She was the daughter of a Nazi party member, he the only son of parents who died in the Holocaust. The love affair between Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan was as unlikely as it was brief, spanning two months in Vienna and a shorter rekindling 10 years later.
But the meeting of minds between two of the most influential writers in the German language – and the more than 200 poems, letters, postcards, telegrams and unsent drafts it spawned – has outlasted not just their love affair, but also their authors’ premature deaths.
A new film consisting of little more than two young actors reading from the correspondence between the two poets has garnered critical acclaim in Germany and Austria. Die Geträumten (The Dreamed Ones), which opens in the UK on 2 December, follows the singer-songwriter Anja Plaschg and actor Laurence Rupp through an unrehearsed recording of the letters, which were published in 2008 and have proved a surprise bestseller in German-language territories.
Throughout the reading, the two performers are pushed to the edge of tears by the declarations of love, open and concealed recriminationsand mourning of missed opportunities. The resulting docudrama has been described as a “genre-defying work of art” by Der Spiegel, and “minimalist and magical” by Der Tagesspiegel.
Bachmann and Celan first met in May 1948 in Vienna, where she was studying philosophy and he was enjoying modest acclaim for his first collection, including Death Fugue, now considered one of the most important pieces of literature about the Holocaust. On 20 May that year, Bachmann told her parents that her room was “a poppy field” because “the surrealist poet Paul Celan” had been inundating her with flowers.
Even though Celan left Vienna for Paris less than two months later, their correspondence continued, with Bachmann writing in June 1949: “Sometimes all I want is to go away and come to Paris, to feel you touch my hands, touch me completely with flowers, and then, once again, not know where you have come from and where you are going.”
An attempted period of cohabitation in Paris ended in strife, and in 1952 Celan married the artist Gisèle de Lestrange, with whom he had two sons. But in 1957 the two poets met again at a conference organised by the influential Group 47 circle of writers, and resumed their affair.
Throughout their correspondence, poetic declarations of love are offset by a deep anguish about the legacy of the Nazi period that has been passed down to them through the German language.
Bachmann, raised in Carinthia in Austria where 99.8% of the population had voted for the Anschluss with Nazi Germany, repeatedly left letters unfinished or unsent: “It has long been like an illness,” she later said. “I cannot write, I am already crippled when I write the date or put the paper in the typewriter.”
Celan, born Paul Antschel into a family of German-speaking Jews in Czernowitz – now Chernivtsi – which was then part of Romania but is now in Ukraine, was repeatedly depressed over his family’s deportation to a concentration camp in 1942, where his father died of typhoid and his mother was shot in the same year.
“It frightens me a great deal to see you floating out into a great sea, but I mean to build a ship and bring you back home from your forlornness,” Bachmann wrote on 24 November 1949.
In the end, the dividing lines wrought by the darkest chapter in European history proved too deep for their friendship. On 17 October 1959, Celan sent Bachmann a copy of a merciless review of Death Fugue, which he perceived to be antisemitic. His poem, he argued, was both “an epitaph and a grave”, and the newspaper review amounted to a desecration.
In an unsent letter, Bachmann accused him of wanting “to be the victim” and refused to join him on this path: “Then that is your affair, and it will not be mine if you let it overwhelm you.”
On 1 May 1970, Celan’s body was found in the Seine river outside Paris. Three years later, Bachmann died of injuries sustained in a fire at her apartment in Rome, believed to have been caused by a smouldering cigarette.
On hearing of Celan’s death, Bachmann had added a new section to the already finished manuscript for her only novel, Malina: “My life is over, for he drowned in the river during deportation … He was my life. I loved him more than my life.”