Celan-Handbuch. Leben—Werk—Wirkung (review)

Without a doubt, the Celan Handbook will become the standard work of reference for scholars conducting research on Celan's life and oeuvre and for readers interested in the particulars of Celan's biographical and intellectual trajectory at large. Covering a broad spectrum of topics ranging from the poet's biography, poetic output, and work as a translator, to his engagement with the sciences, medicine, philosophy, music, and the arts, and contextualizing his legacy historically, culturally, politically, and geographically (including its international reception—especially in France, Romania, and Italy), the Handbook is the most comprehensive and detailed scholarly volume on the German language's most keening poetic voice of the latter half of the twentieth century to date.

Divided into seven parts, the Handbook will, if not exhaustively answer virtually any factual question you may have about Paul Celan, the man and the poet, at least point you in the right direction. The first, introductory part provides, in addition to a concise précis of the poet's life, a summary account of Celan's critical reception during his lifetime, as well as a comprehensive list of available selected and collected works editions of Celan's oeuvre. The second part gives a detailed historical overview of the creation and publication of Celan's individual collections of poetry from his early writings and Der Sand aus den Urnen (1948) to the two posthumously published collections Schneepart (1971) and Zeitgehöft (1976), and caps off with a look at more recent publications from Celan's estate. The third, fourth, and fifth parts are devoted to a comprehensive chronology of Celan's prose writings, translations, and letters, respectively. The sixth, thematically most pithy part is dedicated to a detailed contextualization of Celan's literary legacy and biographical trajectory (from Czernovitz to Paris via Vienna and Bucharest) in cultural, historical, literary-historical, philosophical, and aesthetic terms. The final section traces, among other things, the significance and enduring cross-cultural impact of Celan's legacy in the fields of literature, music, and the visual arts.

In addition to a wealth of factual and cultural-historical information on matters Celanian, the Handbook also offers succinct critical analyses und interpretations of Celan's poetry and prose, arranged in chronological order and, thus, along the lines of the unfolding contexts of Celan's de facto evolution as a poet. In its comprehensive, historically organized, and topically interlaced approach, the Handbook is uniquely conducive to enabling its readers productively to navigate Celan's poetic universe—whether they be looking for answers to specific questions or whether they be interested in sounding the spectrum of Celan's poetic-existential concerns and interests more generally—without having to find their bearings in the burgeoning mazes of Celan studies.

Probably the most poignant and enduring impression this reader was left with after perusing the Handbook is that nothing would be more reductive than to think of Celan as a German poet (as a matter of record, we should keep in mind that Celan never had German citizenship). If anything, as the Handbook amply attests to, Celan was—given the international, multilingual, multicultural, and geo-political range of his poetic outlook—a world poet writing in German.