Magnetic Fields

July 1959: Paul Celan and his family are vacationing in the Swiss Alps. They’re in Sils Maria, where the poet’s beloved Nietzsche sent Zarathustra up into the mountains—where he is to meet Theodor W. Adorno. Celan incorrectly assumed that the philosopher’s oft-cited statement, published eight years earlier, “After Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric,” was made in reference to “Death Fugue” (1948), then and now Celan’s most famous poem, a ghastly Holocaust collage which the poet himself would later renounce as too stylized. The meeting never happens; Celan returns home to Paris early. But some months later, he imagines what it might have been like in his only work of prose fiction, “Conversation in the Mountains” (1960).