Paul Celan was born in a German-speaking area of Romania in Czwernowitz. He studied medicine in Paris in 1938 and then Romance philology at the University of Czernowitz. His parents were deported to death camps, where they died long afterward. During World War II Celan, a Jew, was sent to a forced-labour camp, where he worked until heavy snow forced it to close. Celan managed to survive the Holocaust, although he was imprisoned until 1943.

When the Russian Army reinvaded his homeland in 1944, Celan went to Bucharest, where he continued reading the great German lyric poets Georg Trakl and Rainer Maria Rilke. He changed his name to Paul Aurel, then to Paul Ancel and finally to Paul Celan.

After the war he moved to Bukarest, where he worked as a translators and editor at an publishing company. In 1947 he went to Vienna and immigrated then to Paris, where he became a teacher of German language at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. In 1952 Celan married the graphic artist Gisèle Lestrange.

Celan established his reputation first in West Germany. His first poems started to appear in the periodicals in the late 1940s. His second book, MOHN UND GEDACHTNIS (Poppy and Memories, 1952) established his reputation as an important poet of the Holocaust. Todesfugue, Celan's most famous poem, describes the Jewish experience under Nazism. Celan's friends René Char, Nellie Sachs, and other poets felt the restrictions placed on them by their indentity and by the nightmare of history that the Holocaust represented. As Celan said in his acceptance speech for Georg Bühner prize, language must be set free from the history.

In the 1950s Celan's work was becoming known for its broken syntax and short length, expressing his perception of the fragmented world in which he lived. Celan's radical minimalaism concentrated the poetry to the essential core of the experience.

In 1960 Celan received Georg Büchner Prize. He translated also works from such writers as Cocteau , Michaux, Mandelstam , Ungaretti, Pessoa, Rimbaud, Valéry, Char, du Bouchet, and Dupin. He suffered from bouts of depression throughout the 1960', and when Claire Goll, poet Yvan Goll's wife, accused him of plagiarizing some of his husband's work, Celan suffered a nervous breakdown. In 1970, overcome with his struggle with language, Celan died by his own hand: he drowned himself in Seine on May 1, at the age of 49.

For further reading: Paul Celan by Amy Colin (1991); The Art of Hunger by Paul Auster (1992)

Note: Celan visited in the 1960s philosopher Martin Heidegger, who has been accused of Nazi sympathies during WW II.

Selected works:

• DER SAND AUS DEN URNEN - THE SAND FROM THE URNS, 1948
• MOHN UND GEDÄCHNIS - POPPY AND MEMORY, 1952
• VON SCHWELLE ZU SCHWELLE, 1955
• SPRACHGITTER, 1959
• DER MERIDIAN, 1961
• GEDICHTE, 1962
• DIE NIEMANDSROSE, 1963
• ATEMWENDE, 1967
• FADENSONNEN, 1968
• LICHTZWANG - LIGHTFORCE, 1970
• SCHEEPART, 1970
• SPEECH-GRILLE AND SELECTED POEMS, 1971
• GEDICHTE, II, 1975
• ZEITGEHÖFT, 1976
• GDICHTE 1938-1944, II, 1985
• Last Poems, 1986
• Collected Prose, 1986
• Poems of Paul Celan, 1995