Regardless of the Consequences

View transcript: Regardless of the Consequences

Text: In The Short Summer of Anarchy, his 37 Ballads from the History of Progress, in The Silences of Hammerstein, and Requiem for a Romantic Woman, Hans Magnus Enzensberger (born 1929) has documented the biographies of different individuals / How to write a biography
Text: Regardless of the consequences! H. M. Enzensberger: How to write a biography
Kluge: A biography is a strange thing, really: compared to the objective course of events, it’s often too short or too long, and some biographies have history pulled out from underneath their feet.
Enzensberger: Yes, but on the other hand, a biography is much denser than anything else, than any other vessel that could contain a life. Of course that also leads to … the narration needs to be discontinuous. As a filmmaker, you always work with montage, and that means, I cannot even imagine this work as an uninterrupted, continuous story; because of the different sources, the different voices, it’s always polyphonic. And the editing is very, very important; the omissions are very important, I cannot include every detail, that would just water down the story. There are such … in the anglophone tradition, there is a big … in England, the biography is a very important medium, but when I hear that there is a 2,000-page Shaw biography in four volumes, I have to say, my friend, that’s thorough work, thanks a lot, but it could have been a lot more focused if some things would have been left out.
Kluge: Take your parents, if you will, your father was born in 1902 and died in 1990, right?
Enzensberger: Yes.
Kluge: Your mother, 1905-2008. Two vessels you are closely connected to. You might even say, sometimes, they are within us.
Enzensberger: Yes, sure. But I try to be careful about it, because with people like my parents, I cannot maintain a distance the way I can with other characters. I mean, with a Prussian general, it’s not an issue to keep my distance, but it’s different with my own family.
Kluge: Your father, crouched behind his desk, looks like you, except that you are skinnier. Something like that shows a certain momentary connection.
Enzensberger: Yes, of course, it’s unavoidable, and sometimes he has to serve as a model, so to speak, for instance when I study the role of the technician – how does a technician work, a technician who … my father told me: okay, I was part of the automation of the telephone network, the first experimental stations were set up during the Weimar Republic. Then the Nazis, then the military occupation, the Federal Republic, first the Trizone, the Federal Republic …
Kluge: But technology develops very slowly.
Enzensberger: And he says very matter-of-factly: But they all want to make phone calls.
Text: “My father’s stubbornness”
Enzensberger: But he also kept his distance. For instance, he was sent to France, because after the invasion in France, the telephone network had broken down as a result of the war, and he fixed it within a year, he fixed it. Then he went home. But he also proved to be stubborn, for example, he was supposed to go to Krakow, during the General Government, during the occupation of Poland, and he was supposed to fix it, the telephone network, that is. And he said: I’m not going. He understood what that meant. Unlike in Paris where at least they kept up appearances, sheer terror ruled in Poland. Frank was the General Governor, they were like a horde of butchers over there. And somehow, he realized that, and he refused to go, because he could, he had that choice.
Kluge: So they did not get their fancy telephone lines.
Enzensberger: Exactly. And in the end, the Führer ordered to blow up all the radio repeaters, the facilities, the technical equipment – scorched earth. He refused, they locked him up. “I’m not going to … those who come after us will want to make phone calls too, it’s not right, like blowing up bridges and so on …” He didn’t want to participate, he went against his orders.
Kluge: And that’s how history turns into drama.
Enzensberger: Yes, those are dramatic scenes, even though he did not choose that, of course.
Kluge: Whereas the history of technology creates a reality in which he and his colleagues might recognize themselves, see what they are capable of.
Enzensberger: And there is a certain continuity to political consequences, it was … he often said: “They all want to make phone calls.” So he also has to take following generations into account … he cannot just blow everything up, it’s not right, it also undermines military strength, of course.
Kluge: But it is an achoring of conscience or morality in something more than mere intention. A better anchor.
Enzensberger: Yes, that becomes apparent in the example of writers and artists who were struggling because they did not have this kind of anchor.
Kluge: But a decent engineer does not follow so quickly.
Enzensberger: … not so quickly. A bridge has to be stable, it shouldn’t break apart, and he knows that.
Kluge: For how much of his life does your father live in this continuum? First, his childhood, then his education, and his active time begins. When does he start working?
Enzensberger: Well, he attended a technical university, he did not get any money from his parents, he muddled through with free meals and other things. And okay, then he had a family, and I think he would have rather … he had a soft spot for the railway. He drew graphs of schedules in his spare time, to improve the express train connections in Germany.
Kluge: In the German Reich.
Enzensberger: In the Reich. He also always had all the timetables, but he didn’t want … he kept the improvements to himself, because he refused to sell anything, he was completely incorruptible in that regard, his incorruptibility was also one of his characteristics, because he was responsible for the big budgets, for all the big companies: Siemens, the telephone companies, Normalzeit, Lorenz, and whatnot, and they built stuff for hundreds of millions. And of course they tried to send him stuff, to his home. I remember that once, a truck drove up to our house, and they brought in hampers – that was during the so called post-war era, when people did not have anything, and we were completely dazzled by all these things, everything, hummer, caviar, you name it, was in these baskets. And they brought a refrigerator, which you really couldn’t buy back then. We were overjoyed. And then my father came home from work and said: “Get out!” We were so disappointed, we had been so excited, and then – nothing!
Kluge: He was a professional, that could have killed him. Like the boss of the German film industry in the 1940s, district court judge Dr. Pfennig. He was dismissed by a tycoon – it was a big thing, to be head of the UFA. But because he accepted a couple of packages of sausage from Prague, he lost everything from one day to the next.
Enzensberger: But it’s strange, because there was a fight against corruption even during the Nazi era, even in the SS people were discharged because …
Kluge: … the SS judges were very strict.
Enzensberger: Yes, it’s strange. How this could exist at the same time as the general will to annihilation, it’s really strange.
Kluge: Those are the contradictions …
Enzensberger: The small kernels preserving that which could not be eroded.
Kluge: And they don’t make the system better, but the observation …
Enzensberger: No, no, and it’s all very ambiguous, of course, it’s all very ambiguous. Because, on the other hand, you could say: Why didn’t you sabotage the system?
Text: Life work / continuity - -
Kluge: Well, your father could have shut down the telephone network for an hour and a half. Then he would have been discovered, and he would have died.
Enzensberger: Yeah, that wouldn’t have helped much.
Kluge: But again, this is the biography of a person close to you, so to speak … and my father and your father, they basically spent a very long time in a continuum, professionally speaking, a very long time. It’s actually a pretty content life.
Enzensberger: Basically a kind of life work, because the day before he retired, he opened the latest telephone exchange, that means, he opened the first and last one for Bavaria, Northern Bavaria, I think. And that was basically his life work – I’m done, here you got it. Before, there were switchboard operators – he put those out of work, though.
Kluge: Because of automation?
Enzensberger: Because of automation.
Text: The elements of a biography
Kluge: Every person is born, that is part of their biography. And somehow, there is a bit of curiosity, I would say, about how we were born. How was it? Were all the stars aligned? That’s something I have never asked myself, but I did ask myself …
Enzensberger: Yes, sure, that is … there is … an American philosopher once coined the impression “historical luck.” Because it’s not something you can influence, you are just born into that time …
Kluge: You are born into it.
Enzensberger: In the 1930s you are born into a time of war …
Kluge: Was the mother happy or not? That’s an important question.
Enzensberger: Yes, all these things, it’s true. But of course there’s also … like I said, I’m particular about these things, but I have a grandfather, for example, who was genealogist and he has enormous … there are enormous handwritten family chronicles, several volumes, he wrote all of that down. But when he didn’t like something, he “corrected” it, he “fixed” it!
Kluge: Oh, the ancestors were painted in a more positive light as time passed, as the work progressed.
Enzensberger: Yes, he went as far as to make up a family crest, for example, which allegedly was awarded by Emperor Maximilian in 15-something …
Kluge: If he had had ten more years, they would have become nobility.
Enzensberger: A complete fabrication, the crest is pure … he just made it up. It’s nicely done, very heraldic, the family crest – which never existed! That means, these are the typical sources that we just cannot trust. The correction of history, people correct their own history. And that’s why I’m so suspicious of autobiographies. Other people are more qualified to say something about a person than that person him- or herself.
Kluge: But when you write biographies, even if you are being laconic and omit a lot, the rest of what you describe is still deduced by means of a sense of empathy. And that means that every person, after a childhood they remember only partially …
Enzensberger: Yes, they learn about it from others. And then they think they remember it themselves. A lot of inevitable declinations. And that’s how a type of … Freud would have called it family novel … develops.
Kluge: And then there is a phase when the child goes to school, at least in Middle Europe. And that is basically already continuum no. 1, where everyone is together.
Enzensberger: Yes, and it is also … the most crucial function of school is not, in my opinion, to learn how to read and write. You can learn that in six weeks; it’s ridiculous to play around with the alphabet for three years.
Kluge: To turn Robinson into a social being …
Enzensberger: Of course. There are the cliques, the alliances, the animosities, rivalries, jealousy, this and that. That is much more important, because a single child would be completely lost if he wasn’t integrated in a context where conflicts are lived through and worked out. By the way, even a bad school is a good school, because you can learn how to undermine institutions, authorities, you learn that as a child already: There is this awful teacher, how are we going to deal with him? That’s important, too.
Text: The latency stage (ages 6-12)
Kluge: And that’s how you get to a stage that is part of basically any middle-European biography, the latency stage, as Piaget calls it. That means, the anxiety of early childhood, the conflicts and the suffering that come with it, even out into a nice, stable level. Just like Goethe talks about lakes in the moonlight, quiet, no wind, until the beginning of puberty. You could say that this is basically already a life.
Enzensberger: Yes. And besides, they are pretty uninhibited, mentally speaking. The children … I mean, sometimes I visit a school, I don’t do readings, I hate that, but sometimes I visit schools. And then … it doesn’t matter if you’ve been in the newspaper or not, they don’t care. Fame doesn’t matter to them, that doesn’t do anything for an 8-year-old. And you can tease out their productivity, and when they get going, well. They paint, they sing, they write poems and often really strange things that get lost over time. Things that get lost later …
Kluge: Just like the voice.
Enzensberger: Yes. That productivity fades again. But there is really … I mean, if you look only at language acquisition … it is impressive, to think about how a person learns the syntax with all its forms and exceptions and oddities, and it happens so fast! And I mean later, if you wanted to learn Japanese, you’d have enormous difficulties, but as a four-year-old, you’d speak Japanese in no time. So, to an extent, we were more talented back then.
Kluge: Just like we know how to swim before we become babies. And this aspect, if you preserve a piece of the small garden that you own during this time in your life, you already have one good quality that you need as a writer, that you keep coming back to …
Enzensberger: That’s true, sure.
Kluge: … not a proper adult perspective.
Enzensberger: I don’t think it’s only … okay, for a writer it is perhaps even more important, but a fully grown-up person would be a pathological case, because they would have to carry all the stages of their life around with them, they have to carry all of that, obviously. And that can lead to a kind of neurosis, but it is still inevitable. And I don’t want to simply be eighty, I don’t want to.
Kluge: And there is an epiphany, deep inside, where you could look for it under the microscope, there is Rumpelstilsken, so to speak.
Enzensberger: Yes, but there is also a line, maybe that is a deficiency, but I simply don’t want to dig too deep into my own life story. I’m good at forgetting, too – I don’t want to dig around, I hate these therapy types who are addicted to … “I have to find my identity, I have to get to know myself,” that’s so boring, terribly boring.
Kluge: And you don’t need that either. No, no one is going to mistake you for someone else. When you start talking, people will say, that’s Enzensberger. It’s not really a compliment, but a character trait of yours: pure stubbornness.
Enzensberger: Inevitably, yes.
Kluge: But if you think about it this way: You could envision without any problems, say, Ovid at the Black Sea, and Ossip Mandelstam who wrote Tristia, who references Ovid while sitting in a café in Moscow.
Enzensberger: Yes, there are situations where things like that just come up.
Kluge: And you are able to casually slide into it, like into a glove.
Enzensberger: Yes, as long as it is someone else, with pleasure.
Kluge: Even though that brings up the same things you would find embarrassing when it’s about yourself.
Enzensberger: Yes, but of course that is not possible without the kind of hidden capital you are talking about. That’s obvious, I mean, someone who is completely liberated from his own self, he wouldn’t be able to do that, of course. But I would like for it to remain latent, I don’t want to present everything on a silver platter … I’m kind of opposed to that, I don’t really know why, but I hope that I’ll never write an autobiography.
Kluge: No. Take this snapshot from your life, which was documented by a cameraman: You are standing at your window and looking outside, and it’s winter, winter in Munich, something very typical, not any different from 1936. That means, there is a very slow movement, winter every year …
Enzensberger: Yes, sure, the seasons. I’m happy to live in a climate zone with four seasons, because there are zones with only one season, or one rainy season, and it’s always the same, it’s terrible. Compared to that, we are lucky.
Kluge: And you, in this snapshot, on this day, the way you sit there with all the cells of your body, and what you are thinking about, it might be related to something else in your life, but basically it’s a moment where …
Enzensberger: That’s great, and it has something to do with Europe, because there is so much variation. And people complain about the bad weather, I never complain about the bad weather, because bad weather is good weather, too.
Text: The moment is the authentic part of a biography.
Kluge: To summarize: when you write a biography, you reconstruct it out of the individual moments, because that’s the living part. The cells will forget, otherwise, and no one is going to be exactly the same person twice.
Enzensberger: Yes, and sometimes you don’t even recognize yourself anymore and you say: What on Earth was happening back there? That looks really strange.
Kluge: Now there is a second …
Enzensberger: And sometimes it can also betray certain things. Even those who want to keep their distance sometimes fall prey to the “zeitgeist” in a certain way, you get dragged along, you get dragged along, suddenly you are wearing weird clothes, and that’s how it starts. Even facial expressions can “betray their time.” Someone makes a “1950s face” – that is really a thing.
Text: A characteristic trait
Kluge: When you live in one reality, you would like to be in a different one, when you are home, you’d rather be in Norway, overseas, in America, in Mexico, somewhere. That means, you initiate change, you escaped for long periods of time after times of intense activity.
Enzensberger: Well, but it’s very simple, because, I mean, we are not trees. That’s why I’m even bothered by the expression: “What’s your position?” I find that annoying, because I’m not tied to one position, I can shift. And this kind of mobility is a sign of life, I think. I cannot even imagine how that could be different. And of course, as for the specifics, I’m born in Germany, and my generation – I wanted to get away, it was a vital need, away! We were walled in during the Nazi era, we couldn’t … and even later, we didn’t have passports, we couldn’t exchange money, we were stuck. And we really wanted to …
Kluge: Yes, at some point reality becomes a bit too narrow. And then you need to explore new horizons …
Enzensberger: Yes, I think that is part of the genre, the mobility, I don’t even understand how someone can see that differently, I don’t get it.
Text

Flying Robert /

Escapism, you shout at me

reproachfully /

What else, I reply,

in this weather! -;

open the umbrella

and rise into the skies /

from your perspective,

I grow smaller and smaller,

until I have disappeared /

I do not leave anything behind

but a legend

that you, like dogs in the manger,

annoy your children with

while the storm rages outside,

so that they won’t fly away /

Kluge: There is a film, an adaptation of the book “Requiem for a Romantic Woman.” The first scene is a very energetic woman hugging the poet Clemens von Brentano during a parade of the Napoleonic troops in Kassel, as we find out shortly after.
Text: Scene from the movie: Requiem for a Romantic Woman
Enzensberger: In Frankfurt, yes.
Kluge: Spontaneously, in Frankfurt.
Enzensberger: Yes, well. It’s a character that lends itself to all kind of things. You know, why do we even write this kind of biography? If I want to stimulate my historical imagination, it’s not enough for me to open my Encyclopedia of World History – this collection of data is a useful compendium, and it’s on my shelf, but there is no imagination … I cannot use it to develop anything. And for me, that’s only possible if I slide into this like into a glove, a subjective perspective, when I empathize … of course, there is research, too, because you have to study it properly from the inside, and then you also get a sense of what was going on with these people, what was going on inside of them. And to a certain extent, we can apply that to the era in general, it is not limited to one person. And in this case, we are talking about a woman, which is strange, because on the one hand, modern women think that the women’s movement only happened over the last 30 years or so, and that is completely wrong. These women were very self-confident, very articulate. So I was working on this female character and on Mister Brentano, who is also very interesting to me as a poet, and I was trying to figure out: what was it like? It was the haute bourgeoisie, to an extent at least, and this social class came with all kinds of restrictions. And what is interesting, I have made the experience that every biography has to find its own form, I cannot have a template that fits a contemporary or 20th century biography … that’s impossible. Instead, I have to … it also has to do with media history, which media were in use back then. And it’s interesting that in Romanticism, for instance … people were obsessed with letter writing, that was the predecessor of the telephone, they couldn’t talk on the phone, so every night …
Kluge: … and there was an echo of souls – that means, the letter is for individual sensitivities what accounting is for the merchant.
Enzensberger: Yes. From one day to the next, they started writing so often that you have context, you can study the emotional changes, like in an encephalogram. And they even slipped them underneath each others’ doors, even when they were in the same house, when they were fighting, they slipped a note … And strangely, a lot of this was preserved, so there is also an element of detective work – I read letters that no one had touched for a century. That’s …
Kluge: … they possess a force of expression … their words, and the way they write is not just subjective, something the romantics are often accused of. It’s a form of diplomatic correspondence. In order to win my man, I write his best friend, whom he confesses to, amen, in a way that is supposed to influence my marriage …
Enzensberger: Yes. Savigny as mediator, for instance. And it also has to do with the social milieu, because Bethman was a great … it’s still like that, it was a banker family, and he was completely opposed to the relationship. There is resistance, and it develops into a kind of …
Kluge: You have to tell me – so there are the Brentanos in Frankfurt, Frankfurt-Offenbach, and then there is the important Bethmann family, even Hölderin is later going to work in this environment.
Enzensberger: Yes, yes, they bought high-value national bonds. It was the beginning … I mean, later, there was Rothschild, governments bacame basically dependent on the money the banker dynasties provided them with, for the war, for the war contributions, there was the Napoleonic era, etc. And it’s also interesting to see what they do with the money. I mean, you imagine a Romantic as someone unworldly, but that’s not true, they did … they had to be careful … I mean, someone like Brentano, who didn’t really want a bread-and-butter job, he still had to have the financial means to be able to afford that. He didn’t want an office job, he refused. And then, this woman, there was a lot of passion, it’s really like a marital drama with Strindbergian tendencies sometimes. And you can show that, those letters demonstrate that, one day after another. And the literary virtuosity of their writing creates a surplus value, they are not the kind of banalities you spread out for the divorce lawyer, it’s not like that.
Kluge: But it’s not really that different from “Werther” and the plot line in “Werther.”
Enzensberger: No…
Kluge: After she is released for good from this fatal, romantic relationship with Brentano, she marries a bourgeois.
Enzensberger: Yes, the romantic woman who commits suicide in the end because she wasn’t happy, what she did later was basically a marriage of convenience, because things with Brentano didn’t work out, they were too passionate, it was a love-hate relationship. And I mean, like I said, I want to slip into this 1805 glove, I want to explore it from the inside.
Kluge: Because it is the turn of an era. 1789 really marks the beginning of a new century on its own that ends in 1815, and then we have the industrial awakening moving in from England …
Enzensberger: Yes, of course, with Metternich, with Biedermeier, all those things …
Kluge: … later. But this here was a beginning, with expectations of life that were higher than what life was able to offer.
Enzensberger: … was able to offer, yes.
Kluge: And maybe it’s the same thing with Brentano: as a poet, he is master of his emotions, but biologically, he is showing signs of weakness.
Enzensberger: Yes, of course.
Kluge: … the conflicted male imagination.
Enzensberger: Yes, sure. And it’s also interesting that …
Kluge: It would be better from a distance.
Enzensberger: … that sometimes there these completely insane limits, for example a man who suddenly plays head of the household and all these traditional roles, and suddenly …
Kluge: But he keeps leaving.
Enzensberger: … he keeps leaving, because he cannot sustain it.
Kluge: But from a distance, it seems so easy.
Enzensberger: And there is also, I mean, that era is also … it’s part of the history of the invention of love, of course, because these expectations in the relationship between man and woman increase to a degree where they simply cannot be fulfilled anymore. This working temperature cannot be maintained permanently, that’s the way it is.
Kluge: And there are treasures to be discovered, a better life.
Enzensberger: Yes, and by the way, I noticed that this kind of work was also … I do like the investigative work that comes with biographic research, because you notice that … many biographers keep copying each other, they are lazy. But if you go out, I went to the archiepiscopal archive and was able to correct the facts that German Studies scholars kept copying from others. Sometimes the outsider is not an expert, I’m not a professor of literary history, but I had the chance to find something that others missed, and that’s fun.
Kluge: But you made up a letter.
Enzensberger: One letter I made up, towards the end …
Kluge: … and then a forceful epilogue. There is a commentary.
Enzensberger: No, not quite. But I wanted to stick with the epistolary form. Whereas in other contexts … I wrote the biography of a sort-of hero of the Spanish civil war, leader of the anarchists, Buanaventura Durruti …
Kluge: “The Short Summer of Anarchy”
Enzensberger: “The Summer of Anarchy” needed a different approach, because of its oral mediality. The anarchists didn’t have files, they didn’t have a bureaucracy, that means – what was I supposed to do? I collected a few leaflets, that kind of material, and whatever I could find in other sources, but the main source were the old men who still remembered. And I had to go there with my camera and the microphone – they were 80-year-old men in exile, in France, the Netherlands, wherever they were living, because I did this during the Franco Regime. And they told me their stories, that is the oral culture, the oral tradition that suits the anarchists better. You have to approach that very differently. And I had to edit the interviews in order to create a narrative, and so on. A very different procedure. Basically, each case … another biography I wrote was about a German general …
Kluge: Hammerstein.
Enzensberger: Hammerstein, yes, and these are completely different sources. I had to visit the archives of the secret services, that’s the objective perspective. And then I had to fill in the gaps, I had to convince the survivors, his family, to open their drawers, there were pictures, sometimes a diary, sometimes a letter, and you have to put it all together, because the files don’t tell you everything, the documents omit a lot.
Kluge: I can see you talk to the family at the Bendlerblock, and it is a great moment. A historical site.
Enzensberger: Yes, that is where it happened.
Kluge: … that was Hammerstein’s office. And now there is his family.
Enzensberger: Yes. So those are three entirely different methods.
Kluge: But in this case you had the most freedom, you allowed yourself to include made-up dialogues from the afterlife …
Enzensberger: Yes. Of course that also has something to do with the era, because …
Kluge: A flying glove, so to speak?
Enzensberger: Yes. But hard to imagine for younger people. They have a hard time relating to that time.
Kluge: But it makes you realize that every documentary work, everything that incorporates documents out of love for the objective truth, is still part of the fictional realm.
Enzensberger: Yes, and you can see the difference … of course it’s a little peculiar, our relationship with the academic historians, it’s a bit difficult, because they operate within certain disciplinary boundaries. A writer has much more freedom.
Kluge: Peer review. Whereas you are working under the mindful eye of the story, the narrative, the narrative art: Tacitus is looking over your shoulder.
Enzensberger: Yes, and the readers: whether they believe it, whether I can make it believable. And the dialogues of the dead are basically an attempt to interview these people from today’s perspective: What were you thinking? Why did you do this, and not …? Younger people cannot relate to that, so it’s a heuristic means to draw them in. It’s very difficult for a 25-year-old to imagine life under a dictatorship if he never experienced it.
Kluge: No. And I imagine that now you experience a certain distance yourself, so to speak, because I can still see you in Wannsee, at the conference of the Gruppe 47 in 1962.
Enzensberger: Yes.
Kluge: Back then, I could not have imagined that you would ever write about a German commander-in-chief – respectfully, by the way, that you could empathize with that, put on this particular glove.
Enzensberger: Yes, but that’s also an advantage, I mean, autobiographies are boring, I know myself to a certain degree, and I also don’t think it’s terribly interesting. But these different – I’m not a militant anarchist, that’s a different world, and I find it much more interesting to explore that instead of talking about meeting Celan or Beckett. Memoirs are often boring and also pretentious. I don’t like them.
Kluge: But then there’s this: With great surprise, I see you here at different moments in your life, as documented by an observant cameraman.
Enzensberger: Well, yeah, but the bottom line is, that’s something you have to leave to others.
Kluge: But it’s interesting.
Enzensberger: Of course …
Kluge: So now that you are sitting here today …
Enzensberger: Sometimes I barely recognize myself in these things … But I have to leave that to others, it’s more sanitary as well. And then there is a fourth project, where I chose the form of the ballad: The title of the book is “Mausoleum;” it’s about different characters from the history of progress. And that was another completely different approach, because it basically refers to … why the ballad? It’s basically a form of heroic song. And heroic songs always assume that the audience already knows the character, which has its own myth. If I write a long poem about Darwin, I am not discovering Darwin, he already exists, as myth and as legend. And that’s why it’s connected to … the ballad is an ancient text form, even in antiquity they honored great athletes, for instance Pindar, the great athlete, or wise philosophers. And that’s why this is a biography consisting of biographies: I’m making use of the archive that has been compiled over the course of time in constant retellings.
Kluge: And because there are 37 of them, they get a little piece for themselves, the focus on the individual, so to speak, it’s a bit random …
Enzensberger: Yes. Well, there is an involuntary … unintentionally, despite himself, the biographer creates a little bit of a self-portrait. Why? Because I can only spend years focusing on one person if there’s something that connects us. I need to have a kind of emotional …
Kluge: Empathy, as they call it.
Enzensberger: I need to feel empathy, but I don’t need to identify with the character, that would be a mistake.
Text: The biography of HOMO NOVUS
Kluge: And now in “Mausoleum” you have people with a certain mindset, the homo novus, who is split into Catilina, an agitator, a conspirator, who invents the natural sciences, a traitor who forms colonies; and at the same time a man who cannot let go of enlightenment and curiosity. Two contradictory character traits.
Enzensberger: Yes. And the subtitle is “From the History of Progress.” There are several facets, because it’s not so clear what progress actually is.
Kluge: The progress of crime, progress of industry, progress of diligence, the progress of intelligence, and in a way also the progress of good deeds.
Enzensberger: Good deeds as well.
Kluge: Even if they cannot be passed down that easily.
Text: Characters without phrases
Enzensberger: Yes, the pastoral element for example doesn’t suit these characters, they are not good at giving unctuous speeches. Well, these stories reveal ambiguities, and the price people pay for their goals, it becomes deeply ingrained in their psyche, it borders on insanity. I mean, many great mathematicians didn’t … they developed a psychosis or something. It’s dangerous.
Kluge: It’s not without risk, to try endlessly.
Text: A new project: THE BOOK OF RESCUES
Enzensberger: Yes, it is a side-effect of dedication, that doesn’t come for free. I think, you can ask yourself if it’s not unhealthy to be a genius. I recently had this idea … I’ll never end up doing it, people always have more plans than they could ever realize. But I would like to read a book called “The book of Rescues,” that means, a dozen stories of people who escape in the last minute, often just by sheer luck. Catching the last train, Nelly Sachs knew someone … Selma Lagerlöf, and a Swedish princess who helped her escape in 1940. That kind of story.
Kluge: Someone misses his plane that ends up being struck by lighting and crashes over the Atlantic.
Enzensberger: Yes, there are crazy stories about last-minute rescues. It’s really …
Kluge: …last-minute rescue, accidental rescue, unintentional rescue … those are great stories!
Enzensberger: Yes, great stories.
Text: Reality is not absolute - -
Kluge: And that’s something the tyrannical principle of reality cannot exclude. If it sits there like a Moloch and says: I exist, I am because I’m real, you would say: I highly doubt that. That’s where the subjective perspective sets in, where commentary starts.
Enzensberger: In that sense, there is no absolute, no totality … Well, there are totalitarian regimes, but there is also no entirely totalitarian society: there are corners, niches, in every society, when it gets bad, there are only nooks and tight spaces, but they still exist. And from the Nazi era, I know that there were always … and that might look rather harmless, like a coffee hour, but it was different, it wasn’t homogenous, this society, the Nazi society didn’t manage to enforce homogeneity.
Kluge: You are basically …
Enzensberger: Mandelstam in the Soviet Union… I mean, that’s … we know Akhmatova, but just as interesting are the ones we don’t know, whose names we don’t know. But there is an American historian, for example, who studies Russia, and he published diaries from the Stalin era that he found in Moscow, private diaries that were written in secret, and of course those are no known names, those aren’t famous people, but they are incredibly powerful and extremely fascinating. And I have a small collection of women’s stories from the Nazi era, partly diaries that have been published, but mostly things that were written at the time, that they kept hidden somewhere, these women in Berlin, some of them are anonymous books …
Kluge: You published them, basically.
Enzensberger: Yes, we published that in these books. And they are pretty powerful, and it is interesting that the role of women is extremely underestimated in historical scholarship, because the resistance, for example, would not have been possible without the messenger services and the logistics that women were responsible for.
Text: Regardless of the consequences! H. M. Enzensberger: How to write a biography
Kluge: The fall of Robespierre only happened because of women.
Enzensberger: Exactly.
Kluge: And in 1789, the king would not have been brought to Paris if not for the Parisian women. It’s interesting.