Correspondence

By: Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan

Narrated by: Francesca Ottley, Mark Young

Length: 4 hrs and 6 mins

Publisher's summary

Paul Celan (1920-70) is one of the best-known German poets of the Holocaust; many of his poems, admired for their spare, precise diction, deal directly with its stark themes. Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-73) is recognized as one of post-World War II German literature’s most important novelists, poets, and playwrights.

It seems only appropriate that these two contemporaries and masters of language were at one time lovers, and they shared a lengthy, artful, and passionate correspondence.

Collected here for the first time in English are their letters, written between 1948 and 1961. Their correspondence forms a moving testimony of the discourse of love in the age after Auschwitz, with all the symptomatic disturbances and crises caused by their conflicting backgrounds and their hard-to-reconcile designs for living—as a woman, as a man, as writers.

©2008 Suhrkamp Verlag (P)2022 Seagull Books

Critic reviews

‘In almost 200 letters, telegrams, postcards, unsent drafts, poems as love-letters, [Celan and Bachmann] tussle with the possibilities and limitations of communication through the written word. Silence and personal darkness have their place.’—The Independent

‘Bachmann’s letters tend to be lengthy, and Celan’s are shorter or absent altogether, his responses often apologetic for not having written sooner (or not having written at all). And yet we receive a sense of the tumultuous times in which they lived and the development of their thinking and writing.’—Christian Kiefer, The Paris Review