Paul Celan

Paul Celan (born Paul Antschel; Chernivtsi, 1920 - Paris, 1970) was a German-language poet of Jewish background, born in Bukovina when the region belonged to Romania. He wrote in German, although Romanian was his first literary language, and he is widely regarded as the most important German-language lyric poet of the decades after the Second World War. His work, shaped by the Holocaust, remains one of the most studied of the twentieth century.

He grew up in a German-speaking household in Czernowitz, the name the city then carried. His father, a Zionist, wanted him schooled in Hebrew; his mother, an avid reader, insisted on German at home, and German prevailed. As a teenager he moved away from Zionism, joined Jewish socialist groups and supported the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. He began studying medicine in Tours in 1938, but returned to his home city to study literature and Romance languages, and there he began writing poems in secret.

After the Nazi occupation in 1941, the city's Jews were confined to ghettos. In 1942 his parents were deported to Transnistria. His father probably died of typhus, and his mother was shot after being worn down by forced labour. Celan spent the following years in a labour camp until 1944. He never got past that loss, and it runs through everything he wrote.

After the war he lived in Bucharest and then in Vienna, where in 1948 he published his first book, Sand from the Urns, which he withdrew because of a large number of misprints. That year he moved to Paris, where he taught German at the École normale supérieure, became a French citizen in 1955 and stayed for the rest of his life. His pen name is an anagram of Ancel, the Romanian spelling of his surname.

His best-known poem, “Death Fugue”, describes a concentration camp through the structure of a musical fugue. Over time his style grew ever denser, fractured and monosyllabic, full of neologisms, and critics often read it as an effort to force German to say what the language had been used to hide. His private life was turbulent: recurring depressions, a difficult marriage, and an accusation of plagiarism by the widow of Yvan Goll that wounded him deeply. He was also a tireless translator of Rimbaud, Shakespeare, Dickinson and Mandelstam.

He died in the Seine in April 1970, most likely by suicide. His legacy is a poetry that asks readers to slow down over every word, and his dialogue with Heidegger and Adorno keeps alive the debate about whether poetry can be written after Auschwitz.