Paul Celan

Born Paul Antschel in Romania on 23 November 1920, he survived the Holocaust while his parents did not. After the war he took the pen name Celan—an anagram of Ancel, the Romanian spelling of his surname—and moved to France in 1949, becoming a French citizen in 1955. His poetry, written in German, broke radically with convention: cryptic, linguistically innovative, shaped by what could barely be said. That difficulty made him one of the most important figures in German-language literature of the post-war era. He drowned in the Seine around 20 April 1970.