Den Osten im Westen suchen. Ein konzeptgenetischer Weg durch Paul Celans Pariser Elegie

Abstract

This essay aims to reconstruct the conceptual history of the origin and suppression of the so-called “Parisian Elegy”, a cycle of poems which Celan planned to include in his No One’s Rose until just a few months before publication (1963). The poet conceived the idea of composing an independent cycle as the closure and peak of the entire collection after he wrote the Valaisian Elegy, a long poem which articulates the arduous search for one’s self through memory and in sorrow. For the outcast poet living in Paris, this search takes on geographical and linguistic contours, as it emerges from the fourth part of No One’s Rose, conceptually and genetically in-terwoven with “Parisian Elegy”. Following the methodological path of the ‘Conceptual Genet-ics’, opened in 2010 by Axel Gellhaus, this work tries to demonstrate how deep this cycle inter-acts with the final cyclic conception of the volume and in which way it seems to predicate a relational and topographical conscience of grief.