Poetry Quote by Wolfgang Schnier

““For the poems of Paul Celan do actually speak to us in an different language. They are not easily to digest like a television commercial, they fly below the radar of the culture industry that is all consuming and wants to sell everything. For this reason Celan's poems - perhaps more than other poems - speak to the human in us, and not to the customer. It seems to me that it has almost become strange to be addressed in this manner in our post-modern consumer society, and thus we find it irritating. And precisely this that is so exceptional when we start wanting to understand the poetry of Paul Celan: we have the chance at least for a while to immunize ourselves against the expectations of the day and can feel a bit more like a human being. But to do this we need a fundamental confidence, a self-confidence and self-consciousness that we have the ability to comprehend the poetry of Paul Celan without requiring someone else to explain it, to explain our own humanity to ourselves.””

— Wolfgang Schnier