Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, and: Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan (review)

Abstract

Paul Celan was born in 1920, in Czernowitz, in a severing time, in what was once the capital of the Hapsburg province of Bukovina, two years after the province became Romanian, after World War I. Czernowitz had become Cernauti, which it remained until the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1940, when Chernauti became Chernovtsy of Soviet Ukraine. In 1941, German and Romanian armies invaded. A year later, Celan's parents were taken to a concentration camp in Transnistria, east of Chernovtsy. There, his father died of typhus; his mother was shot by the SS. Celan was imprisoned for a year and a half in Romanian labor camps. After the war, Celan returned to Chernovtsy and completed his university studies. During the Hapsburg period, the dominant language of the region was German, though Ukrainian was spoken in the surrounding villages. With Soviet occupation, Russian was the official language and Stalinist strictures and anti-Semitism replaced Nazi rule.