Paul Celan

Romanian-born German poet

• Born: November 23, 1920
• Birthplace: Czernowitz, Romania (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine)
• Died: April 1, 1970
• Place of death: Paris, France

Identity: Jewish

Biography

Paul Celan (TSEHL-ahn) is considered among Europe’s most important post-World War II poets. He was born Paul Antschel (or Ancel) in 1920 in Czernowitz, the capital of Romania’s Bukovina region, to a German-Jewish family. A crossroads of languages and cultures, Bukovina had only recently belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In a letter to an aunt following his Bar Mitzvah, Celan remarked that “as for anti-Semitism” in the Romanian state school he was then attending, “I could write a 300-page opus about it.” {$S[A]Antschel, Paul;Celan, Paul}{$S[A]Ancel, Paul;Celan, Paul}

Celan’s formative years were marked not only by anti-Semitism but also by ambivalence toward his Jewish heritage. His mother, Friederike Antschel, taught her only child German songs and poetry. Her influence probably contributed to Celan’s continuing to write in German after the Holocaust. References to Friederike recur in Celan’s poetry, and his earliest known poem is a sonnet to her. His father, Leo Antschel, however, is hardly ever mentioned in his son’s poetry. Celan had a difficult relationship with his father, a disciplinarian with strong Zionist convictions.

As a medical student in Tours, France (Romania’s medical schools enforced quotas against Jews), Celan was introduced to the French avant-garde by an uncle pursuing an acting career in Paris. When World War II broke out, Celan, on holiday in Czernowitz, was unable to return to France. By 1941 the city was overrun by German troops, who, joined by the Romanian army, forced the Jewish population into ghettos and then deported them to death camps. In June, 1942, Celan’s parents were among those deported; reports vary as to why he escaped. Whatever the facts, Celan experienced guilt throughout his life over his parents’ fate. His father died from typhus, and his mother was shot by camp guards.

Sent to a series of labor camps, Celan was back in Czernowitz when the Soviets captured the city in March of 1944. Probably sometime that year, he wrote his best-known poem, “Todesfuge.” Celan’s early title, “Todestange,” recalls evidence of a term, “death tango,” for the music played as German troops led camp inmates away to be shot. “Todesfuge” elicited much controversy. Some read it as a reconciliation, while others rejected it based on Theodor Adorno’s pronouncement (later revised) that after the experience of the death camp Auschwitz, to write poetry is “barbaric.” Celan later downplayed the poem, stating that he intended it neither as a balm for German consciences nor as an aestheticizing of the camp experience.

In December, 1947, Celan left Bucharest, Romania, where he had been living since April, 1945, for Vienna. There, he began using the pseudonym Celan, an anagram reflecting his Jewish, Romanian, and German origins. As in Bucharest, he became friendly with a group of Surrealist writers and artists. In 1948, as Austria’s denazification efforts ended, Celan resettled in Paris. He began studies in German philology and literature, receiving his Licence des Lettres in 1950. In 1952 he married Gisèle de Lestrange, a graphic artist, with whom he had a son, Eric. From 1959 until his death, Celan taught German language and literature at L’École Normale Superieure. Translation also provided an income, while offering the “encounters” Celan sought in language. He felt a particular affinity with the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam.

With the publication of his second poetry collection, Mohn und Gedächtnis, in 1952, Celan attracted significant critical attention. Included in the collection were “Todesfuge” and other selections from his first volume, Der Sand aus den Urnen, which the meticulous Celan disavowed because of misprints. A plagiarism charge issued the following year was revived in 1960. Germany’s Academy of Language and Literature commissioned Celan’s defense and awarded him that year their Büchner Prize. Celan’s acceptance speech, “The Meridian,” constituted his manifesto on poetry. Poetry, according to Celan, is a “letter in a bottle thrown out to sea,” poised between potentiality and silence.

In 1965, writing his birthdate and a motto from Psalm 45, “Ride for the Truth,” above a list of poems for a new collection, Celan showed a determined spirit that belied hospitalizations for depression beginning in 1962. His probings into Jewish mysticism were evident in his poems, and from the collection Fadensonnen on, his work grew progressively enigmatic, reflecting his quest for a new poetic idiom to convey the devastations of the Holocaust.

Separated from his family since the late 1960’s, Celan was living alone. On May 2, 1970, his body was pulled from the Seine River. On his desk lay a biography of the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, open to the underlined passage: “Sometimes this genius goes dark and sinks down into the bitter well of his heart.”

Bibliography

Baer, Ulrich. Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000. Baer sees a basis for comparison of the nineteenth and the twentieth century poet. Bibliographical references, index.

Bernstein, Michael André. Five Portraits: Modernity and the Imagination in Twentieth-Century German Writing. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2000. Compared with Celan are four other German poets and philosophers: Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Musil, Martin Heidegger, and Walter Benjamin. Includes bibliographical references, index.

Block, Haskell M. The Poetry of Paul Celan. New York: P. Lang, 1991. A collection of papers from a conference at the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1988.

Chalfen, Israel. Paul Celan. New York: Persea Books, 1991. A biography of Celan’s youth and early career. Includes bibliographic references.

Colin, Amy D. Paul Celan: Holograms of Darkness. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. An overview of Celan’s cultural background as well as postmodernist textual analysis.

Del Caro, Adrian. The Early Poetry of Paul Celan: In the Beginning Was the Word. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. A detailed treatment of the early volumes Mohn und Gedächtnis (1952) and Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (1955).

Felstiner, John. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. 1995. Reprint. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001. Illuminates the rich biographical meaning behind much of Celan’s spare, enigmatic verse. Includes bibliographic references, illustrations, map, index.

Fioretos, Aris. Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Close readings. Bibliographical references, index.

Glenn, Jerry. Paul Celan. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1973. Biography and criticism of Celan’s work. Includes a bibliography of Celan’s work.

Rosenthal, Bianca. Pathways to Paul Celan. New York: P. Lang, 1995. An overview of the varied and often contradictory critical responses to the poet. Illustrated; includes bibliographical references, index.

Wolosky, Shira. Language and Mysticism: The Negative Way of Language in Eliot, Beckett, and Celan. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995. A useful comparative study that helps to place Celan in context. Bibliographical refernences, index.