The poem remains mindful of its ‘data’. Data-driven Storytelling in Yoko Tawada’s Novel Paul Celan und der chinesische Engel.

This paper investigates whether Tawada’s German novel Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel can be considered ‘post-digital literature’, since it treats Celan’s works as a kind of dataset. In it, poem titles, famous lines and recurring words – following a principle of recursion that focuses on Celan’s collection Threadsuns and his speech The Meridian – are broken down and recombined using a method similar to computational or algorithmic processes, creating new connections through a ‘data-driven storytelling’. It explores also what it means to analyse literature with data, applying concepts from computer science to literature in an interdisciplinary manner, and reflects on the broader implications of this shift for the way we understand both human creativity and dignity.