Celan’s Chalked Star

»From the outset I was fully aware that I was embarking upon something momentous, that this could never be the kind of love affair of which afterwards the places, names and circumstances are easily forgotten.« Brigitta Eisenreich

When Paul Celan met Brigitta Eisenreich, the au pair and student had left behind her Austrian home and Catholic environment in order to live in Paris, she was twenty-five, Celan thirty-three. Their ten-year relationship began shortly after the poet married Gisèle de Lestrange in 1952. Celan, for whom French had become means of everyday communication, re-discovered in his lover Brigitta the language spoken by his mother. The acts of speech and love became inseparable; in many respects Brigitta was Celan’s German wife in Paris. This relationship, one of Celan’s most enduring, was also the most secret: almost no letters, dedicatory asterisks in the books, a star chalked on the slate on Brigitta’s door when Celan failed to find her home. The couple read books together or met up for festive meals. Celan made Brigitta gifts of books such as one about eroticism in Jewish mysticism, saying he wanted to make her a »Herzens-Jüdin«, a Jewess in the heart.

Brigitta Eisenreich’s intimate recollections of Paul Celan were triggered by reading the poet’s correspondence with his wife Gisèle and with Ingeborg Bachmann. She began to write, and the intensity of her recollection opens a new perspective on Celan’s work and life, on his charismatic and enigmatic being in all its contradictions. 

»Brigitta Eisenreich is concerned with facts, with the stuff of life that makes new interpretations possible. […] A very fine book, affecting in its noble objectivity.« Iris Radisch, DIE ZEIT

»The biographies of Celan, who evidently preferred the company of highly gifted women, will have to be re-written in the light of this extraordinary partner. […] Celans Chalked Star, an account made up of recollections and scattered documents, notes and dedications, is a model of restraint and subtlety. The self-questioning of this sober account is testimony to a moving circumspection.« Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»Celans Chalked Star is a highly individual intertwining of biography with philology, a fascinating side entrance into the work of a poet considered ‘hermetic’ and difficult in the extreme.« Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»Her poems are the ›secret accompanying music‹ to the work of Celan« Frankfurter Rundschau