Vielfalt 3: 2012-13

Cover photo: Valentine Dohn

V I ELFA LT

Vielfalt MCGILL GERMAN STUDIES STUDENT JOURNAL STUDENTENZEITSCHRIFT DER MCGILL GERMANISTIK REVUE ÉTUDIANTE D’ÉTUDES ALLEMANDES DE MCGILL

VOLUME 3 | 2012—13

VOLUME 3 | 2013

COVER PHOTO: VALENTINE DOHN

Vielfalt MCGILL GERMAN STUDIES STUDENT JOURNAL STUDENTENZEITSCHRIFT DER MCGILL GERMANISTIK REVUE ÉTUDIANTE D’ÉTUDES ALLEMANDES DE MCGILL

VOLUME 3 | 2012—13

MCGILL UNIVERSITY MONTRÉAL

COORDINATING EDITOR: Emilio Comay del Junco

EDITORIAL BOARD: Maximilian Amendy, Robin Basalaev-Binder, Élora Bussière-Ladouceur, Sophie Chauvet, Gregory Corosky, Karl Hart, Joseph Henry, Jennifer Huang, Kaj Huddart, Lauren Pires, Matthew Shields

CONTRIBUTORS: Carolyn Bailey, Guillaume Benoit-Martineau, Vincent Calabrese, Matthew Chung, Christina Colizza, Valentine Dohn, Danika DruryMelnyk, Joseph Henry, Elliot Holzman, Elias Kühn von Burgsdorff, Scott Leydon, Samuel Neuberg, Marcus Oosenburg, Katrina Sark, Peter Shyba, Noah Tavlin

SPECIAL THANKS: We would like to extend our thanks to the Arts Undergraduate Society, the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at McGill University and to the Goethe-Intitut-Montréal for their generous support. Additional thanks to the The McGill Daily/Le Délit for the use of their facilities.

Vielfalt VOLUME 3

EDITOR’S NOTE | VORWORT.............. 1 MIRRORS ALWAYS [SEE] THE TRUTH: MIRRORS AND SADOMASOCHISM IN Emilio Comay del Junco FASSBINDER’S MARTHA ................ 51 UNRAVELLING THE SOCIAL FABRIC: Christina Colizza THE POLITICS OF FASHION ETHICS AND THE NOUMENA: THE IN THE GDR ...................................... 3 POST-KANTIAN PROBLEMATIC IN Matthew Chung THE WORKS OF KLEIST................. 55 Vincent Calabrese STAUB ALS FORM UND WESENHEIT BEIM DIVAN...................15 ACCOUNTING FOR POST-SOCIALIST Joseph Henry NOSTALGIA IN RECENT GERMAN FILM ................................ 59 EYE OF DER STURM: HERWARTH WALDEN AND EXPRESSIONISM .... 21 Elliot Holzman Danika Drury-Melnyk

CINEMA, NAZISM, AND SOLIDARITY: LE DIALOGUE SILENCIEUX .............29 ‘UNITY’ AND THE APPEAL OF Guillaume Benoit-Martineau RIEFENSTAHL’S TRIUMPH OF THE WILL ............................................... 65 PROPHETIC TRAGEDIES: FATALISM, Elias Kuhn von Burgsdorff FUCKING, DISEASEDNESS AND VICTIMHOOD IN QUERELE ............. 35 CONTRIBUTORS......... 70 Scott Leydon

FREUDO-MARXIST IDEOLOGY IN 1930S BERLIN: WHY DOES IT MATTER?......................................41 Peter Shyba

FEATURING ART BY: Carolyn Bailey, Valentine Dohn, Joseph Henry, Samuel Neuberg, Marcus Oosenburg, Katrina Sark, Noah Tavlin

JOSEPH HENRY

EDITORS’ NOTE

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nterdisciplinatirty has been central to our goals since Vielfalt was first conceivedtwo years ago; publishing a wide variety of work that goes beyond literary studies in both its objects and methodology has remained central to our aims. Rather than selecting work on the basis of its disciplinary origins, we have done so almost exclusively by making a relationship to some aspect of German history or culture in the broadest sense. That the only real unity within this journal comes from a common German-ness of the objects of study is certainly true, but need not be taken to be a weakness, but its greatest strength.

Intellectual links emerge in the pages of this issue not only between the pair of essays dealing with different aspects of sexuality in the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, but also in the two cultural histories of the former East Germany – one about fashion in the GDR and the other analyzing “Ostalgie” in recent German film – or the pair of essays describing early 20th century German culture, concerning the media of German expresssionism on the one hand and the history of psychoanalysis on the other. And it must not be assumed that we’ve forgotten about literature itself: this issue contains remarkable studies of Goethe and Paul Celan.

Finally, the radicality of our editorial approach should also not be over emphasized: after all, what I have described is not something new, but simply literary studies and German studies at its best.

–Emilio Comay del Junco

VORWORT

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ls Vielfalt vor zwei Jahren erst konzipiert wurde, stand die Interdisziplinarität in erster Linie. Wir haben damals vor allem danach gestrebt, Arbeiten, die in ihren Gegenständen sowie in ihrer Methodologie über die traditionellen Grenzen der Germanistik hinausgingen, zu veröffentlichen. Statt Werke aufgrund ihrer disziplinären Herkunft auszuwählen, haben wir sie im breitesten Sinne aufgrund ihrer Beziehung zu einer Facette der deutschen Kultur oder Geschichte gewählt. Dass die einzig wirkliche Einheit dieser Zeitschrift aus einem gemeinsamen Blick auf etwas Deutsches besteht ist zwar richtig, muss aber nicht deswegen als eine Art Zerrissenheit angenommen werden. Ihre Vielfalt ist ihre größte Stärke.

Mehrere Beiträge dieser Ausgabe stehen in gewissen Zusammenhängen zueinander. Nicht nur zwischen den zwei Behandlungen verschiedener Aspekte der Darstellung der Sexualität im Werk Rainer Werner Fassbinders entstehen intellektuelle Verknüpfungen in diesem Band.

Auch zwischen den zwei kulturgeschichtlichen Arbeiten über die DDR – der einen, die die Mode in Ostdeutschland behandelt, und der anderen, die eine Analyse der “Ostalgie” im neueren Deutschen Film vornimmt – bestehen Zusammanhänge. Des Weiteren, sind luzide Darstellungen der Kultur des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland mitinbegriffen: Wir haben einerseits eine Arbeit über die Medien des deutschen Expressionismus, und dann dürfen sich die LeserInnen auf eine Arbeit über die Geschichte der Psychoanalyse in Deutschland freuen. Es soll trotz Allem nicht angenommen werden, dass wir die Analyse der Literatur völlig aufgegeben haben, denn auch diese Ausgabe enthält ausgezeichnete Interpretationen von Goethe und Celan.

Abschliessend soll die Radikalität unseres redaktionellen Vorganges jedoch nicht zu viel betont werden. Unsere Beschreibung der Interdisziplinarität dieser Zeitschrift ist nicht unbedingt etwas Neues, sie trifft ganz bestimmt auf eine unserer Meinung nach generellere Bestimmung der Literaturwissenschaften und der Germanitik im Allgemeinen –Emilio Comay del Junco

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JOSEPH HENRY

UNRAVELLING THE SOCIAL FABRIC THE POLITICS OF FASHION IN THE GDR

MATTHEW CHUNG INTRODUCTION

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hile scholars may have trivialized consumer interest in clothing until the early 1990s, the leadership of the GDR came to understand the very real politics associated with fashion.1 The regime attempted to foster a distinctly “socialist fashion” in order to instill “socialist consumer habits” and to confront Western fashion in the Cold War cultural contest. Historian Djurdja Bartlett nonetheless insists that, “socialist fashion was always simply a discourse, with little concern with reality.”2 In the end, socialist fashion promoted by fashion shows and women’s magazines remained at odds with offerings in shop windows. This essay therefore argues that within the politicized sphere of consumption in the GDR, this dearth of fashionable clothing would prove detrimental to the legitimacy of the regime. In this way, this case study positions itself within the body of literature that examines the collapse of state socialism in relation to “the inability to match goods to promises and reality to the aspirations they raised through their own pronouncements, and by the failure to balance consumer interests with those of the militaryindustrial complex.”3 Other case studies of consumption have examined “the increasing inclination of the East German population to link economic performance, as measured by the supply of consumer products, to questions of political legitimacy.”4 A body of literature now posits the automobile as “a revealing artefact in the archaeology of late socialist society.”5 Clothing, however, has characteristics that would seem to distinguish it from other consumer goods. Given its association with both need and luxury, clothing can be displaced from the economic to cultural sphere when it is transformed from the everyday object into the phenomenon of fashion. Moreover, its

daily contact with the bodies of East German citizens made the political meaning of clothing more apparent relative to other consumer goods.6 In the words of historian Judd Stitziel, “clothing was on the front line of everyday relations between the citizens of the GDR and their state.”7

FABRICATING “SOCIALIST FASHION” Can fashion, in the words of Bartlett, “start from zero”?8 As Stitziel writes, the Stunde Null or the “zero hour” following the Second World War “was far from a totally blank slate.”9 In the wake of the collapse of National Socialism, debates soon emerged over the relative merits of a market versus planned economy. In the Soviet-occupied zone, the place of fashion in a socialist society and command economy figured in discussions of the contours of the society under construction. Yet cultural theorists failed to heed the warnings of the preceding political regime. After all, Wilhelm Vershofen of the Nazi Society for Research on Consumption claimed, “You cannot create fashion.”10 Still, much of the rhetoric emphasized a radical break with the past. Die Frau von heute, the socialist women’s magazine, captured the zeitgeist of early 1946: Today we have in Germany, as a result of Hitler’s war of conquest, neither raw materials nor processing industries that could be the basis for a fashion. The fashion goddess is, like so many other false gods, dethroned. Her “leadership principle” [Führerprinzip] is over. No, here there’s no fashion in the previous sense and there won’t be for any years to come. But what will take its place? That is a new problem.11 Despite its pronouncement of a break with the sartorial past, this statement also speaks to

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the material conditions that would ultimately subvert this ideal. In an ironic way, the earliest discourses on clothing emphasized the imperative to “make new from old,” one that had been preached by the Nazi regime throughout the war years. The first fashion shows held in Berlin featured the Flickenkleid, described by the press as “the height of fashion.”12 The patchwork dress was accessorized by gloves crocheted from the threads of unwoven sugar sacks and a handbag woven from the straps of gas masks. The women’s press fostered the already ubiquitous practice of self-fashioning clothing by providing paper patterns to its readership. Stitziel maintains that the political leadership and consumers alike understood the imperative to “make new from old” as “making a virtue out of necessity in order to cope with a presumably temporary situation.”13 However, the inclusion of such paper patterns in the women’s press constituted a tacit admission that consumers would have to compensate for the shortcomings of industry.

The provision of consumer goods was a challenge common to the authorities of each zone of occupation. In their negotiation of the contours of the society under reconstruction, authorities in the Soviet zone deemed “the path to a better future […] lay exclusively in the primacy of heavy industry.” Historian Mark Landsman writes, “this emphasis on capital goods, however, necessarily came at the expense of consumption goods.”14 This policy was therefore reminiscent of that enacted by the Nazi regime during the war years.

A number of factors ultimately played a role in this orientation of the economy. The need to reconstruct infrastructure damaged by war required investment in the production of iron and steel. At the same time, the Soviet Union continued to demand reparations in the form of raw materials and capital goods. In addition, trade was directed to the socialist countries of the Soviet bloc that had less need for products of light industry such as textiles, traditionally produced in eastern Germany, than they did for heavy industrial goods. Beset with these economic imperatives, the political leadership thereby “consigned [the] population to an indefinitely prolonged condition of sacrifice and want, combined with vague promises of a bet-

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ter future.”15 Given their memories of enticement and deprivation under the Third Reich, the question remained of when the patience of East German consumers would ultimately become frayed.

The threat that fashion poses to market rationality has been acknowledged time and again by economic historians.16 That German women, while adhering to the imperative “to make new from old,” attempted to make their improvised clothes as attractive as possible would imply that consumerist desires for fashion had emerged by the late 1940s. On the one hand, the crux of socialist consumer politics in the postwar era was the satisfaction of needs. Yet a fundamental hierarchy was also established in socialist discourse between such “basic needs” as the need to clothe oneself and other “higher needs.”

Fashion was relegated to the latter category and “the cultural superstructure built on a material and economic base.”17 Therefore the East German political leadership initially viewed fashion as a challenge to the society and economy oriented to satisfaction of basic needs. Stitziel writes, “Frau Mode’s whims directly undermined state socialism’s drive toward planning the economy and steering societal development through well-ordered and predictable production and consumption.”18 Those cultural theorists who objected to a place for fashion within a socialist society resorted to the construct of women as slaves to fashion.

In this way, Frau Mode ultimately personified irrational feminine desire and was often portrayed as a capricious and impulsive woman. In order to resist her bouts of moodiness, which were ostensibly influenced by “capitalist designers,” the new socialist woman was to comply with the rules of Herr Geschmack, Mister Taste. To these ends, the East German political leadership could draw upon habits already instilled in consumers.

Landsman observes, “there was a recent German precedent for the notion that consumers could be educated and consumption guided in ways desired by the state,” an ostensible reference to Nazi policy.19 In state discourse of the 1940s, good taste was constructed so as to make virtue of the limits to the economy of shortage. It connoted the values of moderation, simplicity and practicality. Stitziel writes, “officials emphasized the

JOSEPH HENRY ‘timelessness’ of good taste in order to encourage slow, gradual change in styles, colors, and types of apparel and thus to match industry’s production needs and capabilities.”20 In response to a proposal to remodel the Berlin apparel industry in 1955, an East German official asserted, “one cannot plan fashion.”21 Nonetheless at this time, party leaders initiated a new attempt to incorporate fashion once and for all into the centralized economic plan. As the preceding discussion of the moodiness of Frau Mode would indicate, at stake was the larger issue of how to reconcile consumption with production. In the aim “to help overcome the perceived irreconcilable conflict between inflexible production and dynamic fashion,” the German Fashion Institute introduced the centrally designed Modelinie der DDR in 1955.22 The display of these models on runways and in the pages of women’s magazines was to shape demand and prime consumers for their appearance in shop windows shortly thereafter.

Perhaps unbeknown to the SED, these were the same advertising techniques of the central dress institute of the same name under the Third Reich. As a means to avoid the appearance of a diktat from above and to accommodate individual enterprises, deviation from the fashion line was

allowed but within certain bounds. Proposals included variations in color and pattern in addition to simple modifications to a basic cut.

As will be subsequently discussed, in this way, socialist fashion in East Germany had only laid the basis of its own demise.

That the East German political leadership attributed a new urgency to fashion was also concomitant with the rise of consumer society in West Germany by the early 1950s. Landsman describes “a nascent, uncoordinated consumer supply lobby within the planning apparatus” that emerged within the SED party after 1953.23 Whereas both socialism and capitalism promised the satisfaction of needs, in the words of historian David Crew, “consumption and the quality of everyday life rapidly emerged as important battlefields upon which the East-West conflict would be fought.”24 Given the “public” quality of clothing, fashion served as one of the most tangible measures of the material successes and thus the political legitimacy of each system.

One East German official addressed this idea: Visitors to the GDR measure the state of our development in large part by the impression that they receive from the offerings, the street scene, and the clothing of

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our people. If the clothing is poor, one will speak disrespectfully about us, one will say, “they can’t even dress themselves properly and yet want to construct socialism.” After all, people are inclined to measure the value of the one or the other society starting out with the things of their daily lives, with the external world of appearances.25 Some historians have responded to the now hegemonic body of literature that advances consumerism as a significant factor in the final collapse of the GDR. For instance, Ina Merkel rejects the retrospective narrative that emphasizes the ultimate failures of the East German economy. She claims its structure was “one attempt among many others to find solutions for similar problems.” For his part, Landsman insists, “we still know little about the initial stages of the Cold War contest of prosperity as it played out on either side of Checkpoint Charlie.”27 Thus far, comparisons between the early discourses on fashion in the two German states have only been made in passing. Stitziel, for instance, devotes a single sentence in his monograph to the topic.28 Therefore a comparative examination may respond to the concerns of Merkel and Landsman and contribute to the historiography of postwar consumption in at least two ways. It may challenge a similar linear narrative of the West German Wirtschaftswunder. It also serves to illustrate the common dilemmas in the sphere of consumption common to both régimes in the immediate postwar years. In this way, through an analysis of primary documents from the British-occupied zone, one may gain insight into the similar challenges faced by the authorities in the corresponding Soviet-occupied zone.

Anny Ruffing, in her article, “A Critique of Dior’s Ideas,” recreates both the form and content of the passage from Die Frau von heute quoted at length above. In a tone of despair, she speaks to the common imperative to “make new from old” in the face of material destruction. Yet she also describes the hope that new fashions would usher in a future of material prosperity: We here, amid ruins, poverty and the struggle for existence, do not hear much about fashion and her ways. […] A num-

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ber of expensive fashion magazines give us glimpses into the fashion of other countries where life has already returned to normal, which we can only hope for in the future. […] We, however, live in the shadow of two terrible wars, on top of destroyed foundations, and in the midst of reconstruction and the struggle for existence. We hope that we will soon find a lifestyle that allows working women and girls the opportunity to dress fashionably and imaginatively.29 While the possibility ‘to dress fashionably and imaginatively’ would therefore connote a break with the postwar destruction, the future of affluence would present its own particular challenges. The author also considers the apparent irrationality of female consumers that would undermine the rationality of mass production, a construct shared by both the East and West German political leadership. It does so through its critique of the French designer, Christian Dior, who had launched his “New Look” one year prior: It would seem that Mr. Dior has exploited underlying feminine frivolity in his very fashionable designs. It hs been said that he has a worldwide empire […] However, it has been proven on more than one occasion that the world is not a fashion magazine and in fashion, as in reality, the dictator always encounters his limits.30 At least in socialist discourses on fashion, the moodiness of Frau Mode was “dictated by Western, capitalist designers.”31 The designer cum dictator would then ‘encounter his limits’ if women were educated to become rational consumers, an effort that was undertaken by the women’s press in the British and Sovietoccupied zones alike. Two years later, this same author described the notion of good taste: Stylish and elegant is what emphasizes restraint and appeals to modesty. The emphasis is on the beauty of lines, meticulous workmanship and an overall harmonious image.32

An anonymous author elaborated on these principles in an article entitled “You Too Can be Well Dressed.” Form and content would seem contradictory. Yet the juxtaposition of images of women clad in the latest fashions with text evoking the slogan of “make new from old” would ostensibly inspire women to fashion their own stylish apparel. The readership could ultimately look forward to the day when such models would be readily offered in store windows.

And you too, factory girls and secretaries, can be well dressed. It is not expensive at all. It is less a question of money than good taste. You just need a good hand to clothe yourself and an eye for what suits you, you alone. And you must know that you are not the Baroness of Kokenheim or Elvira Camara whose clothes therefore do not suit you. […] You are a pretty but simple factory girl. You are a nice, modest bank apprentice. Simple, plain clothing suits you best. Simple does not mean cheap or shabby.33 Nonetheless the emergence of a consumer society in West Germany by the early 1950s was not without its setbacks. The author of the article below expresses the scepticism common to women in both West and East toward the new economic order in addition to the experience of having their sartorial demands torn apart: Today, the purchase of a winter coat has become quite the affair and when this fall, having put together our savings, we go forth to make the purchase with some hesitation.

A winter coat must last and must remain in style as long as possible so as to avoid another unnecessary purchase. Will we have to pay a steep price for a coat of good quality? Will it match our wardrobe and will we be able to wear it for the next few years? So we ask ourselves these questions, running from one shop window to another, and by the end of our Sunday afternoon, we find ourselves empty-handed.34

While the subject in the end finds ‘the right one’ after considerable effort, given her skepticism toward the economy, she makes a new jacket from an old coat. Nonetheless through this act, she nonetheless acknowledges that she would have to fashion what the economy, at least for the time being, could not produce. While this practice may have ultimately receded in West Germany over time, this essay argues that its continued prevalence in the GDR constituted a challenge to the political legitimacy of that regime.

TEARS ALONG THE SEAMS OF “SOCIALIST FASHION” Any expectation that the East German economy would deliver the Modelinie der DDR to consumers became undone at state fashion shows. At the biannual Berlin Fashion Week, first held in August 1958, the public observed the creation of dresses from sketches to final product. However, this display did not lessen their doubts. Stitziel writes, “the displayed models generally were either one-of-a-kind, handmade garments or supposedly would be produced six to twelve months later in series sizes of only two hundred to three hundred, of which four-fifths or more would be exported.”35 Through entries in the guestbook of the second Berlin Fashion Week in February 1959, one may assess, to a certain extent, the response of those twenty thousand in attendance to the centrally designed fashion line. Many ultimately spoke to their skepticism in light of their own experiences of shopping. For example, one individual expressed her reservation in a sarcastic tone, “it would be desirable if the models would make it into production; and that hopefully before 1965.”36 The last Berlin Fashion Week took place only three years after these comments had been written. As Bartlett implies, “the contrast with everyday reality had become too obvious.”37 The writer Anna Seghers described how the models of the centrally designed Modelinie der DDR would materialize in the lives of consumers. She wrote, “by drawing the observer into the shop window, it is clear from where she is able to buy all these good and lovely things to

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which she is entitled as a working woman of the people.”38 The consumer was therefore not at fault when she evaluated the material successes of socialism not by the displays of fashion shows but rather those of store windows. Anthropologist Nancy Ries describes the prevalence of “tales of heroic shopping” in the period of late Soviet socialism.39 East German women described similar efforts to have their specific sartorial desires fulfilled and in the late 1940s, they began to embark on trips from store to store and even from city to city. On the other hand, while it had attempted to educate consumers in “socialist consumer habits,” the political leadership frequently observed the practice of impulse purchases. In the economy of shortage, this Hamsterkauf could be later traded or sold.40 In any case, the most common experience of consumers was to receive the response of shop personnel of “Hamwanich” or “don’t have it.”41 As a result of the disconnect between production and trade, displays on runways rarely appeared in store windows. The Modelinie der DDR ultimately did not comply with the capabilities of industry in that it “often required materials or production processes that were either unavailable or prohibitively expensive.”42 In addition, although the German Fashion Institute issued officially sanctioned images of the centrally designed fashion line, individual women’s magazines often reinterpreted them along their own lines. This problem of representation therefore only served to distort expectations of consumers.

Stitziel posits that Exquisit shops, which offered high fashion for sale, may also have also been a factor in the demise of Berlin Fashion Week. He explains, “Exquisit could serve simultaneously as showcase and as store, overcoming the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the fashion-show runway and the store shelf.”43 The inauguration of the chain in 1964 was ultimately foreshadowed by the controversy associated with that of the Sibylle boutique six years prior.

While the Exquisit shops were in a similar way intended to secure the loyalty of the upper social strata, Die Frau von heute revealed its proletarian ideals and “attacked the fashionable sack dresses and extravagant evening wear on offer, declaring that they were only appropriate for a dinner

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with Monaco’s Prince Rainier III.”44 The article then quoted women who criticized its offerings for being “out of touch with the tastes and true wishes of the GDR’s working women.”45 Therefore at the crux of the controversy were the high prices associated with these high fashions. Nonetheless by the early 1970s, some East German consumers had come to view Exquisit “often as the last possibility for the satisfaction of a specific purchase wish.”46 Given the high prices associated with Exquisit or the lack of offerings in the displays of other stores, consumers had recourse to other means to fulfill their sartorial desires. That store purchases accounted for a small percentage of East German wardrobes, for example, one-third of all women’s outerwear, spoke to the prevalence of informal channels and alternative practices.47 The relative share of self-made clothing ultimately increased during the 1970s and up until the collapse of the GDR. In this way, East German women continued to take wartime imperative to “make new from old” to heart. If one was deficient in skills required to be a self-sufficient seamstress, then one could always hire a dressmaker. This practice that was still more affordable compared to the purchase of clothing from stores.

As the imperative “to make new from old” was seen as a make-do measure in the immediate postwar years, this practice came under increasing public attack by the late 1960s. In spite of this rhetoric, it would seem that the political leadership was somewhat ambivalent toward its complete abolishment. As Bartlett observes, at this time, women’s magazines otherwise continued to publish do-it-yourself columns and paper patterns for fashionable models. However, she contends that the latter was consistent with the larger ends of making demand consistent with production in that “they provided templates for desirable dresses, without the regime’s having any obligation to deliver the finished product.”48 On the other hand, such publications as Sibylle also continued to report on fashion trends from Florence, Vienna, New York, London, and Paris thereby informing its readers of the material prosperity on the other side of the Cold War divide. In an ironic way, the reason given for the new rhetoric attack on the self-provision of clothing was that it “contradicted many of

the SED’s ideological and social welfare goals.”49 This theme will be discussed in the subsequent section of the essay.

CONCLUSION: UNRAVELLING THE SOCIAL FABRIC A woman of a certain age can and will not wear the panties that are offered. In the GDR, not all women are young ice princesses and exquisitely slim comrades. It cannot possibly be that our somewhat fullfigured workers and farmers continue to be punished by the fashion industry forty years after the founding of our republic.50 Over the course of the film Good Bye, Lenin!

Hanna Schäfer pens a number of entreaties to the East German authorities, such as the one quoted above. While they undoubtedly represent minor plot devices ancillary to her characterization, might it be significant that they all describe the poor quality of clothing in shop windows? Employing comparable rhetorical devices, a number of East German citizens wrote similar petitions to official institutions in which they described the discrepancy between displays on runways and those in shop windows. While the role of these petitions in the collapse of the GDR should not be reified, in this way, writers of these petitions ultimately addressed the larger question of political legitimacy.

Political anthropologist Katherine Verdery contends that in the context of an economy of shortage, “consumption became deeply politicized.”51 The insignificance of votes at the ballot box was also a factor in this phenomenon.

Nonetheless the codified right of consumers to appeal to the highest authorities served as an ersatz public sphere in which to voice their discontent. The 1953 Directive about the Examination of Suggestions and Complaints of Workers guaranteed “the legal right of average citizens to write letters to government officials asking for help with their daily problems.”52 The number of Eingaben received by official state institutions ultimately began to increase to a significant extent in the 1960s. If, in the words of historian Katherine Pence, “Eingaben are a valuable source for examining popular opinion

in the GDR,”53 then anger toward economic conditions constituted a threat to the political order by the late 1980s. Werner Jarowinsky, the Politburo member responsible for trade, warned in 1988, “some questions concerning consumer goods are being put more aggressively, for example in petitions. We cannot afford a trial of strength to the breaking point.”54 The “object of misery” of a certain Gertrude was “not some exaggerated demands, but rather very simply plain, dark gray bouclé that one repeatedly presents to us as exhibition pieces in convention centers, exhibition halls, and store windows.”55 Despite her localized discussion, Gertrude, like other petitioners, could ultimately link her own individual frustrations to the larger economic system and thereby call into question the political legitimacy of the regime. On the one hand, a common tendency of a writer was to portray herself as a generalized, representative consumer and thus claim authority to speak on behalf of all women. Statements such as “I am certain that this not only affects me but rather many other women” reflected this notion.56 In an even more politically subversive way, one could point to the moral bankruptcy of the regime in that “prosperity for all was the declared goal of socialist consumption policy.”57 This notion became and more problematic for the political leadership of the GDR as the years went by. Party propaganda in the 1940s and 1950s emphasized the deferment of consumerist desires during the construction of a socialist society. When these principles were applied to fashion, the political leadership had concluded by the 1960s, “with the progressive socialist development, the working population has the right to make ever higher demands especially on clothing.”58 Bartlett contends, “consumption and fashion practices were legitimized through a series of tactic deals that can be traced between the respective socialist regimes and their nascent middle classes.”59 Thus “as much as the appearance of the middle classes had been instrumental in the establishment of socialist fashion, their role in its demise was equally critical.”60 Bartlett concludes that fashion was a specter that would haunt socialism until its demise.61 One month prior to the consumer crisis of 17 June 1953 that would shake the SED regime to

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its core, the head of the State Commission for Trade and Supply expressed her indignation toward “the criticism the population brings to bear on the quality of the ready-made clothing, knitted goods, stockings, and shoes produced by light industry is completely ignored.”62 Yet historian David Crew contends, “after the 1953 uprising, these grievances did not seriously threaten the political power of the SED until the very end of the GDR.”63 How then does one account for the stability of the regime in the face of the sartorial demands of the East German population? Historian Jonathan Zatlin writes, “the primary purpose of the petition system […] lay in preventing political fall-out from consumer discontent by preventing individuals with similar complaints from organizing themselves.”64 Thus while petitioners may have claimed authority to speak on the behalf of others or linked their frustration to larger economic or political deficiencies, “the complaints expressed by individual consumers were reduced to their singularity.”65 In that most consumers presented specific problems or circumstances, the political leadership attempted to justify if not actually resolve them. Stitziel explains how “state officials ordered manufacturers or retailers to provide complaints with specific articles, met with consumers in their homes to discuss provisioning problems, and even accompanied individuals to stores in search of specific items.”66 Such acts implied that the political and economic system “despite its highly visible and dramatic flaws, was fundamentally sound and legitimate and could be reformed through relatively localized, cosmetic measures.”67 A final question therefore emerges. If the sartorial desires of East German consumers had the potential to subvert its legitimacy, why had the SED regime not acknowledged them sooner? As evidenced by the inclusion of do-it-yourself columns and paper patterns in women’s magazines, the political leadership tolerated and even encouraged the practice in that “it provided partial solutions to problems beyond the purview of the plan.”68 Moreover, given the association of fashion with “false needs” in socialist discourse, “the SED was unable to perceive the threat to its legitimacy inherent in the political discontent arising from

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shortages of consumer goods.”69

NOTES 1. See Valerie Steele, “The F Word,” Lingua Franca 1 (1991): 16-20.

2. Djurdja Bartlett, Fashion East: The Spectre that Haunted Socialism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 8.

3. David Crowley and Susan Reid, “Introduction,” in Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 16.

4. Jonathan Zatlin, “The Vehicle of Desire: The Trabant, the Wartburg and the End of the GDR.” German History 15 (1997): 358.

5. Crowley and Reid, 24.

6. For a theoretical discussion of the publicprivate dichotomy as applied to clothing, see Carol Turbin, “Refashioning the Concept of Public-Private: Lessons from Dress Studies,” Journal of Women’s History 15 (2003).

7. Judd Stitziel, Fashioning Socialism: Clothing, Politics and Consumer Culture in East Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 20.

8. Bartlett, 1.

9. Stitziel, Fashioning Socialism, 1.

10. Hartmut Berghoff, “Enticement and Regulation: The Regulation of Consumption in Pre-War Nazi Germany,” in The Politics of Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 179.

11. G. Berger, “Frau Mode – Entschleiert,” Die Frau von heute (February 1946): 23 cited in Judd Stitziel, “On the Seam between Socialism and Capitalism: East German Fashion Shows,” in Consuming Germany in the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 52.

12. Irene Guenther, Nazi Chic: Fashioning Women in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 264.

13. Stitziel, Fashioning Socialism, 50.

14. Mark Landsman, Dictatorship and Demand: The Politics of Consumerism in East Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 17.

15. Ibid, 29.

16. Erica Carter, How German Is She? Postwar West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 231.

17. Stitziel, Fashioning Socialism, 15.

18. Stitziel, “On the Seam between Socialism and Capitalism,” 57.

19. Landsman, 97.

20. Stitziel, Fashioning Socialism, 55.

21. Stitziel, “On the Seam between Socialism and Capitalism,” 57.

22. Stitziel, Fashioning Socialism, 70.

23. Landsman, 91.

24. David Crew, “Introduction,” in Consuming Germany in the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 2.

25. Cited in Stitziel, Fashioning Socialism, 21.

26. Crew, 3.

27. Landsman, 3.

28. Stitziel, Fashioning Socialism, 55.

29. Anny Ruffing, “Kritik an Herrn Diors Einfällen,” Aufwärts: Jugendzeitschrift des Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes, 17 July 1948, 7. This quotation, like all the preceding ones in this section of the essay, is my own translation.

30. Idem.

31. Stitziel, “On the Seam between Socialism and Capitalism,” 56.

32. Anny Ruffing, “Herbstliche Mode— Übersicht,” Aufwärts: Jugendzeitschrift des Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes, 23 September 1950, 7.

33. “Auch Du kannst gut angezogen sein,” Aufwärts: Jugendzeitschrift des Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes, 11 December 1952, 8.

34. “Wie finden wir den Richtigen,” Aufwärts: Jugendzeitschrift des Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes, 24 September 1949, 7.

35. Stitziel, “On the Seam between Socialism and Capitalism,” 69.

36. Ibid, 72.

37. Bartlett, 170.

38. Anna Seghers, “Das Schaufenster unserer Zeit,” Die Waage, October 1951, 1. cited In Landsman, 96.

39. Nancy Ries, Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation during Perestroika (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 52.

40. Daphne Berdahl, Where the World Ended:

Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 121.

41. Stitziel, Fashioning Socialism, 145.

42. Ibid, 73.

43. Stitziel, “On the Seam between Socialism and Capitalism,” 73.

44. Bartlett, 147.

45. Stitziel, Fashioning Socialism, 126.

46. Ibid, 140.

47. Ibid, 149.

48. Bartlett, 244.

49. Stitziel, Fashioning Socialism, 151.

50. Good Bye Lenin!, DVD, directed by Wolfgang Becker (Berlin: X Verleih AG, 2003).

Translation of the original German subtitles is my own.

51. Berdahl, 122.

52. Katherine Pence, “’You as a Woman Will Understand’: Consumption, Gender and the Relationship between State and Citizenry in the GDR’s Crisis of 17 June 1953,” German History 19 (2001): 234.

53. Ibid, 235.

54. Zatlin, 379.

55. Cited in Stitziel, Fashioning Socialism, 155.

56. Ibid, 159.

57. Ina Merkel, “Luxury in Socialism: An Absurd Proposition?” in Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc, 68.

58. Stitziel, Fashioning Socialism, 20.

59. Bartlett, 182.

60. Ibid, 240 61. Ibid, 12.

62. Landsman, 110.

63. Crew, 6.

64. Zatlin, 375.

65. Ibid, 376.

66, Stitziel, Fashioning Socialism, 160.

67. Idem.

68. Zatlin, 372 69. Ibid, 379.

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FACING PAGE TOP: CAROLYN BAILEY, MATERIAL WITNESS #1, FACING PAGE BOTTOM: CAROLYN BAILEY, MATERIAL WITNESS#3 THIS PAGE: CAROLYN BAILEY, MATERIAL WITNESS #7

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NOAH TAVLIN, REQUIEM FOR BEACHED EAGLES

14

STAUB ALS FORM UND WESENHEIT BEIM WEST-ÖSTLICHEN DIVAN

JOSEPH HENRY

„Ich aber sah nachdenklich auf die Zeichen, die verwischt im Staube zu unsern Füßen standen. Und der unvergängliche Vers zog majestätisch durch die Wölbung dieser Geschichte wie durch ein Tor“1 –Walter Benjamin, „‚Dem Staub, dem beweglichen, eingezeichnet’“ Wie Walter Benjamin in seiner Novelle beschreibt – benannt nach einem Vers aus Goethes West-östlichen Divan – trägt Staub die Fähigkeit, Signifikationen („Zeichen“) zu verbergen und die Aufmerksamkeit zu ergreifen. Durch diese Aktion entsteht eine bestimmte Kraft der Poesie, etwas fast göttliches oder heiliges, und ein gewisser Bereich der Unvergänglichkeit.

Staub ist vielleicht der unauffälligste Stoff der irdischen Existenz, unbestimmt, und fast immer in der Form einer Abstraktion. Aber Staub enthält das Vermögen, durch Zeit und künstlichen Ausdruck („Geschichte“) anzudauern. Der vorliegende Aufsatz behandelt die Frage, wie Goethe das Motiv des „Staubs“ im Divan einsetzt, um Vorstellungen vom Göttlichen und abstrakter Form im spezifischem Zusammengang seines Orientalismus zu artikulieren. Ich untersuche diese poetische Anwendung durch eine Analyse der Gedichte „Alleben“ und „Talismane“, in denen das Motiv Staub innerhalb des Gedichts eine signifikante Rolle spielt. Dann erkläre ich, dass Staub im Divan eine Art Werden darstellt und nicht Sein, ein Ausdruck der Vergeisterung selbst. Als ein quasinatürliches Symbol, welches außerhalb von Beweglichkeit unvorstellbar ist, stellt Staub das Wesen des Divans selbst dar, und Benjamin zufolge, eine Unvergänglichkeit zwischen den Geschichten und poetischen Strukturen der Abend- und Morgenländer.

In seiner Analyse der Bedeutung eines Flusses im Korpus Goethes bemerkt Daniel V. Hegeman: „In the West-östlicher Divan water becomes a symbol for the undulating imagery

of Eastern poetry which lends itself with so great difficulty to Occidental attempts at precision“.2 Obwohl wir uns mit dem Motiv Staub beschäftigen, sind Hegemans Meinungen über Fluss unserer Analyse von Bedeutung. Sie werden uns helfen etwas über die Logik des Motivs Staub aufzuklären: unweigerlich sind wir mit Hegemans Auslegungsschwierigkeiten konfrontiert.

Wir analysieren schließlich ein ganz unstabiles Bild. Staub behält seinen eigenen ‚flüssigen’ Gegenstand immer außerhalb strenger Bestimmungen und Darstellungen und zwar überall im Divan spielt dabei eine semantische Ambiguität, die zwischen der Qualität des Signifikantens und Qualität des Signifikats pendelt, eine grosse Rolle. Wasser vertritt Beweglichkeit, wie zum Beispiel im Gedicht „Lied und Gebilde“, worin „der Grieche“ Gestalten aus seinem Ton formt, ganz im Gegenteil zum morgenländischen Sprecher, der „im flüßgen Element/ Hin und wider [zu] schweifen“ vorzieht.3 Staub funktioniert ähnlich. Er bleibt nie in einer festgelegten Form, und bleibt auch nie mit spezifischen kulturellen Konnotationen behaftet. Das soeben erwähnte Wasser stammte aus dem Euphrat in „Lied und Gebilde“. Staub schafft einen unbestimmten Teil der orientalischen Wüste, und ist Aushängeschild für die morgenländische Exotik, wie es in „Hegira“ passiert („Jeden Pfad will ich betreten/ Von der Wüste zu den Städte.)4 Aber die Aufgabe meines Aufsatzes ist es zu untersuchen, wie Staub mit symbolischer Einzigartigkeit behaftet sein könnte.

Auf diese Weise entsteht eine wichtige Dialektik für Formen und Strukturen im Divan: nämlich Positionalität mit stabilen Bedingungen, während Fluss und Flexibilität dazwischen existieren. Bewegung selbst wird immer im Divan privilegiert, um dieses unnachgiebige System der Skizzierung zu vermeiden, aber nicht genau ein strukturelles Zentrum, wie ich weiter

15

unten in Bezug auf Goethes klassische Mystik analysieren werde. Anil Bhatti schreibt: „Es geht nicht um eine Brücke zwischen zwei gefestigten Polen, sondern um eine fließende Simultanität, wo die Grenzen fuzzy sind“.5 Das spricht nicht nur ästhetische Qualifikationen an sondern auch Goethes generelleres Projekt eine Nacharbeit der Grenzen selbst zwischen Orient und Okzident zu schaffen und eben nicht nur einen Dialog zwischen Morgenland und Abendland zu eröffnen und zu behalten.

In diesem Sinne muss man die Unterschiede zwischen Wasser und Staub als poetische Motive im Divan kennzeichnen, möglich erstmal durch eine Überlegung des Gedichts „Keiner kann sich aus den Banden...“ von Hafis, der persische Mentor und Gesprächspartner Goethes im Divan. Im Gedicht beschreibt Hafis die affektive Kraft und erotische Fähigkeit seiner Geliebten: „Keiner kann sich aus den Banden/ Deines Haars befreien/ Ohne Furcht vor der Vergeltung/ schleppst du die Verliebten“.6 Ihre Macht ist so, dass der Sprecher seinen eigenen Körper und eigene Sinnlichkeit aufgeben muss, um diese Liebe wirklich zu genießen: „Bis du nicht wie Schmetterlinge/ aus Begier verbrennest,/ Kannst du nimmer Rettung finden/ von dem Gram der Liebe.“ Liebe setzt Zugang über das Sinnliche voraus und in diesem Sinne verbindet Hafis Erotik mit Göttlichkeit: „Bis nicht in des Elends Wüsten,/ der Verliebte wandert,/ Kann er in der Seele Inners,/ Heiligstes nicht dringen.“ Durch diese Dialektik schafft Hafis einen anderen Bereich außerhalb der reinen Erotik, welcher Goethes Veränderung der Sinnlichkeit ähnelt. Dennoch verneint Hafis im Kontrast die Bedingung der Erotik.

Jedoch macht Hafis weiter, „Sieh, der Chemiker der Liebe/ wird den Staub des Körpers,/ Wenn er noch so bleiem wäre,/ doch in Gold verwandeln“.

Indem Hafis den „Chemiker“ der Liebe bemerkt, versetzt er dem Staub anthropomorphische Handlungsfähigkeit, nämlich die Fähigkeit des transzendenten Prozesses der körperlichen Entsagung des Staubs. Staub ist ein mystisches Beiprodukt, irgendwo zwischen den Status des Bleis und des Golds; in diesem Sinne ist Staub noch quasiphysisch. Wasser ist als biologische Zusammensetzung erkennbar, aber mit dem Begriff „Staub“ gibt es keinen materiellen Ref-

16

erent. Natürlicherweise ist Staub eine ganz offene Vorstellung – seine Konsistenz stammt aus einem geistigen Niveau und deshalb ist Staub ein provokatives Bild für Goethe beim Divan, ein sinnlicher sowohl also auch unsinnlicher Gegenstand. Yomb May identifiziert die essentiellen Qualitäten von „fascination, recognition, and contradiction“ im Divan, die im Motiv des Staubs zentralisiert sind.7 Außerdem wird bei Hafis der Staub im Prozess der Verwandlung impliziert, ein Ergebnis nach der Entsagung der Körperlichkeit. Diese Verwandlung spricht ein Vorbild der islamischen Mystik an, die, wie Rainer Hillenbrand behauptet, eigentlich nicht in Goethes Divan passt.

Die Mystik Goethes ist, laut Hillenbrand, „keine Überwindung des körperlichen“ oder „transzendente Vereinigung mit dem Absolute[n]“, sondern eine „Erneuerung und Verjüngung des Geistes unter den Bedingungen des menschlichen Lebens“.8 Diese „Verjüngung“ oder Entfernung des Geistes findet eigentlich bei Hafis nicht statt, sondern es handelt sich eher um eine Änderung ihrer Positionen. Dem Divan kommt eine dauernd unbeendende Dialektik zu; Staub ist nicht nur das Resultat eines Prozesses, sondern ein Element in einem Zyklus von Wechselzuständen, schon ganz unstabil als Vorstellungsgegenstand etwas außerhalb des physischen Bereichs. Vielleicht steht Staub, im Sinne eines hegelischen Vorbilds, mehr für ‚Werden’ als ‚Sein’. Zu diesem Zweck untersuche ich nun Goethes Gedicht „Alleben“, um die gleichzeitige Vergeisterung und Entmaterialisierung dieses natürlichen Stoffs auszulegen. „Alleben“ folgt einer generellen Struktur, von der materiellen sozialen Welt zu einer metaphysischeren, fast göttlichen Dimension. Es demonstriert wie Staub den transkulturellen Übergang zwischen dem Morgen- und Abendland befördert. Zu diesem Zweck nimmt der Staub göttliche oder zumindest geistige Eigenschaften an. Vielleicht direkt als Antwort auf „Keiner kann sich aus den Banden“ schreibt Goethe, „Staub ist eins der Elemente,/ Das du gar geschickt bezwingest,/ Hafis, wen zu Liebchens Ehren“.9 Goethe notiert die Umgestaltung des Motivs Staub bei Hafis, worin der persische Dichter den Staub mit höheren Bereichen verbindet, aber ich glaube, dass Goe-

the dem Staub weitere Funktionen anhängt.

Anschließend destabilisiert Goethe den poetischen Wert des Staubs, indem er bemerkt, wie die anfängliche Position des Staubs auf der Schwelle, welche einem unstabilen Ort angehört, auf den Teppich mit „goldgewirkte[n] Blumen“ wechselt. Im Vergleich zum orthodox christlichen Vorbild, in dem der Staub in der tiefsten Lage des Profanen bleibt („Staub zu Staub“), schwebt der Staub bei „Alleben“ in den ganzen Sozialwelten von Hafis und Mahmud, ein gleicher Gegenstand der Dichtung.

In der nächsten Strophe führt Goethe die natürlichen Elemente ein, während er diese Sozialwelt hält: „Treibt der Wind von ihrer Pforte/ Wolken Staubs behend vorüber,/ Mehr als Moschus sind die Düfte/ Und als Rosenöl dir lieber.“ Wie wir bei „Talismane“ beobachten werden, fängt der Zyklus durch den Wind an, das Gedicht aufzuschließen, indem sich der Staub als „Wolken Staub“ abhebt und den Sinn des Riechens integriert, ein Bild, das in der letzten Strophe doppelt wiederholt wird. Es scheint, als bekäme Staub seinen ‚Kern’ von Geist teilweise durch die Bewegung des Winds, er visualisiert sich geradezu als Prozess der Natur. Dann etabliert Goethe seine ‚abendländische’ Positiontalität in Bezug auf Staub („Staub, den hab ich längst entbehret/ In dem stets umhüllten Norden,/ Aber in dem heißen Süden/ Ist er mir genugsam worden), vielleicht um zu implizieren, dass diese generelle poetische Vorstellung nur im Zwischenraum des Divans funktioniert, ein Produkt der generellen Begegnung mit dem Orient. Staub ist der Gegenstand, der den graduellen Wandel von reiner Sozialwelt zur heiligen-metaphysischen Welt vermittelt, eine Vermittlung die selbst infolge der ‚Divanischen’ Vorstellung des Staubs statt findet.

An den letzten Versen des Gedichts evoziert Goethe das Heilige: „Heile mich, Gewitteregen,/ Laß mich, dass es grunelt, riechen!“ Der ehemalige Bezug auf die Düfte des Rosenöls wird gegen das Riechen des Natürlichen ausgetauscht. Das Gedicht fährt fort: „Wenn jetzt alle Donner rollen/ Und der ganze Himmel leuchtet,/ Wird der wilde Staub des Windes/ Nach dem Boden hingefeuchtet.“ Sofort „entspringt ein Leben/ Schwillt ein heilig heimlich Wirken,/ Und es grunelt und es grünet/ In den irdischen Bezirken“.

Die Sozialwelt am Anfang wird ganz gegen

eine heilige natürliche Welt ausgetauscht. Goethe drückt den in diesem Fall den vom Heiligen evozierten Kreislauf des Lebens aus. Aber Goethe gestaltet dieses Bild der Natur ebenfalls um: bei „Und es grunelt und es grünet“ ist „gruneln“ ein unregelmäßiges Verb, dass nach dem Deutschen Wörterbuch Grimms ein suprasensueller Sinn von „grünen“ mit Elementen des Riechens, Schmeckens („nach frischem grün reichen“) ist,10 das nur sichtbare Erlebnisse eröffnet. Außerdem setzt Goethe einen Vergleich zwischen Sinnlichkeit und Unsinnlichkeit: das „heilig heimlich Wirken“ spricht an einem unsinnlichen mystischen Moment, wo „Wirken“ eine relativ abstrakte oder unsinnliche Bedeutung hat, aber Goethe beendet „Alleben“ mit „In den irdischen Bezirken“, so dass es eben mit dem Geistigen oder Unsinnlichen eine Spannung zwischen irdischen und heiligen Welten gibt. Staub wird in Wolken verwandelt und dann „hingefeuchtet“; die materiellen wirklichen Zustände des Staubs führen eine geistigere Vorstellung, die die physische und heilige Welt ermöglicht. Hillenbrand schreibt Folgendes über den klassischen Denkraum, „Die geformte Gestalt ist Ausdruck des unendlichen Geistes, das Konkrete ist Symbol oder Spiegelbild des Absoluten. Auch diese innige Verbindung von Realismus und Idealismus ist klassischer Geist, der sich gerade im Divan exemplarish in einem doppeleten Schriftsinn ausdrückt, wonach alles Konkrete eine höhere Bedeutung hat, aber auch umgekehrt alles Geistige sich nur im Sinnlichen zeigen kann“.11 Aber ich würde behaupten, dass Goethe mit unstabilen Sphären von Sinnlichkeit und Unsinnlichkeit arbeitet, besonders mit dem Symbol des Staubs, das, wie ich schon bemerkt habe, keinen genauen physischen Referenten hat. Außerdem öffnen diese bewegenden Umrisse des Symbols Staub Raum für eine virtuelle Vorstellung des ‚Allebens’.

Dieses Gedicht stammt nicht aus den wirklichen Beobachtungen Goethes, wie das „Persien in meinem Kopf“. Staub funktioniert als Mittelpunkt zwischen Geist und Material und ist deshalb beides. Er stellt schließlich das Geistige selbst dar – eine poetische Visualisierung Gottes System, geformt aus der überschwänglichen Subjektivität des Dichters.12 Die Modalitäten des Staubs und seine

17

VALENTINE DOHN Bedeutung bei „Talismane“ offenbaren seine dynamische Struktur und Form. Das Gedicht beginnt mit der göttlichen Welt, die am Ende des „Allebens“ etabliert wird: „Gottes ist der Orient!/ Gottes ist der Okzident! Ruht im Frieden seiner Hände“.13 Während „Alleben“ schrittweise einen Übergang von der Sozialen zur heiligen Welt schafft, beschwört „Talismane“ das Göttliche ganz direkt herauf. Diese göttliche Wesenheit übernimmt die Rolle, dem „verwirrten“ Sprecher des Gedichts zu helfen („Mich verwirren will das Irren;/ Doch du weißt mich zu entwirren“) und wenn man daran denkt, wird „verwirren“ in einem physischen Sinn als eigene Form im Gedicht thematisiert. Der Sprecher fährt fort: „Ob ich Irdsches denk und sinne,/ Das gereicht zu höherem Gewinne./ Mit dem Staube nicht der Geist zerstoben,/ Dringet, in sich selbst gedrängt, nach oben“. Goethe etabliert noch eine weitere Positionalität aus der Sinnlichkeit, sogar für geistige Aktionen (irdisch zu denken und die Körperlichkeit von „gereicht“) aber er versucht eine Trennung vom Geistigen und Sinnlichen zu vermeiden. Staub wird mit dem Göttlichen von früheren Strophen des Gedichts eingegossen. Wenn Goethe bei „Alleben“ das Sinnliche aufschließen wollte, will er bei „Talismane“ eine Immanenz entdecken, die

18

die Form des Staubs selbst as Göttlich darstellt, und somit die Hierarchie des poetischen Inhalts umstülpst. In ihrer Erforschung über „Einheit“ im Divan beschreibt Ingeborg Hillman eine symbolisch auflösende „Steigerung,“ wonach die signifikatorischen Grenzen eines Symbols in die Richtung esoterischerer Wahrheiten aufgespannt wird.14 Im Sinne von Ausrichtung sollte man „Steigerung“ vielleicht nicht als aufwärts Bewegung konzipieren, sondern als eine bewegliche jedoch nicht grenzenlose Erweiterung. „Talismane“ erweitert auf der einen Seite eine 1-1 Korrelation zwischen dem Material des Staubs und seiner Göttlichkeit, während auf der anderen Seite zum Beispiel „Alleben“ den Sinn von natürlichen Phänomenen erweitert.

Das Gedicht endet mit einer Beschreibung des Göttlichen im Aus- und Einatmen. Für Goethe ist diese Bewegung eine direkte Spur Gottes in der banalen Existenz des Alltäglichen: „So wunderbar ist das Leben gemischt./ Du danke Gott, wenn er dich preßt,/ Und dank ihm, wenn er dich wieder entlässt“. Der Sinn der Bewegung im Laufe des Gedichts schließt „Talismane“ auf: die heilige Form ist paradigmatisch dynamisch und auf dieser Dynamik aufbauend. Durch den Staub entsteht diese Form. Im „Alleben“ schwebt Staub im Him-

mel und im „Talismane“ verbindet Goethe die ‚Steigerung’ des höheren Gewinnes mit dem fast vertraulichen Prozess des Atmens. Aber kann man sich eigentlich Staub als ‚nicht bewegend’ vorstellen? Widersprüchlich dargestellt, steht Staub im Divan für eine unregelmäßige Regelmäßigkeit, ein gewisses Paradigma der Beweglichkeit. Jedoch soll man nicht diese Umläufe für komplette Formlosigkeit deuten: George F. Peters erinnert uns, dass das Atmen im Divan aus „ceaseless recprocity“15 besteht, einer Regulierung des Göttlichen.

Zum Schluss komme ich nun zu den einführenden Zitaten Benjamins, ursprünglich aus dem Divan Gedicht „Nicht mehr auf Seidenblatt“ im Buch Suleika. Dabei spricht eine Figur, wahrscheinlich Hatem, dass „Nicht mehr auf Seidenblatt/ Schreib’ ich symmetrische Reime/ Nicht mehr fass’ ich sie/ In goldne Ranken.“16 Man sieht die selben Dinge der Sozialwelt wie in „Alleben,“ aber der Sprecher lehnt sie ab; wie die Wiederartikuliering der Form in „Talismane“ gibt es regelwidrige Qualitäten bei der ‚Flüssigkeit’ des Staubs. Das Gedicht macht mit Benjamins Wörtern weiter, „Dem Staub, dem beweglichen, eingezeichnet/ Überweht Sie der Wind, aber die Kraft besteht./ Bis zum Mittelpunkt der Erde/ Dem Boden angebant“. Als beweglich und gleichzeitig eingezeichnet dargestellt ist Staub eine sich immer ändernde Form, aber mit einem Kern – der Fähigkeit das Geistige oder Göttliche auszudrücken, der gleichzeitigen Rolle des Vertreter davon, und zu selber Zeit ein kleiner Teil von ihm. Staub im Divan annulliert Grenzen; er schafft eine universale Topographie, aber vereinigt sie mit der göttlichen Wesenheit und künstlerischen Tendenz zu einem poetischen System von Bedingung, Begegnung und Dichtung.

NOTES 1. Walter Benjamin, “”Dem Staub, dem beweglichen, eingezeichnet”,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Tillman Rexroth (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1991), 787.

2. Daniel V. Hegeman, “The Significance of the River in Goethe’s Writings,” Monatshefte 44, no. 3 (1952): 18.

3. J. W. Goethe, “Lied und Gebilde,” in Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe : Selected Poetry, trans. and ed. by David Luke (London: Penguin,

2005), 146.

4. J. W. Goethe, “Hegira,” in Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe : Selected Poetry, trans. and ed. by David Luke (London: Penguin, 2005), 144.

5. Anil Bhatti, “Der Orient als Experimentierfeld. Goethes »Divan« und der Aneignungsprozess kolonialen Wissens,” Goethe-Jahrbuch. 126 (2009): 118.

6. Dieses Zitat kommt aus der berühmten 1812 Übersetzung von dem Orientalisten Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall. Hafis, “Keiner kann sich aus den Banden..” http://gedichte.xbib.de/ Hafis_gedicht_Keiner+kann+sich+aus+den+ Banden....htm. Die selbe für alle Zitate hier.

7. Yomb May, “Goethe, Islam and the Orient: The Impetus for and Mode of Cultural Encounter in the West-östlicher Divan,” in Encounters with Islam in German Literature and Culture, eds. James R. Hodkinson and Jeffrey Morrison (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2009), 94.

8. Rainer Hillenbrand, “Klassische Mystik in Goethes »West-östlichem Divan«,” GoetheJahrbuch 127(2010): 188.

9. J. W. Goethe, “Alleben,” http://www.textlog. de/17968.html. Die selbe für alle Zitate hier.

10. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, “GRÜNELN, vb.,” in Deutsches Wörterbuch (Leipzig: Verlag Von S. Hirzel 1971).

11. Hillenbrand, “Klassische Mystik in Goethes »West-östlichem Divan«,” 190.

12. Obwohl es nicht genug Raum bei diesem Aufsatz es zu untersuchen, der Divan scheint vorzuschlagen, dass die Figur des Künstlers einen privilegierten Zugang diesen geistigen/göttlichen Phänomen hat.

13. Goethe, “Talismane,” 152. Die selbe für alle Zitate hier.

14. Ingeborg Hillmann, Dichtung als Gegenstand der Dichtung; Untersuchungen zum Problem der Einheit des “West-östlichen Divan. (Bonn: H. Bouvier, 1965). 41-42.

15. George F. Peters, “Air and Spirit in Goethe’s “West-östlicher Divan”,” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 30, no. 4 (1976): 224.

16. J. W. Goethe, “Nicht mehr auf Seidenblatt...” http://www.textlog.de/18166.html.

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VALENTINE DOHN

20

EYE OF DER STURM

HERWARTH WALDEN AND EXPRESSIONISM

DANIKA DRURY-MELNYK

I

n the early twentieth century, Herwarth Walden’s Berlin-based journal Der Sturm was one of the most important vehicles for promoting modern art in Germany, and perhaps in all of Europe. Der Sturm is commonly referred to as an “Expressionist” journal, a term which is loosely defined and encompasses a variety of different movements. Der Sturm was one of the main vehicles in popularizing the term “expressionism,” though their use of the word was also fairly broad and was for the most part loosely synonymous with simply “modern art.”

In order to understand what Walden and Der Sturm-Kreis believed united them as modern, I will examine the social context in which they founded the journal. I will try to establish what social and aesthetic paradigms Der Sturm was rebelling against, and how they saw themselves in relation to society. I will then look at some of the ideals expressed in the journal, the actions of Der Sturm-Kreis, and how Der Sturm presented its artists in accordance with its worldview.

THE AKTUAL AND THE AVANT-GARDE The 1880s saw a rise in entrepreneurial art journals in the newly united Germany. As the century drew to a close, the initially supportive stance towards kaiserliche Kultur that journals and periodicals had held began to change. By the beginning of the twentieth-century, leading independent journals such as Julius MeierGraefe’s Pan began to advocate a new role for the journal in society, “asserting that it was the duty of any cultural publication to be ‘aktual’ (topical).”1 For the majority of publishers in the 1890s and early 1900s, topical referred to the tendency towards individualism and ide-

alism; this viewpoint posited the artistic individual and new art generally as an essentially asocial “cult of the ideal individual.”2 Influential art dealers such as the Cassirers helped bring French Impressionism into the Berlin art scene; a style, which the Wilhelmine press labelled as “gutter art,” the art of the enemy. 3 This body of critics and publishers was closely associated with French Impressionism and later, Jugendstil. The idealism and asocialism of the “cult of the individual” was the dominant paradigm that Walden would be fighting against. Walden expanded beyond the “topicality” which had been so groundbreaking to these earlier critics and publishers, and positioned himself as a champion of the avantgarde – not only reflecting but also instigating cultural change.

Der Sturm included a large array of contributors, but it was Herwarth Walden who gave them a unified direction; as August Stramm would later attest, “Der Sturm ist Herwarth Walden.”4 Walden was born Georg Lewin in 1879. Before becoming involved in publishing, he trained as a pianist with Arnold Schoenberg’s brother-in-law and forged a successful career as an avant-garde composer.5 In 1903 he married the renowned poet Else Lasker-Schüler, who gave him his new name.

Over the course of the first decade of the twentieth century, Walden became more involved in the world of publishing. He found work as an editor at a variety of art magazines, most of which fired him, after his stubborn refusal to abide by their editorial policies led to repeated clashes with his more conservative employers.6 In 1909, after Walden was fired yet again, this time by the theatre magazine Der Neue Weg,7 Lasker-Schüler wrote to the influential Vien-

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nese writer and publisher Karl Kraus to enlist his help in protesting the injustice of Walden’s firing.8 Kraus must have taken Walden’s cause to heart, for this alliance led to Kraus lending Walden the money and support to get Der Sturm off the ground.9 With Kraus’s funding and guidance, Walden was able to launch the first issue of Der Sturm on March 3, 1910.10

BRINGING IN THE OUTSIDE Der Sturm’s home and centre was Berlin.

Oskar Kokoschka, who acted as Der Sturm’s Vienna arts and culture editor, found in prewar Berlin a place where the future was undetermined and “the fundamental difference between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries could [not] still be ignored by turning a blind eye.”11 Moreover, Berlin was where the publishers were. Writing of his adolescence in Vienna, the expressionist poet Hans Flesch von Brunningen recalls speaking to a friend about Berlin and telling him, “Berlin’s where one should go […] That’s where they print everything that’s avant-garde and modern.”12 In the decade from 1910 to 1920, over one hundred different daily newspapers13 and thirty-two different Expressionist periodicals were published in Berlin,14 with Der Sturm leading this surge.

While Berlin may have been an artistic magnet to many, the avant-garde artists of Der Sturm remained outside of mainstream society and had to find alternative communities. Although Lasker-Schüler frequently wrote about feeling like an “outsider” in mainstream Berlin, the café was one place where she felt at home.15 Der Sturm-kreis’s café of choice was Café des Westens, nicknamed Café Megalomania by its patrons. Besides offering cheap food and heat, Café des Westens catered to its clientele by subscribing to a wide variety of national and international publications – and even employing a special “newspaper waiter” who served papers and provided reprint information on the publications. 16 The café was the place to go if one wanted to be up-to-date on the most recent publications, contracts, exhibitions, and general gossip on the art and publishing world.

As Lasker-Schüler wrote, “[the café] is our stock exchange, that’s where you have to go,

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where the deals are closed.”17 Der Sturm fed off of this café culture, and vice versa. The pages of Der Sturm were frequented by many of the same people who frequented the café. The kind of community found in Berlin’s café culture nourished Der Sturm-kreis and created a unity that was more than simply aesthetic – both as a journal and as a social circle, Der Sturm was a place where the outsiders were insiders.

Walden was not content to remain inside the café; through Der Sturm, he wanted to bring the ideals that flourished within his café circle out into the world. A manifesto by Rudolph Kertz published in the first issue of Der Sturm stated boldly: We do not wish to entertain our readers.

We want cunningly to demolish their slothful, gravely sublime, world view […]

With the most provocative of gestures we shall ridicule every statement of this culture which aims at the retention of its conventions instead of a full appreciation of life.18 This quote clearly indicates that Walden and his colleagues’ aspirations extended beyond self-contained aesthetics – Walden meant for the journal to fight against the culture of convention and champion what was truly modern. In its first years, Der Sturm was heavily involved in promoting Kokoschka as well as members of both Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter. The journal soon branched out to include an increasingly broad array of artists such as members of the Czech and Russian avantgarde, and Paul Klee’s Der Moderne Bund. Der Sturm published established artists such as Picasso and Delaunay as well as younger artists like Max Ernst. Many of these visual artists also contributed essays, poems, and literature, as did August Stramm, Alfred Döblin, and Adolf Loos to name a few. Der Sturm aimed not just to introduce its readers to new artists but also to attack convention and create the kind of debate that would open society to the insights provided by these artists.

EXPANDING THE STRUGGLE In Der Sturm Walden would defend mod-

ern art and modern artists with the same stubbornness for which he had repeatedly been fired in his early days as an editor. When Lasker-Schüler’s poem “Leise Sagen” was reprinted and ridiculed in the Hamburg paper ReinischWestfälische Zeitung without her permission, it was Walden who convinced her to file a lawsuit.19 Walden then proceeded to publish a running commentary of the case in Der Sturm until Lasker-Schüler was granted her verdict.

Walden would later encourage Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky in similar suits.20 The importance that Walden placed on these copyright cases elevated them to ideological struggles. His determination in pursuing such cases is an indication of the extent to which Walden believed resistance to convention was an essential element of Der Sturm’s mission. Walden was constantly trying to attract subscribers but was not willing to bend to public taste even if it meant losing them. When Kokoschka’s illustrations to his play Murder, Hope of Womankind, which graced the title page of many early issues of Der Sturm, were deemed too lewd by some and caused half of the journal’s subscribers to cancel their subscriptions, Walden persisted in publishing the drawings throughout the year.21 The promotion of Walden’s modern artists was seen as in an expression which shared in the goals of the art itself. Provocation was not just a means to an end but an important end in its own right.

In 1912, Walden acquired a gallery in an effort to expand the activities of Der Sturm.

The Sturm gallery hosted monthly exhibitions, many of which introduced new or international artists to the Berlin public for the first time.

These exhibitions were fairly popular and some drew thousands of paying visitors per day.22 For many of the paintings in the gallery’s exhibits Walden attached a clause into the contract of purchase, which required the buyer to continue to allow the works to be collectively available for future exhibitions,23 ensuring that the art would not be completely removed from society. The Sturm Gallery’s most important exhibition was the 1913 Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon. With the financial help of artist August Macke’s uncle, Walden gathered and presented 366 works by 75 artists from twelve

countries including the United States, India, and Japan.24 Included were works by international artists such as Marc Chagall, Piet Mondrian, members of the Russian avant-garde, and Czech cubists, as well as groups based in Germany like Der Blaue Reiter.25 The show was considered scandalous by the majority of the press who decried it as “unclean fantasy;”26 Walden later turned their words against them, republishing excerpts of the most critical reviews and attacking them in Der Sturm.27

UTOPIA DIVIDED The term Expressionism is often used to describe a uniquely German movement which “did not become pan-European, but remained firmly rooted in German-speaking countries;” 28 this definition of Expressionism was not what Walden envisioned. Der Sturm fought against any sort of nationalist concept of modern art and grounded itself in a decidedly internationalist stance. The continent-spanning range of artists and writers featured in Der Sturm is evidence of the group’s international pedigree.

Even Walden’s chosen surname, inspired by the American Henry David Thoreau’s novel of the same name, reflected his cosmopolitan outlook. Walden had a utopian vision of Berlin as a model of internationalism that would provide an example to the world. He referred to Berlin as “the capital city of the United States of Europe” and praised it as a “microcosm of America,” insisting that, “one should form a United States of Europe as quickly as possible.

Not only for the sake of Berlin, but also for the sake of Europe.”29 Walden deliberately worked to present those aspects of artistic movements that concurred with his vision. For example, when organizing the Berlin debut of the Italian Futurists in the spring of 1912, Walden carefully orchestrated his mediation of the Futurists to present a less violent and nationalistic version of Futurism, which would foster his vision of the modernist movement. Articles on the Futurists in Der Sturm tended to focus positively on the Futurist’s rejection of conventionality; Alfred Döblin wrote in his review of the Futurist exhibition that Futurism “represented an act of emancipation.”30 This presentation

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did not agree with many of the Futurists, who resisted being brought under the umbrella of Walden’s Expressionism. The Italian Futurist Filippo Marianetti later wrote to Walden: “We are […] extremely annoyed that […] you mixed together the Futurists and the Expressionists, a group with whom we have no association.”31 Even so, when Walden wrote the Futurist Umberto Boccioni’s obituary in 1916 he again glossed over the violent aspects of the movement by reassuring his readers that Boccioni’s enthusiasm for war concerned only war as “an intellectual phenomenon,”32 a statement which is, at the least, debatable. What Walden sought to conceal about Italian Futurism reveals much about what he considered to be modern. The dynamism, rejection of tradition, and future-orientation of the movement were accepted, but the concrete violence and nationalism were not.

Walden’s internationalist vision was not shared by many of Germany’s more established art dealers. When critics of the time decried modern art’s focus on French artists and demanded a greater emphasis on German artists and national culture, Walden took up the debate in Der Sturm. He exposed this nationalist concern as a dependence on antiquated convention, writing, “the German Court buys only Düsseldorf – the German snob Böcklin.”33 Though Alfred Böcklin, who Walden alludes to here, was born in Switzerland, he studied in Düsseldorf and his symbolist paintings were considered highly influential by many Art Nouveau artists, as well as many of the same leading critics who espoused a focus ‘national culture’. Walden here equates this kind of nationalism with what he considered to be aesthetic backwardness.

Walden’s polemic attitude had a dual function – it provoked a public debate on art, and also emphasized a well-defined stance for Der Sturm. By creating controversy, Walden encouraged the reader to critically examine artistic tradition and also kept Der Sturm’s name in the papers. Oskar Kokoschka would later refer to Walden’s achievements as a “total propaganda victory for Der Sturm,”34 describing his “[vanquishing] of rival art magazines” as a “contest reminiscent of capitalists

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for markets.”35 These conquests were at least as much ideological as they were financial.

Der Sturm’s relatively coherent aesthetic and ideology, made clear by its attacks on what it was not, distinguished Walden from his journalistic competitors. The aggressiveness with which Walden and the journal’s contributors defended their view of modern art created a kind of ideological brand name for Der Sturm that helped to market its artists to the public.

Through its polarizing rhetoric, Der Sturm created an illusion of homogeneity within its pages. Walden could include a diverse assortment of artists, many with conflicting views, because they were all part of a general Expressionist worldview that was represented in the journal.

EXPRESSION AND THE MASSES The term “expressionism” was not coined in Der Sturm, but the magazine was one of the first publications to popularize the word in its common usage. The term first came into use to describe a group of French painters inspired by the Fauves.36 In the summer of 1911, Der Sturm published an essay by Wilhelm Worringer who described the work of the expressionists as a “return to the irrational abstraction of primitive and abstract forms.”37 This essay still for the most part used the term to describe the French expressionists, but its broad theoretical claims paved the way for a more general usage of the term. Shortly afterwards Der Sturm printed an article by Paul Ferdinand Schmidt titled “Die Expressionisten”, in which he used the term to describe a number of different artists from Russia, Germany, and France who were concerned with “inner truth rather than external verisimilitude.”38 Schmidt, however, conceded that there was no defined school of expressionism and that the artists he mentioned had little relation to one another. The Sturm gallery began hosting monthly exhibitions of “French Expressionists,” “German Expressionists,” and “Belgian Expressionists,”39 using the word to include an progressively diverse array of artists. The term continued to appear frequently in Der Sturm in an increasingly general usage. By 1919, “expressionism” was used by Der Sturm more as a mark of artis-

than objective realtic quality that could ity. Paul Klee’s wellbe applied to anyone known phrase that whom they chose to “art does not repropromote. In 1919 duce the visible; rathWalden wrote an artier, it makes visible” cle in which he stated: expresses exactly this “We call the art of idea.43 Real art must this century Expressionism to distinguish create by making visit from that which is ible the subjective not art.”40 Expresspiritual realm of experience – what Kansionism was defined dinsky referred to as primarily not by “exan “inner necessity”44 pressionist” artists themselves, who em– rather than simbodied various styles, ply imitating reality. but by the critics who Perhaps inspired by mediated their work. experimental physThe term became a ics or contemporary tool to distinguish philosophers such that which was capaas Henri Bergson, ble of engaging with many Expressionand expressing the ist artists believed it OSKAR KOKOSCHKA, SELF-PORTRAIT new from that which was necessary even to (POSTER FOR DER STURM), 1910 remained trapped break from objective within the distant structures of space logic of the old. and time in their reflections on form and moWalden and Der Sturm-kreis wanted to tion.45 A 1913 issue of Der Sturm contained break from the mimetic or imitative under- an article by Robert Delaunay, which conveyed standing of art that dated back to Plato. As the Expressionist view that the creation of new Walden wrote in his introduction to the Erster forms by this subjective realm has the power Deutscher Herbstsalon, “art is presentation, and to shape shared reality: “Our understanding is not representation.”41 He writes that, shackled correlative to our perception. Let us attempt to by convention, “most of today’s viewers are too see.”46 It was the job of the true artist, Walden proud of their eyes, with which they have not wrote, to become “the creator of his forms” in yet learned how to see.”42 What they failed to order to help the people “see” and thus awaken see, in Walden’s mind, was the creative poten- them from the passivity of societal indoctrinatial of an internality that was not subject to the tion.47 Drawing on a kind of communitarian uniformity of objectivity. This emphasis on the interpretation of Nietzsche, Walden wanted to subjective, and on the emancipatory potential use art to encourage the public to free themof non-mimetic art, was embedded in a broad selves of the oppressive political structures, trend away from positivism that was occurring which masqueraded as morality and aesthetic in other realms of philosophy in the eight- convention.48 Franz Marc articulated this eenth and early twentieth centuries – perhaps sentiment in a short piece, which stated that most notably for Der Sturm-kreis in the work only by creating new forms to express a moof Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Despite their bile truth rooted in the subjective could art be many differences, all the artists included un- “profound enough and substantial enough to der Walden’s Expressionist umbrella shared in generate the greatest form, the greatest transsome iteration of the idea that art must express formation that the world has ever seen.”49 The an inner or spiritual realm more fundamental artists of Der Sturm thus rejected positivism’s

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attempts to objectively explain subjective human experience and tried to create new forms of understanding.

Despite its emphasis on the subjective experience, expressionism as presented in Der Sturm was opposed to what was perceived as the “art for art’s sake” mentality of Jugendstil and the asocial individualism of Impressionism. While Der Sturm for the most part avoided the fray of party politics, it was certainly not asocial. In his eulogy of Edvard Munch, Kokoschka wrote that, “[In expressionism] two individuals are necessary. Expressionism does not live in an ivory tower, it calls upon a fellow human being whom it awakens.”50 Kandinsky reflected these sentiments, though somewhat more theoretically, when he discussed the relationship between the artist and the viewer in his essay “The Problem of Form.”51 The expressionist artist, by expressing the truth of existence as subjective, was supposed to create new forms of mediating this experience, allowing it to be understood and internalized by the public. The expressionist artist thus sought to change people’s thoughts and experiences – to draw on a non-representational inner life in order to revolutionize public life.

In Der Sturm’s Expressionism, engaging the public was essential. If Expressionism wished to awaken the people, this would necessarily have to be as much the work of the curator or the publisher as of the artist. Walden’s highly public legal and rhetorical battles were effective publicity stunts and Walden went out of his way travelling the continent to attract subscribers. Kokoschka relates a particular campaign where he, Walden, and Lasker-Schüler travelled along the Rhine distributing copies of Der Sturm. Deliberately dressed outlandishly, the trio attracted ridicule and jeers, but this was attention nonetheless. Though they did not make it very far before they ran out of money, the campaign was successful in bringing in a number of new subscriptions.52 Despite constant financial setbacks, Der Sturm’s circulation grew steadily over its first few years.

Kokoschka reports that the journal was much in demand “by the intellectuals, and soon by the nouveaux riches as well.”53 The journal’s circulation expanded not just demographi-

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cally but geographically, with subscriptions in France, the Netherlands, and Sweden. In early 1914, Walden further expanded his reach by beginning the “first comprehensive program of circulating exhibitions of modern art.”54 He put together exhibitions that were sent abroad to cities such as Helsinki, Stockholm, London, and Tokyo.55 He also made a point of circulating these avant-garde exhibits to small German towns, outside of the urban art scene.56 Again, Walden’s focus on gaining subscriptions and increasing his reach was not just financial but ideological; his actions reflected Kokoschka’s later statement that “essentially, Expressionism must be seen as a revolutionary movement, a compulsive need to communicate with the masses.”57

WAR Despite difficulties, Der Sturm remained functioning during and after the First World War. Walden continued to publish the journal regularly despite the fact that Paris was almost entirely cut off and many of the journal’s strongest contributors, including Franz Marc, were killed in combat; during the war nearly every issue of Der Sturm contained obituaries.58 As the war progressed, Der Sturm’s enterprises expanded to include an art school, a print shop, an acting school, and, from 1920, a reading room which imported papers and journals from as far off as Egypt.59 In the 1920s, Der Sturm changed from a weekly to a quarterly as it struggled to keep its place among the many new periodicals which sprang up during that period, and some of its frequent contributors moved on.60 Despite its broad commitment to society, Der Sturm had long sought to stay out of formal politics, even avoiding taking a definite stance on the war. This changed in the Weimar period, as Walden increasingly abandoned the arts and any attempts at apoliticism in favour of his “rather esoteric brand of utopian socialism.”61 Struggling with the rise of fascism and the increasingly hostile political climate in Germany, Walden would finally discontinue Der Sturm in 1932 when he emigrated to the Soviet Union.62 There he worked at the national Foreign Languages Institute and continued to publish articles on

art and culture.63 Though he had long been an admirer of aspects of the Communist government, his long struggle to navigate his idiosyncratic and uncompromising political and artistic concerns eventually must have caught up with him: in 1941 he was arrested and sent to a Soviet prison camp as part of the Stalinist regime’s crackdown on Trotskyites and other “socially dangerous elements.”64 He would die within a year of his arrival in the camp, though this fact would not become public until decades later.65

A MOBILE CONCLUSION The way Walden used the medium of the journal in many respects embodies his view of Expressionism. The journal was relatively cheap, allowing it to reach and “awaken” a larger demographic. The journal was also mobile, enabling it to reach an international audience and also to attract the attention of international artists who could later become contributors.

Though this curatorial framework was able to create the impression that Expressionism was something of a movement, the mobile and timely nature of the journal also avoided allowing the idea of Expressionism to become too uniform and stagnant. The themes that united the artists within the pages and exhibitions of Der Sturm were the same factors that prevented Expressionism from being a coherent movement, as each artist followed his or her own “inner necessity,” or formed smaller groups, each claiming to be definitive. Der Sturm-kreis was concerned with opening up new possibilities, and perhaps for this reason their Expressionism could never be too concretely defined.

For a brief time however, a vast multitude of the factions and “-isms” that abounded during the early twentieth-century, were bound together and given a relatively coherent ethic within the pages of Der Sturm.

NOTES 1. Helen Boorman, “Rethinking the Expressionist Era; Wilhelmine Cultural Debates and Prussian Elements in German Expressionism.” Oxford Arts Journal 9, no. 2

(1986): 6.

2. Ibid., 7.

3. Sigrid Bauschinger, “The Berlin Moderns: Else Lasker-Schüler and Café Culture,” in Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture, 1890-1918, ed. Emily D. Bilski. (New York: The Jewish Museum, 1999), 67.

4. Lothar Schreyer, “What is Der Sturm?,” in The Era of German Expressionism, ed. Paul Raabbe, trans. by J.M. Ritchie (London: Calder and Boyers, 1974), 193.

5. Betty Falkenberg, Else Lasker-Schüler: A Life (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland, 2003), 52.

6. Ibid., 61.

7. Peter Selz, German Expressionist Painting (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1957), 250.

8. Falkenberg, Else Lasker-Schüler: A Life, 61.

9. Oskar Kokoschka, My Life, trans. David Britt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), 60 10. Bauschinger, “The Berlin Moderns…,” 69.

11. Kokoschka, My Life, 65.

12. Hans Flesch Von Brunningen, “Die Aktion in Vienna,” in The Era of German Expressionism, ed. Paul Raabbe, trans. J.M. Ritchie (London: Calder & Boyers, 1974), 129.

13. Bauschinger, “The Berlin Moderns…,” 60.

14. Christanne Miller, Cultures of Modernism: Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, & Else Lasker-Schüler (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 34.

15. Ibid., 35.

16. Bauschinger, “The Berlin Moderns…,” 79.

17. Ibid.

18. Helen Boorman, “Rethinking the Expressionist Era; Wilhelmine Cultural Debates and Prussian Elements in German Expressionism.” Oxford Arts Journal 9, no. 2 (1986): 8n32.

19.Falkenberg, Else Lasker-Schüler: A Life, 70.

20. Selz, German Expressionist Painting, 264.

21. Nell Walden, “Kokoschka and the Sturm Circle.” In The Era of German Expressionism, ed. Paul Raabbe, trans. J.M. Ritchie (London: Calder and Boyers, 1974), 126.

22. Peter Selz, “Emergence of the AvantGarde: Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon of 1913,” in Beyond the Mainstream, ed. Peter Selz (Cambridge: Cambridge University

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Press, 1997), 47.

23. John J. White, “Futurism and German Expressionism,” in International Futurism in Arts and Literature, ed. Günter Berghaus (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2000), 43.

24. Selz, German Expressionist Painting, 265266.

25. Ibid.

26. Karl Scheffler’s review for Bruno Cassirer’s Kunst and Kunstler. Quoted in Selz, “Emergence…,” 53.

27. Riccardo Marchi, “’Pure Painting’ in Berlin 1912-1913: Boccioni, Kandinsky, and Delaunay at ‘Der Sturm.’” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2002), 16.

28. Shearer West, The Visual Arts in Germany: Utopia and Despair, 1890-1937 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000), 84.

29. Paul Mendes-Flohr, “The Berlin Jew as Cosmopolitan,” in Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture, 1890-1918, ed. Emily D. Bilski (New York: The Jewish Museum, 1999), 30.

30. White, “Futurism and German Expressionism,” 49.

31. Ibid.,” 43n9.

32. Ibid., 46.

33. Boorman, “Rethinking…,” 10.

34. Kokoschka, My Life, 59.

35. Ibid.

36. Selz, German Expressionist Painting, 256.

37. Selz, “Emergence…,” 45.

38. Ibid., 45.

39. Selz, German Expressionist Painting, 261.

40. Ibid., 256.

41. Herwarth Walden, “Introduction,” trans. unknown, Der Sturm, last modified March 28, 2005 Berlin Hypermedia Archive, http:// www.berlin.ucla.edu/hypermedia/1905_people/texts/Herwarth_Walden.pdf, accessed December 10th 2012, 5.

42. Ibid.

43. Paul Klee, “Creative Credo,” in Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,1968), 182.

44. Wassily Kandinsky, “The Problem of

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Form,” in Voices of German Expressionism, ed. Victor H. Miesel (London: Tate Trustees, 2003), 51: “What is most important is whether or not a form results from inner necessity,” as opposed to external resemblance.

45. For instance, in a 1913 letter August Macke wrote: “Recently it became especially clear to me that in painting space does not stand by itself, but that space and time are inseparable” (Selz, German Expressionist Painting, 269). Cf. The Italian Futurist idea of “simultaneity,” which merged space and time by including “the total environment and all the motions constantly occurring in it.” (Ibid., 258.)

46. Robert Delaunay, “Light,” in Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1968), 319.

47. Walden, “Introduction.”

48. Seth Taylor, Left-Wing Nietzscheans: The Politics of German Expressionism, 1910-1920 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1990), 216.

49. Franz Marc, “Aphorisms,” in Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1968), 180.

50. Oskar Kokoschka, “Edvard Munch’s Expressionism.” College Art Journal 12, no. 4 (Summer 1953): 320.

51. Kandinsky, “The Problem of Form,” 51.

52. Kokoschka, My Life, 59.

53. Ibid., 58.

54. Selz, “Emergence…,” 53.

55. Ibid.

56. Selz, German Expressionist Painting, 271.

57. Kokoschka, My Life, 66.

58. Bauschinger, “The Berlin Moderns…,” 81.

59. Ibid., 71.

60. Selz, “Emergence…,” 53.

61. Se1z, German Expressionist Painting, 273.

62. Jean-Michel Palmier, Weimar in Exile: The AntiFascist Emigration in Europe and America, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso. 2006), 182.

63. Ibid.

64. Ibid., 181-182.

65. Ibid., 182.

LE DIALOGUE SILENCIEUX GUILLAUME BENOIT-MARTINEAU «TODESFUGE» (1948) Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends Wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts Wir trinken und trinken Wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt Der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete Er schreibt es und tritt vor das Haus und es blitzen die Sterne er pfeift seine Rüden herbei Er pfeift seine Juden hervor läßt schaufeln ein Grab in der Erde Er befiehlt uns spielt auf nun zum Tanz Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts Wir trinken dich morgens und mittags wir trinken dich abends Wir trinken und trinken Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt Der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete Dein aschenes Haar Sulamith wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng Er ruft stecht tiefer ins Erdreich ihr einen ihr andern singet und spielt er greift nach dem Eisen in Gurt er schwingts seine Augen sind blau stecht tiefer die Spaten ihr einen ihr andern spielt weiter zum Tanz auf

wir trinken dich mittags und morgens wir trinken dich abends wir trinken und trinken ein Mann wohnt im Haus dein goldenes Haar Margarete dein aschenes Haar Sulamith er spielt mit den Schlangen Er ruft spielt süßer den Tod der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland er ruft streicht dunkler die Geigen dann steigt ihr als Rauch in die Luft dann habt ihr ein Grab in den Wolken da liegt man nicht eng Schwarze Milche der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts wir trinken dich mittags der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland wir trinken dich abends und morgens wir trinken und trinken der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland sein Auge ist blau er trifft dich mit bleierner Kugel er trifft dich genau ein Mann wohnt im Haus dein goldenes Haar Margarete er hetzt seine Rüden auf uns er schenkt uns ein Grab in der Luft er spielt mit den Schlangen und traümet der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete dein aschenes Haar Sulamith Paul Celan1

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts

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« Welches der Worte du sprichst – du dankst dem Verderben. » – Paul Celan En écoutant l’enregistrement audio de Paul Celan lisant sa Todesfuge, on a l’impression qu’il expire à l’infini tellement ses poumons sont serrés. Sa performance, une course épuisante vers l’autre, ne laisse que des ahanements à l’auditeur. Son souffle lointain, suicidé depuis longtemps, vient se nicher dans le canal auditif et cogne doucement au tympan, arrivant en quelque sorte chez lui. « En quelque sorte » parce que le glissement manifeste qui a lieu ici est trop important pour qu’on le taise.

Je désigne donc et plaide coupable : Celan n’est pas son poème; il ne devient pas cette conversation souvent désespérée2 tout simplement parce que « [t]he poem’s ambition is to impart a personal truth by losing the subject’s or author’s sovereign claim on the utterance, to let the ‘saying,’ or ‘breathcrystal,’ become a message that cannot be resisted by breaking it down into a piece of information, a notion, or a ‘said.’3 » Il est sans doute risqué d’appliquer ce désir d’autodétermination à un poème rédigé bien avant l’élaboration par Celan de la poétique qu’il ébauche dans Der Meridian. Cette ambition du texte absolu dont Baer parle, ambition qui est le fruit de sa détermination et, peut-être aussi, prudemment, de son espoir, puisqu’il se dirige tout droit vers « the ‘otherness’ which it considers it can reach and be free4 », est pourtant bien présente dans Todesfuge. Malgré la primauté écrasante de la mort dans ce poème, cet espoir d’un dialogue avec l’autre et de liberté hors du texte, est bien là.

Cependant, cet espoir est tapi dans ce qui n’est pas exprimé directement. Il est évoqué principalement par ce qui manque. Robert Foot écrit que les atrocités commises par le régime nazi « forced Celan […] into a state of speechlessness, a condition which was to act as the impetus for his ensuing lyric5». Le texte qui permet à Foot de tirer cette conclusion n’est certes pas Todesfuge, mais cette aphasie, cette incapacité de dire ne peut en aucun cas être re-

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streinte à seulement quelques textes du poète.

Elle est en quelque sorte un moyen de défense contre une langue dont chaque mot « exists thanks to and on the basis of and hence runs the risk of appearing to endorse the ‘disaster’6 ».

L’allemand, langue volée, transformée à jamais par ce qu’elle dégoulinait encore de sang bien après la guerre, était vecteur d’oppression et pour ne pas y prendre part, Celan devait faire preuve d’ingéniosité. C’est là que le non-dit entre en jeu. Le corollaire de ce choix l’entraîna peut-être à recourir à la poésie. En effet, celleci : seems [to excel] only in the expression of inexpressibility and […] this, paradoxically, becomes the mode in which the sense of alterity and singularity alone can be communicated. Not by being communicated, but rather by being marked as evading all linguistic formulations, the inexpressible is made at least to show up in poetry. 7 La fuite linguistique à laquelle le précédent passage fait allusion n’est peut-être pas aussi marquée dans Todesfuge que dans les textes plus tardifs du poète, mais elle s’y trouve et c’est par elle que les juifs, narrateurs collectifs, peuvent se permettre d’espérer.

Le soldat habitant la maison, écrivain à ses heures perdues, est associé au personnage de Margarete. Le lien qui unit cette femme et le tortionnaire est autant celui de la poésie que de la conformité à l’idéologie raciale proaryenne du régime hitlérien. L’activité qui occupe le garde est intéressante parce qu’elle fait de lui le représentant d’une vision de la poésie qui n’a plus court. Il s’agit d’une poésie allemande, fondatrice et qui s’impose, vraisemblablement la réappropriation du projet poétique hölderlinien tel que défini par Heidegger, « a project that had been so easily corrupted into the catastrophic program of a ‘National Aestheticism.’ Poetry, Celan insists, now exposes itself to another idiom and another language8».

L’appropriation par cet homme de Margarete, blonde aryenne passive de service, s’inscrit dans la perversion du discours fondateur du poète qui l’impose et par lequel il détermine « ‘the origin of a people’s historical existence’ by creating a work ‘through which history com-

MARCUS OOSENBURG mences or begins again’ » . Margarete fait figure de génitrice pour cette race prétendument supérieure dont l’apprenti poète s’affaire sûrement à écrire le mythe fondateur. Cette femme menace d’être complètement réécrite par une poésie qui fera d’elle une complice du bourreau.

Cette crainte est toutefois effacée par la subordonnée «wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland» . En effet, la position du verbe « dunkelt » n’est pas standard, car il devrait en théorie se trouver après Deutschland. La juxtaposition du groupe verbal « der schreibt » à cette subordonnée suggère un lien de cause à effet entre l’occupation artistique de l’homme et la tombée de la nuit. Il est plus que probable que ce crépuscule littéraire porte sa marque parce que plus tard, quand « ein Mann wohnt im Haus » est immédiatement accolé à « dein goldenes Haar Margarete », cet assombrissement n’est plus mentionné et il n’est plus jamais question d’écriture. La simultanéité de ces disparitions les lie. Quoi qu’il en soit, en relevant la faute de syntaxe commise par l’homme qui les maintient en joue, les narrateurs signalent qu’il ne maîtrise que mal sa langue maternelle et qu’il est par conséquent un écrivaillon minable dont l’œuvre ne parviendra pas à refondre 9

l’histoire de son peuple à jamais. Leur espoir est celui de son échec. Il n’est pas question ici d’insinuer que ce scribouilleur ne laissera pas sa marque, mais plutôt qu’elle ne deviendra jamais l’étalon d’un ordre nouveau. Pour ne pas anéantir cette faible lueur, les juifs se doivent d’aiguiller le lecteur vers celle-ci sans la désigner à l’aide d’un terme précis, ce qu’ils font en reproduisant la syntaxe fautive du garde. Les mots sont porteurs de l’horreur que l’on sait, mais la langue se montre assez souple pour permettre l’élaboration de solutions rendant possible l’expression de l’espérance.

S’accrochant à cette faute, les prisonniers montrent aussi que cette incapacité de l’homme à réécrire Margarete selon son propre code poétique l’empêche de se réapproprier la femme en chair et en os qui le côtoie à l’intérieur de la maison. Une fois le lien poétique disparu, la réalisation du mythe est compromise. La passivité de Margarete est patente et elle permet au garde de la garder près de lui dans une certaine mesure, mais au fond, elle lui échappe complètement parce que les juifs la définissent comme étant extérieure au texte. En se servant du déterminant possessif « dein», les narrateurs placent aussi bien la femme réelle que sa contrepartie poétique en

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lieu sûr en les versant toutes deux de leur souffle dans les poumons vides du lecteur. Si on considère que la poésie est une Atemwende10 et que « the poem is as much the taking of a breath as the expulsion of it11 », alors les prisonniers aspirent la poésie contaminée du tortionnaire, révoquant par le fait même son droit à l’écriture, et en l’expirant, la projettent dans le temps et dans l’altérité pour qu’elle soit reçue dans toute sa fragilité. Peut-être pas par un lecteur ni même jamais, puisqu’il s’agit d’une « ‘open’ question ‘without resolution’, a question which points towards open, empty, free spaces12 », mais comme ce discours porte sur un poème absolu13, peut-être faut-il, dans le cas du poème réel, chercher la réponse à cette question dans la réception du lectorat. Au fond, l’important est que la poésie et la femme, victimes elles aussi de par l’alignement final de Margarete et Sulamith dans les deux derniers vers, sont sauvées comme dans le premier Faust de Goethe.

Elles ne s’en sont toutefois pas sorties indemnes, car comme la langue, elles ont dû traverser « [their] own lack of answers, [go] through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. […]

Went through and could resurface, ‘enriched’ by it all14 ». Maintenant elles sont là, la poésie instrumentalisée pour l’horreur et la femme idéalisée par elle, et elles se portent mieux, même si la sécurité n’est jamais une certitude.

Cette fuite, si elle est possible, ne doit pas faire de l’ombre à Todesfuge. Cependant, la question se pose quant à la possibilité qu’elle fasse partie intégrante du poème. N’est-ce pas, après tout, l’apostrophe « dein » qui rend possible cet exil?

La poésie de Celan est un dialogue, alors qui pourrait bien être le « dein » anonyme persillant Todesfuge sinon cet « approchable you15 », cette ouverture hospitalière ? Le tour de force auquel on assiste est donc la persistance de cette apostrophe malgré la tombe creusée dans un ciel assombri de nuages cinéraires. Le dialogue tacite continue malgré les crématoriums calcinant à plein régime et donc, l’espoir tient bon, même s’il tient peut-être bon à cause de la danse macabre des fours, qui assurent sans doute cyniquement un renouvellement de population et d’espoirs à briser.

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Il est après tout difficile de parler d’espoir quand l’existence même d’une mort belle, absolument unique et authentique est niée par Celan16. Dans ce sens, la proposition grammaticale qui clôt le trente-troisième vers, « er schenkt uns ein Grab in der Luft », semble atrocement sardonique. Ce passage ne peut que refléter le mépris complet et verni de haine du gardien. L’espoir ne peut pas être dans cette tombe venteuse et peut-être ce mot est-il beaucoup trop fort pour désigner ce à quoi les narrateurs peuvent aspirer. Cependant, ils semblent tenir une autre clef. Elle est bien petite, il faut en convenir, et peut-être ne permet-elle pas d’avoir accès à quoique ce soit de rassurant, mais si « der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland », alors quoi ? On nomme seulement un maître, la mort, mais il y a aussi tout ce qui est omis par cette désignation. Contre cette mort seule et unique pèse le poids de tout ce que l’on tait. Là encore, cet éternel autre ineffable vers lequel les juifs et le poème se dirigent, cet autre inconnu et auquel les narrateurs et le texte s’exposent17, trimbalant avec eux toute la douloureuse vulnérabilité18 de leur dernière chance. Cette exposition est peut-être un danger, mais elle est aussi toute la liberté dont les fugitifs disposent. Ils doivent avancer vers l’autre parce que ce qui est derrière eux est indicible. Le sens du poème découle de cette exposition, de cette ouverture infinie, plutôt que de l’adhésion aveugle de celui-ci à « an implicit horizon of understanding19 ». Cette pluralité sémantique est une planche de salut.

En fait, peut-être les juifs qui adressent la parole au lecteur sont-ils après tout des poèmes et que ce qui leur reste est de risquer tout comme le texte d’avoir une multitude de maîtres, ne serait-ce que parce que la mort n’est pas parmi eux.

L’avancée des narrateurs et du poème est peut-être la fugue du titre. Todesfuge est habituellement traduit par fuite de mort. Or, en général, on fuit quelque chose. Mais que fuit-on, ici, en courant pour toujours vers l’inconnue espérance d’un endroit qui s’avère être un méridien20 ? Vraisemblablement la mort d’une définition puisque « das Gedicht behauptet sich am Rande seiner selbst 21 ». Pour le poème, le méridien est une ligne entre la poésie et la

non-poésie. L’affirmation de soi est d’une certaine façon le refus d’appartenir à l’un ou l’autre de ces deux mondes. Ni le texte ni les narrateurs ne fuient en mourant, car il s’agirait là d’une imposition supplémentaire de la part des tortionnaires. Il s’agit plutôt pour eux de refuser d’être épinglé comme un papillon par un mot.

Dans Todesfuge, la réappropriation poétique de la fugue est une solution intéressante qui permet de résister à cette menace. Comme le mentionne Timothy A. Smith dans son article : the poem is a fugue – not in its formal mimicry but in its purpose and essence. Its purpose is to reveal multiple connections between seemingly unlike things, which it does by developing an idea in slightly different ways each time. Its purpose is also to demonstrate relationships, which it does by revealing new ideas born of old ones, but also in counterpoint with the old.22 Le poème refuse de demeurer statique en se recyclant lui-même. Par exemple, le thème introduit par les trois premiers vers ne présente jamais la même séquence temporelle. La variation introduite par le changement de position des adverbes « abends », « mittags », « morgens » et « nachts » vient briser la monotonie du cycle. La souffrance que représente le fait de boire le lait noir n’est jamais la même puisque la suite adverbiale évolue avec elle. Ce rejet de l’immobilité est salutaire en ce qu’il empêche les autorités de figer, de nier puis d’effacer cette souffrance. Cependant, s’il y a un espoir, il n’est pas dans la métamorphose de cette profonde douleur. Il est plutôt dans le refus de faire de l’autre un ennemi, refus manifesté par l’incapacité évidente de faire de lui un pôle magnétique opposé à soi. Si les juifs boivent le lait noir qu’il devient, c’est qu’il est une source de malheur. Pourtant, le trente-et-unième vers indique que « er trifft dich mit bleierner Kugel er trifft dich genau ». C’est donc que cet étranger à qui l’on s’adresse est également une victime. On garde espoir en l’être humain par la reconnaissance que l’inconnu, celui qui permet d’oser croire en d’autres possibles, se

trouve aussi sur un méridien puisqu’il ne bascule dans aucun des deux territoires psychogéographiques ici opposés que sont l’agressivité et la lamentation. Il oscille entre les deux et marche sur la frontière, déjouant ainsi le langage par le fait de son impossible définition.

Son altérité est garantie par la multiplication de ses avatars pronominaux. C’est donc que la fuite s’opère encore une fois par un refus de fixité.

Comme on a pu le voir, dans ce poème, les juifs n’espèrent en général que très peu pour eux-mêmes. Ils se savent condamnés. Il a été question plus haut de leurs potentiels maîtres, mais le cas de celui qui les domine au présent n’a pas été réglé. La pénultième strophe fait trois fois référence au fait que « der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland », mais cette mort, qui est-elle sinon le gardien sans talent poétique qui s’essaye à l’art lyrique, ce qui lui vaut comme punition de voir ses stylos et son papier lui être retirés par la narration ? Son autre œil bleu, il le ferme pour mieux viser et abattre l’illustre inconnu, qui, sûrement, le dérange.

L’espoir des juifs n’est pas souhaitable pour l’homme au pistolet. Cependant, cet artiste raté ne réussit pas à tuer son ennemi puisque celui-ci resurgit triomphant dans les cheveux entremêlés des deux femmes réconciliées. Le garde prouve son incompétence encore une fois, tout simplement parce qu’il ose rêver. Le rêve n’est pas davantage une échappatoire pour lui que pour les prisonniers à qui il ordonne de creuser leur propre tombe. Le rêve est courtcircuité par ce qu’il a de désuet et d’idéalisant dans ce monde. Il a déjà été établi que le projet à caractère mythologique de l’homme au fusil était un échec et pourtant, il remet ça en rêvassant comme un poète maudit dont l’anachronisme est flagrant au milieu de cette boucherie historique qu’a été la Seconde guerre mondiale. Son rêve éveillé l’amène à croire du plus profond de son cœur que la mort est un maître venu d’Allemagne.

Il croit à la permanence de cet état de fait temporaire, mais la permanence est impossible dans ce poème. Il y a toujours une porte de sortie qui vient chambouler tout l’ordre que l’on peut tenter d’imposer dans ce camp, porte que le garde a tenté de défoncer brutalement

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en lui enfonçant une balle à une vitesse inimaginable entre les deux yeux. L’existence de cette issue est le fruit d’un dialogue qu’il faut opposer à l’écriture du garde dans le sens où ce dernier ne participe pas à un échange. Pour lui, l’écriture est une activité solitaire qui relève de l’élaboration d’un fantasme guerrier de domination du plus faible. L’échec de sa tentative de meurtre ainsi que le fait qu’il ne dispose plus de l’écriture comme moyen d’expression et d’imposition sont deux des raisons qui empêchent son rêve de devenir réalité. Ce qui achève de le discréditer est la présence même du verbe « träumet » dans le texte, car ce verbe revèle son penchant pour la fiction. En rêvant que « der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland », le garde se prend à fantasmer son propre avenir. La mort, c’est en partie lui, mais s’il réussit à tuer des juifs, il ne réussit pas à tuer l’espoir de voir l’Allemagne être gouvernée par d’autres principes ni à condamner pour de bon le méridien, auquel il n’a de toute façon pas accès. Si sa tentative de réduire à néant tout ce qui reste de positif pour les gens qu’il élimine de façon routinière jour après jour se solde par un échec, il est dérisoire pour lui de penser qu’il réussira à imposer sa loi, qu’il souhaite pérenne.

C’est donc par une série de détours linguistiques que les narrateurs réussissent à miner l’autorité de ce garde et à se lancer dans une conversation avec un espace inconnu. Il y allait de leur possibilité à croire en quelque chose d’autre. La stratégie de l’évitement aura donc porté ses fruits, même si elle n’aura nécessairement pas réussi à atténuer la douleur de quiconque. Au fond, chercher et trouver de l’espoir dans ce poème était peut-être odieux.

Celan a quand même dit à propos de la poésie « what an eternalization of nothing but mortality, and in vain23 ». Cependant, même si l’entreprise était risquée, elle a peut-être permis de montrer l’esquisse d’un Celan métalinguistique avant l’heure.

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NOTES 1. Paul Celan. Todesfuge. Sur la page « Die Todesfuge –gelesen– », dans ‘Die Todesfug es’, sur le site de Eric Horn, celan-projekt. de, [en ligne], (consulté le 22 avril 2012) : http://www.celan-projekt.de/ 2. Paul Celan. Collected Prose. Traduc. Rosmarie Waldrop. Riverdale-on-Hudson, N.Y: Sheep Meadow Press, 1990, 50.

3. Ulrich Baer. Remnants of Song : Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan. (Stanford, Calif : Stanford University Press, 2000), 204.

4. Celan, Collected Prose, 48.

5. Robert Foot. The Phenomenon of Speechlessness in the Poetry of Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Günter Eich, Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan.

(Bonn : Bouvier, 1982), 211.

6. Baer, 78.

7. William Franke. « The Singular and the Other at the Limits of Language in the Apophatic Poetics of Edmond Jabès and Paul Celan », New Literary History 36, no. 4 (automne 2005), 621-638.

8. Baer, 161.

9. Ibid., 164.

10. Celan, 47.

11. Gerald L. Bruns, Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997, 91.

12. Celan, 50.

13. Ibid., 51.

14. Ibid., 34.

15. Ibid., 35.

16. Ibid., 171.

17. Ibid., p. 29.

18. Baer, 162.

19. Ibid., 165.

20. Celan, 155.

21. Bruns, 95.

22. Timothy A. Smith. « Subject to Death & Life Paul Celan’s Todesfuge, J. S. Bach & the Passion of Christ », Touchstone 23, no. 2, (March/April 2010).

23. Celan, Collected Prose, 52.

PROPHETIC TRAGEDIES

FUCKING, FUTURISM, DISEASEDNESS AND VICTIMHOOD IN FASSBINDER’S QUERELLE1

SCOTT LEYDON

M

ay 31,1945: Bavarian wunderkind Rainer Werner Fassbinder is born a mere three weeks after the unconditional surrender of the Nazis in World War II. As a young German filmmaker, he is fated to spend his career in the uneasy position of being “representative” of a new German culture as it comes to terms with its “citizen-subjects” inherited complicity in the atrocities levelled at Jews and other minority groups during the reign of the Third Reich.

His films contend with the pervasive effects of this most crucial historical moment in the lives and minds of his fellow Germans.

10 June 1982: Fassbinder dies of a lethal mixture of cocaine and sleeping pills eight days before the first medical report on AIDS – still being referred to as GRID (Gay-Related Immune Disorder) – is published, ushering in a crisis of gay representation on a level heretofore unseen. As a young gay filmmaker who “refuses the solidarity discourse of the group,”2 he had been widely critiqued for the sexual politics of his films, apparently evincing no “awareness that gays are oppressed as gays.”3 The same forces of history that had brought Fassbinder into the world in order to comment on the abject situation of post-World War Two Germans seem thankfully to have abjured him of any obligation to explore the abject situation of late-modern Western gays.

Additional levels of fateful irony lie in the fact that Fassbinder, at the time of his death, had recently released unto the world his two most ambitious and perhaps “representative” statements concerning the position of Germans vis-à-vis their history: the epic miniseries Berlin Alexanderplatz (based on the canonical novel by Alfred Döblin), as well as Veronika Voss; the final instalment of his BRD (Bundesrepublik Deutschland) Trilogy. Ad-

ditionally, he had finally turned his camera toward explicitly gay-related and decidedly non-German subject matter for what was to be his final film: Querelle, based on the short story by gay literary icon Jean Genet. Given the direction his oeuvre was headed, it would have been of critical interest to see the kinds of films Fassbinder would have made in response to the emergent AIDS crisis, in which certain minorities (mostly IV drug users and gays) were ruthlessly targeted by propagandist machines in a supposed attempt to protect the members of society worth protecting (i.e. its straight, white, middle class). Fassbinder did not live long enough to make these connections, but his audiences – as fate would have it – were left with a single, strange document that was produced on the cusp of the AIDS crisis and seems strangely prophetic of it. In many ways, with its networks of casual manon-man affection leading to nothing but death and dis-ease, Querelle seems to represent the apex of Fassbinder’s irresponsible sexual politics. With a movie that threatens to utterly devalue gay experience, he precipitately echoes popular media responses that understood “faggots and their promiscuity” as responsible for all the devastation wrought by AIDS. The lurid, offensively lit, awkwardly-played film portrays male-male sexuality as essentially narcissistic and relentlessly phallocentric, inextricable from death and violence, and motivated by a self-destructive death drive. Not unlike the work of other gay artists working in the 1980s, Fassbinder seems to be portraying “the very figure of the homosexual as imagined by heterosexuals – sexually voracious, murderously irresponsible. [... a] homophobic nightmare of himself.”4 Although this is unmistakeably true on one level, a refined understanding

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MARCUS OOSENBURG of Fassbinder’s conception of “victimhood,” identity and the dream-inducing faculties of film, as well as considerations of contemporary theories of “queer time,” may allow Querelle to be redeemed as something more than a reckless affirmation of the gay stereotypes that were largely perceived as the sole cause of AIDS. In the hyper-sexualized world of Querelle, as in the newly sex-conscious social realm whose groundwork was being laid as the film was released, anal sex is purely a “risk:” a dangerous game of chance. When the Handsome Sailor Querelle arrives at Brest Harbour, he plays a game of dice with the colourful seaport’s beefy black bartender Nono (played, as one might expect, by Fassbinder’s long-time collaborator Günther Kaufmann). The two possible outcomes of the game – which are public knowledge and take on a mythic quality as they are relayed from sailor to sailor – determines whether one may fuck Nono’s wife, or whether one must first get fucked by Nono.

Querelle cheats at the game while Nono’s back is turned, and deliberately loses. Faced with the thought of being anally penetrated, he mutters the words “death sentence.” In spite of the knowledge that getting fucked will be his “death sentence,” or perhaps because of this knowledge, Querelle cannot help but want to have gay sex. This moment takes on a tragically ironic undertone when one remembers

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that Brad Davis, the actor playing Querelle, died of AIDS-related complications eight years after the movie was released. Watching the film from our vantage point in time, this all-tooreal historical fact might compel the audience to collapse the imagined reality of the film with the reality of the historical actors who produced it. Querelle (Brad Davis)’s wilful “death sentence” thus begins to shimmer like a ghostly premonition. In a 1988 Village Voice article discussing the homophobic remarks of a supposed “scientific expert” on AIDS, the author asserts that such remarks represent “a stunning regression to 1982, when AIDS was presumed to be a consequence of “the gay lifestyle.”5 If 1982 was the year of blaming “the gay life-style” for disease, Fassbinder’s film is unwittingly and dangerously emblematic of this logic.

In a rather heavy-handed way, Fassbinder makes a parade out of typical gay stereotypes as they interact with each other around Brest.

There are horny sailors, leatherboys, scantily clad police officers, drag queens, and an inconspicuous priest: a smorgasbord of Village People stand-ins who apparently have nothing on the brain but fucking and killing one another.

Gay sexuality and gay murderousness are seen as inextricable, as when Querelle watches his drug-trafficking accomplice Vic slowly undress before taking a knife to his throat. In succes-

sive shots, the camera cuts first to a close-up of Vic’s jock-strapped crotch as he touches himself one last time, before cutting to a close-up of his chest as Querelle sensuously rips it open with his knife, eroticizing death and casting an inescapable pall of morbidity over male-male sensual contact. Furthermore, when Querelle is initially reunited with his older brother Robert, a moment of tenderness is transformed into an odd expression of lust and violence, as their lengthy embrace is punctuated by a series of punches to the gut. Interestingly, as this moment is enacted, a title card appears on-screen that reads, “This film is dedicated to my friendship with El Hedi ben Salem m’ Barek Mohammed Mustafa. -Rainer Werner Fassbinder,” which only serves to emphasize the ways in which autobiography seem to be pervading Fassbinder’s filmic universe. Was this the kind of sensual activity that Fassbinder engaged in with his male “friends” like El Hedi ben Salem?

Is this death-driven, hyper-sexualized culture a reflection of his own networks of affection between men?

Fassbinder’s seemingly pathological need to foreground the process of “reflection” through his frequent deployment of mirrors in the mise-en-scène take on additional significance in Querelle: a film in which the male characters seem narcissistically hell-bent on seeing themselves reflected in surfaces and in their objects of desire. As Fassbinder scholar Thomas Elsaesser remarks, “not even coldblooded murder or violent anal rape can shatter the mirrors that keep these anxious sleepwalkers of the lost reflection in thrall to their self-images.”6 Right after Querelle kills Vic, for example, he looks into a well, in which his reflection has been distorted by the waves, but gradually re-assumes calmness and clarity. The erotic murder has but momentarily disrupted the man’s sense of himself, and only serves to feed his narcissistic impulses. “Each man kills the thing he loves,” sings Jeanne Moreau mournfully throughout the film, indiscreetly highlighting the destructive, life-ending force of gay love and – given that they are all seemingly hot for themselves as well – the deathdrive inherent in the gay psyche. This conflation of man-to-man “love” with “killing” is

strangely prophetic of the language often employed by homophobic popular media during the late 1980’s that sought to depict gay men living with AIDS as murderers rather than victims. As Leo Bersani remarks, the “original desire to kill gays may itself be understandable only in terms of the fantasy for which it is offered as an explanation: homosexuals are killers.”7 Might Querelle be participating, then, in this devastating cultural construction, stoking the flames of a newly emergent homophobic fire?

Fassbinder was known for giving “spectators a quite physical, not to say tactile sensation of bodies agonizingly and violently in contact with each other,” which is certainly a marked characteristic of Querelle’s aesthetic.8 On another level, his stylistic decisions also seem to be working towards depicting the lurid diseasedness of the gay male psyche. Unlike the sober film-blanc aesthetic of his penultimate film Veronika Voss, or the rich, auburn colour scheme and unified, artfully constructed mise-en-scène that characterized the insular lesbian world of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, each frame in Querelle seems painted with rainbow vomit. The film is decidedly unpleasant to watch – lurid and garish – with its dominant colour scheme of oranges, greens and purples presenting a sickly perversion of primary colour. Is this diseased and dis-easing mode of aesthetic a direct product of an uninhibited gay male dream-space, designed by the characters who embody this “hermetically sealed artificial” universe and by the notoriously hedonistic gay director who was likely taking pleasure in filming all these hunky, shirtless sailors? This seems to be supported by the overblown production design, which involves a constant barrage of the most explicit of phallic imagery. The pillars keeping Brest Harbour afloat, for instance, are replete with foreskin and balls. The idea that the film’s gaudiness and dis-easing effects are emanating directly from a “gay consciousness” is further emphasized the first time Querelle lovingly lays eyes on his paramour-to-be Gil. Their initial exchange of looks is underscored by an affectionate song sung by Gil, which is jarringly drowned out by the noises of a pinball machine. What could have been a moment of

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earnest gay affection necessarily leads to ugliness and impairment. In many ways, the film seems designed to offend, right down to the laughably wooden acting, which robs the characters of a sense of humanity.

Although they are explicitly portrayed as degenerate murderers and aggressors – Querelle is even referred to as “the Angel of the Apocalypse” at one point by the film’s ominous and omniscient narrator – it is useful to think of the characters in Querelle in terms of their “victimhood:” a loaded term both in Fassbinder scholarship and in AIDS discourse. To be sure, “people living with AIDS” in the 1980’s generally preferred to be named as such (or by the acronym PWA), rather than “victims of AIDS,” seeing a harmful and unnecessary fatalism in the latter term, where “fates are often joined by unconscious wishes, and victims are often seen to be in some way complicit with, to have courted, their fate.”9 Looking back at Querelle’s dice rolling, such a “courting of fate” seems precisely to have been what he undertook. His concurrent desire to submit to passive sex and to bring about his “death sentence” is a deliberate, willed acceptance of a state of victimhood. For Fassbinder’s characters, however, being a victim was in some ways “a solution;” a way of “refusing the complicity of power struggles over sexual or class identity.”10 And just as his artistic answer for reconciling the supposedly characteristic German sensibilities associated with anti-Semitism and fascism was “to open his films up to the ambiguous play of both displacements: the love of the other (without castrating the other’s power to avenge himself ), and the masochistic pleasure of self-abandonment, abjection” and to take this repressed logic to a place where the ground on which German identity has been imaged can “give way on all sides,” perhaps he saw in the gay sensibility a true “love of the other” and a “masochistic pleasure of self-abandonment” that were inversely reflected in the German consciousness. These affective stances might be repressed, displaced, and manifested as their diametric opposites: love of the self, and the sadistic pleasure of aggression. Perhaps the gay man’s alignment with the subjectivity of victimhood could allow his identity (built

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on destructive precepts like “masochistic pleasure of abjection”) to “give way on all sides.”11 In the same way that Kaja Silverman rescues Fassbinder’s sexual politics in Berlin Alexanderplatz, we might also see Querelle’s networks of destructively homoerotic victimization/ aggression as an attempt to “get ‘inside’ male subjectivity, driven by the wish to love another man, and to accept in the other man all the violence and aggression that constitute idealized masculinity in our culture.”12 Although the characters in Querelle are walking gay stereotypes, they are also figures of camp machismo and of an exaggerated hyper-masculinity. Just as Fassbinder explores the recklessness and disease of a hyper-gay world, he may be levelling a deeper critique at the matrix of masculinities from which this problematic “gay consciousness” has risen.

Another critic who has recently explored the relationship between queerness and the death drive is Lee Edelman, whose pathbreaking polemic, No Future, advocates that queers should accede to their position in the cultural imaginary as figures of death in order to counteract the movement of what he terms “reproductive futurism.” Using a psychoanalytic framework to draw connections between the death drive, homosexuality, jouissance, and the constitution of identities, Edelman explains that, “as the name for a force of mechanistic compulsion whose formal excess supersedes any end toward which it might seem to be aimed, the death drive refuses identity or the absolute privilege of any goal.”13 As Querelle indulges in the impulses of the death drive, therefore, he accepts the kind of psychological and sexual shattering that accompanies experiences of jouissance. He refuses the precepts of reproductive futurism and, although he does not make his goals or his actions entirely legible, he clearly revels in the ego-shattering force of a good fuck. In this way, Querelle does not present a sanitized, easily digestible vision of queerness, but it is one that nonetheless disrupts conventional understandings of what men can (and should) desire.

Along these lines, contemporary queer theorist J. Halberstam has stated that, especially in the wake of the AIDS crisis, “queer

subcultures produce alternative temporalities by allowing their participants to believe that their futures can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience – namely birth, marriage, reproduction and death.”14 The idea that queer subcultures participate in loopy temporal logics is useful in understanding the connection between Fassbinder’s Querelle, the AIDS crisis, and contemporary articulations of queer theory. Rather than understand these three events as situated on a linear, teleological timeline of progressive enlightenment, one might explore the reverberations that pass between them. The power of Fassbinder’s might lie in the fact that it can easily be read through the logic of what Walter Benjamin has called “messianic time,” in which the past is not imagined as the harbinger of the future. Instead, past and future are constantly affecting and re-writing one another, as in the Biblical narrative, for instance, of the sacrifice of Isaac and of Christ.

The Marxist theorist Benedict Anderson has explored this conception of time in relation to the way devotional communities were imagined before the rise of the nation state.15 If we reconsider Querelle’s moniker “the Angel of the Apocalypse” and what it implies for an understanding of the developing AIDS epidemic, it might seem apt to re-appropriate the logic of messianic time for queer purposes, in order to imagine creative, provocative links that have the power to defy teleology and could help in imagining a community of queers that cuts across generational lines and lets its members – past, present, and future – inform each other’s work deeply.

As attested by the research of Kaja Silverman, Thomas Elsaesser, Lee Edelman and J. Halberstam, in particular, there are productive theoretical routes through which one can redeem Fassbinder’s seemingly irresponsible sexual politics in the face of the AIDS crisis.

But Fassbinder has been quoted as saying: What interests me is what I can understand about my possibilities and impossibilities, my hopes and utopian dreams, and how these things relate to my surroundings, that interests me. I’m interested in…the

potential I might have to overcome the things that bother me, fear and all that, much more than theory. I don’t think theory is important to me as a TV watcher, but only as a reader of books. As a television or film spectator, what’s important to me is what can activate my dreams in one way or another.16 Although theory may be useful for cultural critics attempting to comprehend what happened during the AIDS crisis and how discourses related to gay subjectivity and promiscuity (both in art films like Fassbinder’s, and in later media responses) shaped understandings of it, Fassbinder (if we give into the temptations of fate and grant him prophetic foresight) would likely have been more interested in making films that spoke to people living with AIDS. Perhaps the most important question to ask of the film would be: what sort of dreams might it have activated in the mind of one of those queer men who had just been given his own “death sentence” while sitting in a darkened San Francisco theatre and watching Querelle during its original run in 1982? What kinds of possibilities, impossibilities, hopes and utopian dreams might it have illuminated for the same man watching it eight years later, somehow still alive despite the media’s insistence that being gay equals disease, which equals death? Perhaps he would have been comforted and turned on by a dream-space world where the “choking, steaming, sweating, bleeding, oozing bodies” emitted fluids that were romanticized rather than assumed to be carrying disease, where the rectum is not a grave, but rather the double-dealings and exaggerated hyper-masculinity of a confused group of men were responsible for all this death and destruction.17 Given the legacy of the film and the conditions from which it emerged, it is tempting to read Querelle as Fassbinder’s death note.

Rather than examining his work for the factors that had stemmed from a divisive historical moment (the death and re-birth of a certain German consciousness having coincided with the birth of Fassbinder), audiences of Querelle may be tempted to examine the film for the

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factors that had led to a divisive historical moment (the death of Fassbinder having coincided with the death and re-birth of a certain “gay” consciousness). One can choose to look at it as an irresponsible piece of shit film made by a self-loathing, coked-out director, and this would not be completely inaccurate. Given the sneaky, cruel ways in which Fassbinder’s empathy had manifested itself in such films as Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, however, it seems unlikely that there would not be a redemptive message underlying his more obvious pessimism. For Fassbinder himself, as well as all the dead gays that litter Querelle, death can be seen as enacting: […] the drama of a very peculiar radicalism, that of divesting themselves of the means of exchange—power, money, phallic identity—in order to attain an almost mystic transfiguration: not by dying as sacrificial animals, but in and through their deaths daring those that survive to reflect on what it means to give and take, which is to say, what it means to ‘love.’18 “Those that survive” have been granted the responsibility to examine what it means “to give and take.” For a lot of gay men in the wake of Querelle’s release, giving and (especially) taking simply meant contracting HIV and getting sick with AIDS. The bigger question, however, one that permeates Fassbinder’s oeuvre, is the question of what it means to love. Although it is impossible to say what dreams of love could be activated in the minds of gay men watching the film, it remains clear that Fassbinder is committed to a “democratic vision of perversion” that has allowed audiences to see at least one thing in his films that may reflect the beauty, pain, history and double-binds of their subjective experience.

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NOTES 1. Querelle, Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, (Planet Film,1982). Film.

2. Thomas Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany: History, Identity, Subject. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), 13-43, 34 3. Richard Dyer, “Reading Fassbinder’s Sexual Politics”, in Fassbinder, ed. Tony Rayns.

(London: BFI, 1980), 54-64, 61 4. Douglas Crimp, “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic”, in AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988), 237-271, 244 5. Fettner, 25 6. Thomas Elsaesser, 297.

7. Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?”, in AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism, 197-222, 211.

8. Elsaesser, 240.

9. Jan Zita Grover, “AIDS: Keywords”, in AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism, 17-30, 29 10. Elsaesser, 250.

11. Ibid., 250.

12. Kaja Silverman, “Masochistic Ecstasy and the Ruination of Masculinity in Fassbinder’s Cinema”, Male Subjectivity at the Margins, (New York: Routledge, 1992), 214-296, 256.

13. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 22.

14. Judith Halberstam, “Queer Temporality and Postmodern Geographies”, in A Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, (New York; London: NYU Press, 2005), 1-21.

15. Benedict Anderson, “Introduction” and “Cultural Roots” in Imagined Communities.

(London; New York: Verso Books, 1983), 1-38, 42.

16. Silverman, 245.

17. Elsaesser, 297.

18. Elsaesser, 254.

FREUDO-MARXIST IDEOLOGY IN 1930S BERLIN WHY DOES IT MATTER?

PETER W. SHYBA Academic humanists find that by entering Freud’s world of interlocking symbols and facile casual assertions they will never run out of shrewd-looking, counterintuitive things to say in their essays and books.

–Frederick Crews, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley

S

ome recent historiography of psychoanalysis has focused on the role that so called Freudo-Marxists played in the second generation of Freudian thought. The foci of Russell Jacoby’s 1983 book, The Repression of Psychoanalysis, are the early lives of what he considers psychoanalysis’ second wave ‘rebels,’ the challengers of Freudian psychoanalytic dogma and inheritors of a youthful, early twentieth-century intellectual tradition that disfavoured sexual repression while holding psychoanalysis as a potential cure for social ills. The majority of these rebels were raised and educated in Vienna under Freud and subsequently practiced in Berlin together in the 1920s and 1930s, sharing the ideal that psychoanalysis that would help cure social strife.

Jacoby writes that the makeup of the group, and its inclusion of women, was exceptional at the time among professional organizations.

“Since psychoanalysis challenged repressive codes and received knowledge, it attracted not only women but also radicals and bohemians of all types.”1 Jacoby describes this group’s decision to move to Berlin as a way they “assembled to evaluate the political relevance in their discipline.”2 They were drawn by the Berlin Institute, a psychoanalytic training school set up

by Sigmund Freud for the ostensible purpose

of spreading psychoanalysis outside of Vienna and making it less exclusive. According to Freud, the purpose of the Berlin Institute was to “make our therapy accessible to the great numbers of people who suffer no less than the rich from neurosis, but are not in a position to pay for treatment.”3 Indeed, the Berlin Institute can be seen as a deliberate attempt by Freud to make psychoanalysis less of a therapy for the bourgeoisie. Yet shortly after the Institute’s opening, young, socialist psychoanalysts announced that they found the professional structure of the Berlin Institute to still be too restrictive. This young and active group began what would come to be known as the “Children’s Seminar,” which received its name from the youthful and idealistic nature of its discussions. (“Fenichel’s reaction [to criticism of the group] was ‘what of it? If you don’t like the way we do it – let us be naughty children!’”).4 It was during this period, within organizations like the Children’s Seminar, that the ideology of Freudo-Marxism came into the psychoanalytic lexicon. Freudo-Marxism can broadly be defined as a critical-psychoanalytic theory that examines how capitalist structures and the human psyche interact on a societal level. It uses psychoanalytic language – poorer citizens could be sexually repressed because of a lack of birth control – and seeks ways to bring treatment “off of the couch” and “into the streets” – that is, Freudo-Marxists envisioned psychoanalysis practiced among society rather than with the individual. This is Freudo-Marxism in practical terms. But, while we know that the ideology was first formalized in 1930s Berlin, it was never clear – even in the 1920s and 1930s – how this discipline would come into practice, and it remained theoreti-

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SAMUEL NEUBERG cal rather than practice-based. Note, then, that this essay’s focus is the specific period of Freudo-Marxist ideological nascency in Berlin in the 1930s. While it is undeniable that FreudoMarxism was – and is – ideologically driven, this ideology has been amorphous, especially in its use by later twentieth-century philosophers like Herbert Marcuse and Slavoj Žižek.

Therefore, the scope of this paper is admittedly limited: What are the ideological origins of Freudo-Marxism, and why do they matter?

I will answer this question through an examination of the overlapping historiographical, political, organizational, and personal forces that suppressed expressions of Freudo-Marxist ideology. Historically, Freudo-Marxism has been criticized by Whiggish investigations of orthodox Freudian theory, which often neglect dissident perspectives. Politically, the Nazis in the 1930s and the American government of the 1950s, to different extents, made FreudoMarxist ideology deviant. Organizationally, Freudo-Marxism was controlled by Freud himself, who had narrow definitions of acceptable practice. Finally, these forces applied person-

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ally to Freudo-Marxists who were often afraid to act on their ideology. Ultimately, I argue that this oppression of Freudo-Marxist ideology was a factor which hastened the growth of orthodox psychoanalytic practice in the United States.

While establishing the “oppressed” past of Freudo-Marxist thought, it should be kept in mind that the importance of Freudo-Marxist ideology lies in its nature of being somewhat aloof and unmoored from practical expectations. As Žižek writes, “Ideology is not simply a ‘false consciousness,’ an illusory representation of reality, it is rather this reality itself which is already to be conceived as ‘ideological’ — ‘ideological’ is a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of participants as to its essence.”5 Freudo-Marxism was never and is not today a concrete ideology; unlike orthodox psychoanalysis, no textbooks have been written on how to use Freudo-Marxist ideology to treat the symptoms of capitalistic oppression. By understanding how this vague subset of psychoanalytic thought was regarded by contemporaneous actors – especially those

within the psychoanalytic establishment – one can uncover a great deal about Freudo-Marxism on the whole.

Freud, known by many as the founder of psychotherapy, is now “modern history’s most debunked doctor.”6 This is not to say, however, that he is not still “haunting” us, as Jerry Adler writes. The Austrian doctor’s theories have profoundly impacted both modern psychology and modern society.

If it is essentialized, the story of early psychoanalysis is straightforward. In the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries, a Viennese doctor named Sigmund Freud developed a number of theories about psychology and psychological treatment. He experimented with treatments that involved rigorous “psychoanalysis” of patients, with a focus on their childhood; Freud postulated that many mental illnesses are traceable to repressed childhood experiences. Freud was also interested in the unconscious and the meaning of dreams.

Through intensive questioning, Freud would gather information on his patients and their history, eventually determining what part of their past was influencing their current malaise. Initially, psychoanalysis was practiced by Freud with young Jewish women from Vienna’s bourgeois upper crust, a group Ed Shorter claims “aspired to be like their non-Jewish counterparts,”7 but as psychoanalysis became better-known and well-practiced, its clientele became more diverse.

Indeed, throughout the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, Freud’s work was very popular. In this period, he wrote and published On Narcissism (1914), Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1917), The Ego and the Id (1923), and, important for this study, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), along with numerous articles on specific aspects of psychoanalytic theory. In each of these foundational works of twentieth-century psychoanalysis, Freud deftly outlined his vision of the human psychological condition.8 His work, like that of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, is considered some of the most influential academic writing of the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries. Indeed, according to Paul Robinson, author of The Freudian Left, Freud was seen by some as a messiah, an “heir to the

critical impulse in European social thought, a prophet in the tradition of Karl Marx.”9 As Freud’s psychoanalytic theory became more widely known, numerous young Europeans chose to become psychoanalysts. This task of “transmission,” or teaching of Freudian thought, was complicated. Freud, as a figurehead, was fickle about letting posterity stray from his established psychoanalytic orthodoxy.

As Elisabeth Young-Bruehl writes in A History of Freud Biographies, “The founder has never been made historical by a successor, never been equalled or even approximated as a contributor to psychoanalysis. There is no Einstein for this Newton.”10 Young-Bruehl describes the consequences of Freud’s recalcitrance: “It is not surprising […] that psychoanalysis is a science that not only cannot hold up the banner of Progress with any confidence but is full of rebellions – frustrated rages, in fact – against the very patriarchal achievements without which it would not exist. During Freud’s lifetime, schisms and reassertions of the true path alternated.”11 Freud was adamant that all those who practiced psychoanalysis did it ‘by the book’– specifically: his. Indeed, as Ricardo Steiner writes in his essay “Notes on the Term ‘Standard’ in the First Translations of Freud”: “In no other case do the problems of transmission play such a critical part, except perhaps that of the Bible or certain works by Karl Marx.”12 Freud’s restriction on the transmission of psychoanalytic theory limited not only understandings of the practice in the 1930s, but modern ones as well. Historians tend to conflate Freud with psychotherapy, obscuring the reality that dissident and radical interpretations of psychoanalytic ideology existed.

Psychoanalysis, for instance, often appears in critical historiography like a body of water, flowing quietly through history and picking up speed before ending in a cesspool. This is the case in the “deconsecration” of Freud in Ed Shorter’s “The Psychoanalytic Hiatus,” particularly in Shorter’s focus on Germany during the rise of Nazism. In contrast to Shorter, I re-examine the history of this period of psychoanalysis to show that it was not simply “a brief period at mid-twentieth century, [when] middle-class society became enraptured of the

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notion that psychological problems arose as a result of unconscious conflicts over long-past events, especially those of a sexual nature,”13 nor was it simply popular because it “permitted [psychiatrists] to shift the locus of psychiatry from the asylum to private practice.”14 The case study of radical Freudo-Marxist psychoanalysts will show that this was not an ideology motivated simply by middle-class concerns, not just about sex, and not just about the desires of psychiatrists to charge patients for their time and services. It was, in this case, precisely the opposite. Freudo-Marxists spent time developing an idea of psychotherapy that challenged Freudian norms by analyzing the oppression of the working class in a psychoanalytic frame.

In elucidating this point, simplistic narratives of the “decline” of psychoanalysis that focus primarily on Freud can be avoided. While Shorter’s claim that psychoanalysis was a diversion from the Whiggish march of psychology towards a biological understanding of mental illness is common, it neglects the impact of less tangible conceptions of psychoanalysis.

The presence of these sub-groups of psychoanalysts with radical motivations and political orientations suggests that Freud’s orthodoxy was being challenged, and that, from the foundations built by Freud, new, more dynamic theories were being built. Wilhelm Reich, a controversial psychoanalyst and one-time member of the KPD – the German Communist Party – perhaps exemplifies this.

Once a promising disciple of Freud, Reich died in the Federal Penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania in 1957, at the age of 60, after being kicked out of his home country and the International Psychoanalytic Association. His professional career in the United States, which began after his flee from Nazi Germany, had been destroyed just months before his death by the Food and Drug Administration. Following months of investigation, the FDA had had Reich arrested for violating an injunction against selling his “orgone accumulators,” a product he marketed as a cure for cancer among other things. His eulogizer and closest friend commented that, “As with all great men, distortion, falsehood, and persecution followed him.

He met them all, until organized conspiracy

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sent him to prison and killed him.”15 Reich was born in 1897 in Austria to a middle-class Jewish family. Although he initially enrolled in the Faculty of Law at the University of Vienna after the First World War, he found his studies there “dull and remote,” and transferred to the faculty of medicine after his first semester.16 He was attracted to psychoanalysis, according to one biographer, because of the dichotomy between science and philosophy. He saw psychoanalysis as an appropriate bridge between law and health, between understanding deviance in society and being able to change it. After graduation, Freud permitted the young psychoanalyst to see patients at the unprecedented age of 22 or 23, a sign of his perceived talent. Freud, though, warned Reich to avoid “therapeutic ambitiousness,” as “premature therapeutic ambitiousness is not conducive to the discovery of new facts.”17 Freud saw Reich as a talented yet brash analyst, whose focus on the repression of sexuality as a cause of disease could stray from the developed, orthodox understandings of mental illness.

During his time at medical school, he was actively involved in the Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei Österreichs (Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria). The party, which advocated for greater equality, the creation of a social safety net, and increased workers’ rights, was perhaps the most left-leaning in Austrian politics and was Reich’s first foray into political activism, something that would engender his later psychoanalytic practice. According to one biographer, in the mid-1920s Reich opened six sexual health clinics in Vienna that primarily saw working-class patients. These clinics, known as Sex-Pol, or, Deutscher Reichsverband für Proletarische Sexualpolitik (German Association for Proletariat Sexual Politics) can be seen as a fusion of his psychoanalytic training and his socialist politics. Reich would rent a vehicle and drive to poor neighbourhoods of Vienna where he organized group meetings. He brought along nurses and gynaecologists who would dispense advice. Many of the people Reich visited had never been given the opportunity to see a physician before, for reasons that included a lack of education, unavailability of personal medical advice, as well as housing

SAMUEL NEUBERG shortages. According to the documentary Wer hat Angst vor Wilhelm Reich? [Who’s afraid of Wilhelm Reich?], Reich felt the Sex-Pol to be important because of “the huge scale on which sexual problems and neurosis occur [in our society]. We will never be able to cope with this by means of individual therapy…it was consequent from this point of view to begin a type of political commitment.”18 Later in 1929, Reich published what is considered by some to be the foundational text of Freudo-Marxism, Dialectical Materialism in Psychoanalysis.19 The text argues that Freudian psychotherapy has the ability to elucidate the social and familial conditions that create class struggle vis-à-vis materialist understandings of interpersonal conflict. Simply put, psychoanalysis can help interpret how oppressive capitalistic structures interact with individuals and families to create human suffering. As Reich wrote: “Just as Marxism was sociologically the expression of man becoming conscious of the laws of economics and of the exploitation of a majority by a minority, so psychoanalysis is the expression of man becoming conscious of the social

repression of sex.”20 Freud – and perhaps more importantly, other Marxist Freudians – did not share in the view that sex-economy was the fundamental answer to solving social problems using psychoanalysis. While it is true that Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) was the most sociologically-oriented of his works to-date and that a large theme of that book was the way in which suppression of the libidinal drive was caused by the mores of civilized society, it was decidedly removed from contemporary subjects (like fascism), and did not see sex as the tantamount driver of neurotic behaviour.

Subsequently, Reich criticized Freud for this lack of understanding of the importance of sexual drive in Civilization and Its Discontents.21 Reich was ultimately persecuted for the publication of his book by both the psychoanalytic profession and the German government.

Upon taking power, the Third Reich deemed the book to be profane, and the Nazis eventually destroyed it in mass book burnings in 1935. Thus we see that Reich was subjected to many forces in the evaluation of his work as

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a psychotherapist: an intolerant government, Freud himself, and disagreement among his peers with his radical interpretations.

For Otto Fenichel, a fellow politicalFreudian, Reich’s work was simplistic. Fenichel had travelled in the same ideological circles as Reich, a fact that made his criticism more scathing. He had been raised and professionally trained in circumstances similar to Reich’s. Born into a middle-class Jewish family in 1897, he was involved from an early age in radical politics and was trained in psychoanalysis under Freud at the University of Vienna. He moved to Berlin in 1922 where he worked, alongside other Freudo-Marxists, at the Berlin Institute, giving lectures to groups like the Psychoanalytic Marxist Group, the Analytic Marxist Group, and others.22 While Fenichel was no doubt an important figure in politicizing Freudianism, he is often portrayed in an understated relief to more radical analysts like Reich. Jacoby writes that “[t]he diffuseness of Fenichel’s political pronouncements signal a quality of his entire oeuvre. His own methodology subordinated naked political declarations to quiet research.”23 Fenichel’s critique of Reich’s work, which chastised the latter’s tendency to treat sex as the “sine qua non of psychic health,”24 can be seen as a recalcitrance against the use of Freudian theory to overtly critique fascist society. Fenichel’s disapproval, unlike Freud’s, was not based solely on a refutation of ideology, but on the method of expressing it. If Otto Fenichel is an accurate representative, it can be argued that FreudoMarxists were loath to “rock the boat.”

Reich’s break with Freud and with his fellow political-Freudians became official one year later at the 1934 conference of the International Psychoanalytic Association, in Lucerne, Switzerland. Reich’s membership in the organization – ostensibly the overseeing body of psychoanalysts throughout the world – was “terminated” by the organization even before he arrived, a move that surprised him.25 According to Robinson, Reich’s expulsion was a direct result of some of his recent work: “he was told that the publication of The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) had made him a liability to 1930’s psychoanalysis, a man whose

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ideas had simply become incongruous with analysts’ view of their own profession.”26 Freud felt that Reich’s connection of psychoanalysis to communism was “embarrassing,” while his daughter, Anna, had been campaigning against Reich for almost three years prior to his expulsion.27 In a 2003 article in the International Forum on Psychoanalysis, Wilhelm and Annie Reich’s daughter, Lore Reich-Rubin, wrote, “Anna plotted to get rid of Reich and slowly convinced Jones [the president of the International Psychoanalytic Association] that this was the correct thing to do […] the fact is that if you did not coalesce with Anna Freud, you were ‘out.’”28 Reich, in turn, felt that he was “completely alone” at the Lucerne conference, likely referencing the fact that he was excommunicated by even the radical psychoanalysts of the Berlin Institute, like Fenichel, due to their lack of support.

In response to this, Fenichel agreed, saying, “The most important thing I can do now for the psychoanalytic movement is not get myself thrown out.”29 Following this very public expression of Freud’s anger with politicized psychoanalysis, Fenichel began the search for a way to transmit ‘opposition’ theories of psychoanalysis away from the watchful eye of the Freudian psychoanalytic establishment.

Fenichel’s chosen method were the Rundbriefe (Newsletters), which contained pertinent essays, reviews of books, and summaries of lectures on Freudo-Marxist thought. These Rundbriefe, which lasted from 1934-1945 and were sometimes over seventy pages long, would be edited by Fenichel and contain content sent in by members of his chosen group of roughly a dozen Freudo-Marxists.30 Fenichel’s goal was that the group would function as a “written Children’s Seminar of Marxist psychoanalysis,” albeit one which practiced in secret. Fenichel asked the recipients of the newsletters to burn them after reading.31 Fenichel’s movement of his Freudo-Marxist thought to the “underground” shows that he was attempting to create a place for a critical analysis that could develop in secrecy amongst like-minded individuals, away from the glare of the formal psychoanalytic structure and the government.

Fenichel, in other words, was aiming to create

a group who could discuss important questions of Freudo-Marxism free from those who had previously oppressed them.

Reich, however, was not included in this Rundbriefe circle, for reasons that were both personal and professional. According to Jacoby: Since Reich was becoming ever more difficult, and since he was demanding unconditional subordination to a theory that was rapidly leaving behind both psychoanalysis and Marxism, friends and students found themselves hard pressed to support him.

Fenichel chose to lead a cover group of analysts who could not completely accept Reich’s theories; who were unwilling openly to challenge the official psychoanalytical organization; and who were dedicated to exploring the issues of a social and political analysis.32 One could conclude that Reichian modes of psychoanalytic thought, while congruent in essence with wider Freudo-Marxist motives, were unacceptable to Fenichel not just because of their negative publicity, but also because of their content. The Rundbriefe group, while admittedly gun-shy of controversy, simply did not agree with Reich’s theories, and, as a result, were attempting to create a less radical, more grounded, and less public Freudo-Marxism. In a review of the first published collection of Rundbriefe, which came out in 1998, the famous American psychoanalyst Martin Bergmann wrote that, “the Rundbriefe, in consequence, show Fenichel at pains to establish a position for himself between Freud and Reich.”33 In the post-Nazi psychoanalytic landscape, Fenichel was making a conscious effort to subtly reframe and redirect Freudo-Marxist ideology.

In due course, both Fenichel and Reich fled from Nazi Germany to the United States – Fenichel to Los Angeles in 1938 and Reich in 1939 to New York.34 Both continued in their psychoanalytic careers in very different ways.

Fenichel worked extensively on his Rundbriefe while writing his decidedly un-radical tome, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis.

Conversely, Reich worked on his theory of Orgonon and developing his “cloud buster”, a machine which supposedly could control local weather.35 The Rundbriefe continued, even as most of the psychoanalysts involved moved to the United States where psychoanalysis was gaining popularity. Given the anti-Communist political climate in the United States during this period, these newly-arrived immigrants were wary of having their self-described Freudo-Marxist newsletter discovered. Fenichel advised all recipients to burn the document immediately after reading, something that, given the 1998 publishing of a complete set, obviously did not occur. According to Lore Reich-Rubin, the fear of being found out as a Freudo-Marxist was intense: As [my mother] lay dying, a fellow recipient [of the Rundbriefe] went into her closet and stole them so that it would not become known that they existed or who had received them – both out of fear that their Marxist past as well as their opposition to organized psychoanalysis would be known. That is how frightened these ex-left wing analysts were to be known as having been recipients of the Rundbriefe.36 The secrecy of these documents and the reluctance of their recipients to disclose their ideology are telling of America in the 1950s, but the diligence due this topic would require an essay with a completely different scope. In the context of psychoanalysis in 1930s Germany, I interpret the existence of these secret Rundbriefe in the United States as way in which Freudo-Marxists could “produce” their ideology safely. As a result of this secrecy, however, some historians have concluded that American psychoanalysis was not challenged, and that only one version of psychoanalysis – the orthodox one – could become known. As Jacoby writes, “They generally desired social and political invisibility, which in turn prompted a public conformism to prevailing intellectual trends. The insecurity of the refugees accelerated the Americanization of psychoanalysis.”37 In

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exchange for security, Marxist-Freudians may have given up the opportunity to create a more adaptive and socially conscious psychoanalysis.

Once very popular in the United States and Canada, today psychoanalysis is less frequently practiced, and Freud has been denigrated by the popular media and the academe alike.

Forgotten, for the most part, are the FreudoMarxists of Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s.

But the tradition of these intellectuals, while perhaps not readily known to the lay-public, did inform psychoanalytic, Marxist, and postmodern theories. Philosophers like Jacques Lacan and members of the Frankfurt School – including Theodor W. Adorno and Herbert Marcuse – built upon ideas of Freudo-Marxism in developing their oeuvres, evidenced by Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, a Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, a book which deals with Marx’s conception of man. More recently, Slavoj Žižek has used Freudo-Marxism to assert a number of his theories, including those I cite above on the importance of ideology, which he argues is an ‘object’ in and of itself.

According to the definition of FreudoMarxism put forward by the medical philosopher Nicholas Powers: In contrast to the conservative neo-Freudian “revisionists” who came to dominate psychoanalysis in the Anglo-American world and for whom the goal of therapy was adjustment (to a social reality of whatever degree of irrationality), the Freudian left would press a cornerstone of Freudian psychoanalysis, viz., that the wages of civilization is neurosis, and offer up not only the most radical critique of western liberalism of the last century, but a bold and positive vision of human liberation. In doing so, the Freudian Left lay the groundwork for post-modernist theoreticians such as Foucault and Lacan, and served as a lighthouse for many of the key constituencies – students, homosexuals, greens, women – of the New Left.38 I wholeheartedly agree with this definition, and argue that Freudo-Marxists attempted to challenge formal liberal structures, albeit

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not always consciously. To them, psychoanalysis was not a merely a new way of scientifically and objectively understanding the human psyche, it was a mode of ideology that imagined less oppressive social outcomes through a psychoanalytic lens. They hoped to use psychoanalytic theory to understand broader social issues, and, in the process, they challenged history, governments, Freud, and their peers.

True, their greatest impacts were ideological; but, if one agrees with Žižek, this fact must be celebrated. Ideology, while “real” and an “object,” can never be destroyed.

NOTES 1. Russell Jacoby, The Repression of Psychoanalysis, (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

2. Ibid., 64.

3. Sigmund Freud, “Vorwart,” in Zehn Jahre Berliner Psychoanalytisches Institut, ed.

Deutsche Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft (Vienna: Internationaler Psychoanalytischen Verlag, 1930), 5.

4. Jacoby, Repression, 66.

5. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, (Brooklyn: Verso, 1989), 15.

6. Jerry Adler, “Freud in our Midst,” Newsweek, (March 27 2006), 43.

7. Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac, (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1997), 153.

8. Freud never won a Nobel Prize, but he did win the prestigious Goethe Award for literary achievement in 1930.

9. Paul A Robinson, The Freudian Left: Wilhelm Reich, Geza Roheim, Herbert Marcuse, (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 4.

10. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, “A History of Freud Biographies,” in Discovering the History of Psychiatry, eds. Mark S. Micale and Roy Porter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 157.

11. Ibid.

12. Ricardo Steiner, “Die Weltmachtstellung des Britischen Reichs’: notes on the term ‘standard’ in the first translations of Freud,” in Freud in Exile: Psychoanalysis and its Vicis-

situdes, eds. Dr. Naomi Segal and Dr. Edward Timms (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).

13. Shorter, A History of Psychiatry, 145.

14. Ibid.

15. Myron R Sharaf, Fury on Earth: a Biography of Wilhelm Reich (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1983), 3.

16. Ibid., 54.

17. Ibid., 73.

18. Wer hat Angst vor Wilhelm Reich?, YouTube, directed by Antonin Svoboda (Vienna, Austria: Coop 99, 2009).

19. Jonas Holmgren, “Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis.” Solidarity, VII, no. 3 (1972).

20. Wilhelm Reich, “Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis,” Studies on the Left 6, no. 4 (1966), 41.

21. Robinson, The Freudian Left, 32.

22. Jacoby, Repression, 71.

23. Ibid., 73.

24. Ibid.

25. Robinson, The Freudian Left, 37.

26. Ibid., 37.

27. Martin S. Bergmann, “The Psychoanalytic Wars of Yesterday,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 53 no. 2, (June 2005), 665.

28. Lore Reich-Rubin,“William Reich and Anna Freud: His Expulsion from psychoanalysis,” International Forum of Psychoanalysis 12 no. 2-3, (2003), 114.

29. Jacoby, Repression, 84.

30. Copies of these Rundbriefe are exceedingly hard to find; the university nearest McGill that has a full set is Yale, and while this research may have been aided by a rounder study of these letters I was unable to access them via interlibrary loan.

31. Ibid., 86.

32. Ibid., 86.

33. Bergmann, 665.

34. The Nazis officially took control of Germany in 1933 following President Hindenburg’s appointment of Hitler to the chancellorship in January. The government’s official anti-Semitic policies became blatant as the year wore on and by May, political Freudians, the majority of whom were Jewish, had

fled in the wake of massive book burnings, which included the works of Freud. Between 1933 and 1938, 70 per cent of German psychiatrists had emigrated to 80 different countries. Psychoanalysts spread out across Europe, communicating with each other via mail and conferences hosted by the International Psychoanalytic Association.

35. This is obviously a simplification, but Reich’s projects in this period are too numerous to describe in detail.

36. Reich-Rubin, 112.

37. Jacoby, Repression, 19.

38. Nicholas Powers, “The Freudian Left,” in Sex from Plato to Paglia: a Philosophical Encyclopedia, ed. Alan Soble (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2006), 287.

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MARCUS OOSENBURG

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MIRRORS ALWAYS [SEE] THE TRUTH

MIRRORS AND SADOMASOCHISM IN FASSBINDER’S MARTHA

CHRISTINA COLIZZA

R

ainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 melodrama Martha, a frightening tale of dominance and submission between a married couple, was originally made for German television, but has come to be known as one of Fassbinder’s greatest filmic works. After viewing the film, it comes as no surprise that the original cover of the film has two opposing images. In one image, the main character Martha (Margit Carstensen), covers her mouth in fearful shock, her eyes wide open.

The bottom image, however, shows a more serene Martha, staring into the distance, with her back turned to her husband Helmut (Karlheinz Bohm), who similarly sits with his back turned, holding a cup of tea. The symmetry of the bottom image creates a sense of equality between the husband and wife, which starkly contrasts from the above image of a hysterical Martha. Both images, however, exemplify Martha’s relationship with Helmut: a marriage dictated simultaneously by theatrical fear and complacency.

What the cover does not display, however, is the complex power relation between the two: mainly, Helmut’s sadistic pleasure in torturing Martha, and conversely, Martha’s masochistic enjoyment of her own suffering. After the death of her father, Martha meets Helmut at a wedding, and the two soon marry. However, their marriage quickly develops into a dynamic of domination and submission, as Helmut coerces Martha into sex, controls her behavior, and eventually forbids her from any contact outside the domestic sphere where the majority of the film takes place. Although Martha appears a tragic and even helpless character, her suffering remains only a mirage, or exhibition of constraint. Fassbinder’s camerawork, physical positioning of characters within the frame, and excessive inclusion of mirrors in the film, work to implicate Martha in her own oppression, as

well as the viewer’s. The cinematography works to engulf the viewer in the domestic sphere, just as Helmut’s power engulfs Martha. While Martha remains alone at home, she constantly fashions her behavior according to Helmut’s wishes in front of the mirror, as if being gazed upon. The audience’s position metonymically becomes that of the physical mirror in order to discipline or catch Martha’s misbehavior. Drawing clear inspiration from Antonin Artaud’s notion of the “Theatre of Cruelty,” Fassbinder, via the mirrors, forces the viewer to witness the torturous dynamic between the characters, as they perform in turn for the mirror, or viewer. In true Artaudian fashion, catharsis exists neither for the viewer, nor for Martha or Helmut, nor is catharsis desired since it would break the sadomasochist cycle of pleasure. The contrasting images on the film’s original cover are simply two glimpses of the poisonous dynamic between the two characters, which is constantly exercised throughout the film.

Within eight minutes of the film, Fassbinder foreshadows the sadomasochistic relationship between Helmut and Martha both cinematographically and through the character’s physical positioning within the shot. Before officially meeting, the two cross paths and slowly make eye contact.

Presumably working on a track, Fassbinder deploys a 720-degree shot, slowly circling around the characters during their moment of initial recognition as counterparts. Particularly telling is the alienation and self-interest they exhibit. Although unknown to the viewer at the time, the characters’ investment in their own pleasure causes them to slowly turn away, balancing each other out through their physical symmetry, or mirror image. The effect is dramatic, as the length of the shot and its circular motion creates a sense of magnetism between the two, akin to a yin-yang.

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They appear equal, yet opposite.

In Gilles Deleuze’s “Coldness and Cruelty,” Deleuze describes the reciprocity of sadomasochistic couples, arguing that “the sadist is in need of institutions, the masochist of contractual relations…possession is the sadist’s particular form of madness just as the pact is the masochist’s.”1 Throughout the film, Helmut exhibits a reliance on the social institution of marriage and normative gender roles to enable his sadistic torture of Martha, just as Martha, as the masochist, relies on Helmut’s implicit “contract” or promise to continue her pain. If the scene described above functions as the recognition of sadist to masochist and masochist to sadist, the scene after Martha returns from seeing Helmut in the park certainly functions as a solidification of their respective roles.2 As Helmut returns home, Martha restrains herself from greeting him with physical affection (affection Helmut consistently denies) and the two take turns moving in front of the household mirrors. The camera stays fixed upon Martha or Helmut and their reflections, and only moves into broader space when guided by a character. Eventually, the two sit back to back, and Martha begins to rehearse the civil engineering book Helmut has forced her to memorize. All the while, the mirror, acting as viewer, is placed directly behind their heads: a clear indication of the performativity of their prescribed roles. As Martha finishes reciting the book, Helmut stares at her with desire.

“See Martha, these things can be fun,” he adds, and subsequently attacks her.

The most significant aspect of the scene, however, is Fassbinder’s repeated usage of the slow, 720-degree shot around the characters as they face opposite directions. Unlike the first scene, however, the shot abruptly cuts to Martha, who is receiving Helmut’s adoring gaze.

The jump cut reveals how Martha shares equal power in their relationship, despite Helmut’s displays of domination. By abruptly cutting the 720-degree shot utilized during Martha and Helmut’s initial introduction, Fassbinder highlights the complementary nature of torturer and tortured, and the development of their sadomasochism throughout the film.

Sitting back to back, they reinforce Deleuze’s

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assessment that “sadism and masochism are confused when they are treated like abstract entities each in isolation from its specific universe.”3 Staring in opposite directions with no physical connection to one another, they both occupy the respective universes of sadist and masochist, while only truly interacting when desirous of mutual pleasure.

The scenes in which Martha and Helmut appear together make explicit Helmut’s sadistic pleasure. Martha’s masochism, however, only emerges when she is left home alone. On multiple occasions throughout the film, Martha exhibits her own torture for the spectator via the mirror. In one instance, Helmut denies Martha’s kiss, and walks out of the door.4 Fassbinder’s camera stays pointed at the mirror’s reflection as Martha sits on the couch to light a cigarette. Glancing upwards, Martha catches her reflection, and lets the match burn out as if someone has caught her smoking inside (something Helmut disallows her to do). Slowly advancing towards the mirror and gazing at her own reflection, she removes the cigarette from her mouth, and walks outside while the shot remains on the mirror. The entirety of the sequence exists through the mirror’s reflection, emphasizing a clear connection between Martha’s exhibitionism of her torture and the audience’s spectatorship. Thomas Elsaesser argues in his book Fassbinder’s Germany that, “[...] in Fassbinder’s films, what matters is not the act of looking after all. The look is mainly necessary in order to support someone’s desire or need to be looked at, suggesting that much of his cinema is not about voyeurism as it is about exhibitionism.”5 Elsaesser’s analysis applies directly to Martha, since she constantly conditions herself according to Helmut’s wishes.

Like the mirror, the viewer is all knowing and all seeing, and completely implicated within the exhibitionism on screen.

Besides Helmut’s confinement of Martha in the domestic realm, Fassbinder simultaneously confines Martha and the viewer to limited cinematic space. The viewer’s vision is kept on Martha’s masochistic self-disciplining or the cruel interactions between Martha and Helmut, both of which are extremely difficult to watch considering the length of Fassbinder’s

shots and their violent nature. Although little scholarly work exists about Fassbinder’s work in theatre compared to his films, “Fassbinder’s interest in Artaud is well documented,” and Fassbinder used the playwright’s words for an epigraph to the film Satansbraten (Satan’s Brew).6 In 1974, the same year Fassbinder made Martha, he explained how “dearly he valued the depths of relationships developed over a rehearsal period in a theatre.”7 As Fassbinder would soon quit theatre direction after making Martha, the film and actress Margit Carstensen shows a clear influence from theatrical practice.

Artaud beckoned for a theatre of action, in which spectators would awaken to the cruelty of the world as displayed on stage. In “Theatre and its Double,” Artaud explains how “a direct communication will be re-established between the spectator and the spectacle, between the actor and the spectator, from the fact that the spectator, placed in the middle of the action, is engulfed and physically affected by it.”8 As Fassbinder once likened the position of the characters and viewers in his films to “insects in a glass case,” Artaud’s influence on Fassbinder’s usage of space is undeniable, and particularly evident in Martha. Artaud imagined a theatre without partitions, with the entire theatre as the set. Fassbinder translated Artaud’s notion of the setting through engulfment and immersion of the spectator by only allowing the spectator limited space. In Martha especially, Fassbinder’s camera movement, “reveals a space, not while but before a character enters it, or it reveals someone else in space, who seems to be watching us, watching.”9 Often, once Martha glances in the mirror, Fassbinder jump cuts to a view from the shrubbery in backyard before she has even exited the house. It appears as if Martha walks out to perform for the spectator, with the spectator already awaiting her performance. The limitations of space and constant immersion of the viewer into the scene create Artaud’s conception of the set.

A second integral part of Artaud’s theatre was the aspect of cruelty, for, “without an element of cruelty at the root of every spectacle, the theater is not possible.”10 Enclosure and cruelty define Martha’s existence, and in Artau-

dian fashion, awaken the viewer to perpetual conflict between people. In one instance, abandoned by Helmut, Martha laughs at her own reflection, wearing only a slip, with streaked makeup and messy hair, stating: “Martha Salomon, née Hayer. On a Monday, September 23.”11 She appears hysterical, and the camera appears to be only inches away from the mirror. Like Martha, the viewer is uncomfortably trapped watching Martha exhibit her own happiness at her tortured state. In repeating the date of her anniversary, Martha emphasizes the establishment of her relationship with her torturer, and the cyclical nature of sadomasochism. The effect is heart wrenching, but Fassbinder offers no resolve, or cinematic space.

Outside the domestic realm, without mirrors, Fassbinder deploys other means for Helmut and Martha to exhibit their torturous relationship. Most notably, Fassbinder includes relatively flat characters to bear gaze on the couple when the viewer cannot. In one scene, “the lovers are observed by a couple at the fair ground; or the camera focuses prominently on the point of view of Olga, the serving maid at the wedding, and later still, it is Inge, Martha’s colleague at the library who has a look but no role.”12 For Elsaesser, Olga and Inge are hardly narrative agents, but privileged by being the bearer of the gaze. They are simply a means by which Helmut and Martha are seen. Public space is transformed into Artaud’s theatre as our vision never leaves Martha, the site of cruelty and pain, but is momentarily co-opted

by Olga and Inge.

In an interview with Fassbinder, the interviewer mentions that the characters never see each other, but only their mirror images, which makes them “strange to themselves.”13 Fassbinder replied that the interviewer was not over-interpreting, saying “in the film we are dealing with two characters, neither of whom really has an identity.”14 The notion of mirror imaging is shown when the two initially meet, then again as they sit back to back. Whether mirrored physically or reflected in the household mirror, Fassbinder is constantly hinting at the power dynamic between the two characters, particularly the pleasure Martha derives from pain. The characters attempt to “situate

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themselves in their interpersonal relationships, seeking to use the other as the direct or metaphorical mirror which will reflect back onto them an image of themselves.”15 Even as the mirror metonymically acts as the viewer of the sadomasochistic exhibitions, the two require each other for pleasure despite their alienation.

The ending shot of the film, with the two silently staring ahead as the elevator doors close is emblematic not of their alienation, but of their need for one another.

While Fassbinder makes Martha appear as a victim of domesticity, her husband’s misogyny, and bourgeois ideals of marriage, these interpretations are only superficial. Through a deeper analysis of Martha, Fassbinder offers the story of a woman as invested in her own pain and suffering as her sadistic husband.

The scenes of Martha glancing in the mirror and subsequently disciplining her actions according to Helmut’s wishes hardly progress the plot, but rather expose sadomasochism at work. The mirrors function metonymically as the viewer, both to implicate the viewer in the diegetic realm as well as reinforce Martha’s masochism as exhibition and performance. As Elsaesser notes, “one is tempted to say that in Fassbinder’s films all human relations, bodily contact, even social hierarchies, and most forms of communication and action manifest themselves…along the axis of seeing and being seen.”16 Elsaesser’s assessment is certainly true of Martha, since the sadomasochism of Martha and Helmut is best exposed in mirrored reflection or the gaze of others. They wish to be seen, and the limited cinematic space Fassbinder offers forces the viewer to look. Feeling sympathetic for Martha is a misinterpretation of Fassbinder’s work at best, and defeats the purpose of Antonin Artaud’s theatre of cruelty, which Fassbinder so closely replicates. By using mirrors and space as a means of implicating the viewer within the diegetic realm, Fassbinder translates Artaud’s notion of engulfing the viewer into cinema. The reason for engulfing the viewer? To witness the cruelty at the core of human nature: cruelty Martha and Helmut exhibit all too well.

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NOTES 1. Gilles Deleuze and Leopold Sacher-Masoch, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty & Venus in Furs (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 20-21.

2. Martha, directed by Rainer Fassbinder (West Germany: WDR Television Network, 1974), Film.

3. Deleuze, Masochism, 42.

4. Martha, 57:00.

5. Thomas Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany: History, Identity, Subject (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), 60.

6. David Barnett, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the German Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 5.

7. Ibid., 4.

8. Antonin Artaud, “The Theatre of Cruelty (First Manifesto),” in The Theatre and its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 96.

9. Ibid., 58.

10. Ibid., 99.

11. Martha, 1:23:00.

12. Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany, 65.

13. Ibid., 63.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid., 62.

16. Ibid., 60.

ETHICS AND THE NOUMENA

THE POST-KANTIAN PROBLEMATIC IN THE WORKS OF HEINRICH VON KLEIST

VINCENT CALABRESE I. KANTIAN ETHICS IN MICHEAL KOHLHAAS Because his Critique of Pure Reason was thought to have dethroned the goddess of Enlightenment and robbed Europe’s intellectual community of its faith in the possibility of infinite progress through reason, Moses Mendelssohn referred to Kant as “the all-destroyer.”1 Kant’s thought created a revolution in all areas of intellectual life, and the dramatist, poet, and short-story writer Heinrich von Kleist was among those who were rocked to the core by the implications of the critical philosophy. In a famous letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge, Kleist laments that if the Kantian system is accepted, “no truth is discoverable here on earth.”2 Though at first the melancholy induced by his discovery of the critical philosophy made Kleist unable to read or write, he eventually returned to literature and engaged head-on with Kant’s system. One piece of his work in which this engagement is clearly on display is his 1806 novella Michael Kohlhaas, in which Kleist presents a critique and parody of Kant’s ethics. In the story, Kleist shows that the essentially unverifiable nature of crucial components of Kant’s ethical system makes it possible, as Kohlhaas does, to adhere to its formal structures while behaving monstrously. After exploring Kleist’s treatment of Kant’s ethics in Michael Kohlhaas, I hope to locate Kleist’s thought in the context of the contemporary response to the philosophical problematic which was the legacy of Kant’s critical philosophy.

In the story, the horse dealer Kohlhaas is robbed of some horses by a local nobleman, and Kohlhaas repeatedly attempts to have his wrongs redressed by the sovereigns of Saxony and Brandenburg, but is repeatedly foiled by

aristocratic privilege and bureaucratic malfeasance. Eventually Kohlhaas snaps, and recruiting a band of outlaws, goes on a rampage throughout the countryside, setting himself up as a crusader waging a just war against the Junker who wronged him. Kohlhaas is a tragic parody of the Kantian ethical actor. A selflegislating agent (the “Kohlhaas Mandates” through which he communicates his commands to the populace are clearly allusions to Kant’s language of self-legislation), Kohlhaas’s reverence for a moral law leads him to do deeds of fearsome destruction. This is possible, Kleist seems to be arguing, because Kohlhaas’s moral action is entirely determined by a devotion to an abstract, formal principle of justice to which all deeds can in principle fulfill. The purely formal nature of the elements of Kant’s ethics and the unverifiable, noumenal ground upon which they depend make possible a paradoxical case such as that of Kohlhaas, whose “sense of justice turned him into a robber and a murderer.”3 Here we can explore the ways in which Kleist uses Kohlhaas to demonstrate how adherence to the formal structures of Kant’s ethics is no guarantee that the resultant behaviour be in agreement with our moral intuitions. Under consideration will be Kant’s closely connected notions of the good will and of duty, as well as the famous categorical imperative. First we must sketch the roles they play in Kant’s ethical philosophy; once this is done, we may proceed to see how Kleist’s treats them in Michael Kohlhaas.

According to Kant, a good will is essential for an action to be considered moral. It is, he writes, “the indispensable condition of even being worthy of happiness.”4 The existence of free will, Kant believes, is a necessary

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condition for establishing coherent notions of moral perfection, as well as God’s goodness.5 A will is not considered to be good in Kant’s sense because of the effects of its actions, but only insofar as it is good “in itself.”6 And how does one determine if a will is good in itself?

The one and only criterion is that the agent performing must be doing her duty, which for Kant means following the moral law for the sake of the law itself. Duty, Kant writes is “the necessity of an action done out of respect for the law,” which alone can be “an object of respect and hence a command.”7 All inclination (motivations rooted in, for example, pleasure or sympathy) is for Kant is essentially irrational passion arising from our physical nature and must be banished from one’s moral decisionmaking process so that we may be swayed only by our respect for the moral law, which is rooted in reason (thus if we are moved to act out of a compassionate reaction to, say, the sight of suffering, this precludes us from acting with good will for Kant). Finally, to determine the moral status of any particular action, the agent must submit the plan of action to the categorical imperative, a formula, which instructs us to “act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”8 Kant freely admits that there are problems in putting his ethical system into practice.

Perhaps the most important difficulty is that actions belong to the phenomenal realm, while duty and moral goodness are noumenal, belonging to the realm of things-in-themselves.

This distinction is central to Kant’s philosophical system. The noumena are the actual objects of the world, and phenomena are manifestations or appearances of these objects, which are derived from sense experience and given structure and order by innate categories of understanding. The noumena, Kant insists, are never actually encountered; when we engage in scientific investigations what we are exploring is the interrelationships of phenomena while the noumena remain unknown somethings.9 This distinction creates serious difficulties when applied to ethics. In the realm of moral life or practical reason, the objects of inquiry (noumena) are good will, freedom, immortal-

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ity and God, while human actions and their results are phenomena. When we judge moral worth, according to Kant, what we are concerned with is not the action as such or its consequences, but the un-encounterable motivation of which that action is a mere manifestation. Thus Kant writes, “when moral value is being considered, the concern is not with the actions, which are seen, but rather with their inner principles, which are not seen.”10 Indeed at times Kant seems to do much of his critics’ work for them, for example when he declares that there is “absolutely no possibility” of determining when an action is really done from duty (and not some hidden, selfish motive) and hence has moral value.11 Similarly, Kant frankly states, “no example can show, i.e., empirically, whether there is such example [of a categorical imperative] at all.”12 The freedom of the will is similarly located in the noumenal realm and unverifiable to us, even though it is supposed to be a condition of possibility for moral action.

Kleist seizes on such problems with these Kantian notions and allows them to play out to great effect in Michael Kohlhaas. For example, the horse-dealer’s actions are performed out of his fanatical devotion to a moral law – namely the law of justice. Kleist emphasizes that Kohlhaas’ vendetta against the Junker is not motivated by material concerns: “the horses were not the issue” for Kohlhaas, who “would have felt the same grief had it been a matter of a couple of dogs.”13 Rather, Kohlhaas feels that “it was his duty to the world to get satisfaction for himself for the offense done him and a security for his fellow citizens against any further such.”14 A closely related objection to Kant’s system, also pertinent to this reading of Michael Kohlhaas, is that the consequences of actions have no effect on their moral value. Kant writes that “what is essentially good in the action consists in the mental disposition, let the consequences be what they may.”15 Kohlhaas acts in accordance with what he takes to be the moral law, and undertaken for that law’s sake, and hence he possesses a ‘good will,’ irrespective of the corpses which that will’s maxim produced.

Kleist’s narrative shows the problems arising with the attempt to put the categorical

imperative into practice. In his Genealogy of Morality, Friedrich Nietzsche writes that, “the categorical imperative smells of cruelty.”16 The essence of this criticism lies in the fact that the categorical imperative is only a formula, that is, it is up to each agent to submit his actions to the formula and decide for himself whether or not it meets the criteria. Because, as Kant freely admits, it is impossible to verify whether or not any particular maxim is in accordance with moral law by submitting it to the categorical imperative, any action can be rationalized.

In the mind of a fanatic, a maxim that is sure to lead to many deaths may meet the criteria of universality with no problem. In his 1799 essay “On a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns,” Kant argues that a single act of falsehood is an affront to humanity.17 As such, it is easy to see how someone like Kohlhaas might take up this train of thought.

Kohlhaas sees his situation as a simple one: he has been done wrong, the law of justice has not been fulfilled, and so he must carry out justice himself. He sees himself as fighting the Junker on behalf of the world in general, and calls on all Christians to join his struggle. In short, for Kohlhaas, his actions do indeed meet the criteria of universality demanded by the categorical imperative.

II. THE PUPPET THEATRE: A RECOVERY OF GRACE? Having explored the ways in which some particular problems with the Kantian system are treated in Michael Kohlhaas, I will now attempt to locate Kleist within the problematic of post-Kantian intellectual discourse in Europe. Having absorbed the impact of the critical philosophy, many thinkers came to believe that the Kantian system “breaks down into a series of vicious dualisms,” such as form and content, reason and experience, and so on, and that, as Simon Critchley puts it, “the primacy of practical reason is a mere empty formalism of abstract duty.”18 The chasm between the various dichotomies was thought to be so severe that it “prohibit[ed] the possibility of interaction between a priori concepts and empirical intuitions,” thus turning the Kantian system into a self-refuting one.19 As a response to this

quandary, the thinkers of post-Kantian Europe tended to search for a unifying principle able to bridge the gaps in Kant’s dualisms.

With respect to Kant’s ethical philosophy, the dichotomy in question is that between our sensual and reasonable natures. As Kant presents it, to be moral must always be a struggle, because the non-rational inclinations arising out of our physical constitution prevent us from following the moral law to which reason would lead us. This situation was seen by many to be “degrading and defeatist.”20 Thinkers such as Friedrich Schiller came to believe that this bifurcation of human nature must be a constructed feature of our experience, and not an essential one. In the Critique of Judgement, Kant presents a model of aesthetic judgement in which our rational and imaginative faculties can act in harmony.21 Taking this account as his model, Schiller proposed a way of rectifying the problem – in his Lectures on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller “urged the revival of the sense of the aesthetic in every aspect of life,” as a means of restoring the harmony between our sensual and imaginative natures.22 In Kleist’s 1810 dialogic essay “The Puppet Theatre,” concerns of this nature are clearly evident, and Kleist presents a vision of the reunification of human nature, which is quite similar to those of Schiller, Novalis, and Hölderlin.23 In the dialogue, man is presented as having a divided nature – halfway between marionette and god. However, man is not essentially divided but has become this way through a fall from grace.

Having gained self-consciousness but lacking complete knowledge, man suffers from “affectation;” his soul is misplaced, as it were. Herr C., a character in the dialogue, suggests that the only way to correct this situation is to develop man’s faculties to an infinite extent. Humanity can only act with unity and grace if we have “either no consciousness or an infinite amount of it,” that is, if we are either marionettes or gods.

Having been expelled from the Garden, it is suggested that “[w]e shall have to go all the way round the world and see whether it might be open somewhere at the back again.”24 Kleist’s model for the pure, unified state to which man’s soul might aspire is, like Schiller’s, an aesthetic one, in this case it is the grace of the dancing

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marionettes.

Kleist’s response to Kant’s philosophy and the criticisms he leveled against it were typical of his time. The critical philosophy robbed Kleist of his life’s plan by removing the possibility of absolute knowledge and placing the bedrock of moral and intellectual life – concepts such as God, freedom, and immortality – in the unreachable realm of the noumena. In Michael Kohlhaas, Kleist reacts against the excesses of Kant’s formalism, showing the unfeasibility of a system of ethics in which it can never be determined if one’s actions are moral or not, and yet at the same time actions of terrible consequence can in theory be considered moral as long as the mental disposition of the actor were one of respect for the universal (but purely formal) moral law and performance of duty. By the time he wrote The Puppet Theatre, it appears possible that Kleist has recovered from the crisis of knowledge into which he had been thrown by Kant’s system. However, it is just as possible that the vision of reunification contained in that essay is an ironic lament, a throwback to the naïveté of the Enlightenment before Kant, when belief in the possibility of man’s self-perfectibility was widespread. It seems to me unlikely that Kleist was able to overcome the epistemological challenge posed by Kant’s critical philosophy. However with a keen poetic imagination, he was able to paint a vivid picture of the state in which we all must live in the wake of the “all-destroyer.”

NOTES 1. Roger J. Sullivan, Immanuel Kant’s Moral Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xii.

2. Heinrich von Kleist, Selected Writings, trans. and ed. David Constantine (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), 422.

3. Ibid., 209.

4. Immanuel Kant, Ethical Philosophy, trans.

James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 7. (Ak. 393) 5. Ibid., 21. (Ak. 409) 6. Ibid., 7. (Ak. 394) 7. Ibid., 13. (Ak. 400) 8. Ibid., 30. (Ak. 421) 9. Kant does make an attempt to explain how

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the things-in-themselves can be correlated with the phenomena in a way which is sufficient for knowledge with his notion of the schema, which is a procedural rule followed by the human understanding for the purpose of applying a category (a pure, nonempirical concept) to sense impressions.

Number, for example, is the schema used to apply the category of quantity to our sense experience.

10. Kant, 19. (Ak. 407) 11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., 28. (Ak. 419) 13.Kleist, 221.

14. Ibid., 214 (my emphasis).

15. Kant, 26. (Ak. 416) 16.Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 41.

17. Kant, 7 (Ak. 393), 162-167.

18. Simon Critchley, Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 21-22.

19. Ibid., 29-30.

20. Peter Singer, Hegel: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 7.

21. Whether or not this theory of aesthetic judgement stands in contradiction to Kant’s first two Critiques is an open question in Kant interpretation. Nevertheless it is safe to say, I think, that Schiller saw in the Critique of Judgement a solution to the problems created by Kant’s theories of pure and practical reason (for example, it seems to be the case that in judging something to be beautiful or sublime, we have the kind of access to the noumenal that the earlier Critiques deny) so that the later Kant could be used to improve upon the earlier. This point of view does suggest that the third Critique involves significant departure from the first two.

22. Singer, 7.

23. Kleist, 441.

24. Ibid., 414.

ACCOUNTING FOR POST-SOCIALIST NOSTALGIA IN RECENT GERMAN FILM

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n the eighteenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Der Spiegel, one of Europe’s largest publishing newsmagazines, polled over 1,000 Germans who had grown up on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Despite years of rebuilding, restructuring and reconstituting German identity, the disturbing conclusion is that Germany remains as divided as ever.1 Many argue that a reunified Germany has not brought the prosperity, freedom, and unity that East Germans had hoped for when they screamed out in Dresden, “We are one people” to West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl on December 19, 1989.2 In fact, the last twenty years have seen many Germans re-examining their history: the search for a path forward has been impeded by a tremendous longing for the path taken by a country that fell into the dustbin of history. Germans living in the former region of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR) have a word for it – Ostalgie – a combination of the German words for ‘east’ and ‘nostalgia.’ The Ostalgie movement has been transformed into a cultural and social phenomenon, which seeks to reinterpret or resuscitate the values, goals, and ideals of the fallen socialist state. It is no coincidence that Ostalgie comes at a time when Germany is experiencing an economic downturn, record-breaking unemployment, and disparities between the former West and East that are only widening. Recently, many films have been produced that capture the essence of the Ostalgie movement: a collective rethinking about the nature and validity of the communist experience and whether there was anything to be nostalgic about in the former DDR. Therefore, one must ask the question: How do we account for post-socialist nostalgia in recent German film?

This paper will focus on four films: Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye Lenin!, Leander Haußmann’s

ELLIOT HOLZMAN Sonnenallee, Hannes Stohr’s Berlin is in Germany, and Carsten Fiebeler’s Kleinruppin Forever.

Specifically, this paper will look at the use of nostalgia as a powerful tool for social awareness and cultural revisionism, the re-examination of the hopes and ideals that these films present through the glorification and valorization of the DDR, and the disparity that these films portray between West and East in reunified Germany. Although much literature has focused on the twenty-first century socio-economic circumstances of Germany as the driving force behind Ostalgie, this paper argues that the nostalgia present in recent German film focuses on cultural-historical circumstances; namely, the identification of the utopian hopes and ideals that formed the backbone of the DDR and the disequilibrium that German unification created in the immediate years after 1990.

Cultural revisionism lies at the heart of the growing Ostalgie movement as the collective longing for the former DDR leads to the creation of an imagined or utopian past and a disillusioned or exiled present. The imagined past is not a completely false account of the state that was, rather Ostalgie seeks to recreate the present with the hopes and dreams of the past, which serves to dislocate former East Germans from both their past and their present. Linda Hutcheon is one of the most prolific critics of the growing post-socialist nostalgia movement. She argues in “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern,” that German nostalgia can be explained by a desire to return to a time, rather than a place.3 Nostalgia has become the coping mechanism for those who realize that time is irreversible.

Hutcheon argues that the very “irrecoverable nature” of the DDR allows the past to be “idealized through memory and desire.”4 This is certainly evident in the depictions of the DDR

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featured in these films where, as Hutcheon argues, the “ideal that is not being lived now is projected into the past.”5 Hence, the imagined past digresses from the conventional socio-economic argument; we see Ostalgie as a culturally imaginative re-constitution of the past. In other words, Ostalgie can be seen as a whimsical and sentimental rethinking of the harsh realities of the various totalitarian elements of the DDR. Nostalgia is also used as a powerful tool for social awareness, in that it provides critical distance from the present, even though it does not provide that same distance from the past.

This idea of the warping of the historical-time continuum is embodied in Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia. In it, she describes the potential dangers of nostalgia: the tendency to confuse or mistreat the actual home with the imaginary home that is being cradled in hope and memory.6 Boym worries that, in extreme cases, nostalgia causes history to become dislodged from the actual time.7 This can be seen in certain films, namely Goodbye Lenin!, where the imagined past that Alex is creating leads to a “phantom homeland.” As Alex admits, the recreated DDR is not the actual past or the literal historical development of the country, rather his dreams for the country are manifested in his recreation: the DDR that he creates for his mother is not an actual portrayal of the country, but rather what he wanted the DDR to look like. Moreover, Boym references a notion of “reflexive nostalgia,” which provides an ideal description of post-socialist nostalgia in these four films. As Boym describes, reflective nostalgia “[…] has some connection to the loss of collective frameworks of memory.”8 This is particularly evident in another form of Ostalgie, the preservation of the Ampelmännchen (the East German pedestrian signals). Following the reunification of Germany, traffic signals were being replaced with newer, Western ones.

Although the East German ones had no significance to the people during the Communist era, they have since become the primary example of reflexive nostalgia as East Germans fought tooth and nail to preserve the Ampelmännchen. The reflexive nostalgic nature of East German identity following reunification actively promoted the commodification of such aspects of DDR

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life. In effect, the Ostalgie phenomenon, as we will see in the next section about the films, uses reflexive nostalgia as a critical tool to bring even the most seemingly insignificant aspects of life in the DDR into the present.

Ostalgie-related German films have at their very core, a re-examination of the hopes and ideals of the DDR through a glorification and valorization of the principles upon which the former country was founded. Cinematically, the perpetual longing for lost elements of the DDR began in 1999 with Sonnenallee. The movie is set in East Berlin during the 1970s and tells the tale of a seventeen-year old boy, Micha, whose passion for banned rock and roll music is only eclipsed by his infatuation with a girl named Miriam.9 These desires naturally run into conflict as the music that he and his friends prefer is banned in the DDR and as Miriam remains similarly out of reach: her relationship with her cocky and snobby West Berlin boyfriend is a painful reminder to Micha that she is unattainable. From the outset, Haußmann’s film presents itself as a coming- of-age story; Micha eventually overcomes his growing pains and wins over Miriam after she abandons her West Berlin boyfriend. Haußmann emphasizes the ‘everyday’ and ‘normal’ nature of East Berlin society during the Communist era as black marketers, Stasi informers, and rebellious youth intermingle in this one district of the city. By the end of the film, the neighbourhood, despite its seemingly diverse elements, is united by the power of rock and roll, embodied in the communal dance to the hit song “The Letter.” Haußmann’s film is poignant in its normalcy and light-heartedness: throughout the film, Sonnenallee is used as a small microcosm of a greater DDR society that cherishes community, social networks, and humour.

Rather than providing an accurate depiction of the way that the DDR actually functioned, Haußmann’s film portrays the DDR in a sunnier fashion, a valorization effort on the part of the director. It becomes strikingly apparent to those watching this movie that there is a serious attempt by the director to encourage a collective re-examination of everyday life in the DDR. This is achieved, in part, by the comedic aspect of the movie. For example, Haußmann’s humorous directorial style deflects attention

KATRINA SARK from the seriousness of many situations that ordinary East Germans would have faced in their former country. Throughout the film, Micha’s mother contemplates and then attempts to flee the DDR and escape to the west – a very serious problem faced by citizens of the DDR. Moreover, the issue of smuggling and contraband is treated in a whimsical way by the director: this is blatantly obvious when Micha’s eccentric uncle regularly smuggles goods from West Berlin, while the border patrol is depicted as being completely ineffectual and unprepared for these illicit activities. When Micha’s forbidden music is confiscated, which would have made him liable to a serious penalty in the DDR, the incompetence of the police who mistake it for a Soviet track, only highlights the superfluous and unrealistic nature of security in the DDR. The quirky neighbourhood guard endures a comical dance of being promoted and demoted from various ranks throughout the movie. These exaggerated and unrealistic accounts of everyday life in the DDR serve multiple purposes in the Ostalgie phenomenon. For one, the lighthearted portrayal of the values and ideals presented in Sonnenallee are a painful reminder to East Germans that their cultural experiences are being erased from the collective German identity since reunification. Furthermore, there is a

serious statement to be made about the foundations of East German society as Micha proudly recalls the high employment levels and affordable housing that he enjoyed in the DDR, and nostalgically ends the film with, “I was young and in love” as the camera shifts to black-andwhite, implying that the sun has finally set on Sonnenallee and the future looks dark and uncertain. Haußmann’s film uses the utopian setting of Sonnenallee to imply to the West that the DDR was, indeed, valid and legitimate and that life in the DDR was not as bleak nor as imprisoned as it is often portrayed. In effect, Sonnenallee calls out to its viewers to recognize the unique and fruitful nature of many citizens of the DDR and the intrinsic popularity that socialism had among its residents.

This idea of “collective re-examination” is portrayed in the latest film to illuminate the DDR in a positive light: Kleinruppin Forever.10 The movie centers on the parallel stories of twins, Tim and Ronnie. Tim, who lives in West Germany, is an up-and-coming tennis star from a wealthy family with lavish expenses, while Ronnie is from a working-class background in the fictitious city of Kleinruppin in the DDR. The twins finally reunite when Tim’s high school takes a field trip to the DDR, which results in the twins assuming the other’s identity. The rest

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of the film chronicles Tim’s experiences in the DDR: his initial scepticism about the political and economic systems of the socialist state makes way for his conversion to valuing the personal relationships, rather than political affiliations, under this new system. Like in Haußmann’s film, scenes of the Stasi spying on Tim’s family and the blatant corruption that he witnesses are cast aside as playful and non-dangerous aspects of everyday life in the DDR. Director Carsten Fiebeler focuses on the positive relationships that Tim forms with his new country. Kleinruppin Forever is a very unique re-examination of the DDR’s ideology as the experiences of both brothers serve as foils for each other. The movie actively demonstrates two opposing ways of life, and it employs nostalgia as a powerful tool for showing both the merits of the DDR, as experienced by a Westerner who embraces the socialist lifestyle, and the moral decay and social emptiness of the West, as experienced by an Easterner who moves there. In other words, nostalgia is used as a crucial tool for evaluating contemporary German society and identifying the positive aspects of life in the DDR that have vanished since reunification.

Movies like Kleinruppin Forever, with its clever use of Ronnie and Tim as mirrors for each other, have allowed East Germans to express their disillusionment with the social and political goals of the West that have been imposed on them since reunification. Tim’s character development sends a powerful message to Western viewers who initially identify with him, but are then asked to assume an Eastern perspective as Tim becomes increasingly sceptical of the outlandish consumer culture that he escaped by moving to the DDR. As in Haußmann’s film, a poignant undertone present throughout Kleinruppin Forever is the desire to look at the validity of everyday life in the DDR: although the DDR is a source of scrutiny at the beginning of the film, the same can be said about West Germany by the end, as its negative elements are contrasted with Tim’s experiences with the socialist alternative.

Films that deal with the so-called “disequilibrium” of reunification are essential in accounting for post-socialist nostalgia in recent German film. Unlike Sonnenallee and Kleinruppin Forever, which deal with everyday life in the DDR before the fall of the Berlin

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Wall, Goodbye Lenin! and Berlin is in Germany discuss the withering away of East German identity and the unequal absorption of the former DDR into West Germany following reunification. Arguably the film most associated with the Ostalgie movement, Goodbye Lenin! reinforces the notion that many East Germans were unsatisfied with their dislocation following reunification with West Germany. The film begins just prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall and is narrated by Alexander Kerner, a young man from East Berlin, who witnesses the drastic changes that come about following the fall of the Wall.11 His mother, an ardent supporter of the Party and a loyal DDR citizen, falls into a coma for eight months and wakes up unaware of the fall of the Wall and the changes going on in the country that she cherishes deeply.

Due to his mother’s serious health issues, and the knowledge that she would be shocked to discover that the DDR has collapsed, Alex embarks on an ambitious plan to prevent his mother from knowing the truth by resurrecting all aspects of her former life in the DDR. This tragicomedy develops many themes central to the study of the disequilibrium between the West and the East during reunification, one of which is the influx of Western goods and the disappearance of Eastern ones.

This theme is developed with a strong sense of comedy as Alex desperately tries to find food products from the former DDR for his mother, with little luck as Western products have flooded the markets and many Eastern businesses have shut down. In this sense, the disequilibrium and domination of Western products causes a tremendous bourgeoning of Ostalgie towards former products as people look back fondly on Spreewald Pickles and Mocca Fix Gold Coffee. The disproportionate influx of Western goods is also manifest in the new clothing choices: Alex’s sister Ariane expresses disbelief that she ever wore such hideous clothing when Alex insists that they must dress the part in order to keep up the appearance that the DDR is alive and healthy. Becker’s emphasis on material culture as a source of disequilibrium illustrates the vast differences between west and east, and Alex becomes an anthropologist sifting through the remains of a

seemingly lost civilization. In effect, his mother’s DDR-inspired bedroom becomes a sort of museum for a vanished culture.

Another theme that Becker’s film highlights is the “phantom homeland” idea that Boym suggested. In order to create the illusion that the DDR is still alive, Alex goes to great lengths to resuscitate aspects of everyday life that his mother could identify with. For example, he hires two young boys to wear pioneer uniforms and sing traditional songs for his mother, creates fake news broadcasts, and falsifies history by claiming that Coca-Cola was actually invented in the DDR, after the company begins advertising in East Berlin. These humorous developments are also very significant in that Alex uses these creations to effectively re-write the DDR’s history. As his broadcasts continue and he finds himself concocting greater and greater lies in order to “normalize” his current situation, we see Alex’s utopian depiction of life in the former DDR become increasingly dislodged from actual history. This is evident when Alex creates a broadcast that shows West German refugees flooding East Berlin after Erich Honecker announces his intention to open the DDR’s borders for those disillusioned with capitalism. There is a tremendous amount of irony in this broadcast, as it is Alex who is looking for an escape due to his disillusionment with capitalism, but the important aspect of all these constructs is that Alex begins to recognize that he is not creating the DDR that was, rather the DDR that he wanted. We see that his dissatisfaction with the vast disequilibrium being experienced by East Germans is breeding his nostalgia and detaching him from both the past and the present. He edits his own country’s cultural memory, and the end product of his broadcasts is purely his own aspiration for the future of the DDR. The pinnacle of his nostalgia is embodied in his reimagination of the fall of the Berlin Wall as the ultimate victory of socialism, rather than its defeat.

Goodbye Lenin! is also crucial for exploring the disequilibrium of German reunification because it tends to place the DDR in a box, as a closed and isolated system. There is a tendency throughout this movie, as well as in Kleinruppin Forever and Sonnenallee, to present the film as a simple family melodrama that could have taken place in any setting at any time. This al-

lows the directors of these films to essentially depoliticize, dehistoricize and decontextualize the actual realities faced by families of the former DDR. Throughout the movie, Alex’s actions reassess the DDR’s guiding principles and raise the question of whether the DDR, if given the chance, could have been critiqued, reformed and improved. Goodbye Lenin! presents a wonderful example of Boym and Hutcheon’s “reflexive nostalgia” as Alex begins to rewrite his own history. He speaks to both the problems faced by East Germans following reunification by using his positive memories of the past to highlight the weaknesses of the present. His final words are quite striking and they leave a dark impression on any viewer: he chillingly tells us that his mother always fought to defend the country that she loved and that the DDR will always be remembered as his “mother’s country.” These comments are dark and seemingly vague, although he seems to suggest that the collective memory has forgotten about the DDR and that East German culture and identity is being withered away as new generations are born and old generations die out. Particularly evident in this movie is the contrast between the portrayal of the older generation who eagerly sings along to the pioneer songs and complains about its undefined role in the new society, and the younger kids who only care about the money that they receive from Alex.

In a way, Hannes Stohr’s Berlin is in Germany is more of a statement about German reunification than Becker’s Goodbye Lenin! Like Becker, Stohr uses a Rip van Winkle-esque absence to address similar and dramatic changes that have taken place in Berlin since reunification. Berlin is in Germany tells the story of Martin Schulz, released from prison after the fall of the Berlin Wall, after being wrongly accused of a crime.12 The disequilibrium present in Stohr’s film is a very physical one, making a strong statement about Berlin’s development in the decade following reunification. Schulz discovers major construction projects, street reorganization, and the renaming and elimination of places like Stalinallee and Leninplatz, implying the reorienting of German history and the rewriting of the forty years of the DDR’s existence.

The central conflict involves Martin’s inability

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to navigate his own city as a taxi driver. It is no mere coincidence that Martin is released from prison at the beginning of the film: the “prison metaphor” is the main device that Stohr uses throughout the film to critique German unification. We can attribute, in part, the Ostalgie phenomenon to the creation of a large enclave of disillusioned and lost people within a larger national unit. In effect, Schulz becomes a foreigner within his own city and country, suggesting a social dislocation that East Germans have felt in the decades following German unification.

Schulz’s experience is used by Stohr as a means of showing the imbalance of unification: East Germans believe they are second-class citizens whose training and education is scoffed at by the West, and feel substandard and sometimes useless. The title of the film is also important for understanding its broader role as part of the Ostalgie phenomenon. The title comes from a homework assignment that Martin’s son completes. The English title shows the shift away from learning Russian as a secondary language, indicating a fundamental change in German education. More importantly, we begin to see a generational gap between parents and children and this emphasizes Martin’s feelings that he is a foreigner within his own country.

It has been two decades since Germany reunified and, so far, it has stood the test of time.

Some would say this is a miraculous feat; there have been growing concerns about the social cleavages that exist between the former East and West. The Ostalgie phenomenon has become a tremendous source of cultural revisionism, and its impact on cinema has been enormous. A recent Berlin walking tour advertised that Berlin is still divided over whether the Wall was “cool” or not. As silly as this statement sounds, the tour company is not entirely out of touch with popular sentiment in the former DDR. Surely, East Germans have no intention of going back to the secret police, repression, or outright totalitarianism, but the upsurge of Ostalgie feelings have led to a complete rethinking and re-evaluation of the forty-year history of the DDR. Through the examination of nostalgia as a tool for cultural revisionism, the re-examination of the hopes and ideals of the former DDR, and the disequilibrium that the unification brought to East Germans, we

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can say that contemporary Germany is still struggling with its unique history. Films such as the ones presented in this paper stress the legitimacy and validity of the East German experience and send strong messages about the negative implications of German reunification. Although the films employ various comedic elements in order to present the former state in a calmer light, they all contain dark messages about the disillusionment and unhappiness that many East Germans feel towards their current role in society. It is quite unclear whether the Ostalgie phenomenon is a temporary reaction to an ever-changing society or whether this movement is permanent, and grounded in thought. The Berlin Wall may have fallen in 1989, but as history shows, it has been notoriously difficult for Germans to rid themselves of the burdens of their past.

NOTES 1. “Germany Still Divided 18 Years After the Fall of the Wall,” in Spiegel Online (9 Nov. 2007). http://www.spiegel.de/international/ germany/0,1518,516472,00.html.

2. Speech delivered by Helmut Kohl in Dresden on 19 Dec., 1989. http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_ id=2889.

3. Linda Hutcheon. “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern” in Methods for the Study of Literature as Cultural Memory, eds. Raymond Vervilet and Annemarie Estor (Amsterdam: Rodopi BV, 2000), 195.

4. Hutcheon, “Irony,” 195.

5. Ibid.

6. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xvi.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid., 55.

9. Sonnenallee, directed by Leander Haußmann (Oberhaching, Germany: Beta Cinema GmbH, 1999), Videocasette.

10. Kleinruppin Forever, directed by Carsten Fiebeler (Oberhaching, Germany: Beta Cinema GmbH, 2004), DVD. 11. Goodbye Lenin! directed by Wolfgang Becker (Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Classics, 2003), DVD. 12. Berlin is in Germany, directed by Hannes Stohr (Paris: K. Films, 2001), Videocasette.

CINEMA, NAZISM, AND SOLIDARITY

HOW THE NOTION OF UNITY CONTRIBUTED TO THE APPEAL OF LENI RIEFENSTAHL’S TRIUMPH OF THE WILL IN NAZI GERMANY

ELIAS KÜHN VON BURGSDORFF INTRODUCTION

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inematographically dazzling and ideologically vicious, Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary film Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens) eloquently succeeded in fusing politics with art. Depicting the Nazi Party’s second rally at Nuremberg following Adolf Hitler’s inauguration as Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, Triumph of the Will premiered in Berlin on March 28, 1935.1 Riefenstahl’s film was a huge success within Nazi Germany – winning the National Film Prize that year – and was accredited internationally for its contemporary aesthetic quality. However, the film’s positive portrayal of Nazism and the Führer is controversial to say the least, especially when considering the horrendous crimes committed by the Nazi regime up until its collapse in May 1945. Thus, although Riefenstahl has called Triumph of the Will a ‘film-vérité’2 and denied her direct association with National Socialism, her documentary was indisputably an effective piece of Nazi propaganda.

The notion of unity, which acted as a prevalent theme in Triumph of the Will, largely contributed to the film’s popular appeal as well as propagandistic efficacy. Considering the complexity of the matter, this paper first examines how the notion of unity is portrayed in Riefenstahl’s film; then, how this theme coincides with Nazi ideology and propaganda; and finally, in what ways political and economic factors played a role in cementing solidarity as an appealing concept amongst such a large

stratum of German society. In essence, Triumph of the Will represents an aesthetic portrayal of the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, and the notion of unity expressed in the film effectively blankets Nazi ideology, making it attractive to the broader masses. Furthermore, this attraction to solidarity rests predominantly on the political and economic induced disillusionment felt by the majority of Germans in the early 1930s.

UN FILM VÉRITÉ Leni Riefenstahl was awarded the German National Film Prize for Triumph of the Will in May 1935. Upon presenting Riefenstahl with the award, Joseph Goebbels (Nazi Minister of Propaganda) is recorded as saying that Triumph of the Will had “lifted up the harsh rhythm of our great epoch to eminent heights of artistic achievement.”3 In the same light, Hitler praised the film as being an “incomparable glorification of the power and beauty of our movement.”4 Riefenstahl’s approximately two-hour long film was warmly embraced by the German people. As Albert Speer wrote in his memoirs while in prison following the collapse of the Third Reich: “Triumph of the Will seduced many wise men and women, persuaded them to admire rather than to despise, and undoubtedly won the Nazis friends and allies all over the world.”5 By depicting crowds of women and children enthusiastically waving, and columns of clean-shaven men in SA, SS, and military uniforms saluting, the film conveys Nazism as an orderly, positive, and uni-

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fying mass movement—signifying a rebirth of the German nation.

In her 1932 feature film The Blue Light (Das Blaue Licht), Adolf Hitler recognized Riefenstahl’s talent to transfer an abstract ideal to the screen and, simultaneously, to infuse it with dramatic realism.6 Upon his accession to power as Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, Hitler asked Riefenstahl to make a film recording the proceedings of the Nazi Party’s Nuremberg Rally of that same year. However, due to insufficient hours of filming, largely the result of interference from Goebbels, the film that emerged, Victory of Faith (Sieg des Glaubens), was cinematographically mediocre.

Nevertheless, Hitler was convinced of Riefenstahl’s potential and asked her to make yet another film, this time of the Nuremberg Rally of 1934. When she told him that she had no conception of how to film parades and speeches, he responded that he had chosen her because she was an artist capable of the task. She protested that she did not know who or what was politically important, and quotes Hitler as responding: “It is not important who is in the film. It is important that the film has atmosphere.”7 Riefenstahl’s remarkable achievement in Triumph of the Will was to do exactly this.

DAS VOLK The Nuremberg rally of 1934 was called the “Party Day of Unity” and a stunning 700,000 visitors attended the proceedings.8 The atmosphere of the rally, as seen through Triumph of the Will, very much reflected the title – one of unity. Two scenes in the film are particularly successful in conveying this atmosphere. The first shows the dynamic of the Hitler Youth: washing, eating, singing, fighting, laughing, and working together. The fact that these boys come from different backgrounds and class plays no part in the esprit-de-corps which is so very present in these shots. In a speech to the Hitler Youth in a later scene, Hitler says that: “In the future, we do not wish to see classes and cliques....We want to be a united nation.”9 The second scene which conveys a particularly strong sense of unity is the one in which Hitler addresses 52,000 labourers. As a group, they went through their maneuvers and spoke

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their lines in absolute unison. And in Hitler’s speech to these men, he proclaims that: “The concept of labour will no longer be a dividing one but a uniting one.”10 Hence, both scenes buttress the view that what ultimately unites all German men, women, and children is their common citizenship as Germans—that is of course, excluding Jews, political dissidents, Gypsies, and homosexuals.

Riefenstahl’s cinematographic techniques reinforce the sense of unity that was inherent to the 1934 Nuremberg Rally. H. Hoffmann suggests in his book The Triumph of Propaganda that: “Themes are stated and restated, motifs are introduced and repeated, and all the individual elements of the film are subordinate to an overall structure which expresses and embodies Riefenstahl’s particular vision.”11 This very much reflects Hitler’s personal view on propaganda: “The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”12 This is what Riefenstahl achieves in Triumph of the Will concerning the notion of unity. Thematically, the numerous parade sequences in the film confirm the idea that Nazi Germany is a massed, marching column of men. Furthermore, the ocean of flags – being one of Riefenstahl’s most persistent and effective motifs – creates uniformity to the landscape while signifying a common identity.13 Consequently, the notion of unity may well have been more evident to the audience of Triumph of the Will than to those who attended the Nuremberg Rally, since the film effectively uses cinematographic techniques to pervasively direct the audience’s attention to the theme of solidarity.

Being a documentary, Triumph of the Will should in actuality be true to the reality of that rally, however dishonest and misleading that meeting may have been. However, that is not entirely the case because ultimately, every decision about what the cameras should or should not record, about the nature of a take, the editing, and the music, inevitably implies a particular perspective on the event in the film.

For example, images of cheering crowds and

massed formations take precedence over images of chief party officials, and even of Hitler himself. Additionally, while speeches only comprise a fraction of the film, during these scenes as much emphasis is given to the audience as to the speaker himself. Riefenstahl wished to focus on the “movement” rather than the Führer, on the German people rather than Hitler’s obedient servants.14 Thus, what Riefenstahl achieved in Triumph of the Will was to encapsulate an extra-aesthetic reality with aesthetic means in such a way that the people who lived in this reality recognized themselves in it: as parts of a crowd.15 By doing so, the targeted audience of the film – broadly all Germans – felt a greater attachment to the events on the screen, becoming more susceptible to its messages, in particular the message of unity.

CINEMA AND INDOCTRINATION The Nazi regime monopolized all forms of media with the purpose of indoctrinating the German people into subordinately following their ideology. Cinema in the 1930s represented a new front of opportunities – a modern medium – for the comprehensive Nazi propaganda machine.16 Triumph of the Will was a private production by Riefenstahl herself and not by the Nazi Party, as Victory of Faith had been, but it was nevertheless a powerful act of propaganda. The film glorified Nazism by depicting it as a movement of progress which advocated German unity. Moreover, Triumph of the Will is purposely free of any reference to the evils which we today associate with the Nazi dogma. The speeches, for example, have been edited to the most general statements about growth and solidarity.17 There are no disturbing ideas, no reactionary proposals, and certainly no indication of the evil that was to come as a result of party policies, i.e. the extermination of the Jews and the attempted hegemony of the world. The Nuremberg Rally of 1934 inspired a rosy view of the Nazi movement, with Riefenstahl using cinema to aesthetically reinforce this view for the eyes of the entire nation to see.

By evoking unity, the Nazi Party could successfully appeal to the broader masses and “conquer the souls of the ordinary people.”18

Moreover, Hitler believed it very important to project an image of solidarity due to the recent purging of the SA (Hitler’s paramilitary), including the execution of SA leader Ernst Rohm shortly after June 30, 1934, which became known as the “Night of Long Knives.”19 In his early years as Chancellor and then as Führer, following President Hindenburg’s death in August 1934, Hitler was still consolidating his power. Therefore, Nazi propaganda during this period aimed to solidify his leadership. Considering this, the notion of unity seen in the 1934 Nuremberg Rally has a specific purpose: to reduce the individual to the status of a purely numerical element within the larger “Volksgemeinschaft,” (people’s community) in order to single out Hitler as their leader.20 And with the entire German media censored, or directly under Party control, such propaganda proved very effective. In the first volume of the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, W.L. Shirer writes, “No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda.”21 Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will complemented the Nazi propaganda effort to convey an image of German unity, and therefore, the film’s appeal was drilled into the conscience of its audience – a very large audience indeed.

YEARNING FOR UNITY The organization of the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, the aesthetic value of Triumph of the Will, and the existence of a comprehensive propaganda apparatus, all explain how the notion of unity contributed to the appeal of the film. To understand why this notion was so appealing within Nazi Germany, an exploration of political and economic factors is necessary.

To be clear, the appeal is largely, but not exclusively, connected to the appeal of the Nazi Party. The Weimar Republic, which emerged in 1919 from the chaos that followed World War One, was never able to liberate itself from the legacy of political turmoil of its early years.

Between 1919 and 1923 there were nine different Chancellors,22 a statistic that shows all too clearly the instability that the young de-

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mocracy faced. Radicals of both ends of the spectrum tried on several occasions to overthrow the government, the most notable attempts having been the Spartacist Uprising (1919), the Kapp Putsch (1920), and the Beer Hall Putsch (1923).23 The economic downturn of the early 1930s and the failure of the government to deal with the crises – or even to exacerbate them by implementing deflationary policies – caused further disillusionment for democracy, disillusionment that Hitler cleverly used for his political benefit. With democracy popularly believed to be systemically weak and fragmented,24 many Germans found it is rather easy to turn to a dictatorship, especially if that dictatorship provided order and employment.

Economically, post-World War One Germany tragically fell victim to the curses of inflation and unemployment. The hyperinflation of 1922 and 1923 largely liquidated the hard-earned savings of most middle-income Germans.25 While the Dawes Plan of 1924 allowed Weimar Germany to experience a period of economic growth, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 made evident how precarious the foundations of this recovery had been.26 The cornerstone of the short-lived era of prosperity had been loans from abroad, principally from the United States, and world trade. When the flow of loans dried up and repayment on the old ones became due, the German financial structure was unable to stand the strain. With tumbling exports, German industry could not keep its plants running, and production fell by almost half from 1929 to 1932.27 The Nazi rise to power came as the lights of hope dimmed over Germany.

In the darkest days of that period, when the factories were silent, when the registered unemployed numbered over six million, and bread lines stretched for blocks in every city in the land, Hitler wrote: “Never in my life have I been so well disposed and inwardly contented as in these days. For hard reality has opened the eyes of millions of Germans.”28 Hitler’s rather cold-blooded analysis, however, had foundation. In 1928, before the depression, the Nazi Party won just twelve seats in the Reichstag.

That number soared to a remarkable 107 seats in 1930: the Nazis jumped almost overnight

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from being the ninth smallest political party in parliament to the second largest. Then in 1932, at the height of the depression, the Nazis received 230 seats, becoming the largest German party.29 History has proven time and time again that economic despair creates a radicalization of politics as voters become disillusioned with the status quo.

The popularity of the Nazi movement increased further when Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich. The German economy got back onto its feet; in particular, the Nazi rearmament and public works programs nearly eliminated unemployment, which fell from six million in 1932, to less than one million four years later.30 These remarkable economic achievements were already felt by the spring of 1935, when Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will was released. However, the film did not only appeal to those who became convinced supporters of the Nazi Party, but also to more moderate Germans. This can also be understood in the light of the political fragmentation and economic bitterness all Germans had experienced. Since the defeat in the First World War, German society saw sharp political divisions, for example between communists, socialists, rightists, et cetera. Moreover, the dual monetary crises caused the upheaval of Germany’s rigid class structure as savings disappeared. Thus, Hitler’s calls at the 1934 Nuremberg Rally for the elimination of ”classes and cliques”31 had already been precipitated on economic grounds and was now yearned for politically.

CONCLUSION Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will documents more than just the political significance of the 1934 Nuremberg Rally: it testifies to the movement’s emotional, even erotic basis.32 Her documentary aesthetically reinforces the rosy view of Nazism that the 1934 Nuremberg Rally sought to portray, and the modern medium of cinema enabled this view to reach out to the eyes of a desperate nation. Be it a film vérité or not, Triumph of the Will encapsulated a romanticized reality in such a way that the people who lived in this reality were able to recognize themselves in it, as part of the crowd.

The audience consequently becomes the ‘ideal spectator’, and thereby, more susceptible to the film’s powerful images and messages. The economic crises of the early 1920s and early 1930s had material as well as psychological impacts on German society, e.g. the liquidation of income classes. What is more, the sharp political divisions and naked fragility that was the Weimar Republic created a yearning among Germans for stability and national solidarity.

In Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will the 1934 Nuremberg Rally is aesthetically documented such that the notion of unity effectively blankets Nazi ideology, thereby making it attractive to a wide spectrum of a German society scarred by economic crises and political fragmentation.

NOTES 1. David B. Hinton, The Films of Leni Riefenstahl (London: Scarecrow Press Inc., 2000), 39.

2. Audrey Salkeld, A Portrait of Leni Riefenstahl (London: Pimlico,1997), 152.

3. Richard M. Barsam, Filmguide to Triumph of the Will (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), 67.

4. Hilmar Hoffmann, The Triumph of Propaganda: Film and National Socialism (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1996), 150.

5. Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, Trans.

Richard Winston (New York: Macmillan Company, 1970), 69.

6. Barsam, 17.

7. Ibid., 14.

8. Ibid., 67.

9. Ibid., 48.

10. Ibid., 44.

11. Hoffman, 150.

12. Ibid., 140.

13. Barsam, 34.

14. Rainer Rother, Leni Riefenstahl: Seduction of Genius (London: Continuum, 2002), 62.

15. Hoffmann, 150.

16. Sebastian Haffner, Geschichte eines Deutschen (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2000), 159.

17. Barsam, 17.

18. Ibid., 17.

19. John Merriman, A History of Modern Europe (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 1023.

20. Hoffmann, 142.

21. William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959), 248.

22.Shirer, 55.

23. Ibid., 109.

24. Haffner, 125.

25. Merriman, 985.

26. Dietmar Rothermund, “The Political Consequences of the Depression”, and “From Depression to War,” in The Global Impact of the Depression, 1929-1939 (London: Routledge, 1996. 136-155), 140.

27. Shirer, 137.

28. Ibid., 136.

29. Ibid., 166.

30. Ibid., 258.

31. Barsam, 48.

32. Ibid., 64.

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CONTRIBUTORS CAROLYN BAILEY is a third-year Cultural Studies and Art History student focusing on intersecting issues of architecture, politics and activism. She spends her spare time contemplating the BaaderMeinhof phenomenon and writing a thesis on boredom.

GUILLAUME BENOIT-MARTINEAU is a tree that was transplanted in mcgillian soil two years ago. In this environment, it is photosynthesizing majors in English literature and German studies. Its autumn leaves fall and twirl like poems in the urban wind.

VINCENT CALABRESE is a U3 Joint Honours student in Philosophy and English Literature. His main areas of interest are metaphysics and the philosophy of religion, in particular the perspectives on these subjects offered by process thought.

MATTHEW CHUNG is in his final year of studies in Honours History. He plans to pursue graduate studies in Eastern European history in the near future.

CHRISTINA COLIZZA is a U3 Cultural Studies Major with a double Minor in Women’s Studies and Italian Studies. She is very interested in cultural theory and journalism and has worked as a writer and editor at The McGill Daily for the past three years.

VALENTINE DOHN is an amateur photographer and a U3 Psychology student from Haldimand, in southern Ontario. He is interested in pursuing research on intergenerational transmission of trauma.

DANIKA DRURY-MELNYK is a recent McGill grad with a double major in philosophy and history, and a minor in political science. She is interested in questions of community, identity, and intersubjectivity vaguely speaking. She greatly looks forward to figuring out what to do with these interests in her wildly uncertain future.

ELLIOT HOLZMAN is a fourth year student completing Joint Honours in History and Political Science. His academic interests include: social movements in nineteenth century Central and Eastern Europe, dissidence and ‘real-existing socialism’ in 1970s and 1980s Warsaw Pact nations, and post-Communist nostalgia in Germany.

JOSEPH HENRY graduated from McGill University this past December. Recent Germanistik-related interests include Joseph Beuys’s aesthetic politics and the visual culture of the Rote Armee Fraktion.

ELIAS KÜHN VON BURGSDORF is pursuing a double-major undergraduate degree in History and Economics at McGill University. Originally German, Elias was born in South Africa and has lived in several countries including Mozambique, Slovakia, Belgium, Cuba, and today Canada. Elias has recently launched a digital journal called Graphite Publications.

SCOTT LEYDON is in his third year of undergraduate English studies at McGill. He is interested in queer, feminist and postcolonial theory and praxis.

He sits on the Department of English Students’ Association and on the editorial board for The Channel, as well as being involved in the theatre community at McGill.

SAMUEL NEUBERG is a U3 arts student double majoring in art history and drama and theatre studies.

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KATRINA SARK MARCUS OOSENBRUG

PETER SHYBA

is a U3 Honours Anatomy and Cell Biology student minoring in German Language. He plans to combine his interest in the country’s unique history and architecture with that of languages next year in Berlin.

is a U3 Honours History major and International Development Studies minor from Calgary, Alberta. This summer, he is taking a course on art in the Nazi regime at Cambridge, and will be taking careful notes for a future Vielfalt article.

KATRINA SARK is completing her dissertation on contemporary Berlin in the department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University, and has been teaching as a course lecturer at McGill for six years. She is the co-author of Berliner Chic: A Locational History of Berlin Fashion (2011) and World Film Locations: Berlin (2012), and has published several academic articles on Berlin film, culture, and fashion.

NOAH TAVLIN is a U2 Arts student studying Urban Systems and English Literature. He is a contributor to VICE Canada and is a member of the Psychic City arts collective.

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