Bachmann und Celan

Catalog description

The work of Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan provide a window into the poetics, as well as the politics, of literature after the Nazis and after Auschwitz. Bachmann, whose father was a Nazi party member in Austria, and Celan, whose parents were murdered in the camps in Transnistria, created some of the very best of postwar German literature, winning major literary prizes in the 1950s and 1960s. They also had an intense intellectual, artistic, and personal relationship. In this course we will study their pathbreaking poetry and their precise prose, their epistolary bond, and the politics of their poetics. In German. Prerequisites & Notes German 202 or permission of the instructor.