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Lebensgeschichte und politische Großerzählung: Die Brüder Grimm im Spiegel ihrer Biographen CHRISTOPH SEIFENER Korea University, Seoul In den von Etienne Francois und Hagen Schulze herausgegebenen Deutschen Erinnerungsorten werden zwar die Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Tatar 277ff.), nicht aber die Brüder Grimm selbst als lieu de mémoire gewürdigt. Betrachtet man allerdings die große Zahl von - vor allem populärwissenschaftlichen - Werken, 1 die sich in den vergangenen 130 Jahren kontinuierlich mit der Biographie der Brüder Grimm auseinandergesetzt haben, so wird deutlich, dass nicht nur die Märchen, sondern auch Jakob und Wilhelm Grimm selbst einen festen Platz im kulturellen Gedächtnis der Deutschen inne haben. 2 Es existieren unter den gerade angesprochenen Schriften Werke, die in erster Linie die Selbstzeugnisse der Grimms aufarbeiten; Texte, die ihren Schwerpunkt auf die Darstellung der wissenschaftlichen Leistungen legen; Bildbände, die den Leser in die Zeit eintauchen lassen möchten, in der die Grimms lebten; Biographien für Kinder und explizit literarisch-fiktionale Adaptionen der Lebensgeschichten. Die Rolle, die solche Veröffentlichungen bei der Konstituierung eines kulturellen Gedächtnisses spielen, ist, wiewohl dieser Aspekt in der Biographieforschung bislang eher am Rande wahrgenommen wird, unbestritten (Klein, Lebensbeschreibung 81ff.). Biographien, so Astrid Erll, «stiften, kontinuieren, zirkulieren und hinterfragen kulturelles Gedächtnis» (Erll 86). Es dürfte dabei davon auszugehen sein, dass das Bild der Grimms, das die Biographen entwerfen, vor dem Hintergrund der gesellschaftlichen und politischen Entwicklungen im Laufe der Zeit deutliche Veränderungen erfahren hat. Betrachtet man allerdings die Texte näher, so scheint deren Aufbau in literarischer Hinsicht jedenfalls von großer Konstanz geprägt. Die Mehrheit der hier untersuchten Werke orientiert sich an traditionellen biographischen Mustern, insbesondere an der Gelehrtenbiographie und an der «Tradition der Leben-und-Werk Biographie, wie sie für das 19. Jahrhundert charakteristisch ist» (Kruckis 556; vgl. Scheuer, Biographie: Studien zur Funktion 49). Das heißt, der Lebensweg der Grimms wird chronologisch anhand der Stationen Hanau, Steinau, Marburg, Kassel, Göttingen und Berlin nachvollzogen. In einem größeren Rahmen wird eine Dreiteilung des Lebens in «Kinder- und 2 Christoph Seifener Jugendzeit, Studium und Herausbildung der Persönlichkeit [und] Beginn der eigentlich schöpferischen Phase» (Klein, Einleitung 7), die nach Christian Klein ebenfalls prägend für die Biographik des 19. Jahrhunderts ist, in beinahe allen Texten beibehalten. Kapiteleinteilungen wie «Heimat und Familie», «Bildungsjahre in Kassel», «Studienjahre in Marburg», «Erste Schaffensjahrzehnte in Kassel» (vgl. Scurla) verdeutlichen dies und verweisen gleichzeitig auf die Programmatik des Bildungsromans, an die vielfach angeknüpft wird. Ebenfalls der chronologischen Ordnung folgend gehen die Autoren mehr oder weniger ausführlich auf die Publikationen der Grimms ein, wobei deren Werke zumeist in sehr engen Zusammenhang mit den Erfahrungen und der Persönlichkeit der Brüder gebracht werden. Die Persönlichkeitsentwicklung der Protagonisten selbst erscheint kontinuierlich, konsistent und teleologisch ausgerichtet. Immer wieder wird die organische Entwicklung bestimmter Anlagen behauptet, die bereits in der Kindheit der Grimms zutage treten, und dann im Erwachsenenalter voll zur Geltung kommen. 3 Autobiographische Quellen, wie die Lebensbeschreibungen der Brüder und Briefe von Jakob und Wilhelm gelten in der Regel als Garant für die Authentizität des Dargestellten. 4 Eine bemerkenswerte Ausnahme stellt in dieser Hinsicht vor allem die Biographie von Steffen Martus dar, die ausdrücklich den Inszenierungscharakter autobiographischer Zeugnisse betont. Es fällt auf, dass eine Reihe von Anekdoten und bestimmte Äußerungen der Grimms in keinem der untersuchten Werke fehlen. Die Stelle aus Jakobs Brief an Wilhelm aus dem Juli 1805 etwa, in dem er schreibt, dass die Brüder sich «einmal nie trennen» wollen (Grimm 86), wird durchgängig in jeder Biographie zitiert. Während die Biographien solchermaßen auf den ersten Blick dutzendfach die gleiche historisch abgesicherte Geschichte zu erzählen scheinen, steht demgegenüber die in der Biographieforschung nahezu durchgängig vertretene Auffassung, dass Biographien «eine funktionalisierte Fiktion angenommener Wirklichkeit» darstellen (von Zimmermann 10). Unter dieser Perspektive verschiebt sich das Erkenntnisinteresse von den in der Biographie geschilderten Ereignissen der Vergangenheit hin zur Gegenwart und Position des Biographen. 5 Vor diesem Hintergrund soll es auch im Folgenden um die Frage gehen, in welche Beziehung die Biographen die Figuren der Brüder Grimm zu ihrer jeweils eigenen Zeit stellen. Dieser «Brückenschlag zur Gegenwart», die «Gegenwartsfunktion» der Texte also, stellt nach Helmut Scheuer ein wesentliches Moment jeder Biographik dar (Scheuer, Biographie. Überlegungen 12). In diesem Sinne ist die Biographie als «eine operationale Literaturform [anzusehen]; sie ist Zweckliteratur, das heißt, sie will etwas erreichen und steht Lebensgeschichte und politische Großerzählung 3 im Dienste bestimmter Normsysteme» (11). Christian von Zimmermann plädiert sogar dafür, die Geschichte der Biographie als «Geschichte der Einvernahme biographierter Gestalten für vielfältige historische, politische, soziale, ethische Zwecke zu schreiben» (von Zimmermann 37). An diese Überlegungen knüpft die vorliegende Arbeit an. Anhand der Analyse von Grimm-Biographien aus dem Kaiserreich, der DDR und der Bundesrepublik soll versucht werden, den Zusammenhang zwischen Biographik und kulturellem Gedächtnis zu präzisieren, indem aufgezeigt werden soll, inwiefern die Lebenswege der Grimms zur Untermauerung politischer Gründungs- und Orientierungsmythen herangezogen werden. Mit dieser Intention der Texte eng verbunden sind die literarischen Strategien, mit denen die Autoren den Gegenwartsbezug ihres Gegenstandes herstellen. Dabei kristallisieren sich zwei Vorgehensweisen heraus. Entweder werden die Brüder Grimm als Vorreiter einer Entwicklung dargestellt, die in der Epoche der Biographen zu einem Abschluss gekommen ist. Als Repräsentanten eines historischen Zustandes, der zum Zeitpunkt der Veröffentlichung der Biographie überwunden erscheint, werden die Grimms damit aber gleichzeitig in eine gewisse Distanz zur Leserschaft gerückt. Oder aber es werden Aspekte aus dem Leben der Grimms herausgegriffen, die es ermöglichen, Parallelen zur Gegenwart der Biographen zu ziehen. Die Brüder Grimm werden dadurch aktualisiert und zu jeweils ‹modernen› Figuren erhoben. Bei einem Lebenslauf, der so sehr von den Entwicklungen der Politik beeinflusst wurde, wie der der Grimms - man denke an den Einfluss der Napoleonischen Kriege und die Folgen der Göttinger Protestation - und bei einem Werk, das so sehr auch von politischen Intentionen geleitet wurde, wie das ihre - hier ist vor allem die Auseinandersetzung mit den Fragen der Reichseinheit zu nennen - verwundert es kaum, dass die Grimms auch von ihren Biographen zum Teil explizit politisch vereinnahmt werden (vgl. Saage-Maaß). Deutlich geschieht dies, wenig überraschend, in Werken aus der Kaiserzeit. «Welche Freude würde den Greis erfüllt haben», schreibt Albert Duncker in seiner 1885 erschienenen Biographie in Bezug auf Jakob Grimm, hätte er es noch erlebt, daß seine Deutschen von den Dänen das deutsche Schleswig, von den Franzosen Elsaß und Lothringen wiedergewannen, daß die Wogen der Nord- und Ostsee eine deutsche Kriegsflotte erblicken, daß das Banner des neu erstandenen deutschen Reiches weht auf den Wällen von Straßburg und Metz (Duncker 111). Der Tenor der Passage macht die Perspektive deutlich, unter der diese und andere zeitgenössische Biographien auf das Leben der Grimms zurückblicken. Das Engagement der Brüder für ein geeintes Deutsches Reich wird zu einer, 4 Christoph Seifener wenn nicht der zentralen Triebfeder ihres Wirkens erklärt. Ihre diesbezüglichen Vorstellungen und Wünsche aber, darin sind sich die entsprechenden Texte einig, sind im deutschen Kaiserreich von 1871 in jeder Hinsicht verwirklicht worden. 6 In Carl Frankes Biographie von 1899 erscheinen die Grimms geradezu als Propheten des preußisch-protestantischen Reichsgedankens. Dies betrifft insbesondere Jakob, dessen «tiefe Kenntnis von Deutschlands großer Vergangenheit […] dessen herrliche Zukunft ahnend schauen» lässt (Franke 126). Der Autor muss nicht extra erwähnen, dass er selbst Zeuge dieser herrlichen Zukunft unter Wilhelm II. sein darf. Nicht nur in der gerade zitierten Passage verfällt Franke in einen quasi-religiösen Duktus. Es ist bezeichnend, dass Jakob Grimm, das «Genie», von ihm immer wieder explizit in eine Reihe mit Martin Luther gestellt wird. Beide verbindet etwa ein besonderes Erweckungserlebnis, das als Leseerlebnis wiederum auf Augustinus verweist. Bei Jakob Grimm ist es der Moment der Begegnung mit mittelhochdeutscher Literatur. Wenn wir uns im Geiste vergegenwärtigen, wie Jakob Grimm […] zum ersten Male die Minnesänger in die Hand nimmt, so tritt uns unwillkürlich das Bild des jungen Luthers vor unser Auge, der das erste Mal eine vollständige Bibel erblickt. […] [Jakobs] Forschungstrieb wurde […] auf das Ziel hingewiesen, welches ihm die Vorsehung gesteckt hatte, auf die altdeutsche Sprache und Litteratur. (17) 7 Neben den religiösen Bezügen ist es offensichtlich der Rezeptionszusammenhang von «Luther dem Deutschen», innerhalb dessen der Reformator im 19.-und frühen 20. Jahrhundert als «Inbegriff nationalen Selbstverständnisses» aufgefasst wird (Hensing 11), der Luther als Referenzfigur anbietet. Luther erscheint in diesem Traditionsstrang insbesondere «als Träger oder Garant, Prophet oder Vollstrecker nationaler Programme und Sehnsüchte» (Hensing 7), erfüllt also genau jene Rolle, die Franke nun auch Jakob Grimm zuweist. Die Grimms werden zu Heilsfiguren stilisiert, durch die sich ein übergeordneter Wille vollzieht. In diesem Sinne wird von Franke wiederholt die Vorsehung bemüht. Sie war es beispielsweise, die «dem deutschen Volke ein auf das innigste verknüpftes Brüderpaar» sandte, das eine «übermenschliche Arbeit in einem Geiste» angehen konnte (Franke 3). Die Vorsehung hat den Deutschen aber nicht nur die Grimms geschenkt, sondern auch die Hohenzollern. Und die Wege beider sieht Franke durch die Berufung der Grimms nach Berlin geradezu schicksalhaft verbunden. So nahm Preußens Königsgeschlecht diejenigen großen Deutschen gastlich auf, welche die durch und durch ganz undeutsch gesinnten Fürsten von Hessen Kassel und Hannover so schnöde behandelt hatten. Das Schicksal hat die Brüder Grimm gerächt. Als des deutschen Reiches Auferstehungsstunde schlug, welche auch die Lebensgeschichte und politische Großerzählung 5 Brüder Grimm mit vorbereitet hatten, da stürzte es die Thröne jener ein, das edle Hohenzollerngeschlecht aber erhob es auf den deutschen Kaiserthron. (76) Ebenso bildet für Albert Duncker die Beziehung der Grimms zu Preußen und zu Friedrich Wilhelm IV. als Vertreter der Hohenzollern einen wesentlichen Hintergrund, vor dem sich die Lebensgeschichte der Brüder abspielt. Der Ausgangspunkt der Biographie, die erste Szene des Buches, zeigt Jakob Grimm in Berlin. Auf dem Höhepunkt seiner wissenschaftlichen Reputation, geehrt und in «sorgenfreie[r] Stellung, die ihm und seinem Bruder der edle Sinn König Friedrich Wilhelms IV. bereitet hatte», blickt er «mit der Ruhe eines wahrhaft Weisen» auf sein Leben zurück (Duncker 1). Die Perspektive, unter der sich die Biographie im Folgenden entfaltet, ist damit vorgegeben. Der Lebensweg der Grimms läuft dank der Unterstützung der Hohenzollern auf Berlin zu, den, das suggeriert der Text, ihrer Größe einzig angemessenen Ort, wo sie denn auch erst die «Höhe ihres Schaffens erklommen» (122). Genauso aber läuft die deutsche Geschichte in Dunckers Darstellung auf das neugegründete Kaiserreich der Hohenzollern zu. 8 Der wesentliche Beitrag der Grimms zur Reichsgründung besteht bei Duncker wie bei Franke darin, dass sie halfen, «das deutsche Nationalbewußtsein [zu] stärken und so [mit] an der Aufrichtung des gesunkenen Vaterlandes [zu] arbeiten» (Franke 34). Erst die Grimms hätten es den Deutschen überhaupt «zu Bewußtsein gebracht», dass sie zu einer Synthese von Altertum, Christentum und «ureigenste[m] Wesen» in der Lage sind, und somit ein «Volk von hoher geschichtlicher Mission» (153). Klingt in dieser Formulierung bereits an, dass Franke den Grimms ganz selbstverständlich zeitgenössische wilhelminische Ideologien wie die vom Sendungsbewusstsein der Deutschen unterstellt, so geht er noch einen Schritt weiter, wenn er fast die gesamten Forschungsleistungen der Grimms in den Dienst der aktuellen Tagespolitik und damit der wilhelminischen Sache stellt. Ohne die Grammatik Jakob Grimms beispielsweise, so behauptet Franke, wäre «sicherlich auch das Kaiserwort, daß das Deutsche Mittelpunkt des Unterrichts werden müsse, nie gefallen» (95). Damit spielt Franke auf den Versuch Wilhelms II. an, die Gymnasialbildung, und hier insbesondere den Deutschunterricht, zur «Bekämpfung der Sozialdemokratie und der gezielten intensivierten Propagierung einer imperialistischen Außen- und Kolonialpolitik», mithin zu einer «durchgreifenden Nationalisierung und Militarisierung» (Herrmann 350) zu instrumentalisieren. Die Sagen der Grimms wiederum befördern dementsprechend «Begeisterung für des deutschen Volkes große Vergangenheit, innige Liebe zum deutschen Lande und Wesen, heldenmütig zu Kampf und Tod für das Vaterland bereite Gesinnung» (58). So tragen sie direkt dazu bei, dem «Deutschthume die machtgebietende Stellung in Europa zu erhalten» (150). 6 Christoph Seifener Und auch die Märchen erfüllen ihre patriotische Aufgabe, indem sie helfen, soziale Gegensätze auszugleichen: «Indem aber die Brüder Grimm aus den dürftigen Hütten der unteren Stände die Märchen in die Kinderstuben der höheren führten, haben sie bewirkt, daß alle Stände des deutschen Volkes wenigstens während der Kinderjahre die gleiche geistige Nahrung genießen, und hierdurch ist unstreitig der schroffe Ständeunterschied gemildert worden» (51). Duncker und Franke schreiben, wie viele Biographen ihrer Zeit, mit an dem «nationale[n] Epos, dessen Hauptthema in der Sendung der Hohenzollerndynastie bestand, Deutschland zu erlösen und zu vereinigen» (Hamerow 32). Es handelt sich dabei um einen politischen Gründungsmythos im Sinne Herfried Münklers, um eine «Großerzählung[], aus [der] nationale Identität gewonnen wird» (Münkler 9ff.). Die Lebenswege der Grimms werden nun auf mehrfache Weise mit diesem Gründungsmythos des Kaiserreichs verflochten. Die Brüder fungieren innerhalb der nationalen Großerzählung in einer nicht unwichtigen Nebenrolle als Zeugen des Aufstiegs der Hohenzollern. Und es sind sehr brauchbare Zeugen, denn sie schlagen eine direkte Brücke zu den nationalen Bestrebungen des Bürgertums der ersten Jahrhunderthälfte. Die Biographien sind in diesem Sinne Teil der preußisch-nationalistischen Geschichtsschreibung, die «Preußen kurzerhand zum politischen Erben der 48er Ideale erklärte und damit die Verwirklichung nationaldemokratischer Forderungen vortäuschte» (Scheuer, Biographie: Studien zur Funktion 73). Im Rahmen einer Gelehrtenbiographie wird die Erzählung von der Sendung der Hohenzollern darüber hinaus in einen wissenschaftlichen Zusammenhang gerückt. Gleichzeitig werden die Grimms durch die Charakterisierung, die sie in den Biographien erfahren, als jeglicher eigener Machtinteressen enthoben und dadurch als besonders glaubwürdige Zeugen dargestellt. Denn Jakob und Wilhelm sind, darauf kommen die Biographen immer wieder zurück, «bescheiden», «unschuldig», «naiv» und vor allem «kindlich» (vgl. Franke 46, 55; Duncker 122). Bei diesen Eigenschaften handelt es sich aber wiederum, in der Nationalstereotypik der Zeit, um ‹spezifisch deutsche› Charaktermerkmale. Sie werden explizit als solche für die Grimms reklamiert, wenn Wilhelm Scherer, im Rückgriff auf Friedrich Schlegel, zu dem Urteil gelangt: Rechtlich, treuherzig, gründlich, genau und tiefsinnig, dabei unschuldig und etwas ungeschickt […] [ist der] Geist unserer alten Helden deutscher Kunst und Wissenschaft: […] vollkommener kam er selten zur Erscheinung als in Jakob und Wilhelm Grimm (Scherer 85f.). Für Franke erweist sich insbesondere Jakobs «kindliches Herz» - und auch hier gibt es in der Zuweisung und Konnotation dieser Eigenschaft deutliche Parallelen zum Lutherbild der Zeit (Münkler 193) - als «echt deutsch» (Franke 68). 9 Auf Grund solcher Herleitungen können die Grimms von Lebensgeschichte und politische Großerzählung 7 Duncker dann sogar zu den «Deutschesten der Deutschen» erklärt werden (Duncker-1). Diese Formulierung öffnet die Perpektive auf das besondere Verhältnis, in das die Biographen des Kaiserreichs die Grimms zu ‹dem Volk›, das in den Texten tatsächlich in zentralen Passagen personalisiert wird und monolithisch erscheint, stellen. Die Brüder, die - das werden die Autoren nicht müde zu betonen - selbst aus dem Volk stammen, befinden sich mit diesem in politischer und sozialer Hinsicht, in ihren Äußerungen und Bestrebungen in scheinbar völligem Einverständnis. Sie greifen die Wünsche des Volkes auf, sind in der Lage, sie zu formulieren und geben ihnen öffentlich Ausdruck. Die Grimms sind nach diesem Verständnis Sprachrohr eines einheitlichen Volkswillens. Insbesondere ihre Bescheidenheit, die von den Biographen immer wieder explizit behauptet und in zahlreichen Episoden beispielhaft vorgeführt wird, sorgt dabei dafür, dass die Grimms als Intellektuelle ‹dem Volk› nicht entrückt werden (Franke 69). Durch diese behaupteten Übereinstimmungen und die ausgesprochene Stellvertreterposition der Grimms gelingt es den Biographen natürlich umgekehrt auch, das Volk - und als solches dürfen sich die potenziellen Leser der Texte verstehen - in die politische Großerzählung einzubinden und es auf diese zu verpflichten. Auch die Biographen der DDR setzen die Grimms dezidiert in Beziehung zu den Gründungsmythen ihres Staates, indem sie die Brüder als Vorkämpfer des eigenen politischen und gesellschaftlichen Systems für sich reklamieren. Dies geschieht, indem die politischen Ereignisse, vor deren Hintergrund sich das Leben der Grimms abspielt, aus marxistischer Sicht als Ausdruck der Klassengegensätze zwischen Bauern, Bürgertum und Feudaladel gedeutet und die Grimms in dieser Auseinandersetzung eindeutig der Partei des Fortschritts zugeschlagen werden. Damit wird der Anschluss an Erzählungen erreicht, die in der DDR neben den primären, antifaschistischen Gründungsmythos des Staates traten. In ihnen wurden Ereignisse und Personen herausgestellt, denen in der deutschen Geschichte eine «fortschrittliche Rolle» zugesprochen wurde (Münkler 443), und die sich dadurch als Teil der «‹Vorgeschichte› der DDR in Anspruch nehmen ließen» (441). Die «fortschrittliche Gesinnung» der Grimms, die beispielsweise in der Biographie von Herbert Scurla immer wieder unterstrichen wird (Scurla 178, 221, 223), und die sich insbesondere gegen die Fürstenherrschaft richtet, 10 lässt die Grimms natürlich auch für die deutsche Einheit eintreten. Scurla gibt dem Nationalismus der Grimms aber eine andere Perspektive als die Autoren der Kaiserzeit, gegen deren chauvinistische Vereinnahmungen er die Brüder in Schutz nimmt (298), indem er ausführlich auch den Einfluss der Grimms «auf die nationale Selbstbesin- 8 Christoph Seifener nung der slawischen Völker» darstellt (175). 11 Das nationale Engagement der Grimms wird dadurch relativiert, denn es wird zu einem grundsätzlichen und nicht mehr nur ausschließlich auf Deutschland bezogenen Anliegen erklärt. Daneben aber ist der Wunsch nach sozialer Gerechtigkeit, der Glaube an den «Grundsatz der Gleichheit aller Menschen» (11) für Scurla eine wichtige Triebfeder der Grimms. Sie findet ihren deutlichsten Ausdruck in den Kinder- und Hausmärchen. Denn die «volkseigenen» Märchen verkörpern für Scurla die «menschliche Sehnsucht nach Erlösung aus Elend, Ungerechtigkeit und Unterdrückung» (72f.), sie sind - und hier zitiert Scurla bezeichnenderweise Positionen der DDR-Germanistik - die «wichtigste literarische Ausdrucksmöglichkeit des unterdrückten Volkes» (73). 12 Während Scurla aber immerhin einräumen muss, dass die Grimms nicht «in der Absicht über Land gegangen [sind], […] um der Gesellschaftsordnung, in der sie lebten und an die sie in ihrer ökonomischen Lage gebunden waren, […] den Kampf anzusagen» (75), geht Lore Mallachow in ihrer Biographie für Jugendliche, die allerdings als fiktionale Erzählung konzipiert ist, wesentlich plakativer vor. Sie lässt Wilhelm unter dem Eindruck der Märchen, die er sammelt, zu der Schlussfolgerung kommen: «Die Menschen sehnen sich nach Gerechtigkeit. Es wäre eine große Sache, etwas dafür zu tun, daß der Traum zur Wahrheit wird.» Jakob antwortet darauf: «Die Zukunft wird’s erweisen, Bruder.» (Mallachow 37) Dass damit direkt auf die staatliche Realität der DDR verwiesen wird, ist offensichtlich. An anderer Stelle formuliert Wilhelm die Hoffnung, dass die Märchen «geboren aus der Sehnsucht des Volkes nach Gerechtigkeit, […] uns Kraft geben, mit der fremden Herrschaft fertig zu werden» (50). Die fremden Herrscher sind aber in der Darstellung Mallachows eben nicht nur die Franzosen der Besatzungszeit, sondern die Adeligen und Fürsten, die eigennützig und rücksichtslos gegen die Interessen des Volkes handeln. 13 Demgegenüber steht das ‹geistige Vermächtnis› von Jakob und Wilhelms Vater, der seine Kinder auf dem Totenbett darauf verpflichtet, «auf das Recht [zu achten]», der ihnen «von den Menschenrechten […] erzählt, daß kein Stand sich über den anderen erheben darf, daß jeder sich bilden kann, satt zu essen hat» (10f.). Der jugendliche Leser der Biographie, der sich möglicherweise mit den Figuren Jakob und Wilhelm identifiziert, wird hier natürlich gleich mit in die Pflicht genommen, sich für diese Ziele einzusetzen. Immer wieder gestaltet Mallachow Szenen, in denen die Grimms direkt mit Vertretern des Adels konfrontiert werden und so Gelegenheit bekommen, ihre Opposition deutlich zu machen. Symptomatisch erscheint die erste Erfahrung, die Wilhelm Grimm macht, als er an der Universität ein Seminar besuchen will: Lebensgeschichte und politische Großerzählung 9 In diesem Augenblick versetzte ihm jemand einen Stoß in die Seite. […] Die Angreifer stießen weiter rücksichtslos mit den Ellenbogen, bis sie sich lachend in der ersten Bankreihe in Position setzten. Wilhelm wollte aufbrausen. Auch Jakob mußte sich auf die Lippen beißen, denn er hätte den Beleidigern - es waren junge Adelige-- gerne Widerpart gegeben. (26) Die soziale Herkunft der Grimms bildet bei Mallachow somit den entscheidenden Faktor zum Verständnis der Entwicklung ihrer Persönlichkeit. Vor diesem Hintergrund erschließt sich dann auch das erneut besondere Verhältnis zwischen den Grimms und ‹dem Volk›, das Mallachow unterstellt. Tatsächlich greifen in dieser Hinsicht die sozialistischen Biographen bemerkenswerterweise auf die gleiche Vereinnahmungsstrategie zurück, die schon ihre nationalistischen Kollegen im Kaiserreich angewandt hatten, indem sie das Volk als homogene Masse und die Brüder Grimm als diejenigen darstellen, die die Wünsche und Sehnsüchte des Volkes zu artikulieren in der Lage sind. Die Autoren entwerfen dabei Bilder, die beim Leser den Eindruck erwecken, es mit der Beziehung zweier Individuen zu tun zu haben. Dies wird insbesondere dort deutlich, wo die Texte auf die Sammlertätigkeit der Grimms zu sprechen kommen. Die Märchen etwa empfangen die Brüder «unmittelbar aus dem Munde des Volkes» (Scurla 75), um sie dann in schriftlicher Form «ihrem Volke neu zu schenken» (Lemmer 17). Der Gegensatz zwischen den dem Volk verbundenen Grimms und dem Adel spielt in Mallachows Biographie auch noch in einem anderen Zusammenhang eine wichtige Rolle. Die Autorin steht nämlich, wie auch die anderen Grimm-Biographen der DDR, vor der Aufgabe, zu differenzieren zwischen den Grimms einerseits, die als Personen und in ihrem Wirken als vorbildlich dargestellt werden, und «den Romantikern» andererseits, die, wie Manfred Lemmer schreibt, zwar «[w]esentliche Impulse zur Beschäftigung mit dem Mittelalter und mit der Volksdichtung» gaben, die aber allmählich «zu einer Ablehnung der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft wie der modernen Umgestaltung des Lebens [gelangten, und] […] sich häufig den feudalen Kräften an[näherten]» (Lemmer 10). Lemmer rekuriert hier auf die ‹offizielle› Wertung und Einordnung der Romantik durch die DDR-Literaturwissenschaft, die in der Epoche die «reaktionäre Gegenposition zur deutschen Klassik» ausmachte und «den Anfang des Niedergangs der bürgerlichen Ideologie, der im Faschismus seinen Tiefpunkt» erreichte (Lehmann 183f.). Mallachow gelingt die Trennung zwischen den Grimms und der Romantik, indem sie eine gewissermaßen natürliche Differenz zwischen den aus einfachsten, bedrängten Verhältnissen stammenden Brüdern und den Romantikern von Arnim und Brentano unterstellt. Insbesondere Clemens Brentano wird zu diesem Zweck als eine Art Gegenfigur zu den Grimms aufgebaut. 14 10 Christoph Seifener Herbert Scurla hingegen beschreibt das Verhältnis der Grimms zur Romantik als allmählichen Emanzipationsprozess von wesentlichen Vertretern der Epoche, denen die Grimms zunächst starke Anregungen verdankten. Entscheidender Punkt ist hier nicht a priori der soziale Stand, sondern die Tatsache, dass erst im Laufe der Zeit «keine politisch-weltanschauliche Übereinstimmung mehr» mit den sich immer konservativer orientierenden Romantikern vorhanden war (Scurla 177). Weder «folgten die Brüder Grimm trotz ihrer Verbundenheit mit ihrem Universitätslehrer [Savigny; CS] [dessen] […] reaktionären Tendenzen», noch «folgten sie […] Brentanos späterem Weg in religiöse Verwirrungen» (176). Dementsprechend bedeutete der «Abschied von Kassel […] zeitlich gesehen zugleich ein[en] Abschied von der Romantik» (177). Im Gegensatz zu den rückwärts gewandten Romantikern werden die Grimms in der Darstellung Scurlas zu Vorreitern der modernen Wissenschaften. Auf diese Weise werden die Brüder von den DDR-Autoren nicht nur zur Beglaubigung der staatlichen Orientierungsmythen, sondern, wie schon im Hinblick auf die Einordnung und Wertung der Gattung Märchen, auch zur Bekräftigung der staatlichen Kulturpolitik herangezogen. Wie sehr die DDR-Biographien im Übrigen ideologischen Vorgaben verpflichtet sind, wird auch deutlich, wenn beispielsweise in der Biographie Manfred Lemmers eine Art Nobilitierung der Brüder im Sinne des Sozialismus stattfindet. Hier werden an hervorgehobener Stelle, nämlich am Ende der Darstellung, als abschließendes Urteil gewissermaßen, wohlwollende Äußerungen von Marx und Engels über die Grimms zitiert (Lemmer 41). Im Bildteil des Buches finden sich neben zeitgenössischen Darstellungen aus dem Lebensumfeld der Grimms auch Fotografien aller DDR-Germanisten, die an der Weiterführung des Wörterbuches beteiligt sind. In der DDR, das suggeriert diese Bildauswahl, wird das Werk der Brüder fortgeschrieben (92). Einen ähnlichen nobilitierenden Effekt hat es, wenn in Scurlas Biographie ausdrücklich auf die Beliebtheit der Kinder- und Hausmärchen in der Sowjetunion hingewiesen und die sozialistische Lesart der Märchen durch Äußerungen Lenins gestützt wird (Scurla 84, 72). Christian von Zimmermann weist darauf hin, dass es als expliziten Gegenentwurf «zur Idealisierung und Heroisierung der Einzelpersönlichkeit» seit dem 19. Jahrhundert in der Biographik «Tendenzen zu einer ‹Vermenschlichung› der besonderen Persönlichkeit gegeben» hat (von Zimmermann 189). Diese Tendenzen zeigen sich in Bezug auf die Grimms zuerst in Josephine Stielers Lebensbilder deutscher Männer und Frauen und begründen eine Rezeptionstradition, die sich insbesondere in der Bundesrepublik in den Werken von Karl Schulte Kemminghausen und Ludwig Denecke, bzw. von Irma Hilde- Lebensgeschichte und politische Großerzählung 11 brandt fortschreibt. Jakob und Wilhelm Grimm werden hier in erster Linie in ihren Familienbeziehungen wahrgenommen. Stieler etwa hebt immer wieder auf das Verhältnis der Brüder zu ihrer Mutter ab, das in sentimentalen Episoden als ausgesprochen innig und liebevoll geschildert wird. Die Grimms erscheinen so vor allem als ‹gute Söhne› und in gewisser Weise bleiben sie dies ein Leben lang. Bezeichnenderweise wird etwa bei Wilhelms Heirat mit Dorothea Wild extra betont, dass die Braut auch das Wohlgefallen der verstorbenen Mutter genossen habe (Stieler 206). Das ‹kindliche› Gemüt der Grimms kommt auch dadurch zum Ausdruck, dass die Brüder sich nach ihrer Entlassung in Göttingen scheinbar sorgenlos «voller Hingebung ihren Lieblingsstudien [widmen], ohne sich irgend mit Plänen für die Zukunft zu befassen» (209). Wie die naiven Helden der Märchen werden auch die Grimms für ihr schlichtes, bescheidenes Wesen ‹belohnt› und zwar mit einem rundum glücklichen Familienleben: «Beim Frühstück, Mittagessen, Thee [sic] und Abendessen versammelte sich alles in dem einfach, aber gemütlich eingerichteten Wohnzimmer […], und man kann sich kaum ein gemütvolleres, behaglicheres Zusammenleben denken» (206). Diese Perspektive auf das Leben der Brüder wird in der Biographik der Bundesrepublik wieder aufgegriffen. Die Bilder einer bürgerlichen Familienidylle etwa spielen insbesondere im Werk von Schulte Kemminghausen und Denecke eine entscheidende Rolle, und zwar sowohl im Hinblick auf die Kindheit und die Ursprungsfamilie der Grimms, wie auch auf das spätere Miteinander von Dorothea, Wilhelm, Jakob und den übrigen Geschwistern. Das familiäre Zusammenleben ist geprägt von Werten wie «Treue», «Sparsamkeit», «Gewissenhaftigkeit», «Rechtschaffenheit» und «Standhaftigkeit» (Schulte Kemminghausen et al. 7ff.). Dieser Tugendkatalog wird vor allem von Wilhelm und Jakob verkörpert und gepflegt und ist Garant für privates Glück und einen «bescheidenen bürgerlichen Wohlstand» (6). Jakob wacht über die Familie als Patriarch. Tatsächlich werden, im Gegensatz zur Betonung der Mutterrolle bei Stieler, in dieser Biographie die Vaterfiguren in den Mittelpunkt der Darstellung gerückt. Jakob etwa ist in seinem Verhalten bemüht, ganz den Leitbildern des Vaters zu entsprechen. Auch der Mutter kommt nach dem Tod ihres Mannes vor allem die Aufgabe zu, «die Kinder […] weiter auf dem Weg des Vaters zu führen» und dadurch «die erste Gefährdung ihres Lebensweges» (11) zu überwinden. In dieser Formulierung nun wird die Konstellation deutlich, die nach Schulte Kemminghausen und Denecke konstitutiv für das Leben der Grimms ist. Denn das Familienglück ist immer wieder durch äußere Ereignisse bedroht. Insbesondere die Politik erscheint als etwas, das ausschließlich in Form von «katastrophenartigen Umbrüchen» eine äußere Bedrohung der ansonsten «konsequent aufsteigenden Lebensli- 12 Christoph Seifener nie» (10) darstellt und daher abgewehrt werden muss (vgl. 27f.). Dies gelingt den Brüdern vorbildlich allein durch ihre Freundschaftsbünde, die «wie eine Zauberhecke […] alle Stöße auffing[en]» (28), und ihren Familiensinn. Die Tatsache, dass Jakob und Wilhelm sich «lieb haben» wird zur «Waffe» gegen alle äußeren Widerstände erklärt (23). Mit dieser dezidierten Zurückweisung des Politischen und der Propagierung des Privaten entspricht die Biographie in vielerlei Hinsicht dem Zeitgeist der 50er und frühen 60er-Jahre in der Bundesrepublik. Von den «katastrophenartigen Umbrüchen», denen sich Jakob und Wilhelm Grimm ausgesetzt sehen - hier sind vor allem die Folgen der Napoleonischen Kriege gemeint - kann man durchaus Parallelen zur Wahrnehmung der Kriegserfahrung in der jungen Bundesrepublik ziehen. Nicht zuletzt als Reaktion auf die Zeit des Nationalsozialismus erfuhr die Familie im westdeutschen Staat eine «Reprivatisierung» (Vogel 43) und wurde gewissermaßen als Schutzraum betrachtet, auf den die Politik keinen unmittelbaren Zugriff haben sollte. Die bürgerlichen Tugenden, die in den 1950er Jahren familiäres Leben bestimmen und organisieren sollten: Sparsamkeit, Ordnungsfähigkeit in Zeit und Raum, […] Häuslichkeit, Planungs- und Einteilungsvermögen, Fähigkeit zum Lustaufschub- und Verzicht, Seßhaftigkeit, Gehorsam, Disziplin, Fleiß, Gewissenhaftigkeit, Arbeitsfreude, Bescheidenheit (45) entsprechen genau jenen Werten, die auch die Grimmsche Familie für Schulte Kemminghausen und Denecke vorbildlich verkörperte. Und selbstverständlich findet auch das patriarchalisch geprägte Familienmodell, das in der Biographie zum Tragen kommt, seine Entsprechung in gesellschaftlichen Vorstellungen der Adenauer-Ära. Die familiären Werte, die Schulte Kemminghausen und Denecke in ihrer Biographie betonen, werden, da sie als allen historischen Entwicklungen und Veränderungen explizit entgegenstehend gekennzeichnet werden, als überzeitlich charakterisiert. Dies schlägt eine direkte Brücke von den Grimms zu den potentiellen Lesern der Biographie, ist doch die Lebenssituation der einen wie der anderen unter dieser Perspektive durchaus vergleichbar. Die Brüder werden somit in gewisser Weise zu Zeitgenossen der bundesrepublikanischen Leser erhoben. Dem entspricht nun auf der textuellen Ebene der Biographie, dass Schulte Kemminghausen und Denecke immer wieder konkrete Spuren aus der Zeit der Grimms beschreiben, die in der Gegenwart noch wahrnehmbar sind, und so die Kontinuitäten unterstreichen, die die Epoche der Grimms mit der Gegenwart verbinden. So betonen die Autoren beispielsweise, dass vor dem Amtshaus, das die Grimms in Steinau bewohnten «heute wie damals eine schattige Linde [steht]. Die Wohnung im Erdgeschoß atmet Erinnerung und noch heute ist spürbar, wie Landschaft, Menschen und Geschichte hier auf ein empfängliches Herz fruchtbar und prägend wirken konnten» (Schulte Lebensgeschichte und politische Großerzählung 13 Kemminghausen et al. 11). In ähnlicher Weise wird das Haus am Wilhelmshöher Tor beschrieben, «dessen Fenster heute noch auf die Bäume des […] Platzes hinausschauen» (10). Die zeitliche Distanz wird in solchen Passagen geradezu wegerzählt. Schulte Kemminghausen und Dennecke stilisieren, genau wie Irma Hildebrandt in ihrer Biographie der Brüder, die Grimms als Oberhäupter, Versorger und Ernährer ihrer Familie in schwieriger Zeit, womit sich die Texte in erster Linie auf die wechselnden politischen Konstellationen der napoleonischen Ära und der Restaurationszeit und die materielle Situation der Familie nach dem Tod des Vaters beziehen. Mit diesem Bild der Brüder gelingt den Autoren aber in gewisser Weise erneut ein Anschluss an eine nationale Großerzählung, diesmal der Bundesrepublik. Denn der westdeutsche Staat zeichnete sich nach Münkler gerade durch einen Verzicht auf politische Gründungs- und Orientierungsmythen aus (Münkler 455). An ihre Stelle trat der «bundesrepublikanische Gründungsmythos von Währungsreform und Wirtschaftswunder», der den «Fleiß und die Tüchtigkeit der Deutschen» (461) in den Mittelpunkt stellte und sich in erster Linie auf «individuellen Wohlstand» (10) bezog. Während die Biographien genau diese Komponenten- - Fleiß, Tüchtigkeit und gesicherte persönliche Verhältnisse - in Bezug auf die Grimms in den Vordergrund rücken, wird das politische und gesellschaftliche Engagement der Brüder bei Schulte Kemminghausen und Dennecke sowie bei Hildebrandt deutlich relativiert. Hildebrandt etwa betont fast entschuldigend, dass die Äußerungen Jakobs hinsichtlich der Grenzen eines zukünftigen Deutschen Reiches der «allgemeinen Stimmung» der Zeit und einem «Kollektivgefühl» (Hildebrandt 120) geschuldet sind. Jakob wird dabei aber nicht als Visionär und Vorkämpfer der Reichseinheit geschildert, der aus der Menge herausgehoben ist, wie dies in den Biographien der Kaiserzeit der Fall war. Das «Utopia Deutschland» (123), das Jakob vorschwebt, hat, nach Hildebrandt, auch wenig mit dem zu tun, was im martialischen wilhelminischen Kaiserreich Wirklichkeit wurde. «Das Deutsche» (123) im Grimmschen Sinne - Hildebrandt setzt hier nicht zufällig Anführungszeichen und macht so deutlich, dass der Begriff in ihren Augen zu problematisieren ist - kommt für die Autorin vor allem in den wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten der Brüder und den Ergebnissen ihrer Sammeltätigkeit zum Ausdruck. Ausdrückliche Würdigung erfahren in der Biographie die «Zivilcourage» und die «parlamentarische Arbeit» (123f.) der Grimms, mithin Formen des politischen Engagements, die in der demokratisch verfassten Bundesrepublik Vorbildcharakter genießen, doch treten diese Aktivitäten für Hildebrandt explizit hinter die kulturellen Verdienste der Brüder zurück. 14 Christoph Seifener Folgt man Herfried Münklers Überlegungen, so wurde «gegen Ende der 1990er Jahre das aus der alten Bundesrepublik in das vereinigte Deutschland übernommene politische Mythensystem von einem allmählichen Erosionsprozess erfasst» (Münkler 482). An seine Stelle sind nun aber, angesichts einer «Bedeutungssteigerung des Bildes gegenüber dem Text» und «dem Rückzug der Intellektuellen an der Arbeit am Mythos», keine neuen politischen Mythen getreten, sondern «Formeln und Parolen, dazu Bilder und Bildsequenzen, die Teilfunktionen politischer Mythen übernehmen» (486). Die Grimm-Biographie von Steffen Martus scheint Münklers These vom aktuellen Bedeutungsverlust des tradierten Mythensystems durchaus zu stützen. Martus versucht nämlich gerade nicht, den Grimms eine Rolle zuzuweisen, die es ermöglichen würde, sie in eine nationale Großerzählung einzubinden. Seine Darstellung lässt sich vielmehr in mancherlei Hinsicht als Entmythisierung der Lebensgeschichten lesen. Für Martus stellt die Modernität der Grimms den wesentlichen Schlüssel zum Verständnis ihres Werdegangs dar. 15 Geschildert wird die Biographie der Brüder vor dem Hintergrund «einer Zeit des Umbruchs», die «gleichermaßen die Sehnsucht nach dem Neuen, wie die Sorge um den Verlust des Althergebrachten erzeugt» (Martus 14). Gerade darin sieht Martus eine moderne Wahrnehmungsweise, deren Ergebnisse nirgendwo so deutlich zum Ausdruck kommen wie in den Tätigkeiten und Leistungen der Brüder als Wissenschaftler. Ihre Werke etwa verkörpern die oben angeführten beiden Seiten der Moderne, «jenes eigentümliche Bündnis von Traditionsverlust und -bewahrung, von Eigensinn und Gemeinschaftsgeist» (11). Modern erscheinen nicht nur die wissenschaftlichen Methoden und Arbeitsfelder der Grimms, sondern auch der Wissenschafts- und Publikationsbetrieb, in dem die Brüder sich bewegen und auf dessen Darstellung in der Biographie großer Wert gelegt wird (191, 197, 248, 287). Jakob und Wilhelm Grimm erscheinen gerade nicht als die naiven, weltfremden Forscher, als die sie in früheren Biographien gezeichnet wurden, sondern als aktive Netzwerker (89, 101, 105), die ihre Wissenschaftskarrieren strategisch planen und sich in einem modernen akademischen Umfeld behaupten und durchsetzen müssen. Die neue Lesart, die Martus mit dieser Perspektive verfolgt, kann exemplarisch anhand seiner Darstellung der Entscheidung der Brüder, gemeinsam zu arbeiten und zu leben, verdeutlicht werden. Sie wird nicht mehr nur als logische Konsequenz besonders tief empfundener brüderlicher Zuneigung verstanden, sondern als genau kalkulierter, bewusster Entschluss, geboren aus «gemeinschaftliche[m] Egoismus» (99), der dem Aufbau einer gemeinsamen Bibliothek dient und sich somit letztlich auch als nützlich erweist, wenn es darum geht, die Karrieren voranzutreiben. Mit dem gleichen Pragmatis- Lebensgeschichte und politische Großerzählung 15 mus machen sich, so Martus, die Grimms daran, sich zu «positionieren», zu «profilieren» und «Alleinstellungsmerkmale» zu entwickeln (291), um sich Marktanteile im Publikationsbetrieb zu sichern (167). Schon das Vokabular, auf das Martus zurückgreift, weist die Grimms als Wissenschaftler aus, die ohne Weiteres auch in die akademische Welt des 21. Jahrhunderts passen würden. Und tatsächlich schlägt Martus einen direkten Bogen in die Gegenwart, wenn er anführt, dass die beruflichen Sorgen der Grimms «fatal an die heutigen Klagegesänge auf den Gängen der Institute [erinnern] und auch die Lösungen [sich] ähneln» (337f.). Um sich als Wissenschaftler zu etablieren, müssen sich die Grimms mit einer «gewissen Skrupellosigkeit» gegen Konkurrenten durchsetzen (139). So beteiligen sie sich an dem «Spiel, Informationen zurückzuhalten, Klüngel zu bilden und durch persönliche Angriffe den Gegner zu disqualifizieren» (122). Die Diskrepanz zu dem Bild der unschuldigen und kindlichen Märchenerzähler könnte nicht größer sein. Zu der Strategie der Grimms, so sieht es Martus, gehört auch, «Imagepolitik» und «Selbstmarketing» zu betreiben (165, 188). Dabei probieren die beiden jungen Philologen Rollen aus […]. Jeder Autor oder Kritiker muss nach Verhaltensnormen in einer Situation suchen, in der Meinungen immer angreifbar sind, […] die Grimms bieten dafür das Konzept der ‹Brüderlichkeit› und der ‹Freimütigkeit› an (172). Martus hebt in dieser Passage deutlich auf den Hang der Grimms zur Selbstinszenierung ab. Tatsächlich zieht sich die Thematik der bewussten Stilisierung und Dramatisierung des eigenen Lebens durch die Brüder leitmotivisch durch die gesamte Biographie. Dies betrifft nicht nur den Versuch, innerhalb der Wissenschaft eine bestimmte Position zu besetzen. Darüber hinaus versuchen Jakob und Wilhelm Grimm zum einen, sich in ihrem Verhalten und in ihrer Wahrnehmung an angelesenen (literarischen) Vorbildern und Mustern zu orientieren (69, 97), zum anderen deuten sie den eigenen Werdegang rückblickend «aus strategischen Gründen» (19; vgl. auch 43, 80ff., 159) um. Indem Martus solchermaßen den Inszenierungscharakter des Lebens der Brüder offenlegt, macht er es unmöglich, die Taten und Äußerungen der Grimms als unmittelbaren und authentischen Ausdruck eines irgendwie gearteten Volksempfindens oder -willens zu verstehen. Die herausgehobene Stellvertreterfunktion der Grimms als Grundlage des Verhältnisses zwischen den Brüdern und ‹dem Volk› war aber in den bisher untersuchten Biographien die Voraussetzung dafür, sie als Zeugen oder gar Träger eines nationalen Gründungs- oder Orientierungsmythos zu betrachten. Für diese Rollen scheiden sie in Martus’ Text praktisch aus. Als Identifikationsfläche für den Leser bleibt die Modernität der Brüder. Sie macht die Grimms in gewisser Weise zu Zeitge- 16 Christoph Seifener nossen des Rezipienten. Der Begriff der Modernität kann aber in seiner Abstraktheit kaum identitätsstiftend im Sinne einer nationalen Großerzählung wirken. Martus’ Biographie bietet darüber hinaus einen weiteren Perspektivwechsel, der das hergebrachte Bild der Brüder in Frage stellt. Denn in seiner Schilderung lässt sich die Biographie der Grimms durchaus auch als eine Geschichte des Scheiterns lesen, insofern eine ganze Reihe von Jakobs und Wilhelms Projekten herausgestellt werden, die nicht den gewünschten Erfolg brachten, bzw. nicht die erhoffte Wirkung erzielten (vgl. 10, 193ff.). Für Günter Grass’ ‹Liebeserklärung› Grimms Wörter ist die Verbindung zwischen der Lebensgeschichte der Brüder Grimm und den politischen und gesellschaftlichen Entwicklungen in Deutschland konstitutiv. Allerdings erscheint Grass’ Darstellung geradezu als ein Gegenentwurf zur Vereinnahmung der Brüder für positiv besetzte politische Großerzählungen. Indem Grass die Biographie der Grimms durch Assoziationsketten immer wieder mit Episoden aus seinem eigenen Leben verknüpft, setzt er die verschiedenen Zeitebenen der Vergangenheit der Grimmschen Lebenswelt und seiner eigenen Gegenwart explizit zueinander in Verbindung. 16 Es geht ihm darum, Kontinuitäten aufzuzeigen, die sich durch die deutsche Geschichte vom Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts bis heute ziehen. Dadurch geraten auch andere Epochen des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts in den Fokus seiner Aufmerksamkeit. So wird, um ein Beispiel zu nennen, eine Linie gezeichnet, die von der Göttinger Protestation und ihren Folgen über das Verhalten der deutschen Professoren im Nationalsozialismus bis hin zur aktuellen bundesrepublikanischen Asylpraxis führt. Stille kehrte [nach der Ausweisung der Sieben; CS] ein und hielt an […], denn fortan blieb man an deutschen Universitäten in sich gekehrt und tat vornehm abgehoben […], so daß - kein Wunder - knapp hundert Jahre nach der Protestation der Göttinger Sieben, als es landesweit dreiunddreißig schlug, aus Professorenmund keine Widerworte laut wurden […]. Denn nirgendwo […] war die Spur von einstigem Professorengrimm und jener studentischen Aufsässigkeit geblieben, die Wirkung zeigte, als drei der Göttinger Sieben […] nach dreitägiger Frist […] des Landes verwiesen wurden; man kann auch abgeschoben sagen, wie es nach gegenwärtiger Amtssprache der alltäglichen Praxis entspricht. (Grass 17) Zwei Aspekte lassen sich an dieser Passage verdeutlichen. Den Fluchtpunkt der deutschen Geschichte in den vergangenen 250 Jahren markiert für Grass die Epoche des Nationalsozialismus. Sie gibt die Perspektive vor, unter der gesellschaftliche und politische Entwicklungen als mögliche Vorgeschichte oder als Nachwirkungen des Nationalsozialismus betrachtet werden. Zum anderen verweist das obige Zitat auf das verbindende Element zwischen dem Lebensgeschichte und politische Großerzählung 17 Autor Günter Grass und Jakob und Wilhelm Grimm, das offensichtlich in der Rolle des Schriftstellers und Intellektuellen innerhalb der Gesellschaft besteht. Es geht Grass ebenso um die spezifischen Probleme einer Schriftstellerbzw. Gelehrtenexistenz, etwa in kontroversen Auseinandersetzungen mit Kollegen (121f.) und Verlegern (305ff.), wie um die Möglichkeiten des Eingreifens von Intellektuellen in die aktuelle Tagespolitik. Die Parallelisierung des Vorgehens der Göttinger Sieben mit Grass’ Eintreten für eine andere Asylpolitik ist hierfür ein Beispiel (79ff.), die Gegenüberstellung öffentlicher Reden mit politischem Bezug der Grimms und von Grass ein anderes (156ff., 217ff.). Darüber hinaus greift Grass aber auch ein wichtiges Topos der Grimm-Biographik auf, wenn er das Verhältnis von Intellektuellen und ‹Volk› thematisiert. Vor diesem Hintergrund sind die Passagen zu verstehen, in denen Grass ausführlich seine Schwierigkeiten schildert, bei Wahlkampfauftritten oder Gewerkschaftsveranstaltungen das Interesse von Arbeiterinnen und Arbeitern zu gewinnen (36ff., 132ff.). In allen diesen Punkten erscheinen die gesellschaftlichen und politischen Voraussetzungen, die die Intellektuellen heute und zu Zeiten der Grimms in Deutschland vorfinden, wenn auch in der Qualität verschieden, so doch in der Struktur vergleichbar schwierig. Grass bietet damit eine Lesart der historischen Entwicklung an, die die problematischen Aspekte, negativen Tendenzen und Fehlentwicklungen in der deutschen Geschichte betont und damit einer positiv-identitätsfördernden Interpretation der Genese aktueller gesellschaftlicher Zustände entgegenläuft. Gerade diese Gegenperspektive verweist aber noch einmal eindrücklich auf die erinnerungskulturellen Bezüge der Biographien, die weit darüber hinaus gehen, Jakob und Wilhelm Grimm als historische Persönlichkeiten ins kulturelle Gedächtnis einzuschreiben. Notes 1 Zur Bestimmung und Eingrenzung von populären Biographien vgl. Porombka 122ff. Porombka nennt Synthetisierung, Intimisierung, Personalisierung, Singularisierung, Typologisierung, Anekdotisierung, Dramatisierung und Überformung als wesentliche Kennzeichen des Genres. 2 Kulturelles Gedächtnis soll hier im Sinne der Begriffsbestimmung von Jan Assmann verwendet werden, als «den jeder Gesellschaft und jeder Epoche eigentümlichen Bestand an Wiedergebrauchs-Texten, -Bildern, und -Riten, in deren ‹Pflege› sie ihr Selbstbild stabilisiert und vermittelt, ein kollektiv geteiltes Wissen (vorzugsweise, aber nicht ausschließlich) über die Vergangenheit, auf das eine Gruppe ihr Bewußtsein von Einheit und Eigenart stützt» (Assmann 15). 3 Als durchaus repräsentatives Beispiel sei hier auf die Formulierungen Manfred Lemmers verwiesen: «[Wir sehen] die Brüder heranwachsen, sehen ihren Sinn und ihre Beob- 18 Christoph Seifener achtung sich an das Kleine, Gewöhnliche haften, eine Haltung aus der später eine ihrer wissenschaftlichen Kardinaltugenden, die ‹Andacht zum Unbedeutenden› erwachsen sollte» (Lemmer 8). 4 In diesem Zusammenhang spielt auch das vielfältige Bildmaterial, das zahlreichen Biographien beigefügt ist, insbesondere die Zeichnungen Emil Ludwig Grimms, eine wichtige Rolle. Es trägt ohne Zweifel auch zu dem Versuch der Autoren bei, Authentizität herzustellen. 5 An dieser Stelle kann natürlich eine Verbindung zu Erkenntnissen der kulturwissenschaftlichen Gedächtnis- und Erinnerungsforschung gezogen werden, die die Deutungsleistung der Gegenwart im Hinblick auf erinnerte Ereignisse der Vergangenheit betonen (vgl. Erll). 6 Das in der Biographie Albert Dunckers ebenso wie dem Werk von Carl Franke unterstellte absolute Einverständnis der Grimms mit dem wilhelminischen Kaiserreich klingt überraschenderweise in einer der jüngsten biographischen Publikationen noch einmal, nun freilich negativ konnotiert, an. Andreas Venzke geht in seiner 2012 erschienenen Biographie für Kinder davon aus, dass «das obrigkeitsstaatliche deutsche Kaiserreich […] für die Grimms bestimmt der ideale Staat gewesen» wäre (Venzke 87). Eine Meinung, die in der Biographie durch die leitmotivische Erwähnung der Ordnungsliebe, und zwar einer fast krankhaft erscheinenden Ordnungsliebe Jakob Grimms, vorbereitet wird. Im Hinblick auf die Charakterisierung Jakobs trägt die Betonung dieses Charakterzugs dazu bei, ihn als einen etwas verschrobenen, durchaus auch unsympathischen Sonderling zu karikieren; bezogen auf politische Zusammenhänge ist sie Ausdruck einer allgemeinen gesellschaftlichen Beschränktheit (18ff.). 7 In dieser Rezeptionsperspektive werden auch die Kinder- und Hausmärchen unmittelbar neben Luthers Bibelübersetzung gestellt (vgl. Franke 48). 8 Auch Duncker kann wie Franke voller Genugtuung auf die ausgleichende Gerechtigkeit der Geschichte verweisen, wenn er bemerkt, dass sich die Bibliothek König Jeromes, die Jakob in Kassel zu verwalten hatte, nun glücklich im Besitz des deutschen Kaisers befinde (Duncker 31). Dass die Berufung der Grimms durch Friedrich Wilhelm IV. als «Regierungshandlung» geschildert wird, der «fast ganz Deutschland zujauchzte», zeigt ebenfalls augenfällig, wie Duncker eine Verbindung zwischen der Politik der Hohenzollern, dem Lebensweg der Grimms und dem Weg zur nationalen Einheit herstellt (94). 9 Vgl. hierzu auch Duncker 39. 10 So betont beispielsweise Scurla ausdrücklich, dass Jakob Grimm «trotz seiner Abhängigkeit vom Landesherren […] nicht zum Fürstenknecht geworden» ist (Scurla 170; vgl. auch 101). 11 Vor allem Jakob erscheint in diesem Zusammenhang als der «edelste Slawenfreund» (Scurla 172). 12 Zitiert nach: Therese Erler. «Vorwort.» Kinder- und Hausmärchen. Gesammelt durch die Brüder Grimm. Hg. Therese Erler. Berlin, Weimar: Aufbau Verlag, 1969. 516. 13 Den Fürsten, das ist eine Konstante in der Darstellung Mallachows, «gelüstet» es beispielsweise ständig nach Krieg, den dann das Volk «mit Gut und Blut bezahlen» muss (vgl. Mallachow 46, 128). 14 Bezeichnend ist die Episode, in der Brentano Wilhelm Grimm zu einer gemeinsamen Reise auffordert und auf dessen Bedenken, er habe kein Geld für eine Reise, Wilhelm anbietet, ihm das Geld zu leihen, nicht etwa, ihn einzuladen. «Da lachte Clemens Brentano, der Sohn aus reichem Hause. ‹Kannst es [das Reisegeld] mir ja später wiedergeben. Sollst mal sehen, wirst viele Bücher schreiben, und die bringen immerhin etwas ein, wenn auch Lebensgeschichte und politische Großerzählung 19 nicht gerade üppige Summen›» (Mallachow 74). Somit sieht Brentano in Mallachows Text auch die wissenschaftliche Arbeit aus rein ökonomischer Perspektive. 15 Dass es sich bei den Grimms um «moderne» Individuen handelt, unterstreicht Martus immer wieder (Martus 20, 54f., 71, 151). 16 Grass wählt in einzelnen Passagen eine explizit fiktionale Vorgehensweise, die es ihm ermöglicht, die Zeitebenen von Vergangenheit und Gegenwart aufzulösen, die Brüder Grimm einerseits im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes zu vergegenwärtigen und ihnen andererseits als Erzähler leibhaftig bei der Arbeit über die Schulter zu schauen und so in einen direkten Dialog mit ihnen zu treten (60, 221, 227, 355ff.). Grass unterstreicht mit dieser Vorgehensweise die dezidiert subjektive Annäherung an die Grimms, die im Text durch Formulierungen wie «so sehe ich sie [die Brüder]» (13) audrücklich markiert wird. Durch die Entgrenzung der Zeitebenen verdeutlicht Grass letztlich den auch für die anderen Biographien konstitutiven Aspekt, dass die Deutung der Lebensgeschichten, die die Biographen vornehmen, sich erst aus einem Dialog der eigenen Gegenwart mit der Vergangenheit der Biographierten ergibt. Works Cited Assmann, Jan. «Kollektives Gedächtnis und kulturelle Identität.» Kultur und Gedächtnis. Hg. Jan Assmann und Tonio Hölscher. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1998. 9-19. Duncker, Albert. Die Brüder Grimm. Kassel: Verlag von Ernst Hühn, 1885. Erll, Astrid. «Biographie und Gedächtnis.» Handbuch Biographie. Methoden, Traditionen, Theorien. Hg. Christian Klein. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 2009. 79-86. Francois, Etienne und Hagen Schulze (Hg.). Deutsche Erinnerungsorte. 3 Bde. München: C.H. Beck, 2009. Franke, Carl. Die Brüder Grimm. Ihr Leben und Wirken in gemeinfasslicher Weise dargestellt. Dresden und Leipzig: Verlag von Carl Reißner, 1899. Grass, Günter. Grimms Wörter. Eine Liebeserklärung. Göttingen: Steidl, 2010. Grimm, Jakob und Wilhelm Grimm. Briefwechsel. Hg. Heinz Rölleke. Stuttgart: Hirzel, 2001. Hamerow, Theodore S. «Die Kunst der historischen Biographik in Deutschland von 1871 bis zur Gegenwart.» Vom Anderen und vom Selbst. Beiträge zu Fragen der Biographie und der Autobiographie. Hg. Reinhold Grimm und Jost Hermand. Königsstein: Athenäum, 1982. 30-44. Hensing, Dieter. «Der Bilder eigener Geist. Das schwierige Verhältnis der Lutherbilder zu ihrem Gegenstand.» Luther-Bilder im 20. Jahrhundert. Hg. Ferdinand van Ingen und Gerd Labroise. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1984. 1-25. Herrmann, Ulrich. «Über ‹Bildung› im Gymnasium des wilhelminischen Kaiserreichs.» Bildungsbürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert. Teil II. Bildungsgüter und Bildungswissen. Hg. Reinhart Kosseleck. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. 1990. 346-68. Hildebrandt, Irma. Es waren ihrer Fünf. Die Brüder Grimm und ihre Familie. 2. Auflage. Köln: Diederichs, 1985. Klein, Christian. «Einleitung: Biographik zwischen Theorie und Praxis. Versuch einer Bestandsaufnahme.» Grundlagen der Biographik. Theorie und Praxis des biographischen Schreibens. Hg. Christian Klein. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 2002. 1-21. 20 Christoph Seifener -. «Lebensbeschreibung als Lebenserschreibung? Vom Nutzen biographischer Ansätze aus der Soziologie für die Literaturwissenschaften.» Grundlagen der Biographik. Theorie und Praxis des biographischen Schreibens. Hg. Christian Klein. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 2002. Kruckis, Hans-Martin. «Biographie als wissenschaftliche Darstellungsform im 19.-Jahrhundert.» Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Germanistik im 19. Jahrhundert. Hg. Jürgen Fohrmann und Wilhelm Voßkamp. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 1994. Lehmann, Joachim. Die blinde Wissenschaft. Realismus und Realität in der Literaturtheorie der DDR. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1994. Lemmer, Manfred. Die Brüder Grimm. Ihr Leben in Bildern. Leipzig: VEB Verlag Enzyklopädie, 1963. Mallachow, Lore. Es war einmal. Aus dem Leben der Brüder Grimm. Berlin/ Ost: Der Kinderbuchverlag, 1973. Martus, Steffen. Die Brüder Grimm. Eine Biographie. 3.Auflage. Berlin: Rowohlt, 2010. Münkler, Herfried. Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2010. Porombka, Stefan. «Populäre Biographik.» Handbuch Biographie. Methoden, Traditionen, Theorien. Hg. Christian Klein. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 2009. 69-85. Saage-Maaß, Miriam. Die Göttinger Sieben - Demokratische Vorkämpfer oder nationale Helden? Zum Verhältnis von Geschichtsschreibung und Erinnerungskultur in der Rezeption des Hannoverschen Verfassungskonflikts. Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2007. Scherer, Wilhelm. Jakob Grimm. 2. Auflage. Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1885. Scheuer, Helmut. Biographie: Studien zur Funktion und zum Wandel einer literarischen Gattung vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1979. -. «Biographie. Überlegungen zu einer Gattungsbeschreibung.» Vom Anderen und vom Selbst. Beiträge zu Fragen der Biographie und der Autobiographie. Hg. Reinhold Grimm und Jost Hermand. Königsstein: Athenäum, 1982. 9-29. Schulte Kemminghausen, Karl und Ludwig Denecke. Die Brüder Grimm. In Bildern ihrer Zeit. Kassel: Erich Röth-Verlag, 1963. Scurla, Herbert. Die Brüder Grimm. Ein Lebensbild. Berlin/ Ost: Verlag der Nation, 1985. Stieler, Josephine. Lebensbilder deutscher Männer und Frauen. Glogau: Verlag von Carl Flemming, 1890. Tatar, Maria. «Grimms Märchen.» Deutsche Erinnerungsorte. Bd. 1. Hg. Etienne Francois und Hagen Schulze. München: Beck, 2009. 277-89. Venzke, Andreas. Die Brüder Grimm und das Rätsel des Froschkönigs. Würzburg: Arena Verlag, 2012. Vogel, Angelika. «Familie.» Die Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Bd.-3: Gesellschaft. Hg. Wolfgang Benz. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1989. 35-86. von Zimmermann, Christian. Biographische Anthropologie. Menschenbilder in lebensgeschichtlicher Darstellung (1830-1940). Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 2006. The Fatherland and Its Double: Hermann Detzner Maps an Overseas Germany MARTIN ROSENSTOCK Gulf University for Science and Technology (Kuwait) Nun aber war der Augenblick gekommen, im Gestöber der Lettern den Geschichten nachzugehen, die sich am Fenster mir entzogen hatten. Die fernen Länder, welche mir in ihnen begegneten, spielten vertraulich wie die Flocken umeinander. (Walter Benjamin, Berliner Kindheit um 1900) Sometime in the European winter of 1915, while the warring powers are preparing for the carnage at Verdun, a German colonial officer plucks a piece of home from the soil of an antipodean island: I could hardly believe my eyes, but it was no mirage: it was an edelweiss, the tropical sister of our most beloved alpine flower, exactly the same snowy flower, only with more and more finely structured petals. I had to have it, even if I could only gather it from its dangerous perch with the help of a rope, and even if the stiff fingers could hardly grasp it. And I got it, the beautiful flower, which came to be the crowning specimen, the most valuable treasure, of my herbarium, which consisted of a copy of Goethe’s «Faust.» I pressed my mouth and cheeks to this salutation from the home country, which was struggling far away; my throat felt like it would close, and I would almost have let a bright yodeler sound over the depth that was increasingly filling up with masses of fog. Crazy fellows those Germans, that they can get so excited about a flower and put themselves in danger and forget everything around them so as to get a hold of it - this flattering verdict I read clearly in the features of my colored companions; I took it in quietly and moved on. (Detzner, Vier Jahre unter Kannibalen 117-18; all Detzner translations mine) Hermann Detzner is in the highlands of New Guinea when he appropriates this botanical sibling of the arguably most Germanic of all flowers, to stow it away in his volume of the indispensable literary text of German ‹Bildungsbürgertum.› The sentimentality leaves no doubt regarding the plant’s significance. The edelweiss constitutes a link to his native land. The risk he runs to gain possession of the flower not only elicits admiring native gazes, but also aligns him, if ever so slightly, with his comrades and their struggle in a far more deadly environment. The edelweiss in his hand underscores his claim to belong, to both the country and the army from which events have parted him. The flower does even more: it aligns the land that produced this particular edelweiss with the land commonly associated with the species. The flora of the New Guinean highlands is alpine. Beyond maudlin emotion, Detzner’s yodeler would have emphasized proprietorship and a belief in a natural affinity 22 Martin Rosenstock between Germany and the tropical island on the opposite side of the planet. The reason why he did not in fact yodel may be the same that prompted him to write his memoir: the ties between the two countries are less firm than he would like - at the heart of affirmation lies doubt. Hermann Detzner was born in 1882 into a solidly middle-class family; his father was a successful dentist. Detzner thus received significant amounts of, in Bourdieuean terms, social and cultural capital, together with a predisposition for complementary political structures. His birthplace was Speyer, a midsized town dominated by a Romanesque cathedral that the Salian emperors had erected so as to monumentalize their power as they struggled with the Popes for control of the German lands. During the first half of the nineteenth century, particularly during the French occupation, the structure had become a reference point for German nationalism. Detzner attended the ‹Gymnasium,› where he would have received the humanist education typical of his day, revolving around the classics of antiquity and the German literary canon of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, «no education for the world, [but rather] an education against the world» (Breuer 28; all Breuer translations mine). At school and outside of it, though, he would also have been exposed to the fervent nationalism present in the Kaiserreich, a state that had only come into existence a decade before his birth. He may, for instance, have read Felix Dahn’s bestselling historical novel Ein Kampf um Rom (1876), a celebration of Germanic culture, its warlike spirit and penchant for heroism and sacrifice. Another obvious candidate for young Detzner’s leisure-time reading is Karl May, the master fabulist of his day, whose books made his readers «identify with the heroes, yearn for far away places and long for manly adventure» (Reulecke 98). 1 In the narrative of his New Guinean adventures, Detzner will allude to having read David Livingstone’s (1813-73) accounts of his African travels (235), but not specify when. As an adolescent, Detzner would almost certainly also have come in touch with German ‹colonial fantasies,› texts from high and popular literature that had been circulating since the eighteenth century and which celebrated a specifically German aptitude for colonization. The effect of these narratives was that «[b]y the time national unification was achieved, the myth of Germans as superior colonizers and of Germany’s moral entitlement to its virgin island had become firmly entrenched in the popular imagination by way of positive identificatory figures such as Columbus, Humboldt, and ‹German› conquistadors - the Welsers, the Great Elector, the Bechers and Nettelbecks of the past» (Zantop 202). After 1871, and especially from the early 1880s onward, once strong societal forces such as the Deutsche Kolonialverein (founded in 1882) began pushing the imperial agenda, production of such texts became an indus- The Fatherland and Its Double 23 try. In fact, as Jeff Bowersox has recently shown, boys (and to a lesser degree girls) of Detzner’s generation grew up in a culture saturated with colonial imagery and narratives. Even many toys had an imperial aspect, and popular culture as well as youth organizations, such as the Pfadfinder, consistently placed German children within (mock-)imperial contexts. 2 This realm more than the one suggested by bourgeois educational institutions, with the prospect they held out of a respectable life in the provinces, seems to have attracted Detzner. Rather than follow his father’s footsteps to university and into a profession, he joined the pioneer corps of the Bavarian army in 1901 and later became a surveyor in the ‹Kaiserliche Schutztruppe,› the troops responsible for the protectorates of the Reich. Even if one disregards the attraction of adventure, this career choice is not as surprising as it may seem. As John Phillip Short has demonstrated, (upper) middle-class men dominated the colonial movement within the German Reich; 3 men similar in background to Detzner were also often drawn to careers in the overseas possessions because the class structure of the Kaiserreich with its favoritism toward the aristocracy placed them «hors compétition in political fields defined mainly as military and economic» (Steinmetz 68). True, men who made their careers in the colonies generally held (advanced) degrees in relevant fields such as ethnography, allowing them to claim positions of authority that would have been barred to them at home, but a hope for more rapid advancement may also have played into Detzner’s decision to pursue a colonial career. And so it was that at the outbreak of the war in August 1914, he found himself in Kaiser-Wilhelmsland, a stretch of territory in northeastern New Guinea that had become a German protectorate in 1884. On 11 September 1914, Australian troops landed in Kaiser-Wilhelmsland. After a few skirmishes, the Australians took over most of the coastal settlements, and on 21 September the German forces, composed almost entirely of irregulars, capitulated. At the time, Detzner, together with a German subordinate and some seventy-five native soldiers and carriers, was on a surveying expedition in the hinterland (under orders by the civilian authorities, not the military (Pilhofer 19)). The expedition’s task was to check on the work of a 1909 Anglo-German commission that had established the border between the German and British possessions on New Guinea. The Australians communicated a demand for surrender to Detzner, which he rejected. According to Christian Keysser, a German missionary, Detzner considered surrender irreconcilable with his honor as an officer. Most of his troops dispersed and returned to their villages; the other German succumbed to malaria and was captured in February 1915 while convalescing at a missionary station. Detzner, however, remained by and large healthy and spent the duration of the war hiding out 24 Martin Rosenstock in the interior, most likely in the proximity of Keysser’s missionary station with its supplies of food, clothing, books, and newspapers. 4 Detzner mentions Keysser in Vier Jahre unter Kannibalen and describes him as a model patriot, who extols uniquely German accomplishments to his native flock (311-12). (Detzner could also be critical of German missionaries when he considered them to have acted cowardly or to have lacked in patriotism, though he accepts the pledge of neutrality they gave the Australians after the occupation of the colony; see e.g. 141-42.) Only rarely, if at all, did Detzner venture into the unexplored jungles and mountain ranges. 5 Following the armistice in November 1918, he surrendered and was interned in Sydney for three months, before being repatriated in the late spring of 1919. That same year, Detzner published a fifteen-page account of his experiences, «Kreuz- und Querzüge in Kaiser-Wilhelmsland (Deutsch-Neuguinea) während des Weltkrieges,» in Mitteilungen aus den deutschen Schutzgebieten. Subsequently, he expanded this article into a book, Vier Jahre unter Kannibalen: Von 1914 bis zum Waffenstillstand unter deutscher Flagge im unerforschten Innern von Neuguinea, which appeared in 1921. Paratextual elements mark both narratives as reportage, though they contain exaggerations and untruths, and particularly the book abounds with entirely fictional descriptions of forays into uncharted territory, confrontations with natives, and images of perseverance in the face of natural obstacles. Most importantly for Detzner’s (self-)image as a patriot ready for struggle and sacrifice, in Vier Jahre unter Kannibalen he writes in detail of a hide-and-seek game with Australian pursuers and multiple attempts to break through their lines so as to reach the neutral Dutch possessions in western New Guinea. His ostensible goal was to embark from there for Germany, so as to go «to the front where every German arm was without doubt urgently needed» (145). 6 In the early 1920s, Detzner found employment in the ‹Reichskolonialamt› and was engaged in corresponding with former colonists over requests for assistance and reparations. An exchange of letters in 1923, housed today in the manuscript department of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, between Detzner and Felix von Luschan, a well-known anthropologist and expert on the peoples of New Guinea, shows Detzner making plans for a west to east expedition across the island. However, it appears he was unable to obtain funding, and the endeavor came to naught. 7 The year 1933, then, brought another rupture in his life. He did not join the National Socialist Party and was obliged to bow out of further state employment. During World War II, Detzner was called up for duty and served in a bureaucratic capacity in the logistical branch of the military administration, the ‹Wehrwirtschaftsamt.› Following the war, he and his family moved from Berlin back to his home region of the upper Rhine val- The Fatherland and Its Double 25 ley, and he spent the remainder of his professional life as the director of a small Heidelberg publishing company owned by his wife’s family. Detzner’s timing as an author was fortuitous, as was his choice of venue. In 1920, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck had published his war memoirs, Meine Erinnerungen aus Ostafrika. Lettow-Vorbeck was the only German commander in an overseas possession who had not laid down his arms before the end of the war. Up to the final days, he had conducted a guerilla campaign, mostly in Deutsch-Ostafrika (today Tanzania), against British and Commonwealth troops. His patriotic book received huge acclaim in the young Weimar Republic. The demoralized country needed heroes. (Literary quality cannot have been the reason for success. Meine Erinnerungen aus Ostafrika reads like a report to headquarters.) Lettow-Vorbeck’s was amongst the most prominent in a flurry of publications aimed at servicing the public’s demand for war memoirs; there were Admiral Scheer’s Deutschlands Hochseeflotte im Weltkrieg (1919), Liman v. Sanders’s Fünf Jahre Türkei (1920), and Gerold v. Gleich’s Vom Balkan nach Bagdad (1921), to name but a few. (Ernst Jünger’s autobiographical war novels also fit into this category, though Jünger’s writings are more literary in nature.) The latter three books, though not Lettow-Vorbeck’s, appeared in the August Scherl Verlag, founded by the newspaper tycoon of the Wilhelmine epoch (Scherl himself, however, had relinquished control of his empire in 1913 after a bout with mental disease and passed away in 1921). 8 There lies a certain logic in the fact that the Scherl Verlag operated in the war’s literary metabolization. Scherl’s publications, particularly the Berliner Lokalanzeiger and the more aspiring Der Tag, had strongly supported the Kaiserreich’s expansionist agenda and the waging of the war. When Vier Jahre unter Kannibalen appeared in the Scherl Verlag’s 1921 program, the book thus found a well-defined market in which the publisher had been active for some time. This contributed to the favorable reception of Detzner’s memoir. Vier Jahre unter Kannibalen garnered rave reviews and by the end of its year of publication was in its fourth edition. Though Detzner never claims a similarity between his and Lettow-Vorbeck’s wartime existence, he does, suggestively, reference the East African campaign (333, 335). He too had not surrendered before the armistice, and, in the most complimentary interpretation of his actions, he could be said to have bound «large numbers of enemy soldiers who might have been used in other theaters of war to guard against the chance that he might organize a full-scale native rebellion» (White 95). In fact, Detzner, alone in the jungle, or at best heading up a tiny contingent, hardly troubled the Australians. But be that as it may, like Lettow-Vorbeck, Detzner reaped the postwar rewards. He was fêted, received the Iron Cross (first class), and went on lecture tours; he also received a number of awards from geographical 26 Martin Rosenstock and ethnographical societies and an honorary doctorate from the University of Cologne for «expeditions that bordered on the miraculous […] and thus for all times erected a monument to selfless German research» (my translation). 9 A look at the reviews suggests why Vier Jahre unter Kannibalen resonated. «German will and German character, German drive and German colonial spirit shine from Detzner’s book,» the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung opined, and the New-Yorker Staatszeitung, a German-language publication for expatriates, wrote: «For it requires a strong, proud, self-confident people, in which books such as these can achieve print runs such as these, and not an internally broken victim of an enormous world-wide conspiracy of pale envy.» 10 Vier Jahre unter Kannibalen articulated deep-seated anxieties over the country’s position in the world after the loss of the war and with it of the colonies, voiced pride in Germany’s cultural and military achievements, and argued against the perceived humiliation of the Versailles Peace Treaty. The text thus provides an opportunity to study how the discourses of German self-conceptualization and colonialism interlink during the early 1920s and to gauge the psyche of a member of the Frontgeneration and colonial military establishment in early Weimar. This essay is therefore concerned not with the colonial era per se, but with its political, cultural, and psychological afterlife. Detzner’s writings have received some attention from historians and ethnographers who analyze how far exactly he strayed from the truth. This question, though intriguing, is of secondary importance here. The focus lies on his rhetorical strategies: How and with what goals does he portray a colonized country, its landscape and inhabitants? How does he inscribe himself into Germany’s colonial heritage? How does Vier Jahre unter Kannibalen reflect the context of the writing situation? And finally, does the text point ahead to Detzner’s future - could his exposure to foreign peoples during his time in the colonies have influenced his decision to sidestep co-option into a racist regime? Ultimately, misfortune resulted from the literary efforts of this accurate surveyor but inaccurate writer. In the late 1920s, missionaries challenged the veracity of Vier Jahre unter Kannibalen, and in 1932 Detzner felt compelled to publish a retraction in the Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin, admitting that he had embellished his wartime actions and invented others wholesale: This book is only in part a scientific account. For the most part, it is a novelistic rendering of my stay there that came into being as a result of the special circumstances I experienced at home after my return from the war. Some of the travels I undertook are not treated in the book; on the other hand, it contains passages that do not correspond to the facts […]. The described attempts at breaking through did not occur […]. A copy of the book that contains the necessary deletions and changes in the text and map is deposited in the library of the Gesellschaft für Erdkunde. (308) The Fatherland and Its Double 27 Making this statement must have been humiliating; in the closing sentence Detzner declares that he has quit his membership in the Gesellschaft. 11 The copy of Vier Jahre unter Kannibalen he mentions may still exist. One copy in the Staatsbibliothek, to which the Gesellschaft’s holdings were transferred after World War II, carries the stamp of the Gesellschaft. The markings in this book are sparse, consisting mostly of brackets around certain chapters in the table of contents and occasional vertical lines next to individual paragraphs. The passages thus marked are, however, the ones that would incite suspicion, tending as they do to self-aggrandizement or lacking outside corroboration. The above-quoted edelweiss-episode is marked with a short vertical line. (The volume’s fold-out map is missing). 12 As an epigraph for Vier Jahre unter Kannibalen, Detzner chose three lines from Rainer Maria Rilke’s lyrical narrative Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke (1906): «Be proud! I carry the flag,/ Be without worry! I carry the flag,/ Hold me dear [habt mich lieb]! I carry the flag» (21; my translation). The text tells of a young soldier, ostensibly the author’s ancestor, who participates in an expedition against the Turks in the seventeenth century and ultimately sacrifices himself on the battlefield, carrying the burning flag. With some misreadings the Cornet was assimilable to a nationalist reception and thus counted amongst the favorites of the German war generation. (Detzner does not provide the source of the lines; he could rely on his readers recognizing them.) In that sense, Detzner’s choice of epigraph with its reference points of glory and pathos appears obvious. At the same time, though, there are a few things quite odd about his usage of these lines. For one, their efficacy as an epigraph depends on an elision. In Rilke’s text, the hero writes these words to his mother; the line preceding those Detzner quotes would have made this clear. By cutting strategically, he turns the reader into the addressee, for a curious blend of hubris and desperate cry for appreciation: Detzner appears to be literally asking for love. To make his case for deserving such sentiment, he aligns himself with a figure who gave his life for the cause of Christendom, while he, Detzner, who certainly did carry the flag, arguably experienced less discomfort during the war than he would have if he had spent it in the trenches. Moreover, in Rilke’s text these words never reach the grieving mother: after writing them, the hero secrets them away in his coat, and this coat, the narrative makes a point of emphasizing, falls victim to a final conflagration. Detzner is quoting from a dead letter of sorts: first not sent and then destroyed, existing only in the realm of literature. But, presumably, now the communication is being delivered, to the German postwar audience, just as distraught as the bereaved mother from the Turkish Wars, and by the lost son himself no less, who has miraculously made it home after all. 28 Martin Rosenstock After this epigraph, Vier Jahre unter Kannibalen opens in medias res: «The small white clouds that stretched across the distant horizon took on a darker color and gradually changed to a champagne hue. I had to leave my surveillance post at an altitude of 3,500 meters if I wanted to reach the camp of the expedition that lay forty minutes away» (13). Detzner could have begun differently. Most obviously, he could have referenced the context of his writing situation, Germany in late 1919 or in 1920. But in most of Detzner’s text this present is absent. To gauge the relevance of his narratorial stance, it is instructive to look at the one minor instance of slippage: describing his familiarity with native customs, Detzner recounts that he drafted plans for the Papuans’ improvement, only to conclude that «unfortunately, we for the time being [vorerst] lack the power to realize them» (135). Leaving aside for now the implicit rejection of German impotence, Detzner’s words clearly allude to the political reality after the Versailles Treaty, which resulted in Germany’s loss of her colonies, either to the former adversaries or the League of Nations. (From December 1920 onward, Kaiser-Wilhelmsland was administered by Australia under a League of Nations mandate.) If one brackets the two concluding chapters, which are less narrative than political pamphlet (on which more shortly), these lines constitute the only instance within Vier Jahre unter Kannibalen of what narratology terms an external proleptic moment, that is, a reference to a point in time lying beyond the scope of the narrative. There are quite a number of internal prolepses - e.g., Detzner writes that «now they began, the days, weeks, months, years - fortunately, it is not given to the human being to look into the future - of loneliness, deprivation, and exertion» (94) -, but these passages avoid reference to the postwar world. The outer limit of what the main body of the narrative acknowledges is the November 1918 armistice. Here a typical passage from the center of the book: [O]nly this much was clear from them [Detzner has gotten hold of some copies of an Australian magazine] […], namely that Germany and her allies had won victory over victory, which however had not been able to rob the main enemy England of her own hopes for victory; in every line one could read that Great Britain still clung to her hopes for an imminent economic collapse of the central powers. (140-41) A single clause pointing out that Britain’s hope eventually came to be justified would be sufficient to establish the distance of a retrospective view that comprises knowledge acquired after the events related. But the text avoids this act of distancing. The narrator Detzner, unlike the author Detzner, does not know the postwar world; 13 the narrative is focalized through the war-period Detzner (see Genette 189ff.). What does the text accomplish via this restriction of the narrator’s field of vision? For one, a higher degree of immediacy and momentum. Detzner’s The Fatherland and Its Double 29 memoir adopts the narratorial strategy of classic nineteenth-century realist novels in which «a narrator […] must appear more or less to discover the story at the same time that he tells it» (Genette 67), making it easy to spring surprises on the reader. This notion should not be disregarded. Detzner was interested in literature, and it stands to reason that he reflected upon issues of craftsmanship so as to create a more appealing narrative, or he chose the most advantageous narratorial voice by instinct. But this explanation only goes so far, for while there may be unexpected events in Detzner’s narrative, the ultimate outcome of the struggle in which Germany is winning «victory over victory» was known to his readers. There is, however, also a psychological pay-off: neither they nor the narrator need confront the fact that early 1920s Germany has been radically severed from its Wilhelmine past of less than a decade before, that, as Thomas Mann noted in his diary on 15 April 1919, «nothing is more certain than that the old social and economic order is over and done with» (47). In Detzner’s book the war at least appears neither over nor done with; rather it is preserved as if in amber. In 1932, Detzner’s justification for playing fast and loose with the truth were the ‹special circumstances› he faced after returning to Germany in 1919. These, he claims, drove him to falsify his narrative. Perhaps this explanation should be taken with a measure of goodwill. The shock occasioned by the confrontation with a changed world prompted disavowal. In 1932, Detzner is apologizing for aggrandizing his own role in the war, but his lies are surface phenomena. They appear linked to the more fundamental artifice of writing from a contrived temporal perspective, and if at all Detzner seems to have been only dimly aware of the implications of this sleight of hand: mentally he has not yet arrived in the postwar world. On the final twenty pages, Vier Jahre unter Kannibalen, in synch with Detzner’s literary persona, enters this postwar world. «I was forced to lend credence to the news of the enemy’s final victory! » (322), he realizes after emerging from the jungle and giving himself up to the Australian authorities. Hindsight begins to materialize, if only hesitantly: «[T]he defection [Übertritt] of the emperor to neutral ground, the onset of the revolution in Germany, the retreat to the Rhine, these reports I had, at that time, still relegated to the realm of fables» (322; emphasis added). There is a reference to his lecturing for the cause of colonialism in early Weimar (333): the new world, brought into being by the emperor’s defection and the retreat of German armies is not accepted. Detzner’s book closes with a call to defy the postwar situation: Are you aware, German people - yes, you must be - that you need to regain the colonies stolen from you, if only for material reasons? [The colonies] where the raw materials grow that are necessary for reconstruction […]. Do you want to cut off 30 Martin Rosenstock yourself the breath of life […]? Do you want to watch quietly how the mandataries of a non-existent League of Nations gradually turn into the owners of the parts of the colonies that have been entrusted to their proxy-administration? (334) The narrative proper has ended; now Detzner is, by implication, placing his story of personal survival within the context of national survival. The past that was related without reference to the future is contrasted with a present that heralds a departure from the historical trajectory, one aspect thereof being a future without colonies. Detzner’s holdout in the New Guinean wilderness underwrites the legitimacy of Germany’s claim to her colonies and of a return to the prewar order. The country’s ability to recover appears dependent on reconstructing, at least in territorial terms, the world of the Wilhelmine epoch. The tropes he mobilizes are reminiscent of the prewar drumbeat for empire that Short has analyzed. Whether Detzner is blinded by his own idiosyncratic relationship to colonialism or whether he is knowingly distorting the facts is hard to tell. Germany’s colonies were never a significant economic factor; they «produced very little of what German industry required,» the bulk of «tropical commodities imported before 1914 flowed freely from Central and South America» (Short 38), 14 and the colonies’ raw materials were irrelevant for reconstruction, in particular as Germany had sustained little damage in terms of infrastructure. The text has been moving toward this overt formulation of a political agenda for over three-hundred pages, yet because the narrator lacked hindsight he was unable to put into words any demands predicated on knowledge of postwar reality. But the narrative proper does anticipate this closing move of an argument for Germany’s continued existence as a colonial power. Detzner’s edelweiss-episode provides a case in point: in the realm of biology Germany and New Guinea are siblings. The linkage of the countries in the political realm rests on natural foundations. The edelweiss constitutes no isolated occurrence: Detzner enjoys «fantastic hiking in the resin-filled forest air» (Vier Jahre 108) of the New Guinean highlands as if he were roaming the Black Forest, and he even sights a «butterfly sporting the German colors» (289). By the latter instance of selective perception, he admits, his mind may be showing signs of strain after more than three years outside of Western civilization, but the pattern of constructing a kinsman-like similarity between Germany and New Guinea is unmistakable. And things do not end in the realm of nature. The native inhabitants complement their surroundings in its display of German attributes: the Papuans take naturally to patriotic German songs (142), and the «whole interior of New Guinea seems predestined for Germandom. The three main colors that the Papuans know to produce and with which they beautify their dark skin for The Fatherland and Its Double 31 festivities or battle or when engaging in courtship are the colors of the German flag» (189). Detzner is not the first to suggest an affinity of the Papuans for the German national colors - the empire’s, of course. Otto Finsch, the doyen of German explorers in New Guinea, describes the following scene in 1884: «Great joy was elicited by the hissing of the flag itself whose colors (black ‹sed,› white ‹ruo,› red ‹siar›) appear to please the natives particularly because they are those that they know» (110; my translation). 15 Finsch, however, appears mostly bemused at a coincidence and does not draw conclusions regarding historical destiny, which makes his description credible enough, though he certainly did favor German colonial expansion. By contrast, Detzner’s affective investment in the essentialist nature of his construction is worth emphasizing: in his view, the Papuans’ cosmetic practices precede their exposure to German culture; they have not acquired a liking for the German colors through acquaintance with them, but have always had this predilection. Hence, Germany’s natural right to the island. Detzner was probably not fabulating entirely regarding the issue of the colors, though there is also another possibility he does not take into account. By the time of his sojourn, German colonial rule was three decades old. It therefore appears not unlikely that the usage of the German colors by the Papuans - even by tribes of the interior who had no direct exposure to the colonizers - now also bespeaks deliberate appropriation, an attempt to claim the symbols of colonial power. In any case, Detzner’s almost comical straining after points of resemblance between Papuan and German nature and culture is rhetorically significant. These points form the basis of conceptual elaboration. ‹Predestined› implies teleology: the only logical future for the Papuans, the only future that would constitute an evolution of existent predispositions, is a German one. Some chapters before Detzner has already formulated the equation’s other half, namely that the past of German culture is the one of New Guinea. Writing of the Papuans’ rich oral tradition, Detzner states: «In this manner may have come into being our old folk songs, whose poets and first singers have been forgotten, whose sentiments and inspirations live on to this day» (143). On the foundations of related realms of nature there exists a historical imperative for the conjoined existence of the peoples of Germany and New Guinea. This tie spans the millennia and bookends the development of civilization. Vestigial indicators point toward a propensity of Papuan cultures for a German elaboration, and German culture finds in Papuan cultures constitutive elements - and what could be more German than a folk song? - of an Ur-German culture. To borrow a term Homi Bhabha has theorized in a very different postcolonial context, Detzner engages in a strategy of ‹mimicry› that shows «the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost 32 Martin Rosenstock the same, but not quite» (Bhabha 122). The goal of colonialist discourse is the construction of a language-based «apparatus of power» (100) that enables the «discursive and political practices of racial and cultural hierarchization» (96). In Detzner’s vision, the Papuan cultures mime, in a mode of anticipation, the German one, which they precede on the anthropological line of development. This miming, paradoxically, negates agency on the part of the colonized: the Papuans, in his view, are not imitating, engaging, or playing with the visual codes of German culture; they are awaiting it. This is why - though not yet reformed, at least not to the desirable degree - they are certainly reformable. The hierarchy is narrowly defined; it is not between Papuan cultures and Western culture, but between Papuan cultures and German culture. Unbeknownst to themselves, the inhabitants of the colony, Detzner implies, are striving toward this acme of achievement. Their natural mentors and rulers on this march through centuries of development are those who have taken the path before. On the final pages, the Papuans feature as a putative audience, transparent to the colonial gaze: «And now, no, for years already, you have understood who is the better master for you, that it is the German who may be more strict but whose heart beats for you, who has not only come to your tropical land to take, but also to give» (333). This display of (psychic) communion is dishonest. Detzner cannot have believed that his words would reach the illiterate Papuans; he is writing for his Weimar readership. By submitting to their benevolent German masters - far less forbearing in fact than Detzner would have his readers believe, as will be shown below - the natives signal that they have ‹understood› what he now wants this audience to understand: that the new republic must make every effort to gather the Papuans back into the national fold. The trope of German superior qualifications in colonial matters, of the Germans’ «calling to being a colonial people» (334), suggests destiny, but also duty: Germans possess both the pedagogical toughness and moral fiber necessary for colonial ventures, and they cannot shirk their responsibility. The boosters of German colonialism cherished this notion, in particular as a strategy of distinguishing oneself from the great rival: the German empire «is staged differently than the empire of the English and organized around tropes of empathy with the colonized» (Berman 10). But Detzner’s theatrics of empathy in the context of the vanished empire are in fact so pronounced that they undermine the construction of a racial Other ‹as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite.› Unlike conventional imperial condescension toward ‹children of nature› and also unlike Bhabha’s view of colonial power, Detzner’s conception of the relation allows for a blurring of self and Other. In a scene of heavy-handed sentimentality, he goes so far as to ventriloquize the voice of a young girl and have her describe The Fatherland and Its Double 33 herself and her people as «dark-skinned Germans» (315) - and the narrator remains silent in approval. Not even a decade and a half after Detzner’s publication, official German policy will regard such a statement as a contradiction in terms, but even for the early 1920s and their lack of ideological certainties this is an astonishingly flexible construction of national identity. Detzner severs the concepts of race and nationality to support his argument for a German colonial empire. He defines German identity culturally and in such a broad manner that to his postwar German readers heretofore stable borders may appear porous - ‹almost the same, but not quite› is shading into ‹in principle the same, but not yet identical.› Undoubtedly, this rhetoric is tactical, designed to bolster his political vision, but it is hard to believe that he was being wholly insincere. Hermann Hiery has remarked that Detzner must have developed a rapport with the native population, since the Papuans - despite the reward they could have expected - did not betray him to the Australians (Die Deutsche Südsee 816; The Neglected War 25). This interpretation seems a little facile. The German colonial administration had often acted brutally toward the Papuans from the earliest days of Kaiser-Wilhelmsland onward. A 1904 uprising that already faltered in its beginning stages resulted in the execution of ten Papuans; as recently as 1912, an unsuccessful uprising had led to the banning of rebels and their families (Krug 207-30). For obvious reasons, Detzner does not mention these events, though he must have been aware of them. Probably the Papuans associated Detzner less with the colonial administration than with the missionaries on whose largesse he depended and thus tolerated his four-year sojourn. Detzner’s sympathy toward the Papuans is paternalistic and late-Rousseauean. Whether it was reciprocated - if it was reciprocated at all - because of a native allegiance to Germany seems more than doubtful. Detzner’s depiction of Papuans and Germans as an instance of Goethian cultural ‹elective affinity› may appear to run into problems when he addresses Papuan practices that cannot so easily be wrapped in the German flag, most notably cannibalism. Repeatedly, he describes this as a staple feature of tribal warfare, and the question arises whether, by the same logic that governs folk songs, cannibalism, then, must also have featured in ancient Germany. This question Detzner elides, but the trope of cannibalism can in fact be integrated quite easily into German self-conceptualizations as educators and promulgators of a more refined culture. As Gananath Obeyesekere, amongst others, has shown, European projections of cannibalistic practices onto native peoples can be traced back to the earliest days of Spanish imperialism. These notions, part and parcel of ‹savagism› (though ritualistic anthropophagy may have existed), were self-serving, since they could be used to reinforce perceptions of native populations as subhuman and justify expulsion and genocide (Obeyeskere 34 Martin Rosenstock 1-24). But they could also be mobilized for purposes of self-perceived benevolent paternalism on the part of the colonizer. Hence, Detzner’s harping on his role as an emissary from the cultural future. His presence and that of the German missionaries not only improves the Papuans’ lives, it improves the Papuans, most notably by curbing their tendency toward violence and cruelty (e.g. Vier Jahre 129); one more reason why a German presence on New Guinea is indispensable. The term ‹cannibal› in the book’s title also added a touch of dime-novel sensationalism that was likely to boost sales. The topic fulfilled expectations on the part of the readership; cannibalism was de rigueur in a text on New Guinea, 16 so much so that the theme even figured in learned works on the challenges of missionary endeavors. 17 Regarding the construction of the two populations, German and Papuan, the degree of the text’s self-awareness is at times hard to gauge. In some instances the question whether there is any self-awareness at all can only be approached by way of circumstantial evidence. In the realms of botany and zoology the alignment of the two countries is carried out with so much rhetorical effort that only self-awareness can account for the accrual of hyperbolic imagery. The same holds true for the emphatic inscription, at different historical moments, of Papuans and Germans into the same anthropological trajectory. Yet how is one to evaluate a statement on tribal warfare such as this one: «Then begins a slaughter, an eating of each other, since the man believes that the good characteristics of the enemy pass on to himself through the consumption of his meat […]. According to careful records, almost twenty percent of the natives die every year in these battles» (Vier Jahre 133)? The invitation to compare this body count with that on the Western front seems obvious, but this invitation is never articulated. Is the text trying to guide the reader toward a realization that in percentage terms modern warfare is less lethal than stone-age warfare? Or that thousands of years have not occasioned any substantive developments in Western civilization? (The eating of the dead enemy may have disappeared, but warfare has not.) Or are these solely the reader’s conjectures, the text being unaware of the additional parallelism that has opened up between Germany and New Guinea? An anachronic aside, perhaps ironical, could locate the narrator vis-à-vis the events related and render clear his affective investment. Yet the narrator never tips his hand. This could be attributed to structural limitations: no open comparison is possible because at this point in time Detzner’s horizon is confined to that of an individual marooned on a tropical island, and he does not know the dimensions of the slaughter taking place in northern France. Yet there is also no rhetoric of kinship; the text does not charge this theme with the sort of imagery that putative German-New Guinean similarities receive. A choice not made or a The Fatherland and Its Double 35 chance not perceived? On balance, it would appear to be the latter. If so, then on the subject of massively destructive warfare narration occurs, so to speak, unobserved by the narrator. Rhetoric ceases as a consequence of lacking selfawareness, and layers of meaning appear that run counter to each other and to the efforts at shaping the recipient’s response so far displayed. The reason appears obvious and shows how strongly the work is shaped by the historical moment of its creation: Detzner cannot perceive the Papuan wars in stereoscopic perspective because of his disorientation in the world that the Great War has brought into being. He is unable to assimilate this war into his construction of history and thus cannot contain war itself within lay-anthropological musings. His rejection of Weimar and of its elite’s accommodation to Germany’s diminished stature is not fully processed and perhaps all the stronger for being so. Incapable of a detached appreciation of the event that caused the new state to come into existence, he cannot map this event onto his antipodean literary territory. Like for most members of the front generation, Detzner’s emotional investments lie with the culture and society that has perished. Many will never transfer their investments; some will never even transfer their allegiance. From its earliest days, the fledgling state lacks the support of influential members of the population. In the words of Richard Bessel: «The idea of the front generation [into which Detzner inscribes himself with so much effort] was thus less a way to interpret the actual experience of the First World War than a means by which to retreat from the unpleasant realities of the war and the post-war period, and that is what made it politically so corrosive» (135). During the 1920s, these alienated citizens formed one quarter of the German electorate (Bessel 128). Detzner may eventually have made his peace with Weimar - he did after all begin a career in the civil services - but when the time came to choose between the republic and its nemesis all he was capable of was non-participation in the totalitarian regime. Hardship as he was prepared to endure for the Kaiserreich he was not prepared to endure for Weimar. The comparison is not entirely fair, of course. By 1933, Detzner was in his fifties and a family man. His time for heroics was over. In fact, his behavior on the whole appears commendable enough. Many of his generation played an active role in the rise of Nazism and considered Weimar’s demise not as a reason to quit promising careers but to hope for rapid advancement. It may very well have been the writing of his books that allowed Detzner to achieve what was denied many of his contemporaries: acceptance of loss and accommodation to the present. If that is the case, however, a cruel irony lies therein, for his mourning work certainly did nothing to promote the acceptance of Weimar in his readership. 36 Martin Rosenstock There may have been other, more personal, reasons why the postwar world strained Detzner’s abilities to adapt. «You wonderfully beautiful island kingdom» (Vier Jahre 328) is how he eulogizes New Guinea on his book’s final pages. The island is a lost paradise, not only because of its beauty, but also, and perhaps primarily, because the difference in power between colonizer and colonized permits imaginative appropriation, allows for the perception of New Guinea as a land of adventures foreclosed in the disenchanted and bureaucratically supervised West. On this island, adolescence could be perpetuated, as the imperialist propaganda of Detzner’s youth appeared validated. In addition, Detzner seems to have held a genuine interest in Papuan cultures and affection for at least some individuals. He, for instance, describes how when one of his hunters fell ill from pneumonia, he, Detzner, nursed him back to health, and there is little reason to believe that this episode was invented (194-96). Also, his exhaustive descriptions of flora and fauna point to a relationship with the land that goes beyond the mercenary or exploitative. They suggest a blend of Rousseauean sensibility and the Enlightenment ethos that Russell A. Berman has identified as constitutive of early eighteenth-century colonial ventures and that still formed marginalized countercurrents once these ventures had turned into imperialist projects. Within the Enlightenment there may well lie the origins of Western discourses of hegemony and domination, but it is not «coincident with them, and its pursuit depends on a categorical disinterestedness, both as a regulative principle and as a source of egalitarianism» (Berman 56) - manifested in, amongst other traits, a recognition of peoples’ shared humanity. Berman also suggests that as a result of Germany’s fragmented political and cultural identity over much of the country’s history «a strand of German culture was quite curious about difference, and this interest produced a particular openness (perhaps less characteristic of the colonialisms of those nations with more rigidly defined identities)» (18). In the most charitable interpretation of Detzner’s writings and of his character, he represents this - unfortunately too weak - strand. Regardless, however, of Detzner’s ‹openness,› his book’s rhetoric seeks to advance consciously a political agenda, namely the restitution of Germany’s colonial empire, and to mobilize support for this proposition amongst his German readership. Structures of his narrative - for instance, the narrator position - suggest disorientation and alienation in the new Germany to which he returned; occasional slips in the rhetoric of similarity - for instance, on the theme of warfare - that otherwise aligns Papuans and Germans highlight the degree to which the recent past is for Detzner still raw and unprocessed. In these regards, it stands to reason, he is very much a representative of the Germans, either military or civilian, who were forcibly returned to their home The Fatherland and Its Double 37 country after the loss of the war. That being said, individual character and experiences mattered, in the early 1920s as well as in the future. In all likelihood Detzner’s exposure to the Papuans was at least one factor that prompted him to steer clear of the racist ideology that would usurp his country in the decade following the publication of his books. At times there is sheer exuberance to his writing, as he attempts to convey his wonderment at this ‹strange and curious land.› Perhaps his wish to do so was one more reason for him to romance his wartime existence. Notes 1 Toward the end of his narrative, Detzner relates how his khaki uniform has become impenetrable to arrows because of all the patches that have been applied over the years (313). Such a coat is also an attribute of Sam Hawkens, one of the recurring characters in May’s novels set in the Wild West. 2 See Jeff Bowersox. Raising Germans in the Age of Empire: Youth and Colonial Culture, 1871-1914. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. 3 See John Phillip Short. Magic Lantern Empire: Colonialism and Society in Germany. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2012. 4 See Keysser 116-21. 5 Still in 1908, a primer on the German colonies describes large swaths of New Guinea as unexplored: «Es folgten die Entdeckungsfahrten Cooks, Forrests, der Franzosen Bougainville und d’Entrecasteaux; auch diese Fahrten geraten nur zu bald wieder in Vergessenheit, und erst im 19. Jahrhundert wird die systematische Erforschung der Insel, die bis zum heutigen Tag für uns zum größten Teil noch terra incognita ist, wieder aufgenommen» (Heilborn 90). For a detailed description of Detzner’s movements during the war see Biskup. Detzner must have tried the patience of at least some of the missionaries. His refusal to surrender led the Australians to contemplate rounding up all Germans on New Guinea and interning them in Australia. Hence, Detzner appears as an unnamed «foolish fugitive, who could not be found in the jungles of New Guinea like a needle in a haystack, and who was entirely harmless» in Rev. John Flierl’s memoir Forty-Five Years in New Guinea (Flierl 109). For another, less critical, view of Detzner’s years in New Guinea as well as for a good overview of the German colonial venture see chapters 8 and-9 in Sinclair. 6 For biographical information on Detzner see Baumann et al. 72-74. 7 On 16 May 1923, Detzner sent a handwritten letter to von Luschan, requesting the anthropologist’s support for Detzner’s proposition of mounting a major scientific expedition (seventeen months in length) with three parties, so as to complete «meinen alten, nur durch den Weltkrieg in seiner Ausführung behinderten Plan der Längsdurchquerung von Neuguinea.» Luschan replied skeptically on 29 May, pointing out practical concerns, such as possible obstruction by Dutch and English authorities, likely difficulties in transporting sufficient amounts of foodstuff, as well as the required year-long preparation for in-depth studies of tribal cultures, ultimately suggesting that one might ascribe «einen überwiegend sportlichen Charakter» to Detzner’s plan. On 23 June, Detzner thereupon beat a retreat in a short, though exceedingly politely worded, typed message, bringing their correspondence to a close. 8 For a somewhat dated, but still readable biography of Scherl see Erman. 38 Martin Rosenstock 9 See Heidelberger Tageblatt, 16 October 1962, as well as the certificate of Detzner’s honorary doctorate, bestowed on him on 31 July 1921. 10 See the inside of the back cover of Hermann Detzner. Im Landes des Dju-Dju. Reiseerlebnisse im östlichen Stromgebiet des Niger. Berlin: August Scherl, 1923. 11 Whether this is true cannot be determined entirely. What is sure, however, is that Detzner stayed in contact with the Gesellschaft after 1932. In the Gesellschaft’s estate, housed today in the manuscript department of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, a letter by the Gesellschaft’s chairman, Admiral a. D. Paul Behncke, from 4 March 1935 can be found. In this letter, Behncke acknowledges the receipt of a letter by Detzner and asks him for a meeting. 12 In 1923, Detzner followed up with a second, less successful book, Im Lande des Dju-Dju: Reiseerlebnisse im östlichen Stromgebiet des Niger. This narrative is set in 1912 and 1913, when he was stationed in Cameroon, with orders to map the border between the German colony and the British colony of Nigeria to the north. Im Lande des Dju-Dju is a mélange of colonial-literature staples: huntingand other adventures, nature descriptions, and ethnographical as well as historical observations, elements Detzner had already employed in Im Lande der Kannibalen, though in a tighter dramatic structure. Im Lande des Dju-Dju may, incidentally, display a less cavalier attitude toward the truth, but Detzner almost certainly also gilded his African adventures. His knack for (self-)dramatization is particularly evident if one compares his rendering of a scene with another author’s take. Detzner’s British counterpart on the expedition to the Cameroon-Nigeria border was Captain W. V. Nugent, who, already in 1914, published an account of the expedition. Not only is Nugent’s twenty-page account substantially shorter than Detzner’s, its prose is also far drier. This is Nugent, describing a feature of the African landscape: «Near the junction of the rivers Wom and Imba is a brackish pool or salt lick, where all kinds of animals congregate in the early mornings and late evenings. In the mud around the pool are countless tracks. From a clump of trees a few yards away it is possible to watch the herds approach. On a bright moonlight night, this is a sight well worth watching. Close to the water grow some beautiful purple ground orchids» (Nugent 640). This is Detzner on the same landscape feature: «Aus einem von hochstengeligen, purpurroten Bodenorchideen gebildeten Rahmen blitzte ein quecksilberner Wasserspiegel von kaum sechs Metern Durchmesser - ein Salzbecken! Zu ihm wallfahrt die Tierwelt der weiten Umgegend am Spätnachmittag, um sich einen köstlichen Trunk des salzigen Wassers zu erobern. Unzählige Tierpfade laufen strahlenförmig in dem Sumpf zusammen, der das köstliche Geheimnis birgt. Bewegte sich dort von Süden nicht schon eine lange Linie braungrauer Vierfüßler über die von der Abendsonne brennende Savanne? Jetzt stockte die vom Leittier geführte Kolonne. Wir waren gesichtet. Verhoffend äugte das Wild zu dem fremden Eindringling herüber, der hoch zu Roß die Baumgruppe umritt, um eine geeignete Beobachtungsstelle in den dichtbelaubten Kronen auszukundschaften, von der aus er in der nächsten Nacht das seltene Schauspiel zu schauen hoffte» (Detzner, Im Lande des Dju-Dju 292). 13 Detzner’s text is no exception in this regard. Lettow-Vorbeck’s book up to the final pages only obliquely acknowledges the existence of a postwar world. 14 See also Conrad 88ff. 15 For other instances of putative native affinities with the German national colors see Berman 189. 16 In his travel narrative of 1904, Richard Freiherr von und zu Eisenstein in a matter-of-fact tone locates the Papuans in the proximity of humanoids predating homo sapiens: «So wie die Kleidung steht auch die Entwicklung dieser Geschöpfe ganz nahe derjenigen der Ur- The Fatherland and Its Double 39 menschen, ja sie sind dazu noch Kannibalen, betreiben die sogenannte Kopfjägerei und essen die getöteten Menschen auf» (91). After the war, the situation remains unchanged. Ferdinand Emmerich, relating in 1923 purportedly true adventures that predate even the establishment of the German colonial empire, retells with every sign of belief the tales of his interlocutors in New Pomerania, the island adjacent to New Guinea: «Und gerade hier auf der Halbinsel lebt das grausamste Volk der ganzen Südsee […]. Sie dulden keine Weißen unter sich und kommen uns nur so lange als Freunde entgegen, als sie etwas von uns brauchen. Nachher schießen sie uns mit Wonne einen Pfeil durch den Leib und braten uns, noch bevor wir den letzten Seufzer ausgehaucht haben» (57). 17 See e.g. Mühlhäußer 374: «Sich diese kostbare Substanz [Reis] zu bewahren, ist bei den Völkern des hinterindischen Archipels der beherrschende Gedanke im Leben des einzelnen. Aber noch mehr: es gilt, sie zu vermehren, und das geschieht u.a. dadurch, daß man sie einem anderen raubt. Daraus erklären sich manche Gebräuche, die dem Europäer zunächst sinnlos, meist aber zugleich grausam und abscheulich vorkommen müssen, vor allem der Kannibalismus.» Works Cited Baumann, Karl, Dieter Klein, and Wolfgang Apitzsch. Biographisches Handbuch Deutsch-Neuguinea 1882-1922: Kurzlebensläufe ehemaliger Kolonisten, Forscher, Missionare und Reisender. Fassberg: K. Baumann, 2002. Berman, Russell A. Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1998. Bessel, Richard. «The ‹Front Generation› and the Politics of Weimar Germany.» Generations in Conflict: Youth Revolt and Generation Formation in Germany 1770-1968. Ed. Mark Roseman. Cambridge (UK): Cambridge UP. 121-36. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Biskup, Peter. «Hermann Detzner: New Guinea’s First Coast Watcher.» Journal of the Papua and New Guinea Society 2.1 (1968): 5-21. Breuer, Stefan. Anatomie der Konservativen Revolution. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993. Bowersox, Jeff. Raising Germans in the Age of Empire: Youth and Colonial Culture, 1871-1914. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. Conrad, Sebastian. German Colonialism: A Short History. Cambridge (UK): Cambridge UP, 2012. Detzner, Hermann. Vier Jahre unter Kannibalen: Von 1914 bis zum Waffenstillstand unter deutscher Flagge im unerforschten Inneren von Neuguinea. Berlin: August Scherl, 1921. -. Im Lande des Dju-Dju. Reiseerlebnisse im östlichen Stromgebiet des Niger. Berlin: August Scherl, 1923. -. «Kreuz- und Querzüge in Kaiser-Wilhelmsland (Deutsch-Neuguinea) während des Weltkrieges. Februar 1914 bis November 1918.» Mitteilungen aus den deutschen Schutzgebieten 32 (1919): 4-19. -. Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin 7/ 8 (1932): 308. Eisenstein, Richard von und zu. Reise nach Siam, Java, Deutsch-Neu-Guinea und Australasien: Tagebuch mit Erörterungen, um zu überseeischen Reisen und Unternehmungen anzuregen. Wien: Kommissionsverlag von Karl Gerolds Sohn, 1904. 40 Martin Rosenstock Emmerich, Ferdinand. Unter den Wilden der Südsee. München: Fr. Seybold’s Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1923. Erman, Hans. August Scherl: Dämonie und Erfolg in Wilhelminischer Zeit. Berlin: Universitas Verlag, 1954. Finsch, Otto. Samoafahrten: Reisen in Kaiser Wilhelms-Land und Englisch-Neu-Guinea in den Jahren 1884 u. 1885 an Bord des deutschen Dampfers «Samoa». Leipzig: Ferdinand Hirt & Sohn, 1888. Flierl, John. Forty-Five Years in New Guinea. Columbus, OH: The Lutheran Book Concern, 1925. Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1980. Heilborn, Adolf. Die Deutschen Kolonien: Land und Leute. Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1908. Hiery, Hermann Joseph, ed. Die Deutsche Südsee: 1884-1914. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2001. -. The Neglected War: The German South Pacific and the Influence of World War-I. Honolulu: U of Hawaii P, 1995. Keysser, Christian. «Das bin bloss ich»: Lebenserinnerungen. Neuendettelsau: Freimund-Verlag, 1966. Krug, Alexander. «Der Hauptzweck ist die Tötung von Kanaken»: Die deutschen Strafexpeditionen in den Kolonien der Südsee 1872-1914. Tönning: Der Andere Verlag, 2005. Mann, Thomas. Diaries 1918-1939. London: Robin Clark, 1984. Mühlhäußer, Ludwig. «Der Animismus in der Völkerwelt und die Mission! » Evangelisches Missions-Magazin. 52.9 (1908). 369-79. Nugent, W.V. «The Geographical Results of the Nigeria-Kamerun Boundary Demarcation Commission of 1912-1913.» The Geographical Journal 43.6 (1914): 630- 48. Obeyesekere, Gananath. Cannibal Talk: The Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas. Berkeley: U of California P, 2005. Pilhofer, Georg. Die Geschichte der Neuendettelsauer Mission in Neuguinea. Band 2: Die Mission zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen mit einem Überblick über die neue Zeit. Neuendettelsau: Freimund-Verlag, 1963. Reulecke, Jürgen. «The battle for the young: mobilizing young people in Wilhelmine Germany.» Generations in Conflict: Youth Revolt and Generation Formation in Germany 1770-1968. Ed. Mark Roseman. Cambridge (UK): Cambridge UP. 92-104. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke. Berlin: Insel Verlag, 2012. Short, John Phillip. Magic Lantern Empire: Colonialism and Society in Germany. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2012. Sinclair, James. Mastamak: The Land Surveyors of Papua New Guinea. Adelaide: Crawford Publishing House, 2001. Steinmetz, George. The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingado, Samoa, and Southwest Africa. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2007. White, Osmar. Parliament of a Thousand Tribes: A Study of New Guinea. London: Heinemann, 1965. Symbolic Homecoming of the «Hero-Father»: Realignment of National Memory in the Neue Deutsche Wochenschau Special Feature on Konrad Adenauer’s 1955 State Visit to Moscow 1 JAN UELZMANN Georgia Institute of Technology In September 1955, ten years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, the West German state-owned newsreel company Neue Deutsche Wochenschau (NDW) accompanied Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to Moscow to report on his much-anticipated state visit to the Soviet Union (September 8-14). 2 In 1956 the NDW, in cooperation with the German Federal Government, produced a 34-minute black-and-white film chronicling Adenauer’s historic journey. Begegnung im Kreml was part of a series of longer, documentary-style films that the NDW created for the Government Press Office (Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung) alongside its regular newsreel output. Made to the Adenauer administration’s exact specifications, these «special feature films» 3 were intended to document Adenauer’s political successes by providing favorable filmic accounts of the Chancellor’s state visits, events surrounding the new capital Bonn, and, by the end of Adenauer’s chancellorship in 1963, his political legacy. Begegnung im Kreml celebrates what is possibly Adenauer’s greatest diplomatic achievement: the Soviet Union’s release of the last remaining German POWs, the so-called 10,000- ‹Spätheimkehrer,› in return for which Adenauer agreed that the Federal Republic would open diplomatic relations with the USSR. Upon their return from Moscow, Adenauer and his delegation were celebrated by a grateful population, since the Wehrmacht’s catastrophic defeat against the Red Army ten years earlier still loomed large in the public’s consciousness, as did the unresolved fate of the many German soldiers still in Soviet hands. This essay will examine the narrative structure of Begegnung im Kreml in order to show how the film was constructed to deliberately manipulate the historic memory of its West German audience. The production is a telling example of the Adenauer administration’s conscious efforts to obtain ‹Deutungshoheit› on political decisions and events in the media at a time when West Germany, with the help of the Western Allies, had already established 42 Jan Uelzmann the foundations for a functioning media democracy. In addition to providing pro-government propaganda, the film functions in complex ways as a psychological projection screen 4 designed to aid West Germans in coming to terms with one of the great traumas of the German World War II experience: the defeat of and separation from their husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers. As such, Begegnung im Kreml can be identified as an important filmic manifestation of the memory work of the early 1950s. This memory work sought to shift the image of World War II Germany from military aggressor and perpetrator of crimes against humanity towards war victim and sufferer of hardship (endured by a heroic community). Robert G. Moeller emphasizes the importance of this alternative «imagined community» for the West German nation building process 5 at a time during which Germans were looking to «establish a sense of collectivity that did not draw on a nationalist rhetoric contaminated by its association with National Socialism» («Remembering the War in a Nation of Victims» 100): […] selective memories of the war’s end also shaped the basis on which a new West Germany was erected. Shared values in the Federal Republic were not only created by celebrations of present prosperity and predictions of uninterrupted economic growth. One of the most powerful integrative myths of the 1950s emphasized not German well-being but German suffering; it stressed that Germany was a nation of victims, an «imagined community» defined by the lasting consequences of the devastation of the Second World War. («Remembering the War in a Nation of Victims» 100) According to Moeller, «the stories of expellees and POWs in the Soviet Union became the stories of all West Germans; in the categories used by contemporaries, the fate of these groups came to represent the fate of postwar Germany» («Remembering the War in a Nation of Victims» 100). 6 The new self-image of a «nation of victims» helped create a common West German identity, and in its quality as an «integrative myth» it was a crucial psychological foundation for the success of the ensuing Economic Miracle. In order to gauge the role that Begegnung im Kreml played in this important memory work, I will first explore the central role that NDW special features - as distinguished from the regular NDW newsreels - played as a «government channel» in creating pro-government coverage in West Germany’s democratic media landscape. I will subsequently demonstrate how both visual language and voice-over narration in the film are used to create a decidedly positive image of Adenauer and his foreign politics in order to perform an act of healing on the West German collective memory. The narrative center of the film - Adenauer’s return from the Soviet Union to Bonn-Wahn airport during which the mother of a POW kisses Adenauer’s hand in a respectful ges- Symbolic Homecoming of the «Hero-Father» 43 ture of gratitude - will be crucial for this endeavor. I will analyze it in terms of its symbolic value as the successful homecoming of the parent generation from the old (and new) eastern enemy, a symbolic corrective for the catastrophic defeat of the fathers and sons ten years earlier. Finally, I will discuss the closing scenes of the film shot at the Friedland refugee reception center during the arrival of the last German POWs, scenes that suggest the closure of a traumatic past through evocative images of reunion and visual tropes alluding to the possibility of redemption and reciprocal forgiveness. The lingering fate of German POWs still held in the Soviet Union «remained a national preoccupation» during the early 1950s (Moeller, «Remembering the War in a Nation of Victims» 96). Throughout the early years of his chancellorship Adenauer was approached with frequent appeals to address the question of the missing POWs, among them a petition containing the signatures of over seven million German women pleading to bring the POWs home. German youths organized a ‹Freiheitslauf› from Berlin to Bonn during the annual ‹Kriegsgefangenen-Gedenkwochen› (Ruge 145). In 1953, to remind the German public of the POW situation, the West German postal service issued stamps captioned «Gedenket unserer Gefangenen,» refashioning the former Wehrmacht soldiers into victims through the use of imagery usually reserved for the Holocaust (Moeller, «Remembering the War in a Nation of Victims» 97). Prior to his trip to Moscow, Adenauer received letters addressed to him personally by families of POWs with «concerns they wanted him to present to Soviet leaders» (Moeller, War Stories 93). In this climate of uncertainty and worry, it is understandable that the release of the last remaining POWs was a huge political success and subsequent popular triumph for Adenauer, one that played an important role in the CDU/ CSU coalition gaining an absolute majority of 50.2 percent of votes in the 1957 Bundestag elections. Indeed, well into the 1970s, people in the Federal Republic best remembered Adenauer as the liberator of the prisoners (Kilian 11-12). The trip to Moscow, which Adenauer undertook with great reluctance, became his most famous state visit (Berresheim), partly because the uncertain prospects of the negotiations made it different from the typical state visit among the Western Allies. In 1955, the notion of a summit-level state visit to Moscow still raised eyebrows in the West and, considering the horrific consequences of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, such a Soviet-West German summit promised to be of an extremely precarious nature. Consequently, it was anxiously followed by West Germany’s Cold War allies and foes and subsequently exploited on both sides of the Iron Curtain for political and propaganda purposes. 44 Jan Uelzmann While most contemporary West German news reports, including Begegnung im Kreml, portray the release of the POWs as the sole product of Adenauer’s diplomatic and political skill, it is now known that the Soviet Union had already planned to use the release of the POWs as leverage on Adenauer to achieve their goal of diplomatic relations with West Germany (Kilian 13). This, however, was not known to Adenauer and his delegation; they had no conclusive intelligence about Soviet intentions regarding the POWs (Kilian 84-85) since the Soviet Union, during the months leading up to the state visit, had conducted negotiations with the GDR leadership in secret (Ruge 136; Kilian 82-84). While the Soviets were already discussing the POWs’ release internally, Adenauer, on the other hand, prepared to travel to Moscow with the public expectation of finally achieving a breakthrough in the pressing POW question. However, as Werner Kilian has demonstrated, Adenauer’s delegation was deeply divided over the idea of potentially exchanging the POWs for diplomatic relations. 7 The film’s coverage of the Moscow visit depicts this dynamic and contentious atmosphere and portrays the negotiations as a true diplomatic cliffhanger, skillfully navigated by Adenauer. The film then complements this impression by symbolically charged images of homecoming, triumph, and reunion in the state visit’s immediate aftermath. Portrayed as solely responsible for turning trauma into triumph, Adenauer towers as the heroic figure in this report. With Begegnung im Kreml, the NDW turned diplomacy into pro-government propaganda. It may seem surprising that West German politicians of the post-World War II era would appropriate such an ‹undemocratic› tool for their new democratic government, especially with the methods of Joseph Goebbels’s Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda (Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda) still on everyone’s mind. However, propaganda had been part and parcel of the Allied reeducation and denazification initiatives in the Western occupation zones, and many German politicians had witnessed firsthand the lingering tenacity of Nazi beliefs during their involvement in the nascent West German self-administration under Allied tutelage between 1945 and 1949. With the rise in Cold War anti-Communism, propaganda was seen not as undemocratic in and of itself, but rather, in the right hands, as an effective tool to steer public opinion toward democracy, and this belief in the necessity of state involvement in the media landscape was a basic tenet of the media policies of Adenauer’s Federal Government (Daniel 72-73). Accordingly, Adenauer had strong reservations about the independent and decentralized media system that had been installed by the British and the Americans: «Die Medienpolitik der Adenauer-Regierungen war bestimmt von dem Versuch, Presse, Rund- Symbolic Homecoming of the «Hero-Father» 45 funk, Film und Fernsehen politisch zu kontrollieren. Die Auffassungen des Kanzlers zur Presse waren von der Gesinnungspresse der 1920er Jahre geprägt» (Schwarz 83). The Chancellor in particular saw the emerging West German broadcasting system as a «politisches Führungsmittel» of the Federal Government (Steininger 391, cf. Schwarz 83). Consequently, the first governments of the FRG had a «relativ ungebrochenes Verhältnis» toward «propagandapolitischen Aktivitäten jeder Art und auch zum Begriff ‹Propaganda›» (Daniel 73). Reportedly, Adenauer even wished for a «democratic Goebbels» as his government spokesperson (Küsters 24, qtd. in Schwarz 83). Thus, and for the more mundane reason of controlling the political process as much as democratic procedures would allow, Adenauer was highly concerned with his image in the news. Adenauer’s repeated efforts to take control of the West German media landscape are well documented and need not be reviewed here. 8 Suffice it to say that the Chancellor’s concept of a complacent media, perhaps best embodied by the famous ‹Teegespräche› with handpicked journalists (a format he preferred greatly to the official Federal Press Conference (Bundespressekonferenz) (Schwarz 83, Daniel 75)), were wholly inconsistent with the democratic media system established by the Western Allies in the Federal Republic. In the face of the democratic checks and balances of the newly established West German broadcasting system, the newsreel medium was the most effective way for the Adenauer government to circumvent democratic media procedures and guarantee pro-government coverage. Consequently, newsreels played a central role in the media policies of the early Adenauer years, with Adenauer personally acknowledging the importance of the newsreel medium (Schwarz 83). Right from the beginning of his chancellorship, Adenauer tasked the newly created Government Press Office (Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung) with organizing and orchestrating media relations. The authority, whose budget grew rapidly from 450,000 to 13 million DM between 1949 and 1959 (Walker 32), and which was occasionally referred to as ‹Manipulationsmaschinerie› by journalists (Walker 14), was both the creator of a favorable government image and the means of relaying that image to the media. According to Uta Schwarz, the NDW was founded in December 1949 as a private enterprise that served as a front for the government, which in 1950 took over ownership of the company. 9 This arrangement helped circumvent the Western Allies’ ‹Lex Ufi,› which among other things precluded the government from intervening in the democratic media process. The Government Press Office immediately established close ties to the NDW, and Adenauer was personally involved in the process (Schwarz 76-80). Joachim Paschen agrees with Schwarz: «[D]ass die Neue Deutsche 46 Jan Uelzmann Wochenschau (NDW) ein Regierungsorgan war, sollte nach außen hin nicht sichtbar werden» («Die unabhängigste Wochenschau der Welt? »). Despite its secretive beginnings, the NDW had an administrative board consisting of fifteen members who represented important public institutions as well as both government and opposition parties. It was chaired by the Hamburg Senator for Culture Heinrich Landahl (SPD) (Paschen, «Vor der ‹Tagesschau›» 24). While this structure accounted for some democratic control, the NDW still «entsprach nicht den Regeln der sich in den 50er Jahren herausbildenden, vom Fernsehen geprägten Mediendemokratie» (Schwarz 19). In order to keep the NDW under tight government control, the Federal Government even had the NDW’s SPD-affiliated editor-in-chief Heinz Kuntze-Just fired in 1952, alleging that some of the NDW’s reporting was too critical of the government and overtly in favor of the Bundestag opposition (Paschen, «Vor der ‹Tagesschau›» 28-29). The influence of the SPD was thus curbed, and a politically reliable replacement was installed in Just’s place. Summing up the NDW’s role vis-à-vis the democratic media system of the early Federal Republic, Uta Schwarz characterizes the NDW as «das audiovisuelle Werbeinstrument des Bundes,» whose task it was «die Wahrnehmung von Politik und Gesellschaft durch dauerhaft wiederkehrende, glaubwürdige Inszenierung im Sinne der Auftraggeber zu steuern und zwischen der Politik mit ihren Repräsentanten und der Bevölkerung zu vermitteln» (19). The NDW’s mission as «Werbeinstrument des Bundes» was realized in the special features created for the Government Press Office. These differed greatly in form and content from the ordinary newsreels that the NDW distributed to West German movie theaters every week. A regular NDW newsreel was ten to twelve minutes in length and consisted of about eight independent segments, offering the audience a light and entertaining mix of politics, sports, and «Sensationen» (Paschen, «Vor der ‹Tagesschau›» 25). The government-commissioned special features, on the other hand, were selfcontained films that took the form of documentary narratives on a single topic of about twenty to forty minutes in length. The Government Press Office oversaw the creation of these films, received regular updates on the films’ progress from the NDW, and had the final say in all decisions pertaining to the films, such as scene selections, commentary, and title. The film under discussion, Begegnung im Kreml, was produced in 1955/ 56 by the NDW for the Deutsche Reportagefilm GmbH, a government contractor that was part of the BPA’s propaganda apparatus («Presseamt: Große Lage» 41; Reimers 161; Reimers-and-Fleschhut 102). Begegnung im Kreml is thus de facto «eine Produktion aus dem Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung» (Reimers 156). Symbolic Homecoming of the «Hero-Father» 47 Although this essay focuses on the construction of the film’s propagandistic narrative rather than on its reception, it is important to briefly examine the film’s screening history, as this will shed light on its intended addressees as well as inform the discussion of the narrative’s desired effect. Unfortunately, reliable data on the number of screenings and exact audience numbers of Begegnung im Kreml have not yet been established. So far, only a panel discussion led by Karl Friedrich Reimers in 1980 provides an idea of the film’s actual audience. 10 Reimers argues that the film was not used much at all by the Adenauer administration: «In ‹seiner ersten Zeit›, nach dem Winter 1955/ 6, also ziemlich schnell nach dem Geschehen von Moskau, ist dieser Film unerwartet selten verwendet worden. Konrad Adenauer selbst soll viel Zurückhaltung gegenüber diesem filmischen Situationszeugnis an den Tag gelegt haben» (167). Nevertheless, it is clear that the film was originally produced to rally public support during election campaigns, especially during the 1957 federal election; there were close ties between the film’s buyer Deutsche Reportagefilm GmbH and the Mobilwerbung GmbH, a CDU-founded propaganda company that owned twenty-four mobile screening trucks tasked with carrying out «Kanzler-Reklame» during elections campaigns («Presseamt: Große Lage» 41). It is even possible that special «Schnittfassungen für den Wahlkampf» existed (Reimers 166). At the same time, there is no conclusive evidence that Begegnung in Moskau was ever used by the CDU during the 1957 or 1961 elections (Reimers 167). At any rate, the film in its finished form seems to have ultimately not been viewed as an effective political campaign tool by the Government Press Office. 11 What were the reasons for Adenauer’s restraint? Reimers’s observations point to potential fears within the Adenauer administration that a campaign audience unfamiliar with the conventions of diplomatic protocol and international politics could misconstrue the film as a document of a West German- Soviet rapprochement that could potentially weaken the Western alliance. Scenes depicting everyday life in Moscow from a touristic perspective in particular seemed to lend the abstract Cold War enemy a human face. Considering the vehemence with which Adenauer worked to dispel any impression of such a rapprochement after the visit (for example, in emphasizing West Germany’s ‹Alleinvertretungsanspruch› during the ensuing parliamentary debate), the film might have seemed too «friendly» towards the Soviets to Adenauer’s cabinet. This would explain the film’s modest circulation among the general public and the emphasis placed on political education and cultural ambassadorship in its distribution (Reimers 167). According to Rudolf Hochsähs of the Government Press Office, special features such as Begegnung im Kreml were usually distributed through the official Landesbildstellen of the 48 Jan Uelzmann Federal Republic and were shown or available for viewing in schools and universities, public libraries, or state sponsored cultural outlets abroad, such as the Goethe Institutes (Reimers 166). Reimers elaborates: Nach etwa zwei Jahren, ab Winter 1957/ 8, wurde der Film engagierter und häufiger in der politischen Bildungsarbeit verwendet, auch international (zum Beispiel durch den Bund Europäischer Jugend/ Junge Europäische Föderalisten in der Europa-Union). Die «Karriere-Adresse» für diesen Reportage-Film waren vor allem die […] Landesfilmdienste, die mit ihrem breiten Streukreis zwischen Jugend- und Erwachsenenbildung verschiedenste Zielgruppen erreichten. (167) Even if it did not have the short-term effect of aiding the CDU in attracting votes as much as Ein Mann wirbt für sein Volk (1953), Begegnung im Kreml’s intended audience still represented potential current or future CDU voters. Such an audience was also ideally suited to what this essay identifies as the film’s long-term effect: to provide West Germans with a symbolic closure to the lingering POW question. To achieve this goal, the film recontextualizes visual tropes and imagery that its audience was already familiar with from the media and which in 1956 had already become part of public memory. Dramatic, emotionally rousing impressions of the return of the last POWs had been widely disseminated in contemporary newspapers, magazines, and even books. 12 Even more importantly, the audience recognized many of the film’s most memorable visuals from regular newsreel reporting. During the 1950s, viewers flocked to movie theaters or the popular ‹Aktualitätenkinos› at train stations, where they saw newsreels such as the Neue Deutsche Wochenschau, the second NDW newsreel Welt im Bild, 13 or the competing Fox’ Tönende Wochenschau. 1956, the year that Begegnung im Kreml was made, marked the pinnacle of the NDW’s popularity with moviegoers, with its distribution network reaching around 9.4 million people per week (Paschen, «Vor der ‹Tagesschau›» 30). 14 Therefore, the events and images of Adenauer’s trip to Moscow and the homecoming of the POWs were well known in 1956. Due to their ubiquity, viewers could easily identify with the recontextualized images presented in Begegnung im Kreml and relate them to a «collective memory»: «Bilder, mit denen man sich situativ oder gar existenziell - noch dazu kollektiv - identifizieren kann, finden leicht die besseren Plätze im Gedächtnis» (Reimers 167). By attaching its political and symbolic message to well-known images deeply anchored in the West German collective memory, the memory work embedded in Begegnung im Kreml became particularly effective. In the narrative logic of the film, this process revolves around Konrad Adenauer alone. A shrewd manipulator of the press in general, and not least due to his close collaboration with the NDW, Adenauer became the first ‹Medienkanzler› of Symbolic Homecoming of the «Hero-Father» 49 the Federal Republic, a term used heavily some fifty years later in relation to Federal Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (Schröder 149). 15 In order to establish an effective connection to the audience, the NDW portrayed Adenauer as a paternalistic figure. In her groundbreaking study on West German newsreels and gender, Uta Schwarz characterizes Adenauer’s media image as that of a ‹pater patriae›: the father of the nation, an elder statesman working tirelessly in the interest of his extended West German «family,» who regularly gathered around him in the movie theaters (352-61). Moeller, who analyzed West German press coverage of the events surrounding Adenauer’s state visit, likewise concludes: «[A]s the POWs returned in 1955, this forceful political leader, the ‹good father of Germany,› stood at the head of the national family» (War Stories 89). In light of this personality cult, and considering the letters from West Germans about the POWs that were addressed to him as a «loving father,» Adenauer even assumed the position of «father of our prisoners of war» in the public eye (Moeller, War Stories 92-94). According to Schwarz, the «Wochenschau-Star» Adenauer is the object of a projective relationship, «bei dem der Rezipient der öffentlichen Person solche Motive, Kräfte, Eigenschaften zuschreibt, die für das eigene Ich untersagt oder unerreichbar sind, so daß die öffentliche Person als passende Projektionsfläche für individuell unerfüllte Wünsche und Sehnsüchte von Vielen fungiert» (352-53). It is precisely along these lines that Begegnung im Kreml employs Adenauer’s public image in order to perform compensatory work on the West German collective memory. Of all the lingering traumas of the war, the one most keenly felt by West Germans was that of the many German POWs still in Soviet hands, whose survival was often unknown to their families. With so many individual fates still unresolved in 1955, the invitation to Moscow provided Adenauer with a unique opportunity to negotiate directly with the Soviets in order to bring closure to many German families. To exploit this achievement for political propaganda, Begegnung im Kreml stages both Adenauer’s return from Moscow to Bonn-Wahn airport and the subsequent reunion of the released POWs with their families in highly symbolic fashion. The footage surrounding the returning Chancellor, who stood his ground in Moscow against the old (Third Reich) and new (Cold War) enemy and who achieved an important political breakthrough in the POW question, is arranged in such a way that it suggest a «symbolic homecoming.» This homecoming is intended to visually supersede and ultimately replace the images of German soldiers overrun, defeated, and taken prisoner by the Red Army, only to later return home in tatters. The editing of the footage of POWs arriving at the Friedland reception center at the film’s end suggests a demobilization of the POWs from soldier to civilian status and their restora- 50 Jan Uelzmann tion to their families, and, in a symbolic sense, to the «extended family» of West Germany. To achieve this purpose, Adenauer’s trip to Moscow is presented as a risky «expedition» into unknown territory, in Adenauer’s own words prior to departure, «eine Fahrt ins Blaue» (qtd. in Kilian 11). After all, this trip was the first summit-level meeting between West German and Soviet politicians after World War II, and its outcome was unclear. The film then goes to great length to show how, through Adenauer’s experience and political skill, the prisoners are released, thus establishing a chain of cause and effect between Adenauer’s negotiation efforts and the emotional reunion of the ‹Spätheimkehrer› with their families at the film’s end. Divided into five major parts, the film chronicles the delegation’s departure from Bonn-Wahn airport, the difficult negotiations in Moscow, the subsequent return of Adenauer’s successful delegation to Bonn, the debate about diplomatic relations with the USSR in the German parliament, and the arrival of Germany’s last POWs in the Friedland reception center in West Germany. During the departure ceremony at Bonn-Wahn airport, the film portrays Adenauer as the undisputed center of attention, surrounded by a large and enthusiastic crowd. As his trademark black Mercedes announces the Chancellor’s arrival, the voice-over reports that Adenauer is receiving the good wishes of his cabinet, the assembled journalists, and the diplomatic corps, speaking to the extraordinary nature of this trip. In terms of the narrative structure of the film, the serious air of the departure ceremony, together with Adenauer’s statement that he would do everything «was in unseren Kräften steht, um dem Frieden in der Welt zu nützen,» underscores the precariousness of the state visit. The impact of this statement is amplified by canned applause and images of the applauding crowd. After Adenauer has ascended the stairs to the aircraft, he turns around to greet the crowd one last time, while an anxious, «extended Western family» waves good-bye to the Chancellor. Several shots emphasize that Adenauer is traveling on one of two newly purchased Lufthansa Super Constellations, while omitting the fact that it is piloted by a US crew since the aircraft were still so new that Lufthansa pilots were not certified yet (Kilian 112). On screen, however, the ultra-modern West German Lufthansa aircraft, which had been allowed to travel internationally only since April 1955 as a result of the Paris Treaties (Kilian 53), was a powerful symbol of the country’s newly earned political sovereignty and newfound economic prosperity. This impression is further amplified by the film’s portrayal of the reception of the West German delegation at Moscow airport, which included full military honors and the playing of the national anthem. The journalist Gerd Ruge, who accompanied Adenauer’s delegation Symbolic Homecoming of the «Hero-Father» 51 to Moscow, remembers how impressed and stunned the West Germans were at the reception in Moscow: «Ich stand also dort und sah, wie Adenauer ankam, wie er die Front abschritt, wie das Deutschlandlied erklang, was für uns doch fast unvorstellbar war in Moskau» (Ruge 120). The images and sounds of this extraordinary reception must have triggered strong emotions among the visitors; emotions ranging from national pride all the way to feelings of remorse and redemption in the face of this demonstration of respect by a nation that had suffered terribly at the hands of the Wehrmacht. Adenauer is then shown being chauffeured to his hotel in his own black Mercedes, and a short sequence shows Moscow schoolboys admiring the ‹Mercedesstern,› a symbol of the West German economic miracle. 16 Fig. 1: Deutsche Wochenschau Filmarchiv, Hamburg Fig. 2: Deutsche Wochenschau Filmarchiv, Hamburg 52 Jan Uelzmann These visual and aural references underline that Konrad Adenauer, and through him West Germany as a respected and sovereign nation, has arrived back on the world stage of politics. 17 The second part of the film, set during the negotiations in Moscow, juxtaposes touristic sights and sounds of the city rendered in surprisingly neutral fashion with sequences about the political negotiations. The fate of the POWs is not mentioned until fifteen minutes into the film, when the ostensibly neutral tone of the commentary suddenly changes back to standard Western partiality. During a deadlock in the negotiations, the film describes an alleged shouting match between Adenauer and Khrushchev when the latter mentions German war guilt. Adenauer’s defiant words «Auch in Deutschland ist Furchtbares geschehen,» reported by the voice-over, are amplified by stock newsreel footage of the Red Army’s onslaught on Germany at the end of World War II, culminating in staged scenes of a lone woman standing in the rubble and of a mother and daughter lighting a candle for their missing husband/ father. Precisely these images of human suffering will be symbolically corrected by the staging of Adenauer’s homecoming later in the film. Catering to West German expectations in 1956, Begegnung im Kreml thus explicitly addresses the plight of German refugees and POWs, while ignoring the atrocities of the Wehrmacht and SS in the East. The montage of newsreel footage then continues to detail the waypoints of the escalating East-West division in the aftermath of World War II, such as the Berlin airlift of 1948/ 49 and the June 17-uprisings of 1953, from a Western point of view. The commentary places the responsibility for the growing political alienation solely on Soviet shoul- Fig. 3: Deutsche Wochenschau Filmarchiv, Hamburg Symbolic Homecoming of the «Hero-Father» 53 ders and makes the argument that Adenauer’s policies of anti-Communism and Western integration were the only feasible approach to counteract the ostensibly hostile stance of the Soviet Union towards West Germany: «Westliche Bündnissysteme als Folge dieser Politik.» In thus conflating World War-II with the Cold War, this sequence emphasizes the Soviet Union’s status as (West) Germany’s enemy both in the past (as the Third Reich) and in the present (as a NATO member). 18 True to the general characteristic of NDW newsreel reporting on these issues, which tended to omit German guilt and portrayed the German POWs not as former soldiers, but solely as «Opfer sowjetischer Gewaltherrschaft» (Schwarz 197), this strategy effectively displaces the discourse of German perpetration and replaces it with a continuous narrative of German suffering at the hands of the Soviets. After a commentary pointing out that most of the churches in the Soviet Union were either destroyed or turned into museums, a short sequence of the devout Catholic Adenauer praying in a small chapel in Moscow emphasizes the image of Adenauer as «Christian soldier» and juxtaposes this evocative visual trope with the secularist «godlessness» of Communism. While the highly partial review of recent Cold War events argues that Adenauer is in the right politically, this sequence emphasizes that he also is morally right, since the West is fighting - in Bob Dylan’s famous words - quite literally «with God on [their] side» (Dylan). The historical fact that the wretched German POWs once came as part of a brutal invasion force that left millions dead in its wake is compartmentalized and cut off from the present humanitarian problem. By highlighting Adenauer’s Christian, moral high Fig. 4: Deutsche Wochenschau Filmarchiv, Hamburg 54 Jan Uelzmann ground over the Soviet leaders, the film sets the stage for the presentation of Adenauer’s victorious return to Bonn. Rendered in suspenseful scenes that emphasize Adenauer’s diplomatic skill, Begegnung im Kreml goes on to detail the successful resolution of the negotiation deadlock in scenes many of which have made it into contemporary historical documentary films. 19 While the political outcomes of the state visit were ultimately limited and of little effect on an international scale, 20 in the West German public eye Adenauer had scored a decisive political victory for all Germans with Khrushchev’s promise that the last remaining POWs would be returned. The remainder of the film capitalizes on this news that triggered a tremendous wave of emotions in West Germany, both publicly and privately. The third segment of Begegnung im Kreml opens with the return of Adenauer’s delegation to Germany, the news of the POWs’ release already having traveled ahead to Bonn. Focusing entirely on this humanitarian success, the film presents the arrival of the delegation at Bonn-Wahn airport in triumphant, yet serious tones that stress the impact of this diplomatic achievement on thousands of German families. Due to the visual parallelisms with the departure scene, this segment allows the film’s carefully constructed «expedition» narrative - the Chancellor travels to a «dangerous» place without knowing what to expect, he has to master various challenges and returns home victoriously - to come full circle. 21 Just as at the beginning of the film, the viewer encounters the mighty Lufthansa Super Constellation airplane as a symbol of West Germany’s new economic prosperity and political sovereignty. A medium shot crosscut then reveals the «extended West German family» as «eine bewegte Menschenmenge» (voice-over) waiting for and waving at the Chancellor. The following medium long shot depicts Adenauer accompanied by a throng of aides and journalists, walking from the right of the frame (symbolically from the «East»), to the left («West»), towards an array of microphones on the tarmac, shaking the hand of Bundestag President Eugen Gerstenmaier. Framed in a medium long shot, the Chancellor then stands in front of the microphones, surrounded in a half circle by his delegation, journalists, and the welcoming party, leaving the view open for the cameras directly in front of him. A little girl with flowers curtsies while Adenauer awkwardly shakes her hand. The stage for the symbolic homecoming is set. As in the departure ceremony, Adenauer is the undisputed center of the event. While Vice Chancellor Franz Blücher thanks Adenauer for his efforts in the name of the German people, an emotional older woman clad in mourning approaches the Chancellor from the left of the frame («the West,» in this case «Germany»). She can clearly be identified as a «Mutter eines Kriegsgefangenen» from an official photograph of the event. 22 She drops to her knees before the Chancellor Symbolic Homecoming of the «Hero-Father» 55 and in an apparent gesture of gratitude kisses Adenauer’s hand as if he were a sovereign king. Strangely enough, this highly evocative scene remains without comment by the narrator (possibly because of Blücher’s still ongoing words of gratitude), but is exploited on visual terms by a cut to a perspective from a second camera in the crowd. This shot depicts the woman’s features in medium close up and thus lends a human face to the still ongoing suffering of the former German home front; a suffering now about to be remedied, the editing suggests, by Adenauer’s direct intervention. Fig. 5: Deutsche Wochenschau Filmarchiv, Hamburg Fig. 6: Deutsche Wochenschau Filmarchiv, Hamburg 56 Jan Uelzmann This act by a grieving woman provided the material for an iconic image that instantly cast Adenauer in the role of liberator of the prisoners. Ruge comments on this scene: «Es gab gefühlsgeladene, rührende Szenen der Heimkehr und des Dankes an Adenauer. Jenes Bild einer alten Frau, die dem Kanzler als Dank für die Rückkehr ihres Sohnes die Hände küsst, symbolisierte den Augenblick: Die Befreiung der Kriegsgefangenen durch die Furchtlosigkeit und Verhandlungsstärke Adenauers» (142). The exploitation of the old woman in mourning for propagandistic purposes, an image that made the rounds widely in the regular NDW newsreels and the press, of course did not go unnoticed. For example, in its contemporary reporting on the event, governmentcritical media like the magazine Der Spiegel mocked the scene as «Empfang in Bonn mit altem Mütterchen und gerührten Politikern» («Kanzler-Besuch»). However, in spite of its overt sentimentalism, the symbolic and even iconic character of this image was recognized early on. Werner Backhaus, who in 1955 published a detailed account of the state visit under the title Begegnung im Kreml: So wurden die Gefangenen befreit, captioned a photograph of the event with the words: «Was Millionen deutscher Mütter empfanden, drückte diese Frau bei der Heimkehr des Bundeskanzlers auf dem Flugplatz Köln- Wahn aus» (93). Through this homecoming scene, Adenauer’s diplomacy has an immediate and highly emotional effect on the viewer. Adenauer’s announcement of the POWs’ release to the surrounding crowd - and, through the microphones, to West Germany and the rest of the world - elicits spontaneous «Bravos» from the crowd of journalists, diplomats, and politicians. Thanking his delegation, Adenauer emphasizes the sense of unity that had prevailed during the negotiations in spite of differences in party politics: «Wir alle haben dort gemeinsam gestanden, für unser Vaterland.» The German verb «stehen» in this context evokes the act of soldiering, a tough struggle fending off the onslaught of a strong opponent. Indeed, in light of the recent World War and present Cold War hostilities, martial rhetoric relating to the state visit and its results was far from uncommon. The West German-Soviet negotiations were often characterized as a «Kampf,» as for example in Backhaus’s contemporaneous account (29). Sharing his personal experience of the state visit, journalist Gerd Ruge commented upon the perception of the trip by the West German public. His recollections add a myth-like, time-transcending quality to the notion of «Kampf,» which is closely related to the «expedition» trope referred to earlier: Ein Kollege hat mir einige Jahre nach diesem Ereignis einmal gesagt, diese Reise habe ja fast den Anschein einer Fortsetzung des Nibelungenliedes bekommen; hier werde sozusagen sagenhaft eine Reise des alten Bundeskanzlers gezeigt, der die deutschen Gefangenen unter schrecklichen Umständen freikämpft, eben ähn- Symbolic Homecoming of the «Hero-Father» 57 lich der Fahrt zum Hunnenkönig Etzel im Nibelungenlied - nur natürlich diesmal mit einem Happy End. Adenauer kämpft in der Hauptstadt der Sowjetunion die Gefangenen frei. Das war doch das, was die Deutschen in erster Linie von diesen Verhandlungen mitbekommen haben, was sie bewegte. (120) With the associations of struggle about the negotiations ranging from an epic battle between the Burgundians and the Huns to the real-world conflict between the Western and the Communist world, it is hard to conceive that Adenauer’s choice of words about the struggle against the Soviet enemy of 1955, a mere ten years after cessation of hostilities, would fail to remind West Germans of the Wehrmacht’s fight against the Red Army. This time, however, the film provides images of Germans in triumph: Adenauer’s words returning from Moscow in 1955 emphasize that the German front had held together and that its unchanged enemy had been kept in check. Besides its exploitation in the film for propagandistic purposes, the old woman’s kissing of Adenauer’s hand speaks volumes about generational and gender relations at the time. While on the surface merely showing a mother thanking a politician for negotiating her son’s return from some ten years of imprisonment in the Soviet Union, this scene has a doubly symbolic dimension since Adenauer and the woman perform a «family reunion» on two levels. Firstly, this moment can be read as the parent generation of the imprisoned Wehrmacht soldiers performing a symbolic homecoming of the «hero-father,» an image intended to displace the memory of their sons’ defeat in the real war. In 1955, Adenauer, who in his own words had «stood» with his delegation in Russia «for our fatherland,» returns to a hero’s welcome after struggling with the Soviets. On a symbolic level, he achieved what the Wehrmacht soldiers (including the woman’s son) had failed to do between 1941 and 1945. By presenting its audience with the image of the «hero-father» returning from the East, something that in reality happened all too rarely, this scene of Begegnung im Kreml performs important compensatory work on the West German collective memory of World War II. Secondly, the scene points to an important shift in gender relations: while the woman emotionally greets Adenauer as the «father of the nation» returning from the East, she equally subjects herself to his male authority. The woman’s humble and submissive posture symbolically anticipates what is going to happen in the households into which the POWs are about to return. The women, many of whom until then had acted as family breadwinners and heads of household, would have to resign their position to the returning men as reflected in the conservative family politics of Adenauer’s Minister for Family Affairs Franz Josef Würmeling (Schissler 361-62). 23 Würmeling’s politics were characterized by a highly traditional perspective on women 58 Jan Uelzmann and the family. Consequently, and as much as the West German democracy would allow, Würmeling’s ministry was a bulwark against equal rights for women, instead emphasizing their fundamental «difference» from men and advocating for a gender politics centered on women as mothers and caregivers. Consequently, official family politics depicted women as the center of the private realm of the family. Erica Carter comments that under Würmeling’s leadership, «efforts were made to reestablish the family as the linchpin of sociosymbolic order at the national level» (35). Thus, Adenauer and the woman - unwittingly or not - are depicted as performing and symbolically reinforcing a key sociopolitical shift taking place in the West German social fabric of the Adenauer years. In line with the film’s propagandistic purpose, the portrayal of Adenauer’s return to Bonn as a hero’s homecoming, carefully exploited in the cutting room for its multiple symbolisms and placed in prominent position in the narrative, downplays the group effort of the delegation and credits the release of Germany’s last POWs solely to the Chancellor, even though especially parliament member Carlo Schmidt (SPD) played a critical role in the negotiations (Ruge 137; Kilian 163-68; Backhaus 82). It also sets the stage for the film’s conclusion: this «symbolic homecoming» precedes the images of the actual homecoming of the POWs, and, in terms of the narrative logic of the film, visually counterbalances the images of the defeated ex-soldiers arriving at the Friedland reception center. The film’s fourth part consists of a brief scene depicting Adenauer presiding over the parliamentary negotiations about diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union (the condition for the release of the prisoners) in the Bundestag. Introduced by shots of the Bonn Bundeshaus and the commentary «Dr. Adenauer erläutert dem Parlament die Ergebnisse,» the Chancellor is once again shown to be in control, this time of the democratic procedures in the Bundestag. After Adenauer insisted that the concession of diplomatic relations to the Soviets would be used to make the «Stimme des Westens» heard in Moscow, the leader of the SPD opposition, Erich Ollenhauer, usually in charge of verbal attacks on the Chancellor, thanks Adenauer submissively for his efforts: «Wir danken dem Herrn Bundeskanzler für sein beharrliches Ringen um die Freigabe der Gefangenen und Verschickten und wir hoffen, dass mit der Verwirklichung dieser Verabredung in Moskau eine der schmerzlichsten Wunden geschlossen wird, die der unselige Hitlerkrieg geschlagen hat.» Both Adenauer’s and Ollenhauer’s statements are crosscut by images of the applauding plenary, casting the SPD opposition as politically compliant with Adenauer’s policy. After Ollenhauer’s statement, the segment concludes with the parliament members unanimously accepting a motion to be presented for resolution at the 1955-Ge- Symbolic Homecoming of the «Hero-Father» 59 neva Conference (with the expectation that the question of German reunification take center stage during these talks), thus creating the impression of undivided support for Adenauer’s policies by the Bundestag. After this parliamentary interlude, the film’s last part reveals the supposed effect of Adenauer’s policies by depicting the arrival of the POWs in West Germany and their reunion with their families. In terms of the film’s dramaturgy, this concludes the master narrative of Adenauer’s political and humanitarian heroism and charges it with maximum emotive force: the impact of Adenauer’s foreign policy on West Germany is rendered in the form of human drama. The film’s dramatic conclusion is introduced by images of the first ‹Heimkehrer› dismounting the trains at the Herleshausen border station and being offered food and drink by Red Cross nurses. 24 During a celebration in the festive town square, the veterans receive flowers from the waiting onlookers and are soon boarding buses to the Friedland reception center. The central segment opens with a shot of the Friedland tower bell and closes with a scene in which the former POWs and their families recite the Lord’s Prayer. This creates a thematic frame around the POWs’ return and imbues the images of homecoming with solemn and religious undertones that suggest the return of Germany’s «prodigal sons,» the remembrance and religious sublimation of their suffering, and the mourning for those who perished during the long ordeal in Soviet labor camps. It is a cathartic scene in which the assembled crowd collectively works through the suffering, the guilt, and the joy of reunification. In visual terms, it finally puts to rest a traumatic past. Fig. 7: Deutsche Wochenschau Filmarchiv, Hamburg 60 Jan Uelzmann Sentimental, emotive music with decidedly «Eastern»-sounding harmonies accompanies the scenes in which the POWs leave the buses and meet their loved ones. Close-ups of women holding photos of their husbands and sons alternate with shots of men being reunited with their families. The commentary «An dieser Straße der Wiedersehensfreude: viele, die vergebens warteten,» together with a shot of a crying, older woman and a younger woman intently scanning the crowd for her missing family member, reminds the viewer of the many men who did not come back, thereby once again stressing the German victim narrative consistently favored by the film. The victim narrative continues after Federal President Theodor Heuss repatriated the POWs with the words «Liebe Landsleute, Heimkehrer aus dem fernen Osten.» A spokesman for the POWs addresses the former soldiers and their families who are assembled in front of a small stage: Wir stehen mit klopfendem Herzen und mit Tränen in den Augen vor Ihnen. Wir schämen uns dieser Tränen nicht. Wir haben 10 Jahre lang nicht geweint. Nicht einmal. Wir weinen auch nicht darüber, dass eine schwere Zeit hinter uns liegt. Wir weinen darüber, dass es soviel Liebe und soviel Treue gibt, wie wir sie heute erleben konnten. Wenn ich heute als Beauftragter dieser 600 Soldaten, die als letzte zurückkehren aus dem großen Kriege, vor Ihnen sprechen darf, und für sie sprechen darf, dann ist für mich das die größte Ehre. In register and choice of topic, this ‹Heimkehrer› employs rhetorical traditions popular in public addresses during the Third Reich: the trope of the pounding heart to illustrate the gravity of the moment; the focus on defiance in the face of adversity; the notions of honor, loyalty, and faith. Two more things are important about this speech: Firstly, it stresses the German victim status; there is no mention of the preceding attack on the Soviet Union, of Soviet casualties. Secondly, it defiantly upholds and rehabilitates German soldierly virtues, the soldiers themselves, and their families: the POWs allegedly never cried, and their families, especially their wives, stood lovingly and faithfully behind them. The issue of «Treue,» in this context, carries a crucial double meaning: national loyalty to the cause of the POWs and, in the private realm, the sexual faithfulness of the wives. All in all, this scene reinforces the impression of a tight community between these men, their families, and West Germany. It recasts the POWs as honorable soldier-citizens and morally untainted individuals who doggedly lived through the ordeal of imprisonment. As the camera pans over the assembled crowd, the men on the screen are not presented as perpetrators, but rather as victimized heroes, and they are recognized as such by a grateful nation. Through the crosscutting in this scene, which alternates between shots of the speaker, the POWs, and their families, the former soldiers are finally demobilized and symbolically repatriated. Symbolic Homecoming of the «Hero-Father» 61 The short sequence at the end of the central segment of the film’s conclusion, in which the assembled crowd, together with Federal President Theodor Heuss, recites the Lord’s Prayer, is of special interest in this context, for it imbues this «family reunion» 25 with strong allegorical qualities. The sequence in question is a montage of three medium close-ups of two returning POWs and a civilian woman. The former soldiers represent the Wehrmacht and thus Hitler’s war of aggression. At the same time, the POWs’ faces betray the enormous struggle of trying to stay alive in the Soviet labor camps. The woman symbolizes the German civilian population, which, like the former soldiers in the film, is cast into a double role: as potential perpetrator or at least passive ‹Mitläufer› of the Nazis, and as victim (of the war and as someone who was missing a family member for so many years). The allegorical effect arises from the placement of the montage in close proximity to the scene depicting the Federal President, various church leaders, and the ‹Heimkehrer› with their families uttering the words of the Lord’s Prayer: «Und vergib uns unsere Schuld/ Wie auch wir vergeben unseren Schuldigern.» In this scene, if only through a vague allusion, German guilt is actually acknowledged, although balanced against the discourse of German suffering. Like the regular NDW newsreels, Begegnung im Kreml avoids explicit references as to how and why these ex-soldiers fell into the hands of the Soviet Union. Schwarz sums up her observations about the treatment of the POW question in the regular NDW newsreels as following: «Nationalsozialismus und Krieg, die der Gefangennahme vorausgegangen waren, blieben ausgeblendet. […] Die Gewalt des Krieges erschien reduziert auf die Erfahrung in den sowjetischen Lagern» (197). Instead of the often Fig. 8: Deutsche Wochenschau Filmarchiv, Hamburg 62 Jan Uelzmann Fig. 9: Deutsche Wochenschau Filmarchiv, Hamburg Fig. 10: Deutsche Wochenschau Filmarchiv, Hamburg Fig. 11: Deutsche Wochenschau Filmarchiv, Hamburg Symbolic Homecoming of the «Hero-Father» 63 invoked «collective amnesia» of Germans, there actually existed a West German collective memory of the years of the Third Reich; however, it focused largely on German victimhood, while «widespread amnesia only applied to the crimes committed in the period between 1933 and 1945» (Wittlinger 64). During the emotionally evocative end of the film, the crowd sings Bach’s choral «Nun danket alle Gott,» a song customarily intoned whenever a new transport of POWs arrived at Friedland («Spätheimkehrer: Den letzten Mann heimholen» 5). The sound of the communal singing accompanies further shots of emotional reunions between the ‹Heimkehrer› and their families. The editing of these scenes presents to the viewer a collective reworking of the German experience of the war against the Soviet Union: it aims to put to rest a traumatic past and suggests reciprocal forgiveness as embodied by the Lord’s Prayer as a path into the future. With these images, the film’s narrative of Konrad Adenauer’s «Fahrt ins Blaue,» framed as a dangerous expedition into the largely unknown territory of the old Bolshevik and present Communist enemy, is complete: «Adenauer kämpft in der Hauptstadt der Sowjetunion die Gefangenen frei« (Ruge 120) - this is the message that Begegnung im Kreml relays in elaborately edited and symbolically complex images. Begegnung im Kreml lends itself well as a case study of the political function of NDW special feature films as «government channels» in West Germany’s otherwise democratic media landscape. By creating an unambiguously positive image of the Chancellor, the film helped cement Adenauer’s media image as the patriarchal elder statesman. Most of the scenes discussed deal with families, and by extension with Germany as a whole. While the film’s laudatory reporting on the negotiations in Moscow highlights Adenauer’s function as a politician whose policies are based on broad political consensus and executed in the best interest of West Germany, its images of homecoming and reunion symbolically close the book on the traumatic German experience in the aftermath of Operation Barbarossa. Presented as a direct result of Adenauer’s policies, these images allow mourning for those who perished, celebrate the return of the ones who survived and the reunion with their families, and serve as a sobering reminder that such a war must never happen again. By admitting guilt and balancing it against German victimhood, they aim to symbolically overcome the haunted past. During the onset of the Economic Miracle in 1956, this film offered its West German audience an opportunity to finally turn the page on a lingering and highly disturbing chapter of recent history. To the West German audience of 1956, the reunion images from Friedland represent a «symbolischer Schlußstein des Krieges» (Schwarz 198). With the last of the remaining POWs back on German soil, the film suggests that West Germans now are ready to direct their attention fully to the future. In the 64 Jan Uelzmann narrative logic of the film, this closure was given to West Germans solely by the political talent and diplomatic skill of their chancellor, Konrad Adenauer. Notes 1 I am very grateful for the support I received from the Deutsche Wochenschau Filmarchiv in Hamburg for this project. I am particularly indebted to Susanne Serowiecki, Heike Meier, and Tankred Howe. 2 Ironically, several of the cameramen (Horst Grund, Erich Stoll) involved in the reporting on Adenauer’s trip had already covered the Wehrmacht’s war on the Soviet Union for the NDW’s Third Reich predecessor, Deutsche Wochenschau (Camera Operator Assignment List). Horst Grund «drehte für die ‹Deutsche Wochenschau› Berichte von Kriegsschauplätzen in Russland […]» (Heusterberg). Erich Stoll had been the head camera operator of the Nazi newsreels (Schwarz 89-90). Additional information on this subject can be found in Reimers 159. While a larger study on personal continuities and the similarities in style and register between the two newsreel companies is still needed, this essay shall take a different focus and look at the significance of the NDW’s reporting for West Germany at the time. 3 I use the English expression «special features» in order to indicate that these films were produced separately from the regular NDW newsreels. In December 1955, the NDW changed its name back to Deutsche Wochenschau. However, Begegnung im Kreml (1956) was still released under the name Neue Deutsche Wochenschau. Special features on Adenauer were made at least until 1976, when the Deutsche Wochenschau produced a film commemorating Adenauer’s one hundredth birthday, entitled 100 Jahre Adenauer. 4 My reading builds on research by Uta Schwarz on Adenauer’s screen persona in regular newsreels (352-53). 5 In Moeller’s analysis, «Germans, East and West, were able to say relatively little about their responsibility in the crimes of National Socialism, at least in part because they talked so loudly about their own status as victims. On both sides of the border, Germans made the transition from the racially defined ‹community of the people› of the Third Reich to the community of victims of a war for which they accepted no responsibility, to the community of survivors that gradually emerged from the ruins, ready to preserve and rebuild what remained of the ‹good› Germany» (Moeller, «The Politics of the Past» 38). 6 To give another example of this process: the heroic image of the «rubble women» (Trümmerfrauen) was instrumental in creating a West German postwar identity during the time of the Economic Miracle. See Heinemann (47) for details. 7 The leadership of Adenauer’s new Foreign Office, most importantly Foreign Minister Heinrich von Brentano, had serious reservations about the new diplomatic presence of the FRG alongside that of the GDR in Moscow. The two most important concerns were that such a presence would result in the FRG’s de-facto acknowledgement of Germany’s eastern border, and that it would threaten the FRG’s ‹Alleinvertretungsanspruch,› the claim that the FRG alone represented the German people (Kilian 45-46). Even after the offer to exchange the POWs for diplomatic relations had been made by the Soviets and accepted by Adenauer after days of difficult negotiations, the representatives of the Foreign Office still insisted on postponing diplomatic relations, continuing the negotiations Symbolic Homecoming of the «Hero-Father» 65 on a lower level, and demanding a written agreement about the POWs’ release. The Soviets, on the other hand, declined to give such a written promise (Kilian 171, 176). 8 See, for example, Schwarz, Steininger, Brenner, and Daniel. 9 See Schwarz (74-80) for a detailed account of the NDW’s founding. 10 Kay Hoffmann speaks of a «Forschungslücke» in regard to newsreel production after 1945. Compared to the Third Reich newsreels especially, West German newsreels are clearly an under-researched field, and hard facts about distribution, audience size, and reception remain scant to this day. While even less research exists on the special features, Hans-Jürgen Schröder has recently offered an insightful discussion of two NDW special features reporting on Adenauer’s early state visits to the United States (Ein Mann wirbt für sein Volk (1953) and Partner der Freiheit (1957)) as CDU election propaganda. Schröder established that Ein Mann wirbt für sein Volk was the most important film in the CDU’s elaborate propaganda apparatus of 1953. Prior to the federal election that year, the film experienced over 1,600 showings per week and reached an estimated total of two to three million people through screenings in commercial cinemas and during «außergewerbliche[n] Filmvorführungen» (Schröder 143-44). Surprisingly, Begegnung im Kreml fared quite differently. 11 Since this essay is more concerned with the production rather than the reception of the film’s propagandistic narrative, Reimers’s preliminary data on the film’s reception sufficiently supports the argument. Precise audience numbers can only be determined by a larger study of the film’s reception that would need to include an assessment of the correspondence about Begegnung im Kreml from the Government Press Office, if such records still exist. 12 See in this context Moeller’s analysis of West German press coverage and public memory concerning Adenauer’s trip to Moscow and the release of the POWs (War Stories 88- 122). See also «Kanzler-Besuch: Lesen Sie Karl Marx,» and Backhaus’s identification of the image of the returning POW as key symbol for the collective memory of Adenauer’s diplomatic achievement. 13 Welt im Bild existed from 1952 to 1956. The newsreel was the successor of the Allied newsreel Welt im Film, which was handed over to NDW in 1952. Starting in 1956, Welt im Bild appeared as Ufa-Wochenschau. 14 This number combines the viewers of the two NDW productions Neue Deutsche Wochenschau and Welt im Bild. 15 Cf. Schröder’s discussion of the term in relation to Adenauer (149). 16 According to Moeller, the German news magazine Der Stern «celebrated» the car as a «genuine tourist attraction in Moscow, carrying not only West German political leaders but dreams of West German economic prosperity as well» (War Stories 97). 17 See the discussion of the film in Reimers. One discussant observes that due to the methodical arrangement of images «[sich] ganz offenkundig wieder zwei ‹Große Mächte› begegnen - wie sonst wäre es zu erklären, daß man in einem wohlkalkulierten Wechsel von sowjetischen/ russischen und deutschen/ bundesrepublikanischen Traditionsbildern vorgeht? […] [M]an zeigt in der Freiheit eines ganz neuen Selbstverständnisses, daß dort ein Volk lebt, viele Völker leben, die über große Traditionen verfügen, die uns etwas zu sagen haben, die sich uns mitteilen wollen - und daß wir als demokratische Bundes- Deutsche nun dort bei diesen ‹fremden› Völkern angekommen sind, bei ihnen Besuch machen, uns selbst erklären» (182). 18 The characterization of the Soviet Union as both an «old and new enemy» also appears in Moeller’s examination of contemporary press reporting on the POWs’ homecoming, 66 Jan Uelzmann some of which recast Hitler’s soldiers as defenders against Cold War Communism (War Stories 113). 19 The cinematic rendering of these scenes, such as the legendary handshake between Adenauer and Bulganin at the Bolschoi theatre, and the banquet in the Kremlin, during which the Soviets took the German delegation by surprise by suddenly agreeing to release the POWs, deserves further scholarly attention. For more information on these events and their political and symbolic implications see Kilian and Ruge. For a very early account (1955) see Backhaus. 20 Most importantly, there was no progress on the question of German reunification, diplomatic relations were neglected by Adenauer from the start, and Adenauer’s declaration that West Germany alone represented the German people remained unilateral. 21 Cf. Schwarz’s discussion of narrative patterns in regular NDW newsreels (361-64). Schwarz uses Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz’s typology of «contest,» «conquest,» and «coronation» in relation to the broadcasting of historical events. I suggest that for the special feature films on Adenauer’s state visits like Begegnung im Kreml, which feature longer narrative patterns than a regular newsreel segment of one to two minutes, a more comprehensive narrative typology such as the proposed «expedition narrative» makes more sense. The «expedition» pattern allows for a combination of all three situations described in Dayan and Katz’s typology, and thus more adequately reflects the different scenes and corresponding situations depicted in the longer special feature films. 22 Bundesarchiv Bildarchiv B 145 Bild-P107546. The corresponding caption on the picture archive website reads: «Die Mutter eines Kriegsgefangenen dankt Bundeskanzler Dr. Konrad Adenauer nach seiner Rückkehr aus Moskau am 14.9.1955 auf dem Flughafen Köln/ Bonn für den erfolgreichen Abschluß seiner Verhandlungen mit der sowjetischen Führung. Dr. Adenauer hatte erreicht, daß bis Ende 1955 über 15.000 Kriegsgefangene, Internierte und Zivilverschleppte in die Bundesrepublik Deutschland entlassen wurden.» 23 For a detailed account see Schissler (359-75). See also Uelzmann (184-86). Franz Josef Würmeling was Minister of Family Affairs under Konrad Adenauer from 1953 to 1962 and belonged to the conservative wing of the CDU. 24 The POWs had the choice to return either to the GDR or to the Federal Republic. According to contemporary accounts, POWs slated for a return to the GDR received preferential treatment and new clothing. However, many of these POWs still opted to go to the Federal Republic instead and insisted on their right to choose their destination (Schmidt 16). Accounts of earlier ‹Spätheimkehrer› repatriations from 1953 suggest that GDR and Soviet officials tried to convince selected individuals to stay in the GDR, while the trains stopped there before they went on to Friedland («Spätheimkehrer: Den letzten Mann heimholen» 9). 25 Examining a regular NDW newsreel about the Friedland reunion event, which must have featured many similar shots, Schwarz calls attention to the «dramaturgisch ausgefeilte Inszenierung einer ‹Familienzusammenführung›» and argues that the montage of individual shots of a couple with two adolescent children created the sense of a «zum Happy End führenden ‹family reunion›-Geschichte» (200). Symbolic Homecoming of the «Hero-Father» 67 Works Cited 100 Jahre Adenauer. Deutsche Wochenschau, 1976. Film. Backhaus, Wilhelm. Begegnung im Kreml: So wurden die Gefangenen befreit. West Berlin: Ullstein, 1955. Begegnung im Kreml: Adenauer in Moskau. Deutsche Wochenschau, 1956. Film. Berresheim, Eliese. «Adenauers Moskau-Reise war ein guter Schachzug.» Welt Online. Die Welt, 9 Aug. 2009. Web. 2 Feb. 2012. Brenner, Wolfgang. «Adenauers ‹Freies Fernsehen›: Der Bundeskanzler hatte es satt.» FAZ.net. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 26 Mar. 2013. Web. 25 Aug. 2013. Camera Operator Assignment List. SF 80. Deutsche Wochenschau Filmarchiv, Hamburg. Carter, Erica. How German Is She? : Postwar West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1997. Daniel, Ute. «Die Politik der Propaganda: Zur Praxis gouvernementaler Selbstrepräsentation vom Kaiserreich bis zur Bundesrepublik.» Propaganda. Meinungskampf, Verführung und politische Sinnstiftung 1789-1989. Eds. Ute Daniel and Wolfgang Siemann. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1994. 44-82. Dayan, Daniel, and Elihu Katz. Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992. Dylan, Bob. «With God On Our Side.» The Times They Are a-Changin’. Columbia Records, 1964. LP. «Flughafen Köln/ Bonn. - Alte Frau küsst Konrad Adenauer die Hand; rechts: Bundesaußenminister Heinrich von Brentano.» 1955. Bildarchiv, Bundesarchiv. Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung - Bildbestand. Web. 27 Aug. 2013. Heinemann, Elizabeth. «The Hour of the Woman: Memories of Germany’s ‹Crisis Years› and West German National Identity.» The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949-1968. Ed. Hanna Schissler. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001. 21-56. Heusterberg, Babette. «Kameramann Horst Grund - Vier Jahrzehnte für die Wochenschau.» www.bundesarchiv.de. Das Bundesarchiv, 25 June 2013. Web. 25 Aug. 2013. Hoffmann, Kay. «Zwischen Kontinuität und Neuanfang: Ein Resumée der Wochenschautagung ‹Zwischen Aktualität und Unterhaltung›.» Dokumentarfilmforschung.de. Haus des Dokumentarfilms/ Europäisches Medienforum Stuttgart, 13-Oct. 2011. Web. 26 Aug. 2013. «Kanzler-Besuch: Lesen sie Karl Marx.» Der Spiegel 21 Sept. 1955: 9-15. Kilian, Werner. Adenauers Reise Nach Moskau. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2005. Küsters, Hanns Jürgen. «Konrad Adenauer, die Presse, der Rundfunk und das Fernsehen.» Konrad Adenauer und die Presse. Ed. Karl-Günther von Hase. Bonn: Bouvier, 1988. 13-31. Moeller, Robert G. «Remembering the War in a Nation of Victims: West German Pasts in the 1950s.» The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949-1968. Ed. Hanna Schissler. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001. 83-109. -. War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2001. -. «The Politics of the Past in the 1950s: Rhetorics of Victimization in East and West Germany.» Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany. Ed. William John Niven. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 26-42. 68 Jan Uelzmann Paschen, Joachim. «Die unabhängigste Wochenschau der Welt? Aus den 1950er-Anfangsjahren eines publizistischen Regierungsorgans.» www.dokumentarfilm.info. Haus des Dokumentarfilms/ Europäisches Medienforum Stuttgart, 12 Oct. 2011. Web. 11 Nov. 2012. -. «Vor der ‹Tagesschau› gab es die ‹Wochenschau›: Hamburg als Produktionsort eines untergegangenen Mediums 1950-1977.» Hamburger Flimmern: Die Zeitschrift des Film- und Fernsehmuseums Hamburg e.V. 17 (2010): 24-31. «Presseamt: Große Lage.» Der Spiegel 14 Oct. 1968: 30-49. Reimers, Karl-Friedrich. «‹Begegnung im Kreml› - Adenauer in Moskau 1955. Diskussion eines bundesamtlichen ‹Reportage-Film›-Dokumentes.» Zweimal Deutschland seit 1945 im Film und Fernsehen I: Von der Kino-Wochenschau zum aktuellen Fernsehen. Ed. Karl Friedrich Reimers, Monika Lerch-Stumpf, and Rüdiger Steinmetz. Munich: Ölschläger, 1983. 147-200. Reimers, Karl Friedrich, and Elisabeth Fleschhut. «Filmdokumente zur Zeitgeschichte: 1955 - ‹Begegnung im Kreml.› Konrad Adenauer in Moskau vor 30 Jahren.» Zweimal Deutschland seit 1945 im Film und Fernsehen II: Audiovisuelle Medien in der politischen Bildung. Ed. Karl Friedrich Reimers, Monika Lerch-Stumpf, and Rüdiger Steinmetz. Munich: Ölschläger, 1985. 99-108. Ruge, Gerd. «Adenauer in Moskau 1955: Was war, was wurde, was bleibt? » Adenauers Moskaubesuch 1955: Eine Reise im internationalen Kontext. Ed. Helmut Altrichter. Bonn: Bouvier, 2007. 120-46. Schissler, Hanna. «‹Normalization› as Project: Some Thoughts on Gender Relations in West Germany during the 1950s.» The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949-1968. Ed. Hanna Schissler. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001. 359-75. Schmidt, Helmut. Ankunft der Spätheimkehrer aus sowjetischer Kriegsgefangenenschaft. 12. Okt. 1955 bis 16. Jan. 1956. Herleshausen: Werratalverein, 2006. PDF file. Schröder, Hans-Jürgen. «Wahlkampfbilder: Die Visualisierung von Adenauers Amerikareisen 1953 und 1957 in Propagandafilmen der CDU.» Wahlkämpfe in Deutschland: Fallstudien zur Wahlkampfkommunikation 1912-2005. Ed. Nikolaus Jakob. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2007. 137-50. Schwarz, Uta. Wochenschau, westdeutsche Identität und Geschlecht in den fünfziger Jahren. Frankfurt a.M./ New York: Campus, 2002. «Spätheimkehrer: Den letzten Mann heimholen.» Der Spiegel 7 Oct. 1953: 5-9. Steininger, Rolf. «Rundfunkpolitik im ersten Kabinett Adenauer.» Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 21.4 (1973): 388-434. Uelzmann, Jan. «Consumption and Consummation: Domestic Tales of the Economic Miracle in Arno Schmidt’s Das steinerne Herz.» The German Quarterly 86.2 (2013): 180-97. Walker, Horst O. Das Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung. Frankfurt a.M.: Haag + Herchen Verlag, 1982. Wittlinger, Ruth. «Taboo or Tradition? The ‹Germans as Victims› Theme in West Germany until the Early 1990s.» Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany. Ed. Bill Niven. Basigstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 62-75. Transcendent Trivialities: Utopian Space and Fallen Things in Gerhard Meier’s Toteninsel SAMUEL FREDERICK Pennsylvania State University Introduction In a letter to Louise Colet from 1852, Gustave Flaubert famously expressed his desire to write a «book about nothing»: […] a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the internal strength of its style, just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing for its support; a book which would have almost no subject, or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible, if such a thing were possible. (The Letters 154) 1 What Flaubert apparently has in mind is not a book of blank pages, in the manner of some of Richard Brautigan’s poems, which provide a title, but nothing more. 2 That would be a book of nothing. Instead, Flaubert dreamt of writing a book about nothing (sur rien), by which he appears to mean a book emptied of its conventional content, but still full - full of words. This would be a book that did not owe its existence as a single, unified work to what it might tell (in the manner of a narrative) or impart to the reader as advice, observation, or argument. Such a book, rather, would self-reflexively call attention to itself as a collection of words that ask to be appreciated in and of themselves, without the need to refer to - and thus be said to be about - something else. One might say that what Flaubert imagined was a book unencumbered by the need to signify any single thing, a self-generating book that performed the free play of the sign in a celebration of the multiplicity and irreducibility of signification. In such a case, nothing would turn over into everything. In not being tied to the need to convey a cohesive collection of ideas, events, or arguments, the book could unravel itself as style, which would hold it together in a manner usually expected of content, something now on the verge of disappearing entirely into the background, reduced to serving no structural role whatsoever - the mere stuff that occasions linguistic play. But Flaubert in fact suggests that the ideal book would lack even this stuff. «The finest works are those that contain the least matter,» he goes on to write in the same letter (The Letters 154). 3 In thus wanting to purify the literary 70 Samuel Frederick work so that it might ascend beyond matter to pure form, Flaubert evokes a kind of literary Platonism. The most real and ideal book is one that floats above things, «suspended in the void,» existing apart from the stuff of this world. In this image Flaubert treats style as an instantiation of the hypostasized Forms, «dependent on nothing external,» unified, self-sufficient, eternal. And yet his point of comparison is «the earth» itself - matter in all its thisness. The vehicle of Flaubert’s metaphor (earth), that is, appears to pull its lofty, ethereal tenor (pure style) back down to solid ground. This tension between matter and form, something and nothing, content and style that complicates Flaubert’s dream also animates the work of the Swiss writer Gerhard Meier (1917-2008). Meier’s 1979 novel Toteninsel, in particular, which uses as its epigraph an excerpt from this same section of the 1852 letter, announces itself as a programmatic response to Flaubert’s ideal of the «book about nothing.» 4 Toteninsel, however, although on one level an attempt to realize Flaubert’s dream, is also deftly critical of the Platonic assumptions that give rise to it. 5 Meier’s ambivalence turns on the aporia of Flaubert’s metaphor, its dual division and interlinking of matter and form, in which pure form is postulated on the basis of matter’s insignificance, even though matter stubbornly persists as a central image of form’s desire for immateriality. Meier’s response is at once to try to write Flaubert’s impossible book, to manifest in his prose some kind of «immateriality» by jettisoning the conventional content of narrative. But in the process he also reveals that such a project is untenable, not least because it neglects the very matter it (ostensibly) needs to cast off for its realization. Meier’s novel suggests that precisely this matter - mere stuff, the ordinary thing - is of critical importance, after all. In this article I will thus read Meier’s undertaking as a literary-metaphysical answer to Flaubert’s Platonism. By «metaphysical» I mean, specifically, the dual act of critique and rescue, «die Anstrengung des Denkens, das zu erretten, was es zugleich auflöst,» that Adorno, in his lectures on Aristotle, articulates as the philosophical endeavor of metaphysics as such (35). Toteninsel’s metaphysical project, I maintain, which is at the same time its literary program, is to expose Flaubert’s dream of a «book dependent on nothing external» as an impossibility even as it attempts to rescue the moment of transcendence aimed for in that dream. Meier carries out this dual critique and rescue first by means of an attempted spatialization of his novel, which is at once a method for overcoming narrative’s most fundamental - because ineluctable - content (its temporality), but also ultimately a means to show up the impasse created by such an attempted overcoming. In this way, the novel performs the failure of what it begins by aspiring for. Meier’s achievement, I aim to show in the first section of this article, is deeply bound up in this para- Transcendent Trivialities 71 dox. The dream of a narrative about nothing, that is, can only be realized by means of the very structures it would need to dispense with in order to reach this goal. How, Meier seems to ask, does one write a narrative about the dissolution of narrative without thereby affirming and re-inscribing what one means to erase? His answer dovetails with the second «metaphysical» impulse of his novel, which is one of rescue. Instead of merely revealing the failure of Flaubert’s ideal, Meier attempts ultimately to redeem it through the very stuff that seems to make it impossible. Instead, that is, of casting off the «matter» of his narrative, Meier homes in on it with renewed attention in the attempt to find transcendence where there is apparently only triviality: in the overlooked things of the everyday. It is in and through these things, as I show in the article’s second main section, that Meier is able to renegotiate the formal and metaphysical conundrum posed by Flaubert’s wish. Things on the one hand provide his book with the mere stuff - as opposed to time-bound actions - needed to populate his newly spatialized narrative. But they also become the locus of poetological reflection on the virtues and vices of privileging form (as «style») over matter (as «content»). The complex literary and philosophical ways in which Toteninsel mobilizes ordinary materiality suggest, in the end, that only if this binary (form/ matter) is recalibrated to allow for transcendence in things can literature (and narrative in particular) grant access to «no-thing,» to Flaubert’s ideal of nothing. 6 The primary impetus of this article, therefore, is to undertake a theoretical investigation of the inconspicuous, forgotten, and discarded thing as a feature of literary representation. How do mere things - necessarily bereft of interiority and situated outside the nexus of instrumentalized objects - become critical to a literary project that wants, above all, to transcend things? In answering this question I borrow insights from various (and diverse) thinkers, most importantly Georg Lukács and Walter Benjamin, to broaden and complexify the conceptual framework that Meier’s work opens up. 7 I approach this framework at the outset with a conception of the thing that comes from Bill Brown, who, using Heidegger, draws an important distinction between objects and things: «You could imagine things […] as what is excessive in objects, as what exceeds their mere materialization as objects or their mere utilization as objects - their force as a sensuous presence or as a metaphysical presence» (5). Meier’s work confronts us precisely with such excess in objects, though this excess importantly refuses to stay put on either this side of sensuous or that side of metaphysical presence. Meier’s things, rather, point to the inextricability of the sensuous and the metaphysical, so that the «force» that epiphanically interrupts the everyday to allow for transcendence coincides 72 Samuel Frederick with the force that draws us closer to the everyday in all its mundaneness. Things in Toteninsel, that is, reside on the threshold of something and nothing, of mere content and pure form, of the mundane and the transcendent. Their oscillation between these realms describes the philosophical content of Meier’s novel just as much as it informs its narrative project, its apparently conflicting attempts to access some realm beyond things in things themselves, to achieve the transcendent status of «pure style» not by disposing of matter, but by embracing it. Because Meier’s «literary metaphysics» makes the originary philosophical problem of matter and form inseparable from questions of literary production and representation, this article also considers Toteninsel as a work of experimental fiction that demands we reevaluate the fundamental categories of content and form (or fabula and sjuzhet) at the basis of conventional mimetic narration. 8 While working through the ways Meier deploys things in his novel opens up new avenues for rethinking narrative’s foundational categories, it additionally reveals how Meier’s aimed-for «transcendence,» in the end, also straddles something and nothing in the guise of interpersonal companionship. I will therefore conclude the article with a brief coda in which I propose reading Toteninsel as a novel of (though importantly not about) friendship, one that does not so much represent as enact a mode of togetherness that is only made possible by means of its formal experiments with space and things, as well as in the philosophical resonances with which these experiments coincide. I. Forging Utopian Space The situation of Toteninsel is fairly straightforward, even if its form is highly idiosyncratic. Two older men - one named Baur, the other Bindschädler - are taking a walk through the Swiss town of Olten. Bindschädler narrates this walk, quoting at length the discourse of Baur, who talks nearly incessantly from the start of the novel to its close. The form and frequency of these two sets of otherwise simple actions (walking, talking), however, complicate the novel’s levels of narrative priority and, in turn, its status as narrative. Take, for instance, the difficulty of determining the novel’s primary narrator. Since two-thirds of the text consists of Baur’s direct discourse, and some portion more of his indirect discourse, Bindschädler might be seen as the extradiegetic narrator. He is the one, from this perspective, who provides the narrative frame in which in fact Baur functions as the main (homodiegetic) narrator. And yet Baur does not really tell much of a story. He rambles. Thinking aloud, he lets his thoughts stray from topic to topic and back again, without Transcendent Trivialities 73 any central cohesion or final resolution that would grant his reminiscences and reflections any kind of unity, let alone mere sequenciality. It would be difficult, that is, to reconstruct a series of interconnected events from the fragments of memory and observation that make up his discourse. Yet if we treat Bindschädler, instead of Baur, as the primary narrator, we encounter a similar problem, since Bindschädler does not tell much of a story, either. The event that he narrates is that of the walk and of his friend’s loquaciousness during that walk. Nothing more. Furthermore, the walk itself - to which I will turn in more detail below - is sparsely narrated: nothing much happens. The two men move south-by-southwest into the center of Olten, first following the river Aar, then some side streets that lead them to a church, which they briefly enter; then to a museum, which they also briefly visit; and then to a shopping center, where they stop, for only a short time, to eat. Having eaten, they continue their walk, which even on the last page of the novel is still underway. These actions may be classified as fulfilling the minimal requirement of a narrative in strictly structural or formal terms. Indeed, in his standard Dictionary of Narratology, Gerald Prince allows for narrative to be realized as the representation of merely one event, such that even «such possibly uninteresting texts as […] ‹The goldfish died›» would, for him, fulfill the minimal requirement of narrativity (58). These three words might constitute a miniature narrative of sorts (since they describe a change of state), but they lack sequentiality and causality, both of which are fundamental to nearly every theory of narrative, and both of which emerge from narrative’s deep connection to temporality. This is precisely what is at stake in Toteninsel. 9 Meier empties his novel of causally motivated events, and thereby reduces it to the slowly unfolding action of a single event - the walk - that, as we will see, has no teleological shape, even though it is unmistakably temporal in its linear movement. But this linearity alone does not ground the narrative in time so much as reduce the overall impact of temporality, leaving a skeletal sequence of action onto and from which spatial details can be built. This spatialization of the narrative may be made possible by means of the novel’s sparse eventfulness, but it is realized by means of its geographical precision. Bindschädler’s narration is so detailed with regard to the urban landscape in particular that the reader can trace almost every move made by the two men through the streets and alleys of Olten. 10 The coordinates of their town stroll, furthermore, reveal movements that have neither center nor goal, de-emphasizing teleology and thus temporality. As soon as something like a pattern to their walk appears to take shape, their course shifts in a different direction. Assuming their starting point is somewhere to the north of the town (since, when the novel begins, we find them walking southward into Olten’s 74 Samuel Frederick downtown), they do not, for instance, take the most direct path to the church (the first stop). Rather, they at first walk further east, then double back before seeming to head back in the direction from which they came, only later to be found heading again into the town center. It is not even clear that they have planned to stop at the church. This brief pause in their perambulations appears to be an improvised stopover that becomes part of the walk’s meandering shape by virtue of its proximity to the otherwise spontaneously unfolding route. Only the visit to the museum (which lasts a mere half page) seems to be partly motivated by the desire to see the paintings of Max Gubler. Therefore, if there is an intention to the single action of the friends’ walk, it is this museum visit, which is hardly narrated at all. But very little is narrated to begin with. The (textual) space allotted to the fragments of observation and memory that interrupt the narration of the walk far outweighs that granted the representation of this walk itself. The reader is thus denied any sense of a narrative design governed by end-oriented motivation so that the spatial features of the walk dominate starkly over its otherwise self-evident temporal character. 11 Despite this neutralization of temporality and teleology as determinants of the narrative, time still remains critically present throughout the novel, in part because most of Baur’s discussion concerns memories of the past. And yet these memories are stripped of their temporality by being presented as static moments that become, as Baur repeatedly says, pictures «an den Wänden der Seele» (e.g., 34). Baur’s metaphorical notion of remembering as looking at paintings hanging on the walls of his soul is fundamentally connected to how the novel forges narrative space, as well as to its extended discourses on various spaces and their representations in the visual arts. The title of the novel, for example, refers to the famous painting by Arnold Böcklin, discussed near the end of the book. 12 Bindschädler repeatedly mentions Picasso, in particular his Woman with a Rooster, as well as Caspar David Friedrich. Bindschädler also describes a Pietà that he sees in the church they enter; and the two friends visit the Olten museum to look at Gubler’s paintings. Finally, there is Alfred Anker’s Mädchen auf rotem Grund, which Baur mentions, and which the narrator returns to again and again in his reflections. 13 Meier aligns these explicitly non-narrative, spatial artworks not only with the act of remembrance, but also with the landscape traversed by the two friends - «Unser Landstrich gab sich nun gleichsam als Aquarell» (132) - and, ultimately, with the novel as literary form itself, which Bindschädler figures as a tapestry: «[F]ür mich [ist] der Roman einem Teppich vergleichbar, einem handgewobenen, bei dessen Herstellung besonders auf die Farben, Motive achtgegeben wird, die sich wiederholen […]» (81). It takes time to make such a tapestry, and time to walk through the landscape, but this time is repeatedly transformed into spatial Transcendent Trivialities 75 forms, which dominate the discourse of the novel. These spatial forms, furthermore, only reveal the traces of time as something to be overcome. 14 Indeed, existence itself is primarily spatial in Toteninsel, and that spatiality becomes a figure for a kind of ideal mode of being, sealed off from time. Baur’s repeated metaphor for remembering - hanging a picture on the walls of his soul - provides its governing trope, reminding Bindschädler of an article he read about a house in Warsaw on the Ulica Dabrowiecka in which every possible space on walls, ceilings, even floors, is used to display works of art. There are so many paintings, sketches, and woodcuts in the house - over 7,000 - that no part of wall or ceiling is visible anymore. The owner calls it a «paradiesischer Käfig» (41-42). It is a cage because any inhabitant would be trapped in an enclosed space that no longer functions as a house, having instead become a grotesque museum. And it is paradisiacal for the same reason: the Dabrowiecka house is unlivable not just in a practical sense, but also in a utopian sense. Made up of static images, the house represents a timeless space that is no longer available to us, a paradisiacal space from which we have fallen in our everyday, time-bound lives. 15 This museum house, then, becomes the literal manifestation of the paradox central to the novel: the only way to recover memories is to narrate them, but to do this is to give time to something that has lost time. The best we can do is to abstract our memories, to turn them into static images, so that the temporal loses grip as the spatial takes over. To fully inhabit the spaces opened up in this way may be impossible - but trying may be as close as we get to something paradisiacal. This notion of the paradisiacal is reinforced by the only work of art from the Dabrowiecka house that Bindschädler singles out with any detail, a woodcut by the folk artist Jozef Lurka called Eve with Trout in Paradise: Da gebe es zum Beispiel von Jozef Lurka, der in Holz die Frohbotschaft verkünde, dabei in schlichter Frömmigkeit theologische Kühnheiten hervorbringend, eine Eva mit Forelle im Paradies, womit Lurka aber nicht auf das altchristliche Fischsymbol für Christus habe hinweisen wollen, sondern ihm sei es darum gegangen, das Paradiesische des Paradieses anschaulich zu machen: Wenn sich ein Löwe streicheln lasse, das sei noch nichts, aber eine Forelle - wo je, seit dem Sündenfall, habe eine Forelle sich streicheln lassen? (42) This art piece serves as the foil to what Bindschädler calls Picasso’s most beautiful painting, Woman with a Rooster, which depicts said animal on its back in a woman’s lap, its feet bound, the woman’s left hand holding its wings tight, and a knife within reach of her right hand. Picasso’s painting shows how we take an animal in hand in order to take its life. Lurka’s shows what ought to be the same situation: a fish has been removed from water so that it will die and can then be eaten. But Lurka turns this image into a paradisiacal setting 76 Samuel Frederick of pure innocence and creaturely peace: the fish is not food, but a companion. Bindschädler gives voice to this strange picture by asking not «when,» but «where» since the Fall has a trout ever allowed itself to be pet, highlighting with this word a crucial distinction in a novel obsessed with space: paradise was a place, not a time. More importantly, it was a place outside of time; and our distance from it is as much a result of being trapped in time, being unable to reclaim a space where time does not reign. Bindschädler is reminded of the Dabrowiecka house and Lurka’s paradisiacal woodcut not just by Baur’s repeated reference to his memories as paintings to hang on the walls of his soul, but also because of the following remark, which the usually silent Baur makes only a page before Bindschädler describes the house-museum in Warsaw: Und alles, Bindschädler, alles dreht sich. Und bald ist das eine oben und bald ist das andere unten. Und da fischt man nach einem Pünktchen, einem einzelnen Leben in diesem Durcheinander, um es herauszustellen zusammen mit anderen Pünktchen, anderen Leben, wie man Fische, Forellen zum Beispiel, heraushebt an der Angel, mit dem Effekt freilich, daß ihr Leben in Zuckungen verebbt. (40) On first glance this image of confusion seems all too familiar, almost clichéd: we seek order in our world, desperately grasping at points with which to orient ourselves in the helter-skelter. But in the context of Toteninsel’s themes the image assumes new, more complex registers of meaning. The little points that we «fish» for are the static points analogous to Baur’s memories as paintings. These are the moments that free us from temporality, the constant spinning we experience as life. But as much as we desire to hold on to one little point, in order to connect it with others, this feat is impossible. The best we can do is to move from one point to the next, shuffling about in the temporal flux. That Baur means to evoke time with these spinning points becomes clear later when he describes the vanity of his cousin’s many clocks as they race not just to measure time, but to get a hold of it for themselves: «während also die vielen Uhren […] durcheinander tickten, die Zeit gleichsam um die Wette messend, aus einer Eitelkeit heraus, diese für sich herauszunehmen.» As these clocks tick away in vain, Baur imagines his town, too, participating in Earth’s spinning: «[es] machte die ausladende Bewegung aller benachbarten Punkte der Erdoberfläche mit, ritt durch das Weltall, drehte sich in der großen Drehung, drehte sich mit um die Erdachse um die Sonne» (53; my emphasis). These are the grand cosmic movements that we try to measure with clocks. But clocks are merely devices that chase after and try to grasp - even to abstract from (another meaning of herausnehmen) - something that cannot be overtaken. Baur’s image of fixing one of the little points would be that moment of overcoming it - everything would stand still, becoming meaning- Transcendent Trivialities 77 ful only in terms of space. But without movement (temporality) everything would also cease to be. Thus to actually succeed in grasping a point would be akin to catching the fish, pulling it out of the environment in which it subsists, and then watching it die. Trout cannot be held - let alone pet - without succumbing. Except in the paradise imagined by Lurka. 16 And that seems to be Meier’s point. To escape from temporality would both be paradisiacal and, therefore, impossible, indeed fatal. Meier’s novel expresses both of these consequences. In its attempt to represent the potential utopian space opened up by the interaction of two friends, Toteninsel reaches for the paradisiacal. Their main action consists of mapping out space while engaged in the most non-productive and causally neutral activity possible: walking. Meier thus makes palpable his novel’s positive, utopian impulse by emptying it of action, and allowing friendship - a state of being, not any single action - to unfold. But he tries to achieve this emptying out via narrative itself, a mode of representation that depends on time to be at all recognizable as narrative. Furthermore, we read in a succession of temporal moments, typically from the beginning to the end of a book, so that our experience of the narrative - whether or not its design is starkly teleological - is a temporal experience. Indeed, time inescapably permeates our existence. To escape from it would be to escape from the world-- effectively to die. Thus in Toteninsel the utopian aspirations embodied in the spatializing walk always carry with them a resignation to time’s ineluctability. The title’s allusion to Böcklin’s painting, an allegory depicting a man being brought to an island representing death, tells us that, on the one hand, this novel is quite literally about nothing: the void, i.e., mortality. It therefore tells not only of two older men who are nearing the end of their lives (Baur lies in his deathbed in the third part of the tetralogy and has died in the fourth); it is also a novel that frames its own utopian aspirations in terms of failure and - especially in the image of the dying fish - fatal impossibility. Gerald Prince’s example of the minimal narrative - «The goldfish died» - here takes on a whole new meaning. Part of the novel’s paradox hinges on the impossibility of recognizing the paradisiacal utopia as a world outside of time without already living in a world governed by time. Paradise is only possible because we have fallen from it - if we hadn’t, there would be no other world from which to understand «das Paradiesische des Paradieses.» For the epigraph to the third novel of the tetralogy to which Toteninsel belongs, Meier expresses the problem via a quotation from Proust: «Die wahren Paradiese sind Paradiese, die man verloren hat» (290). In Toteninsel Meier seems to admit to this impasse, choosing 78 Samuel Frederick the form of narrative as the only means to make palpable a world without narrative (that is, without time). To actually enter this utopian space would be to lose time along with the narrative that allowed for this place to be imaginable in the first place. Meier’s strategy for writing a «book about nothing» is to suggest the undoing of narrative itself in the very process of narrating - thereby constantly reminding us of its impossibility. Theoretical Interlude In the introduction to his Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard defines his central notion of the «new poetic image» in terms of Eugène Minkowski’s «reverberation,» which, as Bachelard specifies, represents «the opposite of causality»: «In this reverberation, the poetic image will have a sonority of being. The poet speaks on the threshold of being» (xvi). Reverberation is a spatial metaphor intended to capture the nature of the change a poetic work can trigger in our being. With this term, Bachelard means to identify how a poetic work communicates to us. He aims to explore this new kind of dynamism in terms of the «phenomenology of the imagination,» which, he stresses, cannot be explained in terms of cause and effect. The poetic image opens up spaces in which reverberations literally take place. But if these reverberations are somehow outside of the realm of causality, then they must take on the characteristic of immediacy. One does not read a poem, and then feel its reverberations. The reading of the poem, rather, coincides with these reverberations, which so alter one’s being that one can no longer speak of a before or after in terms of the aesthetic experience. The poetic image has «take[n] root» (xix) and become one’s own, transforming one’s basic ontological makeup in such a way as to call into question the very temporality that appears to have made it possible. For there was a change, was there not? - and change implies both temporality and causality. But the change effected by reverberation essentially erases the causal original of that change in triggering its transformation. With reverberation, being takes on the characteristics of space. This peculiar, paradoxical logic - which is less Bachelard’s than my reading of Bachelard’s reading of Minkowski - can be found at work in Meier’s Toteninsel, where, as I have attempted to show thus far, fundamentally temporal narration is the vehicle by which that temporality is attempted to be overcome. What «reverberates» in Toteninsel, specifically, are its many things, its inventory of mere stuff, the seeming trivialities observed by Baur and Bindschädler which have little or no impact on the novel’s exiguous action, but emerge instead as static images and recurring motifs. Transcendent Trivialities 79 Attention to such things, leading as it does to a preponderance of static images, can be detrimental to the conventional, temporally grounded narrative. It is Georg Lukács who best articulates why this is typically the case. In his 1936 essay «Erzählen oder Beschreiben? » Lukács argues against those modes of narrative fiction in which «das Zufällige» is not dialectically integrated into «die Notwendigkeit» of the whole. He focuses in particular on the ekphrastic tendencies of nineteenth-century novels, in which he sees the dominance of the descriptive leading to the static image, such that the reader does not read any meaningful sequence of action so much as observe «eine Reihe von Zustandsbildern.» Descriptiveness, for Lukács, becomes «ein schriftstellerischer Ersatz für die verlorengegangene epische Bedeutsamkeit» (213). The «danger» of description is that it can gain meaning independent of human action, which is to get outside of meaningful human time. For description «macht alles gegenwärtig,» and this «räumliche Gegenwart verwandelt Menschen und Dinge auch in eine zeitliche Gegenwärtigkeit» (216). For Lukács, such presence is a kind of stasis akin to the reified subject and, ultimately, to death. Thus the temporal presence afforded by attention to trivial or incidental things is for him a «mere succession» (bloßes Nacheinander) of states - a kind of false temporality in the face of meaningful historical time. We may here be reminded of E.M. Forster’s «story» (as opposed to «plot»), the sequence of states without causally determined connections. Indeed, for Lukács such mere story - a sequence of incidental and thus seemingly unnecessary states or even actions - can turn into «a sequence of static images» that are only connected in terms of their materiality as things in a spatial realm, not as meaningful, human acts that move a plot forward: «Die sogenannte Handlung ist nur ein dünner Faden, an dem die Zustandsbilder aufgereiht werden.» The weak plot, Lukács insists, «schafft eine oberflächliche, […] dichterisch zufällige zeitliche Aneinanderfolge der einzelnen Zustandsbilder» (230). These images may be «temporal» by virtue of their succession on the page, but they appear, finally, as «einzelne Bilder, die im künstlerischen Sinne so unverbunden nebeneinander hängen wie die Bilder in einem Museum» (220). 17 Lukács’s insights into the tendency of descriptions or unconnected acts to become spatialized «static images» similar in their arbitrary sequentiality to paintings on the walls of a museum gets right to the core of Meier’s novel, both thematically (in the image and the painting) and formally (in Meier’s refusal to provide a necessary sequence of actions). For Lukács, everything in such works becomes «present,» which presentness then ceases to be an indicator of temporality - the moment now - and becomes instead a space of being. Meier’s novel, I have been arguing, does something similar - though it is positively valued. 18 Toteninsel presents a world freed from the need for things to happen, 80 Samuel Frederick a world in which past and present collapse into a set of static images that draw attention to the spatial dimension of the narrative (and of existence). This dimension, furthermore, takes on utopian resonances via the «paradisiacal cage» of the Dobrowiecka house and Bindschädler’s metaphor for memory - both involving spaces that, like Lukács’s conception of spatial narrative, are characterized by static images that are hung on walls. And, ironically, what Meier writes has to be narrative, because this form always already invokes the time that one needs to escape from in order to access this utopian space. Narration, in Meier’s novel, is thus always a kind of negation. In a sense it is narrative itself that is in the way of returning to a state of pure togetherness. But it is also narrative that is our only way of returning to that state. Meier’s novel shows a remarkable sensitivity to this paradox, performing its own failed overcoming in order to make palpable the space that would open up in that overcoming. II. Redeeming Fallen Things Critical to this performance are the very things - the static images and incidental stuff - that populate the novel in place of what Lukács calls «meaningful action.» I wish to show in this second part of the article how Meier mobilizes these things for his narrative experiment. They are not only critical to his formal needs, but also to the philosophical project of the novel, which I defined at the outset as a «metaphysical» undertaking (a dual critique and rescue). Having shown the formal impossibility of Flaubert’s «book about nothing,» Meier still wants to redeem it, not through «style,» but through content, through the very «matter» Flaubert saw as an impediment to its achievement. Meier does this by setting in motion a peculiar dialectic of nothing and something, which takes the following shape. Something, usually just some thing, a merely trivial object or even situation, is revealed as exactly such «nothing» of importance, but in this disclosure of its seeming worthlessness (it being closer to nothing than something) that thing grants access to something transcendent: the infinite, the paradisiacal, what Meier himself calls «das Unstoffliche,» which is yet another «nothing» (indeed, it is Flaubert’s «nothing»). The seemingly incidental and ordinary thing in Toteninsel thus bears resemblance to Walter Benjamin’s notion of the fallen object of the Baroque Trauerspiel, which is redeemed in the process of allegorical transformation. Below I will briefly pick up Benjamin’s reflections to help us come to terms with the theological dimension of Meier’s metaphysical project of critique and rescue. This dimension is indispensible to grasping properly the fundamental ways in which Meier maps these problematic binaries (matter/ form, something/ nothing, critique/ rescue) onto the formal experiments of his work. Transcendent Trivialities 81 The things in Toteninsel come in all shapes and sizes, from the feathers on the head of the last of the Mohicans (as imagined by Baur) to a leaf that Baur holds in his hand and then drops, from the sound of crickets to the scrapped railway parts in an abandoned field, and from Baur’s shoelaces to the sewage pipes underneath the earth and the excrement they carry. These and other inconspicuous and (often) discarded things join in a network of trivial, ordinary, or overlooked stuff mentioned by Baur or described by Bindschädler, things that serve, on the one hand, as motifs, the reappearing props in a narrative without action, and the naturalistic reminders of the concrete world in which our characters have been placed. As such, they retain their fundamental thingness, which Meier himself calls the «ordinary» (das Gewöhnliche) or «banal» (das Banale), and which with Roland Barthes we might say participate in the «reality effect,» that which has no apparent symbolic or structural value except to announce «the real.» In discussing the importance of Joyce’s Ulysses for his own work, Meier begins by articulating precisely such a «view of things» («seine Sicht der Dinge [ist] auch meine Sicht der Dinge»), placing emphasis on his shared interest in «diesem Gewöhnlichen […] diesem Banalen, Nichtigen, Unscheinbaren» (Das dunkle Fest 146). 19 In this way Toteninsel’s attention to mere stuff is part of Meier’s program for writing the «book about nothing.» Since style on its own is impossible and Meier is stuck with having to narrate something, he chooses as this something that which is closest to nothing: the inconspicuous and unspectacular. But on the other hand this indexicality of the ordinary is not an end in itself for Meier. 20 In the same discussion of Joyce, he clarifies that, «Genau in diesen Banalitäten oder Lappalien sehe auch ich die Größe oder das verkappte Pathos der Welt» (148). The Swiss writer’s interest in things in their very ordinariness, that is, coincides with these things’ capacity to evoke something «great,» something not at all ordinary. Werner Morlang suggests that Meier uses materiality to make spirituality «dingfest,» to which Meier responds: Da [in Toteninsel] werden scheinbar lediglich Banalitäten ausgebreitet, aber diese Banalitäten erscheinen auf dem Hintergrund der Stofflosigkeit um so schöner, um so bewegender, um so rührender, um so anrührender, weißt du. Da muß man sich gar nicht scheuen, solche Banalitäten aufzuzeigen, denn darin zeigen sich jene irdisch-schön-verspielten Angelegenheiten, die scheinbar nicht der Rede wert sind und doch für unser Leben von großer Bedeutung sein können. Es geht um Federn auf dem Haupt, es geht um Schuhe, Schuhbänder, Knöpfe und andere kleine Lebensdinge, die auf diesem Hintergrund eine wunderbare Leuchtkraft bekommen. Wenn man sie aber zu ernst nimmt, offenbaren sie nur ihre Banalität, und man erreicht gerade das Gegenteil. Wenn man also Materialität zu stark betont, wird sie läppisch. (287-88) 82 Samuel Frederick Meier here reveals his ambivalence towards the very things that he «disperses» in his prose. Although he claims to find them beautiful and moving in and of themselves, he also suggests that this quality really only emerges on account of a «background» that permits them to appear in the first place. That background of «immateriality,» then, assumes a position of ontological priority over merely «material» things, which, by themselves, are only significant insofar as they enable us to become aware of this background. Seen in this way, things merely carry out a semiotic function - exactly the opposite of Barthes’s «reality effect.» What is of «great importance» is not their ordinary materiality as such, which should not be emphasized, but only the fact that this materiality points beyond itself to something immaterial and transcendent. Such apparent devaluation of things in the face of some more important «beyond» complicates the special value Meier wants to bestow on them as things. In Toteninsel and in his discussions with Morlang, Meier on the one hand privileges things over the background they supposedly make knowable. It is the things, after all, that «light up» («eine wunderbare Leuchtkraft bekommen»; elsewhere Meier uses aufleuchten [289] and aufscheinen [307]), not the background, which serves not as any immaterial goal, but only as the condition of the possibility for seeing things in their transfiguration. The background, from this perspective, can only be known because it allows things to appear in the foreground, as the ambient light in a room allows one to see the features of and things in that room, but is itself imperceptible. In this way, it is the things themselves, ultimately, that are the locus of «Pathos» and «Größe» (68, 148), the true matter of importance. Having enabled things to emerge into view, the immaterial recedes into the background, subservient to primary materiality. Further complicating matters is not only Meier’s repeated invocation of the «immateriality» (Meier uses variations on das Unstoffliche or die Stofflosigkeit) behind things, but also his insistence that things be transfigured so as to become «great» (groß). Yet with this sentiment Meier seems to contradict himself. For once things have been transfigured, as he describes it, they would cease to be mere things, having turned over from the ordinary to the extraordinary, from inconspicuous matter to something that radiates in a special kind of metaphysical glow. This contradiction, however, is at the heart of Meier’s literary-metaphysical undertaking. Since his wish to convey the immaterial (which is also Flaubert’s wish) keeps coming up against the ineluctability of a world whose representation and representability will always involve matter, Meier does not reject that matter, as Flaubert wants to, but embraces it. He may ultimately desire the «immaterial,» but it by definition has no substantial reality, despite being the «most real» (Das dunkle Fest 446). As such, and to Transcendent Trivialities 83 echo Flaubert again, it is really just «nothing.» In order to access this nothing, this transcendent immateriality, Meier has to mobilize mere things, which then stand in as ciphers for that which themselves fail to attain. The things in Toteninsel thus take on an allegorical resonance in the Benjaminian sense. Their very materiality is a negative trace of an immateriality no longer accessible to us - but as such also the only means left for knowing that immateriality. Meier wants both to redeem the thing and to find redemption beyond things, but without the one cancelling out the other. This effort importantly parallels his attempt to spatialize narrative, to find a space beyond temporality through fundamentally temporal narration. Put in terms of the metaphysical project of critique and rescue: Meier wants to show how seeking transcendence at the expense of things is a mistake, even as he tries to save that very moment of transcendence - in things themselves. We might usefully inflect this metaphysical model with a more theological one, a move consonant with the novel’s concern with Edenic space. Because the transcendent background is only available to us negatively - as that which allows things to appear, but cannot itself appear - its inaccessibility takes on the characteristics of the paradisiacal: that which only exists by virtue of being inaccessible. These inflections can be found in the ways Meier figures the things of his novel as fragments in a larger narrative of redemption. «Für mich ist das Ästhetische viel tiefer verankert, verhängt mit dem Unstofflichen schlechthin, mit dem bewegend Kleinen, Verschrobenen, Hinfälligen, Anfälligen, Unauffälligen» (290), he says to Werner Morlang. Later in the same discussion he claims to be interested in the «small occurrences» (kleine Ereignisse) that are both «banal» and (paradoxically, by virtue of being banal) «unusual» (ausgefallen [308]). Meier’s language here does not just draw attention to the fragility, marginality, and triviality of these things. By virtue of the repeated root -fall (hinfällig, anfällig, unauffällig, ausgefallen), he links these scraps of useless stuff to a cosmological narrative as «fallen things,» i.e., lapsarian objects. These things embody the qualities of the postlapsarian world, serving as constant reminders of our distance from any originary paradisiacal state, in which there was no gap between subjects and objects, in which things therefore were perfectly integrated into our way of being. In Toteninsel, this distance is especially palpable in the repeated references to the manure that the figure Joachim Schwarz used to fertilize the egg dealer’s field. Here the postlapsarian stuff of the world is revealed as more than just trivial. It is a special kind of waste product, one caught up in the process of recirculation and regeneration: 84 Samuel Frederick Im Apfelgarten dieser Matte gab’s großblütige Vergißmeinnicht. Das hatte vermutlich mit dem Hühnermist zu tun. Joachim Schwarz hielt darauf, seine Matten zu jauchen. Und er hatte auch Jauche; denn er verwendete Schlächtereiabfälle (Blut, Eingeweide) zur Jauchebereitung, das heißt, er reicherte die anfallende Jauche aus dem Landschaftsbetrieb mit besagten Abfällen an, was den Gehalt der anfallenden Jauche steigerte… (63-64) The language of the novel in this passage anticipates Meier’s own discussion of his interest in trivialities, in particular in the repeated root -fall that emerges from the twice-used words «Abfälle» and «anfallende.» Schwarz takes the derived (anfallende) manure and mixes it with the byproducts (useless animal parts: Abfälle) from his slaughterhouse. One animal’s excretions together with other animals’ innards and blood become a rich food for the flowers in the egg dealer’s field. Otherwise useless waste, thrown away stuff, is made integral to a larger cyclical process of growth. This transformation of useless things significantly takes place in the shadow of apple trees, which allude directly to the paradisiacal garden from which we have «fallen.» Because we ate from one of these trees we can no longer return to paradise; because, in other words, we now have an awareness of things at all, an awareness that separates - indeed, alienates - us from the world by dividing it into subjects and objects. Meier appears to want to rescue this fallen stuff. The process of regeneration evident in the egg dealer’s field, in which useless things are made useful again, presents one image of such redemption, but ends up being a grotesque parody of paradise. How, Meier asks, might one rescue these fallen things while also preserving them in their useless, postlapsarian state - without, that is, transforming them into their opposite? Benjamin describes one such form of redemption through props, objects, and fallen things using the term «Umschwung,» a dialectical process in which the profane world is «lifted up» and «devalued» at the same time (e.g., 351, 401, 405). Only negatively, by way of the fragments and disjecta of the postlapsarian world, can salvation be attained. Indeed, only because we have been banished from paradise to a world in which name and thing no longer correspond is the restitution of that paradise a possibility. For Benjamin, it is precisely the profane and forsaken stuff of the world in ruins that contains the hope for redemption. And the realization of that hope is only possible because things are «mute,» unable not just to speak, but to be meaningful in and of themselves (398). On the one hand, Benjamin’s insights help us to better understand how trivial things function in Meier’s literary-metaphysical project, which appears to involve work similar to that undertaken by Benjamin’s allegorist. But on the other hand, one crucial distinction stands out. For Benjamin, the allegorist is ultimately not concerned with the thing as such, which is only Transcendent Trivialities 85 instrumentalized in his hands. 21 Because Meier desires to preserve the thing’s triviality, he does not grasp, appropriate, or even transform things. Rather, he lets them fall. As he puts it in reference to Joachim Schwarz’s special manure, he saves such seemingly inconspicuous things from being lost, «aber, um Gottes Willen, nicht bewußt im Sinne von: Das will ich jetzt aufbewahren und nicht fallenlassen» (Das dunkle Fest 308). These things, then, are purposefully not captured or held fast. And yet this refusal serves as a method, indeed the only possible method, for their preservation. For any other type of appropriation would turn the fallen thing into its opposite, halting its fall and making it meaningful or useful. Meier wants to preserve these things in their fallen state as postlapsarian things that enact their and our loss of originary meaning. (The parody of Eden that Meier gives us in the egg dealer’s field brings this point home in the name of the flower that grows there, Vergißmeinnicht, warning us not to forget the fallen things that have here been made «productive.») Only as such fallen things can they «light up» and «become grand,» full of «pathos,» precisely because they are revealed for what they are: negative manifestations of the paradisiacal. Like the fish that would die were one to lift it out of the water, one has to let these things simply be, or with Heidegger, «das Ding […] in seinem Dingsein auf sich beruhen lassen» (21). In Eden, as with Lurka’s Eve and trout, we might take it in into our laps without killing it; but in the fallen world such appropriation would only be fatal. The appropriate metaphor, then, would be one in which catching the fish would coincide with letting it swim away, in recognition of our fallen state, our inability to catch the fish without it succumbing. Meier provides precisely such a metaphor in his conversation with Morlang: Ich bin wahnsinnig glücklich darüber, daß ich sozusagen als Netz dienen und etwas davon festhalten konnte, damit es nicht zerrinnt in einem fernen, unbekannten Ozean: etwas von diesen herrlichen Lappalien, die sich abspielen auf unserer harten, weichen, schönen und grausamen Erde. (309-10) In Meier’s peculiar syntax net and catch merge so that the tool for fishing and the thing being fished become one and the same. The word Meier uses here for trivial, fallen things is «Lappalien,» «trifles» or «mere nothings,» from the word for a throwaway scrap of fabric or rag. Although originally (as Lappen) a tool for ridding the world of its surplus of insignificant and useless stuff, to clean up and throw away refuse, «Lappalie» is here aligned with the very stuff it - in that original form - helped dispose. Meier retains both (opposite) meanings by referring to these «mere nothings» as net and that which this net captures, evoking the peculiar image of a net that is trying to catch itself, to hold fast that which is neither part of the «hard earth» nor of the water that 86 Samuel Frederick slips between our fingers. Thus even though he here expresses fixing or holding onto these trivialities, Meier also betrays that such appropriation is only possible in its necessary failure. No net can catch itself. We hold on to triviality as triviality by performing a failed appropriation of it. Only in this way can Meier overcome the paradox of representing trivialities without either elevating them to a status that cancels out their thingness or reducing them to the merely «petty.» And only in this way can he gesture toward the moment of transcendence that he sees contained in or made possible by these things, without that transcendence eclipsing the things themselves. Making present the thing as - to borrow Bill Brown’s language again - excess materiality and that which exceeds materiality, as on the threshold of something and nothing, allows Meier both to make them «light up» as matter and to let them reveal the «immaterial» light around them. What they light up, then, is themselves as well as the world that makes them possible, a world that may be «fallen,» but that might be transfigured by virtue of a newfound attention to the banal. For this reason, Meier’s narrative project involves less the relating of events as - in a long tradition from Homer through Rabelais to Joyce - the creation of a list, an inventory of fallen things that shimmer in utopian potential: «das Auflisten dessen, was uns trotzdem noch geblieben ist jenseits von Eden» (Das dunkle Fest 177). And so, as the characters and events of Toteninsel recede into the background, we are presented with this inventory of «mere nothings,» including smells, sounds, shadows, light, and movement. Even the central event of the walk and the conversation between Baur and Bindschädler become forces of movement and sound, respectively. Speech, Meier says, represents the «immaterial» itself - despite its concretizing into printed words in the medium of the book (Das dunkle Fest 286-87). In allowing these «mere nothings» to draw attention to «immateriality,» Meier also - inescapably - draws our attention to these trivialities as more than just trivialities, but as remnants of the postlapsarian world. They may on the one hand evoke a nostalgia for that which they reveal («das Heimweh nach Eden,» as Meier puts it [177]), but they are also reminders of our distance from that paradise - reminders of our own «nothingness.» Ultimately, they are also reminders of the medium which Meier has chosen to convey these ideas. Art - specifically, the novel - is a thing, too, after all. And in the grand scheme of things, it, too, as something «ordinary,» is as such actually closer to «nothing»: «es ist etwas Paradoxes, daß gerade ein Kunstwerk […] letztlich das Gewöhnliche selber ist» (143). But herein also lies Meier’s final answer to Flaubert, and in a sense his ultimate metaphysical move, as I have defined it. If Flaubert had elevated style to an insubstantial Transcendent Trivialities 87 Form so as to jettison «things» in the hope of attaining «nothing,» Meier turns that binary on its head. Style is not some ethereal Form, he insists, something that might be made more pure by ridding it of its content. Style, rather, is the substantial stuff of writing itself. All we are left with, in the end, are the words on the page. And that which these words convey is not some material «content» that might be disposed of. That content, not - as Flaubert assumes - style, is the insubstantial and thus invisible element of literature, that which can only appear in the concrete form of style. Put another way, we typically think, as Flaubert had, of what a novel is «about» as its substantial content, which is shaped by a writer’s style or manner of telling, its otherwise invisible form. Without this content, from this perspective, style as such does not and cannot really exist. It is a mere how waiting for a what. Meier’s response to Flaubert is to reverse this priority of content over form (as style), so that the how becomes a what itself. In this way the concrete matter of his novel is to be found in its telling, its incarnation of a particular style. It then follows that the «insubstantial,» which is purely dependent on this particularity, is what the story is «about» and only really exists when made manifest in and as style. 22 Meier’s novel thus mobilizes the notions of form and content as they were originally understood by Plato and revised by Aristotle. «Content,» or matter (hyle), is the less real, unformed stuff that has no independent existence without first being given shape. Form (morphe), on the other hand, does have an individual existence, and it essentially bestows this existence onto matter by granting it - content - particular contours. The novel as genre is, from this perspective, always about nothing, since - as the Russian formalists knew - its fabula (story content) is the unformed story stuff that has no independent existence outside its concretization in sjuzhet (its telling, its style). Indeed, we only posit the existence of this story content as a theoretical construct, abstracted from the material artifact of the text. Meier subtly plays with this notion of narrative’s constituent elements in his critique of Flaubert’s pure style, and in doing so redeems the project of Toteninsel as a «concrete thing» whose primary claim to utopian potential lies in the materiality it makes manifest in and as the very stuff of its style. In this way Meier also rescues Flaubert’s notion of the «book about nothing» even as he critiques it, locating its dream of «pure style» not in any ethereally suspended realm above things, but in things themselves, most importantly, in the matter of writing. Coda: Utopian Friendship But lest that writing be seen as an end in itself, as some kind of self-reflexive linguistic play or mere «Sprachwirklichkeit» (Spiegelberg), which is what I 88 Samuel Frederick speculated at the very beginning of this article, Flaubert’s unmoored «book about nothing» could end up being, it behooves us to remember that Meier sought transcendence both in and through things. Thus in Toteninsel transcendence is not figured as any kind of escape from or renunciation of the world, but rather as a renewed attention to its very things, to its fallen objects, which are capable of disclosing to us a way of being in this world that might activate its and our utopian potential. Meier’s notion of transcendence is therefore, as we have seen, firmly rooted in the ordinary, not just in the matter of writing, but also in the banal activity of friends that this writing conveys. That activity takes the particular form of walking, which becomes more than just the occasion and celebration of togetherness, as Peter Handke rightly expresses it («das Fest des gemeinsamen Redens, des gemeinsamen Spaziergehens» [39]). Walking also expresses a fundamental attunement to the world of things in terms of corporeal presence among these things. The primary condition for this attunement is less the walk in and of itself than it is the friendship between Baur and Bindschädler, which reveals a deeper structure of togetherness in which bodily movement, observation, reflection, speech, and writing become productively intertwined. The interpersonal connection between the novel’s two main figures, however, is not expressed in the form of an affective bond or shared past experience. The representation of their friendship is thus a highly idiosyncratic one, not anchored in subjectivity or shared memories, not directly thematized or even addressed, but only emerging in and as the concrete, corporeal activity of walking and its accompanying conversation, in the rhythm (bodily and linguistic) in which these men interact. 23 Only in passing do we learn the simple and unelaborated fact that both men were in the active service together during the war. Their shared past remains otherwise inaccessible. As such, their experience of companionship resists being defined - as it typically is in narratives about friendship - by past actions and their attendant present consequences. 24 Theirs, rather, is a shared experience of togetherness that unfolds as spontaneously and mundanely as the walk itself - in space. Meier’s technique of eschewing the temporal structures of narrative so as to open up a utopian spatial realm therefore parallels how the novel maps out this space of friendship. Instead of narrating their friendship by delineating its distinct path along the trajectory of time, their friendship is enacted in space, extended in contiguity with the things around them. Baur and Bindschädler are not just granted this space, however; their bodily movement through Olton creates it. 25 In shifting their activity from the sphere of plotted action to the coordinates of space, Meier insists that friendship is fundamentally distinct from what Lukács identifies as the only proper realm of the novel, «[das] Transcendent Trivialities 89 Schicksal der handelnden Menschen» (218). Meier’s experiment exposes such a narrative framework as insufficient to portray his characters’ companionship, suggesting that a narrative requiring «fate» and «plotted action» would only lock friendship into the structures of give and take that are fundamentally antithetical to it. 26 Instead, Meier allows friendship to take shape in a space unencumbered by the economy of exchange. 27 Like the things around them, their friendship does not have instrumental, but rather existential, significance. Baur and Bindschädler therefore do not need to profess their friendship, let alone make superficial gestures to confirm it; neither shared history nor expectations for the future are of consequence - only the present moment of togetherness matters. Friendship in Toteninsel, that is, does not take place, but rather has place. In this way the novel is not really about friendship, since it does not tell the story of these two men and what connects them. Rather, it ought to be read as a novel of friendship, because, although not directly (or conventionally) represented, the connection between these two men becomes uniquely present in the space their being-together, in turn, makes possible. 28 This space opened up by Baur and Bindschädler is just as much the actual space of the provincial town as it is a utopian space of togetherness beyond the demands of exchange or interpersonal expectation. Indeed, these two realms mirror each other in the novel, such that attuned activity rooted in immediate experience is revealed as the closest we can get to occupying a space of ideal, even utopian, togetherness. The novel, finally, reveals this space of friendship as the region this side of eternity where transcendence might be cultivated in the seemingly trivial matter of the everyday. Notes I wish to thank Paul Buchholz for reading and providing helpful comments on a draft of this article. 1 Letter dated 16 January 1852. The original reads, «Ce qui me semble beau, ce que je voudrais faire, c’est un livre sur rien, un livre sans attache extérieure, qui se tiendrait de luimême par la force interne de son style, comme la terre sans être soutenue se tient en l’air, un livre qui n’aurait presque pas de sujet ou du moins où le sujet serait presque invisible, si cela se peut» (Correspondance II 31). 2 E.g., «A 48-Year-Old Burglar from San Diego» and «1891-1944» from Rommel Drives Deep into Egypt. The musical equivalent would be John Cage’s 4’33» (1952), in which a pianist performs three movements that consist of exactly zero musical notes. 3 «Les œuvres les plus belles sont celles où il y a le moins de matière […]» (Correspondance II 31). 4 The quotation appears in German translation: «Was mir schön erscheint und was ich machen möchte, ist ein Buch über nichts» (6). Toteninsel is the first volume in what 90 Samuel Frederick would end up being a tetralogy. The other three novels are Borodino (1982), Die Ballade vom Schneien (1985), and Land der Winde (1990). 5 In the literature on Meier critics usually assume that he uncritically embraces Flaubert’s wish in an attempt to write a book whose primary «content» is language itself. See Sośnicka 49, 59, 106 and Hoffmann 59-60. 6 In examining this paradox I am also examining - and thus highlighting - the work of a relatively obscure writer. Although this article is not meant as any kind of introduction to Meier’s writing, I do hope it will draw some attention to his output, which has been severely neglected both in Anglo-American scholarship (where there exists no literature on Meier at all) and in continental Europe (where he is still a marginal figure). Meier’s somewhat conservative provincialism has had no small part in his outsider status, which has not changed much, even though his work has been championed by such recognized writers as Peter Handke and Karl Krolow, among others. A recent, award-winning English translation of Toteninsel by Burton Pike will, I hope, draw attention to Meier in the English-speaking world. 7 My intention is neither to conflate these theorists’ often divergent thinking nor to suggest that they somehow express a single conception of thingness. 8 It would be illuminating to situate Meier’s novel historically in the development of German-language experimental fiction, though time and space (as well as the primary focus of the article) prohibit this undertaking here. Furthermore, Meier positions himself more frequently within a broader European context of modernist literature that includes, especially, Proust, Joyce, and Woolf. These are the writers whom Meier sees, above all, as having grappled with Flaubert’s wish. 9 Fernand Hoffmann correctly notes that narrative without time is not possible, but goes on to claim that what Meier achieves is precisely such a non-narrative timeless space that is the space of language itself: «Was er anstrebt, ist nichts mehr und nichts weniger als die radikale und totale Versprachlichung der Außen- und Innenwelt» (59-60). I would caution against such a reading, which too easily assimilates Meier’s project with the «pure style» of Flaubert’s dream, thereby ignoring its rootedness in the things of the world. 10 It thus makes no sense for Rosmarie Zeller to claim that the reader is unable to orient herself in Meier’s depicted world (165). 11 For contrasting readings, see Sven Spiegelberg’s argument that the novel takes place in the space of memory (89) and Dorotea Sośnicka’s similar suggestion that it takes place in spaceless and timeless consciousness (203, 221) or memory (269). 12 Böcklin painted five different versions of Toteninsel. Meier’s characters discuss the one painted in 1880 and housed in Basel. 13 For a discussion of the recurring paintings in Meier’s work, see Christoph Vögele’s article. 14 Cf. Sośnicka’s reading of the «Teppich» metaphor as an image for the collapse of past and present in a nontemporal «Fläche» (282). 15 The notion of the utopian that I employ here emerges directly from Meier’s novel and his conversations with Werner Morlang, and is only indirectly informed by the rather vast literature on utopia. As I hope to show, for Meier the utopian is an Edenic and thus inaccessible space outside of the corrupting time of the modern world that is available to us only by recognizing this inaccessibility and resolutely embracing the potential for transcendence in the everyday (including literature itself). Sośnicka also points to the destructiveness of «objective time» in the novel, and suggests it might be overcome: «Der utopische Drang, die Zeit zum Stillstand zu bringen» (275). She, however, sees «inner time» - that of memory and consciousness - as the space of this utopia. For an overview Transcendent Trivialities 91 of the major theories of social and literary utopianism see Bloch 547-728 and 929-81. For more recent theoretical approaches to utopia, see Moylan and Baccolini. 16 Lurka’s woodcut is pictured in Das dunkle Fest des Lebens (311), and appears to depict Eve petting the trout in the water. This detail of the woodcut seems to have been left out of the novel intentionally, so that coming soon after Baur’s «wie man Fische, Forellen zum Beispiel, heraushebt an der Angel, mit dem Effekt freilich, daß ihr Leben in Zuckungen verebbt,» the image evoked is of Eve lifting the trout out of the water. In this way it also functions as a perfect foil to Picasso’s painting. 17 This static effect results from descriptions of characters’ inner states as much as from descriptions of external states or things. Lukács here echoes Lessing’s famous distinction in Laokoon between the «neben einander» of painting (in space) and the «auf einander» of epic poetry (in time). See in particular chapter XVI (116-23). 18 As Tamara Evans writes, contrasting Meier’s novel with Max Frisch’s Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän, «Die Aufhebung einer linear und teleologisch konzipierten Zeit […] wird hier […] nicht als Katastrophe, als Sturz in die ‹Unzeit,› sondern als ein Aufgehobensein in den Strukturen der Gegenwart erlebt» (363). 19 Peter von Matt notes that Meier must have learned his «Lehre vom Wesen der Dinge» from «jahrzehntelanger Anfertigung von Dingen,» by which he means Meier’s twentyyear-long work in a lamp factory (260). In fact, Meier did not begin writing seriously until he had completely given up the daily activity of making everyday household lamps. 20 In her fascinating book on the ordinary in modernism, Liesl Olson argues along these lines that modernism’s innovation was to succeed in representing the ordinary as ordinary. Joyce’s work is one of Olson’s primary examples. 21 See, in particular, Richard Wolin’s reading of the Trauerspiel book: «the allegorist is never interested in the thing itself, but only in its allegorical meaning - i.e. its significance in relation to the theological concept of salvation» (72). 22 Style is not simply content plus expression, or merely a how that depends on a what. Thus, in my reading, the Flaubertian (and also commonplace) notion of style as the way in which language expresses something (some content) is less important than the concrete existence of this language as a material medium of expression and the fact that this medium is itself more fundamental (it is both what matters and what is matter) than anything it might succeed in expressing. 23 See Peter von Matt’s refutation, with which I agree, of readings of the novel that want to see these characters escaping into some kind of «Innerlichkeit»: «Sie heben nie ab in ganz andere Räume, sondern arbeiten an der Gegenwart. Immerzu arbeiten sie an der ungeheuren Gegenwart dessen, was da ist» (262). Although Wilfred Schiltknecht rightly notes the strangeness of «Zusammensein» in Meier’s work in general, which often comes hand in hand with «eine gewisse Distanz» (77), he does not consider how this apparent distance might be part of Meier’s strategy for portraying a deeper mode of togetherness. 24 Critics frequently conflate the two figures as dual aspects of one person. See Pike (v), Wysling (240), Sośnicka (22, 223-24), and Spielberg (90). For Spielberg, this conflation becomes symptomatic of a lack of communication, the split ego «Baur/ Bindschädler» carrying out an isolated «Diskurs in der Leere.» Such a reading, it seems to me, takes what is undoubtedly a strange feature of the text (lack of shared memories) and interprets it in a way that conflicts with the novel’s core concerns. 25 Alternately and complimentarily, the other activity of the two men, their conversation, opens up this space. Wilfred Schiltknecht makes this claim, and also argues that the mode of communication we find in Meier is a particular kind of resistance (77-78). 92 Samuel Frederick 26 I do not have the space here to elaborate a theory of friendship, but suffice it to say that I conceive of it in part following Aristotle in its ideal form as a relationship not determined by the need to be productive, and thus as a special mode of human interaction that subsists on togetherness without the expectation of gaining anything beyond the (immaterial) pleasure afforded by this togetherness. 27 That Lukács’s normative model for a plotted narrative of human activity relies on the logic of exchange fundamental to capitalism seems to me highly ironic. And yet it is clear that he needs these structures both as that against which human activity can be made meaningful, and also as the model for the means by which one engages in a classconscious struggle against these very structures. Lukács would call the «presence» of the friends in Meier’s novel a kind of «falsche Gegenwärtigkeit» (218). 28 As Dorotea Sośnicka writes in reference to the novel’s fundamental structure, «es bedarf immer beider Figuren, damit das Erzählen überhaupt realisiert werden kann» (138). Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. Metaphysik: Begriff und Probleme (1965). Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Nachgelassene Schriften. Abteilung IV: Vorlesungen Vol. 14. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1998. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. Barthes, Roland. «The Reality Effect.» The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1986. 141-48. Benjamin, Walter. «Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels.» Abhandlungen. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 1. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1991. Bloch, Ernst. Das Prinzip Hoffnung: In fünf Teilen. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1985. Brautigan, Richard. Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt. New York, NY: Dell Publishing, 1970. Brown, Bill. «Thing Theory.» Things. Ed. Bill Brown. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2004. 1-22. Evans, Tamara S. «Lurch und Maßliebchen: Moderne und Postmoderne Bestandaufnahmen in Max Frischs Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän und Gerhard Meiers Baur und Bindschädler.» Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik 38/ 39 (1995): 353-68. Flaubert, Gustave. Correspondance II. Ed. Jean Bruneau. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1980. -. The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830-1857. Trans. Francis Steegmuller. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1980. Handke, Peter. «Zeit für eure Toten! Zu den Büchern Gerhard Meiers. Eine Skizze.» Neue Zürcher Zeitung 25 January 1991: 39. Heidegger, Martin. «Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes.» Holzwege. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. Gesamtausgabe Vol. 5. Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994. Hoffmann, Fernand. Heimkehr ins Reich der Wörter: Versuch über den Schweizer Schriftsteller Gerhard Meier. Luxemburg: Verlag der Abt. für Kunst und Literatur des Großherzoglichen Institutes von Luxemburg, 1982. Transcendent Trivialities 93 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laokoon/ Briefe, antiquarischen Inhalts. Text und Kommentar. Ed. Wilfried Barner. Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2007. Lukács, Georg. «Erzählen oder Beschreiben? » Probleme des Realismus I: Essays über Realismus. Werke Vol. 4. Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand, 1971. Matt, Peter von. Die tintenblauen Eidgenossen. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2001. Meier, Gerhard. Baur und Bindschädler. Werke Vol. 3. Bern: Zytglogge, 1987. Meier, Gerhard, and Werner Morlang. Das dunkle Fest des Lebens. Amrainer Gespräche. Oberhofen: Zytglogge, 2007. Moylan, Tom, and Raffaella Baccolini, eds. Utopia Method Vision: The Use Value of Social Dreaming. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007. Olson, Liesl. Modernism and the Ordinary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Pike, Burton. Introduction. Isle of the Dead. By Gerhard Meier. Trans. Burton Pike. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2011. v-viii. Prince, Gerald. Dictionary of Narratology. Rev. ed. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 2003. Schiltknecht, Wilfred. «Literatur als Widerstand bei Gerhard Meier.» Aspekte der Verweigerung in der neueren Literatur aus der Schweiz. Ed. Peter Grotzer. Zurich: Ammann Verlag, 1988. 69-79. Sośnicka, Dorotea. Wie handgewobene Teppiche. Die Prosawerke Gerhard Meiers. Bern: Peter Lang, 1999. Spiegelberg, Sven. Diskurs in der Leere: Aufsätze zur aktuellen Literatur der Schweiz. Bern: Peter Lang, 1990. Vögele, Christoph. «Gerhard Meier und die bildende Kunst (Nach einem Vortrag im Kunsthaus Langenthal).» Jahrbuch des Oberaargaus 40 (1997): 13-50. Wolin, Richard. Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1994. Wysling, Hans. Streifzüge: Literatur aus der deutschen Schweiz 1945-1991. Zurich: Schulthess Polygraphischer Verlag, 1996. Zeller, Rosmarie. Der neue Roman in der Schweiz. Die Unerzählbarkeit der modernen Welt. Freiburg: Universitätsverlag Freiburg, 1992. Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG • Dischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen Tel. +49 (07071) 9797-0 • Fax +49 (07071) 97 97-11 • info@attempto-verlag.de • www.attempto-verlag.de JETZT BES TELLEN! JETZT BES TELLEN! Kathrin Nielsen Zeitatomistik und „Wille zur Macht“ Annäherungen an Nietzsche Phainomena 16 134 Seiten €[D] 18,00 / SFR 25,40 ISBN 978-3-89308-440-1 »[ ... ] -unser wunderliches Dasein gerade in diesem Jetzt ermuthigt uns am stärksten, nach eigenem Maass und Gesetz zu leben: jene Unerklärlichkeit, dass wir gerade heute leben und doch die unendliche Zeit hatten zu entstehen, dass wir nichts als ein spannenlanges Heute besitzen und in ihm zeigen sollen, warum und wozu wir gerade jetzt entstanden.« (Nietzsche) Gerhard Richter and the Ambiguous Aesthetics of Morality THYRA E. KNAPP University of North Dakota Paintings with innocuous titles such as Onkel Rudi, Tante Marianne, and Herr Heyde would not, on first consideration, immediately suggest content inextricably linked to Germany’s troubled past; however, that is precisely what they deliver. These, and other celebrated works created over the last half century, have helped to establish Gerhard Richter as «the world’s most famous living painter» (Baker n. pag.). Commemorating Richter’s eightieth birthday in 2012, both the Panorama exhibition at the Neue und Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin and Corinna Belz’s documentary Gerhard Richter Painting (2011) allowed viewers to revisit his œuvre with retrospectives featuring an impressive variety of styles. When viewed together, the red thread connecting the majority of his works - ranging from photo paintings to abstracted overpaintings - is their aesthetic ambiguity; whether created with gray areas, blurring, or squeegeed layers, Richter’s characteristically obscure paintings both attract and repel the viewer’s gaze, requiring more than a cursory glance and providing no obvious answers. Time and again, «Richter tests our experience and knowledge of reality through our capacity to see: he unsettles our habits of seeing and knowing […] by contrary actions of both giving and taking away, of simultaneously stating and denying» (Nasgaard 33). While his complex aesthetic may be read as an attempt to avoid political engagement, the artist’s blurred images actually invite engaged contemplation. Distancing himself from the notion of the elite aesthete, Richter realizes that his works have a very real function in the contemporary world: «[A] painting can help us to think something that goes beyond this senseless existence. That’s something art can do» (Storr, Doubt and Belief 183). This essay posits that, for Richter, the moral act of painting involves the creation of an ambiguous space in which the viewer is able to (re)consider not only the image itself, but also her/ his relationship to what is being depicted. With regard to his photo paintings, this takes place by means of an intricate double mediation: «[E]s geht im Folgenden um Fragen zur doppelten Repräsentation der Fotomalereien und ihrer sozialen sowie ästhetischen Kontexte - also um den anscheinend einfachen Sachverhalt, dass in den Bildern Richters wiederum Bilder erscheinen, die auf Bilder verweisen» (Rubel 48). 96 Thyra E. Knapp Richter’s photo paintings begin with personal photos, press clippings, or police photos that may or may not be in clear focus. He then paints the photo, not creating a work of photorealism - because the painting should not look exactly like the original photo - but rather an approximation or interpretation of the first image. By deliberately blurring lines and strategically utilizing various shades of gray, Richter obfuscates his own visual language, creating instead a space for critical dialogue. As Ulrich Meurer states, the artist does this «not to depict [the subject] more clearly (a cliché of art criticism), but to make room for a thought which neither reality nor its images can provide and which does not exist outside or without the painting» (193). Thus, these incomplete-looking, blurry representations of once-familiar objects and people challenge the viewer, transforming her/ him into a sort of detective: Vor allem aber macht sie aus jedem Betrachter einen Detektiv, der davon träumt, auf dem Foto doch noch das entscheidende Indiz zu entdecken, das Aufschluß über das Unvorstellbare gibt, was kurz darauf eintreten wird. So sind es unscharfe Bilder, die die größte Faszination ausüben und zahllose neugierige Augen nicht mehr zur Ruhe kommen lassen. (Ullrich 7) Perhaps most important about this detective work is the fact that the clues provided in the images are meant to transmit information about the unimaginable, inconceivable, and unthinkable. Because, as Richter himself states, «[p]ainting is the making of an analogy for something nonvisual and incomprehensible: giving it form and bringing it within reach» (qtd. in Elger, A Life 311), his works are able to explore controversial subjects of the Third Reich and the German Autumn, portraying them with blurred lines and incomplete forms so that the viewer can gather her/ his own evidence and proclaim her/ his own verdict. While Richter’s obfuscations encourage individual exploration and the formation of independent opinion, there is something undeniably provocative about the subjects the painter chooses to engage. With regard to the works discussed here, it is not only the individual canvasses that are of sociohistorical significance, but also their consideration as groups or cycles. This discussion focuses on three such groups (or cycles) of paintings: Onkel Rudi (1965), Tante Marianne (1965), Herr Heyde (1965); 48 Porträts (1971-72); 18.-Oktober 1977 (March - November 1988). These groups have been selected to demonstrate that although Richter invites each viewer to draw her/ his own conclusions, he has also chosen to purposefully and critically engage with contentious events from Germany’s troubled past and present. Born in Dresden in 1932, Gerhard Richter grew up under National Socialism, and as many adolescent boys of his generation, was a member of the Hitler Youth (Elger, Maler 9-10). During the war, Richter’s family moved from Gerhard Richter and the Ambiguous Aesthetics of Morality 97 the city to the countryside, ultimately settling in Waltersdorf, a village located within the Soviet occupation zone (Elger, Maler 12). After being turned down by the Dresden Art Academy following his first application, Richter took a job with a team charged with creating banners for the Communist East German government - an occupation that would certainly come to inform his strong stance against the use of ideology in art (Storr, Forty Years 20). Richter’s aesthetic would also be affected by his eventual acceptance to the academy, where he completed the five-year curriculum in the mural department, graduating with a work of Social Realism entitled Lebensfreude (1956) (Storr, Forty Years 21). After viewing the works of artists such as Jackson Pollock and Lucio Fontana at the Documenta 2 (an art exhibition held once every five years) in Kassel in 1959, the young painter’s eyes were opened to modern art, inspiring him to leave the German Democratic Republic for the West (Storr, Forty Years 22). Fig. 1: Gerhard Richter, Lebensfreude, German Hygiene Museum, Dresden 1956 In 1961, just before construction of the Berlin Wall began, Richter immigrated to the Federal Republic of Germany (Nasgaard 34). At the recommendation of a friend, the painter enrolled in the Düsseldorf Art Academy and began to immerse himself in the works of his contemporaries. Both Düsseldorf and Köln had become hubs for the postwar experimental art scene, and Richter 98 Thyra E. Knapp had the opportunity to meet many young artists and try his own hand at pop art, surrealism, and photorealism (Nasgaard 34). Despite - or perhaps because of - the fact that Richter was living in the midst of Konrad Adenauer’s West German Wirtschaftswunder, an existence diametrically opposed to what he had known in the East, the artist became wary of both socioeconomic extremes. As Robert Storr notes, «thirteen years of living under Nazi rule and sixteen years living under Communist Party discipline had inoculated [Richter] against totalizing ideology» (Doubt and Belief 238). This deep distrust of ideological hegemony could be one explanation for Richter’s attempt to find a moral approach to painting, leading to his third way, located beyond socialist and capitalist paradigms. Richter achieves this third way oftentimes by stripping away both color and finite delineations. In the case of many of his photo paintings, the artist reduces the color spectrum to gray scale, removing the emotions associated with specific color tones. Additionally, Reinhard Spieler notes that «when Richter eliminates color from his paintings and restricts himself to shades of gray, he forces the viewer to take a consciously less sensuous and more intellectual approach» (11). The painter’s own explanation for his predominate use of gray is highly intellectualized: «It makes no statement whatever; it evokes neither feelings nor associations […]. It has the capacity that no other color has, to make ‹nothing› visible. To me, gray is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, non-commitment, absence of opinion, absences of shape» (qtd. in Spieler 11). Regardless of such claims of neutrality, Richter nevertheless chooses to make ‹nothing› visible, an act one can argue is not at all indifferent. The painter further strives to neutralize his works by blurring the shapes defined by shades of gray: «I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant. I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsmanlike but technological, smooth and perfect» (qtd. in Obrist 37). In the case of the equality of blurred images, the fuzziness of the blur will not allow the viewer’s eye to rest on one specific object. The brain and the eyes conspire to find identifiable shapes (people and objects) on which to focus the gaze, and when there is none, the picture plane dissolves into confusion. Richter’s second desire, to transform the appearance of an artistic creation to one of a mechanical reproduction, is also understandable with regard to his need for indifference. If the image is a result of technology, it is believed to be objective and devoid of political ideology. Richter’s objective aesthetic choices to use gray and blur the lines lend themselves particularly well to the works discussed here as they are photo paintings; the viewer has seen and expects to see photos both in shades of Gerhard Richter and the Ambiguous Aesthetics of Morality 99 gray and out of focus. Furthermore, even in today’s world of digitally enhanced photography, there remains a belief that photographic images are innately objective and free of bias. As Julia Gelshorn observes, «[b]y copying photographs, generally understood as the perfect recorders of reality, Richter achieves a high ‹iconic tension› between transparency and opacity, that is between a painting’s representational qualities and its material two-dimensionality» (27-29). Undeniably, part of the attraction to a Richter photo painting is the appearance that it is actually a photograph. When it is discovered that the «photo» is in fact a painting, and that the blurred image cannot be focused into a comprehensibly clear composition, the viewer is forced to consider the artwork even more closely: «Photo-painting acts to add a moment of cognitive reflection, of historical and representational self-consciousness, to the experience of the photographic image. It creates a space and a time for reflection upon that image which is qualitatively different from that of the photograph itself, haunted as such experience is by the trace of the object» (Osborne 107). It would seem that this is precisely Richter’s intent, particularly when one considers the photographs that serve as source materials here. Because Richter has chosen to engage with such difficult and emotion-laden historical subjects as the Third Reich and the German Autumn, his break with the art historical tradition of strict mimesis is a necessary one. Much in the vein of Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, and in what Gertrud Koch refers to as «cold distanciation,» Richter opts for intellectual detachment over emotional embroilment («Richter-Scale» 142). Although the painter’s canvasses invariably draw the viewer near, his technical mediations push the viewer away again, thus creating tension. Detlef Hoffmann explains: «Grenzen, Oberflächen sind auch die Formen der Distanzierung. Das Spannungsverhältnis von Nähe und Ferne, von Annäherung und Unerreichbarkeit, die alle Arbeit am Thema Erinnerung bestimmt, ist von Gerhard Richter eindrücklich thematisiert» (267). In the works discussed here, which engage with controversial and troubling elements of Germany’s past and present, Richter deliberately creates images that both attract and repel, fostering a contemplative tension in which the viewer is able to better grapple with lingering questions of memory, identity, and morality. The act of attracting and repelling ends with the viewer but begins with the artist himself. Having established early on that his paintings would have nothing to do with political ideology, Richter searched for suitably objective subjects. At the beginning of his career, this proved problematic until his discovery of photographs as inspiration: «In 1962 I found my first escape hatch: by painting from photographs, I was relieved of the need to choose or construct a subject» (qtd. in Obrist 130). Although the young painter may have 100 Thyra E. Knapp convinced himself of the objectivity of photographs, it is clear to the contemporary viewer that Richter, in actuality, deliberately chose subjects in order to inspire and provoke contemplation. Contrary to his assertion that he «had to choose photographs, of course; but [he] could do that in a way that avoided any commitment to the subject, by using motifs which had very little image to them and which were anachronistic,» the very act of selecting a photograph is as subjective as choosing any object or person to paint from life (qtd. in Obrist 130). In fact, Hoffmann agrees that Richter’s use of photographs jettisons neither the subjectivity of his works nor their engagement with history: «Im Gegensatz zu manchen Interpreten sehe ich in Gerhard Richters Bildern eine intensive Auseinandersetzung mit Geschichte. […] Erst die Übersetzung der Photos in die Unschärfe der Malerei macht Vorlage und Gemälde zu historischen Gebilden» (263). This is particularly evident in the three collections discussed here in which Richter has chosen to paint photographs of subjects representing the most controversial facets of twentieth-century German history. The first group addresses the complicated relationship of the Second Generation (postwar generation) to Germany’s National Socialist past. Beginning with two family photographs and one picture from a press clipping, these paintings have the most personal resonance of those investigated here with the artist himself. With Onkel Rudi, Tante Marianne, and Herr Heyde, Richter creates a (at the outset perhaps unintentional) triptych of images exploring the roles of victim and oppressor during the Third Reich. Richter painted all three in 1965, twenty years after the end of the Second World War, and right before his generation began to publically question the actions of their parents under Hitler’s regime. The first piece, Onkel Rudi, is the blurred portrait of a Wehrmacht officer, who seems to enjoy being photographed (Hoffmann 254). One initially notes the man’s smiling countenance, then the stiff, formal uniform, creating a sense of dissonance. As Hoffmann states, this tension occurs because this military figure does not lend itself to portrayal in soft focus: «Das Motiv verträgt sich schlecht mit der Unschärfe. Motiv und Unschärfe der Oberfläche konkurrieren miteinander; wer sich auf beides einläßt, kann sich in ein unlösbares Problem verwickeln» (254). The «softening» of this soldier, pictured here with a broad smile and unassuming posture, creates a conflict between form and content; however, the disjuncture occurs on multiple registers. Richter’s blurring not only obscures the clean lines of military precision, visually moderating the brutality of the Third Reich, but also problematizes the complications of personal relationships and historical legacies. Koch observes: Gerhard Richter and the Ambiguous Aesthetics of Morality 101 Darum gerät Onkel Rudi so gespenstisch: was in den grauen Verwischungen des Bildes von ihm hängen geblieben ist, kennzeichnet ihn genau als Typus. Der lachende Mann in der Ausgehuniform der Wehrmacht, der vermutliche Offizier mit dem vermutbaren Hakenkreuz an der Mütze, ist so unheimlich, weil er einerseits ‹Onkel Rudi› ist, der, weil er auf einem Photo so abgebildet gewesen zu scheint, als eine individuelle Person mitgedacht werden muß, und diese gleichzeitig auf den Typus, eben ‹Onkel Rudi› hin dekonstruiert wird. («Das offene Geheimnis» 19) Fig. 2: Gerhard Richter, Onkel Rudi, Lidice Gallery, Lidice, Czech Republic 1965 This Onkel Rudi is in fact Richter’s maternal uncle, Rudolf Schönfelder, who served as an officer in the Wehrmacht until his death in 1944 (Elger, Maler 177). Because Richter’s own father could neither be taken seriously nor respected (his wife accused him of adultery and fathering children outside their marriage), Uncle Rudi was regarded as both father figure and well-respected hero: «Das war der Bruder meiner Mutter, der Liebling der Familie. Von dem wurde viel gesprochen, und der wurde mir als Held präsentiert» (qtd. in Elger, Maler 175). Giving this painting (featuring the smiling officer with what appears to be a swastika on his hat) a title like Onkel Rudi points the viewer to the ambivalence so many Germans felt after the war. How does one reconcile 102 Thyra E. Knapp the identities and memories of much-loved family members who fought for their country with the atrocities perpetrated under the Third Reich? Through the blurred lines of the painting, one sees reflected the seemingly antipodal concepts of remembering and forgetting, loving uncle and complicit soldier: «Das Gemälde löst den Helden auf wie eine harte Substanz im Wasser. Nicht das Was, sondern das Wie der Erinnerung ist [Richters] Thema» (Hoffmann 268). In contrast to Onkel Rudi, Tante Marianne appears quite innocent at first glance. Perhaps because of this, Marianne has not received nearly the critical attention that Rudi has, but when considering the theme of ambivalence and memory, this work certainly deserves further exploration. Based on another personal family photo, this image shows the artist as an infant and his then fourteen-year-old aunt. Richter’s characteristic gray scale shades the background into the distance, while a pale triangle of light is pulled into the foreground. At the apex is Richter’s aunt, whose head bows slightly forward, in deference to the child on her lap. Fig. 3: Gerhard Richter, Tante Marianne, 1965, sold at auction in 2006 for nearly $4,000,000 Gerhard Richter and the Ambiguous Aesthetics of Morality 103 Without knowing the history behind the image, it would be impossible to understand how this composition relates to Onkel Rudi and Herr Heyde; however, with further investigation, one learns that Marianne suffered from schizophrenia and in 1945 fell victim to the Nazi practice of euthanizing the mentally ill (Elger, Maler 172). By choosing an image in which Aunt Marianne and the infant Richter could be read as a ‹Madonna and Child› for the twentieth century, the artist underscores the innocence and tenderness of the scene, thereby adding to the complexity of Richter’s own family dynamic - and to the case for other German families still coming to terms with their own histories. The piece linking Rudi and Marianne is one based on a press photo of psychologist Dr. Werner Heyde, one of the initiators of the Nazi T-4 (Tiergartenstraße 4) Euthanasia Program. This photo shows Dr. Heyde being taken into police custody in November of 1959. Up until he turned himself in to the authorities, the psychologist had been living in Germany and practicing medicine under an assumed name. Just before he was to stand trial for his war crimes, and one year before Richter would paint this picture, Heyde committed suicide (Elger, Maler 172). By titling the painting Herr Heyde rather than Dr. Heyde, Richter strips the psychologist of his credentials, reducing him to the criminal that he is. As with the other two paintings, this composition is characterized by the blurred effect for which Richter is so well known. Two men are seen in profile, and the caption tells us that Heyde has surrendered, inviting the viewer to inquire about his crimes. The simple fact Richter provides this image with a caption sets it apart, visually and didactically, from the other two. While the source images for Rudi and Marianne are family photographs, the origin of this painting, with its official looking caption, lends authority while simultaneously distancing itself from the viewer. As Gelshorn notes: Richter’s use of blurred images, frames, and writing in his paintings is not only intended to draw the viewer’s attention to the mediating and other functional qualities of painting, but also represents an explicit reference to the original source. This demarcation of an image as a visual quotation is analogous to setting quotation marks to frame a verbal quote in a text. In demonstrating the relationship of a painting to another picture by revealing the process by which an image is transposed from one medium to another, Richter intrudes upon, or at least calls into question, the viewer’s naive, unobstructed perspective. Richter’s ‹appropriations› emphasize the fact that both they and their models serve as mediators. (29) In the case of this grouping, Richter appropriates the public image of a doctor whose euthanasia program was sponsored by Nazi officials and directly resulted in the death of his aunt. By choosing to mediate the image of Herr 104 Thyra E. Knapp Heyde, Richter pulls the doctor into his own family’s private history while at the same time exposing him to the public at large. Fig. 4: Gerhard Richter, Herr Heyde, 1965, sold at auction in 2006 for $2,800,000 When considering all three paintings together, one finds a profound connection between victim and perpetrator; the everyday manifestations of the Third Reich played out through the example of one family. Richter’s maternal uncle shows the smile and pride of a young Wehrmacht officer, while his aunt stands as one of the millions of innocent victims of the regime for which he was fighting. Richter connects them with the image of Heyde, showing how the fate of his aunt and uncle - this unsuspecting brother and sister - are diabolically linked. While Richter was clearly aware of who Rudi and Marianne were, when asked if the artist knew that Herr Heyde was the conspicuous connection between them when he painted him, he responds: «I am sure I knew it. But I repressed it right away, and it became a picture like any other […]. I did not want to be part of the faction that accused. I do not belong to these who present themselves as anti-fascists, because I am not. I am also not a fascist» (qtd. in Storr, Doubt and Belief 164). Gerhard Richter and the Ambiguous Aesthetics of Morality 105 Richter’s assertion that he is neither anti-fascist nor fascist supports the ambiguity so characteristic of his œuvre, yet his series 48 Porträts can be seen (at least in its first exhibition) as an anti-fascist piece. Begun in 1971 and displayed in the Germany Pavilion (a structure redesigned by Ernst Haiger in 1938) at the 36th Venice Biennial in 1972, this collection of paintings should be read not only as a statement on the portrait genre, but also the iconographic tradition of fascist regimes (see Elger, Maler). Dieter Honisch’s description of the work in the catalogue for the Venice exhibition declares its political connotations: «Männer, die durch ihre Arbeit die Welt verändert haben und nun, kaum wiedererkannt, ein Lexikondasein führen, werden von Richter hervorgeholt, um in der faschistischen und einer falschen Repräsentationsvorstellung dienenden Architektur des deutschen Pavillons Probleme aktueller Malerei vorzuführen» (qtd. in Elger, Maler 249). In the place of politicians, Richter’s pantheon of modernity is comprised of physicists (Max Planck, Albert Einstein), authors (Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke), composers (Gustav Mahler, Igor Strawinski), and other learned men who helped to define the twentieth century. It is interesting to note that although there are creative figures on this list, there are no painters or sculptors, and among these luminaries there is not a woman to be found, something Richter attributes to his desire to maintain a certain anonymous, masculine aesthetic. Fig. 5: Gerhard Richter, 48 Porträts, Venice Biennial, 1972 The reference to a fascist aesthetic - one would expect to see likenesses of Hitler, Stalin, or Mussolini displayed in this manner - is heightened by the fact that Richter’s forty-eight paintings were hung around the large room in a continuous manner evoking a frieze. Placed at a height above eye level, visitors were forced to look up at the men in the portraits, thus establishing a position of reverence (Elger, Maler 247-48). Furthermore, in order to cre- 106 Thyra E. Knapp ate the effect of focused attention toward the center of the room, the artist chose source portraits based on the angle of their individual visages: «Die Reihenfolge der Tafeln ordnet Gerhard Richter nach der Blickrichtung der Dargestellten. Zu beiden Seiten des Eingangs und mittig auf der gegenüberliegenden Wand hängen die Bilder mit den frontal dargestellten Personen» (Elger, Maler 247-48). With images ranging from near profile depictions to direct frontal views, Richter’s portraits command attention and guide the visitor’s gaze toward the center of the space. Fig. 6: Gerhard Richter, Franz Kafka, Museum Ludwig, Cologne 1971/ 1972 When shown in Venice, this powerful arrangement featured the portrait of writer Franz Kafka in the center of the display. Author of works such as Die Verwandlung, Das Urteil, and In der Strafkolonie, Kafka is perhaps one of the best-known men in this collection, and his dark countenance - one half of which swims in shadow - seems to cast an uneasy presence on the whole gallery. With such detailed calculations of positioning and facial angles, it seems unlikely that Richter did not intend Kafka’s centrality over the other figures, yet the artist denies this assertion so vehemently that he never again installed 48-Porträts in this particular configuration: Richter geht dabei so weit, die Hängung nach der Eröffnung der Biennale noch einmal zu korrigieren, weil er Sorge hat, die Plazierung des Bildnisses von Franz Kafka an hervorgehobener Position, mitten auf der dem Eingang gegenüberliegenden Gerhard Richter and the Ambiguous Aesthetics of Morality 107 zentralen Wand, könne ihm als eine perönliche Vorliebe ausgelegt werden: «Weil Kafka eine Lieblingsfigur und somit zu bedeutend ist. Der relative unbekannte Blackett war mir da lieber», rechtfertigt Gerhard Richter 1990 gegenüber Susanne Ehrenfried seine nachträgliche Korrektur der Präsentation. (Elger, Maler 248) Despite his argument to the contrary, one could argue that Richter chose this prime position for Kafka with good reason, replacing the expected dictatorial leader with a man known for creating literary worlds of psychological exploration and brutal alienation. Perhaps with this inaugural grouping, Richter intended to invite viewers to question whether their (political) leaders could be trusted or whether they are just creating fictional worlds in which their citizens are expected to meet with the same absurdity and hopelessness found in Kafka’s works. Whatever his specific intent, Richter’s attention to detail with regard to every other element of this obliquely anti-fascist work seems to suggest that Kafka’s positioning at the center of this pantheon of great men was anything but accidental. The final series of paintings discussed here moves from an oblique critique of fascism to the politically charged, very specific subject of domestic terrorism. Richter’s 18. Oktober 1977 consists of fifteen paintings depicting members, actions, and objects belonging to the Baader-Meinhof group. As with the other photo paintings, there seems to exist a disjuncture between Richter’s claim of nonpolitical art and the reality of the images, resulting in what Desa Philippi notes as the tension created by diametrically opposed forces: There remains something deeply troubling about this installation that seems to simultaneously announce and cancel a possible relation between art and politics. October 18, 1977 does not narrate - if that were at all possible - the events it evokes. It presents versions and variations on the theme of a particular kind of archival material. The origin of these images refers us to other images, which in turn suggest representations that are not on view and not for viewing. (120) Richter’s ambiguity thereby creates a self-reflexivity that opens his paintings to both that which is seen, and that which lies beneath the surface. Painted from March to November of 1988, these blurred images present various views on Germany’s Rote Armee Faktion (see Storr’s monograph on the cycle). This band of left-wing terrorists was founded in 1970 and grew out of the student movements of the late 1960s. The founders, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, began their protests with letters and bombs, but the violence quickly escalated and more than thirty deaths have since been attributed to the group. What started as a reaction to Germany’s quick economic recovery from World War II and the denial of a generation as to what took place during the Third Reich, the increasingly violent actions of the Rote Armee Faktion (RAF) were admired by their sympathizers, questioned by the majority of 108 Thyra E. Knapp German citizens, and condemned by the government and law enforcement; an ambivalence reflected in the works themselves. After evading the police for two turbulent years, several of the core members (Baader, Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, Holger Meins, and Jan-Carl Raspe) were caught and arrested in June of 1972. The trial began in 1975 in Stammheim Prison, where the members were being held, and before it could be concluded, Meinhof, Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe committed suicide. Conspiracy theories abound regarding the question of whether the members had a suicide pact - for Baader, Ensslin and Raspe all died on 18-October 1977 - or if the government was somehow involved in their deaths. The unsettling and divisive events of the German Autumn proved difficult for the entire country, and it would seem that Richter was speaking for many Germans when, a decade later, he stated: «The deaths of the terrorists, and the related events both before and after, stand for a horror that distressed me and has haunted me as unfinished business ever since, despite all my efforts to suppress it» (qtd. in Obrist 173-74). As an artist, Richter was uniquely able to take these feelings of uneasiness and uncertainty and translate them into visual expression; his externalization of internalized incomprehension became art objects viewers could share. The painter admits: «It is impossible for me to interpret the pictures. That is: in the first place they are too emotional; they are, if possible, an expression of speechless emotion. They are the almost forlorn attempt to give shape to feelings of compassion, grief and horror,» thus making a space for «understanding those events, being able to live with them» (qtd. in Obrist 174). One of the greatest obstacles preventing Germans from being able to «understand» and «live with» the realities of domestic terrorism created by the Baader-Meinhof group is certainly connected to the victim/ oppressor dichotomy witnessed following the end of World War II. Richter explains: If people want to see these people [terrorists] hanged as criminals, that’s only part of it: there’s something else that puts an additional fear into people, namely that they themselves are terrorists. And that is forbidden. So this terrorism inside all of us, that’s what generates the rage and fear, and that’s what I don’t want, any more than I want the policemen inside myself - there’s never just one side to us. We’re always both: the State and the terrorist. (qtd. in Obrist 186) The conflict that each of us ostensibly carries within ourselves is visually manifested in the depiction of blurred distinctness. One expects photographs, particularly the black-and-white variety, to record truth: «There’s something documentary about them. More than any other kind of depiction, you believe in them» (qtd. in Obrist 218). However, Richter uses the appearance of documentary photographs to attract the viewer to his image, which then blurs the Gerhard Richter and the Ambiguous Aesthetics of Morality 109 truth, requiring the audience to draw its own conclusions in the face of this painted ambiguity. From an innocent portrait of Meinhof as a young woman to depictions of Baader and Ensslin found dead, Richter bases his paintings on photographs whose subjects range from the banal to the macabre. Even in the case of objects that at first seem harmless, such as a record player, the informed viewer is immediately aware that the pistol that took Baader’s life was smuggled into the prison in its base. It is precisely the artist’s selection of such diverse subjects within the cycle that makes this collection obliquely political. What does the artist want to say with these images - and the others in the series - portraying the deaths of these left-wing radical terrorists? Is he mourning their loss, or proclaiming the futility of their lives? Perhaps he is doing both simultaneously, again furthering the cause for ambivalence. Although each of the fifteen individual paintings is able to stand on its own, and when exhibited together they form a major installation addressing the German Autumn, I am focusing here on only two images, Zelle and Erhängte. Zelle depicts Baader’s vacant prison cell at Stammheim; divided nearly down the middle, white space on the left is balanced by dark, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on the right. At first glance, and particularly with the heavy blur, this small room could easily be mistaken for a Studentenbude, a utilitarian space filled with books. The association of prison cell to dorm room seems a natural one, especially when one recalls that the RAF grew out of the student movements of the late 1960s. Yet, when Zelle is viewed next to Erhängte, which shows Gudrun Ensslin hanged in her cell, a dialogue between the two images is created. What appears to be an overcoat hanging on the left in Zelle is mundane on its own, but when seen in reference to Erhängte, it eerily echoes the body of Ensslin hanging limply in her cell. By reading these two paintings against one another, Zelle seems to point to the origin of the radical movement (revolutionary ideas represented by the many books) while Erhängte represents its tragic end (violence culminating in a hanging). Michael Kelly argues that with these paintings, Richter is creating a space for grief caused by this violence: «This space is not only metaphorical; it is quite concrete in the sense that the public exhibition of the Baader-Meinhof paintings in a museum (or gallery) is a performative grieving affair, allowing viewers to experience the series as if they were attending a wake or funeral» (259). At this wake, presented through the mediation of Richter’s blurred visions, the horrific images of these terrorists are made bearable. According to Kelly, the act of painting these subjects «[gives] him a voice about them so that he would no longer be a ‹mute spectator› in their presence. If horror reduces us to silence, art as mediation allows us to get our voices back. 110 Thyra E. Knapp Fig. 8: Gerhard Richter, Erhängte, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1988 Fig. 7: Gerhard Richter, Zelle, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1988 Gerhard Richter and the Ambiguous Aesthetics of Morality 111 This is the Richter Effect, as described by Richter himself» (261). While it is true that Richter’s works do not promote any particular ideology, the artist nevertheless asks the viewer to consider the relationships between images he creates and draw one’s own conclusions about politically charged events. As Kelly notes: «[Richter] saw a need to express something more than certain innocence and certain guilt, clear victims and clear criminals. It is not that he wanted to blur these distinctions; rather, he wanted to open up discussion of issues that the rush to certainty and closure had shut down» (272). In each of the instances explored here, Richter uses the blur to provoke and unsettle, pushing the viewer to revisit her/ his own relationship to the past. In his own words, Richter claims to «blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant» (qtd. in Obrist 37), but the equalization only happens within the frame, once a subject has been chosen. Before this can happen, the painter gives significant thought to the subjects he represents: «The object is so important to me that I take a great deal of trouble over my choice of subjects. It is so important that I paint it» (qtd. in Obrist 58). As demonstrated, Richter has repeatedly chosen to portray subjects that were monumental in shaping the sociohistorical context of modern Germany. His works, while not ideologically dogmatic, do indeed engage politically charged themes. With the selection of particular subjects, Richter points the viewer toward consideration of difficult events; with the intricate double mediation of these photo paintings, Richter creates an ambiguous space in which the viewer is able to arrive at her/ his own understanding of not only the artwork itself, but also the event that inspired it. By utilizing gray scale and blurring lines to create this space, Gerhard Richter upholds his own morality of painting: the artist does not tell the viewer what to think, he simply inspires her/ him to do so. Works Cited Baker, Kenneth. «‹Gerhard Richter Painting› Review: An Inside Look.» sfgate.com. San Francisco Chronicle, 4 May 2012. Web. 18 Mar. 2014. Gerhard Richter Painting. Dir. Corinna Belz. Kino Lorber, 2011. Elger, Dietmar. Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010. -. Gerhard Richter, Maler. Cologne: DuMont Literatur und Kunst Verlag, 2002. Gelshorn, Julia. «Nachbilder. 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Meurer, Ulrich. «Double-mediated Terrorism: Gerhard Richter and Don DeLillo’s ‹Baader- Meinhof.›» Literature and Terrorism. Ed. Michael C. Frank. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011. 99-117. Nasgaard, Roald. «Gerhard Richter.» Gerhard Richter: Paintings. Ed. Terry A. Neff. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988. 31-36. Obrist, Hans-Ulrich, ed. Gerhard Richter. The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings and Interviews 1962-1993. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Osborne, Peter. «Painting Negation: Gerhard Richter’s Negatives.» October 62 (1992): 103-13. Philippi, Desa. «Moments of Interpretation.» October 62 (1992): 115-22. Rubel, Dietmar. «Die Fotografie (un)erträglich machen: Gerhard Richter gesehen mit W.G. Sebald.» Sechs Vorträge über Gerhard Richter. Ed. Dietmar Elger and Jürgen Müller. Dresden: König, 2007. 47-69. Spieler, Reinhard. «Ohne Farbe.» Gerhard Richter: Ohne Farbe. Ed. Reinhard Spieler. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2005. 8-23. Storr, Robert. 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