Biography
Celan grew up as an only child in a German-speaking Jewish family and in a highly cultivated city characterized by Hasidism. Even as a student he was enthusiastic about literature and through this he got to know authors like Rainer Maria Rilke. After attending a German and Hebrew school, he switched to a Romanian and Ukrainian high school. Celan also learned the Romanian language. Early poems were written in 1937/38, including love poetry, which contained traditional lyrical harmony, enthusiasm for nature and other traditional forms, but also showed the first tendencies towards alienation. After abandoning his medical studies in Tours, France, in 1938, he studied Romance languages.
He experienced the Nazi terror, especially the mass murder of the Jewish population, in Bukovina first hand. Celan was taken to a labor camp and his parents were deported to a camp in Transnistria. At the end of 1942 he learned of his parents' deaths. The murder of his mother and the death of his father in the camp represented a clear turning point in the poet's work. From this point on, his own experiences and thoughts, also as a motif of death, dominated Celan's works. In the work "Black Flakes" from 1943, the mother appeared as the main motif, which is directly addressed there, but subsequent works also repeatedly put the mother at the center. Linguistic-lyrical alienation and irritation come to light in different ways, for example in the decline of the rhyme.
After 1945, Paul Celan worked in Bucharest as a publishing editor and translator, among other things, for Russian literature. In 1947 the first poems appeared in public, including his most popular work "The Death Fugue". In the same year the artist moved to Vienna, met Ingeborg Bachmann there and made the acquaintance of the Viennese scene of surrealist writers. The following year he moved to Paris, where he studied German and linguistics. He earned his living by working in the factory, as a translator and interpreter. He met the German-French writer couple Yvan and Claire Goll, for whom he translated poems. From 1960, Claire Goll accused Celan of copying from her works. Paul Celan suffered increasingly psychologically from the dispute; it left lasting damage and weakened his will to live.
In 1952 he took part in a meeting of the legendary "Group 47" in Niendorf on the Baltic Sea and introduced his "Death Fugue". Even though Celan met with little understanding there, this appearance marked his breakthrough as a poet. In the same year, his book of poems "Poppy and Memory" was published, which made him known worldwide. Celan created his works under the influence of the circumstances of the time and their terrible experiences. It was no longer possible for the artist to use the language of the murderers unchanged. He not only alienated them, but also retreated into his own linguistic ego world. This lyrical attitude continued into his late work, which only presents meager remnants of worldly deformations. His works not only caused irritation, but his language also made an understanding approach to them no longer possible.
Paul Celan married the noble painter and graphic artist Giséle de Lestrange. The first child died shortly after birth in 1953. In 1955 the second child named Eric was born. In the same year his volume of poetry "From Threshold to Threshold" was published and he became a French citizen. During this time, Celan continued to work as a translator, translating and transcribing from French, Russian and Italian. In 1960 he received the Georg Büchner Prize. In his acceptance speech entitled "The Meridian" he also expressed one of the few theoretical ideas about his work, in which he described the poem as a "fringe existence" - against the background of the generally propagated speechlessness among intellectuals after 1945. In the period 1962/ In 63, Paul Celan was admitted to a mental hospital for treatment for the first time. "The Nobody's Rose" was published in 1963.
Celan, however, continued to be admitted to psychiatric clinics from November 28, 1965 to June 11, 1966 because he wanted to kill Lestrange in a delirious state. In November 1967 he separated from his wife.
Paul Celan probably committed suicide on April 20, 1970 in Paris. The circumstances and date have not been fully clarified. His body was recovered from the Seine near Courbevoie on May 1, 1970. In 1976 "Zeitgehöft. Late poems from the estate" was published posthumously.
