Todesfuge (Death Fugue) is a German language poem written by the Romanian poet Paul Celan and first published in 1948. It is Celan's most famous poem.
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The exact date of composition is not known, though scholars believe that it could have been written as early as 1944.[1] The poem was first published in a Romanian translation titled "Tangoul Mortii" ("Tango of Death")in 1947; Celan's close friend Petre Solomon was the translator.[2] This version was also the first poem to be published under the pseudonym "Celan," an anagram for "Ancel," Celan's real name.[3] The original German version appeared in the 1948 Der Sand aus den Urnen ("Sand from the Urns"), Celan's first collection of poems."Todesfuge" has since appeared in numerous anthologies.
The structure of the poem is similar to that of a fugue: the phrases are recombined, which is typical for a fugue. The title can also be seen as a reference to "death music" (Todesmusik): prisoners in concentration camps were forced to play music to other prisoners waiting for their death in gas chambers.
Like most of Celan's poetry, "Todesfuge" is highly enigmatic and resists being reduced to a single meaning. The first stanza opens with the striking image "Schwarze Milch der Frühe," which can be translated as "Black milk of dawn." This line is repeated at the beginning of three of the remaining six stanzas, invoking the repetitive structure of the fugue. The speaking voice in the poem is mostly a collective "We," who are imagined as drinking this "Black milk," digging graves both in the air and in the earth, and being ordered to sing and dance and dig by an unnamed "He." This individual, who is counterposed to the collective "we," writes letters to Germany, plays with snakes, and is ready to use the gun in his belt as he gives orders. One of the most haunting aspects of the poem is its frequent allusion to hair: the theme first appears in the first stanza, in which "He" uses the phrase "your golden hair Margarete" in the letter that he writes to Germany. The poem repeats the same phrase in the second stanza, but turns it into a double-image: "your golden hair Margarete / your ashen hair Sulamith" ("dein goldenes Haar Margarete / Dein aschenes Haar Sulamith"). This is then repeated through the rest of the poem, and constitutes the concluding couplet.
The most frequently-quoted expression in the poem is "der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland."
| der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland sein Auge ist blau er trifft dich mit bleierner Kugel er trifft dich genau |
Death is a Master from Germany his eye is blue He shoots you with shot made of lead he shoots you level and true |
The line is often used in antifascist context, and found in graffiti and posters. It is also used in music, often in altered form, eg. by the Black Metal-Band Eisregen (their Hexenhaus contains "Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Thüringen"). The poem is used in a song by seminal German punk band Slime, "Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland." Rüdiger Safranski titled his biography of Martin Heidegger, who was involved with the Nazi party, Ein Meister aus Deutschland.