Heart time

"Explain to me, love, what I cannot explain ..." (Ingeborg Bachmann)

Reading with Johanna Wokalek and Markus Meyer

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 six-week spring together, then Celan leaves for Paris. Bachmann writes to her parents that "the surrealist poet Paul Celan" has "gloriously" fallen in love with her.

The two remained lovers until 1953, and resumed their relationship from October 1957 to spring 1958. In the meantime, Celan was already married to Gisele Lestrange and had a son with her. Bachmann met Max Frisch during this time and moved in with him in October 1958.

The correspondence is the moving testimony of two people who love and yet hurt each other, who cannot live without each other but cannot live with each other.