From Romania to Austria
Celan's parents were killed in the Holocaust; he escaped death by working in a Nazi labor camp. When he realized that the communists were going to take power in Romania, surrealist poet, translator, lecturer, and essayist Paul Celan fled Romania for Austria. There he fell into German literary circles and began a love affair with Ingeborg Bachmann.
Love Gets Lukewarm
The affair was neither sordid nor spacious enough to last. Though Celan chased ghosts, fancies, and implausibles around Nazi-wasted Europe, his love life never met the aesthetically-jaunty standards of surrealism. In fact, it seems he was quite the realist, knowing Bachmann's feelings dwarfed his own. How Bachmann reconciled her love for Celan with her philosophical crush on Martin Heidegger remains baffling.
Ina Hartwig writes about the newly-published correspondence between Celan and his short-time lover:
"Glorious news" the 21-year old Ingeborg Bachmann writes in a letter to her parents, the "surrealist poet" Paul Celan has fallen in love with her. It is May 1948, Vienna. The 27-year-old Celan, whose parents, Leo and Friederike Antschel, died in a German concentration camp in Ukraine, had fled just a few months earlier from Bucharest, via Budapest, to Vienna. Bachmann, the daughter of a teacher and a former member of the Nazi party, is writing her PhD on Heidegger. Celan, of all people, will write in a letter to Bachmann several years later, that Heidegger's choking on his own mistakes is more agreeable to him than the solid Federal German conscience of someone like Heinrich Böll.
The correspondence opens with Celan's poem "In Egypt", which he sends to his beloved, with the dedication "to one who is painfully precise", on her 22nd birthday. It contains a motif, so tantalising and uncomfortable, that it foreshadows the conflicts to come: "Adorn the stranger beside you most beautifully./ Adorn her with the pain for Ruth, for Mirjam and Noemie". This motif of "adorning pain" - the pain of the Jewesses adorns the Gentile - is close to the bone, and yet it constitutes something akin to the constitution of the love between the Austrian philosophy student, who stands before a precipitous career as a poet, and the stateless Jew from Czernowitz in Galicia, whose most famous poem "Deathfugue" has already attracted attention in literary circles.
Like Hannah Arendt, Bachmann's early intellectual milieu revolved around the existential writings of Martin Heidegger. Later, she would abandon Heidegger's existentialism for Ludwig Wittgenstein's analytic, language-centered philosophy. In the interim, however, she would love a man which her intellect was trained to scorn. Though this book has not yet been translated for English or Romanian audiences, I'm holding out hope.
The last letters in the book were written by Celan's widow to Bachmann following Celan's suicide in 1970. Bachmann, herself, died under mysterious circumstances, suicide-speculating circumstances. Their love passed away before their bodies.
For the Hungry
"Celan" is actually an anagram of the Romanian spelling of his surname, Ancel. For more about Celan, Bachmann, and their tryst:
- "Celan and Heidegger: Translation at the Mountain of Death", a thoughtful essay by Pierre Joris.
- Dr. Klaus Hubner reviews the book for the Goethe Institut.
- Paul Celan on Osip Mandelstam, courtesy of Pierre Joris encore.
- Four new translations of poems by Paul Celan by Iain Fairley in Guernica.
- Stephen Mitchelmore examines the "post-Holocaust" poetry of Paul Celan for Spike magazine.
- David Vickrey read the German version of the book and liked it enough to blog about it here.
- Paul Celan from LightDuress (Cycle 6).
