Celan’s Sichtbar (GW II, 119)

This short essay offers a close reading of Paul Celan’s short poem beginning with the word “SICHTBAR”, a late work that compresses anatomical, biographical, and historical violence into five terse lines. By tracing the poem’s interplay between corporeal vocabulary (Hirnstamm, Herzstamm, Mark) and symbolic constellations such as the twelvefold song and the figure of the Mitternachtsschütze, the analysis explores how Celan inscribes trauma into the very structure of the body. The poem, as will be argued, stages a confrontation between poetic language and what Celan himself called Vielstelligkeit des Ausdrucks — a multiplicity of expression that resists both psychiatric reduction and redemptive closure. Celan almost never wrote in prose, for precisely this reason. Poetry allows for language’s otherness. Gerhart Baumann recalls in his memoirs of Celan:

“Beweisen wie Erklärungen war Celan abgeneigt; ohne es nachdrücklich auszusprechen, teilte er mit Rudolf Kassner die Überzeugung: “eine Geschichte ist so lange wahr, als man sie nicht zu erklären versucht.” Mit Zurückhaltung erwiderte er jeden Versuch, ihm einen Hinweis zu seingen Gedichten zu entlochen. Nichts gab er preis, er begnügte sich damit, das völlig Einfache und Einsichtige zu berufen, was nicht anderes bedeuten konnte, als den Vorhof zum Schwierigen, zum Unbetretbaren zu umreißen.” (Baumann, 17).

If we take Baumann’s description as indicative, truth does not reside, for Celan in the absolutely clarity in the sense of univocity, but in the kind of speech that carries silence with it. This also means, something left to discover, hence it is a poetry of the open, of new possibilities, of things being otherwise. In doing so, it reveals how Celan transforms medical vocabulary into a charged poetic material, capable of bearing the weight of historical memory and the ruptured lineage of a fractured collective.

SICHTBAR, bei Hirnstamm und Herzstamm, unverdunkelt, terrestrisch, der Mitternachtsschütze, morgens, jagt den Zwölfgesang durch das Mark von Verrat und Verwesung. (GW II, 119)

(English translation)

Visible, at brainstem and heartstem, not darkened, terrestrial, the midnight marksman, in the morning, chases the twelvefold song through the marrow of betrayal and decay.

The poem begins with the word “SICHTBAR” (“visible”) — a striking declaration of presence that immediately directs our gaze inward, to the “Hirnstamm und Herzstamm” (brainstem and heartstem). These are not metaphorical abstractions but anatomical, biological cores — places where life pulses beneath consciousness and volition.

This visibility is “unverdunkelt” — not obscured, not shaded — and “terrestrisch” — earthly, of this world. The insistence that this phenomenon is clear and grounded points to a kind of undeniable presence, an eruption that can no longer be spiritualized or deflected. It is terrestrial in the most literal sense: tied to the suffering, mortal body. The appearance of the “Mitternachtsschütze” — the midnight marksman — further intensifies this dynamic. In Celan’s own life, Schütze was his zodiac sign (Sagittarius, the archer), adding a layer of biographical and mythic resonance to the term. But the figure also evokes death, execution, or unseen violence — someone who operates in the dark, but whose action becomes legible in the light of morning. The fact that this marksman acts “morgens” (in the morning) underscores a kind of poetic reversal: what is nocturnal, secret, or destructive reappears in consciousness, in the clear light of day.

The marksman is said to “jagt den Zwölfgesang durch / das Mark von Verrat und Verwesung” — he drives the “twelvefold song” through the marrow of betrayal and decay. This is perhaps the most enigmatic and charged image of the poem. The Zwölfgesang, or twelvefold song, might suggest structured poetic form, liturgical chant, or an allusion to the twelve tribes — each “singing” or representing a part of a collective memory or identity. But here, this twelvefold expression is not celebratory or redemptive — it is driven through the Mark, the marrow, the innermost and most vulnerable part of the body. Mark can also mean core, or even terrain or territory (as in older germanic usage, as in Markgraf). Here we find the Vielstelligkeit des Ausdrücks.

This act of the marksman, the hunt of the twelve-song, is not merely one of articulation, but of violation. It penetrates the core of “Verrat und Verwesung” — betrayal and decomposition. The terms suggest both ethical collapse and physical rot: treachery and death, possibly collective and historical. The image of marrow evokes Holocaust imagery — of bones, of the body reduced to skeletal remains, but also of memory etched into the deepest tissues of life. The betrayal also can refer to Celan’s sense of isolation in the German-langage literary world as well as the accusations of plagiarism (the Goll-affäre, most notably).

Taken together, the poem sketches a scene in which deep biological structures — the brainstem, the heartstem, the marrow — become sites of inscription for historical trauma. What is driven into these sites is not merely memory but song, or rather, a distorted or weaponized form of song. The Zwölfgesang, possibly alluding to liturgical or ancestral tradition, now traverses decay and betrayal, as if tradition itself has been contaminated. The intrusion of the midnight marksman, perhaps a stand-in for death, history, or even the poet himself (as Sagittarius), marks the violent moment of this transmission. The poet is not a passive observer but implicated in the shot, the wound, and the song.

In this sense, the poem reflects on poetry’s power not as healing or redemptive, but as something that cuts, wounds, and reveals. The visible here is not enlightenment but exposure — the opening of the body and the past to forces that have long been hidden.

The use of Stamm in both terms already carries a dual semantic weight. While literally referring to the ‘stem’ or core part of an organ, Stamm in German also means “tribe” or “lineage,” hinting at a potential link to a collective body, a genealogy of trauma or memory, perhaps even to the Stämme Israels, the twelve tribes of Israel. This connection is not explicit, but obliquely present in the poem’s choice of numerical and anatomical registers. The invocation of “visibility” in these hidden, vital zones suggests that what once lay buried — in history, in the body, in the unconscious — is now erupting into appearance.

The link between the Stämme (stems/tribes) and the twelvefold song hints at a broken genealogy, a fractured cultural inheritance that can only be sung through suffering. This intertwining of anatomical and tribal language, of poetic form and biological vulnerability, renders the poem a dark meditation on memory, embodiment, and the limits of tradition in the wake of catastrophe.

Celan’s use of anatomical and neurological vocabulary — Hirnstamm, Herzstamm, Mark — should not be read as merely metaphorical, nor simply as symptoms of his psychiatric condition during the period of composition. While it is important to acknowledge the biographical context — Celan was hospitalized in psychiatric clinics during parts of his later life — reducing his language to clinical pathology would flatten the very complexity that he defends under the name of “Vielstelligkeit des Ausdrucks” (GW III, 167), a concept discussed by Kai Fischer, who emphasizes Celan’s resistance to interpretive reduction and his insistence on poetic ambiguity and semantic overdetermination.[1] The forensic, medical, and anatomical lexicon that enters his late work signals an intensified poetic engagement with how the body is structured, exposed, and violated — particularly under a clinical, scientific, or even bureaucratic gaze. As Sieghild Bogumild has insightfully argued, Celan’s use of what she calls Spezialvokabular — especially neurological terminology naming parts of the brain and the regions responsive to external light stimuli — reflects not only an interest in anatomy but also a theoretical preoccupation with the formation of images in the unconscious:

Das neurologische Vokabular, das Teile des Gehirns nennt […] und besonders immer wieder die Regionen, auf die der äußere Lichtreiz wirkt […]: dieses Spezialvokabular aus der Neurologie lässt deutlich erkennen, dass Celan sich seit der Wende in seiner Lektüre auch theoretisch mit der Frage nach der Entstehung der Bilder im Unbewussten beschäftigt.[2]

The neurological vocabulary that names parts of the brain […] and especially, time and again, the regions affected by external light stimuli […]: this specialized vocabulary from neurology clearly shows that, since the turning point, Celan has also been engaging theoretically in his reading with the question of how images arise in the unconscious.

This observation situates Celan’s lexical choices within a larger poetic and philosophical concern: how perception, memory, and language emerge not from transparent consciousness, but from embodied and often violated structures. The Hirnstamm, then, is not only a medical term — it becomes a site where visibility, perception, and trauma intersect. The medical terms, such as “Hirnstamm”, becomes also special kind of material, the materiality of words, that Celan uses to build a separate reality not reducible to the medical one.

Celan’s Fadensonne marks a turning point in his poetic development, signaling a departure from the more recognizable tone of his earlier work and demanding a new critical orientation. As Kai Fischer notes, referencing Anneliese Odry’s review in the Rheinischer Merkur, the “decisive principal merit” (entscheidende Hauptverdienst) of the volume lies in the fact “that Celan’s work must now be redefined” (dass man Celans Arbeit nun neu bestimmen müsse) (Odry, 40). While a few poems in the collection may still resonate with the ‘older’ Celan tone, Odry emphasizes that what is more significant is how the volume confronts the reader “with new questions and perspectives.” Fadensonne thus challenges the reader to reconsider the parameters through which Celan’s poetics have been understood. No longer grounded in a stable lyric subject or a hermeneutics of symbolic recovery, the poems advance a mode of address that is fragmentary, difficult, and radically open — a poetics attuned to interruption, loss, and the opacity of meaning.

Bibliography:

Bogumild, Sieghild. “Celans Wandern im Wort: Entwicklungslinien in der Lyrik Paul Celans II.” Neue Rundschau 94, no. 1 (1983): 88–105.

Fischer, Kai. “Fadensonnen.” In Celan-Handbuch: Leben — Werk — Wirkung. 2nd ed. Edited by Markus May, Peter Gossens, and Jürgen Lehmann, 98–105. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2023.

[1] Kai Fischer, “Fadensonnen,” in Celan-Handbuch: Leben — Werk — Wirkung, 2nd ed., ed. Markus May, Peter Gossens, and Jürgen Lehmann (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2023), 104.

[2] Sieghild Bogumild, “Celans Wandern im Wort: Entwicklungslinien in der Lyrik Paul Celans II,” Neue Rundschau 94, no. 1 (1983): 94.