Paul Celan (1920-1970)  
Celan, originally given the name Paul Antschel, grew up in a small Rumanian town in what is now part of Ukraine. He went to study medicine in France in 1938, but his interest in medicine lasted a year and he returned home to pursue his new found passion for romance languages and literature. In 1941 German forces occupied the region and in 1942 his parents were deported to an internment camp where they both perished: his father by typhus, his mother by a gunshot in the neck. He somehow escaped arrest but was later forced into a labour camp. In this period Celan first experienced the darker side of human nature, a side he was to explore and struggle with the rest of his life. He began studying Russian and translating Russian poets such as Yesenin and after the war began writing seriously while working as a Rumanian translator of Russian literature.
After the publication in Austria of his first book of poems, Der Sand aus den Urnen, which he withdrew because of the many misprints it contained, he settled in Paris, where he took up the study of German literature. In 1950 he obtained his "Licence" and became a lecturer in German literature at the École Normale Supérieure. He quickly insinuated himself into the Parisian creative community that was just starting to make its presence felt around the world. In 1952 Celan married a graphic artist and republished his first book of poetry, which brought him immediate recognition with its vivid and disturbing evocation of the holocaust. Most of the poems in the rejected first collection were reprinted in Mohn und Gedächtnis, which appeared in West Germany in 1952 and won him immediate recognition, confirmed by an invitation to read at the annual gathering of the "Gruppe 47" in the same year. Celan's next collection Von Schwelle zu Schwelle followed in 1955. Between 1957 and 1967, Celan received a number of prizes, including the prestigious Georg Büchner Prize in 1960. A speech delivered by Celan on that occasion, Der Meridian, is one of the very few prose pieces he published and his nearest approach to a manifesto of his aims as a poet.
In addition to his own poems, he remained active as a translator of French, English and Russian literature. In the 1960's he wrote poems ( Sprachgitter and Die Niemandsrose ) that focused on his private world instead of the external political concerns that initially made his reputation and, as consequence, his readership declined. The poems of this period reflect his turbulent emotional life and his obsessive, easily wounded psyche. He now wrote in an almost hermetic manner using a private system of symbolism and allusion that many found hard to decipher. Another Rumanian writer and personal friend, Emile Cioran, once described Celan as a man "profoundly wounded....too tormented to take refuge in scepticism." Instead he took refuge at the bottom of the Seine when he threw himself off a bridge and drowned in May of 1970.

links:  - Celans Homepage  - Celans Gedichte auf Englisch  - weitere Werke