Photocoercion

Paul Celan's poetry collection Light Compulsion (1970), which appeared posthumously, contains poems written in the first half of 1967 during the poet's stay at the St. Anne University Hospital in Paris. The "fight with demons" that the poet had to wage at this time left its mark on many of the poetic texts that deal with madness, pain, and death. At the same time, Celan always sought to keep his finger on the pulse of life - he revises important stages of historical development, responds to current problems and challenges facing human society, and outlines his own vision of the future. In their paradoxicality and closedness, some poems do not lend themselves to immediate understanding, and they all the more require repeated careful reading and joint creative thinking.