HERZZEIT

In May 1948, two people meet in Vienna—a young poet and a young poetess—Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. He is 27, the student 21 years old. They spend an intense spring together lasting six weeks, then Celan departs for Paris. "The surrealist lyric poet Paul Celan" has fallen for her "gloriously," Bachmann writes to her parents. Until 1953, the two share a love affair that was taken up again from October 1957 to spring 1958. Celan is by then already married to Gisèle Lestrange and has a son with her. During this time, Bachmann meets Max Frisch and moves in with him in October 1958. The correspondence is the moving testimony of two people who love each other and yet hurt each other, who cannot live without each other, yet cannot live with each other.

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