A German-speaking boy in Czernowitz
Paul Antschel was born on 23 November 1920 in Cernăuți, the city German speakers called Czernowitz, in Bukovina. A generation earlier it had been a provincial capital of the Habsburg Empire; after the First World War it belonged to Romania, and today it is Chernivtsi in Ukraine. It was a city of many languages, and its large Jewish community was among the most cultured in eastern Europe. Paul was the only child of a German-speaking Jewish family.
His parents pulled him in two directions. His father, Leo Antschel, was a Zionist who wanted his son educated in Hebrew. His mother, Friederike, called Fritzi, née Schrager, loved German literature and insisted that the family speak proper Austrian German at home. It was his mother’s language that won, and it was his mother he would mourn in poem after poem for the rest of his life. He attended several Romanian secondary schools and graduated in 1938.
Medicine, languages and war
In 1938 he went to Tours, in France, to study medicine; the annexation of Austria had closed Vienna to him, and Romanian quotas on Jewish students made places at home hard to obtain. He returned to Czernowitz in 1939 to study literature and Romance languages. In June 1940 the Soviet Union occupied northern Bukovina and began deportations to Siberia. Then, in July 1941, German SS units and Romanian forces took the city, and its Jews were forced into a ghetto. There, as if holding on to something, the young man translated Shakespeare’s sonnets.
On the night of 21 June 1942, while Paul was away from home, his parents were seized and deported to internment camps in Transnistria, the Romanian-run zone across the Dniester where around two-thirds of the Jews deported died. His father probably died of typhus; his mother, exhausted by forced labour, was shot. Paul learned of their deaths later that year while he himself was in a Romanian forced-labour camp, where he spent some eighteen months. When the Romanians abandoned the camps in February 1944 as the Red Army advanced, he returned to Czernowitz and briefly worked as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital.
Death Fugue
From 1945 to 1947 he lived in Bucharest, translating Russian literature into Romanian and publishing his own poems under pseudonyms. There he found the name he would make famous: Celan, an anagram of Ancel, the Romanian spelling of Antschel. In May 1947 his most famous poem appeared for the first time, not in German but in Romanian translation, as “Tangoul Morții”, the Tango of Death. In German it became “Todesfuge”, Death Fugue.
The poem is built like a piece of music, with themes that return and interweave: prisoners who drink the black milk of daybreak at evening and at noon and at morning, a camp commandant who writes letters home to Germany, who has the Jews dig graves in the air and play music while they dig. Its refrain names death as a master from Germany. Without description, without a single statistic, it carries the reader inside the machinery of the camps. Generations of German schoolchildren learned it by heart, and it became perhaps the most widely read poem of the Holocaust.
Vienna, Paris and a new life
In 1948 Celan fled communist Romania for Vienna, where his first collection, Der Sand aus den Urnen (The Sand from the Urns), appeared that year and where he met the young Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann, with whom he had a love affair and a lifelong, painful correspondence. Later in 1948 he moved to Paris, which would be his home for the rest of his life. In November 1951 he met the graphic artist Gisèle Lestrange, from an aristocratic Catholic family that opposed the match; they married on 21 December 1952. Their first child died a day after his birth in 1953; their son Éric was born on 6 June 1955. That year Celan became a French citizen.
He earned his living as a translator and teacher, and from 1959 until his death he was a lecturer in German language and literature at the École normale supérieure in the rue d’Ulm. In 1952 he read at the influential West German writers’ circle Gruppe 47, and presented “Todesfuge”; the reception was cool, Bachmann won the group’s prize that year, and Celan later remarked bitterly that only six people remembered his name afterwards. He never attended another meeting.
A language passed through darkness
Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and Memory), published in Stuttgart in 1952, made his name in West Germany. It was followed by Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (From Threshold to Threshold, 1955), Sprachgitter (Speech-Grille, 1959) and Die Niemandsrose (The No-One’s-Rose, 1963). With each book his poems grew shorter, stranger and more compressed, full of invented compound words, broken syntax and silences. In later collections such as Atemwende (Breathturn, 1967), Fadensonnen (Threadsuns, 1968) and Lichtzwang (Lightduress, 1970) the language seems to be testing whether it can still mean anything at all.
That was the point. Celan wrote in German, the language of his mother and of her murderers, and he believed that German had to be broken and remade before it could tell the truth again. In his speech accepting the Bremen Literature Prize in 1958 he said that language alone had remained reachable amid all the losses, but that it had had to pass through its own answerlessness and through the darkness of death-bringing speech. In “The Meridian”, his address on receiving the Georg Büchner Prize in Darmstadt on 22 October 1960, he set out a poetics of the poem as an encounter, a message in search of an addressee.
Translator of the world
Celan was also one of the great translators of the twentieth century. He rendered poetry and prose from Romanian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Hebrew and English into German, including Shakespeare’s sonnets, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Emily Dickinson, Fernando Pessoa, Sergei Yesenin and, above all, Osip Mandelstam, the Russian Jewish poet who died in Stalin’s camps and in whom Celan recognised a brother.
His friendships ran across Europe. He was close to the poet Nelly Sachs, another German-language Jewish survivor, who would win the Nobel Prize in 1966, and to the Romanian-born philosopher Emil Cioran. His German readers, editors and prize committees honoured him; yet he remained an outsider, a Jew from the far east of Europe living in France and writing for a country he could not forgive.
Persecution, Heidegger and Jerusalem
From 1953 Claire Goll, the widow of the poet Yvan Goll, whose work Celan had translated, accused him of plagiarising her husband. The charges were baseless, but they were repeated in the German press and wounded him deeply, feeding a sense of persecution that grew into recurring episodes of severe mental illness. He was hospitalised several times in the 1960s.
On 25 July 1967, the day after a reading at the University of Freiburg, he visited the philosopher Martin Heidegger, whose thought he had read closely and whose Nazi past he could not ignore, at Heidegger’s hut in Todtnauberg in the Black Forest. What was said remains unknown; the poem “Todtnauberg” that followed records a hope for a word from a thinker’s heart that never came. In the autumn of 1969, from 30 September to 17 October, Celan made his only journey to Israel. He read in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, spoke to the Hebrew Writers Association, and stayed with the poet Yehuda Amichai. He later described Jerusalem as a turn, a caesura, in his life.
Death in the Seine
Celan’s last years were lonely; by the end he and Gisèle were living apart, though they remained bound by deep affection and by their son. On the night of 19–20 April 1970 he left his apartment in the avenue Émile-Zola, walked to the Pont Mirabeau and went into the Seine. He was forty-nine. His body was found downstream on 1 May. His despair may have been sharpened by a fresh fear of plagiarism charges: in 1970 a 1944 poem by his Czernowitz friend Immanuel Weissglas, which shares images with “Todesfuge”, had resurfaced in print in the Romanian journal Neue Literatur. The old wound of the Goll affair, it seemed, would never close. He was buried in the cemetery of Thiais, south of Paris. Collections he had prepared, among them Schneepart (Snow-Part, 1971) and Zeitgehöft (Timestead, 1976), were published after his death.
Legacy
Theodor Adorno had written in 1949 that to write poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric. Celan’s work is often read as the most serious answer to that challenge: poetry that did not look away, that refused consolation and beauty for their own sake, and that still insisted on speaking. Today he is regarded as one of the major poets of the twentieth century in any language, and the most important German-language poet after 1945.
His poems have been translated into dozens of languages, by translators including John Felstiner, Michael Hamburger and Pierre Joris, and are studied by philosophers as much as by literary scholars. His correspondence with Ingeborg Bachmann became the basis of Ruth Beckermann’s 2016 film Die Geträumten. In Czernowitz, now Chernivtsi, a monument on Holovna Street and a literature centre honour the boy who left speaking his mother’s language and spent his life making it bear witness.
Sources & further reading
Paul Celan, Wikipedia · Celan, Paul, Deutsche Biographie · Paul Celan, Poets.org (Academy of American Poets) · Writing Zion (Celan in Israel, 1969), The New Republic · 40 Years Ago: Paul Celan, Pierre Joris · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life 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.