Letters from Vienna #70
On the 10th of May 1970 Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, the widow of the poet Paul Celan, wrote to his former lover, the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann:
My dear Ingeborg,
I don’t know if my letter will reach you. I think you have heard the terrible news. I wanted to write to you all the same.
On Thursday April 16th, when my son Eric had lunch as usual with (his father) Paul (Celan), he realized that he was again very ill. I called him myself the next day and each and every day until Sunday April 19th. Friends who tried to reach him or who saw him only confirmed the crisis he was in again.
On the night of Sunday to Monday April 19th/20th, he left his home never to return.
I spent fifteen days looking for him everywhere; I had no hope of finding him alive. It was on May 1st that the police found him, nearly a fortnight after his terrible gesture. I only found out on May 4th –
Paul threw himself into the Seine. He chose the most anonymous and lonely of deaths.[1]
Paul Celan’s sanity had already been fundamentally called into question roughly ten years earlier: “During the family’s winter vacation in December 1962, Celan, in a fit of insanity, attacked a passer-by. When returning to Paris in a hurry, he ripped the yellow scarf from his wife’s neck on the train – he thought he saw a Jewish star in it.”
“After that, Celan had to go to a psychiatric clinic for the first time. Four more stays followed. On November 24, 1965, he attempted to kill his wife with a knife. Gisèle fled the apartment with her son in the middle of the night. On January 30, 1967, he stabbed himself in the chest with a knife and severely injured his left lung.”[2]
“In the second half of the 1960s, (Klaus) Reichert was Celan’s editor at (the publishing house) Suhrkamp. The signing of the contract was celebrated in Frankfurt with copious amounts of whisky, which led to Celan singing revolutionary songs and chanting anarchist slogans on the way home to the hotel.”
“The exuberant mood was abruptly interrupted when Celan saw an FDP election poster – with the colors blue, yellow and white. “Celan jumped, froze, scared to death and cried out in horror: “For God’s sake, those are the colors of the Ukrainian fascists””.[3]
The Bloodlands
Although a large number of factors played a role, traumatic memories from the “bloodlands” were undoubtedly the main cause of Celan’s fits of madness, depression and untimely death (at the early age of 49). Like many survivors of the Holocaust and similar traumatic experiences, life became simply unbearable for him.
In July 1939 Paul Celan (at that point in time named Paul Antschel), finished his first year of medicine in Tours, France, and returned to his native Czernowitz, the capital of Bukovina, a province of Romania.
The Bukovina, which had once belonged to the Hapsburg monarchy was made up of Ukrainians, Romanians, Jews, Germans, Hungarians, Hutsuls, Lipovans, Slovakians, Czechs, Armenians and Romani.[4] Roughly half of “Little Vienna’s” (as Czernowitz was then known) 100,000 inhabitants in 1920 (the year of Paul Antschel’s birth), were, like him: Jewish.[5]
Even after the Romanians took control of the province in the wake of the First World War the Jews of Czernowitz remained loyal to the language of the Hapsburg monarchy[6] and Celan’s mother (née Friederike (“Fritzi”) Schrager) attached considerable importance to perfect control of the language. German was for her, as it was for many, the first step towards civilized respectability and prosperity; she had absolutely no time at all for slang.[7]
In 1938, Paul’s father, Leo Antschel, wanted the family to move to South America but Paul vetoed the plan[8]. As always: there was a fight over money. The family could only afford one or the other but not both. By choosing to study medicine in France, Celan unwittingly contributed to his parent’s death.
What was worse: when his parents were eventually picked up by the Nazis Paul successfully hid in a factory.[9] In many cases where sons stayed and let themselves be deported the families survived;[10] Paul’s parents didn’t. This undoubtedly weighed on him in his later years and played a key role in his emotional and mental breakdown.
All that was left was for him to sing in anguish, sorrow and despair at the fate not only of own his parents but all of those like them:
It’s falling now, mother, snow in Ukraine:
the Saviour’s wreath of a thousand grains of sorrow.
None of my tears will reach you.
From earlier farewells, a proud mute one. . .
We’re already dying: why doesn’t the barrack sleep?
The wind moves as if banished…
Is it them then, that freeze in the slag –
the heart’s flags and the arm’s chandeliers?
I remain the same in the darkness:
redeem the gentle and expose the sharp?
neither blown nor torn apart by my stars
the strings of an overly loud harp. . .
At times there’s a rose hour attached to it.
Fading. One. Always one. . .
What would it be, mother: growth or wound –
If I’d drown in the snowdrifts of Ukraine?
[1] pp. 196-197 Herzzeit, Ingeborg Bachmann Paul Celan, Der Briefwechsel
[2] https://www.spiegel.de/kultur/bittere-brunnen-des-herzens-a-96c9e568-0002-0001-0000-000018869922
[3] https://science.orf.at/stories/3203043/
[4] p.10 Paul Celan, Israel Chalfen
[5] p. 28 Paul Celan, John Felstiner
[6] p.18 Paul Celan, Israel Chalfen
[7] p.40 Ibid
[8] pp.77-78 Ibid
[9] pp.118-119 Ibid
[10] p.52 Paul Celan, John Felstiner