In 1960 Paul Celan was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung. His speech in acceptance of this prize, "Der Meridian," occupies a central position in his work.

"The Meridian," like the brief address in acceptance of the Bremen literary prize two years previously, deals with the relation of poetry to time and to individual existence, with the poem as a step on the way to both self and other. But in "The Meridian" these relations appear in their social and religious dimensions, and the statement on art rounds itself to a work of art. "Enlarge Art" – the demand is made, then taken back, that is, made contingent upon utmost fidelity to the finitude of the individual being: "No. Rather go with Art into that strait which is most your own. And set yourself free."

This statement, perhaps the central programmatic statement of "The Meridian," is probably also to be read as a report of actual experience. The "stepping-out" into an "uncanny" realm is apparently a moment of poetic creation; it may also be analogous to the moment of death. The poet’s voice thus emerges, as Celan says in a poem written a few years later and contained in the collection Atemwende (Breath-turn – the term first occurs in this speech), from "beyond humankind." And the poem perhaps speaks, not only for an individual at grips with its own limitation, but "on behalf of something other – who knows, perhaps wholly other." "Wholly other" is a theological circumlocution for "God," and Celan emphasizes that he has not used this phrase by chance.

In other words, Celan here reveals himself as a refiner of the methods of the Hebrew prophets, who prefaced their oracles with the words "Thus saith the Lord." To the same effect, one may recall in connection with the references to the "locus" of poetry that in Hebrew "H-Makom," "the Place," is another circumlocution for the Divine Name.

Like the Hebrew prophets, Celan speaks, as he emphasizes, in the context of contemporary events. The event which leaves him "no choice" in setting the "acute accent" is, of course, the Holocaust. To establish this as the context, only a few oblique references are necessary, such as the remark about "something in the air – in the air we have to breathe." His aim, however, is not only to remind people of this recent history, but to examine some of the cultural assumptions of his hearers in its light – in particular the attitudes fostered by Western culture towards art and poetry. For an understanding of this, some information about Georg Büchner is indispensable.

Georg Büchner was a poet, medical student, and revolutionary who died in 1937 at the age of twenty-three. He left three plays: The Death of Danton, Leonce and Lena, and the unfinished Woyzeck, as well as an unfinished novella, Lenz. In the first paragraphs of "The Meridian, Celan alludes to a scene from The Death of Danton. The central figure of this play is a revolutionary who, having acted his part in history, is now overcome by a sense of the futility of political action; from this he concludes the futility of life itself and cannot rouse himself to cope with the threat to his own and his followers’ lives which Robespierre represents. Among the followers is Camille Desmoulins. Celan assumes that his hearers are familiar with the following dialogue:

Though Lucile does not know what the men are talking about, she knows that Camille is threatened. Later in the scene she says: "When I think that they – that this head! ... The world is wide, there are so many things in it – why just that one? Who would take it from me? That would be cruel. What would they want with it?" Of all the characters in the play, only Lucile really knows the value of a human life. The guillotining of Camille prompts her to a suicidal act of protest: walking past the guillotine, she cries out, "Long live the King!" These are the last words of the play; she is dragged off by the patrol.

In the next scene to which Celan alludes, from Woyzeck, a carnival barker unfavorably compares the creature "as God made it" to the product of "Art" (in the sense of "civilization"). The main character, Woyzeck, attends the show along with his commonlaw wife, Marie. Woyzeck, an army private systematically humiliated by his superiors, used by the doctor as a guinea pig for a senseless experiment, finally murders Marie on account of infidelity and then drowns himself. He exemplifies the human creature driven to the wall by a society ruled by mindless power, and of course he is, both as victim and as murderer, a prophetic figure. The "rushing wind" to which Celan alludes later comes from this play; it is the sensing of a threat to all human existence.

The third scene to which Celan alludes in connection with Art is from Leonce und Lena, a farce which mingles the cynical and the visionary. Prince and princess are destined for each other, as their names, linked in the title, immediately tell us; but they first learn of each other as partners in an arranged marriage of state. Each decides to run away from marriage to a stranger; on their separate flights they meet, each unaware of the other’s identity, and fall in love. The prince’s companion Valiero, the cynical jester, is entrusted with the task of arranging their marriage, against the presumed opposition of the king, the prince’s father. Valerio brings the couple, masked, to court, where everyone is becoming very nervous because the hour of the wedding has arrived and neither bride nor groom can be located. Valerio announces the two as robots (he himself is, as he admits, perhaps the third and the most remarkable robot) and suggests to the king that, in the absence of bridge and groom, the ceremony could be performed with these robots as stand-ins. After the ceremony the masks are removed and recognition occurs. Both Leonce and Lena exclaim, "I’ve been cheated!" but resign themselves. In the end a return to Paradise is anticipated, all clocks are to be smashed, etc. Valerio, who has the last word, speaks of praying for "classical bodies, musical throats, melons and figs, and a comfortable religion." Leonce und Lena seems to be a satire on "free will." Even if he thinks he chooses, Büchner seems to say, man can act only in accordance with predestination. He is a contraption, a mechanism; there is no escape. Leonce, who senses this from the start, still struggles against the boredom which results from this knowledge; Valerio knows that struggle is useless: "It’s miserable! You can’t jump off a steple without breaking your neck. You can’t eat four pounds of cherries with the pits and not get a bellyache..." Leonce is finally reconciled to determinism through love, and it is with this reconciliation that the return to Paradise begins. Valerio’s prayer for a "Comfortable religon" has a cynical ring; Celan, however, while aware of the cynicism, seems to be asking if, in the jester’s guise, a serious hope is not being expressed here. It amounts to asking whether some of the insights he is trying to elaborate in the "Meridian" might be the basis for something of the kind.

The farcical Valerio has something in common with the tragic Lenz, who in the fragmentary novella of that name "Sometimes found it unpleasant that he could not walk on his head." Lenz was an historical figure, a contemporary of the young Goethe; his work in many respects anticipates that of Büchner; he succumbed to madness during a stay in the mountains, at the home of Pastor Oberlin. The novella is based partly on the diary of the good pastor, who clearly had no understanding whatever of his guest; some sentences are quoted verbatim. Büchner, on the other hand, is able to project himself into Lenz’s mind, and the contrast between external and internal observation is exceedingly poignant and significant. Dantons Tod also incorporates actual speeches by the historical figures, as Celan points out; Büchner’s gift was not merely creative, he was able to penetrate the events of the past and to tell what actually happened. Lenz at the is the artist as outcast, the man whose words are not taken seriously, who is condemned to powerlessness and who nevertheless takes it upon himself to will the impossible. His mad thought in the mountains of "walking on his head" foreshadows a mad act: the attempt to resurrect a dead child. Celan, one of whose early poems ends "Let a human come from the grave" and who must often have felt himself surrounded by uncomprehending, perhaps in some cases deliberately uncomprehending, solicitude, plainly identifies with Lenz. In speaking of Lenz’s solitary death he is probably anticipating his own death, already foreshadowed in such poems as the quatrain which he quotes. The "voices," as we know from the cycle in which the quatrain appears, are the voices of the dead.

In reading the speech it is important to listen for the voice – its checks, its reservations, its elliptical yet none the less definite assertions. It is not only a speech in the sense of a prepared address; it has an actual dramatic quality. Celan seems to have written it in the anticipated consciousness of his physical presence before a German audience. The uncanniness of the occasion was felt by others; one hears it in the introductory remarks of the Oberbürgermeister of Darmstadt, Dr. Ludwig Engel, as well as in those of the poet Marie Luise Kaschnitz. Frau Kashnitz, immediately before the speech, concludes: "‘We were dead and could breathe,’ he says in one poem, and we undergo this dying and breathing again with him, who won his life from language and stands here today as the giver."