Transkript: Program 2: All Objects are Enchanted People

News from Ideological Antiquity (First Version, 2008)

Alexander Kluge

PROGRAM 2: All Objects are Enchanted People

1. Man in Things (starts: 0:00:00, ends 0:09:05)

text

MAN IN THINGS / A film by Tom Tykwer

Narrator

As far as we can tell, this picture is utterly free of specific objects. At least they are not visible. They’re either microscopically small or too far away to be captured by our cameras at the present time of day. And yet we do see something: the sky. “Sky” is not a geographical term, it’s neither a specific place nor an object. And yet we see it and know where it is, that is, it is always above us. What is the sky made of? Out of the universe, you might say. But let’s forget that for a moment.

Let’s turn our view to the tangible things. We are in the city, on a street. There’s a house, there’s a façade. To borrow a phrase, a day like any other. A place like any other. A female is in a rush. Hold on there, just a sec. What do we see? An order, an arrangement of things, materials, and in their midst, a person. The person has a story, which we won’t be able to tell here. Behind the walls there are probably more people. And behind the things, behind each and every one of them, yet more people, yet more stories to tell.

The textile industry, one of the oldest, and by numbers of workers and sales one of the most important sectors in the productive industries. A skirt has a single tube and covers both legs from the hips downwards. Trousers have a tube for each leg. Anatomical examinations of stone age foot and leg bones gave rise to the theory that shoes have been worn for 40,000 years. In the middle ages, handbags were made of leather and worn on the belt, by men. Eventually the fashionable item became an accessory for females, as a bag with a grip. Many materials come from low-wage countries such as China, India, South Korea and Taiwan.

A house number designates a building and is used for referencing purposes. The numbering of plots of land is done by the land surveying office. It issues the number. The house owner is responsible for providing the sign. In 1899 the Berlin-based Paul Haudegen & Co. introduced the first intercom system. It was more of a speaker, really. It didn’t allow one to reply. The first two-way intercom was introduced in 1935 by the AB Gylling company. Based on telephone technology, it was the first of its kind. Only in 1951 did it become possible to talk back without loss of volume. The majority of all door locks are pin tumbler locks. They were invented by Linus Yale Jr. in New York in 1865. Multiple pins pushed into the plug by springs or gravity block the plug until all are pushed so far into the casing that the pins align at the shearing point between the plug and the casing. Grates have been produced industrially by the Lichtgitter Company since 1929. The shaft covered by the grate was used for coal or potatoes and can be seen in front of Berlin buildings built after 1880. Signs for gas and water supply indicate the location of subterranean valve chests that provide access to blocking valves of the gas and water networks. The numbers to the right of the T show the distance between sign and chest measured to the right of the sign. The numbers at left indicate the distance between sign and chest measured to the left of the sign. The numbers below indicate the distance between sign and chest from the sign outwards. All specifications are given in meters and decimeters.

The cobblestones are made of large dimension stones. They can be set in various types of patterns. Gneiss, the basic material, is harvested from the quarry using explosives, and processed mechanically in a factory. The rough pieces are cut using stone saws or diamond wire saws. The stones are set on a bed of gravel, sand or granulate. The joining material is mortar. The construction reacts to dynamic loads with elastic deformation. The curbstone is set in a concrete bed to achieve a uniform height. The cobblestones adjacent to the curb have a straight-edged pattern, while the ones next to them have a diagonal or polygonal arrangement. A very practical construction.

The sidewalk stones are gravel bricks. The sidewalk must fulfill specific requirements. It must be possible for 2 pedestrians, with umbrellas, to pass. Pedestrians always want to maintain a certain distance. It must be noted that approximately 46% of pedestrians are carrying luggage, a bag, or the like. Embedded in the sidewalks are cover plates for the gas and water networks. The plates are secured against loss by stainless steel bolts. The plate covers the valve chest for the gas network or the water intake for the sewer system or the ducts. The initials of the provider are cast in the cover plate. In 1945, this made it possible to find totally destroyed supply lines. To enable workers to locate snowed-over cover plates, their position is indicated on a sign posted near the valve chest on a post or a building.

Chewing gum has a long history. People chewed tree gum as far back as the stone age. Today gum is produced from petrochemical substances. Gum consists of roughly 50 to 60 percent sugar, while the gum base is comprised of artificial substances. John Curtis Jackson established the first gum factory in the USA in 1848. In 1862 the first German cigarette factory was opened in Dresden. The cigarette whose butt we see here had an active life of 7 minutes. Production and waiting times prior to consumption are short. The history of smoking is thought to stretch back 40,000 years, i.e. the evolution of man. ­­– Where did I leave off? Here perhaps? Right. Perhaps there. – Steel clamps serve as fasteners for affixing objects to the pole. Originally, they were developed for the construction of warships. In 1909, Kaiser Wilhelm, King of Prussia, issued the first standard regulations for street traffic, the Law on Transport with Motorized Vehicles. The last change to German traffic regulations with regard to signs took place in 1997. Detailed graphic illustrations were abandoned in favor of simple, clean lines. Graffiti comprises all text and pictorial representations made with spray paint, felt-tipped markers or scratched into surfaces with sharp objects in the public space. At its inception, graffiti was closely associated with abstract painting, calligraphy and comics. Graffiti has meanwhile become an established part of youth culture. In the hip-hop world, graffiti is one of four elements along with rap, DJ-ing and breakdance.

text

A commodity appears, at first sight, a trivial thing, and easily understood.

text

Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties …

text

DAS KAPITAL, I. Commodities and Money 1. Commodities d) The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof

Camera: Frank Griebe Effects: Viktor Müller, Sound: Frank Kruse Music: Tykwer / Klimek / Heil Woman in a rush: Marie Steinmann

2. The Torch of Freedom (starts: 0:09:06, ends: 0:13:30)

text

The Torch of Freedom

text

What is commodity fetishism?

text

At commemorations of the

text

Great French Revolution,

text

in the scenery PROVIDED by DAVID,

text

what is known as the torch of freedom

text

is (as it has been for centuries)

text

at the core of the true western European

text

a glowing light or glimmering ember /

text

[…] The INNER LIGHT

text

• is it a divine spark? /

text

It is the genesis of thrift, of industry,

text

of accumulation of wealth /

text

Need and oppression never

text

extinguish this light.

text

Rather, it is stoked by “forces from outside” /

text

[…] suddenly, 200 years after the

text

“invention of freedom”,

text

it becomes apparent that all OBJECTS

text

that men TRADE amongst themselves

text

exhibit an illumination /

text

The trade value luminesces as an image or a plan

text

as once the conscience glowed /

text

With these words Antonio Gutierrez-Fernandez,

text

director of the academy in Havana,

text

plans to open his speech

text

before the central committee /

text

A. Gutierrez-Fernandez

text

The small circle of defenders of the republic

text

meets once a week for educational speeches / […]

text

Using examples from Karl Marx,

text

it cannot be explained how the Cuban’s soul-lamp works / […]

text

Gutierrez-Fernandez contradicts the thesis

text

that Cubans are a

text

highly inflammable people /

text

Rather, there is a gleaming light or a soul-lamp

text

glowing in every person on earth /

text

[…] These light apparitions, which Gutierrez-Fernandez

text

calls ORIENTATION LAMPS,

text

will be camouflaged by the

text

BILLIONS of SPARKS

text

in the goods

text

that will inundate Cuba

text

if the republic’s defenses should fail /

text

The tiny lights that show the value of the good,

text

like so many candles on the graves of the

text

dead work,

text

block out the INNER LIGHT;

text

which is visible mostly in times of scarcity and want /

3. The Memorial and the True Grave (start 0:13:31, end 0:18:28)

text

Karl Marx (1818-1883)

text

Family grave, Highgate Cemetery

text

WORKERS OF ALL LANDS UNITE

text

The Memorial and the True Grave / Karl Marx in London

British man

Hi, um, I’m wondering if anyone can remind me: Karl Marx, it’s actually the family stone, I can’t remember where it is, can anyone remind me?

Sorry, can anyone remind me where Karl Marx’s family stone is?

Speaker phone

[unintelligible]

British man

Oh, actually the first pathway? Alright, sorry. Thank you!

Woman

It’s a very nice cemetery.

British man

This is why [unintelligible]

Woman

So it this sort of community service?

British man

Ah, no. [unintelligible] if you’ve killed someone, or broken the law. This is voluntary.

Woman

Voluntary.

British man

We have guided tour, free guided tour [unintelligible]

Kluge

In a cemetery in London there is a memorial, Marx’s memorial grave site, but he’s not under there.

Woman

That is just a memorial erected by the Russians. His real grave is hidden in the depths of the cemetery, because he was Jewish.

Kluge

And you went there, and then someone said, I can show you where his real grave is.

Woman

I was filming the memorial, and then a man approached me and said: “You know that the dead can’t move, don’t you?”

Kluge

Really?

Woman

Yes.

Kluge

Was he a groundskeeper?

Woman

No, he was a man who volunteers to tend to the cemetery.

Kluge

So a team of people who tend to the dead.

Woman

Not the dead, just the paths around the dead.

Kluge

It’s a very old cemetery.

Woman

Yes.

Kluge

So he’s showing you the way, but at first he can’t find it. So he asks for help with some kind of device.

Woman

He explained to me that that wasn’t Marx’s real grave. I asked him if he could show us the real grave. He said yes, so we followed him, but he’d forgotten how to get there. Where he thought it was, it wasn’t. The cemetery is very overgrown, so it was very hard to find. So he kept on calling the office with his walkie-talkie to ask if they knew where it was. So someone came out and showed us where it was.

Kluge

And how does it look? Is it a stone slab?

Woman

A broken stone slab.

Kluge

And what is on it?

Woman

Karl Marx.

Kluge

And that’s where he’s buried?

Woman

Yes.

text

The real grave

4. “All things are enchanted people” Peter Sloterdijk on metamorphoses of “added value” (starts 0:18:30, ends 1:05:39)

text

In 1929 the Russian master director Sergei Eisenstein planned to film two books: 1. ULYSSES by James Joyce; 2. DAS KAPITAL by Karl Marx / What kinds of images and TRANSFORMATIONS (“metamorphoses”) did he have in mind - - ?

text

Sergei Eisenstein

text

ALL THINGS ARE ENCHANTED PEOPLE / Peter Sloterdijk on metamorphoses of “added value”

Kluge

Eisenstein planned, after “Oktober”, to film “Das Kapital” by Karl Marx and “Ulysses” by Joyce at the same time. An audacious plan. This was on the heels of a great success. If you, as a philospher, look at this, what do you think he was up to? What could such a film look like? What kinds of images does Marx even have to offer?

Peter Sloterdijk, philosopher

I think we get some indication of what Eistenstein may have been thinking at that time if we look at the initially unapparent parallels between the two texts. What does he see in “Das Kapital” which at the same time fascinates him in “Ulysses”? I could imagine that the answer is something like this: He grasped that Marx, in “Das Kapital”, depicted a kind of archetype of the adventurer, a sort of system theory of adventure, in which the soul’s journey is overlaid with the journey of money. And that ushers us into a world which, in James Joyce’s conception, consists entirely of metamorphoses. His Ulysses is no longer just the person who journeys around the Mediterranean. Rather, he experiences the complete transformation of his self in the course of a day. He doesn’t need more time than that to undergo a metamorphosis.

Kluge

Like when he emerges as a liar, and tells tales to win hospitality through deceit, and it continually transforms his fates, indeed himself, and he has grave difficulties trying to reassume his old form back in Ithaca.

Sloterdijk

And that’s true of money in general. Homer gives us two of the greatest epithets that were ever given to a person, in reference to his Odysseus, who becomes Ulysses in Latin. One of the epithets is Polymetis, he of many wiles. But then he says something surprising and calls him Polymechanos, meaning “he of many strategies”.

Kluge

Polymechanos is a strategist, not a craftsman.

Sloterdijk

A man who uses devices to get the materials to do something that they wouldn’t do on their own. And that’s what money does, too. In essence, money is a generalized strategist or a generalized quick-change artist, who calls the material into the changing room, so to speak, and transforms it, squeezes it into costumes that it wouldn’t have donned on its own. And I think that if you try to tap into that image-conceiving intelligence of the great director in 1929, you might reach such a pole, where you feel there are forces in the world that generate transformations on their own, that is, they invite the materials, which, philosophically speaking, have a very bad rap, being characterized by instability, malleability, wantonness even, and he invites the material into the most grandiose changing room that ever existed, namely capitalist industry, to assume forms that it never would have dreamed possible.

Kluge

A natural history of societies, and man, the human aspect … to depict this social animal, man. That’s his topic.

Sloterdijk

It’s not just natural history, it’s also a sort of theatrical history of man, the common history of man and material. That is Marx’s stark approach, that you have to talk about nature as the common history of the natural and non-natural, or the natural and the supernatural. And this continual appearance of the one thing in the other, that’s the key to understanding “Das Kapital” and Marx’s thinking in general. He always manages to demonstrate that nothing is what it appears to be, the metamorphosis has already taken place, we always encounter the material in another state, removed from the ominous state of raw material and natural treasures, which is also an interesting bourgeois metaphor, with its conception of nature as a sort of treasure chest. But if we look beyond raw materials, natural resources, everything we encounter in the world of value, the world of goods, is already changed, dressed-up, costumed material that is part of this theatrical history of value and the exhausted material. This brings us back to Marx, the critic of ideology. He’s the greatest thinker in the generation after Hegel. What that signifies, at the same time, is that he … learned … to pose other questions to human intelligence, questions that can only be posed when the grand cycle of earnest thinking has run its course. That seems to be the case with Hegel. Man plainly has … and Marx is among the first who come back to this realization, man has multiple kinds of intelligence that constitute his intellectual makeup. One kind of intelligence I would call the believing or earnest intelligence. This gives rise to workers and believers. It’s an intelligence that’s made for serious matters. There’s a second kind of intelligence, the intelligence of the cheat, or the engineer, or the trickster, as the ethnologists say, a character that appears in many mythologies.

Kluge

Jason.

Sloterdijk

Jason is one such. There is Loki in Germanic mythology. Hermes, of course, the deceiver-god par excellence. But he embodies a different type of intelligence,

Kluge

which is the intelligence that tells us

Sloterdijk

to take nothing at face value, that you can’t take anything seriously. The other intelligence tells us that you have to take things seriously, confront yourself and believe. And these two intelligences have been battling it out inside of us since time immemorial. And Marx is part of the first generation of intellectuals who came after the grand cycle of seriousness that culminated in Hegel and sent these two types of intelligence into battle against each other. So he belongs to a generation of post-philosophy philosophers. He is a sophist again, he has recaptured this combative form of intelligence. In some ways his thinking mirrors that of the advocate, that is, everything one says is part of making a case and not just a delineation of the facts. The one just sticks to the facts, while the other, the trickster, or lawyer, the serious form thereof, so to speak, who has cultivated this deceptive intelligence, knows that everything is part of the case, an effect, a strategy of representation. And now he tries, by working both sides at the same time, to play these two types of intelligence off against each other.

Kluge

These are his dramatis personae.

Sloterdijk

Absolutely.

Kluge

Like in your imagery from the theatre, that’s his play. Eisenstein could, if he were so inclined, use that as the dramaturgical starting point for his film. He presents the product, the citizen’s mask, the character mask, but behind the character mask there are passionate characters, as Balzac described so amply. So you would be relating this metamorphosis to the continual transformation of the people being depicted as well as the continual transformation of the objects being depicted.

Sloterdijk

I think that in some respects Marx was one of the inventors of the idea of the citizen as a dramatic character … and that’s something that you can see in Balzac as well, the miser character who emerges in the 17th century in Molière and is developed somewhat more in the 18th century. Balzac then distills it into this demonic character of the banker, who exhibits this … almost a sort of metaphysical constipation …

Kluge

Who has this wonderful daughter.

Sloterdijk

Yes. And for whom giving anything becomes torture. The human embodiment of accumulation. But that had to be invented first. The capitalists aren’t really like that …

Kluge

They’re more mediocre.

Sloterdijk

Well, first they’re mediocre, secondly, if they’re innovative they’re often quite driven, they have to strive to be original, involuntarily original, because credit knows no mercy and the lender can always send the marshal to collect. There are even some schools of thought about the modern era that hold that the entire modern state is built around the role of the marshal, who engenders the most important function of state authority, namely the guarantee of credit. We see this in today’s world, with the Hermes cover from the German government, to ensure the credibility of credit in a way that reassures the outside world, the state steps in as a guarantor of credit, which shows that maintaining that core belief, belief in the credibility of credit, is one of the state’s chiefest concerns. We should perhaps rewrite the history of the modern state, revised from this perspective, to illustrate how the state, where it functioned as a guarantor of non-nihilistic values, when it fostered belief, then it wasn’t just the famed alliance between throne and altar, but the perhaps even deeper alliance between throne and credit system and …

Kluge

The use of fiduciary relations. There’s another example from farming communities, from pre-capitalist times. Loyalty for Loyalty.

Sloterdijk

Loyalty for Loyalty. That’s why the scandal that broke out in France in the early 18th century with the introduction of paper money was such a … such an early nihilistic shock …

Kluge

Could one say that the revolution failed because credit can’t provide the reliability that’s called for? The assignees became worthless.

Sloterdijk

Utterly worthless.

Kluge

The entire outcome of the revolution rested on it, the land was appropriated, ready for redistribution. It doesn’t work.

Sloterdijk

It doesn’t work. There’s also the story of the English financier who persuaded the French king to take part in a paper money experiment. That was a harbinger of deceit at the head of the state. And that led to the development of a certain revolutionary dynamic that undermined confidence in the state’s capacity as guarantor. If you look at how the reasons of state behind the reasons of state function, you come across such points over and over again. If you want to establish credibility, it’s much less about the personal integrity of politicians than the engagement of the state to ensure its smooth functioning.

Kluge

Keeping things dependable, maintaining stable horizons.

Sloterdijk

And ensuring that accumulated wealth doesn’t disintegrate overnight. That’s the mandate that all the responsible actors have taken on board, and that something like judgment day for the modern economy, Black Friday in 1929, can never be allowed to happen again. That was the great flood that, despite the Biblical guarantee, was visited on humanity again.

Kluge

It was at that time that Eisenstein was making his sketches, thinking about “Das Kapital”. And in the central committee, there are a few remaining Trotskyists who now say, after Black Friday, we could buy General Electric for the Soviet Union. We’ve got money, the Czar’s emeralds, the resources in the Urals, they even had trains standing ready at the borders, to make these offers, to make shipments to the West.

Sloterdijk

If we regard Black Friday as a sort of additional uninvited screenwriter, Eisentein would have had, in addition to “Ulysses” and “Das Kapital”, a third source of ideas going there, in which we see that in this huge changing room of value there can also be moments of unbearable exposure in which …

Kluge

… which then have to be remedied by force. The crisis continued, the Baisse, until 1934. And what sort of institutions do we see, in China, in the Third Reich, in Italy and with Roosevelt, to respond to the situation?

Sloterdijk

Well, they have to convene a sort of ecumenical council of capitalism to restore faith in the system. Halfway between the first and second Vatican councils, the Vaticans of capital, if you will, had to restore faith in money. And that against the backdrop of the catastrophe of 1929.

Kluge

And the belief in the regenerative power of pillage, that I can take Norway’s gold reserves, or Greece’s, or France’s, etc., and keep them for the German Reich, that would now take over from the old economic paradigm, that was so discredited in 1929, all the notions of credit, and be the dominant belief. The idea that we can return to the 16th century, if you will.

Sloterdijk

Not just the 16th century, but actually all the way back to the first empires, which began as systems of exploitation. In other words, where the secret of creating value in its earliest manifestations is based on the realization that some other group already has something of value that I can get for the price of a trip, without production costs. That is, I only have to be able to finance a military expedition, and make sure that I have a reasonable chance of returning. In other words, I have to have mastered the art of military campaigns. Just getting there is not enough, you have to get back as well. If you can do both, get there and back, you’re a master of the raid, master of plundering, and you’ve conquered the problem of obtaining riches for a whole era of human history, up to the modern era when industrialization takes over, ushering in a new form of plunder and a new means of creating value. And then it becomes much more difficult to define what you have to do to gain control over the world’s riches.

Kluge

You, in the year 2008, could, philosophically, approach “Das Kapital” with similar categories and write a story of wrath, a story about love or about attractions, and so on, and meanwhile a rich world of subjectivity would have learned from industrialization, an external force. But 50 to 100 years after an external development in the economy, an internal repetition takes place inside the people, with similar metamorphoses, and enormous forces are unleashed that drive developments in the economy. Have I understood you correctly? That’s the idea you return to over and again in your books, not to restrict your consideration of these movements to things, because the things, and the commodities, the commoditized things, are not object-like, but are rather, if you will, human characteristics transformed. Transformed people, like in fairy tales.

Sloterdijk

Right. I also think …

Kluge

Like the “Seven Ravens”.

Sloterdijk

… the best approach to Marx’s analysis of capital is through fairy tale theory. I believe that the history of capitalism is something like a gigantic magnification of the fairy tale “The Devil With the Three Golden Hairs”. But whenever you seek a solution, deliverance, a treasure, you always need a helper. These are the famed adjuvants in the fairy tale morphology of Propp and Grimas, the great French structuralist.

Kluge

Incidentally, it is women, including the devil’s grandmother, who also helps the caulbearer get the devil’s hair.

Sloterdijk

These helper figures can be people, but they’re also trickster characters, amulets. We’ll return to amulets in a minute because Marx was the first to understand that a commodity is never only that which it appears to be, but rather that it always also has something of the amulet in it.

Kluge

… a hidden person, indeed many people behind it.

Sloterdijk

Yes, and that all things are enchanted people. From this perspective it becomes clear that only a great storyteller is capable of penetrating the world of Karl Marx, the world of this greatest analysis of enchantment that ever was. You have to …

Kluge

And the robustness of this economy only works with these enchantments.

Sloterdijk

And it should have been forbidden from the outset to read “Das Kapital” alone. There ought to have been a canon. That is perhaps one charge that one would have to level against Lenin and co. from today’s perspective. They ought to have created a canon and said, if you read “Das Kapital” without reading Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” alongside it, you’re on the wrong track.

Kluge

Don’t say Lenin and co. He is, if you will, a rather lofty individual, albeit an errant one, as are so many, and one-sided. This requirement, I think, is the core point. You can also put Marx to music, his texts, and they are transformed.

Sloterdijk

Marxism as a whole went astray in the composition of its group of classics, above all in the unfortunate trio of Marx, Engels, Lenin. It’s the wrong canon. If you leave out the fourth man, Ovid, who belongs in the group, you get this truncated, basically positivistic Marxism. That’s the pity of Marxism, that he underestimated the fairy tale-like metaphysical component of his own work and actually competed with the positivism of the bourgeois sciences, based on the concept of “worth”. It was a generation of …

Kluge

… false objectivity.

Sloterdijk

False objectivity. There was this belief in the worth of things, in which all the mystifying elements surrounding the good were stripped away and people would enter into this idealized world in which commodities were completely demystified and the people would return to the real relations they have together. That was a false path into positivism and it was very, very destructive. It was also a category error with regard to what society means, because it basically confused a small group utopia with a large group theory. In small groups it is possible to achieve different modes of communal living. After all, in terms of our biological, or evolutionary design, we are herd animals that can function well with 20, 50, maybe 100 people if it comes to that. Anything over that has to be dealt with through abstractions, symbolic constructs. And if you understand that, if you can come to terms with the idea that it’s not possible to transform the world into a circle of friends, you’ve learned, as I see it, the first lesson of socialism and can then begin to interact with the telecommunicative elements that are needed in the context of human coexistence, … in a positive sense, that’s the crucial thing. We can’t put too much faith in our small-group reflexes. We have to assume that this other fairy tale motif, this political fairy tale motif of making the world into a community and viewing humanity as a group of friends and family …

Kluge

… which is an atavism.

Sloterdijk

It’s an atavism, but above all it’s a dangerous delusion that leaves us in the dark regarding our transcendental elements.

Kluge

Because then we create falsified and false idols, false symbols, like the concept of nation, for example, an identity that, from afar, looks like a community, represented by all the flags and images, but isn’t at all, and can’t be.

Sloterdijk

It can’t be at all, because only through a kind of monumental emotional sleight-of-hand can people generate familial feelings towards 50 or 100 million of their own.

Kluge

And as philosophical detectives we could now, in addition to Marx, Engels, Lenin, discover Ossip Mandelstam, who starts a one-man opposition to Stalinism, which ultimately kills him, and in his Tristia poems draws on Ovid when Ovid was banished to the Black Sea and longed for Rome, and follows in his footsteps with the experience, the awful experience of the 20th century. “My Century, My Beast” is one of his cycles of poems.

Sloterdijk

Yes, that’s a very telling analogy when Mandelstam rediscovers the Ovid of the Black Sea, and relives Ovid’s predicament, namely that he always looked to Rome and always tried to get something like an imaginary private audience with Augustus and be able to tell him, “I didn’t mean any harm, I just …. "

Kluge

His tongue had already betrayed him.

Sloterdijk

Right, “I lost control of my tongue there for a minute, and you’re the first and only one who ought to understand that, you, son of the muses, who might be occupied with his trying business but you’re actually one of us.” Likewise, many authors in the Stalin era always trained their eyes towards Moscow, and always had the feeling that the only reader who really mattered to them sat in the Kremlin burning the midnight oil.

Kluge

This is another kind of enchantment behind this. It’s not the “Kapital” sort, it’s something older, the idea that the malicious god might have a beneficent moment after all. Introjection of the aggressor.

Sloterdijk

And that … the person, who is gripped by the demon of strictness, the person who has let the state into himself, if you will. That’s not the case today, generally, because politicians don’t internalize the state, but look at it as an employer. They don’t embody the state anymore. And if they do, they get interesting, but also dangerous. Most politicians today have a business relationship to the state and society.

Kluge

There must be a trace of royalty if he’s so brutal, the assumption’s not unfounded.

Sloterdijk

Then he’s befallen by the coldest of all monsters, which Nietzsche described, and taken over by it. And he develops something that people usually don’t and can’t have, namely this severity of the superman. The king, the judge, the executioner and the marshal, these are all characters through which the state can project its severity. They’re all derived from the function of king.

Kluge

And that’s the intelligence you talked about before, based on belief, on devotion …

Sloterdijk

And thinks about earnest things, and is always close to death because that’s the most serious thing that can happen, and thinks of the state in terms of death.

Kluge

And that has a certain credibility, even under inhumane conditions. In this sense, Thoas in “Iphigenie” is a very serious character who can’t be killed off.

Sloterdijk

Right, because he embodies the will of the state and plans on being present in the next generation, and the next, and a hundred generations hence. And he has to be something like an embodiment of the essential. That’s something that never penetrates the ordinary human soul. Even writers tend to shy away from it, and regard the essential from afar. Even Virgil, who from a philosophical perspective was very close to the empire, still demanded more space for his ideas than Augustus could grant. Let alone Ovid, who was practically a rogue in regard to the state. That’s probably what August resented, and why he then declared the evil tongue an act of treason and banished his greatest poet to the Black Sea, where he sang lamentations. But Mandelstam had every reason to empathize with him, because he’s obliged to send these reports to Moscow, to a man whose steeliness, this rigor that springs from the state, from necessity, from history, he even wants to represent through his very name. This is a man who developed a mythology of cruelty, of the necessity of cruelty, that in the end devoured his whole psyche.

Kluge

This is a kind of underground economy, a sort of counter-economy, that one always has to consider and is occasionally useful to the economy, tangentially, for example in fascism, also in mild forms of fascism, and is something that you always emphasize. If you leave that out, some part of human existence is left unexplained. Not everything enters into the world of commodities, there’s a part outside of it that never became a matter of state.

Sloterdijk

That’s also due to the fact that “Das Kapital”, and thus Marx and all the rest need this thoroughly eroticized human for their worldview and to justify their system. But they can only explain half of human life with it if you translate the word “eros”, somewhat strangely for modern ears, as “desire”. Our idea of eros conveys other things. We think of the titillation of sexual tension and all the lovely things one can obtain for a price.

Kluge

Desire and attraction.

Sloterdijk

Desire and attraction, yes. And the pleasure of surrendering to the impulse and all that. The capitalist in this picture is a thoroughly eroticized character who has this devil who tells him, “the others think that greed is bad, but just between us, greed is good.” This idea has been popularized. The message has since reached the proletariat through modern advertising. In the last 200 years a diabolical morality of exceptions has gained sway. In politics, ever since Machiavelli one sector has declared its exemption from conventional morality. If you occupy a position of state, if you are obliged to be a principle, you have to learn the exceptions to conventional morality, the conventional Christian morality.

Kluge

Let’s look at the word “fetish”. What does the word fetish mean?

Sloterdijk

This is a key term. The word “fetish” leads us back to its African origins. The word seems to have come to us through Portuguese trade in Africa. Portuguese traders, and perhaps also missionaries, observed that … in Central Africa there were these curious kinds of cults that made a rather eerie impression on the Catholic visitors because they’re like a more archaic step of the Catholic cult of sainthood, indeed, the dark side of the same. They observed that they made statues in human form with relatively cruel facial gestures, and they performed a ritual in which the idea was to invest this form, this fetish-to-be, with soul forces. This was the genesis of the famed nail fetishes from the Congo. Some have up to 100 iron nails, completely covered with iron nails, from local production, by the way, since Africa had had iron production since its own middle ages. And with each nail, a wish or a curse was pounded into the body of the fetish.

Kluge

This also happened in WW1 with wooden figurines of Hindenburg. Nails were driven into the figurine, and the nails represented a donation. But the idea of pounding nails into a General Field Marshal, a revered person, of being allowed to do it, is interesting.

Sloterdijk

It seems to embody an elementary idea, a figure, a gesture that appeals even to people who have never yet been exposed to it. Such things always suggest that there are some elementary ideas, elementary gestures, that have meaning for people even if they’re doing them for the first time.

Kluge

And so people’s most valuable, most devoted characteristics are unwittingly channeled into the division of labor, and hammered into commodities and then return to the people as commodities. But it could also be a bullet, a good of some sort, or a tank.

Sloterdijk

It could be anything in which a sort of gesture of divestment has coalesced. Something flows into the product. The thinkers of antiquity had already understood this, but because they didn’t have the concept of work in our sense, they had to work with the concept of “impetus” to represent the flow of subjective intentions into the product in the terminology that was available to them. The impetus theory is, if you will, the unseen antecedent of modern work theories. The idea, based on observations of mechanics, is that when an object is struck, it retains the kinetic energy from the strike. This transfer of energy, if you think about it, really does have something mysterious about it … How can my energy transfer into that thing, how can the force in a billiard ball go into the other billiard ball?

Kluge

It’s a venture, a shot. But a book is a big venture. You take this impetus, as you call it, and say, I’m going to invest this thing with my life’s force.

Sloterdijk

That was Marx’s idea of intelligentsia. You make the book a vessel of all the collected fury, the collected desires of the whole history of man, as a spur to put an end to the conditions in which the intolerable conditions described here are perpetuated.

Kluge

And he says: “The industrial landscape is like an open book of human psychology” and all that went before it. Is that the idea?

Sloterdijk

That’s it. And that means that we constantly find ourselves in this panorama, whichever direction we look, we always find ourselves in a sort of history museum.

Kluge

And it’s good to comment on it,say it to ourselves,“we will break the curse of these conditions if we break them down,” and repeat it quietly over and over.

Sloterdijk

I think that’s the crucial point. You can’t proceed with “revolutionary force” or anything like that. The work of demystification consists in going back to the point of production,which also means …

Kluge

Digging up what’s
been buried, like a treasure hunter.

Sloterdijk

But you can’t just dig up the commodities. You also have to dig up the curses that were hammered into the fetishes, as well as the …

Kluge

Which are extremely useful as antidotes.

Sloterdijk

Right. You can use them again. Humanity is …

Kluge

They even transform themselves. A buried curse can turn into animosity, but it can also be a forgotten curse, and then it might even possess some beneficial magical power. It was made by people, and there’s a lot of power in anger.

Sloterdijk

In short, whoever ventures into this territory had damn well better study alchemy. You have to know your way around in this huge transformation laboratory for subjective and objective forces …

Kluge

Human experience …

Sloterdijk

And constantly reshuffle everything in that experience, resynthesize it …

Kluge

… lateralize, break down, disserrere.

Sloterdijk

And you don’t wind up with some ultimate distillate of it from which the revolutionary explosion came forth. You can never say exactly which reaction it is that leads to a reaction for the better. In the 20th century, this laboratory saw a couple more or less unsuccessful large-scale trials. The forces being experimented with back then are still with us, and are reconstituting themselves once again. Now more than ever, they require a meaningful kind of alchemy, an alchemy which, in the light of experience, helps us understand these enchanted conditions.

Kluge, whispering

You consider Marx a writer.

Woman, whispering

A talented poet.

Kluge, whispering

He sits in the grandest library in London, excerpting history, and writing a story around those core ideas.

Woman, whispering

Thus emerges the backbone of his theory.

Kluge, whispering

Is it not a disservice to him to degrade this scientific materialist to the station of the writer?

Woman, whispering

Why do you say degrade? A poetic metaphor is the highest form of insight. In the hills of Great Britain in the 16th century farmers’ cottages are set aflame, their land expropriated and made into pasture lands. Herds of sheep graze where people once lived. That’s how Marx describes it.

Kluge, whispering

That’s the original accumulation.

Woman, whispering

The land is only useful as pasture land for sheep whose wool is sought-after in Holland where capital is blossoming.

Kluge, whispering

That generates return flow.

Woman, whispering

There must be some previous accumulation of wealth in terms of money to get the trade process moving. That can be done by burning down the cottages. Or 2000% profit in the opium trade with China, the slave trade or by robbery. There has to be some original appropriation.

Kluge, whispering

It brings misery.

Woman, whispering

And misery breeds invention. Those whose cottages had been burned down, the dispossessed, flock to London. Those who are lazy or resort to thievery are sent the gallows. The others learn resourcefulness in the face of circumstances. They begin to work. In other words, from the fields of their dispositions they plow a patch of willingness to work, which nurtures specific skills. Like a greenhouse.

Kluge, whispering

A treasure within the man.

Woman, whispering

I believe that that’s what Marx was saying.

5. Original sound of a workers’ struggle (1965). Günther Hörmann, “We were prepared – Thursday morning, six o’clock – to go on strike” (excerpt) (starts 01:05:43, ends 01:12:53)

[Voiceover, archival]

“We are ready. Enough protest, Enough talk. It’s time for action. Walter, it’s time to make our move. We are ready.”

APPLAUSE

[Voiceover, archival]

“Attention, attention, this is the Industrial Union of Mining and Energy Colleagues, in wage negotiations the owners gave us the cold shoulder. With this strike ballot, we will show them that we are resolved to strike, if necessary, to achieve our demands.”

Union miner, archival

We want our conditions that Mr. Arendt demanded, and we’re insisting this time. Up till now, we’ve always given in. This time we’re not giving in.

Union miner 2, archival

We get poorer and poorer, and the owners keep getting richer. It’s about time they showed where the economic miracle is.

Union miner 3, archival

And that’s why I want the union, the IG Bergbau, to fight for us and make sure that we get the wages that we always had before. I’ve been working the mines for 16 years and what I used to get, I’m not getting anymore.

Union miner 4, archival

I support the union’s demands and hope that there’s a breakthrough.

Union miner 5, archival

Just strike.

Narrator, archival

The workers vote from 5 a.m. to 12 p.m.

Union official addressing assembly, archival

We’re not expecting anyone to pat us on the back and say, “what a great bunch of guys you are for negotiating this great deal.” No one’s expecting that, and we haven’t asked for it. This deal before you is the best that could be achieved through negotiations. We know that if we strike, we will not get this deal. That’s what I’m saying. [AUDIENCE BOOS] I’m saying that. You’re free to say something else in a minute.

Union official addressing assembly 2, archival

If I recall that just a few days ago our leadership called on us to plan a strike and make all the necessary preparations, and have meetings, and how our colleague Heinz Vetter, just a few hours before the strike, talked about a rocket being launched that would land a direct hit on the owners, I have to say, the fact that we are discussing a compromise this morning is a pretty shoddy finale.

Union official addressing assembly 3, archival

Never before was a strike so earnestly prepared as this one. And when things got serious, when it became obvious, some people may have thought, it’s just a bluff, they’re having us on. No! They felt us breathing down their necks, the miners are serious, even in the mines which, as we just learned, are on the verge of closure. And the result was that they made concessions to us. But we are not content with those concessions. That’s how we all feel about it. The worst of it is … [AUDIENCE CHEER and APPLAUSE] Let me tell you, Walter Arendt, I have to say, despite the harsh criticism, we must always fight for the union. However harsh the critics may be, we must stand together as an organization. But the greatest criticism, Walter Arendt, was inevitable, as you must know. We have repeatedly told our colleagues, you told us yourself when the question came up in the locals. We have no … Many colleagues have asked, what good is a raise? The prices have to sink. And we’ve said, we can’t influence that, it’s a political question, we need a contingency plan. And now, with this minimal raise for 2 years, we’re basically stagnating while prices continue to rise. We reject that categorically!

Union official addressing assembly 4, archival

I came here today, like many of you, like all of you, I daresay, to carry out a duty. And this duty was given to us by our members: We’re counting on you today! We expect an answer from you! With regard to this compromise, the answer can only be: we reject it. I still maintain, and no one can refute it, that as quickly as the legal signatory Beitz, Bertold Beitz, came to the negotiating table when the steelworkers made a stand, our rejection will bring them to the table just as quickly. I defy anyone to prove the contrary. Colleagues, we as functionaries are not here to take potshots at the leadership. No! We are here to represent what our members are saying. And it behooves us all, leadership as well as functionaries, to say “no” to this compromise. We owe it to our members and to the future of our union.

[AUDIENCE CHEER and APPLAUSE]

Union official addressing assembly 4, archival

Compromises do have to be made if we want to live together in this world. Now I’m being reproached for saying at the Dortmund conference in my closing words that victory will be ours. Let me ask you, what should I have said? That we’re going to lose? I took the mood at the conference, and the reactions to the proposals, as indicating that we wouldn’t have a strike ballot. And I’m glad about that, and I’ll tell you why. According to our bylaws, the directorate, which is elected for a term of 4 years, is responsible for the leadership and fortunes of the organization. The delegates’ role at the conferences is not only to hold us accountable, but also to implement the decisions taken by the directorate. We therefore assert that this is a matter for the directorate, and the directorate has proposed, or rather decided, unanimously decided, to accept this result.

[AUDIENCE LOUDLY MURMURING]

Narrator, archival

The majority of delegates rejects the compromise.

text

By statute the strike leadership cannot be voted down. A done deal: compromise.

6. Song of the Crane Milchsack 4 (starts 01:12:53, ends 01:15:03)

text

SONG OF THE CRANE MILCHSACK IV

text

“My name is

text

Milchsack Number IV

text

I drink lube oil,

text

you drink beer

text

I eat coal

text

you eat bread

text

You are not alive yet,

text

I am still dead

text

Day by day I do

text

my tour

text

I was here before you

text

on the Ruhr

text

When you are gone,

text

I’ll be here long

text

I know you

text

by how you move” Bert Brecht: Song of the Crane Milchsack IV

7. What does Happy Failure men in the Risk Society? (starts 01:15:04, ends 01:19:56)

text

Keyword: “HAPPY FAILURE” / “You make your own luck”

Kluge

There is an expression: “happy failure”. When would that be said?

Oskar Negt, sociologist

“Happy failure” is a somewhat cynical expression said by people who want to assert that we’re too wedded to old ideas of job security, employment-for-life, the social safety net, and finally need to begin to look at failure not as an attack on one’s identity, but to welcome the fact that there are losers out there and that one can also lose.

Kluge

Failure can also spur me to reorient …

Negt

And not to be ashamed of it or hide it, but to proclaim publicly that today there are a lot more losers than winners. This is a notion that has sprung from the risk society.

Kluge

What is the risk society?

Negt

It’s the idea that, basically, you make your own luck. And if you strike out, you just weren’t doing it right. So you have to go back to the drawing board and recognize that failure wasn’t a rebuke of your efforts or a knock on your character. You should to regard failure as a chance to begin anew with a different approach. Every man is an entrepreneur. Every person should behave in an entrepreneurial fashion and bankruptcies and failures are learning opportunities. In my view, it’s a rather awful theory that’s gaining sway at the moment and spreading. It is absolutely not the case that all people assume the same risks. A top-level manager who loses his job continues to get paid, or a civil servant or an intellectual …

Kluge

700,000 Marks severance pay.

Negt

They’re not going to fall through the cracks. A normal worker, by contrast, a bank employee who’s 50 and loses his job can’t summon up cheerful optimism when he sees what kind of prospects he has of finding a decent job somewhere.

text

What is DEVALUATION SPEED?

Kluge

Take the concept of “devaluation speed”. What does it mean?

Negt

The devaluation speed can be characterized by the way in which things or circumstances or thoughts are drawn into a maelstrom in which only the most novel and most original and anything that didn’t exist before has any commercial value, can be sold. That applies to the whole public sphere these days. It’s the search for the intimate, anything that’s still unknown. It causes much clamor in the media. But it’s a deceptive thing, as we see at present, where many newspapers and news services, not to mention fraudsters, just invent things, they don’t do a bit of research, they just plain invent stories. And this devaluation speed has increased. With regard to thought, nowadays everything that’s modern, up-to-date, is truer than anything that existed in the past. It’s this modernizing drive, the imperative of constantly thinking up new things. But that’s related to the rather frenzied fabrication of products, in which the value of a product depends on whether or not there has already been something similar. That’s true of fashions, and it’s a historical trend that’s playing a pernicious role in the devaluation of remembrance and collective memory.

8. Short History of the Bourgeoisie from Hans Magnus Enzensberger (starts 01:19:57, ends 01:22:47)

text

SHORT HISTORY OF THE BOURGEOISIE /

text

This was the moment when we,

text

without knowing it,

text

for five whole minutes were immeasurably RICH,

text

generous and ELECTRIC,

text

chilled in July /

text

[…] We were elegant,

text

no one could stand us /

text

Orchids in cellophane / We made playthings of chips, solo concerts,

text

clouds that said I /

text

Matchless! /

text [printed on cigar box]

STOCK MARKET 3 FOR 5 […]

text

like fishwives

text

we cursed with abandon /

text

Every man had his own calamity

text

stowed beneath his seat /

text

Quite a pity really /

text

It was so convenient /

text

The water flowed like nothing from the faucets /

text

Do you remember? Simply numbed

text

by our mite-sized feelings

text

we hardly ate /

text

If we’d only known

text

that it would all be over

text

in five minutes,

text

The roast beef wellington would have tasted differently,

text

SO VERY differently /

9. Revolutions are the Locomotives of History (starts 01:22:49, ends 01:27:30)

text

“Revolutions are the Locomotives of History”

Oskar Negt, sociologist

Walter Benjamin used a quote from Marx, “Revolutions are the locomotives of history.” Benjamin takes a critical stance, suggesting that perhaps the reality is quite different. Revolutions are not the locomotives of history. Instead, revolutions are the emergency brakes which serve to halt a train that’s heading for disaster …

Kluge

… that’s going the wrong way.

Negt

To stop the runaway train. Revolutions as the halting of history, so to speak. That’s also how he regarded the shooting of clocks in the French revolution, a moment halted, a pause. Humanity begins to reflect about what such accelerations, such movements mean and picks something up that had been left behind.

Kluge

So if we look at the French revolution through Walter Benjamin’s eyes, if an industrialization takes place, and brings down the old order, politically we have to be up to speed with that industrialization. That’s the idea.

Negt

We have to catch up with history. It’s no coincidence that the French revolution dons the costumes …

Kluge

… of Rome.

Negt

… and the consul, the first consul, is Napoleon. In other words …

Kluge

He names himself after Caesar. He wants to inhabit a political, an institutional authority lost since the Roman empire and of which the French kings of the 18th century were simply incapable, they can’t do it, are discarded because they can’t do it, because they make themselves culpable.

Negt

And that’s why the Napoleonic paradigm is associated with a new rule, the Solonian constitution, the Draconian constitution. The reclaiming of history. Engels once said, we’re reclaiming history. We’re reclaiming history, taking that which history left unresolved and putting it in the proletarian revolution. And the French revolution had something of that spirit too, not only in the historical analogies, but by saying we’re actually the ones putting an end to this tale of misery through revolutionary upheaval.

Kluge

A tale of woe. A tale in which fate deals out its blows and the people remain passive.

Negt

And Napoleon said, what’s all this nonsense about fate, politics is fate. He says that in conversation with Goethe. And that’s Walter Benjamin’s conception of revolution, in which he moves away from the metaphor of the locomotive, which he associates with speed and forward motion, always forward, always progress. That’s even more pronounced in the communist version than in the French revolution.

Kluge

Avantgarde.

Negt

Always to the front, he would say, is utter nonsense, it’s not revolutionary. It’s the processing of the undigested problems of history. That’s revolution.

text

On Marx: Class Warfare in France in: MEW, Vol. 7, p. 85

10. Reason is a Torch (starts 01:27:31, ends 01:29:12)

text

Encyclopedia, Vol. 1, 1751: “Reason is a torch

text

ignited by nature

text

whose purpose it is to enlighten us.

text

AUTHORITY, by contrast,

text

is, at best, but a CRUTCH

text

created by man

text

and can only prop us up

text

when we falter along the path

text

that leads us to the future” /

text

Jan Czajkowski, piano

11. Time Requirements of the Revolution (starts 01:29:13, ends 01:30:53)

Andreas Tobias as Jean Leclerc

“Revolution is immensely time-consuming.” Jean Leclerc was, before he joined the revolution, a tutor. For the landed gentry and the lower nobility in the towns of Normandy. For anyone who could pay, he taught their children. Then, amidst the ardor of the events of 1792, he established schools for the revolution. The adults, surprised by the upheaval, needed instruction. The citizenry had to organize. By 1822, Jean had forged ahead to form four instruction groups learning the revolutionary craft. At last the little education clan that he patiently led knew what revolutionary education and practice was all about. The revolution, meanwhile, had vanished. Even Bonaparte’s regime could hardly be called a revolution. The King had been back on the throne for 7 years already. Only now, concluded Jean, should the revolution have begun its course. At least there would have been a few trained revolutionaries about. It took a course of four years to train a crew of 20 adults at an accelerated pace to be the kind of citizens capable of functioning as producers of the revolutionary process. Marksmanship training was faster.”

12. Farewell to the Revolution with Peter Konwitschny, Martin Kusej, and Johannes Harneit; Exceprt from Luigi Nono’s Al gran sole carico d’amore (In the Bright Sunshine Heavy with Love), Azione scenica by Luigi Nono; with a Commentary by Joseph Vogl on the question “What is a Revolutionary?” (starts 01:30:55, ends 01:58:23)

text

Four passages from Al gran sole carico d’amore by Luigi Nono / Directed by Martin Kušej at the Staatsoper Stuttgart

text

Part 1, Vogl: Paris in Revolt

text

“One man searches for another”

text

All around me lay the corpses of my friends,

text

we have prevailed /

text

We have prevailed, but all around

text

lay the corpses of my friends / Heinrich Heine, from Hymnus, 1844 /

text

KEYWORD: What is a revolutionary?

Kluge

What is a revolutionary?

Joseph Vogl

To begin with, a revolutionary is a type, not a person but a type or an aggregate state, a collective aggregate state, that is, someone, something …

Kluge

Someone ignited by other people?

Vogl

Yes. Someone who, before he becomes anything, before he has any characteristics, is a synapse, a bridge. That is, he has a special quality of linking end-situations and beginning-situations with each other. A revolutionary is at first less an agent than an acute observer in whose gaze these decadences, the collapse of regimes, be they creeping or precipitous, become linked with a moment of inception or vice versa, a person who can join the future with fading pasts. This is the juncture where the revolutionary steps in, a specialist in the art of connection, of cross fading beginnings and endings. In other words, he’s a montage artist.

Kluge

A man between two societies.

Vogl

Two societies, two times, between two states, two collectives, perhaps even between two views of humanity, which are always at play. So we have this montage artist who can join the strands of history and who knows that now is the time to do so.

Kluge

Is Mirabeau in the French revolution a revolutionary in this sense?

Vogl

Mirabeau is a revolutionary in this respect. He himself, and in all his mythological manifestations, because he saw the moment as one that was yet to be defined. When Mirabeau begins to speak, he doesn’t know how it will end. He only knows that it will end something and perhaps start something new. A grandiose example of rhetoric, if you will.

Kluge

The king’s emissary comes, a royal steward, and says the parliament has been dissolved. And then he steps in, and doesn’t know what he’s going to say and says the king doesn’t exist. He tries to divide the parliament.

Vogl

In other words, he works with loose associations. The emissary arriving, a message from the king …

Kluge

… and the next day he can’t believe what he’d done.

Vogl

Which also means that he can’t be viewed as an individual orator, but rather as a vessel for temporal states, for a blip in time, that is, for connections that seemed to come unstuck for a moment.

Kluge

He’s a conductor.

Vogl

Exactly. And that also means, of course, that no revolutionary actually is any particular thing, but rather only understands himself in the moment of becoming. In the course of his speech, he becomes something he never was before. He accumulates potential for action that previously he would not have been capable of engendering. Which also means that we have to regard the situation of the revolutionary, when he appears in the form of a person, as an experimental situation. This in turn means that at that moment it remains unclear just which forces, which social and political forces, will ultimately prevail.

Kluge

If we imagine a merging group, it’s a mimetic element. It’s a kind of mutual mimicry for something that the time is demanding. If I show up with notes or a finished speech, it wouldn’t work.

Vogl

And for a very simple reason, namely, if revolutions are characterized by being a test of social and political cohesion, that is, of the dissolution of the old and creation of new ties, a whole new interplay of forces is introduced in which it is completely unclear what competences are even called for. The revolutionary can be authoritarian, he can be a good friend. He can distinguish himself through through physical strength or industry, he can be characterized by misanthropy or by excessive philanthropy. All of these moments, these codes by which social and political conditions begin to take shape are challenged and we’re confronted with the question as to which cohesive factors are suitable at this particular moment in time. Is it charisma, is it the legal form, is it the deepest friendship, is it the community, is it communal fervor, etc.

Kluge

We get opposites such as Robespierre and Danton, for example. What were their professions?

Vogl

Danton was a doctor, as far as I know, and Robespierre certainly a lawyer.

Kluge

So there were a lot of lawyers in their ranks, a lot of academics are players in the revolution.

Vogl

It’s a very important observation in regard to revolutionaries that they always display a high degree, if you will, of social and political specialist knowledge. It’s rarely the naive Joan of Arc type figures who lead revolutions. It’s always a consortium of specialists, technocrats, experts, at the forefront of some field, people who are working on the modernization of society and who know that revolutions can never work without knowledge.

Kluge

There is actually no example of a revolutionary emerging from conditions of squalor. Mahatma Gandhi came from another family, he was no peasant. Mao Tse-Tung … comes from a rather comfortable family. Take any of them. Spartacus is an educated elite gladiator. He might be a slave, but an elite slave. So we have all these examples, but not a single one of someone who really rose up from privation, from squalor, one of the misérables, to undertake this complicated task of negotiating the space between two times.

Vogl

Yes and no. You’re certainly right that the plight of the dispossessed consists in not themselves being able to make revolution happen, an elementary insight. There is a level of disenfranchisement, of social neglect …

Kluge

Also of the means.

Vogl

Right. That’s one side. On the other side, remember that the revolutionary does not appear as his own person but is always the embodiment of something, so he’s always a dramatis personae, in other words an actor in the most basic sense. He has to portray something, give expression to a collective. And the question arises, what stock characters, what genres go into the makeup of the collective person? And … it also means that the revolutionary not only links the past and the future at a decisive point, but he also, if you will, links the lights of society with its manifest shadows. He has to play the role of the developer in the photographic sense, he has to coax a society, a patchwork out of the darkness and make things visible. That’s why I say that he will certainly adopt the characteristics of the slums, the neglect, the unknown realms, the global jungle, and shed light on those things. That’s a revolutionary character, one who not only links past and present with each other, but also illuminates something at the same time.

Kluge

But he might have been a librarian in the provinces.

Vogl

Right. He can be a school teacher, an aid worker, an environmental activist, etc. He simply has to have the ability to shed light on something …

Kluge

… to emerge from the shadows.

Vogl

Exactly. In the French revolution too, one of the crucial factors was the spectacle of the royal house, the locus of power, Versailles.

Kluge

That’s something you can use …

Vogl

… make it the people’s theatre, a stage for the masses. To put something out there which previously was unobservable.

text

“We shall return

text

as masses without number;

text

We shall come by every pathway,

text

avenging specters from the darkness,

text

we shall come

text

holding one another’s hands / " Louise Michel

text

Remarks on Al gran sole carico d’amore by Luigi Nono / Direction: Peter Konvichny, Musical director: Johannes Harneit / Staatsoper Hannover

Johannes Harneit, musical director [at piano]

For Tanja Bunke, whom I mentioned, who fell in battle, and who’s in the score, there’s a requiem. A women’s choir sings with harmonies like this, actually very pretty harmonies, curiously so. And then the tenors come in, singing the “Internationale” in ultra slow motion. It sounds like this: “Internationale … the future … he has the word fade out, and then it dies, and it just lingers in memory. The music completely freezes. It’s beautiful, all of a sudden, quite strange, how the people on the stage, who only have their voices, it’s all they’ve got, duel with the orchestra with its arsenal. You could almost say it’s one of the themes of the piece. In a simple way, not psychological like Wagner, where the orchestra knows something the singer is about to think. The orchestra is against the choir because it’s louder. Period.

text [image caption]

Russian working class neighborhood, 1905

Harneit [playing demonstrations on the piano throughout]

That’s what distinguishes a composer who went to the workers in the factory played his pieces for them and asked “can you make anything of that”? And they said: “Yes, but our workaday reality is actually much worse.” The sounds are actually pleasant. So he thought, it has to be harder so that it’s clear what’s going on here. And this contrast with the prudent, safe composer who uses the apparatus of opera is manifest here, because he’s a composer for whom the Scala is the lion’s den and a commission for the Scala has to be exploded, not like Boulez once said, blown up, but composed to blow the roof off. The striking thing for us today, 30 years later, just like with Richard Wagner, the people who wanted to change opera, tear it down, actually kept it alive. We see people working in a Russian factory, and in the score it says: In scena svoni di lime e martelli, that is, the sounds of hammers and files are heard. We do that by having drums do that on the stage, and the music he’d composed, which is destructive already, is overlaid and destroyed again by these sounds. That could what led the factory workers to say, that’s not enough. And this music, which in turn destroys itself, is very aggressive, and sounds like this: At first you think, that’s just noise. Then you realize it’s structured, always triplets. So it’s really just… You can imagine something like a machine and suddenly the music gets very quiet and you hear the Dubinushka, exactly the battle song you mentioned, the call to strike, so to speak. The melody here is in timpani, as in the prelude, the orchestra is quiet. And now you hear the timpani. I’ll play it now with the accompaniment, which is like a destruction of it. You can hear it, it has to fight its way through. Nono writes that as soon as the workers on the stage hear it they stop working and listen to the timpani. We do exactly that as well. And then the work begins again. By the way, that’s the “fate” motif of the piece, always this threefold call, from the capitalists saying “onward”, as well as from the communists, who then say “enough”. It’s like pounding on the desk. With the percussion, the whole orchestra, it runs through the piece and always means “this has to stop.” Now the timpani start again. I’ll just play the melody. Here the orchestra comes back in. And now we come to the close of this phase. So we have this completely tonal motif with the accompaniment, which then sounds like this: You can hear it, but it’s covered, it’s not allowed to come through yet. Work begins again, once again with this motif. The orchestra’s loud, quarter tones, aggressive. Now the factory boss comes in, and whenever he portrays confrontation between the workers, between the bosses and the workers, he gets very ironic, that is, at this very moment he counteracts the presumption that some social- revolutionary kitsch opera is coming, which was always said of him in Germany. He avoids this by going into almost a parody of a recitative. The factory boss enters to a colossal string chord. I can’t even play it all at once, I have to do it in succession. This entire sound is his harmony and the strings play it. He sings: “Why have you stopped working?” And that’s conducted like something like a Wagner or a Mozart recitative. Now you hear the strike song again, flautists, in the descant. But underneath that is a cluster, half tones next to each other, woodwinds. The brass are a half tone higher, that’s the underlying accompaniment. Now the one worker, the son of the mother at the center of the second half, says “docking our pay because you’ve got to drain swamps in unjust.” The other workers chime in: “unjust, unjust, unjust, do it with your own money, not with ours.” Then the boss answers, to the sound of cymbals clashing, just a clamor, and says, “I command you to resume working.” Now the Dubinushka starts again, the strike song played by the flutes. You can sense the strike taking shape. In the background the choir sings, “Go work yourself.” That is, “do your own work.” Then comes the boss’ threat, which Nono has him sing all alone. You can also show power that way, he doesn’t have to be strong, he just says, if you’re not working in 15 minutes, you’ll be sorry. You’ll pay for it. Now the strike song reaches its finale. At the same time the next part starts. A flute starts, the other’s playing the second half, the idea is born. And they say: “They can’t dock our pay, we have to strike.” Meanwhile the basses sing: Then Pawel says: “you have to strike.” Sciopero. Anyone who’s ever tried to take a train in Italy probably knows it. They still strike a lot, it’s not such a scary word, unlike here where the threat alone is shocking. Then the tenors say “scioperiamo” and the basses “sciopero sciopero.” They agree. Now comes the orchestra’s biggest chord, also rectitative. And he says “Then I’ll fire you all.” The ultimate threat. So Pawel says: “So who’s going to work then?” Pause. Then the traitor, Delatore, the cymbals clash again … says “oh, we’ll find them”. And then Pawel says: “Of course, the scabs.” In other words, he’s saying “make up your minds.” And as soon as that starts, the Dubinushka starts again, the melody we’ve heard several times now, sung by the whole choir. It would be quite pretty, if there were no accompaniment, you might think you were at a musical. The choir is just singing vocals. But there’s an accompaniment, if you think back to the start, where there were triplets for the factory, now we have quintuplet rhythms, so even more complex factory work waiting to be done. And the whole orchestra doesn’t help the choir at all, but represents something like the counterpart again and plays the following accompaniment. You have to imagine them together. It sound like this. It’s actually incredible music. If you consider that in the 70’s people were put off by the melody, but without hearing what was being set against it. And that’s the crazy thing, people didn’t like the melody and overlooked the battle he was depicting. And I find it fantastic, and it is, the accompaniment is so hard, the choir, everyone who’s up there trying to sing, is pleased as punch just to hit the right note. The accompaniment … Just try and pick something out of that. If he had done this … … you could say it was clear. But that’s just what he doesn’t do. And the fact that he doesn’t do that is his way of saying: “This world doesn’t exist anymore.” The strike, by the way, is repeated in the music, which is interesting. He puts in repeat signs, which was also totally taboo. In the new music, serial music, composition was, by definition, without repetition. This strophic element, this repetition, is one of Nono’s great contradictions. The decision to strike takes time, deliberation, so such forms become possible again. But not in the sense of returning to repetition, but to depict a thought process. We represent that by repeating it yet again, starting quietly and letting the idea form gradually. This is another of the elaborated moments like at the beginning, and the timpani come in again, where the audience is privy to everything in the score and nothing is reserved for the expert, but everything flows into the hall and is accessible to all. It’s important that we achieve that.

text

FACTORY BOSS (alias Minister THIERS, Oppressor of the Commune)

text

Pawel, the worker, is shot.

text

Lament for Pawel, Deola, Tanja / many women mourn

13. “War before Peace” text from the introduction to Grundrisse (starts 01:58:24, ends 01:59:52)

Sophie Kluge and Gabriel Raab, reading, together

“Production. Means of Production and Relations of Production. Relations of Production and Relations of Circulation. [Onscreen text: Siberia, January 1918] Forms of the State and Forms of Consciousness in Relation to Relations of Production and Circulation. [Onscreen text: Readings from “Grundrisse”] Legal Relations. Family Relations. Notabene in regard to points to be mentioned here and not to be forgotten: War developed earlier than peace; the way in which certain economic relations such as wage labor, machinery etc. develop earlier, owing to war and in the armies etc., than in the interior of bourgeois society. The relation of productive force and relations of exchange also especially vivid in the army.

Production. Means of Production and Relations of Production. Relations of Production and Relations of Circulation. Forms of the State and Forms of Consciousness in Relation to Relations of Production and Circulation. Legal Relations. Family Relations. Notabene in regard to points to be mentioned here and not to be forgotten: War developed earlier than peace; the way in which …

14. Manifestos of Immorality. Boris Groys on biopolitical utopias in Russia before and after 1917 (starts 01:59:54, ends 02:13:37)

text

The revolutionary ideas in Russia in the early 20th century are radical / People were to start anew from the zero hour / But other projects were of a biopolitical nature, resurrecting the dead for example, rejuvenation, or the settlement of the universe / Philosopher and culture expert Boris Groys on biocosmists and the Russian avant-garde -

Kluge

There are three great books, one of them is “The New Humanity: Biopolitical Utopias in Russia at the Start of the 20th Century.”

text

MANIFESTOS OF IMMORALITY/ Boris Groys on biopolitical utopiasin Russia before and after 1917

Kluge

Not 1917, but before that as well.

Boris Groys, philosopher

Much earlier. Already in the late 19th century, Nikolai Fedorov, as this book shows, asks the question: Is Socialism actually a just system, a just society? He concludes that this is not the case, because Socialism, as conceived by Marx and many others, does not incorporate the deceased. In other words, all the people who worked and died for the cause of human and historical progress do not in any way receive justice in Socialism. That is why he decided to establish a project that provides the possibility to correct this injustice, by having Socialist society commit to reconstitute all deceased people by artificial, scientific means. To resurrect them, so to speak, thereby giving them the chance to participate in the Socialist future.

Kluge

Quite ridiculous. 1789, the rights of liberty, equality, fraternity. We need immortality.

Groys

We need immortality. You see, all those human rights and civil rights are certainly good and important, as long as we are finite beings, as long as we will encounter death. But the moment we become immortal, we lose, so to speak, the last bit of private property. That’s very important. Because, even if we, for example, renounce all private property, you keep temporal private property. We thus own a piece of property.

Kluge

We own a curriculum vitae.

Groys

And that separates us from others. As mortals, everyone has a bit of time. And that means, all attempts to form a Communist society are impossible, unless people become immortal. People must first become immortal, then a material basis will be made for the Communist society of immortals.

Kluge

Do the deceased exist within us, or do they come back from the grave?

Groys

They come back from the grave. Fedorov proposed using the museum as the model for this society. The museum, because it is the only place where the technology is not progressive. Meaning it does not serve progress, but rather the preservation of the old, of tradition. So he proposed building a museum of all people who ever lived, in which everyone gets a space. Today we would call it genetic code. In general, all memories surrounding that person would be gathered, and eventually, when we’re far enough advanced, technically and politically, we can bring these people back to life. So this museum is no a cemetery, but rather a waiting room.

Kluge

And not for Ramses II or Czar What’s-his-name, but for simple people, for the simple leper, who died an unjust death in Aleppo.

Groys

Absolutely. For all insulted and humiliated people. This is, so to speak, the synthesis of Christian covenant and Communist utopia. Since everyone suffered for the future, everyone must have the right to participate in that future. What’s important is that the museum, the library, the cemetery are seen as the preliminary stage to the resurrection.

Kluge

As if humankind would order ships, which take them across the River Lethe and back again.

Groys

Yes, but alive, as citizens of a new society. A society without private property.

Kluge

And they held assemblies for this, and voted on it? This movement doesn’t make it to central Europe or France.

Groys

No, but it had a political role in Russia after the Revolution. There was a party, called “Party of Biocosmists/Immortalists.” They had their offices in Moscow, and in Petrograd, and they were elected. It was a serious political party. They demanded that rejuvenation and immortality be elevated to main objectives of Soviet state politics. And they demanded that a majority of the budget be used to attain immortality.

Kluge

And rejuvenation, meaning that while I am still alive, I won’t become an old man.

Groys

Yes, rejuvenation. Rejuvenation, as it is stated in the book, in line with Bogdanov’s experiments…

Kluge

Alexander Bogdanov.

Groys

His institute.

Kluge

Head of the party school on Capri. You see him playing chess with Lenin. He is the only serious rival of Lenin’s…

Groys

Absolutely.

Kluge

… whom Lenin brought to the minority.

Groys

The entire Bolshevist movement came about, so to speak, out of the discussions between Lenin and Bogdanov. But at some point, Bogdanov became fascinated by the idea of immortality and rejuvenation. And he created an institute for the exchange of blood between the older and the younger generation.

Kluge

So he takes a 21-year-old’s blood?

Groys

Absolutely. He describes an example in which the blood of a young student was exchanged with the blood of an older writer. The writer felt much younger and better, and she felt wiser. So both of them were happy.

Kluge

But he died of this, after the 123rd transfusion, which he administered himself, causing an infection and blood poisoning, and he died.

Groys

That’s right. But the idea behind it was that you can create one human body that comprises all of humanity, by way of these blood systems. Through blood transfusions he wanted to get everyone to exchange 80% of their blood each year. You can say it was something like a blood Internet, by which all the information and all the energy is constantly exchanged…

Kluge

Because information is disseminated?

Groys

Yes. And Communism is anchored on the physical level. That’s the key aspect for me, in contrast to biopolitics, like that of Foucault, for example. That kind of politics, ultimately stems from the individual’s isolation, despite the fact that the individual is part of the masses. In Communism, however, what they attempted was to create this unity among people on the physical level. Not on the level of ideology.

Kluge

It’s not the thoughts that unite, not the steps of the protestors, of the marching crowd, not the weapons that unite, but the bodies themselves. And not through cohabitation, sperm…

Groys

No. That even had to be abolished. Sexuality as a whole was seen as a distraction from this grand project, and as a certain isolation, which it actually is.

Kluge and Groys

So the idea is one of a current flowing through all humanity, all bodies.

text

The basis of the economy is the lifespan

Groys

And then, if you will, time becomes the commodity. It’s not about consuming, but society offers you something you can only receive from society, namely time, the time of your own life.

Kluge

The heartbeat, so to speak, is not money, the heartbeat is the motor, the meter of the economy.

Groys

Yes. And it’s an economy that assumes a fundamental neediness by people, and a striving for immortality, which is not fulfilled by God, so to speak, or satisfied by God, but by the state. The state makes the commitment to pay people with time, not with money, or with consumer goods, but with their lifespan, and even immortality.

Kluge

So if I’d been hard-working and virtuous, if I was a Socialist, then I’d get more life.

Groys

More life, more time.

Kluge

Like a garden, to be cultivated at the end of life.

Groys

That’s right. But even those who might not have worked so hard ultimately obtain the same thing, through the grace of the state.

Kluge

But that’s no longer a state.

Kluge

Yes, it’s a state…

Kluge

That’s horticulture.

Groys

Or museum curatorship, I would say. The state as the museum of its population.

Kluge

Now there’s this very strange person, I think he was originally a teacher. How do you pronounce his name?

text

Konstantin Ciolkowskij

Groys

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.

Kluge

Who was he?

Groys

Alright. He started with very advanced ideas in geometry, along the lines of Riban and Lobashevsky. At some point…

Kluge

A mathematician?

Groys

Yes.

Kluge

But actually a country boy?

Groys

Yes.

Kluge

A small district capital.

Groys

Yes, a dreamer.

Kluge

Community college classes at night.

Groys

Something like that. But with a talent for mathematics. And at the same time he was enthusiastic about the idea of the general resurrection of all people. But then there was the question of where they all should go. Due to the earth’s population, finding room for all these people on earth is virtually impossible. So he comes up with the idea of patriating the heavens.

Kluge

Other planets should take in the elderly, the deceased, the reconstituted dead people?

Groys

The heavens. But the heavens in the sense of a cosmic space. So then he invents the first rockets, as vehicles that take these deceased to other planets, where they can settle so that this resurrected humanity can spread throughout cosmic space.

Kluge

And not only to other planets in this solar system, but…

Groys

Throughout the cosmos as large.

Kluge

Towards the star Alpha Centauri, extending across the whole zodiac sign of the swan, conquering the Milky Way.

Groys

But not necessarily to settle. Malevich, for example, said he would simply keep on flying, and not land anywhere at all.

Kluge

Not even land?

Groys

No.

Kluge

No looking back?

Groys

No. He likes the idea of just flying on into the blackness. That would be enough for him.

Kluge

He refers to the cosmos as the “Unwhite,” the unwhite place.

Groys

Exactly, it’s blackness. But not black as a color, but rather the absence of all colors, the absence of light.

Kluge

In 1913, he did fantastic stage sets, for a famous piece, an opera.

Groys

“Victory over the Sun.”

Kluge

In two acts.

Groys

Yes. It had the goal of actually abolishing the sun, and replacing sunlight with artificial light. Because as an artist, he found it insulting that the sun dictates to him what he sees. And that he has to copy it. So as long as the sun shines, the artist is not free and not autonomous.

Kluge

Is it a lamp of the soul, lit by an inner light?

Groys

Yes, but also artificial light, electric light, and other lights that are man-made, that’s okay, too. He wanted to impose an absolute darkness, so that every artist could then produce his own light. That was the idea behind this victory over the sun.

Kluge

Is that picture of black from him?

Groys

Yes, that’s where that black square comes from.

Kluge

What is “Victory Over the Sun” about? Famous poets contributed.

Groys

Yes, Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh. And it’s a mystery, really an attempt, using radical poetry, to convince the sun to simply step down, and in effect to let humanity have its own light. I’m not sure if it’s a myth or not, but I think there’s some truth in that Khlebnikov really believed that the sun would accept this after the performance of his piece, and that it would disappear. He spent a long time thinking about why it didn’t work. He thought it was because the Neva was not a holy river. So he applied for an entry visa to India, in order to perform this piece on the banks of the Ganges. He thought that the sun would then be forced to disappear. However, the British government of India at the time turned down his request, calling it Communist subversion.

15. Rosa Luxemburg and the German Chancellor (starts 02:15:38, ends 02:28:13)

text

The Socialist Rosa Luxemburg, born in 1871, was murdered on January 15, 1919 /

text

Politician Prince Bernhard von Bülow could have saved her/

text

He did nothing –

text [photo caption]

Von Bülow, German Chancellor 1900-1909

text [newspaper headline]

LOCAL GAZETTE Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg Killed.

text

ROSA LUXEMBURG AND THE GERMAN CHANCELLOR / A statesman loses face

text

Von Bülow

text

Speed polka / Alban Berg, Wozzeck, Act 3

text

Phillippe Jordan, piano

text

One of the murderers: Kurt Vogel, first lieutenant in the Cavalry Guard Rifle Division

text

Murder celebration in Hotel Eden, on the evening of January 15, 1919

text

Present in the murder hotel Eden on January 15, 1919

Kluge and text

Count Kessler, Diaries 1918 to 1937, Frankfurt 1962, page 112 f.:

Kluge

Count Kessler was long considered illegitimate son of Emperor Wilhelm I.

Kluge and text

“Berlin, January 24, 1919.

Kluge and text

Friday. Breakfast at Ludwig Stein’s with Count and Countess Bülow,

Kluge and text

Georg Berhards and the Swiss envoy Mercier.

Kluge and text

Of course, they talked about Spartacist.

Kluge and text

The Bülows live in Hotel Eden,

Kluge and text

after the shooting drove them from the Adlon.

Kluge and text

There they mingle with the Rifle Division,

Kluge

which is based at Hotel Eden.

Kluge and text

The Countess says that the events

Kluge and text

surrounding Liebknecht’s and Rosa Luxemburg’s murder

Kluge and text

went unbeknownst to her.

Kluge and text

She said the hotel was quiet.

Kluge and text

That her chambermaid saw Rosa Luxemburg among soldiers

Kluge and text

in the hall. A small woman

Kluge and text

who went with them quietly…

text [photo caption]

Eden Hotel

text

Von Bülow in the Reichstag

Kluge and text

What is astonishing about Bülow:

Kluge and text

He, the main culprit of the Great War,

Kluge and text

and of Germany’s downfall,

Kluge and text

had such a clear conscience.

Kluge and text

He has the same rosy, well-rested, almost cute expression

Kluge and text

that he had twenty years ago, or even 40 years ago, that’s how long I’ve known him,

Kluge and text

back when he quoted profusely and chatted

Kluge and text

with beautiful women in a high-brow manner.

Kluge and text

Of all the things that transpired in the world,

Kluge and text

he saw above all his own rosy face in the mirror.”

Kluge

An opportunist of the purist kind, German Chancellor, referred to as “Silver Tongue.”

Kluge and text

“It would be most awful

Kluge and text

if all this destruction and suffering

Kluge and text

would not be the birth pangs

Kluge and text

of a new era,

Kluge and text

because there would be nothing

Kluge and text

that wanted to be born;

Kluge and text

if all that were left is repair.” “Count Kessler, ‘Diaries 1918 to 1937,’ Frankfurt 1962, page 104.”

Kluge

Refers to the First World War.

text [photo caption]

“Corpse of a Proud Rebel”

text [book cover]

What does the Spartacist League want?

text [photo caption]

Anti-war demonstration

text [photo caption]

Rosa Luxemburg’s prison cell (1917)

text [credit]

Phillippe Jordan, piano

text

I was /

text

I am /

text

I will be /

text

Eugen Leviné, revolutionary / His wife Rosa, his son Genja / On leave from the front, 1916 / “We are dead men on holiday”

text

v. Bülow: plans for the fleet, Baghdad railway, Morocco crisis

text

“Révolution ou BARBARIE”

text [sign]

Halt, or you will be shot!

text [photo caption]

Gunned down Spartacists.

text

“FREEDOM is always that of the dissenter”

text [photo caption]

With Luise Kautsky (1905)

text

Names, under which Rosa Luxemburg wrote /

text

ego

text

Gracchus, Hicrodus

text

Józef Chmura

text

Juvenis, Junius

text

K.

text

M.R., Maciej Rózga

text

Mortimer

text

R., rg, R.K.

text

R. Kruszynska

text

R.L., r.l., rl.

text

Spartacus

text

The canal Landwehrkanal in Berlin / Rosa Luxemburg was thrown, likely unconscious, from this bridge into the water

text [photo caption]

The murdered woman –

text

Shame on the German Chancellor!

text

“I was / I am / I will be!”

text

ROSA LUXEMBURG AND THE GERMAN CHANCELLOR / A statesman loses face

16. “I Believe in Solidarity!” Lucy Redler on the political strike and social resistance (starts 02:28:15, ends 02:43:16)

text

General strike!

text

Lucy Redler is working on the HISTORY OF THE POLITICAL STRIKE in the Federal Republic since 1945 / Her political group currently consists of 100 comrades / She positions herself to the left of the LEFT / That is not much bigger than the organization with which Rosa Luxemburg once took up the fight - -

text

“I BELIEVE IN SOLIDARITY!”/ Lucy Redler on the political strike and social resistance

Kluge

Originally, general strike was the highest form of political struggle for the workers’ movement.

Lucy Redler, social economist

Yes.

Kluge

The Kapp Putsch, the right’s attempt to establish a dictatorship in Germany, brings about a general strike, which topples the putschist government. In 1920. That was the working class’ answer, just as in 1948 it was the answer to the price increase and wage freeze, following a large wave of strikes in companies. Demands for nationalization of industry, etc. led to the 1948 general strike. The last political strikes in Germany weren’t in 1920, as many assume, when ultimately, yes, bourgeois society was defended. 1948, as well as the political strikes after that, are not so fondly remembered by bourgeois historians.

Kluge

But in the original concepts of political and social struggle, as developed by, say, Marx and Engels, the path leads through the general strike, which at some point ends, then leads to workers’ councils, and the self-organization of production, and it is a long march towards changes in society.

Redler

It was the case in 1918 as well, in the great strike movement. In Germany, there had long been the discussion among Social Democrats whether political strike should be used or not. In 1916 in Berlin, 300,000 workers in the arms industry went on strike. During the First World War they had turned against the war.

Kluge

Against martial law, so… –

Redler

They went on strike for peace. Exactly. Economic and political demands went hand in hand. Then we had the huge strike movement of 1918, The entire 1918 Revolution began with the strike movement, starting with the sailors. One of the demands was that councils be established. And that happened. In the course of the Revolution, the councils turned out to be too weak. The Communist Party and the Spartacist League were too weak to coordinate the councils and implement the Revolution.

Kluge

But the councils could’ve coordinated themselves. They are spontaneous endeavors, autonomous councils.

Redler

Still, even if Rosa Luxemburg spoke of spontaneity, the working class, as she also said, requires a party, requires political leadership in the struggle. And that’s right. But the Spartacist League was much weaker than the Bolsheviks in 1917 in Russia.

Kluge

The Spartacist League, how many people were in that? Perhaps 300.

Redler

Certainly less than the Bolsheviks, who in the end numbered 240,000.

Kluge

And they had the majority. Right. But half a year prior to the Revolution, they were only 8,000. The party formed very quickly.

Kluge

If I understand your interest in the political strike, then you’re saying 1914 was the right time for the workers of France, England and Germany to prevent the war.

Redler

That’s right. It would’ve been possible. It was made difficult by the Social Democratic majority, which voted for the war loans, and thus made a truce, and fostered enthusiasm in certain parts of society for the war. So the starting point was difficult. But it quickly became apparent to the workers’ movement and the unions on whose shoulders the war would be waged, and that it would be a war waged for profit, for markets, for geopolitical interests and so forth, but not in the workers’ interests.

Kluge

And when you say, “My politics are realistic,” then you’re thinking about a moment like 1914, when it was realistic to prevent the war. The war is a catastrophe, so the opposite is true, it is profoundly unrealistic. Right?

Redler

Yes.

Kluge

Then all means should be justified, and if necessary we should pay compensation out of union funds rather than pay for the damages from this war.

Redler

If there had been general strike in the ’50s, it’s debatable whether these demands would’ve been made of the unions. I don’t think so. But I think that political strike is back on the agenda today. We in Germany often look to France, where the French unite and all take to the streets together. It wasn’t just in ‘68 that France was farther along than Germany, but also today, the way the French utilize labor disputes and political strikes.

Kluge

You are considered to be to the left of the Left. They are too organized for you, too willing to compromise. And too involved in the discussions which everyone else is involved in.

Redler

Yes, the starting point was the situation in Berlin. The Left in Berlin is not the same as Lafontaine’s Left on the Federal level. The main difference is that in this government, the Left is implementing neoliberal policies with the SPD. Which is what they proclaim to be fighting against on the Federal level. We are for the minimum wage, the right to labor organizations, against privatization. It’s the exact opposite in Berlin. The government has continued to undermine labor organizations, curtailing the right to co-determination in Berlin. The Left is putting it into practice, and we had to fight it. We said, “Not with us. We will run independently as WASG Berlin.” That was the starting point. So in our view say it’s more that the Left in Berlin, formerly PDS, or “Linke.PDS,” wasn’t all that left. Cutting 20% of blind people’s benefits, or privatizing 120,000 apartments, that’s not leftist politics. So that’s when you have to start looking at the labels.

Kluge

They call you a Trotskyist. So do you. What is a Trotskyist? What is the essence of Trotsky, his legacy, so to speak?

Redler

To me, it’s a form of modern Marxism. The term refers to Trotsky who, starting in the ’20s in the opposition, fought Stalinization in the Soviet Union. In that sense he said that the planned economy is legitimate, as opposed to capitalism, which is chaotic and prone to crisis, as we are currently seeing. The economic crisis will hit Germany. But he said we still need a Socialist democracy. There must be a functioning system of councils, there must be creativity.

Kluge

You can’t build up one country at the cost of others, but you have to remain an internationalist.

Redler

Exactly. Socialism in one country, as represented by Stalin since 1924, is impossible, he said. And in the end, it proved true. Referring to the establishment of true Socialist democracy in what later became the entire Eastern Bloc, or course. But that wouldn’t have been possible in the Soviet Union alone.

Kluge

I can still see him, leading a demonstration in Moscow to mark the October Revolution. And the workers don’t emerge from the factories, as they did in 1917.

Redler

But I don’t share that very critical or negative view about dependent workers or the working class. I am fairly confident that what we recently saw in the train driver strike in Germany, in the strike movements we see in France, Italy or in Greece, where there have been many general strikes in recent years, will become more widespread in Germany as well. And that we can expect major conflicts and movements in Germany. That’s why I don’t believe the thesis of Markuse and others from the ’60s, that the worker is a manipulated being, manipulated by Springer & Co., and can’t defend himself. I don’t buy it. Of course that has an influence, but I still believe that, especially during struggles, a different awareness comes about. We saw this in the strike at Bosch Siemens Appliances last year, no, 2006, in Berlin. At the start of the strike, there was one group of Turkish employees, another Vietnamese group, a few Africans and some Germans. They didn’t mingle much at first. But in the dispute, they grew together, fought for their cause, against the closing of the plant. And increasingly they said: We’re not just fighting for our own interests, to save our own skin. This is also about our colleagues at AIG Nuremberg, at BenQ, the planned layoffs at Siemens, the employees at Nokia Bochum… Out of that struggle grew a different class consciousness and solidarity. I’m confident, and that’s my optimism, that this will continue to develop.

Kluge

So you say that the foremost political decision is whom to trust, and whom can you by no means trust. And those responsible for the First World War and 1933, I certainly can’t trust them, no matter how they’ve dispersed. But I trust workers because they produce something?

Redler

Well, I think that what Marx said about an irreconcilable class conflict, and that the class of dependent workers, to which I would count the jobless, that they are the progressive class, who can develop an awareness, can reorganize production later on. I think that this progressive class is capable of shutting down this entire country. Then they can fight for completely different conditions, can bring about a society that revolves around the needs of people and nature, instead of a small minority, like Nokia, that can’t get enough. It’s pure trust on my part, but I think that history has shown repeatedly what can be achieved through struggle.

text

What does “left” mean ?

Redler

To me, being left means positioning yourself on the correct side. That’s the short answer. In that sense, if we assume that we will continue to live in a class society, even if today it takes on different forms, and working class no longer means only those…

Kluge

When the class divisions run within a person. A lot of it is subjective, is already interjected.

Redler

Marx also established the difference between class as itself and for itself. There are objective classes, but they don’t always see themselves as such. That’s clear. But still, I think that being left means taking the side of dependent workers, the jobless, the youth, not the side of those who now are laying off the Nokia staff, to put it in concrete terms, or who decrease employee wages and increase hours, for example. Those who already have the cash and are making profit. So you have to decide. As we did two years ago, as WASG Berlin and SAV. We decided, for example, to support those demanding wage increases in the public sector. Or to support the staff of Charité Hospital, who are opposing the continued privatization of the Charité. The leftist Berlin Senate usually takes the other side, and its policies, as a rule, advance all these cuts in social benefits, wage cuts and job cuts. So we said, that’s not our policy, we think leftist politics means to fundamentally change social conditions. In my view, that doesn’t mean refusing to be a part of a government. If you look to Bolivia, or to Venezuela, you see that governments are involved in nationalization. That doesn’t go far enough for me, but it’s the right development, it’s going in the right direction. But there were mass movements there. Mass movements against neoliberalism, which were what made it possible for Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales to get elected at all, and to make progress for the workers and for the jobless. In Germany it’s a different situation. Here, the left is on the defensive. We’re slowly going on the offensive. Polls show a shift in perception among the population.

Kluge

How big is your organization?

text

“I BELIEVE IN SOLIDARITY!”/ Lucy Redler on the political strike and social resistance

Redler

At the peak of WASG Berlin, there were 850 members. WASG Berlin no longer exists. We built up the BASG as a regional organization with 100 members. I’m also in the SAV, the Socialist Alternative…

Kluge

Approximately as many as were in the Spartacist League.

Redler

Except that the Spartacists weren’t only in Berlin.

Kluge

No, throughout Europe. It was made up of people from all over Europe.

17. King Steam, Empress Electricity (starts 02:43:16, ends 02:49:22)

text

KING STEAM, EMPRESS ELECTRICITY

text

A day with Karl Marx and Wilhelm Liebknecht

text

LONDON, DECEMBER 1850

text

KARL MARX AWAKENS…

text

IN A SHOP DISPLAY WINDOW ON REGENT STREET…

text

…THE FIRST ELECTRIC LOCOMOTIVE!

Marx

“This is the breakthrough…”

woman (offscreen)

… he suddenly said.

text

STEAM PASSION

text

AEG FILAMENT LAMP

text

ELECTRICITY

text

MIND

Narrator

He has to talk. His friend Liebknecht will be visiting tonight.

text

OUTSIDE IT IS COLD…

text

THE ATMOSPHERE IS CHARGED!

text

TALKING, DRINKING, TALKING…

text

…EXHAUSTED, UNTIL DAWN/

text

WAITING…

text

WAITING…

text

A film by Rudolf Kersting, Agnes Ganseforth

text

Based on a report by Ulrich Erckenbrecht

18. What does subjective-objective mean? with Joseph Vogl (starts 02:49:24, ends 03:02:14)

text

Keyword: What does subjective-objective mean?

Kluge

What is meant by a subjective-objective relation? A key term with Marx. Nothing is only subjective, nothing is only objective.

Joseph Vogl

The subjective-objective relation is basically an intellectual machine. It’s the attempt to construct an intellectual machine…

Kluge

To understand what is really happening.

Vogl

Yes. To understand what’s happening, but even more: It’s a machine that, like all other machines, produces something. No machine produces nothing. Every machine is related to a production assignment. That entails two things: A machine must be set in motion. What’s interesting about the subjective-objective machine is that it has two ends, each of which have a switch to set it in motion. As soon as a subject starts to move, an object world is also set in motion. As soon as an object world moves, a subjective moment is also set in motion. That’s the first part. That works by way of a program. All machines have a program. The subjective-objective relation is thus a relational program. But what is produced in this subjective-objective relation? What is produced here, and this applies to Hegel as well as to Marx, what is produced here is world, a very specific world. Two moments are interesting here: For one, a world of forgeries can be produced, a world of forgeries in which, for example, subjective-objective relations produce objects in which this subject-object relation has disappeared. This simulates a form of synthesis, pretending that the objects, or the foreign things, are available, can be held in your hand, and can in a way contribute to making existence more comfortable. This means it is a machine for the production of illusions. The dialectic view, the Marxist view, would be that this machine must be sabotaged. “Sabot” means wooden shoe and must be thrown into the machine. Early industrial workers brought the machines to a standstill to improve their working conditions. So this machine, this dialectic machine, that produces illusions, comfortable objects…

Kluge

Can it be stopped?

Vogl

It can be stopped by raising objections, throwing sand into the gears, by which something is created, which, I believe, is the other object of production, the other outcome: namely the insight into the fundamental foreignness, the insight into the basic inability to appropriate a production world, in which this subject, a part of this machinery, was always a knave, always a subordinate, always a fragile, exploited being.

Kluge

But here, it seems to me, the machinery of the subjective-objective matter, meaning the insight machinery, cannot simply be slowed down by the wooden shoe, but rather that a second machine exists, one that does in fact work. And that could appropriate, pick up on, the subjective-objective relation, not as an illusion, but as an actual relation, by lowering the ego barrier, by combining, anticipating the other. That would be the case in love, but also in war, if I grasp the enemy faster than he grasps himself, or in the production process, or in the case of inventions.

Vogl

Now this means that if this machine produces illusions on the one hand…

Kluge

It can also produce anti-illusions.

Vogl

… it can also produce truths.

Kluge

Realities, realities that are of use to people.

Vogl

If it does that, and does so in the Marxist sense, in the sense of Marx, in the sense of “Das Kapital,” then there is one key aspect in this production of truth, namely that this truth is no longer within me, no longer within my person, or in my consciousness, but rather in the things out there, in the relations of production…

Kluge

And in between, according to Marx, based on “Das Kapital,” and on his analysis. So then a strange, distorted reflection comes about, because this diligent Marx analyzes, in such a righteous way, what capital itself causes in terms of societal change and manipulation of the subjective-objective relation, but he fails to describe the flipside, or only does so in his early work. Namely how is it possible to gain experience in the in-between spaces between two subjects, two… a thing and a subject, or whatever? How does the production of realities in society function, in an auspicious way? He doesn’t describe that.

Vogl

He does not. At most, he gives clues. The best definition, probably, of what is produced, and what is produced in the way of truth, is that the true or the real always lies in between. That which exists between us, between me and the collective, between me and the relations of production.

Kluge

When I speak, between two speakers.

Vogl

Exactly. That’s why it’s interesting to look at the question: How can the scene of the truth even be found? In which place would the truth appear?

Kluge

Truth or veracity?

Vogl

Veracity. The spaces in-between always play an essential role. Take the negotiating table, for example. It is nothing more than an empty center, in which truths are produced in lengthy processes. Or take the courtroom. Why do witnesses, defendants, judges, lawyers and observers sit around an empty center? Because they know that only in that space can truths emerge.

Kluge

In the Middle Ages, nobles met at bridges. Each walked to the bridge’s middle, not only for security reasons, but because understanding is possible at the junction between opposites.

Vogl

The possibility of understanding is transmitted, but also the substratum of that understanding. Call it truth, reality, or common ground, it is transported. But the fundamental problem is one of architectural nature, namely that if truths require architectures of truth, then truth needs the empty space, the space that has been cleared, the enclosed place, even if it’s only a court oak tree, or marked by an initial barrier, which clearly delineates between the world and the place of negotiation. So these truths are tied to operations of interruption, of cutting off, of producing an unwritten place. That then would be the theater of truth. And in our subjective-objective machine, it would also be the in-between place. Neither on the side of the subject, nor on the side of the object can truth emerge, but in fact only in the process in-between, which is actually…

Kluge

Which is separate, at the juncture. So this exists in every person, as a possibility of sensitivity. People can do that. But Marx never wrote the book about this that we need.

Vogl

There would have to be a book written in which Marx demonstrates a higher sensitivity and awareness for his own anthropology. In other words, for a person he always hypothesized, as a working person, a person who sees himself as a thermodynamic machine, as someone who is chained to his production process.

Kluge

But someone receptive to the free association of producers.

Vogl

Exactly. Someone capable of seeing this relation, the relation of subjective-objective conditions, without humans, without this human reference point. That is where there would need to be a Marxist anti-anthropology added, in which man is no longer the point of reference for all things.

Kluge

So he steps away from the pre-human for a change, and as long as he does so, he can deal with the others, like a citizen of the world. Then he returns to his snail shell.

Kluge

He returns, and it is furnished with what 18th century anthropology left behind. Namely a high degree of self-esteem, a high degree of sensual-intellectual relations, a high degree of emancipatory will, a propensity to illusion and so on. At this point you find with Marx, and surely in “Das Kapital” a blind spot, namely the emancipation of humans, not into humans, but the emancipation of humans out of themselves. This challenge, or this, call it centrifugal movement, was not achieved by “Das Kapital.” There is a radical aspect in Marx’s “Das Kapital.” The radical aspect is that the reality of given conditions can only be described in the subtraction of human consciousness, with the strange reference point of the narcissistic ego, which thinks it can act autonomously. That’s the radical aspect. The blind spot consists of the fact that changes in the conditions, which “Das Kapital” uses as a horizon line, these changes are only possible by falling back on this small, weak, humane ego.

Kluge

So in a different constellation, it emerges from itself again. So besides work, it develops something that something else can appropriate.

Vogl

Yes. And the outcome of this analysis, like an outcome of this emancipation, is a human, or however you want to call this being, a human who will stand there, whom you do not know, who was not recognizable, who the 19th century hadn’t yet described.

Kluge

He is not new, but consists of age-old elements.

Vogl

Yes, elements that already exist…

Kluge

But organized differently than the classical workforce.

Vogl

Yes, with a different composition, a different chemical make-up. But it’s an experiment, namely to create a human for whom these conditions are not yet sufficient. It’s creating a human for future situations. A human who is, in a way, amorphous, who, as Nietzsche would’ve said, is a yet to be determined animal. This open question, I believe, is depicted in “Das Kapital,” but also strangely closed. So one could say that here, with Marx, there is no great difference to Kant’s anthropology, which says that society should be established for a society of devils. But it might be that in the future, there is a society of angels. It could also be that neither angels nor devils are sufficient to describe this human substratum. To put it differently, in Marx’s “Das Kapital,” there is a presupposed anthropology that in my view poses problems for Marx that he himself cannot yet solve.

19. The “Total Worker” at Verdun (starts 03:02:14, ends 03:19:29)

text

THE “TOTAL WORKER” AT VERDUN / Burrowing in the hills of Vauquois

text

The total worker

text

Beneath the village of Vauquois,

text

which after the battle

text

no longer existed,

text

German and French pioneers,

text

carefully selected miners,

text

dug tunnels

text

from both sides

text

into the hilly landscape /

text

[…] The detonations

text

began with 50 kg of dynamite /

text

Now, on May 14, 1916,

text

a German charge packed

text

the destructive force

text

of 60,000 kg of explosives /

text

With this, the German miners

text

blew up a tunnel above them

text

that belonged to the French miners,

text

who otherwise

text

would have blown up

text

the German tunnel /

Kluge

Looking at you here in front of me, one could almost call you a dead man. Or at least at death’s door.

Helge Schneider as the Master Blaster of Vauquois / Cigar Willi

That’s true.

Kluge

You’re not a smoker, that’s material for igniting the charge.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

Exactly. I don’t like the taste of cigars. I’m a non-smoker. I just wanted to show that we, the special forces, need the cigar in order to light to fuse. A cigar works better than lighting a match down there in the tunnel. It’s more reliable. It’s a matter of seconds, milliseconds.

Kluge

Milliseconds. And the fuse burns for half a minute, and you have to flee, and if you get out in one piece… It goes well 7 out of 8 times.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

It’s not even half a minute. 10 seconds, 14 seconds, then… The shorter the fuse, the more precise you can set the moment of detonation.

Kluge

And you have to be fast, as you can only decide between dying because you’re not fast enough in terms of your own fuse, or the enemy’s fuse is faster, and you get blown up that way. Sometimes there are double explosions in both tunnels, tunnel and countertunnel, at the same time.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

That’s almost the rule by now. The French are good. Some of them are real experts. Some of them learned on our side, in Oberhausen. I even know a few of them…

Kluge

You’re proud of your enemy, on account of their skill. It’s your duty to hate them and destroy them.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

There are some good guys among them. I went to vocational school with some of them, that’s how we got into this field.

Kluge

Here you need a little more than just talent, more than at home. In the mines, detonations have to be authorized.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

Yes, of course. Both digging and tunnel driving have to be authorized, while taking great precautions, because…

Kluge

When you’re at war, however, it’s unauthorized.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

It’s a whole different story. And there… There’s where… the wheat is separated from the chaff. Normally, when you normally do digging, underground digging, a lot of factors come into play, and you have plans. But when we operate like we do here in Vauquois, in close contact with the enemy, it’s an entirely different story. Here, the enemy is not the coal, the enemy is the French foe.

Kluge

So you build a tunnel. You put explosives at the tunnel head.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

That’s right. We drive the tunnel as far as possible.

Kluge

From below, because you know the French tunnel is above.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

Exactly. We can’t dig too high, or the detonation loses its impact. The deeper it is, the larger the area of the detonation’s upward impact. If we go too deep, however, the explosion loses force. And now you imagine that the French are thinking the same. They had the same teachers that we did. Still, I don’t see myself as a total worker.

Kluge

You reject that term?

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

I reject it, yes.

Kluge

That would mean you are in a sense working together in cooperation with the enemy. As if it were sabotage, by agreement.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

You couldn’t…

Kluge

But there’s an inner conspiracy, by which everyone does his best.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

Yes, I have… Sure, you have respect for the enemy’s expertise, that’s how I’d put it. There are real geniuses among them. But we have good men too.

Kluge

So if you were leading the other side, you’d also be saying those Germans have some real geniuses among them. There’s no shortage of mutual respect.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

No, no shortage of that. We cannot forget the soul.

Kluge

The soul wants to express itself.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

The soul is in the tunnel.

Kluge

Mankind would rather want nothing than not want a thing.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

Correct. For example, when we withdraw from a tunnel, in order to make headway, we use depth sounders to hear how far the enemy is. We’re dealing with sediments, with sheet rock, then clay. And here in Vauquois there’s lots of sand. And…

Kluge

You get through that quickly.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

So on an imaginary level, you are linked to the enemy’s soul, and also to his hearing, his senses.

Kluge

They listen, you listen.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

That’s right. Without the work that the enemy is doing, which really is excellent work, we wouldn’t be motivated to keep driving the tunnel forward, nor would we have the extreme danger involved in accepting the possibility of encountering the enemy’s tunnel. That happens when the tunnels are at the same elevation, which, strangely enough, is the desired outcome. Although we always try to get slightly lower, so that we…

Kluge

The enemy’s trying to do the same!

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

Yes. And we can’t, as I said, go too deep. The non-plus-ultra situation is if the tunnels move toward each other, and when the first to break through…

Kluge

Then there is a detonation right away. But it’s impossible to detonate. You can’t set a charge quickly enough.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

Immediately.

Kluge

No, that would kill both parties. They look at each other in amazement. They won’t kill each other.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

Yes, they will. It has nothing to do with killing.

Kluge

They use a pistol? So they greet each other… It would be like Christmas, in the tunnel, if both enemies…

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

It’s not unheard of.

Kluge:… come face to face.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

I’ve experienced it myself, a face-to-face encounter. It’s happened to me, but a job is a job, and a job has to be done. Both sides want to be first, want to be the best.

text

In the hills of Vauquois

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

I’d like to try to explain what the term “Fatherland” means to me, personally, and for many, many others. Hopefully. For me, Fatherland is my own skills, my commitment, that which I am capable of.

Kluge

That which I have. I don’t have bank accounts and property, but I have my skills.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

That’s right, I have my skills, I have my qualifications. Perhaps more than others, I developed my skills into a specialization. So I can say that I love what I do, and that’s what Fatherland means to me.

Kluge

If I were a singer, I’d have to sing. If I were a poet, I’d have to write. If I’m a master blaster…

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

And I happen to be a master blaster. Certainly, blasting also has to do with annihilation, with destruction. But if I were a gardener, for example…

Kluge

I’d water the lawn.

Schneider (as Master Blaster):… I’d water the lawn, and that would be my Fatherland.

Kluge

Then I’d be a gardener.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

If I were a gardener, I’d be…

Kluge

Useless for purposes of war.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

Yes, sure. Afterwards, as a gardener…

Kluge

You could lead the gardeners, the German versus the French gardeners, but there wouldn’t be a battle.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

No, but after the war there would be plenty to do as a gardener. It all ties into each other. Or kindergartener. Come to think of it, a kindergartener, well… But why should a kindergarten teacher not see her job as her Fatherland? And live it accordingly. My job just happens to be master blaster.

text

Why do they say Fatherland and not Motherland?

Kluge

Why don’t they say Motherland?

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

There are so many single mothers, so maybe Motherland could by now take the place of Fatherland. We’ve had the fatherless society ever since the late ’60s.

Kluge

You hear that a lot. –

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

Yes, an awful lot.

Kluge

A motherless society couldn’t exist, or else there would be no children.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

But there is the term mother ship. But that’s a whole different story. The very word “mother ship” has much more… That has a very different character than Fatherland. For me, Fatherland also has to do with protecting, with expansion, with skills, oddly enough also with war. While mother ship has to do with… Breast, yes. Drinking from the breast.

Kluge

Seafaring.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

Seafaring.

Kluge

• Supplies.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

Supplies. Yes, docking. Arriving. Fatherland means gushing out.

Kluge

Mother ship: Waving as you leave.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

That’s right.

Kluge

Others wave when you return.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

Waving to the ship.

Kluge

Peaceful, actually.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

So is Fatherland. Once you step out of the area where you represent your Fatherland, then Fatherland is still there.

Kluge

But you’re not working in the Fatherland, you can’t call the hills of Vauquois land, they’re tunnels. Father tunnels, so to speak, which isn’t a widespread term. I blow myself up inside my father tunnel.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

But father tunnel is Fatherland, too, for the tunnel is in the land. Above us is land, to be precise. Earth is land.

Kluge

Shredded land, not actually land. You couldn’t even plant a turnip.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

Sand land.

Kluge

Sand land. Land of debris.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

Land of debris.

Kluge

Destroyed land.

text

The pock-marked hills of Vauquois

text

Original photos of detonations June 21, 1916, 8:32 am

Kluge

What you’re conquering there is actually awful.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

I don’t know, I really believe that coming generations will thank us for our actions.

Kluge

And such a find, the hills of Vauquois, could be like a memorial you send home, as a package. It beats sending your own ashes, which after a detonation don’t exist.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

You could say that here we are preparing a site of mass tourism, perhaps. It will be a famous place.

Kluge

If posterity cherishes your heroism, and doesn’t deny it.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

Even then.

Kluge

It could get bad, like if they say, “We are so sick of the war, we don’t even want to ignore it.”

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

Still. What we’re doing here: Building tunnels, carrying out detonations, regardless of what form it takes, it is definitely significant.

Kluge

Significant, but counterproductive.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

And, sure, why not? Counterproductive is productive.

Kluge

Counter: against someone else.

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

No matter whether it’s counter or for something. It is productive. Okay?

Kluge

If you were to give a guiding principle for this standpoint, what would it be? A saying?

Schneider (as Master Blaster)

A saying… Perhaps I’d say: “Burrow or lose.”