The Holocaust
Although this might seem rather obvious, the key theme is the Holocaust. The experiences that Celan suffered during his time as a prisoner in a death camp formed both who he was and what he wrote about. We are able to see clearly the terrible way in which the Jews were treated by the Nazis and the evils that were perpetrated for no reason other than the obvious enjoyment of each individual prison guard.
We are also able to see from the poem that whereas sometimes it is claimed that the guards were "following orders" they actually enjoyed the orders they were given. A guard who was ordered to kill a certain number of prisoners could follow orders and do just that; these guards did not just follow orders, but created an event for themselves to enjoy around the killing process.
Although the Holocaust took place within World War Two, it was also a war within a war, and in some ways, not connected to the global warfare that was taking place. It is almost as though being engaged in the war was the cover Hitler's Third Reich needed in order to carry out the Holocaust that was their real intention. Their hatred for Jews is evident throughout the poem and is its key theme.
Many Kinds of Suffering
We have all seen so many war movies that we almost know what is coming in them. We have seen television footage of what was perpetrated at Death Camps; we have seen film of the emaciated prisoners too weak to stand, the piles of shoes belonging to dead Jews, and all kinds of torture committed during the Holocaust. However, the suffering that Celan writes of in his poem is horrific because it is both physical and mental. The men are are dehumanized and kept in conditions that are not fit to live in, yet they are confronted with beautiful music whilst they literally dig their own graves. There is horror in the fact that the guards who are capable of such evil are also still able to appreciate such artistic beauty, and the two do not seem to belong in the same situation together.
The men in the poem speak about death almost in the third person, not as something that they fear, or try to avoid, but as something they have become accustomed to and detached from. They see so much of it that it is almost normal. They are conditioned to accept it as a fact of their situation and have even had the ability to feel fear taken away from them. The humans that they were have died a long time ago and the humans they are now are barely alive. Whilst the physical suffering they endure is unimaginably terrible, the psychological suffering they are subjected to is even worse.
Art and Culture versus Barbarism
The philosopher Theodor Adorno said that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. Poetry is, after all, an art form, and all art has its own beauty. To make something beautiful out of a subject that is only ugly and evil is the barbarism he was talking about. Yet, Celan's poem also shows us that some of our preconceptions about people who are educated and cultured are completely wrong, and rooted in how we want the world to be rather than how the world actually is. An example of this is the Nazi guard who is the most well-educated character in the poem. He loves 19th century German romanticism, enjoys music, appreciates the beauty of nature - yet he is the most murderous person in the poem as well, and has no problem contradicting his love for art and culture with his fondness for brutal murder.
Even Celan himself, having experienced the barbarity of the Germans, still appreciates the German culture he was brought up to revere and enjoy. This poem raises an important philosophical question with this theme of art and culture - we tend to believe that the more cultured a person, the more moral they are. The guards contradict this entirely. The constant struggle between culture and art, and the barbarism shown by the Nazis, is one of the themes throughout the poem.
Nazi View of the "Master Race"
Ironically, given that he was a short, dark haired man with little physical prowess, Hitler wanted to created a 'master race' of blonde, blue-eyed Germans. This is one of the themes of the poem, and "Marguerite" represents this stereotypical Aryan. She has blonde hair and blue eyes and is implicitly innocent and pure because of this. She is idolized by the Nazi camp guard who is obsessed with her, and she is recognized as the desired Nazi racial ideal.
By contrast, the other woman in the poem, "Shulamith" is also beautiful, but has "ashen" hair rather than blonde. She is a symbol of the beautiful Jewish women, whose race is dying, her hair ashen as the hair of a corpse.
Identity
The Jewish prisoners in the camps are completely dehumanized, and their names immediately irrelevant (this is why they are given only numbers). They are not seen as people, but as "jews". They live crammed into a tiny space, en masse, with nothing to distinguish them from each other. By contrast, the German guard lives in a house and is seen as an individual rather than as a number. The Jews in the camps and in the poem have been robbed of their identity because they are no longer nationals of the country they had previously considered their own. They are Jews. They cannot be Romanians, or Germans, or Belgians, because to be a citizen of one of these countries is a privilege not offered to them because their identity is Jewish. In this poem Celan observes that the way in which they are viewed by the Nazis has become the way in which the Jewish prisoners view themselves; they no longer feel like people and they have no wish to be a part of Germany, and are therefore identity-less even to themselves. The fact that they are treated worse than cattle and the Nazi lives in a house has become their new normal, and this identity brainwashing is one of the lesser themes in the poem.
