Breathturn into Timestead (3 page)

Alle die Schlafgestalten, kristallin

Zwei Sehwülste, zwei

Vor mein

Du wirfst mir

Das Flüsterhaus

Kleine Nacht

An die Haltlosigkeiten

Ich albere

Dein Uhrengesicht

Ich lotse dich

Meine

Ein Stern

Kleines Wurzelgeträum

II

Mandelnde

Es stand

Die Glut

Wir, die wie der Strandhafer Wahren

Ein Ring, zum Bogenspannen

Das Leuchten

Du gleißende

Komm

Einen Stiefelvoll

Die Posaunenstelle

Die Pole

Der Königsweg

Es kommt

Ich trink Wein

Es wird

Das Nichts

Im Glockigen

Wie ich

Das Fremde

Umlichtet

III

Fortgesalbt

Ortswechsel

Die Welt

Was bittert

Die gesenkten

Krokus

Rebleute

COMMENTARY

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX OF TITLES AND FIRST LINES IN ENGLISH

INDEX OF TITLES AND FIRST LINES IN GERMAN

COPYRIGHT

Introduction

Since his death in 1970, Paul Celan's reputation, though already firmly established during his lifetime, has grown exponentially. He is now considered the major German-language poet of the period after 1945, and by some (George Steiner, for example) even as the major European poet of that period. Only Rilke, among last century's German-language poets, can conceivably match his fame and impact on German and world poetry. Despite the difficulties the work presents (or maybe because of them), the usual postmortem eclipse, so often visited upon poets well-known and influential during their lifetimes, did not touch Celan: the flow of essays, commentaries, and books on his work has not only continued unabated, but has picked up speed and grown to flood-tide proportions—an informed guess would put it at some six-thousand-plus items worldwide by now. Translations of his work into a wide range of foreign languages are myriad. A benchmark of limit-possibilities for many younger poets in Europe, America, and beyond, Celan's work has also proved a major attraction for contemporary philosophy. As Hölderlin functioned for the late Heidegger, so does Celan represent a lodestone pointing to directions “north of the future” for philosophers and thinkers as diverse as Otto Pöggeler, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean Bollack, Anne Carson, and Peter Szondi, who have all devoted at least one book to his work.

At the same time, the publication of Celan's work has progressed apace so that we now have the oeuvre available nearly in toto (with the exception, mainly, of personal diaries and notebooks) in a variety of forms. Thus the slightly fewer than a thousand poems are distributed over eleven individual volumes, and are gathered in several collected works editions, including an annotated collected poems, different selected works volumes, and in two major critical-historical editions based on the individual volumes. Beyond the poetry proper, we have some two hundred fifty pages of prose available, and nearly seven hundred pages of poetry translated by Celan from eight languages and assembled in two volumes. To date, some fifteen volumes of correspondence have been published, if only a few of these in English translation so far. Though we do not yet have an official or reliable and exhaustive biography (except for Israel Chalfen's
Paul Celan:
Biography of His Youth
), the two-volume edition of the annotated correspondence between Paul Celan and Gisèle Celan-Lestrange
1
can stand in for such a book (although available right now only in French and German—and in an updated 2008 Spanish edition—it is, however, in the process of being translated into English as of this writing). Besides several volumes that gather historical, archival, and critical materials—one on the Goll affair, others on his stay in Vienna and on his hometown, Czernowitz, as well as one on his activities as a translator—there is also an annotated volume of Celan's philosophical library inventorying some five hundred books in six languages (German, French, ancient Greek, English, Latin, and Russian) and reproducing all the text extracts underlined or marked by Celan, as well as his handwritten marginalia. At the end of this book the reader will find a selected bibliography of critical texts on Celan's work available in English.

1. “DEATH IS A MASTER FROM GERMANY”

Celan's life is inseparable from the fate of the Jewish people in the twentieth century. The Shoah is thus core to the life and work, even if Celan did his best to make sure that neither would be overdetermined by or become reducible to those events. He is a survivor of
khurbn
(to use Jerome Rothenberg's “ancient and dark word”), and his work is a constant bearing witness to those atrocities; even when it imagines a world beyond those historical limits, it remains
eingedenk
(to use Hölderlin's word), that is, mindful, conscious of said events. Born Paul Antschel in Czernowitz (today Chernivtsi, in Ukraine), the capital of the Bukovina, a province of the Habsburg Empire that fell to Romania in 1920, the year of his birth, Celan was raised in a Jewish family that insisted both on young Paul receiving the best secular education—with the mother inculcating her love of the German language and culture—and on his Jewish roots: both his parents came from Orthodox and, on one side, Hasidic family backgrounds. The languages were multiple: besides the usual Czernowitz languages—Romanian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish—the family at home spoke High German, somewhat different from the Czernowitzian dialectical German with “its Austrian informality and Slavic breadth, and interwoven with Yiddish idioms.”
2
Following his father's Zionist ideals, young Paul attended the local Hebrew grade school, Safah-Ivriah, for three years, though moving eventually to the Romanian high school, where he showed great interest in botany and French. Because of growing anti-Semitism, he moved to another state high school, where he added Italian, Latin, and ancient Greek to his studies. As a German-speaking student, he studied primarily the classics of German literature, supported in this by his mother and from 1937 on by his friend Edith Horowitz, whose father, a scholar of German literature, had a library very rich in this field. After his Bar Mitzvah Paul stopped studying Hebrew and began distancing himself from his father's ideological leanings. At this time he also began to take part in meetings of communist youth groups, got involved in antifascist activities, and read intensely in the classics of socialist literature.
3

Celan, always reticent of speaking of private matters, left little autobiographical information, and the only somewhat expansive statement concerning his homeland occurs in the so-called Bremen speech, where he writes:

The region from which I come to you—with what detours! but then, is there such a thing as a detour?—will be unfamiliar to most of you. It is the home of many of the Hassidic stories which Martin Buber has retold in German. It was—if I may flesh out this topographical sketch with a few details which are coming back to me from a great distance—it was a landscape where both people and books lived. There, in this former province of the Habsburg monarchy, now dropped from history, I first encountered the name of Rudolf Alexander Schröder while reading Rudolf Borchardt's “Ode with Pomegranate” … Within reach, though far enough, what I could aim to reach, was Vienna. You know what happened, in the years to come, even to this nearness.
4

On November 9, 1938, the night that came to be known as Kristallnacht and that saw the first major Nazi pogrom against Jews in Germany and parts of Austria, Paul Celan traveled by train through Germany, an occasion remembered in the poem “La Contrescarpe,” where he writes: “Via Kraków / you came, at the Anhalter / railway station / a smoke flowed toward your glance, / it already belonged to tomorrow.” He was on his way via Paris to Tours, France, to study medicine at the local university, obedient to his parents' wishes. During this year in France he came in contact with a range of contemporary French literature and, in fact, spent much time on literary matters while slowly turning away from his premed studies. He had already started to write poetry a few years earlier, and in the summer of 1939, after returning to Czernowitz, and unable to return to Tours and his medical studies because of the outbreak of the war, Celan decided on a major career change, enrolling in Romance studies at his hometown's university. The oldest surviving poems date from 1939 but would be published only posthumously.

The following year Soviet troops occupied his hometown, only to be replaced in 1941 by Romanian and German Nazi troops—specifically, Einsatzgruppe D, led by SS-Brigadeführer Ohlendorf, which reached Czernowitz on July 6. The SS had one essential job to fulfill—“Energisch durchgreifen, die Juden liquidieren” (to energetically liquidate the Jews), as they didn't trust the Romanians to do the job thoroughly enough. On July 7, the Great Temple went up in flames and for the next three days the hunt was open: 682 Jews were murdered. By late August, Ohlendorf triumphantly reported to Berlin that more than 3,000 had been killed. On October 11, the ghetto was created—the first one in the history of the Bukovina and of Czernowitz. Then began the
Umsiedlung
(relocation) of most Jews to Transnistria. The Romanians managed to argue with the Germans and to retain 15,000 Jews in Czernowitz to keep the city functioning. The Antschel family were among those who, at least for the time being, remained in the ghetto. Paul was ordered to forced labor on construction sites. Then, in June 1942, a new wave of arrests and deportations began, taking place primarily on Saturday nights. With the help of his friend Ruth Lackner, Paul had found a large and comfortable hideout, but his parents refused adamantly to take refuge there, preferring to remain in their own house—where Celan's mother did prepare rucksacks in case they should be deported. On one of those nights, disobeying his parents' orders, Paul left the house and decided to spend the night in the hideout. When he returned the next morning he found his home sealed off: his parents had been deported.

Celan continued to work in forced labor camps, where in the late fall of 1942 he learned that his father, physically broken by the slave labor he was subjected to, had been killed by the SS. Later that winter the news reached him that his mother too had been shot. These killings, especially that of his mother, were to remain the core experience of his life. He was released in February 1944, when the labor camps were closed. In April, Soviet troops occupied Czernowitz without a fight. Celan was put to work as a medical auxiliary in a psychiatric clinic and made one trip as an ambulance assistant to Kiev. He remained in Czernowitz for one more year, enrolled at the now Ukrainian-Russian university there, studying English literature while working as a translator for local newspapers. In February 1944 he had put together a first typescript of poems, expanding it in the fall of that year to include the poems written during his labor camp days. He entrusted this manuscript to his friend Ruth Kraft, who took it with her to Bucharest to present it to the poet Alfred Margul-Sperber. (This book would be published posthumously in 1986 as
Gedichte 1938–1944
, with a foreword by Ruth Kraft.) In April 1945 he left his hometown, Czernowitz, never to return. But the Bukovinian “meridian” (to use one of his favorite lines of orientation) would always be present; he mentioned “my (Czernowitz) meridian” in a letter to Gideon Kraft as late as 1968,
5
as he spoke of Gustav Landauer and Leon Kellner, two elder Bukovinians who had been important to him. As one commentator put it: “Celan's poetry transforms the main characteristic of Bukovina's culture into a structural principle. It is the legendary Bukovinian receptivity to heterogeneous ethnic traditions with which Celan infuses the rich intertextuality of his entire oeuvre.”
6

*   *   *

For two years he settled in Bucharest, making a living as a translator (mainly from Russian into Romanian) and working at becoming a poet, remaining true to his mother's language, German, as he would do all his life, but also trying his hand briefly at poems in Romanian. He was clear about this choice, stating on a number of occasions that there is no such thing as bilingual poetry, that the poet has to write in his mother tongue. The strongest formulation of this conviction was reported by Ruth Lackner, to whom he said: “Only in the mother tongue can one speak one's own truth, in a foreign language the poet lies.”
7
It is, however, in Bucharest and in a Romanian translation by his friend Petre Solomon that the poem that would make his fame—“Todesfuge” (Death-fugue)—was first published in May 1947, in the magazine
Contemporanul
, as “Tangoul Mortii” (Tango of death). It is also here that Paul Antschel, who signed many of the translations of that time with various pseudonyms, decided to change his name and anagrammatically transformed the Romanian spelling of Antschel, Ançel, into Celan.

But Vienna, the old Hapsburg capital, which the German-cultured Bukovinians and Czernowitzians had always looked up to as
their
cultural center, beckoned, and in December 1947 Celan clandestinely crossed over to Austria via Hungary—from the little information we have, an arduous journey but one made necessary by the tightening of the Iron Curtain. The only German-speaking place the poet was ever to live in, the Vienna of those years
8
—Orson Welles's
The Third Man
comes close to what it must have felt like to Celan—was relatively hospitable to the young poet, though the minimal and superficial denazification program it had submitted itself to must have left the survivor uneasy, to say the least. Through an introduction from Margul-Sperber he met Otto Basil, the editor of the avant-garde literary magazine
Der Plan
, in which he would publish a number of poems, and at some point he went to meet Ludwig von Ficker, who had been a close friend of Georg Trakl's, and who celebrated the young Bukovinian poet as “heir to Else Lasker-Schüler.” A meeting with the surrealist painter Edgar Jené led to the writing of the first essay by Celan that we have, “Edgar Jené and the Dream of the Dream,” composed as a foreword to a Jené exhibition catalogue. He also met a number of people who would remain lifelong friends, among them Nani and Klaus Demus, and maybe most important, the young poet Ingeborg Bachman, who even after their early love affair faded was to remain a close friend and a staunch defender in the later, darker days of the Goll affair. It was also in Vienna that Celan readied his first book,
Der Sand aus den Urnen
(The sand from the urns), for publication—though he would recall the book and have it destroyed, judging that the many typos and mistakes lethally disfigured his work.