Tag Archive for Emmanuel Levinas

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Paul Celan: Todtnauberg

Paul Celan (1920-1970) was a Romanian-Jewish poet whose mother-tongue was German. Both his parents died in Nazi labor camps. After the war, Celan settled in Paris but continued to write poetry in German. On July 24, 1967, he gave a recitation of his poems at the University of Freiburg. The next day he visited Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) at his cabin in Todtnauberg in the Black Forest. Many believe that Celan asked Heidegger to make some statement renouncing the Nazi movement that he had joined in 1933. However, although a 1966 interview about his ties to the Nazi party was published posthumously in Der Speigel, Heidegger never made any statement about the evils of Nazism and never mentioned the Holocaust. The 1963 photograph of Paul Celan is by Lütfi Özkök.

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