Paul Celan - Todesfugue

Paul Celan was born Paul Antschel in 1920 in Romania of German-speaking Jewish parents. (Celan is an anagram of Ancel, the Romanian form of his name.) They spoke German at home at his mother's insistence; she was a passionate student of German literature. Celan also knew Romanian, Russian and French, and could understand Yiddish, a German Jewish dialect. Celan went to France to study medicine in 1938, but returned to Romania in 1939 to study literature instead. First the Russians and then the Nazis took over the part of Romania in which he lived. Forced into a Jewish Ghetto created by the Nazis, he translated the sonnets of William Shakespeare and continued to write his own poetry. In 1942 both of his parents were captured and taken to concentration camps, where they died. Celan was made to do forced labor until 1944, when the Russians drove out the Nazis and took over again. Celan wrote Todesfugue at the end of the war, using accounts of the death camps he had heard when the camps were liberated. After the war he moved to Bucharest, where he worked as an editor and translator and changed his name. In 1948 he moved to Paris to study German philology and literature. He became a French citizen in 1955 and remained in France for the rest of his life. He committed suicide in 1970 by drowning himself in the Seine River.

Celan struggled with the irony of writing in German. It was both the language that connected him to his family, especially his mother, and the language spoken by the country that had killed his parents, uncle, and numerous other close friends and family members. He struggled with survivor guilt and depression, but became one of the major German language poets of the 20th century in spite of this. In 1958 we won the Bremen Prize for poetry and in 1960 the Georg Buechner Prize.

Of language, Celan wrote:

"Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. It gave me no words for what was happening, but went through it. Went through and could resurface, 'enriched' by it all." (from "Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen", p.34, in Celan's Collected Prose, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop, Riverdale-on-Hudson, New York, The Sheep Meadow Press, 1986.

You can hear Celan read "Todesfugue" by clicking on the link at the end of the poem on this site.