The poem-lecture Der Meridian, the speech given by Celan at the presentation of the Georg Büchner prize in 1960, plays an important role in my work. It is a passionate plea for life and art, the eternal elixir of life that moves, contradicts and therefore survives; a plea for an ultimate, perhaps sublime individual existence. Celan's poems and his language that alter thought structures, are a rich source for me as painter and visual artist. From Der Meridian: “The poem maintains itself on the edge of itself; it calls and takes in order to continue to exist, to constantly return from no-longer-being-there to always-being-there.”

Here pictures of book covers of an extensive study of the speech. The speech itself was reason for me to read work by Büchner, Trakl, Mandelstam and others.