Paul Celan was a man whose home country was poetry itself; almost every other form of citizenship remained dangerously in flux throughout his life. Born Paul Antschel into a Jewish-Romanian family in 1920, Celan grew up speaking German, studied medicine in Paris as a teenager, returned home, lost his parents in the Holocaust, and was himself sent to a fascist-run work camp in Romania for three years. He escaped to Bucharest, changed his name several times, and in 1947 fled again to Vienna, where he met Ingeborg Bachmann, a beautiful 21-year-old doctoral student researching Heidegger. He fell in love with her.
“Today something else happened,” Bachmann wrote to her parents in May 1948. “The surrealist poet Paul Celan, whom I had just met two nights earlier with Weigel, and who is very fascinating, has, splendidly enough, fallen in love with me, which adds a little spice to my dreary work. Unfortunately he has to go to Paris in a month. My room is a poppy field at the moment, as he inundates me with this flower.”
The feelings were mutual. That Christmas she wrote: “Dear, dear Paul! Yesterday and today I thought a great deal about you—or about us, if you will. […] Someone suddenly gave me your book of poems as a gift. I didn’t know it had come out. That was so … the ground was so light and buoyant beneath me, and my hand was trembling a little, just a very little bit.” But this was one of many more honest, open letters Ingeborg Bachmann never sent.
Perhaps because he didn’t receive it, and also perhaps because he sensed that he was “a little spice” to the busy young intellectual—who had grown up in relative privilege and safety—Celan would settle permanently in Paris, eventually marrying the equally beautiful Gisele Lestrange, a young painter to whom he wrote an even greater volume of love letters. They would have two sons: Francois, who died in childbirth, and Eric, who survives.
But Celan’s feelings for Bachmann continued to manifest themselves, and their intimate relationship continued off and on for 20 years, often painfully and spitefully, until shortly before Celan’s suicide in 1970. Correspondence, rendered perfectly in English by Wieland Hoban, traces their letters, telegrams, and book inscriptions to one another, color-coded and augmented by hundreds of footnotes. Like other volumes from Seagull Books, it’s physically gorgeous, with a pleasingly compact trim size.
Reading Correspondence feels like an indulgence. It also feels disorienting. The world of the letters and the world of their authors’ real lives are askew in a sometimes jarring way, so that the emotional content of the letters reads almost as fiction. Both Bachmann and Celan have pressing matters to which they must attend, literary and career opportunities, even other love interests.
Already during the first twelve months after their initial meeting, Paul’s letters are slightly apologetic and frustratingly brief. In January 1949, he writes, “Try for a moment to forget that I was silent for so long and so insistently—I had a great deal of sorrow,” etc. This is a line Bachmann must have grown accustomed to hearing from Celan. But at this early stage she responds hopefully and with much news, admitting, “Two or three times I wrote you a letter, and then left it unsent after all.” She concludes, “I think of you, and I am still listening to you.” She receives no response.
She writes less officially, more tenderly in an undated, unsent letter from mid-1949: “I long for you and for our fairy tale. What shall I do? You are so far away from me, and the cards you send, which satisfied me until recently, are no longer enough for me […] You are always my concern, I […] take your strange, dark head between my hands and want to push the stones off your chest, free your hand with the carnations and hear you sing.” In a later letter she writes, “Sometimes all I want is to go away and come to Paris, to feel you touch my hands, touch me completely with flowers … “—and actually sends it.
Celan’s response begins, “just a few words in haste,” and supplies his telephone number. His next letter, near the end of August 1949, again apologizes, “Do you know, Ingeborg, why I have written to you so little during this last year? Not only because Paris had forced me into a terrible silence from which I could not escape; also because I did not know what you thought about those brief weeks in Vienna.”
Simultaneously Bachmann is writing to him a letter she doesn’t send until the end of November, with a cover letter—a letter to explain everything, in which she admits, “you can imagine that the time since you has not been devoid of relationships with other men …. I fulfilled a wish you voiced back then; I have not told you that either.”
The bomb has been dropped. There is no recorded response from Celan until September of the following year. It is chilly and deals with the logistics of Bachmann’s imminent visit to Paris. Then another year passes, and it is 1951. Bachmann sounds rather mopey in a letter from March, writing, “Please write to me occasionally. To not write too vaguely.” Although neither correspondent knows it at the time, this is the year Celan will meet and fall in love with his future wife, Gisèle Lestrange. When that does happen, he does not reveal it to Bachmann, who is experiencing literary successes heralding a brilliant future.
What he does do is cease writing letters to her, while her letters become more frequent and stalkerish. “I am simply worried,” she writes, in January 1952. “I really have no idea how you are, or ‘where’ you are. […] Write to me soon, please—it need not be a long letter. Just give me some sign of life at last!” He responds: “Let us no longer speak of things that are irretrievable, Inge—all they do is reopen the old wound, they stir up anger and ill will in me, they rouse what is past. […] Friendship is the only possibility between us. The rest is irretrievably lost.”
She continues to pound out letters to him, mingling offers to promote his poetry in the literary world with begging requests for him to write. It’s not until May of 1952, when the two meet at the elite German literary society Gruppe 47, to which Bachmann has finagled an invitation for Celan, that she learns of his impending marriage. He tells her in person. There is a photo plate of Bachmann and Celan sitting next to each other at this event, looking in slightly different directions.
She writes to him in July, “I can see clearly that our first conversation [at Gruppe 47] crushed all my hopes and efforts of the last year, and that you managed to hurt me better than I ever hurt you. It chills me so deeply to think that this had already happened long ago and I did not sense it, that I was so unsuspecting.” But she spends the next eighteen months writing letters to him, and he does not respond.
It’s hard to imagine this “love” being good or even pleasurable for either party. The affair flares up again in late 1957, at Celan’s initiative, and they meet in Munich and spend some self-indulgent nights together. They walk away from that weekend full of each other’s poems, with romantic train-rides described in prose, and so forth. They couch this experience in high-flown terms: “You are the reason for my speaking” and “When I met you, you were both for me: the sensual and the spiritual” and “I shall sit beside you for a while and give your eyes kisses.”
In July of 1958, Bachmann continues in this vein, writing from Italy: “I am thinking desperately of you, then again of you during that afternoon on the Ile St Louis—it was as if we were in equilibrium, in the rain, and as if there were no need for a taxi to take us away …. And we—oh Paul, you know, but right now I cannot think of any words that would fully convey what holds us.” Then in October she announces that she’s moving in with the Swiss playwright Max Frisch. He will take care of her, she believes.
It’s difficult to read these letters objectively, for two reasons. First they are laced—no, loaded—with poetry-business matter: what to publish where, who’s reading new manuscripts, why so-and-so hasn’t paid me yet, along with smarmy attempts at mutual advocacy, some of which pan out and others of which fuel passive-aggressive jealousy. This matter is especially unpalatable alongside all the cooing, desperate love-talk. Which leads to the second reason. The careful reader can see that Celan and Bachmann’s “love” is, from the start, a selfish, indulgent trap from which neither can escape—a few evenings in Vienna, an exchange of poems, and a gift of poppies become blown wildly out of proportion in each of their fertile imaginations, and they do not allow the sanctity of Celan’s later marriage to impede them in the pursuit of their desires. His marriage may even have added a degree of thrill, as their “love” became more perfectly irresolvable.
What this collection does well is reveal some particulars about the lives of each of its primary subjects, Celan and Bachmann, documenting their lives in occasionally eloquent terms. For example, Celan writes in late 1951,
Difficult to be in Paris again: searches for a room and for people—both disappointing. Lonely times cloaked in chatter, dissolved snow landscape, private secrets whispered to the public. In short, an entertaining game with gloom—naturally, in the service of literature. Sometimes, the poem seems like a mask that only exists because the others need something from time to time to hide their sanctified, grotesque everyday faces.
It also provides another lens through which to view Celan’s increasing paranoia related to the critical reception of his Holocaust poetry, his argument with Max Frisch (contained in a separate Celan-Frisch section of the book), and the difficult downward slope toward his suicide in 1970. The initial letter from Frisch to Celan stands as a benchmark for male humility and levelheadedness in this collection. Celan responds with years of frozen silence.
Nothing ends well here, with Celan’s eventual suicide and Bachmann’s decline and mysterious death three years later—and that’s perhaps how life inevitably is. But Correspondence is not the tale of tragic love, or of true love surviving natural impediments. It’s an epistolary portrait of a man and a woman more skilled at writing poetry than capable of selfless love.
Aaron Belz teaches English at Providence Christian College in Pasadena, California. His second poetry collection, Lovely, Raspberry, was published by Persea Books in 2010.
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