Paul Celan

Todesfuge, often translated as Death Fugue, is a post-Holocaust poem built around recurring images of labor, music, command, and death. It became one of the most discussed German-language poems after World War II.

Celan's mother tongue was German, even though he was born in Czernowitz in 1920, in a multilingual region. His continued use of German is central to the force and difficulty of his postwar poetry.

Yes. Celan survived forced labor during World War II, while his parents were killed after deportation under the Romanian and Nazi-allied persecution of Jews.

In English, readers often start with collected or selected poems that include Todesfuge, Corona, and later compressed works from books such as Sprachgitter. His poetry becomes more fragmented and difficult in the 1950s and 1960s.