[Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker's language, rhetoric and habitus].

Abstract

Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker was not only an exceptional physicist, philosopher and peace scholar, but also a skilled and articulate speaker and a highly successful author. Dozens of his books were published in tens of thousands of copies despite their highly nontrivial content. This wide impact was only possible--this at least is one of the claims made in this paper--because of his sophisticated style and rhetorics. The analysis here is based on hand-picked samples from all kinds of Weizsäcker texts (talks, scientific and popular papers and books, poems and Limericks). Strangely enough, this interesting stylistic and rhetorical facet of his oeuvre has hitherto not been analyzed in any detail despite its crucial importance in the broad impact on his multifarious audience. My paper starts out from a collection of striking features of his language and structural specialties in his published talks and speeches, and explore findings from sound recordings and film tapes which offer further insight into his manner of emphasis, usage of pauses and intonation. On the basis of these stylistic traits and their often subcutaneous, but nevertheless clever rhetorics, I close with a few remarks on the habitus of this scholar and his positioning within the ensemble of German-speaking physicists of that generation.