The European I: Paul Celan’s Construction of a European Subject

Abstract

The construction of a European subject is a major dimension of Paul Celan’s poetry: According to Celan, poems are ‘laden with world’; contexts, metaphors, and the relations of the lyrical I and You support the hypothesis that this means foremost a consciousness of a ‘historical world’. His poetry refers to a European history of suffering, injustice, and persecution. The poems support an individual, subjective perspective rather than a global perspective. The following article argues that this perspective of a lyrical subject is not only prevalent in Celan’s poetry, but in addition it’s a European perspective that his poems suggest, offer, and claim.