Paul Celan: A Life

 Paul Celan: A Life by Anna Arno (Translated from Polish by Soren Gauger) - review by Charlie Louth

Charlie Louth

Where Books Were Alive

Paul Celan: A Life

By Anna Arno (Translated from Polish by Soren Gauger)

Belknap Press 416pp £29.95

 

Paul Celan, generally reckoned the most important postwar poet writing in German and perhaps any language, thought that ‘true poetry is antibiographical’, though he also insisted that not a single line he wrote was not linked to his existence. Either way – and there is in fact no contradiction here – knowledge of his life is extremely useful when it comes to reading his poems. Anna Arno’s accomplished biography, which first appeared in Polish in 2021 and has been smoothly translated by Soren Gauger, is now by far the best account available in English and has a claim to be the best tout court. 

Celan’s life is of great intrinsic interest. He was born in 1920 in the city he called Czernowitz, though its official name by then was Cernăuți: with the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the First World War, it became part of Romania. Later, in 1944, it was annexed by the Soviet Union, and since the collapse of that empire it has been part of western Ukraine and known as Chernivtsi. The city has had several other names, reflecting its complicated history and mixed population, but for Celan it always remained Czernowitz. Arno opts to use Chernivtsi throughout which runs the risk of missing something about Celan’s relationship with his hometown. Czernowitz, which he left in 1945 and never returned to, wasn’t just a place but a whole way of being, a remnant of Austro-Hungarian life which ‘because it bears the name Lost, remains ours for ever’, as he wrote to his friend Klaus Demus in 1960. However, Arno’s decision is part of a larger and valuable emphasis of her book, which is to come at Celan from a Central European perspective. This is particularly noticeable in her excellent treatment of the Russian dimension of Celan’s work and imagination, most obvious in his translations of Alexander Blok, Sergei Yesenin and above all Osip Mandelstam, whose poetry first became known in the West through Celan’s versions.

Celan’s actual name was Antschel – he adopted Celan in Bucharest after the war, switching the syllables of its Romanian form, Ancel; but he was never able to get it changed formally, and on official documents he remained Paul Antschel. His parents belonged to the German-Jewish population of Czernowitz, which as in Kafka’s Prague formed the cultural elite of the city, though their circumstances were modest (his father was a dealer in firewood). He spoke German at home, learned Romanian and Hebrew at school, and later, when the Soviets invaded, picked up Russian. He was a brilliant linguist who, having settled in Paris in 1948, operated almost wholly in French, keeping German for his poems and for his relationships with German-speaking friends and lovers. Until the war, he had led a happy and privileged life, enjoying the pleasures – theatre visits, swims in the River Prut, ventures into the Carpathians – of the still-enduring Austro-Hungarian lifestyle. Celan later referred to Bukovina, the region of which Czernowitz is the capital, as a place ‘in which people and books were alive’. The loss of it, which included the loss of his parents, is at the root of his work.

The devastation began in July 1941 with the arrival of Einsatzgruppe D. On 5 July, the main synagogue was burned down, and by the end of August three thousand Jews had been murdered, nearly all of them German-speaking. Celan survived in various labour camps in ‘old’ Romania, but his parents, deported east to the notorious camps of Transnistria, were both dead by the end of 1942. Celan was particularly close to his mother, who had transmitted to him her love of the German language and its writers. He wrote what is by far his best-known poem, ‘Death Fugue’, either just before leaving Czernowitz or shortly after arriving in Bucharest in 1945. He called it ‘an epitaph and a grave’ and observed that ‘my mother too has only this grave’. As that wording suggests, the poem is not specifically about her but commemorates all Jewish victims of the Holocaust. A few poems address her more personally, but in a sense she is present, or absent, in all of them and particularly in their commitment to the language she gave him. 

The two years Celan spent in Bucharest, deftly evoked by Arno as the period when communism, ‘emphasising equality at the expense of liberty’, took hold and gradually eliminated most of the Western European influences that had survived the war, were his most Romanian. He worked as a reader and translator for a publishing house that promoted Russian literature in Romania, translating some Chekhov novellas and Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time (his first publication). He also wrote some of his own work in Romanian, and ‘Death Fugue’ first appeared in a Romanian translation by his friend Petre Solomon. He moved in Surrealist circles, had many liaisons and seemed to be living in a ‘state of euphoria’: in a short piece of prose in Romanian, he calls himself a ‘partisan of erotic absolutism’. In December 1947, the opportunity eventually came for him to go west. He crossed the border into Hungary clandestinely, with the help of smugglers, and hid in the red-light district in Budapest until it was possible to continue on to Vienna.

The Austrian capital turned out to be only a staging post, though an important one. He published many poems in magazines, met Ingeborg Bachmann and formed other significant friendships. But Vienna, hollowed out by the war and its refusal to examine its past, was not the place he had long imagined, the mother city to the ‘little Vienna’ of Czernowitz. It was, rather, ‘a city fearful of its present, uncertain of its future’, in words Arno quotes from The Third Man (1949), which was being shot in Vienna at about this time. By July 1948, he was in Paris, beginning once again. It became his home and remained so for the rest of his life.

At this point, the book changes tack somewhat, and the chapters develop a thematic focus that cuts across the whole of Celan’s life. Celan met Bachmann in Vienna, but the chapter on this extends to cover the whole of their relationship, which went on in one form or another all her life. And so we read about the meeting of the Gruppe 47 in Niendorf in 1952 – which Bachmann was instrumental in getting Celan invited to, and where his reading of ‘Death Fugue’ received a mixed reception – before we learn of his arrival in Paris. We also hear of his ‘improbable’ relationship with Heidegger – beginning with the meeting in 1967, after which Celan wrote ‘Todtnauberg’ – after the account of his visit to Israel in autumn 1969. These soundings – of Celan’s Jewishness, his illness, his affairs, his work as a translator – are very well done and help the reader assemble a composite image of Celan as a person and writer in his times, but the method does make it difficult to keep track of the order in which things happened. Only retrospectively does one grasp the remarkable fact that in 1953, less than a year after marrying Gisèle Lestrange and at about the same time as they lost their first child, Celan began a parallel relationship with Brigitta Eisenreich which lasted nearly ten years. Language seems to have been a large factor: Celan’s French was impeccable, but Eisenreich spoke the kind of Viennese German he associated with home. Nearly all his many sexual relationships were with either German-speaking or Jewish women (or both). Lestrange came from an aristocratic Catholic family who strongly opposed her marriage to a more or less destitute Jew. But as Arno says, the relationship with her was the ‘crux of his existence’ and she stood by him even after (in 1967) she had decided on separation to protect herself and their son from Celan’s increasingly violent psychotic episodes. She also seemed to accept that the affairs were in some way necessary for the poetry. She did, however, note the contradictions: ‘He will not tolerate lies, yet he deceives his wife.’ 

The lies he would not tolerate were what poisoned his life and make the whole latter part of it so sad. ‘We dwell so long on Claire Goll in Paul Celan’s biography,’ Arno writes, ‘because of the damage she wrought.’ Goll accused Celan of plagiarising the poems of her husband, Yvan Goll, whom Celan had met soon after arriving in Paris. For good measure, she also accused him of attempting to rape her. She built these smears into a campaign that was a major cause of what became his paranoia. Poison is the right term, because it spread into every element of his life. From a distance, it seems obvious that Celan should simply not have taken this poison, and several of his friends thought so at the time. He rose above it in his poems but let mistrust infect relations with even his most supportive friends. The insinuations were so destructive because they implied that the centre of his existence and means of survival, his poetry, was not his own; and also, because he saw that the purchase they had on critics and other writers was due to a groundswell of anti-Semitism he could never escape.

Arno notes that Celan spent two of the last seven years of his life in psychiatric hospitals. He carried on reading and writing, though the poems became increasingly private and difficult to access. He drowned himself in the Seine in April 1970. Arno’s account ends abruptly, but it is consistently sympathetic and illuminating; lucid in its judgements, both discreet and direct. There are one or two slips, notably the claim that in 1941 Celan was hired by the Russians to collect books to be burned, when the Russians had been driven out of Czernowitz by that point and his job was to gather Russian books, but such cavils do not affect the book’s achievements. Anna Arno has given us a rich and nuanced evocation of the life of a vital poet.