2020 marks the 100th birthday and 50th anniversary of the death of Paul Celan. He was one of the most significant poets of the German postwar era and was awarded the Bremer Literaturpreis in 1958. He grew up in Chernivtsi (Ukraine) and after 1945 faced the paradoxical task, as a German-speaking Jewish author, of reinventing his relationship to the ›language of the perpetrators.‹ In his poetry, commemoration of the dead is combined with existence in all its liveliness. Celan regarded the circus as a projection screen for utopias. ›Cirque Celan‹ balances differences and paradoxes, touches upon places and non-places of the poet, detects traces of anarchy and Dada with polyphone brass movements, and gives rise to associations with thoughts, commemoration and humanity. Newly composed chansons after poems by Celan, a montage of scenes and texts, refer to the concatenation of biography, oeuvre and contemporary history—to a poetics highly relevant to the present that grasps the poem as an antonym and a dialog offer.