Paul Celan

INTRODUCTION

The ambition of this literature review is to shed light on Paul Celan, who is arguably the most prominent Jewish poet after 1945. More specifically, this review will examine the poet’s outspoken attitude towards the sense of loss, which will greatly influence his literary works. The following review consists of two sections, this is due to the topic’s difficult nature. The first section will focus on Celan’s relevant biography, whereas the second section will provide an insight into the poet’s struggle with the concept of loss. At the end of this analysis, the reader will have a coherent answer to the question: what is Paul Celan’s attitude towards the concept of loss and how is this integrated into his poetry? This review’s point

This burden would haunt the poet, then living in exile in Paris, for the next 28 years until he would take his own life in 1970 (Joris, 2005, p. 10).

SECTION TWO: CELAN’S RECEPTION OF LOSS AND ITS IMPLEMENTION IN POETRY

In the upper part of this section, G. Weiss argues that the notion of diaspora is cast deep within the identity of Jewish people, thus being applicable for Paul Celan. Furthermore Weiss (2016) states that this aspect is inevitably intertwined with a notion of homelessness, a notion of being the other on more levels than solely having no homeland.

The lower part of this section is reserved for M. Aquilina and Paul Coates, who both draw attention towards Celan’s experimenting with literary techniques, which accentuates the poet’s interpretation of language as a discourse which is deprived of its semantic value.

Paul Celan fell prey to various ordeals where the concept of loss is central. As a Jew, he learned from his Zionist father that ‘the old homeland’, embodied by the city of Jerusalem, was long gone with the destruction of the first Jewish temple, which was followed by the Jewish diaspora, the state of being deprived of one’s motherland, leading to the fact that Jews were widely scattered over the globe (Weiss, 2016, p. 60). After the Second World War, he lost his – at that time – ‘current homeland’, which was Romania. To conclude this list of ‘empirically perceivable

Though it would perhaps have a more beneficial effect in order to refer to these non-existing compounds as neologisms, since the neutral term komposita (compound words) proves to be too generic. One, however, could bypass this impasse by acknowledging that, technically speaking, Celan’s creative metamorphose of two ostensible irreconcilable words do not only produce new meaning, but additionally create a new syntactical construction, therefore meeting the requirements of a neologism (Bruns, 1986, p.