- Person
- Paul Celan
- Lived
- 1920–1970
- Field
- Poetry
- From
- Romanian-born French
The story
Paul Celan was born Paul Antschel in 1920 into a German-speaking Jewish family in Czernowitz, then part of Romania. His mother, a passionate reader of German literature, insisted that German be the language of their home. In June 1942 his parents were deported to an internment camp in Transnistria, where both died, and Celan himself spent the war years in Romanian labour camps until February 1944. After settling in Paris in 1948 he kept writing in German, the language of those who had murdered his parents.
By the late 1950s his collections Mohn und Gedächtnis (1952) and Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (1955) had made him one of the leading new voices in German poetry. In 1957 he received the literature prize of the cultural circle of the Federation of German Industries, and in 1958 the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen awarded him its Literature Prize. He used his acceptance speech to reflect on what it meant to write in German after the Holocaust.
He told his audience that amid all his losses one thing had remained within reach, close and secure: language. It too had suffered. It had had to pass through its own lack of answers, through a terrifying silence and through the many darknesses of murderous speech. It gave him no words for what was happening, he said, yet it went through those events and was able to resurface, enriched by them all. The speech was published the same year.
Scholars regard the death of his parents and the trauma of the Holocaust as defining forces in Celan's poetry and his use of language. His later poems grew ever more compressed and fractured, and in collections such as Fadensonnen (1968) and Lichtzwang (1970) he coined new German words to express experiences that existing language could not hold. In a letter to his wife he wrote that the German he spoke was not the same as the language the people around him in Germany were speaking.
The Bremen speech remains one of the clearest statements of the conviction behind his work: that a damaged language could still carry the truth. Germany's Neue Deutsche Biographie notes that his creative handling of the language had a considerable influence on German poetry, especially after his death in 1970, and today his poems are read and studied around the world.
Why it matters
Celan's Bremen speech remains a profound statement on how art can bear witness after atrocity.
About Paul Celan
Holocaust survivor from Czernowitz whose German-language poems, above all “Todesfuge” (Death Fugue), became the defining poetic witness to the destruction of European Jewry.
More about Paul Celan
- Paul Celan taught German at the École normale supérieureFrom 1959 until his death in 1970, Paul Celan taught German language and literature at France's elite École normale supérieure.
- Paul Celan brought Osip Mandelstam's poems into GermanIn 1959 Paul Celan published German translations of the poems of Osip Mandelstam, the Jewish poet who died in a Soviet camp.
- Paul Celan translated Shakespeare even in the ghettoConfined in the Czernowitz ghetto in 1941, Paul Celan translated Shakespeare's sonnets; in 1967 he published 21 of them in German.
- Paul Celan began his career as a translator in BucharestIn Bucharest from 1945 to 1947, Paul Celan worked as a publishing reader and translator, rendering Chekhov and Lermontov into Romanian.
- Paul Celan's 'Death Fugue' became a defining Holocaust poemPaul Celan's 'Todesfuge' ('Death Fugue'), a stark evocation of life in the Nazi camps, became one of the most widely anthologised poems of the Holocaust.
Sources
- Paul Celan Wikipedia
- Celan, Paul Deutsche Biographie
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.