Celan is regarded as one of the most important figures in German-language literature of the post-World War II era and a poet whose verse has gained an immortal place in the literary pantheon.

His journey to France took him through Berlin as the events of Kristallnacht unfolded, and also introduced him to his uncle, Bruno Schrager, who was later among the French detainees murdered at Birkenau.

On arrival in Cernăuți in July 1941, the German SS Einsatzkommando and their Romanian allies set the city's Great Synagogue on fire.

In October, the Romanians deported a large number of Jews after forcing them into a ghetto, where Celan translated Shakespeare's sonnets and continued to write his own poetry.

Before the ghetto was dissolved in the fall of that year, Celan was pressed into labor, first clearing the debris of a demolished post office, and then gathering and destroying Russian books.

[2] The local mayor, Traian Popovici, strove to mitigate the harsh circumstances, until the governor of Bukovina had the Jews rounded up and deported, starting on a Saturday night in June 1942.

Friends from this period recall Celan expressing immense guilt over his separation from his parents, whom he had tried to convince to go into hiding prior to the deportations, shortly before their deaths.

He was active in the Jewish literary community as both a translator of Russian literature into Romanian, and as a poet, publishing his work under a variety of pseudonyms.

The literary scene of the time was richly populated with surrealists, such as Gellu Naum, Ilarie Voronca, Gherasim Luca, Paul Păun, and Dolfi Trost.

He also met with the poets Rose Ausländer and Immanuel Weissglas, elements of whose works he reused in his poem "Todesfuge", which first appeared as "Tangoul Morții" ("Death Tango") in a Romanian translation of May 1947.

Celan, however, found only a ruined city divided between Allied powers and which bore little resemblance to the literary, musical, and cultural mecca it had been as the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Furthermore, the urbane, cultured, and sophisticated Viennese Jewish community described by Stefan Zweig in The World of Yesterday had been largely annihilated by the Holocaust in Austria.

His first few years in Paris were marked by intense feelings of loneliness and isolation, as expressed in letters to his colleagues, including his longtime friend from Cernăuți, Petre Solomon.

It was also during this time that he exchanged many letters with Diet Kloos, a young singer and anti-Nazi Dutch Resistance veteran who had witnessed her husband of just a few months being tortured to death.

Celan's sense of persecution increased after the widow of a friend, the French-German poet Yvan Goll, unjustly accused him of having plagiarised her husband's work.

[13] It may have been suicide, and if so, perhaps related to the appearance of Weissglas's poem, dated 1944, in the Romanian journal Neue Literatur, and fears that he might again be accused unfairly of plagiarism, the initial assertions about which, in 1953, later occasioned four psychotic episodes involving paranoia.

[17] 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,[17] while the blue-eyed "Master from Germany" embodies German Nazism.