Journal der Künste 05 (EN)

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE P. 2

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EDITORIAL Werner Heegewaldt

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IMRE KERTÉSZ – “MY ONLY IDENTITY IS WRITING” Durs Grünbein’s recollections of the Hungarian Nobel laureate in literature

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ENGLISH EDITION

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05

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NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVE

BIG STAGE FOR THE ARCHIVE: P. 14

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BERLINER ENSEMBLE

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Erdmut Wizisla

MY INNER EUROPE

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Alain Mabanckou

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WHAT ARE WE COMING TO

VOLKSBÜHNE

Kathrin Röggla and Manos Tsangaris

Stephan Dörschel

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ON IM SCHIFFBRUCH NICHT SCHWIMMEN KÖNNEN Johannes Odenthal

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ART AS AN AESTHETIC CRISIS Lia Rodrigues

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On the occasion of the exhibition “By-Products of Love”, Rosa von Praunheim speaks to himself

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UNDERGROUND AND IMPROVISATION: ALTERNATIVE MUSIC AND ART AFTER 1968 Markus Müller

NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVE

PRODUCTION DOCUMENTATION: P. 15

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CHILD LABOUR Katerina Poladjan

Nele Hertling

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FIFTY YEARS OF THEATRE DOCUMENTATION AT THE AKADEMIE DER KÜNSTE

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KUNSTWELTEN

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THE ART OF SELF-DETERMINATION:

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BEYOND THE MOMENT: ON “THEATRE DOCUMENTATION” IN THE ARCHIVES OF THE AKADEMIE DER KÜNSTE

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“I PLAN TO EAT SOME VIEWERS”

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NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVE

FOUND PIECES: DOWNFALL OF THE GLORIOUS ARMY – SCHADOW’S SATIRE OF NAPOLEON Werner Heegewaldt

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Konstanze Mach-Meyerhofer P. 17

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RECORDING DEVELOPMENT PROCESSES Barbara Gronau

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THE HISTORY OF FMP AT THE AKADEMIE DER KÜNSTE

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Nele Hertling

OBITUARIES P. 8

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CARTE BLANCHE

REFLEX – THOMAS FLORSCHUETZ

JAN 2018

Johannes Odenthal

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EDITORIAL

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MY INNER EUROPE Alain Mabanckou

Dear Readers, How does postcolonial Africa regard Europe? Is there still such a thing as national literature in the globalised world? These are two questions that concern the writer Alain Mabanckou, born in the Republic of Congo. The journal’s first piece is his ironic essay “My Inner Europe”, and it offers a perspective of the manifold activities of the Akademie der Künste in the new year. It appears in bilingual German and English form for the first time, to reach out to an international audience.

The halls of the Academy at Pariser Platz will open their doors in May 2018 with the exhibition “By-Products of Love”. The electrifying artistic friendship between the filmmakers and Academy members Elfi Mikesch, Werner Schroeter, and Rosa von Praunheim forms the main focus of the work. All three are crossover artists in their work, as in life. Openly queer, they have shaped imagery in subcultures with trash, pathos, and poetry since their early days in the West Berlin of the 1960s, and to no small degree.

The theme of two exhibitions in early 2018 at the Hanseatenweg will be the alternative music and artists’ scenes in West Berlin and the states of the former Eastern bloc. “Notes from the Underground – Alternative Art and Music in Eastern Europe 1968–1994” presents a generation of artists who worked to distinguish themselves from official culture. Censorship and lack of means resulted in inspirational works at the interface of fine art, video art, and experimental music. In 1969 at the Academy at Hanseatenweg, a legendary and not entirely harmonious series of concerts by Free Music Production was held bearing the title “Three Days of Living Music and Minimal Art”. The exhibition “Free Music Production / FMP: The Living Music” leads them back to the place where they started by recollecting the Berlin Platform, which was founded by artists to produce free music. It will involve encounters with contemporary music and the improvisational scene.

“What are we coming to” when members of the Akademie der Künste set up a workshop dealing with questions of design? The correspondence between the two initiators Kathrin Röggla and Manos Tsangaris offers an insight into how the experiment might look. We will know more in the autumn of 2018 after the start of the pilot project.

The topic of theatre dominates the news from the archive. A change of artistic director does not just mean a cut-off point in terms of artistic work; it also presents the question again and again of what will happen with the written bequest. Following the departure of Claus Peymann from the Berliner Ensemble and Frank Castorf from the Volksbühne at Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, the Academy has taken over their stage archives, which are not just of importance for Berlin theatre and cultural life. They make an excellent addition to the current stock in the Bertolt Brecht Archive and the Performing Arts Archive. But are they really sufficient to document theatrical work? The field of theatre documentation has devoted itself to the task of preserving the transient artwork of theatre for posterity. A symposium where theatre managers, academics, and media representatives debated the future of documenting stage production demonstrated how relevant and vital this task is, and that many actors must play a role in this effort.

We hope you enjoy the read.

Yours, Werner Heegewaldt Director of the Archives of the Akademie der Künste

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I didn’t become a writer because I had emigrated – but I looked at my native country differently after I’d left. It was as though in my early writings, all drafted in the Congo, there were pieces missing; my characters were confined, stifled, they needed me to give them more space, more imaginative range, more encounters with people unlike me, but whose skin was the same colour, who might not understand, but at least could be made to listen to, the seven African languages I speak.

My move from Africa to Europe helped to feed the longing that underlies all creativity, a longing without which no work would ever truly reflect the concerns of its creator. You write because “something’s not quite right”, to try and move mountains, or to get an elephant through the eye of a needle. Writing grounds you; it’s a cry in the dark, too, and the tilt of the ear to the horizon, towards the Other …

My fellow writer, Dany Laferrière, often reminds me that “a writer should always live in a town he doesn’t like”. I understand this as a call for distance, a constant reinvention of the paradise that got lost, misplaced somewhere in whatever childhood memories we retain. I’ve been to so many towns, and loved them all.

I’m amazed by all these places that are nothing like where I grew up. I arrive with a light heart and a mind free of thoughts of any kind. The true emigrant does not export his being, his customs, or tastes, seeking to impose them on the host country. It’s because the place where we live and our “natural milieu” are so utterly different that the “closet” of our childhood: the street noises, the suffering, the joy of our own people thrust their way back to the surface. The tornado season reminds you of the virtues of a clear blue sky, the swoop of a free-flying bird, and the flowers of a tree you can’t quite name, until one day you remember it also grows round the back of your father’s hut, or in a park in Moungali, Brazzaville. In the desert your realise that the Atlantic Ocean and the River Congo are a heavenly blessing. But it is important to understand that the writings of an “émigré” aren’t just songs born of nostalgia. You can feel homesick even when you remain in your own place. I’m not one for nostalgia, what brews inside me is fear, the fear that I might one day have to leave this life before I discover that tiny detail that binds us all together …

The 1980s saw a proliferation of so-called “immigration literature” – what professor Jacques Chevrier would later term “migritude” or migrant culture. Works by fellow writers, such as L’Impasse by Daniel Biyaoula and Le paradis du Nord by J. R. Essomba, showed us the lives of Africans torn between Africa and Europe. In parallel fashion, the question of immigration lay at the heart of European policy: the immigrant came to be seen as a “foreigner” who repels and conquers – fraudulently – the

very space he once defended for the greater glory of the colonial empires …

The phenomenon of “migritude” is however nothing new – if we look back, for example, at novelists such as Bernard Dadié (Un Negre a Paris), or even Camara Laye (The African Child). The aim of the first writer was to fill an empty space, to depict the way of life of the inhabitants of the North. The immigrant returned home and told his adventurer’s tales, in a sort of “Persian letters” in the style of Montesquieu. What drove Dadié was the wish to discover the world of the erstwhile coloniser. Although Camera Laye ends his novel with a description of the journey out, he sought both to magnify his native country and to seek a meaning for his life elsewhere – Europe offered salvation, sanctification by acquiring a diploma. There was something potentially suicidal in such a step; the clash of cultures might drive a character to a kind of madness, as we see in Ambiguous Adventure, by Cheikh Hamidou Kane …

Our generation – the one which came of age in the 1990s – persisted in this world view, but while many of us had chosen to live elsewhere, for others it was less a choice than a necessity, the reasons for which were as many and as varied as the number of migrants themselves. Returning to the fold was not necessarily on the emigrant’s agenda. We discovered that literature had no homeland. That the writer’s nationality was the nationality of whoever read his work.

Sometimes I’ll say I’m a European, like it or not, burned or not by the sun …

What is a European to someone Congolese? It’s difficult to say. I’ve been looking for an explanation for years, but never found one. Besides, Europe is a shifting concept, eluding the strategists and cheap purveyors of one-size-fits-all utopias.

Are Africans not capable of framing their own definition? Here, for example, is what the Robert dictionary has to say about the word “European”: 1. Relating to Europe, or its inhabitants.

2. Favourable to European construction.

3. Used of any non-African white person.

So anything is European if it comes from Europe or relates to its inhabitants. Which Europe? Which inhabitants? Who are they? What’s most important, and what applies to me, is the definition of Europe the Robert dictionary offers us Africans. Apparently for us a European is simply a white non-African! By this definition, Africa can be said to have a racial – not racist, I’m glad to say – concept of Europe. All “non-African” whites are Europeans, to us. Skin colour decides – for good, for bad, whatever! If we deconstruct this “African” definition, we find at least that it recognises the existence of “white Africans”, to whom we “black Africans” supposedly refuse the “status” of European.

This representation is highly questionable – it encloses, restricts, partitions, divides, and reduces. Perhaps one thing can be said for it. It proves that we Africans long ago grasped the subtleties of this world, adapting it in advance to suit the characteristics of man-

kind! For us what mattered was attachment to place, not to race. We have no problem calling a white from South Africa an African. And the same is true for a white from Zimbabwe, to whom it has always been home.

But the pertinence of this concept, such pertinence that it has, stops there. In Zimbabwe we had a president, a lifelong monarch, who – as game became increasingly rare in the bush – took to hunting whites.

This president liked to remind them that they were white, and therefore European, even though many had never set foot in Europe. For the dictator, ensnared in his own labyrinth, all whites would be forever European! By divine decree. So what if they’ve never set foot outside Africa! And once “driven back” to Europe, these whites find themselves caught in a trap, wandering stateless and homeless. In Africa people point fingers at them. In Europe they stare at them. They have no connection to that continent, and it has nothing in common with the tropical world they know.

Sometimes I’ll say I’m a European, like it or not, burned or not by the sun …

becomes a migratory bird, who remembers the country he came from, but chooses to stay and sing on the branch where he’s perched. Do the songs of these migratory birds still come under the banner of their national literature? I’m not sure they do, any more than I believe literature can be contained within specific borders. I don’t mind where I live, provided it shelters my dreams and lets me reinvent my own world. Africa gave me my wings, Europe taught me to fly up high in the sky, and America assigned me a tree I could perch on, to make my nest and write in peace. Ultimately, I’m the outcome of a polygamous marriage between Africa, Europe, and America …

Translated from the French by Helen Stevenson ALAIN MABANCKOU

born in 1966 in the Republic of the Congo, moved to France in 1989 to study commercial law and worked as a legal advisor for ten years. He then started teaching francophone literature in the US in the early 2000s and became a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2007. In 2012 he was awarded the Grand Prix de Littérature by the Académie française. Four of his books have already been published in English. This lecture was written by Alain Mabanckou for the General Assembly of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, in November 2017.

The definition of European provided for Africans by the Robert contains precisely those piquant ingredients that fuel animosity and separatism. It’s this kind of ideology that justifies interracial war, increasing hatred, and the chain of extra-judicial expropriations. If the ex-president of Zimbabwe is to be believed, Europe is the cause of all our woes. Perhaps we should send him a copy of Yambo Ouologuem’s Bound to Violence – in English translation, of course …

European: “used of any non-African white person.”

Perhaps we should turn that around and say that Europe is the continent of “all white people who are NOT African”. All other races can go hang. You’re only European if you are white by race, and non-African.

Let’s erase all notions of human encounter, the power of an idea, the grafting of History. Would we also say that in Asia, “anyone white and non-Asiatic is European?” What about the Oceanians? How should we describe them?

I can just imagine the pat definition the North Americans might give: “All white non-Americans are Europeans!” Since America is predominantly white, and moreover a land of settlers, this would bring on complete chaos, with tons and tons of pages of history to be burned. In consideration, I suspect, of the sensibilities of its various communities, America has come up with terms which connect everyone to the Nation, without actually disguising their place of origin. Thus we have the African-Americans, the Asian-Americans, the Indian-Americans, and so on. This has serious con­ sequences, and suggests a society overwhelmed by the difficulty of managing its minorites. Each in its small corner …

With the proliferation of means of communication, we’ve created new regions, networks shooting off throughout the world. “Rome is no longer in Rome”. The writer

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 05 – ENGLISH EDITION

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ON IM SCHIFFBRUCH NICHT SCHWIMMEN KÖNNEN Johannes Odenthal

The Raft of the Medusa by Theodore Géricault, now in the Louvre, is one of the major works of the 19th century. Géricault created the painting for the Paris Salon in 1819 as a critique of the self-conception of French society after the Revolution. In 1816, the frigate Méduse, which was ferrying occupying troops to Senegal, sank off the coast of Africa. Of the 400 passengers on board, 149 were left behind on a raft, which due to lack of manoeuvrability, drifted for days on end off the coast.

The situation descended rapidly into suicide and cannibalism. Of the 149 castaways, only 15 were rescued.

In a video work by Marcel Odenbach, three Africans contemplate the painting in the Louvre. The three visitors look at this key work of the French colonial period from their own perspective; with their own refugee experiences in small boats across the Mediterranean, thus revealing to the watcher of the video a new glimpse into European art history. At the same time, by reflecting on colonialism and its consequences they update a moment of history in a contemporary visual language.

The 2011 video work Im Schiffbruch nicht schwimmen können is being shown in the Akademie der Künste at Pariser Platz on the occasion of the “Koloniales Erbe” (“Colonial Legacy”) conference starting 25 January 2018.

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“I PLAN TO EAT SOME VIEWERS” On the occasion of the exhibition “By-Products of Love”, Rosa von Praunheim speaks to himself

In May 2018 the halls of the Akademie der Künste at Pariser Platz will open for an exhibition dedicated to the intense artistic friendship between the filmmaker, painter, and activist Rosa von Praunheim; the camera­ woman, filmmaker, and photographer Elfi Mikesch; and the film, theatre, and opera director Werner Schroeter. All three cross boundaries in their art and lives – and being openly queer, their paths have repeatedly crossed. They have contributed to the image canon of the subculture since its beginnings in the West Berlin of the 1960s. Kitsch, trash, provocation, pathos, and poetry shape their work in equal measure with their tender observations of friends, neighbours, and night crawlers. Yet, they time and again distance themselves from each other, and go their own ways.

For Mikesch, Praunheim, and Schroeter, what is private is always political. This unites them beyond all differences. Rosa von Praunheim, who turned 75 in November last year, recounts how it all began ...

RVP

How nice to have run into you.

ROSA It’s my pleasure, as always – and even more often.

RVP

How may I address you?

ROSA Preferably by title, as I am a noble.

RVP Well, you appropriated the title unlawfully, so I will stick to the informal.

ROSA So, what is all this about?

RVP It’s about the planned exhibition at the Academy, “By-Products of Love”, featuring the life’s work of Elfi Mikesch, Werner Schroeter, and you, dear Rosa.

ROSA Yes, this will be one of the high points of my life.

I am building myself a mausoleum there, where I will stab myself to death in public at the end of the exhibition. And then I plan to make many more films posthumously; as you know, they are the best.

RVP This is indeed a great prerequisite for a lifelong friendship.

ROSA You said it. I implored the Mikeschs to move to Berlin to live with me and work as freelance artists.

And that’s what they did; they took drugs and made great art, pictures, and objects. Elfi is a brilliant photographer and documented my first small productions with my Berlin Superstars. This resulted in the photo novel Oh Muvie in 1969.

RVP And how did Werner Schroeter come into your life?

ROSA Werner had a sheltered upbringing in Heidelberg and made Super 8 films. I met him on New Year’s Eve 1967/68 at the Experimental Festival in Knokke, Belgium. American underground films were being shown for the first time and were a revelation to us. I had just shot a short film and Werner had shot a cat film. Werner was with his girlfriend, a stewardess, whom he later married in order to get cheaper flights; and I was accompanied by my Superstar Carla Aulaulu, whom I married in 1969 in order to cash in on the married couple’s loans for Berlin couples. I then put the money into more films. Werner and I were attracted to each other and fucked in the hotel room. Carla discovered us, kicked us out of the bed, threw the mattress on top of us, and jumped on it singing Jäger aus Kurpfalz. Those were the days. Werner visited me in Berlin and we helped each other with our small 16 mm films. He had his own camera, which I benefited from.

Together, we were invited to the Mannheim Film Festival, where we both won awards and accepted them hand in hand. Werner also got to know Elfi, who then went on to do costume and make-up on his film Salome in 1971 – as well as taking great photographs.

RVP

So Elfi had not made any films at that stage?

ROSA No, I took the Mikesch couple with me on a cin-

to eat some viewers, only against their will of course.

ematic world tour of ten cities throughout America and Asia in 1971. Elfi and I did camera; Fritz played the lead role. We travelled around the world for four months and were so annoyed with each other after it that we did not see each other for years. The film was completed in 1973 and was called Leidenschaften.

RVP

RVP

RVP

Is that even allowed?

ROSA In art, everything should be allowed; I even plan

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RVP How did the three of you come to know each other?

ROSA Well, I met Elfi Mikesch at the beginning or in the middle of the 1960s through her attractive husband Fritz Mikesch. Both came from Innsbruck and worked in Frankfurt am Main, where I met them. I was a crazy painter and Elfi was horrified by me and thought I was the devil incarnate.

What awaits us at the exhibition?

And Werner Schroeter?

ROSA Well, unfortunately, Werner Schroeter is no

ROSA He quickly became famous in France and then

longer with us, though he is perhaps looking down on us. His work is to be presented in two rooms: one room designed by his long-time stage designer Alberte Barsacq and another room by his camerawoman Elfi Mikesch, who made a great film about Werner in 2011, Mondo Lux – Die Bilderwelten des Werner Schroeter.

in Italy with his films – he spoke several languages and we no longer saw each other as often. In 1972, we were both in Los Angeles, where he was shooting his film Willow Springs for “Das kleine Fernsehspiel”. I was to play the lead role, but after two days, working as an actor was too boring for me and I got a lover of mine to act as my replacement. Unfortunately, the film turned

out to be beautiful, even without me. Werner also encouraged me to murder the director of the film festival in Los Angeles, who I was unhappily in love with, but more about that later. In the exhibition, I plan to organise some talk shows with contemporary witnesses.

RVP

THE ART OF SELF-DETERMINATION

And the wonderful Elfi Mikesch?

ROSA She began making her first film at the end of

the 1970s, for which she immediately won the German Film Prize, which I had also won in the meantime, though Werner still surpassed us. He received many awards, won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, and so on.

RVP

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And the wonderful Elfi Mikesch?

ROSA She continued to make wonderful films – had

become an internationally renowned camerawoman – and did the camera work on many films by Werner and on mine as well. In the meantime she was also living her love for women.

Werner Schroeter made films right up to the end of his life, staged countless theatre pieces and operas, and travelled around the world constantly, until he could no longer go on. Marked by illness, he was repeatedly honoured for his life’s work, including at the Venice Film Festival.

Elfi Mikesch is two years older than me, rides her bike around Berlin every day and takes photographs, works on the development of new films, and did the camera work for my two Neukölln films. She is a brilliant light artist. I admire her a lot.

RVP As for you, you must surely have retired long ago, since you are rich and famous, as it says in the title of your most recent book.

ROSA Yes, I get one hundred euros per month from my professorship; nevertheless, I can look back on more than 150 films, and a few books and theatre productions. At the Deutsches Theater, I was given the opportunity to stage an autobiographical musical, Jeder Idiot hat eine Oma, nur ich nicht. The premiere is on 21 January 2018.

RVP

That’s enough from me – everything else can be seen in the exhibition. The opening is in May 2018, if world war has not broken out by then, but you love disasters anyway.

ROSA No comment.

ROSA VON PRAUNHEIM film director and author, is a member of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Film and Media Arts Section.

He has been Director of the section since 2015.

Underground and improvisation form the theme of two exhibitions to be held at the Akademie der Künste in the spring of 2018. “Notes from the Underground – Alternative Art and Music in Eastern Europe 1968–1994”, curated by David Crowley and Daniel Muzyczuk in collaboration with Angela Lammert, and “Free Music Production / FMP: The Living Music”, curated by Markus Müller, will be dedicated to alternative music and art movements in the East and West, from the year of the student revolts and the Prague Spring to the post-reunification period in Berlin and Eastern Europe. In his article, Markus Müller spans the years between the beginnings of the record industry and the present day and recounts the efforts of the musicians not only to create their works but also to be able to actually own them. Nele Hertling’s article throws the spotlight on the special relationship between the FMP and the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

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UNDERGROUND AND IMPROVISATION: ALTERNATIVE MUSIC AND ART AFTER 1968 Markus Müller

Pop Art is: Popular (designed for a mass audience) / Transient (short-term solution) / Expendable (easily forgotten) / Low Cost / Mass produced / Young (aimed at youth) / Witty / Sexy / Gimmicky / Glamorous / Big Business Richard Hamilton, January 1957; According to Jon Savage: “The simple things you see are all complicated”

The general ideas of the underground can be described as being in a binary relationship to pop. Admittedly, the word and the history of the ideas of pop are so complex that they are not, as one might hastily assume, diametrically opposed to the idea of the underground. And yet, pop is big business and underground was originally understood to be the opposite to, or at least outside of, a successful business model.

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 05 – ENGLISH EDITION

Regarding the temporal classification: in England, the television show Top Of The Pops conquered the prime time slot at the BBC in 1963. Pop, according to Jon Savage, had already reached its international high point by 1966 and it worked incredibly well as a hypercapitalist music industry for five decades. 1 At the same time, however, pop constantly posed a fundamental question, a battlefield of meaning based on the inherent ambiguity of the term “popular”: “are the people, as a mass and individually, to be feared or celebrated?” 2 While being big business, pop always promised the potential to make the disenfranchised, the voices outside the mainstream, audible and also visible. 3 Interestingly, the Guardian launched a series in October 2017 under the heading “Where is the musical underground in 2017?” 4 The impetus for this systematic investigation was the re-evaluation of a “whole page guide to the Underground”, prepared by the writer Adrian Mitchell for the readers of the Guardian in October 1967 – fifty years ago. Just one year after pop had reached its high point, the underground arrived in the mass media.

The history of the motivation behind it and its emergence was primarily fed by the following arguments: “The mass media are too expensive for the underground artist.

There are too many compromises. Too many people telling you how you should be doing things.” 5 Until the late 1990s, all aspects of the mainstream music business, and not just the relationship between the artist and the record company, the artist and the manager, the musician and the club owner, and the musician and the music publisher, were highly influenced by the fact that the creatives were systematically exploited, cheated, and controlled by others. This is also due to the fact that the record or media industry has been based on an oligopolistic structure since its very beginning.6 In 1894 the German emigrant Emile Berliner founded the United States Gramophone Co. as the world’s first record company. This was followed in 1897 by the Gramophone Company in London and one year later by Deutsche Grammophon GmbH in Berliner’s home town of Hanover. At the beginning of the 20th century, there were four major record companies. In addition to Berliner’s aforementioned labels, there was Edison Amberol (1888), Columbia Records (1888), and the Victor Talking Machine Company (1901). By 1914 there were about five hundred competing record labels in Germany alone; today, in 2017, there are again just three major companies, namely Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Entertainment, who share a good 70 percent of the global record sales market. Two of these companies, Universal and Sony, can be directly traced back to Emile Berliner’s business.

The concentration of market forces and the long history of these incredible developments and upheavals are not an issue at this point. 7 However, what is important is the fact that the underground has always developed in opposition to these dominant market forces, whether it was about participating in a market from which one was otherwise excluded, or making one’s own decisions within racist systems. Today, there are in fact international success stories that have developed and been realised outside of the oligopoly (see for example Napster and the consequences). So the history of the

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underground has to do with the emancipation of a certain group of participants in these production relationships: with the emancipation of the musicians. And it was Jazz musicians, in particular African-American musicians, who drove these changes, because they no longer saw themselves just as entertainers. They reclaimed the role of the artist, which they saw as part of an unwritten African-American music history. And while the visual arts needed a good four centuries to develop their autonomy; 8 in the case of Jazz, it took less than fifty years until the “changing awareness of the role and the possibilities of the artist and the art changed how art itself was seen, gaining new areas of expression”. 9 The first step toward self-determination concerned the record production conditions, and the history of the initiatives by musicians from the underground is briefly outlined in the following. In 1951 Dizzy Gillespie set up his own label, Dee Gee Records. Gillespie said in his memoirs, not without ironic exaggeration, that “One alternative to playing it cool was to make a lot of money […] With the objective of building a large record company, I invested my money and talent and tried to become a musical industrialist”. 10 But two years later it was all over again: due to arrears, the US tax authority seized the inventory and sold all the master tapes and the associated copyrights to Savoy Records. In 1952 Charles Mingus, Celia (his wife at the time), and fellow musician Max Roach started their own record label, Debut Records. Often described as the first musician-run label in the US, 11 Debut Records existed from 1952 to 1957.

As well as being an act of self-help for Mingus and Roach, it was always about political equality and emancipation: “I will never again play anything that does not have social significance”, Roach explained to the Jazz magazine DownBeat. 12 “I knew Joe Oliver. He used to go record and they would go in there and stay five or six hours and if they made sixty-five or seventy dollars for the whole group for all day, they were happy. Then when it came for selling the records, there was no rule to give them royalties. So all they got out of it was the fifty or sixty dollars. The industry made all the money. The white manager made money.” 13 What one musician and trade union activist said shortly after the end of the First World War about the music industry has been expressed in countless variations up to the present day as a commonplace in the oral history of Jazz and its production conditions. 14 The relatively short period during which the first musician-run record companies existed tends to allow more conclusions to be drawn about the enormous resistance than about the intellectual history and symbolic potency of these initiatives. The relevant political issues of the 1950s and ’60s – the pursuit of emancipation and equality, for example – and the manner in which they unfolded during the following period, had a direct impact on all subsequent initiatives for the self-determination of musicians on both sides of the Atlantic. The only musician who succeeded not only in running his own record label for decades but also in maintaining a big band in a paramilitary style, as a commune for future music or, depending on your perspective, a sect for basic research on aspects of music

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history, was Herman Poole Blount. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1914, he operated under the name of Le Sony’r Ra from 1953 (which incidentally was also his name according to his ID) and made music history as Sun Ra. Sun Ra, however, was not a person but rather, in Le Sony’r Ra’s pre-Warholian words: “Sun Ra is not a person, it’s a business. So if they say that my name is this-that-and-the-other, just remember, it’s a business name. A business just happens, it’s not born. And corporations are like that, they just happen. And they’re eternal, too. You get a corporation, it’s eternal.” 15 Sun Ra was involved in the “October Revolution in Jazz” in 1964, a now legendary series of concerts organised by Bill Dixon at the Cellar Café on New York’s West Ninety-Sixth Street. For four days (1–4 October) nearly forty concerts and discussion events took place there. Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Milford Graves, and others, or to put it simply, the main protagonists of the underground, played music and discussed their musical life. As a consequence of the “October Revolution”, Bill Dixon founded the Jazz Composers Guild. Dixon had the idea that an institution should be in a position not only to strengthen the self-esteem of its members but also to improve their individual market situation (“You can’t kill an institution, but you can kill an individual”, Dixon to Cecil Taylor, 1964). Later on, the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra, led by Carla Bley and Mike Mantler, developed out of the Guild, and also registered a record label with the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra Association Inc., from whose activities the first independent record sales resulted – the New Music Distribution Service. 16 In Chicago, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) was recognised by the state of Illinois as a non-profit organisation in 1965. The Articles of Association state that the organisation concerned itself with the social, cultural, artistic, economic, educational, and spiritual needs of black musicians in their environment. The AACM is the only American musicians’ organisation from the 1960s that succeeded in bringing its ideas into the 21st century and transferring these from Chicago and New York to Paris.

Based on organisational ideas, but also and above all on the musical developments in the US of the 1960s, “elective affinities” developed in Europe between musicians whose working conditions were, to some extent, comparable to those of their colleagues in the US. For the European representatives of the new Jazz underground, there were two major problems: firstly, they were belittled as epigones and, secondly, the American “originals” were invited in preference.

The so-called plagiaristic phase of European Jazz (with certain exceptions, such as Django Reinhardt) ended with the music of Caribbean-British musician Joe Harriott at the beginning of the 1960s. In the medium term, however, he remained rather isolated. His 1962 LP Abstract earned the dubious distinction of being included in the list of “100 Records That Set The World On Fire (While No One Was Listening)” by the British magazine The Wire. From 1965 onwards, a new scene developed in England around three groups, who also built up relations with continental European musicians: the Spontaneous Music Ensemble (founded by John

Stevens with Evan Parker, among others), AMM (originally Keith Rowe, Lou Gare, and Eddie Prévost; joined from 1966 by Lawrence Sheaff and Cornelius Cardew), and, last but not least, the South African sextet The Blue Notes (Chris McGregor, Mongezi Feza, Dudu Pukwana, Johnny Dyani, and Louis Moholo). In 1964, after a concert in Antibes, the members of The Blue Notes decided to stay in Europe and finally ended up in London in 1965, where they met the South African Harry Miller. In 1974, he founded one of the two most important musician-run British labels: Ogun Records. The trigger for founding the label was provided by recordings of McGregor’s big band, Brotherhood of Breath, who had not managed to be signed by any record label (despite Miller’s tragic death in 1983, Ogun still exists today). The other label, founded in 1970 by Derek Bailey and Evan Parker, was Incus, the first independent label in England.

The first label on the European mainland founded by musicians was the Instant Composers Pool, set up in 1967 by the Dutch musicians Willem Breuker, Misha Mengelberg, and Han Bennink. The Instant Composer Pool infiltrated the SJIN Association (Stichting Jazz in Nederland), which had been around since 1965, and they prepared a structure plan for jazz in the Netherlands, founded the BIM (Professional Association of Improvising Musicians) in 1970, and opened the BIMHUIS in Amsterdam in 1973, with rehearsal rooms, a café, offices and, above all, a concert hall. 17 Peter Brötzmann is one of the decisive figures in this European emancipation movement. In the mid-1960s, he played with, among others, Don Cherry and Steve Lacy in Paris, before moving back to his chosen home in Wuppertal to record his first record in 1967 on his own label, BRÖ. The Peter Brötzmann Trio also included Peter Kowald, who tragically died prematurely in 2002, and Sven-Åke Johansson; their now legendary album was called For Adolphe Sax. At the end of the 1950s, Brötzmann was accepted to the college of applied arts (Werkkunstschule) in Wuppertal, where he studied painting and then design and graphic design – playing music on the side. Wuppertal in the early 1960s was a city where art history was made. Galerie Parnass hosted Nam June Paik’s first solo exhibition “Exposition of Music – Electronic Television” in the spring of 1963, which ended up being an international sensation and at the same time a real scandal. FAZ described it as follows: “The photo […] shows the delivery of the ox head which, prepared with cords, was just being hung at the entrance of Galerie Parnass. The farmer in the middle holds the long end of the cord in his hand. To his right, Nam June Paik approaches, presumably with a knife, to cut the remaining end of the cord. The artist Peter Brötzmann, Nam June Paik’s assistant at the time, can be seen sitting on the steps to the left.” 18 In 1963 Peter Brötzmann was still an artist who played music; and an artist who, as Nam June Paik’s assistant, was caught up in the middle of the most interesting processes of the newest art. This also included the famous 24-hour happening with Joseph Beuys, Bazon Brock, Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik, Eckart Rahn, Tomas Schmit, and Wolf Vostell in 1965. In 1968, one year after the first BRÖ recording, Machine Gun

followed; an octet in which the trio was expanded with the addition of Willem Breuker, Fred Van Hove, Evan Parker, Buschi Niebergall, and Han Bennink. With these two records, Brötzmann expanded the forms of opportunities open to European musicians for working in a self-determined manner.

Thanks to the initiative of Peter Brötzmann and Jost Gebers, Free Music Production (FMP) was founded in Berlin in 1968, almost fifty years ago. In the same year, the first “Total Music Meeting” was held, which was followed in 1969 by the first “Workshop Freie Musik” and FMP’s first LP – Manfred Schoof’s European Echoes.

Gebers received an invitation from the Berlin Akademie der Künste to organise a series of concerts for the spring of 1969, within the context of the “Junge Generation Großbritannien” exhibition. But the “Three Days of Living Music and Minimal Art” turned out to be all but a fiasco. The audience was not prepared for the juxtaposition of Alexis Korner’s Blues Group and Alexander von Schlippenbach’s avant-garde nonet and also caused considerable damage to the exhibited works of art. There were even fist fights. 19 Free Jazz had arrived at the museum, misunderstandings and all.

FMP managed relatively quickly to gather together in West Berlin the German musicians around Manfred Schoof and Alexander von Schlippenbach (Cologne) and around Brötzmann, Kowald, Detlef Schönberg, Hans Reichel, and Rüdiger Carl (Wuppertal). FMP acted as a catalyst (also because of the special position of the culturally and politically divided city) for bringing the European and international improvisation scenes together. Or, as Bill Dixon put it in 1995: “The interesting thing about our experience is that it did work later on in Europe. This is the story of Free Music Production in Berlin, and that is exactly what we wanted to achieve with the Jazz Composers Guild too. We wanted to have total control over our music. We wanted to not only create it but also to own it.” 20 By the 1980s, at the latest, FMP had developed a transatlantic exchange. In 1983 Peter Kowald and William Parker organised the Sound Unity Festival at a basketball hall in New York’s Lower East Side and invited Don Cherry, Peter Brötzmann, Billy Bang, Charles Tyler, and Irène Schweizer, as well as some dancers. As was the case in the context of the Workshop Freie Musik at the Akademie der Künste, A. R. Penck created roomfilling images that were used as backdrops. 21 This trans-disciplinary festival, now called “Visions”, still takes place today at irregular intervals.

Interestingly, these now historic strategies and initiatives have taken on a whole new relevance today. Of course, the Guardian series on the underground also looked at the music which FMP, for example, had represented for almost fifty years. In the context of an article on Evan Parker, the newspaper noted that: “All of this makes it the ultimate in underground music. The music is simply too inaccessible for the mainstream, and no one involved is particularly interested in it anyway.” 22 And Greg Tate pointed out that it is young people in particular, with their interest in improvisation and others kinds of music grounded in the history of Jazz, who are the “Black Power flower children of the Black Lives Matter era”. 23

1 Jon Savage, “The simple things you see are all complicated”, in The Faber Book of Pop, eds. Hanif Kureishi and Jon Savage (London, 1996), xxvi ff.

2 Savage, ibid. xxxi.

3 Ibid. xxxiii.

4 https://www.theguardian.com/music/ng-interactive/ 2017/oct/09/where-is-the-musical-underground-in-2017 5 Ibid.

6 The following passage summarises individual aspects from Markus Müller, “ECM im Kontext unabhängiger Schall ­ plattenfirmen und der Selbstbestimmung von Musikern in den 50er, 60er und 70er Jahren”, in ECM – Eine kulturelle Archäologie, ed. Okwui Enwezor (Munich, 2013), 54–65.

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Cf. Friedrich Kittler, Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 (Munich, 1985); Kittler, Grammophon Film Typewriter (Berlin, 1986); Ekkehard Jost, Sozialgeschichte des Jazz in den USA (Frankfurt am Main, 1982); Jost, Jazzmusiker.

Materialien zur Soziologie der afro-amerikanischen Musik (Berlin, 1982).

8 Werner Busch, “Die Autonomie der Kunst”, in Kunst: Die Geschichte ihrer Funktionen (Weinheim, 1987), 178 ff.

9 Ibid. 178.

1 0 Dizzy Gillespie, with Al Frazer, To Be, or not ... To Bop: Dizzy Gillespie (Minneapolis, 2009), 370.

1 1 Horst Weber and Gerd Filtgen, Charles Mingus, (Gauting-Buchendorf, 1984), 36.

1 2 Peter Keepnews, “Max Roach, a Founder of Modern Jazz Dies at 83”, The New York Times, 16 August 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/16/arts/music /16cnd-roach.html 1 3 The violin player and union co-founder (1918) William Everett Smith according to George Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (Chicago, 2008), 22.

1 4 Cf. Jost, Jazzmusiker (Berlin, 1982), 47.

1 5 John Corbett, Extended Play: Sounding Off From John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein (London, 1994), 316.

1 6 For everything about Bill Dixon and the Jazz Composers Guild according to Valerie Wilmer see, As Serious As your Life: The Story of New Jazz (London, 1977), 213 ff.

1 7 Ekkehard Jost, Europas Jazz: 1960–1980 (Frankfurt am Main, 1987), 345 ff.

1 8 “Schamanen in Wuppertal und ein Verstoß gegen das Kadavergesetz”, FAZ, Kunstmarkt Spezial, 27 October 2005, http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton /kunstmarkt/serie-schamanen-in-wuppertal-und-ein -verstoss-gegen-das-kadavergesetz-aus-dem -zentralarchiv-30-1283716.html 1 9 Quoted from Jürg Solothurnmann, Zwischen Erfolg und Frustration. FMP – ein Bollwerk der Kreativität (Berlin, 1980); cf. www.fmp-publishing.de /freemusicproduction/texte/1980d_solothurnmann.html 2 0 Christian Broecking, “Interview mit Bill Dixon: Zirkelschluß der Bewußtlosigkeit”, Jazzthetik, 7/8 (Münster, 1995), 10.

2 1 Christian Broecking, “Interview mit William Parker”, in Christian Broecking, Respekt (Berlin, 2011), 146 ff.

2 2 Noah Payne-Frank, “Free Improvisation: still the ultimate in Underground music?”, Guardian, 15 November 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/nov/15 /free-improvisation-jazz-ultimate-underground-music?

CMP=share_btn_fb 2 3 Greg Tate, “Why Jazz Will Always Be Relevant”, The FADER, 5 May 2016, http://www.thefader.com/2016 /05/05/jazz-will-always-be-relevant MARKUS MÜLLER

is an author and curator. In 2007 he founded Bureau Mueller, a communications and consulting company in Berlin.

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 05 – ENGLISH EDITION

S. 18

THE HISTORY OF FMP AT THE AKADEMIE DER KÜNSTE Nele Hertling

In 1968 we prepared a large project with the title “Junge Generation Großbritannien” at the Akademie der Künste, where I was secretary of the department of music at the time. It was about representing the unusual development in England over the previous few years in all its facets. During the preparatory work in London, I got to know drummer John Stevens and bassist Dave Holland by chance. We decided to invite them and their Spontaneous Music Ensemble, which among others included Derek Bailey and Evan Parker, to the opening of our exhibition in Berlin. The concert sparked our interest in this new, lively music.

A short time later, I got to know the bassist Jost Gebers through the actress Donata Höffer, who was rehearsing at the Academy at the same time for a production by Willy Schmidt. As a result of the concert with the English musicians, we planned an event together entitled “Three Days of Living Music and Minimal Art”, which was to take place in an exhibition hall, among others with Alexis Korner and Alexander von Schlippenbach.

This evening almost brought any further planning to an end, because during the musicians’ performances, amidst the exhibited works of art, an unpleasant situation arose when the audience – initially almost playfully and unintentionally – started using the objects of art as seating and as their own percussion instruments.

When we tried to stop this, violent scuffles and even fights broke out.

According to one newspaper “In a courtyard, reeds were plucked nonchalantly and one paced toward a sound happening, where feet and fists were hammered into the metal exhibits.”

Yes, sure, the music was unusual for most of the audience and was not accepted immediately, but what happened also demonstrated the suspenseful atmosphere of those years, when everyone felt they had the right to participate, to do things themselves and join in everywhere. There were huge insurance losses and Jost Gebers was sure that the cooperation with the Academy was over. But we considered this musical beginning so important that we were able to convince the Academy to give it another try – in an exhibition hall again, but without works of art. The idea came about for a workshop that was to be designed entirely by the musicians themselves. Surprisingly, the institution, namely the Akademie der Künste, allowed us to do it.

There was perhaps no real interest in this music from the Academy members, but the generally friendly relationship of trust with us much younger employees created the basis and thus also the financial opportunities for new forms and event contents at the Academy.

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And so, from 23 to 30 March 1970, the first FMP Easter Workshop took place in the large exhibition hall, during which the initially small but rapidly growing audience followed the musical programmes and developments with interest and enjoyment, thus establishing a long tradition of co-operation between FMP and the Akademie der Künste.

Throughout this process, we never tried to influence the artistic decisions, which were not made by a “curator” but by the musicians alone, at first primarily Peter Brötzmann and Peter Kowald. Jost Gebers, as a bassist, was one of those involved and became largely responsible for planning and implementation. The FMP workshop was a communal process and I myself took care of the project for over twenty years on behalf of the Academy.

This artistic self-determination was something very special and almost unique, and defined the quality of the project for many long years.

The rare performances by fellow musicians from the GDR, who were allowed to travel to West Berlin fol­ lowing considerable efforts, were both important and impressive, making a little bit of the musical development behind the Iron Curtain audible.

FMP musicians were also involved with workshops and concerts in the Academy series “Kinder und Künste”, which were almost overrun by the lively and sometimes chaotic audience, for example when a children’s group – defended by mothers standing up for the rights of their children – hijacked Han Bennick’s drums; many of these now grown-up children still have fond memories of this today.

In 1988 Berlin was the “European Capital of Culture”, and I left the Academy to get involved with the programme planning of the Culture Capital under the title of “Werkstatt Berlin”. This planning made it possible to pursue a great desire of Jost Gebers and the FMP by inviting Cecil Taylor to Berlin for an extended stay. His many performances, workshops, and concerts have not been forgotten and are recorded in a separate publication by FMP. The countless hours and nights in the great halls of the Academy, the atmosphere which was all at once open, relaxed, and yet concentrated, the encounters with the musicians, the returning audience, and the great musical moments have left their mark on those involved – it is good to remember this again in a separate project and at the same time to make insights into the future development of Freie Musik possible.

NELE HERTLING dramaturge and author, is a member of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Performing Arts Section.

She has been Director of the section since 2017.

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S. 26

S. 20 CARTE BLANCHE

REFLEX – THOMAS FLORSCHUETZ Johannes Odenthal

Thomas Florschuetz has selected five works from his photo series REFLEX to be featured in the Journal der Künste. Moving around in front of a wall covered in various types of mirrors, the photographer’s reflection in them resembles a self-portrait. As the gaps between the mirrors and the wall create negative indented shapes, an optical illusion is produced, shifting between wall and mirror, between sculpture, reflections, and presumed clarity, between inside and outside. In the five photographs, only part of Florschuetz is visible in the reflections. He always positions himself so that his eye appears in a wall segment, making himself invisible as the author whilst disappearing ever more as a person. He thus develops a relationship between outer reality, the act of seeing, and inner perception, much like in his series on architecture. A visual dialectic between inner and outer is the result, which can be understood as the reflection of photography in terms of a medium, and moreover as a reflection of one’s own perception. Florschuetz is someone who is suspicious of all reality, someone who considers his own perspective, and thereby translates this into a photographic language, something which Merleau-Ponty describes in his philosophy as an anthropological space, a space in which one’s own perception is just as much rooted as in a material reality observed at a distance.

In this sense, Florschuetz views himself as part of the tradition of art history, if nothing else. An easel is reflected in the mirrors, which is an allusion to the acquisition of reality through painting. I like to interpret the photo series as one which paraphrases no lesser work than Las Meninas by Velázquez – the depiction of one’s own artistic perspective in the work itself. Velázquez plays with the metaphor of the mirror as a graphic reflection of one’s own social and artistic viewpoint, as does Florschuetz, using media from the present. Yet in his playful exploration he doesn’t edge into the image himself, he disappears between the mirrors of his own medium.

JOHANNES ODENTHAL

is the Programme Officer for the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

IMRE KERTÉSZ – “MY ONLY IDENTITY IS WRITING” Durs Grünbein’s recollections of the Hungarian Nobel laureate in literature, republished to coincide with the conference “Holocaust als Kultur.

Zur Poetik von Imre Kertész” (“Holocaust as Culture: On the Poetics of Imre Kertész”)

In addition to Christina Viragh, László F. Földényi, F. C. Delius, and Ingo Schulze, Durs Grünbein will take part in the panel discussion at the opening of the Imre Kertész Conference taking place from 12 to 14 April 2018 at the Akademie der Künste at Pariser Platz. The title of the panel discussion and conference is “Holocaust als Kultur. Zur Poetik von Imre Kertész” (“Holocaust as Culture: On the Poetics of Imre Kertész”). The formulation “Holocaust als Kultur” comes from Kertész himself and leads directly to the heart of his poetics.

Jean Améry’s “Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältigten” (“Contemplations by a Survivor”) from At the Mind’s Limits become radicalised in Kertész’s work. He even goes so far as to describe Auschwitz as a “mercy”; a mercy that allowed him as a writer to transform the extreme experience of suffering into art.

Over these three days, writers, literary scholars, critics, and companions will address the work and elective affinities of the Nobel Prize winner and member of the Akademie der Künste, who passed away in 2016 and whose literary estate is to be found in the Academy archives. Questions regarding a new canon in Shoah literature and especially Kertész’s literary performance, which, as Péter Nádas has repeatedly emphasised, was for too long hidden by his lifelong theme, will also be addressed in lectures and discussions.

The telephone rings in the hallway of our Roman apartment; as usual, one of my daughters is first to answer the phone. She then calls through the apartment, so loud that the caller must be able to hear. “Dad, there’s a man on the phone. He sounds like he is about to die.”

Perturbed, I take the phone and say “Hello?”

I hear an older male voice that sounds both soft and high – like that of a child – speaking a wonderfully smooth German that only the most cultured Hungarians speak. The caller is Imre Kertész. That was two years ago, and now it has come to pass. Imre Kertész died in his native Budapest, the place where he was born eighty-six years ago.

Never again will I hear the soft voice of the man who, for me, since the death of Samuel Beckett, was one of the last upstanding proponents of literary modernism.

How would you explain to a young person who this Imre Kertész was? Not as a writer, that would be too simple; that would only require a precise reading of his books, although this is a difficult prerequisite, as I have noticed in many conversations.

I would say: this essentially decent man was the existential outsider himself. A stranger in the world, in bureaucratic society, in marriage, in the nation, and, as goes without saying, among writers. Never a hanger-on, he was a despiser of all ideologies, one of the greatest moral teachers of my time, a true role model for life.

His form of resistance was clever naivety. To remain sceptical, where most people already know and use words as permanently cut-out formulas. It was not in his nature to bend himself to fit the existing rules. His isolation in a culture of general complicity, of control and competition, was complete. Destined to be exterminated by the henchmen of National Socialism in Hungary, he survived as if by a miracle, but after his return to his geographical starting point, Bolshevism remained just as foreign to him. Emigration was out of the question too. Tied to his mother tongue, living a life of obscurity like the ancient Stoics, he contributed, in all modesty, a number of masterpieces to the Hungarian language. And that was it, I would say; that was his greatness; persevering like a slave in the galley and doing his work, the one thing he mastered as only very few can – writing.

That he, as a Jew, as a Hungarian, as an author, never gave in to the usual ethical and aesthetic standards (to put it plainly, compromises), was, he knew, unforgivable. It was solely about surviving, persevering for decades in the barracks of socialism to finish the job, which, after the Hungarian border fences had been removed (and the Berlin Wall had fallen), his new, unexpected readers in the West were then able to understand and appreciate as one of the few major life works to emerge from the century of destruction and mass murder. He protected the existence of the witness against illness and self-doubt and suicidal thoughts.

His survivor’s smile was a kindness that was later easily confused in the West with the popular Eastern European melancholy. He knew how far out he had swum on the ocean of loneliness. “In view of this, my Judaism is just a symbolic attachment.” He was also aware of this (though one can argue about it, and he would have enjoyed the argument): “It is not the novel that is dead but the reader.”

What remains now are his books. I would recommend that young people begin with I – Another. A very short novel that describes someone being released from prison and suddenly becoming famous. Fame is something that everyone is interested in these days. A person writes himself free, but how is that possible, after knowing so many walls, identities, terrible afflictions, and conditionalities? His other books? You should order them again, immediately. First, Fatelessness (and then Fiasco, followed by Kaddish for an Unborn Child, and then perhaps Liquidation). In the first book of this tetralogy, which is structured like a complex television series, the narrator ends up in Auschwitz because of a stupid coincidence, just as Karl Roßmann, the hero in Franz Kafka’s novel The Man Who Disappeared, comes to America. But Auschwitz was not America, folks. You might think you can guess what happens next, but what does in fact happen is something quite different, seen through the eyes of a 14-year-old boy who happened to get caught up in this maelstrom of destruction.

The narrator was one of a stream of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. This was Adolf Eichmann’s last major action against the Jews (“Judenaktion”) and is exceptionally well documented. The only photographs that we have of what happened were taken by chance during the handling of the so-called Hungary transports on the ramp in Birkenau. The images are among the most overwhelming documents to be seen at the Auschwitz Museum today. They also served as evidence during the very last trial proceedings. In the pictures, you can see children everywhere, even young boys dressed up in their best clothes, some the same age as the young Imre when, inside the gates of the camp, he stepped out of one of the brick-red freight wagons, which were closed on the top and sides.

For the author, this was about a moment of human history that remains incomprehensible as long as no one recounts it. The author who would have been gassed that same day had the selection gone differently, with nobody to mourn his passing. Against all odds, however, he survived that hell – and has now passed away, in our time and known to us all.

Maybe his German helped him. As he says in Fatelessness, “it occurred to me that no doubt I might also derive some benefit from having acquired some fluency in their language at grammar school.” And he mentions the headteacher, who welcomed the students with a classic quote: We do not learn for school, but for life. But what do we learn? “I ought to have been learning all along exclusively about Auschwitz,” writes Imre Kertész.

He saw the Nobel Prize as an “auspicious catastrophe”, an intolerable burden that robs the esteemed man of his last shred of peace. He clearly foresaw this fate and several other things too. “I write about Auschwitz, but I was not taken to Auschwitz so that I could win a Nobel Prize.” Lack of illusion was his strength. He was protected against bitterness by the gaiety of those who enjoy life and by something he shared with his most important master, Franz Kafka: childish innocence.

Childishness protected him against all fear of living and dying throughout his entire life.

“Anybody who remains of sound mind and is lucky, dies like the child forced to put down his toy when he is sent to bed in the evening; complaining on the one hand and barely able to keep his eyes open on the other. Although his parents try to comfort him by saying that his toys will still be there the next day, the child believes in tomorrow as little as the dying.” Kaddish for a rare person.

First published in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 2.4.2016.

DURS GRÜNBEIN poet, dramatist, and essayist, is a member of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Literature Section.

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 05 – ENGLISH EDITION

S. 28

WHAT ARE WE COMING TO Kathrin Röggla and Manos Tsangaris

The following correspondence is part of an Academyinternal workshop initiated by Manos Tsangaris, Karin Sander, and Kathrin Röggla, with the provocative and future-oriented title “What are we coming to”. Questions are to be asked on both the social and artistic handling of forms, and in a two-month work phase in 2019 at the Academy on Hanseatenweg a process will be intensified that starts with individual events in autumn 2018.

Dear Manos, In his book Gespenster meines Lebens, pop theorist Mark Fisher describes the different aspects of a renaissance of the ghostly in all cultural expressions, or the expression of a certain eeriness of one’s own time, accompanied by both a loss of orientation and specific hauntings. No longer knowing in what time we live and where all of these pop-cultural expressions that could have come from any time actually overlap; becoming stuck in the midst of a policy of no alternatives that can supposedly only be broken open by the Right; all this sets a melancholy overproduction of the ghostly in motion. From no-longer to not-yet, everything is in a state of suspense; images, aberrations, ghostly manifestations of what has already been, once again asserting itself formally, are right next to the things we do not yet dare to mention and are an elephant in the room, just waiting to be said out loud, addressed, put into other words. What makes a formal impression on us that we do not dare to perceive clearly? Capitalism?

Loosely based on Slavoj Žižek: Do we find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism? Or is that too crude? What negative displacement dynamics of speech, creation, and symbolism are in motion? Such things currently interest me. They provide impetus for questions of form. Are there compelling forms? Why has the debate on form been reignited in literary studies? And what are we to do with all of the subject-based content of artistic PR texts that bandy about political slogans? Why this thematic fury to make art visible by using the journalistic? And what do the flowing forms of the Net and the ever-present commercial and media user interfaces do, which you, Manos, have demanded be thematised again and again in recent discussions?

It seems to me that we have to work on certain reopenings of the Academy building at Hanseatenweg, or at least on openings. What architectural links within the building are suitable for this? Is there a line that extends from the recording studio to Hall 1? Or from the cafeteria to the store? What true inner life of the Academy can we make productive? Karin Sander allowed the inner life of the office work of a gallery to suddenly spill over

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to the outside in a paper waste installation. Do you have something similar planned? You also work with the social ears of your audience, which are aesthetically mature.

(How many ears should I actually bring?) We started talking to each other a year ago; how shall we continue?

Why is this conversation important? What ghostly investigations can we pursue with other artists?

With this question, regards, Kathrin Röggla

Dear Kathrin, Thank you for your beautiful letter with a thousand questions and ghostly apparitions.

I have experienced a slight change in recent days.

That which we defended so well in the abstract (so as not to have to be incorrectly specific) has suddenly turned into two very specific projects.

One is to begin as early as autumn 2018, long before our very “hot phase”. I call it “Free International Drumming” or “Buschtrommel Berlin” (“Jungle Drums Berlin”). Jungle drums are news drums. They forward information. And the “Free International ...” is deliberately intended to be reminiscent of Joseph Beuys, who co-founded the Free International University.

At various venues at Hanseatenweg, I want to play my DRUMS OFF CHAOS again and again and also to invite drummers from all over the world. In addition to this, Elektro-Lurche, young DJs and laptop artists from Berlin, will connect with us musically. So it is not about folklore, but rather the current movement of things.

“Everywhere we seek the Absolute,” writes Novalis, “and always we find only things”. The drum is a thing that is empty in the centre. Outside there is the skin and the shell, in the centre there is ... nothing (solid anyway).

This empty centre is what makes the sound possible.

The language of drumming is international. We will open the building for Berliners, for foreigners, for outward and inward refugees, for young and old lovers of musical change.

The second thing, running in parallel, refers to Hanseatenweg as a vessel and an architectural dispositive, but also to our Academy. I would very much like to work with a crazy filmmaker and do something there that I would not otherwise be able to do, to use the opportunities of the Academy. We will perform in and shape different routes and situations within the building, which are to be spatially composed as transitions and stations.

This is intended for individuals, i.e. very small audiences, who seek out these spatially composed situations and complete the circuits referred to here. Have humans not sought shelter in caves for the greatest part of their history? And do we not still withdraw into our private caves, bringing all sorts of things in from the outside using the small distributors, the displays, literally, the “Unfolding”. At the centre, humans are the topic of discussion. The viewer is in the picture.

And there is a third thing: if it suits us, we will proclaim a small republic overnight at Hanseatenweg.

We will form councils, and we will solve the problems of the world with perseverance and discipline. Then we celebrate.

My very best regards,Yours, Manos

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Dear Manos, That sounds good – if we open up a republic, however, it will need to be completely different to all the artist states that were opened over twenty years ago, all these hybrid art states. It would have to be handled in a manner completely devoid of melancholy, not even simply ironic, i.e. with an irony hidden behind a single gesture that just throws symbols about. A republic of the arts that moves forward, for me, has to be one with ghostly voices, amplifiers, and real networks, one which makes dual-track listening and watching possible, a dialogic system – a republic that perhaps generates a conversion of its formal rules, which is why I am forced to think of the occupation of the recording studio, a digitalanalogue radio station of another kind, a performative space that includes connections to the overground and underground. A place in which the elephant in the room nobody wants to talk about can always be portrayed and taken apart at the same time. But we still do not know what the others are saying, we still do not know what Karin Sander will have to say …

Regards, Kathrin

This stretto, this interpretation of the motifs in close succession, that I find in your response, dear Kathrin, is not foreign to me as a musician. There are certainly some things I misunderstand. But the rhythm of the entirety carries me with it, inspires and generates curiosity. “The rhythm formula of logic must always be found before all else”, writes Imre Kertész in his Galley Diary (quoted from memory). If you occupy the recording studio, I will gladly join you. And our two vascular systems at Hanseatenweg can complement each other perfectly: your nerve centre at the electronic studio – the overpasses and underpasses, the sound and resonant spaces – and my cave system. Both are determined, if possible, to be a specific (i.e. precisely formed) vessel that can, however, be opened again and again, open for others, their working methods, instruments, paths, and tool boxes. Like you, I am very excited about this.

Regards, Manos [To be continued] KATHRIN RÖGGLA writer, is Vice President of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

MANOS TSANGARIS is a member of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Music Section. He has been Director of the section since 2012.

S. 30

ART AS AN AESTHETIC CRISIS Lia Rodrigues

A central idea of the Brazilian dancer and choreographer Lia Rodrigues is that the place where we find ourselves is written into our bodies. In a radical step away from the bourgeois institutions and cultural spaces, and in the consequent confrontation with an often brutal reality in the favela of Maré in Rio de Janeiro, fundamentally far removed from art, Lia Rodrigues began a unique project in 2003. With the foundation of the Centro de Artes da Maré (CAM), artistic research, social commitment, political involvement, and a fundamental educational mission are mutually inspired and galvanised.

This lecture was given by Lia Rodrigues in October 2017 to inaugurate her Valeska Gert Visiting Professorship, which is awarded annually by the FU Berlin, the Berlin Artists’ Programme of the DAAD, and the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

Johannes Odenthal

Today, when everyone speaks of the other and of otherness, it is important to remember that words also have their other. There are other ways of looking at the same word. Take the word crisis.

I live in a place where crisis does not mean the same thing as it means here in Europe. It’s the same word but it’s not the same crisis. I can say that in Brazil we live in a permanent state of crisis. One crisis after the other; or many different kinds of crisis at the same time. And crisis in the countries of the South has always meant work. We live and feed on it. And it is neither provisional nor transitory but a condition of existence. To be in crisis is to be in a state of vulnerability.

In places where the crisis is a permanent state we learn that vulnerability is not a synonym of fragility. Vulnerability is a condition that promotes the creation of life, of relationships, of architectures. We are immersed in all its dimensions: political, social, personal, and ob­viously artistic. And because vulnerability is a way of living, it teaches us specific skills. Experiences and knowledge are born from this state.

Social relations in Brazil are marked by the systematic use of violence. And violence doesn’t only operate in the soul, but also in blood and muscles, as Frantz Fanon wrote.

Brazil has the largest absolute number of homicides in the world, with more than sixty thousand homicides a year. Every eight minutes one person is killed in Brazil. Of every one hundred people murdered in Brazil, seventy-one are black.

Among them, the largest number are black, young, and poor. Every year, around twenty-three thousand young black men between the ages of 15 and 29 are killed. Every twenty-three minutes a young black man

is murdered in Brazil. To give you an example, it is as if every year more than 150 airplanes carrying young blacks crash, with no survivors. Genocide of the black population is the expression that best fits the current reality of Brazil.

Living in a country as unequal as Brazil raises questions. Is it possible to approach the other, this other, who is so distant from us but lives in the same city? How do we cross borders and create common ground? How can contemporary art work against these flagrant inequalities?

During my professional life, working in times of crisis and vulnerability was the norm, not the exception.

As an artist I tried to respond in different ways, with propositions, initiatives, and actions.

I am a choreographer and started my professional life as a dancer in São Paulo in the seventies. In the eighties I worked with Maguy Marin in France. Back in Brazil, I created my dance company in 1990. In 1992 I founded the Panorama Dance Festival, and I was the director for fourteen years.

Since 2003 I have been developing different projects in the favela of Maré in Rio de Janeiro, together with the NGO Redes da Maré. This favela, with 140,000 inhabitants, is one of Rio’s largest favelas. Located between the international airport and the city centre, it occupies a symbolic and strategic area of the city.

Maré has a high density of population and is bigger than 80 percent of Brazilian cities, but like all the favelas it suffers from a lack of investment in health, education, security, sanitation, and infrastructure; and is marked by borders created by the violence of armed criminal groups, limiting the circulation within the favela and relations with the outside.

Most favelas can’t be found on the maps of the city.

They are still seen as empty and precarious spaces, at the margins of society. These areas – notorious for their violence and extremely dangerous – are kept out of the way. This strategy of invisibility and emptiness finds echo in the perception of what a favela is. The inhabitants of the favelas are widely perceived as potential criminals or passive victims, and violence is the dimension to which these popular spaces are constantly being reduced.

But the favela is not just a place of violence and poverty; it is also a vibrant place, rich in popular events, with a strong tradition of activism and self-organisation. From January to March 2017, thirteen children and adults were killed in the favela of Maré. This violence hit education and health: children spent many days without classes and residents had no access to medical posts. These numbers are only an example of a reality that is repeated in other favelas in Rio. To give you an idea: during one of our performances someone was killed in front of our space; we are used to working with the sound of machine guns and bullets; children in the school often have to lay down on the floor to hide from stray bullets that wound and kill.

Last March more than five thousand people took to the streets of Maré to protest against violence and in favour of peace. This protest was an invitation to make people more aware of what was happening. There is a need for change.

The fact that my dance company is working daily in Maré changes and contaminates what we create. The place where we are is inscribed in our body and in the way we move. It is a convergence full of different intensities, failures, and victories.

In 2008 I found a large warehouse that had been abandoned for twenty years. This warehouse became the Centro de Artes da Maré, the first cultural centre in this favela. The place was in a very bad condition and together with Redes we cleared out the space, cleaned it, rebuilt the floor and the roof, painted the walls, and so on, all while creating and rehearsing.

The Centro de Artes da Maré hosts many different activities, such as classes, performances and presentations of theatre, dance, photography, film, and visual art; as well as conferences, seminars, exhibitions, and meetings of the inhabitants of Maré. It’s also where my dance company is based.

When I decided to set up my company in a favela, I was aware that we would be confronted with very specific situations resulting from economic and social inequalities. But for me the artistic act cannot be restricted to the creation of a work of art; it must also create a territory and the conditions to survive, building the ground for the work of art to exist. That is why it is crucial for me to create a physical space devoted to art in a neighbourhood like Maré. It is the space where I create and where I think about my profession and my place in the world.

Another project was born in 2011: the Escola Livre de Dança da Maré (Maré Free Dance School), with more than three hundred students between the ages of 8 and 80 years old. The school is based on two complementary cores: one with regular dance classes, offered for free to all; and another with a group of fifteen young students who receive continuous training in dance in order to become professionals.

The majority of these students have entered Uni­ versidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), and two of them were admitted last year to PARTS, a dance school founded in 1994 by choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Some of them are giving classes in our school.

Recently, artists and cultural institutions in Brazil have been censored and subjected to attacks by ultra-conservative groups and politicians. This is both very serious and dangerous, putting our already fragile democracy at risk. These reactions against art in Brazil say something about what is happening now in many parts of the world, with the endemic bloom of conservatism. The preservation of freedom is in danger and the preservation of the artist’s freedom as well. We must be aware of this threat and we must have the courage to denounce it.

Watching a certain show, viewing a certain piece of art, is a choice. However, I’m more concerned to reflect together on how to stop the production of violence and intolerance. When someone forbids the other to have their own voice, it is a violent and intolerant attitude.

The question is how to live in this world of voices in the plural without the reinforcement of violent speech. How could we diminish the speech of attack and war and turn them into conversations? How could we hear the

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 05 – ENGLISH EDITION

other’s voice without erasing or destroying it? How could we live politically and not polemically?

The world has too much war because we do not know how to live in diversity. And diversity depends on the democratic practice of producing dialogue. My work talks about how I deal with the daily violence that exists in the place where I live – and I work in Rio de Janeiro.

It is a violence that is there every day.

What has been put into motion through the encounter between the people of Maré and my dance company is a lively process, constantly changing, giving rise to new possibilities. It’s like a collective body.

At a time when more and more walls are being built everywhere in the world, when territories are strongly demarcated and protected, and boundaries are imposed and fiercely defended, we propose to make the opposite movement and go against the tendency to exclude a huge part of the population of Rio de Janeiro.

We must not delude ourselves. The sky will eventually fall on our heads. It’s a certainty. How will we manage? There can still be hope, but it depends on what we do, how we act. It is a fighting hope.

The title of my latest creation is “For the sky not to fall”. Everyone must look for a way to support the sky.

For some it will be supporting democracy, for others, solidarity with immigrants and refugees. The possibilities are endless. There are many ways to support the sky. We must fight and persist.

LIA RODRIGUES dancer and choreographer, is head of the Companhia de Danças in Rio de Janeiro.

The concluding event of Lia Rodrigues’s Valeska Gert Visiting Professorship will take place on 14 February at the Akademie der Künste, Pariser Platz.

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S. 36 KUNSTWELTEN

CHILD LABOUR Katerina Poladjan

At the beginning of November, Katerina Poladjan invited children from a primary school in Anklam to a KUNST­W ELTEN Werkstatt (ARTWORLDS workshop) at the Akademie der Künste. Poladjan and the visual artist Rolf Giegold came together with forty-four girls and boys on five mornings. They read fairy tales, wrote stories, took photographs, painted, and drew pictures.

In October, a workshop with Fiston Mwanza Mujila and Stefano Zangrando took place at a different school in Anklam. Further writing projects are scheduled for the new year. The results will be published in a small book series in which the children of Anklam tell about their lives, their wishes, their fears, and their dreams.

I’m in the town of Anklam in eastern Germany. I’m going to be spending a week working with primary school children. The subject: When I feel like I don’t belong.

DAY ONE I’m staying in a hotel in the town centre. My room is painted in friendly shades of red; there’s a giant television, a giant bathroom, and a giant bed. There’s a copy of the New Testament on the pillow. That’s good. Leafing through it, I come across a keyword index with the title Where to Find Help. I look up exhaustion and end up on Psalm 90: It says All our days pass away under your wrath and then Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us. Under the keyword distress I find: He said to them, If any of you has a sheep and it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will you not take hold of it and lift it out?

I turn on the TV. The actor Hape Kerkeling is talking about coming out. Didn’t he already do that in the 90s?

I turn the TV off again. I’m nervous. I’m scared of children. I look up decision, and find James 1: the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. No, I am not one who doubts.

DAY TWO The breakfast is splendid. Egg, apple, cold meats and cheese, yoghurt with chocolate sprinkles, and two bread rolls, one brown and one white. Everything OK? asks the lady who has got out of bed only for me. Everything OK. The bread rolls come from the baker. Thank you.

Where do you come from? From Berlin. Ah. And what are you doing here? Working with children. Child labour?

Something like that, yes. Ah – more coffee? Yes. They’re closing everything down here. Like what? The swimming pool, for example. No one asks, it just gets shut down. Who? Politicians. Which ones? The kids don’t have a swimming pool any more. It’s like that with everything. More coffee? Yes. You drink a lot of coffee!

Yes. And Berlin? You can swim there. Exactly. Yes. I’ve

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been here thirty-five years. That long? GDR. Yes. I’ve always worked. You too? No. I’ve even worked in Austria. Oh. But the mentality is different there. Where? In Austria. In what way? Different. OK. Just next door to here, at the Stone Gate, people got decapitated. Oh. More coffee? Yes. Good? Very. There’s a lot in the papers about our town. What? We don’t have a good reputation. Bullshit. Complicated. Yes. After doing my child labour I amble through the town.

I count six pharmacies, one book shop, three shoe shops, four care homes, five building sites, four foot-care salons, and five churches. The market square in Anklam is remarkably big. Along with the older Church of St Mary, the Church of St Nicholas is one of the town’s most striking buildings. It’s named after Nicholas of Myra, an extremely versatile saint, who not only uses his rod to keep children in line in the run-up to Christmas but is also patron of mariners, bargemen, thieves, pharmacists, prison guards, carters and salters, pilgrims and altar boys. The Hanseatic merchants in Anklam were presumably thinking of his protection of fishermen and sailors when they dedicated their church to him. All that remains of the church tower is a stump. According to legend, the Devil wanted to seize the pastor and break his neck because he’d proclaimed the Word of God so convincingly that no one was doing anything wicked any more.

He missed, and broke the church spire instead of the pastor’s neck. I’d have liked to have seen the broken spire, but German troops took it upon themselves, just a few days before the end of the last war, to complete the Devil’s work and bombard the tower to the ground.

I hear the children’s questions in my head. Why do you ask if we like reading? Why don’t you live here? Why do you want to know if I feel like I don’t belong? So when do you feel like you don’t belong, Miss Katerina?

I feel like I don’t belong now. I buy nuts in a drugstore. Five youths are standing in front of the driving school. One is missing a leg. They’re smoking. They have yellow faces. They’re listening to music and I hear: shit, shit, shit. No, it’s not all shit, I want to say, but I prefer to keep quiet.

After five o’clock there’s hardly anyone on the street.

It’s dark. My steps echo through the streets. Mischa, a boy from Ukraine who’s lived in Anklam for a year, said: Ich habe Mischa. You mean, ich heiße Mischa, the girl sitting next to him whispered. Mischa stood up and went out of the classroom. I looked at the clock; he stayed away for nearly fifteen minutes. When he returned, he took a black pen and drew a planet. Next to it he wrote: On planet everything good, animals good, people also good, streets good, and monsters also good. His cheeks reddened. At the end of the morning his teacher told me Mischa always goes to bed too late; that’s normal in Ukraine; it’s difficult; worlds colliding.

In the pub I order Anklam fish soup. Is anyone joining you? No. No problem. The soup is served with toast.

The waitress has something floral tattooed on her arm.

I open my notebook; after the line Women in Anklam with flower tattoos on forearm I place a third x. It’s delicious. I feel slightly lonely and order more toast. Should I start a conversation with the guests at the next table?

I turn slowly in their direction. Could I please have the salt? Do you come from Anklam? Yes. All of you? No,

also from Usedom. Oh, I went to the clinic there, I say.

Where? Trassenheide, orthopaedic rehab, it’s lovely there. And now? Nothing. The waitress brings ribs for the gentlemen and chicken for the ladies. Enjoy.

Thank you.

Back in the hotel, I try to work. Someone has put a book about Leonardo da Vinci on the table for me. Is it a sign? It’s an unusually big coffee-table book. On the windowsill is a model sailing ship. I look into the dark night and see nothing. I look up gratitude in the New Testament. Hebrews 13: For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come. Tomorrow I must ask Mischa what he does late at night.

DAY THREE Mischa made a flower for me out of folded paper. He stood shyly in front of me and waited for my reaction. I thanked him a little too effusively. I didn’t ask him what he does late at night. Maybe he watches TV with his parents. Maybe his parents are made of straw. Maybe he came from Donetsk with four suitcases. You should live in Anklam from now on, someone told them, because there’s space here. Maybe his mother sits at the kitchen table in the evenings and learns German words. Hafen: harbour. Vermächtnis: legacy. Quelle: source: Maybe his father crochets a scarf. Maybe his father is over the hills and far away. Or it’s all completely different. I don’t know anything.

While I was assigning tasks and thinking up games, I watched Mischa, sitting between the other children, pale, with troubled eyes, trying to understand individual words. Every now and then he gave up, took a deep breath, looked out of the window; then he composed himself and the struggle began again. At the end of the morning I went to him and said: I know how you feel.

When I came to Germany I was about your age. I remember what it’s like to not understand anything. He looked at me and a shadow came over his face. I’m good, he said. He took his coat and went. I should’ve kept my mouth shut.

I hear the children’s questions in my head. Why do you ask if we like reading? Why don’t you live here?

The sun is shining. Even the row of chain stores, KiK, Aldi, Famila, and Futternapf, looks friendly. Finally I see my first swastika. It’s sprayed onto the wall of a block of flats. I take a photo. A woman with full shopping bags in both hands stands still, shakes her head and continues. I don’t know what she was shaking her head about.

Either about the graffiti or me. I haven’t got my lederhosen on today. Men are fishing by the river Peene.

They’re spread out five metres from each other and are waiting for the fish. Almost as though on the Bosporus.

I take a photo. One of the men strikes a pose. He’s wearing camouflage. Poking out of his jacket pocket is The German Hunting Magazine with the cover story Bait Hunting for Boars – Grunting Game.

Caught anything? I ask. Have a look, two zanders! Oh, so big. I don’t care what anyone says, the Peene is the Amazon of the North. I have no objection. We’ve got thirty-seven types of fish; we even get large predatory fish here sometimes. Oh. What do you mean, oh? The thing about the predatory fish. What are you doing here in Anklam? He uses “du”, the informal word for “you”.

Then he repeats the question with “Sie”, the formal form. A project for the Academy of Arts. Ah ha. What kind of project? I work with children. There’s not much for children here. Who says? It’s well known. I asked, who says that? Studies. What kind of studies? Do your studies also say that I go fishing with my children every weekend, that the little one can already gut a fish and a rabbit? He lights a cigarette and says slowly: you lot get on my nerves.

I could of course have asked who he meant by you lot, but I say my goodbyes. Maybe I should’ve kept my mouth shut.

In the Chinese restaurant China, fat goldfish swim in the aquarium. Predators? There’s a buffet. Sweetand-sour chicken, sweet-and-sour soup, fried crab rolls, breaded fish, baked bananas. I order plum wine. A young couple is sitting at the table to my right. She doesn’t have any flowers tattooed on her forearm, but she does have a not-very-cute dog on her neck below the shaved back of her head. She holds his hand and at several points he thinks about pulling his hand away so he can eat, but he seems to be nervous of doing so. At the table to my left is a group of four women. All have buzzcut hair with blonde highlights. They’re toasting a 20th anniversary. They’re drinking coke-and-orange and – like me – plum wine. There’s no one else in the place. The young couple are quiet. They’re in love. They don’t have to speak. She lets go of his hand and gets him a second portion of baked bananas. They get two fortune cookies with their bill. Mine says: you’re smarter than you think, she says. He eats his cookie unopened and they leave the restaurant. The ladies at the next table are talking about the blueberry cakes at Netto, which are supposed to be good. I eat three portions: sweet-and-sour chicken, fried fish, soup. I can never restrain myself at buffets. You will travel far, my cookie says. I won’t read the bible today.

Günther’s nickname – visit Anastasia’s grandparents.

On the roof at the grandparents’ house is a chest with a glowing square. Ananas and Günni fall through this square onto the planet of the Aluschins. They have all kinds of adventures and at the end they don’t ever want to go home. There’s a party and they have their first kiss.

When we came to the kiss, some children crawled screeching under the tables and held their ears. Others shouted: more more, how nice! That’s the way it is.

When I said goodbye, Mischa came to me again. He held out his hand and said: but there’s no such thing as green pugs. But when you and I imagine them, there is such a thing.

First published in Zeit-Online, 20.11. 2017.

KATERINA POLADJAN

born in Moscow in 1971, came to Germany as a child and lives today in Berlin. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, In einer Nacht, woanders, was published in 2011. In 2015 she was nominated for the Alfred Döblin Prize for Vielleicht Marseille and was also invited to Klagenfurt for the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize.

DAY FOUR My last day in Anklam. Scrambled egg for breakfast again? No, boiled egg please. Oh, but still an egg? Yes, an egg. Hard or soft boiled? Sort of in the middle. Ten minutes later she brings me a hard-boiled egg and watches how I eat it. Very dry, isn’t it? Yes. When I go, she winks at me. I wink back. Did you find the book?

Leonardo? Yes. Thanks for the book. Good, I thought you might like it. I liked it. It’s not a present though, the book. I know. Good.

The children had already had three hours of lessons and a maths test. The life of children is cruel to children.

They were expecting me. I’m feeling emotional. I quickly give out jelly bears. We read the story we made up together: Günther and Anastasia are best friends.

Günther lives in a tower block; Anastasia with her parents and a green pug in a terraced house. In the holidays, Ananas – Anastasia’s nickname – and Günni –

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 05 – ENGLISH EDITION

S. 38 NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVE

FOUND PIECES: DOWNFALL OF THE GLORIOUS ARMY – SCHADOW’S SATIRE OF NAPOLEON Werner Heegewaldt

Berlin: 200 years ago. In the winter of 1813, the city, under occupation by French troops, receives the news that the Grande Armée has been defeated and that Napoleon has retreated from Russia. Scattered soldiers move through Berlin, ragged, emaciated, and maltreated. Their faces show the horror and misery of the lost war. The mystique of the unvanquishable conquerors, masters of half of Europe, seems finished. Driven out by Cossacks, in March 1813 they are finally forced to leave the Prussian capital for good. In response, the counterattack is formed. Prussia and Russia forge a treaty of friendship. On 17 March, the Prussian king publishes the appeal An mein Volk (“To my people”) in which he exhorts his subjects to join the fight against Napoleon. Previously suppressed, criticism of French domination becomes loud and widespread. Mockery and hatred of the occupiers spills out in biting satires that quickly reach a wide public.

In April 1813, on the request of the publisher Caspar Weiss, Johann Gottfried Schadow draws two caricatures of Napoleon and his army: La Retraite de la Renommée (“The Retreat of the Glorious One”) and Le Déjeuner à la Fourchette (“Dinner with Forks”). In less than a month they are in print, but in a version that contains ironic commentary added after the drafts. The trenchant satires show Schadow as a virtuoso draftsman and unerring caricaturist, in marked contrast to the plethora of crude cartoons that were then fashionable. In detailed snapshots and impressive figure studies, he depicts the pretension and the reality of the Napoleonic army. His stark visual language exposes the arrogance and conceit of the defeated general, of whom French military propagandists had been claiming, as recently as December 1812, “His Majesty’s health has never been better.” The artist’s personal experiences play a major role in the work. As a citizen and property-owner in Berlin, Schadow not only suffered from the harsh taxation imposed by the occupiers but also experienced the reality of forcible billeting of French troops in his house and studio. He also had to watch his Quadriga statue be removed from the Brandenburg Gate and taken as a trophy of war to Paris.

La Retraite de la Renommée shows the emperor’s flight from Russia. Dramatically and caustically, Schadow creates a scurrilous visual narrative in which the main characters are introduced almost in passing.

Within a hazy winter landscape we see a strange

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horse-drawn sledge, a wooden trough on skids, not unlike half a coffin, surrounded by a crowd of people of strange bearing and clothing. A signpost points to Posen, a province in Poland, a land the French characterised as barbaric and uncivilised, but on whose goodwill their retreat now depends. In front of the sign, an officer in gold-­encrusted parade uniform bargains over the onward journey with a fur-clad Polish wagon driver. Despite his stature and magnificent costume, it is clear who has the real authority here. Napoleon can be seen near the right-hand edge. His back is turned but his figure and bicorne hat are nevertheless unmistakeable. With an energetic gesture he demands that the journey continue. He ignores a small dog that yaps at his heels and that is, according to the caption, the voice of the people. The emperor is flanked and towered over by both his loyal Mamluk bodyguard Roustam Raza and a soldier of the guard. Their mimicry makes the tragicomic nature of the situation clear.

The climax of the satirical scene is Madame la Rénommee, who wears a headdress decorated with the colours of the French flag. As an allegory of the defeat of the celebrated army, she falls when her mule stumbles.

Laurels and a fanfare trumpet lie broken on the floor.

Her skirts ride up to reveal naked and unfamiliar facts: the glorious Grande Armée has been beaten into the ground. The caption, in French, makes this even clearer.

Madame “Glory” is beginning the menopause. The soldiers around her nevertheless ignore this message and look pointedly the other way. Unworried, an infantryman pulls out his lorgnette and gazes, bored, into the distance.

Its pendant picture Le Déjeuner à la Fourchette shows the battered remains of the imperial army in their bitter struggle for survival. Two ragged soldiers have made a fire out of the wreckage of an army waggon and are grilling a horse’s skull over it. They are barbecuing two rats and a dog, skewered on bayonets, while two soldiers in women’s dresses and shoes made of straw fight the cold, gnawing on meagre bones. Their comrades react with disgusted grimaces, though this does not stop them from butchering a horse of their own.

Schadow experienced the reality of forcible billeting of French troops in his house and studio.

Both pictures are outstanding examples of Schadow’s graphic work. The rare caricatures were in a private collection until they came up for auction in Berlin earlier this year. The Academy has managed to acquire La Retraite de la Renommée for its art collection. The purchase was made possible by the generous support of the Society of Friends of the Akademie der Künste, the Ernst von Siemens Art Foundation, and the Cultural Foundation of the German Federal States. Its companion piece will be preserved in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The new acquisition is an important addition to the art collection. Johann Gottfried Schadow, the founder of the Berliner Bildhauerschule (Berlin School of

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Sculpture) movement and a central sculptor of classicism, left behind major sculptures and, with over 1,200 drawings, by far the largest holding of works on paper.

However, this did not include any caricatures. This gap has now been filled.

The image: Johann Gottfried Schadow, La Retraite de la Renommée (“The Withdrawal of Napoleon”), 1813. Watercolour over quill in brown and brush in grey on vellum, 15.4 × 39.3 cm.

The printed version from 1813 by Gaspare Weiß und Comp.

Berlin has a caption in French that comments ironically on the events (from left to right, translated into English): Observation and consideration | The luminary reaches the menopause | Misstep of the imperial mule | Escort of the light cavalry | Cadre of prospective infantry regiment | The disastrous vehicle| Excellence and servitude | In Egypt it is too warm, in Russia too cold | Back view | The people’s voice | Hope WERNER HEEGEWALDT is Director of the Archives of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

S. 40 NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVE

BIG STAGE FOR THE ARCHIVE Erdmut Wizisla, Stephan Dörschel

Berliner Ensemble and Volksbühne at the RosaLuxemburg-Platz – two important new collections in the archives. By acquiring this outstanding theatre archive, the Academie der Künste has significantly enhanced its specialist section on theatrical and cultural life in Berlin. These institutions have been central sites of artistic and aesthetic engagement and public discourse on social and political questions, both in the Peymann and Castorf eras and under their predecessors.

BERLINER ENSEMBLE The Akademie der Künste acquired the Berliner En­semble’s extensive archive during the 2017 season break, following mutual talks with the departing director Claus Peymann and his successor Oliver Reese.

It documents the theatrical work of the period 1949–2017, beginning with the era of Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel, moving on through the following decades under Ruth Berghaus, Manfred Wekwerth, Heiner Müller, Stephan Suschke, and others, until the period under Claus Peymann, who directed the theatre from 1999 to 2017.

The archive of the Berliner Ensemble is being processed in the Bertolt Brecht Archive and is available for use as of now. It owes its existence to Bertolt Brecht’s marked interest in documenting his work for teaching and study purposes, as well as his constant desire to preserve and develop his own principles of dramatic practice. The archive takes up some two hundred metres of shelf space. At its core is the documentation of all stage productions, including documents with handwritten edits by Brecht. The productions are also precisely documented in books that were produced for various purposes: scripts and other documents for directors, stage managers, and prompters. A visual record of the productions of the Berliner Ensemble exists in the famous model books and in documentary films. A discursive record exists in notes made by collaborators and in dramaturgical materials. Also retained are posters, reviews, files from various departments, file indexes on actors, notes and scores, documents on guest performances, readings, special events, prizes and awards, programme booklets, and other printed materials.

The archive of the Berliner Ensemble provides a wide basis of source material and enlarges the records already kept in the Akademie der Künste. After Brecht’s death, Helene Weigel ensured that important materials for the period up to 1956 were transferred from the theatre to the Bertolt Brecht Archive, and after her death, Brecht’s heirs requested documents be trans-

ferred from the Helene Weigel archive. The Brecht Archive also takes care of the archives of Isot Kilian, Hans-Dieter Hosalla, Hainer Hill, and Vera Tenschert, who were closely involved with the Ensemble. There are, furthermore, overlaps with holdings in the archives of the performing arts, literature, music, and the visual arts: from the directors Ruth Berghaus, Benno Besson, and Manfred Wekwerth; the director-writers Fritz Marquardt, Einar Schleef, George Tabori, and B. K. Tragelehn; the actors Ernst Busch, Erwin Geschonneck, Regine Lutz, Käthe Reichel, Ekkehard Schall, and Leonard Steckel; the authors Thomas Brasch, Volker Braun, and Heiner Müller; the composers Paul Dessau and Hanns Eisler; and the set designers Karl von Appen, Heinrich Kilger, and Teo Otto, to mention just a selection.

Along with the written material, the photo archive from the Peymann era, with more than twenty thousand images, was acquired. The comprehensive visual documents follow on chronologically from the photographic archive of the Berliner Ensemble, which was previously transferred as a permanent loan. The extensive audio archive is also moving to the Akademie der Künste. This contains recordings including more than five hundred tapes of production excerpts and working discussions from the early 1950s to the early 1990s.

The Akademie der Künste is grateful to the directors Claus Peymann and Oliver Reese for their cooperation.

Hannah Arendt described the development of the Berliner Ensemble as “perhaps the most outstanding cultural achievement in post-war Germany”. The acquisition of the archive makes it open for anyone who wants to study this significant chapter in the history of theatre.

ERDMUT WIZISLA manages the Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin Archives of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

S. 41 VOLKSBÜHNE The Berliner Volksbühne has transferred its archives to the Akademie der Künste. The transfer preserves a history of work, including the 25-year directorship of Academy-member Frank Castorf. Once the holdings have been processed they will be made accessible to the public. This major increase in holdings forms part of an effort to secure, process, and make publicly accessible collections that document the most important theatrical and historical events in the development of German theatres after the Second World War. It includes Bertolt Brecht’s and Helene Weigel’s Berliner Ensemble (1949), Kurt Hübner’s Bremer Theater (1962–73), Peter Stein’s Schaubühne (1970–85), and the quite different theatre that Frank Castorf established in 1992 when he took over directorship of the Berliner Volksbühne in collaboration with set designer Bert Neumann and dramaturge Carl Hegemann, turning it into a template for theatres all over Europe. Interestingly, today it is Eastern European theatres in particular that follow the example of Castorf’s Volksbühne!

The archive of the Berliner Volksbühne covers a period from around 1954 to 2017. Only a few documents – such as cast lists, programmes, and performance photographs – remain from the period that directly followed the foundation of the theatre in 1914. The actual acquisition begins with the directorship of Fritz Wisten, who offered the Volksbühne a progressive and diverse season programme. Brecht’s Swiss protégé Benno Besson took charge of the Volksbühne in 1969 as Chief Director, and became Intendant in 1974. He brought the institution to international attention with unusual spectacles and outstanding productions. In contrast to the West Berlin theatre Schaubühne, it remained an experiment, one which, however, ended in 1978. Artists such as Heiner Müller and Fritz Marquardt were responsible for a succession of exciting productions that continued into the following period.

In addition to the continuous documentation of the individual productions since 1954 (including programmes, cast lists, reviews), the archive also contains a comprehensive photographic collection, documents relating to dramaturgy and management, and the legendary performance and promotion posters. The extensive collection of audio-visual recordings has been digitised, thanks in part to support from the charitable foundation of the German Lottery. The Volksbühne website, featuring Bert Neumann’s un­mistakeable use of Gothic script, has also been acquired by the Academy and remains accessible online at https://volksbuehne.adk.de.

But even before it took over the Volksbühne archive, the archives of the Akademie der Künste had already supported Frank Castorf’s directorship with the documentation of numerous productions, those by the director himself and also by his colleagues Christoph Marthaler, Herbert Fritsch, and René Pollesch. Because the archive was intended to preserve the entire period of Frank Castorf’s directorship, it was transferred shortly before the end of the season and is currently being viewed, sorted, described, and indexed. With around six hundred removal crates full of documents, it is one of the largest collections in the department.

STEPHAN DÖRSCHEL manages the Performing Arts Archives of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 05 – ENGLISH EDITION

S. 42 NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVE

PRODUCTION DOCUMENTATION How can an ephemeral work of art like a stage play be captured for posterity? Representatives of theatre, science, media, and archives discussed this topic at a symposium in November 2017. The occasion was the 50th Anniversary of the Production Documentation Collection at the Archives of the Academy.

Three statements deal with these issues.

S. 43

BEYOND THE MOMENT: ON “THEATRE DOCUMENTATION” IN THE ARCHIVES OF THE AKADEMIE DER KÜNSTE Nele Hertling

What does it mean for active, practical theatre work when this process is being documented as the production is emerging? What sort of relationship develops between the artists and the “documentarist”? How close are they? Is it possible for those involved in the production to have an objective view of the work? Which parts of this complex process are included in the documentation? What does it reflect? Can the parallel processes of production and documentation perhaps be helpful to the rehearsal work and support the decisions being made? What does such documentation communicate in the end and who can benefit from it?

We know that the artistic work of performance exists only in the moment of its live presentation. Any attempt to capture it creates something new, perhaps a new work of art, but it cannot be identical to the performance itself. For the artists, the documentation of a production can be a new starting point, inspiring them to engage with the decisions made regarding the piece selected, the interpretation, the casting, and the use of the chosen material; to question their own work methods and the outcome of the solutions found. Thus, it may well be important to be selected as one of the performances to be documented.

This means that the criteria for selection are important. Who makes this decision and is it a question of theatre politics, a task of the “theatre documentation” department in consultation with the artists? Does the documentation have a specific task? Is it about an

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analysis of the respective artistic work? Or is it, so to speak, without purpose?

If one looks back on the results of fifty years of work, it is clear that the archived documentation is, above all, a particularly important record for research into the theatre work of the time, beyond the artistic and aesthetic interest in the artists themselves, but also for recognising cultural-political contexts. For example, it allows programming policy to be tracked; the selection of productions to be documented can provide information on trends in theatres and their overall assessment.

This was also true in the period after 1989, especially when the documentation of developments and theatre policy processes began, such as processes shortly before and during German reunification and political activities by theatre artists in the autumn of 1989, but also the start-ups that followed as political change was transforming Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the closing of the Schillertheater. These collected materials make the critical observation of theatre work over longer periods of time possible, which means they become important documents, especially for research. It would be interesting to know – also for the members of the Performing Arts Section of the Akademie der Künste – where today’s particular interest lies regarding the work of this specific area and the per­ception of historical contexts.

Over the course of time, the methodology of documenting has changed. In particular, technical developments have contributed to this, especially the simplified option of visually recording performances and the associated processes. In practice, it is almost inconceivable that no recording would be made of the rehearsals and the final performance, even in the so-called “independent scene”, which generally only has access to limited production budgets. Those filming a production usually make their own decisions regarding the individual viewpoints chosen, producing a result that is seen through a subjective lens. Due to this approach, the proximity to the development processes during a theatre production and the deeper insight into decision-making processes and analyses are lost. In part, this kind of documentation now has other tasks, such as promoting performances, preparing possible guest performances, and so on, though it can of course also serve theatre practice or research studies and experiences.

Certainly, the undoubtedly important task of theatre and production documentation must continue to develop flexibly in regard to questions of selection criteria, methodology, and financing. In this context, the question of who the work is being done for should also be addressed accordingly. We hope that this specific part of the Academy archives that has for so long successfully collected experiences can also contribute to future works and continue to be an important partner both for theatre practice and research.

NELE HERTLING dramaturge and author, is a member of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Performing Arts Section.

She has been Director of the section since 2017.

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S. 44

FIFTY YEARS OF THEATRE DOCUMENTATION AT THE AKADEMIE DER KÜNSTE Konstanze Mach-Meyerhofer

The problem is that theatre is at the moment also seen as a commodity.

And only the product is of interest, the saleable product, and not the process.

The theatre will die if we don’t succeed in shifting the emphasis to the process.

Heiner Müller in an interview with Alexander Kluge

The production documentation collection in the archives of the Akademie der Künste encompasses more than a thousand documents on theatre and musical theatre productions. They attempt to enable significant insights into the development, the result, and the impact of a given production. In this way, the documentation not only conveys deep insights into the working methods of over 350 theatre and musical theatre directors at 120 theatres in the German-speaking area but also into contemporary history, which is reflected in many productions that have become famous. With its 130 running metres, approximately seventy thousand production and rehearsal photos, and numerous audiovisual recordings, the frequently used collection is one of the most comprehensive archive holdings. In accordance with the interdisciplinary character of the archives of the Academy, it is linked to many archives which shed light on theatre from another perspective, such as Ruth Berghaus, Benno Besson, Volker Braun, Paul Dessau, Adolf Dresen, Achim Freyer, Peter Konwitschny, Heiner Müller, Hans Dieter Schaal, Arila Siegert, Maria Steinfeldt, and Peter Zadek.

The model books and direction chronicles of the theatre reformers Bertolt Brecht at the Berliner Ensemble and Walter Felsenstein at the Komische Oper Berlin have exemplarily demonstrated how a fleeting artwork such as a theatre performance, which – being an artistic and social event – resists every form of materialisation, can be held onto. It was these examples that members of the Performing Arts Section of the Academy (East) referred to at the end of the 1960s when they encouraged the preparation of production documentation to exchange the experiences and results of their work. Using the method developed for this purpose, which does not start out from existing, more or less coincidentally produced material, but rather from the respective event to be recorded, production processes

and theatre developments can be documented as they evolve as well as retrospectively. It requires detailed attention towards the specific personality and method of the director; the particularity of the dramatic or musical-dramatic source material; and the conditions under which the production is taking place. In this way, subjective-authentic statements by the theatre makers about their intentions, the search for solutions, and their experiences are obtained. Thus, the position of the maker towards his or her own work becomes the starting point for the archivist, who as a rule is part of the production team and produces an original document (the production documentation) in a creative process.

It usually contains a systematic, annotated collection of work and theatre materials as well as written and, if possible, audiovisual rehearsal recordings, interviews, prompt books, photographic documentation, descriptions, and evidence of the work’s impact, such as critiques. However, a complete documentation is not always possible and also not intended; it can also follow a thematic aspect.

In selecting productions from the mid-1960s onwards, the attempt was to provide a representative mirror image of the overall happenings in GDR theatre, and to detect – as far as possible, right from the start – innovative directorial concepts such as those

by Ruth Berghaus, Frank Castorf, Jo Fabian, Peter Konwitschny, and Heiner Müller, as well as new interpretations of repertoire works, including premieres and debut performances. From 1990 onwards, this was no longer possible due to the large number of theatres with an abundance of premieres. During a three-year transition phase in which the Zentrum für Theater­­doku­mentation e.V. (Centre for Theatre Documentation) was supported by the newly founded Förderverein Theaterdokumentation e.V. (Friends’ Association for Theatre Documentation) and financed by the Federal Ministry of the Interior, the state of Berlin, the state of Brandenburg, and the Stiftung Kulturfonds (Culture Fund Foundation) as an archival facility worth preserving, the focus lay on the documentation of transition processes in the theatres in the East German states and in Berlin. As such, the Centre became a point of contact and support for researchers from abroad in particular – they were able to use meaningful documen­ tation about plays dealing with current affairs such as Räuber von Schiller by Frank Castorf at the Volksbühne Berlin and Hamlet/Maschine by Heiner Müller at the Deutsches Theater Berlin, both in 1990, as well as work with the thematic collection “Theater in der Wende”, which began in 1989 and continued until 1993. There was also a focus on supplementing the collection with documentation on productions from before 1990, which could not be documented due to political reasons, such as the last banned GDR staging of Revisor oder Katze aus dem Sack at the Hans Otto Theatre in Potsdam, or because material was withheld due to other reasons. Following the incorporation of the Zentrum für Theater­dokumentation (Centre for Theatre Documentation) into the Performing Arts archives as the Arbeitsbereich Theaterdokumentation (Theatre Documentation Department), the focus has been on productions by directors who are members of the

Akademie der Künste and on other directors shaping the theatre scene.

Which conditions must be met for documentation to permit a deepened engagement with theatre performances and allow insights into artistic development tendencies, and hence also to contribute to the tasks of the Akademie der Künste? Essentially, the following is to be mentioned here: a stable financial and personnel-related basis for continual collecting activity; the further development of documentation methods in exchange with practice and scholarship, including in workshops; a network for supporting the work (members of the Akademie der Künste, theatre staff, persons working in an honorary capacity such as members of Förderverein Theaterdokumentation e.V., researchers and students at universities and colleges); the announcement of results at events and in publications; and the clarification of legal matters to facilitate the possibilities of the archival database and provide access to documentation for a larger number of users in the future.

KONSTANZE MACH-MEYERHOFER is a research assistant at the Performing Arts Archive at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

S. 45

RECORDING DEVELOPMENT PROCESSES Barbara Gronau

Six years ago, I was looking for sources on Einar Schleef’s production of Salome, since it began – as is well known – with a long, silent tableau vivant which regularly caused outrage in the audience. Although I didn’t find anything about this tableau in the Schleef bequest in the Academy archives, I did find a videotape labelled “Konversationsprobe 3/1997”, which I must now have watched a dozen times in the media room at Robert-Koch-Platz. In this 88-minute recording of a voice sample for this production from the early summer of 1997, the directing team, the actors, and the choir go through a dramatic and sometimes highly comic crisis situation which ends with a great, complex dialogue scene in the cramped conversation room of the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus. This recording illustrates, more than a photo or theatre text could, the work method of the theatre maker Einar Schleef and the participants. It reveals a process in the form of a joint search (and not the assertion of a so-called directorial idea), where crises and solutions concern all participants and must be jointly worked out. However, it also reveals that this archival record is itself fragmentary. In order to “read” it, I needed numerous other sources, which sometimes also contradicted what I saw or didn’t answer my questions. The document’s value clearly lay in its ability to record the actual theatre work and not just its outcome. Only such a perspective on the production processes enables a deep understanding of the performing arts.

This concern was expressed in the foundation of the Production Documentation Collection: to not only record works but also their development processes and to make transparent the questions and approaches to solutions processed in them. It’s not surprising that in the past fifty years, more and more researchers have turned to these sources. Today, they constitute the largest group of users. With the increasing interest in rehearsals and production processes, new and fundamental questions are also emerging in theatre studies concerning the relationship between theatre and scholarship but also between the process and the document, participation and observation, or temporality and stasis. In a cursory overview, four subject areas are up for discussion here.

2 METHODOLOGY OF DOCUMENTING Following the now established criticism of the notion of objectivity, it becomes apparent that the question of “how to document?” cannot be answered in any right or wrong way. The multitude of possible recording processes and methods of description and evaluation, which must repeatedly be adapted, reflects the complexity of working in theatre practice. Bearing in mind Nietzsche’s dictum that the tool participates in writing our thoughts, the decision for or against certain technical media (pen, camera, video) is already far-reaching. Alongside this, there’s the fundamental question: What is understood to be rehearsal work? How can collective work be recorded, described, and evaluated?

And in what way can the social conditions, the “zeitgeist”, or the historical constellation of precisely this artistic work be reflected upon?

3 AESTHETICS AND EPISTEMOLOGY OF DOCUMENTING Brecht’s model books have already demonstrated that rehearsal documents are not only repositories of knowledge and instruments of insight but that they themselves can have artistic quality. Documenting is itself an aesthetic practice and the production of photographs, films, audio files, or texts creates representative forms, which must be placed in relation to one another and interpreted. In the history of theatre and rehearsal photography, it is this artistic aspect of the artefacts which has so far most strongly been reflected upon.

4 CANONISATION THROUGH DOCUMENTION Of the over three thousand productions being created in Germany each year only ten are taken up in the Production Documentation Collection of the Academy archives. This makes clear how strongly documentation is linked to the question of canonisation. What effect does it have if dance, performance, or works of the independent scene remain excluded? And how can new archive platforms be created in order to leave behind traces of the fleeting art of theatre that would still be able to exite and inspire coming generations?

BARBARA GRONAU is Professor for the Theory and History of Theatre at Berlin University of the Arts and Speaker of the DFG Research Training Group “Das Wissen der Künste” (“The Knowledge of the Arts”).

1 ETHICS OF DOCUMENTING This is linked to the simple question: Why should this process of practice be documented? What form would be adequate for this purpose? Who am I myself as an observing or observed person in this process? In essence, it’s a question of the responsibility but also the difficulty inherent in every act of witnessing.

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 05 – ENGLISH EDITION

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S. 48

OBITUARIES ILSE AICHINGER To claim that I never met Ilse Aichinger would be a fruitless endeavour on many levels. There isn’t a writer from Austria who hasn’t encountered her. We’ve all met her and meet her still, in coffee houses, in cinemas, between lines of text, in the centre of Vienna, in the mountains around Salzburg. We try to start a conversation with her, and while this only succeeds by means of certain tricks and feints, it seldom truly fails. After all, she was the least monolithic monolith of post-war Austrian literature. But “post-war Austrian literature” does no justice to the scope of her achievement: she helped shape the literary world in Austria and beyond for more than sixty years. Her 1948 novel Die größere Hoffnung brought her instant celebrity, and she won the Prize of Group 47 in 1952 for Spiegel­geschichte, which secured her a place in German-language school textbooks. My conver­ sation with her began in her many works of short prose: in the collections Schlechte Wörter, Kleist, Moos, Fasane, and Eliza Eliza; in scenes and sketches, and in her poetry collection Verschenkter Rat. What I can say is that she encouraged me to use the short form with acuity and straightforwardness, in defence of a conception of literature that is disappearing, at least in the German-speaking world; and always in opposition to a conformism that beleaguers us now more than ever.

We know her as a euphoric lover of cinema, whether hailing the “sovereignty of ridicule” in the work of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy or providing literary commentary to the films of Fritz Lang and Marcel Ophuls. Her writings on cinema, which regularly appeared in the Austrian newspaper Die Presse, showed an understanding of how we can, once again, celebrate our experiences in those palaces of light. Her books on film connected her once more, but differently this time, with a younger generation: one could say, the grandchildren of the Nazi generation.

About Laurel and Hardy she wrote: “What those two aimed at went far beyond reassurance.” And reassurance is precisely what she never offered. Moreover, it was never appearing that mattered to her but disappearing.

She was an artist of disappearance – which makes it almost amusing that the Fischer publishing house put out a volume of photographs of her. In almost complete opposition, she quotes Bob Dylan: “I’m glad I’m not me.” Not to have to be myself but rather that which is important to me. As a humanist, she encouraged distrust of oneself.

“I don’t use the better words any more” begins one of her most famous assertions on poetics, and she continues: “Living is not a special word, nor is dying. Both are assailable; they overlap rather than define. Perhaps I know why. To define is almost to undermine, and definition obstructs the access to dreams.”

No, Ilse Aichinger isn’t dead; that’s a delusion she herself, as an artist of disappearance, would have loved to have put into the world.

KATHRIN RÖGGLA writer, is Vice President of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

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GABRIEL EPSTEIN Gabriel Epstein was a fine person. A fine and, in a reserved way, very friendly person. He usually spoke little of himself, but when he did, for example in an interview at the University of Stuttgart, all of the life situ­ations he described had a meaning: he spoke with emotion, but in a considered way.

I am telling you about this interview now because I believe that his life had more to do with what he did and thought in a quite reflective way than is usual. This aspect of the story of his life was always ingrained in him, even if he did say in retrospect that the course of his life and the decisions were “made by chance – everything unplanned”.

Epstein had, as they say, an upper middle-class upbringing. The family had lived on the Lower Rhine for centuries and owned a large department store in Duisburg. His father, an early Zionist, was a lawyer and was involved in helping the multitude of Eastern Jews who came to Germany because of persecution in Poland and Russia, who were rejected by the German Jews, and “should hold their bent backs up straight again.”

The house of his parents was of the upper echelons in artistic terms: Epstein’s godfather was the pianist Rudolf Serkin; Arnold or Stefan Zweig would come for dinner, or even Ernst Toller, who “after dinner, took off his beautiful silk shirt, put on some simple clothes, and went to the workers in order to talk them into communism”. Erich Mendelsohn rebuilt the family’s department store, and Epstein’s father engaged in a lengthy correspondence with Einstein, which has unfortunately been lost.

In the spring of 1933, their way of life fell into complete darkness: in a single day, the family managed to flee to Belgium, then two of the children went to Palestine on their own, followed later by their parents, but his father never felt able to settle – in a country for which he had worked his whole life.

However, Gabriel Epstein made friends there. He was the fastest Morse operator in the Haganah, something he still smiled proudly about in his old age, like a little boy. He would later say that life in this land of unrest was a better context for him than “the bourgeois life in Duisburg on the River Rhine”. The Haganah was his home.

Many of his father’s family managed to save themselves, but his mother’s relatives remained in Theresienstadt. In 1984, of Epstein’s three siblings, two lived in Israel and one brother, who was never to return to Germany, lived in America.

A year before his Abitur (school leaving examination), Epstein went to Mendelsohn and announced that he wanted to be his apprentice. Mendelsohn immediately sent him back to school until he completed his Abitur, but after that he worked for him and was regarded by Mendelsohn as his master student, before he – and this is where his affinity to England began – went to study at the Architectural Association School in London.

Finally, having returned to Jerusalem, he met the man he would come to regard as his teacher in life, both professionally and as a person: Heinz Rau from Berlin, who he described as a “subtle and non-declamatory architect”. He often sat by Rau “in the evening, when it

was getting dark, and watched as he drew”. He never forgot him, and, as Julius Posener wrote, spoke of him with the same unwavering respect all the days of his life.

In 1942, he joined the British Army with his Haganah unit and then spent the war as an officer, mostly in Egypt and Tripoli. There are strange stories from this time.

But now comes the long English period of his life.

Having returned to the AA, he graduated with a distinction and then joined the firm he was to become a partner in and remain with until the very end: Bridgwater and Shepheard, and then also Epstein.

He was also very attached to the AA as a teacher and ultimately became its president – until he no longer considered his ideas for teaching concepts feasible.

It was in London that he met his wife Josette, a lovely, elegant Parisian, who was with him until he died and with whom he had a very close relationship, living in Paris’s Quartier Latin. The eldest of his three children died three months before him, a fate that no parent can overcome.

Gabriel Epstein’s life also defined his concept of architecture – though not in any demonstrable way. If the words modesty, calmness, and humanity were not entirely overused, Epstein would have liked them. His buildings and especially his urban structures are in fact on an “appropriate” scale; they are not very abstruse, little exalted, but very effective on a human and social level. Above all: he recognised the space outside the building as having a truly social effect, as the space for people to interact. He saw the street-facing walls of the buildings as actors; the alleys, passages, arcades, and squares as the real centre.

He also brought a very logical practicability that was fed into by his insights and experiences and by his character, incorporating the temporal sequences of a particular use and the social consequences in the future, which, as he saw it, was ultimately a question of responsibility – always enriched with an atmospheric serviceability that was part of all his projects. His university buildings included development capacity for the future, the most famous example being the one in Lancaster and its planning phase, for which he received his first major recognition and which he himself considered to be the most important in his professional career.

Epstein did not like excess, nor did he like excessive architecture. With this attitude, he was polite but firm.

On a lecture tour of Germany, Epstein spoke about English programmatic university planning and met Horst Linde, who was also a member of the Academy. This ultimately led to his acceptance of a professorship at the University of Stuttgart. So the three of us, Linde, Epstein, and I, held the same chair in succession.

Epstein had to make weekly round trips to do so: Paris, London, Stuttgart; Paris, London, Stuttgart. He did not suffer because of this, as far as I know. Quite the contrary; he loved the links between the different activities and had a lot of friends at the university.

And there was one more thing: Gabriel Epstein drew, very well. There are a plethora of wonderful, atmospheric ink drawings that show Paris in his light, the Paris of squares and street corners, the trees and leaves, the water and the façades.

When Epstein was elected to the Academy, his wife said: “But you cannot accept!” This was with regard to Germany and its history; she had witnessed the occupation of Paris and those were difficult memories.

After reviewing the list of members, however, she saw it quite differently and Epstein became one of our members. He himself did not see any collective guilt on the part of the Germans.

Regarding his life, he said that it was strange how such decisions were made at random – everything unplanned. Life is really a compromise between a certain degree of direction and a certain openness to the influences that push us back and forth. One should not be too rigid. And: if you do not know whether to say yes or no, then yes is always the best answer. Or quite the opposite: if you are not sure whether to say yes or no, you had better leave it. He was unambiguously diverse with a certain irony, a combination that I experienced.

A wise, fine, international person, with a slight, ingrained sadness. He also understood how to involve very good partners in his ideas, a great art. Often, when we had to deal with miserable machinations, we would imagine that there were people like Gabriel Epstein, with an attitude like his – which helped. And this help is, in fact, still at our disposal now.

KARLA KOWALSKI architect, is a member of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Architecture Section.

DANIIL GRANIN On 27 January 2014, Daniil Granin gave the speech for Holocaust Memorial Day in the Bundestag. On 27 January 1944, one year before the Red Army liberated Auschwitz, the Siege of Leningrad was lifted.

On the eve of his speech, Granin visited a few members of our section at the Academy building on Pariser Platz. An entire retinue of Russian photographers and cameramen accompanied him, which he was not at all happy about. He brusquely dismissed the journalists, though to little effect. Toward us, he was full of curiosity and friendliness. Most of the time we communicated in German, which he had learnt as a child and as a teenager. Born in 1919, Granin had studied electrical engineering and was working as an engineer when he volunteered for military service in his native city of Leningrad.

He regarded it as an unlikely miracle that he had survived the war, both the start, as an untrained soldier with outdated weapons on the front, and as one facing the danger of losing consciousness from cold and hunger in the trenches outside Leningrad, and later, as the commander of a tank company. Minutes before an attack during which almost everyone in his company was killed, he was demobilised because electrical engineers were needed.

He wrote about this in his last novel, “My Lieutenant”, which was published in Russia in 2011 and awarded a major prize for literature. Granin was glad that this novel would at least also to be published in German – the first German translation of his work since 1990.

Granin’s short stories, novels, and essays were present in the GDR and I was one of his readers. But what

touched me most was “A Book of the Blockade,” a book he co-wrote with Ales Adamovich, published in 1987, which documents the Siege of Leningrad.

“My Lieutenant” is an autobiography that is as artistic as it is unreserved: the narrator is the observer of his former self; that man in uniform. Using himself as an example, he makes comprehensible the contradictions that tore apart the life of anyone who lived in the Soviet Union. It is also a reckoning with the Soviet leadership, which not only had to answer for the GULAG but also, due to its narrow-mindedness and incompetence, was responsible for the millions of innocent victims within its own troops.

One of the most egregious scenes in this book – and at the same time one of literary mastery – describes how two German soldiers, an officer and a private, stagger drunkenly through a mined area between trenches, without responding to any calls, and immediately fall into a deep sleep in a Soviet trench. When they wake and look into the eyes of the Russian soldiers, the officer begins to laugh because he thinks it is a nightmare, and this does not change, even as the narrator escorts the two Germans to the city for interrogation. What they see – a dead old man sitting frozen in a broken-down tram car, a pile of frozen corpses, an exhausted old woman who is terrified at the sight of the Germans – reinforces the German officer’s delusion that it is a dream. The longer he holds onto this delusion, the more desperate the narrator becomes, as does the German private. Perhaps the only adequate description is that the officer refuses to recognise and comprehend the horror that is before him as a human being.

Our conversation at the Academy revolved around the many political upheavals Daniil Granin had witnessed. He was proud that the Soviet Union had liberated itself from Stalinism.

His speech in the Bundestag can be watched, listened to, and read on the Internet. It was not a speech in the true sense of the word, but rather a report on the blockade. And yet it was one of the most important speeches made in the German Parliament. In his suit, which was already a little too big, and without a tie, he wanted to stand at the lectern and resisted the numerous attempts to offer him a chair that interrupted his speech. The 95-year-old spoke as a soldier before the German members of parliament. He did not spare himself or the audience anything. “A child dies, just three years old. The mother lays the body in the double window and cuts off a little piece of him every day to feed her second child, a daughter.”

“I, who fought as a soldier on the front line outside Leningrad,” said Granin, “could not forgive the Germans for a very long time for having exterminated civilians for nine hundred days and having killed in the most agonising and inhumane manner, in that they did not wage war with weapons in their hands but rather created circumstances for the people of the city under which one could not survive. They exterminated people who could not defend themselves. [...] Today, these bitter feelings of that time are just memories.”

Afterwards, Granin also met with Helmut Schmidt, who was a lieutenant on the German side with a tank division that advanced on Leningrad. Schmidt wrote the

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 05 – ENGLISH EDITION

preface for the German translation of “My Lieutenant”, and there was to be an evening with the two of them at the Academy to introduce the book. The tickets had already been sold, but Granin suffered a complicated broken leg shortly before the reading. He still hoped to be able to give his reading at the Academy at a later date.

On 4 July of this year, the oldest member of our section passed away at the age of 98 in Saint Petersburg.

INGO SCHULZE writer and essayist, is a member of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Literature Section. He was Director of the section from 2005 to 2010.

PETER HÄRTLING Jean Paul wrote on one of his thousands of slips of paper that if Goethe were to die, for him a whole world would collapse. Yes, if Waiblingen were to die, if Schubert, Schumann, Niembsch, Nikolaus Lenau, E. T. A. Hoffmann, “A Woman”, “The Three Marias”, if Hölderlin were to die.

Peter Härtling brought all of them, and many others, back to life in his novels and stories. He made them contemporaries of the reader, and the reader their contemporary too. He gave them all time and space.

Time and space: this is poetry, the poetry of the poet Peter Härtling.

The word “time” struck me again and again over the last few weeks when I thought about him. Wherever and whenever one met him – as often happened by coincidence – he had time, lots of time, like someone who had nothing else to do other than to be here now, to be here for this person. I never experienced him other than in a state of conviviality. Härtling loved people. I know that is a simple sentence. For Härtling it was more; it was a principle. And he could be quite passionate and combatively engaged, but even this was not without allowing “space and time”. I know of only one person he reacted to with hatred and anger, but even this was done calmly, the calm of a dallier.

At the same time, he could hardly be surpassed when it came to diligence. His huge body of work is the work of someone diligent. Where did he find the time to drink with me, to be together with us, to give us time? Now he has taken it with him forever, this time – where am I, a harried indiligent, to find this time now? I am reading his early work, starting with Niembsch, which I have often read – I want Peter Härtling’s time back.

PETER BICHSEL writer and essayist, is a member of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Literature Section.

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COLOPHON Journal der Künste, Edition 5, English Supplement, January 2018 Print run: 2,000 Journal der Künste is published four times a year and is available at all Academy locations.

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