An Other Rhetoric: Paul Celan's Meridian

"Meine Damen und Herren!"¹ With these words, Paul Celan's 1960 Georg-Büchner-Preis-Rede Der Meridian commences its claim upon the audience, and allows itself to be claimed by a tradition of rhetorical conventions—such as the apostrophe, "Meine Damen und Herren."

For all its banality, this call to the assembly in Darmstadt also calls attention to itself. At first glance "Meine Damen und Herren" is not original; to the contrary, it is the most common mode of beginning a formal address. As such, the phrase gathers Celan's address together with countless others and reveals nothing of the singularity that belongs to a speech and occasion. A worn commonplace, this opening tends to be no more and no less than a rhetorical performance.²—And indeed, the phrase "Meine Damen und Herren" would seem to be a characterless performance, available to any number of speakers upon any number of occasions.

Nonetheless, when it serves as such an empty (yet polite) rhetorical commonplace, the phrase tends to glide seamlessly into the words that follow, as when Gottfried Benn begins his Probleme der Lyrik (a text against which Celan's Meridian situates itself),³ stating, "Meine Damen und Herren, wenn Sie am Sonntagmorgen Ihre Zeitung aufschlagen, finden Sie in einer Beilage [. . .] ein Gedicht"⁴—and it rarely recurs, once a speech has moved past its first breath.

In Der Meridian, these opening words alone are presented as a complete act and statement—and they recur, throughout the work.

Here, in their first appearance, the phrase concludes with an exclamation mark that abruptly severs it from the text below—which stands across the abyss of a paragraph break. Spoken, these words would be accompanied by an intensity that distinguishes them from other statements, and they would be followed by a brief interlude of silence.⁵ Sundered from the flow of subsequent words, the apostrophe takes on a significance in itself, before Der Meridian moves to the position of Georg Büchner's character Camille, whose words resound in the next paragraph: "Die Kunst, das ist, Sie erinnern sich, ein marionettenhaftes, jambisch-fünffüßiges [. . .] kinderloses Wesen."⁶

Celan's "Meine Damen und Herren!" opposes the tendency to leave a rhetorical opening behind as quickly as possible, and as a result, its meaning diverges from Gottfried Benn's "Meine Damen und Herren, wenn Sie am Sonntagmorgen Ihre Zeitung aufschlagen, finden Sie in einer Beilage [. . .] ein Gedicht"—although the phrase is neither richer nor poorer in content than the words that we find in Benn, among countless others. The difference in meaning does not stem from a shift in the sense of the words themselves, but from their placement and emphasis. Instead, a rhetorical performance transforms into a performance of rhetoric. And with this, one might hear the genitive relation between an "Ich" (mein) and its audience (Damen und Herren) as the condensation of what Aristotle calls the three parts of speech itself in his Art of Rhetoric: the speaker, the audience, and the matter of speech—where the matter here becomes speaking per se, direct address.⁷ Through such condensation and isolation, "Meine Damen und Herren" tropes speech itself (ὁ λόγος)—and later, this trope will become poetic, as "Meine Damen und Herren" appears in anaphoric repetition, opening each paragraph near the close of Celan's Rede.⁸

How are we to understand this shift? It would seem, at first, trivial—and yet, it has to do with one of the central questions that Der Meridian solicits us to pose: How does Der Meridian assume a position within a tradition of public speaking, while resisting and participating in the tradition of rhetoric? All too often, readers of Celan's Meridian leap over its status as a public address, calling it a poetological text⁹ or interpreting it philosophically.¹⁰ First and foremost, however, Der Meridian is a "Rede" that must be considered on its own terms—that is, as a Rede—even though these are precisely the terms that the speech will challenge.¹¹ Hence the transformation of "Meine Damen [End Page 633...