Paul Celan

Since 1919, Chernivtsi, located in Bukovina, was under Romanian rule. In addition to Romanian, Ukrainian, Yiddish and German were usually spoken in the multicultural city. A distinct German dialect had developed, which, however, was not accepted by everyone. Thus, pure High German was cultivated in the Antschel family. Leo Antschel and his wife Fritzi made a living from his work as a construction technician and timber merchant. On November 23, 1920, the couple's only son was born. Together with his parents and paternal grandparents, Paul Antschel lived in the three rooms of the first floor at Wassilkogasse 3, which was adjoined by a small garden. The building with the number 5 was renovated by the city in the 1990s. Later, a cousin identified the house next to it as the family's former home.

The father felt committed to religious Zionism, while the mother placed great emphasis on a middle-class upbringing with German-Austrian educational ideals. They initially let young Paul attend a German school, but then sent him to the Ssafa-Iwrija for financial reasons and because the father preferred a Hebrew-language elementary school. Paul continued Hebrew classes until his bar mitzvah in December 1933, whereupon he began to move away from his father s way of thinking. In school he learned Romanian, French, Italian, Latin and ancient Greek and read the classics of German literature. At 18, he passed the Matura.

The previous year he had met Edith Horowitz, whose father was a Germanist. The adolescent spent many hours in his library, learning about the works of Georg Heym, Georg Trakl, as well as Stefan George. Paul Antschel became a friend of the family. It is already known from his early youth that a friendship with him meant exchanging ideas and talking to each other a lot. Children's games interested him only a little. In reading circles he talked with friends about world literature as well as socialist works. His own poems did not yet play a role here.

At the request of his parents, Antschel began to study medicine. Concerns of his father that studying in Tours would be too dangerous were able to appease mother and son. On November 9, 1938, the day of the Reich Pogrom Night, he traveled to France via Nazi Germany under the protection of Romanian citizenship. Exactly when his train arrived in Berlin and whether he saw the smoke from the burning synagogues is disputed. In any case, he took up studies at the École de Plein Exercice de Médecine et de Pharmacie. The provincial city of Tours was less expensive than Paris, and according to his parents, studying medicine was supposed to ensure him a successful life.

He successfully completed his first year of study with exams in physics, chemistry and biology. With the intention of returning to Tours after the lecture-free period, Antschel traveled to his parents in Czernowitz in June 1939. However, the beginning of the Second World War made his plans impossible. He had to ask for his papers to be sent from Tours. However, the numerus clausus established for Jews prevented him from continuing his medical studies in Czernowitz. So Antschel enrolled for Romance studies with a focus on French.

Until the invasion of the Red Army at the end of June of the following year, the time was marked by political uncertainty. The nonetheless calm situation and the inconceivability of what was yet to happen prompted the Antschels to remain in their hometown. They did not pursue any plans to leave the country. When Soviet troops arrived in the summer, Paul Antschel learned Russian and worked as an interpreter. From then on, he took Russian language and literature courses at the Russian-Ukrainian University.

Considered by the Soviets as class enemies, 4000 Chernivtsi citizens were deported to Siberia - two thirds of them were Jews. Shortly after, on July 5, 1941, fascist Romania occupied the city. The second phase of the terror began with the establishment of the ghetto and the destruction of the synagogues under the direction of Einsatzgruppe D. The Einsatzgruppe D was a special unit consisting of guards and Jews. It was a special unit consisting of Schutzstaffel as well as Security Service and was used to enforce the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question".

Paul Antschel performed forced labor during this time. One weekend he tried to convince his parents to look for a hiding place. But they did not listen to him and stayed in the apartment. When Antschel returned to it the following Monday, he found it empty. Not knowing what exactly had happened to his parents, he was assigned to a labor service set up especially for Jewish men. Thus he escaped deportation, but was away from home for the following year and a half. "If Paul was asked during a vacation in the city what he was doing in the camp, he answered laconically: 'Shoveling!'" (Chalfen, p. 121)

Late in the fall of 1942, news of his father's death reached him. The following winter, a cousin who had fled reported to him that his mother had been killed by a shot in the neck. It is hard to imagine the extent of his grief - the horror he felt, which henceforth only his poetry was able to process.

When the labor camps were dissolved in February 1944, Antschel returned to his parents' apartment with surviving relatives. He soon began to study English, met the poet Rose Ausländer, and prepared a first publication, which, however, was not to come at first.

In May 1945, Antschel moved into Strada Roma No. 74bis in Bucharest. Enrolled at the university, but not actually studying, he took up work as an editor and translator. His first independent publications were translations from Russian into Romanian. They were published under the Romanianized form of his name: Paul Ancel. In Bucharest he moved in intellectual circles and was in exchange with numerous writers and artists. Much later, on September 12, 1962, he recalled in a letter to Petre Solomon: "A long time ago I had friends who were poets. It was between 45 and 47 in Bucharest. I will never forget it." Here he sang again at festivities, often his favorite song: Flanders in Need. His childhood friend Edith Silbermann already wrote about the Czernowitz times: "Occasionally there was not only discussion, but also singing. [...] Paul could be very funny and boisterous, but his mood often changed abruptly, and then he became either brooding, introverted, or ironic, sarcastic."

The magazine Contemporanul published Death Fugue in May 1947 - at that time still in Romanian translation, which Solomon had helped him with. He was able to publish three more (German) poems in the Agora. For his poetry he now chose the well-known anagram Celan. Antschel he called himself only in an official context. The Todesfuge thematizes the persecution of Jews under National Socialism and is shaped by the time in Czernowitz: there "prevailed [...] an overheated, literary exchange, in which a certain metaphoric network [...] emerged," sums up the literary critic Helmut Böttiger. Thus the poem took up the poetry of Rose Ausländer, Immanuel Weissglas as well as Moses Rosenkranz. It was to become Celan's best-known work.

Although he was prolific in Bucharest, he left Romania. The proclamation of the People's Republic entailed persecution of opposition figures, and the political situation became increasingly tense. As a German-language poet, he had no future here.

The path Celan took was dangerous: at the Romanian-Hungarian border, Jewish fugitives were arrested or even shot. In return for payment, escape helpers enabled him to reach Budapest, from where the then 27-year-old traveled to Vienna. He reached the Austrian capital in December 1947 after a week-long walk. Initially staying for a few days at the Rothschild Hospital, he moved into a room at the Pension Pohl. It was centrally located in Vienna's 1st district, not far from the city hall.

The young poet immediately sought work and was able to make contact with Otto Basil through a friend. The latter's avant-garde magazine, Plan, published part of his poems in the upcoming January issue without much hesitation. Its offices were located directly above the Galerie Agathon. Here, at Opernring 19, Celan met the Viennese Surrealists*, gave readings, and even participated in an exhibition in March 1948. A review of the Österreichische Zeitung on his artistic debut, however, turned out badly: "We want to overlook Paul Celan's detour (should we call the eye mask nailed to a sheet of paper with two thumbtacks a work?)

Arriving in the circle of Viennese Surrealists*, Celan met Ingeborg Bachmann in May. Like him, she was a poet and, from the 1950s on, was considered one of the most important female writers of the century. The two spent only six weeks together, as Celan traveled on to Paris. Little is known of this period. But the correspondence that followed indicates an ebb and flow of emotions. Bachmann, for example, recalls, "Be very calm, think of the city park, think of the leaf, think of the garden in Vienna, of our tree, the Paulownia blooming." Because of his first name, Celan felt drawn to this tree. In a letter to her parents, Bachmann wrote that Celan fell in love with her and showered her with poppies - the plant that was a central motif for him: "We love each other like poppies and memory," reads a verse from the poem Corona, which he dedicated to his new love.

In mid-July 1948 Celan arrived in Paris and lived for the first few years in the simple Hôtel d'Orléans. Already in Bucharest he had decided to stay here. Germany was out of the question for him as a place to live. Why he nevertheless wrote in German has often been discussed in research. Primarily Celan's love of the German language and literature is considered the reason.

Once again, he enrolled at a university: this time for German studies and general linguistics. He completed his studies after two years. A few months after his arrival, the volume The Sand from the Urns, whose poems had been written in Bucharest, was published in Vienna. At first, however, he was still unknown in Paris. He expressed his loneliness in a letter to Max Rychner in March 1949: "[...] that I am very lonely, and know no advice in the middle of this wonderful city, where I have nothing but the foliage of the plane trees." His life took place in the student milieu of the Latin Quarter, financed by a scholarship and minor sideline jobs as a translator.

In the same year, he became friends with the Goll couple. Yvan Goll was suffering from leukemia, and Celan often visited him at his bedside. He continued to translate for him even after his death in February 1950, and his widow Claire Goll thanked Celan and other young poets who had stood by her husband. He could not have foreseen that she would later accuse Celan of copying from her husband and publicly denounce him in the process.

In Paris, he was also visited by Ingeborg Bachmann, with whom he again entered into a love affair. But the union would not succeed, because "for unknown, demonic reasons, we took each other's breath away," as Bachmann wrote to Hans Weigel. Only a little later Celan met the Frenchwoman Gisèle Lestrange, who came from an old French noble family. She had been raised strictly Catholic and spoke no German. Contemporaries described her as "a sovereign, self-determined woman, free of prejudice" (Emmerich, p. 74). Celan himself affectionately called her "Fräulein Seltsam".

The couple married in Paris on December 23, 1952. Lestrange's family had previously put up considerable resistance. But it was her mother's retirement to a convent and the inheritance that came with it that secured the couple's economic future two years later. 

In the year of the marriage, Celan also traveled for the first time to the Federal Republic, from which he had otherwise stayed away. Under Konrad Adenauer, fascism continued to operate underground; in public, it was suppressed. This observation was central for Celan and it had an influence on the way he dealt with his Jewishness as well as the death of his parents. At a meeting of the Group 47, to which the German writer Hans Werner Richter had been inviting since 1947, Celan read aloud. In a letter to his wife-to-be afterwards he wrote: "I have met a good third of German writers. [...] But among these one finds a large number of uneducated, blowhards and half-failures, and they have not failed to take aim at me." Celan's pathetic way of speaking met with resistance in the group: "He reads like Goebbels!", Richter commented. The fact that the poet's pathos was pushed into this corner had to do with the repression of National Socialism. The members of the Group 47 mostly came from a petty-bourgeois milieu, had been in the Hitler Youth and had never come to terms with their past.

However, Celan's stay in Germany was not entirely overshadowed by rejection. In Stuttgart, he signed a contract and was able to publish Poppy and Memory. Back in Paris, he continued to meet German as well as French fellow writers (including Wolfgang Bächler and Günter Grass). In 1955 son Eric was born. François had been born two years earlier, but died shortly afterwards. The new family happiness was followed by the publication of the volume From Threshold to Threshold and the naturalization as a French citizen. By this time his network of relationships was well developed and he was respected by both publishers and critics.

The resumption of his love affair with Ingeborg Bachmann caused the first crisis in Celan's marriage. As a result, he ended the liaison with Bachmann and went on a long trip with the family. Celan meanwhile also worked as an editor at the École normale supérieure Saint-Cloud, but did not hold a permanent position. The poetry collection Sprachgitter appeared in the late 1950s and Die Niemandsrose in 1963. On the one hand, they were euphorically praised, but elsewhere they met with complete incomprehension. The poet now referred more clearly in his poetry to Judaism as well as to the horrors of the Shoah. This was not only praised. Critics accused him of making improper use of the catastrophe. Behind the criticism of his literary confrontation with the Shoah Celan suspected anti-Semitic motives -"sensitive, but by no means oversensitive" (May, p. 26).

Increased accusations in the Goll affair made Celan think about giving up his job as a lecturer and leaving Paris, though this did not happen. In the fall of 1961, he suffered his first depression, which required inpatient treatment the following year. It plagued him again and again until his death. Surprisingly, his productivity was not limited by it: Celan wrote several poems that later appeared in the cycle Atemtemkristall. Gisèle Lestrange published eight etchings in it.

Her marriage to Paul Celan was severely strained by his recurring depression. In November 1965, an argument escalated and Celan tried to kill his wife with a knife. She was able to flee with her son to neighbors, and Celan again went into inpatient treatment. With an interruption of several months, he resumed this in 1967 after trying to take his own life. At Lestrange's request, Celan moved into his own apartment at 24 Rue Tournefort. Through the translation of his poems into French, his work was now increasingly noticed in France. The journal L'Éphémère played a special role in this. Further publications also followed in Germany.

After his trip to Israel in October 1969, Celan realized, despite successful readings, that he was a stranger there as well. Suffering from severe depression, he threw himself into the Seine, presumably from the Pont Mirabeau, on the night of April 19-20, 1970. His body was found days later ten kilometers downstream.

Like a thread running through Celan's early work is his Czernowitz origins. In search of his own style, it is influenced by his youth, forced labor in the Romanian camps, and stays in Bucharest as well as Vienna. His later work is considered one of the most significant and influential of the 20th century. Central to his work was his ongoing relationship with Surrealism, which reached its peak in France after the war. Celan s themes were Judaism, foreignness in exile, and the horror of the Shoah. His Jewish identity was not initially the guiding principle of his literary development, yet it was present: Celan had learned and read Yiddish. In his later work - as a result of the deeper confrontation with the Shoah - also came the increasing orientation to Jewish tradition.

Research into Paul Celan's poetry and his person himself has taken on a special significance in Germany as well as in France. The reception has been fed again and again by newly published correspondences. The death of Gisèle Lestrange in 1991 and the resulting sale of her estate to the Marbach Literary Archives also brought new material to the surface that needed to be analyzed. For Celan's creative phases, various motifs of his lyric poetry could be worked out.

Reception goes beyond research
. Garden architects Cornelia Müller and Jan Wehberg learned in conversation with architect Daniel Libeskind about how he had engaged with Celan's poetry for his construction of the Jewish Museum Berlin. They decided to incorporate a work by Gisèle Lestrange into their plans. For Celan's texts in the poetry collection Atemkristall, his wife had designed the graphics. Thus, one of the works became the template for a floor relief made of natural stone. The courtyard is named after Paul Celan. Behind it is the Garden of Exile, at the edge of which a Paulownia was planted, in honor of the poet.