View transcript: Harbingers of Plundering

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In 37 ballads Hans Magnus Enzensberger had mon…[Text cuts off]

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Harbingers of Plundering / From Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s epitaphs for monsters and heroes of the bourgeoisie

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C.M. (1730-1817)

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M. The letter M on the astral maps:

M42 in Orion; the ring nebula in Lyra;

Plus the Pleiades, M45; and the New Star of the Chinese, the supernova, M1

Glowing clouds of gas, cosmic bombs, radio sources / Al-Sûfi, heavenly falcon!/

Oh Swedenborg, extragalactic dreamer! /

This man in contrast

deft, clean, plain /

Starving. In Paris at twenty-one, he brought along

A pretty penmanship, and that was all./

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Charles Messier, Astronomer

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Five hundred francs a year, plus room and board. /

Delisle had him copy his plan of Peking /

[…] Once his wife cost him an entire night

She lay dying. /

He wept for the comet

He’d missed./

While old Herschel in London cast, polished, and mounted his giant refractor,

He burnt his measly midnight oil, without theories /

An ignoramus / Sharp eyes, a pendulum clock /

A small quadrant, a shabby telescope (seven inches). /

That was all /

He never slept./ He sought. /

Eclipses, sunspots./

In an autumn night two hundred years ago

He noticed, not far from Zerta Tauri,

A feeble glow /

A comet that was no comet,

For it didn’t move/

The phenomenon, a milky way, bothered him. /

He saw, noted, grasped nothing.

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The King - -

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[…] He didn’t miss the beheaded king,

Nor the beerbrewers and the washerwomen,

The rat-catchers and the bankers

that the stoical ax sliced up./

The astronomers had fled/

He only found one, Bochard de Saron, a friend of Laplace/

[…] In his cell, de Saron figured out a comet’s path for him

Before mounting the scaffold.

[…] Two million light-years from here

A milky way is waning slower than we.

M31. / The smog permitting,

when I look away from the glare of Manhattan Island,

from history, I sight it, tiny,

with my naked eye, in the northern sky

between Mirach, Sirrah, and Shdir, in Andromeda/

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L.S. (1729-1799)

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The abbé, high handed,

small chin, piercing eyes, an electric temperament,

but rather fat/

[…]Reflecting on a class of questions not previously conceived,

he found the answers by acting

systematically

Systematically, he wielded

the bone scissors, the scalpel, red-hot needles /

Where does the bat fly when blinded?/

The brain of the slaughtered cow,

the muscles of the dead dog

and the lungs of the drowned woman

kept breathing under the bell-jar for hours/

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Brain removed from skull

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[…] Amputate parts of the salamander,

Shoo away the carrion flies,

Amputate and amputate and amputate and amputate again

Do the tail and the legs and the jaw grow back,

Even a fifth time?/

Divide the earthworm lengthwise and crosswise,

In five parts/

Off with its head. /

Determine the consequences of these actions carefully./

[…] The scholars secretly eye

one another like scorpions./

[…] Experimental reflex

On the Digestive Behavior of Man

And Various Animal Species. /

Take a sponge, tie it

To a thread, swallow it, haul the gastric juice from your body/

Tear a cat’s stomach out after it’s eaten,

Sew up the organ, place it in warm water,

And thus, on the table, demonstrate the digestive processes of corpses./

Nothing could be more beautiful /

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Doctor Lazzaro Spallanzani

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[…] The Abbé was a sex offender/

He coupled newts and toads

Monstrous unions./

He removed the roe from opened females,

Then he slaughtered males,

tapped their milk,

and reproduced the dead./

He masturbated a dog

And injected the sperm in a bitch./

I can sincerely say that I have never

Partaken of a keener pleasure. /

The creature whelped. /

(So did, shortly, the first woman.)/

[…] Determine the consequences of these actions carefully./

Alexander Kluge

You describe Spalanzani here…

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

The biologist who was among the first to study the artificial reproduction of living beings, he experimented with in-vitro fertilization etc.

Kluge

Grafting…

Enzensberger

He grafts…

Kluge

Snakes, toads…

Enzensberger

Yes, snakes.

Kluge

Usually the plants and animals die in the process, but occasionally something happens.

Enzensberger

Sometimes he gets results, yes. And I mean, Stanley for instance: the great Africa explorer, and a pillar of imperialism in Europe, of course, comes home and builds a garden, a miniature Africa in his garden shed. In his garden shed he plays like a child.

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Henry M. Stanley, Africa traveler

Kluge

Tell us what kind of man he is. He’s sent by the “Herald Tribune,” a big newspaper, to find Livingstone who’s gone missing in Africa.

Enzensberger

… to find him, yes.

Kluge

He travels on foot with a caravan across Africa …

Enzensberger

He has people carry him.

Kluge

… he has people carry him. He finds Livingston…

Enzensberger

He finds Livingston, yes.

Kluge

But then he is also an instrument …

Enzensberger

Congo, the Congo issue is related to that …

Kluge

He brings cruelty to Africa.

Enzensberger

He brings cruelty, and a systematic cruelty at that. Surely the societies down there were not idyllic either, but the systematic exploitation is something that comes from outside.

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H.M.S. (1841-1904)

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[…]False consciousness in a pith helmet/

Heroism, hand painted/

Jungles, deserts, prairies

nothing but backdrops/

Every gesture posed,

History, a pretext for scoops/

[…] Hack writer, idealist, mercenary,

Expense-account spender, go-getter, agent/

Tourist of blood-baths,

blow-fly of genocide

Quelling the Kiowa, Comanche and Sioux (1867),

Massacre at the Gold Coast (1873)

Always there in his high-minded way/

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Inventory of an Expedition:

A leader, an adjutant,

An assistant adjutant, a rifle bearer,

An interpreter, a staff sergeant,

Three sergeants, 23 guards, 157 porters,

A cook, a tailor, a carpenter,

Two horses, 27 donkeys, a dog, a few goats;

71 crates of ammunition, candles, soap, coffee, tea, sugar,

Flour, rice, sardines, pemmican,

Dr. Liebig’s meat extract, pans, pots,

three tents, two folding boats, a bath tub /

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Gulliver and the Lilliputians

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Gulliver and the Giants

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“A healthy man he, an unwitting carrier

of the disease, a selfless harbinger of plundering, a courier

who didn’t realize he had come to announce the annihilation

of what he lovingly painted until ninety, in his Views of Nature."

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Alexander von Humboldt

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“An unjust trial”

Lima (Peru)

October 23 – December 24, 1802

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[…] The viceroy Castelfuerte gave the councilor Antequera

An unjust trial./

He had him tied to a bony mule and

Made him ride from Paraguay to Lima/

He falsely accused him of wanting to cause uproar in Paraguay/

Later he regretted that and saw

That there were only two options

Either to let the defendant escape

So that his trial could not be concluded,

Or to hang him./

He allowed the councilor to walk around town,

But when the prisoner didn’t flee,

He had him hanged. /

There was a crowd of people

angry with the viceroy/

The Franciscan monks told the councilor

To have faith/

The viceroy was cruel enough to want

To enjoy the spectacle of his revenge/ On horseback

He arrived on the place/

Once the monks saw him,

They assumed he’d come

To pardon the prisoner/

They screamed at the top of their lungs

“Pardon, Pardon…”/

At these words, the people wanted to free the councilor

From the executioner /

The viceroy did not lose control

And ordered the soldiers

With loaded guns to

“Kill the monks!”/

Indeed, the soldiers shot

And killed two monks/

The executioner who saw that monks were being killed,

Believed that time should not be wasted

And hanged unlucky Antequera/