„l'Est – Il y est“/„Jerusalem ist“? Paul Celans geopoetischer Osten

The word “Osten” marks a complex system of references in Paul Celan’s work. It stays for the ‘referential’, topographical landscape of Bukowina-Ukraine (present in many texts as Bildkomplex but hardly as a toponym), or as the “cultural” land “where men and books used to live”, but stays also for a wider, u-topical, sometimes a-topical space that may be identified with the russian imaginative world of Osip Mandel’stm and Marina Cvetaeva. During his parisian years, in which Celan feels cut off from his ‘eastern landscape’ and imagery, he drafts a further aspect in the definition of Osten as the negation of the western political and cultural setting, in which he never felt at home. His way of looking esatwards becomes part of his bitter confrontation with his situatedness in Paris. This aspect ist particularly evident in his letters to the rumenian friends. His form of intra-european orientalism, that he shares (to a certain extent) with Kafka and Joseph Roth, becomes part of a critical discourse against the cultural system of western Europe. There is a further dimension to be classified as a peculiar, paradoxical orientalism, and it is the use of the noun, image and landscape of “Egypt”. In a letter to Max Frisch Celan wrote that he didn’t remember to have ever got out of Egypt (after the Exodus), that is to say, he had never reached the Promised land, he still and always in the desert, neither in exile nor in a homeland. The oriental place named ‘Egypt’ acquires therefore an a-topical quality to be compared with the place named “Osten”.