The paper approaches Celan’s Atemkristall as a joint work between poet and graphic artist, in this case the wife of the poet, Giselle Celan-Lestrange.  It begins by showing how the philosophical readings that focused on Atemkristall – Bevilacqua, Gadamer, Poggeler and to lesser extent Derrida – obliterate the graphic dimension of the work.  It is suggested that in complex ways this obliteration repeats the act by which the poems that emerged in proximity with the graphic works were separated from them when published in the canonical collection Atemwende.  This obliteration is related to the issues of censorship and the archive and the tension between visual and verbal archives.  It is shown that the philosophical and art-historical readings of Atemkristall are dependent upon and continue this originary act of archival censorship.  The proposed readings of the poems and images return to the performances of the poems in the presence of the graphic work and show the mutual implication between the visual and verbal registers and the difficult place each occupies with respect to their respective archives – post-war poetry in German and modernist engraving.