- Person
- Paul Celan
- Lived
- 1920–1970
- Field
- Poetry
- From
- Romanian-born French
The story
Paul Celan was born Paul Antschel in 1920 to a German-speaking Jewish family in Czernowitz, then in Romania. On 21 June 1942 his parents were taken from their home and deported to an internment camp in Transnistria, where two-thirds of the deportees perished. His father probably died of typhus and his mother was shot. Celan himself was held in a Romanian labour camp until February 1944.
He wrote 'Todesfuge' ('Death Fugue'), probably in 1944 or 1945. Celan was never a prisoner in a death camp, and the poem reflects experiences recounted to him. His school friend Immanuel Weissglas, who had been interned in Transnistria with Celan's parents, probably told him how they died, and an unpublished poem by Weissglas shares several of its images. It first appeared in May 1947 in a Romanian translation by his friend Petre Solomon, titled 'Tangoul Morţii' ('Death Tango'), and it was the first poem published under the name Celan. The German original was printed in his first collection in 1948, but that book was withdrawn because of misprints.
The poem's 36 lines fall into four sections, each opening with the image of 'black milk' drunk at dawn. A collective 'we' speaks while a blue-eyed master, who writes letters to Germany, orders his Jews to dig graves and play music. Phrases return and recombine like the voices of a musical fugue. Its closing lines set the golden hair of Margarete against the ashen hair of Sulamith, figures that recall Goethe's Faust and the Song of Songs and have been read as standing for Germans and Jews.
In May 1952 Celan read the poem at a meeting of the influential literary circle Group 47, on his first trip to West Germany. Later that year it appeared in his collection Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and Memory), which won tremendous acclaim and established his reputation. The Academy of American Poets calls it a stark evocation of life in the Nazi death camps, and it became the most frequently printed of all his works.
In Germany the poem became part of high-school readers, and in 1988 it was read aloud in the Bundestag to mark the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht. Composers including Samuel Adler, Aaron Jay Kernis and Harrison Birtwistle have set it to music, and in 1981 the painter Anselm Kiefer took its final lines as the titles of two paintings.
Why it matters
'Death Fugue' gave the world one of its most powerful poetic memorials to the victims of the Holocaust.
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 explained how language survived the HolocaustIn his 1958 Bremen Prize speech, Paul Celan said that amid all his losses, language alone had remained within reach.
- 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.
Sources
- Paul Celan Academy of American Poets
- Paul Celan Wikipedia
- Todesfuge Wikipedia
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