Transkript: Program 3: The Paradoxes of Exchange Society

1. Karl Korsch’s Blitzkrieg Theory (starts 0:00:00, ends 0:03:55)

text, image title

TROOPS AT MAAS CROSSING MAY 13, 1940

text

The breakthrough of tanks towards the Channel in May 1940 is called BLITZKRIEG /

text

What caused the unlikely success was unknown /

text

The secret lay in the SUBJECTIVE SIDE

text

Karl Korsch’s Blitzkrieg Theory

text

Karl Korsch, Boston 1942, thought

text

the Marxian Method wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on

text

if it couldn’t explain the appearance of the Blitzkrieg /

text

In a conversation with W. Reich in April 1941 Korsch put it like this:

text

Blitzkrieg = leftist energy (ideas, drive, “living labor”),

text

adopted by the right, causing swiftness of movement,

text

and unerringness (“at first”) /

text

Korsch, who studied in Jena, knew the Mansfeld area well /

text

Rebellious in the Peasants’ Wars, Miners, experiencing

text

quartering, gouging out of eyes, etc.:

text

To work means “to escape somehow”/

text

To avoid at any cost the bone crusher of Verdun /

text

That means for an armored division (the 5th and 7th come from Mansfeld):

text

We breach a 50 m gap in the front tonight (“There’s always a way”)

text

and the following afternoon we’ll be 200 km behind enemy lines,

text

unassailable/ While we advance,

text

we will be attacking in defense /

text

The motive is: to escape from the enemy and one’s own superiors!

text

According to drive-economy victory is guaranteed!

2. Ships in the Mist (starts 0:03:56, ends 0:04:45)

Sophie Kluge and Gabriel Raab, reading, together

“Ships in the mist” Paul Valéry reports according to hearsay, after having had lunch with officers of the admiralty, how a modern, steal-built well-fortified fleet, based in the Mediterranean, was caught in the mist near Biscay. [text onscreen: On chapter: “Big Machinery and Cooperation”] Although heavily armed and communicatively well-equipped

Raab

but unsuitable for sailing in the mist,

Sophie Kluge and Gabriel Raab, reading, together

it remained there passively, in utter silence, as if destroyed by the enemy, the French fleet lay there in the almost motionless sea. You could only see 6 meters ahead. Every movement could have caused a collision of the steel machinery.

3. The Concierges of Paris with Ute Hannig (starts 0:04:46, ends 0:06:47)

Kluge

You’ve been a concierge for 13 years?

Ute Hannig

Yes. For 13 years. My mother was a concierge, too, so it’s in my genes.

Kluge

There isn’t a single building in Paris that’s not watched over by a concierge.

Hannig

Yes, every building has a concierge. She’s the soul of the building. If we’d go on strike, Paris would…

Kluge

No one could get out. No one could get in or out of the building.

Hannig

Exactly.

Kluge

These keepers of the keys have been in place ever since the French Revolution. They are a kind of supervisors…

Hannig

We supervise lovers, too. Yes.

Kluge

The enemy of the state is kept out.

Hannig

He is. But we do turn a blind eye when one or another…

Kluge

When a lover wants to meet the other lover.

Hannig

… manages to slip in.

Kluge

But you don’t take money? You’re incorruptible?

Hannig

No, never. I’m absolutely incorruptible.

Kluge

You have invested capital. In Russian government bonds, meaning the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Hannig

Unfortunately I did. It was a very disappointing affair. By now I have… I cried a lot about it. I got very angry about it. All the money I saved, everything I’ve put aside, that I’d been saving for years… I am incorruptible! And all this money that I’d been saving over the years, I put into the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Kluge

And then there’s the Great War, the Revolution, and the Soviet Union won’t pay you back.

Hannig

It’s gone! It’s gone up in smoke. The Russians won’t pay me back. I’m very angry with the Russians. After all, the Russians copied our revolution. I, as a Parisian concierge, I am Paris! I am France! So I am the Revolution. I’m the mother of the Russian Revolution, so to say. So my own children have betrayed and deserted me. How very disappointing!

4. The Genesis of Stupidity (starts 0:06:47, ends 0:13:21)

text

The Genesis of Stupidity

text

The emblem of intelligence

text

is the feeler of the snail,

text

“the animal with the groping face,”

text

with which, as Mephistopheles claims, (Faust, Part 1, Verse 4068)

text

it also smells/

text

The feeler on meeting an obstacle

text

is withdrawn into the body’s safety

text

and becomes one with the whole again,

text

only to come out cautiously once more

text

as an independent agent /

text

If the danger is still there,

text

it disappears anew and the interval between repeats

text

of the attempts grow longer /

text

Mental life in its earliest stage is

text

of infinite delicacy/

text

The snail’s sense is dependent

text

on a muscle and muscles grow slack

text

if their play is impaired/

text

Physical injuries paralyze the body,

text

terror paralyzes the soul/

text

(…) The suppression of opportunities

text

by immediate resistance of the natural surroundings

text

continues inward

text

as organs degenerate through terror/

text

In any animal’s look of curiosity

text

a new form of living dawns

text

that might emerge

text

from the defined species,

text

to which the individual belongs/

text

It’s not what defines it that holds it within the safety of the old being,

text

its look is confronted by a force that has condemned it

text

to its present stage

text

for millions of years and with ever renewing resistance

text

hindered every step it took to leave

text

this imprisonment/

text

A first groping look is easy to break,

text

behind it is good will

text

and fragile hope,

text

but no continuous energy/

text

The animal becomes timid and stupid

text

on the path it was driven away from/

text

Stupidity is a scar/

text

(…) Any partial stupidity in a human

text

denotes a place where the play of muscles

text

on awakening was hindered, not encouraged/

text

Are the repeats paralyzed in a child,

text

or was the hindrance too brutal,

text

attention can direct itself elsewhere,

text

the child has gained in experience, as they say,

text

but all too easy on the spot

text

where pleasure was affected,

text

an indiscernible scar remains,

text

a slight hardening, of which

text

the surface is dull/

text

Such scars create deformations/

text

They can build characters,

text

severe and diligent,

text

they can produce stupidity in the sense

text

of deficit manifestations like blindness and unconsciousness,

text

(…) In the sense of evil, of spite

text

and fanaticism/

text

(…) Good will turns to evil

text

due to the force it encountered/

text

Like species among animals,

text

the mental stages within human kind

text

denote the blind spots

text

in the same individual, stations

text

where all hope came to a halt,

text

witnessing, in its petrification,

text

that all things alive

text

are under a curse/

text [credit]

Horkheimer / Adorno, “Dialectic of Enlightenment” (Amsterdam 1947)

5. Hopkins the Machinist (starts 0:13:22, ends 0:23:32)

text

Hopkins the Machinist / “Revenge of the machines on mankind”

text

An industrial opera by Max Brand. Premiere: Duisburg in 1929

Oskar Negt, Author

It is indeed a very strange situation that is described here in this opera. On the one hand, the machines are given a voice so they can sing their laments…

Kluge

At night, as a choir.

Negt

They lament their life of slavery. On the other hand, the people, the workers, as is clear by the end, lead a life of slavery, too.

Kluge

And become one with the machine.

Negt

They start behaving rebelliously. Then again, the people show an immense concentration of emotions converging on a single point. They are equipped with actual explosions of emotion. But always the icy cold of the machine world is also within the people themselves. The phrase “ice cold” is heard often. Hopkins tells Nell, the woman whom the opera is about, and whom they fight over, and who ends up as a harlot… In an ice cold way he tells her about the kidnapping and seduction plan, and he explains the plan for revenge on his current employer. So there are always machine-like emotions and the ice cold world of human relationships involved.

Marx once spoke of machines as “dead living labor,” something objectified, that at the same time still possesses mind and emotion. Now evidently Brand is trying to bring back to life what this entails and what has become objectified, by creating machine choirs and by having machines speak and sing. With Max Brand there’s something in it. The suffering of machines, machines as “instrumentum vocale.” That’s what Marx once described slaves as: “instrumentum vocale.”

Kluge

An instrument with a voice.

Negt

A speaking instrument. Within their history of slavery and suffering these characters are vengeful, too. So when the lever is suddenly released, after the main key has been expropriated by this man’s own wife, the key with which the machine can be turned on and off, this man loses a leg because of it. That means, these machines are also devices… … devices that carry out spontaneous revenge by turning themselves on, or by being turned on upon their tormentors. So there’s a very strange humanization of machines, and “machinization” of people in this opera.

Sylvia Ackermann, pianist

[title] “The machine hall at night”

S. Ackermann, singing

Enslaved mind

S. Ackermann, singing

Frozen into a form

S. Ackermann, singing

In iron so hard

S. Ackermann, singing

Has to reap

S. Ackermann, singing

Reap…

Kluge

It all starts out with Nell. “A blond girl” she’s called. She’s a worker. She loves Bill. But she belongs to the foreman, Jim, who is killed by Bill. He is thrown into the machine. It’s a very old metaphor. Even Griffith used it, when he had the evil stock-exchange speculator thrown into a grain mill. In this opera Jim dies in the machine. It’s a kind of original debt within the plot. It starts out with murder, and then Nell and Bill rise up, they are no longer workers, they are now company directors. She’s also a lady of society. They are no longer recognizable as workers. They haven’t become union leaders, instead, they are now entrepreneurs.

Negt

It’s not really discernable whether Jim as the foreman, who has the main key to operate the machines, whether he’s an oppressor or not. That’s not discernable. Everything is at his command, but whether or not he’s a bad person, is not made clear by Max Brand.

Kluge

It suffices for Bill to say, “I want this privileged position for myself, so you have to go, you must die.”

text

After-hours conversation of 2 workers “See the fillies looking luscious.”

Astrid Ackermann, speaker

“See the fillies looking luscious.” Oh, that’s nothing.

A. Ackermann

There’s one, I can tell you, blond and delicate, taking everyone with pleasure.

A. Ackermann

Where is she from?

A. Ackermann

I don’t know.

A. Ackermann

There are lots of rumors. Some say she used to be a fine lady, While others say she’s from around here.

A. Ackermann

Do you know her?

A. Ackermann

I just visited her.

A. Ackermann

Well, I never!

A. Ackermann

She’s got hands, I can tell you, so delicate, you can hardly believe what people say.

A. Ackermann

What do they say?

A. Ackermann

She once had a husband, whom she killed.

A. Ackermann

I wouldn’t like to get mixed up with her sort.

text

The machine hall at night /

text

Against the clearer background (glass)

text

gigantic machines stand out

text

like fantastic mythical creatures/

text

On the left: a platform from which an iron spiral staircase

text

leads down to the stage/

text

Hopkins the Machinist / “Revenge of the machines on mankind”

6. Early Marx and Late Marx (starts 0:23:33, ends 0:27:07)

Actor portraying Marx, reading

“Part I: Commodities and Money.

Actor portraying caveman, reading

Chapter I: Commodities.

Marx, reading

Section I: The 2 Factors of a Commodity: Use-Value and Value

Caveman, reading

In parentheses: (Substance of Value, Magnitude of Value)

Marx and Caveman, reading, together

The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities, its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.

Marx, reading

A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another.

Caveman, reading

The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference.”

Marx, reading

So this is about…

Caveman, reading

Hold on, there’s a footnote: “Desire implies want, it is the appetite of the mind, and as natural as hunger to the body. The greatest number (of things) have their value from supplying the wants of the mind.” That’s from Nicholas Barbon.

Marx, reading

“Every useful thing, for example, iron, paper, etc., may be looked at from the two points of view of quality and quantity. Every useful thing is a whole composed of many properties and it can therefore be useful in various ways.

Marx and Caveman, reading, together

The discovery of these ways and hence the manifold uses of these things is the work of history.

Caveman, reading

A watch is the social product of an immense number of detail laborers, such as mainspring makers, [text on screen: p. 309: Division of Labor] dial makers, spiral spring makers, jewelled hole makers, ruby lever makers, hand makers, case makers, screw makers, gilders, with numerous subdivisions, such as wheel makers (brass and steel separate), pin makers, movement makers, acheveur de pignon (fixes the wheels on the axles, polishes the facets, etc.), pivot makers, planteur de finissage (puts wheels and springs in the work),

Marx and Caveman, reading, together

finisseur de barillet…”

Marx, reading

Finisseur de barillet…

Caveman, reading

… (cuts teeth in the wheels, makes the holes of the right size, et cetera…

Marx and Caveman, reading, together

Escapement makers…"

Marx, reading

Escapement maker…

Caveman

You’re more the escapee…

Marx and Caveman, reading, together

“For cylinder escapements, escapement wheel makers, balance wheel makers, raquette makers…

Caveman, reading

Raquette makers!”

Marx, reading

Racket makers… "

Marx and Caveman, reading, together

Raquette makers, apparatus for regulating the watch, the planteur d’échappement, (escapement maker proper), then the repasseur de barillet (finishes the box for the spring, etc.), steel polishers, wheel polishers, screw polishers, figure painters, dial enamellers (melt the enamel on the copper), fabricant de pendants (makes the ring by which the case is hung), finisseur de charnière

Caveman, reading

(puts the brass hinge in the cover, etc.), faiseur de secret (puts in the springs that open the case), graveur, ciseleur, polisseur de boite,

Marx and Caveman, reading, together

et cetera, et cetera, et cetera…"

7. Brecht’s hexameter on the Communist Manifesto (starts 0:27:09, ends 0:48:42)

Kluge, on phone

… tells us that Bert Brecht in America, in January 1945, as the Battle of the Bulge is taking place, writes this didactic poem, “The Manifesto.” What is it?

Durs Grünbein, author, on phone

In January 1945, Brecht begins writing, in hexameter verse, a version of the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels. In other words, he takes this little polemic and attempts to put it into verse, a classical verse meter as we know from Homer, in a nifty alternation between hexameter and pentameter. [text on screen, title: Long-distance call on Bert Brecht’s hexameter on the ‘Communist Manifesto’] He hews closely to the images, formulations, turns of phrase, of the original text, but then tries to recast it all in verse. In the first version it starts like this: “Wars reduce the world to rubble, and a specter is haunting the ruins.” The formulation is Marx’s. “… born not of war, but long known in peacetime as well, ghastly to the masters but kind to the children of the city, peering up out of meager dinners, shaking its head at deprivation.” I’ll jump ahead here. “Guest of honor in the slums and terror of the palaces, come to stay forever, its name is Communism.”

Kluge

You could hardly fit harsher words into such a short space. From “specter” to “Communism,” fierce words, all taken from the “Communist Manifesto” and all this in America.

Grünbein

Beyond that, Brecht must have been motivated to, if you will… In the guise of humanism, he’s dealing in some provocative ideas. The effect of this, if you look at this verse, is that each word has an emphasis of its own. There’s no fluff in there, each word has its significance. Clearly, the way the word “Communism” appears in the last line, it comes off like a punch line and amplifies the emphasis on it. Hexameter has six metrical feet followed, as a rule, by pentameter with its five feet, and then it starts all over again. This is the lilting back-and-forth of this epic meter in which this all takes place.

Kluge

Describe this meter for us: “And the pitiless stone would come thundering down again…” That’s Homer. And that’s how it… That’s the intonation of the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey.”

Grünbein

Right. Interestingly… [text onscreen, with meter diagram: Dactylic hexameter (Homer)] Well, just a second… In his plan, Brecht refers to the Roman poet Lucretius, who wrote a didactic poem, “de rerum natura,” “On the Nature of Things,” a compendium of contemporary atomistic, stoic teachings, in a didactic poem. He shows us nature, also human nature, cloud formation, the genesis of rain, all in a calm, measured flow. He now tries to apply this to a social theory. That’s what’s behind it. But the much older use of it is that of Homer and Hesiod. Basically it’s not only the meter in which the great battles, the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” are set, but also the hymns to the gods. What’s much more interesting, I think, is that Brecht uses it not so much as a didactic poem, but rather as a hymn. The ideas he wants to get across are already classical, there’s no doubting them, they are fixed and need no more verification. It’s presented here as a hymn to the gods, to the gods of Marxism, the gods of this theory.

Kluge

So what do you get when you show in a classical, solemn verse form, as if it was decreed by the “Académie française,” something that is all about movement? Something that should lead to a breaking up of grammar?

Grünbein

Interestingly enough he does create movement, but it’s posthumous movement. A posthumous rocking back and forth of observation and thought. He says something like, “Deeper and more lasting than the war of the people is the war of the classes, that our historians shamefully suppress.” But there are also idyllic passages, that remind me of Goethe’s “Herman and Dorothea,” when he describes the breaking up of all borders by the capital flow: “But the walls cannot keep the cloth, and trade wakes the sleeping village. Seaside towns start building ships to reach new shores. Diligently they sail round Africa and bravely to America.” That’s the heroic part. It portrays the contributions of the bourgeoisie and, if you will, the revolution of the middle class in wonderful images. It does enable you to accentuate several important keywords within any given line. It’s easy enough to drive home. There may be problems memorizing it, but the verse is supposed to be read out loud or even chanted, like this: “It renders the production and use of goods cosmopolitan, destroying indigenous old trade and bringing in raw material from the most far away places. Its factories serve needs and whims caused by the climates of other regions.”

Kluge

“High up in the clouds, the feverish goods go over the pass, smashing old toll gates and their password is ‘cheap’.”

Grünbein

Yes. That’s the logic on commodities, the breaking up of all borders by what is now a global market with an unhindered flow of capital, and production becoming cheaper. Wages being kept low and so on. This whole dynamic is being suspended, if you like, in a nice, epic, ocean-like, rocking rhythm. Another beautiful passage deals with the idea of progression: “On the market Harun al-Rashid hears irate complaints against the bourgeoisie. The poor shopkeepers, the owners of the smaller stalls, artisans, farmers, they all fight tooth and nail for a small property. Furious the carpenter condemns the furniture factory, and the farmer curses the tractor and all deplore the decline of morals. But none of them is in favor of rising against the structure of society, they only oppose the rising that has taken place within the production of goods. They shake crushed fists. That, what’s so heinously waltzing over them, is progress.” A classical motif, also to be found in all of Brecht’s plays. The dynamics of how the petty bourgeoisie and the small landowners are left out, how everything gets drawn into these economic struggles. A classical passage picking up on a phrasing straight from the “Communist Manifesto” in which it says: “The bourgeoisie has disclosed how the brutal display of vigor, reactionaries so admire about the Middle Ages, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals. Its expeditions put all former migrations and crusades in the shade.” And now for Brecht: “But what are pyramids to us, or Rome’s aqueducts, Cologne’s cathedrals, the migrations? What is a crusade to us, who have seen gigantic buildings and processions realized by this insurrecting class breathlessly overthrowing everywhere and at all times what it has created itself. It lives through insurrection.” This evokes completely new images, of course, of mega cities like Shanghai, Dubai and so on. All these overnight investments we saw over the last ten years, the unbridled concentration of capital in completely new places on earth.

Kluge

“The laws of economy expose themselves as the laws of gravity, when the house collapses crashing over our heads.” It’s almost like a sort of hammering, to drive out the thoughts and old metaphors out of the sentence. It appears to me to be some kind of system to break up grammatical, normal free speech bringing out certain terms like apparitions. Wouldn’t you say?

Grünbein

Exactly, and in the passage you’re quoting you sense how near it is to Lucretius. Certain events in society [text onscreen: Lucretius (97-55 BC) “On the Nature of Things”] are depicted as natural phenomena: an inevitability, a catastrophe, an earthquake, a flood and so on. It starts with the famous opening line: “A specter is haunting Europe…” [quoted text also onscreen] It shows the way.

Kluge

What does it actually mean?

Grünbein

First of all it’s pretty imprecise. This “Communism” as the text calls it, is presented as a chimera, a specter, something intangible, but that it has already been in contact with everyone.

Kluge

Are you saying, it doesn’t exist, it’s an illusion of the powerful? Of the beholder?

Grünbein

To me to use of the metaphor “specter” does seem to imply that he felt uneasy about it himself. You can’t refer to something factual…

Kluge

“Something sinister is haunting Europe?”

Grünbein

“A specter is haunting Europe, the specter of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French radicals and German police spies…” Exactly. So, the specter is created by the resistance or the reaction to it. But it’s still a specter. A text by Edgar Allan Poe could begin like this. It hasn’t made it any more palpable. There are many passages like it. And speaking of which, it has almost become a sort of literary tradition ever since Hegel. The Hegel-scholar Marx has indeed adopted the use of metaphors in philosophical and political texts. When things get less palpable, the metaphor steps in.

Kluge

“The iron hand of the world clock.” What does that suggest to you as a poet?

Grünbein

Well, it’s obviously some sort of allegory of time…

Kluge

A world clock… Does it exist anywhere? In England maybe?

Grünbein

The idea of the world clock means, that time beats the same everywhere, that there’s no place on earth that is exempted of this synchronized time.

Kluge

And the “iron hand” stands for…

Grünbein

Time has a certain necessity. With great necessity time has taken hold of the circumstances, of the people. That’s what the image of the iron hand stands for. It’s like a steamroller. It changes everything.

Give me your interpretation. What’s exactly in it? First there’s a song of praise, right? A hymn to the dynamics of bourgeois development, with enormous respect for the results of change in society. The bourgeoisie is a true revolutionary, and the capitalist forces always revolutionize. That takes up about two thirds of the text.

Grünbein

Yes, it is indeed a song of praise to the revolution of the bourgeoisie. So now it shows these two classes emerging, as it were, in tandem: bourgeoisie and proletariat. Brecht has actually said, he considers the main role of the manifesto to be the creation of these terms. They’re being primed and driven home. Part 2 deals with the proletariat and Communists, which are not the same. The proletariat consists de facto of wage laborers. It’s the army of workers creating the bourgeoisie, or rather capital. But they haven’t been politicized yet, Their consciousness hasn’t been raised. Only the Communists can achieve that. So at first only few Communists swim in this giant flood of laborers.

Kluge

He pictures them as metropolitans…

Grünbein

That’s what created the dynamics: the struggle of the opposition was to separate the communists from the proletariat. The agitators from the wage laborers.

Kluge

If you try to imagine what he means. In 1848 he means young revolutionaries, like farmers, leftists Hegelians and actual workers. Very undifferentiated and very isolated groups who are supposed to be cooperating. Who’d be a worker, who a Communist?

Grünbein

Purpose of the manifesto is also to dissociate themselves from other leftist theories, for instance, from the utopians, from the anarchists, and so on, from Proudhon, and so forth. Communism is strictly defined as being the outcome of the dynamics of the processes themselves. Meaning Communism is the final result of the socialization of capital, as Marx put it. So it will happen one day that capital, will abolish the propertied class.

Kluge

The product of this progress. Part of the surplus.

Grünbein

The logic behind the Manifesto is, basically: all you have to do is wait. But with heightened consciousness. [text onscreen: How would Brecht have labelled himself?] I think at the height of his art and in full command of his artistic powers, Brecht might have labeled himself a “Verse Technician.” Someone who knows all there is to know about the technical aspect of literature and how to apply verses in an auspicious and rewarding way… It’s as if he didn’t care what he was putting into words, strangely enough. He even consulted a theoretician like Korsch, a very strict Marxologist, to check the content of the work. His own pleasure comes from putting it into verse. He could’ve chosen anything. He might as well have put Darwin’s theory of evolution into hexameters or any other meter. Or Newton’s physics, anything. It hardly mattered to him, strangely enough. The speed with which he picks up and then drops a subject is conspicuous.

Kluge

But listening to you, I can’t help but wonder. If you take a sentence, a theoretically sound and poetically tight sentence, and translate it from German into French, then into Russian, Italian, Latin, English, and then back into German, it will have changed slightly. Like a prism it will take on a new splendor every time. Along the same lines, if I were to write something in prose and then set it in hexameters, as if you were cutting a jewel, then have it put into rhyme, and by different people to boot, then add some slang at the bar “Theke” in Oberhausen, such a line would change, too, it’d be polished like a beautiful stone.

Grünbein

We could also say, we’re dealing with a kind of aestheticization. Thought is made accessible this way. It has been taken out of the context of argumentation. It no longer has to prove itself, it can now be looked at from without. Great classical thoughts become objects to behold, thanks to the hexameter. And, like I said, it gives it a lulling quality. It is thereby removed from all dispute and theoretical debate. But that’s been done before. It’s just like what Schiller did when he translated Kant’s ideas into very similar meters. I think we can say, though it may sound disrespectful, but Marx is… What Marx was for Brecht, that’s what Kant was for Schiller, a new idealism as a sort of vehicle.

Kluge

It’s quite remarkable that they go to the trouble.

Grünbein

But dramatists need that.

Kluge

To say that there’s no border between theory and poetry. That’s Schiller’s basic principle. While all the others are writing novels, following Petrarch’s path, writing love stories, mainly, he says: “I write thoughts.” That’s actually a very bold attitude regarding the wherewithal of poetry. And Brecht had that, too. I like that. Could I get you to read a somewhat longer passage, to demonstrate how it sounds? Page 124 for example: “Overthrow the machinery and the means of production, the structure of society and all its living parts.”

Grünbein

Yes. “Conserving the old modes of production was always the rulers’ chief motive, the first to establish constant upheaval as the base of existence. Building its houses on trembling earth, fearing nothing but rust and moss, daily it smashes the power of crying inequalities, dissolving old moral bonds. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned. And the people left standing unsettled on trembling ground.” That’s a good verse, eh? “At last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition.”

Kluge

“But all this does not happen in just one land or two for the urgent…” Join me.

Grünbein

“For the urgent compulsion to unload its production incessantly chases our bourgeoisie across the entire globe as if in delirium. It settles in everywhere, everywhere nestled, everywhere spreading its enveloping threads.”

Kluge

“Consumption and manufacture, it makes cosmopolitan, destroying old national industries and drawing materials from the remotest of nations and its factories serving…”

Grünbein

“Needs and wants produced by the climes of other regions.” Here’s the lovely part with the mountain pass. “High up in clouds, the feverish goods go over the pass, smashing old tollgates and their password is ‘cheap.’ Bales of calico blow breaches into all the walls of China.”

8. Abschied von der industriellen Revolution: Hätten die Russen das Kapital kaufen können? Eine Episode aus Anlaß des Börsenkrachs 1929 (starts 0:48:43, ends 0:59:22)

text

Russia rises again!

text

That was the end of the

text

industrial age /

text (newspaper headline)

Stocks crash 10 billions

text

Around midday on October 30, 1929,

text

even the greediest plunderers,

text

who had bought shares

text

that the day before sold at $138 a share

text

for a measly 12 cents,

text

now wanted none of it /

text

It seemed a foregone CONCLUSION

text

that buyers down the line

text

were no longer to be found,

text

that the values lay buried

text

beneath the real circumstances to which they’d returned,

text

as if there’d NEVER been any such thing

text

as a market value /

text

These experienced speculators

text

acted wisely,

text

for it was three years later, in June 1932,

text

when things hit bottom /

text

The 2nd International Section

text

of the Central Committee in Moscow

text

received, on October 30,

text

telegrams that told

text

of the happenings

text

on the New York Stock Exchange /

text

Chests of SIBERIAN GOLD were taken

text

to the Kremlin’s loading platforms

text

next to stacks of cardboard boxes

text

containing, swathed in wadding,

text

forty sizable emeralds to a box /

text

The boxes, packed on pallets,

text

carried official seals /

text

[…] The ruling commissars’ idea

text

was based on the belief that the existential doubts

text

that the capitalist continents

text

were facing would not affect

text

the workers’ paradise /

text

Perhaps one could

text

buy up the capital ?/ […]

text

-The old boxes with share certificates

text

for Baku oil are still here /

text

Seven boxes with

text

Maria Theresa thalers /

text

Antiques from the palaces of the Czar

text

and confiscated Turkish pounds/

text

• One could even print purchase options

text

for Siberian land /

text

In the city of URALSK

text

VLADIMIR PUTILOV, engineer, watched

text

as a convoy of trucks

text

carrying the machinery

text

of his construction site drove off /

text

The equipment was to be used

text

for the WORLD ACQUISITION project /

text

Putilov never forgot the image

text

of the mud-bound convoy

text

rolling up the hill

text

and disappearing into the west/

text

The takeover of world markets by the

text

workers’ bloc failed /

text

The USSR had among its ranks

text

not more than 800 activists who had

text

experience in trading stocks

text

in western markets /

text

A Socialist takeover by force

text

with Mauser guns, ARMORED TRAINS

text

and squadrons was,

text

the commissars knew, impossible/

text

Nor did the PREDICTION come true

text

that capitalists (in a pinch)

text

would SELL the noose

text

with which to hang them/

text

And why was the Soviet Union,

text

a region sealed off from the worldwide depression,

text

affected by it anyway ?/

text

It seemed that some

text

MADNESS or desperation

text

that gripped the feelings of the masses

text

all over the world infected even an organizationally

text

separate part

text

of humanity /

text

Thus the same people [or their

text

sons and nephews] in 1944

text

drive the fascists from the country

text

that thought a takeover of the exiled,

text

helplessly prone CAPITAL back in 1929 was impossible / […]

text

• Would the collapse of heavy industry

text

as we now witness in the CIS

text

and the former East German states

text

not have happened

text

if the world economy had been

text

taken over by the workers ?/

text

If they’d seized the commanding heights of capital,

text

would the workers then

text

have produced unlimited amounts of

text

coal, iron, machines, planes and ships?

text

• Yes, and they would have built on it

text

with other means/

text

• Would that have been progress

text

or a dead end ?/

text

• An industry with self-confidence

text

cannot be compared with

text

an era of Real Capitalism

text

that continually suffers from

text

an inferiority complex /

text

• Self-confidence left

text

with the convoy in the hills of Uralsk?/

text

• Yes, because of the

text

international crisis /

text

• And the East German combines

text

would not have been broken up today ?/

text

• Both of the moons of Mars would now be populated /

9. How to read Das Kapital? (starts 0:59:23, ends 1:31:52)

Kluge

There is an edition from 1932 of the 1872 version of “Das Kapital.”

Oskar Negt, Marx commentator

Yes, the second edition.

Kluge

Prepared by Marx without any of the alterations that people like Kautsky and other publishers added to it. And Karl Korsch wrote the preface. In 1932. You know there’s something like National Socialism heading our way. The split in the labor movement is already perfect. There’s a strike at the Berlin transportation company, in which Communists and National Socialists team up. And now he writes the preface, a sort of user manual…

Negt

“Introduction,” as he calls it. How to deal with “Das Kapital.”

Kluge

How does one read a book like that? Or rather, how does one read it in 1932? [text onscreen: How to read Das Kapital?]

Negt

Well, he suggests a reading order that’s rather unusual, but it does suit our way of thinking. Not to start at the beginning, which is the systematic part, but to start with “The Working Day.” So that first of all the phenomenology of the consequences of capital can be made apparent and, of course… I mean…

Kluge

One day of life-activity.

Negt

One day of life-activity. The whole relationship between labor-time and life-activity is treated very extensively by Marx in the chapter on “The Working Day,” as it was already indicated at in the “Ten Hours Bill” about the achievements of the labor movement and the reduction of working hours. So first you have to get an impression of all the aspects and the agony-causing problems of capitalism in the division of a working day. Start with that and then read Marx’s other chapters that are of a more systematic nature for a better understanding.

Kluge

When reading this chapter, you land in all sorts of fights. Descriptions of fights for the 8-hour working day, for the 10-hour working day, against child labor. That means you are in a concrete situation and you see… This will become important in the chapter on commodity fetishism. How does it affect the lives of real people? [text onscreen: The industrial revolution has two products.] The industrial revolution has two products. First, the factories and commodities, and wealth that capital acquires and second, cooperation.

Negt

Cooperation of living labor. The first thing you mentioned is in a way the accumulated “dead labor,” as he calls it. As far as the other is concerned: in the realm of living labor a whole different logic reigns. [onscreen text: Chapter 13, “Machinery and Large-scale Industry”]

Kluge

It can only be gained, it can’t be accumulated or bought.

Negt

And it rebels, too. He ties in this rebellious element with the history of productive force. Living labor carries within itself an element of rebellion towards the dead labor that has deposited itself on top.

Kluge

That’s so incredible about this novel, or rather this commentary work, that these are real people, comparing themselves with others. In every commodity there’s a spark of life that is the labor invested in it. These commodities carry a part of life in them.

Negt

That’s why he speaks of commodities as “dead labor.”

Kluge

[onscreen text: Marx speaking like Hölderlin / “Recognition”] If Marx could write like Hölderlin, he would say that commodities are so desirable that when you starve for commodities, you start overthrowing governments. It makes empires implode. That’s why dead labor, living labor and buyers’ living capacity for desire recognize each other.

Negt

Certainly. They are reflections.

Kluge

Reflections?

Negt

Reflections. And… That’s his idea of alienation and of self-alienation. If these reflections no longer take place, if that which I produce is dispossessed from me, I am estranged from these objects, that are really my objects and my added value. So to get this estranged world of objects back into the context of the living is actually what real Socialism is. In a way it is giving life to what’s dead.

Kluge

You’re saying the resurrection of the dead should be promised?

Negt

“Resurrection of the dead” might be too theological.

Kluge

Jesus promises it.

Negt

And too religious a reading. But Marx did entertain the notion that “Communism is the production of the form of intercourse itself.” The way people treat each other and the way they use objectified objects within the context of their lives is for them an essential element of liberation, emancipation and Socialism. As far as that’s concerned, the resurrection of the dead, the overcoming of dead labor is an essential element of…

Kluge

Overcoming it or liquifying it?

Negt

If you include the world of commodity in determining the aims of human relationships, it would…

Kluge

Re-appropriation!

Negt

Re-appropriation.

Kluge

That means the streets, the cities, the habits and laws, but also the machine tools that can build new machines, the inventions, all that is more or less congealed labor. And this labor of our ancestors is our wealth, if we can… I don’t mean to say “exploit it,” but if we can utilize it…

Negt

The idea of Socialism is… to reap the harvest of the wealth that has been produced by generations. That is the criticism that Marx levels at capitalism: he cannot reap his own human harvest.

Kluge

In the “Communist Manifesto” he actually sings capitalism’s praise. He praises what it has yielded…

Negt

Things like the Great Wall of China. Exactly. But he can’t reap it.

Kluge

He can’t keep it, can’t save it.

Negt

And that’s a viewpoint of great current validity. The overflowing wealth of these developed societies is only in part of benefit to these societies.

Kluge

It vaporizes like in an explosion. If you could put the explosive power in a receptacle, like an Otto engine, that turns it into movement, you’d have harnessed explosive power. That would be the real purpose.

Negt

Which is why time and again… This whole idea of these cities in ancient Greece, the “polis” idea… You just mentioned Hölderlin, to him this “polis” idea is the essential concept of polity. That’s why this receptacle is time and again… If you see Athens at the time of Pericles as a receptacle…

Kluge

Where they were in such close contact, that mutual decisions could be made.

Negt

And the objectified world could be controlled.

Kluge

If you had to tell someone who hasn’t read “Das Kapital” what it’s about, how would you summarize it off the cuff?

Negt

Basically, what it’s about is… I’m speaking of volume 1, as that’s the deciding breakthrough, the deciding concept. That’s about how capital works with respect to wage labor. The logic of capital.

Kluge

The production process of capital.

Negt

How that works, and in this case what, independent of commitments, of refractions, of ties to the welfare state, what this logic looks like. Habermas has always criticized, as I and others have, that Marx failed to consider the integration into the welfare state. Today, though, one could argue that capital, for the first time in history, works exactly the way Marx described it in this version of “Das Kapital,” with all the refractions.

Kluge

Globalization allows it to free itself of all historical circumstances.

Negt

And of moral circumstances, often even of legal circumstances. In this respect, “Das Kapital,” as Korsch presents it, has an enormous current validity, showing how one capital kills off another. In the last chapters he analyzes the process of circulation of capital. And these merger-metaphysics that you witness today have been predicted there. Not in a prophetical way, I think, but by an impressive painstaking analysis of the movement of capital.

Kluge

Just like mutation and selection are the two rules…

Negt

To quote Darwin.

Kluge

… according to which life regulates chance production, he presents his elements here.

Negt

I think he meant to underline the parallels to Darwin. He describes the production process of society. Darwin, on the other hand, described the process of the species.

Kluge

[text onscreen: How to comment on it with images?] They are huge thought processes. With what kind of images could one comment on them? To challenge, comment and illustrate, not just to accompany it with pictures. The images should be closer to the concrete situations and thus forever challenge the abstractions. With the working day it’s obvious.

Negt

Yes, that wouldn’t be too hard. When he speaks of commodity fetishisms, of phantasmagoria and of people standing on their heads…

Kluge

What does he mean by that?

Negt

Because the exchange-value has started dominating the use-value, although the exchange-value stems from the use-value. So it’s topsy-turvy. In commodity fetishism the true history of a commodity is lost. Meaning the memory that the commodity would have of its own origin is lost.

Kluge

It doesn’t yet apply to craftsmanship. Look at Cardillac the goldsmith. He makes jewellery and won’t give up. He doesn’t part with his jewellery.

Negt

No, he doesn’t.

Kluge

He doesn’t sell it.

Negt

He kills the people.

Kluge

And then gets back what he produced. The true memory of commodities! [text onscreen: The memory of commodities / “The producer’s greed”] Pretty narrow-minded, of course. It’d be pretty tricky if all producers of commodities…

Negt

If they are produced as commodities! That’s exactly the problem in Balzac’s work. There the jewellery is produced as a commodity. Had they been produced for their use-value…

Kluge

Gobseck, for instance, who produces a daughter and money, in other words, who produces wealth, but he’s stingy with both, and doesn’t pass either on. First of all that form of behavior is rudimentary.

Negt

It is rudimentary, it’s the greed of the true collector. A collector doesn’t part with anything.

Kluge

Like a dragon he guards what he has stolen or produced. And in this respect capital is first of all something creative. It upsets all of this. [text onscreen: “Creative destruction” / Dynamics of capital] Creatively.

Negt

That’s another important element, if you want to explain to someone what “Das Kapital” is all about, these incredible dynamics that open up all the traditional relationships. Capitalism is the economic system that contrary to the conserving economies of old…

Kluge

Pharaohs, warehouses.

Negt

… only consist of dynamics and of smashing up. Just the way Joseph Schumpeter defines the entrepreneurial human being: “He destroys. He is compelled to destroy old things to enable him to create something new.” Something like that had been unheard of in the economy of the household since Aristotle, so ever since people have been thinking about economy. Economy has always been, literally, keeping house meticulously on a long-term basis. What this capitalism is doing is housekeeping on a short-term basis. And basically it passes the costs of it on to the next generation, to the future.

Kluge

I’d like to come back to the images. Working day. The sum of all my working days is my life. Now there’s a worker who at the end of his life goes to see a doctor and says, “These tablets for my stomach is what I get in return for always having done my best. That’s no equivalent. It’s no consolation that my employer also has stomach pains and takes the same tablets. Equality is not what I’m after. I want a better life, another exchange.” [text onscreen: “Ideal-typical” images / Relative poverty of images in DAS KAPITAL]

Negt

And maybe better work.

Kluge

If you compare an entire human life with a working day and the minute an accident at work occurs, like dots on a map, which is a means of navigation, then you see how images develop. They’re not as specific as you’d think. They show the scale of things, in what relations things stand.

Negt

[onscreen text: The image as “frozen moment”] An image captures a moment that would otherwise go by fleetingly.

Kluge

The moment is everything.

Negt

And the moment is indeed the funneled experience, the funneled living experience that is being captured.

Kluge

That’s how it was meant in life. That’s what the moment shows and the entire life, too.

Negt

And, of course, we as analysts and to a lesser extent writers, and even all the well-trained analysts of the Frankfurt School have trouble developing visual worlds that can express in concrete terms what truth analyses and the findings present. I think there’s a kind of aporia, or rather a contradiction between image and concept.

Kluge

We should learn to treat images in a serial way: Show an image, then it’s variant, then a variant of the variant, etc., so we can learn to comment in images and situations. Language couldn’t do that.

Negt

I suppose you’d use a lower frame rate than for a normal film?

Kluge

Much lower. Film doesn’t really lend itself to that.

Negt

It’s too fast.

Kluge

Much too fast! Besides, a new image erases the old one. Sometimes you’re lucky enough that the old ones linger on unconsciously in a memory beneath the memory and sort of “colorize” the new ones, thus creating epiphanies. That’s basically what Eisenstein wants, but it’s a very weak tool. If someone is insusceptible to it, it won’t work. And music made only for musical people is wrong.

Negt

The question is, of course, what Eisenstein’s intention was in filming “Das Kapital.” He didn’t want to make a film about “Das Kapital.” It’s something different. Eisenstein has always been one to produce didactic pieces and get learning processes going.

Kluge

Not so here. Here he wanted to say, “I want to leave the anecdotic, the exemplary and didactic that I still had in “October” and in “The Battleship Potemkin” behind. I want to get through to the subtext of the people. I want to show a single day of two people from 2 pm until late at night. In this working day, this day of life everything should come up, from world history, economy and the production process of capital that is relevant.”

Negt

Maybe it was an excessive demand on himself.

Kluge

He thought, Joyce managed it in “Ulysses” …

Negt

He did, but he didn’t want to do “Das Kapital.”

Kluge

Joyce worked with words not images.

Negt

With words. Maybe with words it would’ve worked, but with images it’s extremely difficult. –

Kluge

He could have said, I’m only doing fragments, and hope the viewers fill in the gaps themselves. They have past experience. It’s an incredible resource, the imaginative power of experienced people, viewers.

Negt

In that case he would supply the fragments, and they would put them together from experience.

Kluge

Like attractors. As if it were a dialogue between screen and viewers. That’s not entirely utopian. It is very well possible. It could work in a different kind of cinema. That’s heterotopia! Now let’s suppose he succeeded in getting at least part of it on film, and some other director would have continued and also gotten a part done, and in the protest movement it was taken up again and Goddard hadn’t made his Ciné-tracts but concerned himself with this and incited other directors, because it’s not impossible to develop such image sequences.

Negt

But I’d still be asking myself, what will it add? I mean what is the additional explanatory value? Even if he didn’t want to make a didactic piece like “Potemkin,” what did he want? Did he want to try out some potential of the medium film? The “Critique of Pure Reason” or Hegel’s “Science of Logic” would be comparable projects. As film projects… To develop this as an experiment… Are there any references in his notes as to what he… Why he wanted to do this?

Kluge

Yes, what he says is at worst it would arouse such criticism of the medium film, that the medium itself would change. But maybe the film could also have encouraged people to think. Not like a prosthesis or tool but to consolidate thinking in another way. So that thinking doesn’t just take place in studies, doesn’t just transpire in words, and is not only done by educated people but in all layers of society and to that end I need “situations.” It’s better to anchor situations with images than with words. There’s not much along the lines of situations in “Das Kapital.” They exist.

Negt

There is the situation in which the capitalist and the wage worker confront each other at the end of the chapter on the barter of products…

Kluge

Let’s do it.

Negt

One goes forth rejoicing, while the other, according to Marx, goes forth somewhat aggrieved as if he’d sold his skin and is now awaiting the tannery.

Kluge

Now let’s take this literally. In images a situation like that would look very differently in different historical periods. In the case of the weavers the families are right behind them. The men stand before the manor of the factory owner. In open quarrel. With the police look on nearby to repress the workers’ rebellion. That’s a real conflict. Schleef and Gerhart Hauptmann have staged it like that. It’s an image. Another image would be when a worker only comes into contact with the entrepreneur via an attorney, the bookkeeper or the cashier. It may be a woman, maybe someone who’s associated with him, she may be a promoted worker. That means, the contact is getting less direct. The worst scene would be if the entrepreneur is sitting somewhere on the Riviera and the crisis takes place at the factory. A labor dispute while the entrepreneur is far away. The most difficult situation for a dispute or a confrontation. So these are several cases in which personal contact, the conversation between the traders, the entrepreneur and the worker, is becoming more and more abstract until, finally, the worker can no longer see the entrepreneur.

Negt

Exactly. [text onscreen: “Concept” and “perception” in Kant] In “The Critique of Pure Reason” there are many such “situations” like in the schemata chapter on the transcendental dog. This poodle…

Kluge

That the Saint Bernard, the poodle and the Chinese pinscher can all be classified under the concept of “dog” although there’s no resemblance.

Negt

No resemblance. Moreover Kant says one shouldn’t have a single impression of a dog. Such a funny situation!

Kluge

Still you can easily tell them apart from any kind of coyote or cat, although they can resemble them.

Negt

Central to “Critique of Pure Reason.”

Kluge

Schematism, yes.

Negt

And likewise there are many…

Kluge

It’s a very important image.

Negt

… there are many poetical passages in “Das Kapital.”

Kluge

Let’s analyze some of them. Suppose you were to look down on earth from orbit. Near Japan and Shanghai you’d see these kinds of electrical sparks. You’d see the planet illuminated over Europe and over the U.S. You wouldn’t see anything on the Pacific and few lights over Africa. What you’d have there is an image of diligence, of what happens on earth at night, of what’s working. You have portrayed night work. And cooperation, too, by the way. Coherence. Something you can usually only feel. That could be one image.

Negt

It could, yes.

Kluge

Or let’s take another image. In the chapter on the working day Marx describes how children of 11 or even 9 working in silk production are being seated on high chairs or platforms so they can reach the machines. But they need these little ones because only they can handle the silk with their little fingers. The silk producers’ lobby cries out, “We have to close our plants, if child labor is banned.” They win.

Negt

The mines demand child labor, too. To keep the tunnel ceilings as low as possible they send in children. That’s right. You could use…

Kluge

Now that is all very pictorial and at the same time it shows how distant these texts are. This situation has been overcome. For once the labor movement won. Here child labor has been abolished and the 8-hour working day was achieved. Here the prime information of the image is to show the distance to the present.

Negt

Yes, but the 8-hour working day is being challenged once more today. People are working longer hours again. In this respect that concept…

Kluge

Hasn’t changed.

Negt

The division between day of life and working day has remained a central problem in our present existence. I’m also thinking about images in the chapter on original accumulation, in which he says that people move to the cities…

Kluge

Because they are forced to, their huts are being burned down.

Negt

Exactly. And if they don’t find work in four weeks, they are brandmarked with an “S,” as in “slave.” If they don’t find work in six months, they’re executed. Elisabeth I had 72,000 people executed. Beggars and the like. So the social conditions can be translated into images very well. The problem I think will be the theoretical side. If you film “Das Kapital,” you must…

Kluge

Isn’t that the thrilling part? These images will be most thrilling. But they’ll be practically useless for an analysis of the process of capital, as even Genghis Khan could have done it, without any meaning. Here it has meaning. That’s the difference. That means, the cottages of the English tenants are burned down, because sheep are meant to graze where people used to work, because it raises the exchange value in Antwerp.

Negt

And also the chapter in which Marx quotes Thomas More that at least the churches will be used as sheep’s pen. That can be rendered into a wonderful image.

Kluge

Then again, under Napoleon without the process of capital it’d be exactly the same.

Negt

Exactly. That’s why I asked what is…

Kluge

What is and what isn’t essential? What is merely a novel-like and exciting image, making you wait for the next love story that could be included there. Which part is novel, which part analysis? That’d be very interesting. One thing is important: A distant reality like for instance child labor, these little human beings, these little British girls, standing on their platforms in a silk factory, working away with their little fingers 10 hours a day, being used up, is not something of our time. But to endure watching something like that, a thing of the past, would change your view of the now.

Negt

Always.

Kluge

Because you would look for something similar in our time, and you’d find there’s no such thing, not even in Bangladesh. At the same time there are other things. That’s “crossmapping”, searching for images based on another image. [text onscreen: On the use of classical antiquity: Alienation of experience - -] That’s just it with classical antiquity. From Latin or Greek texts I can learn a lot about my own time exactly because that time has past. Because of the notion…

Negt

The same goes for political analysis. The rule of the senate, the age of Pericles can shed so much light…

Kluge

Exactly because it has no reference to our experience, it’s like a new place for our imagination. It has to be as far away as the moon then I can colonize it with my imagination.

10. How much blood and horror is at the bottom of all “things good”! (starts 1:31:53, ends 1:36:04)

text

How much blood and horror is at the bottom of all “things good”!

Kluge, reading

“You burn something in so it remains in the memory.”

?, reading

“Only that which never ceases to hurt remains in the memory.”

Kluge, reading

“A main principle from the oldest, but, sadly, also the longest psychology on earth.”

?, reading

“You could even say, wherever on earth there still is solemnity, seriousness, mystery and dark color in the lives of men…”

Kluge, reading

“… it is a continued effect of the terror with which people everywhere on earth used to promise, pledge and praise.”

?, reading

“The past breathes on us and rises within us whenever we become serious.”

Kluge, reading

“It was never without blood, torture or sacrifice when man deemed it necessary to make a memory of something.”

?, reading, and as text onscreen through ‘mankind’

“Ah, reason, seriousness, mastery over emotions, the whole gloomy business called Thought, all the privileges…”

Kluge, reading

“… and showpieces of mankind, how dearly they have cost.”

?, reading

“How much blood and horror is at the bottom of all ’things good’.”

Kluge, reading

Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morality,” “Works,” 8vo edition, Volume VII, Leipzig 1921, as quoted by Max Horkheimer in: “Authority and Family.”

11. The forced institution of exchange (starts 1:36:05, ends 1:39:05)

text

The forced institution of exchange - - (Adapted from Marx, Adorno, Benjamin, Kurnitzky)

text

“Off the coast, behind which there are farming settlements,

text

Phoenician ships appear /

text

The ship’s crew lays out commodities on the beach:

text

pots, iron tools, etc. /

text

At night the coast dwellers

text

collect these interesting objects,

text

thinking they are gifts from the gods /

text

The crew mounts a punitive expedition

text

that burns down a few settlements /

text

Then it withdraws aboard the ships /

text

At this the inhabitants, who are not familiar with exchange

text

only with sacrifice, try to appease the gods /

text

They lay out offerings on the beach, food and produce of the land /

text

Because the night before the massacre the crew had taken

text

the “stolen” commodities back to the ship

text

and laid them out on the beach again the following morning /

text

Two rows are lying next to each other:

text

the commodities from the ship and the inhabitants’ counter-sacrifices /”

text

“(…) After the ships had left,

text

the instructed inhabitants hesitated,

text

thinking of all the severed limbs and

text

destroyed houses,

text

but then took the just equivalent off the beach /

text

For the time being they have learned

text

what ’exchange value’ is /”

12. “I’ve never seen two dogs exchange a bone!” (starts 1:39:06, ends 1:57:03)

Prof. Rainer Stollman, Bremen University

Marx writes somewhere that the exchange of commodities develops on the fringes of society. At the point where two societies meet that each have things they can exchange for things the other doesn’t have. It is their mutual needs that lead to these kinds of markets and exchanges.

Kluge

So you first have long-distance trade and only then business starts…

Stollman

In the domestic market.

Kluge

… in the primary market of the village or a single town.

Stollman

Exchange is something you have to learn. You have to develop the trust that it’s not a swindle. Like Adam Smith said, “I’ve never seen two dogs exchange a bone!” Such a moment of exchange has an almost anthropological quality that distinguishes humans from animals.

Kluge

Before the first exchange takes place, the inhabitants are very different from the world that already knows exchange. Seafaring, civilized people arrive and spread out commodities on the beach. The inhabitants believe them to be gifts from the gods and take them. Then a punitive expedition is mounted and punishes them until they understand that they have to leave a counter-gift on the beach.

Stollman

Remnants of this behavior, albeit without punishment, can still be witnessed today when new markets are being opened up. Commodities are given away for free for a certain period, and when people get used to having them, they have to pay. [text onscreen: The undercurrent of exchange / Pre-capitalist preparatory work] There must be something else, beyond the exchange of commodities and capital-dominated exchange, that sustains it.

Kluge

So you could say that urban capitalist exchange in itself would not survive for very long, without an undercurrent of preparatory work. Think of the groundwork of the family that continually produces the commodity of labor for free.

Stollman

There are several different motives. Marx mentions a pre-capitalist motive: craftsman’s pride, craftsman’s spirit, the will to do a job well for it’s own sake.

Kluge

Minutely analyzed in Richard Sennet’s new book.

Stollman

He has went into that in detail. It’s important to him again, or rather, he thinks it’s more important than we have been taking it for. And he gives some nice examples, for instance, that women accept lesser jobs in hospitals when they are state-run, because they believe state-run institutions do things right, not just for profit. That alone is worth accepting lesser wages. And then there are different contexts, for example, something that only grows among workers in larger companies, and is more to do with solidarity and daily cooperation than with craftsman’s pride.

Kluge: [text onscreen: Behind the backs of people the “Law of Value” is at work] Like a law of nature the law of value instates itself behind the backs of those exchanging.

Stollman

People exchange commodities without knowing what they’re doing. Meaning: the commodities are being exchanged according to their value, which is the law of value, but the people doing the exchanging only know of this superficially. They don’t realize it’s the invested labor force that’s being compared. To them the price is set by the market. Where this price comes from, and why it regulates itself like it does, is not known to them. [text onscreen: “DAS KAPITAL” PART 1: COMMODITIES AND MONEY CHAPTER 1, SECTION 1] “The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist production mode prevails presents itself as an ‘immense accumulation of commodities,’ its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.” To my mind there are two terms in this sentence that are important. One is “presents itself,” the other “immense accumulation of commodities.” The problem with “presents itself” isn’t easy to understand for us today, as the “accumulation of commodities” actually presents itself to us. Go to a department store and there it is. But when Marx wrote this, there were hardly any department stores. He meant wealth merely presents itself, but it’s an illusion. It presents itself as an accumulation of commodities…

Kluge

But it isn’t.

Stollman

In reality wealth is something else completely. That’s the point.

Kluge

That’s how he puts it.

Stollman

So the material accumulation of commodities is an illusion.

Kluge

That means all the wealth of the department stores, which has always delighted me when I was a child, and the sum of there being products everywhere on earth, of our entire planet being like an accumulation of commodities and operating like a commodities route, but at the same time excluding people in certain countries, all that is an illusion because true wealth lies where?

Stollman

In labor. In the ability of man to produce these commodities. It’s not all that hard to envisage. You can see it, if there’s a strike a production stoppage or a transport shortage, then very quickly these commodities are gone. If certain goods can’t be repaired, they very quickly… Even a house that’s not occupied, needs repairs and crumbles down sooner than one with tenants in it. Always having an eye on things and saying “that’s wealth” is the true fetishism of commodities. And the apparent “objective character of the product,” as Marx calls it, is, in fact, the capability or ability of the people to produce these things. That’s the true wealth.

Kluge

So how can they come together? So far they haven’t done that.

Stollman

Within capitalist production this wealth of the abilities is not positively existent, but only as something made one-sided, as poverty of these abilities that are later joined together in the great machinery, but that lead to impoverishment of the one. Meaning this wealth exists as wealth of abilities not within the individual, as education or the like, but only as a summary of their individual, disowned, expropriated abilities.

Kluge

But what if you look at the opposite, the “collective worker”? The collective worker is what Marx calls the sum of all productive forces of mankind that, without being organized, work together on this planet. You could say that, right?

Stollman

You could. Marx uses the category of “collective worker,” and you have to look at it to achieve any kind of understanding of what keeps the entire machinery, this structure together.

Kluge

Their wealth would reflect insufficiently on their property situation and their means of enjoyment. But it is in the joy of labor, if it is coherent, and in the entire planet whirring and buzzing with cooperation that wealth lies.

Stollman

It does, but in concrete history it only exists as a distortion. The Third Reich setting up a department for “The Beauty of Labor” is a distortion of the true pride of production that people could develop if they were to find joy in the overexertion of their individual manpower.

Kluge

The National Socialists tried playing to that tune. One bit of propaganda went: The Führer is on an express train, at night crossing the Ruhr region. He sees all the lights and people working late at night for the Reich. He observes, as it were by proxy of the dear Lord, this collective work. The idea of everyone working together, with public interest coming before self interest, and on the streets a variety of goods is indeed being transported… For brief moments that is what you just called “pride of the producer,” working people relishing in themselves in cooperating. Like a life form that is obviously less narrow-minded than, as it were, servitude, dependence of nature and isolation.

Stollman

It was the same under Communism. There’s a famous poem that’s usually quoted in irony: “There is still light in the Kremlin.” Your talk of Hitler reminded me of it.

Kluge

It’s the same propaganda image.

Stollman

Stalin’s still at work while every one else is asleep.

Kluge

It’s saying, he observes the brave labor of the night, the collective night shift all the way to Siberia. “What is ‘Das Kapital’ really?” is what I read in your manuscript. Is it science? Is it art? Is it an anthology?

Stollman

Yes, that seems to me to demand some preliminary considerations and it poses a problem. First of all, it is science in so far as science was regarded in the 19th century. Marx himself refers to Darwin, he speaks in all earnest of laws, meaning laws of nature as discovered by Darwin, to be taken seriously. This understanding of law for example isn’t all that precarious as it may sound. The law of falling bodies, for example, is not an empirical law. If I drop a sheet of paper here, the law of falling bodies doesn’t apply.

Kluge

A ball of iron would fall faster.

Stollman

Exactly.

Kluge

Only in a vacuum…

Stollman

Only there does it apply. Similarly, scientifically speaking, Marx’s law of motion only applies if you create a vacuum of capitalism. The historical sources of friction surrounding that…

Kluge

So after capitalism and before it, it would be possible to observe these laws?

Stollman

Well, yes. That’s the scientific aspect, but it’s also major philosophy, of course. It’s Hegelian philosophy transposed onto the true development of society. It’s Hegelian philosophy corrected. That’s the philosophical aspect. And the third aspect can be found in Karl Korsch’s preface who states two perplexing quotes, in which Marx speaks of “Das Kapital I” as being an aesthetical construct, as having an artificial form, is more or less how he puts it. And that is most perplexing.

Kluge

Who is Karl Korsch?

Stollman

Karl Korsch is a great western Marxist, you could say. Brecht’s teacher. He held a chair in Thuringia, had to flee from the Nazis, and joined Brecht in exile …

Kluge

From 1918 he was a minister in a radical left-wing government of Thuringia for a short while.

Stollman

He joined Brecht in Denmark, who called him “my Marxism teacher.” Then he went to America, but without much luck. He goes on writing and…

Kluge

In Boston. For the university, so he is accepted.

Stollman

Yes, but it was a struggle and he met a lot of rejection, it was hard for him.

Kluge

But he’s the kind of man who deals with it by not applying a doctrine. No doctrine, because he uses the language of the post-1918 society to transpose in a very robust, simple and plain way, the 19th century language of Marx’s complex thoughts into a 20th century language, isn’t that so? He’s a top-class commentator.

Stollman

He was involved in workers’ education, so he wanted to write texts that could be read by non-academics.

Kluge

But nothing like a manual either. Nothing like an ABC to Marx in a simplified form. No, he retains the full complexity but speaks of real experiences. His examples are simply robust, simple and comprehensible.

Stollman

He’s a very independent thinker. He was the first to hold the thought that Marxism itself was the false consciousness of the Soviet Union, enabling this country to industrialize. A breathtaking notion for a Marxist of that time. [text onscreen: In the “Cloak of Marxism” / 
Societies catapult themselves towards industry – !] Marxism was, in Marx’s words, the false consciousness of this society to be able to industrialize.

Kluge

I see! Under the pretense…

Stollman

In the cloak of Marxism a society that’s actually not yet ready, because apart from small numbers in the cities it has no proletariat, can catapult itself into the industrial age.

Kluge

Through hallucination.

Stollman

Exactly. The same goes for China.

Kluge

So as an incentive the production of surplus value and contentment of the workers are insufficient to achieve a hastened and premature industrialization. What I need is an assurance of the conditions behind Marxism, namely a nation of freedom. And this goal, this paradisiacal assurance, creates the production capacity with which, in this case by a manipulator like Stalin, industrialization is enforced.

Stollman

Yes.

Kluge: [text onscreen: An ‘artistic whole’.] It says here “An ‘artistic whole’.” That’s what Korsch is saying: Read it like a piece of music or like a great, as you call it, educational novel. An educational novel about commodities.

Stollman

Well, yes, because Marx was very stringent about this correlation. He develops the whole system of society from a cell. Just like medical science can tell a lot about a body from a single cell, and, as genetic engineering shows, if it understands this cell, it can re-create the entire body, according to today’s fantasies. That’s the reasoning behind “Das Kapital I”: If I know the cell, i.e., “the commodity,” then I can develop the entire society from it. That’s what makes this book so fascinating. Just to list them: he starts out with commodity, commodity exchange, the commodity exchange generates money, money evolves into capital, capital creates surplus value, then follows the expanded scale of capital, and finally we come to the personality of this vulgar commodity “interest.” When money becomes more money, and you don’t even have to know how it does so.

Kluge

And that is…

Stollman

The ideal personality.

13. Socialist Robinsonians of 1942 (starts 1:57:04, ends 2:12:56)

text onscreen

Diana Leibowitz, commissar (1939)

text onscreen: “Imprisoned by nature” / Socialist Robinsonians of 1942

Galina Antoschewskaja, translator: “Diana Leibowitz, commissar, a Jewish girl from Odessa. Thoroughly studied political economy. An example of this economy is the story of Robinson Crusoe. How can anyone who is shipwrecked, his head full of London ideas, survive on a lonely island using the basic elements of human civilization until some ship finds his island by accident? Diana was assigned to a trading vessel of the USSR that left Odessa in the summer of 1940 for New York. From there the ship was to join a convoy [text onscreen, photo caption: Steamship Komsomolsk IV] that was sailing from Iceland, early winter 1941, to Murmansk…”

Kluge

Murmansk?

Antoschewskaja

Murmansk, that’s a city. “… where it was to supply them with armaments and relief supplies. North of Norway the convoy was attacked by German surface forces, and driven apart. The Komsomolsk IV, entrusted to the commissar, was sunk. In a lifeboat the sailors, the commander, the 1st navigation officer and the commissar reached Bear Island.

text onscreen

Bear Island

Kluge

Who is Diana?

Antoschewskaja

Diana…

Kluge

Diana is a commissar.

Antoschewskaja

Yes.

Kluge

And Bear Island is way up north.

Antoschewskaja

If this is Spitzbergen, this Murmansk, and this Norway, then Bear Island is in the middle.

Kluge

And there’s nothing there, only glaciers, rocks and boulders.

Antoschewskaja

It’s freezing cold. Oddly… And not a soul lives out there. [text onscreen, photo caption: Deserted hunting cabin]

Kluge

No, hence “Robinsonians.”

Antoschewskaja

The book “Robinson Crusoe” was read in school by everyone during the Soviet era. I can’t remember any of us dreaming of being Robinson, but everyone in school knew the book, although it wasn’t part of the curriculum. It was like a fairy tale. It was even turned into films, into cartoons, and probably… I think for the Soviet people it was like an inborn idea. People should survive everything, when the dear Party has given you an order.

Kluge

Through thick and thin, right? Even on a remote northern island on which you can’t survive.

Antoschewskaja

You must! Your homeland awaits you. And probably… in the second place, and I laugh, but everyone dreams of a miracle happening. It may come from up above or from deep down, but it will come. That’s probably why all these people who used to be saved by planes on the North Pole…

Kluge

But that wasn’t possible here, it was war, no planes would come.

Antoschewskaja

No Red Army planes were flying around. They didn’t come. But the people probably said to themselves…

Kluge

Fired at in their lifeboat, they go ashore where you can’t survive. Many of them die. And eventually she is saved by a German submarine.

Antoschewskaja

But she showed great courage. She shot two polar bears with a Mauser. And then she…

Kluge

A Mauser is a gun?

Antoschewskaja

Mauser is a kind of gun.

Kluge

What’s it called in Russian?

Antoschewskaja

Mauser. There are many kinds, a ladies’ gun, a big Mauser… The word “Mauser” has simply become part of the Russian language. He took a Mauser…

Kluge

With a strong one you can kill a polar bear?

Antoschewskaja

They used a heavy one…

Kluge

But polar bears carry trichinella! They’re very dangerous. Not so much as predators, but because the meat is poisoned.

Antoschewskaja

Yes, probably.

Kluge

It killed off the rest of the crew. And there she sits, opposite this German lieutenant, the class enemy. She, as a Jew and commissar, is in grave danger.

Antoschewskaja

Her being a Jew was probably never first on her mind.

Kluge

In graver danger than on the island.

Antoschewskaja

It’s probably… If someone saves another human being, at some point he no longer sees the other as the enemy: “I saved him, so how could I kill someone that was saved by me?” That’s impossible.

Kluge

So he protects her.

Antoschewskaja

Of course!

Kluge

Not because he’s a decent officer, for a change, but because he’s proud…

Antoschewskaja: “I saved her!”

Kluge: … of having saved another human being. That’s why he doesn’t turn her in.

Antoschewskaja

Sure, of course. Normally…

Kluge

She escapes as by a miracle.

Antoschewskaja

Sure, it was a miracle, but the miracle was within her.

German Officer

Would you call yourself a Communist?

Diana Leibowitz, commissar

Yes.

German Officer

Admitting this in front of a German officer seems bold.

Leibowitz

If I were a defector, you’d despise me.

German Officer

And you don’t?

Leibowitz

What can I do?

German Officer

So how would you regard your trials based on your worldview? Does hardship unite people? Does it open up unknown ways out?

Leibowitz

In theory that’s what I expected.

German Officer

In reality it didn’t happen?

Leibowitz

No.

German Officer

Shouldn’t the quality of a worldview prove itself in an emergency?

Leibowitz

It should.

German Officer

But it didn’t?

Leibowitz

In our case it didn’t become apparent.

German Officer

Please explain.

Leibowitz

What does it have to do with the interrogation?

German Officer

I’m interested.

Leibowitz

According to the laws of war I am to state my name, rank and place of origin. Nothing else.

German Officer

Were your commands obeyed?

Leibowitz

Only if I had the gun in my hand.

German Officer

Who had the gun when you were asleep?

Leibowitz

The navigation officer.

German Officer

Your lover?

Leibowitz

How do you know?

German Officer

From an interrogation.

Leibowitz

I take it you have nothing else to do, and don’t want to find out anything so you question me about gossip.

German Officer

Are you embarrassed about having a lover?

Leibowitz

It was public knowledge.

German Officer

And unfair.

Leibowitz

Why unfair?

German Officer

One of them had a lover. The others, at first 83, at the end 11, didn’t. As I’m told, socialism means everyone according to his ability, everyone according to his need.

Leibowitz

That is correct.

German Officer

In an emergency that means: equal supply for all of the asset “woman.”

Leibowitz

The darkness and loneliness here make your imagination run wild.

German Officer

What good is Communism if essentials aren’t without ownership?

Leibowitz

They are without ownership. But I am not anyone’s property. I’m not the slave Friday, who has to be shared among all.

German Officer

I’d like to know what use Socialism is in an extreme and absurd situation as people on Bear Island experience? What is useful about it?

Leibowitz

I think nothing at all. Socialism presupposes abundance. Socialism should take place on a luxury steamer.

Kluge

So she’s a prisoner and if she’d ever return home from German imprisonment, she’d probably be killed.

Antoschewskaja

Who knows? There were so many different personal histories here in Germany… Their first thought was to get home. Those who were a little cleverer first wanted to know what was going to happen to them. They never thought they’d be hauled off to Siberia. They never expected that, I think.

Kluge

And, professor, you are still teaching this story after all these years?

Antoschewskaja

Well, “after all these years…”

Kluge

You need to have examples.

Antoschewskaja

You do. But first, you must find the courage in yourself to say, “I can! I will! I will get through it.” This woman showed such courage.

Kluge

And personally she was saved. But she was not a citizen like Robinson. And as a Socialist, she cannot say what use Socialism on Bear Island was. You need an entire society.

Antoschewskaja

At that time she didn’t think in terms of Socialism, Communism, capitalism…

Kluge

Just survival.

Antoschewskaja

Exactly. That was all-important. [text onscreen: “I can!”] She just said, “I can! I can help others.” She probably had a strength that was so great and beliefs so strong, not in God, but in the force of life, that it saved her. That’s what I believe. What would I have done in her place? I don’t know. How would I have behaved? No idea.

Oskar Negt, social researcher

This commissar… is marooned on an island with several others and a struggle for survival ensues.

Kluge

But they don’t kill each other.

Negt

No…

Kluge

She hides her Mauser gun.

Negt

Yes… Several people die but not by violence.

Kluge

Not by the hand of another.

Negt

It’s a very different situation because she’s a committed Communist and could now try to establish something like a community under the same extreme conditions as on Robinson Crusoe’s island. But it is, of course, an entirely different situation. It’s isn’t just about returning to their old society, but also about preserving their ideas and their humanity towards others.

Kluge

And also to try and survive somehow, as Socialism doesn’t offer a recipe for hopeless situations. You need a certain level of luxury. Goods that have already been produced.

Negt

In that respect this example documents in a great way that Socialism mobilizes certain survival instincts under situations of hardship that are actually inherent in all people. And founding a new society, complete with communication, solidarity and everything that is related to it is only possible in a society that has a certain wealth.

Kluge

There is the story about the plank of Carneades from classical antiquity. Under hopeless circumstances there is only one plank. Two people are shipwrecked and the plank can only support one. Now both of them have the right to use physical violence to push the other aside and deliver him to his death because no rules apply here. That’s the old tradition.

Negt

Kant is very cautious about the plank story and says there is no such right. It’s a so-called adiaphoron. That’s a…

Kluge

An undistinguishable case.

Negt

Something that has no moral quality, let alone a legal quality. It’s the hardship that allows you to survive only…

Kluge

It’s an anomic situation. It’s outside society.

Negt

Exactly.

Kluge

It’s impossible to forbid the stronger to kill the other, but at the same time he doesn’t have the right to kill him.

Negt

No. “Res nullius.” An adiaphoron. It’s neutral. They are very cautious interpretations. But in the interrogation records of the commissar it’s about the German officer wanting to find out what she’s thinking, why she’s a Communist.

Kluge

If there isn’t a magical cure within Communism with rules that apply here. But in one respect the story seems to depart from the plank of Carneades, namely, in the avoidance of lapsing into barbarism as long as possible.

Negt

She hides the gun, so no one will have it.

Kluge

She doesn’t exercise power.

Negt

If she had the gun, it would lead to a struggle for power.

Kluge

The others would want it, too. She’d have power. But she doesn’t assume the power that Robinson had over Friday but, instead, tries to survive without barbarism. The German submarine captain wonders how little difference in behavior there is, but senses there is a minute difference after all.

14. Keywords: “Ideology,” “Alienation,” “Vitality of Things?” " Is There a Human Right of Things?” with Joseph Vogl (starts 2:13:56, ends 2:26:43)

text onscreen

Cue: ideology

Kluge

To Marx ideology means “necessary false consciousness.” What does that mean?

Joseph Vogl

It means that reality, including what’s called empirical reality, is something that presents itself in a consistently simulated, falsified or even deceiving context. Necessary false consciousness means having access to the world around you in which my actions, my cognitive faculties and my desires are adequate enough to function completely reliably within a certain reality, except for one crucial misjudgment, namely that my efficient behavior in this world and my efficient life in this world, that the excess of my desires and their satisfaction in this world misjudge one thing, and that is that despite all these insights and all these desires, despite all these activities, I produce my own death without knowing it. Necessary false consciousness means believing you live while you are producing your own death.

text onscreen

Cue: alienation

Kluge

Cue: alienation.

Vogl

It’s a concept with a long history and an extensive biography. Like any concept with an extensive biography, there are two possibilities: either the biography of the concept has survived the world, or the world has survived the end of the concept’s life. If we take this concept as one having an indeed enormous biography and also a very important biography with a long conceptual and biographical career, then you’d have to trace it back to it’s original, earliest habitat, and ask, in what kind of constellation was it born and shaped? And in that case I’d say the concept of “alienation” was born into a world in which the social conditions, including political and economic conditions, subsisted under the aspect of “enchantment.” So the concept of “alienation” stems from a constellation of social magic and it describes a magical relationship, or a falsification of relationships a consistent falsification of relationships in which “I” and “Not I,” what’s mine and what’s alien, become very exchangeable.

Kluge

My experience is taken from me, my reality is pulled from under me. I have lived in a certain time and done my best, my utmost. Therein lies part of my life. Now this time is torn away by a change of dynasty, a lost war or a catastrophe, and now I am without my reality.

Vogl

And thus the concept creates a setting, a location inhabited by a multitude of eerie things. One of these would be a doppelgänger, my alien self. Another would be an object that has made itself independent. It has grown legs and moves about without my intent. And the third agent in this constellation would be the emergence or appearance of the unconscious. Something within me that possesses hidden, secret knowledge that I cannot decode. All these things cooperate within this idiosyncratic magic and call up a decoding plan, an observation plan to rectify the world of things, to rectify the facts.

Kluge

And I demand another world, a second life, because in the life that I’m living I don’t really have a first life.

Vogl

And at the same time that means that the idiosyncratic complex that is called “human being” is exposed by this alienation. A complex that cannot be rectified by the human being, by the self, by the anthropological substrate. You need another pivot, another Archimedean point. It must be on the outside, within the relationships, attached to some small thing like “commodity.” There it can be decoded in what way I misjudge my relationship with myself. And this misjudgment, the core of this misjudgment is alienation and it carries with it an enlightening promise. The concept of alienation carries with it the enlightening promise that I may some day in the future become one with myself.

text onscreen

Cue: The vitality of things

Kluge

The vitality of things.

Vogl

It has long been known that things have a life of their own, a vitality of their own. There is, for example, a long history of religious things and of things of worship. This poses the question: to what extent does the vitality of things add itself to my life, or to what extent does it live a parasitic life, sapping my own life. The vitality of things contains both options. I can combine my own vigor with that of things and enhance it. Conversely, I can get mixed up in the life of things and meet parasites, Dracula-like things that sap my life force.

Kluge

That can convene.

Vogl

Yes, and even conspire…

Kluge

That are in the majority.

Vogl

They are always in the majority.

Kluge

Joining forces with my needs.

Vogl

They may join forces with my needs, or they may interfere with my needs. Interposing themselves between me and the world.

Kluge

Starting a civil war within me, creating continuous unrest.

Vogl

And at the same time causing linguistic problems every time. The vitality of things develops an idiosyncratic language. I have to listen carefully to the things to hear it. Was sort of strange collective is it? Is there a parliament of things? Is there an assembly of things that decides democratically on idiosyncratic human sovereigns. There’s a political problem here. If things would vote on people, they’d always have a majority. Which political problem is lying dormant there?

Kluge

Something like the world exposition of 1851, held in a greenhouse with a tree in the middle of the Crystal Palace, would that be a parliament of things?

Vogl

That was more like a zoo of things. Things are shown like animals in a zoo and become sightseeing objects. We don’t know what these things do at night when all visitors have gone and all the lights have gone out. Maybe there’s a conspiracy of things.

Kluge

Palace-like buildings, such as the stock exchange, could they house a parliament of things?

Vogl

Stock exchanges are more like a room for orphaned things. A stock exchange works best when the things have become spiritual, when they have become immaterial. A working day at the stock exchange starts on a smooth floor, on a freshly cleaned floor, and after something like a market crash, or after a hard day’s work, piles of garbage are left behind. Piles of telegrams, scraps of paper and so on. The trash of a day at the stock exchange. The best stock exchange is the one that presents a free forum without things, in which things have become nothing but abbreviated communication that can be shouted out, or exchange rate charts and so on. This means: the closest interconnection of the stock exchange’s building with things occurs where these things don’t appear inside the stock exchange but on the fringes. And inside a kind of holy communion of things takes place, marking their metamorphosis to an immaterial body. It’s the High Mass of things that takes place in the stock exchange.

Kluge

But not parliament?

Vogl

No.

text onscreen

Cue: a human right of things

Kluge

Is there a human right of things?

Vogl

There’s a human right of things against humans. So it’s an idiosyncratic paradox. Or to put it in another way: accepting a so-called human right of things would fundamentally change the human right for humans. There is a central paragraph that since the 19th century has been part of every modern society’s criminal law, and that is the question of, the paragraph about “accountability.” With this paragraph human law, as regards to things like the question of human dignity, opens up to the rights of things. Things are given the same discretion to act as human beings themselves. It means, for example: What does a murderer do when he says in his defense, “I didn’t kill him. The dagger, my weapon did.” A weapon has become independent.

Kluge: “As a human being I am a projectile. Something within me killed you. At that moment I was a thing.” That’s no justification?

Vogl

It is, but the question of mankind and accountability, i.e., everything that makes a “good” criminal, subject to the law, guilty of having committed a crime, of having wanted to commit a crime, everything that makes him accountable, is thereby opened up to an area of action potential, a network of action, in which things can suddenly become perpetrators themselves. A human right of things implies: giving things a discretion to act, thus showing options to act, in which man, what he does, and what he wants is but a small particle. In other words, a human right of things fundamentally challenges the phrase “I want.”

Kluge

But autonomy of things would actually be just like autonomy for humans?

Vogl

The autonomy of things already exists. The only question is in which area you want it granted access. In some areas their access is self- evident. They have domiciliary rights. One example would be a physicochemical experimental set-up. Of course, this would only work if man steps back to let things get on with it, knowing that every result will only become visible through the action potential of things. It’s an agency with non-human agents. And it can only register if an human right of things is admitted to. An area where it only has restricted access is, for example, in the area of the oikos, the household. Can you assign a right to animals, pets, within the oikos, the household? Can you assign a right to things, to tools? Within the oikos, everything we call household, the very old pater familias principle is still at work. Man is at the center and the animals and things arrange themselves in differing concentric circles around the master.

Kluge

Odysseus returns to the home he built himself as a young man. After 20 years he finally comes home from the war on Troy. He can rely on the fact that he built the house from a single tree, an olive tree, with his own two hands. The bed is part of the tree. Therefore it cannot be moved by Freyja. So that the object has its dignity and is given continuity.

Vogl

And I’d say that’s another area in which things have been granted human rights: “history.” Man himself has no history. He derives it from the history of the things around him. That’s why the immovable bed is actually a monument to the biography of which Odysseus only learns after seeing the bed again. Not man has history, but the things around him…

Kluge

That he has made.

Vogl: … show him his own biography.

Kluge

The lasting form is what man truly is.

Vogl

Time is stored within things.

Kluge

History is what man really is.

Vogl

Exactly.

15. The Big Head of Chemnitz (starts 2:26:44, ends 2:27:59)

Man’s voice, singing

Getting in line to pick up your welfare money

Will not relieve your misery

Who took you down,

You poor man,

From all the way up there?

And now your bones stick out

Through your skin

And in just a few weeks

You have wilted

And you buy yourself some slats

From your last buck

For one who’s as thin as a shadow

A narrow casket will do

No need to rush

To meet the angels

You will make it there in time

Comely rationalization…

16. “The one with the best score will be the main feature” (starts 2:28:00, ends 3:02:39)

Kluge

So you don’t actually have a job anymore.

Helge Schneider as Atze Mückert, social security recipient

No.

Kluge

But you still go there every day, to watch?

Schneider as Atze Mückert

I go to watch every day where I worked.

Kluge

And at 5 o’clock you have an evening class, right?

Schneider as Atze Mückert

1700, that’s right. Evening class.

Kluge

Marx course.

Schneider as Atze Mückert

Yes. It’s interesting. Yeah, he is… He was very… He was a sharp guy. A very sharp guy, he just really… He summed it all up, eh?

Kluge

You hear a lot about him.

Schneider as Atze Mückert

Oh yeah, it’s, so to speak, if we didn’t have him…

Kluge

We’d have no comfort.

Schneider as Atze Mückert

We’d all be out of work. So it’s a rough deal for me that I personally don’t have work, you know? But what can you do? But you know … How can I put it? I have to go there, so I do. When you’ve worked there for such a long time, you can’t just abandon them.

Kluge

At night you type away on the Internet with your laptop with your Chinese colleagues, who are also interested in Marx.

Schneider as Atze Mückert

Now that’s a whole other special thing there. Those Chinese… let me tell you, they know quite a bit about it.

Kluge

Well, the ones in northeastern China are even more laid off than here.

Schneider as Atze Mückert

But there are more of them.

Kluge

Whole industries shutting down. All heading to Shanghai.

Schneider as Atze Mückert

All heading to Shanghai.

Kluge

So what do you learn there? You’ve got an hour…

Schneider as Atze Mückert

In the class?

Kluge

Do they lecture?

Schneider as Atze Mückert

You learn quite a bit. If you’re interested in it… I’ve been interested all my life, being a worker myself, of course, I was interested in books by Karl Marx. He’s a genius. Let me see, when was he born? About…

Kluge

Schneider as Atze Mückert

Right, 1818. So he would be… It’s now 2008. So he’d be almost 190 years old. He’d be exactly 190.

Kluge

Right, exactly 190. Right, May 5th.

Schneider as Atze Mückert

That’s aunt Annegret’s birthday, too, but that’s another thing.

Kluge

She’s not quite that old.

Schneider as Atze Mückert

Yeah, that’s another thing altogether. So, Karl Marx is 190. You know… I don’t think people get that old.

Kluge

Reincarnation?

Schneider as Atze Mückert

Well, sure, that could happen.

Kluge

Should he be cloned? They still have some of his bones.

Schneider as Atze Mückert

Speaking of reincarnation, I think Karl Marx is one of the few people who don’t believe in reincarnation. That’s what I believe, he didn’t go in for that.

Kluge

But it can happen even if you don’t believe in it. How often has he been declared dead? And yet he always comes back, now especially.

Schneider as Atze Mückert

What’s his name? Heesters? The singer, he has to be at least 120 or so.

Kluge

In the Caucasus there are people who eat yogurt and the like.

Schneider as Atze Mückert

And yoga.

Kluge

That’s also good.

Schneider as Atze Mückert

Yogurt and yoga, anything “yo.” You just say “yo.” But this life-affirming stuff is also very ageing, right? I mean, for old people.

Kluge

But what good does it do you to learn about Marx if you don’t have a job?

Schneider as Atze Mückert

Well, maybe for later. You do learn something, and you get something out of that. The Marx Brothers weren’t related to him.

Kluge

But they go great together.

Schneider as Atze Mückert

Yeah, in terms of… their things. Well, Marx… I was in the GDR once and there was this statue of him, but just his head. Don’t even ask me how big. A huge head.

Kluge

Big enough to walk around in or to house a restaurant.

Schneider as Atze Mückert

Yeah, right in the middle of town. That was in Chemnitz. That really knocked my socks off. I just thought, wow, he’s made quite an impression, eh? They’ve learned a lot from him, I think. And now I want to learn from him, too. That’s obvious. Me especially, myself being a worker.

Kluge

And do some catching up.

Schneider as Atze Mückert

Yeah. Out of work, but a worker.

Kluge

And you’d like to…

Schneider as Atze Mückert

I’d like to work. Yes. But only manual work. Real work. Not using my head. Not interested in that.

Kluge

There are loads of new professions.

Schneider as Atze Mückert

Oh yeah. Nail salon, right?

Kluge

What’s that?

Schneider as Atze Mückert

My wife was toying with that idea. I don’t know what it is.

Kluge

And nowadays there are professions like folding-chair advisor.

Schneider as Atze Mückert

Yes.

Kluge

It’s new.

Schneider as Atze Mückert

I haven’t heard about that. Yes, I have. I don’t know. You see those ads in the paper’s supplement: “Looking for work,” and I think I read something like that there. Right, “folding-chair advisor.” What sort of profession is that? Can it be called a real profession?

Kluge

I don’t think so. There’s no certificate or apprenticeship for folding-chair and no master craftsman’s diploma for folding-chair advisor. There is one for folding ladders.

Schneider as Atze Mückert

Yes, but I’d have to say…

Kluge

And folding bicycles…

Schneider as Atze Mückert

Yeah, sure. But folding-chair advisor? It is something I can imagine. Because some of these things…

Kluge

They collapse.

Schneider as Atze Mückert

No, they pinch your fingers. If you don’t know how to open or close them, you can easily get you finger…

Kluge

If they’d supply an advisor with every chair, that’d create a lot of jobs.

Schneider as Atze Mückert

Or at least… It could be a brochure, this folding-chair advisor. A folding-chair advising brochure. Or a video. They often use videos nowadays.

Kluge

Folding knife?

Schneider as Atze Mückert

Folding knife? That’s no profession. Although at the Olympics I saw one of those divers who, while he was jumping, closed and opened up again and like an open folding knife he jumped headfirst into the water. You couldn’t even see a single bubble coming up, or a single splash. He got ten points.

Kluge

After your enormous success as Hitler, for which they almost bit your head off, you refused to play Heydrich, Bormann and the rest of them. But now you keep getting offers. Most recently an offer in English [text onscreen: After “My Führer” the MARX project] that’s hard to understand.

text onscreen: “The one with the best score will be the main feature!”

Helge Schneider as Helge Schneider, actor and director

I’m supposed to direct and play the lead, an enormous task, because Karl Marx is really famous. An incredibly famous man. I’ve read up on him and created a voice. With the help of his great-great… great-great-great-granddaughter Donata von Hafenschneider I managed to get some voice recordings. They’re very old. And you can hear his voice. It is a recording that was made while he was speaking to some workers.

Kluge

What does he sound like?

Schneider as Helge Schneider

It was one of the very few speeches he gave. He went to England, of course. That’s why the English want him. They see him as an Englishman because he was a frequent guest of the London high society. He smoked. A lot. Now I’ll give you a demonstration of how his voice used to sound. [in high scratchy voice] “No, leave it.” A really high-pitched voice. Hard to imagine with those piercing eyes.

Kluge

If you could just say this line: “Workers of the world, unite!”

Schneider as Helge Schneider

I’ll give it a try. [in high scratchy voice] “Work-, workers…” It was really like that. . [in high scratchy voice] “Workers of the world, unite.” It’s obvious that he didn’t go down too well with the public at first. Initially they laughed at him, of course, but it didn’t really matter how he said it, but just this line…

Kluge

What he said.

Schneider as Helge Schneider

Right. Workers of the world, unite! Later this became a very famous line.

text onscreen

How do you put Eisenstein’s MARX project to music?

[Helge Schneider as Fedor Rostoptschin, film composer, plays electric piano through Kluge’s next long quotation.]

Kluge: “In the social production of their existence men inevitably enter into definite relations, independent of their will: relations of production, appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which arises a legal and political…”

“Could commodities themselves speak, they would say: Our use-value may be a thing that interests men. It is no part of us as objects. What, however, does belong to us as objects is our value. Our natural intercourse as commodities proves it. In the eyes of each other we are nothing but exchange values.”

“Value, i.e., exchange value, is a property of things. Riches, i.e., use-value, are a property of man. Value, in this sense, necessarily implies exchanges, riches do not. Riches, i.e., use-value, are the attribute of men. Value is the attribute of commodities. A man or a community is rich.”

“To be a well-favored man is the gift of fortune, but reading and writing comes by nature.”

Kluge

Does Marx have a sense of humor?

Schneider as Atze Mückert

I could read something by him.

Kluge

Then we could check.

Schneider as Atze Mückert

I don’t know if he had a sense of humor.

Kluge

What you did last Tuesday?

Schneider as Atze Mückert

Last Tuesday? What happened then?

Kluge

At 1700. School. Further education.

Schneider as Atze Mückert

Oh that! Yes, my evening class.

Kluge

They always start 15 minutes late. They swindle you out of 15 minutes.

Schneider as Atze Mückert

The teacher smokes. I suspect he’s a smoker and he has a smoke outside. And some of the students smoke. I’ve quit. It’s too expensive. In the end all you do is support not so much the domestic industry, but more the doctors.

Kluge

All you do is burn them.

Schneider as Atze Mückert

Yes. If it’d support the domestic industry, I would smoke. I’d get a job more quickly. I’ve been with this company for 40 years. And I’ve never seen the owner.

Kluge

He never introduced himself?

Schneider as Atze Mückert

No. I’m told he’s a very busy man. “Could commodities themselves speak…” Speaking of which, the owner seems to spend a lot of time on Lanzarote.

Kluge

Thank God you’ve got one at all. Sometimes there’s no one…

Schneider as Atze Mückert

He has to represent.

Kluge

But if you have an owner who’s on another continent, you can’t write him any kind of appeal or demand.

Schneider as Atze Mückert

I’ve heard about that before. There are companies that don’t exist.

Schneider as Helge Schneider: [in high scratchy voice] “Workers of the world, unite!” Yes. So they chose me. I love this project, working with Marx, on Marx. I’m even thinking of growing a beard like his. Suits me, doesn’t it? There’s nothing wrong with it. Not bad at all.

Kluge

This beard is that for the part of the young Marx.

Schneider as Helge Schneider

This beard…

Kluge

Fire-red.

Schneider as Helge Schneider

Yes, fire-red, that’s the young Marx. The older Marx has a graying beard that’s a little flecked.

Kluge

Black and gray.

Schneider as Helge Schneider

The old Marx has a white beard with a little gray in it. And then there’s the post-Marx. Marx died at some point, obviously, but he has to live on. He is in fact omnipresent. There’s a post-Marx with only a moustache. That’s in 1929, at the time of the stock market crash, “Black Thursday” in New York, and not only there, but all over the world, too. And in 1941 there’s another Marx but I’m not yet absolutely against him having sideburns, but I don’t know yet.

Kluge

There’s a modern one.

Schneider as Helge Schneider

Of 2008?

Kluge

Of today, 2008.

Schneider as Helge Schneider

Of today, 2008.

Kluge

As an advisor. For Bush in Hokkaido.

Schneider as Helge Schneider

Yes, the happy eight.

Kluge

So in your movie a Marx of 190 years old appears next to the young Marx at the age of 3, so we sort of fast-forward through the history of time?

Schneider as Atze Mückert

Let me read this aloud. This is from the book: Marx/Engels, Works. “Could commodities themselves speak, they would say: Our use-value may be a thing that interests men. It is no part of us as objects. What, however, does belong to us as objects is our value. Our natural intercourse as commodities proves it. In the eyes of each other we are nothing but exchange values.” “Now listen to an economist speaking straight from the commodity’s soul.”

Kluge

The commodity’s soul?

Schneider as Atze Mückert

Yes. the commodity’s soul.

Kluge

So commodity has a soul?

Schneider as Atze Mückert

With “from the commodity’s soul,” he means: what you can buy is a commodity and that has a soul. Because, with this book, Marx has breathed a soul into the objects that are for sale. And things have been worth a lot more ever since. He did a lot, in particular for commodities. That’s why I go to evening class, to listen to all that, because I think there’s a comparison to be made between commodity and man.

Kluge

Human rights for commodities, justice for mankind. If man doesn’t treat a certain commodity right, the commodity won’t treat man right either and that’d be bad.

Schneider as Atze Mückert

And it would be most desirable that man is finally compared with commodities. Then man would finally have a value. Because now man has no value.

Kluge

Man is the commodity “labor force,” and as such he has a value.

Schneider as Atze Mückert

Only then does he have a value. As a workman. If he has work. If he doesn’t have work, he still has a value: Zero!

Schneider as Helge Schneider

Marx would never wear a beard like this today. Nobody’d take him seriously, he looks like Rasputin. He’d scare people. So he would be clean-shaven. Do you want me to demonstrate? He would look something like this.

Kluge

There’s still something at the back of his head.

Schneider as Helge Schneider

I suppose, you could… Today he’d be wearing a hairpiece. It would look something like this. In today’s world as an advisor to, let’s says, Angela Merkel…

Kluge

How would he say “Workers of the world, unite”?

Schneider as Helge Schneider

Shall I give it a try? Today he wouldn’t have a high-pitched voice. He’d have had voice training. He would’ve studied rhetoric.

Kluge

He’d have had a gentle voice.

Schneider as Helge Schneider

A gentle…

Kluge

A velvety voice.

Schneider as Helge Schneider

Like the wolf eating chalk. So not a very deep voice either. More or less in this pitch… [in higher, thinner voice] “Workers…” Shall I?

Kluge

Please.

Schneider as Helge Schneider: [in deeper voice] Shall I?

Kluge

Yes.

Schneider as Helge Schneider: [in smooth, higher, thinner voice] “Workers of the world, unite!” I don’t know the rest.

Kluge

There is no rest. It’s on his monument.

Schneider as Helge Schneider

Exactly. Is he buried in Paris?

Kluge

No, in London.

Schneider as Helge Schneider

London, right. Paris is Jim Morrison of The Doors. I’m supposed to make a film about him, too. They’re a bit alike.

Kluge

Would that be the pre-film? No, would they run simultaneously?

Schneider as Helge Schneider

The one with the best score will be the main feature.

[Schneider as Fedor Rostoptschin, plays electric piano through “By an open window with a cigar.”]

Kluge

Here comes the rejoicing.

Schneider as Fedor Rostoptschin

The rejoicing, but coupled with the apprehension that it’s very dangerous what he’s doing.

Kluge

You can die because of it.

Schneider as Fedor Rostoptschin

A little Russian music. The bear. The Russian bear. And now… By an open window with a cigar.

That’s what I had in mind. A streetcar passes by. Cut to Shanghai. The first streetcar. All those people killing themselves, the coolies. Then the dramatics.

Kluge

What about Black Thursday?

Schneider as Fedor Rostoptschin

Black Thursday?

Kluge

The stocks are falling.

Schneider as Fedor Rostoptschin: [electric piano begins again] That can only be done in E. Funnily enough in E major. Stocks plummet. A look at the boards on Wall Street. The first deaths on the floor of the stock exchange.

Kluge

The excited cries.

Schneider as Fedor Rostoptschin

And now the excited cries. A moment of silence. First the realization of what’s going on and then the cries. Ships keel over. In a normal home things are boiling over. Another ship. Workmen all running round during a break. [electric piano ends]

Schneider as Helge Schneider

And then his original voice over this music… : [in high scratchy voice] “Workers of the world…” Like that.

Kluge

It’s most authentic. It’s like a transfer in time. Is the voice’s high-pitch a result of recording techniques? Edison sounds exactly the same.

Schneider as Helge Schneider

Well, it’s also caused by the fact that people had to shout in those days. There were no microphones… At best you had a loudhailer. A thing made of brass like a coxswain in a rowing boat has. I remember the coxswain in the German men’s eight shouting through his brass loudhailer in 1970… Like that, but that wasn’t Marx’s way.

Kluge

No.

Schneider as Helge Schneider

Marx didn’t need a loudhailer.

Kluge

No. No other book was taught from more than “Das Kapital.”

Schneider as Helge Schneider

No.

Kluge

More copies of the Bible have been printed, but no book has been read more often in groups.

Schneider as Helge Schneider

Karl Marx’s intentions were completely different, of course, but it was one of the first manager bibles.

Kluge

Manager bible.

Schneider as Helge Schneider

Yes, they learned from it. They read it in secret, of course, because it was a workers’ bible.

Kluge

The workers didn’t read it that much.

Schneider as Helge Schneider

It’s foolish! It is totally foolish to write a workers’ bible without knowing that the managers will study it to learn all the tricks of the working classes.

Kluge

That’s the danger.

Schneider as Helge Schneider

It is.

Kluge

That’s why…

Schneider as Helge Schneider

It will always be the danger.

Kluge

Don’t tell anyone apart from the wise?

Schneider as Helge Schneider

Not even him! Because even the fool can prove himself to be a wise man. And the wise… may compromise!

Kluge

So a whisper campaign would be best? In the spirit of the partisans?

Schneider as Helge Schneider

No, no, not even that. Only feeling. Intuition. Unspoken.

Kluge

But communicating Marx as something unspoken would be very difficult.

Schneider as Helge Schneider

Yes, but it’s the only way.

Kluge

The unspoken cannot communicate. I say something unspoken, a Chinese comrade says something unspoken, and then we take it to Cape Town?

Schneider as Helge Schneider

Well no, but… Very close to us we have a version of it that works. Lots of us have dogs and among dogs it works.

text onscreen

A question of self-confidence

Kluge

There are these very small dogs that feel as big as a St. Bernard. When they meet, they don’t care. The tiniest of pinschers tangles with a big dog because he imagines he’s a big dog.

Schneider as Helge Schneider

That’s exactly what Marx had in mind. It’s what Marx had in mind, only he put it into words and shouted it from the rooftops. Engels helped him with it.

Kluge

If you were to put the core of Marx’s message into verse, which verse would you chose?

Schneider as Helge Schneider

A penny saved is a penny earned.

Schneider as Atze Mückert

I’ll just read on from here. “Now listen to an economist speaking straight from the commodity’s soul.” So he speaks as if from the soul of a commodity, as we discussed only a minute ago. “Value, in quotation marks, i.e., exchange value, in parenthesis.” Obviously. Makes sense. He goes on in quotation marks: “… is a property of things, comma, riches, quotation mark, i.e., use-value, in parenthesis, of man.” So value is a property of things, riches of man, not of things. “Valued in this sense…” “Value, in this sense, necessarily implies exchanges.” Right? So value implies exchange, but riches do not. It doesn’t imply that. It might be cheap.

Kluge

Well, riches cannot be exchanged.

Schneider as Atze Mückert

You won’t get anything for it.

Kluge: “I give you my riches and you give me your poverty.”

Schneider as Atze Mückert

Nobody would do that. “Riches do not.” Note 34. This note is in English. “Value is a property of things, riches of man. Value, in this sense, necessarily implies exchanges, riches do not.”

Schneider as Fedor Rostoptschin: [electric piano playing] Machines, right? Pounding machines, wheels, papers…

Kluge

Workers coming round the corner.

Schneider as Fedor Rostoptschin

Workers? A woman in a headscarf waves. A train. An electrical train. A streetcar.

Kluge

From the distance.

Schneider as Fedor Rostoptschin

Drama. A dam bursting?

Kluge

Yes, a bursting dam is good.

[electric piano stops]

Kluge

They crashed into each other.

Schneider as Fedor Rostoptschin: [electric piano played intermittently throughout] Right. But then… People don’t… People don’t want to see death in the cinema. They want a happy end. After the crash something different.

Kluge

One child is saved from the train crash.

Schneider as Fedor Rostoptschin

Exactly!

Kluge

It’s lost a leg, but everyone’s happy.

Schneider as Fedor Rostoptschin

Right, here goes… The child sticks its head out. The rescuers come running. Saved.

Kluge

The cake was waiting.

Schneider as Fedor Rostoptschin

Right. The camera pans away from the crash site. The girl in pigtails… Here we can add some strings. I’m not sure yet, but we’ll think of something. And now maybe…

Kluge

“The Internationale.”

Schneider as Fedor Rostoptschin

The ehm…

Kluge: “Brothers, toward freedom, toward the sun!”

Schneider as Fedor Rostoptschin

Something like that, where you can have a dance group at the end, so that the workers can maybe… A sort of musical/ballet. And then… See? Then the applause and that’s it. The people leave the movie theater happy and suddenly everything is good.

Kluge

Interactive!

Schneider as Fedor Rostoptschin

That, too. They all go… It’s very important. Andew Lloyd Webber has it down pat. He can do that.