Journal der Künste 17 (EN)

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 17 THE LAND USE CONFLICT ERICH WONDER AND HEINER MÜLLER SYRIAN CASSETTES LANGUAGE AND RESISTANCE ENGLISH EDITION JANUARY 2022

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P. 26 JUNGE AKADEMIE

P. 48 NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVES

KLEINSTADT – SMALL TOWN

WRITTEN IN STONE + THE DISCREET CHARM OF NEOLIBERALISM

FINDS

Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler

Meena Kandasamy P. 5

EDITORIAL

WRITING ON THE WALL – JOACHIM WALTHER’S NEWSPAPER FOR SCHÖNHAUSER ALLEE 71 Christoph Kapp

P. 28 CARTE BLANCHE

Kathrin Röggla

SASHA KURMAZ

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P. 6 THE LAND USE CONFLICT

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LIVING SUSTAINABLY DESPITE CULTURAL IDEALS, OR THE DECISIVE BATTLE FOR THE SINGLE-FAMILY HOUSE

AWAKENING A YEARNING FOR A DIFFERENT STATE OF THE WORLD – ERICH WONDER AND HEINER MÜLLER

“JUST WRITE TO ME ALWAYS A LOT” THE CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN HANS AND LEA GRUNDIG

Stephan Suschke

P. 52

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ONE PERSON – ONE EVENT – ONE JOY OPENING THE ROGER WILLEMSEN ARCHIVE

Wilfried Wang

P. 18 JUNGE AKADEMIE

WE HAVE TO KEEP TALKING AND WRITING BECAUSE WE HAVE NO OTHER MEANS

BEHIND THE MEMBRANE – THE ELECTROACOUSTIC STUDIO OF THE AKADEMIE DER KÜNSTE

RESONATING STRUGGLES – PAUL AND ESLANDA ROBESON IN EAST BERLIN A conversation with Matana Roberts, Doreen Mende, Kira Thurman, and George E. Lewis

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SUSTAINABLE BUILDING IN BERLIN – HUGO HÄRING’S ARCHITECTURAL PLANS

ARCHIVING THE EPHEMERAL

Sibylle Hoiman and Marieluise Nordahl

Mark Gergis in conversation with Lina Brion P. 57 FREUNDESKREIS P. 46

THAT’S LIFE, AFTER ALL… Cornelia Klauß on Tamara Trampe

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Insa Wilke in conversation with Gabriele Radecke

Malte Giesen

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr in conversation with Kathrin Röggla

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Kathleen Krenzlin

HERMANN VON HELMHOLTZ AND MUSIC – A GOOD THING HE PLAYED THE PIANO Günther Wess and Eugen Müller

EDITORIAL

Cooperation is something that grows increasingly important in times The multilayered political poems of Meena Kandasamy overwrite of proliferating crises; it emerges as a precious commodity in quar- Tamil Sangam poetry and render visible the appropriation of lanantine in particular. In society and in the arts, we need a transdis- guage by the discreet charm of neoliberalism from a South Indian, ciplinary crossing of fields and a connecting of different places and trade union perspective. The Carte blanche of our Ukrainian visual institutions. It has therefore been working relationships that have arts fellow Sasha Kurmaz, who provocatively brings ephemeral especially captured our imagination in this issue of the Journal der bodies back into the public eye, also shows us how much the JUNGE Künste. There is the astonishing working dialogue between Heiner AKADEMIE can be a vehicle for the global communication of forms Müller from Saxony in Germany and Erich Wonder from Burgen- of resistance. land in Austria, to which a major exhibition at the Akademie der Wilfried Wang sketches the haunting image of sixteen million Künste is dedicated; and the film family created by Tamara Trampe, empty single-family homes in Germany. Seemingly more than dyscomprising Johann Feindt, Martin Steyer, Jule Cramer, Helmut functional in times of ecological crisis and land scarcity, these can Oehring, and many others. Roger Willemsen, whose archive is being be seen as a symbol of modern consumer society in a linear econpresented in a conversation with Insa Wilke, was always commit- omy. Rather than merely meeting the needs of the few, this archited to the spirit of collaboration, which, from a historical, compo- tectural approach needs an overhaul to ensure our survival in the sitional, and curatorial-theoretical point of view, also informs the Anthropocene: You have to change your life. discussion of Paul and Eslanda Robeson’s archive.

The story of the Syrian Cassette Archives, initiated by Mark Rather than just remembering, however, we also spotlight Gergis, is particularly touching. What began as an almost random present-day collaborations. OSTKREUZ, for example – the pho- collection by a professional music enthusiast in search of his own tographers’ agency, co-founded by Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler, family’s musical roots has now become an important document of creators of the “Kleinstadt” (Small Town) series, which in itself is a lively musical culture that can no longer exist in situ, and thus the result of years of shared photographic research – is presented also a treasury for future practices. in this issue. And there is our Studio for Electroacoustic Music, our One of the “finds” that this issue recalls is Joachim Walther’s “cabinet of curiosities”, which its new director Malte Giesen pro- wall newspaper activities in Schönhauser Allee. The Architecture files as a thoroughly social place, a working academy in the pan- Archives present the restoration work on Hugo Häring’s architecdemic age, where analogue and digital techniques interact and the tural plans, and the Society of Friends of the Akademie der Künste question of collaboration with AI can also be raised. The JUNGE reminds us of Hermann von Helmholtz’s musical studies that illusAKADEMIE is also a place of collaborative communication. trate how our perception is generated by various neurological proMohamed Mbougar Sarr, our Berlin fellow and newly honoured Prix cesses which need to be understood. In this spirit of cooperation, Goncourt winner, has even made the collaboration of those engaged then, may 2022 begin! in resistance the central theme of his novel Terre ceinte (recently published in English as Brotherhood), which explores the active Kathrin Röggla presence of the many languages in postcolonial poetry.

Vice president of the Akademie der Künste

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THE LAND USE CONFLICT As a contribution to the 20th Bundestag elections, the Architecture Section of the Akademie der Künste invited politicians to two urban-development policy discussions held online. The first discussion, which took place on 19 August 2021, was on the topic “Land, a limited resource”.1 Bernhard Daldrup (SPD, Social Democrats), Christian Kühn (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen, Green Party), Caren Lay (Die Linke, Left Party), and Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann (FDP, Liberals) took part. No one from the CDU/CSU was able to attend.

With all participants aware that the current land consumption in Germany of 56 hectares per day must not be allowed to continue, surprisingly, by the end of the discussion, a cross-party consensus was reached on what was needed:

LIVING SUSTAINABLY DESPITE CULTURAL IDEALS Wilfried Wang

oordinated and integrated regional planning • Cacross local authorities to effectively manage land consumption. ormation of suburban hubs to improve the public • Ftransport network. only on already sealed land; alternatively, • Btheuilding use of land certificates or exchange systems. nsealing of downtown areas (e.g. through • Umodification/replacement of car parks, creation of new green spaces). ensification of the existing fabric, including • Dtaller buildings. arge-scale planning of inner-city brownfields, • Lformer industrial areas, and railway land.

• Intensification of the local public transport network. reation of a functional/social mix in residential • Careas.

• Short distances between residential areas.

The topic of the construction of single-family houses, controversially discussed in the media in the run up to the elections, was only briefly addressed during the Akademie der Künste debate. The following article thus fills this gap.

1 The discussion was recorded and is accessible online: https://www.adk.de/en/programme/?we_object ID=62724. The second conversation of 30 August 2021, on the subject of “Design the metropolis sustainably!”, is also online: https://www.adk.de/en/programme/?we_ objectID=62728

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Map of Suburban Areas, Berlin-Brandenburg, 2021 (areas with single-family houses in pink)

OR THE DECISIVE BATTLE FOR THE SINGLE-FAMILY HOUSE

“Whoever has no house now, will not build one anymore.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, “Autumn day”, 1 Paris 1902

FROM INDIVIDUAL DREAM TO COLLECTIVE TRAUMA Historically rooted and geographically widespread cultural ideals such as the desire to own one’s home, often conflated with the idea of the free-standing, single-family2 house, will continue to be pursued by large sections of the world’s population over the coming decades.

In Germany, two-thirds of the population dream of living in a free-standing, single-family house. Just over one-third of the German population currently live this way; according to statistics, that is 28.67 million people (34.4 per cent).3 If the surveys are to be believed, then there are another 25 million Germans who would like to live in this way. Of the total 19 million existing residential buildings in Germany, 16 million are single-family houses (83 per cent),4 on average these are occupied by 1.79 people, just under half of their occupant capacity (figures from 2021; assuming four persons per household, in purely mathematical terms, 32 million additional people could be accommodated in these existing houses).

Were all of those who wish to be granted permission to purchase the land for a new-build – with a useable floor area of 150 square metres, suitable for four people, on a plot of 500 square metres plus an access road, then an area of about 3,750 square kilometres would be required. So far, the daily land consumption (for commerce, settlement, traffic, etc.) is 56 hectares (204 square kilometres per year),5 of which, according to the Federal Ministry for Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, 52 hectares per day are allocated to settlement and traffic areas (about 190 square kilometres per year).6 In 2020, about one-third of this area was occupied by the construction of 107,747 new detached and semi-detached houses, a total of about 64 square kilometres. Thus, were the same number of single-family houses to be built over the next eight years as have been built in recent years (which is around 90,000) then the total area of land consumed would be equivalent to the built-up part of Berlin (489 square kilometres), while only 2.88 of the potential 25 million people would have realised their dream.

What are the arguments against this desire for single-family house ownership?7 The constant consumption of land? The progressive destruction of the soil (whether arable, forest, or fallow land)?

The increase in average commuting distances (68.4 per cent of the working population in Germany commute to work in their own vehicles8)? The increasing demand for energy (mobility, spatial comfort)?

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Isn’t living on the periphery actually the ideal answer to the current coronavirus pandemic (looking at the maps of the respective case numbers, it was primarily the “rural” regions that showed higher incidences of infection during the pandemic)? In general: isn’t the cultural ideal of living in a single-family house timeless?

The real challenge of sustainability for society and politics, however, is not only to reduce the ecological footprint of current pollutant emissions. Equally, it must be recognised how the cultural footprint has left its mark on the environment through the depth of rootedness and breadth of spread of a collective desire, and then this must also be revised.9 Thus, the extent of the cultural-political work of enlightenment that still lies ahead becomes clearer in terms of questioning the raison d’être of the current use of the single-family house. However, who will take on this work of enlightenment? The universities? The professions? The politicians?

The outcry that has been echoing throughout the Federal Republic since January 2021 after media reports about the ban on building single-family houses in Hamburg-Nord, for which Green Party politician Michael Werner-Boelz is responsible, marks the beginning of the culture war over the single-family house. Yet, this discussion is only representative of all other inadequate, unsustainable ways of life, whether international holidays, meat consumption, or planned obsolescence of electronic devices through constant updating of operating systems.

THE IDEAL OF COMFORTABLE INDEPENDENCE WITHOUT ANNOYING THE NEIGHBOURS How one lives and how one becomes accustomed to ways of living are determined by acquired conceptions and ideals. In the case of the single-family house, its users believe that they will enjoy security, freedom, and independence, a closeness to nature, and tranquillity. Holding the deeds to one’s own single-family house is proof of one’s personal social success; the house represents the owner – one has made it to the top of the tree. One’s children can play unperturbed in the garden and grow up healthy and vice-free. The adults want to be able to party and barbecue at leisure too without complaints from the neighbours. Even of the younger people in Germany – “Generation Z” (in the Interhyp AG study, this age group was limited to 18–25-year-olds) – only 18 per cent want to live in a big city.10

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The detached single-family house is the ultimate goal for many their focus. The Palladian English villas found their imitators in people, because it is associated with a sense of freedom, inde- the European colonies. Stylistically modified, but identical in terms pendence, and self-realisation. In this sense, the human strife for of settlement type, the country houses of Frank Lloyd Wright, self-determination has given rise to all developments in civilisa- Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and others, replaced the classicist tion over thousands of years. Buildings form part of this strife. They models for millions of architecture students. Looking at the maghave enabled people to live in all regions of the world by providing azines on sale at any German railway station news stand today, shelter during climatically inhospitable seasons: my house, my there are dozens upon dozens of lavishly illustrated monthly magworld. This is how individual detached, single-family houses came azines fixated on housebuilding, with something for everyone: for into being at one end of the scale, as well as housing estates at the the thrifty customer (Hausbau); those who strive for social recogother end of the scale. Beyond the structural shell, heating or nition (Architectural Digest); for the ecologically aware (holz- und air-conditioning systems enable people in drastically inhospitable ökohäuser); and for the solid housebuilding contractor market regions to be able to live there at all. This process of autonomisa- (HAUSBAUHELDEN). tion of all areas of human life from all natural environmental conThe single-family house with a garage and two cars sym­ ditions, achieved especially in extreme climate zones, demanded bolises modern consumer society. The essence of this way of life high material and energy input is the linear economy: from over a period of thousands of resource extraction to producyears. tion, advertising, distribution, While part of this differenpurchase, and, finally, landfill tiated development has been disposal – from the ground back accomplished since the First into the ground. The way the World War, the development of single-family house, including suburban settlement structures an SUV, is used currently, comes (the so-called suburban sprawl) top of the list of the demonstrahas progressed intensively all tive consumption of the supposover the world since the edly leisured classes – the conSecond World War. In addition spicuous consumption of the to detached single-family capitalist-colonialist exploitahouses, this type of settlement tive society – so sharply critistructure is made up of buildcised by Thorstein Veblen. The ings for spatially separated dominant form of use for the functions such as production, single-family house equals the retail, education, and leisure as black-hole ideal of the Western well as the numerous infralifestyle: it can never be big structural elements such as enough to fulfil its purpose as a public transport, roads, and Map of Suburban Areas, Cologne-Bonn, 2021 museum-like temporary waste media (energy, sanitation, comsite for personal souvenirs, the munications, etc.). In other words, the same elements that exist sports trophies of children who have long since moved out, mothin cities – albeit in a concentrated form – are more scattered in eaten clothes; as an archive for virgin gardening tools, food long suburbia, interspersed with separating greenery in the shape of past its due date, the no longer playable music media, and unread barely recognisable vestiges of the nature-mimetic – the so-called books. For most of its existence, most rooms in the single-family “English landscape garden”. house are empty – in Germany, 16 million times over.

The cultural-historical canonisation of this life dream was Linear consumer culture is the decaying model of Western affected with the help of literature, painting, and architecture. For civilisation; it is on the verge of extinction, and with this extinction, example, the writings of Alvise Cornaro, the frescoes of Paolo the single-family house as a purely representative residential propVeronese, and Andrea Palladio’s ideal of the villa in a rural setting erty is also becoming a sociocultural dinosaur. Many people are defined the fundamental values, pictorial stylisation, and struc- aware that effective climate protection requires every individual to tural representation that was to become valid for centuries.11 How- make lifestyle changes. In the case of single-family houses, too, ever, whereas Palladio’s villas remained agriculturally oriented, the there will be both restrictions on the future construction of this type subsequent English Palladian country houses saw themselves less of dwelling and changes in its use. Existing single-family houses as production sites and more as refuges set in completely artifi- will have to become more productive in the future; they could thus cial but natural-looking varied landscapes that, interspersed with certainly make decisive contributions to energy generation (elecsmall classical temples and gothic-style pavilions and pagodas in trical and energy for heating) and food production (fruits and vegthe pseudo-Chinese style, had the contemplation of the arts as etables). With the installation of solar and photovoltaic systems on

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the roofs of existing residential and single-family houses, the elec- urban periphery will continue, because there will still not be a functricity and heating requirements of private households could be tioning sense of common interest in all areas of public life – from serviced to a considerable extent. In addition, the existing 16 mil- schools to public spaces. lion single-family homes in Germany could provide living spaces for some of the 25 million residents who are interested in living in MYTHS: RURAL AREAS AND THE EUROPEAN CITY single-family homes.

But, let us not kid ourselves, a future ban on single-family For decades, settlement development has either been glossed over house construction will trigger a last-minute panic, just as it has or played down by politicians and administrators in a very revealin other areas, once one suspects it will be banned at some point, ing way. For example, although the “Leipzig Charter for a Sustainsuch as the purchase of Sports Utility Vehicles (SUVs). In June 2021, able European City”16 has officially been in force in Germany since these vehicles accounted for 23.8 per cent of all new German car 2007, as a result of which individual socially deprived neighbourregistrations (2016: 12.7 per cent).12 No trace of Rilke’s gloom here: hoods have experienced minor improvements (this charter was if you don’t have an SUV now, you can still get one – but you’d best renewed again in 2020),17 the overarching goal of integrated urban hurry up. and regional planning has unfortunately not actually begun in any On the subject of singleGerman city. The “European” family houses, the respective city has remained a cliché. The positions – not only in Germany only results were large groups – are currently still irreconcilof monofunctional, tranquilisable. On the one hand, living ing, rectangular boxes. in a single-family house is In this context, the rural the epitome of individualism, of area is often understood as the self-interest; on the other hand, counterpart to the European parents bear a responsibility city: actually, the rural area for the entire family. Who can comprises sparsely populated blame the parents for striving areas dominated by forestry and to improve the health of their agricultural use, but in common family thanks to a “closeness to parlance, suburban sprawl is nature” lifestyle, safe distance also subsumed under it. The from social ills and urban vices?

European city, on the other What parents honestly don’t hand, is socially and functioncare if their own children are ally mixed and densely popueducated alongside a majority lated, with streets and squares of pupils with a migrant backclearly defined by perimeter ground? blocks. But what about the setSpeaking of migrants: The Map of Suburban Areas, Hamburg, 2021 tlement structure between rural percentage of people living in areas and the “European city”?

13 Germany with a migrant background is 26.7 per cent. In 2018, the Suburban settlement structures are characterised predominantly proportion of people with a migrant background in Germany’s inner by residential use in detached, semi-detached, or single-family cities was 59.5 per cent, while in the “rural” regions it was 12.7 per houses. cent.14 It is the process of suburbanisation that has led to this difIf we look at contemporary lifestyles now, it is not enough to ferentiated development over the past decades. Since the 1950s, analyse only these three settlement types. Instead, we must also this collective movement has been referred to as white flight, espe- look at those overarching coherent spaces in which a large proporcially in North America. The demand by German politicians that tion of people in Germany live – that is in the metropolitan regions: migrants should double their efforts at integrating themselves with for example, Berlin-Brandenburg, Hamburg, Cologne-Bonn, Rhinethe majority society (a demand already fulfilled in the inner cities, Main, and Munich. These regions are economic magnets that attract where migrants often make up the majority) opens up two options: more people to the available residential accommodation within the the first, according to which people with a migrant background metropolitan city limits than there is housing stock to accommoalso move to the suburbs until the proportion has grown to 26.7 per date them. Thus, people often live in the suburban sprawl and comcent;15 and the second, that people without a migrant background mute to work in the city. The extent of metropolitan regions can be return to the inner cities, ideally, of course, without causing gen- mapped based on commuting patterns, and by looking at the coltrification. But let us not fool ourselves, neither one nor the other lective public-regional transport networks.18 The cities, as proudly option will take place; both processes of the heterogenisation of introverted territorial authorities, look idly on as the surrounding the culture in the inner cities and the homogenisation of the sub- countryside becomes overdeveloped. None of this is new, nor is

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the dominant settlement pattern generated by this commuter lifestyle. It is therefore all the more necessary that this settlement pattern is finally consciously perceived, because the European city is only a tiny fragment of the entire settlement unit of the metropolitan region. The latter consists largely of peripheral suburban developments around older towns and villages.

In general, the share of the “European” city in relation to the total area of the respective metropolitan region in the German examples is about 1 per cent: the densified part of Berlin (274 square kilometres) takes up 0.89 per cent in the Berlin-Brandenburg metropolitan region (30,546 square kilometres). In the Munich metropolitan region, the share of the dense inner city is 0.44 per cent of the region’s total area (113 square kilometres out of a total 25,548). In the metropolitan regions around Hamburg, Frankfurt am Main, and Cologne, the inner-city area shares are 0.32, 0.42, and 1.28 per cent respectively. The remaining 99 per cent of area space is filled by mobility networks, logistics, and shopping centres, villages and small towns transformed into dormitories, suburban sprawl, and areas for the agro-pharmaceutical food industry, formerly known as agriculture.19 The “European city” is a gem that will now not be able to counter the effects of rapidly growing online trade and the resultant death of retail or the continuing popularity of the home-office mode of working, even after the pandemic.

The gem of the city has increas- Map of Suburban Areas, Munich, 2021 ingly been losing its significance for locals and has been degenerating into a caricature of itself thanks to over-tourism.

THE SUBURBAN REALITY The degree of suburbanisation can be deduced from the ratio of the number of inner-city residents to the total population of the metropolitan area: in Berlin-Brandenburg, 35.78 per cent of people currently live in Berlin’s densely populated inner city; in Hamburg, 34.94 per cent of people live there, so almost as many. By contrast, only 19.16 per cent of the regional population lives in Cologne’s inner city; only 6.68 per cent of the total population of the Rhine-Main area lives in Frankfurt am Main.20 According to a study by the Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development (BBSR), 84 per cent of the population in Germany lives outside the inner-city centres.21 This proportion, therefore, reflects the reality of settlements rather than

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any notions of dense, urban life in the sense of the classic “European” city.

It is unlikely that the continued suburbanisation of rural areas will be slowed down by future German governments. The Federal Environment Ministry’s 2016 “Integrated Environmental Programme 2030” envisaged a daily land consumption of 20 hectares for 2030, but this will not be achievable due to the implicit embrace by politics and economics of the multiplier effect of single-family house production. Besides, the conservative parties (CDU/CSU), whose members often hold the decisive building offices in the “rural” areas, the financial, automobile, construction, and consumer goods industries, have a vested interest in the continuation of suburbanisation.

NECESSARY CONSEQUENCES Much of what has been stated here has been common knowledge for decades. Various federal governments and their subordinate federal agencies have themselves called for far-reaching consequences, most recently the Federal Environment Agency;22 but unfortunately, even the Green Party has rejected the demand to abolish the commuter subsidy. À la carte climate protection is pointless because everything is interconnected.

New technologies will only save a fraction of the current “necessary” emissions. As indicated, existing single-family houses could make a major contribution to climate protection and social harmony. But what course of action would have to be pursued by the federal government for the country to reach the target of only 20 hectares of land consumption per day from 2030 onwards?

What legal instruments would have to be created by the federal government to enforce this limit in all federal states, in all district governments, in all cities, councils, and villages? Proportionally for Bavaria, for example, this would mean a daily land consumption of 3.9 hectares (39,000 square metres). This will not make only Bavarian politicians choke on their beer. The fight over the principle of subsidiarity is thus pre-programmed: last-minute panic in the building councillors’ offices will ensue.

Future regional and urban planning and design, however, should not be limited to the setting of quantifiable ceilings, but be concerned with long-term, concrete, and integrated climatefriendly design, not abstract diagrams, of metropolises and rural areas.23

The global community has already missed the Paris Climate Agreement target of a maximum average temperature increase of 1.5 degrees centigrade. Now the question is whether the world will even care if the rise reaches 2.7 degrees, or more, by the end of the century. The enlightenment project has failed: Modernity has reduced itself to absurdity. The West lacks any moral authority.

But, ironically, the single-family house as a symbol of selfdetermination, a technically equipped, self-sufficient ark of the bourgeoisie, could even experience a renaissance.

And so, some think that there is still plenty of time before real changes need to be made. Let China, the US, Russia, and the Indian subcontinent first reduce their CO2 emissions, and then perhaps Germany and its citizens can think about their reduction measures, including land consumption. After all, Germans have worked hard for their fun. Regardless whether climate change is irreversible or not, a few more homes on the edges of suburbia, a few more SUVs, a few more kilometres of motorway will not make a difference. No one will even notice.

“… for there is not one part that does not have you in sight.

You have to change your life.”

1 Rainer Maria Rilke, “Herbsttag” (Autumn day), written in Paris in 1902, in R. M. Rilke, Das Buch der Bilder (Berlin: Axel Juncker Verlag, 1902): “Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.” Translated by the author.

2 Julia Meyer, editorial office, Interhyp, “Wohntraumstudie 2021” (Dream home study, 2021), Munich, https:// www.presseportal.de/pm/12620/4951167#gallery-2 3 Statista Research Department, “Bevölkerung in Deutschland nach Wohnisituation von 2017 bis 2021” (Population in Germany by housing situation from 2017 to 2021), https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/ 171237/umfrage/wohnsituation-der-bevoelkerung/ 4 Statista Research Department, “Statistiken zum Thema Wohnen” (Housing statistics, 24 Sept. 2020), https:// de.statista.com/themen/51/wohnen/#dossierKeyfigures 5 Reply by the Federal Government of Germany, 19th Legislature, to a minor enquiry by the Green Party, Dec. 2020, source no longer in the public domain, see Johanna Michel, “Flächenverbrauch müsste fast um die Hälfte reduziert werden” (Land consumption would have to be reduced by almost half, 9 Feb. 2021), https://www. agrarheute.com/politik/flaechenverbrauch-muesstefast-um-haelfte-reduziert-578080 6 Federal Ministry for Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU), “Flächenverbrauch müsste fast um die Hälfte reduziert werden” (Land consumption would have to be reduced by almost half), https:// www.bmu.de/themen/nachhaltigkeit-digitalisierung/ nachhaltigkeit/strategie-und-umsetzung/flaechen verbrauch-worum-geht-es 7 BMU, ibid., translated by the author: “Consequences of land consumption: Land consumption often destroys valuable (arable) soils. Rural areas are being overdeveloped. Undissected landscape areas, important for our flora and fauna, are lost. Future development opportunities or development needs for which these areas are required are often thoughtlessly abandoned. One only has to think of measures that might be necessary to adapt to climate change, such as flood protection. Another problem is that increasing urban sprawl reduces the use of infrastructure. These consequences are exacerbated when the population shrinks due to demographic change.

“Urban sprawl is therefore also highly questionable from an economic and social point of view: If the density of settlement decreases, the expenditure per inhabitant increases to maintain the technical infrastructure such as supply lines, sewage systems, traffic routes, and so on. The lower the user density, the less profitable public transport becomes. The result: the supply shrinks. This increases the dependence on private motorised transport, which in turn leads to calls for even more (relief/ bypass) roads – and thus land consumption – and much more. Similar consequences also affect social infrastructures such as kindergartens, schools, and hospitals.

“Not to be forgotten are general environmental burdens such as noise, air pollution, loss of biodiversity, and so on. They increase when settlement areas and traffic areas increase.”

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Rainer Maria Rilke, “Archaic torso of Apollo”, 24 Paris, 1908

8 Federal Statistical Office (Destatis), “Employment – Commuters”, https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Arbeit/ Arbeitsmarkt/Erwerbstaetigkeit/Tabellen/pendler1.html 9 Wilfried Wang, “Sustainability is a Cultural Problem”, Harvard Design Magazine, no. 18 (Spring/Summer 2003), pp. 1–3.

10 Poll by the Rheingold Institute carried out for the Interhyp AG, Wohntraumstudie 2021 (Interhyp Dream home study 2021, 24 June 2021), https://www.interhyp.de/ ueber-interhyp/presse/interhyp-wohntraumstudie-2021wunsch-nach-eigentum-steigt-erneut.html 11 Reinhard Bentmann and Michael Müller, Die Villa als Herrschaftsarchitektur: Versuch einer kunst- und sozialgeschichtlichen Analyse (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970).

12 Mathias Brandt for Statista, “SUV-Anteil steigt 2021 wieder” (SUV share rises again in 2021, 12 July 2021), https://de.statista.com/infografik/19572/anzahl-derneuzulassungen-von-suv-in-deutschland/ 13 Statista, “Bevölkerung – Migration und Integration“ (Population – Migration and Integration), https://www. destatis.de/EN/Themes/Society-Environment/ Population/Migration-Integration/_node.html;jsessionid =6BE41F3EFAB9B59BDF545D3F5ACD60B7.live742 14 Federal Agency for Civic Education, “Bevölkerung mit Migrationshintergrund” (Population with a migration background, 1 Nov. 2021), https://www.bpb.de/nach schlagen/zahlen-und-fakten/soziale-situation-indeutschland/61646/migrationshintergrund-i 15 For this to happen, the granting of loans would need to become blind to applicants’ migrant status, see Yasemin von Haack, Safaa Mohajeri, and Julia Große-Heitmeyer, “Diskriminierung von Migranten beim Wohneigentums­ erwerb” (Discrimination against migrants when buying their own home), Intergration and Migration in Deutschland (15 Nov. 2012), Migazin, https://www.migazin.de/ 2012/11/15/diskriminierung-von-migranten-beimwohneigentumserwerb/ 16 Federal Ministry for Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, “LEIPZIG CHARTA zur nachhaltigen europäischen Stadt” (LEIPZIG CHARTER for a sustain­ able European city, 25 May 2007), https://www.bmu.de/ fileadmin/Daten_BMU/Download_PDF/Nationale_ Stadtentwicklung/leipzig_charta_de_bf.pdf 17 Federal Ministry of the Interior, Building and Community, “Die Neue Leipzig-Charta”, 8 (The New Leipzig Charter, no. 8, 3 Dec. 2020), https://www.bmi.bund.de/SharedDocs/downloads/DE/veroeffentlichungen/2020/eu-rp/ gemeinsame-erklaerungen/neue-leipzig-charta-2020. pdf;jsessionid=7B9DC8B03DCD6B7F0914FB09518F47 A0.1_cid287?__blob=publicationFile&v=6 18 See the extensive research by Professor Alain Thierstein at the Institute for Urban Development, Department of architecture, Munich University of Technology (TUM) on the metropolitan region of Munich, “WAM – Wohnen, Arbeiten, Mobilität” (WAM – living, working, mobility, 3 Feb. 2016), https://www.ar.tum.de/fileadmin/w00bfl/re/ Aktuelles/WAM_Schlusspraesentation_deutsch.pdf

19 Hoidn Wang Partner, Mapping of Suburban Settlements: Berlin-Brandenburg, Hamburg, Cologne, Rhine-Main, Munich (Berlin, 2020). The analysis defines suburban settlements solely by means of single-family houses: free-standing, semi-detached, terraced, and courtyard; multistorey apartment buildings are not included. See Wilfried Wang, “Die suburbane Wirklichkeit” (The suburban reality), Marlowes online magazine (24 Nov. 2020), https://www.marlowes.de/die-suburbane-wirklichkeit/ 20 For the calculation of these ratios, the respective urban quarters with perimeter-block development were used.

21 Federal Institute for Research and Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development in the Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning, “Wandel demo­ grafischer Strukturen in deutschen Großstädten” (Change in demographic structures in large German cities), BBSR-Analysen KOMPAKT, no. 04 (2016), https://www. bbsr.bund.de/BBSR/DE/veroeffentlichungen/analysenkompakt/2016/ak-04-2016-dl.pdf?__blob=publication File&v=2 22 Federal Environment Agency, “Klimaschutz im Verkehr” (Climate protection in traffic), https://www.umwelt bundesamt.de/themen/verkehr-laerm/klimaschutzim-verkehr#undefined 23 A proposal for the future of the Berlin-Brandenburg region was submitted by Hoidn Wang Partner for the All-Innovate Ideas (AIV) Competition 2020; see also Hoidn Wang Partner, 21BB Model Region Berlin Brandenburg (Zurich: Park Books, 2020); http://www.hoidnwang.de/04projekte_87_de.html 24 Rainer Maria Rilke, “Archaïscher Torso Apollos” (Archaic torso of Apollo), Paris 1908, in R. M. Rilke, Das Buch der Bilder (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1913): “... denn da ist keine Stelle, die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.” Translated by the author.

WILFRIED WANG (with Barbara Hoidn) is a founding member of the architecture firm Hoidn Wang Partner, Berlin. Born in Hamburg, he studied architecture in London. In addition to teaching assignments at the Polytechnic of North London; Bartlett School, Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD); ETH Zurich; University of Texas, Austin; and ETSAUN Pamplona/Madrid, he is editor and author of publications on architecture, and curator of architectural exhibitions. Wang is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, the Comité International des Critiques d’Architecture, the Akademie der Künste Berlin, Honorary Doctor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and honorary member of the Ordem dos Arquitectos, Portugal.

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KLEINSTADT – SMALL TOWN

UTE MAHLER (born in Berka, Thuringia in 1949) and

A series by Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler

WERNER MAHLER (born in Bossdorf, Saxony-Anhalt in 1950) were among the style-defining photographers

Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler visited small towns in Germany over a period of three years and discovered a generation asking themselves: do we go, or do we stay?

“We wanted to visit towns that are not in any travel guide and that are too far from the motorway for people to pass through in transit. We call them overlooked or forgotten towns. In these small towns, many shops in the centre are empty, schools are having to close because there are no longer enough children, and the buses run less and less frequently […]. We wondered how people live in these small towns. And what is the atmosphere like there? How do things look?”

Zeit-Magazin, 23 October 2018

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of the eastern part of the country during the East German era. As outstanding exponents of their discipline, their humanistic view of the world has found expression in various in-depth projects. After reunification, they co-founded the OSTKREUZ – photographers’ agency and the Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie in Berlin. In addition to teaching, the couple have been devoting themselves to freelance projects since 2010. In 2019, they were awarded the David Octavius Hill Medal by the German Photographic Academy for their photographic work. “Kleinstadt” is their fourth long-term project together; a book of the same name was published by Hartmann Books in 2018.

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WE HAVE TO KEEP TALKING AND WRITING BECAUSE WE HAVE NO OTHER MEANS.

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The writer Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Literature fellow of the JUNGE AKADEMIE and winner of the Prix Goncourt 2021, in conversation with Kathrin Röggla

KATHRIN RÖGGLA Mohamed, you live in Beauvais, you studied in Paris, but you started your life in Senegal, where your family lives. I know that you write in French, have you written in any other language, and would you like to?

MOHAMED MBOUGAR SARR I have tried to write in Serer, my mother tongue, and in Wolof too, the most spoken language in Senegal, but it is now difficult for me because in Senegal you don’t learn to write in Serer or in Wolof at school, you study in French, which is why I write in French. Everything that concerns the brain, the activity of the brain, the intellect, comes to me in French.

But deeper there is Wolof, and there is especially Serer.

I have tried, but for now I’m not ready, but one day I will because it’s important for me personally, politically, and symbolically.

KR Would you say that literature is a work of translation?

MMS Writing is always a matter of translating, or at least there is always a way to find the balance between the different languages that I must speak... As the famous philosopher Édouard Glissant said: “I always wrote in the presence of all languages, even if I wrote in French.” So, at the same time, I also wrote in Serer, in Pulaar, and so on. There are all languages present. Every writer has his or her own language, and this language goes far beyond the technical language French or English or German, it is his or her personal language as a writer.

KR How is the situation as an author living in Paris with his origins in Senegal? You know there is this term “world literature”? Here in Germany it would be understood as a marginalising term.

MMS There’s a situation of marginality, that’s clear, a kind of inheritance from colonisation, because in French literature I am not always considered as a French writer.

I don’t like it when people talk about “world literature”, I always have the feeling that it is a way, even if it is not expressed clearly, to say: I am the centre, and here is this periphery – satellites which surround me – and that’s world literature. In France, I can be recognised as an African, Senegalese writer. When I write in French, I am considered as a francophone writer, someone who only writes in French, but this French does not belong to France, it comes from an ancient colony, from Senegal, Kongo, Haiti... That’s a very ambivalent situation.

KR You recently published a new novel...

MMS I am doing a very exhausting reading tour now, because my novel is shortlisted for many important liter­ ary prizes: Prix Goncourt,1 Académie française, and so on.

These last few days I made several meetings in libraries and bookstores with young students.

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KR What’s the title of your new novel?

MMS La plus secret memoire des hommes – the title comes from Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, he is a writer I really admire. All the questions we have been discussing just now are in his book: What is it to be an African writer in the French literature scene? It is also a trap for French journalists, or for the literary field, because the book shows them their own images in the mirror of colonisation.

KR Your most celebrated novel, Brotherhood, from 2015 – which just this year has been translated into English – tells us a story of rebellion against an Islamist terror regime in a fictional city called Kaleb. I suspect there were probably many paths leading to this novel?

MMS I started to think about writing the book in 2012, because large parts of Mali had been assaulted by Islamist militia that year. It made me very sad. I really love Mali, because the Malian culture is absolutely beautiful and ancient – poetic and meaningful for the African continent and history. Seeing the culture literally being destroyed really shocked me, and I decided to start writing a novel to show what could happen in a city dominated by terrorists. That really simply was the main idea of that novel, to just show what can happen in any ordinary city.

KR In your novel it is not only the militia against the army, it is especially the ordinary citizens, who revolt…

MMS It is important to show that the ordinary citizen can resist, as they are in the front line of this kind of situation. Resistance is a beautiful idea, but it is also a very challenging one. It was important for me to show ordinary people in ordinary situations showing resistance, to show cowardness too, and to show how people resist, because every citizen, every person, has his or her own reasons to do or not to do something. Not everyone resists, because it is risky. The possible diversity of reactions in ordinary people interested me.

KR You also raised the question of the moment: When do the people start their resistance? At the beginning of your novel there is a public execution of a young couple, and nobody showed any resistance. But one day when the wife of Ndey Joor Camara, who is one of the main characters, was publicly beaten, they reacted.

MMS Violence has something fascinating about it. When you are fascinated you have two reactions: You can stay silent, be very impressed, or not be able to do anything, but sometimes the violence moves you so deeply that you must do something. Especially when that violence implies an act of barbarism, an act of killing, it produces some tragic reaction in humanity. This is what I tried to compare in the novel.

KR Did you have a model of some kind for this type of resistance?

MMS I read a lot of novels like Albert Camus’ La Peste, or Joseph Kessel’s L’Armée des ombres about the French resistance during the occupation. Even a novel like Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada has something to do with this idea of a city where many characters have different reactions in the face of the same situation.

KR Literature has its own role in this fight. When the famous library of Bantika in your book is burnt down, the international community responds. But you also quoted Heinrich Heine: “Where they have burned books, they will end up burning people.”

MMS It is ambivalent. Sometimes we do love books more than people. As all the dimensions of our humanity pass through symbols it is not so surprising that we are moved when one of the symbols is destroyed, because we feel that there is something in ourselves, our humanity, which is destroyed too. I started to write when I saw the destruction of the library of Timbuktu, the cemetery, the saints of Timbuktu... but I try to remember, that before symbols there are living people, men, women, children, who die from that situation too. In a perfect world we should be moved by the fate of people more than by the fate of symbols, but that is very complex.

In a perfect world we should be moved by the fate of people more than by the fate of symbols.

KR The symbols are important, but there is this futility of language mentioned by your characters as well.

MMS Every writer knows that language is a very powerful tool, maybe the only weapon he or she has, but, on the other hand, every writer can see very quickly how language is not touching the true depth of things. We try to reach something beyond – the truth – we try to find something essential with language. In the situation of violence there are many things you can do, many things to denounce, describe, and criticise to do with the situation. But on the other hand, you can say: These are only words, what can they do? Nevertheless, we have to go on talking and writing because we don’t have anything else – we are powerful, but also poor.

KR The question of language is also connected to the concept of justice you address. There is the Islamist leader shown in his ambivalence between arbitrariness – he likes the people pledging for their lives and to see them die, he likes to play God – and has the urge to instil the law of God. He is arguing, working with words as well: Is this why you give him so much space in the novel?

MMS Language and Justice are connected. Both are searching for a kind of truth. When justice is enacted it is to discover or to reveal or to find a kind of truth. Both are in a way united in that character of Abdel Karim. It might be very tempting to reduce him to a kind of beast, an incarnation of evil. But I thought it was more interesting to adopt his point of view. To describe him in his complexity as a human being. He is leading people who are very different from him, but he believes deeply in what he is doing. He has to punish his own men because he thinks they are acting in the absence of a sense of justice.

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My main idea relates to the notion of prophecy as a poetic language in literature and in music.

KR Why do you think that the people of Kaleb follow the Brotherhood?

MMS They are afraid and also versatile. Evil can lead them to change. Do they have something to die for?

Do they have something to lose? Do they follow the Brotherhood by conviction or do they follow by fear?

Sometimes it is a grey space between those two possibilities.

KR Was your novel discussed in Senegal, in Mali?

MMS Yes, in Senegal, in Mali, in Burkina Faso, in Niger, in many countries where Islamist terrorism is present. I feel this is because people found some of their own questions in the novel. Of course, I was really happy and surprised. A playwright from Burkina Faso recently adapted it for a theatre play which was very popular with the Burkina people. He told me that the people went to the scene, testified, and cried out: “That’s what we are living.

We see in that adaptation something of us.”

KR You have quoted Victor Hugo, Apollinaire, Heinrich Heine... but no African authors...

MMS That was something I regretted after the book was published. There were many African authors who wrote about the situation I could have mentioned: the Algerian author Yasmina Khadra, the great Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah…

KR You wrote four novels, but during your fellowship at the Akademie der Künste you worked with sound poetry – are you performing as well?

MMS I am not a performer in the strict sense, but a friend, the Chilean composer Francisco Alvarado and I often discuss the relationship between literature and music, we talk about both as a particular artistic and poetic language. We decided to do something around my fifth novel: my main idea relates to the notion of prophecy as a poetic language in literature and in music.

KR Prophecy in a religious or in a strictly poetic sense?

MMS In a very personal interpretation, because my next novel could be a work around the figure of my grand­ father. He was considered a kind of prophet locally. He’d say some things that would happen years and years later.

Every time I went back to Senegal, I’d see aunts and uncles and other family members and people of my village who would always say to me, you should write about your grandfather. So, I decided to see to that. He proph­esied that one of his grandsons would become a writer…

KR So, it’s a circle?

MMS Maybe I come from that the prophecy. I will see how I can deal with this idea of prophecy in a literary, poetic way.

KR Did you meet your grandfather?

MMS No, he died some years before my birth. There are many legends, myths, stories people tell me about him, which no one can verify, but they describe an excep­ tional man, someone really strange, really joyful, but also really scary. I will try to describe him in the book. But this is also about questioning the act of writing... one of

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the topics is memory, the timeline. Literature is always a type of time architecture.

KR Your work is often on the topic of memory…

MMS Writing is always an attempt to go deeply into our memory, a way of giving structure or – on the contrary – to deconstruct time. I deeply believe that what interests us human beings the most is not the future, but the past.

We are going toward our future, we are progressing... but what preoccupies us the most is not what is coming, but what has happened. In that way, literature is an investigation of time.

KR For the project Arbeit am Gedächtnis – Transforming Archives at the Academy, you participated in the discussion “Rewriting Memories”. There, you were talking about a language game called ñaangooj…

MMS Learning about the genealogy of our ancestors has always been done through that kind of play, as a way to teach young children their family history and how he or she is related to that family. And it’s also used as a way to stimulate young minds. I had this as a child with my mother, my grandmother, and many aunts. It is used as a way to teach the child to tell very simple stories and tales and to play with language.

KR Is it a female tradition?

MMS Most of time it is a tradition held by women. Indeed, I come from a culture in which mainly the women recount history, memory. So maybe it’s not the prophecy of my grandfather, but it is the tales, the narratives told by women that taught me how to tell stories.

KR What would you say are your expectations for literature?

MMS My expectations for literature are very high and also very humble. I expect everything from literature: the truth and revelation, I also expect to learn something deep and secret about our human condition. But at the same time, I know it is a game, it is not serious. I must not expect too much from literature, because if you expect too much from literature, it gives you not that much... I am in between: High expectations and no expectations. And this might be a definition of literature.

1 Mohamed Mbougar Sarr received the Prix Goncourt award a few days after this interview.

MOHAMED MBOUGAR SARR, born in Senegal, attended the high school and college of a military institute there, and studied literature and philosophy in Paris. So far, he has published three novels in French in which he questions the complex layers of reality in various places: terrorism in West Africa, the hospitality – or not – shown towards immigrants in Sicily, and homosexuality in Senegal. Currently, his attention is focused on literature itself: its power, its possibilities, its failures, its secrets.

At the opening of the JUNGE AKADEMIE work presentations on 12 March 2022, he will present a poetry sound performance.

KATHRIN RÖGGLA, a writer, is the vice president of the Akademie der Künste.

RESONATING STRUGGLES

Digital rights of use are not available for this image.

Paul Robeson sings at the Neues Deutschland press festival, 19 June 1960

PAUL AND ESLANDA ROBESON IN EAST BERLIN JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 17

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In 1965, the Akademie der Künste in East Berlin founded an archive in honour of their corresponding member, the world-famous African American singer, actor, author, and lawyer Paul Robeson (1898– 1965). It also contains part of the estate of his wife and business manager, the anthropologist and author Eslanda “Essie” Cardozo Goode Robeson (1895–1965), whose 1946 book, African Journey, was the first published volume about the African continent written by a Black woman. Therefore, the Paul Robeson Archive could more accurately be called the Paul and Eslanda Robeson Archive.

Its formation resulted from a very particular historical constellation. Between 1950 and 1958, Paul Robeson was neither allowed to perform in the US nor to leave the country because of his “Un-American”1 political view. In Manchester, England, the “Let Paul Robeson Sing” Committee advocated for Robeson’s freedom to work and travel; similar initiatives followed in several other countries, including in the GDR. Although the Robesons only visited the country a few times, they became household names in East Germany. As staunch communists and prominent activists in the US Civil Rights Movement, the Robesons seemed to fit perfectly the narrative of the internationalist, anti-racist socialism promoted by the GDR. Even after their passports had been returned to them, the work of the “Paul Robeson Committee” in the GDR proceeded: it maintained connections to supporters all over the world, promoted Paul Robeson’s celebrity status, organised his first visit to East Berlin in 1960 and, eventually, initiated the Paul Robeson Archive.

When the archive was taken over as a completed collection after the reunification of the East and West Academies, the material – much like the lives of Paul and Eslanda Robeson themselves – was forgotten for many years. Today, however, its reverberation could not be louder. The archive and its history poignantly demonstrate the historical ties between the American Civil Rights Movement and the postcolonial struggles for liberation, the internationalism of socialist countries, and the power politics of the Cold War. At the same time, it is precisely the recent rediscovery of the Robesons that underlines how incomplete both their struggle and today’s memory work are when it comes to the commitment to anti-racism and gender equality.

For the group exhibition Arbeit am Gedächtnis – Transforming Archives, which was on view at the Akademie der Künste from June to September 2021, composer and artist Matana Roberts engaged with the Paul Robeson Archive to create a sound installation about its Resonance, as the work is titled. The conversation between Matana Roberts, curator and theorist Doreen Mende, and historian Kira Thurman, moderated by composer and music professor George E. Lewis and printed on the following pages, is an excerpt from a panel discussion held at the Academy in June 2021.

LINA BRION is Assistant to the Director of Programming at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

NORA WEINELT is research fellow at the Institute for Comparative Literature / European Literatures at Augsburg University.

Eslanda Robeson (centre) at the opening of the trial of Hans Globke at the First Criminal Senate of the Supreme Court of the GDR, 8 July 1963, next to Greta Kuckhoff (right), communist Resistance member in Nazi Germany, from 1964 vice president of the Peace Council of the GDR.

Paul Robeson and Walter Ulbricht at the award ceremony of the Großer Stern der Völkerfreundschaft (Great Star of Friendship between Nations), 5 October 1960

MATANA ROBERTS My focus is on what it meant for Paul and Eslanda Robeson to be from the United States yet not to be accepted as citizens in their country. It has a lot to do with the power of memory and the power of history that Paul and Eslanda Robeson pulled on in order to stay committed to a very futurist vision that they had for themselves, while at the same time living very visionary lives. I was stunned, time and time again, by how they could continue to get back up, day after day, while being knocked down over and over again by their own birth country and also, in a sense, kind of paraded around as propaganda. I took great inspiration from the ways in which they inserted themselves into different cultures and into different communities, the ways in which they broadened their reach and understanding of what it means to be a global citizen at a time when I’m not sure Americans, let alone African Americans, were being given a chance to think about that.

DOREEN MENDE I first came across Eslanda Robeson in Barbara Ransby’s biography Eslanda.2 In the Paul Robeson Archive of the Akademie der Künste, I found a few boxes about her. I chose to work with Eslanda Robeson as a kind of a transgenerational voice and as a point of entry to study and engage in the trajectories of a Black, often intersectional feminism, of an anti-colonialism, an internationalism that had been crossing the geography of the East. But I chose to work with Eslanda Robeson as an interlocutor also, to think about a world-making after internationalism. Eslanda Robeson was a prolific writer, speaker, and traveller. Her reports are fantastic, for example “140,000,000 Women Can’t Be Wrong”, which she published in 1954. My approach to the archive is very much informed by acknowledging the struggles that both Eslanda and Paul Robeson were experiencing, not only during their lifetimes, but throughout the archive in process. So how do we engage with an archival substance – or maybe we could call this an antiphonal sub-

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 17

stance, a substance that is speaking back and resonating, vibrating in the present – while considering the violence of erasure and the violence of exclusion in the 1970s, 1980s, but specifically also in 1989, 1992, when the global world order rearranged itself?

KIRA THURMAN As a historian and musicologist, I want to talk about the context in East Germany for understanding Paul and Eslanda Robeson’s visit there in 1960.

And that’s to show, I think in the same way as perhaps Matana and Doreen, how extraordinary Paul and Eslanda Robeson were – but also that they were part of the greater context of African Americans coming to East Germany in the 1950s and 1960s. It was a sort of mutual, symbiotic relationship: East Germany held up African Americans as political symbols and used them as a legitimating tool, and rightly so in a lot of ways. They pointed out that they stood in solidarity with African American civil rights, that they understood and were supportive of anti-colonialist struggles and anti-capitalist struggles, and recognised the problems of racism. East Germany positioned itself as a land and as a space that was welcoming to African American political activists. Angela Davis came to visit, Martin Luther King Jr. came to visit, Paul Robeson as well. There is a fascinating, long history of African American entanglements with East Germany; for example, African American soldiers stationed in Germany occasionally left the military to live in the GDR. But it also went both ways; it was also really useful for African Americans to travel to East Germany. They could use it as a form of international pressure in communicating back in the United States, “Look at all of the support we have from around the world.”

When I think about Paul Robeson’s tour in 1960 and him getting the Peace Medal from the GDR, it very much fits that model and that mould, and the ways in which they chose to celebrate him reflected that. I’m going to be the most critical of how Paul Robeson was often received in East Germany. He fit the mould so well of

what the East German state and a lot of East Germans were looking for: a sort of African American hero. But what I also look at in my research is that there are other African Americans who, when they did not fit that model, were not treated so well. The initiative to bring Paul and Eslanda Robeson to East Germany was a powerful moment of international solidarity in the wake of Paul Robeson finally getting his passport back. But nonetheless, I am suspicious of how people understood (American) Blackness.

Paul Robeson and Aubrey Pankey, American baritone and Lieder singer, who emigrated to the GDR in 1956, 5 October 1960

He fit the mould so well of what the East German state and a lot of East Germans were looking for: a sort of African American hero. Kira Thurman

Digital rights of use are not available for this image.

Paul Robeson and Helene Weigel, 5 October 1960

GEORGE E. LEWIS What I’m thinking most about at the moment is Shana L. Redmond’s extraordinary hermeneutic treatment of Paul Robeson in her recent book, Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson, which takes its title from an Eslanda Robeson quote.

She writes: “Everything, everybody, asked him to be everywhere.”3 It’s kind of funny, I’m an African American academic at a big-time institution, and that really is still the case. The few Black academics are called upon to be a part of diversity committees in order to hide the lack of diversity in these institutions. Now, a recurring theme in Redmond’s book is the primary role of voice as productive of social status, cultural image. Sound becomes a prime site for struggles over representation as a resource. Her chapter on vibration connects the sensory aspect of personal listening to Robeson, and that folds

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out into an account of how his voice could move audiences to reassemble themselves as political and social actors. I think both Matana Roberts and Kira Thurman address the consequences of this issue in their works.

But I’d like to turn towards Doreen. I was researching your important concept of archival metabolism, which considers the archival system as a transformative one with the possibility to initiate what is not yet there. With that, you also suggest a performativity of the archive.

You write: “What if the archive whispers dissonantly in various voices and operates within transgenerational time and misunderstandings, deracinating the mechanisms of linear narratives?”4 Here, I thought that a discussion of the relation between archive and performance could be helpful. I was thinking of performance theorist Diana Taylor’s 2003 book, The Archive and The Repertoire,5 which is a wide-ranging and strongly politically inflected analysis that rightly identifies the fiction of the internally unchanging, stable, unmediated archive.

Extending Taylor, I take archival metabolism as the sense in which an archive actually enacts a repertoire. So, you get an apparently disembodied memory that nonetheless produces gestures, orality, dance, and movement.

And in the case of Paul Robeson: voice. How does that feel to you?

DM That’s really an amazing observation, thank you. And one that has become extremely important, specifically while working on archival substances departing from political geographies of anti-imperialist politics, of solidarities, political friendships, of forms of internationalism that have infrastructurally and institutionally pretty much disappeared after 1989 and 1990. Or rather, they have been violently erased or repressed. Archival metabolism is an attempt to look to these historic moments as transhistorical, transgenerational moments while considering the extreme tension between these macro­ political infrastructures of state socialisms. Yet we do not only have the macrostructure of a socialist kind of entity, which sits in the global Cold War, but also the microsocial potencies that come across in the form of practices of the undocumented, of what is whispered, of what is slipping through. In an interview with Radio East Berlin in 1963, the interviewer continuously misnames Eslanda as Esmalda, but also says the N-word, which is so disturbing, until Eslanda very loudly says, “ES-LAN-DA is my name.” It’s about these elements that would usually slip through a more classical historical observation but that matter for a contemporary approach to the archive, let’s say from a more curatorial/politics perspective – which I think is necessary, specifically for the kind of narratives and archival substances that speak of independence, liberation, or a Black internationalism.

You can’t just copy and paste these ideas into the present condition. They need processing. And this is what

I have always looked to history as a sense of coping with a certain sort of layers and layers upon filters that I have to deal with as a Black body in the world. Matana Roberts

24

Digital rights of use are not available for this image.

Germany and Austria. How can we think more seriously and more critically about Black German expressions and Black German activism? In fact, I was wondering if the Paul Robeson Archive is the only “official” archive in Germany dedicated to a Black person – to an African American, not to a Black German. I say that also because in Berlin there is a Black German centre called Each One Teach One (EOTO); it’s a makeshift archive that has been forming in the last ten to twenty years. And there are some materials about May Ayim at the Freie Universität, but they have never really been processed. It’s important to think about decolonisation efforts, and it’s worth asking whose voices we do and do not hear in the archives.

GEL You’re making me think about the non-official archives, which are thus placing pressure on the mainstream regimes, such as the SAVVY Contemporary here in Berlin and their work on Anton Wilhelm Amo, the 18th-century Black German philosopher.

Eslanda Robeson speaks at the mass rally to mark the International Day of Remembrance for Victims of Fascist Terror, 13 September 1959

this concept tries to do. I would like to see it as a methodology for decolonising socialism, decolonising internationalism, which has not always only been anti-imperialist and anti-fascist.

GEL Kira Thurman, you just published this amazing book, Singing like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. You recount the experiences of Afrodiasporic Bach performers in Germany, stretching back more than a century, and situate the struggles and triumphs of African American Lieder singers there. Now, in your essay about Paul Robeson’s 1960 performances in the GDR, you write: “Robeson’s tour created the opportunity for East Germans to redress or reaffirm their own beliefs about Blacks and musical aesthetics. East Germans also reinforced their own constructs of race and African American identity, praising him for evoking a particular kind of Black authenticity they admired.”6 And I was reminded that, often enough, the archive, especially perhaps this one, comes bundled with a kind of anxiety. I’m thinking here about James A. Snead’s well-known essay “On Repetition in Black Culture”.7 He saw the use of repetition in ways that encourage the self-bounded cultural entity to maintain a sense of continuity about itself. So, does the reception of Paul Robeson in the GDR reflect not only German constructions of race and African American identity, but also Germany’s own constructions of its own identity?

KT I think the answer, at least in an East German context, is yes. One of the reasons why I think Paul Robeson is held up is because he is so comfortably un-German as well, so in a way they can celebrate him without necessarily having to wrestle with East German anti-Black racism. And that’s maybe the thing that’s missing and the context that I’m trying to bring with my book. It is taking seriously what those German anti-Black racisms look like and how we can put it in conversation with this very long history of African American musicians going to

Digital rights of use are not available for this image.

Eslanda Robeson receives the Deutsche Friedensmedaille (German Peace Medal), 8 July 1963

Now, what I got in your paper, and this takes me back to repetition, is this ongoing repeated effort to deploy the Robeson story as an epistemological other. You quote all this press reception. He was a Black giant, a Black prophet, a Black Jesus, a Black Saint Francis, their Black brother, et cetera. Oh, yeah, and did I mention he was Black? Was this kind of dynamic limited to the GDR and its interpretation of socialism, or do we find similar resonances today?

KT There are similar resonances. One way in which societies try to limit Black people is through musical reception and the expectations that we place on Black bodies.

Sonic and visual expectations of Black people and what they should look and sound like and that need to somehow confirm or conform with people’s ideals. So many conversations about Paul Robeson’s voice are just tied into these longstanding stereotypes of Black voices as dark, smoky. I see this across the board for any Black

[...] an archive actually enacts a repertoire.

So, you get an apparently disembodied memory that nonetheless produces gestures, orality, dance, and movement. George E. Lewis musician; you can be a soprano, and somebody is still going to say, oh, dark, smoky.

GEL Matana, you wrote in your essay about resonance: “There have been times in my own life when I have looked to history to cope with my experiences of just being a Black body in a vast world.”8 And to me, that points to a kind of empathy in your encounter with the Robeson Archive. Later you write: “The term resonance can be defined as ‘the quality in a sound of being deep, full, and reverberating’ or, when thinking about resonance as applied to an image, it brings to mind ideas of clarity, of depending upon your own associated memories and experiences.” Now, for me, empathy is also a form of resonance. You made a piece in dialogue with the Robeson Archive. What is that piece about?

MR I have always looked to history as a sense of coping with a certain sort of layers and layers upon filters that I have to deal with as a Black body in the world, as a Black artist whose work has to constantly be filtered through a white gaze in order to garner support or criticality. Rarely do I get to intercept with the Black gaze first, other than my own. Looking in the archive made me think a lot about how the lives of Black artists through generations are essentially theme and variations. I’m not certain that I would have been able to handle the things that Paul and Eslanda Robeson have been through. But still, because of the perniciousness of systematic racism and the way in which it still sits within the root work in most institutions, looking at their work I recognise a reminder to stay in the fight. And I got from the archive just massive inspiration to remain a Black body in the world, to remain a Black artist in the world, to continue to push through and hold my head as high as I can to create the world that I wish to see.

1 In 1956, Paul Robeson was subpoenaed to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

2 See Barbara Ransby, Eslanda: The Large and Uncon­ ventional Life of Eslanda Robeson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014).

3 See Shana L. Redmond, Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), p. 14.

4 Doreen Mende, “The Undutiful Daughter’s Concept of Archival Metabolism”, e-flux, no. 93 (September 2018), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/93/215339/theundutiful-daughter-s-concept-of-archival-metabolism/ 5 See Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

6 Kira Thurman, “Ol’ Man River in the Promised Land: Paul Robeson in East Germany”, in L. Brion, ed., Arbeit am Gedächtnis – Transforming Archives, exh. cat. (Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 2021), pp. 90–92, here p. 90.

7 James A. Snead, “On Repetition in Black Culture”, Black American Literature Forum, vol. 15, no. 4 (1981), pp.

146–54.

8 Matana Roberts, “Resonance”, in L. Brion, ed., Arbeit am Gedächtnis — Transforming Archives, pp. 32–33.

MATANA ROBERTS is a composer, band leader, saxophonist, sound experimentalist, and mixed-media practitioner. Best known for the acclaimed Coin Coin project, the aims of which are to expose the mystical roots and channel the traditions of American creative expression, Roberts has dealt intensively with narrative, historical, social, and political forms of expression within improvisatory musical structures. In 2019, Roberts was a fellow in the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program.

KIRA THURMAN is a historian and Assistant Professor of History and Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan with a focus on the relationship between music, German national identity, and Central Europe’s historical and contemporary relationship with the Black diaspora. Together with colleagues across the United States and Europe, and supported by the German Historical Institute Washington, DC, she runs the public history website blackcentraleurope.com.

DOREEN MENDE, a curator, theorist, and educator,

GEORGE E. LEWIS is the Edwin H. Case Professor

has been head of the research department at the Staat-

of American Music at Columbia University in New York

liche Kunstsammlung Dresden (SKD) since 2021. Since

City. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts

2015, she has been professor of curatorial/politics and

and Sciences and a corresponding fellow of the British

director of the Critical Curatorial Cybernetic Research

Academy as well as being a member of the Association

Practices Master and PhD Forum at the Visual Arts De-

for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and, since

partment of HEAD Genève (Geneva). Moreover, she is

November 2021, a member of the Akademie der Künste

Principal Investigator of the research project “Decolo-

Music Section. He is widely regarded to be a pioneer

nizing Socialism: Entangled Internationalism” (2019–

of interactive computer music, creating programs that

24), and is a founding member of the Harun Farocki In-

improvise in concert with human musicians.

stitute in Berlin.

This excerpt has been edited by Nora Weinelt.

The video recording of the entire conversation can be found on www.adk.de

Paul Robeson in front of Humboldt University in Berlin after being awarded the Großer Stern der Völkerfreundschaft (Great Star of Friendship between Nations) by the GDR government, the Deutsche Friedensmedaille (German Peace Medal) by the Peace Council of the GDR, and the honorary doctor’s degree of Humboldt University, 5 October 1960.

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 17

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Two Poems by Meena Kandasamy In the poem “Written in Stone”, I employ the classical Tamil Sangam poetry tradition of framing love poetry using quoted speech, where several points of view are juxtaposed, creating an intimate world of He Said, She Said, What His Girlfriend Said to Her, and so on. Sangam poetry has an antiquity of over two thousand years, which is the reason for choosing to mimic its structures in this poem, to highlight that love has always had a striferidden existence, and that all of love is birthed in this continuum.

Sangam poetry also abounds in rich descriptions of nature and the ecological landscape, and here a woman looks back at her relationship with her lover, remembers all the metaphors that relate to stone, which is at once primeval and enduring. This is an intensely personal poem. Even as the world outside is turning increasingly sectarian and casteist, and men and women are being killed (honour killings) for daring to love against diktats, this poem seeks to preserve a tiny universe of precious intimacy.

The poem “The Discreet Charm of Neoliberalism” takes on the impossibility of wresting language away from neoliberalism’s total hijack of it. The examples cited result from my discussions with the Dalit woman leader of a powerful trade union in Tamil Nadu, who was lamenting about the sinister nexus between capitalists and the NGO sector – and how the NGO sector has been deployed to give a positive spin on the havoc wreaked by capitalism. Feminism and the empowerment of women are words easily co-opted by neoliberalism. Democracy, change, people, power – any word with a radical connotation is soon appropriated by neoliberalism. In this milieu, where do we look for a language that does not serve the exploitative ruling class? Can truth only be spoken between lovers? How can a poem – a space where truth is smuggled in for safekeeping – peel away the hypocrisy of neoliberal onslaught on language, simultaneously reiterating trust in words? This is what prompted me to write the second poem, which is again, evidently, an autobiographical poem. The waiting for the lover is symbolic, it signifies that there is still hope for love and truth, even as we live under a devastating economic system.

Meena Kandasamy

On the opening night of the JUNGE AKADEMIE’s work presentations on 3 March 2022, Meena Kandasamy will give a presentation of her political poetry.

WRITTEN IN STONE WHAT SHE OFTEN SAID TO HER LOVER

How are you so stone-hearted?

Why this stony-silence?

WHAT HER MOTHER SAID TO HER

What did he say? Did he even react?

Did he commit, did he evade as always?

Was he quiet as the sunken stone sitting at the bottom of a well?

WHAT HER FATHER SAID TO HER

I love you, my difficult daughter.

I love that you love each other.

Hear me out for I’m an old man: What will this world say?

Will you be able to face all their stone-throwing?

WHAT SHE ALSO SAID TO HER LOVER MANY, MANY YEARS LATER

Those who reject you today Will tomorrow worship you in stone There will be your statue in every village Everyone will name their sons after you.

WHAT HE SAID ONCE UPON A TIME BEFORE THEIR STORY EVEN STARTED

From the hardest sun-facing rock, where there is not a drop of water there sprouts one lonely seed, sends forth its tiniest leaves, takes root. It is in the nature of stone to stay firm, to put stiff resistance, but faced with so much tenderness, such faith, it gives way.

This is the nature of love.

This is love.

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THE DISCREET CHARM OF NEOLIBERALISM In a world that really has been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood.

Guy Debord

We call ourselves poets, believe our words are weapons against oppressors, walk around with bravado for being such truth-smugglers.

Neoliberalism is not a word that belongs in any poem, I reason while I paint my toenails red, wear kohl and wait for my lover who kisses me, always, on the eyelids first.

Love births a million poems.

In the restlessness of mine, my lover sneaks through, a repeat offender, arriving first in my poems, then in my arms saying, ennadi chellam?

Neoliberalism knows how to spin, I say: When workers flock to sweatshops: the working conditions have improved and, when workers leave in droves: the community has been sensitized.

How to spin about a spin master? — a question I want to ask, but do not.

He kisses me as though all words have been obliterated — makes love, making me birth afresh a language always, already there.

Days later, we take up where we left off — he says, they have reduced language to a rotting corpse, and I wince at the serrated edges of his words.

Neoliberalism finds room in a poem.

MEENA KANDASAMY is a poet and novelist who was born in Chennai, India. She has published two collections of poetry, Touch (2006) and Ms Militancy (2010). Her critically acclaimed debut novel, The Gypsy Goddess (2014), tells the story of the 1968 Kilvenmani massacre. Her second novel, a work of autobiographical fiction, When I Hit You: Or, The Portrait of the Writer As A Young Wife (2017) was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2018. Her latest novel, Exquisite Cadavers (2019), is a work of experimental fiction that investigates storytelling. She divides her time between London and Tamil Nadu. She received the Berlin Fellowship 2020 of the JUNGE AKADEMIE at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 17

27

CARTE BLANCHE

SASHA KURMAZ

SASHA KURMAZ, born 1986 in Kiev, graduated from the

themes. In most of his works, he plays a game of depowering

Design Department at the National Academy of Culture and Arts

power structures, explores the changing relationship between

Management in Kiev. He uses photography, video, and public

human beings and the modern world, and examines the

interventions in his artistic practice, through which he studies

tension between the citizen and the state. In 2020 he received

social interrelationships that address both poetic and political

a scholarship from the JUNGE AKADEMIE in Visual Arts.

30

NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVES

AWAKENING A YEARNING FOR A DIFFERENT STATE OF THE WORLD

THE CONGENIAL COLLABORATION BETWEEN ERICH WONDER AND HEINER MÜLLER Stephan Suschke

Der Auftrag, director: Heiner Müller, Schauspiel Bochum, 1982

36

Heiner Müller and Erich Wonder met for the first time in the mid-1970s at the municipal theatre Schauspiel Frankfurt. This led to an extraordinary working friendship that was to last until Müller’s death. Frankfurt am Main – where Wonder was engaged as a stage designer at Schauspiel Frankfurt from 1972 to 1978 – had a formative influence on him: “Frankfurt was the decisive factor for me. We really got about back then, lived in the station district but travelled to the outskirts of the city.

It was quite an experience to bring this aesthetic into the theatre. It had to do with the lighting, which wasn’t usual for the time – an aesthetic of bringing inside all the action from outside.”1 All of this happened against a backdrop of the demonstrations and brutal street clashes that made political and aesthetic certainties obsolete. Theatre-makers also opened themselves up to the reality going on outside, and, like Wonder,

imported the reality into the huge boxes of the municipal playhouses. The American cinema of the late 1960s and early 1970s had a marked aesthetic impact on this.

Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese discovered the artificial light of the city: “Colourful, aggressive, flickering neon lights, snack bars at night, murky gambling dens, bare light bulbs dangling from slim cables – all these were among the impressions that caught you by surprise visually, spatially and physically.” 2 Wonder absorbed these impressions and expanded the theatre’s visual toolkit by using special spotlights. This period also saw the beginning of seminal working relationships with Luc Bondy and Jürgen Flimm. With these two, as well as directors – the likes of Hans Neuenfels, Ruth Berghaus, and Peter Mussbach – he conquered Europe’s theatre and opera stages for many years to come.

The first performance of a play by the East German playwright Heiner Müller in West Germany was PHILOKTET at Munich’s Residenztheater in 1968. At the beginning of the 1970s, Ruth Berghaus at the Berliner Ensemble and Benno Besson at the Volksbühne staged several productions by Müller, who had been banned several times

by East Germany’s cultural bureaucrats. Müller soon became the foremost playwright, the most controversial contemporary writer in both parts of Germany. Wonder and Müller meeting for the first time in 1977 was a unique encounter between two exceptional artists who normally would have remained separated by the Iron Curtain: a highly talented man in his mid-thirties from Burgenland in Austria met the almost 50-year-old Müller from Saxony; they soon started working on joint projects. The first of these came about in March 1979 at the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus: ROSEBUD, performed by the actor Fritz Schediwy, on a stage designed by Wonder, was a collaged rendition of Wonder’s dreams with literary set pieces by Müller, including an excerpt from DIE HAMLETMASCHINE. Their first theatre collaboration came to fruition in 1982 at the Schauspielhaus Bochum. DER AUFTRAG was a play about revolution, betrayal, and death: “It was the overriding idea of Wonder, the stage designer in Bochum, that you have to make it clear to the audience that they are voyeurs. Voyeurs can never see everything they want to see. So, we designed a space that excludes the audience from the action again and again.”3 Since Wonder needed “independent projects” in order to “survive artistically” in a theatre world in overdrive, he repeatedly worked in public space at a distance from theatres, for example, at documenta in 1987 – MAeLSTROMSÜDPOL, a performance for which Müller wrote a text set to music by Heiner Goebbels. Adapted to play at different venues, this work was also performed on the Landwehr Canal in Berlin and at the VOEST works in Linz.

In 1986, Müller was offered a production at the Deutsches Theater Berlin. To the surprise of the theatre’s director Dieter Mann, he proposed DER LOHNDRÜCKER (The Scab), a “production piece” from East Germany’s early years that seemed to have little to do with the current issues of the time. From the outset, Müller wanted to engage Wonder – who had neither visited East Germany nor seen an East German factory – for this production. The production celebrated its premiere at the Deutsches Theater Berlin in 1988.

Wonder designed an alien world hovering between archaic scenery and a high-tech future. The oven, which was to become a fiery furnace on set, played a key role in the stage design. In Wonder’s interpretation, the set was a cross between a tank turret and a bunker, the continuation of war by other means. Müller’s associations were “oven = Auschwitz = Chernobyl”.

Müller took stock in the face of East Germany’s incipient death throes. A play that intended to lend impetus to the building of the state became, Müller explained with reference to his own production, “the diagnosis of a congenital disorder that had developed into an incurable disease of this structure, of this society”.

Preparations for their second joint production at the Deutsches Theater – HAMLET/MASCHINE – got under way in February 1989. The desolate economic and political conditions in East Germany, the flood of people leaving the country, and the fall of the Berlin Wall were the foil for rehearsals. By the time, after almost seven

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 17

Sketches by Erich Wonder for Das Auge des Taifuns, Vienna, 1992

37

reality, Wonder brought this reality into the theatre on the visual level. Neither of them was concerned with realistic representation, always only with artificial translation. To them, their collaborative theatre evenings were all about creating an alternative world that made you want to question the existing one.

1 Koschka Hetzer-Molden, ed., Erich Wonder. Bühnenbilder / Stage Design (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2000), p. 64.

2 Elisabeth Schweeger, ed., Erich Wonder, Raum-Szenen/ Szenen-Raum (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 1986), p. 18.

3 “‘Was ein Kunstwerk kann, ist Sehnsucht wecken nach einem anderen Zustand der Welt.’ Ein Gespräch mit Urs Jenny und Hellmuth Karasek über VERKOMMENES UFER, den Voyeurismus und die Aufführungspraxis in beiden deutschen Staaten” (1983) [“‘What a work of art can do is awaken a longing for a different state of the world.’ A conversation with Urs Jenny and Hellmuth Karasek about VERKOMMENES UFER (Dead Shore), voyeurism, and performance practice in both German states” (1983)], in Heiner Müller, Werke 10: Gespräche 1.

1965–1987 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008), pp. 266–79, here 274.

4 “Heiner Müller”, in Stephan Suschke, Müller macht Theater. Zehn Inszenierungen und ein Epilog (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2003), p. 141.

5 Schweeger, Erich Wonder, Raum-Szenen/Szenen-Raum, p. 17.

STEPHAN SUSCHKE worked closely with Heiner Müller on his productions at the Deutsches Theater Berlin and the Berliner Ensemble from 1987 to 1995. He became deputy director of the Berliner Ensemble in 1996, and was artistic director from 1997 to 1999. From 1999 he worked as a freelance director; he has been acting director at the Landestheater Linz since the 2016/17 season.

Heiner Müller, Der Lohndrücker, Deutsches Theater Berlin, 1988; top: directing team with technical staff, in the middle Heiner Müller and Erich Wonder; below: rehearsal, stage set-up, in the middle Erich Wonder. Photos by Sibylle Bergemann

months, the premiere took place on 24 March 1990, East Germany’s demise had already been sealed by the first free elections a week earlier. Thus, the eight-hour production became a requiem for a state in the process of extinction. In an initial conversation, Müller described the stage design somewhat flippantly as “from ice cube to stock cube”. Wonder translated the play into a stage set of shifting climates. Müller commented, “The next century is bound to be a century of climate disasters [...]. It will start in the ice and end in the desert.”4 On 16 May 1992, another intervention/performance – DAS AUGE DES TAIFUN (The Eye of the Typhoon) – took place on the Burgring in Vienna, which Wonder described as a “movement of baroque stage machinery”. Müller proposed texts by Pliny the Younger and Adalbert Stifter woven into a music collage by Blixa Bargeld for the experimental music group Einstürzende Neubauten.

Their final joint project took them to Bayreuth. In TRISTAN AND ISOLDE, Müller called into question the romanticised love affair between the couple; he was interested in the coldness of love in a militaristic male world

38

that results in isolation, which found expression in the production in spacious interiors in Wonder’s cool, mono­ chrome set designs. The premiere in 1993 at the Bayreuth Festival divided an audience already accustomed to scandal. The performance was cheered and booed, before it attracted acclaim in the ensuing years and gained legendary status.

The secret of the Wonder–Müller collaboration lay in their respect for each other’s autonomy: in Wonder, Müller had found a set designer in whose stage designs his texts could “rest”; and in Müller, Wonder had found a director who allowed his set designs their own dynamic, taking them as an opportunity for playful thinking rather than functionally constraining them. Müller suited the self-conception of Wonder’s that: “I want to zoom into the sets. I want the close-up on stage. That’s why I see myself as a camera operator who builds spaces, and the opposite of an architect who designs static buildings.”5 While Müller had been searching, both thematically and technically, since the 1960s, for structures in his theatre texts that reflected an increasingly complex

ERICH WONDER – SETS OF WONDER FOR HEINER MÜLLER 16 January–13 March 2022, Akademie der Künste, Pariser Platz The exhibition examines Heiner Müller and Erich Wonder’s collaborative work processes. Much of it put on public view for the first time, there are paintings and large-format watercolours by Erich Wonder, texts by Heiner Müller, photographs by Sibylle Bergemann, costumes by Yohji Yamamoto, and film excerpts from the legendary productions DER LOHNDRÜCKER and HAMLET/MASCHINE, dating back more than thirty years. The Akademie der Künste is acquiring Erich Wonder’s artistic archive, which, like the exhibition, provides a memory for the future.

BEHIND THE MEMBRANE THE ELECTROACOUSTIC STUDIO

OF THE AKADEMIE DER KÜNSTE Malte Giesen

The AMS3 synthesiser, custom-made for the Akademie der Künste

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 17

Creative endeavours at the Studio for Electroacoustic (EA) Music have successfully weathered the consider­ able restrictions imposed on the activities of many artists over the last year and a half; the often-solitary experimenting and tinkering in the studio remained possible throughout. Here, perhaps the impact of the temporary halt in the otherwise-hectic cultural scene was not entirely negative for artistic output: detached from the usual round of festivals and events, many artists were thrown back to their inner interests and themes, far removed from commissions, the wishes of event organisers, and the urge to address contemporary issues. In a certain respect, the studio also represented a sanctuary, an occasional and isolated space (if only acoustically) for the exploration of audio phenomena, well away from the perpetual state of pandemic anxiety.

Now that we are increasingly entering calmer waters pandemically, it is up to us to use this pause accordingly, to reflect, to evaluate new findings, and to see what happened before in a new light. Numerous conversations with artists yielded the realisation that the last years’ extreme societal pressure markedly changed many artists’ view of their own work. At any rate, seamlessly taking up the topics and trends of 2019 is out of the question.

One of the most special features of the Akademie der Künste’s EA studio is that, unlike many other studios, it is not affiliated to any educational establishment. It is a place of purely artistic production, a public institution that, in accordance with the Academy’s definition as a society of artists, makes its resources and infrastructure available for creative purposes first and foremost to its own members, but also to the general public.

Through links to the various sections of the Academy, the studio is fundamentally open to all disciplines and consciously fosters exchange and cooperation between the arts.

This year, for example, members from various sections of the Academy – Arnold Dreyblatt, Carola Bauckholt, Ulrike Draesner, and Peter Ablinger – made use of the studio for projects. Also, the Radio Choreographies recently produced here by the choreographer and dancer Netta Weiser, the choral recordings for the musical theatre work Chthuluzän by Therese Schmidt and Wolfgang Heiniger, and a radio-play production by Annedore Bauer further testify to the studio’s role as a facilitator of interdisciplinary contacts.

“So rarely do you have the opportunity to actually experiment in a recording studio.

The economic setup I’m used to doesn’t allow for experimentation – you book the studio, and you have to use your time efficiently so you don’t go dramatically over budget. Having access to the Akademie der Künste’s remarkable equipment, exquisite microphones, meticulously positioned loudspeakers, and expert staff is a totally exceptional experience for me in my work.

Having the space, time, and support to experiment and feel free to play in the

39

Panoramic view of the Studio for Electroacoustic Music

studio has opened up new avenues that I can now pursue in my work.”

Jessie Marino, composer

In recent decades, the legitimacy of the tradition-steeped studio has been repeatedly questioned and its obsolescence claimed. The fate of the famous Electronic Studio in Cologne is probably illustrative of this: for decades, the equipment of the historically outstanding Cologne studio has been stored in the basement rooms of the WDR television studio, maintained by Volker Müller who died this year, still without an answer to where it should be housed and how it should be preserved. Nevertheless, nothing has changed in terms of the need for such institutions. Although today’s laptops can relatively cheaply contain software for what would have hitherto been a whole truckload of hardware equipment, worth the equivalent of a semi-detached house, the key elements of a studio – loudspeakers and microphones – remain high-end professional products, often still handcrafted rather than being outsourced to low-wage countries. They are the only devices that actually operate with the acoustic sound that we are capable of hearing: the microphone as a portal into the electrical and ultimately digital sphere, so to speak, and the loudspeaker as the only object in the studio that produces sound. The special acoustic environment – insulated walls, decoupled floor, acoustically tight doors – is also a significant cost factor.

40

All the more important, therefore, are institutions like the Studio for Electroacoustic Music, which, despite its structural proximity to the ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe and the Experimental Studio in Freiburg, is unique as a federal institution in making these resources and infrastructure accessible to and usable by the general public. So that the studio can continue to perform this task, we must, in addition to the Aufhebung (preserving and changing) of tradition (in the Hegelian sense), look ahead, and current developments in society, technology, and aesthetics must be an immediate part of the studio’s work.

Digital and analogue: digitisation is a term much bandied about by politicians and business people. But after almost two years of social distancing and life in 2D, as human beings with mental faculties and social needs, we are now having to “go analogue”. Only now are we becoming aware of the uniqueness and peculiarities of physical contact, presence in space, and communication that transcends pixelated faces and fragmented voices in digital tiles.

The same also applies to the future topics of electroacoustic music and the tasks of the studio: beyond conventional stereophony, we facilitate multichannel setups of spatial sound – that is, sound not projected within a space but as an acoustic event in a real acoustic space – and explore the possible translation of this experience into the digital sphere with the aid of 360-degree microphones, binaural recording setups,1 and historical artefacts such as Hermann Scherchen’s spherical loudspeaker known as the “Nullstrahler” and

their interfacing with virtual reality (VR) technology, which has so far been focused on the visual. In the consumer sphere too, there is a desire to extend classical stereo­ phony towards three-dimensional sound, more commonly known as “immersive audio”.

A central concern is to overcome the dichotomy between the analogue and the digital, the tactile and the abstract, in which the digital, rather than being a substitute for the analogue, both complements and generates tension with it.

“A studio is always also a social space, which is always much more important to us than the machinery: the atmosphere and people’s friendliness and openmindedness.”

Wolfgang Heiniger, composer

As a still relatively young discipline, electroacoustic music is perhaps in a good initial position for the social discourses to come. This art form evolved in an already partially globalised world – the first piece to be taperecorded (or better: wire-recorded) was produced by the Egyptian composer Halim El-Dabh. In Russia, Leo Theremin developed the instrument that bore his name,

which could be played without physical contact and produced electroacoustic sounds. The North American Reed Ghazala has been considered the father of circuit bending since the 1960s, and in Japan, an independent variant of Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète of the 1950s in France, dubbed “Japanoise”, developed in the 1980s.

Electroacoustic music has, however, been institutionalised and anchored in the educational system mainly in the Western world. Here, there are still imbalances with regard to the diversity of the artists, the majority of them being male, perhaps due mainly to its technical nature and the stereotype of “male tinkering” that still clings to the creative process. The recently released film Sisters with Transistors, however, shows the impressive work of the female pioneers of electroacoustic music.

At the Akademie der Künste studio, we make deliberate efforts to overcome this imbalance: in the last three years, 45 per cent of the thirty-three artists that have worked in the studio have been female, and 21 per cent have come from a non-white background. In addition, the educational threshold for access to electroacoustic music does not seem to be as high as in the middle-class classical music scene: quite a few of the artists here are self-taught, technically and artistically.

Another important consideration for the future is the topic of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI).

In the field of the arts too, and especially in electroacoustic music, machine learning technologies such as sound synthesis and processing – having evolved from voice cloning and deep fake software as well as sample-based feedback recurrent neural networks (RNN) and style-

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 17

copy­ing generators – are still in their infancy. In the work of artists, unlike in the commercial “culture industry”, humans will not be replaced by these technologies.

Instead, the latter will always be tools and playmates, fields of discourse, and sources of aesthetic and conceptual inspiration.

“During my residency, I developed my Radio Choreography project, which involved recording sessions with a dancer, singer, and pianist in unconventional settings along with sound design work. Working as a choreographer in an electroacoustic music studio is unusual, and the successful realisation of my vision depended in many ways on dialogue with the studio team and sound engineer. Thanks to the team’s commitment, expertise, and eagerness to experiment, as well as the studio’s space and equipment, we succeeded in realising my artistic vision in the best possible way.”

Netta Weiser, dancer/choreographer

In our everyday lives, the loudspeaker is omnipresent and has thus become invisible (and inaudible) as a medium.

The sound from loudspeakers, headphones, et cetera is a virtual acoustic reality in which the physical reality of the loudspeaker is intended to vanish. To reveal the loudspeaker’s medial and intrinsic qualities, to see and hear behind the membrane, so to speak, and to sharpen and sensitise our consciousness for acoustic reality, has always been, and still is, the ambition of electroacoustic music. The electroacoustic utopias of the 1950s and ’60s, which led us to believe that we had overcome the physiological limitations of classical instruments, have today given way to predominantly dystopian forecasts and visions of the future – although a sense of new departures currently seems within reach. The existential experience of what is possible in exceptional situations – politically, socially, and technologically – will have an impact on the future work of artists and the studio in every respect. For the future, it will be more important than ever to listen in all directions, attentively, closely, and with open minds.

1 Recordings with an artificial head that replicates the acoustic reflection characteristics and the differences in running time between the ears.

MALTE GIESEN, composer and interpreter of New Music, has been head of the Studio for Electroacoustic Music at the Akademie der Künste since June 2021.

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ARCHIVING THE EPHEMERAL

For several decades, the compact cassette was virtually the most important medium worldwide for the distribution of music. From the end of the 1970s, the cassette made it possible to produce music quickly and cheaply, making it portable and universally available. Mark Gergis witnessed the extent to which cassette culture also left its unmistakable mark on cities like Damascus and Aleppo. From 1997 to 2010, the musician, producer, and music archivist made several trips to Syria from the United States to research the various music scenes and sound worlds of the region and to get to know the people behind the music. Each time, he returned with as many cassettes as he could fit in his luggage – until 2011, when the Syrian civil war that continues to this day broke out, laying waste to large parts of the country and forcing millions of people to flee. The more than 400 cassettes in Gergis’ collection suddenly became documents of a bygone era, cultural heritage that had to be not only protected but also, and above all, shared. His broad collection became the starting point for the “Syrian Cassette Archives” project, which Gergis, who now lives in London, launched with a team of music researchers and in cooperation with Syrian communities in Germany, the United Kingdom, Lebanon, Jordan, Sweden, and Syria.

The project digitises and archives the tapes, conducts interviews with the people involved from that time, and makes the music and conversations publicly accessible.

In October 2021, the project celebrated its launch with live music, discussions, and a cassette exhibition at the Akademie der Künste. The interactive database syriancassettearchives.org went online at the beginning of the year.

Cassette kiosk next to the National Telephone Company, Damascus, 1997

MARK GERGIS ON THE PROJECT “SYRIAN CASSETTE ARCHIVES” IN CONVERSATION WITH LINA BRION

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LINA BRION Why did you go to Syria to collect music?

MARK GERGIS In the 1990s, I began listening again to the music that I had grown up with. One side of my family is Iraqi, or rather Chaldean-Assyrian – that’s an indigenous people from what is now Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and part of Iran, the territory of old Mesopotamia. I began to study the music of the region and became really immersed in it. I’d spent years collecting tapes and records from diaspora shops in cities like Detroit, where there were large settlements of Arabs and Iraqis. But the selections were very limited, only touching the surface; I was struck by how little was available in the US. Especially after the first Gulf War, the demonisation of the Middle East was a very real thing in the US – and its invisibility. I wanted to travel to Iraq, but as an Arab-American, it was complicated to access the country. And Iraq had a drain at

that time because of the sanctions and wars. Many people lived in exile in Syria, among them a lot of musicians, so I set my sights on Syria.

LB How did your music research progress?

MG Back then, I could only have dreamt of this “armchair investigation” that we can so easily do today. So, I pretty much went in blind. I didn’t have any contacts in Syria; I just wanted to check it out for myself. There was a dizzying amount of music cassettes everywhere. This was the primary medium at the time for music. Everywhere in downtown Damascus were mobile cassette kiosks on carts, this week’s tape blaring at full volume, next to another cart whose owner would have his favourite tape of the week blaring. It was incredible; I didn’t even know where to start. When I travel, I always bring a radio with me, so I would sit in my hotel room and record

music that I liked off the radio and bring those tapes to the cassette stalls and ask, “What is this style? Can I hear more?” And they would offer me suggestions, discourage me from some purchases, and encourage me to buy others. And sometimes, somebody else who was buying music in the shop at the same time wanted to tell me about his favourite artist and so on.

LB So a lot of people were eager to talk about the music and to share with you what they liked.

MG Absolutely. I’d end up talking with someone for six hours in a café after meeting them in the shop, or going home with them, meeting their family, and listening to some music. At first, once they learned that I didn’t speak Arabic fluently, they would ask, “How do you like this music?” And then they would take me under their wing.

This was a sort of learn-as-you-go approach for me, fully immersing myself in this music. I didn’t have any intention of making an archive; I was just curious. The initial collection of the “Syrian Cassette Archives” reflects that period of personal research, curiosity, and exploration and also the connections that I made over time with local music shops, producers, and musicians in Syria.

LB What kind of music did you collect?

MG The material in the collection is quite broad. As an outsider, I didn’t recognise the stigmas that went with certain regional musical styles. My choices were kind of unique in their naiveté; I wanted to hear as many styles as I could. Of course, my tendencies toward Iraqi and Assyrian music are reflected, but there are tapes of Syrian Arabs, of Kurds, Armenians, recordings of live concerts, studio albums of groups and soloists; classical, religious, patriotic tapes, children’s music, and so on. But the more I listened, the more my ears were tuned to the dabke and shaabi music: the folk music of the region, often danceable, which is performed at weddings and celebrations. In the 1980s and 1990s, electronic synthesisers made their way into Syria, and shaabi musicians began to incorporate these new sounds, creating hybrid forms of folkloric styles. I’d soon learn that this music didn’t always have the best reputation amongst some of the academics and urbanites in Damascus.

LB Was this a classist distinction?

MG At the end of the day, these are classist stigmas as well, yes. But when I put myself in their shoes, I understand them. One has to consider: Damascus was one of the first cosmopolitan cities. By the time I got there, however, tourism had declined, Syria had been reduced to a “rogue state”, and it didn’t have any visibility in the West.

There were brilliant minds ready to be on the world stage that just didn’t have the opportunity. At the same time, computers were on the rise, the world was connecting, but Syrians were feeling more isolated. So, in the big city of Damascus, they would think about the country music as something maybe a little bit embarrassing, they didn’t want an outsider hearing what they might consider a lower form of music. They were also curious about how I could profess to like the sound of shaabi and like the sound of the classics as well.

LB What did you tell them?

MG That I was curious… I wanted a holistic musical map of the country. I wanted to hear what it sounded like. It was so striking how diverse Syria was. I was interested in hearing everything, from the most outlying tribal Bedouin tracks from the south to the greats such as Farid al-Atrash, Fairuz, et cetera. To be an outsider, though, was also an attribute. A lot of this music, especially the

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 17

shaabi tapes, is so ephemeral. It existed solely on cassettes; this was its only medium. It was never deemed important enough to be digitised and released on CD. I’ve been told by some Syrians who see my collection that maybe it’s a good thing somebody was there picking out these exact tapes.

LB On the one hand, the cassette introduced the sense that everything could be recorded all the time – every party, every gathering. You too, always had your cassette recorder with you on your travels. At the same time, this culture of recording was not for keeping and securing, but for a circulation of the music over a certain time. Do you think this kind of cassette culture was specific to that region?

MG Syria was no exception when you talk about the democratisation of music that cassettes enabled everywhere so suddenly. But there were styles of music and musicians in Syria that had never been recorded before.

Some were regional stars, maybe singing at weddings, and everybody in town knew who they were. Maybe they had a reputation, if they were good, in the next city. But they were hardly known out of their own locality. Cassettes suddenly afforded them a platform, since this medium could be quite cheaply reproduced and distributed. You had a large population of workers from villages all across the country in the big cities – as you have in any country. The music companies thus found a market for distributing regional music. They had talent agents in different regions that would bring them the artists’ names and recordings. Now people in the north could hear what the people in the south listened to. Workers from the north going to Damascus could listen to their favourite singers from home, at a bus stop or at a cassette kiosk. And the cassette became a sort of business card: every time a singer played at a wedding, the orga­ niser would record it on cassette and give it to the distributor, who would copy it. And maybe that singer gets ten, twenty, thirty tapes a year on a shop shelf, with a phone number on the cover. Those were the most ephemeral cassettes: they would disappear after a year. You don’t want to be seen to have a tape from 1997 on your shelf in 1999. It was a fast rotation. Aleppo was a hotbed for these production companies. I don’t even know how many there were. Some came and went, some endured for decades.

LB I guess those shops don’t exist anymore?

MG A couple of them still exist, in cities that weren’t as ravaged by the war. There are still people who buy cassettes – mainly because of the vehicles that still have cassette decks in them. The roads are bumpy in some places, and CDs just tend to skip on them. But in 2011, when the crisis began in Syria and Syrians were fleeing the country, longstanding music-production houses disappeared overnight. A few of them are not even trace­ able today. We’ve been looking for some of them, but nobody knows where that guy or this guy is. After 2013, my wife and I were living in Vietnam. So from that distance, I had to watch Syria literally fall apart. Obviously, I didn’t know that 2010 would be my last trip there. It was truly heartbreaking. I was listening to the stories of my friends and contacts there as they became refugees, trying to make it into Europe and elsewhere. Some of them suffered serious misfortunes and death, and it just went on and on. And then ISIS arrived, and the destruction was compounded beyond belief. I thought about my cassettes, which were back in California. I had pulled from

Every time a singer played at a wedding, the organiser would record it on cassette and give it to the distributor, who would copy it.

Cassette kiosk in Damascus, 2006

them over the years for releases, such as the audio documentation I Remember Syria in 2003. But now, I’ve realised the urgency here. Not that music and collecting music is very important in that context. It takes the privilege of peace to be able to create art and music. But that’s all I had: my memories of Syria, my love for Syria, and these cassettes. And I thought about how demographics can really shift, so that music may not sound like it did in this or that region ever again. Assyrians for instance: many of them were killed. Thousands of them left. Will they ever return to Iraq or Syria? Why would they, where’s the promise for them? That really affects the way the musical landscape is in the country. A cultural amnesia can result from that. I’ve seen the same in Cambodia and Vietnam, Afghanistan and Somalia, in any country that has had this kind of tumult and loss. So, I saw the urgency in documenting the tapes to make them available. That’s when the idea for the project was born.

LB And those who fled the country probably didn’t bring their music collection with them, so the archive also enables them to listen to their music again, especially since a lot of this music existed solely on cassette.

MG Yes. In a way those ephemeral cassettes accident­ ally became the most valuable in the collection. We didn’t know that at the time, but they have this tragic added value to them now. I mean, we do have YouTube, which has become this accidental repository for cultural heritage. I do a lot of research not only on Syrian and Iraqi but also on Cambodian and Vietnamese diaspora music, and apparently a lot of people – especially during lockdown – started digitising their audio and video collections. These people received no funding; they’re just passionate and happy to share it. I think we need to look at the beauty and the function of that. No matter what you’re researching, if you’re into anything specialised and it’s media-related, you’re probably going to find

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 17

something of interest on YouTube, sometimes an embarrassing amount of material, it’s mind-blowing. But YouTube can change this tomorrow and shut down every one of those channels. We don’t have a friendship agreement with them; YouTube hasn’t said: “we support your cultural heritage”. Somebody who’s done an incredible amount of work to put this material up could lose it overnight should somebody somewhere claim it. So, basically it’s endangered if you’re putting it on YouTube.

Therefore, I think it’s important to work on and support other outlets. It’s important that independent archives and collections can stand on their own feet and that we recognise the value of them. And I hope that there are a thousand more coming.

they’ve been 2ffected not only by 2 w2r, but 2lso by music being consumed 2nd v2lued in 2 very different w2y. We h2ve 2 long-term vision for this project 2nd 2re still exp2nding the collection. Being 2 digit2l 2rchive c2n re2lly help. We don’t need to be ho2rding physic2l t2pes, which is second2ry to the stories we c2n tell 2round them 2nd the w2ys we c2n coll2bor2te with people inside 2nd outside Syri2. This project will h2ve 2 different signific2nce to different people. Some m2y come to it nost2lgic2lly; some m2y come 2s rese2rchers. But hopefully, it c2n serve 2s 2 sort of vehicle in 2n effort to bring together those who 2re behind the t2pes 2nd those in front of them, listening.

MARK GERGIS is 2 London-b2sed music producer,

Wars shift demographics, so that music may not sound like it did in this or that region ever again.

musici2n, 2nd 2udio 2nd video 2rchivist, known for, 2mong other things, his music rele2ses on the Sublime Frequencies record l2bel. Since the e2rly 0111s, he h2s been devoting his rese2rch 2nd production to region2l folk-pop music from the Middle E2st 2nd Southe2st Asi2, 2long with music from the Asi2n di2spor2 in the US from the mid- to l2te 01th century. In 0117, Gergis brought the Syri2n singer Om2r Souleym2n to st2ges

LB “Syrian Cassette Archives” is not only a music archive but also an archive of stories and encounters. Your research over the years has been almost as much about talking to people as it has been about collecting music.

MG The online archive is not just a digital dump of music on a website – each tape tells a story. We are adding as much as we can with the help of a great team of collaborators and contributors, young researchers, as well as people who were part of the cassette era in Syria. To locate and be in touch with some of these great musicians, producers, singers, and music fans is a real gift.

We talk to them about their story, where they are now, and where they see music now. Because, let’s face it,

in the West for the first time; he h2s 2lso worked closely with the Turkish musici2n Erkin Kor2y. He founded the “Syri2n C2ssette Archives” project in 013a.

The “Syri2n C2ssette Archives” is 2 project by M2rk Gergis in cooper2tion with Heike Albrecht 2nd Y2men Mekd2d 2nd is supported by H2uptst2dtkulturfonds Berlin, the Ar2b Fund for Arts 2nd Culture (AFAC), 2nd the Gw5rtler Found2tion.

LINA BRION is Assist2nt to the Director of Progr2mming 2t the Ak2demie der Künste, Berlin.

45

THAT’S LIFE, AFTER ALL…

46

TAMARA TRAMPE was a documentary film director. She only began making films of her own when her work as a dramaturge at the DEFA feature-film studio came abruptly to an end after twenty years in 1990. She originally studied German language and literature at the University of Rostock before working for two years as a cultural editor for the weekly magazine Forum. Born in 1942, two themes dominate her work: childhood and war. In her essayistic explorations, Trampe evolved her own style, which is closely associated with her collaboration with cinematographer and co-director Johann Feindt. Receiving numerous awards, her films have been screened at festivals such as the Berlinale and Cinéma du Réel in Paris. She became a member of the Film and Media Arts Section in 2016. Tamara Trampe died in November 2021.

A LAUDATORY SPEECH FOR TAMARA TRAMPE BY CORNELIA KLAUSS

A laudatory speech… not so easy. There’s so much on my mind that needs to be said, things that only inadequately can be described in words, perhaps, as far as I am concerned, encounters with you have always been overlapping with images from your films.

Now, this honorary prize. Maybe you didn’t expect it, but you certainly deserve it.

You’ve dedicated your whole life to film. When I sit at your kitchen table, drinking tea from blue-and-white patterned cups with gold rims and smoking a cigarette, everything is always at stake.

You tell us what you think is wrong, dishonest, or inconsistent in a project you are supervising (and you’ve always got several on the go). Then you persevere with your suggestions until your protégés – often young people who come to you with their half-finished films, follow your advice, and get back to the “editing bench” – and then, a few weeks later, you can triumphantly and proudly announce that the film has been invited to a festival.

You’ve been involved behind the scenes in countless works as a dramaturge, a role that is often underesti­ mated. After all, where would these films be without you?

Anyone who comes to you for advice has to know that

you don’t exactly hold back on criticism, but that’s precisely why they come, so as to get the full treatment.

At the DEFA film studios from 1973 to 1990, you not only supervised films but were also instrumental in pushing them through. Examples include Alle meine Mädchen (All my girls) by Iris Gusner, Bürgschaft für ein Jahr (On probation) by Herrmann Zschoche, and Junge Leute in der Stadt (Young people in the city) by Karl-Heinz Lotz, films that I went to see in the cinema in East Berlin of my own free will, even though they were from DEFA. What I also really like about you is that you don’t make a big fuss. When I ring you up and ask how you are, your voice sounds from the deep: “Normal”.

Yet, many things in your life were anything but “normal”. Born in the winter of 1942 on a field near the war front, after having been sheltered for a while in a village with your warm-hearted grandmother, you came to Germany as a child without knowing the language. You then studied – of all things – German language and liter­ ature. By chance, you got a job at the DEFA film company, where you were given permission to direct the short film Ich war einmal ein Kind (I was once a child), an upsetting experience (with the censors, too). You got to know Johann Feindt, the director and camera operator from West Berlin, with whom you had a relationship that crossed the Wall. Although there could hardly be a more awkward setting for a romance, this turned out to be a stroke of luck and the start of a partnership in which you share your work, thoughts, and lives, a rare experience.

Weiße Raben (White ravens), film still

In 1990, after the DEFA film company was driven into bankruptcy, you decided to take filmmaking into your own hands. You were 48 when you made your debut film.

Your film family grows and includes the respected editor Stephan Krumbiegel, sound mixer Martin Steyer, composer Helmut Oehring, and sound engineer Jule Cramer.

You create a protective space in order to reveal yourself again and again in your films. Together, among many other works, you make four films: Der schwarze Kasten (The black box), Weiße Raben – Alptraum Tschetschenien (White ravens – The nightmare of Chechnya), Wiegenlieder (Lullaby), and Meine Mutter, ein Krieg und ich (My mother, a war, and me). Each of these films is like a big book: even experienced again and again, their relevance remains amazing. Moreover, they should be on the curriculum at film schools, because they can teach how material is converted into a story, how people’s destinies can slowly be unfolded, and what the opposite of journal­ ism looks like. We’re talking about cinema documentary films and not documentations or reports. This distinction is always very important to you.

Why am I taken by these films? It’s the people’s inner depths you bring forth, and your own experience shines through each of the protagonists. For example, there’s Jochen Girke, the Stasi lieutenant from the secret service of the GDR, who taught operational psychology and whom you tried to decipher. You knew only too well from your own experience how perfidious the methods of the Stasi were, how skilful they were at blackmailing.

In Russia, you seek out young recruits who were conscripted into the war in Chechnya at the age of 18 or 19. In home videos, we see young people whose lives could have taken a completely different course had the war not brutalised and mutilated them so severely. In Meine Mutter, ein Krieg und ich, you find the last of the female veterans who fought at the front in the Second World War, most of them forgotten by history. What does war do to people, what pieces of “wandering shrapnel” would it leave in them for the rest of their lives?

Unforgettable for me: the view of photographs that play a role in your films again and again. Who do we see, but even more so: who is missing?

Or there’s Helmut Oehring, son of deaf-mute parents, who becomes a composer – first in protest, then to repay them. Or the girl counting the raindrops on her hand. Or the young man who lost an arm and a leg in the Chechen War, walking down the hospital corridor. His father has started building a house for him. Life will go on.

I could mention many more scenes, encounters, and moments that are unique, moving, upsetting, desper­ ately sad or hilarious, and enlightening – that’s life, after all. And never without hope. There’s always room for hope.

I congratulate you on your award; in my view, a very wise and overdue choice has been made.

Laudatory speech by Cornelia Klauss for the presentation of the Honorary Award of the German Film Critics Association to Tamara Trampe on 19 September 2021 at the Akademie der Künste.

CORNELIA KLAUSS, a curator and co-editor of the publication Sie: Regisseurinnen der DEFA und ihre Filme (She: DEFA directors and their films), is Secretary of the Film and Media Arts Section of the Akademie der Künste.

Meine Mutter, ein Krieg und ich (My mother, a war, and me), film still

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 17

47

NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVES 48

FINDS WRITING ON THE WALL JOACHIM WALTHER’S NEWSPAPER FOR SCHÖNHAUSER ALLEE 71

He had planned a voyage. From the beginning of July to the end of September 1970, Joachim Walther intended to sail the Mediterranean in a cargo ship of the Deutsche Seereederei (DSR) shipping line, stopping at the ports of Algiers, Tripoli, and Alexandria. But permission was denied.

Instead of reporting from southern climes, therefore, he reported from and for his home neighbourhood, choos­ ing to do so by means of a wall newspaper posted in his apartment block at Schönhauser Allee 71. He posted bulletins there every week from July to August: jokes, sayings, montages, recipes, erudite quotations, aphorisms, fictitious agency reports: “BERLIN. (Ackerpress). News of Milli: the other day, Milli (54) accused a resident of a front flat at Ackerstrasse 5, to her face, of being ‘an old cow!’” along with photos, poems, drawings, letters to the editor, and the current theatre and cinema programmes.

Foreign correspondent Walther reported not on Africa, but instead on the familiar foreign territories of Oderberger Straße, Schwedter Straße, and Ackerstraße in Berlin, the capital of the GDR. His wall newspaper was a continuation of the journalistic and literary form of miscellaneous news items and at the same time a parody of and subversive response to the standardised wall newspapers that hung in every company premises and many a block of flats.

The carefully dated materials for this local newspaper can be found in Joachim Walther’s estate, which has been in the Literature Archives of the Akademie der Künste since 2021. And with them the writings of an author who also became a literary historian after reunification. Born in Chemnitz in 1943, Walther was an editor at the book publisher Der Morgen from 1968 to 1983. His first novel, Sechs Tage Sylvester (Six days of Sylvester), was published in 1970. As the editor of the magazine Temperamente, he was dismissed along with the entire editorial staff in 1978. After the fall of the Wall, Walther became deputy chairman of the German writers’ association and published the encyclopaedic standard work Sicherungsbereich Literatur (Security zone literature) about writers and the Stasi – that had been observing

and “operatively processing” him since 1969. In 2001, he and Ines Geipel founded the “Archiv unterdrückter Literatur in der DDR” (Archive of suppressed literature in the GDR) and published the series Die verschwiegene Bibliothek (The silenced library), in which texts not published for political reasons were made accessible for the first time.

His wall newspaper, on the other hand, was public. He then went on holiday, in October, not to the Mediterranean but to Hiddensee on the Baltic Sea coast. He wrote his first article about it, “Journal einer Nachsaison” (Journal of a postseason), for the Weltbühne. In it appears a sentence that the residents of his apartment block would have found familiar, because they had already encountered something to the same effect on the walls: “Dogs are permitted to bark. During the day, they reverse-bark their nightly quota.” In a literary reportage about Schönhauser Allee, published in May 1971, the sentence turns up again – as do two other sentences from his treasury of aphorisms: “Berlin is a linguistic melting pot, and Thuringians and Saxons are currently being melted down.”

And: “It is strictly forbidden for ageing trees on Berlin’s streets and public squares to fall down.” But that is not the end of his quotation journey. Walther integrated the reportage, and with it the aphorisms, in his second novel Zwischen zwei Nächten (Between two nights), published in 1972.

On the way from the wall newspaper to the magazine to the book, the aphorisms not only change their literary function. On the journey of self-quotation something is also lost. The anarchic freedom of an unregulated public sphere – however small it may be, like that of Schönhauser Allee 71 – is blunted and truncated by the intervention of editors and the obligatory “print approval procedure”. In this way, the wall newspaper illustrates negatively Walther’s lifelong preoccupation: that of the suppression of literature by the authorities.

CHRISTOPH KAPP works in the Literature Archives of the Akademie der Künste.

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 17

NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVES

“JUST WRITE TO ME ALWAYS A LOT” THE CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN HANS AND LEA GRUNDIG A WORKSHOP REPORT

Kathleen Krenzlin

Lea Langer and Hans Grundig at a circus arts festival at the Kunstakademie Dresden, presumably 1925/26 Excerpt from a letter, Lea Langer (no location) to Hans Grundig (Dresden), presumably 29/30 June 1926

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HANS (1901–1958) and LEA (1906–1977) GRUNDIG met while studying at the Kunstakademie in Dresden in 1925. Daughter of a Jewish merchant, Lea (née Langer), married Hans in 1928 against her family’s wishes. Both became members of the German Communist Party (KPD) and, in 1930, co-founded the Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists (ASSO). After several arrests, Lea Grundig fled to Palestine in 1940, while Hans was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. After the Second World War, Hans became rector of the reopened Kunstakademie in 1946.

Lea returned to Dresden in early 1949, where she assumed a professorship at the Kunstakademie. In 1964, she became chairwoman of the Association of Visual Artists of the GDR, and in 1967, she became a member of the Central Committee of the SED.

The Grundig Archive of the Akademie der Künste contains, among other things, the private correspondence of the Dresden-based artist couple Hans and Lea Grundig, which consists of some 700 letters written in the course of more than three decades, between the years 1926 and 1958.

Around one hundred of these letters were published in the 1966 volume Hans Grundig. Künstlerbriefe aus den Jahren 1926 bis 1957,1 which came about under the aegis of Lea Grundig (1906–77). Collaborators on this publication were the art historian Bernhard Wächter, who wrote the preface, and Diether Schmidt, who conducted the initial review and compilation of the letters. The book did without editorial annotations and content-related comments, and also underwent a process in which the linguistic and orthographic peculiarities of Hans Grundig’s (1901–58) writing were ironed out, and a number of private and political statements considered sensitive or superfluous at the time were deleted. Nonetheless, upon closer inspection, the volume of letters lacks the direct approach of the autobiographies written by Hans Grundig in 1957 and Lea Grundig in 1958,2 which are presented in the tone of saintly legends and include instead letters that reveal thoughts and reflections which show a more differentiated picture.3 In his introduction at the time, Bernhard Wächter rightfully praised the writing: “Alone as love letters, they are precious and beautiful. Their fascination, however, ultimately stems from the broad horizon that they open, from the totality of the account of life.”

These three published “ego documents” are still today frequently queried and much-cited sources when it comes to the artistic and political events in Dresden that relate to questions of emigration, exile, Jewish life in Germany, and details of the life of Hans and Lea Grundig.

Attempts to separate the unpublished letters from the bundle of private correspondence and to incorporate them to any relevant extent into research have failed on account of the peculiarity of the material, a situation that allows neither open questions to be answered nor truly new insight to be unearthed. As with a rough diamond, closer inspection was the only way to discern whether the letters would reveal anything beyond what had previously been known.

And things would likely have remained in that state had Klaus Leutner not subjected the letters to academic scrutiny while researching his book Das KZ-Außenlager in Berlin-Lichterfelde. The external camp in the Lichterfelde district of Berlin was where Hans Grundig, as a prisoner of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, was compelled into forced labour for the Berlin SS. As an admirer of Hans Grundig’s artwork, and aiming to contribute to a new biography, Leutner took on the substantial task of copying the letters. And although the editorial work still remained, for the first time, it seemed possible to evaluate the correspondence and consider whether or not it would be worthwhile to polish the diamond.

It became clear after systematic comparative work had been carried out in 2018 and 2019 that this was a remarkable collection of primary sources of German cultural history, and that evaluation of it would make an outstanding contribution to understanding the historical context of the correspondence, laying the foundation for further studies into the life and work of Hans and Lea Grundig.

Lea Grundig had bound most of the letters in albums.

It turned out, for example, that the letters, which were

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 17

often without a date or incorrectly dated due to spelling errors, do not form a chronology. It also turned out that even in that time of the encounter around 1925/26, the reality of the letters contradicts the narratives in the autobiographies.

The “workshop report” referenced in the heading, which as a result of the pandemic will be published in the run-up to the launch of the first volume of letters originally planned for 2020, and whose content relates to that edition,4 will provide an exemplary selection of topics in individual articles, present questions and findings generated from the research on the letters, and point to the possibility of contextualising the correspondence on different levels, using a range of methods.

In addition to an introduction written by the editor Kathleen Krenzlin, a report written together with Anne Flierl (cultural scientist and researcher working on this edition of the letters) explains the classic challenges and questions that arose while editing the letters.

Beate Schreiber, co-founder of the historical research institute Facts&Files, presents for the first time a sourcebased provenance of Lea Grundig’s family history, showing how the Langer family emigrated to Galicia in the 19th century, and thereby making it possible to access reliable material for future biographical research. One of the more important findings of the research conducted in recent years is the fact that the young Lea Langer is the only voice to date who reports live from the Frieda Fromm-Reichmann therapeutic centre in Heidelberg.

Rainer Funk, psychoanalyst and administrator of the estate and rights of Erich Fromm, acknowledges, among other things, the significance of the Heidelberg letters for Fromm research. Hans Grundig and Lea Langer were actively involved in the political and cultural events of their time. The film scholar Claus Loeser examines the films they discuss in their letters, which range from early Soviet revolutionary films to more run-of-the-mill entertainment, putting them into cultural-historical context and describing the social significance of cinema for the respective periods and locations. One of the most important questions is how the politicisation of Hans and Lea Grundig came about within the communist milieu of Dresden. Historian and sociologist Marcel Bois, whose research specialisms include the history of communism, attempts, among other things, to explore the activities of the previously neglected communist student group at the Kunstakademie in Dresden. And last but not least, the publication is expected to shed light on the editor’s discovery in Dresden of a photo taken by Bruno Wiehr presumably in 1925. Hilja Hoevenberg, an expert on image identification, who also specialises in systematic, shapebased comparisons for art studies and has developed corresponding strategies, will present her morphological expertise on the identification of the protagonists.

The phrase “just write to me always a lot”5 is found in one the earliest surviving letters. It marks the beginning of a relationship which, due to the dramatic milieu the couple were living through, often had to rely on writing as the only means of communication and mutual reassurance over long periods of time. From the very beginning, in addition to touching upon everyday matters, the letters also highlight the outstanding role played by the transmission of artistic and political issues.

Hans Grundig, Girls on the Bench, lino cut, 1930 1 Bernhard Wächter, ed. and preface, Hans Grundig, Künstlerbriefe aus den Jahren 1926 bis 1957 (Rudolstadt: VEB Greifenverlag, 1966). Not all letters from this volume were written by Hans to Lea Grundig. The volume also contains postcards written by Hans to his mother from Sachsenhausen concentration camp, as well as letters to third parties. Finally, there are several letters written

by Lea to Hans from the cells of Dresden police station.

2 Hans Grundig, Zwischen Karneval und Aschermittwoch (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1957); Lea Grundig, Gesichte und Geschichte (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1958).

3 President of the Association of Visual Artists of the GDR since 1964 and member of the Central Committee of the SED from 1967, Lea Grundig enjoyed a prominent position. Especially at the beginning of her (cultural) political career, this allowed her creative leeway and influence.

4 Volume 1 comprises the years 1926 to 1932. In 2020, the three-volume publication project began with the aim to complete the first critically annotated edition of letters, funded by a start-up grant from the Rosa-LuxemburgStiftung. As was the case with numerous projects in the humanities in the years 2020/21 that rely on archives and libraries, the work could not be completed due to the restrictions brought about by the pandemic.

5 Lea Langer (no location) to Hans Grundig (Dresden); AdK, Grundig-Archiv 852, p. 179; the letter is undated, and no location is provided in the letterhead. Undoubtedly, it was written from Vienna, where Lea Langer resided in the summer of 1926. From the larger context, the letter can be dated to 29/30 June 1926.

KATHLEEN KRENZLIN was a research assistant at the Akademie der Künste until 1993, where she curated, among other things, the first retrospective on the Dresden-based painter Wilhelm Lachnit (1899–1962) in 1989. Since 2018, she has been working on the critically annotated edition of Hans and Lea Grundig’s private correspondence in collaboration with the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. “schreibe mir nur immer viel” (“just write to me always a lot”). The correspondence between Hans and Lea Grundig: A workshop report. Kathleen Krenzlin (ed.), on behalf of the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung and Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Contributors: Marcel Bois, Anne Flierl, Rainer Funk, Hilja Hoevenberg, Kathleen Krenzlin, Claus Löser, Beate Schreiber

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NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVES

ONE PERSON ONE EVENT ONE JOY

Literary critic and moderator Insa Wilke was among the closest confidants of Roger Willemsen, one of the most famous and multi­ faceted intellectuals of our time. After his death, Wilke took over his position as programme manager of the Mannheim Literature Festival Lesen.Hören and became a member of the board of trust­ ees of the Roger Willemsen Stiftung. She still manages Willemsen’s extensive and diverse estate, which she handed over to the Akademie der Künste in 2019.

INSA WILKE IN CONVERSATION WITH GABRIELE RADECKE

Roger Willemsen, early 1980s

OPENING THE ROGER WILLEMSEN ARCHIVE 52

GABRIELE RADECKE Mrs. Wilke, your enthusiastic commitment to Willemsen’s legacy is clear from your events, publications, and interviews. Just prior to his death, you published your last conversation with him in the book Der leidenschaftliche Zeitgenosse (A passionate contemporary), while last year you published, among other things, the two volumes Unterwegs: Vom Reisen and Willemsen’s Jahreszeiten (On the road: On travelling and Willemsen’s seasons). When and how did you meet Roger Willemsen?

INSA WILKE I met him in 2004 when I was an intern at the Literarisches Zentrum (Literary centre) in Göttingen.

He had been invited to put on an evening event at our institute on the subject of speed, and I was to introduce him. I wasn’t familiar with Roger Willemsen and his work at the time, so I began to take a closer look. While reading an interview with him, in which he spoke of the term “happiness”, it seemed to me – and this is something that many of his readers will be familiar with – that someone was expressing something that I also felt deep down but could never put into words. At any rate, I wanted to meet this man face to face, to engage with him on a critical level. Roger later told me that, listening from backstage, he was very much amused by my words and that he had never been introduced like that before. And so, a bond was forged between us. He had a great talent for friendship, regardless of age, background, and so forth.

GR What fascinates you most about Roger Willemsen?

IW His empathy, his attentiveness. His love of life. As a fellow event organiser, I can say that I had never met anyone who combined a sense of humour, understanding for others, and analytical and rhetorical talent the way he did. But I must say that fascination is the wrong word; those are all the things that I loved about him.

GR You worked with Roger Willemsen for many years.

What did you learn from him that you were able to apply to your own work?

IW To always remember that you are speaking to others.

That goes for the stage just as much as it does for writing. I once said, dismissively, that it doesn’t really matter. He got very upset and replied: it always matters. He had very high standards for himself and an incredible respect for the audience. He knew that when people came to see one of his performances, they were taking time out of their lives, so he felt an obligation to them. He had

Roger Willemsen in Afghanistan, Kabul, 2015

an almost allergic reaction to any disdain for the audience. This was also the source of his criticism of the media, which still holds true today. And he was someone who knew a thing or two about entertainment! Anyone who says, “We have to reach people” should be given a book by Roger and reminded that he reached thousands of people, because he took them seriously.

GR Roger Willemsen was a writer first and foremost. In an article for Süddeutsche Zeitung, you said that he felt “a deep-seated happiness when writing”. There were times when he rarely left his house. That was when he devoted himself to his extensive literary and journalistic work. Is there anything you can tell us about how he worked?

IW At the end of a stage tour, he was generally extremely exhausted and happy to be able to take time for himself.

Then, he would write for weeks on end. He was actually a quiet person, which might come as a surprise to some.

Quiet on the inside. But at the end of these hermit phases, he looked forward to mingling with people again. There were both sides to him, the quiet and the sociable.

Regarding how he worked: he was constantly writing. He was already at his desk at five in the morning. When he was out and about, he would scribble things down in little notebooks. He lost one of them once, in Bangkok of all places. It contained his travel notes, and he was quite shaken by the loss. But in the end, he became interested in seeing how the loss would affect his work on Bangkok Noir. He was so curious about everything going on in the world. He had no cell phone, so he could only be reached by email or through his assistant Julia Wittgens. He was focused, and he didn’t like distraction. When you saw him on stage, it often seemed as if his lectures and stories were off the cuff, but he was always meticulously prepared – which had also to do with his respect for the audience. He researched, sorted information, formulated things in advance. And then of course, there was his extraordinary talent for rhetoric, his ability to focus, his memory.

GR Roger Willemsen’s estate consists of 108 archival boxes, 151 document files, and 2,250 audiovisual documents. It reflects the extraordinary diversity of his artistic and creative work, containing manuscripts of works, speeches, and broadcasts, research material, interview transcripts, and preparations for when he moderated discussions, as well as radio and television shows. On

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 17

Spritzdecor from Roger Willemsen’s collection

top of that, there are diaries and notebooks, pocket calendars, biographical documents, photos, and his correspondences. You manage this extensive estate and have entrusted us, the team of the Literature Archives of the Akademie der Künste, with securing and researching the holdings. What led you to choose the Akademie der Künste?

IW For my own doctoral thesis, I worked in your archives, researching the estate of Thomas Brasch. That’s how I know what a great sense of responsibility all the staff have towards those who have entrusted their estates to them. There is also an exceptional understanding of people who work in the arts, which is combined with discretion, an incredible wealth of knowledge, and also a genuine sincerity. I felt that all of you would take good care of Roger and support me in keeping his work alive at the same time.

GR Do you have a favourite piece among Willemsen’s possessions?

IW He collected tea caddies, plates, mugs, and bowls from the 1930s. “Spritzdecor” – airbrushed ceramics. I always made fun of his passion for collecting. But already back then, these things reflected his joie de vivre, his entire personality, his enjoyment of beautiful and good things. Now all the more so.

GR The estate also contains many documents that provide insight into Willemsen’s social commitment in Afghanistan. One photo, for example, shows him holding his notebook, surrounded by the people he is talking to, including children. In 2006, Roger Willemsen became patron of the Afghanischer Frauenverein (Afghan Volunteer Women‘s Association) and did some unparalleled campaigning for it. How did that come about?

IW In one of his texts, he describes how an older friend of his sister returns from Afghanistan. That established an early connection. Later, it was solidified by a friendship with Nadia Nashir, chairwoman of the Afghanischer Frauenverein, who he met as a film student in Munich and with whom he shared a lifelong and very close friendship. And then, of course, there were the people of Afghanistan who impressed him so deeply.

GR What do you hope for in terms of the reception and cultivation of Willemsen’s work? Are there already any ideas for further projects?

IW I would like younger people to discover him – and they already are. I know of some, who never even had the

chance to meet him, who are currently working on texts and films about Roger or who have been inspired by him to do their own writing. I hope that people will keep reading his books and will rediscover him through his texts.

Together with Markus Peichl, I’d like to publish his 0137 talk shows. And other than that, we’ll see what kind of projects are possible with your help and through the work of Maren Horn, who helped prepare Roger’s estate for the Archives.

GR Thank you for the interview!

INSA WILKE is one of Germany’s most influential and popular literary critics. She has been creating and moderating cultural events since 2006. She is part of the team of the radio show Gutenbergs Welt (on WDR3) and the TV show lesenswert Quartett (on SWR) and is jury chairwoman of the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize and the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. She writes literary reviews for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, among other publications.

She submitted her PhD thesis on Thomas Brasch in 2009, and was awarded the Alfred Kerr Prize for literary criticism in 2014.

GABRIELE RADECKE is a literary and edition scholar and is head of the Literature Archives of the Akademie der Künste.

The Roger Willemsen Archive opened with the event “One Person – One Event – One Joy” on 18 November 2021. The focus lay on a conversation that Insa Wilke had with Roger Willemsen’s companions and friends: with the actor Matthias Brandt, the editor Jürgen Hosemann, the chairwoman of the Afghanischer Frauenverein Nadia Nashir, and board member of the Roger Willemsen Foundation Julia Wittgens. The event also presented objects from his estate for the first time in a showcase exhibition. The S. Fischer Foundation supports the indexing of the Roger Willemsen estate; the results are gradually being made accessible in the Archives database.

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NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVES 54

Hugo Häring, Friedrichstraße, Berlin. Competition design for a high rise at Friedrichstraße railway station, 1922

Hugo Häring, Urban planning study, isometric drawing, 1922

SUSTAINABLE BUILDING IN BERLIN HUGO HÄRING’S ARCHITECTURAL PLANS

RESTORATION, DIGITISATION, AND ONLINE PUBLICATION OF 1,700 PROJECTSPECIFIC PLANS AND DRAWINGS Sibylle Hoiman and Marieluise Nordahl

Architecture is created on paper, more precisely, on the translucent tracing paper that allows the designer to adapt, revise, and duplicate the project designs during the process of creation: tracing paper, the most principal medium for the architectural plans of the 20th century. It is also the paper used in around 80 per cent of the 1,700 project-specific blueprint, pencil, and ink drawings that make up the estate of Hugo Häring (1882– 1958), one of the most important architects of the Neues Bauen (New Building) movement. This material has now been restored, digitised, and published online in the Architectural Archives of the Akademie der Künste.

The short paper fibres, which are compressed in the manufacturing process, can be penetrated by light and thus obtain the transparent quality that is typical of tracing paper and constitutes the key characteristic of the master copy. One quality of the paper’s structure is a high sensitivity to moisture and water, which frequently leads to the occurrence of crinkles and folds in the paper.

Since the short paper fibres are largely inflexible, bends and folds in the paper tend to break, which leads to tears and defects.

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 17

The starting point for the project was an assessment of the state of Häring’s plans in preparation for the scanning process. This assessment determined the number of objects that were not fully legible and/or were in a precarious state and in need of protective stabilising measures for the digitisation process and in order to transport and store them safely. In the course of the assessment, a need for restoration was identified in 800 plans: 200 were separated from old passe-partouts and mountings, whilst 600 required repairs, either because of defects or tears or needing of flattening. Over a period of five months, this amounted to repairing tears totalling over half a kilometre using a four-millimetrewide strip of wafer-thin Japanese paper! To avoid warping, repaired areas were subjected to moisture-free ironing from the reverse side using a heat-activated adhesive (RK 2 / Anton Glaser, 11 g/m² coated with Lascaux HV 498®). Gaps were secured and supplemented with colour-matched paper when necessary. Material with a wavy or warped surface was conditioned in a humid atmosphere and subsequently flattened and lightly weighted between blotting paper. Stable folders, specially manufactured at the Academy, protect the material during handling, transport, and storage in the depot.

The existing data sets received a critical revision, and supplemental information was provided where necessary. They formed the basis for detailed lists of objects containing all relevant data for each individual sheet and for the handover protocols, as well as metadata for the export. This laid the groundwork for the digitisation subsequently carried out by the Technische Universität

Berlin’s Museum of Architecture, which has a large-format scanner at its disposal for such jobs.

Following the processes outlined here – conducted cooperatively between the Architecture Archives and the preservation and conservation department over the course of a year – the online publication and long-term archiving of the material has gone ahead. Around 1,700 project-specific plans of nearly 200 individual projects with various concentrations of material stemming from Hugo Häring will soon be accessible online in the Academy’s digital showcase (digital.adk.de). This portal provides easy access to digital holdings and aims to give greater visibility to the outstanding collections of the Archives. Until now, only a few previously researched copies of catalogued visual material were available digitally – relevant both for architectural historiography and for today’s architectural practice – through the archive database. With this project, the gap has now been closed.

With approximately 2,000 plans, 10.5 metres of written material and photographs, six models, and five metres of estate-library bookshelves, the complete estate of Hugo Häring, who in 1955 was granted membership of the Akademie der Künste (West Berlin) Architecture Section, was handed over to the Academy in several batches between his death in 1958 and 2011. It is part of the core holdings of the Architecture Archives and, together with the estates of Hans Scharoun, the Luckhardt brothers (with Alfons Anker), and Max and Bruno Taut, forms the world’s most comprehensive and outstanding collection from the Expressionist period.

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Restorers and collection supervisors check the state of preservation, fill in the gaps in descriptions, and separate plans from historic passe-partouts in the architecture depot at Pariser Platz 4

Repairing tears in the tracing paper

Hugo Häring’s understanding of architecture, however, went far beyond visionary and utopian design. The architect was primarily concerned with people and their immediate needs within the architectural environment, as well as with the harmonious relationship between humans and nature, which served as his model. One of the manifestations of this approach can be found in the terms “organic architecture” or “Organwerk” (organic works) for utilitarian objects, terms which he himself chose and used consistently. Merely applying these concepts to the organic language of form that is indeed central to many of his buildings and designs, however, would not do them justice. Because in Häring’s view, the building or the façade itself was less important than the floor plan, that is, the space that is adapted to the specific requirements of the respective architectural task; in other words, he built from the inside out.

Numerous variants of small residential units and micro-apartments as well as other studies, for example relating to settlement houses (non-profit residential communities), reveal an intensive examination of essential questions that revolve around the notion of Existenzminimum (minimum-yet-optimal), the simplification of work and life processes, and the design of flexible spatial structures, not least of all with a view to sustain­ ability and resource conservation. These are topics that have lost none of their relevance from today’s perspective; on the contrary, they essentially anticipate key positions that are now more pertinent than ever. This also applies to Häring’s rejection of any definition of architectural form and his emphasis on site-specificity and its link to the choice of natural material – to name just a couple of his concerns that testify to the ongoing relevance of his work for the present day.

His “organic” architectural approach, however, meant that the prospects for realising his designs became suddenly very limited as of 1933. As a result, he increasingly turned his attention to theory, writing numerous programmatic texts. Without a doubt, Hugo Häring was one of the most important thinkers of his time.

The plans and drawings from his creatively productive years (1906–56) cover his entire architectural work (urban planning, buildings, interiors, and furniture) and are therefore of great value, not only for the architectural history of modernism: they represent a virtually inexhaustible source of solutions to the challenges and pressing questions of today. This is yet another reason why it is important and expedient to make the entirety of the preserved plan material digitally available for scientific and research purposes, for the architectural community and for the interested public, in the interest of stimulating further research, thought, and design.

The project was funded by the Senate Department for Culture and Europe of the State of Berlin, Förderprogramm zur Digitalisierung von Objekten des kulturellen Erbes Berlin 2021 Forschungs- und Kompetenzzentrum Digitalisierung (Funding program for the digitisation of objects of cultural heritage Berlin 2021, Research and Competence Centre Digitisation).

SIBYLLE HOIMAN is head of the Architecture Archives at the Akademie der Künste.

MARIELUISE NORDAHL is team leader of Conservation Colour-matched pieces of tracing paper used for repairing tears

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and Restoration at the Akademie der Künste.

FREUNDESKREIS HERMANN VON HELMHOLTZ AND MUSIC A GOOD THING HE PLAYED THE PIANO Günther Wess and Eugen Müller

Image (top) For his composition Monophonie, the musician, sound artist, and DJ Phillip Sollmann wrote music scores for selected instruments made by Harry Partch, for the sound sculptures by Harry Bertoia, and for the double siren by Hermann von Helmholtz. The compositions were debuted at a premiere in 2017. The Helmholtz double siren – which is now in the Berlin Museum of Medical History of the Charité – was photographed

by Anette Kelm for this occasion.

Annette Kelm, Helmholtz Sirene, archival pigment print, 99.8 × 75 cm, 2017

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 17

The 31st of August 2021 marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of the scientist and natural philosopher Hermann von Helmholtz, a name familiar to many due to one of Germany’s most prestigious scientific societies – the Helmholtz Association – being named after him. But what does this have to do with the Akademie der Künste or even with the current issues and debates in society today?

Born when Goethe and Beethoven were still alive, Helmholtz died in 1894, before the dawn of modernity in art.

So, what could he still have to say to us today?

His life’s achievements are usually seen through the lens of the physicist, and his various contributions to physics, his services to the development of universities, and the founding of the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt (Germany’s national metrology institute) have long been acknowledged. During his lifetime, his work even gained a certain cult status in Berlin, where he was considered the “Reich Chancellor of Physics”.

His contributions to music, on the other hand, have received little recognition. Yet they have never been surpassed and remain fascinating to this day, continuing to

point the way for all those involved in music, be they musicians, composers, conductors, sound architects, acoustic or sound engineers, instrument makers, or, of course, listeners.

In 1863, he published a comprehensive work about music entitled On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music. It was based on his research, firstly, into the physics of tones and sounds and, secondly, into the physiology of the ear and the processes of hearing and sensation. His thinking was rooted firmly in the fundamental as well as in the overtones and the interactions that yield the sounds we perceive. This was followed by essays on the development of music, philosophical and psychological matters regarding music, and finished with the issue of aesthetics. In subsequent editions, the content was repeatedly supplemented with the latest findings from research in physics and physiology, written using practical examples to enable the layperson to grasp the phenomena described.

In his Sensations of Tone, Helmholtz was the first to present an overall account of musical phenomena. His

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Perspective view of a double siren constructed

by Hermann von Helmholtz to demonstrate the “interference of sound”.

findings were disseminated rapidly in national and international musical and scholarly circles, and his advice was even sought after by instrument makers because of his analysis of instruments in terms of their sound spectrum. His favourite instrument being the piano – it is said that he practised for at least an hour every day, and even more on days off – he gained insights that led to advances in the development of the Steinway grand piano. Also studying the organ and the physics of organ pipes with great interest, he visited and praised the most famous organ builder of the time, Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, in Paris.

Without Cavaillé-Coll’s instruments, such as the organ of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, which is still played today, the development of French Romantic organ music would have been unthinkable.

Helmholtz was particularly open to the music of non-European cultures, such as Asian, whose scales and sounds he studied and to which he devoted much of his work. Many modern composers have benefited from his insights and continue to be influenced by his writing today: Charles Ives, Edgard Varèse, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and the exponents of spectral music, to name but a few. In particular, Charles Ives – the long underappreciated American avant-gardist and one of the founders of American modernism – wholeheartedly endorsed Helmholtz’s conviction that there should be no prohibitions in music. In a number of theoretical writings on music, he frequently refers to Helmholtz, praising this unequivocal position that stood in stark contrast to many traditionalist German composers of the time. Paraphrasing Helmholtz, Ives demands that “the ear must learn to hear”.

Finally, without Helmholtz’s systematic investigation of overtone spectra and sounds, the development of electronic instruments would be scarcely conceivable. Many modern composers use Helmholtz’s findings in the production of innovative music, because like Helmholtz, most composers and sound artists are constantly looking for new and exciting sounds.

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Double-pane, modular, 12-tone hole siren with a sliding sound box, controllable via Max/MSP: implementation, planning, and development

by Atelier Blattmacher in cooperation with Phillip Sollmann

At this point, it should be briefly mentioned that Helmholtz also wrote a Treatise on Physiological Optics, an opulent work on sensory perception and the process of seeing, which is in no way inferior to his Sensations of Tone. His research into sensory perception and processes in the brain is the reason why Helmholtz is regarded by some authors as a co-founder of neuroscience. The celebrated neurobiologist Eric Kandel, for example, drew on Helmholtz’s work to explain perception in abstract art. Kandel made the observation that expressionist art triggers far stronger empathic reactions than figurative painting. Even highly abstract paintings such as those by Rothko, Mondrian, Pollock, and de Kooning have a powerful effect on the viewer, as they are reminded of more basic past impressions, even personal experiences, and can thus empathically associate with the images. This is the result of how the brain fuses visual impressions to form complete images, an idea which Kandel credits to Helmholtz’s assertion that the brain assembles information from the various sensory systems and unconsciously draws conclusions from it: “We do not have direct access to the physical world. It may feel as if we have direct access, but this is an illusion created by our brain.” As such, Helmholtz was probably the first physiologist to regard perception as a process of unconscious inference, on the basis of which cognitive researchers and experts in artificial intelligence have coined the terms “predictive coding” and “predictive processing”. His findings thus extend into the very latest areas of neurobiology.

Leaving aside the lasting impact of his remarkable scientific publications, what do Helmholtz’s life and work tell us today in a broad social context? He was, of course, influenced by the ideals of his time, the ideals of classicism. But at the same time, he was bold, enquiring, and open to new developments, willing to break rules and cross boundaries. And he always had the practicability and utility of his research in mind.

As a young scientist, Hermann von Helmholtz had the courage to grapple with complex issues spanning several disciplines. He built a bridge between science and art that still holds to this day. He showed how scientific knowledge and artistic creativity interpenetrate each other; both were inseparable parts of his work, of his life.

He recognised that aesthetic principles change with time; and he thought little of clinging to values merely on the strength of tradition.

To quote Goethe, Helmholtz was a “Weltkind in der Mitten” (Child of the world in its midst). Perhaps this is what we can best aspire to today, in a society of diverging functional systems, (sub-)cultures, and perceptions.

GÜNTHER WESS is a chemist and pharmacist who headed the Helmholtz Zentrum München – German Research Center for Environmental Health (HMGU) in Munich until recently. A trained church musician, he has studied the writings of Hermann von Helmholtz, especially those on music, in detail. He is chairman of the board of trustees, EUGEN MÜLLER is the managing director of the Aventis Foundation, Frankfurt am Main.

The Aventis Foundation is a member of the Society of Friends of the Akademie der Künste.

CREDITS

COLOPHON

pp. 3–4, 12–17 photos Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler/OSTKREUZ | pp. 6–10 © Hoidn Wang Partner 2021 | p. 18 photo Alun Be | pp. 21–25: Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Paul Robeson Archive (AdK, PRA), partly also Federal Archives, Berlin (BA) with kind approval; p. 21 without specification, AdK, PRA 590.03 © BA (Bild 183-74126/21); p. 22 Brüggemann/Stöhr, AdK, PRA 613.01 © BA (Bild 183-B 0708/14); p. 23 (top) Alfred Paszkowiak, AdK, PRA 513.15 © bpkBildagentur; (middle) Herbert Görzig, AdK, PRA 516.15; (bottom) Krüger/ Hochneder, AdK, PRA Nr. 513.16 © BA (Bild 183-76837/3); p. 24 (top) Zühlsdorf/Sturm, AdK, PRA 612.11 © BA (Bild 183-67155/10); (bottom) Krüger, AdK, PRA 613.02 © BA (Bild 183B0708/17/1); p. 25 Gerhard Kiesling, AdK, PRA 515.08 © bpk-Bildagentur | pp. 28–35 © Sasha Kurmaz | p. 36 Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Erich Wonder Archive, 3/19 © photo Erich Wonder; p. 37 Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Erich Wonder Archive, 19_4, 19_3, 19_2 © Erich Wonder; p. 38 Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Erich Wonder Archive, 6_7, 6_1 © Estate Sibylle Bergemann | p. 39 photo Malte Giesen; pp. 40/41 © mutesouvenir | pp. 42–45 © Mark Gergis | p. 46 © Zvetelina Belutova/private archive; p. 47 (top) © Johann Feindt/zero one film; (bottom) © Johann Feindt | p. 49 Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Joachim Walther Archive, 580 © Erben Joachim Walther | p. 50 (left) photo Bruno Wiehr, HfBK_DD, F 177; (right) Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Hans and Lea Grundig Archive, 852, p. 179; p. 51 Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Art Collection, fol. Grundig Hans 225, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022 | p. 52 photo: unknown; p. 53 photo (left) Nadia Nashir; photo (right) Insa Wilke | p. 54 Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Hugo Häring Archive, 1198_14_12 © VG BildKunst, Bonn 2022; p. 55 Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Hugo Häring Archive, 1199_11_2 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022; p. 56 (top and bottom) photos Marieluise Nordahl; (middle) photo Juliane Kreißl | p. 57 Courtesy the artist and KÖNIG Galerie Berlin / London / Seoul / Vienna © Annette Kelm; p. 58 (left) fig. 56, in: H. v. Helmholtz, Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik, Braunschweig, 1870; (right) © Phillip Sollmann, Sirene, installation detail, Oststation, Vienna 2015

Journal der Künste, edition 17, English issue Berlin, January 2022 Print run: 800

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JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 17

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