Explosion of a Memory - Alexander Kluge

View transcript: Explosion of a Memory

Explosion_Memory

Text: 10 to 11. TEN TO ELEVEN
Text: In his field pack on the way to his place of death, Heiner Mueller carried the METAMORPHOSES BY OVID / Mueller converts strong words from Shakespeare’s texts into German / Their impact increases even more with their translation into American English. / His New York editor Gautam Dasgupta calls Heiner Mueller the “FIRST POET OF THE DIGITAL AGE”
Text: EXPLOSION OF A MEMORY / In honor of Heiner Müller’s 70th birthday (1929 – 1999)
Text: Heiner Müller, playwright
Text: “Death remains green in memory.” Shakespeare Factory 2: Hamlet
Gautam Dasgupta: When we first published “Hamletmachine” as a book, I was sure that the first 2.000 copies would take to the 21st century to sell. But, believe it or not, the book has had about five printings and has sold more than 15.000 copies.
Text: Gautam Dasgupta, publisher in New York
Alexander Kluge: So for American standards a very high number.
Dasgupta: Yes, it is. Even before Bob Wilson associated himself with Heiner Mueller, we’d been already selling his books to universities, to students, to the most advanced theater practitioners in America, and at some point perhaps we can talk about why Heiner was so well received in America … Or would you like me to talk about it now?
Kluge: Yes, that …
Dasgupta: I think, part of the reason is certainly the formal experiments that Heiner Mueller conducted in terms of his dramaturgy. I think for many young students, naturalism and realism was a dead end.

And they felt that, in an awkward way, Heiner Mueller was perhaps the first, what I’d like to call the first digital playwright of the digital era. And even though most of the students were not mature enough to understand Heiner’s politics and his various references, they liked the compactness of his work, the fragmentation of his work, his borrowings from other literary texts, his poetics … his poetry, not his poetics, but his poetic texts, because they were trying to find another way of relating to emotions, which was not the naturalist or realist way of relating to emotions, they wanted grander emotions.

Text: HAMLETMACHINE / Prologue
Dasgupta: From “Hamletmachine”, the first part, which is called “Family scrap book”: “I was Hamlet. I stood at the shore and talked with the surf, bla bla, the ruins of Europe in the back of me. The bells tolled the state funeral, murderer and widow a couple, the councilors two-stepping behind the high-ranking’s carcasses’ coffin, bawling with badly-paid grief. Who is the corpse in the hearse, about whom there’s such a hue and cry? ‘Tis the corpse of a great giver of alms, the pillar of the population, creation of a state craft. He was a man who took all from all.

I stopped the funeral procession, I pried open the coffin with my sword. The blade broke, yet with a blunt reminder I succeeded and I dispensed of my dead creator. Flesh likes to keep the company of flesh, among the throngs around me. The mourning turned into rejoicing, the rejoicing into lip-smacking. On top of the empty coffin, the murderer humped the widow. Let me help you up, Uncle. Open your legs, Mama. I laid down on the ground and listened to the world doing its turns in step with the putrefaction.”

Text: Translation: Barbara Chisholm
Kluge: What is his principle here, does he eliminate the principle of reality?
Dasgupta: Yes, I think that this notion of real existing socialism which was something that was so much part and parcel of the sociopolitical framework of East Germany, and Heiner of course reacted against this real existing socialism in Germany, but not only against real existing socialism, I think Heiner actually reacted against all existing systems, whatever they were, whether they were from the East or the West. He was a rebel … in spirit.
Kluge: He is an anti-realist.
Dasgupta: Absolutely. And that certainly endeared him to people, to students, and to the public in America.
Kluge: The feeling that this was needed. So, it’s like during the French Revolution, when the people distanced themselves from the king, that’s how today people distance themselves from the constraints of reality claiming to be realistic. As Heiner Mueller would say: Reality is unrealistic.
Dasgupta: Absolutely. I mean, in fact, as you well know, whenever Heiner Müller spoke about human history not having yet begun, he meant the following: human history, so Müller, would only begin when all injustices, etcetera, are wiped out. So for a lot of my students, for example, that is something that they can really relate to, regardless of what social class they come from.
Kluge: Would you say that he has certain characteristics of the prophets from the Old Testament?
Dasgupta: Absolutely. I recently wrote,an article for the “Tagesspiegel” where I said that I thought Heiner may have perhaps seen himself as Lear’s fool, and I too prefer to see him in that light, as “King Lear”’s fool, a wise fool.
Kluge: Perhaps you could describe the world of literary forms that Heiner Mueller prefers as a poet, and that he partly introduced himself. The fragmentation: A fragment is closer to truth than the whole.
Dasgupta: Yes, because I also think that Heiner indeed, as you say, really believed in the truth of the fragment more than the whole, because I think that in the whole, Heiner always felt that ideologies would play a role, and in a sense, just as we said before that Heiner was against reality, I think Heiner was also against the notion of real time, which is why I think in his plays there is such a conflation of things from so many different eras and even an imaginary future and that sort of thing. Because I think that he really did not believe that the organic nature of experience, the normal nature of experience was capable of generating truth. I think that’s why Heiner I’m sure stayed in the East, because of the pressure of experience, the extremity of experience, is something that I think he reacted to … or, he found it more creative than a more normal experience of time and space.
Text: Gautam Dasgupta, publisher in New York
Text: Bloodied comets are streaking through the skies instead of gentle, pious stars, and they blaze their dark tidings all over the world / All good means are exhausted now, the bad ones assume their place / And not till Siegfried’s death has been revenged shall any deed on earth be called a crime / Until that time justice shall be in hiding / Kriemhild You ate my flesh and drank my blood and chased me through ten countries and stretched my skin across your drum Now be my guests at the last supper Eat your dead and quench your thirst with their blood The table will be richly decked and celebrate your wedding with the nought.
Die blutigen Kometen sind am Himmel anstatt der frommen Sterne aufgezogen und blitzen dunkel in die Welt hinein / Die guten Mittel sind erschöpft, es kommen die Bösen Und erst, wenn Siegfrieds Tod gerochen ist gibts wieder Missetaten auf der Erde / Solange aber ist das Recht verhüllt / Kriemhild Ihr habt mein Fleisch gegessen und mein Blut getrunken durch zehn Länder mich gejagt und meine Haut gespannt auf eure Trommel Seid meine Gäste jetzt zur letzten Mahlzeit Esst eure Toten und löscht euren Durst mit ihrem Blut Der Tisch wird reich gedeckt sein und feiert eure Hochzeit mit dem Nichts Heiner Müller: KRIEMHILD from: GERMANIA III
Kluge: He is merciless towards misunderstandings.
Text: “MERCILESS towards misunderstandings”
Dasgupta: Well, Heiner actually always liked that. He thought that misunderstandings were indeed very creative, And I think that misunderstandings allowed Heiner himself – and he’d expect the same from his own readers – to get a perspective that would not be possible if one had read something in a more traditional, hermeneutical or meaningful way. I remember once when Heiner, stayed with me – he would always stay with me in New York –, and one time he went through my bookshelf, and he picked out a book and just read a sentence or two, at random, and and then he comes in my room and says to me: I read that book. He had an enormous appetite, and a grasp of eating literature, I mean he could eat literature, he could eat experience, and one can only eat fragments, one cannot eat the whole, and I think he believed very much in imbibing literature that way , in imbibing experience that way, because he thought it would be digested that way, better.
Text: Gautam Dasgupta, publisher in New York
Kluge: Just like in the 12th century an entire science developed on the base of 17 lines of an Aristotelian fragment. Once he told me that Abelard had written 80 volumes of commentaries about Aristotle’s 17 lines, and those 17 lines were actually forged. They contained mistakes. That is basically his ideal.
Text: Translation: Barbara Chisholm
Dasgupta: Absolutely. I mean in some sense of course it was similar to what Brecht did when there was that big attack on the “Dreigroschenoper”, where it was said, that he had stolen from François Villon. And I think it was Alfred Kerr who had complained that Brecht had taken lines, and then Brecht wrote a poem against Alfred Kerr saying that, you know, Villon has written 650 lines and I have only borrowed 25 of those lines. Of course, Heiner, was someone who made collages, he was a collagist, I mean he had taken a lot from cubism, he had taken a lot from cubofuturism, certainly one of his great heroes was Mayakovsky of course, who believed in that kind of bullet lines, and in very precise lines, precise lines, staccato lines.
Kluge: What are bullet lines? Was does that mean, bullet lines?
Dasgupta: Like shots, like bullets from a weapon. They were very abrupt, they had the speed of a bullet that had just been fired. They were very compact, he was also a compact playwright. In some sense I believe that every play Heiner wrote was a part of the history of mankind. He was able to take the entire World War or the Ice Age, he was able to compact the entirety of it all into the experience of the moment. So in that sense it was an explosion, that’s how it was always, his lines were explosive, his dramatics were explosive.
Kluge: And that’s why … Explosion of a memory. That’s why this is the title that you picked.
Text: “Explosion of a memory”
Dasgupta: Yes, that’s why we chose the title: Explosion of a memory.
Kluge: And in reality, an implosion of memory happens again and again. Withdrawal from history.
Dasgupta: Right.
Kluge: Expropriation of experience.
Dasgupta: Yes, but then of course he would also spit it out. He would digest it, and he would also spit it out. And I think in that spitting out, that is when the sparks would fly. And so, yes, you are right that it was an implosion when he was absorbing all these experiences around him, but then Heiner would digest that and spit it out, and that was the explosion.
Text: DIFFERENT from BRECHT / “Voice of the dead”
Dasgupta: I always felt, that Heiner, in a very paradoxic way, was very close to the nature of the non-human or of the in-human. I always felt that Heiner also gave a voice to the dead in the world, he gave a voice to inanimate objects of the world. Heiner was in that sense much more democratic, or, one could say, perhaps, he was a much better communist. Heiner was totally concerned about the equalization of all forms of being. Thus when Heiner would write something like “Landschaft mit Argonauten”, for example, you could see that the nature of landscape becomes very important for Heiner, the nature of the people buried below. Heiner was a great spokesperson for the dead of the world, which Brecht was not, Heiner was a great spokesperson for rocks, for plants, and for – you mentioned Tacitus, let me mention Lucretius – I think Heiner was very much someone who would find Lucretius a soul-brother, if you will.
Kluge: If you had to compare Heiner Mueller to an animal – we’re not supposed to do that, but there are heraldic animals, after all, there’s reincarnation – what kind of animal would you compare him to?
Dasgupta: A cuddly dog. And let me tell you why I say this. Your question surprised me of course, therefore the very spontaneous answer. But having said that he’s like a cuddly dog, I’m reminded of two things. One is a statement made by Gertrude Stein, who said once in one of her writings: I am I, because my dog recognizes me. And in some sense, now that I have said it, I think that I knew myself better, or I wanted to know myself better, when I was in the presence of Heiner. Because I really do miss Heiner very much, especially … Heiner I think believed very much in women, as the saviors of humanity. I mean I really felt that, I mean he was very close in spirit to the figure of Rosa Luxemburg …
Text: Gautam Dasgupta, publisher in New York
Text: “I am I because my little dog knows me.” Gertrude Stein
Kluge: And his own mother?
Dasgupta: Absolutely. And also to Ulrike Meinhof. What would you have been if you were not a dramatist? And in Heiner’s inimitable fashion he said: I would like to have been a gynecologist.
Kluge: How does he mean that?
Dasgupta: I felt that he wanted to look into the birth canal. He really wanted to look into the birth canal. He wanted to …
Kluge: A wish for children, so to speak.
Dasgupta: I think it was his wish to go back to the first birth in the world and rewrite the history of progeny.
Kluge: So he actually wants to descend into the underworld. He wants to show the past, the underworld. He is an anti-Columbus.
Dasgupta: Absolutely. .
Kluge: Not curious to discover new worlds.
Dasgupta: Right, no, indeed, …
Kluge: Has he got a bigger chance in English or German language? You said that he would be one of the main poets in the 21st century. In English?
Dasgupta: Oh, this is wonderful. Yes, I think so.
Kluge: Including all misunderstandings.
Dasgupta: Yes, I think including all misunderstandings. Partly because … the one thing that Heiner always does, even in the opening of the “Hamletmachine,”where he says: “I was Hamlet”, is to relegate the individual in some sense to the past …
Text: EXPLOSION OF A MEMORY / In honor of Heiner Müller’s 70th birthday (1929-1999)
Text: 10 to 11. TEN TO ELEVEN