"Auch ruhiges Land...": Remembrance and Testimony in Paul Celan's Nuit et Brouillard Translation

In 1955, the renowned poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan, a Rumanian born Jew who wrote in German, was commissioned to write a translation, for German television, of Jean Cayrol's narration to Alain Resnais's film Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog), a 32-minute documentary on the horrors of the Nazi death camps. Celan's version focused much more explicitly than Cayrol's text had done on the German origins of the Holocaust and the predominantly Jewish identity of the victims. Its eventual television broadcast in 1978 provided a stimulus to a new generation of German filmmakers who sought to problematize issues of Holocaust remembrance and West Germany's inability to come to terms with its past.