Paul Celan on the Impossibility of Testimony: “Ort meiner eigenen Herkunft”

Abstract

In his poems, Paul Celan does not use words such as territory, border, border crossing, and only very rarely the word space. I would like to reconstruct the traces of “Heimat” in Celan (in a number of poems from different periods “Heimat” plays an important role), and perhaps try to describe what Heimat might have meant for the young Paul Antschel (his real name). That is to say, I would like to understand whether “Heimat” is synonymous with what Celan speaks about, many years after his name change, in the address given on the occasion of the Georg-Buechner- Preis: “Ich suche auch, denn ich bin ja wieder da, wo ich begonnen habe, den Ort meiner eigenen Herkunft.” In the poems written at the time when Antschel is learning Hebrew as well as reading Martin Buber (Israel Chalfen) for the first time, I look for some basic figures Celan ties to his life in Bukovina at the time, in the environment of Czernowitzer Judentums. Aside from the works by Israel Chalfen, Else Keren and Elke Guenzel, I would like to make use of a book published some ten years ago, a detailed listing of Celan’s Paris library. I would like to consult this archive in the coming period, since Celan punctuated the margins of many of those books with evocations of his early creative period.

Paul Celan u svojim pesmama ne upotrebljava reči kao što su teritorija, granica, prelaženje granice, a veoma retko reč prostor. Namera mi je da rekonstruišem tragove „Heimat“ kod Celana (u nekoliko pesama iz različitih perioda „Heimat“ je važna tema) i eventualno pokušam da opišem šta je Heimat mogao da znači za mladoga Paul Antschel (njegovo pravo ime). Odnosno da li je „Heimat“ zaista u sinonimiji sa onim što Celan kaže, puno godina kasnije, u govoru povodom uručenja Georg-Buechner-Preis: „Ich suche auch, denn ich bin ja wieder da, wo ich begonnen habe, den Ort meiner eigenen Herkunft“. Pokušaću da u pesmama napisanim u vreme kada Antschel uči hebrejski i prvi put čita knjige Martina Bubera (Israel Chalfen), pokažem neke osnovne figure koje Celan vezuje za svoj tadašnji život u Bukowini, a u okruženju Czernowitzer Judentums. U ovom istraživanju ću se koristiti, osim radova Israela Chalfena, Else Keren i Elke Guenzel, i knjigom koja je objavljena pre desetak godina u kojoj je detaljno popisana pariska biblioteka Paul Celana. Namera mi je da konsultujem ovaj arhiv u narednom periodu jer Celan na marginama svojih knjiga na nekoliko mesta evocira svoje prve stvaralačke godine.