‚Habsburgische Spuren‘ im Leben und Werk Paul Celans
‚Habsburg Traces‘ in Life and Works of Paul Celan

Summary/Abstract: As was to be expected, the question of the meaning of ‘Habsburg’ for Paul Celan is complex. The place of its origin – Chernivtsi – belonged to Austro-Hungary until 1918, with the end of the First World War the city became Romanian, so Celan was – formally – born in Romania; later he experienced the tempo-rary (1940/41) and long-term (from 1944) Sovietization of Bukovina. A (not only) biographical self-localization can be found in the so-called Bremer Rede (1958), in which the poet introduces himself as someone coming from an un-known landscape, a “province of the Habsburg monarchy that has now fallen victim to history.” Subsequently, the cultural structure of the Habsburg world retains for Celan – although born after the disintegration of the multi-ethnic state – a sense of belonging. He understood “Kakanien” (Musil) as an integrative structure and thus as a counter-image to nationalistic and fascist tendencies, whose multilingual, transcultural and interdenominational elements influenced Celan’s works. In this context, ‘Habsburg’ can be read as a synonym for a cultural-literary affiliation that undermines (political) boundaries and dividing lines and thus forms a counter-image to the reality of the Cold War.

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