Jean-Paul de Dadelsen

Jean-Paul de Dadelsen, French Alsatian poet, was born in Strasbourg, Alsace, in 1913. He studied German Romanticism, and fought with the French army until the defeat of 1940. After teaching German literature in Oran, he joined de Gaulle’s Free French Army in London as a paratrooper in 1942, after which he served in the Free French Provisional Government in London. He was a correspondent for Albert Camus’s newspaper Combat, a journalist for the BBC’s French Service after the war, worked with the International Press Institute in Zurich, and became involved in Jean Monnet’s movement for a unified Europe, precursor of the European Union.

Dadelsen's first published poetic work was his sequence "Bach in Autumn," published in Nouvelle Revue in 1955. He published work in various journals between 1955 and his death in Zurich in 1957. His works were collected and published posthumously. His complete poems (excepting juvenilia) were published in the Poésie Gallimard series in 2005.