Paul Celan died on the Seine fifty years ago.

Once, Paul Celan even wanted to buy a Loden coat in Frankfurt. It was summer, July 1967, and the poet was in a good mood. You could say: he was in a strange German mood. He just came from a visit to Martin Heidegger. The Jewish poet from Bukovina who lived in Paris and the philosopher of the Black Forest with a Nazi past, that was a connection that was not easy to understand.

At the same time, however, it is part of the history of the work of two works that combine the complementary. Something that seeks enlightenment, but goes through darkness. Heidegger as a philosopher. Celan because he couldn’t help it. Its darkness had names, places, and biographies. There were perpetrators in the pulpit. Heidegger was also one of them.

Paul Celan at the 1967 Frankfurt Book Fair.

Digne M. Marcovicz / bpk

For a long time, Celan was considered the whispering dark poet who tried to understand the somewhat “comprehensible” and later even legible “Nazi mass murder of Jews in the” flight of death “but was otherwise practically unreadable. The Hermetic Celans was a drug for anyone who read poetry as an incomprehensible revelation. But that was a misunderstanding.

«In the sense of radical demystification. Nix Styx! Celan once wrote to his editor Klaus Reichert in his copy of “Poppy and Memory.” Philology has gained a lot of ground over the years. Through the precise study of the source. Biographical references were illuminated. Sometimes a simple glance at the “German dictionary” by the Grimm brothers was enough.

In the language of the murderers.

The fact that Celan’s poems are better understood today than perhaps twenty years ago is an advance that has simultaneously led to new areas of private life. And besides the poet, there is also the letter writer Celan, who has left an almost novel autobiography with his correspondence that spans thousands of pages. One of Paul Celan’s internal contradictions is who he contradicted and who he didn’t. Who did he expel from friends and who stayed with his relatives.

German was the language of the assassins, while Celan himself felt that he belonged to something very German. To an essential exaggeration of German, so to speak, which he found in the poems of Hölderlin, Stefan George and Rilke and as a completely different version in the work of Martin Heidegger and Ernst Jünger. Here he felt understood in his own writing.

The fact that there are biographies that contrast with his even among his close friends may have irritated him, but it has not necessarily disturbed him. At the group 47 meeting in Niendorf, Celan met Rolf Schroers, the son of an SS brigade leader, in 1952. Schroers himself had been a lieutenant in the Wehrmacht and during the war in Italy in “frontal reconnaissance”. He was anti-Semitic and believed in the elitist of the word. To an initiated secret society that made him feel connected to Celan. Because Celan, as a Jew, was “despised by the crowd” like him. Only late, and after hundreds of letters, Celan broke the friendship.

In an August 1959 letter, Paul Celan wrote about Heidegger to Ingeborg Bachmann that he was “the last” to overlook Heidegger’s “Rector of Freiburg speech and a few other things”, but prefers “the one who drowns with his misconduct. ” like “patented anti-Nazis like Böll or Andersch”.

After 1945, Heidegger’s suffocation from his own misconduct was very limited. There was never any real distancing. So Heidegger’s sentences from his 1933 Nazi glee speech were still in the room when Celan made friendly contact with the philosopher. Heidegger 1933: “It is not enough to greet the reorganization, the only thing that must be done is decide whether to place yourself in command of the new reality or to sink into a sinking world.”

The confrontation in the Black Forest

Paul Celan put into words what Heidegger’s “mandate of the new reality” was supposed to do in “Death Groove”. What the poet thought after visiting the philosopher can be found in the lines of “Todtnauberg”. In July 1967 there was a confrontation at Heidegger’s cabin and while walking through the rainy Black Forest, which left both feelings mixed.

Heidegger’s enthusiastic reader, Celan, has occasionally designed letters that seem paradoxical. Celan chooses the greeting “Mr. Martin Heidegger / the thinker // on the way through the Engelsbucht”. It is said to be the “shy greeting from a wishing neighborhood / wish-inspired neighborhood.” In relation to Heidegger, “Denk-Herr” is more than a strange word, but it is not understood here politically, but as an almost desperately naive philosophical category.

Basically Paul Celan was apolitical. He had little interest in matters of political indolence, as in the case of Heidegger. On the other hand, he reacted to the commitment of other writers with aggressive malice. Since his experience with Group 47 in Niendorf in 1952, Celan has been allergic to everything that was pure realism. Which tried to expel the ambivalence of the words in the language of German literature. Added to this was the insult that Hans Werner Richter had compared him to Goebbels because of his reading style.

In 1953, accusations by Yvan Goll’s widow, Claire, about Celan plagiarized her husband’s poems. At this point Celan’s relationship with Germany and his German friends is redefined. This is where the fight for work itself begins, and that won’t change in the decades until Paul Celan’s death.

A tragic circle of insult

If poetry is intended to be something that draws its truth from the emphatic areas of language, then the author must defend himself in his own way. Only the true poet can tell what is true, and Paul Celan is caught in a tragic circle of insult. Anyone who attacks his poetry attacks him himself in a very comprehensive way.

Celan is listening to everything friends say about him. Even committed lawyers like Peter Szondi are the victims of a verdict that completely removes others from the friends lists. Ingeborg Bachmann, Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass.

Paul Celan had achieved the Büchner Prize for German literature no later than 1960. He never lived in his mother tongue in Germany, but he did not feel at home either. A note from Celan’s legacy shows all the bitterness: “There must be, there should be, in contemporary German literature. I am so repressed, more precisely: one of these repressed.