Dear List,
There was a recently a discussion on the List about a Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung article, "City of the Dead Poets".
Ethel Tillinger wrote: "Dear Gabriele and list
I wonder if someone could translate the article it seems to have touched so
many readers. I speak German but as I spoke it before I learnt to read I
cannot read German. I would be grateful if someone did have the time and
inclination to translate it.
Warm regards
Ethel"
My German is very limited, but I used Google to make a first shot at
translating the article into English. I have then gone over the first few
paragraphs to improve the readability (insofar as my limited German will
permit!), but I don't have time to do more, so I thought I would send this
to the List as it stands. You can get a sort of gist of what it's all
about.
If any List members who can read German would like to make any improvements
to this translation, I would be delighted to send them the text below as a
Word document, which would be an easier basis for further improvements. I
do hope someone can help with this. I think the article merits a good
English translation.
Best regards to all,
David
*****************************************
The City of the Dead Poets
Black Milk
For a moment, small Czernowitz was host to the thoughts of the world. Then
came war, ethnic cleansing, mass murder. Today it is a city of the dead
poets. One of them is Paul Celan.
Dirk Schümer
22 September 2010
The birthplace of Paul Celan is not a museum. Where one of the greatest
poets of the German language lived, visitors are welcomed with no till, no
didactic concept, no literary archive, and certainly no cafe. In
Saksaganskogo Street even today people live, and one can well understand
that. For Czernowitz this is a good neighborhood with beautiful art nouveau
buildings, old chestnuts, impressive blocks, but still close to the centre.
Two large eagles in stucco adorn the gable of the house - symbols of the
social ascent, for which also the architect Leo Antschel hoped, who lived
here with his family ninety years ago.
Who would take off for such a beautiful property for a dead poet in a
distant language, even with his name twisted to Celan? Still for the past
few years, a bronze plaque commemorates the man who grew up in Czernowitz in
a cocoon of old Europe, the murder of his family had to witness and then to
the language of the desperate murderer, who was also the increasingly
harried, always concentrated language of his poems. And as the birthplace of
the poet of "Death Fugue" is home to no memorial room, the living German
poets, who travelled to the first poetry festival in Paul Celan's hometown,
step simply by the scrubbed the floor out into the backyard. Here, tenants
have created a peasant garden patch, with orange flowers glowing in the late
summer light; a carpet hangs over a rail to air. It is very quiet.
The outer periphery is innermost center
To listen to the silence, he came to Czernowitz, says Mark Belorusez, who
translated Celan's poems into Ukrainian. In the peace of the province - the
remotest Habsburg province that can be imagined - Paul Celan could mature as
a poet. And Mark Belorusez recites Celan's poem on the curly mint and the
plain mint, as if they also could grow on this peasant patch.
"By this Hof flows the Seine," he says, and has tears in his eyes, because
he thinks of the river, in which Paul Celan at forty took his life. And
while no one looking, the German poets can inspect the clean, bright
stairwell with its flowered wallpaper, go over the cellar stairs, on which
also small Paul Antschel played, before he called himself Paul Celan, and
can think about how the outer periphery of the German language could
miraculously be its centre.
And while the Central European poet delegation departed from Saksaganskogo
Street in a melancholy mood, their Ukrainian counterpart Igor Pomeranzew is
immediately pragmatic: "The people here in the house must hate Celan. He is
a constant threat that they be kicked out soon so that another museum can be
created here."
Five languages in unheiklen balance
On the ninetieth birthday of the great Celan his native city first organized
a poetry festival has poets from half of Europe loaded, especially from
German speaking countries, to where 1880-1940 is one of the most outrageous
explosions of creativity took place, which has existed in Europe's culture
ever . Czernowitz, which crumbled away over the hills on the far Prut drawn
Habsburg something old, but is completely preserved, had only eighty
thousand inhabitants.
But in the delicate imbalance of five languages - German, Yiddish, Romanian,
Ukrainian, Polish - and the clash of medieval piety of the village priest
and Hasidim and humanist modernity of the university and the laboratory, the
genius fired a generation, the only way up. A small town home to a precious
moment the thought of the world.
It can not be through the vast, go no overview allows them to be hilly
streets of Czernowitz, without every few meters unearth memorials for great
minds, as if you were wanted in Paris or St. Petersburg or the city, which
Czernowitz are similar at all costs: Vienna. In the great synagogue, which
was used by Nazis burned and blown up by the Soviets and their remaining
walls now house a cinema, the young Joseph Schmidt, sang one of the greatest
tenors of all time, as a cantor. He died in 1942-eight years in a Swiss
refugee camp on the run, they did not treat his heart disease. A few steps
next to the temple designated a board, the birthplace of Erwin Chargaff, who
was three years younger than Schmidt, a biochemist, the DNA co-discovered
and died with ninety-seven 2002 in New York - by the way he was one of the
most intelligent essayists of the last century.
Rose Ausländer not to forget
In Czernowitz, the relative majority of the population in 1900 was composed
of Jews, learned and wrote, taught and published at the same time some of
the best Yiddish writers: the teacher Eliezer Steinbarg and the drunken poet
Itzig Manger, who managed to escape and after a peripatetic life in 1969 in
a sanatorium near Jerusalem last found shelter. Gregor von Rezzori, who was
seen with Brigitte Bardot on the screen and in Czernowitz for his "Maghreb
Stories" is inspired from here.
The poet Rose Ausländer born in 1901 became acquainted with Celan in 1941 in
the Czernowitz ghetto - especially his criticism of work to date,
expressionistic style, primed it owed those laconic style that characterized
her large, long contemporary classical poems. Again and again she has fled
from Czernowitz, often returned: "A golden chain," it says in the poem
"Hometown", "binds me / my urliebe town / where the sun rises / where she
has gone / for me."
Romania's national poet Mihail Eminescu also lived in the Habsburg capital
of Bukovina as several poetic icons of today's Ukraine: Olga Kobylanska or
Dmytro Zahul, who perished in Stalin's Gulag. One could continue the list as
required. Josef Burg, the last Yiddish poet from the shtetl dies last August
in Czernowitz aged almost ninety-seven.
Now Chernivtsi is a city of the dead poets - but what stories they have had!
What pathetic deaths they died! The convinced communist Klara Blum, born in
1904, Chinese woman, after Stalin had murdered in Moscow in their Chinese
husband - she died in 1971 in Guangzhou Zhu Bailan, in the midst of the
Cultural Revolution. Your year of Comrade Moses Rosenkranz survived the
Nazis as a secretary at the Romanian Foreign Ministry, also survived the
Gulag and fled the Securitate in 1961 in the Black Forest, where he died in
2003 at ninety-nine.
Bumpy roads, hardly a decent hotel room
Alfred Margul-Sperber, the sponsor and sometimes ideas of Celan, was
recognized writer in communist Romania. Alfred Gong desperate as a librarian
in a psychiatric hospital in the Bronx. The young genius Selma
Meerbaum-Eisinger was killed in a labor camp in 1942 Transnistrian of
eighteen years and her great poems have been published until now. Your
Fast-neighbor Ninon married the Nobel laureate Hermann Hesse in time and
lives during the dark years in Switzerland. Today achtundsiebzigjährige
Aharon Appelfeld had the murder of his mother watch the Nazis, arrived in
the Czernowitz ghetto struck by a stray child in the Carpathian forests and
now teaches Hebrew literature at Ben-Gurion University in Israel.
In spite of such a heritage, as it can boast no other town on earth, it was
not until after the turn of the century, that today, the Ukrainian
Chernivtsi could put their poets. At the opening of "Meridian Czernowitz"
said Svyatoslav Pomeranzew, the organizer of the festival, as well as frank
and free: it was an importer of air conditioning never thought about the
history of the city to which his family had come to the war with the Red
Army . The imposing marble hall of the Romanian Orthodox Patriarchate, now
University, he "Biznessman" as would not have gone. But after the financial
crisis had brought him to the brink of bankruptcy, had suddenly Pomeranzew
time to read and think.
You can tell him and the organization team almost wonder that today, a
player to fix American Jewish Tradition Fund, the ruins of the Miracle Rabbi
Synagogue of Sadagora on the city that volunteers from the United States
release the cemetery from the bushes and that open up more and more German
tourists after Czernowitz. And yet it takes a lot of courage in a city with
bumpy road access and no decent hotel rooms there to invite European
writers, where they can guess the secret center of the continent nurmehr.
And the students in the hall applauding surprised if the Swiss writer
Andreas Saurer them in the recitation of his aphoristic poems in fluent
Romanian, where the German poet Hendrik Jackson speaks to them in perfect
Russian. It would thus be interested in this forgotten part of Europe. Quite
hermetic poet as Elke Erb Brigitte Oleschinski return for the trip to
Czernowitz to the roots of the genre, to Paul Celan's dense and enigmatic
images back inside.
The print-like the German Max Schickler
When Gerhard Falkner his beautiful poem as a poem and the map of the streets
as lines and maintains the houses than words, then you feel on foot in the
defunct Czernowitz, which for the residents of magical poetry. For the
Ukrainians, but it is a very ordinary town in the government offices and
markets, restaurants and garages. For a few days, the otherwise somewhat
boring and over the palaces of the old Polish Lemberg Czernowitz
unspectacular now capital of culture.
The temple hymns of the tenor Joseph Schmidt get a video installation that
Celan's poetry a chilling performance in the ruinous hall of the former
house of the German people. And the recitation of the Ukrainian Serhiy
Zhadan young rapper Czernowitz come out in droves to the Zezyno hill far
from the city, where the paved road has long since ceased and the foothills
of the Carpathian beech forest begins.
In those days, Chernivtsi city proves to be the living poetry, just as there
are in Paul Celan's parents at his ninetieth birthday, not a museum. And
also the time of the shy high school students Antschel Paul has not entirely
lost. Max Schickler crammed in the Romanian language at the same school, the
fourth state school - but one born of Paul Celan. He also has come to a
literary festival. Rumpled white hair, shabby suit jacket, one eye is blind,
but also with ninety-one years, Schickler Max maintains a printable German.
The lanky Antschel Paul is not even noticed him at school: "He was not yet
known as a pupil."
A life in the local hosiery mill
And then Max Schickler tells of his father, the hatter Czernowitz, the
Russians deported in 1940, from the mother, who survived the concentration
camp Romanian miraculous. And of his own escape five hundred kilometers on
foot to the Red Army, where he got through thanks to his mother tongue as a
translator of German prisoners of war. Because Jews "at my graduation in
eight years' study was no longer allowed, he has spent his life working in
the local hosiery factory. His high opinion of hard work and the
organization of ethnic Germans Czernowitz ("You supplied the whole town")
has given him the Shoah, which came from the land of his revered culture of
Goethe and Schiller for his people not destroyed.
Now Max must Schickler with almost one hundred Euro pension and small grants
come through the Jewish charitable organization in any way. One could see
how difficult this is. But he is unbowed. Among the seven hundred Jews of
Czernowitz once over four thousand speak more than two dozen German or
Yiddish, even Max Schick Jewellers children have not learned the language.
"Nothing more. Off. German is no longer modern, "he says.
And so Max Schickler is limping and with the bus at least like to heirs
Celan, his little school friends, and falls in the explanation brief and to
the more concise Yiddish: thwarted "I did not talk to whom." This sad story
of the destruction of a culture Igor Pomeranzew least, the uncle of the
organizer. As a living in London and Prague, poet and journalist, he is not
completely innocent in the conclusion of the festival, which is the poetic
Czernowitz to break from the rigor mortis. He grew up after 1948 in the city
and embodies the son of the Red Army Siberian last time being suppressed
language of the city: the Russian.
In the end it comes down to fog and Archaeology
The expatriate as a dissident Soviet man told in the former Herrengasse an
unwritten final chapter of city history: In the fifties, the Jews, despite
the mass murders in the Romanian camps are again available in the city, but
it was the survivors of the Bessarabian shtetl, the large in the homes of
the dead were recovered. Pomeranzew remembers Boxer and whores and rabbis,
to a meadow liges life got away: "For us children it was all exciting, it
did not return a glance, the city was bursting with optimism." The few
surviving "Habsburg" Jews in their suits and fine coats had been feeling
under the proletarian same bad faith uncomfortable. Around 1960 the
Czernowitz Jews settled then almost collectively to Israel.
to replace all the lost crops since then is up to the Ukrainians. But what
should happen to you? "There are too many dead, the rest under our feet,"
writes Yuri Andrukhovych, the best-known author. He is on the track, boarded
in his home town of Ivano-Frankivsk in the poet-bus to Czernowitz, after
all, a city that for a poet - is named - Ivan Franko. Andrukhovych, who
wrote a few years Russia has just completed a Ukrainian novel about the
search for a lost friend in a semi-mythical city. The book is about Venice,
but the author never stayed overnight in the lagoon, so that his vision is
not too real.
A beautiful poem about trees and human life
So it goes with Czernowitz: At the end is all perception of the city out
into fog and archeology. The giant Jewish cemetery, the third largest in
Europe, with its hundreds of thousands of graves in places, completely
overgrown with elder bushes, elsewhere, the grave stones with Hebrew,
Yiddish, Russian, German inscriptions in rows upset. Czernowitz dead to the
horizon, the stele - unlike the much smaller Berlin Holocaust Monument - all
have a name.
The Austrian writer Milena Findeis was presented at the festival is a
beautiful poem about trees and human life, the yarn spun by the small child
crawling around in the orchard on the first kiss under the tree to the
coffin of beech wood. Milena Findeis could not know in writing that they
would read these lines again in Czernowitz, the capital of Bukovina, the
only area in Europe, which is named after a tree: Bukovina. A small country
with millions of trees for millions of coffins and millions of lines of
poetry. For between the words, there's no one close.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
This moderated discussion group is for information exchange on the subject of
Czernowitz and Sadagora Jewish History and Genealogy. The opinions expressed
in these posts are the opinions of the original poster only and not necessarily
the opinions of the List Owner, the Webmaster or any other members
or entities connected with this mailing list. The Czernowitz-L list has
an associated web site at http://czernowitz.ehpes.com that includes a
searchable archive of all messages posted to this list. Please post in "Plain
Text" if possible (help available at:
<http://www.jewishgen.org/InfoFiles/PlainText.html>).
To remove your address from this e-list follow the directions at
http://www.cit.cornell.edu/computer/elist/lyris/leave.html
To receive assistance for this e-list send an e-mail message to:
owner-Czernowitz-L_at_list.cornell.edu
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Received on 2010-09-27 18:56:08
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : 2011-01-01 14:59:47 PST