View transcript: Reader for Those Who Live in Cities East

Song

Rowdy, oh Baby Baby rowdy, oh Baby Baby rowdy, rowdy is what they are called, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah! Rowdy, oh Baby Baby rowdy,

Boy

Man, how often [inaudible]

Text

Located between the mid-size city Halle on the Saale

Frau

Could you come over here, please?

Mann

No, not even thinking of it.

Text

and the chemical plant LEUNA is the high-rise slab settlement HALLE-NEUSTADT (NEW CITY) /

Woman

Yeah, no problem. Thomas Heise, film and theater director in the circle around Heiner Mueller, has documented the people in NEUSTADT in an impressive movie - -

Man

The dream of a generation.

Text

READER FOR THOSE WHO LIVE IN CITIES EAST / Thomas Heise’s impressive movie NEUSTADT (traffic jam – state of affairs)

Voice-over

Once upon a time, there was a nation that lived in a big country. Many great and noble ones had ruled it in the course of time. This country was once big, then later small, as is usually the case after war. Among this nation’s people lived many artists, singers, poets, architects, but also engineers and many happy craftsmen. They were very hard-working people, because they enjoyed their work. One day, when the time is right, this nation will raise again their newly forged and invincible swords. And when the sun rays are refracted by the blades and thrown back to earth, the enemy will be burned by this beam.

Alexander Kluge

And that’s Halle-Neustadt. What does that mean, Halle-Neustadt? Halle is a city, isn’t it? In Saxony-Anhalt, right? The second capital, right? And Neustadt?

Thomas Heise

Neustadt is an appendage of Halle, plain and simple. And let’s say … well, Neustadt was built as a residential area for the workers of Leuna. And by now, Leuna has considerably less employees, and that’s why so many people live there who are unemployed. And those people is what it’s all about. Well, not so much the people…

Kluge

Well, Leuna was once the highlight of chemical industry, wasn’t it, a true pearl, right? War’s auch noch in der DDR, nicht, ja? A big combine.

Heise

Yes, that’s where young people moved, because they made more money there, it’s that simple.

Kluge

And then it is taken over, right? With or without bribery.

Heise

Ja.

Kluge

And is now economized, and basically erased and rebuilt, isn’t that right?

Heise

Well, Leuna is being reconstructed right now. So, there are a lot of empty surfaces, if you visit Leuna now, which doesn’t really appear as a factory in the movie, I’d say. But the fact is that if you drive past Leuna, you can see how it changes, right. How these ruins that were there before, these functioning ruins, are turned into a big lamp store. If you go and look at it at night, it’s terribly light and bright and beautiful. So… but it’s with a lot less people. And those who are dispensable live in this town.

Kluge

They are disposed of… or not disposed… stored. In a waiting loop.

Heise

Well, people are waiting anyway. I mean, I noticed that especially in Halle people are always waiting for something that will tell them what to do. Because they are not able to do anything on their own. And they are trying to adjust to the new life, so to speak, whatever that is supposed to be, and to cope with the realization that it’s not working.

Kluge

And that’s what you describe. And why did you say love stories earlier?

Heise

Well, that’s just because the people we met there, in everything they do to keep themselves busy, and also in all the free time they have, that simply plays a very important role. Of course it’s always… if they lose their job, if debts accrue, if they have a hard time coping financially, then other things play an increasingly important role. They need someone.

Kluge

Does love grow that way?

Heise

I met so many lonely people there, searching for it.

Kluge

And here you say that the city means exhaustion, and the field of metaphors that goes with that can be found in Brecht’s “Reader for those who live in the cities”. What’s the “Reader for those who live in the cities” by Brecht?

Heise

It’s a cycle of six, seven poems Which after all appears quite often in Brecht’s work, the image of the funnel, right, that is open at the top, so to speak, and then it narrows down.

Kluge

That’s how a society works, right? But you keep sliding downwards.

Heise

Yes. And in the end you are six feet under, sure. So your path leads downwards, that’s always the refrain in this text, so to speak.

Kluge

What Brecht writes about here actually refers to the 20s, doesn’t it? So that is a foundational experience for him, is it not? And you basically say here that Halle-Neustadt, indeed, contains an experience of the 20s, of the depression.

Heise

I would disagree with the assumption that it’s just Halle-Neustadt, I guess I see it in a more general way, but basically that’s what it is, of course. That when you go to Halle-Neustadt, an industrial town from the 60s, you suddenly rediscover things that you could see in the 20s and that Brecht did describe back then. Which of course has to do with …

Kluge

So as a link we have the time after Versailles, right? The era of depression after Black Friday, and at the same time the economic boom. The time before ‘29 and the time after ‘29, all at the same time. And that is, what you …

Heise

I think that is what we’ve seen there and what we describe.

Text

Scene from the movie NEUSTADT (traffic jam – state of affairs) by Thomas Heise

Sign

House of services

Text

Halle during the workers’ protests (1920)

Graffiti

Red front, die

Graffiti

Rather dead than red

Mann 1

But at age 22, what on Earth am I doing there?

Mann 2

Yes, but they don’t care about that. The number that it adds up to in the end, that’s what counts. This was a place where civil servants lived, railroad workers and whatever, all of them middle class. And now all of that degenerates. Asylum seekers hang around here, random people … there’s certainly no one who could be called racist. But when all of a sudden everything is just too much, and when you worry about your own survival, then I can imagine that for some people the crisis of survival turns into a fear of survival. That’s just how it is. We are not the first ones who would say …

Kluge

You made this film that I admired very much. It was about a police station in East Berlin, when it was still the capital of the GDR, right?

Heise

Kluge

And that was a police station that managed its district

Text

A movie by Thomas Heise about a police station (1985) You do really need an enormous patience, a kind of patience that’s not that common among intellectuals anymore. By the way, would you call yourself an intellectual, or how would you label your profession?

Heise

Of course I am a petit-bourgeois intellectual, sure.

Kluge

That’s the classification. And where does this quasi agrarian, peasant patience come from, with which you observe people like that, who are from your perspective actually strangers. That is a concentration that people don’t usually have, it’s against every law of the market.

Heise

I don’t know, I mean, I guess I am just interested in them. And it takes time. So, if I want to find out something about someone, I need to take the time to stand there or sit there or whatever, and to wait until I get noticed and someone is willing to tell me something. That means, I can’t just go there and say: You, you do this or you do that… I just have to wait. So I wait.

Kluge

But that’s what the director as a type generally does, right? He sets something up, he presents himself, after all …

Heise

I am actually trying to avoid that.

Kluge

So no specific I in the foreground.

Heise

No, I believe that in documentaries it’s important to forget about yourself. In theater too, by the way.

Kluge

I am, because I can forget that I am I. Where does something like that come from? Where do your ancestors come from?

Heise

Are you asking about my parents, my grandparents now?

Kluge

Yes, parents, grandparents, ancestors.

Heise

My great grandparents on one side came from Mecklenburg, so they were poor farmhands. And the other side, which means, the Jewish part of the family, came from what’s now Latvia. And they went to Vienna, and the other part went to Berlin, and then at some point they connected, and the Jewish Viennese married the communist from Berlin, and those were my grandparents, so …

Kluge

The I immerses itself completely in a task, in a patience, right? That’s how you recognize a Heise movie, right: it observes patiently from the beginning to the end, not impartially, you can’t call it that, right?

Heise

No. No, it’s got something to do with taking notes, right. I mean, it has got something to do with … in the past, there was something like travel literature, which then disappeared at some point – which of course also had to do with the media – Johann Gottfried Seume and people like him, and those people just described what they saw. And I believe that it’s necessary … I mean, for me, simply … there’s also something educational about it after all… that you simply describe things and simply name them and make that accessible to others, so that you function as a kind of translator, so to speak, that passes through the head and exits again through the mouth, and you try to get close, without a lot of …

Kluge

In other words, the messenger who delivers the emperor’s messages to the last man and always runs, runs, runs …

Heise

Good.

Kluge

… I mean, he needs patience and continuity, too.

Heise

Well, it’s just about… the very first movie I made, right, that was way before the police movie, that was the only one that I finished while at the film academy in Babelsberg, its title was “Why a movie about these people?” And that was the question the teacher asked me, when I wanted to do this movie, and then I decided to use that as title, and in the end it just went on like that, if you will. If you keep asking yourself: Why always these weird people, why with such a patience, and why with those … whether it’s neo-Nazis or something else, so why are you doing this, right? It’s really about giving them a voice.

Text

Scene from the movie NEUSTADT (traffic jam – state of affairs) by Thomas Heise

Young man 1

[inaudible]

Young man 2

And then the cops freak out.

Young woman 1

The newspaper says that the Germans attack the negros. But that’s not true. The negros, they attack us, they start shootings and what not.

Young man 2

And then the cops freak out.

Young woman 1

And in the end they blame us… we aren’t doing anything. We are standing here and talking and what not. And in the end they blame us for attacking the immigrants. And – no, that’s not right. Like last Friday. The negros attacked us.

Young woman 2

Well, not you personally.

Young woman 1

Well, not me personally, I wasn’t even there, but we heard about it.

Young man 2

But I was there!

Young woman 1

They blamed us again! The immigrants, they are always looked at like they’re guardian angels. It’s true!

Young man

Anga, you give the pitch!

Group song

A young nation rises, ready to attack! Lift the flags higher, comrades! We feel our time has come, the time of young soldiers! Ahead of us march with tattered flags, the dead heroes of a young nation, and above us the heroes’ ancestors, Germany, fatherland, here we come!

Kluge

If you had to explain what Halle is to a Martian, or rather to a person on a different continent, how would you describe this city?

Heise

Halle … The difference between Halle and Berlin, to take something really big for once, where the distance is very large, is that in Berlin, the things you can see in Halle are simply covered by movement or junk. You can find the same things in Berlin, no problem, but in cities like Halle, especially Halle-Neustadt, everything comes up to the surface, that means you don’t have to get rid of all the trash first, but it’s already there from the outset, and that’s what makes it interesting.

Kluge

But try to describe Halle to me as someone who doesn’t know what it is.

Heise

Well, Halle has got a huge problem. Halle lies on the border separating the states of Saxony-Anhalt and Saxony. Leipzig is 20 to 25 kilometers away, a big thriving city, a real city. And Halle has always suffered from being second place. Now, if Halle were the capital of Saxony-Anhalt, maybe it would be easier for the city. But as things stand, people have always had the feeling that they are dispensable. And they actually really are. Nobody needs these people in Halle. You could let the entire city disappear from one day to the next and it wouldn’t make a difference for German industry or politics or whatever.

Kluge

Even though back in earlier days they were seen as a metropolitan industrial location because of Leuna, right. And with the University of Halle they were the highlight of the Prussian state.

Heise

That was a long time ago.

Kluge

As a Napoleonic creation, it belonged to Westphalia at that point, I believe, they would have been France’s advance party, together with Erfurt, to promote a united Europe.

Heise

Well, the problem is that if you are in Halle, and if you talk to the people, or if you meet people who have been in Halle too, then people always wave it off and say: That’s really depressing. That has got something to do with its diffuse location. It’s like a bubble inside this country that has barely anything to do with Germany, it’s like something separate, like an island – and it works like an island inside this huge industrial country Germany, right. It simply functions differently.

Kluge

It was named after salt mines that don’t even exist anymore. In an age where salt is not needed.

Heise

It’s superfluous, yes.

Kluge

The traffic routes would work just as well without Halle.

Heise

They all go right past it, it’s unnecessary. But then there are the people, they are still there.

Kluge

Dispensables of the world, unite! Does that have any political power?

Heise

It could, but I don’t know if I would want it, the political power that would arise from that, because of course that shifts immediately to the right. That’s what you can see there, right, if poverty comes together, in the widest sense, not just economically, but also mentally, then you can see how that develops into a shift to the right.

Kluge

Marching column to the right!

Heise

Sure. I was already in Halle and Halle-Neustadt seven years ago and shot a movie there, and back then it was the problem of a radical fringe group – only those who fall under the category of skinhead etcetera – and today this kind of argumentation and also this way of thinking has shifted far into the center and happens there very casually. That’s what that develops into. And you can see that there very clearly. All you need to do is look into the faces you see when you ride the tram, the longest tram line in Europe …

Kluge

That goes through Halle?

Heise

That’s in Halle, yes. It goes from Halle to Bad Dürrenberg. You can ride the tram for over an hour. If you look into people’s faces, you can see the entire complex of problems in a silent face when you pass Leuna.

Kluge

The city does have an airport?

Heise

Well, that’s the airport for Leipzig, it’s part of its catchment area, they don’t have their own.

Kluge

What’s there that’s specific about the city, except for the fact that Handel was born there?

Heise

Well, it’s not like there’s nothing. There’s Giebichenstein, of course, there’s also a theater, there’s plenty of things… but those are again islands inside this island Halle that try to … where people in Halle try to catch up to the rest of Germany, right. But that may not have much to do with the majority of the people; at least that is my impression.

Kluge

What is so fundamentally different about Leipzig, where one wouldn’t seem to have much to hope for either?

Heise

Leipzig is a functioning city. Just like Berlin is a functioning city, too, even with all the problems.

Kluge

What’s a functioning city? Something about the flow velocity is different, isn’t it? Something in the horizon of hope that is different.

Heise

Well, in a functioning city geht alles gleichzeitig. And there may be poor people, there may also be beggars, there may be anything, but they have always a chance to escape their fate. Whereas when you are in Halle, you don’t get the impression that people have a chance to … that if they end up in a bad situation, that they ever have the chance to escape again. That’s a superficial impression, you’d have to test to see if it’s one hundred percent correct, but from what appears to the eye…

Kluge

You are a city person.

Heise

Yes.

Kluge

With a certain passion, so to speak, for the noise level, the movement level, the speed of a city.

Heise

Yes.

Kluge

But your patience is agrarian. Could you say that?

Heise

I don’t know if it’s agrarian. But I’m good at being patient, although I’m also known for sometimes being very impatient.

Song

When I was born, you know. I couldn’t speak and go. My mother worked each day, and she learned me to say …

Text

Scene from the movie NEUSTADT (traffic jam – state of affairs) by Thomas Heise Mother and father and son, sister and uncle have fun, and she learned me to say, life is so hard each day. Poor boy you must know,

Poster

Cheers, my angel

Song

poor boy life is so hard to go …

Voice-over (young woman)

I don’t go on the offensive by revealing myself completely in front of a camera, because I intend to study law and become a lawyer. And this profession, lawyer, is also supposed to benefit our cause, of course. But if I was recognized and seen in this movie and in this context, they would definitely know how to prevent me from practicing in that profession, which means that it would not be possible to support the cause. And the so-called democracy that we have here is not actually a democracy.

Man

Yes, maybe we can discuss this topic more thoroughly at our next comrade meeting, or at one of our training courses, it depends. Well, then I’d like to ask you to continue with the next presentation. Voice-over (young woman): The progression of the unemployment rate since the annexation of Middle Germany to the capitalist system of the Federal Republic of Germany was and is certainly one of the most radical changes …

Song

When I was born, you know. I couldn’t speak and go…

Text

LESEBUCH FÜR STÄDTEBEWOHNER OST/ Thomas Heises eindrucksstarker Film NEUSTADT (Stau – der Stand der Dinge)

Song

My mother worked each day, and she learned me to say …

Text

10 vor 11. TEN TO ELEVEN.

Song

Mother and father and son, sister and uncle have fun …