Paul Celan

Paul Celan (; ; born Paul Antschel; 23 November 1920 – c. 20 April 1970) was a German-speaking Romanian poet, Holocaust survivor, and literary translator. He adopted his pen name (an anagram of the Romanian spelling Ancel) following the war and resided in France from 1949, becoming a naturalized French citizen in 1955.

Celan is regarded as one of the most important figures in German-language literature of the post-World War II era and a poet whose verse has gained an immortal place in the literary pantheon. Celan's poetry, with its many radical poetic and linguistic innovations, is characterized by a complicated and cryptic style that deviates from poetic conventions.

Life Early life Celan was born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Cernăuți, Bukovina, a region then part of Romania and earlier part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (when his birthplace was known as Czernowitz). His first home was in the Wassilkogasse in Cernăuți. His father, Leo Antschel, was a Zionist who advocated his son's education in Hebrew at the Jewish school Safah Ivriah (meaning the Hebrew language). Celan's mother, Friederike (Fritzi) Antschel née Schrager, was an avid reader of German literature who insisted Austrian German be the language of the household. In his teens, Celan became active in Jewish Socialist organizations and fostered support for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. His earliest known poem is titled Mother's Day 1938.

Paul attended the Liceul Ortodox de Băieți No. 1 (Boys' Orthodox Secondary School No. 1) from 1930 until 1935, Liceul de Băieți No. 2 în Cernăuți (Boys' Secondary School No. 2 in Cernăuți) from 1935 to 1936, followed by the Liceul Marele Voievod Mihai (Great Prince Mihai Preparatory School, now Chernivtsi School No. 5), where he studied from 1936 until graduating in 1938. At this time Celan secretly began to write poetry.

In 1938, Celan traveled to Tours, France, to study medicine; the Anschluss precluded his study in Vienna, and Romanian schools were harder to get into due to the newly imposed Jewish quota. His journey to France took him through Berlin as the events of Kristallnacht unfolded, and also introduced him to his uncle, Bruno Schrager, who was later among the French detainees murdered at Birkenau. Celan returned to Cernăuți in 1939 to study literature and Romance languages. where he was invited to read at the semiannual meetings of the hugely influential Group 47 literary group. At their May meeting he read his poem Todesfuge ("Death Fugue"), a depiction of concentration camp life. When Ingeborg Bachmann, with whom Celan had an affair, won the group's prize for her poetry collection (The Extended Hours), Celan (whose work had received only six votes) said "After the meeting, only six people remembered my name". He did not attend any other meeting of the group. They married on 21 December 1952, despite the opposition of her aristocratic family. Their first child died a day after birth in 1953 and their second child, son Éric Celan, was born on 6 June 1955. During the following 18 years, they wrote over 700 letters; Celan's active correspondents also included Hermann Lenz and his wife Hanne. He made his living as a translator and lecturer in German at the École normale supérieure. He was a close friend of Nelly Sachs, who later won the Nobel Prize for literature. Celan was awarded the Bremen Literature Prize in 1958 and the Georg Büchner Prize in 1960. It may have been suicide, and if so, perhaps related to the appearance of Weissglas's poem, dated 1944, in the Romanian journal Neue Literatur, and fears that he might again be accused unfairly of plagiarism, the initial assertions about which, in 1953, later occasioned four psychotic episodes involving paranoia.

Poetic style In addition to writing poetry (in German and, earlier, in Romanian), he was an extremely active translator and polyglot, translating literature from Romanian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Hebrew, and English into German. Meanwhile, Celan's own poetry became progressively more cryptic, fractured and monosyllabic, often deviating from conventional poetic meter and verse structures. He created and used German neologisms, especially in his later works Fadensonnen ("Threadsuns") and Lichtzwang. Celan has been seen as attempting either to destroy or remake the German language in his poetry, using it to convey dense imagery and subjective experiences; he described this stance in a letter to his wife Gisèle Lestrange as feeling as though "the German I talk is not the same as the language the German people are talking here".

The death of his parents and the trauma of the Holocaust are regarded by scholars as being defining forces in Celan's poetry and his use of language. In his Bremen Prize speech, Celan said of language after Auschwitz that:

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 masterpiece, "Todesfuge", may have drawn some key motifs from the poem "ER" by his fellow Romanian poet Immanuel Weissglas, another Czernovitz poet. The characters of Margarete and Sulamith, with their respectively golden and ashen hair, can be interpreted as a reflection of Celan's Jewish-German culture, He has been regarded, alongside Goethe, Hölderlin and Rilke, as one of the most significant German poets, and a radical innovator of German-language literature. Despite the difficulty of his work, his poetry is thoroughly researched, with the total number of scholarly papers numbering in the thousands.

In film The Dreamed Ones (Die Geträumten; 2016), is a feature film based on the almost 20-year correspondence between Celan and poet Ingeborg Bachmann. It was directed by Ruth Beckermann, and won several awards.

Celan is featured as an inspiration for the work of Anselm Kiefer, who reads Celan's poem Todesfuge, in Wim Wenders' 2023 3D movie Anselm.