Mind, Power, Castration - Alexander Kluge

View transcript: Mind, Power, Castration

Intertitle: Mind, Power, Castration - “Culture comes only from the losers” Lenin as Grandmother / Ernst Jünger and July 20 / Brecht in the Berlin Ensemble/ Heiner Müller on the role of the intellectual in relationship to power -
Kluge: Is there any example of an intellectual who was himself a ruler or who had an advisor with whom he cooperated, such that intellectualism and power coincided?
Müller: I don’t know of any because the most interesting negative example is not only negative. The only intellectual on a German throne was Friedrich II or Friedrich the Great.
Kluge: And he didn’t have an advisor?
Müller: It wasn’t even possible to advise him. There was this unusual love-hate relationship with and to Voltaire, which then didn’t work. It was actually Friedrich’s idea, I think, to have this relationship with Voltaire.
Kluge: What about Voltaire and Catherine?
Müller: Even that had its limits, I think. He wasn’t consulted about executions. She decided that for herself. Gorky and Lenin, Lenin’s “tyrannical grandmotherliness”. There is a story about Lenin in the time of the red terror, that is to say, after the white terror, or the red terror against the white one. It was openly declared and not hidden. At that time Gorky was very shocked by the forms of the red terror, actually already before it. There are texts and statements from him about the torture and execution methods of the commissars during the civil war. He thought that they were the result of the fact that everyone had learned how to read and knew the lives of the saints, the martyr stories, and were staging their executions based on the model of the executions of the martyrs. In any case, Gorky was very shocked and also expressed his opinions journalistically in very strong terms, in concrete cases and also in general.
Kluge: Oh, the method of execution in the early Soviet Union was not just functional, as with the guillotine.
Müller: In the civil war.
Kluge: Yes, in the civil war. But it was not done with an execution squad - technical …
Müller: They certainly tortured a little and tormented a little, in the Christian or anti-Christian tradition. And Gorky spoke out strongly against that in print. Then Lenin invited or ordered him to discuss the matter and told him: I will have to have you shot if you remain here and keep commenting on something that is necessary. I recommend that you go to Capri, to cure your tuberculosis. Gorky was thus banished to Capri. There are very interesting letters about this from Lenin. There was a correspondence between Gorky and Lenin, between Capri and Russia. There is a great commentary by Benjamin, where he says that these letters from Lenin to Gorky in Capri, which say for example “I hear that you have a goat. That is good. Goat milk is good for the health, also for the lungs”… Benjamin defines Lenin’s attitude as tyrannical grandmotherliness. The whole system retained some of this, almost to the end, the tyrannical grandmotherliness.
Kluge: The paternalistic is actually a personal regime, communicated through people.
Müller: But “paternalistic” is not totally correct; it is the grandmothers. They were also the ones in Russia. The grandmothers maintained the structures and held things together. No family functions without the grandmother. The more women were emancipated and included in the work and production process, the more important the grandmothers became. Hitler and Ernst Jünger, Ernst Jünger involved in July 20, 1944? There was a text by Schirrmacher, which was based on an expert opinion that a letter by Freisler was counterfeit. It is a letter from Freisler in which he claims - I don’t know to whom, the Reich Security Central Office or something; you can look it up-\- that the trial against Jünger that was being prepared will not take place - according to this letter - because Hitler decreed that the Jünger case should be left alone.
Kluge: You mean Jünger was informed about the preparations for July 20, which were practically successful in Paris?
Müller: Yes. For example, he apparently had contacts with Rommel after all, and Rommel had read Jünger’s text about peace. And Jünger cites in his letter, which was published two or three days ago, a statement by Rommel about this text, where Rommel said that something can be made out of this text. Apparently there were very close contacts. Jünger didn’t comment on the debate about whether the text was counterfeit or not. It is also a somewhat obscure letter; he also mentions a third person, who could possibly also be asked about it, but who is not named. And then the letter transitions fairly quickly into general observations about his situation, that he never was in the opposition. He would never formulate it that way, because he assumes that he was in a position where one attacks and doesn’t resist; therefore, it is the same level.
Kluge: Oh, so he felt like he was participating as a ruler?
Müller: Yes, as an illegitimate ruler or a legitimated ruler. And then there are observations about age that are also very interesting, about when the dead come closer and become alive. He hadn’t found the right attitude towards “Old Age” [“Uralter”] \- that is a formulation by Carl Schmitt that he quotes there. It is a great letter.
Kluge: And what was that with Carl Schmitt?
Müller: Carl Schmitt said that there is not only Aging, there is also Old Age, when someone is older than 90, that is probably what he meant. Jünger is now 98, and he says that he hasn’t yet found the right attitude towards Old Age, to the experience of Old Age. Of course he assumes that he will live until 100. And what is strange is that he is, I think, the first German writer who lived so long. I think there has never been an older writer than Jünger.
Kluge: Could you describe your relationship [to Jünger]? You are one of the few authors of your generation who has great respect for Jünger.
Müller: For one thing, there are biographical reasons. Before the war I read On the Marble Cliffs ([Die Marmorklippen]), when I was practically still a child, because my father had read it. It was considered a resistance book. There was a strange parallel for me. One character in On the Marble Cliffs is the Head Forester, i.e., the chief of state terror. And the “Head Forester” was a name for Hitler that was common in the Ore Mountains ([Erzgebirge]). They called him the Head Forester, not Göring. Hitler was the Head Forester, and then somehow it shifted and then Göring was the Head Forester, of course. And suddenly this name was used for Hitler too.
Kluge: Other than that, you are very far away [from Jünger]. Look, you grew up in a different republic, in the GDR. You didn’t write military regulations for the army, which Jünger did. He is a real Prussian officer and comes from World War I.
Müller: But after the war in the Soviet Occupation Zone, when it was developing, in this structure out of which the GDR emerged, I read Jünger really carefully for the first time, after this early reading of On the Marble Cliffs. It was an anthology, Leaves and Stones ([Blätter und Steine]). It included “Total Mobilization” (“Die Totale Mobilmachung”), the essay “About Pain” (“Über den Schmerz”), but also the “Sicilian Letter to the Man in the Moon” ([“Siziliische Brief an den Mann im Mond”]), and “Praise of Vowels” ([“Lob der Vokale”]), an odd mixture of aesthetic theory and also very literary texts and
Kluge: political and institutional life experience … dealings with power.
Müller: Yes exactly, in dealing with power. That was important to me. That was something like an injection of aristocracy against the leveling-out in these first years.
Kluge: A lot of ideas that are basically forbidden. Not by the party, but they are simply not socially acceptable among modern authors.
Müller: Exactly. That was really important to me. I read Jünger before I read Brecht. I only read Brecht later, much later. Brecht comes to the SBZ \–/ Drama as the “scientific creation of scandals” The fourth volume of Brecht hasn’t been written. And when I think back on it, it wasn’t ever written down at all. Brecht came from Switzerland via Leipzig to Berlin. He made a stop in Leipzig because Bloch and Hans Mayer were there. He knew them or they probably invited him. There was a discussion, a conversation with students at the university in Leipzig. That was before he even came to Berlin. I only know about it through a friend, with whom I went to school. He became a psychiatrist, and in the meantime that has become a tragic story, the typical “Stern” story with Stasi involvement and so on. He killed himself, I think eight or nine years ago. He told me that he was at this discussion in Leipzig as a student. Brecht said first of all, he would only speak if no journalists were there. So all journalists were sent out. That is why there is no record of it. These students wanted to know, Mr. Brecht, what are you doing here in the Soviet occupation zone? And Brecht said, “I want my own house, my own theater for the scientific creation of scandals.” That is a great formulation. But it was unfortunately never written down. Why scandals? They [the students] were somewhat annoyed. What this country needs is twenty years of ideology destruction, and that is the task of theater in this country.
Kluge: That is now a lost press conference?
Müller: That is a lost press conference, because no press were there. And also what he then achieved. The best performance ever was The Tutor ([Der Hofmeister]). I’m sure you didn’t see it. That was what he really wanted. A very crisp, elegant, beautiful performance. The Tutor is an adaptation of a play by Lenz. Definitely a very one-sided adaptation. For him the main theme was German misery. The Germanists have correctly criticized him for bracketing out or striking the aspect of the plebian revolts of the schoolteachers and so on. That didn’t interest him. He was interested in the motif of the self-castration of the intellectuals.
Kluge: The teacher, who is aspiring to the court, to nobility just like [Luise] Miller… Could you describe for me the content of The Tutor?
Müller: Many German writers were tutors at that time, that is to say private teachers at the court or for princes or the nobility. Hölderlin and Lenz both held that position for a while. That is the story of the tutor, of a private teacher for a nobleman. And he falls in love with his pupil, the daughter of the nobleman, because he doesn’t receive any money. He keeps demanding money, because he needs a horse in order to go to a brothel in Königsberg or Insterburg. He needs a release, the girl keeps turning him on and toys with him of course, and he now needs a horse and money for the brothel. But he doesn’t get it. And for this reason he seduces the daughter, his pupil, and she becomes pregnant, a great family tragedy. She then wants to drown herself somewhere, but that is thwarted.
Kluge: That means: the noblewoman gets a petty-bourgeois problem that Luise Miller otherwise would have had.
Müller: Exactly. The tutor is then sent away, of course, and then he decides to become a useful member of human society. He has no opportunities other than this job as tutor, and he can’t do this job perfectly unless he is castrated. And then there is the great high-point and middle-point scene, storms, night, a long monologue, and the tutor castrates himself, in order to turn himself into a useful member of society. What was interesting was the sharpness. Peter Brook was once asked in an interview whether he ever saw theater in Artaud’s sense, the theater of cruelty. And Peter Brook said, yes, once, The Tutor in the Berlin Ensemble, that was the theater of cruelty in Artaud’s sense, i.e., cruel in its invasion into consciousness, in the destruction of illusions, of ideology. That was the high point. But it was so strongly opposed that it couldn’t run for very long. Then there was also another strange thing. In a performance that I attended there is a scene \–it was only hinted at by Lenz and which Brecht intensified-\- in which Major von Berg, the employer of the tutor and the father of this daughter cuts his hedges with a hedge shears and simultaneously gives a speech about freedom, the bourgeois concept of freedom. Brecht formulated this scene very sharply against the bourgeois concept of freedom. Because the major simultaneously refuses him the money for the ride to the brothel.
Kluge: While he is cutting his hedges in the style of French…
Müller: While he is cutting his hedges and giving a speech about the freedom of the individual. And the appalling thing was that in this performance \–and in others, as I have heard - there was always applause for this speech about bourgeois freedom. That was the GDR situation, and the end was the staging of The Chalk Circle (Der kaukasische Kreidekreis).
Kluge: What was that like?
Müller: It was colorful, and the piece is also strongly colored by Brecht’s life near Hollywood. It was an attempt to approximate American theater, this slightly socially kitschy story of the maid. A colorful piece and also colorfully staged.
Kluge: You would say, then, that the beginnings of his domestication are not in the GDR but in Hollywood, when he tries to write a screenplay there. On the other hand, he always remained wild, a radical, and he actually really evaded every domestication.
Müller: There was of course a point, which I find to be very important and interesting from today’s perspective. There was once a quarrel at a rehearsal. Brecht said something negative that an actor thought was directed at him. He seldom said anything negative about actors, normally only about the technical director, who would then be fired. And the actor went behind the stage and unpacked his sandwich. Then Weigel came up to him and said that Brecht didn’t mean it that way. Those were proxy quarrels. But there was something about it that angered one actor. That was Friedrich Gnass, an old proletarian actor from the 1920s, from the tradition of Mother Krausen Goes to Heaven ([Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Glück]), and so on. He interrupted the rehearsal and went to the ramp and said: “Mr. Brecht, while you were tanning your ass in the California sun, we were suffering on the eastern front.”
Kluge: He said that to him?
Müller: Yes. Then Brecht didn’t say anything further. What really interests me, for example: I have been wanting for a long time to write a play that begins in Stalingrad and ends with the fall of the wall. That is the preliminary sketch. Because these are two events or two historical points that for me absolutely belong together. And it would have, let’s say, five or seven parts. And I would want to have one part performed every year and let’s say the whole thing in the year 2000. That is totally silly, it also sounds megalomaniacal, but I think that one has to have these giant plans, especially today. Because the problem now is that there is only time or speed or the passage of time, but no longer any space. Now one has to create and occupy spaces against this acceleration.
Kluge: The acceleration of time is so great that metaphors can’t keep up. They cannot cause a deceleration. We need symbolic places. And if you have experienced Bayreuth, when you say that the Prince Regent Theater is doing Everding, then you can say now that the Berlin Ensemble is a prism, a place that helps to reduce the speed. When you want to get from Stalingrad to the wall, that is a permanent time-lapse. That is not drama, it is not epic, but it is a fourth thing, it is also not criticism. Lyric, Drama, Epic, and Criticism: those are the four art forms according to Alfred Kerr, and now a fifth form is added, and it is called: Deceleration.
Müller: Yes, right.
Kluge: Because drama is actually a form of acceleration, right?
Müller: Yes, but there is a metaphor from Faulkner, I think, that is a very good example. It is in the novel “Intruder in the Dust,” a story about a black man who is a murder suspect. There is also a corpse, and the black man is supposed to have done it, and he is supposed to now be lynched. There is a boy, actually a variant of Huckleberry Finn, who knows that the black man didn’t actually do it, or he believes him, he loves him, etc. And then the boy is able to get the corpse exhumed, and then it is clear that the black man didn’t do it. That is the basic story. But there is a passage where the boy - it is told from his perspective, a fourteen-year-old - is going down the Mississippi in a boat with the black man. And it is just at a particular time of year when pigs are slaughtered. And the slaughtered pigs are hanging there on the side, and the smoke is there, and one smells it, and the pigs all look as if they are running at a rapid speed towards the center of the earth, these hanging pig corpses. That is a metaphor for insanity, I think. An attempt to concretely demonstrate something. That is his theme, the trauma of the south and the defeat, the losers.