Not long after the death of Paul Celan certain writers and thinkers tried, illegitimately, to make of Celan 's rare and powerful work a poetry, sometimes under the influence of the ideological approach of H. G. Gadamer, sometimes with the acknowledged goal of denying any link at all between the work and its obvious Hebraic references. But what if Jewish identity were precisely the central concern of the poet? And what if the Hebraic references and Jewish identity led us, like Ariadne's thread, to the heart of his interrogation?modern, universal, and destined to serve as that which will arouse and upset us for eternity? Poetry is memory. A poem invites us to find the forgotten paths?from birth to maturity?of our living experience, invites us to remain sensible to the work (often submerged, but sometimes expressed and elabo rated) of the personal and the collective unconscious. In his quest-of self, Celan, exiled in Paris, holding a modest position as a lecturer in German (both his maternal language and that of his torturers), very naturally had to be confronted with his Jewish difference, with his Romanian past, and with the memory of his perished family. His poetry is, in part, constituted by these biographical elements, although it should be noted (and hopefully it is not a useless caution) that his work cannot be reduced to being a simple evocation of his past (which would only be an inversion of the Heideggerian error). Celan inscribes himself, as did Heine, in a tradition of German poets of exile. This inscription binds him in a very obvious way to H?lderlin, the poet of revolution and madness, a key figure of modernity, who also has been illegitimately claimed by Heideggerian rereadings. But Celan utilizes this past and this tradition from a radically different perspective. Certainly his poems, written in German, evoke from time to time themes proper to German philosophy. A reader would be correct in finding elements of a dialogue Celan carried on with his elders and with his poetic models. But, thanks to Celan, biblical memory is allowed to make its way into this universe that has always denied or, at least, ignored it. This forgotten reference and this forbidden identity finally find their place in this literature. The Hebraic source of thought and of