ANTSCHEL – A film in progress

The film’s narrator is Paul Celan’s friend from youth, Klaus Demus. The two young poets met in Vienna in 1948.

Passfoto Paul Celan

Klaus Demus in an interview:

I was an art historian by profession, at the Kunsthistorisches Museum. I identified pictures that were in storage without titles, collected over centuries, and I named over fifty artists. And I found out everything about the paintings that was needed for the catalogs I published.

Ayoub interviewing Klaus Demus

That was my second passion. I am not an artist. I was interested in visual arts, especially the art of my own era, and for a time I looked at and pursued poetry merely as an amateur. Only later did I recognize it as a calling. In that phase of awareness of my actual existence, I met Paul Celan.

Translation Geoffrey Howes

Celan with Nani and Klaus Demus