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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