„In den Lüften liegt Man nicht eng“. Anmerkungen zur unauflösbaren Tragik des Dichters Paul Celan

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 9-34
Author(s):  
Horst Samson ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Paul Celan ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Personal Tragedy

"“In the Air Where You Won’t Lie Too Cramped.” Notes on the Irresolvable Tragedy of the Poet Paul Celan. Paul Celan's work is characterized by reflections on the power and possibilities of language and poetry in general in processing personal tragedy and painful borderline experiences, especially the experience of the Holocaust. These experiences range from the persecution of Jews, the deportation and murder of his parents, to the ""Goll Plagiarism Affair"" or to mental illness in the last years of his life. These experiences of persecution and extermination of the Jews and Celan's involvement in the tragedy of his people are reflected in many of his poems, especially in Todesfuge. Keywords: Celan, Shoa, modern German poetry and language, tragedy "

Paul Celan, Poet of the Holocaust

Worldview ◽  
1976 ◽  
Vol 19 (12) ◽  
pp. 24-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luitgard N. Wundheiler
Keyword(s):  
Special Treatment ◽  
German Language ◽  
Final Solution ◽  
Paul Celan ◽  
Public Address ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Pass Through ◽  
The One ◽  
Native Tongue

The Jewish poet, Paul Celan, was born in Czernovitz, Rumania, in 1920 and committed suicide in Paris in 1970. His native tongue was German. He wrote eight volumes of poetry, all in German, although he spent almost half his life in France and was fluent in several languages. In a public address delivered in Bremen in 1958, on the occasion of being awarded a literary prize, he spoke of the German language as the one possession that had remained "reachable, close, and unlost in the midst of losses…although it had to pass through a thousand darknesses of deathdealing speech." German is the language of Holderlin, Biichner, and Rilke, all of whom Celan admired, but also the language in which the words Endlösung (final solution), Sonderbehandlung (special treatment), and judenrein (cleansed of Jews) were coined.

Manifestations of the Holocaust: Interpreting Paul Celan

Books Abroad ◽  
1972 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 25
Author(s):  
Jerry Glenn
Keyword(s):  
Paul Celan ◽  
The Holocaust

How to Dance After Auschwitz? Ethics and Aesthetics of Representation in John Cranko's Song of My People—Forest People—Sea

2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 5-26
Author(s):  
Liora Bing-Heidecker
Keyword(s):  
Paul Celan ◽  
Dance Company ◽  
The Holocaust

John Cranko's only ballet for the Batsheva Dance Company in Israel, Ami-Yam, Ami-Ya'ar (Song of My People—Forest People—Sea, 1971) is described in a program note as “A Nation and Man Move in Parallel Cycles from Death to Regeneration.” It has remained unique in Cranko's choreographic corpus and in the Batsheva repertoire. Based on recently discovered film evidence, I reread Cranko's largely forgotten project and discuss its problematic and controversial reception in Israel and abroad, in light of Adorno's statement that “writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbarism.” I situate it as a landmark in tackling the Holocaust in dance in Israel as of 1971. I problematize the ethics and aesthetics of representation in Cranko's ballet on the grounds of Giorgio Agamben's discussion of testimony and in reference to Jacques Derrida's reading of Paul Celan.

scholarly journals Hearing the Form: Breath and the Structures of Poetry in Charles Olson and Paul Celan

2021 ◽  
pp. 409-434
Author(s):  
David Fuller
Keyword(s):  
American Poetry ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
First Century ◽  
Paul Celan ◽  
Charles Olson ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
Post War

AbstractThis essay examines the ways in which the American poet Charles Olson, and the German-speaking Romanian Jewish poet Paul Celan, each in relation to specific post-war cultural circumstances, experimented with new ways of structuring poetry in relation to the breath: Olson in response to new global scientific, political, and intellectual currents; Celan in response to the Holocaust. The essay discusses not only how the poets wrote but also how they realised the printed forms of their poetry in performance, contrasting Olson’s literal performance of his theories with the different relation of print to performance of his contemporary and associate William Carlos Williams. It argues that Olson’s experiments, polemically formulated in his manifesto Projective Verse, while they have influenced central currents of American poetry since the 1950s, have remained largely American, whereas Celan’s, tentatively intimated in his anti-manifesto Der Meridian, and inimitably personal in their specific forms, can also be seen as modelling ways in which a wide range of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry can be realised in reading aloud.

scholarly journals How Jewish Refugee Critics Changed British Literary Criticism, 1970–2020

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 80
Author(s):  
David Herman
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Paul Celan ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Jewish Refugee ◽  
Huge Impact ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Post War

During the mid- and late 20th century, a small group of Jewish refugee critics changed the way British culture thought about what kind of literature mattered and why. These outsiders went on to have an enormous impact on late 20th-century British literary culture. What was this impact? Why in the last third of the 20th century? Why did British literary culture become so much more receptive to critics like George Steiner, Gabriel Josipovici, Martin Esslin and SS Prawer and to a new canon of continental Jewish writers? The obstacles to Jewish refugee critics were formidable. Yet their work on writers like Kafka, Brecht and Paul Celan, and thinkers like Heidegger and Lukacs had a huge impact. They also broke the post-war silence about the Holocaust and moved the Jewish Bibl from the margins of English-speaking culture.

scholarly journals Leçons de Tenebrae: Brian Cherney, Paul Celan, and a Music of Witness

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-179
Author(s):  
Anton Vishio
Keyword(s):  
Natural Extension ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Paul Celan ◽  
The Holocaust

In several compositions, Brian Cherney has reflected on the Holocaust and its impact, exploring how music can respond to such tragedy; his recent engagement with the poetry of Paul Celan is a natural extension of these preoccupations. This article offers a close reading of Cherney’s choral setting of Celan’s Tenebrae. The composer incorporates several additional texts that create a genealogy of the poem, from biblical passages to fragments of Dante and Hölderlin to accounts of the Holocaust itself; he arranges these texts to highlight semantic and sonic features of Celan’s work. Perhaps Cherney’s boldest move is his insertion of Hebrew letters, linking his composition to the long tradition of Lamentations settings—a link cemented by a quotation from Couperin’s Leçons de Ténèbres, which provides important motivic material. Through these additions, Cherney turns the poem towards us, inviting us to respond to its call for reflective witness.

Genius, Lunatics, and Poets: Mental Illness in Prize-Winning Authors

2001 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 305-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
James C. Kaufman
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Creative Writing ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Nobel Prize ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Creative Arts ◽  
Control Groups ◽  
Creative Writers ◽  
Personal Tragedy

The links between mental illness and the creative arts, especially creative writing, are well-established, if controversial. Several studies have found more mental illness in creative writers than in control groups; few studies, however, have investigated the truly eminent, genius-level writers. To address the question of how genius-level writers compare to merely accomplished writers, two historiometric studies examined writers who won the Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize. Study One examined 986 20th century writers, while Study Two 889 American writers from the 17th century to the present day. In both studies, both types of prize-winners were more likely to suffer from mental illness than non-winners. In addition, Nobel Prize winners were more likely to suffer from alcoholism (Study One) and experience a personal tragedy (Study Two). Implications and theoretical possibilities are discussed.

Polish and Hungarian Poets on the Holocaust

2019 ◽  
pp. 395-408
Author(s):  
George Gömöri
Keyword(s):  
Eastern European ◽  
Paul Celan ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Eastern European Countries ◽  
Holocaust Poetry ◽  
Nelly Sachs ◽  
Second World ◽  
Large Corpus

WHEN discussing Holocaust poetry two names usually spring to mind: Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs. There is, however, a large corpus of poems on the subject from two eastern European countries, both of which had large Jewish communities before the Second World War: Poland and Hungary. In what follows I shall discuss the best poetry on the Holocaust from both countries, excluding that written in Yiddish....

Fassbinder’s Nabokov—From Text to Action:Repressed Homosexuality, Provocative Jewishness, and Anti-German Sentiment

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis Ioffe
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Holocaust

This chapter analyzes Werner Fassbinder’s 1978 film of Vladimir Nabokov’s 1936 novel Despair. In light of Nabokov’s own border crossing as a Russian immigrant in Berlin, Fassbinder draws out the implications of the German setting in the writer’s time. The chapter argues that by focusing on the homosexual and Jewish themes of the novel in light of Fassbinder’s own homosexuality and experience as a citizen of a nation that had carried out the Holocaust just before his birth in 1945, the director creates a complex cultural map of sexuality, religious identity, and the mental illness that plagues the protagonist, Hermann. Fassbinder also develops Nabokov’s device of the double: in the film, Hermann, by murdering his stand-in Felix as a symbolic suicide, allows him to experience a rebirth through a new identity, away from Germany and his financial, marital, and social problems.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document