Expulsion from Verdun - Alexander Kluge

View transcript: Expulsion from Verdun

Text: Toward the end of his life, Heiner Müller visited Verdun / It was because of his play “Ghosts at Dead Man” / Müller condemned the charnal-houses and monuments of Verdun as “death kitsch” / Müller was disinvited by the mayor / His companion and confidant Mark Lammert reports - - Expulsion from Verdun / Heiner Müller’s last visit on the battle fields of World War I –
Alexander Kluge: You also were in Verdun with him. Could you tell me about that?
Mark Lammert: Well …
Kluge: What’s the occasion?
Lammert: To this day, I still don’t know. I guess there was an invitation from Verdun …
Kluge: From the local theater?
Lammert: From the local theater, but I think that was more of a catalyst. There was an extremely intense wish to do that and …
Kluge: At the symbolic place commemorating the slaughterhouse of 1916.
Lammert: Yes, and it had certainly also something to do with the fact that the play is titled “Ghosts at Dead Man”, and the Dead Man is a battlefield in Verdun … A business trip, in any case, so there was no great excitement, of course.
Kluge: At the hotel, you get there, it’s a provincial town, or what is it?
Lammert: No, I just personally wasn’t very excited. There was still an inner reluctance to go there. I mean, I’m not a big fan of battlefields, especially since … It’s a different kind of experience, but I was already used to that from the Soviet Union, that they always take you to these random battle fields …
Kluge: Monuments…
Lammert: Well, that too, but that would still have been okay. I simply never found battlefields particularly stimulating, because …
Kluge: You don’t see the battle!
Lammert: You don’t see the battle. And you can actually imagine what happened there without seeing the place. I mean, I’ve never – I haven’t done that systematically – never a battlefield …
Kluge: So you stalled. And then he initiates it?
Lammert: He initiates it, and we fly there and …
Kluge: What’s Verdun? What does it look like?
Lammert: Well, just what such a small town in Northern France looks like,
Text: Mark Lammert, painter so from that side, coming from Luxembourg: a little industrial, but not really “nouveau rich”.
Kluge: On a plain, in a valley, right?
Lammert: Yes, in a valley, yes. Like, well, an industrial town …
Kluge: So you arrive at the hotel?
Lammert: No! We don’t even go to the hotel, instead we arrive at a dinner, and Heiner sort of wasn’t feeling that well, he was in pain, and was not in good shape…
Kluge: That was already during the time when his illness strikes again, right?
Lammert: Yes.
Kluge: So first in intensive care, then off to California, right?
Lammert: Exactly.
Kluge: …there’s a bout of productiveness, right? And now he’s back and he’s in bad shape: he can’t swallow, nothing stays down …
Lammert: Keyword “barf face” or something, right? And then there’s always the same food. What is considered fancy, which means grilled salmon or cooked salmon, something with a white sauce, then some vegetables, wine, which he didn’t like anyway… So the basic tenor was a bit lackluster …
Kluge: His stomach is now close to his esophagus, right? Like in your drawing, right, the esophagus is basically cut off, removed, his stomach pulled up: it serves as esophagus. A terribly delicate tissue, right? And that gets tortured now by this kind of semi-official food.
Lammert: Yes. Of course, that leads to a higher whiskey intake. He’s also in France, where it’s particularly awkward, if you keep asking for whiskey. If you ignore the wine and ask for whiskey. It’s a different food culture. And I think he was not a big fan of French cuisine, more Bavarian or something. Well, anyway. They start telling jokes. And then …
Kluge: Defense front …
Lammert: Defense front And then this sightseeing number starts, which means: walking. And of course there’s this hill in Verdun, this fort
Text: Fort Douaumont / Verdun
Lammert: and it has truly pyramidic dimensions in that regard.
Kluge: …and the Dead Man.
Lammert: Well, the Dead Man is more these layers, with the tunnels, forty tunnels underneath each other. I don’t know if it’s forty, but a pretty high number of tunnels that lie underneath each other. So you kind of become aware that something insane has happened here. You knew that already, of course, but despite all this I remember mostly that they only had 15 toilets for the 2,000 people who stayed there, and the picture that stayed with me was this metal toilet lid that they’d dug up again five years ago, and that was the perfect sign. That was the best thing about the visit, because that, on the other hand …
Kluge: Because the industry produced concrete products, not by-products of the armament, for the marginalities of the industrial war process.
Lammert: The metal toilet lid was kind of good, somehow. When Müller talked, he told stories about his grandfather, who was buried somewhere nearby,
Text: Heiner Müller’s grandfathers
Lammert: and almost everyone has got a grandfather, after all: stories about the grandfather that he, because he was much older, had picked up as a child. But the whole tenor of the thing was lackluster, right. And on the other hand, of course, it was sometimes such a terrible physical effort.
Kluge: You marched… field mission…
Lammert: Yes, and then the inevitable happened. At some point there was a local reporter, although apparently journalists always had kind of a vitalizing effect on him, that was something you just had to accept, it wasn’t like he was prone to chase them off, as an annoyance or unbearable right at the moment, and then …
Kluge: … he spoke freely.
Lammert: But of course in English, with a non-English speaking reporter, and actually it felt more like 20 clicking photo cameras, but these small ones, children’s cameras or something. Somehow it was absolutely… we never analyzed it or anything … but that’s simply how I experienced it. And then there were situations like this: It was my birthday the next day, but no one knew and I told everyone at the last minute, and it was a very quiet night and the mood was very relaxed. We talked about jokes, but more about the dramaturgy of jokes, by which I mean, what’s the best way to tell a joke.
Kluge: But it’s like this: In this interview he already talked about all the stuff that got him disinvited.
Text: “DEATH KITSCH” / “Lego-Land of the dead”
Kluge: After all, he got disinvited by the mayor of Verdun, in a very hurtful way, because he made inappropriate comments about death kitsch, right?
Lammert: Well, technically he made a lot of other comments. For example, we were at this museum. The museum is so … horrible, right? Basically horrible …
Kluge: Horrible how?
Lammert: Because you can’t communicate horror, and that’s what you always realize in a museum like that, plain and simple. But maybe it’s not even that horrible, but you just notice …
Kluge: The exhibition of dead objects does not make the dead present, nor the undead either.
Lammert: … you can’t communicate that through playing in a sandbox, even if a sandbox is set up, you don’t understand it. And Müller was very polite: he signed the guest book and stuff, and the interview was simply… he basically told a story about how in East Berlin Mitterand expresses a wish to see Stefan Heym, Christa Wolf and Heiner Müller und es findet also so ein Treffen statt und das malt er aus – I can’t and won’t do that here – and then there was the simple question: Was it good? And I said that I thought it was very vain. And he says: maybe that’s true. And then there was the story with the architecture. But that again is related to something else entirely, that we… he had this Bucharest experience …
Kluge: Bucharest experience how? The palaces of Ceaușescu?
Lammert: Well, I think Bucharest is a very strange mix of a city. Where Byzantine, Italian, French, \ rural and other influences meet, and I know Bucharest pretty well, because I have a friend there, an old painter, and I’ve been there quite often and I spent the summer in Montpellier, which he also knew pretty well, and in a way Verdun was a memorialized blend of both styles, the Ceaușescu palace and Montpellier, so to speak …
Kluge: And now in Verdun, right? Built by French architects after 1918, right? Für diese Totenhäuser verwendet…
Lammert: You can probably find those everywhere, that doesn’t really have anything to do with Verdun, but it’s basically a kind of Lego-Land, so to speak …
Kluge: A Lego-Land of the dead.
Lammert: Yes, something like that: Lego-Land of the dead, yes …
Kluge: With the firm intention to part with it, to somehow get rid of them this way and to continue in Paris. The Maginot line for the now, the charnel-houses for the dead and that was enough. And that was his opinion and he spoke his mind …
Lammert: Well, he simply said, he wasn’t even really referring to Verdun, but said: you should not erect memorials, at least not this kind. It’s absolutely legitimate and totally justified, but he doesn’t think they are beautiful, but it was basically just a throw-away comment …
Kluge: Two things: On the one hand, he really thinks that, I’m sure of it…
Lammert: Definitely, yes …
Kluge: … And secondly, he doesn’t hide it, because you use the spurs and actually hurt him. Apparently he once told you to be impolite.
Lammert: Yes, it was a challenge. I don’t normally tend to be impolite and I tested the limits very little, but at least twice and then sort of halfway in Verdun.
Kluge: But in Verdun itself there wasn’t any spat with the officials or anything like that.
Lammert: No, not at all, quite the contrary …
Kluge: … but it’s like through a magnifying glass, like through a speaker, so to speak, right?
Text: “MEDIA ECHO as speakers”
Lammert: The strange thing is that they probably intended to win him over for something that happened there around ‘97 or ‘96 as a theater festival or so and I thought the surprising thing was – he didn’t talk about his condition - that they pushed things through at such a pace …
Kluge: …so that one can be certain that he’s alive …
Lammert: Well, at least… You simply could see – maybe only if you knew him, I wouldn’t know – you could see that this was not a completely healthy man, right? I’m talking about what’s notable when you see someone you don’t know on the street:
Text: Mark Lammert, painter you could see, this is someone who wants to walk, but who isn’t …
Kluge: But with the greatest effort, a play of his was integrated, in order to support this festival idea. What kind of play was that, with the Ghosts at Dead Man?
Lammert: Well, it’s … basically, it’s called “Germania 3 – Ghosts at Dead Man”, right? Like I said, the highlight of the trip was visiting the Dead Man,
Text: “Heiner Müller: Germania 3 – Ghosts at Dead Man”
Lammert: there’s nothing to see but a big shrub and a common memorial, like the others in the series, and the rest is the flight back, so to speak.
Text: Expulsion from Verdun: like the others in the series, and the rest is the flight back, so to speak.