„Komm auf den Händen zu uns“. Zu einem Kippbild der Begegnung bei Paul Celan
“Come to us on your hands”. About an Ambiguous Image of the Encounter in Paul Celan’s Work

Summary/Abstract: One of the essential images of the lyrics and poetics of Paul Celan is hand walking, an image inspired from the novel Lenz by Georg Büchner. This appears not only in poems such as Stimmen and Es geht, but also in the most important text written by Celan about his poetics, in the discourse Meridian, whose variants reveal the complex semantics of the hand motif in Celan’s thinking. Essential in articulating the truth both in quotidian gestures and in the „mimics” of poetry or poetical reflexion, the hand participates, through hand walking, to the change in perspective on the world, to the meeting with abyssal depths and the opening of a dialogue with Büchner, Pascal, Nietzsche, Isaak Babel and also with the important themes of the Holocaust and the exile. The present study proposes an investigation on the manner in which hand walking becomes an ambiguous image of the encounter and the dialogue, generating a poetic language in which the chiastic reversals or quasi-absurd linguistic distortions communicate the aim of poetry about which Celan says it does not change the world, but the way of being in the world.

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