Close Strangers

A study on Paul Celan‘s relationship with Germany – in the year of his 100th birthday as well as the 50th anniversary of his death.

Paul Celan, born in Czernowitz in 1920 as a German-speaking Jew, wished to be a poet from an early age. However, after the murder of his parents in the Holocaust, he developed an ambivalent relationship to the German language. He often travelled to the Federal Republic from his home in Paris for readings or private visits. However, this Germany, where Nationalsocialism was still virulent, remained alien to him, and deeply disturbed him again and again. His friendships with German authors (most of them former Wehrmacht soldiers) failed. In the so-called »Goll affair«, he felt that the accusation of plagiarism made against him was character assassination, which for him amounted to an delayed act of murder. His relationship with Germany and his mother tongue, a language spoken by murderers, proved irreparable.
Emmerich traces Celan’s difficult relationship with the »close stranger Germany« on the basis of the author’s literary oeuvre and his extensive published correspondence.