Brunnenland: The Image of the Bukovina in Paul Celan

Summary

The poetic world of Paul Celan (1920–1970), as the perhaps preeminent poet of the Shoah and its aftermath, is traditionally defined in terms of two highly contrastive extremes: on the one hand, at the level of the microcosmic, the most personal and intimate, Celan’s poetry centers on the figure of his murdered mother, who often serves as the posthumous muse, the missing “Thou” of dialogue, and a kind of Kabbalistic Shekhina, or feminine spiritual guide of his poetic utterance. This utterance is of course at the same time being fundamentally driven, in the dimension of the macrocosmic, by that engulfing cataclysm of universal history, the Holocaust. However, there is at the same time an intermediary link between these two poles that until quite recently was often neglected or overlooked in discussions of the poet: and that is the lost world of the Bukovina, the at once largely Germanophone and at the same time largely Jewish enclave at the easternmost tip of what had once been the Austro-Hungarian empire; a territory subsequently annexed by Romania after World War I, falling to the former Soviet Union after 1945, and now forming a portion of present-day western Ukraine, while having lost its Jewish and otherwise ethnically mixed population in the disasters and dislocations that accompanied and followed the Second World War. It is here, however, in this unique and endangered cultural space, that Celan was born at the beginning of what we must now regard as the interregnum between two world conflagrations, and which, in the light of later historical catastrophe, so fatefully bequeathed him, as the perhaps greatest poet of remembrance of the Shoah, his German mother tongue. Celan thus lost both his parents to the Holocaust as he did his Bukovinian Heimat; this German term seems all the more appropriate as the world and homeland that the poet lost was indeed itself, and rather paradoxically, a German-speaking one. In 1945, Celan forever turned his back on it as a space that had been for him and its erstwhile Jewish population now historically and irrevocably voided, initially by the Shoah, and afterwards by the vast uprootings of populations which occurred throughout Eastern and Central Europe in the aftermath of the war.