Born in 1920 in the Romanian city of Czernowitz, the poet Paul Celan (né Antschel) spent most of World War II in that city’s ghetto—where he translated Shakespeare’s sonnets into German—and then in a forced-labor camp. His less fortunate parents were among those Jews sent to the internment camps in Romanian-occupied Ukraine, where they both perished. After the war, he continued to write poetry and also to produce numerous literary translations. The Holocaust remained a major subject of his work, including his best-known poem, “Todesfuge (Death Fugue). Reviewing several recent books on or of Celan’s poetry, Mark Glanville examines the poet’s refusal to abandon German:

For Celan, post-Holocaust German had become a language “gagged with the ashes of burned-out meaning,” yet it was his mother’s tongue, and “to speak like one’s mother, means to dwell, even there where there are no tents.” Czernowitz (now the Ukrainian city Chernivtsi) had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and in 1920 had only recently become Romanian. . . . His mother had been a passionate advocate for German language and culture. Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire had thrived under the benign rule of Emperor Franz Joseph I. Celan [wrote] “I believe that I remain in the domain of my mother-tongue, thus in the domain of the German language, which I have been speaking forever.” “This is my fate,” he wrote in a letter to the Swiss writer, Max Rychner, “to have to write German poems.”

Celan’s answer was to forge a German that would serve his own poetic purpose: full of archaisms, obscurity, and the neologisms that the German language facilitates with its penchant for portmanteau words, conveyed in a stark, pared-down syntax. Poetry should no longer be a matter of “verklären” (transfiguring). . . . Celan believed that the language of German poetry had to become “more sober, more factual, . . . grayer” and that it is a language “which wants to locate even its ‘musicality’ in such a way that it has nothing in common with the ‘euphony’ which more or less blithely continued to sound alongside the greatest horrors. . . . It does not transfigure or render ‘poetical;’ it names, it posits.”

On Tuesday, a Hizballah drone attack injured three people in northern Israel. The next day, another attack, targeting an IDF base, injured eighteen people, six of them seriously, in Arab al-Amshe, also in the north. This second attack involved the simultaneous use of drones carrying explosives and guided antitank missiles. In both cases, the defensive systems that performed so successfully last weekend failed to stop the drones and missiles. Ron Ben-Yishai has a straightforward explanation as to why: the Lebanon-backed terrorist group is getting better at evading Israel defenses. He explains the three basis systems used to pilot these unmanned aircraft, and their practical effects:

These systems allow drones to act similarly to fighter jets, using “dead zones”—areas not visible to radar or other optical detection—to approach targets. They fly low initially, then ascend just before crashing and detonating on the target. The terrain of southern Lebanon is particularly conducive to such attacks.

But this requires skills that the terror group has honed over months of fighting against Israel. The latest attacks involved a large drone capable of carrying over 50 kg (110 lbs.) of explosives. The terrorists have likely analyzed Israel’s alert and interception systems, recognizing that shooting down their drones requires early detection to allow sufficient time for launching interceptors.

The IDF tries to detect any incoming drones on its radar, as it had done prior to the war. Despite Hizballah’s learning curve, the IDF’s technological edge offers an advantage. However, the military must recognize that any measure it takes is quickly observed and analyzed, and even the most effective defenses can be incomplete. The terrain near the Lebanon-Israel border continues to pose a challenge, necessitating technological solutions and significant financial investment.