Zweistimmig eine hommage an paul celan biography

Paul Celan

Paul Celan was born in Czernovitz, in Romania, in Until , this region of Romania had formed part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, a polyglot amalgam of nations stretching from Austria in the west to the Balkans in the south-east.

Though each region spoke its own language, and many Jewish communities spoke Yiddish, German acted as the common language for the empire as a whole.

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The speaking of a good German marked an individual as both bourgeois and cultured, one who particpated in the cosmopolitan world of politics, art, literature and music.

Celan grew up speaking German at home and Romanian at school. He also understood Yiddish. His father's interest in Zionism (the movement dedicated to the refounding of a Jewish homeland in Palestine) led to three year's education in a Hebrew school.

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Later he became fluent in French, Russian and Ukranian. A schoolfriend of Paul Celan wrote, 'We had no natural language. To speak good German was something you had to achieve. You coul