ONLINE FIRST
published on April 26, 2023
Charles Bambach
https://doi.org/10.5840/jcp202342046
Celan and H?lderlin in Conversation
Reading Ars Poetica 62
This essay offers a close reading of a poem written by Paul Celan in 1962: Ars Poetica 62. I choose this neglected text since it offers genu?ine insight into Celan¡¯s torturous relationship with German culture in the early 1960s especially against the background of the German unwilling?ness to confront the horrors of the war and camps. Celan situates this poem not only against German silence and forgetfulness, but against the way it defines them in terms of literary history¡ªespecially as concerns the German-Jewish (non-)conversation about identity, belongingness, and in?tegration. In terms of this tradition, Celan integrates two principal figures (H?lderlin & Kafka) to explore the contradictions, paradoxes, and caesu?rae of the recent German past. I also look at the role that Heidegger plays within the Rezeptionsgeschichte H?lderlins as it affects both Celan and the German philosophical tradition.