Background
Yvan Goll was born on March 29, 1891 in Alsace-Lorraine, Germany (nowadays Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, Lorraine, France) in the family of a Jewish clothing merchant.
4 Rue Blaise Pascal, 67081 Strasbourg, France
Yvan Goll studied law at the university in Strasbourg.
Yvan and Claire Goll, France.
Yvan Goll was born on March 29, 1891 in Alsace-Lorraine, Germany (nowadays Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, Lorraine, France) in the family of a Jewish clothing merchant.
Yvan Goll studied law at the university in Strasbourg, as well as in Freiburg and Munich, where he graduated in 1912.
Goll's Jewish heritage and political convictions as a socialist-pacifist turned him into an exile beginning with the onset of World War I. Having studied law and philosophy, his literary interests were sparked by the German Expressionist movement, which was centered in Berlin.
In 1914 Goll avoided conscription in the German army by moving to Switzerland, where he published poems and articles criticizing the war. During the years between World War I and World War II, Goll and his wife worked and associated with avant-garde writers and artists while living in Paris and Berlin. His varied pursuits included publishing poetry accompanied by the artwork of Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, and Marc Chagall, and collaborating on the opera, Royal Palace, with composer Kurt Weill.
In 1939 Goll immigrated to the United States because of the threat of Nazi persecution. During this period he completed the first English translations of Aimé Césaire. Goll was diagnosed with leukemia in 1944; he returned to Paris three years later, where he continued to write even while being hospitalized. Near the end of his life, sixteen poets donated blood to help him. Goll finally succumbed to the disease in February 1950.
Claire Goll was active in editing and selecting writings from among Goll's work for publication after his death, including some highly acclaimed writings done in the last few years of his life. Some of this work generated public controversy in the early 1960s.
The close working relationship between Goll and his wife is reflected in the scope of the 1997 study, Yvan Goll-Claire Goll. Texts and Contexts, by Eric Robertson and Robert Vilain. The volume examines their combined involvement in the concepts of intertextuality, Trivial literature, psychoanalysis, feminism, cultural marginality, and négritude. It also details the "isms" that Yvan Goll studied, including Italian futurism, French Orphism, Surrealism, and Zenithism, and Goll’s interest in film and its relation to drama and literature.
Quotations: "I hear rustling in your dark magic; the old seas of midnight."
While living in Berlin, Paris, and Switzerland, Yvan Goll became part of sophisticated art and literary circles, and experimented with many of the stylistic innovations that emerged during the first half of the twentieth century. Goll often revised and translated his own works, and he was a frequent collaborator with other artists, including his wife, the poet Claire Goll. His body of work offers readers and analysts an often forbidding field of study, which has led to Goll being labeled as a neglected writer.
Yvan Goll was married to Claire Goll.