‚Habsburgische Spuren‘ im Leben und Werk Paul Celans

Abstract

"As was to be expected, the question of the meaning of ‘Habsburg’ for Paul Celan is complex. The place of its origin – Chernivtsi – belonged to Austro-Hungary until 1918, with the end of the First World War the city became Romanian, so Celan was – formally – born in Romania; later he experienced the temporary (1940/41) and long-term (from 1944) Sovietization of Bu-kovina. A (not only) biographical self-localization can be found in the so-called Bremer Rede (1958), in which the poet introduces himself as someone coming from an unknown landscape, a “province of the Habsburg monarchy that has now fallen victim to history.” Subsequently, the cultural structure of the Habsburg world retains for Celan – although born after the disintegra-tion of the multi-ethnic state – a sense of belonging. He understood “Kakanien” (Musil) as an integrative structure and thus as a counter-image to nationalistic and fascist tendencies, whose multilingual, transcultural and interdenominational elements influenced Celan’s works. In this context, ‘Habsburg’ can be read as a synonym for a cultural-literary affiliation that un-dermines (political) boundaries and dividing lines and thus forms a counter-image to the reality of the Cold War."