Photograph: Ruth BeckermannĮven 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.”Īn 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. The docudrama has been described as a ‘genre-defying work of art’. 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.

The resulting docudrama has been described as a “genre-defying work of art” by Der Spiegel, and “minimalist and magical” by Der Tagesspiegel.īachmann 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. 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. 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.

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.

Celan poet