An Exchange on Nation and Exile
An Exchange on Nation and Exile "Perhaps I am one of the last who must live out to the end the destiny of the Jewish spirit in Europe." Why "must"? Writing from Paris in August 1948 to relatives in the new state of Israel, Paul Celan, having barely survived the "Final Solution" expedited by Nazism, explains that a poet cannot stop writing, "even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German." This fateful pledge, from a brutally orphaned son whose stirring 1945 ballad, "Deathfugue," intones "Death is a master from Deutschland" and threads "your ashen hair Shulamith" into the Bible'...
Source: wordswithoutborders.org