Levine, Michael G.: InterventionenDie Dichtung Paul Celans
Michael Levine's Interventionen takes as its point of departure critical moments in the life and work of Paul Celan: the birth and death of his first-born son François in 1953; the traumatic structure of Georg Büchner's work around which the 1960 Meridian address turns; the poems addressed in 1968 to his second son Eric composed at a time of personal and political crisis during which the poet saw himself compelled to choose between his child and his poetic vocation; and the Jerusalem poems written after the »caesura« of his 1969 trip to Israel. Seeking to orient himself in these times of crisis, Celan also and above all endeavored to keep time open. For only through such openings, only by letting time itself open, could »that which is most proper, most other, be given a chance to speak.« Because access to this ownmost otherness of poetic speech is never direct, it is necessary to approach it in a roundabout manner – by way of the dense intertextual networks in which Celan’s poems are enmeshed and via the responses to it by such eminent scholars as Bernhard Böschenstein, Jacques Derrida, Werner Hamacher, Stéphane Mosès and Thomas Schestag.
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