Ort-Raum als Zäsur. Paul Celan in//und Jerusalem

Based on the distinction between place and space, my contribution attempts to discuss the ambivalent significance of the place-space "Jerusalem" in Celan's "Jerusalem Cycle": as a place of memory, as a scene of remembrance that can open up a utopian space, but which does not so much want to point "into the future", but rather enables an intentionality of the "now", of today, of the present, of a now(-in)-Jerusalem-being. This present, which simultaneously reveals some characteristics of the "place" and others of the "space", unfolds through the dialogue dimension between Paul Celan and his counterpart: Ilana Shmueli. Walking through the city together and co-writing letters and poems opens up a palimpsest-like topography of the city where their geopoetic reading and rewriting can begin. The Jerusalem poems represent an extreme phase of Celan's poetics of the "East", which reorients itself from Eastern Europe to Jerusalem. These are not geographical points of the compass, but new signs on his geopoetic map, whereby he thinks his eastern meridian through to the end.