History’s Forgotten Ones - Alexander Kluge

View transcript: History’s Forgotten Ones

News & Storys (10.09.2006)

Text: World revolution is a term from a different time / Those who fought for the revolution in 1920s Germany have disappeared / H.M. Enzensberger’s poetic curiosity focuses on those forgotten /Those people, he says, who were used up in the maelstrom of history, deserve at least an epitaph.
Text: History’s forgotten ones / H.M. Enzensberger about the biographies of forgotten revolutionaries
Kluge: After your last novel, you are now working on something new. What are you working on?
Enzensberger: I don’t know if you can even call it work yet, but there are certain twilight zones that I find very fascinating, and one of those twilight zones is the history of the Weimar Republic, especially in its final stage. I have to say that sometimes I thank God for not having had to live through the Weimar Republic.
Kluge: But you were born during that time, in 1929.
Enzensberger: Yes, but this myth of the 1920s, the Golden Twenties … it makes my hair stand on end when I hear that, because in reality it was a miserable republic from the very beginning, a historical miscarriage, so to speak.
Text: Hans Magnus Enszensberger, writer
Enzensberger: And the more you get into it, the less comfortable it seems. Towards the end, in particular, people got sucked into a whirlpool, a kind of political maelstrom that one could not get out of anymore. And that is also embodied in certain characters, in specific persons, some of whom are very famous and well-known, but others have been forgotten …
Kluge: For instance?
Enzensberger: There are a few people who were basically rubbed out in this maelstrom. And I am interested in their biographies. There are the purely political ones, the people who joined the left, from the Spartacus League to Comintern. And when events came to a head between 1928 and 1935 – you can see in their biographies how they were ground up by it all.. And there are people who distanced themselves from Soviet communism, but did not want to join the opposite side either; and they formed a left-wing opposition, composed of several small groups. And some of them are very interesting people, who ended up in exile, in Moscow, in the Gulags, who were executed, who got the rug pulled out from under them as emigrants, and so on. It is a very strange constellation. And many of those people, I believe, have somehow been forgotten, or are at least underappreciated, because they were not in the forefront … they were not a General Secretary, or a Minister, or something like that. I mean, we know quite a bit about Zinoviev, and about Bukharin …
Kluge: They died, too.
Enzensberger: Yes. But someone like Ruth Fischer, for instance …
Text: Ruth Fischer (1895-1961)
Enzensberger: Yes, I once visited her in Paris. She was a lady, who used to live in a very elegant pavilion at the Rive Gauche, by the way, and even back then I thought that was very interesting, because she used to be the leader of the German Communist Party, after all. She belonged to the party’s left wing, was dethroned, got summoned to Moscow, she had good contacts in the Comintern, she knew everyone. Then there are the Vienna stories, they are important, too. And then she went to Paris …
Kluge: First she was a Trotskyite.
Enzensberger: Trotskyism, but she was not well equipped for it, she was too stubborn, maybe also too ambitious, too self-reliant, a very strong woman who did not want to put up with separatism, not even the Trotskyist kind. Then the groups became smaller and smaller. She managed to get a visa for America, by way of Marseille. At first she continued her work in New York. But then, anti-Stalinism drove her to very extremist positions, extremely anti-Soviet positions …
Kluge: Because she also knew her stuff, she was an expert.
Enzensberger: Yes, all the inside knowledge.
Kluge: She loves the old version, studies it …
Enzensberger: Yes. And she was even recruited by the American State Department, it was very ambiguous, because of course deep inside she did not want to defect to the Americans, but she was an expert, and maybe it was also an issue of life or death. In this very complicated situation, the problem was to pull your head out of the sling without giving up your political convictions. Mrs. Fischer’s maiden name was Eisler.
Text: The Eisler siblings
Kluge: She was the sister of Hanns Eisler, the famous composer …
Enzensberger: Yes, Hanns Eisler and Gerhart Eisler…
Text: Hanns Eisler (1898-1962)
Kluge: … a proper communist who still played an important role in the GDR.
Enzensberger: … who played an important role in the GDR. So there are biographical connections you can find if you do a little research, if you are interested …
Text: Gerhart Eisler (1897-1968)
Kluge: It is like a grenade, exploding …
Enzensberger: …it’s interesting …
Kluge: … they are three fragments of one family, each going in a different direction.
Enzensberger: Yes. It is very strange. The conflicts, the enormous conflicts even within these groups that develop an explosive potential under the pressure of political history.

Or someone like Franz Jung, an expressionist writer who was part of the left, and wrote a wonderful autobiography with the title “The Torpedo Beetle”. Of course Jung knew all these people, he knew Ruth Fischer, you see. He was interested in the history of the Hammerstein family. Hammerstein was general staff chief of the Army’s high command right before Hitler came into power, and his daughters – he had two daughters …

Kluge: A big family with Swedish roots, they had already been generals during the Thirty Years War …
Enzensberger: Mecklenburg nobility, old nobility, an old military family …
Kluge: Their family crest says: Wealth won during the war, with God’s help.
Enzensberger: Yes. Old land owners from Mecklenburg …
Kluge: The only one who could have stopped Hitler 1933.
Text: Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, commander in chief
Enzensberger: Probably, he had a very important position, there are very interesting sources. And the Hammerstein family is also interesting because the general’s daughters …
Kluge: … for love …
Enzensberger: … for love and because …
Kluge: …they slept with …
Enzensberger: … because of their dislike for the looming Hitler dictatorship, they gave away information about the Army’s high command …
Kluge: … because Hammerstein knows everything, he knows every single one of the Reichwehr’s military and social secrets … and I think the daughters worked for the Ministry of Defense ….
Enzensberger: One of the daughters had access to the safe, and she gave information to the Russians, there is a Comintern file about this.
Text: Hans Magnus Enzensberger, writer
Kluge: … then there is Werner Scholem…
Enzensberger: … Scholem, another figure in this complex network …
Kluge: … Brother of Gershom Scholem…
Enzensberger: Yes, Gershom’s brother …
Kluge: … high school classmate of Ernst Jünger in Hannover.
Enzensberger: … of Ernst Jünger, and lover of one of the Hammerstein daughters.
Kluge: … member of the Comintern’s military espionage apparatus.
Enzensberger: … the Comintern, yes. Of course the story doesn’t end there: they get caught up in the Stalinist purges, many of these people are now severely threatened from both sides, from the Gestapo as well as the GPU.
Kluge: But what you are talking about sounds like a realist novel. If you imagine Thomas Mann or Balzac writing about these things, it would be a novel, so to speak. But here, the narrator is reality.
Enzensberger: Yes, and of course that is also the problem, because it is not clear at all how to appropriate material like this for literature. I mean, there is the historical method, there is good groundwork … there are sources.
Kluge: Historians can be narrators, too.
Enzensberger: There is a historian at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, who went to Moscow during the time of the thaw, when you could get access to the archives, and he discovered very, very interesting things. He wrote a book about the Herbert Wehner file – which heavily incriminated Wehner, by the way – and its consequences. After all, he kept denouncing his comrades and even sent some of them to the slaughter. So there are connections, too, that reach way beyond the end of the war.
Text: “Loss of history” / Expropriation of someone’s own life –
Kluge: Basically, what we have here is the worst expropriation possible. I live my life, and history is pulled out from under my feet. Loss of history. Loss of property is not half as bad, it is just of material value. But my life is deprived of its reality in hindsight. That’s what happens to these people.
Enzensberger: …You could say that, because the elimination is not just physical, but there was also a kind of damnatio memoriae involved that means of course the entire left wing has completely disappeared by now.
Kluge: First, Stalinism happens …
Enzensberger: Ideologically speaking, you could say that’s over and done with. I mean, I am not particularly interested in the turf wars within the Communist Party in the 1920s, the Bolshevization, all these tactical games.
Kluge: … that doesn’t exist anymore, no.
Enzensberger: Because it is absolutely incomprehensible, even back then it was incomprehensible. You ask yourself how a worker was even supposed to deal with that. They all used a jargon, a very obscure political jargon; then someone got kicked out, and that is the least interesting part. What’s interesting is the biographical aspect.
Text: “Your work will not be lost! The spark will kindle a flame!” (Aleksandr Pushkin)
Kluge: Pushkin wrote this phrase, this verse, as part of a longer ode to the rebels who stood up against the Tzar and were all deported to Siberia, or killed. And it says: “Your work will not be lost! The spark will kindle a flame!”, and later, it says: “Freedom will burst the chains and we will hail the comrades at the gates!”
Enzensberger: : Yes, that is …
Kluge: … Pushkin, a long time ago.
Enzensberger: Yes, it is very interesting, but it is also the history of pathos, because this kind of pathos does not exist anymore. Even when we were young, it already made us uncomfortable, because the national-socialists utilized pathos, for example. As a child, you kept hearing the booming noise, the pompous speeches, and so 20th century history made pathos suspect.. Not just in Germany, I believe, but all over the world. But it is also a loss, in a way it is also a loss: pathos is not an option anymore.
Kluge: But imagine Aleksandr Pushkin, this elevated soul – he travels from his estate to St. Petersburg, and arrives exactly one day too late for the revolt, or he would have been in Siberia as well. Here we see a soul right before the revolt. That’s something you can relate to, can you not? Aleksandr Pushkin is not just a person full of pathos, he is also a realist, at the same time, he is a lot of things.
Enzensberger: Yes. You can relate, but it is a language that …
Kluge: … the great-grandson of an Abyssinian at the Russian court.
Enzensberger: I don’t know if it is possible to reappropriate this language. I don’t know. I mean, it still appears in Russian Literature, for example in Akhmatova’s work. But that was … I don’t know. Or, there is sublime poetry in an apolitical sense. Kolmar, or Nelly Sachs, that is high poetry. But what happened to it? I mean, where is it hiding? The question is: Where is the sublime hiding nowadays?
Kluge: So that is basically a negative capital account?
Enzensberger: Yes, sure. Of course we are also scarred children, that certainly plays a role. But it is also related to a kind of loss.
Kluge: But this kind of fate, where the wife of a sentenced anti-tzarist assassin moves to Siberia with him and lives there for twelve years, takes care of him, organizes reading material for him and so on, and then takes her husband home, whole and healthy; where Leonore gets into the prison to reclaim her husband. That is something … it has a very personal glow to it, doesn’t it?
Enzensberger: That’s true, but maybe we have to look for the height of drop in the events themselves, not in the pathos formula of poetry. I believe that something … that the sober language has to be compensated for by the material itself, with the experience, which also includes height of drop. I don’t necessarily need an elevated style or a grand formula, the pathos formula.
Kluge: Or personal engagement, this woman actually goes … she’s a princess, but she goes to Siberia, lives in a cabin, in the Wild East.
Enzensberger: Yes, but how can we talk about these things? We cannot …
Kluge: … “yes that was Hannah Cash, my child”. That’s how it ends.
Enzensberger: Well, Brecht was very good making these things sound very dry. He was part of the maelstrom himself, he was sucked into … but he escaped, went to California, because he was intelligent and he knew exactly …
Kluge: That is your perspective …
Enzensberger: … but he made things sober, in his best work, he mostly avoided the pathos formula.
Kluge: If you were to compare the pathos formula with a microscope or binoculars, or a distorting mirror, novels from the 1920s would be like looking through a simple window pane in comparison, or with the naked eye.
Enzensberger: Well, yes, there was already … I mean, there was a reason for the emergence of the so-called New Objectivity, it was a way of getting distance, an attempt to get away from … the expressionists also employed such a solemn style. Someone like Becher, I mean, it is unbearable for us, it’s impossible to read it, his pompous rhetoric.
Kluge: But they, obviously, liked the Bauhaus … just like a good mathematician thinks.
Enzensberger: Hence, New Objectivity, even though it was also …
Kluge: …it was enough, because history can provide the exaggeration itself.
Text: “Socialism or barbarism!”
Enzensberger: But, I mean, the people that I am interested in now, they weren’t artists, they were political people.
Kluge: And they come up with a completely different way of thinking: Socialism or barbarism. That is the battle cry of the Kiental. They meet in Switzerland during the war and say …
Enzensberger: Zimmerwald…
Kluge: … Zimmerwald. The massacre of Verdun teaches us something. It is basically virtue turned wild, fighting against itself, with industries pulling the strings in the background.
Enzensberger: But who has actually learned anything?
Kluge: Well, at least they founded a party.
Enzensberger: The societies, the European societies just prepared for the next round of fighting.
Kluge: That’s true.
Enzensberger: They did not draw any consequences, politics just continued the way it was before. And not just in Germany, we simply know the most about that country. But there were warmongers in France as well, and in Poland, and in the Baltic .
Kluge: But those who call themselves The Spartacus League, who come back from the conference in Zimmerwald, what they are saying is … From what I can see, they don’t find social equality as important, or as easily understandable as the issue: Never again another world war!
Enzensberger: Okay, but what about the protests of 1923?
Kluge: True, but that is not the same as Spartacus of 1921.
Enzensberger: Of course the KPD was supporting it, 1923 in Thuringia. The slogan was … and Mrs. Fischer wasn’t completely innocent, she actually was part of the radical, ultra-left wing, she wanted to take the entire party with her, and that failed, and then the other group emerged, the conciliators, as they were called later, and so on. The party has a complicated history. But I highly doubt that the wish for peace was very strong.
Kluge: For the first generation …
Enzensberger: Revenge, it was revenge on the right, and on the left it was revolution. And sure, why shouldn’t things get bloody? No, no, they did not want peace, people did not want peace, no one wanted peace in 1919, no one wanted peace and calm, they wanted to play the entire game again on a different level: World revolution, revenge for Versailles, or something, everyone had their own agenda. And they did not learn anything from World War I, at least that’s what I think. And that is one of the reasons why the Weimar Republic was so horrible, why things went on in the streets the way they did. There was the Reichsbund, the Stahlhelm, the SA, the SS, the Communists … they were all having it out in the streets. Basically, they all wanted to kill each other. Was that peace? It was not peace at all, it was horrible, the Weimar Republic was a misconstruction from beginning to end. And we could argue forever about who’s to blame, but it was definitely a terrible atmosphere, a terrible atmosphere, and it is not comforting to me at all that there were also a few great fortune-tellers, or singers, or musicals. I mean, if I have the choice – I would even prefer boredom to such a civil war-like constellation.
Text: The generation that already fought before 1914 - -
Kluge: And there are these older people, who already pursued their political goals at the time when Freud was active, before World War I: Rosa Luxemburg, her partner Jogiches, Ernst Mayer, Thalheimer … they are certainly reasonable, educated theoreticians, none of them are workers. But they are also educated people, they have this slogan: barbarism or socialism. There thinking was we cannot continue like this, because every new start leads back to 1914 or Verdun, and that’s exactly what happened. In that regard, they are actually wise prophets, and they all get killed or dismissed.
Enzensberger: So that socialism can find its own path into barbarism.
Kluge: But first they have to be eliminated.
Enzensberger: … gotten rid of, they have be gotten rid of..
Kluge: But I don’t want to omit a tiny bright spot: the original Spartacus League had about 23 to 30 people.
Enzensberger: Yes.
Kluge: A small group with a lot of power over the press.
Enzensberger: You are right, of course there are these minorities … there is a line that you cannot just wave off.
Kluge: And this Noah’s Arc of Thought, I want to call it, is decimated, mowed down, and then …
Text: Paul Levi, successor of Rosa Luxemburg
Kluge: The last man standing is a lawyer, Paul Levi, Rosa Luxemburg’s lawyer, really a respectable man, who always sat next to Lenin at the first Comintern congress, very close. He can still speak, he basically addresses the workers in Latin.
Enzensberger: All these people had to … either they had to be killed, or they had to be exiled, they had to …
Kluge: … or be dismissed ..
Enzensberger: … somewhere, they had to …
Kluge: … or kicked out of the party …
Enzensberger: … at the very least, that was the mildest sentence.
Kluge: But that happens now, in 1921.
Enzensberger: Yes, it is already happening.
Text: Kapp Putsch and “March Action” 1921
Kluge: And there is the so-called March Action. On the occasion of the Kapp Putsch, they say: Well, if the right can have a putsch, we can too. And they fail. And then there is the purge, and 1923 we get the next few chapters of the novel.
Enzensberger: Yes, a key year, actually a horror year. A lot of things come together, from the German side: Inflation leads to the elimination of the middle classes, economically speaking. The reparations, the pressure from the outside …
Kluge: Occupation of the Ruhr …
Enzensberger: … the occupation of the Ruhr …
Text: Albert Leo Schlageter, a hero of the right and the left
Kluge: Albert Leo Schlageter.
Enzensberger: It is astonishing that this period was even followed by a period of stabilization, because …
Kluge: And that summer, Stresemann arrives.
Enzensberger: … Stresemann, during that summer, yes.
Kluge: Schacht arrives …
Enzensberger: They decide foreign politics.
Kluge: The Rentenmark is introduced.
Enzensberger: The Rentenmark is introduced. The failure of the left-wing protests …
Kluge: … in Thuringia and Saxony.
Enzensberger: In Thuringia and Saxony. And to come back to our cast, the ultra-left among the leaders of the Communist Party were replaced. There were also the so-called conciliators, or whatever you want to call them, and then Brandler and Thalheimer, who had been shunned before, were welcomed back with honors.
Kluge: Nasty fights. And the fights always develop to the point where they are reported to Moscow, where the final decisions are made.
Enzensberger: Yes. And of course, there was the Kader file, that started early on: the surveillance of the communists, the international communists …. the lists were basically already prepared for Stalinism, they could simply fall back onto files that documented painstakingly whoever had once lifted a finger to disagree.
Kluge: How horrible! And Ruth Fischer, now leader of the left, who, basically against the tradition of Rosa Luxemburg and the educated dead, starts a radical agenda with Maslov and an entire fraction. And they hold a secret party congress in Frankfurt/Main 1924: 123 people in a Christian hospice.
Enzensberger: No announcement, no reports. In a way, it was a putsch within the party.
Kluge: And the entire leadership is replaced. Everything shifts to the left. And left means to break up the unions.
Enzensberger: Yes. They did so-called factory work, where cells consisting of party people were installed within the unions.
Kluge: … there was no public sphere, the parliament is not the place of decision-making, but rather a stage.
Enzensberger: Yes, yes, there was talk of the “chat room”, coming from the left and the right.
Kluge: On the other hand, Werner Scholem, the brother of Gershom Scholem, the famous kabbalist …
Enzensberger: … is a representative. He is a Reichstag representative.
Text: Werner Scholem (1895-1940)
Kluge: But he is a Reichstag representative, and a member of the Prussian Parliament, and is known to be a real troublemaker, a witty attorney, and he causes uproar. But Werner Scholem is actually a very decent person, juggling the farce in the parliament and the adventures of secret service work, from seducing the daughters of the Army commander in chief to planning a putsch.
Enzensberger: Of course.
Kluge: Like an actor in different plays …
Enzensberger: Behind the façade of an attorney, which is basically a bourgeois facade …
Kluge: … but later, in the concentration camp, he is the one who helps others and puts together a proper organization.
Enzensberger: He was murdered towards the very end.
Kluge: … murdered by the national-socialists.
Enzensberger: Yes.
Kluge: Others were beaten up, or murdered in Russia.
Enzensberger: Yes, of course, it is a very long list. And it began with their own, with the great people of the Russian Revolution, with their own people, the Bolsheviks were eliminated first, in their own country, in the Soviet Union. Of course, also under the strict Comintern regime, and because communists had to flee from many countries. And of course, most of them thought the safest place for them would be the Soviet Union.
Kluge: And that wasn’t the case.
Enzensberger: That’s when the famous Hotel Lux was built.
Kluge: That’s where they were waiting for their trials.
Text: Hans Magnus Enzensberger, writer
Enzensberger: That’s where they waited, whether it was Béla Kun … they were from all over the world, from Rumania, Hungary, France, from many different countries, and they were all stuck at the hotel. And were tapped, of course, were spied on, and then the mutual denunciation began, the question of who was a dissenter. And if you look at a list of possible dissenters, I once put together a list like that, you end up with 20 people. There were so many things you could do wrong: a spirit of adventure, separatism, ultra-leftism, all these things could be dangerous too, the ultra-right, deviation to the right, to the left. And a particularly nice form of dissent was centrism. It is only logical, either I can deviate to the left or the right …
Kluge: … or in the middle …
Enzensberger: … or as a centrist, conciliator, and whatnot. It was a net that basically anyone could get trapped in, if someone wanted it to happen.
Kluge: That is very similar to the year of terror during the French Revolution.
Enzensberger: Yes, of course, that is basically the model.
Text: The time span of revolutions
Kluge: Why is that the case? If … could we talk about the time span of revolutions for a moment? A bourgeois revolution like the industrial revolution takes, let’s say, 210 years, seven generations.
Enzensberger: Until its completion, yes.
Kluge: And we basically still live in the times of the industrial revolution, it is not completed, it continues. And the agricultural revolution has been going on for 6000 years. That means, a revolution, historical change, including that of the emotional state, would take forever.
Enzensberger: Yes, of course. Mentality and economy move slowly. But on the other hand, there are issues of power.
Kluge: … ad hoc, six-months events.
Enzensberger: Yes.
Text: What would you compare a revolution to?
Kluge: And the periods of expectation before a change of power are even shorter. What would you compare a revolution to? Marx said once: to a locomotive, revolutions are like locomotives that pull world history. Benjamin said: no, they are more like the emergency brake people pull to stop the train.
Enzensberger: Yes. I really believe that they can only be successful if there is a certain degree of despair, of hopelessness. That does not necessarily have to be the moment when the economic situation is at its lowest, because that is usually just enough for a famine revolt, which is something different. Revolutions need brains, they need brains, too. It’s the issue of representation, and then …
Kluge: … brains, motivation, weapons.
Enzensberger: And an occasion.
Kluge: … Means of production.
Enzensberger: A catalyst.
Kluge: … A catalyst. And luck.
Enzensberger: Yes. Well, now it looks like … the revolution has a bad reputation nowadays, and there are reasons for that, there are explanations. But you could also turn things around and say that world history without revolutions is probably hard to imagine, for some reason. It is hard to imagine. So you can do a different equation and say: those weird ideas, like human rights, for instance …
Kluge: That is a revolutionary achievement as well.
Enzensberger: Revolutions are what puts them on the agenda in the first place. It is not as simple as saying: “Let’s just stop this revolution nonsense, it is such a bloody matter that only makes things worse.” That would be a simplification, because it is not that simple.
Kluge: Try to put yourself into someone else’s shoes: You are from France, you are French, or Spanish, you speak Spanish fluently, and with the entire tradition of a different country you come to Beijing in 1989, 200 years after the French Revolution. There is a lot going on at Tiananmen Square, massacres, and you visit the local Museum of Revolutions. Behind you all the revolutions are displayed in the form of an exhibition, and through the windows, you look down on Tiananmen Square, on the day of the anniversary. What do you feel?
Enzensberger: Well, first I would say: how are things down on the square going to evolve, is that also going to be displayed in a museum one day? Because that is probably an inevitable fate. As long as there are museums, there is nothing you can do to prevent things from ending up in a museum. I was in Berlin recently, at the Museum of German History, and everything is stored there, of course it is also kind of like a dumpsite, all the remains … it is kind of depressing, the museum is depressing, somehow it is depressing … I don’t know, all the Stasi stuff and the Reich eagles, and all that stuff. It is really pretty horrible. I did not feel like …
Kluge: And some things don’t really come back … for instance, I cannot imagine the return of Prussia, with the long-windedness of the Great Elector, the Seven-Year War, that is not going to happen again. It is not an artificial product. Whereas the revolutions that the Museum of Revolutions deals with, from Spartacus in Ancient Rome …
Enzensberger: Yes, there is something inevitable about them. And I mean, that is …
Text: “I was / I am / I will be!”
Kluge: Rosa Luxemburg once said “I was, I am, I will be”, her last words about the revolution. She says, either I am getting a stomach ache, or something revolutionary is going to happen. Is that something real?
Enzensberger: Yes, but, it is not something you choose. It is strange, but I believe that there are people who want to start a revolution for pleasure, out of impatience or something, and of course that is not how it works. A revolution requires a certain situation, on a macro-level …
Kluge: Situations that you cannot create, nor prevent.
Enzensberger: Like magma … there needs to be magma, a geological movement, in order for it to erupt. And it won’t happen just because someone is making something up.
Text: Why do we need poetry?
Enzensberger: That is also one of the reasons, why poetry is never going to become extinct, because this kind of representability – if you want to call it metaphor, or analogy, or symbolism, I don’t care right now – this kind of representability is the reason, or one of the reasons, why every attempt to erase poetry has failed, so far.
Text: What are metaphors for?
Kluge: What we call metaphors are really detours for transferring something.
Enzensberger: Yes.
Kluge: To make an experience communicable.
Enzensberger: Yes. Well, it starts with the ability to speak, but the division of labor leads to situations where a tax consultant cannot communicate everything. He can communicate something we can’t, the secrets of the German tax system.
Kluge: And the economist is an upgraded tax consultant, and he cannot communicate either.
Enzensberger: Well, and the division of labor leads to a high level of specialization, but on the other hand it creates a lack, a lack. There have to be people to break with that.
Text: To empathize / What a writer can do -
Kluge: And if you were sitting four meters away from Saint Just, the French revolutionary, you could also give him good advice.
Enzensberger: I don’t know.
Kluge: You could steal a sheet of paper from him …
Enzensberger: Of course he wouldn’t listen to me, Saint Just, the way I understand him, he would never …
Kluge: But if you stole a decree from him and hid it, as a writer, as a poet, a decree that orders an execution, that would be a good deed, an anti-historical deed, which would be befitting for a good navigator.
Enzensberger: Yes.
Kluge: And to turn that into pleasure, that would be literary?
Enzensberger: Yes, exactly.
Kluge: For now I imagine that Werner Scholem or Ruth Fischer are sitting in Moscow in 1928/29, on Black Thursday, the news arrives, the world stock markets crash, the entire stable capitalist production system is basically worthless.
Enzensberger: Yes, that is a great day for them.
Kluge: … a great day …
Enzensberger: But what are the consequences?
Kluge: We have diamond mines in Ural, which were discovered by Alexander von Humboldt. And we could fill a few cars with some of the resources, and set them up at the border, and buy the entire thing.
Enzensberger: … buy it.
Kluge: Because we know from Marx that the capitalist will even sell the noose with which he is strung up on the gallows, he is going to sell it. That is a basic assumption of the Revolutionary Primer.
Text: Hans Magnus Enzensberger, writer
Enzensberger: Yes. But what this perspective does not take into account is the Protean nature of capitalism, its adaptability, the fact that Mister Roosevelt shows up to propose a New Deal and gets them out of their mess. And of course the adaptability of the Soviet System was much lower.
Kluge: Absolutely.
Enzensberger: And Ruth Fischer might have come up with a proposition like that, but I don’t think it would have had a chance at the politbureau.
Kluge: No, certainly not. But I simply wanted to elaborate on the mentality. And the entire time-line is distorted. That means, someone like Karl Korsch, a brilliant Marxist, a former minister …
Enzensberger: … a teacher of Brecht’s.
Text: Karl Korsch (1886-1961)
Kluge: … a teacher of Brecht’s, who ends up as a professor in Boston. But he does not know that yet in 1938/39.
Enzensberger: Of course not. I mean, Ruth Fischer too, it was very strange that eventually …
Kluge: … that she would survive like this.
Enzensberger: Her papers are in Harvard. Harvard University has acquired her entire library and her papers.
Kluge: She definitely did not see that coming in 1929. But at the same time these are all people that try to mirror the world situation, like a radar, and it is such an appealing idea: the tzar’s treasures that we have in our possession, the gold from our country’s mines … gold is not worth anything in Russia at the time, I cannot trade it for anything. And technically, I could buy all that plunder at the stock market in New York and Shanghai for a very low price, because none of it is worth anything.
Enzensberger: Yes, but maybe capitalist thinking was too unfamiliar for them. I mean, they sold a lot of stuff, they sold art for some cash. But it wasn’t really a strategic operation, but because of their needs, to fill a gap; it was not an advancing, thinking-ahead kind of strategy, I don’t think, the sale of the Hermitage paintings, for instance.
Text: At least an epitaph: memorial for the forgotten ones
Enzensberger: And well, it is kind of tempting – I don’t want to speak in legal categories of rehabilitation, that’s not what it is about, but there have to be memories of these characters – there should be, anyway.
Kluge: In that regard, literary work resembles that of a lawyer.
Enzensberger: Yes. And at the same time, there is a kind of empathy, maybe that is an exaggeration, but there is definitely something impressive, these characters are impressive. But at the same time, the historical distance is long, in our situation it is difficult anyway to talk about revolution in any serious manner, because our situation is so very different. But that doesn’t mean that the question is forever moot, that would be a misconception.
Kluge: But as a poet, you also imagine yourself being a different person, for a moment.
Enzensberger: Yes, of course, you have to … their motivations, how did they end up here?
Kluge: What would I have done? Or how would I have understood it, if I had lived back then?
Enzensberger: Yes. How do you end up in a situation like that? Somehow, history repeats itself as a farce, think about 1968: how did people get involved in that? There were people who accidentally ended up being involved. That poor student, Ohnesorg, he got involved completely by accident, he was simply dragged along. It is the magnetism of such a group that assembles and heads in a certain direction … it would be wrong to simply call that a fellow traveler, because there is a reason why they tagged along.
Kluge: Where is the revolutionary potential located, by the way? Could we say that reason encourages revolution? Leadership, sure, but …
Enzensberger: I don’t think so, no, I don’t think so.
Kluge: How about mathematics, what does it contribute to revolution?
Enzensberger: I think that it is a very slow build-up process that is partly hidden, under the surface. A potential builds up and the suddenness of the discharge is like a thunderstorm. A thunderstorm doesn’t come into being in the moment of thunder either, but it has been building up in the atmosphere for a long time. And something similar happens … that is how you have to imagine a situation like that, I think.
Kluge: In a thunderstorm, lightening isn’t hidden in a raindrop, or a cloud, or some kind of matter, but it develops through contact, it exists between the elements. So in this case, you could say that the fusing of a revolutionary group that temporarily comes together …
Enzensberger: Yes, temporarily. And sometimes only for a short time, because …
Kluge: Yes, that’s where the energy between people builds up.
Enzensberger: … As soon as the discharge happens, there are signs of disintegration, because after it has discharged, the potential doesn’t have the same power anymore.
Text: Which genre is appropriate to honor the dead?
Kluge: You can’t say that it is drama, you cannot say that it is necessarily a poem. But the form of the epitaph, for example, the eulogy, would be fitting, wouldn’t it?
Enzensberger: Yes, I can imagine Heiner Müller doing something with it. I don’t know, but …
Kluge: But what would you call the art form that recalls the forgotten people of history, the cherished dead, the ones who have unfairly died? What do you call that? There was something like it in ancient times.
Enzensberger: Yes, sure. There are also the Bíoi parálleloi people, for example, the double biographies. If we had two people like that and pitched them against each other in double biographies – in Ancient Rome it was Plinius.
Kluge: Plinius, wonderful, yes. And that basically comes close to the art of navigation. They are really cartographies of forgotten people …
Text: History’s forgotten ones / H.M. Enzensberger about the biographies of forgotten revolutionaries
Enzensberger: Yes, well, you can call it what you want, but, I don’t know. There is something … you know, you were talking about curiosity. Curiosity is not actually value-driven, it is knowledge-driven. And I don’t think that everything we do has to produce an end-result. It is like a maze that you enter, and the exit: the question is whether you find the thread or not.