Celan's poetry is greatly linked to his Jewish origin and events that occurred in his past and youth. It grants us a piece of history in a way, which can not be expressed with any other media. The poem has the ability to voice feelings of terror, the confinement of the cyclicality of time, violence, evanescence and perpetual wandering. The reader's immersion in the songs encourages him to think about history, humanity and the roles of art in the everyday life. In my thesis I analysed the elements of judaism in the Death Fugue, which are shown through the choice of theme, motives, and literary references to other works from the field of culture, music and literature. Analysed are also the allusions to authors of a Jewish-German origin and other of a German origin, who have already at the time been positioned in the artistic canon. I have found, that the song works well on a basic semantic level, but Celan's mastery is fully appreciated only with a well informed reader, who can identify and parse the large semantic field of the elements of Judaism in the contex of time in which it was written.
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