Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
Celan was a big fan of the American poet Emily Dickinson and translated her poems into German (which must be almost as hard as translating Celan into English!). Can you see traces of Dickinson in this poem? (source)
Maybe the only reason that Celan was not sent to the same camp where his parents died is that he was not at home that night his parents were taken. (source)
A Nazi camp guard who "rehearsed" songs with Jewish prisoners was interviewed for the documentary Shoah. He said that none of the prisoners who learned the songs survived. (source)
Maybe Paul Celan would have won the Nobel Prize for Literature if he had lived longer. But the first (and so far only) Holocaust Survivor to win the award for literature was Imre Kertész, a Hungarian, who won it in 2002. (source)