Death Fugue

"'" (Deathfugue') is a German language poem written by the Romanian-born poet Paul Celan probably around 1945 and first published in 1948. It is one of his best-known and often-anthologized poems. Despite critics claiming that the lyrical finesse and aesthetic of the poem did not do justice to the cruelty of the Holocaust, others regard the poem as one that "combines mysteriously compelling imagery with rhythmic variations and structural patterns that are both elusive and pronounced". At the same time it has been regarded as a "masterful description of horror and death in a concentration camp". Celan was born to a Jewish family in Cernăuți, Romania (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine); his parents were murdered in the Holocaust, and Celan himself was a prisoner for a time in a work camp. The poem has reached international relevance by being considered to be one of the most important poems of the post-war period and the most relevant example of Trümmerliteratur.

== Summary == The poem is 36 lines long, with breaks after lines 9, 15, 18, 23 and 26, which would seem to divide it into six stanzas. However critics typically regard it as being in four sections, each of which begins with the image which can be translated as "Black milk of dawn." The speaking voice in the poem is mostly a collective "We". The structure of the poem has been said to reflect that of a musical fugue in that phrases are repeated and recombined, comparably to the musical genre.