Die „Mitte [...], die mich zurücknimmt“: Paul Celans Ringen zwischen „Zentrum“ und „Peripherie“
“The Center that always reacquires me”: Paul Celan’s Agonizing Vacillation between Center and Periphery

Summary/Abstract: Drawing on a significant number of testimonies—correspondence, memoirs, the actual poetic texts—we investigate a concept of existential value for the poet Paul Celan, that of ‘Mitte’ (Center). For him, this is not only the utopian projection of the balance of that ‘Atemwende’ (breathturn) which bestows creative power upon language, but also the locus of identity within a symbolic geography centered around the “mother” tongue, German, restructured in his own poetic idiom against the grain of the “language of the killers” of both his mother and his world.

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