![]() ![]() “And can you bear, Mother, as once on a time,ĭespite, or perhaps because of this, Celan chose to address the Holocaust–or, as he once referred to it, “that which happened”–in German.Ĭelan had already published several poems in German and Romanian by the time Hitler arrived in Romania. He reflected on this in a poem written shortly after receiving news of his parents’ death: ![]() Celan himself spent the latter years of the war as a forced laborer in a Transnistria internment camp.įor Celan, who spoke several languages, German was the language of his mother, as well as that of his mother’s murderers. Their deaths, particularly his mother’s, would haunt him for the rest of his life. While his father gave young Paul a Jewish education, his mother exposed him to the works of the great German poets such as Rilke and Schiller, inspiring in him a deep love for German language and literature.īoth of Celan’s parents died during the Holocaust. ![]() Holocaust Poetry in Germanīorn Paul Antschel in 1920, in Czernowitz, Romania, Celan was the only child of German-speaking Jews. ![]() My Jewish Learning is a not-for-profit and relies on your help DonateĪ poem, Paul Celan (1920-1970) once said “can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the–not always hopeful–belief that, somewhere and sometime, it could wash up on land.” Widely regarded as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, Celan gave voice to the poet’s desire to communicate while recognizing the limitations of poetic expression and of language itself. ![]()
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