Jews dig graves in the air so that “she won’t like too cramped,” it is because she, too, is being buried as an innocent victim, not as a cause of strife.
Unlike Shulamith, Heine’s golden-haired Lorelei, like Faust’s Margareta, represents the toxic breath of the eternal feminine. She is the lovely siren of the Rhine sitting upon a rock whose sublime, yet terrible beauty, whose wondrous, yet drowning song, lures sailors to their deaths, just as Helen’s haunting voice mimes the Argive wives’ voices to lure the Trojan Horse chieftains to death,66 just as Lady Beauty’s weavings of her war song lures all into an abysmal, endless mirror, repeating its war grief thousand-fold.
There is an intricate, fearful symmetry, far-off from Shulamith’s sublime-sublime, amongst the Aryan and Grecian ideal of physical beauty, and Hitler’s Grecian ideological beauty, conjugated in blonde-haired Stefanie as a Valkyrie, lovely-haired Helen, golden-haired Margareta, and golden- haired Lorelei, all emblems of the eternal feminine terrible- sublime. It manifests itself fearfully in daydreams and idylls. Just as young Hitler daydreams with beloved Stefanie-Valkyrie,
65 Felstiner, John. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven, 1995. 34-40. 66 Ody., 4.265-295.
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