“das ungewisse”: the Uncertain Time of Paul Celan’s “Grabschrift für François”

This dissertation is a detailed study of the poem “Grabschrift für François” [Epitaph for François], written by the Holocaust survivor and mid-20th-century German-language poet, Paul Celan. Celan’s poetry is regarded in the scholarship as a site of mourning for the brutalities of the Holocaust, including the murders of his parents. “Grabschrift für François,” however, marks a critical point of loss for Celan that post-dates those losses from the Holocaust, deaths with which his poetry is traditionally associated. The poem’s title points to Celan’s most significant loss since the end of the Holocaust, the death of his first-born son, François, on October 8th, 1953. This dissertation remains with this poem and its treatment of this death in order to re-orient the way we think about loss in Celan’s oeuvre. In order to do so, the project examines the figures, form, and unique language of this poem through a detailed close-reading. This reading is informed by Celan himself—his speeches, letters, and other archival materials—along with scholarly works from the fields of psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, and contemporary literary theory. Through this analysis we come to the intervention of “uncertain time,” time that has encountered loss and loses its linearity, predictability, and measurability. This is “time out of joint” or time at odds with itself, that is, time “in contretemps.” Such time produces a specific kind of relationship of the survivor to loss, that of the “exilic mourner.” It is through these various interventions that I conclude that uncertain time is not simply an idea but part of the poem, part of the poetic structure of the text, that serves to keep the poem—in Celan’s own terms—“speaking” of loss.