What historian Yuri Slezkine called “the Jewish century” has concluded: a hundred years of Jewish achievements and influence, overshadowed by the Holocaust. The Romanian-born, German-speaking Paul Celan was the preeminent poet of that catastrophe, though also the least tractable. Reading him today—when antisemitism seems resurgent and the self-evident deference accorded to Jewish victimhood seems, in several quarters, to have dissipated—is a fresh challenge, and a provocation. Anna Arno’s Paul Celan: A Life (first published in Polish in 2021 and newly translated by Soren Gauger) proves itself equal to this moment in the ongoing life of his work.

From its opening pages’ layered evocation of prewar Chernivtsi (Germanized as Czernowitz)—the polyglot city in the Bukovina region, then in Romania and now in western Ukraine—the biography shows itself to be the work of a confident teller, richly attuned to the poet and his milieu. Celan was born Paul Antschel, an only child in a typical household of the modestly prosperous Jewish middle class. Arno’s portrait of the city contains many fascinating details, among them the fact that Jewish students, rebelling against the language reforms of Romania’s prewar nationalist government, persisted in speaking German instead of Romanian—though they sometimes added mock Romanian endings. 

The anecdote is a reminder that German just was, along with Yiddish, the language of a segment of the Central European Jewish diaspora—long before it became “the language of the murderers.” Arno records that Celan, like other Czernowitzers, could be snooty about Yiddish and even about his own diaspora dialect—a useful riposte to commentators who have noted with pleasure that Celan’s German was “inflected by other languages from the outset” and thus “‘multilayered and multivoiced.’” In this literate milieu, the young Paul and his friends were initiated into a high-level, but playful, poetic culture. Celan first developed his sense of poetic calling in an atmosphere of passion and danger. Art and friendship were a romance; the danger was murderous and squalid. 

Like other biographers, Arno leaves undetermined exactly why Celan was away from home the crucial night of June 27, 1942, and hence avoided being deported with his parents. She also reports conflicting accounts of his parents’ demise. Paul learned of his father’s death from “a letter his mother sent in the fall of 1942—this was the only word he received from his parents in the camp.” But it is unclear whether Leo Antschel died of typhus or was executed, or whether Paul’s beloved mother Fritzi was killed with a rifle butt or shot. Nor do we know in which camp or camps they died. 

Paul, meanwhile, had been conscripted into work gangs run by Todt, the Nazi military engineering organization, building roads in what is now Moldova, some 250 miles south of Czernowitz. When the Red Army rolled back the German forces in the winter of 1944, he was eventually able to find his way back to Czernowitz, now occupied by the Soviets, and to his parents’ ruined house. After a harsh winter, he succeeded in leaving for Bucharest, where he launched himself as a writer in Romanian and first adopted the pseudonym “Celan,” an anagram of his birth surname. Before long, he slipped across the border to Vienna, where he published his first poems in German. A year and a half later, he left for Paris, the city he would make his home. 

In Paris, Celan’s friends tended to be fellow expatriates, survivors, German speakers. Thanks to his wife Gisèle’s aristocratic family, he lived comfortably in the Sixteenth Arrondissement, but he was still on the margins of respectable French society, a translator and instructor in German at the École Normale Supérieure who composed poems at his office desk. From this position of alienation and anonymity, he launched his assaults on German letters. His work faced opposition and incomprehension. And yet, as Arno shows, Celan made the hostility of readers—along with what he saw as misplaced praise—the spur that drove his poetic transformation.

The major precursor in English to Arno’s biography is John Felstiner’s Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (1995). Felstiner’s is a critical biography, foregrounding interpretation of Celan’s poems and translations. Arno’s is “A Life”: an unadorned, even prosaic portrait of the man and, somewhat indirectly, his poetry. Some might find this indirectness a fault, but Celan’s poems do not lack for commentators. Arno’s spare and illuminating treatment shows the virtues of a straightforward account that “remembers its dates,” as Celan said a poem ought to do.

The freshness of Arno’s book is not primarily a matter of new facts, though there are some. Newly available testimonies from Celan’s childhood friend and later lover Ilana Shmueli, for instance, as well as from his lovers Gisela Dischner and Brigitta Eisenreich—neither of whom is mentioned in Felstiner’s account—provide details about a passionate and elusive man leading several “parallel lives.” The prevailing difference, however, is one of tone. Whereas previous biographies often have an air of reverence, if not sanctimony, Arno speaks more forcefully by speaking plainly.

I have read no previous account that so clearly delineates Celan’s tragic last years of madness and hospitalization, culminating in his suicide by drowning in April 1970, nor one that so convincingly traces those incidents to his postwar persecution, which he saw as a reenactment of the Nazi past. Arno brings particular clarity to the murky and confusing “Goll affair” that consumed much of Celan’s final decade. Claire Goll was the wife of Yvan Goll, a Franco-German, Jewish Alsatian poet who had mentored Celan after his arrival in France and whose works Celan translated. After Yvan’s death, Claire—perhaps out of “spurned love”—baselessly accused Celan of plagiarizing her late husband. Arno convincingly argues that Claire’s campaign against the poet, which was brazen and ongoing—conducted through circular letters and involving multiple collaborators—was a decisive factor in the madness that left Celan “cut to the brains.” Most galling was how Claire’s campaign intersected with what Celan saw as a recrudescence of Nazism, both in Germany and abroad. 

Postwar West Germany was not altogether de-Nazified: Celan was not wrong to say that “you never knew whose hand you were shaking” during his visits there to give readings. Nor was he wrong to detect an antisemitic subtext in certain hostile reviews—some of which made opportunistic use of Goll’s allegations. Arno does not mince words in describing Celan’s attackers: Goll, she writes, was increasingly “insane.” Yet neither does she draw a veil over Celan’s own obsessive response. His friends sought to reassure him that the negative coverage—which dismissed his work as “wordplay,” or as “aestheticizing” the horrors it depicted—was evidence of his increasingly central position in German letters, expanding from the beachhead he had established among younger readers. His anger was unassuaged. Showing the right level of indignation and assiduity in defending him became an impossible test of loyalty. Celan’s friends and, above all, his wife Gisèle endured his mercurial, abrupt temper, which shocked old friends from Czernowitz when they were reunited after years apart. 

A particular strength of Arno’s book is articulating how Celan’s poetics reshaped themselves dialectically in response to his German reception. Incensed by readings of his poems that either faulted or praised them on “aesthetic” grounds, Celan railed against “those who collect metaphors and assemble them into fragrant bouquets.” He insisted on the literal truth of his images—like “grave in the air” (an image borrowed from his school friend, the poet Immanuel Weissglas) for the cremated corpses of Holocaust victims. In 1966, Celan offered another image for his goal in poetry: “At least in language, to show bits of a spectral analysis of objects, to show them simultaneously in many aspects and permutations with other things: neighboring, adjacent, opposite.” 

A spectral analysis is not metaphorical: the crystal is not transformed, but rather revealed. Celan’s friend Péter Szondi, the Hungarian Jewish literary critic, similarly insisted that his poems were not analogous to, but somehow instances of, “landscape.” Those notions are themselves metaphors, of course, and their mixture of literal and figurative, open and cryptic, points to the challenge of Celan’s late collections. Imaginative and aggressive, and often more musical than the poet himself acknowledged, the later work extends like some remote spit of stone and ice, still largely unexplored. (There are now, fortunately, several translations; the versions by Ian Fairley are, in my opinion, unparalleled.)

Celan himself always felt one had to read his poems attentively and intensively—not “skim over them”—so that their reality could be revealed. Contrary to a stirring critical impulse that enthroned interpreters over artists, readers over writers, Celan saw his poems as direct communications—to you. And you were asked to understand, or, in the erotic register of many of Celan’s heightened forms of address, to “take me in” (in Hebrew, “hachnissini”).  

It is little wonder that many of Celan’s best readers were his lovers—readers who shared (or felt they shared) the private world of the poems and could therefore grasp them intuitively. Celan, Arno reminds us, is one of the most intense poets of sexual love of the past half century; indeed, she tells us it was Celan’s eroticism that first drew her to his work. 

Arno’s portraits of Celan’s lovers are among the most significant parts of the biography. Her depictions are not rosy, but neither are they gossipy. Celan’s relationship with the Austrian poet and novelist Ingeborg Bachmann, which began before his marriage and was resumed fitfully afterward, receives an entire chapter and echoes throughout the narrative. His affair with Shmueli also receives particular attention. The young Paul and Ilana, who shared the darkest days of the Nazi occupation, reconnected during the poet’s pivotal 1969 trip to Israel. Readers of Felstiner will have learned, though he seems initially reluctant to part with the information, that Shmueli was the addressee of Celan’s poem “Mandelnde” (“Almonding one”), with its memorable blend of erotic and Jewish motifs. Arno greatly fills out our understanding of their largely epistolary relationship, which culminates after Celan’s death but before his body was found, when Shmueli, disturbed at not having heard from him, took a flight to Paris to search for him, in vain. 

The most mysterious figure in the book is surely Celan’s wife, the artist Gisèle Lestrange. Arno’s spare treatment does not preclude experimentation; employing a not-quite-linear structure, she withholds full introduction of Gisèle for some time—until the book’s midpoint. Before she appears fully, she hovers offstage: “Celan…had met his future wife, Gisèle Lestrange, in November,” we read in a chapter on Celan’s relationship with Bachmann, and a similar sentence appears in the chapter on the Goll controversy. In each case, Arno’s pluperfect tense emphasizes Gisèle as an enigmatic presence, already there in a way one is tempted to call maternal. (The poet gave her the epithet “Maïa” in his letters; at other times, he emphasizes her foreignness, playing on her birth surname, Lestrange.) She was descended from a Catholic, aristocratic, Vichyite family, worlds away from Celan’s, prompting him to refer to her ironically as “my highly Jewish wife.” Her support was steadfast and unflagging, up to the point when Celan’s degenerating condition and his threats of physical violence against her and their child made it impossible. Her abstract, crystalline etchings evolved in dialogue with Celan’s work—though Arno also relates the haunting fact that, after Celan’s death, Gisèle reverted to the use of color for the first time in twenty years. 

Another figure one wishes one learned more about is Gisèle and Celan’s treasured son Eric. Some years ago, over a drink with the translator Pierre Joris (since deceased) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he and I fell to talking about Celan’s son. What was he up to now? It took a couple of repetitions to confirm—what with the din of the bar and Joris’s Luxembourgish accent—that I had indeed heard, “He is a juggler.” A childless bachelor, Eric was now living, Joris reported, on the middle floor of a three-floor townhouse, one floor of which was devoted to his father’s relics, the other to his mother’s. 

Whether or not this report or my recollection of it is accurate (publicly available information places Eric in a Belleville, Paris, apartment, not a townhouse), it was a memorable image of a burden handed down from one generation to the next. I thought of it again when reading Arno’s terse final paragraph. At Celan’s funeral, his friend Jean Bollack, the classical philologist, “bent down to give Eric a kiss.” Eric, we read, “‘had changed; he was oddly like his father.’” “Not strangeness, but strange likeness,” as the English poet Geoffrey Hill would write in a different context, a few years afterward. And so, Arno leaves us with a shiver. It is a fitting end for this unsettling, strangely revitalizing life.

Paul Celan
A Life
Anna Arno
Translated by Soren Gauger
Harvard University Press 
$35 | 416 pp.