ABSTRACT
This essay attempts to explore the role of “fugue”, a style of musical composition, in Paul Celan’s memoir, as expressed in “Fugue of Death”. An attempt has been made to read Celan’s “Fugue of Death” vis-à-vis the memoir of Wladyslaw Spzilman, as narrated in The Pianist: the extraordinary story of one man’s survival in Warsaw, 1939–1945 and adapted on the screen by Roman Polanski. The essay explores what the functions and significances of music were on both the suffering inmates and the Nazi guards who inflicted the suffering, within the ghettos and concentration camps, during the Holocaust.
