Michael Levine's interventions choose key moments in the life and work of Paul Celan as their point of departure: The birth and death of Celan's first son in 1953; an examination of the traumatic structure of Georg Buchner's work in the 1960 Meridian speech; the poems to his second son Eric, with Celan feeling compelled to choose between him and his devotion to poetry during a time of personal and political crisis in 1968; and the Jerusalem poems written after the "caesura" of the 1969 trip to Israel. Circling around moments of crisis, the essays examine how Celan not only strove to take his bearings in time, but also, and above all, to keep time open in order to allow "that which is most proper to him, to the Other, to speak", to which even listening must first open up. In doing so, the texts represent not only an examination of Paul Celan, but also discussions with his outstanding readers: Bernhard Boschenstein, Jacques Derrida, Werner Hamacher, Stephane Moses and Thomas Schestag.