Paul Celan was born on November 23, 1920, as Paul Antschel, the only son of German-speaking Jewish parents in what was then Romanian Czernowitz. After graduating from high school in 1938, he began studying medicine in Tours, France, but returned to Romania a year later to study Romance languages. In 1942, Celan's parents were deported. In the autumn of that year, his father died of typhus in a camp, and his mother was shot. From 1942 to 1944, Celan was forced to work in various Romanian labor camps. From 1945 to 1947, he worked as a lecturer and translator in Bucharest, where his first poems were published. In July 1948, he moved to Paris, where he lived until his death. In the same year, Celan met Ingeborg Bachmann. Their romantic relationship, which began in the late 1940s and continued from October 1957 to May 1958, is confirmed by the posthumously published correspondence "Herzzeit" between the two. In November 1951, Celan met the artist Gisèle de Lestrange in Paris, whom he married a year later. Their son Eric was born in 1955. In the spring of 1970, Celan took his own life in the Seine. Kurt Leonhard was born in Berlin in 1910. His areas of work include poetry, short stories, novels, essays, and translations. In 2004, he received the Maria-Ensle Prize from the Baden-Württemberg Art Foundation - like few other authors, Kurt Leonhard has influenced German post-war poetry. He lives in Esslingen.