Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of the outstanding poet of the twentieth century, who is considered one of the best European lyricists of the postwar period.
Paul Celan (real name Paul Leo Anchel) was born on November 23, 1920 in Chernivtsi in a family of German-speaking Jews. After graduating from the "Lyceum of Grand Duke Michael" in 1938 he studied medicine in France. With the beginning of the Second World War he returned home, where he continued his studies at the University of Chernivtsi at the Faculty of Romance Philology. After the occupation of Bukovina by the USSR in June 1940, Celan studied Russian and worked as a translator. Shortly after the start of the German-Soviet war and the return of Chernivtsi to Romania, Celan's family found themselves in the ghetto. The parents were deported to a concentration camp, where they died. Paul himself ended up in a Romanian labor camp. After liberation from it in February 1944 he returned to Chernivtsi. He resumed his studies at the university and worked as a physician's assistant in a psychiatric hospital.
In early 1945, Paul Celan took the opportunity and moved to Bucharest. He worked in the publishing house "Russian Book", translated Russian prose into Romanian. It was in Bucharest in 1947 that his poems were first published in German under the pseudonym "Celan". Paul rewrote the German spelling of his surname "Ant-schel" into the pseudonym Zelan, but later wrote it in the French Celan style. In the same year, Contemporanul published the Fugue of Death in Romanian under the name Tangoul Mortii, which became the poet's most famous work. These poems were sung in the Bundestag on the 50th anniversary of the victims of the Crystal Night pogroms. At the end of 1947, Paul Celan left for Austria, where he published his first book of poems, Sand from the Urns. He later moved to Paris, where he lived for the rest of his life. In 1952, Celan's first collection of poems, published in France, "Poppy and Memory", appeared. In 1955 - a new collection "From threshold to threshold". Military upheavals, the loss of relatives, even after years, determined the emotional and physical condition of the poet. On April 20, 1970, Paul Celan committed suicide.
Paul Celan has won a number of literary prizes, including the world's most prestigious German-language literature, the Georg Büchner (1960). Despite the little known in his homeland, according to critics, the poet's work is one of the most notable phenomena in the literary history of the mid-twentieth century.
The library of Museum "Jewish Memory and Holocaust in Ukraine" offers to read the following publications dedicated to the work of Paul Celan:
1. Rykhlo P. Poetry after Auschwitz: "The Fugue of Death" by Paul Celan as an intertext.
http://library.tkuma.com/index.php?PGID=4&KNIGA_F=5311&RAY=0
2. Takhterina E. Paul Celan and his Fugue of Death. Biblical roots of Paul Celan's poetics on the example of his most famous poems. http://library.tkuma.com/index.php?PGID=4&KNIGA_F=6204&RAY=0