The Death of Seneca - Alexander Kluge

View transcript: The Death of Seneca

Running Text: Heiner Müller has left a poem behind in anticipation of his death: “The Death of Seneca” / Seneca, a teacher and minister to the Emperor Nero, took his own life / He demonstrated ataraxia: “the unshakeable tranquility of the soul”
Intertitle: The Death of Seneca
Müller: There is a letter from Nietzsche to, I think, Peter Gast. He had read the reports about the fire in Mommsen’s house. And he says very clearly that he actually can’t stand Mommsen, doesn’t like how and what he writes. And then he describes the way Mommsen runs into his burning house and comes back out, his hair is on fire and he has wounds all over his body, in order to rescue manuscripts and books. And then he says that he almost feels like crying when he pictures this to himself. And then comes a great question, a sentence in the form of a question: Is this sympathy? This fear of sympathy. That was really great.
Kluge: It’s not sympathy, it’s hunger for profit, Mommsen wants to publish the fourth volume, as a philologist.
Müller: Yes, yes, of course. Exactly. But this anxious question: “Is that sympathy? I can’t allow myself that. I am not allowed to have sympathy.”
Kluge: Nietzsche refers to himself as a philologist. How would you interpret such a sentence in 1992/1993? What is a philologist? And are you one yourself?
Müller: Well, I think that the impulse behind philology is actually greed. Certainly, there is not only curiosity, or greed for what is new (Neugier), but also greed for what is old (Altgier). That’s almost the same thing.
Kluge: . . . treasure hunters . . .
Müller: The desire to simply have everything, grasp everything, know everything. And I think that nothing would work without such a desire.
Kluge: André Gide writes that Montaigne was so greedy when eating, much like Henry IV, that he constantly bit his own fingers - they didn’t eat with knife and fork in those days \- or he bit his own tongue out of sheer appetite.
Müller: Not appetite, there’s a difference, I think . . . I was recently in Paris, for the umpteenth time, because I wanted to show Brigitte this permanent exhibit in the Centre Pompidou, the modern art exhibit. It was really awful for me, to see that for a third time. It’s so boring, so dead, all of this modern art . . . Matisse . . . carpet patterns, and in general, it’s all completely boring. Then you suddenly enter a room. It’s the Giacometti room. And suddenly you’re in a temple. I don’t mean that it’s “sacred,” but suddenly it’s art. All the rest you can throw in the trash. That’s when one notices the real divide. Picasso was the last universal artist, or the last Renaissance artist, if you wish. He was still hungry. After that, everyone simply had his own special appetite. The difference between hunger and appetite is very important. And the harder it becomes to feed the population of the world, the more hunger in art decreases. There can’t be art without hunger. Art can’t exist if it doesn’t want to consume and to possess everything.
Kluge: And how would you define greed? What is greed?
Müller: Greed is something entirely positive in art and a precondition for art.
Kluge: To come back to Seneca for a moment: Seneca is a high-ranking Roman nobleman with a certain amount of wealth who is educated enough to be named the teacher of the prince Nero. And he now educates a young dictator, a young emperor.
Müller: I think that was already a mediated form of power, not a direct one.
Kluge: That is to say, he creates the appearance of power? And in so doing he creates a clientele.
Müller: Perhaps he also has the illusion, that he has power.
Kluge: People pay him something for that.
Müller: Yes, of course. He also got rich. I think Seneca had a cynical attitude in this regard. There is a bust of Seneca, it’s interesting, I wanted to bring that with me today, but I couldn’t find it . . .
Kluge: What does he look like? Is he bald?
Müller: Something like that.
Kluge: Thin?
Müller: No, not thin, but . . .
Kluge: In terms of his character . . . does he resemble a woodcut?
Müller: No, not at all like a woodcut . . . Actually more what one would describe as decadent and morbid, pleasure-seeking and such. I think that’s a part of it.
Kluge: Really? A decadent man, someone who has a special relationship to the theater, a split personality. On the one hand a lot of appearance, and relatively little substance.
Müller: In any case, pleasure-loving. That’s clear from this bust.
Kluge: But pleasure characterized by a high-degree of greediness. I would rather die than do without pleasure. Well, he succeeded at that, over the centuries.
Müller: Yes, of course. And the other point that interests me was this being in command of one’s own life, which was obviously pretty clear to the Romans, one was in command of one’s own life. There was a whole series of suicides like that, most of which were certainly not as theatrical as Seneca’s, not as well staged, but . . .
Kluge: Much like the Japanese, the samurai, commit seppuku: “I am not subjugated to the emperor as long as I rule over my own life and death.”
Müller: Yes, that was self-evident, not at all weighed down by scruples, and nor by much fear.
Kluge: I am armed with the knowledge that I will retain my property if I kill myself, whereas if I am killed by the emperor or his henchmen, I lose my property, as do my descendants.
Müller: Yes, it’s also related to the fact that at that time there was no belief in an afterlife. One knew that with death, life was over, and that was it.
Kluge: But I gain an eternal life . . . in that it will be talked about; namely “The Death of Seneca.”
Müller: Yes, okay. But not the idea or the illusion that there’s someplace where one goes on living.
Kluge: No, no, but Heiner Müller will someday wite a poem about me, I mean, in a more extended sense. Do you really think that he was a scoundrel, Nero? After all, only his successors, usurpers, have provided reports of him.
Müller: By the way, that’s something I forgot to mention: There’s a strange statement by Mommsen explaining why, among other reasons, he didn’t write the fourth volume. He says: “How can one explain to students that the period of Nero’s reign was probably the happiest ever experienced by the population of Rome?”
Kluge: Because the usurpation of the empire by an artist was something completely new. That is to say that it was impossible for legionnaires or militarists to understand the Roman state, the Rostra, as a drama. And simultaneously as the highest form of luxury, as you’ve been saying.
Müller: Yes, and also because Nero had absolutely no interest in military endeavors, he was much too cowardly.
Kluge: But new architectural constructions . . . Can you tell me, Seneca’s death, historically speaking, how did that occur?
Müller: The information about it comes from Tacitus. I read Tacitus very early, it’s something I still read constantly, really I always keep re-reading Tacitus.
Kluge: . . . a crystalline narrative structure . . .
Müller: Exactly. And also the laconic quality of his writing and even the mannerism. There’s this strange division of Latin literature into the Golden and the Silver Age. And Tacitus belonged to the Silver, so from the perspective of the classical philologists he belonged to a lesser genre.
Kluge: Whereas Cicero’s hot air, that was considered golden, at that time one still paid attention to grammar, whereas Tacitus neglects it. The substance displaces the grammar.
Müller: And that’s exactly what’s interesting about Tacitus. He gives a very precise description of Seneca’s suicide. He was Nero’s teacher, he was an author of dramas, it’s the same thing. There was also a Seneca the Elder and a Seneca the Younger, I believe, but in any case, the teacher of Nero was the author of the dramas. I only became acquainted with the dramas very late, I believe.
Kluge: Those are dramatic works, full of pathos . . .
Müller: Yes, full of pathos, dramatic. There was something new about them, which is the reason why Seneca was the author of the Elizabethans, of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. They didn’t know the Greek dramas. That was, I think, important for the development of this type of drama.
Kluge: Ah, and their reception of Greek drama took place by way of Seneca’s adaptations?
Müller: Yes, and the difference between Seneca and the Greek plays is that the atrocities, the murders and such, take place on the stage, because the plays were never performed, they were only designed to be read. For that reason, all the atrocities and murders take place on the stage, in written form. And that was really the impulse behind the whole art of Elizabethan drama. And then of course there’s a history of the Seneca theme, and that belongs to German history, I believe, this theme of “Seneca’s suicide.” Lessing, in his writings, considers writing a play about it, and there is a play by Ewald von Kleist, Seneca’s Death. That was always a theme in the German literature of the eighteenth century, during the time in which the illusion of the education of princes still existed, but was already breaking down: the attempt of intellectuals to become involved in politics and to exert influence, and at the same time the disillusionment with such an attempt. And this was what Seneca represented, as a theme and as a character.
Kluge: So one of the few successful examples of an intellectual who influenced an emperor, for decades, for years . . .
Müller: But at the same time a failed example, of course.
Kluge: Yes, he had to die as a result. It was also completely unsuccessful.
Müller: And he didn’t achieve anything. But he attempted it.
Kluge: Heidegger had the idea that he could play the role of an educator of princes in relation to Hitler.
Müller: Yes, that is, I think, a very German illusion. And it’s obviously also an illusion typical of the GDR.
Kluge: How does the death itself take place? One knows that in Nero’s court a proscription was under way.
Müller: There was suspicion of a conspiracy, that was the conspiracy of Piso, and Seneca - this is the case of Jünger, one might say - was under suspicion of taking part in this conspiracy.
Kluge: Even without this suspicion, he has too much wealth. The emperor will begin to eye it.
Müller: Yes, whereas Seneca’s wife - this isn’t mentioned in Tacitus - survived. Nero spared her. There was a kind of final inhibition with respect to Seneca. Usually, that was part of the process, to wipe out the whole family.
Kluge: Wipe them out? Or perhaps appropriate them?
Müller: No, one appropriated the wealth, and wiped out the family so as to appropriate the wealth. But Seneca’s wife was left in peace.
Kluge: He is in danger, and he preempts them and kills himself.
Müller: No, it wasn’t a preemptive strike, it was really quite simple. It was really like with Stalin.
Kluge: . . . He is informed that . . .
Müller: It was clear, if the centurion comes, the captain of the body guard, and brings the order that he should kill himself, then one has to do it, otherwise one is killed.
Kluge: Like Rommel: Two officers from the general staff come and simply hand him a poison.
Müller: The only opportunity to administer one’s own death was to kill oneself before one was killed.
Kluge: That’s what is left of the rule of law in Rome. And now he has difficulties, because he is an old and pleasure-loving man, and his blood no longer flows very quickly. That’s famous. Does Tacitus describe that?
Müller: Yes, rather precisely.
Kluge: Rather precisely . . . And he has to, so to speak, warm his blood, in order to make it flow. Finally in a steam bath, and even that doesn’t suffice. When you think about your own death - we are all going to die, after all - what kind of a death do you wish for yourself?
Müller: You know, I don’t think it would fit at all with my way of thinking to formulate that kind of a wish.
Kluge: You would say, I’m not responsible for that?
Müller: No, I’m not responsible for that. I would assume, instead, that there’s an alternative: Either it’s a completely sudden death, or else it’s a very long one.
Kluge: Are you afraid of the long one?
Müller: I don’t think so. SENECA’S DEATH, a dramatic poem by Heiner Müller Seneca’s Death What did Seneca think (and not say) / When the captain of Nero’s body guard mutely / Pulled the death sentence from out of his breast plate / Sealed by the student for his teacher / (Writing and sealing he had learned / And contempt for the deaths of all instead of / For his own: / Golden rules of all statecraft) / What did Seneca think (and not say) / When he forbade the guests and slaves to cry / Who had shared his last meal with him / The slaves at the end of the table / TEARS ARE UNPHILOSOPHICAL / WHAT IS DECREED MUST BE ACCEPTED / AND AS FAR AS THIS NERO IS CONCERNED, WHO KILLED HIS MOTHER / AND HIS SIBLINGS, WHY SHOULD HE / MAKE AN EXCEPTION OF HIS TEACHER, WHY / FORGO THE BLOOD OF THE PHILOSOPHER / WHO DID NOT TEACH HIM THE SPILLING OF BLOOD / And when he let the veins be opened / Those in his arms at first, and those of his wife / Who did not want to survive his death / With a cut, probably by a slave / The sword on which Brutus fell / At the end of his republican hopes / Also had to be held by a slave / What did Seneca think (and not say) / While the blood too slowly left his / Too old body and the slave obediently also opened his lord’s / Leg veins and knee hollows / Whispering with dried-out vocal chords / MY PAIN IS MY PROPERTY / BRING MY WIFE INTO THE NEXT ROOM AND THE STYLUS TO ME / His hand could no longer hold the stylus / But his brain still operated the machine / Manufactured words and sentences and noted the pain / What did Seneca think (and not say) between the lines of his final dictation / Bedded on the couch of the philosopher / And when he emptied the cup containing the poison from Athens / Because his death was still a long time coming / And the poison that had helped many before him / Could only write a footnote in his / Body already nearly emptied of blood, no plaintext / What did Seneca think (finally speechless) / When he went to meet death in the steam bath / While the air danced in front of his eyes / The terrace darkened by the confused beating of wings / Not, probably, from angels, for even death is no angel / In the flickering of columns, reacquainted / With the first blade of grass he had seen / In a meadow near Cordoba, taller than any tree.
Kluge: Why do you mention Cordoba there?
Müller: Because he was born there. He was a Spaniard, Seneca.
Intertitle: Heiner Müller’s wife, Brigitte Marie Meyer, eight days before Anna’s birth - “Orpheus, ploughed,” by Heiner Müller
Kluge: “Orpheus ploughed” - what is that?
Müller: “Orpheus ploughed” Orpheus the singer was a man who couldn’t wait. After he had lost his wife by sleeping with her too soon after childbirth, or because of a forbidden glance while climbing out of the underworld after freeing her from death with his song, so that she turned back into dust before her flesh had become new, he invented pederasty, which spares the childbed and is closer to death than the love of women. The neglected ones chased him: with the weapons of their bodies, branches, stones. But the song protects the singer: whatever he had sung about could not scratch his skin. Peasants, frightened by the noise of the hunt, ran away from their ploughs, for which there had been no place in his song. Hence his place was under the ploughs.
Running Text: Heiner Müller has left a poem behind in anticipation of his death: “The Death of Seneca” / Seneca, a teacher and minister to the Emperor Nero, took his own life / He demonstrated ataraxia: “the unshakeable tranquility of the soul”