Anti-Opera - Alexander Kluge

View transcript: Anti-Opera

Running Text: Heiner Müller visited Japan / There he discussed the formal dimensions of opera / At the same time, Heiner Müller was staging the Fatzer Fragment, an enigmatic 1932 text by Bert Brecht, in Berlin
Intertitle: Anti-Opera / Mechanized Warfare in 1914 / A Flight over Siberia / Interview with Heiner Müller
Kluge: You recently traveled to Japan. How long was the flight?
Müller: I think it was - well, I flew by way of Frankfurt, then Paris, then Tokyo, and then Toyama. It was twenty hours, I think, all told.
Kluge: Twenty hours?
Müller: Yes.
Kluge: And did you fly over South East Asia or over Siberia?
Müller: We flew over Siberia. And that’s really the only reason one should fly to Japan occasionally - this route over Siberia. If you’re lucky and the view is clear, it’s amazing, this view of Siberia.
Kluge: How long were you flying over Siberia?
Müller: It was, I think, six or seven hours of Siberia.
Kluge: And what did you see?
Müller: You see a completely uninhabited landscape, mountains with snow and ice, and rivers in between them, covered with ice even at this time of year. And what’s most striking is the expansiveness and the emptiness. It’s completely untapped. It’s . . .
Kluge: It’s a separate continent.
Müller: A completely separate continent. And above all it’s completely untapped. And it’s something really like a time reserve. And if you know what all there is there in terms of gold, diamonds, and so on, and they don’t even know, everywhere, where what is.
Kluge: It’s worthy of the instincts of a gold-digger.
Müller: I think so. And it reminded me above all of a passage in Malaparte, in his reports from the front.
Kluge: His book about the . . .
Müller: . . . war in Russia.
Kluge: . . . in the summer of 1942.
Müller: Where he describes how when, near Moscow, Siberian regiments suddenly came out of the forests, another kind of war began. It was no longer the war of the armies of workers, which he describes rather romantically. Something else began then.
Kluge: Is it romantic? I mean after all, it’s a war. . .
Müller: It was romantic, yes.
Kluge: . . . conducted by two armies of workers. But workers, along with their technological equipment, or as much of it as was still working there in Russia, are fundamentally always elites. So they’re minorities. Aren’t they?
Müller: Yes, and then something foreign suddenly appeared.
Kluge: Yes.
Müller: And I always found this thesis about Russia’s Asiatic time reserve illuminating. And this idea of Siberia as a gigantic ridge. And one flies over this gigantic ridge. And that’s the real quality, I think, that will never really be completely exploitable. I think that it cannot be done. And I also have the feeling that that will still be there when there are no longer any human beings. That will last longer. That interests me also in relation to the turn of the century or the turn of the millennium that’s approaching now. I think that the technological utopias are over. The next century will instead . . .
Kluge: A century of caution?
Müller: . . . be characterized by caution and by a retreat to small units, to micro-structures. And by a grand retreat from grandiose projects, from macro-structures.
Kluge: Now you’ve arrived in Japan. You’re there for a conference about the fate of opera in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. Rolf Liebermann - a composer, a director - is one of your discussion partners. What are the prospects for opera? Will there be a resurrection of drama out of the spirit of music?
Müller: Decades ago, because I had written a libretto for Paul Dessau, I was compelled to take an interest in opera, which didn’t in itself interest me at first. And I had the idea that opera could be a vessel for utopia, more so than drama. Perhaps one can already sing that which one cannot yet say. Today I would be more skeptical about this. Today I would instead say that when everything has been said, then the voices become sweet, and then comes opera.
Kluge: Could you please repeat that?
Müller: When everything has been said, the voices become sweet, and then comes opera.
Kluge: So it’s a kind of fraud?
Müller: It’s a kind of fraud, I would say, at the moment.
Kluge: If you take military power, for instance, either in the form of fleets or in the form of parades or cavalry regiments, then that was the pride of nations in the nineteenth century, this pride was represented in these types of parades. The opera houses were built in parallel to this, weren’t they? So they’re not churches, the sky is closed above them, and they are the earthly form of the heaven of ideas. And what if the operas then had to leave the opera houses and become partisans, just as the soldiers turn into partisans, or military power has to take the form of partisan warfare, otherwise it’s always defeated. If that were the case, then would there be an anti-opera, a countermovement? It wouldn’t necessarily have to be sung. Could there be an opera in the form of messages in bottles?
Müller: If we’re talking about Japan: What was most important for me in Japan, already during my first visit there, was the theater. But the traditional theater. Especially the Bunraku, I don’t know, are you familiar with that?
Kluge: I’m not familiar with it.
Müller: It’s the classical puppet theater. And I think that that’s really the theater of the future. It’s really the Gesamtkunstwerk, and opera is integrated into it and not just an extraneous element. And that’s the problem, I think, in Europe, that it’s become an extraneous element, and that it arose out of the illusion that one could use it to reinvigorate ancient Greek tragedy. Those are marionettes, they are approximately three-quarters life size, with very detailed workmanship, very exact, and also with very realistic masks. And then there are puppeteers who operate the puppets visibly on the stage. They are clothed completely in black, and their faces are also covered in black, with only slits for their eyes.
Kluge: And they narrate to the public in open view?
Müller: No, they don’t narrate anything, they work the puppets. And a prominent marionette has three puppeteers, less prominent marionettes have two, and the crew has a leader. And one puppeteer is responsible for the right arm, the left leg, etcetera. And then on the side there’s a catwalk, and musicians sit there, they’re the real actors, they sing and speak the dialogue. And it’s totally amazing.
Kluge: So the prompter is combined with the orchestra?
Müller: Yes. It’s totally amazing, because the movements of the puppets are very realistic, but they’re dead, and death stands behind them and guides them. And small, fat, elderly Japanese people sit on this catwalk, and they need to have a lot of experience. They do the dialogue.
Kluge: And tell stories.
Müller: And for example, such a performance lasts for five to six hours. There are many intermissions. And there was a scene: The daughter of a samurai is pregnant by the wrong samurai, by an enemy samurai, and he has cast her out, as was to be expected. And she now returns to her parents’ house and wants to give birth and be taken in at home. The mother runs like a hen - she’s one of the marionettes - back and forth between the daughter and the father and moans, and the father yells. And one singer does these three voices, plays these three roles. It’s incredibly naturalistic, actually, but at the same time also artistic of course. It’s enormously emotional, the effect, but completely artificial. And that’s a future, I think, into which one could integrate opera.
Kluge: It contains a complete rectification, however. What I mean is that the story is told separately.
Müller: Yes.
Kluge: Yes. There’s . . .
Müller: The elements have been separated.
Kluge: The elements have been separated. If you were to apply that to Tristan and Isolde, without taking the expectations of Bayreuth into account, how would you tell such a story?
Müller: It would be ideal, of course, to have people who perform it and, separately, people who sing it.
Kluge: Yes. And you could even do without the singing. You have people who tell the story, an orchestra is playing, and at the same time marionettes are in motion, and a stage designer can at the same time operate the flies separately, and the lighting can also be separated, so that a light show takes place. If you could use the different elements independently in this manner, couldn’t you narrate a lot more than simply the same old story over and over again?
Müller: Yes. Clearly, clearly. Wagner essentially made a first attempt at this. But that was really only this one attempt, the greatest innovation at Bayreuth is the invisible orchestra.
Kluge: That’s right.
Müller: And that’s really significant. Because I can’t stand almost any concert; the more advanced the music is, the more unbearable it is to see the musicians. It’s the same with the catalogue of gestures used by singers. They use certain gestures for breathing and for sustaining notes, etc., and for that reason you can never really get away from this strange operatic pathos. The pathos arises out of the necessity of breathing properly. And it’s very hard to reduce it.
Kluge: If they were to focus on singing well, and at the same time other people were . . .
Müller: Exactly. Yes, yes. And the others are their representatives and do the acting. Exactly. Yes.
Kluge: . . . representatives, masks, or . . . they act for them, it would be more balanced that way.
Müller: That would be ideal, yes. Wilson has attempted something like that in his own way.
Kluge: Neuenfels in Aida.
Müller: Neuenfels, Aida, that was a great performance.
Kluge: Yes, yes.
Müller: Wilson attempted it with Parsifal. It didn’t work.
Kluge: No.
Müller: Because he had to do it with the singers . . .
Kluge: Now I can’t imagine you doing Parsifal.
Müller: No, that I wouldn’t . . .
Kluge: There’s also not a lot to perform there. What would you do if you had to establish a Siberia in the middle of an opera by Richard Wagner, that is to say, empty spaces? Using the Japanese methods of rectification you would need only a part of the time, you might take the score as a whole, but you would only need . . . you could narrate a lot more in terms of a plot, you could tell the entire prehistory as well. You wouldn’t need to be so limited in terms of the plot. After all, at times in this opera nothing is happening.
Müller: Yes, almost nothing.
Kluge: So you could tell, in addition, about all of the generations that precede Isolde and all of the generations that precede Tristan and all of the fragments that connect King Arthur’s round table to antiquity, including the pagan emperors . . . So you could narrate an incredible number of variations of dramas one after another. Is that right?
Müller: Yes, that’s right, yes. Naturally, that would mean . . . Bayreuth is already a utopia to that extent, and the ingenious thing about the idea of this festival is that it occurs once a year, for a limited time.
Kluge: Yes.
Müller: And there’s no repertoire. That’s really ingenious. One would really have to expand that to encompass performances that last twenty-four hours. That would be the logical consequence . . .
Kluge: Yes, that would be the logical consequence.
Müller: And then one could do that.
Kluge: Yes. That’s something one could . . .
Müller: The problem is that theater is at the moment also seen as a commodity. And only the product is of interest, the saleable product, and not the process. And the theater will die if we don’t succeed in shifting the emphasis to the process.
Kluge: Yes, because that’s the only thing that makes it interesting for laypeople to watch.
Müller: Yes.
Kluge: Of course, then I end up getting told forty versions of the same drama.
Müller: Yes, clearly.
Intertitle: Wolfgang Rihm on his collaboration with Heiner Müller in the musical theater
Kluge: You’ve collaborated with Heiner Müller?
Rihm: Yes.
Kluge: Hamletmachine.
Rihm: What do you mean by “collaborated?” Very much in keeping with his theses on opera, each of us came from his own world and brought accordingly what was his. And what was his was already there, and what was mine was added and began, through the process of composition, to become something new, namely Hamletmachine. I consider it one of the most significant texts of recent years.
Kluge: What is your understanding of opera?
Rihm: Just a minute. Actually I’ve always tried, whenever I’ve compiled texts myself or summarized them myself, I didn’t really try to do it, but the text that came out always lived from the dramaturgy of Hamletmachine. So perhaps that’s the result of this collaboration, that I can no longer stomach wordy librettos.
Kluge: What is Heiner Müller’s understanding of opera?
Rihm: Well, there’s a text, “Five Theses on Opera,” or I don’t know what’s it called exactly? I don’t remember offhand, but among other things it says that . . .
Kluge: One has to abolish it, one has to make it chaotic, one has to . . .
Rihm: That’s putting it too crudely.
Kluge: . . . rather for oneself . . .
Rihm: No, no, that’s putting it too crudely. But the notion that the visual level, the level of sound, and the level of language don’t arise out of sitting down together and then saying: Now let’s do something collaborative, we’ll work together. That corresponds very much to my own views, because that way of thinking about collaboration is a pious deception. That’s exactly how it doesn’t work . . .
Kluge: It’s about the sum of the collisions.
Rihm: . . . but rather it’s a matter of people who are really strangers, strangers, strangers to each other coming together and not tipping their hats and saying, now we know each other, but rather we are strangers and remain strangers, and then they part ways again. But on the spot where they came together there remains a mark, a sign, and that’s what has arisen out of their encounter. And that’s what I experienced in this coming together. Perhaps a description of the circumstances of our encounter will help to characterize it. I read the text of Hamletmachine and was convinced right away, that’s it, that’s the text that I need now for musical theater, or that’s the text that can put me on the path towards a musical theater. And then a few days later I was in Berlin, I arrived around noon, and I went to a bar and he came in, we were the only patrons. I started a conversation with him, which is something that I normally never do, I don’t accost people, that’s not something I like to do, but because I had written him a letter a few days before, and he remembered it right away, I thought ah, fantastic. And he saw that I smoked cigars, then everything was in order. I offered him a cigar and got the opportunity to do Hamletmachine. It was simple . . . none of this big talk that one hears all the time - ‘Let’s do something now, collaborate.’ Each person brings something.
Intertitle: Blücher’s imaginary pregnancy of 1815
Kluge: The general who annihilated Napoleon and spearheaded the drive to Paris, on the basis of his stubbornness, was Blücher.
Müller: Yes, yes.
Kluge: And he was also defeated at Ligny, but then he brought about the turning point at Waterloo and defeated Napoleon with his German contingent and by that means temporarily slowed down the advance of civilization across the Rhine.
Müller: Yes, yes.
Kluge: How can one represent him?
Müller: There’s this story about his imaginary pregnancy.
Kluge: Yes, that’s right.
Müller: He was lying . . .
Kluge: His apparent pregnancy.
Müller: . . . under a horse, I think it was in . . .
Kluge: . . . in the Battle of Ligny.
Müller: Ligny, yes. And . . .
Kluge: Napoleon attacked, he had come from Elba, he had assembled about 400,000 troops, he encountered the Prussians first, who were moving the quickest to engage him, delegated to do so by the Congress of Vienna. And here Napoleon attacks, breaks through the front, encircles the whole army, and cuts the whole Prussian cavalry to pieces. One of those lying on the battlefield - with his leg under a horse - is Leberecht von Blücher. No one knows if his leg is broken, an adjutant defends him against French dragoons, and then they pull this commander out as if with a tractor, - hydraulically, so to speak - and he’s carried away moaning on a stretcher. During the night Gneisenau decides, we won’t retreat, but instead we will pursue the enemy, in spite of the fact that we have been defeated. This was the unexpected decision that led them to Belle-Alliance, to Waterloo, and that sealed Napoleon’s fate. And afterwards Blücher has this imaginary pregnancy, he feels like he has been raped by a corporal.
Müller: Yes, that is to say, he wanted to reenact the defeat.
Kluge: But he really gets a belly full of air, a gigantic belly, and he says in French: I am pregnant. He also confidentially informs Wellington of his due date. He thinks he’s a woman. A Prussian general.
Intertitle: “I’m carrying an elephant in my belly.” Blücher
Kluge: Ambassador von Schön tries desperately to keep him from making the rounds in London, where he has been invited as one of the victors. But he doesn’t allow himself to be withdrawn from circulation, walks around with his big belly and tells people what complications . . .
Müller: . . . when he is supposed to give birth.
Kluge: Yes, and about the complications and the feelings, the sensations.
Müller: Yes. It reminds me a great deal of the Bunraku story in which this small, fat, sixty-year-old Japanese man produces these three voices: The voice of the disgraced daughter and the voice of the excited mother and the voice of the angry father. And I think that the theater suffered a great loss the moment casting started to be done on the basis of gender.
Kluge: The Marquis von Posa is not a woman.
Müller: For example. And Don Carlos would be much more interesting if Posa were played by a woman. Or even in Shakespeare’s time it was normal for women to be played by men, that’s another whole dimension. And in the Japanese theater it went without saying that women were not allowed to act, only men. The most famous performers were the ones who played women. There’s a Japanese story about the origins of the theater, I find it really interesting in this context. Theater came about during a period in which there had not been any rain for a long time, the rain goddess was refusing to provide rain. They needed to have it rain again. And then a different goddess did a striptease in a cave. All the gods assembled outside of this cave in order to see her, and they laughed, and then it started to rain again.
Kluge: That means that rain is the laughter of the gods.
Müller: Yes, yes, yes. But provoked by . . .
Kluge: . . . theater.
Müller: . . . the obscenity of the theater. And also the femininity of the theater. Opera is of course a feminine genre in comparison to drama. It’s the dissolution of theater into femininity. And perhaps that’s another way of renewing the theater, of getting away from this gendered disciplining.
Kluge: And also of getting away from the idea that if it’s an opera, then it’s only an opera, and the opera dominates all the texts, and the music is oppressive to a certain extent. So not the birth, the reawakening of the drama from the spirit of music, but rather the birth of a Greek tragedy in which music and drama will coexist. So that all the forms are rectified. Is that your basic position?
Müller: I think so, yes. Then there’s naturally another point as well, namely that in the Greek tragedy only dead people appeared, which was why masks were used. Living people didn’t appear. I think that the only exception is The Persians - and that was a political play used for agitational purposes.
Kluge: Living people appeared in that play, because they were supposed to be killed immediately afterwards.
Müller: Yes, yes.
Kluge: When you present such ideas in Japan, what is the reaction there?
Müller: They’re quite interested, because it reminds them of their own traditions, and they start to take them seriously again. And that was really my main interest there, too.
Kluge: But you also brought a very negative myth into the discussion there, from Brazil?
Müller: Yes. Well, that was the point in Toyama. Because they’re naturally interested in cultural exchange, that’s kind of the catchword at these conferences.
Kluge: . . . and they kidnap writers . . .
Müller: Yes. And they want to import European culture. And for that reason I told this wicked parable from Brazil. There’s a type of ant there in the Amazonian rainforest that is genetically programmed only to walk on the ground, only to move on a horizontal plane. When they encounter an obstruction, they walk around it, they can’t climb.
Kluge: That’s true, that’s been proven scientifically. Alexander von Humboldt already described that.
Müller: Yes. And in the trees there there’s a plant, a flower, that drops its spores on the ground, and many of them fall on ants, and these spores work their way through the ants’ exoskeletons and into the ants’ bodies and penetrate the ants’ brains and change their genetic programming in such a way that the ants climb up the trees. When they’re at the top, and they can’t climb any further, they hold on tightly, die, and out of their heads grow the flowers. That’s an example of cultural exchange. The danger and the hope associated with it. The problem is the tendency towards festival culture, which of course hollows out the cultural substance, because culture must ultimately emerge on a regional basis and grow. That runs counter to economic interests, however.
Kluge: Economic interests, or the interests of those . . .
Müller: . . . who make money from art.
Kluge: . . . who work to provide ornaments for the economy. Who use famous names, cultural jewels, for purposes of representation. In an earlier period, one would have exported jewels, now one adorns oneself with a couple of writers or musicians or opera houses. If you think of the turn of the century, 1999 is fast approaching. In 1899 the turn of the century was moved forward by a year, because people were so curious, because there was an impulse - by law the year 1899 replaced the year 1900 as the turn of the century. Can you describe 1799 to me? It’s the year of Pushkin’s birth, at the same time it’s the year of Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt. How many years after the plot of The Task ([Der Auftrag]) is it? Your characters . . . come after the Brumaire.
Müller: No, before the Brumaire . . .
Kluge: Before the Brumaire.
Müller: . . . they’re sent to Jamaica to organize this uprising against British colonial rule, and shortly before they want to unleash the explosion there, they receive word of the Brumaire, and that means that the task . . .
Kluge: Napoleon has seized power.
Müller: . . . has been completed in the view of the leader of this group, there is no longer a task-giver . . .
Kluge: There is no longer a French Revolution.
Müller: . . . and there is no longer a task. And then things return to business as usual.
Kluge: And a little bit later we have a turn of the century. If you think your way into this apparent end of the eighteenth century, which then really lasts until 1815. But for a short time people believe that the year 1800 will bring something new. And for that reason people stuff all of their remaining projects into the year 1799.
Müller: Yes, yes. It’s a difficult question for me, because I think that that’s happening again now, that people are investing this turn of the century with hopes that in the meantime have become completely irrational.
Kluge: It’s really an idea for bookkeepers.
Müller: Yes, yes.
Kluge: Because, so to speak, one has the impression that one is entering an inventory of 900 years into the books. But they’re just books. That’s really an idea from a novel, that something changes at the end of the century and that it has not long since . . .
Müller: Yes, yes. Of course one must not underestimate the effect that such a number can have on people’s brains, even if it doesn’t mean anything in reality . . .
Kluge: It has magical power.
Müller: Exactly. Even if it’s a completely arbitrary number, it of course has a magical effect, and that can give rise to something. Simply as a result of the feeling that something has passed and that one is standing in front of a vacuum, in front of an empty surface that one must now describe or with which one has to do something.
Kluge: What would you look back on as a chronicler of the year 1799? Imagine you have to write a drama, and the author is being forced. He has obvious shortcomings, his whole background as a sans-culotte has been discovered, his only hope is to write a drama that once again reminds the audience of the achievements of the eighteenth century, then he’s unassailable. So he’s a true apostate, he has to once again describe the entire century positively and actively.
Müller: Mmm, yes. That’s really the divide or the break between Goethe’s original Faust and the second part.
Kluge: One could say that.
Müller: Between the first part of Faust and the second part.
Kluge: One could say that. Yes, exactly.
Müller: And the second part is completely projective.
Kluge: Yes.
Müller: It consists entirely of projections.
Kluge: Yes.
Müller: And that goes so far that it anticipates the form of the revue.
Kluge: Yes.
Müller: And . . .
Kluge: . . . it begins many millions of years ago, when the archangels sing, and ends with a vision of the future that extends into the ’90s of our century, with the construction of a canal and all kinds of chicanery, the demise of Philemon and Baucis. But it’s really ahistorical.
Müller: Yes, yes. That’s perhaps the interesting thing about it, that the idea, or perhaps rather the feeling, that history is over is associated with such a date. One has to reinvent history.
Kluge: Yes. It seems as if there’s a tabula rasa. As if the spirits of the new century hadn’t already been biding their time amongst us like partisans, as if they hadn’t already infiltrated our time like ghosts, so that one . . .
Müller: Incidentally, there’s also a great text to that effect in Fatzer. Fatzer says at some point: “just as ghosts used to come from the past, so they now come from the future as well.”
Kluge: Ghosts come from the future?
Müller: Ghosts from the future, yes.
Kluge: That’s interesting. That’s really good.
Müller: I think that’s a great thought.
Kluge: And the ghosts from the future really encroach upon Verdun and, in 1939, they will produce Auschwitz.
Müller: Whereby another aspect is naturally that the Schlieffen Plan was based on uninterrupted motion. And Moltke made this one correction to the plan. It was clear to Schlieffen that the middle portion, the section along the front . . .
Kluge: Would remain stationary.
Müller: . . . no, Schlieffen wanted to keep it in motion and even wanted to let the French enter Germany so that the motion of the German armies could be maintained. And Moltke, out of patriotism, made the center stationary and in that way really provoked trench warfare, which means that he allowed the other side’s armies to bring their material superiority to bear.
Kluge: Or unleashed the mechanized weapons of the Germans and of their opponents at the expense of that which, so to speak, human beings can do.
Müller: Yes, yes.
Kluge: First the horses, and then the human beings, are marginalized, and finally only the machines remain.
Müller: The machines, yes, clearly.
Kluge: You have a draft of a drama that you want to do, and I understand your allusion to twenty-four hours to mean that, from Stalingrad to Berlin, the work is to last twenty-four hours. If you now had to accept the task, as a form of punishment, of doing a farewell to 1914, a farewell to 1916 and a farewell to the experience of the First World War - a continuation of Fatzer, part two. What would you do? Faust, second part, Fatzer, second part.
Müller: That’s a real problem. I don’t know what I would do, because at the moment it seems to me that this Fatzer text also describes everything that is happening now, what happened in the Second World War.
Kluge: And what is happening now, in 1989.
Müller: And what is happening now, in 1989. At the beginning of the Fatzer material there’s - well, it’s not dated in Brecht’s manuscript, but . . . - a scene that takes place during the First World War. It describes the experience of mechanized warfare, it’s a desperate reaction to that experience, and Koch, who later becomes Lenin, the functionary, shouts . . .
Kluge: Is he a cook [Koch]? Or is he named Koch?
Müller: Koch, Koch, he’s named Koch. He’s named Koch, he isn’t a cook. Later, in another version, he’s named Keuner, and he then becomes a Lenin figure, but Brecht only planned that, he never wrote it. And during the battle he shouts, the enemy is everywhere and people are shooting, etc. And then comes this incredible conclusion where he says, “where can one flee, for man is everywhere.” And then Büsching says, “man is the enemy and must come to an end.” What do you mean by mechanized warfare? Well . . . Verdun, and battles like that . . . or on the Somme, and simply this experience of being pinned down to the ground or in the trenches and the helplessness of this machine.
Kluge: The human beings are chained together by commands, and mechanized warfare is basically dead labor against dead labor.
Müller: Yes, yes. And that’s why there’s this conclusion, man is the enemy and must come to an end. Man, who has materialized in the form of this machine. I find that an incredible moment in the text. And you also have something there that you talked about earlier: the blueprint for Auschwitz can really be found in this mechanized warfare. And if one looks, for example, for the equivalent to the national material used by Shakespeare, the Wars of the Roses: There’s nothing like that in Germany. In Germany there’s no national material. That’s why Schiller’s enthusiasm for Frederick the Great is so interesting, and Goethe’s temporary enthusiasm. That was the hope for a national material, but it didn’t work. It was impossible to write it. It was impossible to write a drama about him.
Kluge: There’s a continuity, on the one hand, with the shortness of the unification of ‘70/‘71, which lasted until ‘45, and now a new unification is taking place, and on the other hand the high degree of continuity between the two world wars. What began in 1914 didn’t end in 1918, it extends, by way of the Freikorps and all sorts of other developments, all the way to 1939.
Intertitle: On the Fatzer fragment.
Müller: Exactly. And that’s the point in Fatzer. This is evident already in the names. Perhaps I need to tell the story briefly. Brecht didn’t finish writing it, but there’s an account of the basic plot by Brecht himself. He describes it like this: Four soldiers in France during the First World War decide to end the war, to desert. The title is The Liquidation of the First World War by Means of Johann Fatzer. Fatzer is the leading figure in this desertion. And then there’s a sentence, for example, in which he explains the situation to the others, he makes a drawing in which he shows that fire and water are opposed to each other on both sides, that is to say that the person at whom we shoot is our brother, and behind him stands our enemy, behind us stands our enemy, who is also his enemy - and so on, like Lenin . . .
Kluge: Yes.
Müller: And then his last argument is finally, because the others are still hesitating: “Now I’m going to smoke the rest of our tobacco, because it’s the iron ration, and that way you will no longer have anything, because otherwise you will continue fighting.” That does it, and then they go to Mühlheim, that choice of a location is also interesting . . .
Kluge: Mühlheim on the Ruhr?
Müller: Mühlhem on the Ruhr. And they hide in the apartment of one of the four soldiers, who is from Mühlheim, and wait for the revolution.
Kluge: And it doesn’t come.
Müller: And it doesn’t come. And then there’s the key sentence: “The war didn’t kill us, but in the still air of a quiet room we are killing ourselves.”
Kluge: When you hear the words “gas warfare,” what do you think? You didn’t experience gas warfare yourself. That didn’t exist.
Müller: Yes, I still carried a gas mask, but there was no longer any gas warfare. And that’s also interesting, that the Second World War no longer became an experience. The First World War was an experience for all those involved.
Kluge: Churchill would not have resisted. But Hitler, who knew what gas warfare was, he resisted. That was one of the few points on which this man had any inhibitions. But when you hear the words gas warfare, what do you think? If you had to stage it.
Müller: Well, the main point is the absolute helplessness, and being thrown back on animalistic reactions.
Kluge: Because . . .
Müller: For me the best metaphor for gas warfare is something really stupid. I was at Disneyland near Los Angeles and rode on this Space Mountain ride, I don’t know if you’re familiar with that. You ride through a miniature Mont Blanc in an incredibly fast train, and it’s pitch black in there, and the curves are terrifying, and suddenly you’re thrown back on a completely creaturely fear that drives you to hold on in the curves, and that’s the closest thing to an experience of gas warfare that I’m familiar with.
Kluge: And gas warfare would be if your lungs would do that.
Müller: Yes, exactly.
Kluge: And your lungs are the last things to fail, you can’t drown voluntarily . . .
Müller: Yes, clearly.
Kluge: You can’t drown yourself, because at the last moment your lungs, as opposed to your understanding or your heart, would drive you back to the surface.
Müller: Yes, yes. Exactly.
Kluge: And in gas warfare, these lungs are in danger.
Müller: And the real point is that death by drowning, at least as one imagines it, is the worst kind of death.
Kluge: At the same time, there’s the constant direction of the westerly winds on our planet. And to that extent - we invented gas warfare, but it was more likely that the gas would blow back in our own direction than that it would blow away with the easterly winds.
Müller: Yes, yes.
Kluge: So that one really only used it when it was calm.
Müller: That’s why the poor neighborhoods are always located in the eastern parts of cities.
Kluge: Sigmund Freud held a congress of psychoanalysts in Budapest in 1917, and all the participants came in the uniforms of Austrian military doctors, only Freud wore civilian clothing. He said, the truly fearful dangers lie on the battlefield of love, and that’s what we’re going to discuss. And that’s why we’re also in a position to cure the secondary dangers on the battlefields of reality. They could cure everything, the psychiatrists couldn’t cure anything.
Müller: Yes, yes.
Kluge: He was someone who understood a thing or two about the unconscious. There’s also a societal unconscious that isn’t psychological but rather results from the fact that society is systematically incapable of perceiving parts of itself, its dead spaces, so to speak. Society is incapable of perceiving its most important parts. How can drama make people aware of that without becoming didactic?
Müller: Well, I think that a really important precondition is first to overcome rigid gender roles, that’s one part of it, but that’s really only an image, a surface image, for the simultaneity of the living and the dead. And that’s something that drama has to make clear, that the dead act just as the living do, and that the dead are present when living people act. And that’s how one approaches the problem of time in a completely different manner. And that’s what sustains drama, really. For Shakespeare it was still completely self-evident that the dead are present.
Kluge: So that you would say that the unconscious runs in waves, at some point it was conscious, and now it’s unconscious again, and now it’s conscious again, and so on.
Müller: And perhaps one can make it knowable by way of the presence of the dead.
Kluge: Really that’s what you preach, the epic.
Müller: Yes, yes, yes. That’s really the core of Brecht’s theory of epic theater, I think.
Kluge: What would you say you learned during this visit to Japan?
Müller: It’s rather intimidating when you hear that there are 25,000 written characters. To read a newspaper, you need 1,800. That’s unimaginable, to have to learn 1,800 characters in order to read a newspaper. That also explains the rigorousness of the Japanese school system. But 25,000, surely only very few people know all of them, but they exist. That’s unimaginable for us.
Kluge: That would be an incredibly rich system of roots, though. Because I think that someone or other must at some point have experienced these 25,000 different meanings. And that underlies everything they do. That is to say that perhaps their societal unconscious is many times stronger, and in their societal conscious they can afford to learn something that they don’t understand.