Looking for a Happy Place: Paul Celan and the Notion of Home

According to Gaston Bachelard in The Poetic of Space, house represents the happy space par excellence, it is the first place in which human life is welcomed to the world, a “big cradle” hosting men and women since their very first breaths. The analysis of the concept of dwelling and of home encounters the literary corpus of Paul Celan, a German-speaking Jewish poet who was born in the ex-Habsburg town of Czernowitz in 1920, and who was the only one in his family having survived the Holocaust. After the Soviet Union invasion of Bukowina, he will be obliged to leave his birthplace, his Heimat, forever and to cross Europe from Romania to France. The search for a happy place to settle his life must face common problems linked to migration, to antisemitism, and the trauma of his mother’s and father’s deaths together with the definitive loss of his native home. This article aims to concentrate on the occurrence of terms such House, dwell and their synonyms in the Speech of Bremen’s Prize and in various poetic compositions: Das einzige Licht ‘The Only Light’, Der Stein aus dem Meer ‘The Stone from the Sea’ and Hüttenfenster ‘Hut window’. In conclusion, the focus will be, at first, on the definition and etymological hypothesis of House/Home, fundamental for the topic connections that will be instituted through the analysis. After that, the inhabitable spaces and refugees appearing in Paul Celan’s poems will be described with a particular attention to the poet’s biography.