Paul Celan ( / ˈ s ɛ l æ n / ; German: [ˈtseːlaːn] ; born Paul Antschel ; 23 November 1920 – c. 20 April 1970) was a poet who wrote in German, a survivor of the Holocaust, and a translator of literary works. After World War II, he chose to use a pen name, which is an anagram of his original Romanian name, Ancel. He lived in France beginning in 1949 and became a French citizen in 1955.

Celan is considered one of the most important people in German-language literature after World War II. His poetry is widely respected in the world of literature. His work includes many new and unusual ways of using language and poetic forms. His style is complex and difficult to understand, and it does not follow traditional poetic rules.

Life

Paul Celan was born in 1920 to a German-speaking Jewish family in Cernăuți, Bukovina, a region that was part of Romania and had earlier been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (known as Czernowitz at the time). His family lived in the Wassilkogasse neighborhood of Cernăuți. His father, Leo Antschel, was a Zionist who supported his son’s education in Hebrew at the Jewish school Safah Ivriah (meaning “Hebrew language”). His mother, Friederike (Fritzi) Antschel, was a German literature reader who insisted that Austrian German be spoken at home. During his teenage years, Celan joined Jewish Socialist groups and supported the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. His earliest known poem, written in 1938, was titled Mother’s Day 1938.

Paul attended several schools in Cernăuți. From 1930 to 1935, he studied at the Boys’ Orthodox Secondary School No. 1. From 1935 to 1936, he attended Boys’ Secondary School No. 2 in Cernăuți. From 1936 to 1938, he studied at the Great Prince Mihai Preparatory School (now Chernivtsi School No. 5). During this time, he secretly began writing poetry.

In 1938, Celan traveled to Tours, France, to study medicine. He could not study in Vienna because of the Anschluss, and Romanian schools were harder to enter due to new Jewish quotas. His journey to France passed through Berlin during Kristallnacht, and he met his uncle, Bruno Schrager, who later died in a French internment camp at Birkenau. Celan returned to Cernăuți in 1939 to study literature and Romance languages.

In 1940, the Soviet Union occupied Bukovina, and deportations to Siberia began. A year later, Romania retook the region, and Nazi Germany and Romania’s fascist government created ghettos, forced labor camps, and internment for Jews.

In July 1941, German SS units and their Romanian allies burned the Great Synagogue in Cernăuți. In October, Jews were forced into a ghetto, where Celan translated Shakespeare’s sonnets and wrote poetry. Before the ghetto was dissolved, Celan was forced to clear debris from a destroyed post office and destroy Russian books.

The local mayor, Traian Popovici, tried to help Jews, but the governor of Bukovina ordered their arrest and deportation. In June 1942, Celan tried to convince his parents to leave the country to avoid persecution. While he was away, his parents were taken from their home and sent by train to an internment camp in Transnistria. Two-thirds of the deportees died there. Celan’s father likely died of typhus, and his mother was shot after being exhausted by forced labor. Celan later learned of their deaths while in a labor camp in Romania.

Celan remained in a work camp until February 1944, when the Red Army’s advance forced the Romanians to abandon the camps. He returned to Cernăuți shortly before the Soviets arrived. He briefly worked as a nurse in a mental hospital. Friends from this time said he felt guilty for not convincing his parents to hide before their deaths.

In 1945, Celan left Cernăuți for Bucharest, where he stayed until 1947. He translated Russian literature into Romanian and wrote poetry under pseudonyms. He met poets like Rose Ausländer and Immanuel Weissglas, whose works influenced his poem Todesfuge (“Death Fugue”), which first appeared in Romanian as Tangoul Morții (“Death Tango”) in 1947.

In 1948, after Romania became a communist country, Celan fled to Vienna, Austria, where he met Ingeborg Bachmann. He later moved to Paris in 1948, as Vienna had been destroyed by war and its Jewish community had been nearly wiped out by the Holocaust. His first poetry collection, Der Sand aus den Urnen (“Sand from the Urns”), was published in Vienna in 1948. His early years in Paris were lonely, as he wrote letters to friends like Petre Solomon and Diet Kloos, a Dutch Resistance veteran. He also became friends with Emil Cioran and Serge Moscovici.

In 1952, Celan gained recognition when he read his poetry in West Germany, including Todesfuge at the influential Group 47 literary meetings. He did not attend other meetings after receiving only six votes for his work.

In 1951, Celan met Gisèle Lestrange, a graphic artist, in Paris. They married in 1952 despite her family’s opposition. Their first child died shortly after birth in 1953, and their second child, Éric Celan, was born in 1955. Over 18 years, they wrote more than 700 letters with friends like Hermann Lenz and Hanne. Celan worked as a translator and German lecturer at the École normale supérieure and was a close friend of Nelly Sachs, a Nobel Prize winner.

Celan became a French citizen in 1955 and lived in Paris. His sense of persecution grew after being falsely accused of plagiarism by the widow of poet Yvan Goll. He won the Bremen Literature Prize in 1958 and the Georg Büchner Prize in 1960.

Celan died by drowning in the Seine River in Paris around April 20, 1970. Some believe it was suicide, possibly linked to fears of being accused of plagiarism again after a poem by Weissglas, dated 1944, appeared in a Romanian journal.

Poetic style

Paul Celan wrote poetry in German and, earlier, in Romanian. He was also a skilled translator who knew many languages. He translated books from Romanian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Hebrew, and English into German. At the same time, Celan’s own poetry became harder to understand, with short words and unusual structures that did not follow traditional poetic rules. He created new German words, especially in his later works Fadensonnen ("Threadsuns") and Lichtzwang. Scholars believe Celan tried to either change or rebuild the German language in his poetry. He used it to express strong images and personal feelings. In a letter to his wife, Gisèle Lestrange, he said that the German he spoke felt different from the German spoken by others.

The deaths of his parents and the trauma of the Holocaust had a major influence on Celan’s poetry and how he used language. In his Bremen Prize speech, Celan said about language after the Holocaust:

Celan also said, “There is nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German.”

His most famous work, Todesfuge ("Death Fugue"), may have used some ideas from a poem called ER by another Romanian poet, Immanuel Weissglas, who also lived in Czernovitz. In Todesfuge, the characters Margarete and Sulamith, with their golden and ashen hair, may represent Celan’s Jewish-German background. The blue-eyed "Master from Germany" likely symbolizes German Nazism.

Significance

Philosophers such as Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, and Hans-Georg Gadamer wrote books about how Paul Celan writes poetry. Celan is considered one of the most important German poets, along with Goethe, Hölderlin, and Rilke. He is known for making major changes in German-language literature. Even though his poetry is difficult to understand, it has been studied extensively, with more than 1,000 research papers written about his work.

In film

"The Dreamed Ones" (Die Geträumten; 2016) is a movie based on the nearly 20-year letter exchange between poet Paul Celan and poet Ingeborg Bachmann. The film was directed by Ruth Beckermann and received several awards.

Paul Celan's work inspired artist Anselm Kiefer, who reads Celan's poem "Todesfuge" in Wim Wenders' 2023 3D film "Anselm."

Audio-visual

• Performances of his original compositions
• Performances of his translations of poems by Osip Mandelstam and Sergei Yesenin
• "Six Celan Songs," which include the poems "Chanson einer Dame im Schatten," "Es war Erde in ihnen," "Psalm," "Corona," "Nächtlich geschürzt," and "Blume," performed by Ute Lemper and set to music by Michael Nyman
• "Tenebrae (Nah sind wir, Herr)" from Drei Gedichte von Paul Celan (1998), performed by Marcus Ludwig and sung by the ensemble amarcord
• "Einmal" (from Atemwende), "Zähle die Mandeln" (from Mohn und Gedächtnis), and "Psalm" (from Die Niemandsrose), set to music by Giya Kancheli and performed by Maacha Deubner as parts II–IV of Exil (ECM, 1995)
• Pulse Shadows by Harrison Birtwistle, which includes nine musical settings of poems by Celan, alternated with nine pieces for string quartet (one of which is an instrumental version of "Todesfuge").

Reviews

Dove, Richard (1981), "Mindus Inversus," review of "Selected Poems" translated by Michael Humburger. In Murray, Glen (editor), Cencrastus, Issue 7, Winter 1981-82, page 48. ISSN 0264-0856.