Paul Celan

Paul Celan , translator and writer , east can be largest poet of German language of the post-war period, composing a work absolutely innovating, conscious of coming after the major event of the extermination from the Jews from Europe.

Its name of writer is the anagram of his patronym Ancel (in Rumanian), or Antschel (in German). Paul Celan was born on November 23rd, 1920 within a German Jewish family with Cernăuţi (German Czernowitz, Chernivtsi in Ukrainian), capital history of the Moldavian province of Bucovine in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (since the end of the 18th century, become again Rumanian in 1918, Soviet after the entry of the Red Army in the area in 1944, then Ukrainian after 1991. Paul Celan probably died in Paris on April 20th, 1970 after being himself thrown in the the Seine, his body being found on May 1st.

Context of its youth

He is the only son of an Jewish family of Cernăuţi, Bucovine, area forming then part of the reunified Romania (see Grande Romania). His/her parents, of German origin, Leo Antschel-Teitler and Friederike born Schrager, speak German at the house. Since the 18th century, Bucovine was a province of the empire of the Austrian Habsbourg until the end of the First World War, in 1918. The multi-ethnic community of Cernăuţi, like that of the other big cities of the area, was at the time made up about of 30% from Roumanians (orthodoxe), 30% of Ukrainians (orthodoxe), and 30% of Jews Ashkenaze S (according to a census of 1911).

In August 1940, the troops Soviet S, following the Pact Molotov-Ribbentrop between the the USSR and the Nazi Germany, entered in Bucovine and occupied Cernăuţi. In 1941, the Rumanian S recovered the Bucovine North, taking part in the offensive launched by German against the USSR directed at the time by the communist dictator Stalin.

After the Second world war, the part northern of Bucovine, between the rivers Dniestr and Prut, and which includes/understands Cernăuţi, bathed by the Prut, was annexed by the Soviet Union, and is nowadays in Ukraine.

Its life

At six years, it follows the courses of an elementary school Libérale in German language, and is sent then to the Jewish school Safah Ivriah. After its Bar Mitsva in 1933, Celan joined a group of youth antifascist, which publishes a magazine Marxiste the red Student . He studies then the Médecine in 1938 in France, but turns over in Romania, at the university of Cernăuţi, to study the Littérature Romance Langue.

In 1942, his/her parents who refuse to hide, are sent in a camp of internment in Transnistrie (which was, before 1940, another area of Romania, and begun again in 1941), where, according to certain sources, his/her father dies of Typhus and where his/her mother is killed of a ball in the back.

In 1943, Paul is sent in a camp of forced labor in Moldavie. It is released by the Russians in 1944, changes his name into Paul Aurel, Paul Ancel, and finally Paul Celan, and lives with Bucharest as translator and editor.

In 1947, it leaves the Romania for Vienna in Austria where it publishes its first book the sand of the ballot boxes (Der Sand aus den Urnen) . It settles finally with Paris, where he is German professor to the National university.

In 1952, he marries the artist Gisele de Lestrange (catholic), that he had met in 1951, and for which he wrote more than 700 letters in 19 years, correspondence published in 2001 with the assistance of his/her Eric son. He wrote also an important correspondence with another loved woman, Ingeborg Bachmann, which was not still published.

Its first poems go back to 1940, in various periodicals, but its second book, Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and memory, 1952) assoit its reputation of poet of the Holocauste, initially in Germany, then in the whole world. Its poem more known, Todesfuge (Running away of Dead) has as a subject the fate of the Jews in the death camps.

It receives the price of literature of Bremen, and considers with his friends poets Rene Char and Nelly Sachs, that the language must be released from the History, and must be used to put words which answer the silence imposed on the terrible situation that it lived. Its worms then become increasingly encrypted, fractured and monosyllabic, comparing themselves in that with the music of Webern. For some, Celan tested déstructurer the German language.

The false charge of plagiarism of the work of Yvan Goll carried out by his wife Claire Goll leads it to the nervous breakdown. Claire Goll made a smear campaign against Paul Celan all along her life. It translated indeed poems of Yvan Goll. It translated also texts of Jean Cocteau, Henri Michaux, Os Mandelstam, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Fernando Pessoa, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Valéry, Rene Char, André of Bouchet, and Jacques Dupin.

It receives the price Georg Büchner in 1960, and makes for the occasion a splendid speech the Meridian line where it presents through a reading of the theater of Büchner what for him art and poetry are.

It is interned several times as from 1965 in a psychiatric asylum, from where it writes some Hebrew texts.

It meets in 1967 with Todtnauberg the philosopher Martin Heidegger. It awaited from him a word for the exterminated Jews which did not come. This silence inspired the poem Todtnauberg to him.

He visits Israel in 1969.

Paul Celan throws himself in the Seine in the night from April 19th to 20th 1970. One will find his body only on May 1st.

The death of his/her parents in the Nazi camps and its own passage in a Camp of work deeply marked it. At the same time pilot and victim of the Nazism, it contradicts the famous word of Adorno, philosopher post-Marxist, according to whom “there cannot any more be poetry after Auschwitz”.

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