What I need, what I so desperately need, is the feeling that amidst all this back and forth, there is a starting point that, even if it can never be reached again, still remains - such a starting point would be my poems, if I knew they were safe, neatly printed and bound. To Diet Kloos, September 6, 1949. In 1952, Paul Celan's poetry collection "Mohn und Gedächtnis" was published by the Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt: four cycles of 56 poems. In these poems, Paul Celan summed up the work he had created up to that point, as well as a summation of his life: on the bitter path of persecution and exile, he had finally reached Paris after passing through Bucharest and Vienna. "Mohn und Gedächtnis" finally fulfilled for Celan that tormenting wish expressed in his letter to Diet Kloos from September 6, 1949, for a book as a "starting point" for his future existence. With "Mohn und Gedächtnis.".