Celan, Paul.

with autograph title at the head of the manuscript ("Todesfuge") and other autograph entries, including the page number "2" on the second leaf and a repetition of the title above it, 2 pages, 4to (26.9 x 21cm), carbon typescript watermarked "The Best & First Paper for Typewriter", no place or date [c.1947, or later], browning, a few small stains, corners strengthened and restored, splitting to central horizontal crease repaired



...er trifft dich mit bleierner Kugel er trifft dich genau
   ein Mann wohnt im Haus dein goldenes Haar Margarete
   er hetzt seine Rueden auf uns er schenkt uns ein Grab in der Luft
   er spielt mit den Schlangen und traeumet der Tod ist ein Meister
aus Deutschland...
  

Paul Celan Werke. Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe, I. Abtheilung/Band 2,2/3,2 (Frankfurt, 2003), p.199 (source H^1e)

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An inscribed and signed typescript of Celan's single most famous poem, and one of the most celebrated poems in German literature. "Todesfuge" is by general consent the most compelling poem to have arisen from the Holocaust, and it remains one of the most powerful and moving utterances by any poet of any age.

This extraordinary, complex and powerful poem, an attempt by Celan in effect to express the inexpressible - the experience of the concentration camp, in particular, as this might be rendered by a Jewish writer and a Holocaust survivor whose creative mother tongue was German - was written in Bucharest in 1945. An early version of the poem, in a Romanian translation, appeared in May 1947 with the title "Tangoul Morţii" ("Death Tango"), the poem later being published in German in Vienna at the end of 1948 (after Celan's removal to Paris), as the last item in his first volume of poems, Der Sand aus den Urnen. The poem was also contained in Celan's first collection of poems to be published in Germany, Mohn und Gedächtnis (1952), the volume that made his reputation there. A striking feature of the typescript is that the occurring German umlauts 'ä' and 'ü' are rendered as 'ae' and 'ue', which points to Celan's having used a non-German typewriter, and is possibly an indication that the poem was typed in Bucharest before his emigration to Vienna at the end of 1947, or in Paris where he settled in 1948.

Although the poem's original 1947 Romanian title reflects the musical performances mentioned in it and which were a reality of concentration camp life (both Celan's parents had perished in an internment camp in the Ukraine, and he himself had been deported to labour camps in southern Romania, before being liberated in 1944), the later highly evocative title "Todesfuge"  is unquestionably more resonant and multi-layered, reflecting and embodying not only the dualism of the poem's subject matter, which contrasts and meshes together, in the fashion of a musical fugue's subject and countersubject, the persecuted and the persecuting, but also its complex modular construction which sets up, combines and develops the individual unpunctuated, and devastatingly unvarnished, lines and line sections out of which it is formed.