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Diet Kloos and Paul Celan

Diet Kloos & Paul Celan

From November 24th 2011-April 23rd 2012 the National Liberation Museum 1944-1945 in Groesbeek will be showing the life of Diet Kloos-Barendregt, a young female member of the resistance movement and the Jewish German speaking poet Paul Celan.

Diet Kloos is born on May 9th 1924 in Dordrecht, the Netherlands. At the outbreak of WW2 she is still attending secondary school. Already in February 1941 she becomes involved with the resistance movement, distributing illegal newspapers and helping people in hiding. The love of her life is Jan Kloos, a member of the resistance and an almost graduated biologist. They marry in November 1944. The marriage only lasts for a couple of weeks. At the beginning of December they are arrested at home in Dordrecht and transported to the prison at Utrecht. Diet sees her husband only once more, after he has been interrogated and tortured by the SD (Security Police). Jan Kloos is executed in Amsterdam on January 30th 1945. Diet is released from prison, returns to Dordrecht and goes into hiding, becomes head-courier and participates also in the transportation of weapons. She survives the war but is completely exhausted, emaciated and in mourning when the country celebrates its liberation.

 In 1949 the young widow is in Paris for a short vacation where she accidentally meets the poet Paul Celan. He was born on November 23rd 1920 in Czernowitz, then Romania. His parents are German speaking Jews. His youth is coloured by anti-semitism. In 1942 his parents are deported by the nazi’s and killed. Celan hardly survives a work-camp as forced labourer. Their common war experience draws Diet and Paul together and they become intimate friends. Their short love story is expressed in their correspondence. The 12 handwritten letters by Celan to Kloos have been kept, as well as the three poems he gave to her, one of them the world famous Todesfuge, considered to be thé Holocaust poem. These unique documents can be seen in the exhibition.

Paul Celan becomes one of the most important and influential poets of the 20th century. He commits suicide on April 20th 1970. Diet Kloos completes her studies at the school of music and becomes a famous oratorium singer. She still cherishes her husband’s farewell letter written in prison. Unselfishly and lovingly he urges her to live life to the full in the event that she is left on her own. The farewell letter by Jan Kloos and the world-famous poem by Paul Celan are impressive pièces de résistance of an exhibition with documents, photographs and films never shown before of the life of young people who lost everything and sought a fresh start.

The exhibition is prepared by guest curators Pauline Broekema (reporter NOS-news) and Paul Sars (professor of German Language and Culture, Radboud University Nijmegen).

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