The death of his parents and the experience of the Shoah ( The Holocaust ) are defining forces in Celan 's poetry and his use of language . In his Bremen Prize speech , Celan said of language after Auschwitz that : Celan also said : " There is nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing , not even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German . " His most famous poem , the early " Todesfuge " , is a work of great complexity and power , which may have drawn some key motives from the poem " ER " by , another Czernovitz poet . The characters of Margarete and Sulamith , with their respectively golden and ashen hair , can be interpreted as a reflection of Celan 's Jewish-German culture , while the blue-eyed " Master from Germany " embodies German Nazism
The Holocaust
The Holocaust
Paul Celan