Between life and literature. Emotional and poetic relationship of Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan. Project accompanying the Polish issue of the book Heart-Time containing the correspondence of both poets.

Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan are two outstanding personalities of the post-war literature of German-speaking countries. According to the heirs’ wish, their correspondence was to be published only in 2013. Unexpectedly, however, the permission to print the letters of both poets arrived earlier and the book published in the Suhrkamp publishing house in 2008 became a literary sensation. Not only because it is a unique contribution to the history of literature, especially the 20th-century poetry, but mainly because it is an impressive record of an intimate relationship that has remained a great mystery to everyone, including literary researchers, until now. The publication contains also Bachmann’s letter to Giséle de Lestrange – Celan’s wife and Celan’s correspondence with the Swiss writer Max Frisch, with whom Ingeborg Bachmann had a relationship from 1958. Mutual fascination, frequent incomprehension, pain and alienation and the history of both the difficult love of both poets and their moving lives, which ended with tragic death in both cases, emerges out of the background that was formed for this correspondence by the post-war literary life and ongoing discussions around it. Paul Celan committed suicide in 1970 by drowning in the Seine, and three years later Ingeborg Bachmann died in Rome due to burns suffered in the fire that broke out after she had fallen asleep with a lit cigarette.
The traces of this unusual feeling and spiritual relationship in the literary works of both poets have been studied since the beginning by literary critics, who have put forward various more or less profound hypotheses. The published letters of Celan and Bachmann show irrefutably how much their work owes to their relationship.

In Poland, although books and poetry volumes by both Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann have been published, their literary output is known only to a small group of enthusiasts. For this reason, we would like to treat the publication of this extraordinary book in Polish as an opportunity to remind Polish readers of those exceptional authors.
At the Conrad Festival, which is to be held in Krakow already for the second time, the correspondence of Celan and Bachmann will be promoted in the presence of the publisher – Ryszard Krynicki, a well-known poet and translator of other poets, including Celan, Małgorzata Łukaszewicz and Andrzej Kopacki – translators as well as guests invited from Germany: Peter Hamm – a poet, director and author of a biographical film about the life of Ingeborg Bachmann, and Helmut Böttiger – a writer, publicist and author of the book Paul Celan, which was also translated into Polish. Cities and places.

We also plan to show feature and documentary films concerning the life and literary work of both poets. Apart from that, we wanted to show how their work inspired other artists, mainly one of the most outstanding German artists – Anselm Kiefer. In 2007, in Paris, during the exhibition Monumenta he presented a big display entitled “Falling Stars”, which was held at Grande Palais and was inspired by the reading of verses by Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann.
Another work of Paul Celan – a short story Dialogue In The Mountains – was a stimulus for the Swiss director Matthias Caduff to make a film under the same title. In this film the author explains the meaning of the poet’s text using various cinematic and theatrical means by reading it line by line. This experimental documentary film, which won many awards, will be presented by us at the Conrad Festival within the framework of the “reading lessons” programme addressed to secondary school students.
After Paul Celan’s death, Ingeborg Bachmann added a fairylike text entitled The Mysteries Of The Princess of Kagran to the manuscript of her most popular novel Malina, which had already been submitted for publication; today this text is interpreted as an epitaph to the dead poet.
The dream of the protagonist of this legend is to meet her lover “in twenty centuries’ time”. We hope that our project as well as the publication of letters inspired by it will help such a meeting to occur in its metaphorical sense already now.