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Paul Celan, Poet of the Holocaust

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 September 2018

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The Jewish poet, Paul Celan, was born in Czernovitz, Rumania, in 1920 and committed suicide in Paris in 1970. His native tongue was German. He wrote eight volumes of poetry, all in German, although he spent almost half his life in France and was fluent in several languages. In a public address delivered in Bremen in 1958, on the occasion of being awarded a literary prize, he spoke of the German language as the one possession that had remained "reachable, close, and unlost in the midst of losses…although it had to pass through a thousand darknesses of deathdealing speech." German is the language of Holderlin, Biichner, and Rilke, all of whom Celan admired, but also the language in which the words Endlösung (final solution), Sonderbehandlung (special treatment), and judenrein (cleansed of Jews) were coined.

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 1976

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References

Notes

* For information about Celan's life and the literary tradition in which reviewers have placed him the reader is referred to an article by Paul Auster, "Paul Celan, Poet of Exile," in Commentary (February, 1976).

* The German word I have tried to translate here is ichten, a neologism I believe to be derived from nichten, Heidegger's word for annihilating or "making something worthless." The old English word "aught" is related to "naught" as ichten is to nichten.