It does, however, include his most famous poem, 'Todesfuge.'

This, the first of Celan's collections, appeared in a form so riddled with errors and misprints that he disowned it soon after publication. That might seem like an odd thing to want to do, but there's certainly a strong argument that each of them is a coherent work in itself: It's now (almost) possible to read all of his complete published books of poetry in English translations, for instance. There are now some new ones which deserve celebration, however. Quite some time ago now (2011), I wrote a post, Collecting Paul Celan, which listed most of the salient books by and about Paul Celan then available in English. This way, the poems are trying to save Eros (in the sense of creaturely love) from being mutilated by the crimes of European history while at the same time aiming at rehabilitating mankind in a post-holocaust world.Paul Celan: Breathturn to Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry,

Celan's poems act as a catalyst, for they exclude god from the spheres of man, making poetry a memorial site to the dead and the ones living in pain. In this ahistorical sphere there is no room for a god that permitted the holocaust, redefining mysticism as the connection between men instead of one between man and god.

Within this space of encounter, only the reminiscence of body and sexuality exists, commemorating the other, so that radical corporeality seems to be the prerequisite for togetherness. In this way, the poems' inherent pain and misery transform the reader into a nobody, for only a nobody has got the prerequisites to encounter other people unbiasedly in their unique wholeness. With this in mind, the modus operandi of his poems is that of a butcher: Whatever has previously been alive – before the Shoah – now has to be stripped bare of its layers of individual and collective history, has to become less than body and flesh. Despite these two objections, Celan's poems address the struggle of togetherness in a world that negates the mere possibility of otherness, trying to salvage the unique identity and dignity of the other. Secondly, in the aftermath of the holocaust, the idea of man wanting to merge with a god that had not prevented this cruelty from happening had lost much of its plausibility. Firstly, the European philosophy of existence, especially with its proponents Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Martin Heidegger, had gone to great lengths to criticize and delegitimize the Abrahametic religions, for the concept of god seemed to be an obstacle to humanity in pursuit of its own humanization. In his 1968 poetry collection „Fadensonnen“, Paul Celan offers a hermetic blend of existentialism and mysticism, which is unusual in two respects.

Fadensonnen paul celan