An Exchange on Nation and Exile Perhaps I am one of the last who must live out to the end the destiny of the Jewish spirit in Europe. Why must ? Writing from Paris in August 1948 to relatives in the new state of Israel, Paul Celan, having barely survived the Final Solution expedited by Nazism, explains that a poet cannot stop writing, even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German.
This fateful pledge, from a brutally orphaned son whose stirring 1945 ballad, Deathfugue, intones Death is a master from Deutschland and threads your ashen hair Shulamith into the Bible s Song of Songs, throws light across a recently discovered exchange of letters between Celan and the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.