A Jewish Poet’s Post-Holocaust German

Born in 1920 in the Romanian city of Czernowitz, the poet Paul Celan (né Antschel) spent most of World War II in that city’s ghetto—where he translated Shakespeare’s sonnets into German—and then in a forced-labor camp. His less fortunate parents were among those Jews sent to the internment camps in Romanian-occupied Ukraine, where they both perished. After the war, he continued to write poetry and also to produce numerous literary translations. The Holocaust remained a major subject of his work, including his best-known poem, “Todesfuge (Death Fugue). Reviewing several recent books on or of Celan’s poetry, Mark Glanville examines the poet’s refusal to abandon German: