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Paul Celan was born in Czernovitz, in Romania, in 1920. Until 1918, this region of Romania had formed part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, a polyglot amalgam of nations stretching from Austria in the west to the Balkans in the south-east. Though each region spoke its own language, and many Jewish communities spoke Yiddish, German acted as the common language for the empire as a whole. The speaking of a good German marked an individual as both bourgeois and cultured, one who particpated in the co..
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