Your Father Shoulders You: On Inheriting Paul Celan

Paul Celan’s wife, Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, once remarked that her husband saw poetry as a jealous deity, demanding of him nothing less than the reperformance of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac. The recently published Letters to Gisèle casts Celan in the grip of this god—a devoted father yet utterly consumed by his art. The letters, which span almost twenty years, illuminate Celan’s twin reckonings: poetry and parenthood after the Shoah—two refusals of erasure, two impossible reaches toward continuity across rupture.

Celan—a stateless, orphaned Jew from Bukovina—had married Gisèle Lestrange, a French painter and engraver, against the protests of her Catholic aristocratic family. Their first son, François, died in 1953, thirty hours after his birth. By the time their son Eric was born in 1955, Celan was already transforming and transcending German. Syllable by splintered syllable, he was enacting a Jewish reappropriation of the language of the executioners.

Despite the inheritance of loss, Eric’s childhood gleamed with moments of delight: summoning birds with breadcrumbs; riding imaginary camels across the family’s furniture; and painting a glass window for Nelly Sachs, whose letters to the Celans were filled with grandmotherly affection for the “wide-eyed enchanted child.” When Eric was eight, Gisèle reported, he said: “I will be a scholar, but that’s not all, I also want to be noble in love!”

Now seventy, Eric Celan lives in a modest apartment in Belleville, Paris. Visiting him there last June alongside Bertrand Badiou—Celan’s devoted editor, literary executor, and biographer—I found Eric reflecting on the multilayered inheritance from his parents: a household saturated by languages (German, French, Romanian) and haunted by the heavy hush of unsayable things.

Indeed, his father’s poetry is precisely that: fractured, stammering expressions that leave the Holocaust unnamed yet palpable everywhere between the lines. Celan, born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Czernowitz, endured the Romanian labor camps but escaped the Nazi extermination machine that had murdered his parents. Yet unlike Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, and Nelly Sachs, Celan declined to name the Shoah. Accepting the Bremen Literature Prize in 1958, he described how poetry had “to pass through its own answerlessness . . . through the thousand darknesses of death-bringing speech.”

Letters to Gisèle, translated by Jason Kavett, includes more than sixty letters and postcards Celan addressed to Eric. They reveal a father desperately striving to balance his art with the demands of fatherhood. There is an aching vulnerability in these letters, as if the father were willing himself into the semblance of stability his son deserved. “You are well, mother is well, I will soon be well again . . . nothing can separate us,” he writes to Eric, then ten, from a psychiatric clinic.

As time wore on, Celan’s fragile equilibrium faltered. By the late 1960s, as reality chafed Celan raw (wirklichkeitswund was his word for it), his “fits of delusion,” as he called them, grew more debilitating. On one occasion, he attacked a neighbor. The imagined offense? That the neighbor had harmed his son. Despite such “jolts,” Celan clung fervently to his role as father, describing Eric to Gisèle as “our tenacious raison d’être.”

Celan once spoke of the poem as a “message in a bottle” that might “wash up on the shoreline of the heart.” Against the backdrop of the May 1968 student demonstrations—during which father and son walked the streets of the Latin Quarter chanting revolutionary songs in Russian, Yiddish, and French—Celan was casting out poetic messages in the hope they would reach his son’s heart.

One poem, written a week before Eric’s thirteenth birthday, his bar mitzvah, reads:

For Eric

Illuminated
a conscience rams
the hither and thither
plague-ridden equation,

later than early: earlier
time holds the brusk
rebellious scales,

just as you, son,
hold my with you arrowing
hand.

(Translated by Pierre Joris)

Here Celan’s paternal love resounds with biblical echoes. The image of the ram (with the verb rammt in the second line) serrates the poem’s opening with an allusion to Abraham’s substituted sacrifice. But in the final lines, the father’s “arrowing hand” reaches forward toward the son.

This reaching forward—away from sacrifice toward embrace—resonates again in Celan’s only poem written entirely in French. Addressed to Eric, it concludes with the punning lines:

Your father (Ton père)
shoulders you. (t’épaule)

I wondered what Eric shouldered of the Jewishness of his father—a man who said, “My poems imply my Judaism,” and who described himself as one who drinks wine “from two glasses,” Germanic and Hebraic.

In one letter to Gisèle, Paul expresses the hope that their nine-year-old son will grow up “Jewish, humanly, humbly, proudly.” Several months later, Paul addresses Eric in a hopeful imperative voice:

My son Eric, you live, you will live, you grow, you will grow, you will be an upright, courageous man, you learn and you will learn, you write and you will write, you sing and you will sing, you love and you will love, you are loved and you will be loved, you will have a wife worthy of you, intelligent and beautiful, you will have children, boys and girls, you will have a beautiful profession, you will have loyal and frank friends, you will be just and charitable, you will love poetry and you will make it, you will have religion and you will respect that of others, you will be a good Jew.

In the fall of 1969, Celan gave readings in Jerusalem, Haifa, and Tel Aviv. Celan called the two-week visit “a turn, a caesura in my life.” He composed a cycle of nineteen poems inspired by his stay (published in 1976). In October, Paul sent his son a postcard: “Jerusalem is an admirable city—you too, you will come one day to see it.” It was Celan’s last known message to his son.

Celan’s Hebrew name, Pesach, signifies both liberation and sacrifice. On the eve of Passover, 1970, he drowned himself in the Seine. He was forty-nine. When I visited him, Eric said that when his father’s body was pulled out of the river, the pockets of his jacket were empty except for two tickets for a performance of Waiting for Godot.

“Our inheritance was left to us by no testament,”wrote Celan’s friend and French poet René Char. In the wake of Celan’s suicide, the absence of a clear testament left Gisèle and Eric to navigate the vast legacy—manuscripts, memories, meanings—alone. How do we hold onto an inheritance that comes to us without any instructions? Eric described how Gisèle was left with the task of deciding who would manage Celan’s literary estate—111 boxes worth of manuscripts, drafts, diaries, notebooks, correspondence (including some marked with the poet’s stark instruction: “Do not publish”), and more than four thousand books from his library—and where it should reside.

Gisèle appointed Badiou coexecutor, along with Eric, of the estate. Badiou and Gisèle first approached the Jacques Doucet Literary Library in Paris, which held the archives of many prominent French writers—Mallarmé, Valéry, Gide, Malraux, and many others. Although Celan had been a French citizen for fifteen years, the library turned her down on the grounds that it was devoted to French literature and not a good fit for the archive of a poet working in German. (In all his years in France, Eric said, not once was Celan invited to give a reading there.)

When her initial plan faltered, Gisèle’s thoughts turned toward Jerusalem, the city that had marked such a profound turning for Celan. She considered donating the estate to the National Library of Israel. According to Badiou, Stéphane Mosès, a professor of comparative literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and founder of its German department, dissuaded her, citing the country’s chronic insecurity.

Finally, in the late 1980s, the German Literature Archive in Marbach made a case that language should be dispositive: because Celan wrote in German, his legacy should reside in Germany. The Germans offered a considerable sum for the archive. Celan had always refused German reparation money. “Now they will pay!” Gisèle said. In 1990, Marbach acquired the Celan archives for approximately €400,000. A year after the sale, Gisèle died in Paris.

This choice was laden with symbolic weight and bitter irony. Celan’s papers, Eric said, would reside uneasily among those of Martin Heidegger and Yvan Goll, whose widow accused Celan, in an antisemitic smear campaign, of plagiarism. But for Eric, pragmatism overrode symbolism. “We can thank Marbach for the apartment in which we’re sitting,” he says now, with a smile that seems to acknowledge the irony of a country that his father had once rejected, whose “death-bringing” language carried the burden of genocide, housing his father’s legacy.

In Celan’s poem addressed to Eric, the poet’s hand, “arrowing,” reaches out toward the son. In the Akedah, the biblical story of interrupted filicide, Abraham’s hand is halted, the blade suspended. But the trauma lingers in Isaac’s silence, in the binding itself. In Celan’s last letter to Gisèle, he writes: “Faced with the choice between my poems and our son, I have chosen: our son.” But the act of choosing Eric could not finally unbind him from the master from Germany.

In 1964, Celan wrote from Hanover: “My dear Eric, in a little while I will read poems—who knows, one day you will do perhaps just as much, in your way. Or you will do something else, and this will still be like writing poems.” Because he felt “poor in languages,” Eric told me, “I chose an art where speaking is not required.” He studied at a circus school and became a professional magician. “At first, the tricks were bad,” he said, “but my father smiled at them. He was extremely encouraging.” Just then, with a graceful sleight of hand, Eric pulled a fan of cards from behind my ear. I realized then that Eric’s magic—the gentle conjuring of presence from absence, joy from grief—was his father’s truest legacy.