View transcript: Program 1: Marx and Eisenstein

News from Ideological Antiquity (First Version, 2008)

Alexander Kluge

Program 1

Marx and Eisenstein

Eisenstein’s notations on Capital

1. From Eisenstein’s notebooks. With Heather McDonnell, (Piano), Irmela Roelcke (piano), Hannelore Hoger (speaker), Charlotte Müller, Thomas Niehans (starts

0:00:00, ends: 0:15:09)

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Heather O’Donnell, pianist

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Notes for a film version of Marx’s “DAS KAPITAL”

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From Eisenstein’s notebooks of 1927/28

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12.x.[1927] I’ve resolved to make a film of “DAS KAPITAL” based on the text by K. MARX. This is the only possible formal solution

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10.11.[1928] Yesterday I thought a lot about “Das Kapital”

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[…] Joyce’s “ULYSSES” deals with this in a wonderful chapter, written in scholastic-catechistic style

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One asks questions and then gives answers to them

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Questions like how to light a KEROSENE LAMP

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But the answers come from the world of metaphysics

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17.III.28 […] the topic of looms and the storm of machines -the weavers need to point out the following conflict: Electric streetcar in Shanghai and thousands of coolies who began to starve as a consequence and lay down on the tracks and died

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24.III.28 […] A good episode from Paris/ A man with an amputated leg riding on a wheeled board commits suicide throws himself into the water

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7.IV.[1928] 0:45 a.m. […] During the course of the film a wife cooks a soup for her husband who returned home/ The cooking wife and the returning husband/

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The association of the third part (for example) comes from the pepper that they use as a spice: pepper, cayenne pepper/ Devilishly spicy/ Dreyfus/

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“Traitor” Dreyfus Sunken ships in the harbor/ The sinking English ships could be covered up nicely with the lid of the saucepan/ Instead of pepper petroleum could have been used for the Primus stove and the transition to “oil”

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Irmela Roelcke, pianist “October 12, 1927.

Hannelore Hoger

I have resolved to make a film of ‘Das Kapital’ based on the text by K. Marx. This is the only possible formal solution. November 4, 1927, evening. In America, even cemeteries are privately owned. Total competition, bribing of doctors and so on. The dying are given brochures, only here will you find peace in the shade of the trees and the burbling brook. For ‘Das Kapital’.” “January 2, 1928. For ‘Das Kapital’: The stock exchange cannot be a stock exchange, like in ‘Mabuse’, but through thousands of little details. The concierge as bondholder. The concierges pushing for admission of guilt by Soviet Russia.”

Charlotte Müller & Thomas Niehaus, Berliner Ensemble

“April 4, 1928. Examination of a centimeter of a silk stocking. April 7, 1928, 12:45 a.m. A torn woman’s stocking and the silk stocking in a newspaper advertisement. The latter begins to pedal and multiplies into 50 pairs of legs. Chorus line. Silk. Art. Battle for a centimeter of silk stocking. The old genre depicted a storyline from several perspectives. The new genre assembles a perspective from several storylines.”

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11.IV.[1928] On repetition

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With regard to dialectical analysis, i.e. analysis in CONTRADICTIONS, such a procedure is an excellent thing

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[…] The following should be FORMULATED in this vein: One pair of silk stockings - Art

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One pair of silk stockings - Morality

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One pair of silk stockings - Commerce and Competition

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One pair of silk stockings

Indian women who are forced to incubate silkworm cocoons in their armpits!

Müller

We have here a silk stocking of the finest quality, and here, a garter. It is placed around the woman’s hips and fastened in the back. Then the woman, taking care to avoid getting a run, pulls the stocking up onto her right leg or her left leg.

Niehaus

If a man isn’t being careful when undoing the connection between stocking, garter and body… … the possibility arises that a run will occur.

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Silk / Art

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The struggle for a centimeter of silk stocking

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The aesthetes are in favor

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The bishops and morality against

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Mais ces pantins dance on the strings of the silk producers and those in conflict with them, producers of linens for outer garments

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[…] The soup is ready is the last part/ A soup without nutritional value/ The husband comes/ “socially enraged”/ The hot soup… watered down his pathos propitiated/ Bloody clashes on points of view/ And the worst of it is

social indifference that borders on treason/ The husband embraces the skeleton of his wife/ […] A “surprise” (in true verse)

She hands him a cheap cigarette/ The question of scope, which can vary

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It must be handled with the utmost sobriety, and each part in its own way

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Perhaps even a part cast as a “feature film” Another part from a film chronicle

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[…] 7.IV. [1928], 1:30 a.m. One chapter is required for the materialistic understanding of “soul”

2. Projects 1927 – 1929. With Eisenstein biographer Oksana Bulgakowa. (starts

0:15:09, ends: 0:27:54)

Kluge

On October 12, 1927, Eisenstein writes, as the first entry in his notes: “I have resolved to make a film of “Das Kapital” based on the text by K. Marx.”

Kluge

Tell us about that day.

Prof. Dr. Oksana Bulgakowa

Well, it was… He had just finished shooting “October” the day before, after which he immediately returned to Moscow and actually went into the cutting room on the 12th because on November 7, just a few weeks later, the film was to be shown at the festivities at the Bolshoi Theater. He had shot 49,000 meters of film and had to cut those down to 2000 meters and present the finished film.

Kluge

2000 meters is a bit less than 90 minutes, right?

Bulgakowa

That’s right.

Kluge

And how much had he shot, did you say?

Bulgakowa

49,000 meters.

Kluge

Has the footage been preserved?

Bulgakowa

Only partially. For the first time in his life he’d been given total freedom in terms of production resources. A typical Soviet film, the average film at that time, cost roughly 30,000

40,000 rubles. His film “October”, although he shot in original interiors, cost 800,000 rubles. He felt like the Cecil B. DeMille of Soviet film and really thought he’d made the greatest film ever, the Soviet “10 Commandments”. The film had been supported at the very highest levels. The Central Committee had repeatedly discussed and corrected the script. He had the whole city at his disposal, did night shoots. They would turn off the electricity in the whole city for a shoot, the bridges were raised and lowered in the middle of the day, so it really was a huge operation. And now he was faced with the task of turning these thousands of meters of material into a film, and it was simply impossible. There just wasn’t enough time. So to work night and day, he was prescribed amphetamines, performance enhancing drugs, as we say today, and once he actually cut for 48 hours in one sitting. But after two weeks of this marathon he was blind.

Kluge

Blind?

Bulgakowa

He couldn’t see the pictures. Couldn’t see any pictures. It was hard to see on the Maviola anyway…

Kluge

This Maviola that he’s using, it’s not a cutting table but an editing machine, with tiny little pictures, like today on the Internet…

Bulgakowa

Right. And the whole film… everything he cut, he cut with his inner eye. He could only check it in parts and repeatedly made corrections. He was in a state of total exhaustion. And in this state, in the midst of cutting “October”, and thinking that he’s creating a whole new kind of film, a film that has nothing to do with the films he’s made before, or anything else, for that matter, he’s thinking that the only thing that he could possibly film after that is “Das Kapital”. During this work, when he’s blind and in a state of total exhaustion, and he doesn’t succeed in cutting the film to 2000 meters, he theorizes and begins to imagine a film that doesn’t yet exist. And he fills… he begins to write these journals. He goes to psychoanalysts in search of a cure because he feels that his creative powers have begun to stagnate. He goes to three doctors to cure his neuroses and the crisis he’s in. After that, and still in a state of total mental exhaustion, he’s sent down south. He brings a book with him, just given to him by the wife of Maxim Litvinov: Joyce’s “Ulysses”. When he embarks…

Kluge

In Russian?

Bulgakowa

No, in English.

Kluge

In English.

Bulgakowa

And in German.

Kluge

When it comes to languages, Eisenstein is able to speak French, English, German, Russian… Anything else?

Bulgakowa

A bit of Spanish, he learned Spanish in Mexico, but that’s it then…

Kluge

Sometimes he switches languages in the middle of a sentence.

Bulgakowa

Yes.

Kluge

In his head it’s like the confusion of tongues at Babel.

Bulgakowa

He doesn’t regard it as confusion. He writes, he uses the language or word…

Kluge, and Bulgakowa

Which fits best.

Bulgakowa

So sometimes he’ll write a sentence in five languages. If it works. Interestingly, he changes to… His intimate language, that he uses in his journal, is German.

Kluge

So we have this journal and these other entries that he makes in 1927/28, up to 1929. In 1929 there are no more entries, but the plans continue …

Bulgakowa

Yes.

Kluge

If we follow these plans to the end, we find him in Paris. On November 29-30, 1929. After Black Friday.

Bulgakowa

Yes.

Kluge

Basically a month later.

Bulgakowa

Yes.

Kluge

That’s when he visits Joyce, who is blind. Could you describe it?

Bulgakowa

He returned from London that day. Léon Moussinac arranged the meeting. He was a Communist film critic, or sympathetic to the Communist press, who Eisenstein already met in Moscow, and the three of them went to Joyce. Eisenstein went with Montague and Moussinac and there they met Simon Kuslansky, a Russian immigrant, at Joyce’s. Joyce wanted to learn Russian, and he did. The meeting didn’t last long and Eisenstein didn’t know how to react, because contact with Russian immigrants was carefully monitored and, despite the fact that he met with many Russian immigrants then, he didn’t know how to react. And during this time there was a wave of people who didn’t want to return, and many were people with whom Eisenstein met.

Kluge

It might have been a Trotsky contact. It might have been an immigrant, a czarist. All of which could’ve been very risky.

Bulgakowa

Yes, and that’s why he didn’t mention Kuslansky in his memoirs. He wrote that he was a dubious figure and was there and followed our conversation. Joyce is blind, but he tells Eisenstein nonetheless that he has seen “Potemkin”. What’s more, Eisenstein writes in his memoirs that Joyce reads something for him, which he cannot do. Joyce himself does not read, he puts on a record. And Joyce’s voice reads… and really does that. This confusion of media that Eisenstein experiences in Joyce’s presence…

Kluge

And they plan to collaborate.

Bulgakowa

Yes. Joyce thinks that his novel could only be filmed by two directors. Either Eisenstein or Walter Ruttmann. He thinks they could pull it off. Eisenstein’s idea is to film “Das Kapital” as “Ulysses”. And when he writes in his notes about his conception of how to do “Das Kapital”, he writes that he will do it as “Ulysses” is written. One day, or rather…

Kluge

A day in the life of one person.

Bulgakowa

Right.

Kluge

Bloom, in other words, in whom the whole Homeric story coalesces, up to… a pub in Dublin…

Bulgakowa

Exactly. And Eisenstein wants to do the same thing. He wanted to take a day in the life of one person and then into this one day, including Homer up until… Everything, that is. And squeeze it into this one day.

Kluge

To write the book about the essential power of man?

Bulgakowa

Yes, and in the end he thought, while riding in a streetcar in Moscow between Strastnoya, a square, where the Pushkin monument stands, and Nikitsky or Petrovskie Vorota, which is probably ten minutes by streetcar. It’s not far. You can walk it in ten minutes, too. He conceived the whole film then. He packed one day into just one evening. And in the end it’s one evening, the last chapter, an inner monologue of a worker’s wife. Using this inner monologue of a worker’s wife, he can do the same as Joyce did with one day in the life of Bloom. He didn’t intend the film to be a story or anecdote. Instead it’s only a chance to link the associations with great freedom. And this minimal unit, the path from midday, from table to bed, in this minimal unit of deft action, he could squeeze in the entire history of mankind.

Kluge

The goods are in it. Cooperation, too.

Bulgakowa

Yes.

Kluge

Large machines, history.

Bulgakowa

Yes.

Kluge

The earlier ones, the work of the dead sexes. Everything is dealt with up to the last chapter, where he wants to develop the associative class struggle. How could we picture it?

Bulgakowa

How could we picture it? Well, there are two moments that I find interesting. He talked about his theory of intellectual film. He wrote this theory while in a drug-induced state. And these drugs help him somehow to release his stream of consciousness. When he read “Ulysses”, he must have been under the influence because he wrote about it. He had toothaches and used strong painkillers, and suddenly his body separated from his consciousness and he wrote down several thoughts in this state where this inner monologue, his own inner one…

Kluge

And he envisioned these films. And he would have also been capable of making them, just as Mozart composed.

Bulgakowa

He thought that but he would have never done so. He just took notes about them. And he thought he could write a catalogue of associations compiling such stimuli and use it as the reference for building this chain. The chain of associations for viewers to use to follow this unmade film.

Kluge

They couldn’t follow it.

Bulgakowa

Maybe.

Kluge

In “October” you can definitely follow the chain of associations.

Bulgakowa

Yes, but critics didn’t want to. They said the physiological effect wasn’t sufficient. In places where Eisenstein thought it was sufficiently physiological, critics claimed this impact was lacking and the clinking of a glass, which you hear, apparently they missed it.

Yearning for the childhood of thought. How do Marx’s texts sound in the year 2008?

3. Three texts from CAPITAL and the GRUNDRISSE (starts

0:27:54, ends: 0:30:43)

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On Sergei Eisenstein’s plan (1928), to “cinematographize” DAS KAPITAL

Kluge

“A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells.”

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NEWS FROM IDEOLOGICAL ANTIQUITY

Kluge

“But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best bee is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labor process we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the laborer at its commencement. He not only effects a change in the material on which he works, but he also realizes a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will.” “Kapital”, Marx Engels Werke 23, 193. Introduction, “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy”, MEW 13. “Man is a Zoon politikon in the most literal sense: He is not only a social animal, but an animal that can be individualized only within society.” “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”, MEW 1. “But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man.”

4. Target / Actual. Assembly line with many who are still alive. (starts

0:30:43, ends: 0:32:06)

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TARGET / ACTUAL

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Assembly on the line

5. Landscape with classical heavy industry. Music

Maeror Tri, “The Revenger,” from the album Multiple Personality Disorder. (Korm Plastics, 1993). (starts: 0:32:06, ends: 0:33:51)

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Landscape with classical industry

6. The book of human essential powers. With Sir Henry; music

Verdi’s Rigoletto. (starts: 0:33:51, ends: 0:36:03)

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Sir Henry, composer

Kluge

You can see how the history of industry and the emerging objective existence of industry is the open book of the essential powers of man, the sensory human psychology.

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“You can see how the history of industry and the objective existence of history is the open book of cognitive powers of man, sensory human psychology…” K. Marx, The Paris Manuscripts of 1844, in Marx/Engels Collected Works

7. “A human being is the mirror of the other. With Sophie Rois (speaker) and Jan Czaikowski (piano); music

Vincenzo Bellini, Norma. (starts: 0:36:03, ends: 0:38:00)

Sophie Rois, Singer

Assuming we produced as human beings. Each of us would have affirmed himself and the other person in two ways. In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific singularity, and enjoyed an individual manifestation of my life during the action, as well as when looking at the object I would have enjoyed the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to my senses and a might above all. When you enjoyed or used my product, I would have had the direct pleasure of knowing I satisfied a human need in my work and objectified another person’s essential nature and created the necessary object for the other person’s needs. Our productions would be a like number of mirrors reflecting our essential nature. Our productions would be a like number of mirrors reflecting our essential nature. Assuming we produced as human beings. Each of us would have affirmed himself and the other person in two ways. Our productions would be a like number of mirrors reflecting our essential nature.

8. The Lament of the Unwanted Product. (starts

0:38:00, ends: 0:41:16)

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LAMENT OF THE UNWANTED PRODUCT

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Checkout 5, Checkout 4, Checkout 3, Checkout 2 A consumer transaction takes 30 seconds

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The consumer’s decision takes an average of seven seconds

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Two-thirds of decisions are made in the supermarket

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These are the facts revealed by market research

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Campbell’s CONDENSED TOMATO SOUP

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How sad is the packaged item, destined for return, even destruction/ What is a population of cattle in which a mad cow was found against a market being cleared on Saturday after closing time

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This moved Wolfgang Rihm, while he was eating noodles in Berlin’s Restaurant Borchert, soothing the tumult in his stomach after a rehearsal at the Unter den Linden opera house

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They, the lusty cells of his stomach walls, called forth in him a lament for the goods declared unfit for sale in large department stores

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Wells, Fargo & Cos.

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Express Never before had Wolfgang Rihm achieved a subtler requiem than for a fleeting bit of trivia: A product seen in passing, a bottle (not bought) of “Dyspio” (whatever it may contain) that caught his eye as he ambled through Lafayette Department Store

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He didn’t react quite quickly enough

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Perhaps it was perfume, perhaps a drink

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In any case, a product

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Now the bolt of information descended on Rihm’s brain and from there gave rise to his lament

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Which topped the charts in the magazine Theater Heute, juxtaposed with the number 1 ranking for the Opernhaus Stuttgart as the best opera house 3 years running –

9. Machines abandoned by people. (starts

0:41:16, ends: 0:43:17)

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Machines abandoned by people

10. Inhabitants of the Cosmos. (starts

0:43:17, ends: 0:47:22)

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“We the inhabitants of the cosmos”

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The Milky Way is a flat, spiraling distributed mass of stars/ A view of the center/ The Earth revolves around the Sun/ The Sun orbits at 750,000 km/h around the center/ One full orbit takes over 250 million years/ The age of the Earth is approximately 4 billion years/ Objective and definite is the interaction with four billion years of evolution, 2,000 years of historical time, the entire landscape of industry and the feeling of the entire body

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The cells know everything right down to the stars, the head has never experienced or forgotten anything like that./

11. “Magic of antiquity.” With Sophie Rois (speaker) and Jan Czaikowski (piano); music

Vincenzo Bellini, Norma. (starts: 0:43:17, ends: 0:48:47)

Rois

“A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does he not find joy in the child’s naïvité, and must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage? Does not the true character of each epoch come alive in the nature of its children? Why should humanity’s historic childhood at its most beautiful unfolding, as a stage never to return, not exercise an eternal charm? There are unruly children and precocious children. Many of the old peoples belong in this category. The Greeks were normal children.” I find that very interesting.

Rois and text

“The charm of their art for us is not in contradiction to the undeveloped stage of society on which it grew.”

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It is its result, rather, and is inextricably bound up, rather, with the fact that the unripe social conditions under which it arose, and could alone arise, can never return –

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(Outline of the Critique of Political Economy, Introduction p.31)

“Playing their music to the hardened things so they start to dance”

12. “Becoming liquid”. (starts

0:48:47, ends: 0:52:27)

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Two scouts prepare for their mission

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“Becoming liquid”

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The equivalent of becoming invisible/

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[clip from] Public Sphere (1967)

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From the concept that isn’t apparent in the obvious that sets things in motion/” There was a danger of idealistic infatuation in this methodical principle, said some

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Should we forbid ourselves to do so?/ That would be Protestant, said others

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They couldn’t contain themselves when it came to “becoming liquid”/ “Nothing can be the one and all A tear has separated it!” You know so by breakfast already/ The imaginative F. Wolff would have enjoyed “becoming liquid” in a tumult/ The black earth drinks the trees drink, too the sea drinks the streams the sun drinks the sea waters the moon even drinks the sun…!/”

13. “Soviet force plus electrification,” or

Two Stasi informants prepare for deployment. (starts: 0:52:27, ends: 0:59:14)

Woman on Right

It’s just water, your shoes, your legs, your arm, your hands. It’s just water. Even if a few other things are mixed in, two or three percent of something else. Substances, but what can they do by themselves? Can’t walk or fly. They can’t do anything. You can move, get upset, excited, all because you have water.

Woman on left

Because of water?

Woman on Right

Because of water, just water. Here we are now in the GDR, and are made up of water. Yet we come from the oceans, the different oceans, at a pleasant 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. No matter the class struggle.

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Course title: Communism = Soviet force plus electrification (sub-text: “BECOMING LIQUID”)

Woman on left

It’s a course about class struggle.

Woman on Right

Class struggles of the oceans. They are oceans. They are water.

Woman on left

Oceans and class struggles.

It’s about other class struggles…

Woman on Right

Water. We’re in the GDR now, but we used to be water. Liquid.

Woman on left

“Used to be” and water.

Woman on Right

Water…

Woman on left

Concentrate on the course.

Woman on Right

Course. An ocean course. A course in the ocean? Did we have that where we came from? Are we trained? Do we have an ocean course? No matter the class struggle, it is about people who are made up of water. Ergo, class struggle equals water. Water is used to generate energy. For example, power plants. Hydropower plants. Electricity. And a Soviet force is needed for electrification and it would result in a communism. We may still only be dried up oceans. The territory of the GDR is a drained ocean. It’s gone now, but the fogs give it atmosphere again and it comes down with the rain because they are memories. We need water, in whatever form because we just are. We need memories. Rain, fog, steam. The territory of the GDR may have palaces and castles, but they are made up of water. The ocean is gone. It’s gone over my head, but the GDR is actually a part of the ocean.

Woman on left

And why is it made up of water?

Woman on Right

Because the most important part of a class struggle, as it is forming, is the people taking part in it. If many people, one next to the other, then you can say people, but we can also say individual parts of the ocean. Put them together and remove the skin, and it would form a huge ocean. It means the ocean is rebelling. Rebellion of the ocean. It wants to be an ocean and nothing else.

Woman on left

And how does it tie into electrification?

Woman on Right

It looks like this: one drop of water, for example. I can’t build a power plant from it. A drop of water purls. It falls down and dries up quickly. But one water bag, for example, or even several water bags, and several water containers and huge cities, where a water arsenal is, then you can generate more power and therefore energy and electricity, that is, a communal water sack territory. How can you electrify a Soviet force? Water is very important for it. Like I said, a drop of water by itself has less power than a gathering. That means, a Soviet force, like I said, a gathering of drops of water, let’s assume it’s the Soviet force, how could we electrify it? It is the electrification at the same time. It is a force already. Electricity is already there. For example, the very fine separator between you and me is the skin. That’s what separates us. It needs great care, otherwise we couldn’t distinguish one from another. Distinguish one water from another wave of water.

Woman on left

How does it tie back into electrification?

Woman on Right

It’s as follows: we need to go back to our common past. You water. I water. And together… Even if it’s different. Your hair is different. Your eyes, too. We’re water. We need to go back to water and we find our common link. A very important issue. It also needs good care. You need to take care of yourself. I need to take care of myself, but not just the skin, we also need to take care of the entire body. Everything. Front, back, top, bottom.

Woman on left

All that water?

Woman on Right

How I take care of my ocean? How do I take care of it? It laps, laps… Oceans are not always a tranquil issue. [whistles] Storm! Slowly. Slowly, it increases. How do I care for it, for storm?

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Claudia Buckler and Stephanie Wüst as Stasi informants in their training period (1989)

14. Marx-Latin, or Preparing for the officer’s exam in the People’s Army. (starts

0:59:14, ends: 1:08:29)

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In 1988, Sven Müller and Renate Pflüger prepare for the officer’s exam / Task: Marx, Early Writings, P. 273

Sven Müller and Renate Pflüger

“Whenever real, corporeal man, man with his feet firmly on the solid ground, exhaling and inhaling all the forces of nature, posits his real, objective powers as alien objects by his externalization, it is not the act of positing which is the subject: it is the subjectivity of objective powers, whose action must also be something objective. An objective being acts objectively, and he would not act objectively if the objective did not reside in the nature of his being. He only creates or posits objects because he is posited by objects, because in essence he is nature. In the act of positing, therefore, he does not fall from his ‘pure activity’ into a creating of an object. On the contrary, his objective product only confirms his objective activity, his activity as the activity of an objective, natural being. Here we see how consistent naturalism or humanism is distinct from both idealism and materialism, and is at the same time the unifying truth of both. We also see how only naturalism is capable of comprehending the action of world history.”

Müller

Okay. What do you understand as naturalism in this context?

Pflüger

Well, that it’s natural. People should understand it without any help.

Müller

Okay, I’ll read the sentence again: “Here we see how consistent naturalism or humanism is distinct from both idealism and materialism.”

Pflüger

People shouldn’t be so idealistic, and they shouldn’t be so materialistic. They should be natural and humane, right?

Müller

But what does “being natural” entail?

Pflüger

Well, don’t reflect on things.

Müller

No, I don’t think so.

Pflüger

You don’t?

Müller

No.

Pflüger

But then what’s “consistent”…

Müller

Consistent naturalism already exists, right?

Pflüger

Yes.

Müller

Or humanism? It refers to both. There’s no distinction. It refers to both terms, I think.

Pflüger

But it’s only different from idealism and materialism.

Müller

They are opposites. Naturalism and humanism…

Pflüger and Müller

… are in opposition to idealism and materialism.

Pflüger

Being humane means being social, right? Do you see it that way, too?

I would have to say yes. And being a naturalist simply means being a human being.

Pflüger

Yes. And materialism means not going shopping so much, right? Valuing things, right?

Müller

Sure, money.

Pflüger

Money, yes.

Müller

But why idealism? Idealism is important to us.

Pflüger

That’s right. It doesn’t make any sense at all.

Müller

It does make sense, I’m sure it does. I’m sure Marx had something in mind. Wait, there’s more: “At the same time the unifying truth.” “Here we see…” This is the most important sentence. “Here we see how consistent naturalism or humanism…”

Pflüger

Naturalism already exists.

Müller

Yes, and, or… “Or” means “and” here, doesn’t it? “And humanism is distinct from both idealism and materialism.” Good, evil. “And is at the same time the unifying truth of both.”

Pflüger

I don’t get it. What is the unifying truth of naturalism and humanism? Or naturalism and materialism? Is there one truth for all four things? “We also see how only naturalism can comprehend the act of world history.” Let’s try to grasp the first passage.

Müller

Okay.

Pflüger

“If the real…” We understand “real”.

Müller

Yes.

Pflüger

And “corporal”, too?

Müller

Yes.

Pflüger

“Man with his feet firmly on solid ground.”

Müller

Fatherland is intended by it, for sure.

Pflüger

Yes. I’d say the planet, too.

Müller

Yes. But “solid”? I mean, we have made the earth solid.

Pflüger

That’s right.

Müller

Our fatherland made it solid.

Pflüger

“If the real, corporeal man…” It’s all very genuine. “… man with his feet firmly on the solid ground…”

Müller

“… exhaling and inhaling all the…”

Pflüger

Who’s standing there? “… All the forces of nature…” Man is standing on the ground.

Müller

And he’s got all the forces of nature in him. Wind, fire, earth.

Pflüger

Wind. Oh, you said “wind” already. Water.

Müller

Water, exactly.

Pflüger

“Posits his real, objective essential powers…” Why “essential powers”? Who he is, then. But we’re actually real and corporeal, not objective.

Müller

Yes, that’s the problem.

Pflüger

Yes. Should we start at the end?

Müller

Backwards?

Pflüger

Or I could just read a sentence, like I would in our language. We’ll read the first sentence and try to translate it into modern talk. “If…” If.

Müller

If.

Pflüger

Yes. “The real…” Real.

Müller

The real. The natural, probably.

Pflüger

“The natural, corporeal man, man with his feet…”

Müller

“On Socialist ground.”

Pflüger

“The four winds.”

Müller

Wind, fire, water, sea.

Pflüger

“And the breathing man.” That is, us.

Müller

Right. I think the first paragraph is: “If the… Socialist man…”

Pflüger

Yes. “with his feet on Socialist ground…”

Müller

“… posits his real, objective essential powers as alien objects by his externalization…”

Pflüger

“… it is not the act of positing which is the subject…” “… real, objective essential powers as alien objects…” “Essential powers” are what he is and is capable of doing. “… by his externalization…” Is “externalization” what he does or what he says because he expresses it? “… posits as alien objects…”

Müller

I think it just means you have to…

Pflüger

Let’s just learn it by rote.

Müller

Or we write a cheat sheet.

Pflüger

Yes, maybe. Are you going to?

Müller

Yes.

Pflüger

Okay, but we can try to learn it by rote.

Müller

I think I have an idea. I think it refers to us Socialists…

Pflüger

What happens if they catch us with a cheat sheet? No, go ahead. Sorry.

Müller

If the real, if we as Socialist people, as people imparted with divine truth… That’s how it is.

Pflüger

Yes.

Müller

If we try to manipulate nature, it won’t work. On the one hand this manipulation is materialism, and idealism. Idealistic values. So the naked, Socialist person needs to base himself on naturalism and humanism.

Pflüger and Müller

“Whenever real, corporeal man, man with his feet firmly on the solid ground, exhaling and inhaling all the forces of nature, posits his real, objective essential powers as alien objects by externalization, it is not the act which is the subject: it is the subjectivity of objective powers, whose action must also be something objective. An objective being acts objectively, and he would not act objectively if the objective did not reside in the nature of his being. He only creates or posits objects because he is posited by objects, because at bottom he is nature. By positing, therefore, he does not fall from his ‘pure activity’ into a creating of the object. On the contrary, his objective product only confirms his objective activity, his activity as the activity of an objective, natural being. Here we see how consistent naturalism or humanism is distinct from both idealism and materialism and is at the same time the unifying truth of both. We also see how only naturalism can comprehend the act of world history.”

Pflüger

We should be able to comprehend this!

Müller

Yes.

15. Those were unsettling times. H. M. Enzensberger on the year of his birth, 1929. (starts

1:08:29, ends: 1:31:30)

Kluge

One has a special relationship to the year of one’s birth and seeks to find out what happened at that time.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Yes. There’s a great deal of literature devoted to the year 1929, more of a collage, really, owing to the difficulty in unifying it all. It was a very turbulent year and… The first thing that comes to mind is naturally the Great Depression… Those were unsettling times, no question.

text

THOSE WERE UNSETTLING TIMES / H. M. Enzensberger on the year of his birth, 1929

Kluge

Unsettling, but a summer like every year?

Enzensberger

Yes.

Kluge

And then in autumn, the disaster. If you put yourself in Eisenstein’s place, who in that very year, judging by his notes, is mulling over a mammoth project for which, he assumes, Gaumont or Hollywood or the Soviet Union will commission him to do… He didn’t get the commission.

Enzensberger

There were many jobs he didn’t get. He was… Such people, I think, are just too unconventional for the industry, like in big business. He also engaged with Joyce, who was also a person who was not exactly regarded as presentable from an industrial standpoint.

Kluge

No. Not only was he blind at that point, he now had restrictive ideas. Not just anyone could film his “Ulysses”. Only Ruthmann or Eisenstein could. Or a third person.

Enzensberger

He said that?

Kluge

Yes. He apparently was very picky.

Enzensberger

Did any negotiations take place?

Kluge

There were negotiations over it. But he contended that not just anyone possessed the talent to film it.

Enzensberger

Yes, it’s also remarkable for the time. You could say, too, people knew each other. And it was also odd because people weren’t as mobile as we are today, when every child has been to New York. It wasn’t like that back then. And yet there was a small community of those “in-the-know”, you could say. They knew it.

Kluge

Now you can see in Eisenstein’s plans there wasn’t a global economic crisis.

Enzensberger

Yes, his approach was different.

text

Eisenstein’s whale method

Enzensberger

I think there’s a certain overabundance, too many ideas in these notes. There’s no way he could implement all the ideas he considered. And he was someone who worked with huge amounts of material. I call that the whale approach. You let all the plankton flow in and it starts to collect there…

Kluge

Something sticks.

Enzensberger

Something sticks. That seems to have been his approach. You get the impression that it’s all a big jumble, anything goes. That can only take place in a mind like Eisenstein’s.

text

Does BLACK FRIDAY lend itself to versification?

Kluge

Let’s say that you, employing the devices of poetics, take on the subject of Black Friday. Could you sing it? After all, it is an event that echoes and provides its own subject material. I’ve always wished that Marx had described something like that.

Enzensberger

Well, there are quite serious problems of representation. Eisenstein says that the stock market shouldn’t be photographed. There are huge representation problems. For instance, I’ve always wanted to write a really long poem about economic matters. A poem about the economy would be a great subject. But the difficulties are great. Why hasn’t it happened? Because I couldn’t pull it off, one might say. There are no… There are so few examples of this sort of thing.

Kluge

In antiquity you have the chorus, which can tell whole stories.

Enzensberger

Right. Well, in a drama it’s a slightly different matter. It’s not necessarily Brecht’s best work, but there is… “Saint Joan of the Stockyards” isn’t bad…

Kluge

There’s a suggestion of the stock market.

Enzensberger

That’s right. But lyrically, it’s a subject that… There has to be a reason why we find so little of that in the corpus of lyrical literature. It’s actually… Poems talk about everything under the sun and it’s omitted, oddly enough.

Kluge

Even the economy itself, for example, the Reich Finance Ministry, it did something along those lines. At a Christmas party in 1941, they performed the balance report. The assets appeared and the liabilities answered. Commentaries came from the prompt box. They tried to stage a performance…

Enzensberger

Maybe a kind of charade.

Kluge

A charade of the financial situation.

Enzensberger

No, it wasn’t dramatic. I think there were objective reasons, too. It wasn’t that they weren’t talented. There were objective reasons, too. These performance problems. Even a subject like money… For most people, even the difference between money and capital is not clear. Money is what I have in my pocket.

Kluge

Which does not multiply on its own.

Enzensberger

Which does not multiply on its own. It actually dissipates… There’s a whole doctrine about the consistency of money. Hard money, coins. Then paper money, then you’re solvent. You have currents of money, so it’s liquid somehow. And the highest form is electronic money. That’s nothing more than en electrical impulse. These levels of abstraction are fairly hard to grasp with normal common sense. A child understands what pocket money is, but not what a derivative is. You can’t explain that to a twelve-year-old.

Kluge

I can talk about “Hans in Luck”, a lump of gold that shrinks, that gets exchanged… But as soon as I leave this level, for instance the case of a banknote, a bill with countless fingerprints, a Reichsmark note that survived the whole war, and in 1949 has no value any more. That note has a story, but you can’t see it.

Enzensberger

There is even a gaseous form of money, the bubble. Bubble… The real estate bubble.

Kluge

Or the stock market bubble…

Enzensberger

Or inflation. Inflation is a kind of bloating.

Kluge

And then you notice, it’s all based on trust. Credit flows into the bubble.

Enzensberger

And if people stop believing in it, it’s 1929 all over again.

Kluge

Then the bubble bursts.

Enzensberger

Yes.

Kluge

At this point, of course, the poet would be able to sing again. If you look at…

Enzensberger

Yes, that’s true. The consequences are easier to depict than the system itself.

Kluge

If you’d do it like John Dos Passos. With a grand montage.

Enzensberger

Yes. The trust needed by the system corresponds to the mistrust of the whole set-up. And I think it’s one… It’s not just with the left wing. This mistrust is also very prevalent in the working class, with farmers.

Kluge

It needs to be taken seriously.

Enzensberger

Yes. It’s quite risky if you go too far. They’ll remember it. It’s…

Kluge

That a corporation like Siemens or a traditional entrepreneur would actually need a number of scouts who know these risky traps, where mistrust has already amassed, for example, towards the barons. The farmers won’t trust them again.

Enzensberger

Yes, that’s right.

Kluge

The Reich used the SA to clean up entire companies. It’s the same mistrust.

Enzensberger

Yes, but I think in our circumstances we’ve become quite blinded by routine. For example, if you look at how companies present themselves. If a bank promotes itself using the slogan: The friendly green ribbon. I don’t know a soul who expects a bank to be friendly. It’s not the job of a bank. It’s wasted money, and blindness. Just ask any cleaning lady. She’d have explained it to him and saved millions. It doesn’t work. But they only live in their little world. It’s very odd how you can realize it from without, but not from within. Blinded by routine, or self-reference, however you care to refer to it. There are reasons based in systems theory that people… I mean politicians, too. They say the people in the countryside. Of course, it’s completely insane.

Kluge

Where is the politician?

Enzensberger

Where does he live? Not outside?

Kluge

In the Bundestag, in the capital.

Enzensberger

Yes. And it’s all… I think we can’t call it subjectively that someone who says that is narrow-minded. He lives in a bubble.

Kluge

It’s characteristic of how you write that you could imagine now that there were a few skilled people in the GDR who’d seen so many monuments for Marx, forced to read many texts, and now they’re waiting and could actually emulate Marx. And they could pop all these bubbles. They could spread critique around the globe, which has entertainment value.

Enzensberger

I’m more pessimistic, because…

Kluge

It didn’t happen.

Enzensberger

Of course. Why didn’t it happen? Why do people who spent 4, 5 years in school learning Russian speak it so poorly, or not at all? They moved it aside. It’s an issue of being counterproductive in education.

Kluge

That means Marx is far too good to be taught by teachers.

Enzensberger

Yes, of course. You need to… It’s best to read him under the table. In secret.

text

Immunoreaction to “false tones”

Enzensberger

I think children are immune to it. Even with simple things. We don’t even need ideologies here. Instead, the immune system… There are immunoreactions to… And children have an excellent ability to hear such attempts to educate them where something isn’t right.

Kluge

Blocking access to Marx’s texts.

Enzensberger

Initially.

Kluge

Marx’s texts lose their weight and are ignored when they become educational. Now there are… There is no early detection method for Marx. Yet post-detection isn’t possible either. Marx’s texts were found at an auction by Stasi officers in southern England in October 1989. They could change the whole thing. They were submitted to the Central Committee. In vain. It was disbanded. It doesn’t help if it comes too late.

Enzensberger

Fine, the evening crowns the day. I think all these printed remnants, even those in minds where people… It takes time for it. I mean, I could imagine there is… Time and again we see even harmless literary publications have their renaissances. All of a sudden people say they weren’t so bad. Or how Sloterdijk dealt with it, for example. He led a discussion about Marx, too. In part, very inventive. In the context of globalization. There’s always another…

Kluge

Rage as well. “Thumos”, based on Homer, through to today, using the entire terminology developed by Marx.

Enzensberger

No, no. The evening hasn’t crowned the day yet.

Kluge

He’s more than just a sauerkraut beard, his characteristic feature.

Enzensberger

Well, to start with, I think he wasn’t a particularly happy person. We see it in his personal relations. The most difficult, the best friendship with Engels. Was he a good friend at all? It’s not known for certain. I think he was so fixated on… These people who… If I believe, and probably here justifiably so, too, that I’m the only one who can do it, it naturally means I have a mission. I have to do it and no one else. I can’t delegate it. I have to do it myself, and that leads to a kind of, how can I put it, egotism, concentration. But it also means…

Kluge

I instrumentalize myself.

Enzensberger

I instrumentalize myself and it’s not a recipe for a pleasant or happy life. That’s for certain. That explains these illnesses, rashes, all these psychosomatic things. So I think he was… I have gathered a number of statements about him that were made by lots of people who met him, wrote to him. Diaries, too. And an extremely contradictory mosaic emerges with very bitter statements about Marx even. They wouldn’t have ever published this book in the GDR back then. He also helped to establish the left wing’s tradition of insulting. The left wing was always one to insult opponents, as well as those in their ranks. This tradition started with Marx. He excelled at it. He had great ideas. I still remember how he referred to Bakunin and said, “Bakunin, Muhammad without the Koran.” The things he could come up with. He had something there. It’s not entirely off. And that’s how he vented his emotions. Lenin took it further and these leftist oafs… It’s pretty peculiar that you didn’t say from the beginning, “I’m not going in because everyone becomes a traitor, a renegade, an opportunist, and this and that. It was really a huge tradition. And I contend it started with Marx. He was the best insulter.

text

Film motifs in 1929 / “Flight from one’s property”

Kluge

What kind of images were there in 1929, images that one could have filmed on the subject of capital?

Enzensberger

Well… One current example from the real estate crisis… In America you see these fascinating images of people who are fleeing from their homes. And you see that the houses are already partially demolished. The faucets don’t work any more. The reason is that they couldn’t make their payments. In America there’s no compulsory registration. There’s no registration office, you can just take off, escape from your property. That’s a very expressive image if you can capture it. There must have been such images back then. Back then there was a strong political interest in the production of images. They all had, more or less, a propaganda function. The soup kitchens, the misery, were shown very frequently, though not necessarily with a clear orientation, a clear message. There were pictures showing wheat being destroyed. I remember that. There’s something to that. Then you can cut to another picture. Then you have a luxurious fashion show, which also took place back then. So you definitely could piece a year together like that. Even so, I doubt that you could really get to…

Kluge

You started with the image of people fleeing their homes…

Enzensberger

That’s good.

Kluge

That’s a strong, intense image, though actually I’ve never seen that, it wasn’t in the film. The other things, yes.

Enzensberger

Right, because they served propaganda. There’s this kind of rhetoric that develops very quickly, of the exploitation of the situation in the form of pictures.

Kluge

What the newsreels are showing. Like when Amanullah from Afghanistan comes to Berlin, we have the aging president and the young potentate from the Orient. These are the typical images. But little analysis flows from them. Should I go to Afghanistan and establish a farm there?

Enzensberger

What interests me much more… and this is something anyone can do who has thought about that time. What would you have done? Let’s say you’re 23, and you’re a student at some university. Your parents have no more money, they’re unemployed. What are your options? And those options… The polarization was already so strong that everyone in the centrifuge was pushed to the fringes. Do I go to the right-wingers, or join the Communists? And it was very difficult to resist that. There were very strong forces at work. And now the question is, how? So it’s interesting to really examine what kind of the dilemmas, what kind of

text

Socialist comrades (all are later killed)

Enzensberger

forced, involuntary situations these people found themselves in. And I think you can imagine that situation and ask yourself: Would you have cracked? How? And that leads to another interesting aspect of that time, the double-life phenomenon. More and more people got into situations where they weren’t allowed or able to lead a unified life. Thus you had this whole sphere of provocations, secret services, strange… there are fronts, and strange alliances. On the left you had people who didn’t want to go with the Muscovites, but they didn’t want to be Social Democrats either. Then you had these interesting, intellectually highly productive people, like Korsch, for example… There were many such people

text

Karl Korsch (1886-1961)

Enzensberger

who were broken by it, by the course of history. They weren’t able to… Trotskyists and all the rest… I must admit that this interests me, because I think you wouldn’t have been content to just say, “OK, I’m joining these guys, or those guys,” but rather… You probably would have known a few people who thought differently. Even if it was only three or four… What does that mean? How did that affect a person’s life? How do you avoid the concentration camps? All the implications this had. At that time, people didn’t realize how dangerous the whole thing was.

Kluge

They didn’t know. It’s a unique contrast that they thought the world could still be changed.

text

1929, the last year in which it was possible to think that the world could be changed

Kluge

I can’t reform the German armed forces, but I can go to China as a trainer. I can shape up Chiang Kai-shek’s group. I can shape my fortune. But I can change the world, too. “Kuhle Wampe”, the film that same year.

Enzensberger

Or even earlier. Hammerstein went to Russia, collaborated with the Red Army. Or he went to Hindenburg and tried to save Hitler at the last minute. Many stories like that, where you ask if it’s time to stage a coup. You ask those questions when you’re in his position.

Kluge

But everything is open and within reach for people. And Marx said that man is a mere appendage of all this production, according to his law of capital. An appendage of his destiny. That is, he can’t at all. It’s a lesson in depression, actually, which lurks behind the truth.

Enzensberger

I don’t know. I also think it’s all a birth defect of this theory. There were famous statements made on the role of personality in history. That’s what they called it, and it was to be kept as small as possible. They were all objective relations…

Kluge

It’s discouraging.

Enzensberger

For one, it’s not very motivating. For another, you ask yourself, too. It’s not true. It’s not true. The history of France would have been entirely different without Napoleon. Not to mention our Austrian chancellor. He’s also a figure that, if he had been deposed in time, it would have all been different. I believe it’s a shortcoming of the theory.

Kluge

A shortcoming of the theory, and a strength in the poetic link would be if I were to tell Napoleon now, with little ado, that in the end he fails, which is disappointing, and instead move to the Prussian patriots, including Kleist’s tyranny or torrent of hatred.

16. Black Friday (October 25, 1929)

“Das Kapital” rebuts itself. (starts: 1:31:30, ends: 1:36:21)

[song begins

“We Shall Overcome” by Gustav]

text

“The expropriators are expropriated”

text

“Das Kapital” rebuts itself/ Black Friday (October 25, 1929)

text

Guiding Principles on Black Friday

text

I do nothing out of NERVOUSNESS

text

I caught myself staring “with coercive intent at the clattering boards, trying to raise them again”

text

I dress myself with caution, that is to say, I avoid unlucky clothes (= clothes that brought bad luck in the past)

text

Two days ago, when the markets began to quake, starting with the Brazilian mines, I could still have saved my fortune

text

Now I, with “unflappable calm”, WATCH MY DOOM

text

In the midst of destruction, I make no additional mistakes DUE TO HUMAN WEAKNESS

text

Just seven big-time speculators, who form fleeting hunting parties of convenience and seldom work against each other, like the GNOMES OF ZURICH, maintain the capability to plan raids amidst the crisis and execute the raids to plan

text

Anyone who is smaller than them avoids any movement

text

The advantage in maritime crises consisted in there probably being nothing to impede the steamer or the sailboat as it plowed into the wind, And certainly the storm would abate after a time (for humans too late, perhaps, though for the planet just fine)

text

A market crash, though, says Dr. Söhnlein, is more akin to the way in which a modern warship, whose hull has been punctured by a torpedo, with its massive machinery weighing on every seam, plunges into the ocean and plunges to the core of the earth

[song ends

“We Shall Overcome” by Gustav]

text

Mountain - Water - Air

text

At a certain depth, the cruiser breaks apart, the individual pieces lose velocity and start to fall to the ocean floor at less than 1G

text

Mountain - Water - Air Mountain

17. The grandniece of Lenin’s interpreter

“The creation of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world to date.” With Galina Antoshevskaya. (starts: 1:36:21, ends: 1:56:03)

Galina Antoshevskaya, translator

It’s not only the five senses, but also the so-called spiritual senses. The practical senses want to love. In short, the human sense, the human nature of the senses. [repeated in Russian] Comes to be through the existence of its object, through humanized nature. The creation of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world to date. [repeated in Russian]

Kluge

For not only the five senses, but also the so-called spiritual senses. How is it in Russian?

Antoshevskaya

[responds in Russian]

text

See, hear, feel, taste, smell

Kluge

The spiritual senses, the practical ones want to love.

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

text

want, love, fight, flee, learn

Kluge

In short, the human sense.

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

text

breathe, feel, think, work, a part of society

Kluge

The human nature of the senses.

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

Kluge

Comes to be through the existence of its object, through humanized nature.

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

Kluge

It means that cities will be built and urban dwellers emerge.

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

Kluge

The soil is farmed.

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

Kluge

Then the farmer comes about, and the agricultural revolution.

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

Kluge

And then the companies and workers…

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

Kluge

… create…

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

Kluge

… entirely opposing interests.

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

Kluge

A new human nature!

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

Kluge

The industry.

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

Kluge

And thus we have, yard next to yard…

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

Kluge

… a humanized nature.

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

Kluge

That’s how human beings come about.

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

Kluge

People are the echo of things, and things are the echo of people.

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

Kluge

And that means the creation of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world to date.

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

Kluge

The Euphrates and Tigris flow in our souls.

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

Kluge

And there are pyramids in us.

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

Kluge

And the grand streets down which Roman legionaries marched.

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

Kluge

And the bitterness of the peasants’ wars.

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

Kluge

And then the French Revolution.

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

Kluge

People descending upon Paris.

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

Kluge

An allegory appearing as an angel and bearing a torch, brings them freedom.

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

Kluge

And the bitterness again of English factories.

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

Kluge

And ships…

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

Kluge

… that took King Kong captive.

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

Kluge

And transported him to America by sea.

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

Kluge

The enraged gorilla nearly destroyed the ship.

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

Kluge

And while protecting the beautiful, white lady on the skyscraper…

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

Kluge

… and nabbing government airplanes…

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

Kluge

… other government airplanes riddled him with their machine guns.

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

Kluge

It’s far from paradise.

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

Kluge

But it is the objective existence.

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

Kluge

The humanized nature.

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

Kluge

You can say that in Russian? “The humanized nature.”

Antoshevskaya

[responds in Russian]

Antoshevskaya

O. The capital letter “O”.

Kluge

Like omega, right?

Antoshevskaya

It becomes one large word. And inside the “O” is the word for “man”.

Kluge

What is “soul” in Russian?

Antoshevskaya

“Doscha” D-O-S-C-H-A

Kluge

Doscha

Antoshevskaya

Where does the soul reside?

Kluge

Where? Between the people.

Antoshevskaya

Somewhere.

Kluge

But if a person reacts to another, if a thing reacts to a person…

Antoshevskaya

Then you have the word, the soul.

Kluge

Then it moves toward it.

Antoshevskaya

Yes. You can say he’s a man with a soul. In Russian we say [Russian] It means he’s ready to bear the burden of your problems. He’s ready to give you your shirt.

Kluge

To share your problems with me.

Antoshevskaya

To share with me and to help you. Not just to share. That’s too little. To help you. And there’s even an interesting saying in Russian: I’m ready to give you my last shirt.

Kluge

Yes.

Antoshevskaya

That has soul. If I’m ready…

Kluge

Is it “soul” or “blessed”?

Antoshevskaya

Blessed.

Kluge

Blessed. Blessed is a Christian concept.

Antoshevskaya

No matter, because this word “blessed” is already seen by many as a Christian concept…

Kluge

It doesn’t come up in Marx.

Antoshevskaya

It doesn’t matter. They’ve read him. They’ve closed the book and turned in the exam. But the word “soul”…

Kluge

They kept it.

Antoshevskaya

… remained among the people.

Kluge

It was never on tests.

Antoshevskaya

It is never on tests.

Kluge

Doesn’t lead to career advancement?

Antoshevskaya

No.

Kluge

But a little something on stock, a little light in the heart.

Antoshevskaya

It’s a little light. And if someone says, “He is blessed,” then he has a soul. It’s always a positive term. Everyone…

Kluge

Are there songs about it?

Antoshevskaya

Songs. I can’t say. But there are…

Kluge

Any song with a soul? For example, there are many songs about love.

Antoshevskaya

About the soul, no. It’s difficult. But there is a phrase: man is without a soul.

Kluge

Without a soul?

Antoshevskaya

Without a soul.

Kluge

Being without a soul is like being damned.

Antoshevskaya

You could say that. But this word: [Russian] Man is without a soul.

Kluge

But the “damned of this earth” who band together are bent on conquering souls?

Antoshevskaya

Yes, but you talk about a person like that, you can forget the person. It’s a bad criterion. It isn’t made in writing. If someone writes a letter about a person, you can say it in confidence, but if it’s an official letter… You don’t ever write the word normally. I’ve never read it.

Kluge

Not in party speeches, in programs, nor in the constitution would you find “soul”. If you say the human soul is indivisible, it’d be Article 1 of a constitution.

Antoshevskaya

Yes, exactly. But understand…

Kluge

The human soul is sociable. To that effect, it’s indivisible as it always comes about with others.

Antoshevskaya

Yes, exactly.

Kluge

The soul isn’t a Robinson, Article 3 of the constitution.

Antoshevskaya

Yes, exactly. That’s very interesting. You see, the soul… it’s not tangible. But…

Kluge

Can it fly?

Antoshevskaya

It doesn’t fly.

Kluge

Does it have wings?

Antoshevskaya

Does it have wings?

Kluge

Is it breath?

Antoshevskaya

It can breathe. Yes, it can breathe and it is breath. It is breath. And when I have the soul, I have to show it to someone. The soul… I can’t live by myself as Robinson and be like this with my soul. It’s impossible because the soul is something intangible. But I know, for example: He was so blessed, the husband. He was so blessed.

Kluge

He was very happy.

Antoshevskaya

He was ready…

Kluge

To give his soul away. As a gift.

Antoshevskaya

As a gift, and give away his last shirt. When you talk about the last shirt, it probably sounds too practical. Very materialistic. But probably because the soul is intangible.

Kluge

But you can speak of a machine’s soul.

Antoshevskaya

No.

Kluge

Yes.

Antoshevskaya

Well…

Kluge

You can’t talk about the stock exchange’s soul.

Antoshevskaya

No.

Kluge

Is there economics of soul?

Antoshevskaya

No.

Kluge

A political economy of soul?

Antoshevskaya

No.

Kluge

But it would be an issue of political economy if the soul were to get lost somehow?

Antoshevskaya

I’d have to say, the people who write or make such policies work with the thoughts and with the soul of the people for whom they make the policies.

Kluge

It’s not only the five senses… If you’d translate it into Russian again.

Kluge

It’s not only the five senses.

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

Kluge

They are the nose, eyes, ears, skin.

Antoshevskaya

[repeats in Russian]

Kluge

The skin.

Antoshevskaya

This is the skin.

Kluge

Skin, yes.

Antoshevskaya

Skin.

Kluge

A very intelligent…

Antoshevskaya

It’s interesting because this word “skin” is used for everything: boots, people.

Kluge

The ship’s skin, the human skin.

Antoshevskaya

Human skin, this is human skin.

Kluge

Does a fatherland have skin?

Antoshevskaya

No. A fatherland has its territory and emotion. No, animals have skin.

Kluge

The souls of all oppressed dynasties. They blow over Russia like a storm. Can we say that? They’re a weather system. If something is treated unfairly, it never dies.

Antoshevskaya

That’s just it, because Russia… At some point they say the Russians have a very special soul. I never really liked this concept, because this concept is… The Russian soul is very, very…

Kluge

But Dostoevsky thought so, Pushkin said so.

Antoshevskaya

They all said it. At some point the foreigners, even the Germans, say: I really want to understand the Russian soul.

Kluge

Where is it located? Is it in a different spot compared to others?

Antoshevskaya

No, no. It’s just… There are probably some…

Kluge

More pressure, since people are further apart in Russia, except for Moscow. Except for the cities.

Antoshevskaya

Not true.

Kluge

But they are further away. Do they desire the others more?

Antoshevskaya

People are more willing to talk with one another. Furthermore, and I have to laugh now, a whole new profession has emerged in Russia now: psychology. In the U.S., as far as I know, it’s so modern. You go to a psychoanalyst and resolve issues with him: how to get a divorce, how to raise my children. Gradually they are trying to heal the soul with this kind of mathematics. To understand the math of the soul.

Kluge

To reckon with your soul.

Antoshevskaya

Exactly. But I believe in Russia there is still a very interesting concept, to this day. [Russian] It’s untranslatable. This is a vest. Vests do not have sleeves. But my friend comes to me and cries into my vest. That means whoever cries next to me has never cried. She’s told me everything. And she asks me how to go on now.

Kluge

And now I know how live my life because I could comfort my friend?

Antoshevskaya

Everyone needs to be comforted. And here normally, in any case in Germany I mean, people aren’t always ready to go to someone and say, “I have a problem… He left me and I’m all alone. He took all my money out of the bank.” I don’t think it’s common here to talk about such issues with your friends. I talked to a friend all morning today, for example. What should she do with her husband? He drinks, and so on. She won’t go to a psychoanalyst. She wrote a letter asking me what to do. I have to comfort her, calm her down, and tell her, I’m sorry, but you have to keep living with him. You can’t just run away.

Kluge

You don’t have another.

Antoshevskaya

In any case, the soul remains. You’re responsible for him. Your soul is responsible for him.

Kluge

It’s a process of becoming literate. The soul learns from alpha to omega and in the process about the various stations of comfort. It preserves itself in its identity.

Antoshevskaya

Of course, it remains the same. And that’s why I laugh at the option of psycholanalysis. It’s… The soul alone, this word, can protect people sometimes. If I know exactly that when I come to you and I know that you are a person with a soul. I have hope then that you can help me.

Kluge

Where is the soul of money?

Antoshevskaya

Money? Good question.

Kluge

The soul of a clock? It has a soul.

Antoshevskaya

A clock?

Kluge

Yes. Regularity. The origin of punctuality. The equilibrium between the gears, it’s called “soul”.

Antoshevskaya

That may be. But this concept is likely translated differently into Russian. It’s called “mechanism”. And this idea of “mechanism” and the soul don’t mesh.

Kluge

No.

Antoshevskaya

That’s why this concept doesn’t exist in Russian. Soul is soul. Clock is clock. A clock’s mechanism is quite different. A person can’t live like a mechanism that keeps time.

Kluge

And does an economy have a soul?

Antoshevskaya

An economy? Yes, it does.

Kluge

Everyone’s trying hard and the sociability in an economy such that an economy isn’t possible with just one.

Antoshevskaya

No, an economy is built on…

Kluge

A lot of people trying hard.

Antoshevskaya

The people are trying hard.

Kluge

This effort is acquired, unjustly, and still remains an effort.

Antoshevskaya

Of course. That’s how it is.

Kluge

And despite the evil intentions of the whole economy, it does something good for individuals. It brings people together.

Antoshevskaya

It brings people together. Everyone who really does it, he does it with soul. He can’t live without soul.

Kluge

He wouldn’t even know what it is.

Antoshevskaya

Precisely.

Kluge

He wouldn’t know effort as a slave.

Antoshevskaya

Slave?

Kluge

Yes. He has no reason to. He never learned it.

Antoshevskaya

A slave would only learn to protect himself. To live on the earth.

Kluge

And Marx wrote about all that. Expressing it differently.

Antoshevskaya

Probably.

Kluge

And where Marx talks of labor power it should read “soul activity”. The activity of human essential powers.

Antoshevskaya

Maybe.

Kluge

What is “human essential powers” in Russian?

Antoshevskaya

“Man” is [Russian] “Soul” is [Russian] “Power” is [Russian]

Kluge

Essential and soul are the same word.

Antoshevskaya

Yes, exactly.

text

Great Aunt Antoshevskaya (1918)

“If money could think, how would it explain itself?”

18. Can “Das Kapital” say “I”? With Dietmar Dath. (starts

1:56:03, ends: 2:41:04)

text

How does film “think”?

text

Dietmar Dath, novelist, on Marx’s question: “If money could think, how would it explain itself?”

text

Can “Das Kapital” say “I”?/ How would Eisenstein have filmed “Das Kapital” by Marx?

Kluge

Let’s try to picture Eisenstein in 1929. The man was a bundle of energy. Subjected to monitoring by censors, but “armed” with his thumos. And he wants to film “Das Kapital”, the first book of it, more precisely. A year after writing down ideas for it, he visited James Joyce on November 29, 1929, in Paris after the economic catastrophe. He was blind, like Homer. What do you think they talked about?

Dietmar Dath

The problem is that Eisenstein’s films and Joyce’s writings had more to say to each other than the two men did. As a Marxist I would say the material is more interesting than a discussion between subjects. I think Eisenstein could have talked to Dickens about filming “Das Kapital”. The problem with Joyce is, just like Shakespeare, he pictured people as having resolved all this annoying business. I mean, Joyce viewed man as being so universal that he already had attained the freedom the avant-garde art and Eisenstein’s art were striving for. as a… Arno Schmidt once said, “Everything I’ve written or thought needs to be treated as ever changing.” It was like that with Joyce, particularly in “Finnegan’s Wake”, whereas Eisenstein created freedom elsewhere. I think Eisenstein created freedom by… You can’t define freedom as having less rules, but rather more rules with more flexibility in between. If I have ten rules and add 20 more that contradict them somehow, I add dynamics and freedom, creating freedom with the numerous parameters.

Kluge

The category of connection.

Dath

I think that’s why he was interested in filming “Das Kapital”. That’s why he had such an interest picturing… He wouldn’t film the phone book. He had to film “Das Kapital” because the phone book is just a copy of the world.

Kluge

Initially he simply took an easy thought from Joyce: Namely that Bloom, the hero in “Ulysses”, and one day in his life, and this day contains the history of the world, as do all the human cells, that is, all novels in one day. It captivated him. He used it first for his film project, as a traveling story, as a connecting element. He can’t express Joyce’s manner of making associations. Hard for a film.

Dath

I think that the film… The book centers on Bloom and says: Through Bloom I see the day as being universal. Eisenstein used the day. Through the day, I can see my object as being universal. So that means, the film thinks… I don’t know if it does that, but when I think of Eisenstein it seems to. The film thinks the world here is from over there. That is, the idea is that this concretion which the film gives you arises because it’s more abstract than just writing. I’s more eternal. It’s art using time. I can’t decide how fast I read it. The film establishes its own speed.

text

A work of commentary / epiphany and hypertext

Kluge

Eisenstein’s idea for “Das Kapital” and its filming was a work of commentary, a side-by-side arrangement of realities that can rub shoulders. He had present events at the beginning of the film’s timeline the same as at the end of it. Side-by-side, something we can now easily do with computers, and have this medium, like with a DVD, where you can…

Dath

Hypertext, simply, but with film.

Kluge

Spherical dramaturgy.

Dath

Absolutely.

Kluge

It doesn’t matter where it leads, the context, the connection remains. I think that’s one of his central ideas.

Dath

The nice thing is, and that’s what’s so impressive in “Das Kapital”, is that if you proceed that way, shape it like a sphere, close it up, you then… Autonomous art, autonomous theory that’s not concerned whether it includes the most recent economy stories or you’ve forgotten about Venezuela, but rather they construct the shape, just as a film would do. It’s often more realistic in the end than all that silly research. Why? Because the world is, too.

Kluge

As if an attractor would pass through and if it’s laden with interests, if the subject is strong, then it draws in what is important and leaves everything else alone. And this draw…

Dath

The pull, the vortex.

Kluge

That’s what Benjamin did in one article where he focused on one aspect, and two weeks wrote a different paper. And he wrote it differently, as a bat would emit an echo. Each one is different.

text

The “grammar” of capital

Kluge

Earlier you mentioned “subject”. And in grammar the subject is, using Marxist terms from “Das Kapital”,

text

“I” in capital = the interest on interest

Kluge

that is, what “I” can say, the capital, the interest of interest.

Dath

The self-valorization of value.

Kluge

The masks of capital. And that’s not the subject, because… the subject can only be the labor force, he change of matter. And if you observe this subject, then you can clearly state: Misery will be confronted by something, at the very least from the midriff. Maybe even the cells mobilize against wounding, pain, etc. Which means everything outside is turned inside out on the inside, so that this necessary false conscience, this ideology, is never a reflection of the actual circumstances.

Dath

Are there reflections at all? I think a huge Achilles’ heel of Marx’s and Engels’ concept of ideology is this idea of reflection.

Kluge

It is really wrong because they are novelists as people.

Dath

Not only that, but how do I compare a world and a sentence? I can’t. If I say, “The cat lying on the mat,” and take this “the”… Can I touch it? No, I can’t. What is “lying”? What corresponds to what? It’s obviously a relation. We should consider a pragmatic turn, which is in Feuerbach’s theory and rather than speak of reflections, we should speak of coordination. Language and description is there for us to agree on what we want to do. And if you look at it like that, then Marx’s “Kapital” and his manifesto… They’re often seen as diremption in Marxist theory. The young Marx who sets out to change everything. And the later one who sees the totality and that change is impossible. Then it fits back together if we know we want to coordinate actions. You have the fatalist aspect: Things are as they are. And the rebellious aspect. We need both. We need to be able to say, “Hogwash”. There must be a feeling of injustice, in order to take things back in the second stage, the Stoic, the assessment of the situation. Where does the injustice come from? And move on to the third stage, where we say, “Let’s get rid of it.” Instead of using reflection, we talk about coordination of actions. It’s in the word “manifest” already.

text

What does the word MODERN mean to you?

Kluge

And if the word “modern”… You mentioned “New Objectivity”, the movement from the late 1920s. If we could analyze the word “modern” together.

Dath

I can’t. I can only treat it synthetically.

Kluge

You’re 38 years old, right?

Dath

I am. And I have an absolutely normative concept of modern. Not one that tries to look at, collect lots of things. That’s all considered modern. How can I list one concept to summarize it all? Instead, my concept of modern is a Marxist one. For Marx, modern times began as soon as abstract and general wealth came about through capitalism, once you’re no longer living hand-to-mouth. We now have a bigger menu and we can ask, “What do we want?”. The move from “is” to “ought to” is not an issue. Now the will comes into play. How is domain of human will? It’s central to his notion of alienation, as opposed to Hegel. When he says it’s not mine. The work… He doesn’t complain about factory work, but that people do silly things that aren’t within their domain of will.

Kluge

That they stand next to the production as if they were observers of their own lives.

Dath

Simply appendages.

Kluge

Appendages being sanded down.

Dath

And for me, modern is when what I want suddenly plays a role. And that’s why a Nietzsche or Rousseau can take the stage. That’s how all kinds of people can suddenly develop models that push with unbelievable, even authoritarian dynamics, demanding it must be done.

Kluge

Making the modern industrialization, that is, farming in a second nature, in another state of matter.

Dath

That’s why I like the hammer and sickle. It wasn’t so well thought out. It was a compromise they made to give the farmers a symbol that wrapped things up, like the cross. Just as you said right now, it was nice that there were two things. The sickle is for metabolism with nature. I need to harvest, to sow, to do these things because I’m a human being, and I have a homeostatic deficit with nature. The amazing thing is I can make the products of my labor, in my metabolism with nature, into the object of the production. I can work through labor. I can produce things as if it were in my nature.

Kluge

And that’s the secret book that’s between the lines of Marx,

text

Political Economics of the Labor Force (a book by Marx that is missing)

Kluge

the political economics of labor force. There are societies, some of which, like in Mesopotamia, are active for thousands of years. Some of which, like in Europe, are short-lived. Yet much can be produced in 400 years. Or even in 40 years. And they are factories, where things are built, things that aren’t found in the whole economic description.

Dath

Exactly, it’s all… The “Manifesto” is part of a labor philosophy. “Das Kapital”, too. They are contrasting, contradictory parts of his labor philosophy. It makes me think of the Mormons. Their reasoning is always: Why is there the Book of Mormon? Why is there another book besides the Bible? The word of God is scripture, there’s a book on a table, square, and there’s a nail in it. That’s the Bible. The problem is that you can turn it in any direction around the nail. That’s why there’s a second book, to nail it down and hold it in place.

Kluge

That’s what the Mormons think?

Dath

Yes.

Kluge

What’s in the Book of Mormon?

Dath

Jesus also came to the Indians because they’re the lost tribes of Israel. The parallel to Marx: The first nail is the Collected Works of Marx and Engels. and the second was the Russians for a long time, or Marxism-Leninism. This second nail was ripped out and the book spins again. I think it’s pretty good. There are so many Marxisms by now. You have Moishe Postone. It’s a critique of industrialization. Wolfgang Pohrt says, on the contrary, it’s a philosophy of the utility value hoping that industrialization will do things for us, but we need politics. Then we have Michael Lebowitz who says, like you just said, “I need the other side’s perspective in ‘Das Kapital’“. For example, how it is with labor, with living labor. That means you spin Marx around in all different directions, and maybe it’ll be possible through this repluralization, to have no new Marxisms crop up because there’ll be so many Marxisms that together they equal Socialism, of which he thought was only one.

Kluge

Because there’s something else, too: the real movement of societies.

text

If money could think, how would it explain itself?

Kluge

They do it without asking us and even if they’re not being watched. They do it blindly for us. Since that’s the real sphere, it is positive if observers would change glasses.

Dath

The problem with all this reading of, analyzing of, and commentating on Marx is that we start to forget

text

If the Devil were a type of theology, what would it say about itself?

Dath

that we live in a system where huge banks can begin to tremble and amazing sums are destroyed. And Marx put forth a demon. He actually gave to Socialism what Milton gave to Christianity, saying: What would the Devil think and do if he cared about theological questions? And “Das Kapital” asks: If money could talk, how would it explain itself? It’s not Marx’s explanation of how it should be, it’s his explanation of how it wants to be itself. “Das Kapital” is written from the perspective of capital. Something that no one has really done, perhaps Benjamin could have, is to rewrite “Das Kapital” from the perspective of productive forces.

text

Marx and Classical Antiquity

Kluge

How about Marx, antiquity, ideology?

Dath

His reference points are Epicurus, against Christianity, asceticism, the Stoics, against the bourgeois.

Kluge

What did he say about the Stoics?

Dath

In his doctoral thesis, his dissertation, he talks about Epicurean things and the differences. And if I’ve understood it right, there’s nothing systematic on Stoicism, but it comes up when he talks about stance. He liked the “stance”. I think it’s…

Kluge

Robust tranquility, watchful.

Dath

Yes, exactly. That’s the stance that let Marx, and Engels, too, write those words. There’s a spot in “The Communist Manifesto” that always ends with a victory for the one class over the other, and here’s where the Stoic comes in and Hegel takes his leave. The demise of the struggling classes. He dealt with it. It’s not the inevitability of Socialism. It could also be that nothing happens. Epicurean, Stoicism, skepticism, a Greek virtue that Marx took from classical antiquity, too. And last of all, Sophism. He wasn’t afraid of being drawn to Sophism, and said: It’s better to refer to Sophism a bit and use the arguments, and later in the manuscripts write, forget that. Four pages and it’s going nowhere.

Kluge

Like a lawyer.

Dath

Yes. A lawyer investigating this, and cross-examining himself, much like a Sophist, but not in a belittling or mean way. He saw Sophism as a powerful weapon of enlightenment. He called it dialectic, but it’s being able to roll things over 4, 5 times.

Kluge

That means you can trust a thought as long as it remains in motion, and acts like an upstart bird. And you can’t chart out where it flies.

Dath

Yes. That’s his link to Prometheus, who he called the most important saint in the philosophical calendar. I think Marx’s reference to classical antiquity is meant to prevent the ossification of Hegel, whom he valued, of his left-wing Hegelianism, in ideology. That means, where Marx tries to use classical antiquity, he tries to exit by standing still.

Kluge

By choosing a point outside what’s happening now.

Dath

He called it the past, classical antiquity, but it’s really the future.

Kluge

And Rosa Luxemburg and her followers do the same when they refer to Spartacus.

Kluge & text

Follow the majority even if it’s wrong. They took the phrase from Spartacus. For the moment the hordes of slaves have defeated the Roman legions, and they head north. They could almost found a Yenan or a new republic there. They now wanted to loot again. And Spartacus stayed with the minority. That’s was the sentiment of…

Dath

The Communists, so to say.

Kluge

Those who see WWI as war of industry.

Dath

And I think it’s due to the fact that learning from a mistaken deed is better than a sound theory from which you can’t learn anything. That’s why they follow the historical process there, in the Greek tradition, a mindset from the tragedies. We all learn from it, even if we know the results can only be catastrophic. We will still go by way of learning because we’re curious.

Kluge

Because maybe there’s something within us, in people as such, that we’ve forgotten, that was once part of their evolution of society from happier times, and that saves in an unexpected way. We don’t know the escape routes. It’s actually the “anti-plan”.

Dath

Exactly. Luhmann put it well:

Dath & text

“Marxism will not repeat itself because it happened”

Dath

It means a backlash, and since you said “physics”, it’s a reaction. It’s much worse than some changing Heisenberg particle. If I tell a person about how he is and how things are, then he will act much differently and more unpredictably, so it loses this scientific character. If monkeys grasped behavioral science, behavioral science would have a big problem. Marx constantly draws parallels with the farmers, which he loved to do. He got that from the scientists. And he said to himself, this fact can’t be ignored that this huge number of people… Perhaps 80 percent of the population of Russia was in agriculture, compared to the U.S. now, where it’s maybe six, seven percent. He was consequent and said, it’ll be less. They’ll become industrialized. And now for the paradox that I’d love to have read as a journalist, because he was an excellent journalist, too. In his idea of Socialism, everything can be produced by society as a whole. Even in the agricultural sector. There’ll be factories, industries. Even film, or better yet culture. Everything. Industrialization goes on, and constantly creates the bedrock of Socialism. But what happens when the Socialists themselves, who rely on this law, and trust that industrialization will go on and we can build up Socialism, have to establish the conditions themselves, like in Russia? I’d love to have read him as a journalist. That is, you don’t need to show the truth of theory through using it, but rather you have to force it. For scientists, it’s much different. It’s not their job to formulate a hypothesis and adjust the experiment until the hypothesis is proven. In studying social history, political history, it may be the job. That is to say, Stalin was faced with the problem: This will all be industrialized, but since it didn’t happen, I have to do it.

Kluge

And here emerged something else, which Freud closely observed. He describes this image of a church standing on Roman territory, which was originally a heathen temple, then it becomes a medieval…

Dath

Exactly, Mithra, etc.

Kluge

Until it becomes a modern Christian church. But all other religious edifices, thoughts, beliefs that once existed still remain. And that’s how the inside of a human is constructed. That’s the soul.

Dath

Absolutely. That’s how evolution is. You can never find a point, an Archimedean, one outside of history and say “Closed - Under Construction”.

Kluge

People can’t do that. Even the children of a man beheaded by the guillotine would carry around his former soul with all antiquity inside. Something Marx…

Dath

The “weight of past generations”.

Kluge & text

“The tradition of all past generations weighs on the brains of the living.”

Kluge

And he said it with regret here. He could’ve put a positive twist to it, and say how rich we are.

Dath

He did. In “Das Kapital” he emphasized it even more, saying: Where would I be without capitalism? That horror story he describes: original accumulation, peasants beaten so they work in factories, amazing…

Kluge

They are honed and become more coarse. They are destroyed and a resistance builds up within them.

Dath

Exactly. They’d be expanded menus on a computer. More options. We’re not substituting…

Kluge

Or parts. A part is being split off. It’s pure energy and can be used for something else. The other part is destroyed. That would mean then that the Biocosmists in the Russian Revolution would say, a revolution without resurrecting the dead is unimaginable. We must express our debt of gratitude for the labor of past generations by resurrecting them in industry. So we need to develop space travel because Earth will get too crowded.

Dath

Unless people become smaller.

Kluge

Interesting.

Dath

Unless we use computers.

Kluge

But they couldn’t have known that.

Dath

Sure. That’s the nice aspect.

Kluge

It’d help.

Dath

They even didn’t know the conditions for what they wanted, because… like Benjamin’s Angel of History, they were in the future the whole time.

Kluge

It actually extends to the future, where they’re now talking about settling on the moons of extrasolar planets, where we can expect nice conditions. A place we’ve already occupied mentally while we reach back to the clans, to the farmers, to the formations before the agricultural revolution. Is that so? If there were no treasures, we’d be unneeded.

Dath

They’ll dig deep wells, because of the pressure down there. So it’ll shoot up. That’s very Freudian of the whole dynamics.

text

View from an extrasolar moon (4003 A.D.) Beyond the icy ocean on Jupiter’s moon EUROPA

text

Young musicians from Riedering

Dath

The poet Wallace Stevens once said

Dath & text

“What is Communism?” “An instrument to improve mankind’s attention.”

Dath

But Stevens wasn’t a Communist. I think smart Communists and anti-Communists would agree. If you’d say it won’t work like the Socialists want it to, you are forced to justify it and back it up with arguments, at a time when Marx presented a clever argument. In general, and not only with “Das Kapital”, Marx took the level of the conflict of how much people can do, how they can plan space travel, genetics, etc… Basically, there’s always a priest present when a bioethics counsel convenes. Actually there should always be a Marxist present, well, a priest, too…

Kluge

What is a Marxist? He contended he wasn’t a Marxist. Likely because he dismissed the term. If you could describe how you would… It would be just a character mask. Or would it be a telescope or a microscope…

Dath

Maybe along the lines of Ezra Pound’s poems, a Personae, as if you were to imagine being in a historical play, just as the French in the French Revolution were Romans. Just as they all come from the Senate and who knows where.

Kluge

So the Enlightenment produced one genus, which was called Marxist.

Dath

Marxists are necessary as soon as there are more than one Socialism. What Marx didn’t want, which showed his genius, his Herostratic, Promethean, proteic element, was to imagine that there were different models of Socialism. His type was right. He didn’t need Marxism. You don’t need Marxism. You don’t need Darwinism if it’s simply all biology. You had to start calling it Darwinism when you had Lamarquists, too. Likewise we’d have Marxists if we were to have Keynesians… Or the Chicago school or Lasalleians, or those annoying anarchists. That’s when we need Marxists. His deepest desire was to not need it.

Kluge

Instead we need intensive attention…

text

Marx’s deepest desire / “Don’t fear problems!”

Dath

A level for these problems, a readiness to watch these many opaque stories, which brings us back to the Stoics, without fear, but rather with joy at how delicate and precise they are.

Kluge

We’re now both authors. We can invent more than one, two expressions. Crystallization: how about that?

text

Crystalline structure / “Monads of knowledge”

Kluge

Throw it together. Moments before it looks like lye, water, and now it’s suddenly crystalline,

text

“Social leaps”

Kluge

and you can walk over it. It was steam, and now it’s ice. Yes.

Dath

Or with Marx, where all that is solid begins to melt into the air. Capital is complete liquidification, evaporation.

Kluge

Liquidification is a word from the protest movement. Liquifying. Playing their music to the hardened things so they start to dance. They’re all images that envisage the difference between states of matter. Constellations are something different. They would be like patterns of stars that are held together by gravitation… Not the constellations, but rather the planetary systems or Milky Ways being held together by it.

Dath

And then there are gravitation lenses. In the theory of relativity, when you have a mass it bends spacetime itself, meaning that light from a star near a massive object reaches me so that I see it somewhere where it isn’t. You could ask whether the Soviet Union was something similar. The idea of where we are right now, which Marx still had, has been skewed for 70 years because someone said we want it now, which was set up initially as a process. “Das Kapital” highlights his own abolishment. It’s not that far, but we see the star where it actually isn’t.

Kluge

Then it wasn’t Socialism. It was a vehicle that turns a non-industrialized country into an industrialized country.

Dath

Yes, that’s catch-up modernization, but I’d contend all modernizations are, because they catch up socially and politically. For example regarding what’s already present when people see a steam engine. I would like to make a difference between the attempt to go quickly, which would be industrialization and walking on corpses, and the attempt to leap, like the Russian attempt. And I would not accept through my Stoicist eyes that someone tells me, a leap is more honorable than a marching step, even if it means falling on your face or rear end. It becomes interesting when you can say: How many people can I convince to leap with me, and how can I convince them?

Kluge

I’d like to offer an example from the Midwest: there was a small town. A young lady lived there. And there was this young seducer from the east coast. He was carefree and liaised down the line, seducing this young daughter, too. He changed her. She breathed in the air of city living. She turned into a wonderful adult. Her name was Mae West. By the way, she became a big actress. That would be a leap.

Dath

Absolutely. For Marx, “Das Kapital” is a historical leap, by creating abstract wealth. We’re not trying accumulate just this and that, instead it’s goods.

Kluge

And the lady cried when he left her.

Dath

Original accumulation isn’t nice. If people are forced into towns, or else face starvation in the country, it’s not any nicer than the seducer working down the lines.

Kluge

But let’s hold on to the bitter thought of the person who isn’t oppressed, who doesn’t know original accumulation, nor industrial discipline even.

Dath

I think you need to have worked to reflect on abolishing labor. I think this thinking on dialectics is right, but you need to be careful since you can explain anything with it. When a thing thinks, it can also think differently, or else it’s not thinking.

text

What does “character mask” mean in Marx’s works?

Kluge

Let’s examine the term character mask, which Marx deals with. It’s a cinematographic element.

Dath

I think it’s a little redundant. Isn’t a character a mask in the end?

Kluge

In Greek it means “distinctive mark”.

Dath

Yes, but it’s not that something grows out of you like an “eidos”.

Kluge

Adorno and Horkheimer say that character is the result of a spot where sensitivity emerged and was disappointed. The scar that formed is character.

Dath

I would have to say: If the character mask is intended to be a critique, as it’s just a mask, then perhaps they meant that the person who wears this character mask doesn’t know that acting like a pig all your life, even if for good reason, for reasons than can be justified in his mind somehow, that he can’t avoid giving up the moment where he admits to himself: I’m acting like a pig, but I know I’m not one. This retreat isn’t there. The critique of this character mask means nothing is behind it, but what appears to be behind the mask, what the person wants to be, is the individual capitalist standing for the mask and the society as a whole is all that is behind it, that is, nothing. An empty abstraction. That’s my critical take on the word. But it’s a problem because you have an idea of the real person being better than the artificial…

Kluge

So you could take it off.

Dath

Yes, there would be something like truthfulness behind it as a value. I’d rather have a false Nazi, who never acted like he wanted to, much more than a genuine one. Genuineness or authenticity isn’t a value there. A value is how destructive I act, no matter whether it’s genuine or not.

Kluge

Turning the coin, if we look at the Russian grandma who we called “man”.

Kluge & text

The five senses hold all of world history,

Kluge

he said. Would you describe it for me? We won’t write “Das Kapital” now, but rather we’d write it backwards. What is “man”?

Dath

For me the face, as a folder in which the things are collected, less important than the hand, because the hand has done something. In general, I don’t like anthropological descriptions that regard people as an object of their lives, but rather I’d always say… At some point, Spengler said what he hated about the left wing. The hate of destiny. I think it’s a positive value. Great. Hate of fate. I can subscribe to that. I think it’s identical to sensing injustice. And the transfiguration of destiny into this Russian “mushik” or old lady is a big problem, I think. I would find the story less of a problem and more heroic if it would… If we have this suggestive image of “man” and the wrinkles on it… I don’t like it because it’s suggestive in a common way. I would like it if the lady started to say, “And we hid the person from the police and we did this and then I…” Because that provides reasons, too, and not only a story. And she becomes the subject once she gives reasons for what she experienced. I’m far more interested in that than a wrinkled face or some… That’s probably the novelist in me. Stories interest me more than pictures. You can agree on objects. Of course it’s fantastic if you have sexual stories, because they’re nothing without the object status. Of course I’m using a person there, just as I would if he were to get water for me.

Kluge

Could you be more specific there?

Dath

The question is how contractual is it? Once a person enters into an exchange with me… That’s the ideal of fair exchange. It’s behind the critique of unfair exchange. “Das Kapital” establishes it and states that fair exchange should be possible. It has to be possible to coordinate a division of labor without hierarchy. Marx’s whole ideal of labor is basically to say: “Can’t we take the benefits of the division of labor, producing wealth, where we have a huge number of menu options available in the world, and clean them up of the sludge, which were the hierarchies for him?” Originally we had a division of labor when the chief told people what to do: You’re the lame one, and you’re the shaman. So people can agree on things, or say, I won’t be the shaman forever. I’ll do it as long as I feel like it. And the love relationships exemplify these fair exchanges.

Kluge

Something magical was produced in these love relationships. Namely, besides the fact of being fair or unfair, something is created that wasn’t there before, without any sacrifices.

Dath

No sacrifices? To create energy, you have to burn something.

Kluge

Years of life. Although they become more valuable in the process.

Dath

Sure. Refined, like in agriculture.

text

Added value in love relationships / “Through YOU I become more - -”

Kluge

Alright, if I love someone else and we trade right now, then we’d both have something more, more presence, more concreteness.

Kluge & Dath

More of each other.

Kluge

And it can’t be returned. And if I were to imagine that, on one hand, we have love at first sight, and on the other hand there are people who live their whole lives together without being in love, realizing it only in the end, that would be the French marriage.

Dath

Five thousand possibilities in between, which we couldn’t list.

Kluge

And they would all be characterized by the fact that two people are richer, that our mind is more sociable and needs this social interaction. Even a baby does.

Dath

It’s more than the steam engine, more than electricity. It’s the concept that you can liberate labor. I think it was just the gates. Why not the steam engine? But I think the real model, which you see in love relationships, friendships, and other things, is that a modular division of labor can exist. This is the answer to history’s riddle, which he called Communism.

Kluge

We have very few expressions for it. Take “playfully”. That, as Freud noted, is something that isn’t in contrast with seriousness. It isn’t unserious. It is entirely indulging. Playful isn’t quite the right word. But it’s typical of such an exchange. We need to invent new words.

Dath

Yes. And new methods, too.

Kluge

New methods and new habits. And make the economics for it, the love politics. It would change the meaning of “politics”, it would change economics, even though one type already exists. Let’s work it through. We have a labor time meter reader. He comes into a couple’s bedroom and says, “You can do all that faster. I could show you seven tricks, and the orgasm is produced without further ado. Although I warn you, it can’t be repeated.”

Dath

That’s the critique on profit making. If production is meant to make profit, if added value is the meaning of labor, and not a reward for producing well, then nothing but crap comes of it. That’s the critique of such efficiency. Marx holds that this rationale is irrational, because its motive isn’t rational. Norman Mailer said:

Dath & text

Love is not a solution, but a reward.

Dath

You can’t sit down, saying I’ll do it to receive maximum love from it. That’s insane. Likewise you can’t produce, saying: I’m producing the maximal value only to reprocess it and increase the value. Crazy!

Kluge

How would “stacked love” be? Is it possible at all?

Dath

Better yet, “nested”.

Kluge

Nested. Hidden. How is it…

Dath

“Stacked love” is paratactic love. Comma and then Luzie. Comma, etc. And its shape isn’t crystalline. I think hypotactic is nicer. After I’ve met the person who reminds me that I learned from another I’m who I really want to be, but can’t always, I learn from him that there are other types of being that fit with the person who I haven’t met yet, and so on. So it’s not stacked, but nested.

Kluge

That’s nice because it’s the way to store something for keeping.

Dath

It lasts longer, longer than just accumulating.

Kluge

Whereas stacking love would lead to disintegration.

Dath

Yes, and every subsequent thing is then negated, instead of attempting another exchange.

Kluge

It’s interesting how we go about with this subjective relationship work as soon as we realize right away what the pursuit of happiness, which is hard-wired in us, is about.

Dath

It’s the interface for the realm of necessity and freedom, as Engels said. Actually it’s the lowest drawer. Love is, if you look at it, the reward, genetically speaking, that feeling of happiness for reproducing. It’s a prerequisite of nature, because no one has sex, not even a dog, to reproduce. Dogs can’t think. It isn’t like: Let’s do it now. It’s more like: We’re doing it because it’s fun. And it’s fun because it fulfills this genetic program. On the one hand, raw necessity. On the other hand, this is where freedom comes in for humans. It goes through their heads, and they can reflect on it. I can’t separate it from reproduction, which doesn’t mean I don’t reproduce, but rather it’s a question of the will, which brings us back to modernity. Are we doing it to have a child? Or to comfort one another? Or out of love? There are thousands of reasons. A big set of menu options.

Kluge

And then there is something uncontrolled about it, the fact that I can’t decide whether I love or not. For example, when Isolde lifted her sword to slay the wounded man who murdered her betrothed, and love penetrated her eyes, she couldn’t separate herself from him. That’s stronger than any love potion. By the way, they didn’t have any children.

Dath

I don’t think the world is like Wagner. It’s more like Shakespeare. Much funnier.

Kluge

Describe a Shakespearean love scene.

text

A personal love story

Dath

They’re much to intimate for me. I could describe my own, but not his.

Kluge

Tell us about yours,

Kluge & text

for Marx’s sake.

Dath

Exactly, okay. Alright, a love story for Marx’s sake. You meet a person at your job, and this job was only intended to be a temporary station in life. You can imagine it as such: I accumulate what I wanted after a few years in that job, then I leave. Suddenly I fall in love with a person there. Suddenly I’m faced with a new decision: I can stay here and try to make this into a permanent station in life to stabilize the relationship. Or I can leave to stabilize this love, because that allows me to find out if our love stands a chance if I stay, or if it’s strong enough to work long distance.

text

Can “Das Kapital” say “I”?/ How would Eisenstein have filmed “DAS KAPITAL” by MARX?

Dath

It’s more interesting than Wagner, because there are four options instead of two in “Tristan and Isolde”.

Kluge

And if you assume they didn’t die five winters later, in Brittany, in a lonely castle, isolated… What would their desires be? They’d relinquish their love.

Dath

I’d like to see Eisenstein do that.

19. Love harder than concrete. With Sophie Rois. (starts

2:41:04, ends: 2:56:04)

[Sophie Rois is singing “Je ne t’aime pas” by Kurt Weill / Maurice Magre while text is onscreen]

text

The main thing in life can’t be bought with money!/ The actress Sophie Rois on the “Currencies of Love”

text

And on MEDEA, a woman who knew how to fight

text

Love in terms of women is harder than concrete, says Sophie Rois- Love harder than concrete/ Sophie Rois on additive & subtractive LOVE

Kluge

Medea claimed you can increase everything with money. If I can afford 24 stallions and they draw my carriage, then… Then I’m as strong as 24 stallions. That’s not the case in love at all. It’s different. If I’m crazy about something… I’m holding my mother’s hand and crazy about something, I’m seven times as strong. Not infinitely, not 24 times as strong. And I pull her and she pulls me. And we’re one. We’re strong. And it’s similar if I’m in love. Additive love, subtractive love. Can we say that?

Sophie Rois, singer

What would you call subtractive love?

Kluge

When two people cripple one another. They are always together. They keep each other from loving others and eventually from loving each other, because they are too sparing…

Rois

Tragic!

Kluge

… with their promiscuity.

Rois

Yes. The question… Can you buy… Can you buy love? There’s the example of Father Goriot, who gave his daughters all his money, so they could support the men they’re in love with, who are gamblers and squander all the money.

Rois

And they distance themselves from their father and the money, the support he gave them. And he lay there on his deathbed.

Kluge

Like King Lear.

Rois

And he said, “My God, if I had money now, if only I had kept it all, my daughters would be standing by me, crying real tears. They would lick my cheeks and kiss my hands.” If he had still had money, he would have been loved. He didn’t ask the Protestant question: They would only love me…

Kluge

For me.

Rois

Exactly. He’s not so childish to want to be loved for himself. Instead, he actually realized: If I had money, I would be loved. But I have none. That’s why I’m alone. So that means that, yes, you can buy love. Of course, you can’t buy it by putting your money on the table.

Kluge

Something else has to be added.

Rois

It’s exactly what Wolfgang Pohrt described as happiness in love. Suddenly, an irrational moment is added to the equation…

Kluge

That can sometimes bridge the impossible.

Rois

Yes. It bridges class differences, social differences.

Kluge

Age differences.

Rois

And those are exciting love stories, in which an uneducated person from the wrong class achieves something else through skill, beauty, charm, or talent… and achieves something new, arriving at a place where people are grateful to this person, and, yes, where they love him for it.

Rois (reading)

“What the devil! Your hands and feet and head and tail end are yours. Yet everything I thoroughly enjoy is mine and therefore less. If I can pay for six stallions, is their strength not mine, too?” “The anthropology of money” is the title of this chapter.

Rois (reading)

“Money is the pimp between a man’s need and the object, between life and means of life.” Money acting as a pimp.

Kluge

The means of life is tenderness, skin contact, identification. I love someone. They are a means of life. I can’t live otherwise.

Rois

Yes.

Kluge

Every person needs a quantum of it, even children. A child would get sick if it lacked it.

Rois

Yes.

Kluge

And that’s money between people. You tell nice stories sometimes, and that is the money of love. He looks good.

Rois

Yes, the money of love, too.

Kluge

He is well-versed in love.

Rois

Yes.

Kluge

Someone waits a long time for love, and there’s nothing he can do about it. The congestion has done him well. Then he has an advantage.

Rois

And some people won’t ever be loved. That, too, can…

Kluge

Very unfair. Socialism can’t change it.

Rois

No.

Kluge

If he had never been loved… I was never loved. It happens. Philip, King Philip of Spain, became downright mean and hungry, hungry for love. There’s no cure for it. He can stage a coup and still not find love.

Rois

And he can’t either… No, you can’t demand a claim for justice.

Kluge

No.

Rois

There’s no remedy. Christianity promises a remedy. But how do you do it?

Kluge

Everyone’s saving a little bit of love.

Rois

It’s difficult.

Kluge

And everyone can expend it. But it’d be nice, because there’s no excuse for not being loved. Let’s assume there’s an influential ship owner, and his wife, who adores him. They have a son they idolize, and a daughter who’s fat for lack of love.

text

“It must be a mistake that no one loves me”

Kluge

Inexcusable.

Rois

As a child, you can’t imagine that you’re not… Each person knows it, feels it. If I think back…

Kluge

But you can’t believe it.

Rois

But you don’t want it… You think there must be a tiny mistake, or you’re overlooking something. But a person really needs to be loved. You can’t imagine anything else.

Kluge

You said earlier that Marx assumed for a moment that you could disband the family, because it stands…

Rois

How interesting. We lost track there. You could disband the family?

Kluge

You can’t. Nobody would say that.

Rois

It’s praised by everyone, all parties.

Kluge

It is true that the family and clan set-up are poorly suited for Socialism. To create a factory of people in society who are all interested in being the same, you’d need to overcome the family and replace it with something loving. Instead, we always return to caveman society, to tribal society, to the family.

Rois

Does the family ask of us…

Kluge

I don’t mean it to sound negative…

Rois

No, nor do I. You have to… Each person has things that are self-evident, such as with your own family, which you don’t want to question. But we can reflect on things elsewhere and examine them, asking ourselves whether the family is a barbaric institution.

Kluge

Barbaric, yes. And at the same time…

Rois

Well, barbaric isn’t the right word, but something old…

Kluge

But every society I know is a collection of coal factories, where love and affection are being cooked, and where one person protects, or fights another to protect a third. But that’s our arsenal with which we can let loose. That’s our real capital, which is fostered in families. They are our emotional fields.

Rois

But it is also what drives us crazy. Or why else do people kill themselves? Or kill each other? Because you can’t leave the family any other way. You can’t cancel your child like a lease. Divorce is different. You can’t cancel your child or your parents. The only way out is to kill each other. Families are killing machines.

Kluge

Like in Shakespeare. There are plenty of dramas there.

Rois

Yes. You also have… There’s something much more recent, E. Jelinek’s “Die Ausgesperrten”, where Paulus massacres his family.

Kluge

But it’s really only helpless shouting.

Rois

We can’t escape otherwise. We can’t cancel this contract.

Kluge

China’s one-child policy is an attempt to tame something.

text

“We are listening to Bellini’s NORMA in the background” Piano: Jan Czaikowski

Kluge

The background music here tells of a priestess who worships a lunar deity, Norma. She is chaste, has two children by an officer of the occupying army. Here’s another example of how the family permeates through things. But as opposed to Medea, she doesn’t kill her two children to punish her unfaithful lover.

Rois

I have the impression that Medea isn’t about an unfaithful lover. I think… For me, it’s too short… A little.

Kluge

Is she a witch who slays children?

Rois

No, not at all. She’s a very cold, calculating political response to a…

Kluge

A dynasty here. One in planning. Her successors will be eliminated.

Rois

Yes, otherwise she wouldn’t have…

Kluge

Even if they are my children.

Rois

any more domain.

Rois & text

When “human” became “woman”.

Rois

Woman used to be human, and then came a traumatic turning point. Since then, women are no longer human, but rather women. Because humans today… You can see it clearly on stage. Faust takes the stage and is man. He represents all humanity. As a human being, of course I reflect on Faust. I don’t reflect on Gretchen. She isn’t a human. Only in his eyes. Everything is subject to his subjectivity. Hamlet takes the stage and represents humanity. Medea takes the stage and has menstrual problems. She doesn’t represent humanity. She represents the problem of being a woman. Like her unfaithful lover, you said. She doesn’t have a problem with an unfaithful lover. Her problem is that she is not whole anymore. And in her we can see that is is one after all. She won’t put up with it.

Kluge

She demands her human rights.

Rois

She does.

Kluge

At all costs.

Rois

It’s always left out, but she does… She’s not a womb stomping around and killing her children. No, she acts differently. A king comes to town. She secures her survival. It isn’t an emotional issue, in the natural realm, where we like to put women, in the simple, emotional realm of gut instinct. Not at all. She no longer has her territory to move around on. She is only a woman with children. She’s cut off from everything else. She’s on the outside. No more political clout. She’s no longer queen, just a wife.

Kluge

Dragged from her land.

Rois

Exactly. She’s treated as a wife, and cast out as one, too. A king comes into town. He’s infertile, so she makes a deal with him. I’ll take care of it for you. I’ll brew a potion for you so you’ll have kids. You only have to promise me to give me refuge, no matter what. It was in Euripides. She considers…

Kluge

A deal.

Rois

It’s a clear-cut contract. She’s a strategic politician. And then… She, like every man does, has her right to fame and dignity. And she’s more than female biology, dependent on her lover. She also wants to… If her husband can say, I want to be king and not constantly on the run here. Now I have the chance. She wants to be someone, too. She felt insulted and won’t stand for it. She also wants to be a person and live with fame and honor, and with dignity. With human dignity. That’s why she kills her children: to fatally hurt her husband. So there she stands, on Helios’ chariot. She still is…

Kluge

She returns to her father…

Rois

Yes, she is a relative of a sun god.

Kluge

She starts over again.

Rois

I’d love to play it, on that chariot,

text

LOVE IS HARDER THAN CONCRETE/ Sophie Rois on additive & subtractive LOVE

Rois

and not in a fitted kitchen. I don’t want to play a married woman from the 1800s, or even the immigrant, because she’s not an immigrant. It’s about this political situation. It’s a breach of contract.

20. The reincarnation of Tristan from the spirit of Battleship Potemkin. (starts

2:56:04, ends: 3:08:43)

text

Richard Wagner worked on “Ob Liebe gilt” in TRISTAN AND ISOLDE as part of a work celebrating TWO hundred years of modern music

text

Werner Schroeter staged a production of this play in Duisburg so the sailors, facing certain death, serving on the BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN, invent or experience for themselves, in the final moments of their lives, the UTOPIA OF LOVE -

text

The reincarnation of Tristan from the Battleship Potemkin’s spirit Werner Schroeter stages a production of TRISTAN AND ISOLDE in Duisburg

actor 1

We are sailors serving on a warship.

Kluge

And what is your first scene? What do you do?

actor 1

We’ll be shot, so to speak. We are mutineers on the ship, and then we’ll be shot.

Kluge

How long will you be on stage?

actor 1

All in all? The whole performance.

Kluge

But in the first… You won’t appear as the living dead?

actor 1

No, we’re different sailors then.

actor 2

I’m a seaman from Essen.

actor 3

I’m a sailor from Duisburg.

actor 4

I’m a sailor from Duisburg.

Kluge

You’re from Japan.

actor 4

Yes, a Japanese sailor from Duisburg.

actor 1

I’m a sailor from Argentina.

actor 5

I’m a sailor from Paris.

actor 6

I’m a sailor from Düsseldorf.

text

The guns shudder.

text

“Fire!”

text

“Fire!”

text

“Fire!”

text

“Man your weapons!”

text

The enemy is within firing range.

text

All against one!

text

One against all!

text

“Ready -”

text

Renée Morloc, Brangäne

text

Linda Watson, Isolde

Kluge

Mr. Schroeter, there’s a pantomime in the beginning, before the “music drama” starts. What is it?

Werner Schroeter, director

It’s the framework I’ve set up for my opera. It tells the story of a group of people, of sailors serving on the Potemkin, who are shot, but then again are not. They are in this area, close to death, facing certain death, and invent this story, this “Tristan and Isolde”. That’s the framework for this revolt on the warship, which was completely justified. And they also knew that they would not survive it. And faced with this voyage, they knew that once they arrived at Odessa, they would be facing certain death. So you can imagine that people would either resign to the fact and become lethargic, or become completely hysterical, Or they could try to invent something, to feel something close to life itself, namely love and death. And that’s how this framework for “Tristan” came about.

Kluge

Let’s look at the situation again. They mutinied against the officers. They mutinied, according to maritime law. They navigated past the Russian fleet of warships surrounding them. No shots were fired. They arrived at a neutral harbor, but can’t stay.

Schroeter

Correct.

Kluge

They have been turned in, basically. That’s how it is. Death awaits them on the Czar’s orders.

Schroeter

Exactly. Absolutely, yes.

Kluge

And from the birth of the tragedy, or the plot, comes the spirit of

text

“The liberty of the SAILORS - - “

Kluge

the real working, mutinying men, which is the premise of it all. Not from Greece.

Schroeter

No, no. Then there’s freedom. The freedom to not become too comfortable and stuck in one place. Instead, like Carmen sings about, it’s that feeling, that notion of freedom. “And above all, this intoxicating moment of liberty.” “And the sky is like the universe, the earth.” It all belongs to me. I’m not attached to anything. I move from one point to the next, and am alive in this motion. And I don’t hold on to anything, not even to a person. Like Don José tried with her in the end.

Kluge

As if I were flying. You said how the condemned man sees his life flash before his eyes, how this film comes in the moment before he dies.

Schroeter

Yes, who can say for sure?

Kluge

That’s where the utopia is born?

Schroeter

You could say that.

Kluge

And love is a utopia.

Schroeter

The main one.

Kluge

And Wagner himself once said that he had never loved, and wrote the opera instead. Well, it’s not an opera. You said he called it something else. What was it?

Schroeter

Comprehensive artwork, musical artwork.

Kluge

But he called this here a storyline?

Schroeter

Storyline, yes.

Kluge

A storyline like “Orfeo Favola per Musica” from Monteverdi. Instead, he had a story, a storyline. He just wanted to do something simple, with few people. A commercial piece. He was supposed to earn him money, his Tristan.

Schroeter

Really? I didn’t know…

Kluge

Yes, he set aside Siegfried…

Schroeter

That I know.

Kluge

… to do something simple, no choir, or at least with few choirs. Like a chamber play. And it turned into a big piece.

Schroeter

And it was likely very simple.

Kluge

Something the stages didn’t want.

Schroeter

The history of his productions was an obstacle course. It was…

Kluge

To do something less complicated. He saw on his huge “ring”.

Schroeter

But if you examine the story as he portrays the subject, Tristan and Isolde, it’s very complicated, too. All those intricacies, with people living through not finding themselves. If love is the only utopia there, then death is reality for this utopia.

text

Reincarnation of Tristan from the Battleship Potemkin’s spirit In cooperation with the Theater Troupe Düsseldorf/Duisburg Musical director: Baldo Podic Staging: Werner Schroeter