Paul Celan, Poet of the Holocaust

Abstract

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.