Vielfalt 2: 2011-12

Vielfalt A McGill German Studies Undergraduate Journal eine Studentenzeitschrift der mcgill germanistik

volume 2 | 2011—12

Vielfalt A McGill German Studies Undergraduate Journal eine Studentenzeitschrift der mcgill germanistik

volume 2 | 2011—12

Mcgill university MontrĂŠal

coordinating editor: Joseph Henry

editorial board: Hillary Amann, Maximilian Amendy, Hannah Augustin, Augustin Chabrol, Jack Deming, Janina Grabs, Karl Hart, Sandy Hervieux, Sawsan Khalaf, Sheehan Moore, Erika Seidenbusch

contributors: Hillary Amann, Grace Brooks, Emilio Comay del Junco, Jack Deming, Danika Drury-Melynk, Amy Goh, Alex Hamilton, Lynsey GrøsfjellHansen, Jurg Haller, Karl Hart, Émilie Harrocks-Denis, Joseph Henry, Sawsan Khalaf, Ricky Kreitner Nicole Leonard, Peter Shyba, Victor Tangermann, Aaron Vansintjan

special thanks: Arts Undergraduate Society; German Students’ Association; Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, especially Shawn Whelan; and the Daily Publications Society.

Vielfalt Volume 2

EDITOR’s NOTE | VORWORT.................................1

The Bauhaus in Motion.................................31

Joseph Henry

Danika Drury-Melnyk

Lightning Bolts or lustrous rays: The relationship between witz and romantic poetry in schlegel’s fragments.........................................................3

Two Aberrations in the Dialectical Movement of Self-Consciousness: The Repetition of the Structure of the Play of Forces................................39

Émilie Horrocks-Denis

Alex Hamilton

Metapher und Gespräch in Goethes “Heidenröslein”............................................10

Interview with George di Giovanni: professor of philosophy at mcgill university......................................................47

Emilio Comay del Junco

To wake a Sleeping word: some more entries for a translational Lexicon................................15 Jack Deming

Homo über Berlin: Weimar Sexual Politics, Anders als die Andern, and Mädchen in Uniform............................................................16 Lynsey Grøsfjell-Hansen

Wiedergutmachung des männlichen: Geschlechts in Die Mörder sind unter uns..............................................24 Hillary Amann

[ohne titel].....................................................27 Sawsan Khalaf

Jack Deming and Ricky Kreitner

The Early Greens: Growing democracy in west germany............................................51 Nicole Leonard

Unentbehrlich: A cousin story..............................................56 Grace Brooks

There’s No Place Like Heimat: An exploration of German identity in the GDR.......................................................59 Peter Shyba

A Revolution in Two Acts?

Comparing the Uprisings of 1953 and 1989 in the German Democratic Republic...................................67 Karl Hart

Featuring Art by: Amy Goh, Jurg Haller, Joseph Henry, Sawsan Khalaf, Victor Tangermann, and Aaron Vansintjan

Jurg Haller

Editor’s Note

Vorwort

The editorial team is thrilled to offer the second volume of Vielfalt, the undergraduate journal from German Studies students within McGill’s Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. We’ve sought to follow the example set by last year’s volume, working towards interdisciplinarity and non-traditional content, while increasing the number of submissions, the size of our editorial board, and scope of the papers published.

To that end, we’ve worked toward a wide variety of approaches within German Studies, and how they may manifest themselves: this volume features an extended piece of fiction, an additional translational lexicon, and, for the first time, a personal graphic essay. We’ve also continued to showcase work with professors, seen in an interview with Philosophy professor George Di Giovanni. In a more traditionally academic vein, we have selected work that not only reflects responses to canonical aspects of German culture and thought, such as essays on Hegel’s philosophy and the Bauhaus, but work that also speaks to alternative themes like queer representation in films of the Weimar Republic and protest movements in the former GDR. In the time span between our two volumes, German Studies has been administratively amalgamated into a larger department featuring three other language and culture programs. We hope the content in this year’s volume continues a vital interrogation into the borders that frame and delineate regional studies more generally, and into the role of such a journal in the contemporary academic, pedagogical, and political landscape.

Das Redaktionsteam freut sich, den zweiten Band von Vielfalt, der Studentenzeitschrift nichtgraduierter Germanistikstudenten des Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures der McGill Universität, präsentieren zu können. Wir haben danach gestrebt, den redaktionellen Prinzipien unserer Erstausgabe gerecht zu werden – und somit besonderen Wert auf Interdisziplinärität und nichttraditionelle Zeitschriftselemente zu legen –, und gleichzeitig die Anzahl der Einsendungen, die Zahl der Redakteure, und die Vielfältigkeit der publizierten Beiträge zu erhöhen.

Zu diesem Zweck haben wir versucht, in unserer Zeitschrift die größtmöglichste Anzahl verschiedener Elemente innerhalb des Germanistikfachbereichs zusammenzutragen: dieser Band enthält einen ausführlichen Belletristikbeitrag, eine Fortsetzung des Übersetzungslexikons und, erstmalig, einen persönlichen Grafikessay.

Ein Interview mit dem Philosophieprofessor George Di Giovanni setzt unsere Tradition fort, auch Professoren das Wort zu erteilen. Auf der wissenschaftlicheren Seite haben wir Werke ausgesucht, die nicht nur Ausführungen zu traditionellen Themen des deutschen Kultur- und Gedankengutes darstellen – wie zum Beispiel die Aufsätze über Hegels Philosophie oder die Bauhausbewegung –, sondern auch alternative Themen ansprechen, wie es beispielsweise die Beiträge über Darstellungen der Homosexualität in Filmen der Weimarer Republik oder über Protestbewegungen in der ehemaligen DDR tun.

In der Zeit zwischen der letzten und dieser Ausgabe wurde unsere Germanistikabteilung auf administrativer Ebene Teil einer größeren Abteilung, die uns mit drei anderen Sprachund Kulturprogrammen vereint. Wir hoffen, dass der Inhalt des diesjährigen Bandes erneut Fragen über die sich ständig verändernden Grenzen zwischen Regionalstudienfächern, und die Rolle einer Studentenzeitschrift in der gegenwärtigen akademischen, pädagogischen und politischen Landschaft, aufwirft.

— Joseph Henry

— Joseph Henry, übersetzt von Janina Grabs

1

whilrpool of darkness domed sky shaken upside down stars wink their solace Amy Goh

2

Lightning Bolts or Lustrous Rays

The Relationship between Witz and Romantic Poetry in Schlegel’s Fragments Émilie Horrocks-Denis

T

he German noun Witz, which is analogous to the substantives wit in English and esprit in French, designates the mental power of discernment and perspicacity, and the capacity to combine and articulate different ideas in a quick, amusing, and surprising manner.1 Witz is a recurring motif in Friedrich von Schlegel’s Athenaeum Fragments, Critical Fragments, and Ideas, which mark the emergence of Romanticism in German literature in the late eighteenth century. This paper aims at exploring the relationship between Witz and Romantic poetry in the Fragments, Romantic poetry being defined as the spontaneous instinct or impulse to create new ideas and images.2 This essay argues that Witz and Romantic poetry are closely connected, because they attempt to unite heterogeneous elements, represent forms of “fragmentary genius,” and border on infinite truth or knowledge.3 Witz and Romantic poetry are also similar since they demand imagination or creativity, emerge in a sudden and unanticipated way, and may be difficult to translate into writing.

According to the Fragments, Witz constitutes a force that unifies diverse ideas: “many witty ideas [witzige Einfälle] are like the sudden meeting of two friendly thoughts after a long separation.”4 Similar to several seventeenth-century philosophers, especially Hobbes and Locke, the early German Romantics thus conceived of Witz as the psychological faculty to find similarity or affinity between things that prima facie seem dissimilar. The surprising discovery of similitude in these things would lead to their alliance or union.5 In addition, the German noun “Einfall,” in the above statement, is defined as a sudden or

random thought [plötzlicher oder zufälliger Gedanke], a collapse [Einbrechen, Einbruch], or an invasion [Eindringen]. Therefore, a witzige Idee or witty idea would not result from a long process of reflection and construction; rather, it would emerge or fall upon a person, in an inexplicable manner.6 The emergence of Witz is thus similar to the experience of poetic inspiration, which, as claimed by Wordsworth, cannot be controlled and occurs in an unanticipated and almost miraculous way.7 Witz is also comparable to poetry, because of their common creative potential: “[Witz] is the […] outward lightning bolt of the imagination [der äußre Blitz der Fantasie].”8 The selection of “lightning,” as a metaphor for Witz, conveys the swiftness and succinctness that are essential to the successful expression of a witticism or wordplay.9 The success of a witty utterance would be measured in terms of its generation of such feelings as surprise and delight.10 Similarly, the value of poetry would lie in its ability to evoke very strong emotions.11 Moreover, the image of a flash of lightning communicates the strength and intensity of the imaginative power, linked to the moment of Witz or that of poetic revelation. The brilliance of lightning also suggests that Witz constitutes illumination, that is to say, a state of spiritual or intellectual insight.12 The special knowledge associated with Witz seems to be absolute or universal: “[True] universality can come into being when the simple light of religion and morality touches on a chaos of combinative [Witz] and fertilizes it. Then the most sublime poetry and philosophy burst into flower by themselves.”13 The adjective “sublime” refers to elements in art or

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nature that exert a significant influence on the mind. Specifically, they inspire deep reverence, fear, or wonder, given their “beauty, vastness, or grandeur.”14 Accordingly, the relationship between the causes and effects of Witz would be reciprocal: Witz, interpreted as the keen and perceptive intellect, gives rise to sublime poetic or philosophical associations that have a profound impact on the mind, thereby bringing it to produce more of such associations. The circular motion of Witz may explain why it is perceived by the German Romantics as approaching infinity. The late British Romantic poets also saw the sublime as a means to obtain universal truth. In particular, Lord Byron and Percy Shelley tended to observe sublime, as opposed to beautiful landscapes, since the former would provide the key to infinity. The infinite size and mighty or menacing aspect of oceans or mountains, for instance, supposedly helped these poets gain access to or understand the natural world and the human condition.

This insight would inspire them to compose sublime or elevated poetry. Consequently, the lines between Witz and poetic inspiration are blurred, because they can both create poetry of infinite truth and beauty.

Furthermore, the quick and unforeseen character of Witz, which parallels that of poetic inspiration, carries significant costs.15 Specifically, the complete significance of Witz cannot be sustained.16 Nancy observes that, “[witty] constructions are as stunning as they are unstable.”17 Consequently, Witz must be “poeticize[d]” or captured in writing: “real wit is still conceivable only in written form, like laws.”18 Similarly, assuming, like Keats, that poetry constitutes a creative impulse, it is necessary to express this impulse through writing. Yet, Schlegel argues that it is impossible to perfectly translate the poetic inspiration brought about by Witz – that is, sensitivity to the similitude and dissimilitude between different words or ideas – into text.

The creator’s failure to accurately reproduce the witty combination on paper results in their discouragement and/or despair.

It is unclear whether the costs of Witz outweigh its benefits. The ambivalence and ambiguity surrounding the effects of wit and witticisms are further revealed below:

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A witty idea [ein witziger Einfall] is a disintegration of spiritual substances [geistiger Stoffe] which, before being suddenly separated, must have been thoroughly mixed. The imagination must first be satiated with all sorts of life before one can electrify it with the friction of free social intercourse so that the slightest friendly or hostile touch can elicit brilliant sparks [blitzende Funken] and lustrous rays [leuchtende Strahlen]—or smashing thunderbolts [schmetternde Schläge].19

This fragment illustrates the German Romantics’ belief that Witz is “chemical,” because it mixes, blends, or dissolves various substances.20 While these substances are described as “spiritual,” in Firchow’s translation of the Fragments, the German adjective geistig has a broader meaning. Specifically, geistig refers to the faculty of reason, or to the mind that is “animated by esprit,” wit, or inventiveness.21 Therefore, the unification and separation of “geistige Stoffe” may be interpreted as the mélange of minds, or the active and heated exchange between human beings.22 Schlegel designated this form of “social intercourse” as “symphilosophy or sympoetry.”23 The Greek prefix sym may signify “to be of one mind” or to “embod[y] the same ideas.”24 Accordingly, symphilosophy and sympoetry require philosophers and poets, respectively, to modify and reconcile their different ideas and personalities by dint of dialogue.25 If these individuals successfully merged their minds, or synchronized their thoughtprocesses, they could collectively “elicit brilliant sparks [blitzende Funken] and lustrous rays [leuchtende Strahlen].”26 The English adjective brilliant denotes an object that shines brightly, and connotes qualities or actions that are ingenious and that “strik[e] the imagination.”27 In contrast, the German adjective blitzend derives from the verb blitzen, which is defined as “the sudden and instantaneous flashing of light, especially during a thunderstorm.”28 Therefore, the phrase “brilliant sparks [blitzende Funken]” assimilates the creative and spontaneous character of Witz to that of poetic inspiration.29 In addition, the German adjective leuchtend is related to the feminine noun Leuchte, which refers to a lamp or a lantern, in the literal sense, or to a wise

and talented person, in the figurative sense.30 Consequently, the causal relationship between a “witty idea [witziger Einfall]” and “lustrous rays [leuchtende Strahlen],” put forward in the above fragment, intimates that Witz partly represents wisdom or a high degree of spiritual or intellectual understanding.31 The German Romantics thus regarded Witz, and sympoetry or symphilosophy, by extension, as a means to attain truth, thereby rejecting the idea that a single and isolated person could acquire or possess absolute knowledge.32 Nonetheless, if the number of poets or philosophers participating in brainstorming were too large, or if the extent of their differences were too great, this process could engender “friction,” or stir up a storm. That is why the “slightest […] hostile touch [could] elicit […] smashing thunderbolts [schmetternde Schläge].”33 The German adjective schmetternd, and its English equivalent smashing, both express the “loud rumbling or crashing” sound of thunder, which is analogous to the loud and vehement voices of individuals engaged in an argument or a debate.34 Moreover, the German noun Schlag could refer to a blow, a shock, or a thunderbolt, each of which is characterized by violence.35 The phrase “smashing thunderbolts [schmetternde Schläge]” thus conveys the antagonism between creative beings whose thoughts, values, or principles clash. Such mental opposition could degenerate into a verbal and physical confrontation, which would result in the emotional and physical harm of the actors involved.

Furthermore, the imaginative power connected to Witz could be so overwhelming, as to countervail the sagacity that stimulated such creativity in the first place. For instance, the loud noise of “smashing thunderbolts [schmetternde Schläge]” could “deafen” an individual.36 That is, the resonance of a witty idea, or its “ability to evoke […] images, memories and emotions,” may be so strong, as to prevent that person from “hearing” or perceiving witzige or poetic inspiration again in the future.37 The possibility that Witz could paradoxically subvert someone’s perspicacity is also implicit in the oft-cited witticism, “Witz ist ein Blitz,” because Blitz or “lightning blinds.”38 Even a

discerning and prudent individual could thus be defeated by darkness, or incomprehension and bewilderment, in the face of the supreme and mysterious power of Witz.

The conception of Witz as both a creative and a destructive force is further implied in the ninetieth “Critical Fragment,” which states, “wit is an explosion of confined spirit [Witz ist eine Explosion von gebundenem Geist].”39 The German substantive Geist signifies, inter alia, cognition, or “the action or process of acquiring knowledge,” as well as the capacity to think creatively.40 The group of words “confined spirit [gebundenem Geist]” thus means narrow-mindedness, that is, the reluctance to receive new ideas or suggestions, or the lack of imagination.41 Therefore, the above fragment invites individuals to interact with one another in order to overcome their biased or prejudiced opinions. By liberating themselves from the constraints of social stratification, rules, and conventions, human beings can communicate as equals in a free, fluid and authentic manner.42 Moreover, by transcending orthodox views, people, notably poets and philosophers, can develop new ideas, thereby expanding the body of human knowledge.43 Nevertheless, innovation can also undermine the welfare and safety of society, as indicated by the noun “explosion.”44 This word denotes “the action of action of driving out, or of issuing forth, with violence and noise.”45 Therefore, Witz, or the ability to reason and to think in an innovative way, may bring human beings to make dangerous discoveries— the atomic bomb comes to mind, though it was not created until the twentieth century.

Yet, nuclear energy is not only instrumental in large-scale destruction, but also in the supply of electricity. This example shows that Witz and the impetus it provides for the expansion of knowledge entail both costs and benefits.

Alternatively, Witz can be seen as having the potential to divide individuals and their ideas in a sudden, forcible, and noisy manner.46 The process of sympoetry or symphilosophy is thus inherently precarious, because, even if its participants managed to reconcile and unify their conflicting beliefs, thoughts, and feelings, this unity would risk falling apart or, to follow the

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metaphor of an explosion, bursting at any moment.47 As a result, the early German Romantics regarded this force as “fragmentary genius [fragmentarische Genialität].”48 The nouns Genialität, in German, and genius, in English, derive from the French substantive génie, and denote extraordinary intellectual and creative power, particularly that exhibited by artists and poets. This power would seem to spring from supernatural or divine revelation, and would be innate, rather than acquired.49 Witz thus seems to be tantamount to poetic inspiration and talent. Furthermore, while Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy contend that the fragment does not emphasize the fracture that provokes it, they fail to acknowledge that it is the fracture or “the explosion of confined spirit” that causes the fragmentation of ideas or words, which had formerly been unified by the creative faculties of philosophers or poets.50 Nevertheless, these authors rightly remark that Witz and collective philosophical or poetic creation are also fragmentary, because they constitute “a process, rather than a fixed state.”51 That is, Witz and sympoetry or symphilosophy constantly attempt to discover truth by blending diverse ideas, but cohesion and absolute knowledge elude them. The ongoing or infinite development of thoughts and individuals striving to form a single entity would explain the notion that Witz verges on infinite truth.52 The fragmentary nature of Witz is implied in the following fragment: “[…] [Witz] has to be properly systematic, and then again it doesn’t; with all its completeness, something should still seem to be missing, as if torn away [wie abgerissen]. This baroque quality may very well be the source of the grand style in wit […].”53 The German adjective abgerissen derives from the verb abreißen, which means to tear or break something apart in a violent or forcible manner.54 The use of this term thus hints at the explosive and divisive capacity of Witz, which was explored earlier. Moreover, the baroque style of art, architecture, and literature, which came to light in Italy during the late seventeenth century and flourished in Europe during the eighteenth century, constitutes an appropriate metaphor for Witz, since

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it seeks to elicit awe from the public by integrating incongruous genres or superimposing ornaments, in a surprising, bizarre, and often grotesque manner.55 For example, a baroque play could incorporate elements of comedy and tragedy. While these individual genres may be complete and coherent, their combination would be contradictory.56 The internal inconsistencies characterizing the baroque and Witz could account for the German Romantics’ impression that they are not structured or “systematic.”57 Romantic poetry, as portrayed in the Fragments, also seems to possess “baroque” properties, because it aims at “reunit[ing] all the separate species of poetry and put poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetoric. It tries to and should mix and fuse poetry and prose, inspiration and criticism, the poetry of art and the poetry of nature […].”58 Romantic poetry would thus attempt to unify different disciplines and genres, in order to become “progressive, universal poetry.”59 Since each discipline is distinguished by a particular esprit or way of thinking, Romantic poetry could be interpreted as the dissolution of “spiritual substances [geistiger Stoffe],” or the mélange of minds and ideas.60 In this respect, Romantic poetry would be the expression of Witz. In addition, the capacity of Romantic poetry to discern similarity in dissimilar things, and to assemble these things in a skilful way, recalls the acute quality and “combinative” power of Witz.61 Moreover, Romantic poetry would appear to fulfil the promise of Witz to surpass “confined spirit,” for it is unprejudiced and inclined “to consider and accept new ideas.”62 Furthermore, the German Romantics viewed Romantic poetry as approaching infinity: “[t]he Romantic kind of poetry is still in the state of becoming; that, in fact, is its real essence: that it should forever be becoming and never be perfected. […]. It alone is infinite, just as it alone is free […].”63 Romantic poetry would be “free,” for, as we have seen above, it would not be confined to a particular genre; on the contrary, it would combine practically all forms, styles, and subject matters, and produce all sorts of feelings.64 Furthermore, this form of poetry would be infinite, because it would

“forever be becoming.”65 Romantic poetry is also regarded as infinite, for it is fragmentary; that is, it does not remain static, but rather is subject to change.66 The fragmentary and progressive nature of Romantic poetry may be understood in two ways. First, as the imaginative power that resides in the mind, poetry would continuously create and combine ideas and images, and modify them in such a way as to produce different emotions. Second, even if poetry comprised the words written on a page, its meaning would not be frozen; rather, it would adapt to new circumstances through the process of interpretation. Yet, the “completeness” and “coherence” of Romantic poetry cannot be fully comprehended by means of interpretation, because they never existed in the first place.67 Therefore, irrespective of whether this form poetry is construed as abstract or concrete, it constitutes “work in progress.”68 By embracing multiplicity and mutability, rather than uniformity and stasis, Romantic poetry would thus obtain “universal” knowledge and “infinite” truth.69

In sum, this essay sought to examine the relationship between Witz and Romantic poetry in Schlegel’s Athenaeum Fragments, Critical Fragments and Ideas. While Romantic poetry was regarded as the creative impulse, Witz was defined as the mind that is nimble, perceptive and discerning. Witz was also interpreted as the mental power to associate diverse ideas, and to express these associations in a surprising, unanticipated, and unusual way.70 This paper showed that Witz and Romantic poetry are intertwined, because they require creativity and imagination, appear in a spontaneous and unexpected manner, can be difficult to reproduce on paper, unify different elements, are fragmentary, and approach infinite truth.

notes 1. Albert, Marina Foschi. “Das Bedeutungsfeld des Wortes Witz.” In Friedrich Schlegels Theorie des Witzes und sein Roman Lucinde (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), 10-11.

Brenez, Nicole. “Jean-Luc Godard, Witz et invention formelle (notes préparatoires sur les

rapports entre critique et pouvoir symbolique.” Érudit 15.2-3 (Spring 2005): 21, 23.

Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe and Jean-Luc Nancy. “The Fragment: The Fragmentary Exigency.” In The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism. Translated by Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester.

Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988, 47-48.

Nancy, Jean-Luc and Paula Moddel. “Menstruum Universale (Literary Dissolution).”

Literature and Its Others 6/7.21 (Winter 1978-1979), 23-24, 28, accessed 10 April 2011.

Thouard, Denis. “Qu’est-ce que les lumières pour le premier romantisme: Chimie, Witz et fragments: Friedrich Schlegel et Chamfort.” Texto! (December 2003). 1-12, accessed 10 April 2011, http://www.revuetexto.net/Inedits/Thouard_Lumieres.html.

2. Greenblatt, Stephen. “Introduction to the Romantic Period.” In Vol. D of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006, 1011.

3. Schlegel, Friedrich. “Critical Fragments.” In Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments.

Translated by Peter Firchow. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971, No. 9.

4. Schlegel, Friedrich, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, and Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenber). “Athenaeum Fragments.” In Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments. Translated by Peter Firchow. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971, No. 37.

Schlegel, Friedrich. “Athenäums Fragmente.”

In Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, Erste Abteilung: Kritische Neuausgabe, Band 2 (München, Paderborn, Wien, Zürich: Schöningh, 1967), accessed 10 April 2011, http://www.zeno.org/Literatur/M/ Schlegel,+Friedrich/Fragmentensammlungen/Fragmente.

5. Hobbes cited in Albert, 11.

Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 47-48.

Locke cited in Nancy and Moddel, 25-28; Thouard, 4-5.

6. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 47.

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7. Greenblatt, 10-11.

8. Schlegel, Friedrich. “Ideas.” In Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments.

Schlegel, Friedrich. “Ideen.” In Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe.

9. Elias, Camelia. “Wit as the Final Aesthetic Imperative: The Fragmentary and the Incomplete in Schlegel, Blanchot, and Jabès.”

Nordisk Estetisk Tidskrift 24 (2001): 39.

Elias, Camelia. “Wit in and Out of Perspective.” In The Fragment: Towards a History and Poetics of a Performative Genre. Bern: Peter Lang, 2004, 91.

Nancy and Moddel, 31.

10. Brenez, 21.

11. “Poetry, n.” in New Oxford American Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

12. “Illumination, n.,” in New Oxford American Dictionary.

13. Schlegel. “Ideas.” No. 123.

14. “Sublime, n.” in Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), accessed 14 April 2011, http://www.oed. com/.

15. Greenblatt, 10-11.

16. Nancy and Moddel, 22.

17. Ibid.

18. Schlegel et al. “Athenaeum Fragments.”

Nos. 116 and 394, respectively.

19. Schlegel. “Critical Fragments.” No. 34; Friedrich Schlegel, “Kritische Fragmente” in Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe.

20. Brenez, 21.

Nancy and Moddel, 23.

Quotation from Schlegel et al. “Athenaeum Fragments.” Nos. 220, 366.

Thouard, 4-5.

21. “Geistig, adj.” In Beolingus, 2006-2011, Technische Universität Chemnitz, accessed 10 April 2011, http://dict.tu-chemnitz.de.

“Geistig, adj.” In DWDS-Projekt, 2008-2011, Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, accessed 10 April 2011, http://www.dwds.de/.

22. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 42.

23. Schlegel. “Critical Fragments.” Nos. 34 and 112, respectively.

24. “Sym- prefix.” In Oxford English Dictionary.

25. Elitism, rather than egalitarianism, un-

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derlies the German Romantics’ conception of symphilosophy and sympoetry: “you shoudn’t try to symphilosophize with everyone, but only with those who are à la hauteur [man soll nicht mit allen symphilosophieren wollen, sondern nur mit denen, die à la hauteur sind].”

Brenez, 22-23.

Elias, “Wit as the Final Aesthetic Imperative,” 35.

Quotation from Schlegel et al. “Athenaeum Fragments.” No. 264.

26. Schlegel. “Critical Fragments.” No. 34.

Schlegel. “Kritische Fragmente.” No. 34.

27. “Brilliant, adj.” in Oxford English Dictionary.

28. “Blitzen, v.” in Beolingus.

“Blitzen, v.” in DWDS-Projekt.

29. Greenblatt, 10-11.

30. “Leuchte, n.” In Beolingus.

“Leuchte, n.” In DWDS-Projekt.

31. Schlegel. “Critical Fragments.” No. 34; Schlegel, “Kritische Fragmente,” No. 34.

32. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 41-42.

33. Schlegel. “Critical Fragments.” No. 34.

Schlegel. “Kritische Fragmente.” No. 34.

34. “Schmetternd, adj.” In Beolingus.

“Schmetternd, adj.” In DWDS-Projekt.

In New Oxford American Dictionary.

35. “Schlag, n.” In Beolingus.

“Schlag, n.” In DWDS-Projekt.

36. Nancy and Moddel, 31.

Quotation from Schlegel. “Critical Fragments.” No. 34.

37. “Resonance, n.” In New Oxford American Dictionary.

38. Nancy and Moddel, 31.

39. Schlegel. “Critical Fragments.” No. 90 Schlegel. “Kritische Fragmente.” No. 90.

40. “Geist, n.” In Beolingus.

“Geist, n.” In DWDS-Projekt.

Quotation from “Cognition, n.” In New Oxford American Dictionary.

41. “Narrow-mindedness, n.” In Oxford English Dictionary.

Quotation from Schlegel. “Critical Fragments.” No. 90.

42. Nancy and Moddel, 23.

Thouard, 4-5, 9.

43. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 41-42, 48.

Nancy and Moddel, 23.

44. Schlegel. “Critical Fragments.” No. 90.

Schlegel. “Kritische Fragmente.” No. 90.

45. “Explosion, n.” In Oxford English Dictionary.

46. Brenez, 21-22.

47. Nancy and Moddel, 31.

48. Schlegel. “Critical Fragments.” No. 9.

Schlegel. “Kritische Fragmente.” No. 9.

49. “Genialität, n.” In DWDS-Projekt.

“Genius, n.” In Oxford English Dictionary.

50. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 39.

Quotation from Schlegel. “Critical Fragments.” No. 90.

51. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 40.

52. Ibid., 40, 42, 44.

Elias, “Wit as the Final Aesthetic Imperative,” 34.

53. Schlegel et al. “Athenaeum Fragments.”

No. 383.

Schlegel. “Athenäums-Fragmente.” No. 383.

54. “Abreißen, v.” In Beolingus.

“Abreißen, v.” In DWDS-Projekt.

55. “Baroque, adj. and n.” Vol. 3 of La Grande Encyclopédie (Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1972), 1476-1479. “Baroque, adj. and n.”

In Oxford English Dictionary.

56. “Baroque, adj. and n.” La Grande Encyclopédie, 1477.

57. Schlegel et al. “Athenaeum Fragments.”

No. 383.

58. Ibid. No. 116.

59. Ibid.

Thouard, 6.

60. Nancy and Moddel, 30.

Quotation from Schlegel. “Critical Fragments.” No. 34.

61. Albert, 11.

Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 47-48.

Nancy and Moddel, 28.

Quotation from Schlegel. “Ideas.” No. 123.

Thouard, 4-5.

62. Schlegel. “Critical Fragments.” No. 90.

“Open-mindedness, n.” New Oxford American Dictionary.

63. Schlegel et al. “Athenaeum Fragments.”

No. 116.

64. Ibid.

65. Ibid.

66. Elias, “Wit as the Final Aesthetic Imperative,” 34.

Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 40, 44.

67.Elias,“Wit as the Final Aesthetic Imperative,” 45.

Elias. “Wit In and Out of Perspective.” 99.

68. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 44.

69. Schlegel et al. “Athenaeum Fragments.”

No. 116.

70. Albert, 10-11.

Brenez, 21, 23.

Greenblatt, 10-11.

Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 47-48.

Nancy and Moddel, 23-24, 28.

Thouard, 3-5.

9

Metapher und Gespräch in Goethes “Heidenröslein”

Emilio Comay del Junco

“Heidenröslein” (1771) Sah ein Knab’ ein Röslein stehn, Röslein auf der Heiden, war so jung und morgenschön, lief er schnell, es nah zu sehn, sah’s mit vielen Freuden.

Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot, Röslein auf der Heiden.

Knabe sprach: „Ich breche dich, Röslein auf der Heiden!“ Röslein sprach: „Ich steche dich, dass du ewig denkst an mich, und ich will’s nicht leiden.“ Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot, Röslein auf der Heiden.

Und der wilde Knabe brach ‘s Röslein auf der Heiden; Röslein wehrte sich und stach, half ihm doch kein Weh und Ach, musst’ es eben leiden.

Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot, Röslein auf der Heiden.

J.W. von Goethe1

EINLEITUNG Den meisten akademischen sowie populären Interpretationen zufolge ist Goethes frühes Gedicht “Heidenröslein” als sexuelle Allegorie zu interpretieren. Für heutige Leser ist es zweifellos nicht schwer, das Röslein als eine weibliche Figur zu deuten, und des Knaben Wunsch „Ich breche dich“ als Allegorie nicht nur für sexuelle Lust, sondern auch für die Vergewaltigung des Heidenrösleins zu interpretieren. Was ich nun

10

klarstellen möchte ist nicht, inwiefern diese fast kanonische Interpretation überhaupt zulässig ist, sondern in wie fern sie überhaupt zugelassen wird. Die umstrittene Frage, die ich hiermit behandeln möchte, hat wenig damit zu tun, inwiefern diese Interpretation richtig oder falsch ist. Vielmehr möchte ich durch interne bzw. textliche Beweise sowie durch externe – bzw. diskursive oder literarische Zusammenhänge klarstellen wie das Gedicht seit mehr als 200 Jahren als Metapher einer Vergewaltigung gelesen wird. Darüber hinaus will ich diese Interpretation auch durch eine Analyse in Bezug auf Performativität ausbauen. Mein Ansatz hat drei Kernpunkte: Erstens, eine diskursanalytische Skizze der epistemischen Bedingungen, unter denen sich “Heidenröslein” als sexuelle Metapher lesen lässt; zweitens eine Analyse der stilistischen und inhaltlichen Struktur des Gedichts um die allegorische Darstellung von sexuellen Themen durch Bilder der Natur näher zu betrachten; und letztens will ich mich auf die philosophischen Folgen der spezifischen Darstellungsart in diesem Gedicht konzentrieren, insbesonders mit Blick auf die philosophische Landschaft des späten 18.

Jahrhunderts (vor allem Hamanns Aesthetica in Nuce und der neo-Spinozismus) sowie auf Jacques Derridas Theorisierung der Metapher.

SEX und Natur, ANCIENS et MODERNES Die literarische Darstellungsgeschichte der menschlichen sexuellen Begierde durch natürliche Metaphern ist lang und reich.

Zumindest im europäischen Zusammenhang ist ihr Ursprung in der frühen abendländischen

Aaron Vansintjan Antike zu finden. Dass die Natur während der Klassik eine ganz prominente Rolle in der Darstellung der Sexualität spielt, ist zweifellos: man muss nur an die tierischen Formen des griechischen Zeus denken, als er Göttinnen sowie weibliche Menschen verführte oder vergewaltigte, oder an die Verwandlung Daphnes in einen Lorbeerbaum, um sich einen Fluchtweg vor Apollon zu sichern.1 Als ein Gedicht, das während einer Zeit mit großem Interesse für die Antike, vor allem für die griechische, geschrieben wurde, kann “Heidenröslein” mit Blick auf diese lange Tradition der Thematisierung der Natur während der Klassik, sowie auf die wesentlichen Unterschiede dazwischen gelesen werden. Am wichtigsten zu bemerken ist, dass die Sexualität im Gedicht nie ganz direkt dargestellt wird. Es gibt gar keine Erläuterung eines zweiten Menschen neben dem Knaben, geschweige denn eines jungen Mädchens, dass das Röslein darstellen könnte. Das heißt, die Titelblume bloß auf einem denotativen Niveau als Röslein erscheint. Das Gedicht kann deswegen nur als derartige Allegorie in einem diskursiven Zusammenhang interpretiert werden, in dem Sex und Natur schon verknüpft werden,

d.h. wenn diese Verknüpfung bekannt und ja gewöhnlich ist. Aber das Goethesche Gedicht ist keine Wiederholung von klassischen Themen; eher im Gegenteil. In der Klassik geht die Verbindung Sex-Natur um Verwandlungen und Verstecke: Zeus wird zu einem Stier, Schwan, Feuer usw., Daphne verwandelt sich in einen Lorbeerbaum. Aber das “Heidenröslein” beruht auf einer völlig anderen Beziehung. Da es kein Mädchen gibt, das sich in ein Röslein verwandelt, wird das Röslein nur im diskursiven Kontext des Gedichts zur Repräsentation einer weiblichen Figur. Das Röslein wird nie mit menschlichen Attributen oder mit spezifischen Einzelheiten beschreiben und außer der Farbe „rot,“ die am Ende jeder Strophe erwähnt wird, gibt es wenige und nur ungewisse Beschreibungen des Rösleins im Allgemeinen. Hinzu könnte die einzige Zeile die das Röslein adjektivisch beschreibt auch hypothetisch mit dem Knaben verbunden werden: “War so jung und morgenschön.” Da nur Prädikatsadjektive benutzt werden, wird das grammatikalische Genus des Subjekts dieses Satzes nicht definiert, und es wird deshalb kein lexikalischer Unterschied zwischen den zwei Figuren gemacht. Goethe lässt

11

keinen einzigen klaren Hinweis auf weder die Menschlichkeit, noch die Weiblichkeit der Blume. Darüber hinaus gibt es eine tiefe Ambiguität, nicht nur in Bezug auf die Menschlichkeit des Rösleins, sondern auch wegen einer unklaren Unterscheidung zwischen den zwei Figuren: In der letzten Strophe wird ein Dativpronomen verwendet, das entweder auf den Knaben (maskulin) oder auf das Röslein (neutral) hinweisen könnte: “Half ihm doch kein weh und ach.“ Diese grammatikalischen Einzelheiten deuten auf die Tatsache hin, dass die Identifikation des Rösleins mit einer weiblichen Figur durch unzählige geschriebene und ungeschriebene Codes entstanden ist.

In seinem Hauptwerk Die Ordnung der Dinge identifiziert Michel Foucault in dem Übergang von der Renaissance zur Frühmoderne (frz. l’âge classique) eine Ersetzung von Gleichartigkeit mit Darstellung als den Hauptcharakter der Beziehung zwischen Zeichen und Bezeichnetem. Ihm zufolge, gab es seit der Antike und bis zum 17. Jahrhundert eine vorgestellte Identität zwischen Dingen und Wörtern: Daphne wird nicht von einem Lorbeerbaum repräsentiert, sondern ist mit einem solchen Baum identifiziert. Aber als Goethe während der letzten Jahre der Frühmoderne schrieb, genauer gesagt schon in den ersten Jahren unserer Moderne, war eine solche Identifikation nicht sehr häufig, denn „On s’était demandé comment reconnaître qu’un signe désignait bien ce qu’il signifiait.“3 Ein Mädchen ist nicht im Röslein versteckt, sondern wird von einem repräsentiert, eine Darstellung, die sich auf spezifische, kulturbestimmte Regeln bezieht und die hierarchisch festgesetzt wird: Im 18.

Jahrhundert, wie auch heute, repräsentiert ein Röslein ziemlich intuitiv ein Mädchen und nicht einen Knaben. Im vollen Gegensatz zur Identitätsbeziehung zwischen Dingen und Wörtern in der Klassik bedeutete dies aber nicht automatisch, dass ein Mädchen ein Röslein darstellt oder umgekehrt. Dennoch, als Goethe schrieb, war der Rationalismus schon am Scheitern,: Er stand an der Schwelle des von Foucault beschriebenen klassischen Alters (l’épistémé classique) sowie von den er-

12

sten Blüten einer neuen Verschlingung zwischen Mensch und Natur, deren erste volle Blüte in der Romantik statt fand. Wie die oben erwähnte einzige pronominale Referenz zur Weiblichkeit des Rösleins schon beweist, ist die Blume kein bloßes Zeichen, sondern etwas viel Komplexeres.

Interne Lyrische EinsÄtze Verbunden mit – und doch untrennbar von – dem Inhalt des Gedichts ist seine sehr einfache, fast simplistische Stilistik. Obwohl “Heidenröslein” als Ballade klassifiziert wird, besteht das Gedicht nicht aus der traditionellen vierzeiligen „Volksliedstrophe“ – nebenbei enthält jede Zeile drei oder vier Jamben – sondern wird eher als Anakreontik klassifiziert, eine von der altgriechischen Dichtung inspirierte Gattung. Wie schon erwähnt, ist das Gedicht recht einfach, und ein Exemplar der völkischen und lyrischen Tradition.

Formelhaftigkeit und Kitsch werden durch die Abweichung von häufigen Formeln vermieden, und ganz im Gegensatz ermöglichen die kleinen Unregelmäßigkeiten des Gedichts eine natürlichere Darstellung des Gesprächs.

Zum Beispiel ist das Reimschema nicht total regelmäßig—die zweite Zeile des Gedichts, „war so jung und morgenschön“, reimt sich niemals auf eine andere, und präsentiert also ganz am Anfang des Gedichts eine gewisse Spontaneität sowie Unvorhersehbarkeit (und, wie schon oben erwähnt, verstärkt diese Strophe durch ihre Besonderheit wieder die Mehrdeutigkeit dieser Zeile). Auch unter Stil steht die Redensart des Gedichts, deren wichtigstes Element ein direkter, quotierter Dialog ist. In der zweiten Strophe gibt es ein paar Zeilen, in denen das Gespräch des Knaben und Rösleins zitiert wird: „Knabe sprach: ich breche dich /… / Röslein sprach: ich steche dich“. Normalerweise stützt sich die Allegorie auf einer Ungewissheit, um den doppelsinnigen Charakter der dargestellten Objekte zu bestätigen, aber hier zeigt das Zitat auf eine Art Buchstabenglaubens. Inhaltlich, und in ihrem eigenen kulturellen Kontext, wird diese Strophe relativ einfach als Allegorie oder Metapher für Vergewaltigung gelesen, aber ihre stilistische und grammatikalische Struktur verleit dieser

Interpretation weniger Gewissheit. Im Gegensatz zu einem allegorischen Bild könnte der Klang dieser Zeilen sogar als ein Voraussehen des magischen Realismus interpretiert werden, welcher völlig andere Beziehungen zwischen Repräsentationen und Dinge ins Spiel bringt, die sehr oft einen bewussten mythologischen Anteil besitzten.

Sprache und Metapher Hinter diesem ganzen Versuch steht eine Grundsatzfrage: Wie funktioniert eine Metapher, und inwiefern nimmt sie besondere Eigenschaften an, wenn eines der verglichenen Objekte unerläutert bleibt, d.h. wenn sie nur wegen ihres diskursiven Feldes verständlich ist? Als definitorische Orientierung folge ich Jacques Derridas Begriff von Metapher als Ähnlichkeit nicht nur zwischen einem Zeichen und etwas Gezeichnetem (d.h. zwischen einem Signifikat und einem Signifikant) aber vor allem zwischen zwei Zeichen selbst.4 In “Heidenröslein” steht die Natur nicht nur als literarische Darstellung der menschlichen Sexualität, sondern auch umgekehrt: Die Natur wird zum Zeichen des Menschlichen, aber sie selbst wird durch normalerweise menschenartigen Themen wie Liebe und Sexualität verstanden, d.h., der Mensch wird auch zum Zeichen des Natürlichen. (Damit diese Formulierung Sinn macht, muss die Natur natürlich immer als etwas betrachtet werden, das von dem Menschen konzipiert ist, d.h. sie ist immer schon menschlich.)

Zeilen, die zum Beispiel die Wichtigkeit der Erinnerung erwähnen – nämlich „Daß du ewig denkst an mich“ oder „Mußte es eben leiden“ – können auch von dem Charakter des menschlichen Begehrens sowohl als auch von der menschlichen Beziehung mit der Natur sprechen, daher die Thematisierung von Ewigkeit, Dauerhaftigkeit und die longue durée im Allgemeinen. Beide sind also Mittel, mit denen man auf ursprünglichere Fragen von Gedanken und Erinnerung zugreifen kann; anders gesagt, wird die von Menschen vorgestellte Natur stark von den Strukturen des menschlichen Begehrens (sowie Leiden, Erinnerung, Lust, Liebe usw.) konzipiert.

Eine Analyse der Metapher geht also nicht

nur um eine Entzifferung der besagten und implizierten, assoziativen und poetischen Konzepte, sondern auch um eine Offenbarung von etwas nicht vorher Erwähntem: Nicht nur die Offenbarung von Konzepten, sondern von einer laufenden konzeptuellen Bewegung.

Derrida identifiziert das sogenannte „mouvement de la métamaphorisation“ mit einem „mouvement d’idéalisation,” der dialektischen Aufhebung von Hegel,5 ein Prozess, der sich genau im Kleinen innerhalb von “Heidenröslein” reproduziert: nämlich dem Kampf zwischen dem Knaben (Mensch) und dem Röslein (Natur) hebt sich ein neues Verständnis auf, das in der besten Hegelschen Tradition gleichzeitig eine Konservierung („daß du ewig denkst an mich“) und Zerstörung („und der wilde Knabe brach“) enthält.

Mit dieser Interpretationsmöglichkeit kommen wir nun zu der Philosophie von Baruch Spinoza, genauer gesagt deren Rezeption im deutschen Sprachraum während des späten 18. Jahrhunderts. Obwohl Goethes Gedicht auf frühere Volkslieder des 17. Jahrhunderts basiert,6 ist es erleuchtend, über das starke gegenwärtige philosophische Interesse für den Spinozismus nachzudenken, dessen Hauptthese ist, dass alles Existierende als Teil von Gott oder Natur (deus sive natura), zu verstehen ist. Die Relevanz des “Heidenrösleins” im Angesicht dieser Philosophie stammt nicht von der Thematisierung der Natur im Gedicht (in einem solchen Fall könnte eine enorme Menge von Gedichten des späten 18. Jahrhunderts so analysiert werden), sondern von seiner Thematisierung des Gesprächs. Besonders wichtig dafür ist eine starke Ungewissheit im Gedanken Spinozas in Betreff auf Sprache: Was er wenig darüber sagt, könnte kurz von Gilles Deleuzes Erklärung zusammengefasst werden: “...[la langue n’est] qu’un ‘signe,’ une ‘indication’ variable.“7 Aber weil alles, das im monistischen System Spinozas existiert, an der Gottheit teilnimmt, steht jedes Wort und jede Aussage als Äußerung der Göttlichkeit, d.h. der Natur. Wegen dieser Mehrdeutigkeit des Gesprächs kann man die Mehrsinnigkeit der Metapher erfassen: Weil die Sprache nicht nur aus Zeichen besteht, sondern aus einer Reihe von veränderlichen (obwohl göttlichen) Anga-

13

ben [“‘indication’ variable”],7 könnte sie zwei oder doch mehrere Sinne haben. Trotz seines geprägten anti-Spinozismus,8 ist der Gedanke J.G. Hamanns in seinem Aesthetica in Nuce, hier ganz erleuchtend.9 Er schreibt: “Reden ist übersetzen – aus einer Engelsprache in eine Menschensprache, das heißt, Gedanken in Worte, – Sachen in Namen, – Bilder in Zeichen.” Trotz Hammans Skepsis der Sprache gegenüber ist die Poesie die ursprünglichste Redensart – je einfacher und lyrischer die Gattung, desto ausdrücklicher ist die Sprache Ausdruck des Göttlichen. Mit Blick auf diese gegenwärtigen philosophischen Tendenzen steht die Einfachheit von Inhalt und Stil dieses Gedichts von Goethe in toto für ein Streben nach diesem Ideal.10 Im Großen und Ganzen steht der Begriff ‚Übersetzen‘ doch im Vordergrund des Gedichts Durch die mündliche Bedrohung des Knaben durch das Röslein – „Röslein sprach: ich steche dich“ – wird die Natur vermenschlicht (das heißt, übersetzt), aber man muss sich auch daran erinnern, dass nicht nur diese Zeile, sondern das ganze allegorische Verstehen des Gedichts eine kulturelle bestimmte Interpretation ist – eine Übersetzung der Denotationen der Wörter (die auch natürlich kulturell bestimmt sind, aber auf einem noch tieferen Niveau) in einer hoch entwickelten symbolischen Ordnung. Im Zentrum dieser bidirektionalen Übersetzung steht das Gespräch. Durch das Gespräch findet “Heidenröslein” einen dichterischen Sinn (oder sogar eine Hegelsche Aufhebung) außer dem streng Buchstäblichen und dem total Allegorischen. Eben weil das Röslein spricht könnte eine menschliche Metapher existieren ohne direkte Erläuterung von einem Mensch. Genau weil das Röslein als an und für sich sprechend beschrieben wird, als grammatikalisch und poetisch dem Knaben gleichgestellt – “Knabe sprach… / Röslein sprach… – hat es einen Charakter, der nicht buchstäblich oder allegorisch als Mensch zu deuten ist, sondern einen der sich auf gewisse Spuren einer pantheistischen philosophischen Allgemeinheit zwischen Mensch und Natur bezieht.

14

NOTES 1. von Goethe, J.W. Goethes Werke:Hamburger Ausgabe in 14 Bänden. Edited by Erich Trunz. Hamburg: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999. Bd. 1, 78. Alle weiteren Zitate des Gedichts beziehen sich auf diese Quelle.

2. Ursprünglich wird die griechische Schöpfungsgeschichte als sexuelle Metapher gelesen: die gegenwärtige Götter als Produkt von Gaia (Erde, weiblich) und ihrem jungfraulich geborenen Sonn Uranos (Himmel, männlich). Grimal, Pierre. The Dictionary of Classical Mythology. Translated by A.R. Maxwell-Hyslop. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996, 128.

3. Foucault, Michel. Les mots et les choses. Paris: Gallimard, 1970, 58.

4. “La métaphore a toujours été définie comme le trope de la ressemblance ; non pas, simplement entre un signifiant et un signifié, mais entre deux signes, dont l’un désigne l’autre.” Derrida, Jacques. “La mythologie blanche: la métaphore dans le texte philosophique.” In Marges de la philosophie. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972, 255.

5. Ibid., 269.

6. Byrne, Lorraine. Schubert’s Goethe Settings.

Ashgate: Aldershot, 2003, 209.

7. Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza et le problème de l’éxpression. Paris: Éditions de miniut, 1968, 268.

8. Di Giovanni, George. “Introduction.” In F.H Jacobi: The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill. Edited by George Di Giovanni. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009, 61.

9. Hamann unterstützte zwar nicht F.H. Jacobi während dem Spinozastreit, aber nur weil Jacobi nicht orthodox genug in seiner Christenheit war, nicht wegen einer Sympathie für den Spinonizismus. Ibid., 88.

10. Man könnte ohne Schwierigkeiten argumentieren, dass die Vertonung des Gedichts von Franz Schubert im Jahre 1815 diesen Versuch ergänzt. (Cf. Byrne, 211)

To Wake a Sleeping Word

Some more entries for a Translational Lexicon

Jack Deming Beforeword

W

e cannot expect words to make any sense at all if we’re not willing to actively make their senses. But we often sleepwalk dreamlessly in the words we’ve always known.

How do you wake sleeping words and give sense to a mother tongue?

Ský / Cloud / Skog / Shadow The English word sky is derived from the Old Norse word ský, which meant cloud. Ský is related to the Old Norse skugge, which meant shade or shadow, and which has phonologically encoded within it a strong sense of shadow,1 due to its close similarity to the Swedish/ Norwegian word skog (“o” pronounced like the “oo” in pool), which at the moment means forest in those languages. So somewhere within the shared linguistic space of English, the Scandinavian languages, and Old Norse, a walk in the woods is a walk in the shadows, and clouds and trees are aligned with each other by the shadows they cast.

Entscheidung - Decision A decision (Germ. Entscheidung) is what we must make when we’re forced to choose between a number of actions we might take. The English word derives from the Latin dēcīsiōn which means “cutting down” (cf. scissors, precise). The literal structure of German decision is made up of the distancing prefix “Ent,” which true to its name, creates distance and opposition, and “Scheid” + “ung,” meaning ‘cutting’ or ‘division.’ So while in English we decide by dividing, in German we decide by moving away from division. The English word

has to do with the action that we actually take when we decide: we cut a real action out from possible ones. The German word on the other hand refers to the state in which we find ourselves that requires us to make a decision in the first place – a divided state, the feeling of being torn – and at the same time it refers to the way that by deciding we cut ourselves away from that division. The hardest decisions are those that force us to choose between things that we care for equally, or that are equally repellant to us. Faced with these decisions, all there is to do is to resolve oneself to things as they have come about, and to accept that there will be no walking away without injury or loss. The Germans have a phrase, “Ich muss mich damit bescheiden,” which in its common sense translates to “I must content myself with it,” but which due to its proximity to the words scheiden (to divorce, to divide, to part) and beschneiden (to cut) can be interpreted literally to mean “I must divide myself from/with it.” The German phrase coupled with the adjectival form of bescheiden (‘humble’) brings to mind the English idiom by which we “cut down to size” the unhumble by reminding them via sharp or cutting criticism of how far their borders actually extend.

NOTES 1. Despite its straightforward etymology, from the old norse skogr meaning “wood, forest.”

15

Homo über Berlin

Weimar Sexual Politics, Anders als die Andern, and Mädchen in Uniform Lynsey Grøsfjell-Hansen “What you call sins… I call the great spirit of love, in all its forms.”

Fräulein von Bernburg in Mädchen in Uniform

T

he Weimar Republic in Germany lasted from approximately 1918 to 1933, and on the former and latter extremes of its tenure, two important queer films were produced: Anders als die Andern (1919) and Mädchen in Uniform (1931). In many ways, these two films can be seen as companion pieces,1 marking both the inception and the swan song of the socially and sexually progressive politics of 1920s Weimar Germany, and the Golden Age of German Expressionism. Further, both films were censored and partially destroyed under the Nazi regime, which deemed their sexual politics to be “decadent” (fig. 1). Anders als die Andern, which means “different from the others,” was an Aufklärungsfilme, or “enlightenment film,” which sought to naturalise the socially deviant figure of the homosexual male.

Contrary to prevailing discourses of sexology extant in the work of Sigmund Freud and other Victorian sexologists, this film averred a new, more sympathetic view of the homosexual, guided by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld of the German Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science). Similarly, Mädchen in Uniform is and was a cult lesbian classic,2 portraying as natural the homosocial and homoerotic intimacy between students and teachers at a German all-girls boarding school, and thus subtly subverting the sexological discourse of the “third sex” or “invert” which held that lesbian women were visibly and behaviourally masculine.3 Both films centre on an eroticised pedagogical relationship between mentor and mentee – Paul Körner (Conrad Veidt), a tor-

16

tured violinist, falls for his protégé, Kurt Sivers (Fritz Schulz); Manuela von Meinhardis (Hertha Thiele), a student at a strict boarding school, pines for her stern governess, Fräulein von Bernburg (Dorothea Wieck). As these infilm pedagogical relationships are both erotic and enlightening – à la contemporaneous ideas of Pädagogischer Eros (pedagogical eros) from German philosopher Gustav Wyneken – they mirror the dynamic between these films and their intended audiences.

I. Enlightenment The Weimar Era in Germany was most certainly one of flourishing intellectualism and new ideas, from the Staatliches Bauhaus vowing to “reunify all the disciplines of practical art,”4 to a growing movement of progressivism in matters of gender and sexuality.5 As mentioned, Anders als die Andern was one of many films produced for purposes of sexual and social Aufklärung. These films “dealt with such issues as disease, prostitution, and abortion, embedded in a storyline that included counselling by a sage physician.”6 During this period of history – in Germany and elsewhere in Europe – the idea of social hygiene was gaining currency in the public discourse, following several decades of cholera epidemics, the establishment of public health programs and a social safety net, emerging medical and sanitary technologies, and the growth of the eugenics movement.7 Thus, the idea of the doctor as an arbiter of moral discourse in the areas of sex and social conduct is especially congruent with

the historical context; and it would have resonated with a Weimar audience. Dr. Hirschfeld – the physician and sexologist who not only helped write the film, but also makes several appearances in the film as the Arzt (Doctor) – intended to rehabilitate the much-maligned figure of the homosexual male by presenting the tragic tale of homosexual violinist Paul Körner: his love for his protégé, his blackmail

by Franz Bollek (Reinhold Schünzel), and his eventual suicide after the exposure of his homosexuality. Indeed, during the time at which the film was created, “Paragraph 175,” a section of the German Penal Code, made “unnatural vice between men” punishable by jail time; this law was toughened under Nazi rule, and not fully repealed until 1994. By 1927, with the reinstatement of censorship laws, in part because of this controversial film,8 only medical students were allowed to screen the film, provided that they carried an identification card to do so.9 Within this film there are two ostensible mentors: Paul – the violinist – and the Doctor, who guides Paul, Kurt’s sister Else, lecture halls full of students, and the audience towards an understanding of homosexuality as natural. This latter pedagogical relationship primarily appeals to a sense of historical progressivism, the hegemony of biology, and the idea of the social body as organism.

When Paul firsts ruminates on “Paragraph 175,” his first reaction is to think of all of the great men who supposedly would have been ruined by this law, establishing a queer heritage comprised of “Oscar Wilde, Peter Tchaikovsky, Leonardo Da Vinci, King Friedrich II of Prussia, and King Ludwig II of Bavaria.” Later in the film, during a lecture, the Doctor argues that “the persecution of homosexuals belongs in the same sad chapter of human history in which persecution of heretics and witches is inscribed.” Both moments can be seen as an appeal to progressivism and rely on the audience, both within and without the film, to want to see themselves as advanced and more evolved that those in the history books. Indeed, this urge to be enlightened and thus cosmopolitan characterised much of Weimar discourse about sexuality.10 Further, at numerous points in the film, the Doctor alludes to the “fifty years of

scientific research” that show that homosexuality is indeed natural, and not deviant: “Science over superstition;” “Nature is boundless in its creations. Between all opposites there are transitions, and this is also true of the sexes;” and You mustn’t think poorly of your son because he is a homosexual. He is not at all to blame for his orientation. It is neither a vice nor a crime, indeed, not even an illness, but instead a variation, one of the borderline cases that occur frequently in nature.

This pedagogical discourse is one of argumentum ad verecundiam – an argument from authority – which is indeed a logical fallacy. In this case, the medical institution, which has previously (and concurrently) oppressed homosexuals with its discourses of deviance, now uses its moral and discursive sway (respect) to argue that homosexuality is indeed not a vice, because the discipline of biology – and thus learned scientists – declare it not to be so. Following from this discourse of biology of the individual body, comes the discourse of the social body, which was at this time understood as a biological system.11 The Doctor declares to Paul’s parents that “your son suffers not from his conditions, but rather from the false judgement of it. This is the legal and social condemnation of his feelings along with the widespread misconceptions about their expression.” Later, after Paul commits suicide, Else affirms to his family that, “You and the rest of society have his death on your conscience.” In this mode, the social body is itself responsible for the persecution of Paul, and the condemnation of that social body serves to shame those within the film and the audience, ultimately making them culpable in Paul’s death. Thus, Anders als die Andern uses three different pedagogical modalities in order to spread its message of antidiscrimination to both the characters and the audience: an appeal to progressivism, an appeal to science and authority, and an appeal to the social organism.

Mädchen in Uniform, however, uses a different approach to education within the film: one of contrasting pedagogical styles of excitement and discipline; excitement, in this context, meaning incepting the desire to

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learn within the pupil, so the pupil continues towards some sort of enlightenment on the subject long after the teacher is gone. Excessive discipline is shown here, as in Anders, to have devastating consequences, whereas excitement – both that of the students for Fräulein Bernburg, and the audience in its identification with Manuela – is shown to bring the “great spirit of love, in all its forms.” The pedagogical discourse here also deals with the idea that excitement is individualising, whereas discipline is homogenising. At the time, the threatening idea of the mass weighed heavily on Weimar consciousness: Stefan Zweig, in his 1925 polemic “Die Monotonisierung der Welt” (“The Monotonization of the World”), rails against the growing penchant for uniformity of the variety that is strictly enforced in the boarding school: It is not with impunity that everyone can dress the same, that all women can go out in the same clothes, the same makeup: monotony necessarily penetrates beneath the surface. Faces become increasingly similar through the influence of the same passions [...] minds more similar for sharing the same interest.12

Similarly, in 1927, Sigfried Kracauer wrote of “indissoluble girl clusters whose movements are demonstrations of mathematics.”13 Several scenes in Mädchen show the girls being forced to dress the same, march the same, sing the same, and eat the same, and the times at which they can show their individuality are only the rare times when they are out of the panoptic glare of disciplinary authorities.

In terms of the how the diegetic world of Mädchen was perceived, a film review from a contemporaneous publication, the German magazine Filmwelt, stated that Mädchen was: Ein film mit unerprobten Kräften in vielen wichtigen Rollen, ein Film ohne Männer, der das Pensionatsmilieu auf ganz andere als die herkömmliche Art schildert und trotzdem dem Humor, der diesmal ganz besonders echt wirkt, sein Recht läßt.

A film with many inexperienced actors in difficult rolls, and a film without men, [Mädchen in Uniform] shows the boarding school [Pensionat] in a

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non-traditional way; nevertheless – as is often case – the humor rings especially true.14 (Fig. 2)

It was clearly notable in 1932 that Mädchen was ein “Film ohne Männer,” a film without men. In many ways, this film illustrates a “lesbian continuum” of intimacy in the various relationships between women.15 To viewers of the film, the entirely homosocial space of the boarding school could be read as just that: homosocial. Or, it could be read as a queer space.

This setting, one without men, leaves the filmic space ambiguous and open to interpretation by its viewers. Though almost every filmgoer is able to engage with the accessible humour of the film, the educational aspect – that which naturalises the homoerotic relationship between Manuela and Fräulein von Bernburg – does not demand to be seen as it did in Anders als die Andern. The viewer can or can not see the subtle moral discourse about sexuality that characterises the film. This subtlety matches the pedagogical style of Fräulein von Bernberg; as mentioned, an ongoing theme within Mädchen is the distinction between pedagogical models based on excitement (enlightenment), represented by Bernburg, and pedagogical models based on discipline, represented by Frau Principal.

Bernburg, in a staff meeting with the other governesses and the Principal, having just acted charitably to two disobedient girls in a previous scene, asserts that in order for teaching to be effectual, “the girls must trust us.” In Bernburg’s classroom, the efficacy of this model is clearly demonstrated: a sea of admiring and smiling faces gaze at her and, after each and every one of her questions and calls to recitation, every hand eagerly pops up, hoping to be called on to answer. Conversely, in a later interaction with Manuela after she has misbehaved, Frau Principal’s disciplinary model is show in full force: Frau Principal makes it explicitly known that she wants Manuela to feel shame.

She yells at her in the infirmary and, seen from an extreme low angle, the audience is beneath her chin. This is her mode of pedagogy, top down, punishing, patriarchal, and threatening.

Indeed, Hertha Thiele, who played Manuela in the film, asserted in an interview that this

film was definitely a commentary on the “cruel Prussian education system,”16 the values of which are neatly summarised in the words of Frau Principal: We Prussians have always been hungry. They are children of Soldiers, and God willing, Mothers of Soldiers too. What they need is discipline. Not a life of luxury. There’s no harm in hardship. We should be like the Prussians of old. Let others follow foolish ways. Through discipline and hunger, we shall be great again, or not at all!

Clearly, based on the ending on the film, in which Frau Principal is humiliated after Manuela’s attempted suicide, the moral message of Mädchen is that disciplinary tactics affect tragedy and unhappiness, whereas tactics that excite and engage young minds affect trust, love, and compassion. The film implicitly supports the same discourse averred explicitly in Anders: that it is better to educate than to punish, and punishment leads to tragedy.

II. Eroticism In both Anders and Mädchen, the youthful players – or mentees – are covertly eroticised. However, in Anders, Kurt Sivers, the object of Paul’s affections, is largely gazed at in the film, whereas much of the erotic tension in Mädchen is derived from Manuela’s gazing at Fräulein von Bernburg. Kurt plays the ephebe, the beautiful youth who inspires an older man: in the Classical pedagogical or pederastic sense, he is the erômenos (beloved) to Paul’s erastês (lover). Kurt is eroticised precisely because he is acted upon; as Paul is the audience proxy – ostensibly the character with whom the viewer is intended to identify – the audience too gazes at Kurt as an object of lust.

Conversely, Manuela works throughout the film to insinuate herself in Fräulein von Bernburg’s space and psyche, and thus the audience feels with Manuela the longing for physical intimacy, punctuated by brief moments such as the kiss and the few embraces, where the two actually touch. Mädchen very much toys with the eroticism of abstinence and withholding, as well as the ambiguity between homosocial and homoerotic relations in women’s spaces.17 In Anders and Mädchen, both young actors are

usually framed in soft-focus close-ups. With Kurt, his eyes are normally averted, and usually, he is performing for either his teacher or an audience on the violin. With Manuela, she is usually either looking directly in to the camera with wet or starry eyes, or looking down with a coy sense of shyness.

Kurt is introduced into Anders als die Andern as an admirer of Paul’s; the title card states: “Young Kurt Sivers never misses a concert by Paul Körner,” as Kurt looks admiringly at Paul from the audience, giving him a card after the show. Later, Kurt calls on Paul – Paul, draped in a flamboyant shawl, is asked by Kurt to be his violin teacher. As their relationship progresses, they are seen walking arm and arm in a park, and are followed by a villainous looking fellow. As the music becomes suspicious, he creeps up next to the duo and says, “Handsome lad!” insinuating that he knows how Paul feels towards Kurt. In all of these scenes, it is left ambiguous as to whether Kurt perceives that he is an object of desire to his older violin teacher, and this continues when Kurt brings Paul a letter in his studio that makes him blanche. The blackmailer – Franz Bolleck (Reinhold Schünzel), whom they met earlier in the park – demands one hundred Mark to keep quiet about Paul’s feeling for Kurt. Kurt wishes to see the letter, but Paul puts his arm around the boy and shelters him from the contents.

Paul is seen repeatedly sheltering Kurt like a child, not only from the stressful blackmailing situation, but also, it seems, from his adult desires. This falls apart when Bolleck is caught

by Kurt going through Paul’s personal effects for collateral. He beats Kurt up in the studio, and Paul intervenes, after which Bolleck reveals Paul’s secret desires to Kurt. Kurt looks horrified and stunned as Paul caresses him to find if he is uninjured, but eventually turns to embrace Paul. It is not until this moment that their relationship seems at all mutual. Indeed, after this point, Kurt leaves, devastating Paul.

When he returns, Paul has killed himself, and Kurt falls at his deathbed weeping. It is never clear whether or not Kurt feels for Paul as more than a friend or mentor, but he certainly feels for him. Conversely, the audience is well aware of Paul’s erotic desire for Kurt, because of the

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way in which the character is framed. To contemporary audiences, framing Kurt in a soft, desiring light would certainly have given this film the potential for not only educational but also erotic enjoyment.

In Mädchen in Uniform, when Manuela arrives at the boarding school and meets the other girls, they swoon when they discover she is in Fräulein von Bernburg’s dormitory.

Ilse – who has been established as a joker in a previous scene – makes quite the display of her and the other girls’ affections: “Careful you don’t fall in love,” she cautions comically.

“All of the kids have a crush on Fraulein von Bernburg.” Later, when Manuela first receives her used, shapeless uniform, she finds a note in the pocket which reads “E.v.B.” When she inquires as to the meaning of the cryptic initials, the seamstress laughingly replies that the previous wearer must have had a crush on “Eva von Bernburg.” Much like the collage of popular German actor Hans Albers in Ilse’s locker (who the other girls say has “sex appeal,” in English), Fräulein von Bernburg is an object of much curious and eroticised admiration in the house. As Ilse says: “You’ll never know how to take her. First she looks at you very severely, then, all of a sudden, she’s really nice to you.” The lower-level staff – such as the seamstress – see these schoolgirl crushes as comic and natural; the higher-level administrators – such as Frau Principal – see these crushes as threatening and deviant. In several scenes, the girls are seen touching, caressing, comforting, and even having crushes on one another. For example, Edelgard, a peer who is clearly shown to be close to Manuela – holding one another, dancing – says to Fräulein von Kesten after Manuela has been disciplined that she feels bad for Manuela because “she is so strange.” Fräulein von Kesten, moving in as to tell a secret, says, “Your friend isn’t worth risking so much for. Associating with her only harms you. I’m sure your parents would be upset to hear about it.” To which Edelgard replies, “Manuela is not bad!” The tension between Edelgard’s youthful and ambiguous intimacy with Manuela is contrasted between the adult, homophobic and punishing gaze of Fräulein von Kesten.

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Beyond the relationships with peers in the boarding school, six major scenes in particular eroticise the relationship between Manuela and Fräulein von Bernburg: their first meeting, the infamous good-night kiss, the shared looks in the classroom, the subsequent gift of a garment, the play the girls put on in which Manuela plays the Lothario, and the scene in which both Bernburg and Manuela are disciplined. Two of these in particular – the kiss and the play – frame Manuela and Bernburg as lovers. Interestingly, both scenes do so using masculine and feminine codes of representation. Before the good night kiss, Manuela is shown crying on a friend, Edelgard. Her face is framed in a soft circle as it is revealed that her mother died a long time ago. Bernburg sends Edelgard away and comforts Manuela, telling her to convince herself that she is happy (perhaps taking her own advice). In this scene, Bernburg is the surrogate mother. Minutes later, however, Bernburg shuts off the light to tuck in all of the girls in her dormitory, revealing her features in a soft, low light. The girls eagerly move to the ends of their beds for a goodnight kiss, each with a look of goofy earnestness. As she kisses each forehead, the girls, enamoured, lay down to sleep. Ilse, miming to Manuela, says, “Give each one a smacker! Wonderful.” The girls each put on a pageant face in soft light as they await their kiss. When it comes to her turn, Manuela wraps her arms around Fraulein Bernburg. They are portrayed in a soft light in a close frame and Manuela, kneeling on her bed, is shorter than Bernburg. Thus, they are framed as a man and a woman lover would be in a classic Hollywood film, with Manuela swooning into Bernburg’s arms. Bernburg plants a not-dispassionate kiss on Manuela’s lips, gently holding her neck. Apparently, this scene was so popular that some copies of the film have numerous other kisses between women spliced into them.18 Discussing this goodnight moment later, Manuela reveals the jealousy that she feels when Bernburg kisses the other girls goodnight: Manuela: When you say goodnight and leave, and shut the door to your room… I stare at the door in the darkness. [Bernburg is shown look-

ing down, realising what is happening during this last statement.] I want to get up and come to you. [Manuela’s crying face in close-up] But I know that I can’t. I think about when I leave the school, and you’ll still be here [Bernburg, avoiding Manuela’s gaze, looking stern or upset] and every night you’ll kiss new girls!

Bernburg: What a silly idea!

Manuela: I love you so, but you’re always so distant. I can’t ever go to your room and talk to you, or…

Bernburg: Pull yourself together child. Forget you’re a young girl, and be a good friend. You know I can’t make exceptions, or the other girls will be jealous. [Pauses, changes her tone to one more gentle] But I think of you often Manuela.

Manuela: Oh, that makes me so happy [Manuela, grinning].

Her jealousy reaches an apex during and after the play. Ilse, having been disallowed from playing her role for sending complaining letters to her parents, threatens to pack up and run away. Bernburg convinces Ilse that the situation is not that bad, smacking her on the bottom flirtatiously, to which Ilse says, “She’s so adorable.” In the play itself, Manuela plays the seducer in male drag, and is chivalrous and brave. Bernburg is apparently enraptured

by Manuela’s performance: according to Ilse, she didn’t say a word, but also didn’t take her eyes off Manuela. After the play, Bernburg takes Manuela’s hands and tells her that with practice, she could be a fantastic actress. Later, dancing together in celebration, the accidentally drunk Manuela finds a classmate has “E.v.B.” written on her arm and, out of jealousy, she reveals to all of her peers that Bernburg “cares for [her],” landing her in quite a bit of trouble for speaking aloud feelings that blur the barrier between homosocial and homoerotic. Manuela is shown as the primary agent in their affair: in many ways, she seduces the resistant and stern Fräulein von Bernburg, playing both the wanton feminine lover and the brave and chivalrous seducer.

Both Anders als die Andern and Mädchen in Uniform reveal diverse discourses about sexuality and gender that were taking place in the

Weimar Era. The most significant of these is the idea of Pädagogischer Eros, which is seen not only within the diegetic world of the films, but also in the dynamics between the films and Weimar audiences.

NOTES 1 Dyer, Richard. “Weimar: less and more like the others.” In Now You See It: Studies in Lesbian and Gay Film, 19-27, 44-62. New York: Routledge, 1990.

2. Meyers, Janet. “Dyke goes to the movies.”

Dyke, Spring 1976, 37-40.

3. Rich, Ruby B. Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement, 179-206. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004, 2nd ed, 201.

4. Gropius, Walther. “Programm des Staatlichen Bauhauses [Program of the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar].” April 1919.

5. McCormick, Richard W. Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

6. Anders als die Andern. Directed by Richard Oswald. Reconstruction: Filmmuseum München (2004). Germany: Richard Oswald-Film Berlin, 1919. DVD. 7. Grosfield, Lynsey. “National, International, Global: Tracing the Origins of the Global Public Health Movement.” In Ampersand: The Integrative Journal of Arts and Science Vol. 4 (May 2011).

8. Belach, Helga, and Wolfgang Jacobsen, eds.

“Anders als die Andern (1919): Documente zu einer Kontroverse.” CineGraph Buch, accessed March 5, 2011, http://www.cinegraph.de/cgbuch/b2/b2_03.html.

9. “Censorship regulations in the Republic of Weimar: Particularities of the Reich Moving Picture Law,” Deustches Filminsitut, accessed March 5, 2011, http://www. deutsches-filminstitut.de/collate/collate_sp/ se/se_03a03.html.

10. McCormick.

11. Grosfield.

12. Zweig, Stefan. “Die Monotonisierung der Welt [The Monotonization of the World].”

Berliner Börsen-Courier: 398.

13. Kracauer, Sigfried. “Das Ornament der

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Masse.” Frankfurter Zeitung no 420 (June 9, 1927): 404.

14. “Mädchen in Uniform.” Filmwelt: Das Film-Magazin 1.7. Berlin: January 3, 1932, accessed March 5, 2011, http://www.virtual-history.com/movie/page/3059, translation mine.

15. Rich, 357.

16. Schlüpmann, Heidi, and Karola Gramman. “Reruns: Mädchen in Uniform,” trans.

Leonie Naughton. Screening the Past, Issue 1, 1997, accessed March 5, 2011, http:// www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/re-

runs/thiele.html.

17. Rich, 184.

18. Tzallias, Evangelos. “Queer Cinema II.” Lecture, Concordia University, Montreal, QC. April 19, 2011.

Filmography Anders als die Andern (1919). Reconstruction: Filmmuseum München (2004). Richard Oswald. Deustchland, 50 minuten.

Mädchen in Uniform (1931). Leotine Saga and Carl Frölich, Deustchland, 88 minuten.

Figure 1 Registration Card for Medical Students to view Anders als die Andern in 1927.

Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, Berlin, Germany.

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Figure 2 “Mädchen in Uniform.” Filmwelt: Das Film-Magazin 1.7. Berlin: January 3, 1932.

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Wiedergutmachung des männlichen Geschlechts in Die Mörder sind unter uns

Hillary Amann

D

er Film Die Mörder sind unter uns, der 1945 von Wolfgang Staudte gedreht wurde, findet in einer Berliner Trümmerlandschaft statt. Die Figuren in diesem Film wohnen in einer Nachkriegswelt, in der die männliche Macht gefährdet ist. In diese Trümmerwelt, die von einem Mangel an männlicher Authorität geprägt ist, treten die weiblichen Figuren ein und versuchen sie durch ihre aktive Teilnahme wiederaufzubauen; aber diese aktive Teilnahme wird im Film nicht immer als positiv oder besonders progressiv kodifiziert. Die weiblichen Figuren in Staudtes Film, vor allem Susanne, sind nicht dazu da, die Geschlechterrolle der Gesellschaft zu kritisieren, sondern sollen nach dem Trauma des Krieges die Männer und Männlichkeit reparieren.

Die zwei Einführungsszenen des Filmes bauen das symbolische Minenfeld der Filmwelt auf: Ein Mann, Dr. Mertens, spaziert ziemlich ziellos durch die Trümmer, die aus Gräbern, gefallenen Stahlhelmen, einem Panzer, und einer Menge von Waisenkindern bestehen. Er sieht ungepflegt aus, und kehrt am Ende der Aufnahme in ein Kabarett ein.

Im Gegensatz hierzu kommt Susanne mit einer Masse von Leuten mit dem Zug an, und als sie durch die Trümmer geht, kommt sie an einer Statue von einer Mutter mit Kind vorbei.

Auf der einen Seite sehen wir eine männliche Welt, welche durch den Krieg total zerstört ist und deren Symbole jetzt in Trümmern liegen, während auf der anderen Seite die Frau steht, die nach Hause zurückkehrt, um ihr Leben wiederaufzubauen. Das Bild der Statue unterstreicht die Schöpfungsmacht der Frau, welche produktiv ist. Diese Produktivität, durch Schöpfung oder Arbeit, wird im Film

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als positives Ziel des Wiederaufbaus mehrmals hervorgehoben.

Eine Überblendung nimmt den Zuschauer von einem gezeichneten Bild eines ehemaligen Gebäudes, welches an einer zerbrochenen Wand hängt, in die Gegenwart, in welcher kaum eine Struktur noch alle vier Wände hat und sich Silhouetten von Wandteilen wie antike Säulen gegen einen leeren Himmel abzeichnen. Diese Formen sehen aus wie Beweise für die Zerstörung einer männlichphallischen Ordnung; nicht nur wegen der phallischen Formen, sondern auch wegen der Verbindung zwischen Krieg und Zerstörung, die historisch immer eine Männerarbeit gewesen ist, besonders während des zweiten Weltkriegs. Das Unglück Deutschlands wird als die Schuld einiger Männer dargestellt, oder wenigstens als Schuld einer männlichen Tradition, welche von Schachspielen „direkt ins Massengrab“ führt.

Im Gegensatz zu diesem Zerstörungsdrang der Männer steht die Aufbaumacht der Frauen. Staudte zeigt den Wiederaufbau als eine Anstrengung, die von einer Mehrheit von Frauen unternommen wird. In der Trümmerszene sieht man eine „Armee“ von Frauen, welche die Gebäude wiederaufbauen.

Hierin liegt die produktive Macht der Frau, nicht nur im Sinne der Kindesgeburt, sondern auch als Wiederaufbauerin und Arbeiterin. Die Männer sprengen die Häuser, und die Frauen fügen sie wieder zusammen. Die Hauptfigur, Susanne, gehört auch zu dieser Masse von produktiven Frauen. Dr. Mertens hat die zerstörte Wohnung kaum repariert, aber Susanne fängt sofort an, alles zu putzen und zu reparieren. Ihr ist Arbeit und Ordnung wichtig,

und sie ermahnt Mertens, wenn er Alkohol kauft und sein Geld verschwendet. Natürlich werden Susannes Gesellschaftsbewusstsein und Gewissen als positiv dargestellt.

Diese Bemühungen, ihre Wohnung und Heimat wiederaufzubauen, richtet Susanne nicht nur auf ihr Zimmer, sondern auch auf ihren Mann, mit dem sie das Zimmer teilen muss. Dr. Mertens war Kriegsarzt und somit Zeuge schrecklicher Gewalt. Er ist traumatisiert und zum Alkoholiker geworden, und Susanne muss am Prozess seiner Genesung teilhaben indem sie ihn zur Produktivität zwingt und seine Gewalt zu kontrollieren hilft.

Ihre Rolle ganz am Ende des Films entspricht der Funktion der Frau, den negativen Gewaltendrang des Mannes zu kontrollieren.

Dr. Mertens will Herr Brückner töten, der während des Kriegs Grausamkeiten begangen hat, aber Susanne hält ihn davon ab um diesen Teufelskreis der Gewalt zu brechen. Durch ihr Gewissen und Sozialbewusstsein (man könnte sogar von Klassenbewusstsein sprechen) beruhigt sie ihn, so dass er auch produktiv sein kann. Diese Produktivität nimmt zwei Formen an: erstens, wird sie durch seine Rettung des Mädchens symbolisiert, und zweitens, durch seine neue Fähigkeit, Susanne zu lieben.

Der Film thematisiert auch eine Art künstlerische Produktivität. Susanne ist Künstlerin, die Bilder zeichnet. Sie ist nicht Photographin, sondern Malerin. Ihre Kunst erfindet sie aus dem nichts. Zudem hat ihre Kunst eine Funktion und trägt mit dem Slogan „Rettet die Kinder“ zum Wiederaufbau bei. Dieses Bild, ihre Arbeit und Kunst sind im Dienst der Gesellschaft, genau so wie es die kommunistische Ideologie vor gibt.

Diese Kunst steht auch im Widerspruch zur Fotographie, welche als Instrument des Kapitalismus dargestellt wird.

Im Kabarett verdeutlicht sich dieser Zusammenhang. Dort versucht die fetischisierte Frau den Fotoapparat zu verwenden, um ihre Anziehungskraft zu vergrößern. Mertens hat diesem Mädchen einen Fotoapparat versprochen, und als er wieder ins Kabarett eintritt, weißt sie ihn auf sein Versprechen hin. Der Zuschauer geht davon aus, dass die Frau den Apparat benutzen möchte, um ihrem

„Geschäft“ zu helfen, vielleicht sogar um ihre Bilder zu verkaufen. Wahrscheinlich verkaufen sich diese Frauen auch selbst, als Prostituierte.

Die Produktion dieser Fotografien steht im Kontrast zur Fertigung der Zeichnungen von Susanne. Es sind reproduzierte und reproduzierbare Bilder von etwas, was keinen produktiven Inhalt hat. Auch die sexuelle Produktivität ist hier abwesend. Die Frauen im Kabarett wollen keine Kinder retten, und ihre Weiblichkeit ist nicht dazu da, Kinder zu gebären, sondern um Männer anzulocken und deren Geld zu kriegen. Diese Frauenfigur hat Macht inne, aber nur durch ihre Position als sexuelle Ware.

Als Mertens in die Garderobe des Kabaretts kommt, sieht man ihn während eines Gesprächs mit einem der Mädchen. Die Kamera zeigt Mertens von unten, und mitten im Vordergrund der Aufnahme sind die Beine und der Schoss der Frau. Ihre „Weiblichkeit“ wird ins Zentrum des Bilds gesetzt, aber als etwas Bedrohliches dargestellt. Dass diese bedrohlichen Frauen geschäftsorientiert sind, ist in diesem Kontext wichtig, weil es die Interpretation einer negativen Darstellung ihrer (kapitalistischen) Arbeit verstärkt. Sie schaffen nichts, wie Susanne es zum Beispiel mit der Wiederherstellung ihrer Wohnung tut, sondern verkaufen ihren Körper als Spektakel oder Ware an diese zerstörte Männlichkeit.

Der Film verbindet den Kapitalismus mit einer abartigen Weiblichkeit, welche das alte System der männlichen Triebe mitzuverantworten hat. Die Behauptung, dass ihre freiwillige Verdinglichung die korrupte Männerordnung unterstützt, wird auch durch Brückners Neigung, an der Unterhaltung teilzunehmen, bestätigt. Ausserhalb der Garderobe ist der Spektakelsaal leer. Man sieht nur eine Frau, die unter dem Zuschauen zweier Männer tanzt. Diese alte Form, männliche Macht auszuüben und zu unterstützen ist vorbei, und die Menschen warten auf ein anderes System.

Der leere Unterhaltungssaal zeigt die Entartung des alten Systems, in dem Frauen passive Objekte sind und Männer sie anschauen. In dieser neuen Welt müssen Frauen arbeiten, um die Stadt wiederaufzubauen.

Diese Produktivität ist etwas Positives, und

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Sawsan Khalaf unterstreicht das alte, kapitalistische und männliche System von Gewalt als Ursprung des Krieges. Nach dem Krieg aber treten Frauen nicht an die Macht, sondern arbeiten, um ihre Welt und ihre Männer wiederaufzubauen. Die Mörder sind unter uns ist kein feministischer Film, und obwohl es Frauen sowohl im positiven wie auch im negativen Licht zeigt, ist Susannes Rolle in der Wiedergutmachung von Dr. Mertens unterstützend. Sie baut ihn auf, so dass er wieder seine Rolle als Patriarch

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einnehmen kann. Eine Mobilisierung der weiblichen Arbeitskraft wird im Film nicht als etwas Befreiendes gezeigt, sondern als etwas Notwendiges um eine sozialistische Gesellschaft aufzubauen und den Kastrationskomplex der Männer wiederheilzumachen. Die Ursache dieses Komplexes wird nicht durch neue Geschlechterrollen überwunden oder addressiert: die phallische Macht wird einzig und allein in einem neuen Kontext wiederhergestellt.

[Ohne Titel] SAWsan khalaf 1) An jenem Abend des halbnackten Plattenbaurennens sagte Daniel zu mir, „du wirst nicht glauben, bei wem ich gerade gewesen bin: In dem Haus des jungen Blonden von der Pizzeria am Rosenthaler.“ Diese Botschaft reizte meine Neugier. Es war schon Zufall genug, dass ich mich dafür entschieden hatte, mir die Bar auf dem Hügel endlich anzusehen, obwohl ich schon zumindest dreißig- oder vierzigmal seit Anfang Juli an ihr vorbeigegangen war, jedoch ohne ein einziges Mal durch die Tür reinzugehen. Es war Zufall, dass Daniel sich an diesem Tag mit der Freundin einer Bekannten getroffen hatte, die auf dem Weg zur Party einer ihrer Freunde gehen sollte, und zufällig war es, dass er mich vorher im Café gesehen hatte, sonst hätte er nicht versucht, mich elfmal anzurufen, oder beharrlich darauf bestanden, mich zu finden.

Es war auch ganz zufällig, dass ich den letzten Unterrichtstag geschwänzt hatte, sonst wären wir von vornherein nicht zur Pizzeria gegangen, zumal ich Lust auf die Lachsrollen bei Yumcha Heroes hatte. Schließlich war es durch Zufall, dass der Blonde da war, der Blonde, den ich während des Verschlingens einer Pizza bemerkt hatte. Es hat sich herausgestellt, dass er der Geselle dieses Blonden Gastgebers der schon erwähnten Party war, und aus vielerlei Gründen ist Daniel zwar auf die Party gegangen. Durch Zufall nahmen sie den Weg durch den Park auf dem Hügel, wo Daniel mich sitzen sah.

Er hätte mich nicht gesehen, wenn ich auf der anderen Bank hätte schlafen wollen, und ich hätte die Bank nicht gewechselt, wenn ich den kleinen, rosawangigen Fuchs vor mir nicht gesehen hätte.

Oli und ich hatten uns an jenem Tag draußen

unter den Lindenbäumen geküsst, was mich drei Mückenstiche von nicht unerheblicher Größe kostete, für die Daniel und ich später eine Zugsalbe von einer Apotheke in Mitte kaufen würden.Wir waren völlig durchnässt.

48) Die drei Stichpunkte, die ich mit lilafarbenem Filzstift auf einen Zettel auf Deutsch geschrieben hatte, um diesen dann auf die Wand der Damentoilette in einer namenlosen oder zumindest schildlosen Bar in der Schwedter Straße zu kleben: • Es erfüllt mich immer noch mit Ehrfurcht, dass du dein Hochbett selber gebaut hast.

• Ich würde dir vietnamisches Essen bestellen, ohne deine Gesundheit auch ein einziges Mal zu erwähnen, wenn ich dich nur wiedersehen könnte.

• Ich hätte dich lieben können.

Sein Name als Überschrift, André V., Akzent berücksichtigt.

49) Als ich gesehen habe, dass er einen Akzent auf das é seines Namens gestellt hatte und ihn dadurch auf die einzige richtige Weise geschrieben hatte, die ich mir vorstellen konnte, – die südländischen Versionen nicht beachtend – hat sich meine Zustimmung zu ihm verzehnfacht. Es machte ihn nämlich – na ja. Irgendwie galt es derart als Ausgleich zum grottenhässlichen Gemälde von “Sex habenden Gestalten” in seinem Wohnzimmer, wie er es so plump beschrieben hatte, dass es ihn zu einem zufriedestellenden Grad mondän machte.

1) A chihuahua comes running out of a bar with an arthouse cinema inside. I am not the only one to wonder whether or not it is – in an endearing way – actually a disfigured adolescent cat of sorts. I am about to stroke it when a bearded man in his late forties picks it

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up and starts talking to the two German men I had been speaking to (“aber wieso sprichst du Deutsch?”). Nevertheless, he has no problem with me stroking the chihuahua. A blonde woman in heels rushes out, though not melodramatic in the least, and she is carrying a chihuahua with a greater percentage of black fur in a fake leopard-skin handbag that almost reaches the ground. I think: how does she make use of this bag without heels, and was she wearing heels when she bought it?

1) Micha, wie ihn sein kraushaariger blonder Kumpel aus Lichtenberg nennt, spricht gerne von Aleppo. Er ist einer jener Berliner Künstler, der die Welt ausgiebig bereist und die erforderliche Affinität zu einer der vorgegebenen orientalischen Kulturen entwickelt hatte. Da die Haare seines Freundes schön weich sind, frage ich ganz sachlich, ob er vielleicht irgendwelche Pflegespülung in Anspruch nehme. Mich überrascht, dass er dieses auf Englisch sofort versteht, wenn ich bedenke, dass ich den deutschen Begriff erst vor einem Monat in einer Apotheke in München - die einzige Pantene Locken Pur verkaufende Apotheke in ganz Deutschland - gelernt hatte. Jedenfalls verneint er die Frage und bei Micha ist das bevorzugte Haarreinigungsmittel eine Mischung von Olivenöl und irgendwelchem Gemüse oder Gewürz und nichts Anderem aus Aleppo. “…die ich eigentlich in Aleppo erworben habe.”

Die Diskussion über Flüssigkeiten und Aleppo, die auf Arabisch natürlich halab heißt, erinnert mich an haleeb, das arabische Wort für Milch. Als ich das ihnen beiläufig erzähle, verstehen sie den Zusammenhang meiner Aussage nicht.

abweisen, zusätzlich zu drei Bänden kritischer Abhandlung, die versuchen würden zu erklären, warum genau eine ganze Halbkugel in keinem einzelnen Geruch eingekapselt werden kann, wenn ich das so sagen darf. Was auch immer die Zauberzutat war, sie geriet sicherlich nicht in die Nähe von Biryani, Hummus, Sushi oder süß-saurem Hähnchen mit gebratenem Reis.

Stunden später, nachdem der uns zum Abschied winkende Freund aus Lichtenberg auf seinem Fahrrad fortgefahren war, vergrabe ich mein Gesicht in Michas Haaren. Wir sitzen auf einer Bank vor einer Kneipe mit notdürftig zerstreuten Stühlen um uns herum, und die holprig gepflasterte Kastanienallee ist fußgängerfrei, menschenleer.

“Deine Haare riechen doch orientalisch,” gebe ich zu,was ich in allem Ernst meine.

Vielleicht liegt das daran, dass ich mehr Öl im Orient verbraucht habe, als anderswo, oder auch daran, dass meine Mutter seit eh und je zwischen Yardley Rose, Miss Dior und Olivenseife abgewechselt hat.

18) mir fehlt etwas.

“Aber riecht doch meine Haare,” sagt Micha.

Um das in seinem genauen Wortlaut zu zitieren, glaube ich, dass er danach hinzufügt: “Es riecht orientalisch.”

am samstag, eigentlich am sonntag um 3 uhr morgens, habe ich mich beschissen gefühlt. ich war vor ein paar stunden einem sehr schönen mann begegnet und statt alleine weiter zu laufen (denn ich bin schließlich alleine ausgegangen) habe ich ihm gesagt, dass er ein gut aussehender bub sei. sein kumpel fragte mich, ob ich auf eine “panama party” gehen wollte, und obwohl ich wirklich keine ahnung hatte, was er mit “panama party” sagen wollte, habe ich die gruppe kurz darauf auf seine einladung hin begleitet und um 1:30 waren wir irgendwo in mont-royal, ich wohne schon seit anderthalb jahren in dieser stadt und weiß immer noch nicht, wo sich diese famose gegend mont-royal befindet.

Die meisten Akademiker würden diese Äußerung mit einer flinken Handbewegung und einem vielsagenden Stirnrunzeln

auf der party habe ich mit unterschiedlichen menschen geredet. trotz des genusses, den mir das alleinsein nicht selten gewährt, bin ich eher

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eine soziale raupe. denn wenn ich vielleicht ein schmetterling wäre (englisch: social butterfly), wäre ich diejenige, die um 2.30 auf peters schenkel säße, anstatt der netten jungen blondine, die gegen 2.30 auf peters schenkel (noch dazu im schwarzen ledersessel) saß. der gastgeber erwies sich als panamaer; daher die bezeichnung der party als “panama party.” im taxi hatte ich zur blondine, und auch zu dem rothaarigen mädel, gesagt: “panama…panamanian. panamanian reminds me of panda- panda…manium? a game that i played on playstation once as a kid. what was it? it means crazy, looney.” “pandemonium?” “pandemonium. exactly that.” obwohl ich mich mindestens eine stunde lang wenn nicht zwei stunden lang mit diesen unterschiedlichen menschen unterhalten hatte, wurde ich einfach bitter und nichts als bitter als ich die blondine auf peter gesehen habe. in letzter sekunde habe ich den kopf gedreht, damit ich sie nicht küssen sehen musste. und zwar mit erfolg, aber gleich danach habe ich mich schon wieder beschissen gefühlt. ohne mich von den neuen netten leuten zu verabschieden, die ich mit meinem nahezu perfekten französischen akzent beeindruckt hatte (obgleich ich gar kein französisch kann, und wie ein papagei einfach alles perfekt wiederholen kann), tastete ich für den griff der tür herum und verließ die feier. es hat geregnet. dies habe ich aber erst nach gut 80 sekunden bemerkt, da meine wut und mein frust mich spürbar regendicht und kältesicher machten. ich dachte an meine mutter, an meinen zwillingsbruder daniel, an sebastian, an florian, an die tausend Männer, die mir nicht gehörten und nie gehören würden, an die anderen männer, die wollten, dass ich ihnen für eine nacht gehöre. ich dachte an meine katzen. was war denn aus meinen katzen geworden? meine zweite frage, diesmal laut: wie könnte ich zur st laurent-straße kommen? der mann antwortete lässig und lieblos, dass die straße ungefähr 25 straßen von dieser liege, und dass

ich am besten ein taxi nehmen solle. jeder block war jedoch winzig und ich beschloss, die 25 straßen zu fuß zu gehen, das heißt, die 25 straßen lange strecke nach st laurent zu fuß durchzulaufen. im regen, in der minus-einsgrad-kälte. irgendwo zwischen der 21. und 24. straße, wie sie auch immer heißen, habe ich die aufmerksamkeit eines jungen mannes erregt. vielleicht war das durch die eigenartigkeit meiner haare, durch meine merkwürdige größe (152cm) oder meine für einen samstag abend ungewöhnliche kleidung (nämlich für das wetter geeignete mantel/hose/schal/ schuhe) bedingt. vielleicht auch nicht. jedoch ist es mir aufgefallen, dass er seinen blick etwas verweilen ließ. ich starrte ihn an ohne zu blinzeln, während ich an ihm vorbeigegangen bin, nur um mich einige sekunden später wieder zu drehen. genau das gleiche tat er in gerade diesem moment. ohne das geringste zögern bin ich zu ihm gestapft, und habe die arme um ihn geschlungen. er hat mir den regennassen rücken wortlos und behutsam gerieben während ich mit dem kopf gegen seine brust gepresst tief einatmete. so standen wir mindestens vier minuten lang im regen und im schweigen der dämmerung, still und doch zitternd, ich aufgeregt, er robust, es waren mehrere leute in der straße in der unverwandelnden gegend (immer noch mont royal), die ich gerne verwünscht hätte, die ich höchstwahrscheinlich mehrmals an diesem abend bzw. morgen, verwünscht habe, ich verstand nicht, warum ich in mont royal war, ich verstand den unterschied zwischen der wortherkunft von montreal und der von mont royal nicht ganz. darüber habe ich aber erst nach dieser umarmung nachgedacht. während ich schwankend und tief einatmend in den armen des mannes stand, dessen körper während die leute vorbeigegangen sind und dessen haltung/körper/bemühen auf mich herkulisch wirkten, dachte ich daran ob es in jeder großstadt irgendjemanden gäbe, der genauso bereit wie meine mutter wäre, mich ohne grund zu umarmen, oder sich ohne weitere erkundigungen, ohne die stirn zu

29

runzeln, ohne einmal den mund zu öffnen, von mir umarmen ließe, selbst wenn (oder gerade weil) es eine affäre zwischen zwei sich noch unbekannten fremden wäre, ohne namen, ohne alter, ohne die meist störenden einzelheiten, von denen man sich allzu oft ablenken lässt. ohne die augen zu erheben, um sein gesicht ein letztes mal zu sehen, habe ich meine arme entschiedenerweise und doch widerwillig zurückgezogen. ohne den kopf zu drehen bin ich von ihm durch die beißende, frostige kälte weggelaufen, und ich weiß nicht, was genau er dieses mal gemacht hat. seine stimme habe ich nicht gehört, sein gesicht nur zweimal gesehen.

8) flughafen wir waren in madrid. im flughafen. du bist nach rio geflogen, du warst einer der letzten, der ins flugzeug einstieg. ein ingenieur aus rostock, der in schöneberg wohnte, der wegen beach volleyball (wie hast du‘s auf deutsch gesagt? sandhandball oder - ) nach rio fahren wollte und vor hatte, danach seine freunde in ecuador zu besuchen. blonder, blauäugiger, ständig lächelnder mann. hast du die postkarte zwischen meinen schenkeln gesehen? ich habe auf dein gepäck aufgepasst und nachdem du vorzeitig vom klo gekommen bist habe ich die postkarte zwischen meinen beinen versteckt. und was stand darauf? “wollte nur sagen, dass du superhübsch bist,” eine email-adresse, ein strichgesicht. für einige sekunden hast du kaum wahrnehmbar gezögert, in mein gesicht gestarrt, als ob du fragen wolltest, was jetzt, wohin des wegs, warum kommst du eigentlich nicht mit, was soll das sein, das ist doch etwas

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seltsames. als ob du fragen wolltest, „warum hast du ‘schöne reise’ gesagt“, eine ganze unterhaltung begonnen, wenn du nicht bei mir im flugzeug sitzen würdest, wenn du nicht mit mir zu einem fast-weißen brasilianischen strand kommen würdest, wenn du mir nicht durch die haare fahren würdest, so eine verfickte scheiße, die situation ist aussichtslos. “ne, die schlange ist nur gewachsen. schau mal, jetzt musst du aber noch nicht gehen.” und du bist für fast vierzig minuten geblieben, und dann aufgestanden, und “leider muss ich jetzt gehen.” eine stunde später - denn es gab eine flugverspätung, sie haben nicht erstaunlicherweise die kleinen, engen stühle in economy überbucht, ich habe mir sofort gedacht, ach europa und ihre billigflieger habe ich mich an ein paar brasilianer mit einer bitte gewandt. erstens freundlich: kommen Sie aus rio, habe ich gefragt. ja, wir kommen aus rio, ja. könnten Sie vielleicht dem blonden deutschen auf dem flugzeug diesen zettel geben, gebrochenes portugiesisch, habe ich das por-favor am ende des satzes wie ein dreijähriges kind vergessen? “eigentlich werden wir nicht einsteigen. der flug wurde überbucht.” ich habe mich entschuldigt, habe mich dazu entschlossen, deinen flugsteig schließlich zu verlassen. letztendlich musste ich zur anderen seite des gebäudes in meinen sonderbaren aladdinschuhen laufen, in jenen albernen schuhen, die irgendwann in ostindien hergestellt worden waren.

The Bauhaus in Motion Danika Drury-Melnyk

T

he Bauhaus school founded in Weimar, Germany in 1919, has had a lasting impact on design around the world. Alumni of the Bauhaus such as Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and Mies van der Rohe are perhaps better known for the contributions to architecture which they made in the United States than for their work at the German school. It was in the United States that the Bauhaus school became tied to the “less is more” slogan which would become a hallmark of modernist architecture. However, the Bauhaus as it functioned in America was almost entirely foreign to the ideas that it began with. To trace the roots of this transformation I will look at the impact that internationalization had on the idea of the Bauhaus and also the impact it had on the lives of individual Bauhauslers. I will also examine the impact that socio-economic factors in both Germany and America had on the Bauhaus.

Interaction with the modern American capitalist system may have drastically changed the Bauhaus, but the migration to America was not the only factor in this process. To better understand the transformation of the Bauhaus I will take into account both the American factors and the trends that had begun to develop within the school in Germany.

To its early participants the Bauhaus was not just a school but an artistic, or even spiritual, movement; a commune – an idea, though what exactly that idea was remained open to interpretation. The Bauhaus sought not to only eradicate the boundary between art and craft, but to embrace the machine and create a harmony between art and technology. Emerging out of the aftermath of the First World War, the school’s founder, architect Walter Gropius, had seen the most devastating possibilities of modernity’s destructive power. Rather than

turning away from the machine or mocking its dehumanizing effects as the Dadaists did, Gropius and his colleagues at the Bauhaus sought to harness the machine and to harmonize modern technology with art to benefit the living situation of the whole of society. The Bauhaus doctrine in Weimar, if it had one, was not “less is more” but “starting from zero,” a phrase which “meant nothing less than recreating the world,”1 but what form that world would take was not defined, at least not aesthetically.

In his initial aspirations for the Bauhaus school, Gropius was driven more by socio-political principles than aesthetic ones. The Bauhaus had the general goal of breaking with the past and interacting directly with new materials in order to define a new and important role for the artist in modern society. Gropius wanted to overthrow the traditional “Beaux-Arts” view of design as decoration and pioneer an approach to design as a socially relevant force. Though in its first incarnation the school did not include a department of architecture, Gropius envisioned that the role of the Bauhaus artist would ultimately be to create a more egalitarian society by designing high-quality, low-cost housing.

Gropius’s goals did not at the time result in one unified style or direction but rather a range of experiments that pushed the boundaries of all forms of art, including culinary art when one student decided to institute a new diet in the school’s cafeteria. As Alma Mahler, Gropius’s then-wife, would later put it, “the historians tell us … that the hallmarks of the Bauhaus style were glass corners, flat roofs, honest materials, and expressed structure [but to me] … the most unforgettable characteristic of the Bauhaus style was garlic on the breath.”2 While the Bauhaus existed as a single institute, the many different directions of this exploration

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were sustained by what Anni Albers referred to as a “creative vacuum.”3 The vacuum of the Bauhaus allowed for a dynamic atmosphere of innovative exploration but at the same time this lack of structure resisted stylistic cohesion.

The year 1923 marked the first of what would be many transformations of the Bauhaus. This was the year that the Bauhaus held its first large scale exhibition and began to garner generally favourable interest not just locally but internationally. It was also the year that the Bauhaus changed its slogan to “Art and Technology – A New Unity” and the Department of Architecture was created; as Lux Feininger, the son of Bauhaus alumni Lyonel, would later put it: “The era of pure experimentation had come to an end, profitable production, to be achieved only through collaboration with industry, was declared to be essential henceforth.”4 It is important to note, however, that collaboration with industry did not entail being led by industry but rather reshaping industry through design to better meet social needs.

Nonetheless, the increased emphasis on design and technology created a rift between “the artists of the Bauhaus and its design-oriented leadership.”5 The side of the “artists” was best epitomized by Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, the two great painting masters of the Bauhaus. After 1923 they grew increasingly disenchanted with the direction the Bauhaus was taking.

The school was beset with problems not just from within but from without. Because the Bauhaus relied partially on the state government for funding it was very vulnerable to the political shifts that were taking place.

When the Nationalists beat out the Social Democrats for control of the Thuringian state government in 1925 the new Ministry of Education drastically cut the school’s already sparse funding.6 Faced with this increasingly hostile political environment, Gropius decided to move the school from Weimar to Dessau.

The move, however, was hardly a solution to the school’s problems. In 1926, when Gropius asked the faculty of the school to contribute a part of their pay to assist the school in its ongoing financial crisis, Klee and Kandinsky were among the few who resisted. In a letter

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Klee wrote to Gropius it is clear that Klee was concerned not just with money but was “afraid of something that was avoided even during the worst phase at Weimar: an inner disruption.”7 As the school gradually began to cohere around an increasingly architectural direction – finally introducing architecture classes in 1927 – tensions among those who did and did not support this direction rose. By 1928 these disruptions proved too stressful to manage and Gropius stepped down as acting director.

After Gropius’s departure, Hannes Meyer’s appointment sparked controversy among many of the students and faculty. Meyer was more ideologically left-wing and functionalist than Gropius had been. Gropius had seen architecture as the ultimate destination for the various Bauhaus workshops and departments, but under Meyer this focus became more strict and explicit. He began to reorient the curriculum of the school away from the more craftbased departments and towards courses considered suitable for the training of professional architects. His disregard for aesthetics and craft angered some of the faculty and shortly after his appointment Marcel Breuer and Herbert Bayer, two of the instructors who had been closest to Gropius, resigned. This emphasis on professional training was something that the Bauhaus émigrés would experience in America, but in Germany under Meyer this training retained a goal which was more political and revolutionary than simply meeting market demand. Though Meyer’s directorship was in many ways a departure from that of Gropius, he did share Gropius’s ultimate goal of architecture leading the way to a more egalitarian society. Meyer’s interpretation of this utopia was thought by some to give too much privilege to group ideology over individual innovation. As political tensions in the environment outside the school continued to rise, so did tensions within the school and issues such as the debate between community-oriented functionalism and individual creative expression divided students and faculty on political as well as artistic lines. Meyer’s idealization of the collective was seen by many as too overtly political and detrimental to the environment of the school. Under Meyer the population of the

student Communist bloc increased and classrooms increasingly became forums for political debate. Meyer’s left-wing policies also made him unpopular among many of the right-wing politicians who did not want to fund a “Bolshevik” institution. In response to these internal and external complaints, Meyer was fired in July 1930.

After Meyer’s dismissal in 1930, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe took over. Mies’s directorship marked an even more dramatic shift in the life of the Bauhaus. Under Mies the Bauhaus curriculum became even more structured around architecture than under Meyer. Even Josef Albers’s multi-disciplinary foundations class, considered by some to be the epitome of the Bauhaus educational style, was considered

by Mies to be “too playful, serving as an inadequate foundation for architecture.”8 To many Bauhauslers Mies’s takeover marked a turn to the right, which was a sharp departure from Gropius’s Bauhaus. Some even went so far as to say that Mies “didn’t like the Bauhaus.”9 The social aspect of the Bauhaus which was so important to Gropius was deemed irrelevant

by Mies, who preferred to conceive of art (architecture included) as something pure and removed from society. Mies’s ideals of spatial perfection eventually won out over Gropius’s social ideals. Because Mies’s aims were not social he could adopt a sort of strategic apoliticism as a means of survival. As the National Socialists gained power, every aspect of society became increasingly politicised and remaining “apolitical” became all but impossible.

For Mies, the survival of the Bauhaus meant increasingly turning against the communists in the school’s student body. To these students the repression of their political expression was not a method of survival but a betrayal which “spelled the Bauhaus’s absolute end.”10 While his lack of socio-political direction did not enable the Bauhaus to survive the changes of the German political scene, by depriving the Bauhaus of its socially contextualized foundation Mies did allow the aesthetic principles of the Bauhaus to transcend the national sociopolitical context and resonate internationally.

This trend of social de-contextualization and reinterpretation would be expanded upon as

the Bauhaus style was taken up in America.

This perhaps helps to explain why Mies – who many contemporaries considered to be out of sync with the spirit of the Bauhaus – would in America become one of the names most commonly associated with the Bauhaus.

The Bauhaus had had connections to America from early on, but these did not amount to anything significant until near the end of the Bauhaus in Germany. The school was home to several American-born students and faculty, such as Lyonel Feininger, who led the printing workshop and had grown up between America and Germany. From the early 1920s on, various American art collectors and journalists sent letters requesting portfolios of Bauhaus work or interviews with faculty.11 These personal and artistic connections allowed the Bauhaus to establish a modest international network, which included some influential contacts, and to establish an international name for itself as a benchmark of “modern art.”

It was not until the early 1930s that there was any real American interest in the Bauhaus. American acceptance of the Bauhaus was spearheaded, or perhaps orchestrated, by Philip Johnson, Alfred H. Barr, and HenryRussell Hitchcock, who undertook numerous investigative trips around Europe in the late 1920s and early 1930s to explore what they saw as an emerging style. The result of this mission was the 1932 New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibit “The International Style: Architecture Since 1922.” The “International Style” grouped works by Bauhaus faculty like Gropius and Mies together with other supposedly stylistically similar architects such as Le Corbusier. The three key features of the International Style were identified in a book that accompanied the exhibit as an emphasis on volume over mass, regularity and symmetry, and the abandonment of unnecessary ornamentation.12 These formalistic principles are a stark contrast to the socio-political concerns that Gropius had expressed in his 1919 manifesto. The classbased concerns of Gropius were not relevant in the American context, where the prevalent idea of class mobility ensured that class was not usually as explicit a marker of identity as

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in Europe. Johnson and his cohorts had once more recreated the idea of the Bauhaus, their American translation removed the societal function of the Bauhaus to focus instead on the aesthetic form. To Johnson, the terms “Bauhaus,” “International Style,” and “Modern Style” were interchangeable.13 Gropius himself, however, resented the term International Style precisely for its emphasis on style.

He did not consider it to be synonymous with

also superimposed a “Bauhaus style” which was far more coherent than any that had actually existed within the Bauhaus at the time.

The Bauhaus’s association with international modernism opened doors around the world at the same time as it closed doors at home. The National Socialists, who became the majority party after the March 1933 elections, criticized the Bauhaus as being unGerman and referred to it as a “cathedral of

Sawsan Khalaf the Bauhaus because it lacked the social ideology which, however vague, was crucial to his Bauhaus.14 In the American reinterpretation of the Bauhaus, it was stripped of the complications which had fractured it in Germany and its most palatable and useful aspects were extracted for American consumption, lumped in with other architectural movements under the general banner of “modern” or “international.” In the end “this stripped-down version of the Bauhaus – the one devoid of ideology – turned out to be much more powerful than what the school really had been.”15 Making the Bauhaus synonymous with the International Style and Modernism not only ignored the wide range of modernist movements which pre-dated the Bauhaus but it

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Marxism”16 and after successfully forcing its closure in 1933 the party continued to harass those who had been involved with the school.

Even Gropius, whose international reputation would have made it difficult for the Nazis to hurt him at that time, was made to feel unwelcome. After being warned by a uniformed Nazi party member that he might “regret” participating in a 1934 exhibition of modern art and architecture in Germany, Gropius saw that modern architecture could not develop any further in Germany and began to look for a way out of the country. Thanks to his international connections, Gropius was able to leave Germany on the pretext of attending a conference in Rome. From Rome he went to London where he worked with English archi-

tect Maxwell Fry for several years. During that time it became clear that the situation in Germany was not going to settle down as Gropius had initially hoped, and in 1937 he accepted an offer of a professorship at Harvard.17 The international reputation of the Bauhaus also opened up doors for László Moholy-Nagy – who, after living in London for two years, accepted an invitation to set up the “New Bauhaus” in Chicago – and Josef and Anni Albers, who accepted positions at North Carolina’s Black Mountain College. Even the apolitical Mies, who stuck around until 1938, eventually found Germany inhospitable and took up an offer of professorship at Chicago’s Armour Institute of Technology in 1937.

The decentralization of the Bauhaus inevitably changed its meaning in America.

Many key figures in the Bauhaus never made it to America and stayed in Europe, notably Klee and Kandinsky. During their time at the Bauhaus they had been two of the most dissenting voices from the increasingly design and architecture-oriented leadership, thus adding another layer of complexity to the idea of the Bauhaus – a nuance of the original Bauhaus which would not make it to America. The work of the Bauhaus’s greatest painters, as well as the existence of its theatre and music departments, were elements which during the time of the actual Bauhaus were considered essential but were almost completely left out of the American translation. Thanks in part to their own work and in part to the perceptions of the American cultural elite, the most prominent names associated with the Bauhaus in America were those of the architects and designers such as Gropius and Mies. Of the former Bauhauslers it was the architects Gropius and Mies who received the most distinguished American positions, at Harvard and the Armour Institute of Technology, respectively. The Bauhaus name thus became most strongly associated with modern architecture and the work done

by Bauhaus alumni to influence the architectural departments of their new institutions and challenge the traditional “Beaux-Arts” architectural teachings.

Philip Johnson and others have since referred to their efforts to promote the Bauhaus

in America as “propaganda,”18 but in America the Bauhaus ideology was usurped and used as propaganda for another ideology – modern capitalism. In the wake of the First World War America had emerged as a rising great power, with an increasing urban population.

America’s power was fuelled not by church or state but by private enterprise. As cities became more crowded and the price of land rose, the skyscraper became the ideal solution to this urban density and emerged as the new shape of corporate architecture, portraying an image of “strength and urbanity.”19 These symbols of modernity were starting to define the American skyline before the arrival of any Bauhaus architects. However, while the first American skyscrapers were based on Art Deco or neoclassical designs, by the beginning of the 1930s newer, less ornamental designs were starting to gain popularity. Perhaps due to the effects of the Great Depression, American businesses wished to portray not only strength but also honesty, and more than that – progress, to embody the hope that America’s modern economy could weather the economic downturn. The skyscraper as a symbol of the modern American economy “reenergized the critical discussion of its aesthetic expression and inspired a desire for modern form.”20 This desire to be associated with the positive aspects of “modernity” allowed Bauhaus-influenced architecture to become prevalent among corporate and government buildings even though the general public never really embraced it. The Bauhaus became a brand name for the image of cultural sophistication and modernity that the United States wanted to project of itself both at home and abroad. As America’s power grew after the Second World War, developments in American architecture reflected not just the American ideal but the ideal of the Western world.

The prevalence of International Style architecture and America’s “commitment to all forms of artistic modernism was widely understood to be an effective Cold War weapon.” 21 The positive connotations and internationalist bent of the Bauhaus style appealed to the American government during the Cold War because by associating themselves with this modern movement, they could portray the capitalist Ameri-

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can ideology as the universally modern, beneficial way of life.

The American Bauhaus largely abandoned its dream of social housing in favour of corporate commercialism; this is all the more striking considering that in America at the time there was a great need for social housing. The American context of the 1930s seemed in many ways almost perfect for the realization of Gropius’s social housing dreams. During the Great Depression, lack of quality housing in America became a national concern. To combat this problem, as well as that of unemployment, the Works Progress Administration and the Federal Art Project employed workers and artists in the subsidized construction and design of houses.22 These efforts, however, never really amounted to what Gropius had envisioned for several reasons, the first of which was a simple lack of funding, which perhaps perpetuated the disinclination of avant-garde architects in America to participate in large-scale housing projects and encouraged them to instead pursue commissions in the more profitable sector of corporate and government architecture. Because the Bauhaus in America was more a style than anything, Bauhaus-influenced architects did not feel any sense of social responsibility inherent in their work and thus they too had little motivation to work on the unprofitable project of workers housing. The few Bauhausinfluenced housing projects that were realized were met with less-than-enthusiastic results.

Johnson and the MoMA crowd were successful in promoting and legitimizing Bauhausstyle modern architecture but only to a select segment of the population. Ironically, though the style of the Bauhaus came to be utilized as a sort of pro-American anti-USSR propaganda, supposed Communist links worked to distrust of the Bauhaus among the general American public.23 It was generally the more elite who both wanted and could afford Bauhaus-style homes. The most notable forays of Bauhaus architects into American residential housing were one-off commissions for members of the wealthy cultural elite. As the “modern style” came to be a marker of a higher class status, rather than a leveler of class, the Bauhauslers became insiders in the very system they had

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once resisted from the outside.

Most of the Bauhaus émigrés had to either find a way to work within the American capitalist system or risk unemployment. In his posthumously published book, Vision in Motion, Moholy-Nagy wrote against the “ruthless competitive system of capitalism.”24 However, at the New Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy relied on the backing of wealthy industrialists and the demands and expectations of these backers made it difficult for him to maintain his long-held position that “design … was meant to lead industry, not to follow it.”25 MoholyNagy’s former colleagues faced similar challenges at Harvard and at the Armour Institute, schools with formal structures and weighty reputations. The Bauhaus had in general tried to provide an education that was a “transformative experience for the student;”26 now in America they were expected to provide vocational training and produce professionals who could meet the market demand for their skills.

This conflict was identified not just by the former Bauhauslers but by American designers such as Harold van Doren who wrote that the Bauhaus approach “[lacked] the realistic qualities that Americans rightly or wrongly demand … [and therefore it would] be difficult to acclimatize the esoteric ideas of the Bauhaus to the factual atmosphere of American industry.”27 In order to acclimatize, the former Bauhaus faculty shifted their outlook to meet American demands; this meant collaboration with industry and with an emphasis on vocational training to a degree that – while it may have been foreshadowed by the policies of Meyer and Mies – had not existed at the Bauhaus in Germany.

Despite influential changes which rooted the architectural programs of Harvard and the like in the modern movement, Gropius, Mies, and Moholy-Nagy were still largely educating students not to change society, but rather to meet the demand to produce a modernist aesthetic face for American capitalism.

One possible deviation from this trend was the situation of Josef and Anni Albers at Black Mountain College. Though all of the former Bauhaus faculty members were able to create some degree of change in the curriculums of their respective institutions, the Bauhaus

educational style was more evident at Black Mountain than anywhere else in America. Because it was a smaller school and a large portion of its funding was self-raised there was less pressure from market forces. This perhaps helps explain why Anni and Josef felt that Black Mountain was able to recapture a part of the “creative vacuum” of the old Bauhaus.

Black Mountain, like the Bauhaus, created a strong sense of community. And as they had done at the Bauhaus, the Alberses taught a curriculum based on the principles of “observation and experimentation.”28 Interestingly, despite the fact that many considered Black Mountain to be “the closest thing there was to an American successor to the Bauhaus,”29 the most renowned graduates of Black Mountain – people like Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly – bore little stylistic similarity to the Bauhaus artists. This is testament to the fact that the Bauhaus approach did not necessitate one particular aesthetic; this cohesion was superimposed after the fact. Black Mountain’s fate may also give us insight into the potential fate of the Bauhaus had it been able to continue its pre-1923 ethos of pure experimentation.

Though Black Mountain was relatively free of external pressures it was increasingly strained by internal pressures. The Alberses gradually tired of “the constant tension … and the constant friction with every faculty member who [had] the same voting voice that [they] had,”30 and in 1949 they resigned. In part due to these same tensions, the school closed less than a decade later, after a relatively short life span of only 24 years. Like the Bauhaus, Black Mountain was very influential in spite of its short life span; but also like the Bauhaus, the creative vacuum created at Black Mountain was ultimately unsustainable.

The Bauhaus began as a loose collective of artists, bound together more by general social principles than by aesthetic style. In America the word came to connote an architectural aesthetic, but this tendency towards cohesion and interaction with industry had already begun to develop in Germany. This shift was particularly evident under Mies but was present even at the school’s origins under Gropius. Gropius had always seen architecture as the ultimate goal

of the Bauhaus, and realizing this goal would likely have necessitated a more formal structure eventually. The creative vacuum could not exist forever. Even in Weimar, the school was expected to produce results, as is evidenced by the city pressuring the school to put on an exhibit to explain itself in 1923, only four years after it opened. As the school continued to realize its architectural goals it was perhaps inevitable that experiments gave way to production and industry became more of an influence.

This is not to say, however, that the American context did not change things. The power of private industry in America meant that Bauhaus artists and architects would be under its influence far more than in Germany. This made the realization of Gropius’s egalitarian housing all but impossible in the American context because there was little interest in such ideas in the private sector, and the American people were unaccustomed to having their government take on such an invasive role. American rhetoric of class mobility on an individual basis prevented Gropius’s socialist-tinged ideas from catching hold with the general public. The idea of the Bauhaus was reshaped by American influences to be more cohesive and more marketable, but those same tensions which had fractured the Bauhaus and made it so difficult to define had also made it dynamic, fluid, and innovative. Gropius’s utopian vision was removed from its societal roots for the purity of Mies’s pursuit of perfect space; this aesthetic ideal was then reduced to the doctrine of “Less is More” which quickly became a rhetorical guise for “Less is Cheaper” – the rationale at the heart of corporate America’s “embrace” of the Bauhaus. Cut off from its ideological foundation and devoid of its characteristic dynamism, so-called Bauhaus architecture became guilty of the same charges of social irrelevancy it had once laid against the Beaux-Arts style – the Bauhaus idea became the Bauhaus fashion.

Notes 1. Wolfe, Thomas. From Bauhaus to Our House.

New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1981, 14.

2. Ibid, 12.

3.

Danilowitz, Brenda, and Frederick A.

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Horowitz. Josef Albers: To Open Eyes. New York: Phaidon Press, 2006, 18.

4. Feininger, T. Lux. “The Bauhaus: Evolution of an Idea.” In Bauhaus and Bauhaus People.

Edited by Eckhard Neumann. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1970, 178.

5. Forgács, Éva. The Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics. Translated by John Batki. Budapest: Central European University Press, 1995, 150.

6. Bergdoll, Barry and Leah Dickerman. Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity.

New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2009, 328.

7. Ibid.

8. Danilowitz, 29.

9. Bauhaus in America. Directed by Judith Pearlman. Cliofilm, 1994. Videocassette.

10. Hochman, Elaine S. Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism. New York: Fromm International, 1997, 260.

11. Kentgens-Craig, Margret. The Bauhaus and America: First Contacts 1919-1936. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999, 80.

12. Hitchcock, Henry-Russell and Philip Johnson. The International Style. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996, 50, 69, and 81.

13. Bauhaus in America.

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14. Hochman, 272.

15. Ibid, 267.

16. Herbert, Gilbert. The Dream of the Factory-Made House: Walter Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984, 203.

17. Ibid., 209.

18. Bauhaus in America.

19. Kentgens-Craig, 4.

20. Ibid., 9.

21. James-Chakraborty, Kathleen. “From Isolationism to Internationalism: American Acceptance of the Bauhaus.” In Bauhaus Culture from Weimar to Cold War. Edited by K. James-Chakraborty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006, 331.

22. Kentgens-Craig, 16.

23. Cf. James-Chakraborty, 331, and Hochman, 267-273.

24. Moholy-Nagy, László. Vision in Motion.

Chicago: P. Theobald Press, 1947, 340.

25. Margolin, Victor. The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissizky, Moholy-Nagy 19171946. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997, 216.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid., 239.

28. Danilowitz, foreword.

29. James-Chakraborty, 166.

30. Danilowitz, 39.

Two Aberrations in the Dialectical Movement of Self-Consciousness

The Repetition of the Structure of the Play of Forces

Alex Hamilton

A

mongst all the contradictory movements traced out by the progression of Hegel’s Concept in the Phenomenology of Spirit, there is none more perplexing than the role played by Geist, which takes itself to be simultaneously the self-containing end and initial presupposition of the entire dialectic. Through an analysis of the “play of Force” and the Understanding’s experience of “itself ” in Section III,1 I will show how the symmetrical development of Geist’s dialectical movement is altered in Section IV (Self-Consciousness) in two significant ways: (a) first, through the one-sided relation of the lord-bondsman and its effect on their derivative activities, desire and work, and (b) second, through the externally mediated relation between the individual and the Unchangeable in the final moments of the Unhappy Consciousness. In order to explain the manner in which these two aberrations become self-evident, I will compare and contrast Hegel’s presentation of the dialectical movement of “Force and the Understanding,” in the third Chapter of Section III, with Hegel’s reconstruction of social life in Section IV, first in the master-slave dialectic and then through its internalization as the historical manifestations of Stoicism and Scepticism in the Unhappy Consciousness.

I. An Analysis of the Dialectical Movement of “Force and the Understanding” In this portion of my argument, I will analyze the way in which Hegel presents the devel-

opment of the Newtonian concept of Force, beginning with the “Concept of the True.”

Through Hegel’s exposition of this dialectical movement, I will show how Force becomes universal, first in “Force as Substance” and then later “as the Concept of Force qua Concept,”3 where this Force becomes internalized and intelligible as “appearance,” Finally, I will explore the implications of the progression from “absolute flux [...] as a universal difference” to the “tautological movement”,5 where Hegel’s replacement of the supersensible world with the inverted world forces consciousness to think speculatively of “difference as an infinity.”6 The first instantiation of Force begins, as mentioned above, with the “Concept of the True” where Understanding first supersedes both “its own untruth and the untruth of the object.”7 In other words, consciousness has come to recognize what truth is and how to apprehend it as an “unconditioned universal.” In content, this universal becomes two sides: “on one side, a universal medium of many subsistent ‘matters’, and on the other side, a One reflected into itself, in which their independence is extinguished.”8 However, Hegel deepens his description by characterizing the relation between these two sides as a movement where the “plurality” of the medium is “sublated” into a negative unity, where “this movement is what is called Force.”9 Robert C. Solomon asserts that this movement is the means by which Hegel logically resolves the contradiction between a whole and its parts, describing it as “the argument that unity is really diversity and diversity really unity”.10 This

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argument is repeated in the other sections of the Phenomenology of Spirit.

This initial instantiation of Force, with which Hegel begins, is only “the Concept of Force,” or the “apprehension of the True,” because the differences of which it is the substance do not yet possess “substantial being, or as moments existing on their own account.”11 Through this movement, Hegel shows that Force becomes actualized as the “inner being of Things,” but in the first instance it is merely an abstraction. This movement of Force is chiefly characterized by self-reflection, expression and duplication. Hegel’s conception of the progression is structured in three steps: (i) first, “as Force or as reflected into itself ” which then becomes (ii) Force that “has expressed itself ” within the universal medium before finally, (iii) an ‘other’ appears “soliciting it [Force] to reflect itself into itself [as other].”12 The progression is thus through the activity of soliciting an alternation between the One of self-reflection and the universal medium of expression. This soliciting appears initially “as an ‘other’ [...] [but] directly proves to be itself Force,” according to Hegel. In this manner, Force is duplicated “into a duality [...] by its self-diremption into two wholly independent forces”13 and where there was a single Force, there are now two.

The two Forces can be differentiated in form, as well as content, “since one solicits and the other is solicited.”14 Furthermore, the “interplay of the two Forces thus consists in their being determined as mutually opposed”15 to one another, therefore as being indivisible in their symmetrical movement from One-ness to the universal medium, through retraction from the medium back into negative unity. However, in this mutual determination, these differences of content and form are revealed as only apparent, thus allowing the “two forces to vanish into their middle term.” The two conceptual extremes vanish because they are indivisible and empty; they exist only through contact with one another – in the movement where the “Concept of Force becomes actual through its duplication into two Forces.”17 But at this juncture, Force reaches its essential expression, i.e. the supersession of itself, as the second universal, the “inner beings of things qua inner, which is the same as

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the Concept of Force qua Concept.”18 We now come to have the “Concept of Force” as an object for the Understanding.

Hegel suggests that this dialectical movement through the “mediating play of Forces” allows us to examine the two extremes that the being of Force unites as a middle term. Hegel describes the extremes as “the Understanding and the inner world,” between which the being of Force is rehabilitated as “appearance.”19 This passage elucidates what Hegel was aiming at through his discussion of Newtonian Force: to show that how things appear as Forces is what makes them internally explicable in the Understanding (as the supersensible). At this stage there are no longer any differences of content or form in the play of Force (which were shown to be empty in any case), and therefore the movement must be re-conceptualized such that “this absolute flux [of appearances] is only difference as a universal difference.”20 In other words, this immediate play of Forces is primarily characterized as true, in that it is difference.

According, Hegel argues that difference is “the law of Force.”21 Solomon suggests that here Hegel takes a “Kantian turn; whereas forces apparently are powers behind the scenes, laws are contributed to nature by us, ”22 i.e. consciousness describes its experience as being lawful when it is, in fact, self-governed.

Although Solomon’s assertion is correct, Hegel’s Kantian bent is already inherent in the structure of Force, law is simply the act of making this explicit. For the moment, as Hegel puts it, “This realm of laws is indeed the truth for the Understanding,”23 that is, until we begin to examine it in a Kantian light. At this point, “this tautological movement” of law reveals itself to be an explanation that “really says nothing at all but only repeats the same thing.”24 To put it another way, there is no difference between explaining the phenomena as law and re-describing them. Both are simply forms of conceptualization that fail to make any distinction that escapes the neutral character of the phenomenon itself. What has taken place is that “consciousness [...] has passed over from the inner being as object to the other side, into the Understanding.”25 In characterizing this progression, Charles Taylor suggests that these

moments “lead us inescapably to a notion of the object as the external manifestation of an inner necessity which must manifest itself.” The point Taylor is making is that Hegel’s object will eventually become manifest as Geist, but in order to reach this endpoint Hegel must first resolve its manifest contradictions.

Ludovicus De Vos suggests: “This difference, as thought, is the infinite: the sublation of the change of different differences.”30 However, in order for consciousness to grasp this distinctly as the limit of our Understanding, the object of consciousness must be that which is infinite, i.e consciousness itself. Hegel argues

Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof Victor Tangermann As a means to remove the contingency of Kantian laws, Hegel first posits a “first supersensible world, the tranquil kingdom of laws, the immediate copy of the perceived world”, which then is duplicated into a “second supersensible world [...] the inverted world.”27 He uses the example of black being white, sweet being sour (and visa versa) to illustrate how this posited world of inversion constitutes “one aspect of the supersensible world.”28 This inversion of the lawful world is where Hegel moves beyond Kant, by suggesting that “this absolute Concept of difference must be represented and understood purely as inner difference, a repulsion of the selfsame, as selfsame, from itself, and likeness of the unlike as unlike.”29 The difference between the two lawful worlds here is transferred to the consciousness, which realizes for the first time that it is able to think difference, thereby becoming difference itself.

that when “this Concept of infinity is an object for consciousness [...] consciousness is for its own self, it is a distinguishing of that which contains no difference, or self-consciousness.”31 In other words, by becoming aware of itself as its object, consciousness attains self-consciousness.

Appearance therefore becomes the middle term that causes the two extremes of the inner world and the Understanding to vanish. Hegel asserts that “the one, of the pure inner world, the other, that of the inner being gazing into the pure inner world, have now coincided.”32 In this final moment, Hegel suggests that the “curtain” of appearance is pulled back and “behind the socalled curtain which is supposed to conceal the inner world, there is nothing to be seen unless we go behind it ourselves.”33 The image of this curtain can be linked to the manner in which “the Understanding experiences only itself,”34 but as before it is difficult to decipher what

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Hegel is trying to point to with this dialectical movement. On the one hand, appearance is revealed to be empty; however what precisely does this illuminate when we consider the contents of our own consciousness? Solomon ambitiously suggests ambitiously: Not only is Hegel arguing that reality is essentially change (along with Heraclitus and Aristotle and against Parmenides and Plato) and that there is no “supersensible world” (along with Fichte and against Kant) and that distinctions in the world are made by us and inevitably in opposition; he is also arguing, in a hands-down no-holds-barred attack on what he calls “finite thinking”–- mere understanding –- that the world itself is geuinely contradictory.35

Again, Solomon’s assertion here appears to be overly simplified. Rather than arguing that the world is “genuinely contradictory,” Hegel is instead saying that the world is contradictory until we render it intelligible. These contradictions can only be accounted for once it is understood that the “course of Geist’s development towards self-knowledge lies through the initial confusions, misconceptions and truncated visions of men.”36 In other words, the apparent contradictions that are encountered in consciousness are simply part-and-parcel of the working-out of Geist. The Understanding’s experience of itself in consciousness – as empty – is an example of such.

II. The First Aberration: The MasterSlave Dialectic as an One-Sided Relation My discussion will now focus on how the structure of the “play of Forces” is repeated in the Self-Consciousness, with a few modifications here and there. Most importantly, I will attempt to show that the first aberration, (i) the one-sided relation of the lord and the bondsman, represents a significant change to the original structures and relations in “Force and the Understanding.” By examining the way in which this new dynamic carries over into the derivative activities of the lord and the bondsman, respectively, and desire and work, I will also look at the initial implications of this change.

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Where Section III begins with the “Concept of the True,” Section IV begins with the Concept of a “movement of knowing” that takes as its corresponding object the possession of knowledge: “a certainty which is identical with its truth.”37 With this shift from truth to knowing, Hegel suggests that self-consciousness has “entered the native realm of truth,”38 thereby repeating the search for truth (as knowledge) on a social level. But just as the movement of the True becomes distinguishable as Force, so too is the movement of knowing articulated as Desire, as “the unity of self-consciousness with itself.”

Similar to Force in content, the unity of selfconsciousness is at first a “universal fluid medium, a passive separating-out of shapes,” and then “the subjection of that existent to the infinity of difference.”40 In this movement, there is at first a being for-itself within the medium, which then becomes aware of itself as different (‘other’) and as a negative unity (a whole). When selfconsciousness thus becomes aware of the existence of the ‘other,’ Desire is re-constituted as the affirmation that “nothingness is for it the truth of the other.”41 Hegel thus conceives of Desire as being a negating activity. This stage corresponds to the “Concept of Force” in consciousness, wherein the desire of self-consciousness has not yet become actualized because, as Hegel points out, it “achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness.”42 This is the starting point of the master-slave dialectic, which corresponds to the movement of Force characterized by self-reflection, expression and duplication. Hegel himself states that in this dialectic “we see repeated the process which presented itself as the play of Forces.”43 Like the “play of Forces,” the confrontation between two self-consciousnesses proceeds in three steps: (i) first, self-consciousness finds itself in another being as a self-reflection (thereby superseding that other), (ii) second, self-consciousness supersedes the ambiguous “otherness of itself ” (as other), thereby expressing itself as the essential being (within the universal medium) but also as ‘other,’ (iii) this necessitates an “ambiguous return into itself,”46 where both self-consciousnesses posit themselves through self-reflection and are therefore equal to one another as free beings. The duplication follows

when it becomes apparent that this is “double movement of the two self-consciousnesses”47 and “indivisibly the action of one as well as of the other.”48 This description of the difference in content between two self-consciousnesses repeats the “play of Force.” However, when Hegel addresses difference of form, he describes two extremes “opposed to one another, one being only recognized, the other only recognizing.”49 However, in this relation the middle term “collapses” because we are presented with two “extremes wanting to be for themselves.”50 The encounter is a “trial by death”51 and as a result the master-slave dialectic is mediated by “material reality,” since one side must submit to this reality if both are to survive.52 The two extremes become actualized in the figures of victor and vanquished, rather than in a middle term: [T]hey exist as two opposed shapes of consciousness; one is the independent consciousness whose essential nature is to be for itself, the other is the dependent consciousness whose essential nature is simply to live or to be for another. The former is lord, the other is bondsman.53

This aberration in the structure of selfconsciousness, deviating from the repetition of the “play of Force,” is carried over into the onesided activity of the two figures. Hegel suggests that by positing itself over its object, desire “lacks the side of objectivity and permanence,” since only in work does the “negative relation” to the object give consciousness’ formative activity both permanence and independence.54 As Taylor points out, the “Marxist notion of the role of work is also foreshadowed here.”55 In the master-slave dialectic, the slave’s experience will prove to be the one with integrity, since “as a consciousness forced back into itself, it will withdraw into itself and be transformed into a truly independent consciousness.”56 Additionally Hyppolite suggests that, “En effet l’esclave n’est pas proprement esclave du maître, mais de la vie; c’est parce qu’il a reculé devant la mort, a préféré la servitude à la liberté dans la mort qu’il est esclave, il est donc moins esclave du maître que de la vie.”57 In this sense, the true master of the relation is “the fear of death, the absolute Lord”58 and the contradictions of self-consciousness become the contradictions of having a relation to life in general.

III. The Second Aberration: The Externally Mediated Relation Between the Individual and the Unchangeable in the Unhappy Consciousness In final portion of Section IV, the Unhappy Consciousness, the dialectic manifests itself through the historical doctrines of Stoicism and Scepticism, which bear considerable formal similarity to the master-slave dialectic. In addition to exploring these similarities, I will show how the “tautological movement” of law can be understood as the rendering explicit of the master-slave dialectic’s internalization, how within the structure of the dialectic Stoicism and Scepticism are related to the supersensible and inverted worlds, and how self-consciousness fails to grasp the infinite as its limit because this relation must be mediated by Geist, which is not yet explicit.

Just as Force reaches its second universal as “Concept qua Concept” and is internalized in Hegel’s Kantian turn as the “law of Force,” so too is the master-slave dialectic internalized. The instantiation of this process of internalization in Section III is the “tautological movement,” but where in consciousness this movement simply revealed the emptiness of law (which was already an internal standard), in self-consciousness the movement is an actual internalization and therefore truly Kantian. This internalization proceeds by way of the historical manifestation of the forms of consciousness already present in the master-slave dialectic. The first manifestation, Stoicism, emerges out of the independent consciousness of the slave. Hegel describes it as the “freedom of self-consciousness [...] [as] a being that thinks.”59 However, this being has only an “abstract freedom and is thus only the incomplete negation of otherness.”60 Thus, according to Taylor, the freedom of the Stoic will remain “radically incomplete” and can be essentially reduced to “a philosophy of slaves.”61 In this way, Stoicism replicates the bondsman’s consciousness on an internal level. The second manifestation, Scepticism, is described by Hegel as “the realization of that which Stoicism was only the Concept.”62 To elaborate, Scepticism negates the determinate being of things that are ‘other’, i.e. the world; in this way “it procures

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for its own self the certainty of its freedom.”63 This negation of the world is similar to the lord’s relation to the bondsman, where he negates the other self-consciousness through the activity of his desire. As a result, Hegel suggests that “the duplication of self-consciousness which formerly was divided between two individuals [...] is now lodged in one.”64 This dual-consciousness is referred to by Hegel as the “Unhappy Consciousness.”

The analogues of these two historical moments, in “Force and the Understanding,” are the first and second supersensible worlds, i.e. the kingdom of laws and the inverted world, the former being Stoicism and the latter Scepticism.

Hegel argues that like the inversion of laws, each of these historical moments expresses only one side of its existence as self-consciousness.65 However, insofar as the two are united in a single consciousness, there will be an “immediate unity of the two” that are “not the same, but opposite, one of them, viz. the Unchangeable, it takes to be the essential Being; but the other, the protean Changeable, it takes to be the unessential.”66 Thus Hegel’s “unhappy, inwardly disrupted consciousness”67 comes to have conscious difference as its object, just as the Understanding had the Concept of difference. This final moment of the Section IV is particularly crucial, since it must be contextualized as a repetition of the concluding moment of Section III – the relation between difference and the infinite. It is also here that we will find the second aberration – the externally mediated relation between the individual and the Unchangeable.

In Section III, this difference is the Concept for our Understanding and graspable, however, in Section IV our object is difference. The infinite, which was hitherto merely an abstract limit is therefore made explicit as an actual limit. Hegel suggests that, in this mode, consciousness’ object is “a pure thinking which thinks of itself as a particular individuality.”68 This is a problem because as a contradictory and changing consciousness, the individual is the antithesis of the Unchangeable. In other words, the individuality is different, and therefore opposed to that which is never different, i.e the infinite, the Unchangeable. Here we see the relation that the individual and the Unchangeable bears to the concluding

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moment of Section III. However, unlike in “Consciousness,” Hegel does not believe that one can situate the middle term of these two extremes internally as empty appearance; this contradiction is an actual one. Instead Hegel argues that the “middle term is itself a conscious Being [the mediator], for it is an action which mediates consciousness as such; the content of this action is the extinction of its particular individuality which consciousness is undertaking.”69 The implication is that the Unchangeable cannot be reached in our internal individuality; in order to unite the syllogism, the individual must sublate himself to Geist through an external mediation, i.e. priest, in the sense of a confessor for example.

When examining this passage, Taylor states that “[a]s a relationship with a transcendent reality, to which I cannot be indifferent, but with which I must strive to unit myself, the unhappy consciousness can be seen as a religious one.”71 Solomon agrees that the unhappy consciousness is a “religious consciousness,”72 but goes on to further suggest that it is also “an attempt to do away with one’s wordly self and thus ‘freeing’ oneself from worldly dependency and coming to recognize oneself as at one with the whole of eternity.”73 Solomon characterizes this negatively; he describes it as resulting historically in a denial of secular consciousness.74 Although this is certainly present in Hegel’s account, there seems to be more at work here than a straightforward denial. The “transcendent reality” of the Unchangeable is taken to be God (in particular

by Taylor),75 which finds its ultimate expression as the working-out of Geist. I see this interpretation of Hegel as justified, given the role played by the religious mediator in the working out of Geist’s contradictions at this stage of the dialectical movement. Nevertheless I take the religious understanding of Unhappy Consciousness to be less essential than the one posed by Hyppolite, who suggests: “La conscience de la vie est une séparation de la vie même, une réflexion opposante, de sorte que prendre conscience de la vie, c’est savoir que la vraie vie est absente, et se trouver comme rejeté du côté du néant.”76 The role played by religion and spirituality is certainly to reconcile this separation of the individual from life as an entirety. However, Taylor’s

assumption that this separation within existence is a separation from God preconditions itself upon a second assumption, namely that such a being as God exists. Whether or not such an assumption is inherent to Hegel’s account in the Phenomenology of Spirit is more ambiguous, but for this reason Hyppolite’s reading is a more accurate representation of the text.

In conclusion, an analysis of the “play of Force” in Section III and a comparison of its symmetrical development, to that undertaken by self-consciousness in Section IV, reveals two significant aberrations: (i) the one-sided relation of the master-slave dialectic, and (ii) the externally mediated relation between the individual and the Unchangeable in the Unhappy Consciousness. The concluding moment of consciousness is the unification of difference and the infinite, as consciousness grasps itself, but the repetition of this same reconciliation is not worked-out by the end of the Section IV. This is a consequence of the fact that, as an individual, self-consciousness has not yet managed to realize itself as Geist because it cannot become actualized without a community of other living beings; the initial presupposition of Geist as self-containing conclusion drives Hegel’s dialectic movement to thus leave behind the discrete realms of consciousness and self-consciousness, and to continue to examine life in a society.

NOTes 1. Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit.

Translated by A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, 165.

2. Hegel, 133. In my discussion I will replace all uses of the term “Notion,” in A.V. Miller’s translation of Hegel, with the more appropriate translation: “Concept.”

3. Hegel, 142.

4. All italics are Hegel’s, except where noted.

5. Hegel, 149 and 155.

6. Hegel, 160.

7. Hegel, 133.

8. Hegel, 135.

9. Hegel, 136.

10. Solomon, Robert C. In the Spirit of Hegel: A Study of G.W.F. Hegels’ Phenomenology

of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983,169. Hegel makes a similar, though much more ambiguous, statement: “[…] the ‘matters’ posited as independent directly pass over into their unity, and their unity directly unfolds its diversity, and this once again reduces itself to unity.” Hegel, 136.

11. Hegel, 136.

12. Hegel, 137.

13. Hegel, 138.

14. Hegel, 140.

15. Hegel, 139.

16. Harris, H.S. Hegel: Phenomenology and System. Indianopolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1995, 60. As Hegel puts it: “These two Forces exist as independent essences; but their existence is a movement of each towards the other, such that their being is rather a pure positedness or a being that is posited by an other, i.e. their being has really the significance of a sheer vanishing. They do not exist as extremes which retain for themselves something fixed and substantial, transmitting to one another in their middle term and their contact a merely external property; on the contrary, what they are, they are, only in this middle term and in this contact.” Hegel, 85.

17. Hegel, 141.

18. Hegel, 142 19. Hegel, 143.

20. Hegel, 148.

21. Ibid.

22. Solomon, 373.

23. Hegel, 150.

24. Hegel, 155.

25. Ibid.

26. Taylor, Charles. Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, 146. Here Taylor is alluding to “the Idea of a necessity which necessarily posits its own external manifestation.” In a similar vein, Hegel writes that: “We see that through infinity, law completes itself into an immanent necessity [...] the simple character of law is infinity...” Hegel, 161.

27. Hegel, 157.

28. Hegel, 160.

29. Ibid.

30. De Vos, Ludovicus. “The Transition of Un-

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derstanding to Self-Consciousness.” In Hegel’s Phenemenology of Spirit. Edited by J.N. Findlay. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. 175. This falls in line with Hegel’s own assertion that this unity of inversions is “difference in its own self, or difference as an infinity.” Hegel, 160.

31. Hegel, 164.

32. Hegel, 165.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid.

35. Solomon, 382 36. Taylor, 127 37. Hegel, 166.

38. Hegel, 167.

39. Hegel, 167. Hegel suggests that “self-consciousness is Desire in general.”

40. Hegel, 171 41. Hegel, 174.

42. Hegel, 175.

43. Hegel, 184.

44. “...First, it has lost itself, for it finds itself an other being; secondly, in doing so it has superseded the other, for it does not see the other as an essential being, but in the other sees its own self.” Hegel, 179.

45. “First, it must proceed to supersede the other independent being in order thereby to become certain of itself as the essential being; secondly, in so doing it proceeds to supersede its own self, for this other is itself.”

Hegel, 180.

46. Hegel, 181.

47. “...Through the supersession, it receives back its own self, because, by superseding its otherness, it again becomes equal to itself; but secondly, the other self-consciousness equally gives it back again to itself, for it saw itself in the other, but supersedes this being of itself in the other and thus lets the other again go free.” Ibid.

48. Hegel, 182 and 183.

49. Hegel, 185.

50. Hegel, 188.

51. Ibid.

52. Taylor, 154.

53. 189.

54. Hegel, 195.

55. Taylor, 155.

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56. Hegel, 193.

57. “The slave is not properly the slave of the master, but the slave of life itself; he is enslaved only because he has withdrawn in the face of death, and prefers servitude to the freedom of the dead.” My translation. Hyppolite, Jean. Genèse et structure de la Phénoménologie de L’Ésprit de Hegel. Paris: Aubier, 1943, 167.

58. Hegel, 194.

59. Hegel, 198.

60. Hegel, 201.

61. Taylor, 158.

62. Hegel, 202.

63. Hegel, 204.

64. Hegel, 206.

65. “In Stoicism, self-consciousness is the simple freedom of itself. In Scepticism, this freedom becomes a reality, negates the other side of determinate existence...” Hegel, 206.

66. Hegel, 208.

67. Hegel, 207.

68. Hegel, 217.

69. Hegel, 227.

70. “As a separate, independent extreme, it rejects the essence of its will, and casts upon the mediator or minister [priest] it own freedom of decision...” (228) 71. Taylor, 160.

72. Solomon, 467.

73. Solomon, 469.

74. “...the section [Unhappy Consciousness] is a Nietzschean progression of a series of “naysayings,” increasingly desperate rejections of the secular world and oneself as a secular being.” Solomon, 469-470.

75. “The failure of this venture forces men to face the real destiny of Christianity which is to make the unity of God and man real in a community.” TayIor, 160. I take the “venture” Taylor refers to here to be implicitly the same venture undertaken by the Unhappy Consciousness seeking to unite its individuality with the Unchangeable.

76. “Consciousness of life is a separation from life itself, an opposing reflection: to have consciousness of life is to know that true life is absent to find oneself cast back into nothingness.” My translation. Hyppolite, 184.

Interview with George di Giovanni professor of philosophy at mcgill university

Jack Deming and Ricky kreitner Vielfalt: How are you doing today?

George Di Giovanni: I’m writing, you know.

VF: What are you writing about?

GG: This is a paper on Fichte and the lectures that he gave in 1804 in Berlin, which are very interesting because there he changes his method of presentation of his science. I’m trying to show how much Fichte is still continuing the cogito ergo sum of Descartes. I’m also trying to portray Fichte as a brilliant phenomenologist.

But then again, one does not have to accept his position. I’m just gleaning that out of a much bigger project I’m working a continuation of my 2005 book [Freedom and Religion in Kant and His Immediate Sucessors: The Vocation of Humankind, 1774-1800]. I stopped that at the year 1800, I want to go on until 1831 and 1832: in other words, the early Romanticism in full bloom in contrast with the late Enlightenment that I was dealing with in the previous volume. That’s if I manage to finish.

VF: How and when did you first become interested in German philosophy?

GG: It was in Toronto. At that time [the University of Toronto] was made up of many colleges. Each college had a character and an interest specific to it. Trinity College, Victoria College – I was at St. Michael’s College. We were studying a lot of the medieval period and the Greeks, [and we were] exposed also to philosophy in talks at other colleges. And once I just hit upon Emil Fackenheim, who was teaching philosophy at University College.

He was giving a seminar at the time on Hegel’s phenomenology. That’s when I realized how much Hegel and the Romantic period was a redoing of the medieval ages, a demythologizing of Christian theology.

If you leave aside the Oxford-Cambridge side of philosophy – very technical, very restricted kind of reflection on language – that time period was really the beginning of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought. And these earlier Romantics were a lot more sophisticated than their would-be “original” successors, like Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, who’s Fichte with a different name. So I stuck with it, and I got more and more fascinated with the kind of problems that philosophers in the late Enlightenment were dealing with.

I think they really mark a turning point in Western thought.

I didn’t even begin in philosophy, I began in chemistry, until I somehow got bored.

When I hooked the Bunsen burner to the water faucet and then to the gas, and water came out when I was trying to light it… I realized that it wasn’t for me.

VF: Your native language is Italian, but you write in English and translate German philosophers into English. What’s it like to translate into a language that isn’t your first?

GG: Languages are funny things. They are really particularized skills. Doing the same things in different languages is not unlike doing the same things with your left hand and with your right hand. Translation can be done best by someone for whom the two languages involved are not his original languages, because he has a

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distance with respect to them that others don’t have, and therefore he can see differences in nuances in words. I can translate German very well, but I can’t speak German really well…

But if I have to, I can… and I can read papers.

But I don’t have the same control of German, for instance, that I have in Italian when I have to deal with such things as eating and looking after kids when I was a young father. Translating German, I just enjoy it; [at the very least] I have been praised for rendering German into very colloquial English in the case of Jacobi and in the case of Hegel’s Logic, and having rendered Hegel’s prose in a very fluent albeit complicated English prose.

VF: How does translation relate to philosophy?

Is it completely different, or are similar skills involved?

GG: Philosophy is such a broad discipline, you can do it in many ways. One thing that is common to all aspects of philosophy is this interest in language. Because, after all, philosophy is concerned with rationality, even when it denies rationality. The distinction between reason and language is very thin. For all practical purposes, to be rational is to be able to speak, to express oneself in discourse and to argue with others. So if language is important, translating a philosophical text requires a grasp of the reasoning that goes behind the text, and also requires rendering this reasoning in different mediums, which are never quite identical.

I think that translation is a dimension of philosophy. For me, granted my interests and my historical exposure to different languages, it’s one way that I can get hold of an author.

VF: There’s a great quote from the translator of Dostoevsky from Russian into German – there was a documentary made about her called The Five Elephants, referencing [his] five big novels – and she had this really nice image for translation as, her teacher would tell her “Augen hoch beim Übersetzen.” In other words, you need to sort of have internalized the text…

GG: Right, right. Exactly, you have to rethink

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it. By which I mean rethink it in your own language. Nabokov has some interesting things on translation. Of course, he could write brilliantly in Russian, French, and English – I mean, actively. I can’t see myself sitting down and writing in German. The only language I can really fluently write in is English. My Italian is very educated and it’s become distant in many ways.

VF: What’s the relationship between what you think personally, and what you write professionally? Do you just take a stance for the sake of taking a stance?

GG: The kind of texts I’m concerned with do require me to be very personal. I wouldn’t be doing the kinds of philosophy that I’m doing were it not for the fact that through the medium of these authors, I’ve raised and, to some extent, answered questions that were very personal. On the other hand, when I’m writing, I do it as a detached scholar. If there is a personal involvement, it may show through from the background.

VF: Ricky and I [Jack] have both heard from other professors who’ll say, “This isn’t necessarily what I believe as a person. I’m just an academic doing a kind of charade.” But for me personally, and for Ricky, to be really interested in something and to want to pursue something requires a kind of belief in what you’re doing, not just as a worthwhile activity but as something that is meaningful, and would have a positive effect on you.

GG: Right, but belief does not mean acceptance. Let me explain: I might be very much taken up, as I am, by Kierkegaard, but not because I believe in what Kierkegaard says, but because I believe that what he says is ultimately wrong! There can’t be this sort of involvement in a subject, in a sense that, “well, yeah, it’s significant because I have to reject that, or only accept it to a certain extent,” and so on. But it also depends on individuals’ personalities, because there are some people who just take a good deal of pleasure or personal satisfaction in just reporting or cataloguing things, and I’m

not criticizing them. I take it, museum keepers, I don’t know – they are committed to their art. It’s the kind of thing they want to do, they love to do, and so on. But do they necessarily believe in the art they are expounding? What about a tax accountant? It depends.

Now, philosophy is a peculiar discipline because, as I always tell my students, philosophy has to do with the question, “Who am I? What am I doing?” So the difference between being a good philosopher and a bad philosopher is between one who is aware that they are a philosopher and one who is not aware that they are a philosopher. Most people think that they are philosophers. It’s a peculiar discipline in that respect. When I teach Kant, I say, “Look, I think that this is wrong.” But for the sake of exposition, for the sake of understanding what was going on, as Emil Fackenheim used to say: “Let’s give the man a run for his money!” See how far we can go with him.

VF: Being a historian of philosophy, are you concerned with objects simply as things that need to be traced through time, or is there really a [different] kind of legitimacy that is assigned to them?

GG: Well, short of defining philosophy in a very technical sense – semantics, cognitive science – I believe in one way or another philosophy is necessarily historical. Its subject matter is the vocation of humankind: “who are we?” And, in a way, we know that the moment we utter our first word, the moment we say anything. We have already broached the problem and answered in principle. The rest is just becoming aware of a position we have already taken. If you look at the whole history of philosophy, the problems are the same. In the paper I’m doing right now, as I mentioned, is whether Fichte is doing the same thing as Descartes. What’s the difference? Well, about two hundred or three hundred years of reflection, a French Revolution, a society changing.

So, from that point of view, it is historical as a constant reflection on what has already been said, to clarify what on Earth it meant.

VF: How has McGill – and the Philosophy

Department, in particular – changed since you started teaching here?

GG: The department is completely different.

For one thing, it’s more than doubled in size.

For another thing, the older colleagues were in a different tradition. They were not as professional as younger philosophers are now, in the sense that they were not faced by the problems which young academics are faced with nowadays, of finding a position in a very, very competitive market, and therefore trying, you see, to conform to different norms which are decisive if one wants to find a job. My former colleagues, in many ways, weren’t as good as my present ones because they were more haphazard in what they were doing, more idiosyncratic. Would I want to go back to that kind of atmosphere? I don’t think so. In some ways, I’m really spurred – and I’m an old man now – by my younger colleagues.

And that applies to McGill as a whole.

When I came to McGill, there was a principal, a vice-principal, somebody to look after the financials, the deans of the faculties, and that’s all. Now I can’t even begin to tell you the names of vice-principals, assistant viceprinciples, associate principals – it’s a huge bureaucracy. But, then, McGill has grown, not so much in the number of students, [but] as an institution with a profile in the world that’s grown fantastically. It’s a different place.

VF: How have your students changed, or not changed?

GG: Oh, I think they are much better. I think they are much more committed to what they are doing. I’m still sorry to see that so many of them don’t know how to write. But that’s not the fault of McGill, it’s not the fault of lack of intelligence or commitment on their part – just, nobody taught them how to write. That’s thanks to the Faculty of Education, who have denigrated education for a long time – you can quote me on that. They don’t know what grammar is, what syntax is, and so on. You might get away with it in other disciplines, but when it comes to philosophy – where language is the essence – if you don’t know how to write, or to

49

express yourself, you are finished.

I should say that what I said about my former colleagues as contrasted with the new ones applies to the students as well. Most of them are not as idiosyncratic; they are more professional as students, but not necessarily as interesting.

VF: What was the first book you ever really obsessed over when you were younger?

GG: Oh, when I was younger, I don’t know.

I read Dumas, there was another one I liked, wrote a lot about adventures, [puzzle books].

When I was older I read Dostoevsky and so on.

Right now, I don’t read novels anymore. History I read. Novels don’t attract me anymore.

VF: What’s your favourite place in Germany to visit?

GG: I never particularly liked Germany, alright. Munich, I lived there. But you have to know, I spent long periods in Germany, but for the most part in libraries. It’s not that I really communicated with people a lot and so on, because I really needed to go there to find the books… by the way, I spent a long time in Wolfenbüttel. That’s where the library is where Leibniz was a librarian, and then Lessing [as well]. The only two industries in that little town are the library and the jail. It’s an interesting [place], you can walk around it in one hour. It was not bombed, so you really have original houses there. But now of course many of the books that I was looking for at that time, I can Google them, they are online, so I really don’t have to go there.

VF: If you could have one superpower,

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what would it be?

GG: Superpower? I don’t know, I never thought of that. Oh, I would like to see how the Earth would look one billion years from now. Out of curiosity.

VF: One billion years?

GG: Well, I’ll settle for one million, alright.

VF: I heard that your family is involved in fashion. Is that true?

GG: Well, my father was a tailor. [Laughs] And he had a shop. And if I’d done what he wanted me to do, I would be a tailor right now. By the way, I do enjoy fashion. I do watch Fashion File on CBC because I wouldn’t mind… mind you, most of this fashion is for women, and of course I wouldn’t buy those kinds of attires, alright. I wouldn’t dress, you know, haut couture, mostly because I don’t have the money, and also I don’t care. But I like to see it. It’s an art, it’s a great form of art.

VF: One little thing to end on: I remember you saying in class that truly great philosophers were the ones that said more than they realized they were saying. Could you just elaborate on that?

GG: Sometimes it’s the bad ones. But the point is that we’re always saying more than we want to mean. Just because the words we use have a tradition of their own, and they carry a lot more meaning than we can possibly comprehend at any moment. That is why, and I repeat, philosophy has got to be historical – just because we have to discover exactly what we meant when we said anything!

The Early Greens

Growing democracy in west germany

Nicole leonard

W

hile the democratic postwar government in West Germany represented enormous development from the National Socialists’ oppressive regime during the Second World War, it still suffered politically from a lack of dynamism. After twenty years of static political consensus, the consolidation and ascent of the early Green Party (“Die Grünen”) enhanced the quality of democracy in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) by representing a conception of post-materialism in politics as described by political scientist Ronald Inglehart, thus strengthening components of liberal democracy outlined by Alan Siaroff.

These include the Green Party’s contribution to improved civic culture and mass political participation, government legitimacy through opposition, and socio-political pluralism via a broad representation of interests. This paper focuses on the rise of the early Green Party (“Greens”) before German reunification in 1990 in order to highlight their initial role as a catalyst that furthered the liberal progression of the West German political system.

Ideological Foundation In his account of post-materialism, Ronald Inglehart provides a useful ideological framework with which to understand the liberalizing role of the West German Greens. His thorough Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in FortyThree Societies describes an inter-generational value shift stemming from the transition from material-based industrial to post-industrial society, one which alternatively emphasizes self-expression and quality of life.1 Traditional modernization theory posits that the core process of industrialization leads to economic achievement and subsequently the rationali-

zation of the political, economic, and social spheres. While Inglehart acknowledges this rationalization, he argues that modernization is a nonlinear process that eventually reaches an inflection point that sets it on the different, more culturally sensitive trajectory of postmodernization.2 He applies this theory to the newly politically mobilized postwar generation in advanced industrial societies during the late 1960s who emphasized subjective values that transcend economic and physical security. Furthermore, Inglehart empirically demonstrates how these post-materialist values, which include universal disarmament, environmentalism, women’s emancipation, and immigrant rights among many others, eventually spread beyond the young postwar niche to mass publics and fundamentally transformed social and political culture.

Most importantly for this paper, Inglehart proves that “postmodernization does seem to be inherently conducive to the emergence of democratic political institutions.”3 He supports this with statistically significant crosslevel linkages, like those between political culture and democracy, from the presently ongoing World Values survey that measures mass attitudes in forty-three countries around the world. He finds that modernization is not sufficient for democratization because it can also give way to authoritarian regimes, as was the case in Soviet Russia. Inglehart argues instead that economic development from industrialization first leads to changes in societal structural that allow for cognitive mobilization via education and job specialization, activating mass political participation and subsequent cultural transformation that consolidate democracy.4 The West German Greens grew out of these postmodern processes and embodied

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post-materialist ideology, helping to enhance and stabilize democracy in the FRG. In order to qualify this, I will examine and apply Alan Siaroff’s components of liberal democracy – the most democratic regime type – to the Greens’ case. These include ideological emphasis on individualism and minority rights, political participation via civil society, political competition, accountability, legitimacy, and socio-political pluralism.5 While the early FRG was by no means only an electoral democracy in Siaroff’s terms, which would imply that the aforementioned features were missing,6 the Greens’ post-materialist values and entrance into government certainly helped strengthen them and thus liberal democracy in West Germany.

Mobilization of Civil Society In order to examine the extent to which the Greens assumed post-materialist ideas and affected growth in civic political participation, an element Siaroff emphasizes in liberal democracy, it is necessary to provide some historical background. Throughout the early postwar years, West Germans were content to pursue economic recovery and repair the negative image bestowed on them by horrendous war and Nazi rule. Accordingly, the postwar settlement in the FRG included a social market economy, powerful regional governance, and heavy emphasis on organized, wage-restrained industry.

While these occurred through democratic institutions and proved to be remarkably effective as GNP increased 67 per cent between the years 1947 and 1972,7 the measures were largely imposed from above and did not encourage viable political pluralism and participation. The December 1966 grand-coalition between the dominant Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) demonstrated a virtual eclipse of the political spectrum and indicated excessive consensus in government during the twenty years after the Second World War.8 As the economy grew, the German corporatist-industrial model began to alienate the younger, materially secure generation. As Inglehart observes, economic security in the FRG led to increased emphasis on education, tertiary economic activity, and

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consequently the emergence of post-materialist issues.

Accordingly, citizens’ action groups supporting the anti-nuclear and ecological issue movements began to mushroom all over the FGR and in 1972 sixteen of the most influential political bodies, including the Greens, joined to form an umbrella organization called the Federal Association of Environmental Citizen’s Initiatives, or Bundesverband Bürgerinitiativen Umweltschutz (BBU).9 The proposed increase in construction of nuclear reactors in response to the 1973 OPEC oil crisis provided an opportune point of mobilization, and in 1975 the BBU organized a massive occupation and nonviolent protest at Wyhl in BadenWürttemberg.10 The famous demonstration succeeded in halting the construction of the nuclear reactor and energized hundreds of subsequent protests.

In late 1976 and early 1977 at the site of a planned reactor in Brokdorf, the police unleashed tear gas and water cannons on a 40,000-person crowd of demonstrators.11 Police brutality, while not particularly frequent, represented the overall FRG government’s inflexibility in dealing with demands of widespread new social movements. Still, the Greens persevered and continued to expand a postmaterialist ideological base, as massive demonstrations against NATO missile deployment from 1979 to 1983 illustrated integration of the anti-war movement.12 The Greens became the pioneers of post-materialism, representing groups that “professed to be alienated by established party and interest structures.”13 Their emphasis on grassroots democracy and civic organization in the FRG demonstrates a transforming political culture. According to survey data, daily political discussion in the FGR jumped from only 8.9 per cent of the populace in 1952 to over 50 per cent by 1972, and general citizens’ belief in their political efficacy had increased dramatically over the same period.14 In addition to being analogous to the cultural change that Inglehart predicts will lead to stable democracy, successful mass exercise of civil liberties including freedom of speech and assembly represented “an ongoing process of articulation and representation beyond peri-

odic elections” that Siaroff incorporates in his definition of liberal democracy.15 In spurring political participation, the Greens strengthened and stabilized democratic norms in the FRG.

Legitimization of the Political System The Greens soon sought concrete political power in order to directly influence policy, but their entrance into the system went beyond an immediate concern to affirm the general legitimacy of government. Throughout the late 1970s, the Greens participated in local and state level elections with scattered successes until they captured 1.5 per cent of the vote in the 1980 national election.16 While not enough to secure parliamentary seats, the run established the Green Party as an official national party with a young, highly-educated core electorate concentrated in urban-residential areas and the service sector.17 After two years of mounting regional victories, the Green Party managed to capture 5.6 per cent of the vote in the March 1983 federal election, surpassing the 5 per cent parliamentary threshold and winning 27 seats in the Bundestag, the FRG’s national parliament.18 This process of legislative entrance signaled that the political system was capable of permitting concrete minority opposition, an important aspect of Siaroff’s “free and fair competition,” which confirms government’s vertical accountability and allowance of a party to legitimately enter government without imposed constraints.19 Furthermore, the Greens’ presence affected the comfortably established parties: the CDU/CSU union, the SPD, and the Free Democracy Party (FDP). While the CDU was relatively unaffected due to stark ideological differences, the Greens began to capture some votes from the center-oriented FDP due to their overlapping emphasis on political and civil rights.20 Most notably, the formerly socialist working class-centred but now increasingly conservative SPD felt great pressure to recapture votes on the left, since the Greens absorbed voters alienated by the SPD’s turn towards the political center.

In Berlin, the formerly governing SPD’s vote fell to 33 per cent in the 1985 state elections, while

the Green-encompassing AL (Alternative List for Democracy and Environmental Protection) secured 10 per cent of the vote.21 The Greens’ entrance as another electoral choice emphasized individual political efficacy and informed decision-making characteristic of post-materialism and liberal democracy, since parties were able to specifically deal with more issues. Empirically supported increases in autonomous issue-based rather than partisan voting in Germany affirms this shift.22 Similarly, democratic theory posits that successful entrance of an opposition party introduces elite competition, which improves trust of internal democratic processes and implies long-term stability.23 The parliamentary Greens emphasized the value of plebiscitary methods,24 which increase direct democracy and according to Siaroff even reach beyond liberal democracy.25 While these were difficult to implement due to opposition from other groups, they did manage to introduce significant informal legislative change that heightened the level of parliamentary scrutiny and overall quality of debate in the Bundestag. The Greens tapped informal information sources and relayed their findings to the public, which increased transparency and lessened the ability of elites to suppress scandals.26 In addition, parliamentary meetings occurred with higher frequency and for longer duration than they had before the Greens’ entrance, indicating more penetrating communication. Interpellations, which forced ministers to explain their decisions and statements, were initiated along with the creation of more subcommittees and an increase in the number of hearings.27 The Green Party’s parliamentary entrance marked the end of both the three-party system and ritualized voting patterns in Germany. It qualified the FRG’s proportional representation system by effectively rewarding determined constituents with a “legitimate and smooth” transition of leadership, which supports Siaroff’s liberal-democratic conception of accountability.28 Additionally, the Greens legitimized government by checking existing parties and parliamentary processes, ensuring more thoughtful deliberation and representation of post-materialist issues. Inglehart un-

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derscores how the presence of post-materialist elites like those that the Greens inserted into the Bundestag is linked to qualities that bolster democracy, including individualism, ad-hoc groups, specific policy changes, and higher skill and education levels in government.29

Expansion of the Political spectrum Finally, the Greens’ inclusion of post-materialism in politics revolutionized social and political pluralism in the FRG and echoed global changes in the political spectrum. This influence reaches beyond the immediate role of the Greens, who eventually faced a divisive paradox inherent in the transition from movement to party and split into two main camps, lessening their political efficacy: the “fundamentalists” (Fundis) were devout in their distrust of the state and dedication to grassroots democracy while the “realists” (Realos), in contrast, recognized the necessity in making ideological sacrifices and joining other parties to ensure political power.30 While the Greens captured an impressive 8.3 per cent of the vote in the 1987 national elections, telling regional races illustrated the delegitimizing effects of diminishing ideological consensus and revealed that the party had roughly reached their electoral limits by the end of the 1980s.

This highlights how the Greens spurred general West German democratic consolidation by bringing post-materialist values into the general political sphere, not by acting as an enlightened party unto themselves. It is first important to note that the Greens did induce specific post-materialist gains – namely a visible decline in nuclear power, higher number of female parliamentary representatives, and an increase in the gasoline tax.31 However, these feats are more accurately attributed to the Greens’ impact on political culture and competition, as existing parties had to absorb and discuss issues including unilateral disarmament, marginalized social groups, ecological initiatives, and a “societal future without linear economic growth.”32 In 1984, an FDP representative in Berlin acknowledged the effect of the Greens: “The AL does something that actually has to be regarded as quite a strengthening of parliamentarism, because all issues are brought up in Parliament.”33

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Siaroff would likely agree with this statement, since autonomy and broader societal contact strengthens socio-economic pluralism, a key component of his liberal democracy.34 This phenomenon correlates with the assumption in Inglehart’s postmodern theory that decreased economic emphasis reduces the importance of class and wealth in political alignment, partially proven by the fact that environmental policy issues had globally overtaken social economic policy in campaigns by the late 1980s.35 Inglehart describes how the “New Left” expanded the one-dimensional issue spectrum to address non-economic issues, which reorganized political loyalties as educated and wealthier voters moved toward the left and the reactionary New Right typically found support with poorer individuals.36 The Greens’ post-materialist influence on the issue spectrum accordingly supported liberal democratic consolidation, as it provided for “political and civil pluralism as well as for individual and group freedoms, so that contending interests and values may be expressed.”37 Siaroff’s words reflect the general vitality of equal autonomy in liberal democracy, so that everyone may be effectively represented.

Conclusion: Post-materialism and Liberal Democracy This paper began with an account of Inglehart’s post-materialism and a description of how it positively correlates with democracy due to an associated cultural change. The ascent of the West German Greens, clearly a post-materialist party that emphasized quality of life over economic issues, represented the tangible emergence of post-materialism considerations in government. In using Siaroff’s tenets of liberal democracy to evaluate the Greens’ social and political effects, I confirm Inglehart’s empirical claims that post-materialism is linked to liberal democracy. The Greens’ contributions to mass political mobilization, legitimate governance, and socio-political pluralism helped strengthen and cement democracy in the FRG, where democratic institutionalism had collapsed just a few decades earlier during the Weimar Republic, thus allowing a brutally illiberal fascist regime to emerge.

Notes 1. Inglehart, Ronald. Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in Forty-Three Societies. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997, 4.

2. Ibid., 8.

3. Ibid., 14.

4. Ibid.,162.

5. Siaroff, Alan. “Electoral Democracies, Liberal Democracies, and Autocracies.” In Comparing Political Regimes. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009, 74.

6. Ibid., 65.

7. Baker, Kendall L., Russell J. Dalton, and Kai Hildebrandt. Germany Transformed: Political Culture and the New Politics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981, 77.

8. Ibid., 235.

9. Morrison, William Bruce. “Green Politics in Europe: The Distinctiveness of the West German Case, as Compared to Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands.” Montreal: McGill University Department of Political Science, 1988, 21.

10. Ibid., 22.

11. Ibid., 27.

12. Shull, Tad. Redefining Red and Green: Ideology and Strategy in European Political Ecology. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. 18.

13. Kolinsky, Eva. The Greens in West Germany.

New York: Berg Publishers Limited, 1989, 16.

14. Baker, Dalton, and Hildebrandt, 39.

15. Siaroff, 65.

16. Ely, John and Margit Mayer. The German Greens: Paradox Between Movement and Party. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988, 77.

17. Ibid., 73.

18. Morrison, 4.

19. Siaroff, 69.

20. Shull, 97.

21. Ely and Mayer, 109.

22. Baker, Dalton, and Hildebrandt, 253.

23. Inglehart, 166.

24. Shull, 41.

25. Siaroff, 81.

26. Ely and Mayer, 106.

27. Ibid., 107.

28. Siaroff, 74.

29. Inglehart, 169.

30. Kolinsky, 146.

31. Ibid., 199.

32. Ely and Mayer, 121.

33. Ibid., 110.

34. Siaroff, 74.

35. Inglehart, 252.

36. Ibid., 252.

37. Siaroff, 65.

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58

There’s No Place Like Heimat

An exploration of German identity in the GDR

Peter Shyba

I

n 1997, when I was six years old, my parents took my siblings and me to the town where my maternal grandma – Oma – was born.

It was in this small town named Oehna that she was raised, where her parents passed away, where she and my Opa were married after the war, and where my eldest aunt was born. It was also the town from which they fled in 1950.

My Opa tells the story of his early morning departure often: he woke up before dawn with his bags packed and biked to the train station.

On the border of the town, he quietly dismounted his bicycle, walked into the middle of a field, and knelt, reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

From here, he would cross into West Germany to my waiting Oma and their young child, and go north to take a ship to Canada. He would not see the town again for forty odd years.

On the afternoon when we arrived, the sun shone brilliantly, illuminating every detail of Oehna. It was spring – my brother and sister and I were taking advantage of our mid-term breaks – and people were tending their gardens carefully after the passing of another winter.

The streets of the town were similar to that of any German town you might happen to drive through. Typically, a main road known as the Dorfstraße bifurcates these towns; on either side, you see the apartments and houses of classic brick or stucco construction with red-tile roofs, the Rathaus, the Church, and the town bar. Each night, the windows are shuttered tight with malleable aluminium in the same way that jewelry stores might be. There is still a sense that, although generally peaceful and calm, there are still certain measures that must be taken to protect from the outside.

The descriptor ‘halcyon’ seems appropri-

ate, except there is no exact date that signifies where – and when – these towns seems to be stuck. Time is an irrelevant concept to these bastions of German culture, worlds apart from metropolises like Berlin and Frankfurt-amMain. It’s a complicated feeling, being there.

There is an ordered stillness that pervades one’s senses, colouring everything with a feeling of security. The German word Heimat – basically meaning “home” – seems to be constructed to represent this emotional connotation.

Much has changed in Germany throughout the years. In the past century, the small town of Oehna, like other towns in the former East Germany, has, besides two World Wars, existed under two totalitarian governments with radically different ideologies: in a matter of days, the German people were told to hate the once widely supported fascist National Socialist Party as it was replaced by Soviet occupation. Concepts of identity in the transition from fascism to socialism were expected to change overnight in April 1945. The new totalitarian government was not chosen, as the Nazis had been, but rather was imposed forcefully in the context of a humiliating military loss, the general understanding of the atrocities of the Holocaust, mourning over those who perished in the military, and widespread physical destruction of infrastructure. With these rapid changes still inchoate in the immediate postwar period, the notion of Heimat to the East Germans was in flux, as was nearly every other factor in their lives. My Opa, whose birthplace was in a town lost to Poland after the war, was forced to find a new place to call home. He was assigned to live in the town of Oehna – his Heimat being in what is now western Poland.

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Like the German people facing these changes, the culturally loaded concept of Heimat also adapted. By examining these changes – that is, the way by which people’s interpretation of the concept changed – we, as historians, stand to gain an understanding of a uniquely personal, individual interpretation of history that goes beyond fact.

This essay will explore how the notion of Heimat changed in the twentieth century to accommodate different social, economic, and political factors. It will be necessary first to establish a good understanding of the etymology and cultural implications of the term Heimat itself. Then, a brief history of the use of the term up to the end of the Second World War will contextualize its meaning in the nascent GDR. A brief recounting of the events of the first days of the transition, including the chaos of a new government, will also be explored.

The essay will finish with the examination of the cultural context of Heimat. This will include a critical study of films produced by the East German film organization DEFA,

Etymology and Meaning of Heimat Traditionally, the term Heimat has been used in a geographic context, specifically referring to small, German towns representing what Christopher J. Wickham calls “the rural idyll,”1 where people live simply and in harmony with nature, away from the corrupting force of the cities.

In Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, delivered at the University of Berlin in the years leading up to his death, the prolific philosopher equated a sense of Heimat with psychological well-being and freedom.

To Hegel, “the germ of thinking free[ly] lies in the spirit of the sense of Heimat, the spirit of the imagined Being-with-oneself, in this quality of free, beautiful historicity.”2 Here, Hegel establishes the fact that as far back as the 1830s – when he delivered his lectures – the term was imbued with a positive meaning; a sense of Heimat led to a greater awareness of one’s identity, wellness and wholeness. Hegel’s notion of Heimat, however, is but one of many interpretations of the term. Wickham gives a good account of the variety of mean-

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ings inherent in the word when he writes that Heimat is characterized by “memory, identity, territory, culture, language, [and] utopia.”3 These characterizations then define Heimat by relating it to “the past, the present, and the future, to social, cultural, and geographic bonding, to material and rational as well as spiritual and emotional dimensions.”4 Thus, Heimat is a complex concept, which, while in its essence refers to a person’s (typically) rural home, has come to represent larger notions of a typically German ethos.5 As Alexandra Ludewig aptly puts it, Heimat provides “identification purposes in … times of change and uncertainty.”6 Equally important to comprehending Heimat is an understanding of the opposite of this term. Sigmund Freud wrote extensively on “the unheimlich,” another term whose definition eludes full translation due to complex associations. Unheimlich, which can be taken simply as meaning “uncanny,” comes from the root heim, which can itself be traced to the Old High German word Heimôti, meaning “native place.”7 In his 1883 An Etmyological Dictionary of the German Language, linguist Friedrich Kluge traced heim to the Sanskrit word ksema, meaning “security, safety, residence, and abiding at ease.”8 It is also interesting to note, for the sake of establishing the universality of this concept, that the Hebrew word ‫( חיים‬Chaim), meaning ‘life,’ is cognate to the Arabic word ‫( ةايح‬hayat) also meaning ‘life.’ Both of these appear to share roughly the same phonetics with Heimat.

Historical Context A historical look at the use of Heimat helps to understand the concept’s significance. In the 1920s, when the use of film became widespread in Germany, the political climate was tense.

Bitter from the loss of the First World War and adjusting to the Weimar Republic, the protection of the Heimat and Heimat values was increasingly important. This protective tendency, according to Florentine Strzelczyk, “formed the basis of a unified German Volksgemeinschaft [national community] that would transcend local, class, and political divisions.”9 The increased value placed on Heimat ideals (for example: hard work, earnestness, strong familial

Aaron Vansintjan ties, an exclusion of Fremd [the foreign]) would eventually be used by Goebbels in his role as the Reich Minister of Propaganda for the Nazi Party from 1933 to 1945. For example, these principles were adopted by the Nazi party in the ideology of “Blut und Boden” [“Blood and Soil”], which professed to make the German people superior based on ancestry (“blood”) and Heimat (“soil”).

A good example of the use of Blut und Boden is in Sieg im Westen [Victory in the West] (1941), a Nazi propaganda film. The movie follows Nazi troops as they go into battle. The directors present the troops before the battle in the countryside, washing up, eating a meal, and interacting with nature.10 This is an example of what Sigfried Kracauer calls the “camping idyll,”11 a play on his term “rural idyll.”

The Nazi regime used the concept of Heimat in the development of its propaganda films for the purpose of dispersing a culturally accessible paradigm. As Ludewig argues, “National Socialist ideas were characterized by their calculated intention to appeal to people’s emotions rather than their intellect.”12 A good example of this simplification was in their use of an “other.” By creating a false dichotomy of Heimat and Other, an essentialist

notion of “true German” was created. In portraits of oversimplified rural idylls that played on a shared German identity, the Nazis slowly altered conceptions of Heimat to allow them to relate directly to jingoist, nationalist aspirations. Heimat and Nazism became inextricably linked. Not only did it keep Germans out of a post-World War I slump, Heimat rhetoric served as a vehicle for a larger, emotional revitalization. A much different force – the GDR – would later appropriate this method to its own ends.

East Germany was not occupied, but liberated in April 1945, according to the Soviet way of thinking. In a period of four years, the Soviet Union established a satellite in East Germany through the occupation and subsequent formation of a government, while the Germans were forced to “kowtow” to their position.13 The last major attack on the eastern front was on April 16, 1945.14 The Reich was officially dismantled on May 1; Hitler had committed suicide ten days after his fifty-sixth birthday in a bunker outside of Berlin. On May 9, there was unconditional surrender in Karlshorst. Just under a month later, the Council of People’s Commissars signed a treaty to create the Soviet Military Administration in Germany.

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In what was likely an attempt to assemble some sort of on-the-ground presence, the Red Army set up Kommandanturas [command posts], which were established in towns and cities throughout eastern Germany. These Kommandaturas were haphazardly assigned Kommandants [commanders], usually based on their ability to speak German. These Kommandants controlled a “Peoples Commissariat of Internal Affairs” (NKVD) made up of twenty-four officers and men, split into five groups – political, propaganda, military affairs and security, economics, and supply. The main purpose of these organizations was to “observe and report” the goings-on in villages and their surroundings, but in many cases, the Kommandants treated their purviews as “their own patrimonial estate.”15 Corruption, favouritism, and bribery were commonplace thanks to a lack of a clear line of responsibility. While the Soviet Military Administration of Germany (SMAG) had ultimate control, for the most part, it kept out of the affairs of the Kommandaturas.

It was in this period that the rape of German women became commonplace. It is not likely that a firm number of victims will ever be established, but in the time between the establishment of the SMAG and the summer of 1946, it has been estimated that anywhere from tens to hundreds of thousands of women, ranging in age from ten to eighty, were raped by Soviet soldiers.16 Personal stories of rape, as can be found in Norman A. Naimark’s The Russians in Germany, are chilling. The victims ranged from young girls, to older, married women (where, in at least one case, the husband was murdered before the act was committed),17 to, in one particularly gruesome incident, nuns in their habits.18 Unable to cope with the shame of these traumas, many German women ended their lives.

The German reaction to these events was limited by their ability to speak out against the SMAG. Following the publication of an article in Neues Deutschland by Rudolf Herrnstadt called “About ‘the Russians’ and About Us,”19 a veiled commentary on the German misgivings about the Soviet presence, the Berlin Branch of the Society for the Study

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of the Culture of the Soviet Union hosted an open discussion in December 1948 that seven hundred people attended. Again, the issue of widespread rape was not mentioned directly (the favoured metaphor was the stealing of a watch or bicycle). Yet through this discussion, a sense of widespread disillusionment with the Soviets was discovered. One particularly telling question at this discussion was posed by a young female Communist Party member: “What can help us [overcome] this disturbed relationship, that is, this fear and this mistrust that comes beyond our control – from the emotions – every time we come across a person in a certain uniform?”20 On October 23, 1948, Bertolt Brecht expressed a similar sentiment in his personal journal: “Still, after these three years, the workers are shaking, I hear it all over, the panic, caused by the plundering and after the rape, that followed the taking of Berlin.”21 Naimark describes the extralegal immediate post-war conditions of Germany as a time of great social and communal tumult.22 The “uprooting character” of this period fundamentally shook notions of Heimat, which has obvious rhetorical connotations of “rootedness.”23 Some other notable examples of how Heimat was negatively influenced by the Soviet occupation are the rapid centralization of East German politics, the collectivization of agriculture, and the militant atheism of the Soviets. The imposition of Soviet culture on Germany rapidly changed its civil society.

In Revolution from Abroad, Jan T. Gross facetiously says: “On the evolutionary tree of social institutions, the Stalinist regime would have to be classified as an amoeba,”24 effectively capturing the feeling of anomie, Fremd, and “Otherness” inherent in the German’s view of the Soviet Union. In looking at the occupation, we can conclude that the Soviet forces stymied the sense of Heimat amongst the German people precisely through this method of creating an Other. Looking at how this would affect the regime later, we see that, even through the later reclamation of the term by the GDR and its film agencies, there were still large hurdles in winning the Germans to their side.

Cultural Context DEFA ( Deutsches Film Aktiengesellschaft), the Soviet state film studio, was established on May 17, 1946.25 It produced six hundred and seventy-seven films between 1946 and 1990, most of which had a theme of social realism, rooted in “the ideology of the time.”26 Heimatfilm, as a genre, was viewed with mistrust by the GDR. “Morphologies with Heimat were viewed with suspicion there, as it was assumed that the bourgeois ideology of Heimat seemed to disguise class struggle above all else.”27 Despite this, DEFA still capitalized on the demand for these films, albeit with the caveat that they should fit within the socialist frame of reference. As Alexandra Ludwig puts it, “in order to break the stranglehold of the lingering fascist Heimat concept, the local perception of Heimat was seen as a means of commingling socialism and the state with ‘Heimatesque’ connotations.”28 These connotations were addressed in many DEFA films, two of which are especially noteworthy: Konrad Wolf ’s Ich War Neunzehn [I Was Nineteen]29 and Der Geteilte Himmel [Divided Heaven].30 In addition, Edgar Reitz’s prolific miniseries Heimat, produced in 1985 in West Germany, addressed the notion of Heimat from a novel, non-GDR perspective.

Ich War Neunzehn is a semi-autobiographical film based on Konrad Wolf ’s post-war experience. In 1933, Wolf left Germany at age eight for the Soviet Union. His father was a Communist writer of Jewish descent who was a founding member of the National Committee of Free Germany. His return to his Heimat came at the end of the war, as he was a young intelligence officer in the twenty-seventh platoon of the Red Army.31 It is telling that Wolf ’s original working title was Homecoming ’45.

The film follows the central character, Lieutenant Gregor Hecker, returning to his homeland of Germany as a Red Army soldier. The young man, in the first scenes of the movie, voices over images of the idyllic town of Bernau, where he would become the Kommandant. “I see German road signs. They say this is my homeland. I was eight when my parents had to leave – I grew up in Moscow,

and my mother lives there. I fought like everyone; I say this almost every day, [but] I get gunfire in return.”32 Throughout the movie, a neo-realistic portrayal of the events from an autobiographical standpoint creates an “authenticity effect,”33 whereby viewers are invited to understand the more nuanced, emotional experiences of post-war Germany. To Anke Pinkert, the film presented an “anti-fascist socialist discourse … aimed at challenging the kind of calcified, ritualized anti-fascism that had functionalized art … that had produced a postwar generation that lacked relevant emotional investment in the historical experience of their parents.”34 The theme of a generational disconnect is prevalent throughout the film, mainly within Bernau.

This theme of intergenerational relationships is also explored in Der Geteilte Himmel, based on Christa Wolf ’s 1963 novel of the same name. In it, we see a young woman named Rita Seidel moving from her home in the country to the bustling city in order to live with an ambitious young chemist. Rita’s narration shows how the rapidly moving city life can be overwhelming: “It happens, you can spin from the edge of the world into the centre.

All of a sudden, everything is possible, every fairytale miracle, every great deed.”35 The film examines the fraying of the relationship between the protagonist and her boyfriend (and his eventual move to the West), along with her questioning of the socialist labour system.

While this may have seemed shocking at the time (and it was quite controversial), the final message of the movie is one of optimism and redemption; the final spoken line is “Maybe now you will realize that the fate of the coming generation depends of the strength of countless people, in every single moment.”36 The 1960s were a time in DEFA cinema when small amounts of discourse over Heimat became somewhat acceptable again. The focus of the new generation, as shown in the two movies studied above, was an indication that, in the wake of years of uncertainty and disenchantment, it was possible for youth to find their way in a new country. These films explored the possibility of the reclamation of a GDR-based Heimat, a “Heimat das Neuen”

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[Heimat of the new]. In fact, research done by the social scientist Rudolph Endres in 1965 showed that the concept of Heimat to young adults in the GDR was playing an increasingly large role in their social identification.37

Conclusion This essay has explored how the notion of Heimat changed in the twentieth century in relation to different social, economic, and political factors. By first establishing the etymology and cultural constructions of the word, it was established that it holds positive significance in many aspects, including memory, territory, culture, language, notions of utopia, and, most importantly, identity.

Next, we saw how the Nazi party used Heimatesque themes in its propaganda to embellish conceptions of blood-and-soil ideology and Aryan supremacy. Then, discussing the Soviet occupation of Germany led to an understanding of how its chaotic rule led to the changing popular conceptions of home, identity, and geographic place through forcing a socialist system rape. Finally, an analysis of DEFA cinema showed that in the 1960s in East Germany there was a cultural reappropriation of Heimat concepts in order to re-enfranchise the new generation of East Germans. This Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or processing of the past, stems from a desire to reconcile the meaning and role of Heimat in German life.

For the first time in sixty years, my Opa returned to the village of his birth, Falkenburg (now known by its Polish name Złocieniec), in the spring of 2009. At the end of the war, he was told that Falkenburg was now a part of Poland as a part of the Potsdam Conference, whereby ethnic Germans would have to leave the areas now a part of the Polish State. As a result, he was forced to leave his Heimat and relocated to Oehna, were he would eventually meet my Oma. Our trip in 2009 was marked with a mixture of bitterness and sadness; it was my Opa’s opportunity to revisit what had once been his home.

True to style, he walked straight to the house in which he was born, opened the door, and entered. The Polish family who had been

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going about their business responded awkwardly, but my Opa did not seem to notice.

He pointed down the street, gesturing to where he famously beat an older boy over the head with his wooden shoe for spooking his horses as they drank from the river. He showed my dad and me which room had been his, where he used to keep his animals and where he spent time with his family. He marveled at how much it had changed, and how much it had degraded from the version in his memory when he left after the war.

As we drove back to Germany from our daytrip, my Opa gestured for my father to slow down the car as we came close to the edge of the town. He walked to a statue that had once presided over the entrance to Falkenburg: a limestone bird with wings extended, with a placard underneath which was once engraved simply with the name of the town. I remember so clearly my Opa brushing his workweathered hands along that stone, trying to feel the engraving of F-A-L-K-E-N-B-U-R-G that had been filed away 60 years ago. It didn’t matter though. He knew he was home.

We drove away as the day ended. He was leaving this time by choice. In what was perhaps an allegory borne of convenience, my Opa, like the German people of the past halfcentury, had eased in his recalcitrance, allowing his definition of Heimat to adapt amd to fit the circumstances out of his control.

NOTES 1. Wickham, Chris. Constructing Heimat in Postwar Germany: Longing and Belonging. Lewiston, New York.: E. Mellen Press, 1999, 8.

2. Hegel, G.W.F. Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie. In Werke in 20 Bänden.

Edited by Moldenhauer and K.M. Michel.

Vol. 18-20, Frankfurt: L Suhrkamp, 1969, 21.

3. Wickham, 2.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid., 8.

6. Ludewig, Alexandra. Screening Nostalgia: 100 Years of German Heimat Film. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2011, 25.

7. Müller, William Konrad H, Georg Freidrich Benecke, and Freidrich Karl T. Zarncke.

Mittelhochdeutsches Wörterbuch, mit Benutzung des Nachlasses. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, 655.

8. Kluge, Friedrich, and John F. Davis. An Etymological Dictionary of the German Language. London: G. Bell, 1891.

9. Strzelczyk, Florentine. “Far Away, So Close: Carl Froelich’s Heimat.” On Cultural History Through a National Socialist Lens: Esays on the Cinema of the Third Reich. Edited by Robert C. Reimer. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002. 110.

10. Brunsch, Fritz. Sieg im Westen. Berlin, 1941.

11. Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of The German film Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1947, 278 12. Ludewig, 25 13. Naimark, Norman M. The Russians in Germany: a History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995, 9.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid., 17 16. Ibid., 82 17. Ibid., 81 18. Ibid.

19. Ibid., 135 20. Herrnstadt, Rudolph. „Über ‘die Russen’ und über uns,” Tägliche Rundschau, 1948.

21. Brecht, Bertolt. Arbeitsjournal 1938-1955.

Berlin and Weimar; Aufbau Verlad, 1977.

454.

22. Naimark, The Russians in Germany, 107.

23. Boa, Elizabeth, and Rachel Palfryman.

Heimat: A German Dream: Regional Loyalties and National Identity in German Culture, 1890-1990. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000, 7.

24. Gross, Jan Tomasz. Revolution from Abroad: the Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988, 131.

25. Ludewig, 298.

26. Mückenberger, Christiane. “The AntiFascist Past in DEFA-Films.” In DEFA: East German cinema, 1946-1992. Edited by John Sanford and Seán Allan. New York: Berghahn Books, 1999.

27. Ludewig, 298.

28. Ibid., 301.

29. Wolf, Konrad. Ich War Neunzehn. Berlin: DEFA, 1968. DVD. 30. Wolf, Konrad. Der Ggeteilte Himmel. Berlin: DEFA, 1964. DVD 31. Pinkert, Anke. Film and Memory in East Germany. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008, 151.

32. Ich War Neunzehn.

33. Pinkert, 151.

34. Ibid.

35. Divided Heaven.

36. Ibid.

37. Enderes, Rudolph. 1967. “Der Heimatbegriff der Jugend in der Gegenwart” Geographisch Rundschau, 19, 25-32.

38. Reitz, Edgar. 1984. Heimat. Berlin: Edgar Reitz Filmproduktion GmbH. DVD. 39. Birgel, Franz A. and Edgar Reitz. 1986. „You Can Go Home Again: An Interview with Edgar Reitz.“ Film Quarterly. Vol. 39, no. 4 (1986), 2-10.

40. Kaes, Anton. 1989. From Hitler to Heimat: the return of history as film. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

41. Ash, Timothy Garten. “The Life of Death.”

The New York Review of Books, December 19, 1985. Accessed December 2, 2011. http:// www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1985/ dec/19/the-life-of-death.

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A Revolution in Two Acts?

Comparing the Uprisings of 1953 and 1989 in the German Democratic Republic Karl Hart

I

s it true that tomorrow the 17th of June will break out?” asked Erich Mielke, a functionary for the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED), on August 31.1 Mielke had lived through the uprising of 1953, the first, and prior to 1989, only instance of mass resistance against the regime in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Now, he was witnessing the beginning of the second and final outbreak of popular opposition against the system he served. Certain historians have interpreted these events as two acts in a single, interrupted revolution against a flawed state.2 For example, Rolf Steininger writes, “the collapse of the SED-Dictatorship was both inherent in and determined by the system! The autumn of 1989 brought the fulfillment of the unfinished revolution of 1953.” Steininger argues that the main differentiation between the two events was that in 1989, the Soviet tanks “remained in their barracks,” allowing the protestors’ demands for democracy and reunification to be fulfilled.3 However, as Gareth Dale asserts, such a model obfuscates the different natures of 1953 and 1989.4 Mass protest in 1953 began as a proletarian uprising, while 1989 saw the workers acting as a dominant group within the protesting citizenry as a whole. As a result, 1989 displayed an intellectual movement absent in 1953. Nevertheless Steininger is correct in his assertion that Soviet military intervention, or the lack thereof, was crucial in deciding the outcome of the two uprisings.

Although members of other social strata would eventually join the protests on June 17, 1953, the initiative for the uprising belonged to the workers. The immediate catalyst for this action was discontent over the retention

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of work norms for industrial workers. On May 14, 1953 the SED had announced a ten per cent work-norm increase for workers throughout the GDR, a move reflecting the party’s endorsement of a Stalinist-style economic policy.

This added stress to the already overburdened and discontented proletariat, leading to sporadic and isolated strikes throughout May and June.5 Matters were complicated following Stalin’s death, when the leaders of the USSR urged Walter Ulbricht and other party notables to soften their “acceleration of socialism.”6 On June 9 the SED decided to heed Moscow’s demands and on June 11 the party published a communiqué, in which the party admitted past mistakes and promised a New Course in government policy.

Pledging an improvement in living standards for “workers, farmers, intelligentsia, tradesmen and the remaining strata,” the document lacked any mention of overturning work norm increases.7 While other groups could find concrete, beneficial policy measures in this New Course, the party appeared to have overlooked the workers. The result was a mismatch between rhetoric and reality – the party of the working class appeared to be abusing its core constituency.8 This change in policy acted as the catalyst transforming worker discontent into action. On June 16, the party sent messengers to angered workers from the Friedrichshain site on the Stalinallee to inform them that work norms would not be rescinded. Incensed, workers marched to the House of Ministries, and bolstered their initial demand with calls for free elections and a general strike the next day.9 A slogan from this march, “Wir wollen Freiheit, Recht und Brot sonst schlagen wir die Bonzen tot,” illustrates

this blending of economic and political demands present from the strike’s inception.10 By the afternoon of the 16th, news of the call for a GDR-wide general strike was being spread via telephone, Western radio broadcasts, and word of mouth.11 The following day, heeding calls from East Berlin, strikes erupted in workplaces

a common next step was to form a march out of the factory into public space. From there, the collective would make its way past other factories on its way to the town centre, the focal public space. It was during this march that members of other social strata would commonly join with the strikers.15

Joseph Henry across the GDR, from Leipzig to Rostock.12 Thus, industrial labourers began mass resistance in 1953, as, in comparison to farmers and the intelligentsia, they could identify no economic benefit in the New Course.13 This working-class foundation shaped the movement’s character, differentiating it from the later 1989 revolution, where the intelligentsia would join the workers in initiating organized resistance against the SED regime.

That the space of origin for protest in 1953 was the industrial workplace where workers decided to strike further conveys how agency for 1953 belonged to the workers.14 While the uprising did not unfold uniformly in all locations, a general spatial pattern characterizes much of the resistance. In the morning workers met within their workplaces across the country, and debated whether to show solidarity with Berlin. In locations where workers voted to strike,

During the final stage, protestors entered the public space of the town centre. At this point, they became less coordinated and tended to exhibit more frenzied and riotous behaviour. Reflecting their political frustration, protestors attacked symbols of the SED power apparatus such as Volkspolizei buildings and prisons.16 These actions are especially noteworthy because such violence was almost entirely absent in 1989. As Gareth Dales notes, this attack on SED authority-centres was complemented by a wave of “symbolic liberation,” including the throwing of Russian textbooks from schools and the reappropriation of labour movement symbols such as the singing of the Internationale and the carrying of red flags.17 This general pattern of a strike within the workplace followed by a march to and an insurrection within the public space holds true in many cities throughout the GDR.18

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In Brandenburg an der Havel, the protest movement first crystallized in the Stahl-und Walzwerk Brandenburg, a steel mill, where approximately 700 workers decided to heed East Berlin’s call for a general strike. They left the workplace at 7:30 AM and formed a march, during which the protest gathered workers from other factories, swelling the number of demonstrators to between 12,000 and 15,000. Now situated in the public space outside the factory, the group moved to the town centre to attack symbols of the SED government, including the Kreis SED building, the Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund building and the Haus der Deutsch-Sowjetischen Freundschaft.19 A similar pattern can be discerned in Magdeburg.

Workers from three industrial factories simultaneously decided to join the strike, merging to form an 8,000-person-strong column of demonstrators. As this crowd entered Magdeburg’s city centre, participants proceeded to attack buildings in the city centre.20 This geographic blueprint demonstrates the crucial role of the proletarian workplace for an emerging uprising. Here, the workers who felt betrayed by the inequity of the “New Course” made the decision to form mass resistance and enter the public realm outside the factory. While other strata joined the masses en route, they were not responsible for its emergence, a feature not seen in 1989. Nevertheless, the participation of members from other social groups demonstrates widespread dissatisfaction with the SED regime, suggesting that in the absence of Soviet suppression, 1953 could have witnessed profound changes in the GDR regime.21 If in 1953 the promulgation of the New Course was the catalyst for transforming discontent into action, then in 1989 the trigger was what Steven Pfaff terms the “exiting crisis.”22 As explained below, opposition movements had emerged in the GDR from the late 1970s onwards, but numerically they attracted very small support. However, changes on the international scene in mid-1989 altered this state of affairs.

In May, the Hungarian government started tearing down fortifications along its

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border with Austria, opening a new Fluchtweg, through which East German citizens could flee to the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). Although Hungary initially attempted to prevent a mass exodus of the East German populace, on September 11 its government announced that it would no longer deport East Germans caught in the attempt to emigrate.

As a result, emigration from the GDR intensified throughout 1989, particularly during September after the Hungarian government’s announcement.23 This situation was a crisis for the SED regime. For East Germans, every additional friend and relative who fled to the West drew attention to the mass discontent present in the GDR.24 To use Hirschmann’s model, every additional exit decreased loyalty to the regime, thus increasing the likelihood that citizens would attempt to reform the GDR from within.25 Taken aback by this sudden outpouring of the population, Honecker decided to seal the GDR’s borders and engaged in a propaganda campaign deriding exiters as “antisocial elements.” Both of these measures failed.

By keeping would-be exiters inside the GDR, the regime only increased the likelihood that they would turn to ‘voice’ in desperation. 26 By vilifying emigrants, the regime alienated more loyal citizens, who nonetheless sympathized with their fleeing friends and family, thus further increasing the probability of ‘voice.’27 GDR citizens were not convinced by the SED’s rhetoric and increasingly realized just how little power the regime had to close the Hungary gap. The result of this “exiting crisis” was that in the autumn of 1989, an increasing number of GDR citizens were ready to resort to protest in the public sphere and join forces with pre-existing forces of dissent.28 It is important to note that unlike the industrial work norms in 1953, emigration was an issue pertaining to the entire citizen body of the GDR, as emigrants were a fairly representative sample of the population.29 Thus, the trigger igniting mass resistance in 1989 was universal, while in 1953 it was worker-specific, demonstrating the distinct characters of the two events.

Whereas in 1953 strikes within the facto-

ries had acted as what Gareth Dale terms the “crystallization points,” for protest, in 1989, this distinction belonged to the churches of the Union of Evangelical-Lutheran Churches.30 In the GDR’s “society of niches,” where one’s true thoughts and actions were confined to the private sphere, the civic society and the opportunity to voice political dissatisfaction had largely been extinguished.31 In this society, the church stood as the only institution independent from the state. As a result, starting in the late 1970s, groups hoping to replant “the seeds of a civil society” found protection within the Church. Within the sheltered walls of Church sanctuaries, an initially very small number of GDR citizens found a refuge in which they could discuss political matters with those beyond their immediate social circle.32 Though small in numbers, these critical voices drew an increasingly large amount of attention throughout the 1980s.33 As the exiting crisis unfolded, the demonstrations of these dissenters acted as rallying points around which disgruntled citizens could gather. It is important to note, however, that the Church authorities themselves were not interested in challenging the regime, but rather providing sanctuary for those on the fringes of GDR society.34 Many in the Church hierarchy were content to focus on moral as opposed to political matters and exhibited an attitude towards the regime that was “respectable, loyal and piously patriotic.”35 The case of the Monday Night Peace Prayers in Leipzig, “the motor of the Revolution in the GDR,” demonstrates the role of the Church as the critical space in which organized dissent catalyzed.36 In 1981, “Peace Prayers,” espousing pacifism, were held for the first time inside the city’s Nikolaikirche. They continued throughout the decade and became increasingly politicized under Pastor Wonneberger in the late 1980s. In March 1989, instead of remaining inside the Nikolaikirche, participants began staging silent vigils in the public square around the church and then marching from there throughout the city streets following. Now, dissidents felt ready to become demonstrators. Increasingly bold and visible, these demonstrations began to catch the atten-

tion and support of passers-by, including those who would have otherwise resorted to emigration as opposed to resistant actions against the regime. Gradually, the people of Leipzig developed the understanding that “if you want to voice your grievances, St. Nicholas on Monday evening is the assembly point.”37 By the summer of 1989, the Peace Prayers attracted both those interested in reform and emigration.38 After a summer hiatus, the Peace Prayers resumed on Monday, September 4. With rising willingness to resort to voice due to the exiting crisis, the number of participants skyrocketed. This effect was evident during the Peace Prayer demonstrations on the 9th of October, the turning point of the revolution, in which 70,000 citizens participated.39 The role of the church as a “crystallization point” was not limited to Leipzig. In the northern city of Schwerin, New Forum, a citizens’ group created by intellectuals whose aim was democratic reform within the GDR, organized meetings and demonstrations in and around the city’s Paulskirche, which culminated in an October protest, where approximately 15,000 protestors created a human chain around a lake at the city’s centre.40 This situation contrasts markedly with that of 1953. Although the workers formed a large percentage of the protestors in 1989, it was not exclusively within their places of work where resistance emerged. Instead it was within and around the more public space of the church, often in conjunction with Peace Prayers, where a mix of social stratum gathered. As a result, agency for the initiation of small-scale demonstration did not rest exclusively with the workers, as was the case in 1953, but rather with the citizen whole.41 The slogan from the protest, “Wir sind das Volk” reflects this idea: protestors saw themselves not as workers, or members of a certain class, but as part of a larger, universal whole.42 The church’s centrality in 1989 can also help explain why absent from 1989 was the violent insurrection witnessed during 1953. The Peace Prayers inside the Nikolaikirche had emphasized the idea “that if [citizens] helped keep peace and order, then others would likewise restrain themselves.” Following this advice on

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October 9, protestors made efforts to contain “rowdies” and maintain a thoroughly peaceful atmosphere.43 Thus, the locations of “crystallization” in 1989 set the revolution apart from 1953, and helped imbue it with a civic character, exemplified by non-violence and a universal appeal.

The formation of intellectual citizen movements as a form of opposition during 1989 is a further indication of this civic character, distinct from 1953. These groups emerged in the spring and summer of 1989 as the exiting crisis came to a head, although they represented a continuation of the grassroots political groups that had emerged in the 1980s. Chief among them was New Forum, whose founders hoped to ignite democratic dialogue between the state and society, thereby creating an alternative to exodus.44 Unlike their predecessors, these new groups were more assertive, attempting to use the exiting crisis as an opportunity to engage in discourse with a wider public. However, this desired dialogue proved difficult to achieve.

The citizen groups generally espoused a more moderate approach than that favoured by the demonstrating masses, leading New Forum founder Jens Reich to state, “with my moderate language, I cannot get [the masses] to listen.”45 Likewise, the workers complained of the intellectuals’ aloofness to real world problems and their inability to communicate in terms comprehensible to the masses. 46 Furthermore, intellectual oppositionists were taken by surprise when mass resistance finally did develop in autumn 1989.47 Thus, these groups should not be seen as the catalyst compelling citizens to protest in 1989. Nevertheless, as Dale notes, the mere presence of these citizens’ groups helped to remove “the clouds of resignation and fear” and to create a “confident forward-thinking culture of protest.” Even if the masses knew only little about New Forum’s platform, the existence of an organized, visible political opposition group made the prospect of taking to the streets in protest less daunting; their actions “planted a flag” to which the masses could rally, even if they did not fully identify with the intelligentsia’s rhetoric.48

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Their effect on the revolution notwithstanding, the presence of these groups underscores 1989’s distinction from 1953. In 1953, the intelligentsia, having benefited materially under Stalinist economic policy, failed to supply any sort of organized intellectual backing to the uprising.49 The closest equivalents to the organizing presence of the citizens’ groups were the strike councils, which were proletarian in nature.50 Although the workers formed a majority in both cases, in 1989, the participation of intellectuals from the revolution’s inception highlights how workers were simply one group in a protesting citizen whole. 51 1989 was a revolution of a universal civic character, while 1953 was a movement initiated solely by the proletariat.

Despite their differences, 1953 and 1989 are united in that their outcomes were, to a large part, decided by Soviet military intervention, in accordance with Steininger’s idea. While resistance in 1953 was decisively squashed by Soviet troops, protest in 1989 went unopposed by Moscow, allowing for the eventual absorption of the GDR by the FRG. The uprising of June 17 represented a grave challenge to the Ulbricht administration. In the previous years, the GDR regime had managed to create discontent and alienation among wide layers of the population through measures such as coerced collectivization in the countryside and raising work norms in the factories.52 Once the workers took the initiative to pour onto the streets, this discontent caused wide swaths of the population to join in resistance. For example, in rural areas many peasants, seizing the opportunity to express their displeasure over coerced collectivization, echoed demands of the workers.53 Furthermore, the widespread demands for free elections and reunification demonstrates a deep-seated hostility to the SED regime.54 Given these conditions, it would not be outlandish to speculate that in the absence of a Soviet crackdown, these efforts could have brought about a similar outcome to that which emerged in 1989-90.55 The weak state of the GDR security apparatus strengthens this idea. The Stasi and the Kasernierte Volkspolizei were in a nascent

state, and the loyalty of many members of the police force had been shaken by the abrupt change in policy under the New Course. For this reason, only Soviet action proved capable of restoring order; however, the outbreak of sporadic resistance in July and August demonstrates the extent of hostility regime.56 In 1989, by contrast, the SED could have engaged in a violent crackdown against the October 9 Peace Prayer demonstrations, as the security apparatus had been strengthened in the wake of 1953.57 Nevertheless, the regime did not engage in a Tiananmen-style massacre. Regime leaders had left the decision to use force against protestors to local officials. This move impeded the likelihood of a crackdown, as local officials realized that repression would provoke more people to emerge from their respective private spheres.

The efficacy of the security apparatus was also compromised. First, the peaceful nature of the demonstrators, as noted above, made it more difficult for the police to find a pretext for launching violence. Second, the party militias and military police forces displayed signs of insubordination and felt little desire to attack protestors, many of whom were relatives and friends.58 As a result, October 9 came and went without a bloodbath.

No longer fearful of state repression, resistance intensified.59 However, this time around, when the SED proved unable to maintain control over the GDR, the Soviet military made no intervention. Gorbachev had begun an era of “New Thinking” in Soviet foreign policy, by which the USSR ended the Brezhnev Doctrine of intervening in the affairs of the satellite nations. In July 1989, Gorbachev issued an official revocation of the Doctrine, a decision he did not take lightly; thus, despite the increasing intensity of resistance, the Soviet Union supplied no military resources to the embattled SED regime.60 As a result, the party regime in the GDR began to unravel, starting with the removal of Honecker on October 17. Less than a year later, free elections and reunification two of the chief demands from 1953, had become reality.61 To label 1953 and 1989 as two acts in the same, long revolution overlooks the different

conditions during the two events. The uprisings of 1953 and 1989 were very much distinct instances of mass resistance. Industrial workers inside factories started the uprising of 1953, as a result of the retention of work norm increases after the announcement of the New Course. Conversely, a variety of social strata gathering in church spaces initiated the demonstrations, which would garner mass support during the exiting crisis. Revolution in 1989 also contained an intellectual movement not present in 1953, further underscoring its status as a civic revolution uniting all sections of the citizen body. Nevertheless, in both cases, the willingness of the Soviet Union to intervene, to a large extent, determined the outcome of mass resistance.

noTes 1. Steininger, Rolf. Der Anfang vom langen Ende der DDR. Munich: Olzog Verlag, 2003, 102.

2. Dale, Gareth. Popular Protest in East German, 1945-1989. New York: Routledge, 2005, 189-90.

3. Steininger, 11, 103-7.

4. Dale, 189-90.

5. Bruce, Gary. Resistance with the People: Repression and Resistance in Eastern Germany, 1945-55. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2003, 170.

Pritchard, Gareth. The Making of the GDR 1945-53. New York: Manchester Universiyty Press, 2000, 200-202.

Dale, 19.

6. Dennis, Mike. The Rise and Fall of the German Democratic Republic 1945-1990. Toronto: Pearson Eduction, 2000, 64.

7. Steininger, 39.

8. Port, Andrew I. Conflict and Stability in the German Democratic Republic. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 71-2.

9. Bruce, 179-180.

10. “We want freedom, justice and bread, otherwise we’ll strike the bigwigs dead.” Steininger, 48; Port, 76.

11. Dale, 22-3.

12. Bruce, 185, 193.

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13. Allen, Bruce. Germany East: Dissent and Opposition. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1989, 29.

14. Dale, 189.

15. Ibid., 22-3, 26.

16. Bruce, 182.

17. Dale, 27, 51.

18. Ibid., 26.

19. Bruce, 186-7.

20. Ibid., 182-3.

21. Pritchard, 210.

22. Pfaff, Steven. Exit-Voice Dynamics and the Collapse of East Germany: The Crisis of Leninism and the Revolution of 1989. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006, 107.

23. Ibid., 108-9.

24. Dale, 141.

25. Dennis 275; Grix, Jonathan. The Role of the Masses in the Collapse of the GDR. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000, 18-21.

26. Pfaff, 112.

27. Dale, 143-4.

28. Dennis, 275.

29. Dale, 144.

30. Ibid., 189.

31. Berdahl, Daphne. Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, 116-7 Grix, 36.

32. Grix, 36.

33. Pfaff, 89.

34. Opp, Karl-Dieter, Peter Voss, and Christiane Gern. Origins of a Spontaneous Revolu-

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tion: East Germany, 1989. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995, 122-4.

35. Dale, 105.

36. Ibid., 20.

37. Pfaff, 97.

38. Ibid., 94-100.

39. Dennis, 275-8.

Dale, 156.

40. Grix, 104-114.

41. Dale, 190.

42. Dennis, 277.

43. Pfaff, 128-9.

44. Dennis, 240-1, 278-9.

45. Dale, 149.

46. Ibid., 156-7.

47. Ibid., 149.

48. Ibid., 158-9.

49. Pritchard, 195.

50. Dale, 23-6 51. Prtichard, 194-6.

Dennis 68.

52. Pritchard, 220.

Dale, 17.

53. Port, 87.

54. Steininger, 14, 107.

55. Ibid., 11.

56. Dale, 31-32.

Steininger, 13.

57. Dale, 36.

Pfaff, 169.

58. Pfaff, 172-180, 187-88.

59. Dennis, 277.

60. Dale, 137.

61. Dennis, 285, 297-99.

Tramlines Sawsan Khalaf

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Contributors Hillary Amann is a U3 Honours German Studies student currently researching intermediality in the creation of Volksgemeinschaft in National Socialist film. She has a Minor in History and great enthusiasm for Eastern Europe and classical Asia.

Jurg Haller is a U2 Art History student, whose academic interests are German Expressionism, found-footage film and post-war and contemporary European art. He also makes electronic music and DJs, and currently works for a local Montreal record label.

Grace Brooks is a U4 Physics and Physiology student. She likes emergent behavior of all kinds, and is really into frizzy hair and floorlength jackets.

Alex Hamilton is currently in the final year of his undergraduate degree at McGill University, studying philosophy with a focus on the continental tradition. His academic interests include an obsession with the French (particularly anything vaguely related to the events of May ‘68), German idealism, medieval ontology, and the secret doctrines of Plato.

Emilio Comay del Junco is currently studying Philosophy and Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literatur at the Freie Universität Berlin; at McGill he is a U2 Joint Honours Philosophy and German Studies student.

Jack Deming will graduate this year with a BA Honours in German Studies. He is currently writing his undergraduate thesis on theories of linguistic attachment in Goethe’s sonnets and appendices. In his spare time he writes poetry, creative nonfiction, and music.

Danika Drury-Melnyk a U3 student majoring in History and Philosophy. She’s interested in a variety of fields including continental philosophy, nineteenth- and twentieth-century European history, and Middle Eastern history and politics.

Amy Goh’s ink-layered illustrations stitch together an encyclopedic visual repository wherein she scrutinizes and navigates memories, dreams, and the nebulous crevices of the mind. She is a U2 English Literature student; her work can be seen at www. atlantisdreaming.org.

Lynsey Grøsfjell-Hansen is a U3 Honours Anthropology student. She is interested in public health, and hopes to continue on to a second Baccalaureate degree in Midwifery.

German studies and language are among her primary extracurricular interests.

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Karl Hart is a U2 History and German Language and Literature student. He is interested in modern German and Central European history as well as the history of European colonization. He is spending this semester studying at Albert-LudwigsUniversität-Freiburg.

Joseph Henry is a U3 Joint Honours Art History and German Studies student and the current Coordinating Editor of Vielfalt. He is interested in researching the video work of Wolf Vostell and the visual culture of the RAF. Émilie Horrocks-Denis graduated from McGill University in the winter of 2011, where she studied Honours Political Science and German language. She is currently working as an English teaching assistant in Berlin, Germany, and plans on pursuing graduate studies in Political Science next fall.

Sawsan Khalaf is a U2 Development Studies major.

International

Ricky Kreitner graduates this year with a degree in Philosophy. He’d like to thank Professor George di Giovanni for agreeing to be interviewed and for continuing, year after year, to do his thing.

Jurg Haller Nicole Leonard is a U2 Honors Political Science student. She’s specifically interested in the social dynamics behind politics and women’s studies, and writes for The McGill Daily and currently acts as editor for Intersections.

He has been developing an interest in photography, while freelancing around the city, acting as Photo Editor for The McGill Daily for the second year, and interning at a studio last summer.

Peter Shyba is a U2 History and International Development Studies and current Health and Education editor at The McGill Daily and an editor at The Prognosis, McGill’s undergraduate journal of public health.

Aaron Vansintjan is U3 Joint Honours Environment and Philosophy, studying on how our habits form our habitat, and vice versa. He enjoys photographing how old and new technologies co-exist, how different cultures live amongst these assemblages, and how people manage local landscapes with global technologies.

Victor Tangermann is a U2 Philosophy and International Development Studies student.

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Mcgill university, MontrĂŠal Cover by aaron vansintjan