Page 38 - GALIET BEAUTY´S LURE: WAR Helen of Troy and Margareta of Germany IV

conjugates beauty and death, and idyll and war. It is sun and eclipse. Thus, victims see, but not see. Thus, victims drink black milk: black milk as the terrible sublime. If Paris, in his transfixed likeness to divinely beautiful Helen, becomes, like Helen, a grief to Troy, Hitler, in his transfixed likeness to Margareta, becomes a terror to Europe. From gazing at the sun, they cease to see. It grows dark. Troy will dance with darkness and fall. In Germany it will grow dark. “When it grows dark in Deutschland” (es dunkelt nach Deutschland), the Meister of Death, Hitler, will write to his beloved golden-haired Margareta. When it grows dark in Deutschland, he will conjure up sublime Margareta of the grand hour of genius, emblem of the eternal feminine, and the grand emancipation of German Romanticism and Classicism:69 his false salvation. She is light and twilight. Her ways are beauty and genocide. She is beauty, but her ways are war: she is the apple of discord. She is white milk, but her ways are black milk. She is golden-haired, but her ways are ashen-haired. She transfigures, yet she blinds. Paris and Hitler’s transfixed gazes see, but not see. Thus, their gazes, too, become a mise en abyme of her infinite gaze, mirroring ascent and fall, mirroring the Iliad’s war narrative unto Nazism’s bestiality. Thus, collapsing time and space, they, too, become the male terrible sublime.
Just as Lady Beauty weaves her war song, a red robe, she lures all who see it into an abysmal, endless mirror, repeating its war grief thousand-fold. She weaves and goes on weaving, with bleeding veins, not only Troy, not only Nazi
69 Felstiner, John. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven, 1995. 36.
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