“The Death of Paul Celan” looks at Celan's poems from a psychodynamic perspective and tries to fathom the meaning of the poet's early death. The author is fully aware both of the hazards of what he is about and of his motive as being the reconstruction of Celan's biography. He draws on both Keilson's theory of sequential traumatization and the close reading of selected poems, and identifies psychodynamically significant aspects in the career and personality of Paul Celan, which—at least tentatively—may furnish some explanation for his suicide.