The Distance between Zurich and Todtnauberg
Journal Title: Religions - Year 2018, Vol 9, Issue 1
Abstract
This paper focuses on two poems written by Paul Celan after first encounters he had with writers who held great significance for him. In 1960 Celan met fellow Jewish poet Nelly Sachs at the Stork Inn in Zurich, and afterwards recorded the event in the poem “Zürich, Zum Storchen”. Seven years later, Celan visited Martin Heidegger at his hut in the German mountains. Celan’s depiction of this encounter is found in the poem “Todtnauberg”. In this essay, I make a two-fold argument regarding the Zurich poem. First I claim that “Todtnauberg” is clearly crafted in light of the earlier Sachs text, a fact that has been overlooked by previous scholarship. As such, it is only in placing the two texts side by side that a complete understanding of “Todtnauberg” comes into view. Second I will indicate how the Zurich poem reflects key elements of an approach to the problem of evil that I term an “enestological theodicy.” Such a term needed to be coined, since this sort of theodicy does not fit in the more traditional narrative categories related to the problem of evil.
Authors and Affiliations
A. K. Anderson
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP25879
- DOI https://doi.org/10.3390/rel9010011
- Views 312
- Downloads 10
Why Are Suicides So Widespread in Catholic Lithuania?
Religion as a protective factor against suicide was introduced in Durkheim’s theory of suicide and analysed from various perspectives in multiple studies. The Lithuanian case is intriguing because before WWII, along wi...
Validation of a Novel Instrument to Measure Elements of Franciscan-Inspired Spirituality in a General Population and in Religious Persons
Today there are several approaches for bringing mindfulness, which conceptually refers to the Buddhist Vipassana tradition, into organizations. Programs referring to value-based attitudes and behaviors derived from spe...
Finding God through the Spirituality of the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous
The 12 Step program of Alcoholics Anonymous has provided relief for individuals recovering from alcoholism for over 75 years. The key to the recovery process is a spiritual experience as the result of practicing the da...
Teaching Widowed Women, Community, and Devotion in Quattrocento Florence with Lucrezia Tornabuoni and Antonia Tanini Pulci
In the Middle Ages and the early modern period, a woman’s social identity changed when her husband died. She became both a symbol of his loss, and a living monument to his legacy—an ambassador between the living and th...
A Transcendentalist Nature Religion
Scholars of religion have often pointed to the Transcendentalists as progenitors of a distinct tradition of nature religion in the United States. Nevertheless, this work has not fully dealt with the problematic qualiti...