eJournals

Colloquia Germanica
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel, der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/61
2021
531
Band 53 Heft 1 Harald Höbus ch, J oseph D. O ’ Neil (Hr sg.) C O L L O Q U I A G E R M A N I C A I n t e r n a ti o n a l e Z e it s c h r ift f ü r G e r m a n i s ti k BAND 53 • Heft 1 Inhalt The Novella’s Everyday Peril: Reflections on Genre in Jeremias Gotthelf’s Die schwarze Spinne Marie-Luise Goldmann � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 3 Zwischen Schrift und Film: Franz Kafkas und Michael Hanekes Das Schloß Damianos Grammatikopoulos � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 19 After the Collective: Judith Schalansky on Post-Socialist Patterns of Thought Jakob Norberg � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 41 National Identity and Gender: Reading Johanna Franul von Weissenthurn’s Herrmann (1817) alongside Johann Elias Schlegel’s Herrmann (1743) Edward Potter � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 59 The Reflex: Group Photography and Ritual in Pioniere in Ingolstadt Martin P. Sheehan � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 81 Reviews Ela Gezen: Brecht, Turkish Theater, and Turkish German Literature: Reception, Adaptation, and Innovation after 1960� Paula Hanssen � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 101 Verzeichnis der Autorinnen und Autoren � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 105 The Novella’s Everyday Peril: Reflections on Genre in Jeremias Gotthelf ’s Die schwarze Spinne Marie-Luise Goldmann New York University Abstract: The article examines the nexus between the novella and the spider in Jeremias Gotthelf’s Die schwarze Spinne (1842), offering a new perspective on the Realist novella’s self-reflexive potential. Contrary to previous scholarship, which has interpreted the spider as an allegory of the plague, femininity, and revolutions, this article reads the spider as a critical reflection on the novella form that simultaneously activates and transgresses the novella’s genre conventions. Drawing on recent theories of Realism and the novella, this study focuses on the temporal aspects of a baptismal celebration that turns into captivity, the ways in which the novella’s frame is destabilized and pluralized, as well as the poetological dimension of the spider’s growth. The black spider is an animal that proliferates and in doing so disturbs the domestic sphere and with it the limitations of the novella form. Keywords: Novella, Genre, Realism, Media, 19 th century Literary critic Theodor Mundt writes in 1834 that one must catch the Germans off guard with the novella, for it “nistet sich noch am meisten in Stuben und Familien ein, sitzt mit zu Tische und belauscht das Abendgespräch” (70). Characterizing the novella as a “Deutsches Hausthier” [sic] (71), Mundt deliberately calls on the novella’s familial reputation 1 1 in order to turn the ostensibly innocent genre into something subversive that interferes with the domestic ideal. According to Mundt, the novella provides the ideal means to activate its readers’ political awareness by clandestinely putting a “bug” in their ears within the confines of their living rooms (71). While Mundt already equips the Haustier with critical qualities that exceed those of a tame pet, Jeremias Gotthelf’s 1842 novella carries the ambiguity of the term Haustier to the extreme. Die schwarze Spinne turns the domesticated 4 Marie-Luise Goldmann pet into a perilous pest that cannot be expelled from the house. Embedded in an interior narrative, the spider dominates a story that a grandfather tells at a baptismal celebration. A detailed frame narrative describes how the guests successively arrive at a luxurious house, where they are offered a splendid feast. After some appetizers are served to shorten the wait time for the roast, someone persuades the grandfather to tell the story of the black window post that has attracted the guests’ undivided attention: Following a breached contract 600 years ago, the sprouting spider wreaked havoc among the population of a small village until a young mother finally managed to imprison it in a hollow piece of wood in the wall. The guests press the grandfather for more of this story. This time, he tells about the spider’s release after 200 years and its serial killing of the villagers, which it continues until a docile young man finally succeeds in confining the spider once again in the same wooden beam. The novella ends with the frightened party guests taking off into the night. Rather than just a semantic coincidence, the spider in Gotthelf’s novella is linked to the genre’s description as a Haustier. To speak with Mundt on this: The spider settles in with the residents of the very house from which it is supposed to be expelled; it shares their table and eavesdrops on their evening conversations. Sometimes one can even hear it cozily purring (Gotthelf 98). Given the discursive entanglement of Haustier and novella in the 19 th century, Gotthelf’s depiction of a house-monster that intrudes upon home after home until it is finally banished into a house where it remains imprisoned for centuries suggests a radical transformation of the novella genre. The ominous pest that lives in the house and yet cannot be domesticated not only contrasts with paradigmatic pets like Boccaccio’s falcon 2 and Goethe’s lion, but also resists, on a structural level, generic norms of limitation. 3 The genre of the novella can be seen as a heightened example for the limitations imposed by genre insofar as the novella is traditionally characterized by its “Einseitigkeit” (Heyse 148), “Beschränkung” (Gervinus 114), “geschlossenste Form und […] Ausscheidung alles Unwesentlichen” (Storm 119). Gotthelf’s novella thus not only depicts the transgression of any genre, but of a genre known precisely for its constraints. Scholarship has interpreted the spider-catastrophe as a representation of the epidemic of the black death (Lindemann 99; Muschg 207; Zobel 126) or the old testament’s plague (Böschenstein 151-170, Lindemann 25) and as a commentary on revolutionary disturbances (Lindemann 82-141), the threats of femininity and foreignness (Donahue 304-324, Freund Phantastik 126, Giovannini 318, Heath 333-350, Höhne 195, Kehlmann 47, Uhlig 73), and the twofold seduction that the tradition of baptism warns about (Von Zimmermann 90). In the following article, I want to suggest a different approach by drawing attention away The Novella’s Everyday Peril 5 from the spider’s meaning to its proliferating form, which bears genre-poetical consequences. 4 I will first address the temporal aspects of a baptismal celebration that turns into endless captivity. Then, I will uncover the significance of the wooden post that imprisons the spider, arguing that the post represents an entanglement of old and new, as well as the pluralization of various unstable frames. A third step engages with the central figure, Christine, whose perspective illustrates a shift from the structuring of the novella around a singular turning point to a dynamic of proliferation. A nuanced reading of the spider’s genre citations and transgressions allows for a reevaluation of a genre that has long been considered tame. In accentuating the novella’s modernity and self-reflexive potential as well as its tendency to simultaneously evoke and resist genre demarcations (Biere 9-15), my study ties in with recent scholarship on the 19 th century Realist novella (See Swales, Schlaffer, Downing, Günter, Biere). 5 Ultimately, the various figures of duration that exceed the traditional novella’s punctual event, frame, and turning point reveal the novella as a Haustier that has gone wild. The spider’s confinement in the window post is one of the most crucial scenes in Gotthelf’s novella, for it not only sets the narrative in motion but also ends the perpetual terror that the killer-spider inflicts on the village. Twice performed and many times ritually arranged, the act of sealing up the monstrous animal in a hollow piece of wood repeatedly emerges as an act of banning: “[B]ewaffnet mit kräftigen Bannsprüchen” (55); “zog er den heiligen Bann mit geweihtem Wasser, den böse Geister nicht überschreiten dürfen” (67); “Gebannt im Loche” (90); “ins Bystal gebannt” (93); “hier sei die Spinne gebannt” (94); “die Spinne, die, wie gebannt durch heilige Worte, am gleichen Flecke sitzen blieb” (108). Gotthelf mobilizes the double meaning of “bannen” as “verbannen, verweisen, verjagen” on the one hand, and as “festhalten, zaubern, bezwingen” on the other hand (Grimm 1115-1117). This ambivalent dynamic of inclusive exclusion banishes the spider from society by preserving it in the very same house that is meant to provide shelter. 6 Remarkably, the baptismal ceremony takes place in the house in which the spider sits. In doing so, the ceremony transforms the novella’s traditional premise of escape, as established by Boccaccio in the context of the plague and by Goethe in the context of the revolution. Whereas Boccaccio and Goethe narrate the story of a community that gathers far away from the site of conflict to forget the crisis at hand, Gotthelf turns the traditional refugee situation into an arrival-scene that lets the guests enter the site of terror. 7 Furthermore, Gotthelf reconfigures the novella’s typical motivation from a means of distraction from the crisis to a means of attracting the crisis. 8 Whereas Goethe’s Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten establishes the impera- 6 Marie-Luise Goldmann tive to banish all debates about current affairs (Goethe 139), in Gotthelf’s Die schwarze Spinne, everyone understands that narrating does not dispel the catastrophe but only fixates on it: “denn wenn einmal eine Sache unsere Seele recht berührt hat, so kommt dieselbe nicht so schnell davon los. […] Und du bringst unsere Gedanken doch nicht von der Sache ab; und wenn wir nicht von ihr reden dürfen, so reden wir auch von nichts anderem” (Gotthelf 93-94). The guests comment on what can be seen as a radicalized version of the novella’s characteristic reception: its captivating suspense (Reinbeck 37) and potential, “den flüchtigen Leser […] um jeden Preis von heute auf morgen festzuhalten” (Heyse 144). As a result, the central event of the novella form - what Goethe characterized as “eine sich ereignete unerhörte Begebenheit” (Goethe 54) - is transformed into an ongoing ordeal. The black beam in the wall that can be sealed and released ad libitum is, as Martha B. Helfer puts it, “a monstrous, lurking, ever-present threat to modernity” (662). The horror reaches deep into the past and never ends. Within the frame story, seemingly harmless conversations about food and festiveness reveal additional moments of duration. At first, Die schwarze Spinne appears as the epitome of an idyll (Donahue 313, Helfer 669): friendly guests eat pancakes, sit in an idealized household setting, and celebrate the baptism of a healthy child. Yet already at this point - long before the black post is even discovered - disruptive moments interfere with the peaceful ambience. The idyll is put on hold, pervaded by scenes of unbearable waiting. “Wenn sie nur bald kämen, es wäre alles bereit,” the midwife sighs, waiting for the guests to arrive (Gotthelf 30). “‘Kommen Sie noch nicht? ’ hört man es allenthalben” (31). Moments of insufferable duration anticipate the agonizing waiting scenes in the interior storyline, in which the unchristened newborns’ delivery to the devil must be prevented. Every time an impatient mother urgently awaits the priest’s arrival to baptize her child, the narrative transforms minutes into eternities (Gotthelf 77). In the frame narrative, the guests ultimately tell stories to pass the time until dinner, for without narration, as the nephew remarks, “gibt’s keine kurze Zeit mehr” (Gotthelf 95). Remarkably, the godmother names the food, namely the lavish feast, as the cause of her delay: “Ich wäre schon lange zweg [sic], wenn ich nicht mehr hätte nehmen müssen, als ich hinunterbringen kann” (Gotthelf 32). In apologizing for the long wait, she alludes to the connection between temporal dilation - a common feature of the idyll - and the excesses of the feast. The food supply exceeds not only what needs to be ingested but also what can be ingested. This is remarkable insofar as prominent theories of the novella associate the genre with a particularly light meal: in Goethe’s Unterhaltungen, the old man defines the novella as “leichten Nachtische” (Goethe 146). Stifter The Novella’s Everyday Peril 7 similarly describes it in his introduction to the novella-collection Bunte Steine as a “Naschwerk” (Stifter 15). In these formulations, the novella materializes as a piece of literature that can be consumed additionally and belatedly, as a small “Spielerei” (Stifter 15) if one is “schon gesättigt” and willing “nach einer ernsthaften Unterhaltung auf eine kurze Zeit aus[zu]ruhen” (Goethe 145-46). Evoking a connection between food and narration, Gotthelf modifies the traditional account of the novella by endowing the meal with agonizing effects. The old man’s unfounded concern in the Unterhaltungen, namely that his family could consider the proposed narrative to be “unschmackhaft” (Goethe 146), comes true in Gotthelf’s novella: the additional food as well as the grandfather’s narrative are indigestible and not “hinunter[zu]bringen” (Gotthelf 32). It is further remarkable that the narration does not unfold “abends nach Tische” (Goethe 146) but exactly between the sumptuous starters and the roast, thus raising the novella’s status from a dessert to the main course: “Jetzt schickte es sich so wohl, bis die Weiber den Braten zweghaben [sic], du würdest uns damit so kurze Zeit machen, darum gib aufrichtigen Bericht! ” (Gotthelf 44) The guests are so entirely captivated by the story of the spider even while eating that they demand a sequel, which is followed by more food. There is no end to and no escape from the manifold dishes that are served before, in between, and after the split narrative (Gotthelf 31-32, 92). Suggesting a structural parallel between literary and meal consumption, the frame narrative presents a mode of reception as perpetual overflow that is - as the godmother cleverly remarks with her comment on the food - accompanied by symptoms of overeating. How does the black post catch the guests’ attention? Remarkably, the post becomes noticeable because it disturbs the house’s harmonious perfection. Already at the outset, it is marked as a disruptive element that breaks up the otherwise ordinarily constructed wall. “Warum da gleich neben dem ersten Fenster der wüste, schwarze Fensterpfosten (Bystel) ist, der steht dem ganzen Hause übel an,” a woman critically notes (Gotthelf 44). A noticeable outlier in the otherwise well-arranged house, the raw post motivates a narrative that neither sugarcoats the misery of the community nor excludes fantastic objects. Mobilizing figures like the devil, a 600-year-old monster, a human-animal birth, a metamorphosis, and fiery squirrels carrying heavy loads, the inner story line transgresses the frame’s idyllic setting just like the rough beam disturbs the beauty of the house. When faced with the grandfather’s defense that “es hätte an Holz gefehlt beim Aufrichten, kein anderes sei gleich bei der Hand gewesen, da habe man in Not und Eile einiges vom alten Hause genommen” (Gotthelf 44), the suspicious woman replies: “Aber […] das schwarze Stück Holz war ja noch dazu zu kurz, oben und unten ist es angesetzt, und jeder Nachbar hätte euch von Herzen gerne 8 Marie-Luise Goldmann ein ganzes neues Stück gegeben” (Gotthelf 44). What exactly does she criticize about the piece of wood? The biggest problem seems to be its color (black), its size (too short), its age (it belongs to the old house), as well as its form (it is patched in). The post’s unsuitability, I want to suggest, reflects on the 19 th century novella’s relative brevity (Aust 19) 9 as well as its conditions of production: namely, the techniques of integrating pieces from other media such as past newspapers (Günter 153), adopting conventional tropes and topoi (Wassmann 61, Füllmann 11), employing traditional forms such as fairy tales and sagas (Gailus 773), and reprinting already published novellas in novella collections (Aust 19)� 10 The old post’s unfitting installation indirectly refers to the patching and recycling that characterizes the genre of the novella. When the woman emphasizes the post’s status as a remnant that is older than the house itself, the narrative introduces the theme of tradition, which continues in subsequent discussions about the value of old and new in both the frame and the interior narrative. However, the narration seems to degrade the new and the young at least as often as the old. For example, the narrator contrasts “die wilde Jugend” with the “bedächtige[n] Alte[n],” who “warnten und baten, aber trotzige Herzen achten bedächtiger Alten Warnung nicht” (Gotthelf 65). To the village’s own disadvantage, no one listens to the warnings of an “alt, ehrwürdig Weib” (Gotthelf 61). Remarkably, “ein alter und ein junger” godfather both scorn the “neumodischen Kaffee, den sie alle Tage haben konnten” in favor of the “altertümlichen, aber guten Bernersuppe” with “diesem ebenso altertümlichen Gewürze” (Gotthelf 33), thus privileging valuable tradition over newfangled trends. On the other hand, it is precisely the young mother who finally succeeds in imprisoning the spider. Furthermore, the villagers’ curiosity displays a dangerous desire for novelties. For example, a toxic wind promptly blows on the “neugierige Weibsseele[n],” punishing them with bloated faces for glancing through a gap in the house to see who is carrying the trees for the lord’s alley (Gotthelf 64). The inquisitive servant, who releases the spider from its wooden hole because he wanted to see “was drinnen sei, und sie müßten einmal auch was Neues sehen” (Gotthelf 101), is the first to fall prey to the newly emerging monster. The fact that curious people never go unpunished in the interior storyline forms a radical contrast with the frame story, in which the audience’s productive curiosity motivates the narration in the first place. Not only is the novella inconsistent in its repudiation of the old or the new, it also lets such superficial oppositions repeatedly collapse, for example, when the new turns old and the old appears in a new light. After all, it is the old spider in the second interior narrative that returns and wreaks havoc, compounding a familiar fright with the newly emerging horrors. What is done, is always already The Novella’s Everyday Peril 9 done for the second time. Even during the baptismal celebration in the frame narrative, the priest abstains from naming “[…] ein Mädeli, […] ein Bäbeli” but instead christens “einen Hans Uli, einen ehrlichen, wirklichen Hans Uli” (Gotthelf 38). The sentence’s focus on the “real” Hans Uli serves as a reflection on the nature of reality. The newborn is not, as one might assume, the narration’s first Hans Uli. Not only is the younger godfather already named Hans Uli, the interior narrative’s feudal overlord is named Hans, as is the father who betrays his family. In this way, Gotthelf marks reality as belated imitation or double of the past. The novella’s ambivalent approach toward the old and the new ultimately displays its own problematic self-understanding. Closely entangled with its own tradition, the novella is simultaneously linked to the daily production of news, which leads Paul Heyse to assert that one might take its name literally and find yesterday’s novella already obsolete today (144). Gotthelf’s Die schwarze Spinne attempts to critically affirm its own contemporaneity and its adherence to tradition, which only succeeds because the narrative alternately condemns both the new and the old. From a pragmatic perspective, the combination of a new house and an old piece of wood seems to offer a solution to the new/ old dilemma: “ein neues Haus könnten sie wohl bauen an die Stelle des alten und nicht anderswo, aber zwei Dinge müßten sie wohl bewahren, das alte Holz, worin die Spinne sei, den alten Sinn, der ins alte Holz die Spinne geschlossen, dann werde der alte Segen auch im neuen Hause sein” (Gotthelf 111). Aiming to preserve the old spirit by combining old and new materials, Gotthelf effectively presents an inversion of Schlegel’s dictum, that “Novellen dürfen im Buchstaben alt sein, wenn nur der Geist neu ist” (3). What is more, even when this new house, which contains the old spirit, turns “wiederum alt und klein, wurmstichig und faul,” the post will remain “fest und eisenhart” (Gotthelf 111). Many overlying frames result from this well-intentioned advice to build the new house where the old once stood: the house encloses the post, which in turn imprisons the spider, thus serving as a metaphorical frame for the encased animal. 11 The doubled frame consisting of the house and the post mirrors the novella’s split narrative framework. But this is not all. The garden surrounding the house creates a third frame: “mittendrin stand stattlich und blank ein schönes Haus, eingefaßt von einem prächtigen Baumgarten” (Gotthelf 27). As this multilayered description suggests, Gotthelf replaces the “Einzelkreis mit einheitlichem Handlungskern” (Hart 182) - a key characteristic of the novella - with multiple staggered frames. Interfering with the generic structures of the idyll and the novella, Die schwarze Spinne does not exclude the monstrous but accommodates and duplicates it in its narrative core. Initially, the frames appear stable: The post is firm, the house beautiful, and the garden splendid. Gradually, however, one frame after the other cracks - the 10 Marie-Luise Goldmann post is perforated, the house rots, and its splendor is compromised. Topoi of contamination pervade the narrative frame from the beginning (See Helfer 670-71). The immaculate house is constantly in danger of being blemished: “Um das Haus lag ein sonntäglicher Glanz […] der ein Zeugnis ist des köstlichen Erbgutes angestammter Reinlichkeit, die alle Tage gepflegt werden muß, der Familienehre gleich, welcher eine einzige unbewachte Stunde Flecken bringen kann, die Blutflecken gleich unauslöschlich bleiben von Geschlecht zu Geschlecht, jeder Tünche spottend” (Gotthelf 27). In various scenarios of cleaning, washing, and wiping, black spots incessantly contaminate white fabrics: “und zweimal musste der Bube Besen und Schaufel nehmen, weil er die Spuren ihrer Behaglichkeit nicht sauber genug weggeräumt” (Gotthelf 28). “Auf rein gefegter Bank […] in der weiten, reinen Küche” (Gotthelf 28-29), the “schöne[n] weiße[n] Strümpfe” (Gotthelf 31) and “schönen, weißen Flaschen” contrast with the excessively mentioned “Kaffee” (Gotthelf 29-32), the “schwarzen Schnüre[n]” (Gotthelf 31), and “schwarzseidenen Haarschnüren” (Gotthelf 31). The “schöne, weiße Tauftuch” is decorated with “schwarzen Quasten in den Ecken” (Gotthelf 35). Right from the outset, the narrative introduces textiles that not only obscure the domestic purity of the house but also recall the monster’s arachnid form. The unstable house-frames critically reflect on the narrative framework’s own porosity. It is remarkable that holes are among the many objects that appear both in the interior and frame narrative. Whereas the frame’s narrator, for example, praises the housewife for her strength, “alleine den Haushaltungswagen aus allen Löchern [zu] heben […], in die er geraten wollte” (Gotthelf 36), an inversion of this maternal power occurs in the interior storyline, in which the mother inserts the spider downwards into the hole to rescue her household. The hole guarantees an alliance of frame and interior narrative in two respects, for it simultaneously acts as a plot device on both levels of the narrative and as a threshold separating and connecting the inside and outside. After the spider‘s liberation in the second interior narrative, it sits “auf die Schwelle und glotzte schadenfroh in die Vergiftung, als ob sie sagen wollte: sie sei es und sei doch wieder da, wie lange man sie auch eingesperrt” (Gotthelf 104). Occupying the threshold, the spider jumps back and forth between both narratives. In doing so, it not only crosses temporal and spatial borders but also violates genre demarcations such as the novella’s limitation to a stable frame. In addition to extending the novella’s crisis and destabilizing its frames, Gotthelf transforms the characteristic turning point, the “Wendung der Geschichte, dieser Punkt, von welchem aus sie sich unerwartet völlig umkehrt” (Tieck 75), into a moment of unbearable duration. In the interior narrative, the feudal lord Hans von Stoffeln forces overworked farmers to carry hundreds of full-grown The Novella’s Everyday Peril 11 beech trees up the hill all within a month to construct shade for his personal alley. The desperate men see no way out of their misery until Christine, who is described as the village’s only emancipated woman, enters into a contract with the devil, who promises to help the farmers in exchange for an unchristened child. The signing of the contract serves as the narration’s turning point in which the village enters a state of irreversible catastrophe. The devil, who unavailingly awaits his promised reward, turns the poor but peaceful village into a scene of destruction by giving life to spiders that invade society like a lethal plague. The spiders first appear in a collective like the vast array of little spiders that Christine spawns and later as the individual spider into which Christine herself metamorphoses. Christine is portrayed as an exception among the villagers not only due to her inversion of traditional femininity but also by her status as a foreigner - “eine Lindauerin” (Gotthelf 52) -who acts outside the social norm. She is characterized as a supplement, which already associates her with the black post long before she metamorphoses. Both Christine and the post stand out and cannot be properly integrated. Although scholarship has emphasized the narrative’s focus on Christine’s gender (Donahue 304-324, Freund Phantastik 126, Höhne 195, Kehlmann 47), it is the neutral pronoun es instead of the female sie that defines her. The moment the narrator introduces Christine, she appears already de-subjectified: “Ein einziges Weib schrie nicht den andern gleich. […] Es hatte wilde, schwarze Augen […] wenn es dabei gewesen, es hätte ihm es sagen wollen, sagte es” (Gotthelf 52). Not only does Christine’s visage foreshadow the spider with its wild, black eyes, the excessive repetition of the es as well as the use of impersonal inquit-formulas suggest an action that is dissociated from any subject. The nominative es describing Christine cannot be distinguished from the accusative es denoting the content of her speech. What Christine would have wanted to tell the devil remains vague: this es (“es hätte ihm es sagen wollen” [italics added]) does not refer to any previously or later mentioned object. The pronoun’s doubled use, referring to both Christine and the content of her speech, threatens to confuse subject and object, turning Christine into that which is spoken: narration itself. Always transformed, Christine is the only one in the village who does not flee during the farmers’ second encounter with the devil but “blieb stehen, wie gebannt” (Gotthelf 55). After some chit-chat, the devil and Christine come to an agreement, which to Christine’s surprise is not sealed with a signature but with a kiss, gluing Christine to the floor: “Somit spitzte er seinen Mund gegen Christines Gesicht, und Christine konnte nicht fliehen, war wiederum wie gebannt, steif und starr” (Gotthelf 58). The contract followed by the kiss, from whose place the spider later grows (and with it, as we know, the novella), evokes the 12 Marie-Luise Goldmann initial meaning of “novella” in Roman law, which refers to a supplement which was added to the existing code of legislation (Aust 25). In Die schwarze Spinne too, the kiss/ novella appears as an addendum to the contract. In addition to presenting a link between the novella’s turning point and the miracle it depicts -as emphasized by Ludwig Tieck (Tieck 75) - Gotthelf’s novella extends the turning point’s duration. Stiff and transfixed, Christine is doomed to paralysis. Even after the devil’s disappearance, his forcible kiss yields violent aftereffects: “Christine stund wie versteinert, als ob tief in den Boden hinunter ihre Füße Wurzeln getrieben hätten in jenem schrecklichen Augenblick” (Gotthelf 58). What does it mean if the turning point of the novella, which usually resembles the drama’s “rascheren Fortschritt, Scenen- und Situationswechsel” (Gottschall 125), becomes inscribed in a poetics of duration that shifts the temporality of the genre from one of transience to one of standstill? Christine’s petrification correlates with the paralysis of those who later freeze when meeting the spider’s horrible gaze: “[d]a starrte allen zuerst das Blut in den Adern, der Atem in der Brust, der Blick im Auge“ (Gotthelf 85); “die Hände hielten erstarrt Becher oder Gabel, der Mund blieb offen, stier waren alle Augen auf einen Punkt gerichtet” (88); “[…] die versteinert in tödlicher Angst kein Glied bewegen konnten, dem schrecklichen Untiere zu entrinnen” (103). One can even observe the devil’s effect on Christine as well as the spider’s effect on its victims in the passivity of the frame society, which openly articulates its desire for gripping storytelling. The audience listens in a state of mesmerized fixation. Where the guests dread re-entering the dining room and instead remain “unten wie angenagelt” (93), the novella imagines itself as an enchantment that leaves the reader spellbound. The shift to a poetics of duration occurring in the novella’s pivotal scene is best observed in the transition from the “Stelle” and the “Punkt” to the “Fleck.” Through the overlay of two different discourses, the spot, Stelle, where the devil kisses Christine, evokes the meaning of a text passage, Textstelle: “da war es ihr, als drücke man ihr plötzlich ein feurig Eisen auf die Stelle, wo sie des Grünen Kuß empfangen […] und was sie vom Grünen auf diese Stelle erhalten” (Gotthelf 68-69). More concretely, the Punkt in the shape of which the spider at first appears can be read as a reference to the novella’s programmatic Punktualität: “und der schwarze Punkt ward größer und schwärzer […] desto mächtiger dehnte der schwarze Punkt sich aus” (Gotthelf 69). 12 The diabolical kiss from which the spider grows transforms the fleeting incident into a moment of extended duration. Linguistically, this permanence is illustrated when Stelle and Punkt are replaced with Fleck, meaning the dirty spot that expands not only spatially but also temporally: “da sah die Alte auf Christines Wange einen fast unsichtbaren Fleck. […] [A]ber die Pein nahm nicht ab, und unmerklich wuchs The Novella’s Everyday Peril 13 der kleine Punkt […] und immer und immer mußte sie denken, daß auf den gleichen Fleck der Grüne sie geküßt, und daß die gleiche Glut, die damals wie ein Blitz durch ihr Gebein gefahren, jetzt bleibend in demselben brenne und zehre” (Gotthelf 68-69). As these passages show, the point grows into a spot that finally turns into the spider. The animal resulting from the multiplying Stelle, Punkt, and Fleck is never identical with itself and constantly shifts its frontiers: So war die Spinne bald nirgends, bald hier, bald dort, bald im Tale unten, bald auf den Bergen oben; sie zischte durchs Gras, sie fiel von der Decke, sie tauchte aus dem Boden auf. […] und ehe die Menschen den Schrecken gesprengt, war sie allen über die Hände gelaufen, saß oben am Tisch auf des Hausvaters Haupte und glotzte über den Tisch, die schwarz werdenden Hände weg. Sie fiel des Nachts den Leuten ins Gesicht, begegnete ihnen im Walde, suchte sie heim im Stalle. Die Menschen konnten sie nicht meiden, sie war nirgends und allenthalben, konnten im Wachen vor ihr sich nicht schützen, waren schlafend vor ihr nicht sicher. (Gotthelf 85-86) The dispersive spider reveals an uncanny ability to be soon here, there, nowhere, and everywhere. Resisting localization, the spider’s immeasurable swelling extends to the frame narrative, in which black stains impose themselves on the house. The frames of the narration as well as those of Stelle, Punkt, and Fleck are shifting, overlapping, and constantly transforming. Both in the corporal sense of the word as well as in terms of narration, the spider’s proliferation suspends what Paul Heyse calls a “Silhouette” (Heyse 148), namely a clearly definable storyline that he marks as crucial for the novella. While the arachnid plague contrasts with the programmatic conventions of the novella, it reflects on the novella’s production and distribution, which are closely entangled with mass media (Günter 137-208). Gotthelf’s Die Schwarze Spinne can be read as a genre-critical comment on the novella’s excessive “Massenhaftigkeit, in welcher sie einherflutet” (Rhiel 138), the “Überwuchern der Novelle, die aus allen Journal- und Zeitungsspalten hervorkeimt” (Gottschall 126), its “heillosen Zerstückelung,” “abgerissene[n] Form,” “Flüchtigkeit,” as well as the “Umsichgreifen jener Zwittergattungen, die […] so lange Jahre gewuchert und den gesunden Wuchs der echten Novelle verkümmert haben” (Heyse 146). In a letter to Paul Heyse, Gottfried Keller bemoans that the “Novelliererei” has turned into a “Nivelliererei” overflooding the market (Keller 384). Drawing on topoi of growth and dispersion, 20 th century critic Fritz Martini uses Mundt’s metaphor of the “Hausthier” to characterize the 19 th century novella’s proliferation: “Dies deutsche Haustier gedieh nach 1848/ 49 in zahlreichen Zeitschriften rudelweise weiter.” (365). Martini’s play with the Haustier-metaphor reaches beyond Mundt’s attempt to stress the novella’s familiar and familial qualities. Rather, the emphasis on the reproduction of pets resembles the logic with which 14 Marie-Luise Goldmann Gotthelf’s Die Schwarze Spinne self-consciously activates contemporary discourses on the genre of the novella. Contrary to theories of the novella that presume a focus on a single moment, Gotthelf’s spider proliferates and thus critically displays the 19 th century novella’s conditions of mass production and distribution. Ultimately, multiple generic conventions undergo fundamental changes in Die schwarze Spinne, such as the characteristic escape from the crisis turning into a state of captivity, the traditional frame appearing pluralized and fragile, and the signature turning point transforming into everlasting duration. The novella’s status as a “border genre” (Gailus 774) advances a norm that perpetually expands its borders. Reading the spider not as a symbol or allegory but rather as a means of reflecting on and modifying the novella genre brings the modernity of Gotthelf’s early Realist novella to light. Notes 1 Florentine Biere identifies the term “Hausthier” as a “Metapher einer Domestizierung, die die Poetik der Novelle lange Zeit bestimmt hat und auch in ihren literaturwissenschaftlichen Konzeptionen ihre Spuren hinterlassen hat” (9). She concludes that the so-called “Anti-Novelle” makes the Haustier novella “fremd” again (408). 2 Gotthelf directly cites the falcon but only to suspend it moments later: When a brave knight in the interior narrative takes his falcon along to defeat the spider, the falcon anxiously flies away as soon as it sees the monster: “[v]ergebens ritt und rief der Ritter, seine Tiere sah er nicht wieder” (Gotthelf 87). 3 Jacques Derrida prominently points to the “parasitical economy” (59) inherent in the law of genre, for he considers it impossible to “not cross a line of demarcation,” to “not risk impurity, anomaly, or monstrosity” (57). For recent discussions on the justification of generic interpretative approaches see Florentine Biere (9-10) and Martin Swales, who stresses the validity of genre-concepts as “a reservoir potentiality, as a structuring principle” (15). 4 Martha Helfer’s article constitutes an exception to prevalent scholarship insofar as she examines the self-reflexive gesture that Die schwarze Spinne exhibits, for the spider’s arachnid, circular form resembles the structure of the narrative (673). Yet, Helfer’s poetological observations do not engage with questions of genre or the novella - a gap that my article seeks to remedy. 5 Martin Swales already points to the “remarkable modernity of the nineteenth-century novella, for it raises issues that challenge many accepted The Novella’s Everyday Peril 15 ‘realistic’ certainties” (207). Hannelore Schlaffer‘s concept of the “Anti-Novelle” does not totally apply to Gotthelf‘s Die Schwarze Spinne, because the former is characterized by its “Langsamkeit, Ereignislosigkeit, Bedeutungslosigkeit,” (267) whereas Gotthelf, on the contrary, practices the horrendous event’s radical pluralization. Yet, Gotthelf’s novella can be characterized as an anti-novella insofar as it cites traditional criteria of the novella and critically inverts them. Eric Downing, in his study on literary Realism, exclusively focuses on novellas, “because novellas are, perhaps generically and certainly historically, more obviously given to the interruption of their own invoked interpretive strategies and deployed social iconographies […] and because many of the novellas produced by the German realists […] were notably eccentric (even as novellas) and removed from any uniform, normed discourse easily identifiable as realism, and more-over were notably given to exploring more or less self-consciously the aesthetic and social problematics of their realist enterprise” (13-14). Manuela Günter determines “die Liquidation von Originalität, Identität, Kohärenz und Kontinuität” not so much as “ein Verdienst der literarischen Moderne als vielmehr der periodischen Printmedien des 19. Jahrhunderts,” crediting the novella with a deconstructive force resulting from its specific mediality (333). Florentine Biere emphasizes the novella’s potential as an “Anti-Gattung, als Ort eines erneuerbaren, freien Erzählens gegen verfestigte Normen” (21). 6 As to Goethe‘s Unterhaltungen, Cornelia Zumbusch develops a similar pinciple of inclusive exclusion, but rather than calling this structure Bann, she employs medical terminology defining it as a “Modell der Immunisierung durch gezielten Einschluß,” a “Prinzip der dosierten Impfung” (Zumbusch 306) as well as a “paradoxe Logik der Immunisierung […], nach der man sich selbst zuzufügen hat, was man eigentlich abwehren möchte” (363). 7 Hannelore Schlaffer sees the connection between interior space and vice already as a crucial characteristic of the early novellas: From the beginning of the novella’s history, the predominantly female associated house fails to offer shelter but rather functions as a place for impertinent intruders (33, 271). Winfried Freund argues that the “moderne Novelle entfernt den Leser nicht vom Schauplatz der Katastrophen, sondern führt ihn hautnah heran” (Novelle 62). While even Goethe’s Unterhaltungen already do not assure the crisis’s exclusion anymore but rather describe a crisis that intrudes upon the frame (Schlaffer 17, Zumbusch 301), Gotthelf’s Die Schwarze Spinne sets a counterpoint to Goethe insofar as it explicitly allows for the spider’s inclusion in the house. In other words: Not only does the exclusion fail, but Gotthelf’s society does not even ask for it anymore, instead openly admitting the catastrophe’s fascinating attraction. 16 Marie-Luise Goldmann 8 Elisabeth Strowick emphasizes the genre-critical potential that is inherent in Stifter’s “Poetik des Unreinen” in his novellas Granit and Aus dem Bairischen Walde. What is impure intervenes in the novella’s intact frame. In Stifter, unlike in Boccaccio, narrating fails to provide a refuge from the catastrophe but rather “steht in ihrem Bann” (Strowick 80, 89). 9 Although a popular definition of the novella is Emil Steiger’s characterization as an “Erzählung mittlerer Länge” (Aust 11), the 19 th century novella was usually thought in contrast to the longer novel. 10 Die Schwarze Spinne was first published in a collection, Gotthelf’s first volume of Bilder und Sagen aus der Schweiz� 11 Martha Helfer observes the multiple frames embracing the house, which she interprets as “concentric circles” and links to the text’s circular narrative structure: “In short, in both form and function the text itself mimics a spider’s web” (Helfer 665). Rather than focusing on the circular structure of this individual text, I seek to examine the frames’ consequences for broader questions of genre. 12 See for example: “Punkt: Die tektonische Fassung solcher Konzentration und Verdichtung erfolgt vornehmlich in geometrischen Ausdrücken: Punkt, Punktualität, Achse, Mittel-, Dreh- und vor allem Wendepunkt, gelegentlich auch Spitze” (Aust 16); “Die Novelle hat der gezogenen Linie des Romans gegenüber etwas Punktuelles” (Vischer 124); “Denn wie sehr auch die kleinste Form großer Wirkungen fähig sei, beweist unseres Erachtens gerade die Novelle, die […] den Eindruck eben so verdichtet, auf Einen Punkt sammelt und dadurch zur höchsten Gewalt zu steigern vermag” (Heyse 147). Works Cited Aust, Hugo. Novelle. 5th ed. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2012. Biere, Florentine. Das andere Erzählen: Zur Poetik der Novelle 1800/ 1900. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2012. 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Unerhörte Begebenheiten: Interpretationen und Analysen zu drei Novellen des 19. Jahrhunderts. Northeim: Drei-A-Verlag, 1994. Zumbusch, Cornelia. Die Immunität der Klassik. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011. Zwischen Schrift und Film: Franz Kafkas und Michael Hanekes Das Schloß Damianos Grammatikopoulos New Brunswick, NJ Abstract: This paper examines the interrelations between Kafka’s novel The Castle and Michael Haneke’s film adaptation of the same name by emphasizing elements that can be classified as not media-specific: the visual and particularly acoustic aspects in the novel and the linguistic qualities in the film. The first segment of the essay offers an in-depth look into the field of adaptation studies and the article as a whole suggests an alternative view on the relationship between source text and adaptation. The further analysis is centered on central motifs (letters, telephones, and other devices) in both works and the means that each medium employs to highlight them. Keywords: Kafka studies, adaptation studies, film studies, intermediality, intertextuality, literary criticism Im Film erkennt der Mensch den eigenen Gang nicht, im Grammophon nicht die eigene Stimme. Experimente beweisen das. Die Lage der Versuchsperson in diesen Experimenten ist Kafkas Lage. (Benjamin 436) Seit der jüngsten Kafka-Forschung liegen Bemühungen vor, Kafkas Texte mit anderen Medien und insbesondere mit dem Filmmedium in Beziehung zu setzen. Neben Max Brod, der schon 1927 thematische Parallele zwischen Kafkas Roman Der Verschollene (den Brod unter dem Titel Amerika veröffentlichte) und Charlie Chaplins Filmen konstatierte (Alt 8), haben Theodor W. Adorno und Walter Benjamin ebenfalls Aussagen über die Verwandtschaft zwischen Kafkas Texten und dem Stummfilm getroffen. In den “Aufzeichnungen” zu seinem Essay “Franz Kafka. Zur zehnten Wiederkehr seines Todestages” behauptet Benjamin, dass Chaplins Werke einen “wirklichen Schlüssel zur Deutung Kafkas” innehaben 20 Damianos Grammatikopoulos (1194). In seinem Brief an Benjamin vom 17. Dezember 1934 untermauert Adorno Benjamins Stellungnahme und nimmt eine ähnliche Position ein, wenn er angibt, dass Kafkas Romane die “letzten, verschwindenden Verbindungstexte zum stummen Film” sind (Adorno 106). In der neueren Kafka-Forschung wird oft darauf verwiesen, dass Kafkas Texte enge Bezüge zu einer Vielzahl von Medien unterhalten. Beispielsweise rekonstruiert Hanns Zischlers berühmt gewordene Arbeit “Kafka geht ins Kino” den kulturellen Kontext zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts in Prag, in den Kafka eingebettet war, und unternimmt den Versuch, die Auswirkungen des Stummfilms auf Kafkas biographische Schriften ans Licht zu bringen. Peter-André Alt geht in seiner Kafka-Analyse einen Schritt weiter, wenn er in seinem Buch “Kafka und der Film” die Hypothese aufstellt, Kafkas Texte wiesen Merkmale einer filmischen Schreibweise auf. Er beteuert dabei, ähnlich wie Benjamin, dass eine “kinospezifische Struktur von Kafkas fiktionalen Entwürfen […] den Charakter eines Schlüssels für die Analyse seiner poetischen Einbildungskraft” gewinnen könnte (11). Filme und Graphic Novels erfreuen sich in der Kafka-Forschung ebenfalls großer Beliebtheit. In Extraterrestrial Kafka: Ahead to the Graphic Novel bearbeitet Henry Sussman die Relationen zwischen Kafkas Oeuvre und Graphic Novels, während die Autoren des Sammelbandes Mediamorphosis: Kafka and the Moving Image, um nur ein Beispiel aus diesem Strang der Forschung zu nennen, sich mit Kafkas Weiterwirken in Filmen bzw. Literaturverfilmungen befassen. Besagte Ansätze sind von einer doppelten Zielrichtung gekennzeichnet: Zum einen sind sie darum bemüht, mediale Bezüge in Kafkas Texte ins Auge zu fassen, um die Auswirkungen des jeweiligen Mediums, in der Regel des (Stumm-) Filmes, auf Kafkas literarisches Schaffen nachzuweisen, zum anderen sind sie daran interessiert, Kafkas Nachleben in anderen Medien ausfindig zu machen. Oliver Jahraus fasst diese Problemlage folgendermaßen zusammen: “Unter der Überschrift Kafka und der Film sind zwei Bereiche zu beleuchten und aufeinander zu beziehen: Der eine eröffnet sich mit der Frage, wie Kafka zum Film stand, und der zweite, wie der Film zu Kafka steht” ( Jahraus 224). Literaturverfilmungen fallen eindeutig in den zweiten Forschungszweig. Während aber Studien zum Thema Kafka-Adaptionen in der Regel die Frage der Werktreue aufwerfen und darauf konzentriert sind, Auslassungen und Umdeutungen in den filmischen Ableitungen zu besprechen - Jahraus spricht hierbei von einer “Verlustrechnung” (330) - schlägt die vorliegende Arbeit einen Ansatz vor, der Adaptionen als mediale Fragmente eines ohnehin fragmentierten (schriftlichen) Werkes betrachtet. Im Folgenden geht es darum, den aktuellen Stand der Adaptionsforschung eingehender zu erläutern, um diese Problemlage und deren Bedeutung für die jüngere Kafka-Forschung darzulegen. Zwischen Schrift und Film: Franz Kafkas und Michael Hanekes Das Schloß 21 Seit den Anfängen der Adaptionsforschung war das wichtigste Kriterium, an dem man den Erfolg einer Verfilmung messen könnte, die Treue des Filmes zur Vorlage, der sogenannte fidelity discourse. In Novel To Film fasst Brian McFarlane die oben erwähnte Problemlage folgendermaßen zusammen: “Fidelity criticism depends on a notion of the text as having and rendering up to the (intelligent) reader a single, correct ‘meaning’ which the filmmaker has either adhered to or in some sense violated or tampered with” (McFarlane 8). McFarlane gibt zwar oft an, sich vom Bereich der Werktreue distanzieren zu wollen, dies gelingt ihm allerdings nur teilweise, denn in seiner Analyse steht ein Vergleich zwischen Original und Adaption d. h. die Frage, was die filmische Umsetzung ausgelassen und was sie hinzugefügt hat, im Mittelpunkt. Welche Auswirkungen besagte Änderungen auf die Vorlage haben und welche Wechselwirkung man hier beobachten kann, wird jedoch nur am Rande besprochen. George Bluestone gilt dabei als der erste Kritiker, der Werktreue als einen äußerst problematischen Begriff behandelte und eine alternative Theorie zu der kritischen Auseinandersetzung mit Verfilmungen vorlegte. In seinem Werk Novels into Film legt Bluestone Nachdruck auf die medienspezifischen Eigenschaften der Medien Film und Literatur und hebt ihre Differenzen hervor, die einen direkten Vergleich zwischen ihnen, Bluestone zufolge, im Grunde unmöglich machen. Unabhängig davon, ob die filmische Aufarbeitung dem Text nahe bleibt oder nicht, bleibt ein Film in seiner Struktur als audiovisuelles Medium ein Werk, das mit dem literarischen Medium, als ein genuin linguistisches Mittel, wenige Gemeinsamkeiten hat. Werktreue erweist sich daher, so Bluestone, als ungeeignet für eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit Verfilmungen. “Like two intersecting lines, novel and film meet at a point, then diverge. At the intersection, the book and shooting-script are almost indistinguishable. But where the lines diverge, they not only resist conversion; they also lose all resemblance to each other” (Bluestone 63). Es wird allerdings oft darauf hingewiesen, dass Bluestone, trotz seiner originellen Herangehensweise, in seiner Analyse implizit dem Medium Literatur den Vorrang gibt. 1 Sein Beitrag hat sich dennoch als wegweisend erwiesen, weil sich sein Ansatz auf die besonderen narrativen Strukturen der jeweiligen Werke bezieht und diese Medienspezifizität bleibt bis heute ein zentrales Anliegen in modernen medienwissenschaftlichen Diskussionen. In Irina Rajewskys Werk “Intermedialität” z. B. ist der Begriff des Intermedialen ohne klare Grenzen zwischen den diversen medialen Gruppen nicht denkbar. Intermedialität wird in diesem Zusammenhang von den verwandten Disziplinen Intramedialität und Transmedialität abgegrenzt. Dem Präfix “intra-” entsprechend bezeichnet das erste Feld Bezüge, die sich innerhalb eines einzigen Mediums abspielen (intertextuelle und intramediale Verweise zwischen zwei oder mehreren literarischen Texten). Transmedialität bezieht sich hingegen auf 22 Damianos Grammatikopoulos Phänomene, in denen das Ursprungsmedium irrelevant ist, wie das z. B. der Fall, Rajewsky zufolge, bei der Parodie ist. Wichtig ist hierbei, wie die Autorin betont, dass in beiden Fällen keine Überschreitung von Mediengrenzen stattfindet. Der Begriff des Intermedialen wird entsprechend erst dann eingesetzt, wenn dies der Fall ist. 2 Als ein Vorgang, bei dem mindestens zwei Medien involviert sind, bilden Adaptionen laut Rajewsky nur einen Forschungszweig des intermedialen Gegenstandsbereiches, der von ihr als “Medienwechsel” bzw. “Medientransfer” bezeichnet wird. 3 Verfilmungen kann man tatsächlich dem Bereich des Intermedialen zuordnen, wenn das Entscheidende hierbei die Übertretung von Mediengrenzen ist, doch das Präfix “inter-”, das zu Deutsch soviel wie “zwischen” bedeutet, verweist nicht auf eine Überschreitung hin, sondern auf Gegebenheiten, die sich zwischen zwei oder mehreren Medien abspielen. Wenn das Überschreiten von Mediengrenzen das Entscheidende ist, dann wäre vielmehr das Präfix “trans-” für derartige Phänomene geeignet, denn “trans-” deutet auf eine Transformation, Transliteration und Transgression hin, d. h. auf eine Überschreitung von einem klar demarkierten Bereich einerseits und einem Transfer von Inhalten andererseits. In seinem Buch Convergence Culture beschäftigt sich der Medienkritiker Henry Jenkins mit der Fusion von Medien verschiedener Art (Medienkonvergenz) einerseits und Narrativen andererseits, die über mehrere Medien hinweg erzählt werden. Der Begriff transmedia storytelling, 4 den er hier prägt, weist auf eine Geschichte hin, die über Filme, Comics, Animationen und Computerspiele erzählt wird, wie das z. B. bei der “Matrix”-Serie der Fall ist: A transmedia story unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole. In the ideal form of transmedia storytelling, each medium does what it does best - so that a story might be introduced in a film, expanded through television, novels, and comics; […] Any given product is a point of entry into the franchise as a whole. Reading across the media sustains a depth of experience that motivates more consumption. ( Jenkins 135) Adaptionen fallen allerdings nur bedingt unter die Kategorie von transmedia storytelling, weil sie nicht als Fortsetzung, sondern als modifizierte Version einer transmedialen Geschichte aufgefasst werden können. Dass sie medienübergreifend bzw. transmedial sind, ist evident, denn bei jeder Umsetzung sind mindestens zwei Medien involviert. Sie sind aber auch intermedial (zwischenmedial), weil das Auftreten einer Adaption Einfluss auf die Bedeutungsdimension der Vorlage nimmt, die sich wiederum auf die Adaption zurückwirkt. Daraus ergibt sich ein neues, komplexes Narrativ, dessen Verständnis von allen hier involvierten Medien abhängig ist. Das Grenzgebiet, auf dem die Wechselwirkungen zwischen Vorlage und Adaption(en) zutage treten, kann man sich als eine Grenze Zwischen Schrift und Film: Franz Kafkas und Michael Hanekes Das Schloß 23 vorstellen, die die jeweiligen Medien nicht nur voneinander trennt, sondern auch miteinander verbindet. Die Präsenz einer Grenze lässt zudem die Möglichkeit einer Grenzüberschreitung offen, ja sie lädt sogar dazu ein. Grenzen sind selten stabil, wie die Geschichte uns lehrt, sondern oszillierend und in stetiger Bewegung und das gilt laut Rajewsky vor allem für Mediengrenzen, die ja historisch bedingt sind: “Wie das spezifisch Filmische, Literarische oder Musikalische zu definieren ist, auf das bestimmte Texte rekurrieren oder rekurrieren könn(t)en, lässt sich somit immer nur unter Berücksichtigung des Kriteriums der Historizität beantworten” (37). Besagte Mediengrenzen werden trotz ihrer vergänglichen Natur von den Türhütern der jeweiligen Wissenschaften streng bewacht und es drohen schwere Konsequenzen für den Eindringling, der unbefugt seinen Fuß über die Schwelle setzt. Für den Adaptionsforscher ist der Schritt ins Ungewisse trotzdem lohnenswert, denn eine Verfilmung und deren Interpretation gehen immer mit einem Akt der Medien- und Fachüberschreitung einher. Vor diesem Hintergrund stellen Adaptionen ein Phänomen von inter-, d. h. transmedialen Weiterverarbeitung, Imitation, Reproduktion und Iteration dar, das sich durch die Geschichte der meisten Medien, alt oder neu, wie ein roter Faden zieht. Im Hinblick auf die transmediale Wiederholbarkeit mehr oder minder bekannter Stoffe, die von den meisten narrativen Medien praktiziert wird, stellt James Naremore Verfilmungen auf die gleiche Stufe mit allen repetitiven und technisch reproduzierbaren Erzählformen und fordert eine fachübergreifende, transmediale Theorie: The study of adaptation needs to be joined with the study of recycling, remaking, and every other form of retelling in the age of mechanical reproduction and electronic communication. By this means, adaptation will become part of a general theory of repetition, and adaptation study will move from the margins to the center of contemporary media studies. (Naremore 15) Die vorliegende Studie geht Naremores Forderung teilweise nach, obgleich kein ausführlicher, transmedialer Ansatz hier vorliegt. Das Ziel der Untersuchung in den folgenden Abschnitten beschränkt sich vielmehr darauf, die Wechselwirkungen zwischen Vorlage (Kafkas Das Schloß) und Verfilmung (Hanekes Das Schloß) in ein neues Licht zu rücken und sie als Teil des gleichen unstabilen und sich stets ausdehnenden Narratives zu betrachten. Das Augenmerk der Analyse richtet sich demgemäß nicht auf einen Vergleich zwischen dem Kafka’schen Prätext und dessen Adaptionen und lässt darüber hinaus die Frage nach Werktreue außer Acht. Die These, die hier aufgestellt wird, ist dabei folgende: Es ist nach dem Erscheinen einer Adaption im Grunde genommen nicht mehr möglich, die Vorlage isoliert von ihrer transmedialen Ableitung zu besprechen, denn von diesem Zeitpunkt an geht das Original, das keines mehr ist, in eine 24 Damianos Grammatikopoulos enge Beziehung mit seiner transmedialen Reproduktion ein. Erzähltext, falls es sich überhaupt um einen Text handelt, und mediale Umsetzung(en) schmieden ein Gefüge, das nicht mehr auflösbar ist. Dass besagter Kontext durch weitere, zukünftige Umsetzungen weiter ausgedehnt werden kann, legt Zeugnis von der Unmöglichkeit ab, eine in sich abgeschlossene Interpretation zu liefern, denn die Bedeutungsdimensionen der ursprünglichen Geschichte verschieben sich durch den Einsatz von Adaptionen ununterbrochen. Von der hier erwähnten interpretativen Unabgeschlossenheit ist auch die vorliegende Studie betroffen, denn sie befasst sich zwangsläufig nur mit einer einzigen Verfilmung und nimmt entsprechend nur einen Teil des intermedialen Kontextes in Acht, den der Ausgangstext generiert hat. So wendet sich die folgende Analyse Passagen in Kafkas Roman zu, die von einer besonderen audio-visuellen Beschaffenheit gekennzeichnet sind, um sie anschließend mit Szenen aus Michael Hanekes “Schloß”-Verfilmung (1997) in Verbindung zu setzen. Oft diktiert der Beamte so leise, daß der Schreiber es sitzend gar nicht hören kann, dann muß er immer aufspringen, das Diktierte auffangen, schnell sich setzen und es aufschreiben, dann wieder aufspringen u.s.f. Wie merkwürdig das ist! Es ist fast unverständlich. (Kafka 281) Gleich zu Beginn des Romans ist festzustellen, dass Geräte, wie der Telefonapparat z. B., Laute von sich geben, die auf keinen Referenten zurückzuführen sind. Dieses Phänomen kommt zu Beginn des ersten Kapitels klar zum Vorschein, als K. im Schlossdorf ankommt und Zuflucht in einem naheliegenden Wirtshaus findet. Als er vom Schlosskastellan (Schwarzer) aufgefordert wird, seine Erlaubnis vorzulegen und seinen Aufenthalt in der Gemeinde des Schlosses nachzuweisen, behauptet K. vom Grafen des Schlosses als Landvermesser berufen worden zu sein. Um das Missverständnis zu klären, entscheidet man sich, telefonisch Kontakt mit den Behörden bzw. der “Zentralkanzlei” aufzunehmen. Das telefonische Gespräch zwischen Schwarzer und einem gewissen Herrn Fritz, der am anderen Ende der Leitung spricht, entwickelt sich zuungunsten K.s., denn die Zentralkanzlei bestreitet K.s Aussagen und seine Behauptung, das Schloss habe ihm einen Auftrag erteilt. Schwarzer legt auf und ist bereit, K. aus dem Wirtshaus zu vertreiben: Einen Augenblick dachte K., alles, Schwarzer, Bauern, Wirt und Wirtin würden sich auf ihn stürzen, um wenigstens dem ersten Ansturm auszuweichen, verkroch er sich ganz unter die Decke, da - er steckte langsam den Kopf wieder hervor - läutete das Telephon nochmals und wie es K. schien, besonders stark.“ (12) Die Lautstärke des Telefons greift im ogiben Zitat in das Geschehen ein und modifiziert durch ihren Einsatz den Ausgang des Disputes, denn Schwarzer wird Zwischen Schrift und Film: Franz Kafkas und Michael Hanekes Das Schloß 25 anschließend von derselben Zentralkanzlei informiert, dass K.s Behauptung der Wahrheit entspricht: “K. horchte auf. Das Schloß hatte ihn also zum Landvermesser ernannt” (12). Das Läuten des Apparates agiert hier wie ein Reflexmechanismus des Schlosses, wie ein Alarmsignal, dem Laut der “elektrischen Glocke” (440) im Gang des Herrenhofes nicht unähnlich, und dank seines Einsatzes erhält K. die Genehmigung, im Schloss bleiben zu dürfen. Damit einhergehend spricht Avital Ronell in ihrer Auseinandersetzung mit Kafkas Roman von einer stetigen Intervention seitens des Schlosses, wenn Kommunikation in Stillstand zu geraten droht. Sie hebt allerdings den trügerischen Wert dieser Form von Kommunikation hervor, die keine ist: Often, when K. finds the villagers’ speech incomprehensible, or when the villagers remain aggressively mute, the castle intervenes as the single source of apparently significative communication. But these communication acts usually point ironically and even ‘joyously’ to dashing the possibility for communication. (Ronell 192) Dass K. als Landvermesser im Schlossdorf anerkannt wurde, ist nicht auf den Telefonapparat zurückzuführen, über den K. ein Gespräch führt, sondern auf die Stimme des Gerätes. Nicht dem Telefongespräch, sondern dem Klingeln des Apparates hat K. zu verdanken, und es ist die Stimme des Telefons, an der Spuren des Schlosses lesbar werden. Michael Levine unterstreicht dabei die gestische Dimension von akustischen Phänomenen im Roman und weist sie in Kafkas Texten als eine besondere Form von Geste (“gesture”) aus: So persistent is this connection that it would appear as though the most radical gestures of Kafka’s texts had to be performed with a musical soundtrack or acoustic accompaniment-that is, unless these sounds were themselves more than mere accompaniments and actually performed the very gestures in question. (Levine 206) Das Zitat thematisiert die Tragweite der Gesten der Kafka’schen Figuren und spielt somit auf Benjamins Kafka-Abhandlung an: Dann erst wird man mit Sicherheit erkennen, daß Kafkas ganzes Werk einen Kodex von Gesten darstellt, die keineswegs von Hause aus für den Verfasser eine sichere symbolische Bedeutung haben, vielmehr in immer wieder anderen Zusammenhängen und Versuchsanordnungen um eine solche angegangen werden. (Benjamin 418) Die von Benjamin postulierte Unentwirrbarkeit der Kafka’schen Gesten wird von Levine auf die auditive Ebene der Texte übertragen, auf der sich ähnliche Mechanismen abzeichnen. Am Anfang des zweiten Kapitels (“Barnabas”) findet ein zweites Telefongespräch statt, das dem Leser die prekären Kommunikationsbedingungen des Romans erneut vor Augen führt. K.s Gehilfen informieren ihn, dass es nicht 26 Damianos Grammatikopoulos möglich sei, ohne Erlaubnis das Schloss zu betreten. Daraufhin befiehlt er ihnen, den “Kastellan” anzurufen und ihn zu bitten, ihm eine Aufenthaltsgenehmigung zu erteilen. Den Gehilfen gelingt es allerdings nicht, K. mit dem Kastellan in Kontakt zu setzen, und so entschließt sich K., selbst anzurufen: Aus der Hörmuschel kam ein Summen, wie K. es sonst beim Telephonieren nie gehört hatte. Es war wie wenn sich aus dem Summen zahlloser kindlicher Stimmen - aber auch dieses Summen war keines, sondern war Gesang fernster, allerfernster Stimmen - wie wenn sich aus diesem Summen in einer geradezu unmöglichen Weise eine einzige hohe aber starke Stimme bilde, die an das Ohr schlug so wie wenn sie fordere tiefer einzudringen als nur in das armselige Gehör. K. horchte ohne zu telephonieren, den linken Arm hatte er auf das Telephonpult gestützt und horchte so. Er wußte nicht wie lange, so lange bis ihn der Wirt am Rocke zupfte, ein Bote sei für ihn gekommen. “Weg”, schrie K. unbeherrscht, vielleicht in das Telephon hinein, denn nun meldete sich jemand. (Das Schloß 36) Dass dem Motiv des “Schreiens” im obigen Zitat eine große Bedeutung zukommt, ist hier evident. Um das rätselhafte “Summen” des Apparates zu bezwingen, reagiert K. mit einem Schrei (“Weg”), “vielleicht in das Telefon hinein”. Dieses Schreien setzt seinerseits das Telefongespräch in Gang. Schließt man einen Zufall aus (es wäre der zweite), liegt die Vermutung nahe, dass es die Intensität von K.s Stimme war, die das Summen der Hörmuschel zum Schweigen brachte und die Verbindung mit Oswald herstellte. Was des Weiteren hervorsticht, ist die Empfindlichkeit des Apparates gegenüber bestimmten Lauten und Lautstärken. Die Anmerkungen des “Vorstehers” und dessen verzwickte Argumentationen im fünften Kapitel (“Beim Vorsteher”), in denen eine eigenartige Klassifikation zwischen “privatem” und “amtlichem” Kommunikationsverkehr eingeführt wird, bezogen sowohl auf Telefongespräche als auch auf Briefe, eröffnen eine weitere Perspektive bezüglich der Funktion und Bedeutung des Telefonapparates und der Geräusche, die es generiert. Als K. im besagten Kapitel dem Vorsteher einen Besuch abstattet und ihm mitteilt, er sei vom Schloss als Landvermesser ernannt worden, entgegnet dieser, dass jedwede Bemühungen, telefonischen Kontakt mit den Schloss-Behörden aufzunehmen, vergeblich sind: In Wirtsstuben u. dgl. da mag es [das Telefon] gute Dienste leisten, so etwa wie ein Musikautomat, mehr ist es auch nicht. […] Im Schloß funktioniert das Telephon offenbar ausgezeichnet; wie man mir erzählt hat wird dort ununterbrochen telephoniert, was natürlich das Arbeiten sehr beschleunigt. Dieses ununterbrochene Telephonieren hören wir in den hiesigen Telephonen als Rauschen und Gesang, das haben Sie gewiß auch gehört. Nun ist aber dieses Rauschen und dieser Gesang das einzige Richtige und Vertrauenswerte, was uns die hiesigen Telephone übermitteln, alles andere ist Zwischen Schrift und Film: Franz Kafkas und Michael Hanekes Das Schloß 27 trügerisch. Es gibt keine bestimmte telephonische Verbindung mit dem Schloß, keine Zentralstelle, welche unsere Anrufe weiterleitet […]. (115-116) K. ist inzwischen mit den musikalischen Eigenschaften des Apparates bestens vertraut. Das penetrante “Summen”, dieser “Gesang fernster, allerfernster Stimmen” (36), bezieht sich dem Anschein nach auf das Rauschen der Hörmuschel. Den Erläuterungen des Vorstehers zufolge ist das einzige “Richtige und Vertrauenswerte” das eben genannte Summen, die Geräusche, die das Gerät generiert und nicht der Inhalt der Gespräche. Anstatt eine Verbindung zwischen zwei Teilnehmern herzustellen, verkompliziert die Apparatur des Kafka’schen Schlosses diesen Prozess, weil die fehlende “Zentralstelle” zufällige und nicht die gewünschten Teilnehmer einschaltet, die ihrerseits die Gespräche als Zerstreuung wahrnehmen. Aus den Zeilen der obigen Passage lässt sich noch herauslesen, dass Kommunikation mittels Telefons im Schloss anscheinend doch möglich ist (“Im Schloß funktioniert das Telephon offenbar ausgezeichnet”). Das charakteristische Summen der Hörmuschel, das K. im zweiten Kapitel in seinen Bann riss, ist auf das kontinuierliche Telefonieren der Beamten und Diener im Schloss zurückzuführen und ist infolgedessen ein Produkt desselben, unzugänglichen Bereichs. Das Summen der Hörmuschel kann entsprechend als eine Spur des Schlosses gelesen werden. Von Avital Ronell wird dieses verbotene und ersehnte Gebiet des Romans als “locus of meaning” beschrieben. The castle, one of the primary fictions that the novel pursues, excites our curiosity by provoking the belief, shared at times by characters and commentators alike, that somewhere beyond the lowly bureaucrats, in some secluded chamber, there resides, with an air of serene majesty, the translucent embodiment of meaning. (Ronell 196) In mancherlei Hinsicht ähnelt die vergebliche Suche nach dem Schloss dem aussichtlosen Forschen nach dem Unbewussten. Achim Geisenhanslükes Überlegungen in “Das Schibboleth der Psychoanalyse”, in dem die psychoanalytische Arbeit mit einer “archäologischen Tiefenwissenschaft” verglichen wird, sind im Blick auf die eben genannte Verschränkung besonders aufschlussreich: An diesen unbehaglichen und unheimlichen Ort schattenhafter Wesenslosigkeit zu gelangen, ist das ebenso erstrebte wie unmögliche Ziel der Psychoanalyse, ein Unterfangen, das Freuds Technik zugleich mit der Topik literarischer Unterweltsfahrten verbindet. […] Sich auf Freud einlassen heißt daher noch immer, sich auf die Suche nach einem unzugänglichen Ort zu machen, der Heimat wie Exil der Psychoanalyse gleichermaßen markiert. (Geisenhanslüke 9) Ähnliches gilt auch in Kafkas Roman. Der Eintritt ins Schloss wird sowohl dem Protagonisten als auch dem Leser und Interpreten gleichermaßen verweigert. 28 Damianos Grammatikopoulos Sich auf die Suche nach dem Schloss zu begeben, gleicht einer Farce. Dessen gut gehütetes Innere ist allerdings durch eine Reihe von Supplementen erreichbar. Sind es Träume und Erinnerungen, die die Spuren des Freud’schen Unbewussten lesbar machen, so sind es Surrogate wie das Summen und Rauschen der Hörmuschel, anhand deren man die Auswirkungen des Kafka’schen Schlosses im Roman deuten kann: “So habe ich das allerdings nicht angesehen”, sagte K., “diese Einzelheiten konnte ich nicht wissen, viel Vertrauen aber hatte ich zu diesen telephonischen Gesprächen nicht und war mir immer dessen bewußt, daß nur das wirkliche Bedeutung hat, was man geradezu im Schloß erfährt oder erreicht”. (Das Schloß 117) Der Vergleich des Telefons mit einem Musikautomaten von Seiten des Vorstehers im gleichnamigen fünften Kapitel lässt erahnen, dass die von ihm geschilderten musikalischen Dimensionen des Apparates sich vor allem auf dessen “Gesang” und “Summen” beziehen. Seine Aussagen lassen sich aber auch im Blick auf das Klingeln des Telefons erweitern. In Hanekes gleichnamigen Filmadaption ist die Verschränkung von Telefon und Musikautomaten besonders aufschlussreich. In der ersten Szene des Filmes, im Vorspann, als K. zum ersten Mal die Wirtsstube betritt, ist Musik im Hintergrund zu hören, die, wie man bald feststellt, intradiegetisch ist (sie kommt von einem Musikautomaten bzw. einem Radio). Der Film wird zudem von keinem Soundtrack begleitet. Die Musik, in den spärlichen Szenen, in denen sie vorkommt, ist immer intradiegetisch, was angesichts der vorangegangenen Überlegungen zur Bedeutung der Laute und Geräusche im “Schloß”-Roman von Bedeutung ist. Es sei allerdings angemerkt, dass Haneke eine Abneigung gegen Soundtracks hat und Musik im Allgemeinen in seinen Filmen vermeidet, wie er selbst in einem Interview mit Michel Cieutat angibt (Zitat aus dem Französischen von Peter Brunette): I love music too much to use it to cover up my mistakes! In film, it’s often used this way, no? Besides, in a “realist” film, where does the music come from, excluding the times when it comes from a radio that’s been turned on? Now, in my film there are no situations in which one would be listening to music. And I would have found it dishonest to try to cover up mistakes. (Brunette 152) Wie aus dem Zitat ersichtlich wird, kommen Geräten in Hanekes Filmen, die Geräusche von sich geben (das Medium des Fernsehers wäre hier ebenfalls zu nennen, obwohl es in der Schloß-Verfilmung verständlicherweise nicht eingesetzt wird), eine besondere Bedeutung zu. Gleich zu Beginn des Filmes, nachdem K. (gespielt von Ulrich Mühe) das Wirtshaus betreten hat, ruht der Kamerablick auf dem Musikautomaten, der nun in Großaufnahme und damit im Detail zu sehen ist. In derselben Einstel- Zwischen Schrift und Film: Franz Kafkas und Michael Hanekes Das Schloß 29 lung drückt der Wirt auf einen Knopf und die Musik kommt zum Stillstand. Der Wirt erteilt anschließend K. die Erlaubnis, in der Wirtsstube schlafen zu dürfen, und dieser schläft in der Folgeeinstellung ein. Während der Kamerablick auf K. ruhen bleibt, hört man im Hintergrund das Drücken desselben Knopfes und die Musik fängt erneut an zu spielen. Die Sequenz endet mit einem langatmigen Schnitt, einem von insgesamt 30, die den Film in 30 klar strukturierte Sequenzen oder, wenn man so will, Kapitel untergliedert (in der Vorlage sind es 25). Es sei an dieser Stelle erneut auf Hanekes eigentümliche Stilmittel verwiesen und den regelmäßigen Einsatz von Schwarzblenden in seinen Filmen: I […] am always fighting a little bit against this idea of identification. I give the spectator the possibility of identifying, and immediately after, with the help of the black shots for example, I say to him or her: Stop a little bit with the emotional stuff and you’ll be able to see better. (Brunette 142) Diese rezeptionsästhetische Technik rückt Hanekes Werk in die Nähe des Neuen Deutschen Films, wie Daniela Sannwald anmerkt: So ließe sich Hanekes Verwendung von Schwarzblenden zwischen den Szenen womöglich als buchstäbliche Umsetzung der damaligen Forderung nach den Lücken zwischen den Filmbildern verstehen, die der mündige Zuschauer selbst zu schließen habe. (Sannwald 7) Ob man den Schwarzblenden im Film die hier formulierte Funktion zuschreiben kann oder nicht, sei dahingestellt. Was sich aber aus ihrem Einsatz ergibt, ist eine fragmentierte Geschichte, die in ihrer Struktur dem “Schloß”-Roman sehr nahekommt. Der Film zeigt dadurch eine in weiten Strecken eigentümliche Treue zur Vorlage auf, die sich sowohl auf der inhaltlichen bzw. wörtlichen Ebene als auch auf der formalen abspielt, wie sich im Folgenden zeigen wird. Die zweite Filmsequenz nach der Schwarzblende beginnt mit einer Großaufnahme von K., der von einer Hand geschüttelt und dadurch geweckt wird. Im Hintergrund ist immer noch Musik zu hören. Es folgt das Gespräch zwischen K. und Schwarzer, von dem schon im letzten Kapitel die Rede war. Als K. Schwarzer nach dem Schloss fragt, schaltet der Wirt die Musik aus. Stille bricht ein und alle Blicke im Wirtshaus richten sich auf K. Das Ausschalten des Automaten wird in dieser Szene als narratives Mittel eingesetzt, um Spannung aufzubauen und die Aufmerksamkeit des Zuschauers auf einen bestimmten Moment im Filmgeschehen zu lenken. Das Ausschalten des Apparates und die damit einhergehende Unterbrechung der Musik markieren einen Bruch in der inszenierten Handlung, was vom Zuschauer als Indikation einer Änderung wahrgenommen wird. Es ist, anders formuliert, die plötzlich auftretende Stille im Film (ein wiederkehrendes und komplexes Motiv auch im Roman), die diesen Effekt in der 30 Damianos Grammatikopoulos Filmszene erzeugt. In Knut Hickethiers Analyse der auditiven Ebene des Filmmediums wird der Einsatz von Stille in Filmszenen folgendermaßen geschildert: Ein tonloses Geschehen auf der Leinwand wirkt unvollständig, unwirklich, wie tot. Ein ständiges, leicht unregelmäßiges Hintergrundgeräusch signalisiert uns dagegen Lebendigkeit, auch den vom Hörenden aufrechterhaltenen Kontakt mit der Welt. Im Film wird deshalb eine sogenannte “Atmo” erzeugt, eine akustische Atmosphäre, die den Wirklichkeitseindruck des Visuellen wesentlich steigert. Sie ist auch anwesend, wenn sonst nichts zu hören ist und eine “spannungsgeladene Stille” beabsichtigt ist. (Hickethier 91) Die Gegenüberstellung von Musikautomaten und Telefon im Film kann im Blick auf die Aussagen des Vorstehers im Roman als visuelle Interpretation der Vorlage gedeutet werden: “In Wirtsstuben u. dgl. da mag [das Telefon] gute Dienste leisten, so etwa wie ein Musikautomat, mehr ist es auch nicht” (Kafka 115-116). Im anschließenden Telefongespräch zwischen K. und Oswald in der filmischen Umsetzung der Hörmuschel-Sequenz, ist es die Stimme aus dem Off, welche die Laute des Geräts mündlich wiedergibt. Das “Summen” der Hörmuschel kann man im Film nicht hören. Was man aber hören kann, ist die Schilderung des Summens vom Off-Erzähler (Udo Samel), der in Anlehnung an die Vorlage diese wortgetreu zitiert. Die Off-Stimme - ein genuin literarisches Stilmittel, das aufgrund von Konventionen als solches nicht mehr wahrgenommen wird - überschreitet hier ihre Funktion als additives, erzählerisches Mittel, indem sie Vorgänge im Film schildert, die während ihres Einsatzes zeitgleich auch mit audio-visuellen Mitteln wiedergegeben werden. Sie erzählt die Geschehnisse und Dialoge, die wir als Zuschauer auch ohne ihren Einsatz in derselben Szene sehen und hören können. Durch diese Überlappung und Iteration, sowohl auf inhaltlicher 5 als auch auf narrativer Ebene, reflektiert der Film seine Verwandtschaft zur Romanvorlage und offenbart, zum zweiten Mal, die starke Einflussnahme des Neuen Deutschen Films auf Hanekes Werk. 6 Das Telefon als technisches Kommunikationsmedium im Roman ist zudem mit sexuellen Konnotationen aufgeladen. Die Verwendung des Wortes “Hörmuschel”, ein Gefüge, das den Stamm des Verbes “hören” und das Substantiv “Muschel” zu einem Nomenkompositum zusammenfügt, steht stellvertretend für die libidinösen Zustände in der Geschichte. Vor allem das Wort “Muschel” ist aufgrund seiner Mehrdeutigkeit von besonderem Interesse. Der Duden führt dabei folgende Bedeutungen an: “in Gewässern lebendes, zum Teil essbares Weichtier”, “Kurzform für: Hörmuschel, Kurzform für Sprechmuschel” und “Vagina [Gebrauch: salopp]”. 7 Das Wort für Vagina wird darüber hinaus in der deutschen Umgangssprache oft durch ein Wort ersetzt, das im Deutschen fast wie ein Homonym des Nomens “Muschel” klingt. 8 Während der allgemeine Zwischen Schrift und Film: Franz Kafkas und Michael Hanekes Das Schloß 31 Gebrauch des Wortes “Hörmuschel” in der deutschen Sprache Zeugnis von der schon erwähnten sexuellen Konnotation des Hörens mittels einer Apparatur legt, werden die sexuellen Anspielungen im Film und im Roman auf die Spitze getrieben. In der folgenden Passage, die im vorangegangenen Kapitel schon zitiert wurde, wird Hören als ein Akt von Penetration geschildert, was es teilweise auch ist: “wie wenn sich aus diesem Summen in einer geradezu unmöglichen Weise eine einzige hohe aber starke Stimme bilde, die an das Ohr schlug so wie wenn sie fordere tiefer einzudringen als nur in das armselige Gehör” (36). In Hanekes Verfilmung wird der Musikautomat Kafkas Hörmuschel gegenübergestellt. Dass der Musikautomat im Film in den Kontext der obigen Überlegungen gestellt werden kann, belegt unter anderem dessen Name und die zahlreichen Großaufnahmen, die ihn im Detail zeigen. Achtet man genauer auf diese Einstellungen, wird einem klar, dass der Musikautomat ein Radio der Firma “Hornyphon” ist (made in Vienna - Abb. 1). Abb. 1: Das “Hornyphon” (Michael Haneke: Das Schloß)- Kafkas “Tele-phon” wird somit durch Hanekes “Horny-phon” erweitert. Dem ersten Wort des Kompositums, dem Adjektiv “horny”, werden im Englischen vier Bedeutungen zugeschrieben, 9 von denen die ersten zwei hervorstechen. Haneke scheint hiermit einerseits auf die Aussagen des Vorstehers anzuspielen, der das Telefon mit einem Musikautomaten vergleicht (bezogen auf seine Funk-tion), und andererseits auf den libidinösen Kraftaufwand der Kafka’schen Figuren, allen voran K.s, die stets den Versuch unternehmen, durch diverse Supplemente Kontakt mit dem Schloss aufzunehmen. Zu diesen Supplementen 32 Damianos Grammatikopoulos gehören Telefongespräche und Briefe d. h. schriftliche und mündliche Nachrichten, sowie Personen, die oft als Mittel zum Zweck genutzt werden. Begehrlich sucht man nach Spuren des Schlosses und dessen hochrangigen Repräsentanten Klamm, die nur durch Substitutionen zugänglich sind. For we learn by observing the characters that in the world of The Castle, the desire to reach the castle or Klamm, whether expressed sensually or verbally, always carries with it the force of an erotic drive. […] Driven by an erotic pulsion toward the castle or Klamm, the characters encounter an implicit interdiction which they however appear to accept: they are never allowed in their sensual or interpretative “performances” to achieve a moment that even remotely approximates satisfaction. The text thus interlaces sensuality with interpretation as it advances a poetics of desire manifesting the characters’ consent to incompleteness, to time and to the repetition of desire in time. (Ronell 197) Ronells Begriff “poetics of desire” bezeichnet eine im Kafka’schen Text manifeste, triebgeladene Begierde der Charaktere, die mit einem unvermeidlichen Misslingen einhergeht. Dieses Unvermögen offenbart sich auch in den zahlreichen Briefen, ein weiteres Kommunikationsmedium im Film und im Roman, auf dem ebenfalls die Hoffnung ruht, Spuren des Schlosses ausfindig zu machen. Man könnte auf dieser Grundlage alle Ersatzformen im Roman und in der Filmadaption, die von den Akteuren als Mittel verwendet werden, um eine temporäre aber nicht vollständige Befriedigung zu erreichen, als “horny-phon” bezeichnen. In ihnen entlädt sich zeitweilig die auf das Schloss ausgerichtete, libidinöse Frustration der Protagonisten, auch wenn sie als Mittel nur stellvertretend für das Objekt ihrer Begierde stehen. “Aber nun höre wie es sich mit den Briefen verhält, mit den Briefen an Dich […]” (Kafka, Das Schloß 282) Im Roman wird von mehreren Briefen berichtet: die zwei Briefe von Klamm an K. (40, 187), Sortinis Brief an Amalia (302, 303), dessen Inhalt man nur andeutungsweise von Olgas Aussagen erfährt, und Olgas Brief an Barnabas (357), der eher als Empfehlungsbrief einzustufen ist. K.s zweite mündliche Nachricht an Klamm (192-93) wird interessanterweise schriftlich festgehalten, obwohl Barnabas sie mündlich an Klamm überliefern soll. Bleiben wir aber bei dem ersten Brief von Klamm an K. Der Brief trägt die schwerwiegende Unterschrift des “Vorstandes” Klamm, ist an K. adressiert und bezieht sich auf K.s Ankunft und seine neue Stelle: Sehr geehrter Herr! Sie sind, wie Sie wissen, in die herrschaftlichen Dienste aufgenommen. Ihr nächster Vorgesetzter ist der Gemeindevorsteher des Dorfes, der Ihnen Zwischen Schrift und Film: Franz Kafkas und Michael Hanekes Das Schloß 33 auch alles Nähere über Ihre Arbeit und die Lohnbedingungen mitteilen wird und dem Sie auch Rechenschaft schuldig sein werden. Trotzdem werde aber auch ich Sie nicht aus den Augen verlieren. Barnabas, der Überbringer dieses Briefes, wird von Zeit zu Zeit bei Ihnen nachfragen, um Ihre Wünsche zu erfahren und mir mitzuteilen. Sie werden mich immer bereit finden, Ihnen soweit es möglich ist, gefällig zu sein. Es liegt mir daran zufriedene Arbeiter zu haben. (Das Schloß 40) Im gleichen Kapitel (“Barnabas”) folgt eine beispiellose Interpretation des Briefes von K. Er behauptet, der Brief beinhalte Widersprüche, die so sichtbar seien, “daß sie beabsichtigt sein mußten” (41), spricht von Stellen “wo er offen oder versteckt als ein kleiner […] Arbeiter behandelt” (41) werde, und interpretiert auch den Satz “wie Sie wissen” (43) als eine geheime Drohung, eine implizite Kampfansage. Im fünften Kapitel (“Beim Vorsteher”) wird schließlich der Interpretationsprozess ad absurdum geführt. Der Vorsteher im gleichnamigen Kapitel deutet Klamms oben zitierten Brief aus einer Perspektive, aus der Inhalte sich als sekundär erweisen. Indem er Briefe und Telefongespräche in “amtliche” und “private” unterteilt und K.s Brief als einen privaten Brief einstuft, führt er K. vor Augen, dass er den Brief “missverstanden” habe und dass er nicht “in die herrschaftlichen Dienste angenommen” sei, wie der Brief behauptet. Die Botschaften aller Kommunikationsmedien im Roman sind demnach inhaltslos (aber keineswegs bedeutungslos), vor allem dann, wenn sie als Wegweiser benutzt werden. Damit ist allerdings nur teilweise das McLuhansche Grundprinzip “the medium is the message” gemeint, nach dem das eigentliche Signifikante nicht die Botschaft, sondern das Medium an sich ist. Im Zentrum der Geschichte steht vielmehr die Geste der Überbringung von Botschaften und weniger eine Unterscheidung zwischen Form und Inhalt. Dieselben Medien agieren dabei als Supplemente, indem sie dem Empfänger eine temporäre, trügerische Hoffnung gewährleisten und ihm glauben lassen, durch sie Kontakt mit dem Schloss herstellen zu können. Den Briefen und allen schriftlichen Dokumenten kommt dabei eine besondere Bedeutung zu, weil sie von einer materiellen Qualität gekennzeichnet sind. Olgas Aussagen im 16. Kapitel sind diesbezüglich besonders aufschlussreich. In ihrem Versuch, K. die komplexen Kommunikationsbedingungen im Schloss nahezubringen, erläutert sie den Umgang mit Briefen in den Kanzleien in folgender Weise: Inzwischen sucht der Schreiber aus den vielen Akten und Briefschaften, die er unter dem Tisch hat, einen Brief für Dich heraus, es ist also kein Brief den er [Klamm] gerade geschrieben hat, vielmehr ist es dem Aussehen des Umschlags nach ein sehr alter Brief, der schon lange dort liegt. … Der Schreiber allerdings macht es sich leicht, gibt Barnabas den Brief, sagt: “Von Klamm für K.” und damit ist Barnabas entlassen. (283) 34 Damianos Grammatikopoulos Anhand von Olgas Schilderungen wird das Sender-Empfänger-Modell auf den Kopf gestellt. Man weiß nicht mehr, trotz der Unterschrift, von wem und wann die Nachricht geschrieben wurde und zu welchem Zweck. Was übrig bleibt, ist die bloße Geste der Überbringung der schriftlichen Nachricht, deren Auslieferung vom Boten und deren Empfang vom Adressaten. In Hanekes Filmadaption kommt dem Motiv des Briefes ebenfalls eine zentrale Rolle zu. Sowohl im Roman als auch in Hanekes Verfilmung erhält K. den ersten Brief direkt nach dem Telefongespräch mit Oswald (Hörmuschel-Szene). Die anschließende schriftliche Nachricht ist folglich von einer Bewegung gekennzeichnet, die den Übergang von einem Medium (Telefon) zum anderen (Brief) markiert. Dieselbe Szene scheint darüber hinaus von einer logozentrischen Kritik durchzogen zu sein, denn schriftliche Nachrichten werden in den Vordergrund und mündliche in den Hintergrund gerückt (die schriftliche Nachricht erfolgt nach dem verwirrenden telefonischen Gespräch, von dem bereits die Rede war). Diese These wird jedoch im Kapitel “Auf der Straße” im Roman entkräftet, als K. seine zweite mündliche Nachricht an Klamm zwar schriftlich festhält, dennoch darauf besteht, Barnabas solle sie an Klamm mündlich vortragen. 10 Im Film, auf der anderen Seite, sticht das Zusammenspiel von drei Medien ins Auge: Telefon, Musikautomat und Brief. Das Aus- und Einschalten des Musikautomaten in der filmischen Hörmuschel-Szene wird auch hier als narratives Mittel eingesetzt, um Spannung auf- und abzubauen. Der Musikautomat wird an dieser Stelle erst dann ausgeschaltet, als K. die Entscheidung fällt, selbst die Kanzlei anzurufen und erst nachdem er die Aussage trifft: “Ich werde selbst telefonieren”. Der Protagonist wird in einer Großaufnahme im Profil gezeigt, bevor man zur nächsten Einstellung, ebenfalls in Großaufnahme, wechselt, in der der Musikautomat im Mittelpunkt steht. Man sieht die Hand des Wirtes und den Knopfdruck auf dem Apparat, bevor die Musik abgestellt wird. Nach einem Wechsel zu einer Nahaufnahme sieht man die Bauern, die sich allmählich von hinten um K. gruppieren, während er mit Oswald telefoniert. Kurz vorm Ende des Dialogs entfernen sich die Bauern von der linken Seite des Bildes und der Musikautomat wird sichtbar (Abb. 2). Zwischen Schrift und Film: Franz Kafkas und Michael Hanekes Das Schloß 35 Abb. 2: Das Telefonat (Michael Haneke: Das Schloß)- Abb. 3: Der Brief (Michael Haneke: Das Schloß)- Direkt nach dem Telefongespräch tritt Barnabas in den Bildraum ein, stellt sich vor und übergibt den ersten Brief an K. Der Brief wird in einer Großaufnahme und in Aufsicht gezeigt. Auf der Rückseite des nassen Umschlags liest man die Überschrift: “An den Landvermesser im Brückenhof.” Es handelt sich hier um eine Ergänzung von Haneke, da diese Überschrift im Roman nicht vorkommt. Der Brief wird aus dem Umschlag gezogen, auseinandergefaltet, und in der 36 Damianos Grammatikopoulos gleichen Einstellung vor der Kamera gehalten. Die Zeilen des Briefes aus der Vorlage, die bereits zitiert wurden, werden im Film nicht vollständig wiedergegeben. Einzelne Sätze werden ausgelassen (Abb. 3). Der Kamerablick bleibt auf den Brief fixiert, während K. den Brief laut liest. Als Zuschauer kann man den Brief in dieser Einstellung aus der Sicht des Protagonisten lesen, während man ihn zeitgleich von K. (Ulrich Mühe) hören kann. Eine eigenartige, iterative Transponierung findet statt: Schrift wird mündlich wiedergegeben, was die akustische Dimension der Sprache hervortreten lässt. Es folgt eine Reihe von abwechselnden Großaufnahmen in einem Schuss-Gegenschuss-Dialog zwischen K. und Barnabas. K. liest den Brief während der Schuss- Gegenschuss-Sequenz zu Ende und spricht seine (erste) mündliche Nachricht an Klamm aus, die Barnabas weiterleiten soll. 11 K.s mündliche Botschaft im Film ist identisch mit der Passage, die im Roman vorliegt. Der Film rückt somit das Zusammenspiel von schriftlicher und mündlicher Sprache einerseits und die Verschränkung zwischen visueller und auditiver Ebene andererseits in den Vordergrund. Noch bevor K. den letzten Satz seiner mündlichen Nachricht ausspricht, wird er vom Musikautomaten unterbrochen, der plötzlich eingeschaltet wird und die Szene musikalisch untermalt. Der Kamerablick bleibt dabei in Großaufnahme auf K. fixiert (im Hintergrund links und rechts hinter ihm sind seine Gehilfen zu sehen); der Apparat wird nicht gezeigt. Von der Musik deutlich abgelenkt, richten K., die Gehilfen und nach dem Cut auch Barnabas ihren Blick auf das Radio, was die zentrale Rolle des Apparates in dieser Szene von Neuem hervorhebt. K. führt den letzten Satz seiner mündlichen Botschaft zu Ende bevor Barnabas “alles wortgetreu” (mündlich) wiederholt. Im gleichen Abschnitt im Roman werden keine Musikapparate oder Musik im Allgemeinen erwähnt. Das Wort “Musikautomat” wird erst vom Vorsteher im gleichnamigen Kapitel erwähnt, in dem Telefongespräche mit der Musik in Wirtstuben verglichen werden. Damit scheint die Figur des Vorstehers einerseits auf die Irrelevanz solcher Inhalte aufmerksam machen zu wollen und andererseits die Selbstständigkeit der Laute hervorzuheben, die sie generieren. Die Anwesenheit eines Musikapparates in beiden Szenen im Film, in denen telefoniert wird, scheint eine Anspielung auf diese Aussage zu sein oder vielmehr eine audiovisuelle Interpretation der gleichen Aussage, die den Inhalt von Telefongesprächen und schriftlichen und mündlichen Botschaften als arbiträr darstellt, wobei gleichzeitig ihre supplementäre Funktion unterstrichen wird. Die hier besprochenen Medien und Medieninhalte sind folglich nur als “hornyphone” Supplemente wertvoll, da sie als solche den Protagonisten eine temporäre, trügerische Befriedigung verschaffen, und ihnen Hoffnung geben, durch sie, vielleicht zu einem späteren Zeitpunkt, das Schloss betreten zu dürfen. Zwischen Schrift und Film: Franz Kafkas und Michael Hanekes Das Schloß 37 Zu Beginn der 19. Sequenz im Film begegnet man einer ähnlichen repetitiven Konstellation. In einer Großaufnahme aus der Perspektive des Protagonisten wird ein handschriftlich generiertes Protokoll gezeigt, das K. laut vorliest, während man als Zuschauer das Dokument zeitgleich lesen kann: Es ist klar, daß der Landvermesser Frieda nicht liebt, aber er wird nicht von ihr lassen, solange er noch irgendwelche Hoffnung hat, daß seine Rechnung stimmt. Er glaubt nämlich in ihr eine Geliebte des Herrn Vorstandes erobert zu haben und dadurch ein Pfand zu besitzen, das nur zum höchsten Preis eingelöst werden kann (Abb. 4). Abb. 4: Das Protokoll (Michael Haneke: Das Schloß)- Die letzten Worte des letzten Satzes (“eingelöst werden kann”) werden nicht laut ausgesprochen. Während K. immer noch dabei ist, den Brief vorzulesen, fokussiert sich der Kamerablick in einer Großaufnahme auf K.s Gesicht, der von dem Inhalt des Dokumentes sichtlich enttäuscht und verärgert innehält und seinen Blick auf Momus und die Wirtin richtet. Es folgt das Protokoll-Verhören. Die Szene ist nicht nur aufgrund ihrer iterativen Struktur interessant, auf die man bereits eingegangen ist, sie sticht auch im Blick auf ihr Verhältnis zur Vorlage hervor. Im Gegensatz zum Roman, in dem der Inhalt des Protokolls nicht preisgegeben wird, kann man in der oben beschriebenen Filmszene das Protokoll deutlich lesen. Achtet man jedoch genauer auf den Roman, stellt man schnell fest, dass der Inhalt des Briefes im Film auch im Roman vorkommt und zwar im 14. Kapitel (“Friedas Vorwurf”), das von den Vorwürfen Friedas an K. durchzogen ist: 38 Damianos Grammatikopoulos Es sind vielleicht die gleichen Worte, welche die Wirtin gebrauchte, auch sie sagt, daß Du erst seitdem Du mich kanntest zielbewußt geworden bist. Das sei daher gekommen, daß Du glaubtest in mir eine Geliebte Klamms erobert zu haben und dadurch ein Pfand zu besitzen, das nur zum höchsten Preise ausgelöst werden könne. Über diesen Preis mit Klamm zu verhandeln sei Dein einziges Streben. (Das Schloß 245) Ein Abschnitt aus dem Roman wird somit durch ein Copy-Paste-Verfahren aus seinem ursprünglichen Kontext gerissen und in der Zeitfolge des Filmes in eine andere, frühere Stelle eingefügt. Durch diesen Akt des Zitierens lädt der Film ein, die obige Szene im Verhältnis zu der Vorlage zu lesen, was dazu führt, Friedas Vorwürfe als die Vorwürfe der Wirtin zu identifizieren. Vor dem Hintergrund der bisherigen Überlegungen erweist sich die Beziehung zwischen Vorlage und Filmadaption als besonders komplex und wechselseitig. Die Vorzüge einer simultanen Lektüre von Text und Verfilmung sind evident. Durch den Prozess der Transliteration, der Übersetzung von einem Medium ins andere, entsteht ein Spiegelbild oder vielmehr ein Trugbild der Vorlage, das für den Roman ebenso unabdingbar ist, wie der Text für den Film. Der Verdienst einer Interpretation, die mehrere Versionen einer Narration miteischließt, liegt nicht nur darin, die Beziehungen zwischen Vorlage und Verfilmung(en) zu besprechen, sondern besagte Medien in eine vielschichtige Wechselbeziehung treten zu lassen. Eine derartige transmediale Lektüre ist imstande, Verhältnisse ans Licht zu bringen und Motive zu erleuchten, die konventionellen, monomedialen Herangehensweisen verschlossen geblieben wären. So steht die hier vorgelegte Verfahrensweise im Zeichen einer Weiterverarbeitung Kafka’scher Stoffe, die allerdings weniger den Transformationsvorgang zum Gegenstand der Untersuchung macht, sondern Ausgangstext und Verfilmung als Bestandteile eines fragmentierten Korpus betrachtet. Adaption bedeutet in diesem Sinne nicht Anpassung an ein anderes Medium, sondern Änderung durch einen Prozess des transmedialen Simulierens. Der hier beschriebene Simulationsvorgang ähnelt dabei einer Transplantation, d. h. der Verpflanzung von organischen Körperteilen an einen anderen Ort. Die Transplantate der Vorlage, die auf den neuen Körper transplantiert werden, bewirken indessen Modifikationen, die sowohl auf den Spender als auch auf den Empfänger Auswirkungen haben. Durch die hier skizzierte Prozedur wird eine Verknüpfung zwischen Spender (Vorlage) und Empfänger (Adaption) hergestellt, die nicht mehr rückgängig gemacht werden kann. Zwischen Schrift und Film: Franz Kafkas und Michael Hanekes Das Schloß 39 Notes 1 “However, as soon as Bluestone focuses on the ‘unique and specific properties’ of each medium, it becomes obvious that his discussion is underpinned by a continued belief in the intrinsic superiority of literature.” (Aragay 13). 2 “Intermedialität: Mediengrenzen überschreitende Phänomene, die mindestens zwei konventionell als distinkt wahrgenommene Medien involvieren“ (Rajewsky, Intermedialität 13)� 3 Unter das Stichwort Intermedialität subsumiert Rajewsky insgesamt drei Kategorien, die sich mit intermedialen Phänomenen auseinandersetzten: Medienkombination (der Photoroman, die Klangkunst etc.), Medienwechsel (Literaturverfilmungen d. h. Adaptionen) und intermediale Bezüge (filmisches Schreiben, Literarisierung des Films etc.). 4 Der Begriff hat sich im Deutschen als “transmediales Erzählen” eingebürgert. 5 Von einer einzigen Ausnahme abgesehen, werden Passagen aus der Vorlage vom Off-Erzähler wortgetreu zitiert, ohne jegliche Änderungen oder Auslassungen vorzunehmen. 6 “Die Wahrnehmung von Handlung ist jeweils anders, ob man sie durch Kommentar oder im Bild beschreibt. Durch die doppelspurige Beschreibung kann eine Intensivierung und wechselseitige Verfremdung erreicht werden, die sowohl den sprachlichen wie den bildlichen Ausdruck erst bemerkbar macht” (Reitz, Kluge, und Reinke, “Wort und Film” 19). 7 “Muschel.” Duden Online. www.duden.de/ rechtschreibung/ Muschel Web. 2. Nov. 2020. 8 Das Wort “Muschi” hat in der deutschen Umgangssprache die gleiche Bedeutung mit dem Wort “Vagina”. 9 “1. (informal) sexually excited: to feel horny. 2. (informal): sexually attractive: to look horny. 3. made of a hard substance like horn: the bird’s horny beak. 4. (of skin, etc.) hard and rough: horny hands.” Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries, s.v “horny”. Web. 2 Nov. 2020. <https: / / www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/ definition/ english/ horny? q=horny>. 10 “aber Du mußt es doch mündlich ausrichten, einen Brief will ich nicht schreiben, er würde ja doch wieder nur den endlosen Aktenweg gehn” (Kafka, Das Schloß,193)� 11 “‘Richte also Herrn Klamm meinen Dank für die Aufnahme aus wie auch für seine besondere Freundlichkeit, die ich als einer, der sich hier noch gar nicht bewährt hat, zu schätzen weiß. Ich werde mich vollständig nach seinen Absichten verhalten. Besondere Wünsche habe ich heute nicht’. Barnabas, der genau aufgemerkt hatte, bat den Auftrag vor K. wiederholen zu dürfen, K. erlaubte es, Barnabas wiederholte alles wortgetreu” (Kafka, Das Schloß, 45-46). 40 Damianos Grammatikopoulos Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. “Aus der Korrespondenz mit Theodor W. Adorno.” Benjamin über Kafka: Texte, Briefzeugnisse, Aufzeichnungen. Ed. Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981. 100-110. Alt, Peter-André. Kafka und der Film: Über kinematographisches Erzählen. Munich: C.H. Beck, 2009. Aragay, Mireia. “Introduction. Reflection to Refraction: Adaptation Studies Then and Now.” Books in Motion: Adaptation, Intertextuality, Authorship. Ed. Mireia Aragay. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. 11-34. Benjamin, Walter. Walter Benjamin. Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 2. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann und Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991. Biderman, Shai, and Ido Lewit. Mediamorphosis: Kafka and the Moving Image. London: Wallflower P, 2016. Bluestone, George. Novels into Film. Berkeley: U of California P, 1968. Brunette, Peter. Michael Haneke. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2010. Geisenhanslüke, Achim. Das Schibboleth der Psychoanalyse: Freuds Passagen der Schrift� Bielefeld: transcript, 2008. Hickethier, Knut. Film- und Fernsehanalyse. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2007. Jahraus, Oliver. “Kafka und der Film.” Kafka-Handbuch. Leben - Werk - Wirkung. Ed. Bettina von Jagow and Oliver Jahrhaus. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008. 224-236. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006. Kafka, Franz. Das Schloß� Schriften Tagebücher. Kritische Ausgabe. Ed. Jürgen Born, Gerhard Neumann, Malcolm Pasley, Jost Schillemeit. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002. Levine, Michael. “Of Big Ears and Bondage: Benjamin, Kafka, and the Static of the Sirens.” The German Quarterly 87.2 (Spring 2014): 196-215. McFarlane, Brian. Novel to Film. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1996. Naremore, James. “Introduction: Film and the Reign of Adaptation.” Film Adaptation� Ed. James Naremore. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2000. 1-16. Rajewsky, Irina O. Intermedialität. Tübingen: A. Francke, 2002. Reitz, Edgar, Alexander Kluge, and Wilfried Reinke. “Wort und Film.” Ulmer Dramaturgien: Reibungsverluste. Ed. Klaus Eder. Munich: Hanser, 1980. 9-27. Ronell, Avital. Finitude’s Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1994. 183-206. Sussman, Henry. Extraterrestrial Kafka: Ahead of the Graphic Novel. New York: Fordham UP, 2010. Zischler, Hanns. Kafka geht ins Kino. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1996. After the Collective: Judith Schalansky on Post- Socialist Patterns of Thought Jakob Norberg Duke University Abstract: Judith Schalansky’s novel The Giraffe’s Neck (2011) lucidly and trenchantly analyzes the logic underlying a hard turn from leftist to rightist ideology. Schalansky’s narrator is a disoriented and disaffected biology teacher who has experienced the collapse of the GDR and draws on her discipline to explain the demise of the socialist project. Specifically, the novel traces the transition from a radical socialist egalitarianism to a biologistically motivated belief in intractable because natural and heritable differences in human abilities. She thinks back to grand socialist projects of generating unlimited resources for a human collective undivided by exploitation, but now invokes natural constraints to such projects. Humanity, she implies, does not have a special position or calling in nature, and its members have no particular moral or political obligation to one another. Mingling cynical reflection and pained recollection, The Giraffe’s Neck maps a momentous ideological shift from socialist principles of redistribution to a biopolitical concern with inheritance, from the ideal of collectivism to reliance on kinship. This ideological analysis qualifies the novel as one of the most important literary works to date on post-socialist Germany. Keywords: Judith Schalansky, DDR, socialism, biopolitics Judith Schalansky’s novel The Giraffe’s Neck: A Novel [Der Hals der Giraffe: Bildungsroman] 1 was very warmly welcomed by critics, nominated for the German Book Prize in 2011, the year of its publication, and soon after noticed outside of the German language area. Translated into English but also French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, and Swedish, it received favorable reviews in such venues as The Independent and the New Yorker. While not a sensation comparable to 42 Jakob Norberg the novels of bestselling authors such as W. G. Sebald or Daniel Kehlmann, The Giraffe’s Neck nevertheless became something of a respectable minor success. The theme of The Giraffe’s Neck is a fairly familiar one to those acquainted with post-1989 Germany: it deals with the transition away from the socialism of the German Democratic Republic after the fall of the wall and the unification of East and West Germany. The main character is a disoriented, soon-to-retire biology teacher whose life is marked by socialism’s collapse and the rapid dismantling of the GDR. In this situation, she is forced to search for a coherent and compelling set of beliefs that could make sense of a disrupted world as well as help her accept, and perhaps even derive some satisfaction from, her own precarious post-socialist situation. It is a novel about the confusions of post-socialist life, published about two decades after the demise of the GDR. None of this would strike the reader acquainted with recent German history as exceptional; there are many literary texts that capture East German life after reunification. Works by authors more established than Judith Schalansky come to mind, such as the novels and short stories of Christoph Hein, Ingo Schulze, or Christa Wolf. These authors have in one way or another offered accounts of years of loyal dissidence under a socialist regime, depicted the challenges of surviving in a capitalist economy, or recorded tragicomical German-German misunderstandings. Schalansky’s work is neither one of the first nor one of the most well-known novels in a kind of post-socialist mini-canon. But Schalansky’s novel possesses a distinct focus, namely sharp ideological change; the focus of the text is a hard turn from a leftwing to a rightwing conception of society and politics. Specifically, the text represents a transition away from a hopeful anticipation of a world mastered by socialist humankind to quasi-naturalist discussions of sapped vitality and necessary adaptation to an unforgiving environment. 2 Through Schalansky’s elaboration of the main character’s disillusioned view of state-mandated utopian thought, the reader can see how the notion of man-made progress is replaced by the concept of unmasterable evolution, schemes of economic redistribution marginalized by a concern with lines of inheritance, and celebrations of solidarity within large collectives edged out by longing for familial intimacy. In the form of an internal monologue, The Giraffe’s Neck presents a methodical, even relentless reconstruction of the passage from a grandiose vision of the transformation of nature for humanity’s benefit to a humbler - or bleaker - view of humans as one species among many, subject to relentless pressures in a treacherous environment. The subject of this paper is precisely this ideological transformation; it seeks to map Schalansky’s analysis of post-socialist patterns of thought. The novel offers us, this essay submits, a psychologically plausible and politically relevant account of a transition from a high modernist commitment to humanity’s tri- After the Collective: Judith Schalansky on Post-Socialist Patterns of Thought 43 umphant achievement of boundless prosperity to a post-modern anticipation of humanity’s likely demise; from efforts to conjure large-scale human collectives to a narrower belief in the endurance of smaller, genetically defined kinship groups; from egalitarian redistribution subtended by solidarity to inheritance between biologically linked individuals. It is this trenchant vision of ideological change that makes The Giraffe’s Neck one of the most captivating and significant literary works on life and society after socialism. How did people who were once firmly committed to the GDR deal with the end of the socialist nation? What coping mechanisms and interpretive vocabularies were available to them? In The Giraffe’s Neck, Schalansky channels a voice from the sparsely populated post-socialist Eastern parts of Germany. The voice belongs to a teacher, Inge Lohmark, whose classes are steadily becoming smaller and smaller; the gymnasium in her rural area of Vorpommern is scheduled to close because of dwindling numbers of qualified pupils. Lohmark sums up the development by speaking of the changing shape of the age structure graph for the current population. With the fertility level far below replacement level and an “excess of seniors,” the age pyramid for the area went from looking like a pine tree to a beehive to something like an urn (Schalansky 37). Schalansky’s novel thus gives us a perspective from within a vision of decline. By representing Lohmark’s slow-moving ruminations, the text brings us the reactions and rationalizations of a person faced with the end - the end of her professional career, the waning of her physical vitality, the breakdown of her already minimal family, the unstoppable depopulation of her province, and, finally, the now two-decade old dissolution of the socialist nation in which she spent most of her active years. Simultaneously disoriented and hardened, Schalansky’s main character makes sense of these conditions by drawing on the subjects that she teaches, biology and ecology. Lohmark is, it turns out, quite ready to affirm the West German chancellor Helmut Kohl’s 1990 vision of “blooming landscapes” in the East, by which he meant that the fall of the Berlin Wall and German unification would inaugurate a new era of prosperity in the former GDR. Only Schalansky’s biology teacher takes the phrase “blühende Landschaften” literally and reflects upon the greening of the deserted region (71). Soon enough, she predicts, plants will cover the ruins of abandoned towns and cities. And she maintains that this should not be seen as a phase of lamentable decline but of great and proliferating life: maggots, mushrooms, and microbes are perpetually at work as agents of decomposition. Resilient vegetation will take over the earth. As Lohmark walks through the contracting county town, she notes that the buildings that were renovated and sanitized after West Germany absorbed the 44 Jakob Norberg former GDR now stand empty, ready to be covered over by indomitable weeds. All the time that people built their towns and cities, the flora was just waiting, sitting in ambush even, always ready to shoot forth everywhere. This does not exactly mean that plants are about to win out over humans. Her approach is, in the end, reducible to the statement that what survives clearly survives, as opposed to that which disappears. In German: “Wer überlebt, überlebt” (Schalansky 217). In her novel, Schalansky thus lets her protagonist imagine the “world without us” as it is about to unfold in a provincial area of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. 3 Sensing how her own career, life, epoch, and even species are coming to an end, Lohmark studies what she regards as the stronger force or more ingenious life form. This is the “green front” that sustains itself and expands simply by capturing sunlight and water (Schalansky 68). If she, too, would be able to draw energy from photosynthesis, she notes, she would be relieved of the constant burden of working and gathering food. From this perspective, the resistance against the loosening hold of humans over the landscape is dismissed as a futile enterprise. And the futility of all human interventions is a recurrent theme in Lohmark’s jaundiced reflections. For example, interregional redistribution for the benefit of weaker regions, that is, money flowing from the former West Germany is, she thinks, a form of artificial life support that should be turned off. Such transfers from more densely populated and prosperous areas to less attractive and sparser ones only represent an institutionalized form of parasitism among humans, set up to in order to sustain that which is plainly unsustainable. Lohmark also thinks that the effort to maintain enrollments at her school and thus save her workplace by lowering the entrance requirements for local children is bound to fail. Given the varying levels of intelligence among different individuals, it would, she asserts, be senseless to open up the theoretical disciplines to adolescents who should be trained for practical jobs. Disparities among pupils remain intractable, she holds, no matter the teaching effort. To sum up her stance, Lohmark rejects any remedies to the current distribution of resources and opportunities across regions, communities, and individuals; they have no beneficial or lasting effect. It is futile to keep a dying region going with money from elsewhere, and futile to open up the education system to talentless pupils. 4 In her terms: Why struggle against nature? Facing the bleak prospects of this post-socialist region and realizing that she is moving into old age herself, After the Collective: Judith Schalansky on Post-Socialist Patterns of Thought 45 Lohmark seeks to ally herself emotionally with the force of inexorable natural laws, to at least get a taste of the triumph in her moment of demise. 5 In The Giraffe’s Neck, there is, according to the main character, no effective way of preventing the German hinterlands from sinking into the wilderness again, and no good reason to put up resistance. Presented as the dark thoughts of a single character, the novel may seem like a study in an individual pathology. But the attitude of Schalansky’s anti-hero, oscillating as it does between Schadenfreude and muted desperation, amounts to nothing less than a twisted, symptomatic working-through of GDR’s legacy. As a former GDR citizen whose mind often drifts to scenes from an earlier professional life in a dismantled system, Lohmark sees in socialism the most fantastical endeavor to manipulate the world to better serve the needs and wishes of humanity. A staff-room discussion with her colleagues leads her to recall, and to ridicule, Soviet visions of redesigning the earth to fit the purposes of mankind pictured as a peaceful union of all peoples. Soviet scientists wanted to melt the polar caps, irrigate the deserts, tame wild animals, eliminate cancer and so on. The title of the book, The Giraffe’s Neck, alludes to the revival of Lamarckism in the Soviet Union, the theory that traits acquired over a lifetime would be inheritable; the giraffe’s constant reaching for leaves, for instance, would gradually elongate the neck, a trait that it would then pass on to its offspring. As experiments would show, however, overheated socialist visions of giving new shape to a malleable natural world never bore fruit. To use a concept that has emerged more broadly a little after the publication of Schalansky’s novel in 2011, the anticipated socialist anthropocene never quite materialized. Strawberries, Lohmark remarks, did not grow very well on the Soviet plains; ambitious socialists could never truly overcome the limits of the geography. In Lohmark’s post-socialist retrospection, the plans of the socialist regime in the end succumbed to the limits of people’s genetic endowment and the challenges of recalcitrant environments, all of which exercise a more genuine dictatorship, an “echte Diktatur,” over human affairs (Schalansky 49). Deeply disappointed with the failure of the socialist vision, Lohmark has become an advocate of a bitterly anti-socialist, anti-utopian, naturalist view of the world. Her “scheinbar postideologische[s] Einüben in eine ‘Verhaltenslehre der Kälte’,” Steffen Richter points out, is nothing if not “hochgradig ideologisch” (Richter 60). Whether Lohmark reflects on schemes to save her school in a period of declining enrollments or on utopian socialist plans to transform the material world to the benefit of all humans, she tends to invoke the limits of human nature or evolved ecologies. After the end of socialism and its vision of a unified, self-determining, and self-transforming humanity able to reduce and annul the dispar- 46 Jakob Norberg ities among people and regions of the world, it seems that some form of fatalistic biologism 6 becomes more attractive. Mankind cannot, Schalansky’s figure insists, lay claim to any special status vis-à-vis nature and is not called upon to exercise dominion over it. Instead, humans are simply one species among many, engaged in constant intra-species rivalry, 7 and quite likely to meet its collective demise, should the environment not sustain human beings. This is her post-socialist position, her evolution-inspired rejection of Cold-War era humanism. Schalansky’s novel suggests that a character disoriented and profoundly disillusioned with socialism might come to espouse particular anti-socialist beliefs, which draw authority from biology. This is, so to speak, the central thesis of the novel as a study in post-socialist psychology. Specifically, the disaffected Inge Lohmark asserts that humanity has no special standing or historical mission and cannot successfully bring radically egalitarian projects to completion. Instead, she believes that the collective of humans constitutes one vulnerable species among many, whose members are differentially endowed. In this perspective, solidarity among all of humanity’s members and grand political attempts to raise everyone up by means of a redistribution of resources make little practical sense. There is a certain logic to these beliefs. Lohmark’s decomposition or fragmentation of humanity into competing and unequal individuals, on the one hand, and her erasure of the boundary between humanity and other species, on the other, belong together. These two positions that emerge in the internal monologue of Schalansky’s novel reflect, I would argue, broader ideological trends in the post-socialist era. Studying dominant sets of politically efficacious beliefs in the post-socialist world, the sociologist Steve Fuller has suggested that contemporary individualism and radical ecological thought converge, however much their respective advocates might consider each other alien. In his book The New Sociological Imagination from 2006, Fuller sees in socialism an endeavor to generate tremendous resources for a future humanity conceived of as one collective, undivided by exploitation. Socialism thus weds a “broadly utilitarian, pro-science and pro-industry policy perspective to an overarching sense of responsibility for all of humanity, especially its most vulnerable members” (Fuller 2006, 38). Put concisely, socialism consists in a commitment to a collective of equals that includes all humans and only humans. Today this vision of a unified human collective of equals, Fuller continues, is less likely to be embraced as dignified or viable. Covering the rise of new paradigms of thought in the last couple of decades, Fuller identifies two successful and complementary counter-socialist strategies. The first strategy involves “specifying a clear hierarchy within Homo Sapiens that makes it unlikely that After the Collective: Judith Schalansky on Post-Socialist Patterns of Thought 47 all of its members can ever be equal participants” (Fuller 2006, 36). The most prominent example today is the neoliberal vision of how free markets separate out people with different levels of ability in a way that should decidedly not be mitigated by the state. According to this line of reasoning, all individuals are not equally productive and are therefore not likely to earn the same. Inequality is thus the manifestation of an underlying unequal distribution of capability. Political regimes that seek to minimize differences in wealth through state-organized transfers only eliminate people’s incentives to be creative, and to invest in creations. 8 Burdened by constant redistribution of resources, exceptionally talented, hard-working, and risk-taking individuals, along with those who are willing to finance their ventures, will unjustly be denied the opportunity to reap the full rewards of their investments and, as a consequence, perhaps even lose interest in undertaking projects. Indeed, people will be pacified by the prospect of universally guaranteed employment and resources. Without the expectation of formidable and rightful gains, individuals cease to develop their potential and, as a consequence, value-generating products never enter the market. A society that strives primarily for socioeconomic equality will therefore become an inefficient, stagnant society. 9 It would be unproductive and unfair to seek to level out all distinctions among individuals, groups or regions in the name of a unified humanity. The other strategy that Fuller describes depends not on breaking up humanity into an agglomeration of individuals with disparate abilities, but to blur the boundaries between humans and other species, “such that the concept of humanity loses its metaphysical grounding and moral priority” (Fuller 2006, 36). This is the project of radical ecology movements concerned with sustainability and animal welfare, but also of deconstructive or post-humanist academics interrogating the “ontological efficacy of the human/ animal divide” (Wolfe 124). Neat categories, this group argues, are always invaded by that which they are designed to exclude. Timothy Morton, a proponent of a “queer ecology” that combines the thought figures of ecological consciousness and poststructuralist theory, asserts that all life-forms are “liquid.” This fluidity renders futile any attempt to raise barriers between species. Instead, we must, Morton argues, come to accept and affirm that all “life-forms constitute a mesh, a nontotalizable, open-ended concatenation of interrelations that blur and confound boundaries at practically any level: between species, between the living and the nonliving, between organism and environment” (275-276). The environment is not the environment in the sense of a contained outside, a reified domain out there beyond the edge of a fully constituted humanity. There are in fact no cleavages or rifts between humanity and the environment. 48 Jakob Norberg To sum up: neoliberal individualists argue that the exponents of an egalitarian humanity ultimately suppress individual achievement, with negative effects for all, whereas poststructuralist ecologists argue that defining humanity is impossible (you cannot cut up a liquid continuum) and bigoted (you should not lock polymorphous life into simplistic oppositions such as male-female or human-animal). We can even speak of a curious alliance between anti-egalitarian, anti-redistributionist neoliberalism and an updated, ecological form of deconstruction, between the advocates of the liberated market and the advocates of a “queer ecology,” insofar as both these groups reject the concept of a shared humanity. The human collective, held together by a special solidarity that extends to all its members, is both dissolved from within and frayed at the edges. Neoliberals promote fragmentation and hierarchies among human beings while radical ecologists or post-humanists tear down hierarchies between species. Both these moves destabilize the ideal collective of socialism by contracting or expanding ethical obligations. These two lines of attack finally converge in their condemnation of humanity’s artificiality. Neoliberals want to release individuals from the burden of redistributive welfare programs and let them join efforts with one another voluntarily for mutual gain. These individuals will then tend to identify permanently only with their immediate families or some other self-chosen group and promote only their own progeny. The queer ecologist or posthumanist in turn discerns violence in the attempt to determine any firm borders of humanity and urges us to rethink “the ‘distribution’ of subjectivity across species lines” (Wolfe 125). The brittle normative human order only serves to obscure the fluid, non-hierarchical relationality of all forms of life. In both cases, neoliberalism and queer ecologists hold that institutionalized forms of solidarity meant to enforce duties to unknown other human beings within specified borders are constructions that quell spontaneous patterns of vitality. Socialist attempts to exercise conscious control over what are impenetrably complex self-organizing economic and ecological systems, so the argument continues, even tend to be self-undermining. The socialist state that seeks to plan production and guide distribution in order to ensure that everyone is given access to goods and services only strangles the economy, for some centralized committee of planners can never acquire and process all the information needed to make the best decisions about resource allocation. 10 And in the realm of ecology, continued human interference disturbs the delicate weave of interrelationships in the ecosystem and disrupts its ability to regenerate itself. In other words, committed socialists seek to exercise human dominion over the environment and promote the material equality of all humanity’s members, and this makes them guilty of interfering with systems of near-incomprehen- After the Collective: Judith Schalansky on Post-Socialist Patterns of Thought 49 sible complexity. Socialists upset the laws of ecology by ruthless depletion of natural resources in the name of human material development, and they upset the laws of economy by trying to supervise and control production and resource allocation for the benefit of disadvantaged classes. The vision of a unified and egalitarian humanity drives socialists into dangerous interventions that throw off the internal balance of poorly understood super-organisms. From an economic and an ecological perspective, socialism is nothing but clumsiness. 11 Through her portrait of a disaffected and resentful biology teacher, Schalansky admittedly works within a completely different discourse than ideology analysis. She does not critically compare and reflect on ideologies, their convergences and divergences. Yet by spinning out the internal monologue of one disenfranchised, deeply disappointed biology teacher socialized in the former GDR, The Giraffe’s Neck carefully traces the transition from a socialist to a naturalist agenda. The narrator, Inge Lohmark, was once committed to the socialist project, but is now left to cobble together a new worldview after East Germany’s collapse using materials from her discipline. The reader learns of her past enthusiasm for defiant Soviet projects to reorganize the planet to fit collective needs, to overcome and transcend whatever obstacles the earth seems to present to striving humanity, as well as her current austere view on how nature imposes limits on human ambition and disallows any grandiose collaborative projects. Schalansky’s figure does not believe that humans occupy an especially exalted or protected position in nature, and she does not believe that interregional, socially conscious redistribution and widely available education can in any way raise up poor pupils or struggling individuals. Along with neoliberals, she denies that hierarchies among individuals can or should ever be flattened through schemes of redistribution, and, along with post-humanists, she disputes that a clearly contoured and bordered humanity enjoys a metaphysically grounded moral priority. The two first sections of Schalansky’s novel are entitled “Naturhaushalte [nature households]” and “Vererbungsvorgänge [processes of heredity]” (7 and 85). Both concepts point to the conditions and limits of human action. What humans can do is limited by ecological circumstances and who they are as individuals is determined by heredity. The Giraffe’s Neck constitutes a sustained exploration of post-socialist or anti-socialist patterns of belief, which involve a turn to ecologism and biologism: in the main character’s estimation, humans are neither special vis-à-vis other species nor able to erase biologically rooted inequalities among themselves. Yet Schalansky’s novel is certainly not a work that ends up celebrating socialism as the more inspiring ideological project or looks back to East Germany with nostalgia. By means of its careful portrait of Lohmark, the text rather includes 50 Jakob Norberg a critique of how socialist collectivism, at least as understood and practiced by Inge Lohmark herself, involved other varieties of interpersonal indifference and coldness. The novel’s clinical analysis of Lohmark’s post-socialist beliefs and attitudes is thus complemented by a look at rationalizations of callousness in socialism; Lohmark, it turns out, also used socialism to disengage from the imperative to care for others. Put in general terms, the novel looks at how loyalties can be divided between larger political collectives and groups of intimate relatives, humanity and family. Socialists have often held that the moral commitment of individuals should be transferred from constricted tribes of close relations to humanity, ultimately integrated into one productive unit that relies on everyone’s labor to satisfy the needs of everyone. 12 Critics have likewise noted that socialism works to break down “ancestral lineage,” or that it moves from an emphasis on generational inheritance (of traits, of property) that perpetuates differences to programs of collectivization and redistribution designed to reduce them (Avery and Goldstein 243). More concretely, with an eye to a specific society, life in the GDR possessed a collectivist character; people were organized into units such as work brigades, seminar groups, sport communities, all of which were tasked with furthering the integration of the individual into socialist society and helping to form the socialist personality. 13 These GDR-specific collectivities embodied and consolidated the dominant societal ideal of equality: within the collective, all members should work together, demand the same things, and harbor the same hopes for a shared future. And, according to the sociologist Wolfgang Engler, people were in fact made equal in the GDR: there was remarkable wage equality, no particular esteem for academic degrees and qualifications, uniform conventions of social interaction and taste, a narrow range of commodities, all of which dampened the efforts of individuals to set themselves apart (217). As the fundamental unit of work and leisure life, the numerous collectives functioned as schools of equality, bodies in which people engaged in continuous horizontal negotiations with and adjustments to each other. 14 Presumably, Lohmark lived her life in such collectives and was told or trained to serve her comrades, or to serve humanity. But such devotion to the collective may come at the price of studied disinterest in one’s own family members and relatives. This is at least the suggestion of an episode, a recollection, inserted at very end of Schalansky’s novel, meant to serve as a final illustration or clarification of Lohmark’s flawed character and frozen life. Inge Lohmark’s own daughter, Claudia, at some point went to her mother’s school and even took her mother’s biology lessons. During this time, we piece together from Lohmark’s memories, Claudia’s peers systematically excluded After the Collective: Judith Schalansky on Post-Socialist Patterns of Thought 51 and mistreated her. And the teacher - that is, Claudia’s mother Inge Lohmark - demonstratively did not intervene. In fact, Lohmark refused to be addressed as a mother in the regulated space of the classroom, even in the moment her daughter broke down and called for her help. Schalansky here casts a harsh light on the effects of the notion that kin should not receive preferential treatment in an institutional setting and that all special familial relationship should be set aside. Lohmark, we are led to believe, let her sense of duty and disgust with atavistic nepotism stifle any impulse of protectiveness. Her conscientious adherence to socialist collectivism was in fact pathological: at a crucial moment, she displayed a cruel unwillingness or inability to be summoned by her daughter’s desperate call for “Mama” (Schalansky 219). The end of the novel seems to highlight a very personal failure, albeit one anchored in a system that undermined families and inadequately protected individuals. In fact, evolutionism, ecological thought, anti-redistributionism, but also socialist anti-family collectivism all seem to function quite well as vehicles of Lohmark’s primary misanthropy - she merely goes from being an indoctrinated unpleasant person to being a disillusioned and unmoored unpleasant person. But Lohmark’s own recollection of how she as a mother once refused to help her daughter also fits with the novel’s analytical approach to the question of what worldviews are more generally available in the wake of socialism’s collapse. In the aftermath of socialism, Lohmark comes to embrace a particular kind of biologism as the proper way to think about what can be achieved by humans, and also uses it to debate which unit she actually owed and owes loyalty, the collective or her kin. After the GDR and its nationwide conglomerate of collectives dissolved, people often felt isolated and disoriented, having to scramble for some other form of integration. The question of the time was: “Whom can I join [Wem kann man sich anschliessen]” (Lange). Not coincidentally, Lohmark herself declares that she misses her daughter, with whom she no longer has any meaningful contact. When the post-socialist and post-collective condition has set in, her once-shunned daughter makes a reappearance as an object of care. It was not just that the general plans and ambitions of socialism for a future humanity were misguided - this is Lohmark’s explicit analysis. But the recollection of her daughter’s vulnerability suggests that Lohmark now believes that she, too, devoted herself to the wrong social formation - to the collective rather than kin - and hence wasted her energies. In the frame of Schalansky’s novel, the slowly emerging, painful longing for the mistreated daughter represents a post-socialist form of regret. The collective demanded a rejection of kin, but it 52 Jakob Norberg proved prone to dissolution, and in the post-socialist condition, the promise of kinship reasserts itself, albeit far too late. Through its portrait of a stranded post-GDR existence, Schalansky’s Der Hals der Giraffe indicates how familial and intergenerational bonds, as well as the transmission of hereditary traits, can attract increased attention in the post-socialist, post-collective situation. When the socialist promise of a gigantic horizontal collective, ultimately encompassing all of humanity, begins to crumble and can no longer make any claim on the individual’s imagination and loyalty, familial units and lines of inheritance become more salient as the proper targets of anxious concern and sustained investment. Lohmark’s obsessive focus on reproduction, on “Fortpflanzung,” in the guise of her own minimal family and her estranged daughter’s childlessness, constitutes a response to the disintegration of a particular kind of collectivized life that sought to transcend the private household and even render it insignificant (Schalansky 68). Indeed, Lohmark’s ongoing articulation of a biological worldview more generally can be interpreted as a reaction to the perceived failure and disappearance of the socialist vision of a unified and internally egalitarian humanity building a future for all of its members. Lost in the post-socialist era, Schalansky’s character claims that humanity is only one species among many, composed of a population of individuals with unequal levels of ability. In this way, she tears down the hierarchy among species and erects a hierarchy of human animals, slipping into thought patterns that parallel the counter-socialist strategies of radical ecologists and neoliberals, respectively. The human collective, she believes, enjoys no special privilege in the natural world, and merely consists of individuals in competition with one another. Humanity will proliferate or be wiped out depending on environmental pressures for which it may or may not be well prepared. Schalansky’s anti-heroine espouses, then, a symptomatic bundle of distinctly post-socialist beliefs. After the undivided, egalitarian human collective has been swept away as the supreme ideal, familial ties rise in importance; and after the socialist efforts to reshape society and the natural world have been retired, the constraints of genetic endowment and limits of ecological systems appear insurmountable. To conclude, Schalansky’s of a disoriented biology teacher in a sparsely populated post-socialist region lucidly captures how biological thinking becomes increasingly appealing during periods in which previously dominant political or religious collectivities begin to dissolve. In her analysis of racism in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt argues that claims about a common racial origin are typically voiced when traditional kinds of interconnection, sustained by shared customs and institutions such as citizenship, are coming under pressure After the Collective: Judith Schalansky on Post-Socialist Patterns of Thought 53 (157). People resort to what they deem indisputable biological facts, their shared blood or common racial traits, precisely when other forms of collectivity are destabilized. In Arendt’s eyes, aggressive race thinking is a testimony to the weakening of the political community rather than to its strength and self-confidence. Steve Fuller offers a similar view of the correlation between the “meltdown of institutions” and the embrace of “pre-institutional forms of social life” for which authentic kinship provides the “grounding ontology” (2006, 65-66). Whenever religious or political communities, which typically seek to reach beyond the borders of small kin groups or even want to neutralize them, are about to lose their institutional embodiment and grip on the imagination, people become more likely to conceive of themselves as at one with the natural world and subject to its laws. Or, in the words of Arendt, people start to gravitate towards “naturalistic ideologies” which consider tribes the largest viable grouping and thus render them “unconscious of the solidarity of mankind” (157). Published in 2011, Schalansky’s novel does not reflect the post-2015 surge of nationalist, anti-cosmopolitan sentiment across Europe, but the ethnically defined nation could constitute yet another pseudo-natural unit below the level of a unified humanity. For Lohmark, the interest in evolution seems to fill the gap left behind by grandiose, feverish dreams of collective progress. By representing the dark ruminations of a biology teacher who is forced to witness the decline of her region and who herself begins to long for the remote, once-rejected daughter, The Giraffe’s Neck traces the shift from collective to kin, from redistribution to inheritance, from utopian anticipation of a man-made future to prudent adaptation to the environment. But are all post-socialist visions of human life as dark as the one explored by Schalansky? Of course not. There are still energies of hopeful anticipation in the present. In the recent past, people’s desire to transform their material being and enhance their life has been boosted, for instance by developments in biomedical research. Inspired by technological and scientific advances, many dream of the improvement of “human intellectual, physical, and emotional capabilities, the elimination of disease and unnecessary suffering, and the dramatic extension of life span” (Garreau 231-32). But, however exhilarating, these visions of technology breakthroughs and health care innovations that are now recharging the belief in a glorious future for humanity do not seem as intimately coupled with a concern for, or even concept of, a unified and classless collective. Instead, the enhancement of individual human beings is likely to widen the gap between groups along extant socioeconomic lines. People will live healthier and longer lives, but likely only if they are wealthy. We have retained the idea of human progress but separated it from the focus on egalitarianism (Antonio 47). 54 Jakob Norberg Notes 1 The German title contains a more specific genre declaration: Der Hals der Giraffe is not just a “novel,” but a “Bildungsroman.” Recent German-language scholarship has not unsurprisingly clustered around this self-categorization and read Schalansky’s text as a response to and development of a central German cultural concept of Bildung. See Yvonne Delhey’s 2011 paper and Anja Lemke’s 2016 contribution on Schalansky’s novel. This paper deals with a different aspect of the novel, namely its critical representation of leftand rightwing ideological discourse. 2 I draw the opposition between “anticipation” and “adaptation” from Steve Fuller, who in turn derives it from Tomoko Masuzawa’s schematic division of Western religions of prophecy (anticipation) and Eastern religions of wisdom (adaptation) (Fuller 2011, 236). 3 The phrase “the world without us” is taken from Alan Weisman’s 2007 book with this title. This post-human aspect of the novel is emphasized by Wolfgang Struck in a recent paper. 4 For a discussion of the concept of futility in reactionary thought, see Albert Hirschman’s famous book on reactionary rhetoric. 5 Referring to the conservative philosopher of history Oswald Spengler, Theodor Adorno calls the attempt to derive satisfaction out of a seemingly hopeless situation by identifying with overpowering forces “Spenglerei” (567). 6 For a definition of biologism as the belief that all human social and normative life can be derived from biological imperatives and constraints, see Urte Stobbe’s 2016 paper on Schalansky and Jenny Erpenbeck. 7 One of Lohmark’s colleagues with a GDR background claims that the Darwinian view of “innerartliche Konkurrenz [intraspecies competition]” is merely a reflection of capitalism (Schalansky 144). 8 In a recent book that seeks to complicate the rigid division of ‘Western’ capitalist and ‘Eastern’ socialist economic knowledge, Johanna Bockman presents neoliberalism as a school of thought that speaks for competitive markets liberated from political (state) intervention, strong (state) protection of private property, and hierarchical management of private firms (1-15). Neoliberalism is thus not against the state, but rather envisages a tightly circumscribed role for it. It should not be involved in redistribution of resources or promotion of equality. 9 For a discussion of equality versus efficiency, see Arthur Okun’s book on the concepts. Efficiency Okun defines simply as getting the most out of a given input (48). After the Collective: Judith Schalansky on Post-Socialist Patterns of Thought 55 10 The major articulation of this argument is found in Friedrich Hayek’s 1945 paper “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” The anti-regulation argument is premised on inevitable and irredeemable human ignorance: central planning is, Jeremy Friedman argues with reference to Hayek, epistemologically impossible. 11 The twin dangers of economic crisis and ecological disaster are neatly captured by the history of intensified brown coal use in the GDR during the early 1980s. Trying to avert the threat of bankruptcy due to overgenerous subsidies put in place by Erich Honecker in a time of declining energy supplies, the GDR Economic Secretary Günter Mittag embarked on a path of frugality and started cutting costs by blocking further investments in production. As part of this strategy of parsimony, Mittag also saved Soviet oil, sold relatively cheaply to the GDR, in order to secure a higher price for it in Western currency, all the while replacing oil use with domestically mined brown coal in the GDR itself. To prevent insolvency, the GDR thus imposed merciless cost-cutting measures on East German factories, shipped its Soviet oil to the West, and engaged in ruthless strip mining at home without care for the resulting pollution (Zatlin 104-115). 12 John Urang has shown how GDR authors and cultural officials viewed the exclusivity of love affairs as a threat to socialist integration. The pair relationship had to “remain subordinate to the claims of the socialist collective” even in the realm of romantic fiction (65). 13 Here I rely on Lydia Lange’s evocative portrayal of East German society. 14 This did not mean that the collectives were always conduits of party-state visions: the non-competitive and sometimes conspiratorial internal sphere of the collective could offer a sense of predictability and security and as such constitute a buffer for the individual in relation to the oppressive political hierarchies which undeniably did exist. Works Cited “Briefly Noted.” The New Yorker, 12 May 2014. Web. 14 Mar. 2020. <http: / / www.new yorker.com/ magazine/ 2014/ 05/ 12/ briefly-noted-753> Adorno, Theodor W. “Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit.” Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Vol. 10.2. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977. 555-72. Antonio, Robert. “After Postmodernism: Reactionary Tribalism.” American Journal of Sociology 106.1 ( July 2000). Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Meridian, 1958. 56 Jakob Norberg Avery, Martha Moore, and David Goldstein. Socialism: The Nation of Fatherless Children. Thomas J. Flynn: Boston, 1911. Bockman, Johanna. Markets in the Name of Socialism: The Left-Wing Origins of Neoliberalism. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2011. Dehley, Yvonne. “Was heißt Bildung des Individuums? Judith Schalanskys Der Hals der Giraffe (2011).” Der Bildungsroman im literarischen Feld: Neue Perspektiven auf eine Gattung. Ed. Elisabeth Böhm and Katrin Dennerlein. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2016. 283-302. Engler, Wolfgang. Die Ostdeutschen: Kunde von einem verlorenen Land. Berlin: Aufbau 1999� Fuller, Steve. The New Sociological Imagination. London: Sage, 2006. —� Humanity 2.0: What it Means to be Human Past, Present and Future. London: Palgrave, 2011. Friedman, Jeremy. “Ignorance as a Starting Point: From Modest Epistemology to Realistic Political Theory.” Critical Review 19.1 (2007): 1-22. Garreau, Joel. Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies - and What It Means to Be Human. New York: Random House, 2005. Hayek, Friedrich. “The Uses of Knowledge in Society.” The American Economic Review 35. 4 (1945): 519-30. Hirschman, Albert. The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy. Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1991. Lange, Lydia. “Kollektiv, wo bist du hin? ” Die Zeit, 5 Nov. 1993. Web. 10 Sept. 2020. <https: / / www.zeit.de/ 1993/ 45/ kollektiv-wo-bist-du-hin> Lemke, Anja. “Bildung als formatio vitae: Zum Verhältnis von Leben und Form in Judith Schalanskys Der Hals der Giraffe.” IASL 41.2 (2016): 395-411. Morton, Timothy. “Queer Ecology.” PMLA 152.2 (2010): 273-82. Okun, Arthur. Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff. Washington DC: Brookings, 1975� Richter, Steffen. “Jenseits der Oie - Laudatio auf Judith Schalansky anlässlich der Verleihung des Förderpreises zum Lessingpreis.” Ostragehege 69 (2013): 59-60. Schalansky, Judith. Der Hals der Giraffe: Bildungsroman. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2011� Stobbe, Urte. “Nach der Natur: Biologismen in Figurengestaltung und Erzählverfahren bei Jenny Erpenbeck und Judith Schalansky.” KulturPoetik 16.1 (2016): 89-108. Struck, Wolfgang. “A World Without Us: Aesthetic, Literary, and Scientific Imaginations of Nature Beyond Humankind.” Readings in the Anthropocene: The Environmental Humanities, German Studies, and Beyond. Ed. Sabine Wilke and Japhet Johnstone. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. 17-37. Urang, John. Legal Tender: Love and Legitimacy in the East German Cultural Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2011. Webb, Flemmich. “Darwin’s theory applied to the human condition.” The Independent, April 30, 2014. Web. 14 Mar. 2020. <http: / / www.independent.co.uk/ arts-entertain After the Collective: Judith Schalansky on Post-Socialist Patterns of Thought 57 ment/ books/ reviews/ the-giraffes-neck-by-judith-schalansky-translated-by-shaunwhiteside-book-review-darwins-theory-9303082.html> Weisman, Alan. The World Without Us. Thomas Dunne: New York, 2007. Wolfe, Cary. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2020. Zatlin, Jonathan. The Currency of Socialism: Money and Political Culture in East Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. National Identity and Gender: Reading Johanna Franul von Weissenthurn’s Herrmann (1817) alongside Johann Elias Schlegel’s Herrmann (1743) Edward Potter Mississippi State University Abstract: Johanna Franul von Weissenthurn’s Herrmann (1817) takes up a topic fraught with significance for the portrayal of gender roles and national identity: the figure of Hermann, or Arminius, the first-century leader of the Germanic Cherusci tribe. Weissenthurn is writing in the early nineteenth century, a period in which conceptions of gender roles and conceptions of national identity are in flux. Her text places itself in dialogue with a long tradition of dramatic production surrounding this important historical figure, stretching backt to Johann Elias Schlegel’s Herrmann (1743). An examination of Weissenthurn’s historical drama within the context of the literary tradition on Arminius, particularly in connection with Schlegel’s play, will bring to light the ways in with her text articulates conceptions of gender and national identity. It will be shown that each of these two Herrmann dramas are products of their own time. While Schlegel had portrayed strong female characters and admirable Germanic figures as part of his project to use national history as literary material, Weissenthurn’s play, seventy-four years later, promotes Pan-German nationalism and subscribes to the medical-biological concept of gender dimorphism, depicting the genders as complementary but very different in nature. Keywords: Johanna Franul von Weissenthurn, Johann Elias Schlegel, Herrmann, Arminius, national identity, gender Johanna Franul von Weissenthurn (1772-1847) was born into an acting family and performed as a child actress in Germany before eventually finding her way to Vienna, where she acted in plays at the Burgtheater from 1789 to 1842 (Toit 4-18; Yates 54). Her performances impressed notable audience members such 60 Edward Potter as the monarchs Joseph II and Napoleon and the literary author Ludwig Tieck (Wurzbach 341-42; Toit 32; Yates 54). In 1809, Napoleon saw her perform in the title role of Racine’s Phaedra, in an adaptation by Schiller, at the palace theater in Schönbrunn; Napoleon was so impressed that he gave Weissenthurn an honorarium of 3000 francs (Toit 32; Wurzbach 341). It should, however, be noted that she had her critics as well; writers such as August von Kotzebue, E. M. Arndt, and Clemens Brentano all were at least somewhat critical of her acting abilities (Toit 30-31). Nonetheless, most contemporaneous critics had high praise for Weissenthurn’s work as both an actress and a dramatist (Kugele 25; Kord, “Die Gelehrte als Zwitterwesen” 170). At the age of twenty-five, Weissenthurn wrote her first play, Die Drusen (1798), in order to win a bet, and this was the beginning of her prolific career as a playwright, during which she published some sixty plays (Toit 32; Wurzbach 341-42; Gugitz 357-58; and Kürschner 276-77). As both an actress and a dramatist, she was most well-known for her comic acting and her comedies (Yates 54; Vestli 167, 169). As a dramatist, she created many comedies (Lustspiele), but she also wrote serious dramas (Schauspiele), including a five-act verse drama in iambic pentameter, Herrmann (1817), which she termed “ein geschichtliches Schauspiel” (Weissenthurn, Herrmann [hereafter: W], 1). 1 Weissenthurn prefaces the first published volume of her plays with a programmatic portrayal of herself as a woman author bravely taking up the pen despite criticism and repressive expectations regarding women’s role in society: “Ich habe allerdings wider die Kleiderordnung gefehlt und - statt Strümpfe zu stricken, ein paar Federn stumpf geschrieben. Die Männer sehen nun ein Mahl die Federn lieber auf unsern Köpfen, und wollen nicht dulden, daß wir sie in die Dinte tauchen […] und ich sehe schon im Geiste hundert Federn spitzen, die meine neue Schriftstellerschaft gleich giftigen Pfeilen verwunden” (Weissenthurn, “Vorrede” 1: v). Susanne Kord has analyzed Weissenthurn’s preface in terms of the author’s portrayal of herself as having both masculine and feminine characteristics; as Kord clearly demonstrates, Weissenthurn portrays herself ironically with “ostentativer Anpassung an die kulturelle Weiblichkeitsvorstellung” in order to demonstrate her own indifference both to this normative conception of gender and also to the criticism of men that she, as a successful female author, anticipates (Kord, “Die Gelehrte als Zwitterwesen” 173; also 170-73). Scholars have pointed out that Weissenthurn enjoyed great popularity during her lifetime, as her plays were, in the first half of the nineteenth century, among the most performed plays in the German-speaking lands, and her literary production not only was published, often in multiple editions, but was also translated into English, French, Italian, Danish, Russian, and Polish (Vestli 166, 169; Kugele 25). One scholar sees in Weissenthurn the only German-speaking woman of this era who successfully combined a career as an actress with the National Identity and Gender in Weissenthurn and Schlegel 61 “männlich konnotierten Dramatikerberuf” (Vestli 168). In fact, between 1800 and 1853, Weissenthurn’s plays were performed in the Wiener Burgtheater for a total of 912 times (Vestli 169). They were also popular in the German-language theater in Budapest and throughout the German lands, as her “Stücke ja das gesamte Theater im deutschsprachigen Raum überschwemmten” (Binal 115). Nonetheless, after her death, her dramatic oeuvre disappeared from both the stage and from literary histories. Vestli sees this as a result of the historical break caused by the revolutions of 1848, a break which also, according to her, had an effect on theater history, in that tastes changed and Weissenthurn’s plays were seen as oudated (Vestli 166, 179). According to one biographer, Weissenthurn wrote “bühnengewandte Lustspiele, Familienstücke im Ifflandstil und romantische Spektakelstücke aus der Geschichte ohne höher gesteckte Ziele” (Gugitz 357). Writing in 1858, Wurzbach finds that Weissenthurn’s plays were becoming less popular because the late sentimental dramatic style of her works and of the period in general in which she was writing was already falling out of fashion (Wurzbach 342). It is particularly interesting that, in Herrmann, Weissenthurn takes up a topic fraught with significance for the portrayal of gender roles and national identity: the figure of Hermann, or Arminius, the first-century leader of the Germanic Cherusci tribe. Weissenthurn is writing in the early nineteenth century, a period in which conceptions of gender roles and conceptions of national identity are in flux, and her text places itself in dialogue with a long tradition of dramatic production surrounding this important historical figure, a figure who becomes the site for articulating conceptions of gender and German national identity, in a tradition stretching from Johann Elias Schlegel’s Herrmann (1743) to Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’s trilogy, Hermanns Schlacht (1769), Hermann und die Fürsten (1784), and Hermanns Tod (1787) to Heinrich von Kleist’s Hermannsschlacht (1808). An examination of Weissenthurn’s historical drama within the context of the literary tradition on Arminius, particularly in connection with Schlegel’s play, will bring to light the ways in with her text articulates conceptions of gender and national identity. It will be shown that each of these two Herrmann dramas are products of their own time. While Schlegel had portrayed strong female characters and admirable Germanic figures as part of his project to use national history as literary material, Weissenthurn’s play, seventy-four years later, promotes Pan-German nationalism and subscribes to the medical-biological concept of gender dimorphism, depicting the genders as complementary but very different in nature (Laqueur 5-6, 11, 22-23, 151-54). As literary scholars have pointed out, Weissenthurn’s comedies were much more popular both in terms of the number of performances and in terms of critical reception than were her serious dramas (Roe 43, 47; Vestli 169). Herrmann 62 Edward Potter was performed fewer than ten times (Roe 43). One reviewer of Herrmann complained that “Frau von Weissenthurn scheint der Aufgabe nicht gewachsen, die höchste Manneskraft mit voller männlicher Energie auszusprechen” (qtd. in Roe 47). This statement emphasizes precisely the issue that forms the focus of the current investigation: how exactly does Weissenthurn’s historical drama Herrmann engage with the literary tradition on this historical figure, particularly as exemplified by Schlegel’s play, and how does this text by a woman writer engage with the depiction of gender and its interaction with the depiction of national identity? Schlegel’s Herrmann provides an excellent foil to Weissenthurn’s Herrmann in that Schlegel’s neoclassical tragedy provides us not only with a text by a male author but also with a text from a different historical period, one in which the political situation and the conceptions of gender roles were different than in the years immediately following Napoleon’s defeat, when Weissenthurn penned her own Arminius drama. It will also be useful to place Weissenthurn’s historical drama Herrmann in dialogue with Schlegel’s play, as Schlegel’s is the oldest Arminius tragedy in German literature that is considered canonical, as can be seen in examinations by a variety of scholars (Bland 568; Heitner 95-96; also Essen; Griffiths; H. P. Herrmann). Arminius, or Hermann der Cherusker, was born in either 18 or 16 BC and died in either 19 or 21 AD; he received military training in Rome, hence his Roman name, Arminius, and from 4-6 AD, he led Germanic warriors as auxiliary troops into battle for Rome, against other Germanic tribes (Müller 19-20). In 9 AD, he led Germanic tribes in the famous battle of Teutoburg Forest, this time against the Romans, who were led by Publius Quinctilius Varus; in this battle, the Romans under Varus lost three legions, or approximately 20,000 soldiers (Müller 20). Although there were some later attempts by Romans to gain ground in Germania, or the area between the Rhine and the Elbe, the victory of Arminius ultimately resulted in Rome’s no longer seeking to conquer the area that they called Germania (Müller 20). Tacitus describes Arminius in The Annals as “the troublemaker of Germany,” an individual full of “ferocity” who was “recklessly aggressive” and admired for it (Tacitus 34-35; book 1.55, 1.57). Arminius died at age thirty-seven, killed by disloyal relatives, but the Germanic tribes of the day commemorated him in song, as Tacitus says: “[H]e is still a subject of song amongst the barbarian tribes” (Tacitus 94; book 2.88). Arminius later became an important cultural icon and the subject of a rather lengthy literary tradition. According to Caroline Bland, the work of Tacitus made Arminius known to Reformation-era Germany, where Arminius “became a rallying figure for the Lutheran reformers as a model for the fight against the influence of Rome” (Bland 568). Already in the seventeenth century, German writers were calling Arminius "Hermann," since they did not want to use a Roman name to refer to National Identity and Gender in Weissenthurn and Schlegel 63 this prominent symbol of German identity (Wagner-Egelhaaf 8). One scholar traces the invention of the German version of Arminius’ name to the sixteenth century (H. P. Herrmann 161). Later writers, such as Schlegel, Klopstock, Kleist, Weissenthurn, and Christian Dietrich Grabbe, among others, structured literary dramas around this historical figure which represent Hermann as an icon of German national and cultural identity. Literary scholars have examined this tradition, mostly concentrating on the male authors whose texts are considered canonical. Gesa von Essen has examined representations of Germanic peoples and Romans in the plays of Schlegel, Klopstock, Kleist, and Grabbe. Hans Peter Herrmann has discussed the dramatic tradition surrounding Hermann as a site where conceptions of patriotism and masculinity converge, and he sees the tradition promoting increasingly strident notions of nationalism, whereby female characters, especially Thusnelda, the wife of Hermann, become increasingly disempowered, marginalized, and dehumanized, as egalitarian social behaviors give way to authoritarian social relationships, all part of “eine Steigerungslinie von Schlegel über Klopstock zu Kleist” (H. P. Herrmann 189-90; here: 189). In a 1995 article in Der Deutschunterricht, H. P. Herrmann discusses Arminius plays by Schlegel, Klopstock, and Kleist; in a 1996 version of the same article that appeared as a book chapter, he adds to his discussion a poem by Herder and a cursory discussion of Weissenthurn’s play that raises a variety of questions without examining the play in depth (H. P. Herrmann 184-85). 2 More recently, Elystan Griffiths has looked specifically at the depiction of gender and its interconnection with culture and German national identity in the Hermann dramas of Schlegel, Klopstock, and Kleist. In this welcome contribution to the representation of gender in Hermann dramas, Griffiths identifies three very different models of German society, and he sees the representation of gender in the plays not in terms of the development of masculinity, as Hans Peter Herrmann had done, but, instead, Griffiths sees the depiction of gender as a function of the type of political society that each text propagates (Griffiths, esp. 135-36). Klopstock’s bardic play, Hermanns Schlacht (1769), was written shortly after the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), a war which saw the rise of the lyric subgenre of patriotische preußische Kriegslieder initiated by Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim in 1758 (De Boor and Newald 5: 473, 6.1: 32-33). In this play by Klopstock, as Griffiths has pointed out, the bards, who are present on the stage throughout the play, are not merely a tragic chorus commenting on the action, but instead spur the warriors into action, inspiring patriotism in them, thereby representing the cultural and literary elites who convert cultural capital in the form of literary creativity into political influence on the ruling aristocracy (Griffiths 125-130, esp. 126-27). Gesa von Essen has pointed out the significant connection be- 64 Edward Potter tween the bards and the landscape around them, even to the extent that nature seems to aid the Germanic tribes in battle (Essen 127-31). Scholars’ comments on the bards in Klopstock’s play similarly apply to the bards in Weissenthurn’s play (Kugele 26). For example, the fourth act of Weissenthurn’s Herrmann begins with the music and the songs of the bards before the curtain goes up. After the curtain has risen, one sees the bards on a cliff in the background, and they sing a bloodthirsty song to spur the Germanic warriors to victory: “Zur Schlacht! zur Schlacht! Heut fließe Blut, / Und räche unsre Schmach; / Es ende Römer-Übermuth, / Ereilt den Feind mit Kraft und Wuth, / Verewigt diesen Tag” (W, IV.i., 69). The bards are thus participating in the construction of a national identity based on violence toward the “other.” In a recent contribution on Weissenthurn’s Herrmann, Jens Kugele analyzes Weissenthurn’s Herrmann mainly in contrast to Kleist’s Die Hermannsschlacht, finding that, in Kleist’s play, the female characters are almost completely subordinated to the male characters or to the “männlich konnotierte Macht,” whereby the female characters in Weissenthurn’s drama receive a positive revaluation and play a central role in the drama (Kugele 27). One should note that literary scholars have interpreted Kleist’s play Die Hermannsschlacht in a variety of ways. For many years, the play was seen as a call to arms, as a battle cry for the people of the German lands to rise up and fight against Napoleon and his army, but more recently, scholars such as Elisabeth Krimmer and Elystan Griffiths have pointed out the implicit criticism of war as a totalistic terror-based enterprise that dehumanizes all who participate in it (Krimmer 66-76, 80-81; Griffiths 130-34). Kleist’s play was written in 1808, and he had hoped that it would be performed right away, but the play was not published until 1821, after Kleist’s death, and it was not performed until 1860 (Bland 568; Griffiths 130). Thus, it is rather unlikely that Weissenthurn could have been aware of Kleist’s play, or that it could have had an influence on her own Arminius drama. A more interesting foil for Weissenthurn’s text would be Johann Elias Schlegel’s neoclassical tragedy Herrmann. In his article on Weissenthurn’s Herrmann from 2006, Kugele maintains that “[i]nnerhalb des […] Arminius-Diskurses finden sich inhaltlich die meisten Parallelen zu Schlegel” (Kugele 25). The ensuing analysis will test this hypothesis by examining conceptions of nationalism, love, forgiveness or revenge, and the depictions of the female characters Thusnelda and Adelheid in both Weissenthurn’s and Schlegel’s Herrmann plays. National identity plays a significant role in these plays. Johann Elias Schlegel’s (1719-49) neoclassical tragedy Herrmann was written, according to his brother and the editor of his collected works, Johann Heinrich Schlegel, in 1740 and 1741 (Schubert 601). The play was first published in 1743 in the fourth vol- National Identity and Gender in Weissenthurn and Schlegel 65 ume of Johann Christoph Gottsched’s influential anthology of original German plays, Die Deutsche Schaubühne (Schubert 601). The Neues Theater in Leipzig opened its doors in 1766 with a performance of Schlegel’s Herrmann (Schubert 604), and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe described, in the paralipomena of his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit, how he was inspired ex negativo by a performance of Schlegel’s Herrmann to pen his first play, Götz von Berlichingen (1773) (Goethe 963-64). In Schlegel’s Herrmann, the German tribes are depicted as virtuous, particularly in their simple lifestyle and their morality, despite lacking official laws such as those of the Romans. The Germanic tribes are contrasted with Romans, who are portrayed as weak, lustful, greedy, and eager to corrupt the morals of others with their luxurious lifestyle. Schlegel presents the audience with a vivid contrast between, on the one hand, a Germanic community founded on the principles of virtue, selflessness, patriotism, and communal reason and, on the other hand, a Roman society based on individuals’ self-interest in what Griffiths has termed “a stark choice between a virtuous German ‘Volk’ and a degenerate Roman empire” (Griffiths 125; Ranke 244; Lamport 157). In this way, Schlegel’s play is participating in the construction of national identities that are strongly associated with either virtue or immorality. Herrmann’s father Siegmar points out the moral discrepancy between the two demographic groups by emphasizing that the Germanic tribes are brave and virtuous but that Romans are focused on wealth and sexual desire and they ridicule the innocence of the Germanic tribes. Siegmar speaks of “der deutsche Muth” (Schlegel, I.i., 124) and of the morally corrupting influence of Rome: “Rom, welches herrschen will, erkauft sich unsre Fürsten, / Lehrt sie nach Golde sehn, und nach der Wollust dürsten. / Die Unschuld wird verjagt, die Einfalt ist verlacht, / Die unsre Väter doch beglückt und groß gemacht” (Schlegel [hereafter: S], I.i., 125). 3 In historical reality, of course, Arminius and his contemporaries were members of Germanic tribes living in an area called by the Romans Germania, but certainly not in a modern nation-state. Nonetheless, in both Schlegel’s and Weissenthurn’s plays, the people are referred to as “Deutsche” living in a country called “Deutschland,” even though there was no unified political entity called “Germany” even during Schlegel’s or Weissenthurn’s lifetimes. In the following discussion, “Germans” will at times be used to refer to the Germanic tribes in both plays, as this superregional cultural-linguistic designation plays a significant role in the identity formation that is at work in both texts. In Schlegel’s play, there is a rather nuanced depiction of Germanic loyalties to one’s own Volk or to the Romans. Griffiths maintains that the older generation in Schlegel’s play is more fixed in its identification with the nation, whereas the younger generation is more fluid and searching for identity (Griffiths 120). Upon closer examination, however, one finds that each generation has fervently 66 Edward Potter patriotic characters and characters that are less stable in their loyalties. In the generation of the parents, Herrmann’s parents, Siegmar and Adelheid, are particularly staunch proponents of patriotic feelings, whereas Segest, the father of Siegmund and Thusnelde 4 , is a Machiavellian plotter who seeks to betray the Germans in order to become their ruler once the Romans have conquered them: “Wie glücklich hat mein Rath sie in dieß Netz verstrickt! / […] / Von allem will ich nun dem Varus Nachricht geben: / Ihr Eifer sey ihr Fall, und bringe sie ums Leben, / Uns aber auf den Thron” (S, II.vii., 143). Among the younger generation, Herrmann and Thusnelde are both patriotic supporters of the German cause of fighting for freedom from the Romans, but each of their brothers, Flavius and Siegmund, respectively, are more conflicted in their loyalties. Siegmund has been made a priest by the Romans despite his own reluctance, and his father Segest attempts to win him over to his plan to rule over the Germanic tribes once Rome has conquered them, but ultimately, Siegmund fights with the Germanic tribes against the Romans and returns from battle a hero. Flavius, on the other hand, appreciates Roman culture and civilization and defends them to his family members: “Mein Vater, ich bin deutsch; doch haß ich Rom auch nicht” (S, I.ii., 128). Flavius is, however, depicted as soft and weak, and this is the result of his time in and appreciation of Rome; Siegmar comments that Flavius has become “feig und weibisch” due to Rome’s detrimental influence (S, I.ii., 129). Flavius is ultimately shocked when he learns of Segest’s treacherous plans, and he eventually decides to join the Germanic tribes in battle against the Romans, mostly out of filial piety, for he hopes to support his father, Siegmar, in his struggle. Flavius has, however, vacillated for so long that his father, Siegmar, has already been killed in battle. Gottsched suggested, in the preface to Schlegel’s Herrmann, that “der Herr Verfasser mit Fleiß sein Stück auf die itzigen Umstände eingerichtet,” by drawing parallels between ancient Rome and modern Paris (qtd. in Schubert 603- 604). Schlegel, however, disavowed this in a letter to his brother (Griffiths 125). Schlegel would later discuss the need for writers to dramatize material that was relevant to their audience, and he recommended using figures from the nation’s history, which led him not only to dramatize the Arminius material for German audiences, but also, when he was living in Denmark and became instrumental in the foundation of a Danish national theater, to dramatize medieval Danish history in his neoclassical tragedy Canut (1747). Thus, for Schlegel, in his dramaturgical writings and also on the narrative level of Herrmann, in the figures of Flavius and Siegmund, national identity can be fluid. The case is very different in Weissenthurn’s Herrmann, in which national identity is a product of the landscape of the place where one was born, thus representing a naturalization or essentialization of national identity. Thusnelda National Identity and Gender in Weissenthurn and Schlegel 67 expresses this idea eloquently with reference to the oak tree, which was typically associated with the Germans: “Die Staude blühe, wo ihr Keim gelegt, / Und ihre Frucht gehört demselben Boden. / Im Eichenwalde lernt’ ich Worte lallen, / Zur Eiche ward mein erster Schritt gelenkt; / So laß mich auch in ihrem Dunkel leben, / Kein andrer Baum soll je mir Schatten geben” (W, II.vii., 42-43). Trees and forests were considered sacred by the Germanic tribes, and oak trees were associated with the sky god or the thunder god, Donar or Thor; it was also a sacred oak tree that St. Boniface caused to be chopped down as part of his missionary efforts in the early middle ages (Davidson 56, 69, 101; Vries 1: 351-52 [§ 250], 2: 128 [§ 427]). In contrast to the Germans’ connectedness to their local landscape, the Romans, with their vast colonial empire, are untrue to their natural provenance and will suffer accordingly, as Herrmann makes clear: “Das Volk, das stets auf fremdem Boden lebt, / Der Nachbarn Glück und Freyheit untergräbt, / Und thront es auch in großen Säulenhallen, / Sie müssen endlich brechen, müssen fallen, / Indeß die Eiche kühn ihr Haupt erhebt, / Das Volk zu schützen, das nach Freyheit strebt” (W, I.ii., 19). In contrast to Schlegel, the Romans are portrayed in a much more consistently negative manner in Weissenthurn’s play. In 1812, Weissenthurn described, in her “Selbstbiographie” her own development as having been influenced by the landscape in which she was raised: Den grössten Teil meiner Kindheit habe ich in den Rheingegenden erlebt; dieser stolze Fluss, an welchem blühende Städte mit den herrlichsten Landschaften wechseln, machte einen Eindruck auf mein jugendliches Gemüt, welcher jetzt mir noch nicht ganz entschwunden ist. Wer die Natur in ihrer Grösse, in ihrer erhabensten Schönheit sah, wer im Entwickeln seiner Kräfte ihr gegenüber stand, der strebt ihr nach - dem entschwinden kleinliche Flächen, gebahnte, fahrbare Wege; der Fusssteig nimmt ihn auf, der ihn höher führt. Ja, ich ging meinen Weg, ohne Führer, oft ohne Freund, oft in Mangel und Elend -aber mein Mut erlag nicht. (qtd. in Toit 3) Weissenthurn thus sees the German landscape as an essential element that helped her to develop her character and as the inspiration for her independence, her resilience, and her progress throughout life. This essentialized, character-building perspective on nature finds its way into her drama as well, for there is a considerable amount of nature symbolism in Weissenthurn’s play. The oak tree, sacred in Germanic religion, is, for example, often invoked in the play as a means of symbolizing the Germans. Critics have noted the central metaphorical role played by the oak tree and also the sun, which are both connected to the Germanic tribes (Kugele 27, 33n11). Another example, also noted by Kugele, are the comments by Sigismar, Herrmann’s father, who is, in Weissenthurn’s version, blind; Sigismar equates Germany with the sun, tying his own fate to that 68 Edward Potter of his native land by claiming that Germany’s loss of freedom through Roman domination has led to his blindness: “Als Deutschland’s Sonne unterging, / Sah ich zu starr in ihre letzten Strahlen, / Mit ihrem Schimmer wich der Deutschen Glück, / Und seit dem ist es Nacht vor meinem Blick” (W, I.ii., 15; also Kugele 33 n. 11). Sigismar thus sees his fate tied up with the natural phenomena that are part of the landscape in which he was born. This essentialized national identity arises from within the contemporary historical context, in which desires for a German nation-state began to be expressed. Weissenthurn, a German woman born in Koblenz who lived for most of her life in Vienna, wrote a play that consistently emphasizes the need for German unity. The play begins with Sigismar comparing the fate of the Germanic tribes to trees in a storm: “Wo Zweig mit Zweig’ zur Schutzwehr sich verbindet, / Wird man die Eiche nicht entwurzelt sehen. / So müßt’ es Deutschlands Völkern wohl ergehen, / Säh’ man sie dicht, wie ihre Wälder stehen” (W, I.i., 4), and the play ends with Herrmann promoting militarism and German unity: “Das Eisen nur gibt Freyheit diesem Leben. / Stets müsse Eintracht eure Schritte leiten, / […] / Wenn Herz und Sinn, und Hände sich verketten, / Dann ist es leicht das Vaterland zu retten” (W, V.xii., 121; emphasis in original). Thus, national identity, Pan-Germanism, and militarism are tied together. Weissenthurn, who had once received a stipend from Napoleon for her acting, was nevertheless inspired during the period of the Napoleonic Wars to pen a stridently nationalistic play, which made use of essentializing depictions of virtuous, patriotic Germans intent on national unity and of decadent, immoral, cosmopolitan Romans. In light of the historical context in which Weissenthurn was writing, it is clear that in her play, the Romans represent the French - as Gottsched had suggested of Schlegel’s play, but which Schlegel refuted - and also that the “Germans” represent the German-speaking people of Central Europe, who, in Weissenthurn’s version, are, on a metaphorical level, striving to overcome their French conquerors and forge a Pan-German nation-state. Historians have demonstrated that contemporary German-language political writing demonized the French, using attributes such as “‘false’, ‘superficial’, ‘lascivious’ and ‘indecent’” (Hagemann 185); this new nationalistic discourse took place more intensely in Prussia, but it was happening in Austria as well ( Judson 91-92). Susanne Kord has noted that one can see this dynamic at work in other plays by Weissenthurn; Kord finds that some of Weissenthurn’s work suggests that German national identity is thoroughly intertwined both culturally and militarily with France, indeed, to such an extent that German national identity is unthinkable without reference to France (Kord, “Defining Cultural Exchange” 12-16). Although Weissenthurn’s Herrmann was performed fewer than ten times, it was performed on a particularly prestigious occasion, i.e., at National Identity and Gender in Weissenthurn and Schlegel 69 the Burgtheater in Vienna in 1815 in order to celebrate the defeat of Napoleon and the French (Roe 43; Bland 572), thereby cementing the symbolic connection of the Cherusci to the Germans throughout Central Europe, on the one hand, as well as the symbolic connection of the Romans to the French, on the other hand. In addition to nascent conceptions of nationalism, the conception of love is an important thematic aspect in the tradition of Arminius dramas that plays a significant role in both Schlegel’s and Weissenthurn’s plays. Dramaturgical theorists of the early Enlightenment such as Gottsched and Schlegel, among other writers, did not consider love to be an appropriate topic for neoclassical tragedy, and this view was to remain current up until Lessing inaugurated the domestic tragedy, or bürgerliches Trauerspiel, with Miß Sara Sampson in 1755 (Heitner 43, 90-94, 170, 413n11). Schlegel, writing around 1739, maintained that the depiction of lovers in tragedy hinders the genre in its moral education of the audience, or Wirkungsästhetik, and he also gave voice to patriarchal anxiety that love in tragedy might “feminize” the audience: “[W]ir thun den Deutschen einen schlechten Dienst, wenn wir sie zu Weibern machen, und ihnen Leute als Muster der Helden vorstellen wollen, deren Leben an dem Blicke ihrer Geliebten als an einem Faden hängt” (Schlegel, “Auszug eines Briefs” 405; see Schubert 621 for dating of this text). Many of the theatergoers in Schlegel’s time were, in fact, women, but in the earlier part of the eighteenth century the audience was often spoken of as masculine, since there was a division of the genders, where the largest portion of the theater, the orchestra seating, was mainly occupied by men, and women were seated in the boxes (Maurer-Schmoock 81). With respect to the inappropriateness of love in tragedy, Schlegel also specifically noted that an overemphasis on love in serious tragic drama endangers the moral-pedagogical project of eighteenth-century theater: “In der That ist unsere Schaubühne noch zur Zeit eine schlechte Schule guter Sitten, wie sie doch eigentlich seyn soll. Denn das ist nicht genug, daß Unflätereyen daraus verbannt sind; Liebesverwirrungen, Intriguen der Helden, und die Sprüche der Opernmoral, wovon auch die Tragödien voll sind, sind eben so gefährlich” (Schlegel, “Auszug eines Briefs” 407). The danger of subverting the moral message of the play was a serious one for Schlegel, as early Enlightenment tragedy was meant to morally educate its audiences, as Gottsched espoused in his Critische Dichtkunst (1730; 4 th ed. 1751), and as Schlegel undertook in his plays, although it has recently been demonstrated that the moral efficacy of neoclassical tragedies functioned somewhat differently than the contemporary dramaturgical theory tended to suggest (Ranke 193-266, 303). As Wolfgang Ranke has demonstrated, neoclassical tragedy was not always successful in its moral-didactic aims (i.e., admiration of virtue, moral edification of the audience), as it staged material from Greco-Roman (or other ancient) 70 Edward Potter sources that, at times, conflicted with Enlightenment conceptions of morality (Ranke 243, 253-54). Considerations of genre also play a significant role in this discrepancy between eighteenth-century Wirkungsästhetik and the material of the drama. For example, the catastrophe required by tragedy is difficult to reconcile with the Enlightenment poetological desire for a (perfectly) admirable protagonist coupled with poetic justice in order to educate the audience morally. In Schlegel’s Herrmann, the happy ending for everyone, including complete forgiveness for the antagonists Flavius and Segest, puts Gottschedian morality into practice but fails to conform to the genre of tragedy (Heitner 100), performing instead what Ranke calls “ein[e] den Stoff moralisierend[e] Bewunderungsdramaturgie” (Ranke 254). Despite his skepticism regarding love as worthy of depiction in tragedy, Schlegel included a subplot in Herrmann dealing with love. Both Herrmann and his brother Flavius are in love with Thusnelde, which, in addition to national loyalties, provides a source of conflict between the brothers and also a means of delineating their contrasting characters. Flavius describes his feelings thus: “Rom kann ein deutsches Herz auf römisch lieben, lehren. / Thusnelda hat in mir nicht deutsche Lieb erregt, / Die der Geliebten nie ein Herz zu Füssen legt; / […] / Mein Trieb herrscht über mich” (S, I.iv., 132). In Rome, Flavius has learned how to feel Roman love, or passionate love, not German love, which corresponds to the “vernünftige Liebe” that was promoted in the dramas of the early Enlightenment (Saße 30-37; H. P. Herrmann 166-167). Flavius, with his passionate “Roman” love, is consumed with desire and made an unproductive member of society. “German” love, in Schlegel, is not all-consuming and allows lovers to be productive members of society. Critics have noted that, in this German conception of love, patriotism, masculinity, and “rigidly controlled sexuality” go hand in hand (Griffiths 123). It is, moreover, clear in Schlegel’s play that German love is based on heroism. When Adelheid and Thusnelde discuss love, Thusnelde makes clear that she loves Herrmann for his heroism: “Das ist ein fauler Held, den nur die Liebe zieht. / Den edler Thaten Reiz nicht von sich selbst beweget, / […] / Mein Herz ist nicht für den, der seine Pflicht vergißt: / Du weist, wem meine Treu auf immer heilig ist” (S, III.iii., 149). In this speech, Thusnelde also draws attention to the fact that Herrmann’s virtue and heroism are not only important to her as his betrothed, but also to the German people as a whole, thereby drawing a connection to the goal of neoclassical tragedy, that of representing figures whose fate is important because the fate of the entire state depends on it. Herrmann, similarly, values his love for Thusnelde very highly, but not quite as highly as his patriotic duty: “Man sage, wenn man einst von meinen Thaten spricht: / Thusnelden liebt er sehr: doch mehr noch seine Pflicht” (S, III.iv., 150). Love represents a selfish desire if it is in competition National Identity and Gender in Weissenthurn and Schlegel 71 with the more serious virtue of duty (Heitner 99). This similarity in perspective and values demonstrates that Herrmann and Thusnelde are ideal partners for a mid-eighteenth-century marriage based on love, virtue, and mutual respect, or “vernünftige Liebe” (Saße 30-37). Weissenthurn’s play has a similar subplot, but here, it is not Flavius, Herrmann’s brother, who vies for Thusnelda’s love, but instead, it is the Roman Lulius. Here, love becomes a function of national identity, for Thusnelda repeatedly states that she can only love and marry a German, never a Roman: “Kein Römer hat ein Recht auf diese Hand; / Dem deutschen Vaterland gehör’ ich an, / Nur seine Helden dürfen um mich werben” (W, II.vii., 42). When her father Segest orders her to marry Lulius, Thusnelda makes the radical decision to leave her father and the Roman camp in order to live among the Germanic tribes as a free woman: “Frey lebt Thusnelda jetzt dem Vaterland, / Frey darf sie nun den deutschen Mann umfassen” (W, II.vii., 48). Here, too, love is based on heroism, for Thusnelda describes her attraction to Herrmann as being based on similar values, a love of freedom, and patriotism: “Da schlang ein Band der Achtung und der Liebe / Sich um das Herz der gelichgesinnten Gatten; / […] / Das ist der Mann, der unsre Freyheit rettet, / Und aller Deutschen Herzen an sich kettet” (W, IV.ii., 83). For Herrmann, love is also based on patriotic, heroic values, since a desire for freedom comes first, and then love can develop out of that: “Der Gattinn Wahl bürgt euch des Feldherrn Sinn; / Eh’ unsre Herzen liebend sich gefunden, / Hat uns der Wunsch nach Freyheit schon verbunden” (W, IV.ii., 83). This is in contrast to the Roman conceptions of love, as evidenced in scene V.i., in which Lulius claims that national and cultural identity are irrelevant in love: “Das Herz fragt nicht nach Vaterland und Sitte. / Ein gleich Gewand verbirgt nicht gleichen Sinn” (W, V.i., 89; emphasis in original). In this same scene, the Roman commander Varus claims that love is a form of sickness or insanity, thereby providing a significant contrast to the Germanic conception of love based on heroism and patriotism. For the Germanic tribes in Weissenthurn’s play, love and sexual activity are subordinated to war and military activity, for Herrmann and Thusnelda will not consummate their marriage until after a German victory over the Romans, as Herrmann says: “Erst nach dem Kampf dich in die Arme schließen. / Jetzt laßt mich stolz der Deutschen Freyheit gründen, / Und dann den Lohn in deinen Armen finden” (W, IV.ii., 86). Thus, sexual activity becomes both a motivation for and a reward for success in battle. Sexual attraction based on demonstrated prowess in battle could already be seen in Klopstock’s 1753 poem “Hermann und Thusnelda,” in which Thusnelda’s desire for Hermann is clearly motivated by his successful performance in battle: “‘Ha, dort kömmt er mit Schweiß, mit Römerblute, / Mit dem Staube der Schlacht bedeckt! So schön war / Hermann 72 Edward Potter niemals! […] / […] / Komm! ich bebe vor Lust, reich mir den Adler / Und das triefende Schwert! komm, atm’ und ruh hier / Aus in meiner Umarmung” (Klopstock 71). This bloodthirsty love scene seems to have been more of an inspiration for Weissenthurn in her conception of the love between Herrmann and Thusnelda than the rational, sensible love based on virtue that Schlegel’s play depicts, since Weissenthurn’s play not only emphasizes sexual restraint until victory in battle has been achieved but also depicts war and military activity as a type of aphrodisiac, as Thusnelda says to Herrmann: “Auf hochgethürmten Leichen wirst du stehen, / Als freyer Mensch ins freye Leben sehen; / Dann schmücke ich dein Haupt mit Eichenkränzen, / Ich ordne jubelnd festlich frohe Tänze” (W, IV.ii., 86). Thus, for the “Germans,” love is intricately intertwined with war and military prowess. Another concept that plays an essential role in both Schlegel’s and Weissenthurn’s Arminius plays is that of either forgiveness or revenge. In Schlegel, there is forgiveness for the Machiavellian traitor Segest and also for the wavering Rome enthusiast Flavius. Like the title hero of Schlegel’s Canut, Herrmann extends forgiveness to those who have demonstrated regret, even though it would seem to run counter to his political interests. In this manner, Schlegel’s text transports Enlightenment values into a Germanic past that would likely not have understood them. Schlegel’s Segest is to remain a chieftain but is to refrain from treachery and deception: “Segest, drum bleib ein Fürst, wie du gewesen bist, / Doch ohne Dienstbarkeit, Verrätherey und List” (S, V.iv., 170). Similarly, Flavius is forgiven for his weakness: “Du, Bruder, warst zu schwach, und gabst der List Gehör. / Als Herzog schenk ich dirs; als Bruder thu ich mehr: / Mein Herz entschuldigt dich” (S, V.iv., 170). Herrmann’s forgiveness even extends to the fact that neither his brother nor his future father-in-law comment on Herrmann’s generosity, which he interprets for the others onstage and in the audience as a sign of the two men’s repentance. In Weissenthurn’s play, there is no forgiveness for the Romans. Segest is elided from the drama; he complains that Varus is not heeding his warnings about the Germans’ plans, and he predicts Varus’s downfall, then exits the stage and does not return. Flavius, Herrmann’s brother, experiences a different fate, for a horrific pair of scenes awaits him. He dies in battle, and his corpse is brought into the Germans’ camp at Herrmann’s orders. No one recognizes the corpse in Roman garb, and the blind Sigismar, the man’s own father, exults in the death of a Roman, plants his foot on the corpse, and proceeds to curse the man and his parents: “Das Römerjoch tret’ ich im Tod mit Füßen, / […] / Fluch, Fluch dem Mutterschooß, der dich gebar! / […] / Dem Vater fluch ich, der die Schlange zeugte” (W, V.viii., 109). When Thusnelda arrives and recognizes Flavius, she tries to stop Sigismar, who only exults even more at his own son’s death: “Auf, senkt National Identity and Gender in Weissenthurn and Schlegel 73 ihn in des Sumpfes schlamm’ge Erde, / Daß mit ihm seine Schmach versenket werde; / Vertilgt von dem Verräther jede Spur! / Mir starb kein Sohn-ich habe einen nur” (W, V.viii., 110; emphasis in original). Thus, Flavius earns contempt, curses, and postmortal desecration for his lack of patriotic feeling for the Germanic tribes and his wavering admiration for Rome. Finally, I would like to turn my attention to the depiction of the female characters Thusnelda and Adelheid, Herrmann’s mother, in these dramas. In Tacitus’s The Annals, Thusnelda is not named, but she is described as stoically heroic when she is brought by her father “under duress” to the Romans: “[T]he wife of Arminius, who was also the daughter of Segestes, but who had more of her husband’s spirit than her father’s - she was not reduced to tears and uttered not a word of entreaty” (Tacitus 36; book 1.58; and 35; book 1.57). Schlegel’s Thusnelde is not only a strong female character who supports the Germanic tribes in their struggle against Rome; she also becomes an actual warrior on the battlefield in his play and seems to die a heroic death. Since Schlegel’s Thusnelde actually fights at the end of the play, it is not technically the case that “Thusnelde’s role in battle consists essentially of preserving the […] lives of other fighters rather than in fighting herself” (Griffiths 123). Herrmann receives this report: “Ein Degen, welchen sie aus einer Leiche riß, / Macht ihren Arm bewehrt; doch ihren Tod gewiß. / Ihr Muth hat sie verderbt. Wer so zum Tod entschlossen, / Und so umringet war, hat sein Blut wohl vergossen! ” (S, V.iv, 170). The readers or spectators learn, in the final scene, that Thusnelde has survived the battle after all; she was captured and kept prisoner, then freed by Siegmund, to Herrmann’s great relief. Thusnelde, in Schlegel’s version, is thus "eine-nur zufällig weibliche-Mitkämpferin" (Essen 76) and a "Heroine, […] femme forte, die im Kampf für das Vaterland patriotisch in Wort und Tat in Erscheinung tritt" (Heuer 86; italicization in original). Caren Heuer asserts that Thusnelde is forced back into the role of "weiblicher Passivität" once she becomes a prisoner of the Romans (Heuer 88), but, in my view, Schlegel’s play depicts her as steadfastly ready for service in battle, either to give moral support and inspiration to the Germanic warriors or to allow her corpse to be used as a shield to protect the warriors, should she fall victim in the battle, which she already states before entering the battlefield (S, IV.iv, 159-60). In the work of Tacitus, Arminius’s mother, who, like Thusnelda, is unnamed, is patriotic and wants her two sons, Arminius and Flavus, to remain loyal to the culture of the Germanic tribes. In a memorable scene in The Annals, Arminius and Flavus stand on either side of the Weser River and discuss their attitudes towards Rome. Flavus defends Rome’s greatness, prowess in battle, and powerful imperial monarchy, while Arminius praises the “fatherland,” freedom, the Germanic gods, and family, pointing out that “their mother […] shared his prayers, 74 Edward Potter namely that Flavus not prefer to desert and betray his kinsmen and relations, and indeed his entire race, than to be their leader” (Tacitus 54; book 2.10). 5 In Schlegel’s Herrmann, the character Adelheid is drawn perhaps more strongly along these lines. Schlegel’s Adelheid is extremely patriotic and enforces patriotism among others: “Thusnelde, laß dich nicht durch deine Liebe führen: / Die Freyheit deines Volks muß dich am meisten rühren. / Was schadets, ob mein Sohn geringern Ruhm erhält? / Wenn Deutschland nur sich hebt, und Rom zu Boden fällt” (S, IV.i., 153). Critics such as Hans Peter Herrmann have commented on the fact that Herrmann’s supposed “masculine” values are really “geschlechterübergreifend, allgemeinmenschlich” and are shared by Adelheid and Thusnelde as well (H. P. Herrmann 164). One definitely sees this in the case of Adelheid’s patriotism. She sings the praises of her husband, Siegmar, who has died in battle, and she exults in the fact that he did not die “krank und fruchtlos” like many older men, but was instead able to give his blood for the “Volk” and his last breath “fürs Vaterland” (S, V.ii., 164). Weissenthurn’s Thusnelda is extremely independent - as we have seen, she leaves her father and strikes out on her own - but she is not a warrior. She functions, however, as a partial warrior, not only giving enthusiastic moral support as her contribution to the war effort, but also participating from the sidelines. Sigismar lists for her her wifely duties: “Dem Kampfgewühle darfst du nicht enteilen, / In kluger Nähe muß die Gattinn weilen, / Den Zagenden zum muth’gen Angriff mahnen, / Ihm so den Weg zum Ruhm, zum Siege bahnen” (W, IV.ii., 84). A wife, in the symbolic universe of Weissenthurn’s play, is thus a sort of pseudo-warrior whose duties as a wife are, to a certain extent, military in nature. This active, patriotic, supportive role reflects the growing patriotism and increased activity among women in the German lands during the Napoleonic Wars, as historians of the period have documented (Hagemann 193). The fact that Weissenthurn’s Thusnelda, unlike her counterpart in Schlegel’s play, does not actually fight in battle herself, is also a reflection of the historical situation. The historian Karen Hagemann discusses the role of “heroic maidens” - a small number of women who fought in battle during the Napoleonic Wars - and points out that efforts to organize women warriors undermined the hierarchical gender ideology of the day and were generally "met with outrage" (Hagemann 193). This was, in part, a result of the differing perspective on gender in the period around 1800, as compared to the mid-eighteenth century. Hagemann identifies "intense efforts at redefining gender differences" in this period (Hagemann 191). The medical-biological concept of gender dimorphism was becoming more established (Laqueur 5-6, 11, 22-23, 151-54). Conceptions of gender were developing, in Weissenthurn’s time, into a more rigid dichotomy National Identity and Gender in Weissenthurn and Schlegel 75 of the genders, justifying the ideological use of anatomy and biology in order to exclude women from the public sphere (Hagemann 191-92). In Weissenthurn’s Herrmann, the eponymous hero’s unnamed mother has already died before the play begins, yet she exerts a patriotic influence over her sons. Herrmann is told that she died of grief, since both of her sons rejected Germany for Rome: “Sie starb für Gram, daß sie dir Leben gab” (W, I.ii., 12; emphasis in original). The Druid Brenno is Herrmann’s source of information, and Brenno speaks metaphorically of the two sons, Herrmann and Flavius, as two young trees carefully tended by their mother, only to be infested with insects and to have their sweet fruit stolen by foreigners. Herrmann later tells his brother Flavius that Flavius’s devotion to Rome was the sole cause of their mother’s death, thereby erasing his own purported responsibility for her death: FLAVIUS: Sie starb? HERRMANN: Weil einem Römer sie das Leben gab. (W, III.i., 57) Herrmann believes that he can hear his mother’s spirit in the rustling of leaves: “Der Mutter Geist rauscht in dem Eichenlaub” (W, IV.ii., 83). The spirit of the absent mother speaks through the oak tree, the symbol of German nationalism and the Germanic pagan religion. The Germanic tribes considered trees - especially oak trees - holy and worshipped them; trees were thought to harbor supernatural, divine beings (Vries 350-351 [§ 249]; Davidson 56, 69, 101). Weissenthurn taps into this spiritual tradition in depicting the pervasive influence of Herrmann’s unnamed mother, but it must also be noted that the author partially erases the character of Herrmann’s mother, giving her voice only through the ways in which male characters interpret her meaning. Critics have rightly pointed out the independence, the strength, and the embodiment of virtues in Weissenthurn’s Thusnelda (H. P. Herrmann 184; Kugele 26-29), particularly when compared with her counterpart in Klopstock’s or Kleist’s Arminius plays. Kugele argues against Hans Peter Herrmann’s thesis that the female characters in Arminius dramas become progressively less independent after Schlegel’s Herrmann (Kugele 31-32), and Kugele’s comparison of the contemporaneous Arminius dramas by Kleist and Weissenthurn indeed demonstrates the strength of Thusnelda in Weissenthurn’s play. Nonetheless, Kugele does not look in-depth into Schlegel’s drama, as I have done here. When one compares Weissenthurn’s early nineteenth-century play to that of Schlegel from the mid-eighteenth century, one notes that the female characters in Schlegel’s play are certainly stronger and more independent. One could posit that this is a result of the political climate in which the plays were created. In the mid-eighteenth-century Holy Roman Empire, men and women were equally politically powerless subjects within a loose confederation of monar- 76 Edward Potter chical governments. In Restoration Austria, on the other hand, the political situation was in transition. After the prospect of more egalitarian treatment under the Napoleonic Code had been defeated, the previous, more repressive political system was in the process of being reinstated. Not only was the political system being redesigned, but the ways in which people thought about gender was also in flux, for the medical-biological concept of gender dimorphism was becoming more established. In conclusion, both Schlegel’s and Weissenthurn’s Herrmann dramas provide the audience with strong female characters and the promotion of a German national identity. Each play is, however, most definitely a product of its time. We see the warrior Thusnelde in Schlegel’s play replaced with the fiercely independent Thusnelda lending only moral support in Weissenthurn’s drama. We also find the adoption of native history as the material for literary production in Schlegel’s play replaced with propaganda in favor of the formation of a Pan-German nation-state in Weissenthurn’s Herrmann. The Arminius material thus becomes a screen onto which each era projects its own conceptions of national identity and gender identity. When one reads Weissenthurn’s Arminius play alongside that of Schlegel, one sees the innovative nature of Weissenthurn’s work. Weissenthurn presents the readers and/ or spectators with a vision of independent femininity, albeit not quite as militarily active as in Schlegel’s play, and she also propagates German national unity at a time when German national identity is coming into being as defined against Napoleonic France. Notes 1 I will designate Weissenthurn’s Herrmann within the text of this article as follows: W, followed by act and scene number, if applicable (in Roman numerals); followed by page number(s) (in Arabic numerals). 2 Page references to Hans Peter Herrmann's essay will be to the second version, which appeared as a chapter in Machtphantasie Deutschland, ed. Herrmann (1996). 3 I will designate Schlegel’s Herrmann within the text of this article as follows: S, followed by act and scene number, if applicable (in Roman numerals); followed by page number(s) (in Arabic numerals). Although Werner Schubert uses the spelling “Hermann” for Schlegel’s play and main character, I will use Schlegel’s original spelling “Herrmann” in this article (Schubert 604). 4 In Schlegel's play, this character's name is spelled “Thusnelde,” and in Weissenthurn's play, it is spelled “Thusnelda.” I will maintain this distinction in this article as well. National Identity and Gender in Weissenthurn and Schlegel 77 5 Scholars have pointed out that this scene in Tacitus is likely fictional, as it would be very difficult to conduct a discussion or to see physical features such as Flavus's missing eye across a major river (Suerbaum 44-46; Sailor 120-121, 120n124). Nonetheless, artists such as Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki and Peter Janssen have depicted this scene, in Chodowiecki's engraving Herrmann and Flavus an der Weser (1800) and in Janssen's painting Armin sucht seinen Bruder Flavus an der Weser für die vaterländische Sache zu bekehren (1871-1874) (Essen 86n90). Works Cited Binal, Wolfgang. Deutschsprachiges Theater in Budapest: Von den Anfängen bis zum Brand des Theaters in der Wollgasse (1889). Vienna: Böhlaus Nachf.-Kommissionsverlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1972. Theatergeschichte Österreichs 10.1. Bland, Caroline. “Hermann’s Handmaidens? 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Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Cambridge Studies in German. The Reflex: Group Photography and Ritual in Pioniere in Ingolstadt Martin P. Sheehan Tennessee Tech University Abstract: This article examines the final scene of group portraiture in Marieluise Fleißer’s Pioniere in Ingolstadt (1968). Despite their initial defiance, the title soldiers eventually allow a local photographer to take their collective portrait, which the Pioneers seem to automatically sit for and then purchase for themselves even though they are eager to forget the crimes they perpetrated in the community. This essay applies Pierre Bourdieu’s work on group photography to explore the conflict between the soldiers, the citizens of Ingolstadt, and the photographer’s camera while illuminating how photography can both damage and (re)build social groups. Two characters exploit photography’s reflexive rituals for differing reasons: the Pioneer Rosskopf seeks excitement by sabotaging the soldiers’ cyclical existence while the photographer seeks to eternally connect the Pioneers to the community they have damaged as a form of justice. In this manner, group photography, its attending rituals, and its meaning to social groups demonstrate how Fleißer’s work promises a delayed “happy end,” thereby justifying its generic distinction as a comedy. Keywords: photography, Bourdieu, comedy, Fleißer, reflexivity As the 1968 version of Marieluise Fleißer’s comedy Pioniere in Ingolstadt closes, one thing is clear: none of the army engineers want a souvenir of their time in Ingolstadt, a small community in provincial Bavaria. With their construction project finished - a wooden bridge over the Danube - the Pioneers have reasons to move on: They leave behind civilians like Fabian, an innocent seventeen-year-old whom they have terrorized and attacked; Alma, a servant girl whom they have enticed into a life of prostitution; the female protagonist Berta, Alma’s friend, seduced and abandoned by Korl, a Pioneer and the 82 Martin P. Sheehan male protagonist of the drama; and, lastly, the Pioneers’ sergeant, whom the soldiers intentionally watch drown in the strong current of the Danube after being caught and pulled overboard by a swiftly moving anchor line. While the group is waiting for their bridge to pass final inspection in the last scene, one Pioneer notes, “Ich vergesse schon, daß wir hier waren” - a line delivered with more detachment than regret (180). Understandably, the Pioneers want to leave behind the assaults, thefts, sexual exploitations, and involuntary manslaughter that the group has perpetrated during their time in Ingolstadt. They anticipate the next town, the next construction project, and the next group of “Mädchen” they will seduce, conquer, and abandon (181). Given this urge to press on, we can understand why, when a photographer arrives during the bridge’s inspection and hawks his services, promising “ein kleines Souvenir an den Aufenthalt der Pioniere in Ingolstadt,” one soldier dismissively remarks, “Denkste” (183). With a physical bridge built and so many metaphoric bridges burnt, the Pioneers have no desire to look back. Yet, this closing scene finds members of the Pioneer corps posing for the photographer not once, but twice. Despite their prior sarcasm, the Pioneers comply when the photographer calls out to the collective, “stellen Sie sich auf” (183). They do not merely assemble themselves and follow the photographer’s instructions for how to pose. After the picture has been taken, eight Pioneers also step up to the photographer, one by one, to supply their names, submit their payments, and then collect their receipts to insure that they receive their individual copies of the portrait in the next town. Moreover, Münsterer, the Pioneer who most clearly expressed the corps’ detachment and most vehemently declined the idea of a souvenir portrait, actually advocates for the medium. The photographer thanks and then entrusts Münsterer with the “Durchschlag der Sammelquittung,” transforming the once reluctant soldier into the group photo’s guarantor (184). That the platoon would devote so much time and attention to these photographs, though, seems puzzling. It is unclear why they sit for, purchase, and then assist these instances of portraiture when the images will forever connect the Pioneers with the city, crimes, and people they wish to forget. Exploring the conflict between the Pioneers and the camera, though, illuminates photography’s often overlooked socially integrative methods and effects. The rituals surrounding group photography compel individuals to integrate themselves into collectives by forcing them to capitulate to the camera that will mechanically capture and eternalize their social connection. While this integration ritual is usually automatic, sometimes a struggle ensues when individuals realize unconsciously that submitting themselves to the medium is not in their best interest. Because the Pioneers initially demur and eventually yield to the medium, the play reveals the normally invisible manner in which photography The Reflex: Group Photography and Ritual in Pioniere in Ingolstadt 83 forges, visualizes, and memorializes the connections between a social collective and a specific geographic and temporal location. As close readings of the dialog and stage directions demonstrate, in pushing back against photography, the soldiers in Pioniere in Ingolstadt reify the struggle between the individual and society, that is, between explicit individual desires to break social bonds and the inherent communal obligation to (re)build them. To illustrate how and why the medium performs this work, I first outline Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of group photography to establish how group portraits traditionally serve a positive function by evincing and reinforcing social connection. By breaking down what Bourdieu ambiguously calls “photographic practice” into a threepart heuristic, I demonstrate how group photography generally serves a socially constructive function by compelling individuals to submit themselves to a larger collective and to link themselves to a specific time and place. When we apply this heuristic to the sequence of portraiture in the comedy’s final scene, we can more easily discern why the subjects find themselves struggling with the reflexive ritual of photography, a practice so common that its motivations, products, and consequences are easy to overlook. Moreover, by using Bourdieu to interpret photography in the work, I hope to clarify how Fleißer’s text functions as a comedy. 1 Extending Helmut Arntzen’s definition of dramatic comedy as a genre that deals with “menschlichen Konflikten und ihrer möglichen und notwendigen Lösung,” I understand that any valid “Lösung” within the genre must necessarily be a social solution, one that affirms, normalizes, or otherwise stabilizes a community in resolving a plot’s conflicts (18). In Fleißer’s text, group photography represents the only viable, social solution to the human problems precipitated by the Pioneers’ stay in Ingolstadt, though these photographs are produced via an unlikely partnership between the nameless photographer character and Rosskopf, the most disaffected and destructive Pioneer. Although each of these characters represents opposing sides of the work’s central conflict, both want the photograph to be taken, albeit for different reasons: The photographer figure, an unlikely agent of social justice, connects the soldiers eternally with the community that they have damaged. In this way, the soldiers’ group photograph becomes an artifact of their anti-social behavior, an incriminating document that, once captured, printed, and distributed, has the potential to destroy the Pioneers’ own social and familial connections. For Rosskopf, the portraits are long-term pranks on the Pioneers, jokes with delayed punchlines aimed at destabilizing his group’s connections. With their fallout, he can vent his persistent ennui and envy caused by the Pioneers’ cyclical existence. Thus, while both Rosskopf and the photographer demonstrate a Bourdieusian understanding of how group photography functions, they both wish to subvert the traditionally constructive document of a group portrait into 84 Martin P. Sheehan a destructive tool albeit for differing purposes. For Rosskopf, the portrait is a delayed explosion of harmful amusement. For the photographer, the portrait is a tool of recovery and justice. In this manner, photography helps Fleißer’s comedy achieve its “happy end” by impacting the Ingolstadt and Pioneer communities in a contradictory manner. Photography’s significance in Pioniere in Ingolstadt has yet to receive the sustained scholarly attention that it deserves. 2 Most investigations of the text focus on Brecht’s relationship with Fleißer, how Fassbinder and Kroetz “rediscovered” her and her work in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and how these relationships with Brecht, Fassbinder, and Kroetz demonstrated in differing ways an “apparent lack of control over or ownership of her own work” (Colvin 158). 3 Beyond such biographical and authorial concerns, critics have explored themes of gender relations, sexual violence, and the commodification of sexuality in Pioniere in Ingolstadt specifically, as well as how the text critiques social hierarchies (see McGowan, Fleißer 58; McGowan, “Kette und Schuß” 19-21). These studies offer insights, to be sure, but none attempts to make sense of photography in Pioniere in Ingolstadt even though each of the play’s three versions ends with portraits being taken. Group photographs connect people, according to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. In his 1965 sociological study of the medium, Photography: A Middle-brow Art, Bourdieu argues that photographic portraits taken of groups or families are eternally positive objects that “[capture] festive events, [give] expression to a collective memory, [consecrate] social identity, and [celebrate] leisure” (Vromen 157). At times, though, it is challenging to see the photographic products and the rituals that produce them as distinct. If we wish to investigate photography’s socially constructive effect more clearly, it is vital that we explore Bourdieu’s understanding of group photography and its effects by studying photographs as objects and also the processes that produce them. We can do this most effectively, I believe, by dividing the photographic practice as Bourdieu defines it into three discrete phases: a photograph’s socially determined motivation, its visual composition, and its eventual distribution and analysis. Doing so demonstrates how the phases of the photographic process (i.e., the moments before, during, and after the group portrait is taken) all illustrate and reciprocally strengthen an overall sense of social cohesion. Before the group members pose together for a camera, they share a reflexive impulse in Phase 1. The desire, the drive, the motivation that inspires the members of a group to either produce a camera of their own or to submit themselves to an outsider’s camera is often so deeply internalized that it arises automatically (that is, as a reflex). The portrait ceremony, according to Bourdieu, “expresses the celebratory sense in which the family group gives to itself, and which it The Reflex: Group Photography and Ritual in Pioniere in Ingolstadt 85 reinforces by giving it expression, the need for photographs, and the need to take photographs” (19). Therefore, the group portrait is also reflexive in that the recipient of the photograph (i.e., the group) is also the photographed object. The other reflexive impulse comes from the desire for the collective to commemorate and later observe themselves and their connection. Once the camera appears in Phase 2, the subjects assemble themselves or are assembled by others to create a display of social cohesion. In such a display, the group attempts to maximize signs that visualize connection and intimacy between the members in various ways, or as Bourdieu writes: subjects are shown pressed against one another (always in the centre of the picture), often with their arms around one another. People’s eyes converge towards the camera so that the whole picture points to its own absent centre. (81) By immortalizing these gestures of social cohesion, the camera marks the high points of collective celebration, thereby optimizing the utility of the gift that the group gives itself. After the shutter closes, Phase 3 begins. The group members develop, print, and present the photographs to themselves. Accordingly, these shared images exhibit and strengthen bonds within the group. When members possess their own picture of the larger group, a network is created that connects recipients through their common possession. Moreover, once these group portraits are distributed and collected by the group, members will often place the image in an album, a compendium of visual documents that similarly commemorate highpoints of social integration. The album’s many pages of images create even larger, stronger networks, as the accretion of images demonstrates an individual’s diverse group affiliations, which can in turn connect the most disparate members of each group. Along with possession, document analysis also plays a role in this third phase of photographic practice. Once the physical connection of the collective pose has ended, the group might easily disintegrate, but group portraits prevent the bonds between members from dissolving. In reading the photos, the group can remind itself of the highpoint of social connection, and in this way, photographic practice’s final phase reminds the group of all the prior stages: in analyzing a group photograph either passively or actively, the group reminds itself of phase 1, the shared desire to commemorate the collective; phase 2, the perhaps tacit way in which the group members organized themselves in front of the camera; and phase 3, the network of shared possession. The group photo is therefore, according to Bourdieu, always a constructive document that arises unconsciously from the group’s need to express, document, and stabilize itself as well as the connection between its members. 86 Martin P. Sheehan But not all photographic portraits operate as Bourdieu suggests. Indeed, when analyzed, the group photo at the end of Pioniere in Ingolstadt reveals that it is constructed differently and for different reasons. As argued below, the soldiers do not wish to express their connection, they do not wish to document their connection, nor do they wish to stabilize their connection. To be sure, it is the photographer not the group itself that activates the Pioneers’ desire for the portrait; it is the camera’s operator that appeals to the group’s unconscious desire. Although the soldiers initially oppose him and his camera, the photographer is able to convince the group with a rhetorical approach that simultaneously individuates members of the collective while speaking to the collective as a whole. In contrast to the group portrait that will visually unite them with the community of Ingolstadt, the Pioneers are emotionally removed from their surroundings as the final scene of Fleißer’s comedy begins. As they put the finishing touches on the bridge, with equal parts alacrity and nihilism they observe how they will soon be moving on: after one Pioneer remarks that they will already be gone tomorrow when the bridge is officially opened, others observe with aloofness “eine Stadt ist wie die andere,” and how it seems “[…] es sind immer die gleichen Flüße. Am frühen Morgen ist die Luft immer rauh” (181). Ingolstadt represents nothing novel or special to them; it is simply another place to build a bridge in an eternal and interchangeable cycle of arrival, construction, depravity, decadence, inspection, and departure. The Pioneers exhibit no extraordinary desire to document their time in Ingolstadt. Indeed, as one Pioneer remarks, even though they are physically present in the town, psychically they are “schon nicht mehr da” (180). Given this shared sense of removal or disassociation and the effect of social integration that Bourdieu claims photographs have, it seems difficult to understand why and how the photographer convinces the soldiers to submit to his camera. Although the soldiers initially deride the idea of a group portrait, the photographer nevertheless entices the group to assent to the portrait by using a variety of gestures and linguistic constructions that activates, leverages, and at times negates the sense of social obligation that motivates group photographs. To be fair, the photographer’s method could be seen as jumbled or haphazard. With so many different parts and approaches, his pitch might seem to lack any defining features. His patter, though, is more than just an unfocused advertisement. When analyzed and considered in sum, everything that the photographer says and does is motivated by one drive: to get the Pioneers to sit for and then purchase a group portrait. In the pursuit The Reflex: Group Photography and Ritual in Pioniere in Ingolstadt 87 of this goal, the photographer’s approach is ambivalent, simultaneously direct and indirect, active and passive, planned and extemporaneous, personalized and depersonalizing, Even before he appears on the scene, the photographer works to gain the group’s united attention. The stage directions note the photographer arrives with a cacophony - “Fotograf nähert sich mit klappendem Werbegeräusch” - and in noting the camera’s noise, the text demonstrates how the photographer, perhaps involuntarily, unites the Pioneers (183). The clatter causes the entire group to glance over at him in one unified movement; all their heads turn to look at the same thing at the same time. This shared gesture implicitly brings them together. As a group, they become a unified viewing subject, taking in the same events around them, moving their heads as one, and observing as a collective. Similarly, the photographer’s language unites the Pioneers. 4 After lumping the soldiers together with the greeting “meine Herren,” the photographer consolidates the collective further through pronouns: “Sie haben uns diese feste Brücke gebaut, damit uns an Sie ein dauerndes Andenken bleibt. Sicher werden auch Sie den Wunsch verspüren, daß Sie ein kleines Souvenir an den Aufenthalt der Pioniere in Ingolstadt mitnehmen.” (183). An antimetabole stresses the reciprocal nature of this transaction’s first part. In addressing the Pioneers, the photographer speaks as a representative of his own social collective, the people of Ingolstadt, and thereby gives voice to social expectation, which in turn taps the internal social motivation of the group photograph. The Pioneers, he announces, have given the community the bridge so that the community will remember the Pioneers. What is implied next (but not articulated) is a parallel antimetabole: the community will give the Pioneers a photograph so that the Pioneers can remember the community. Yet, this second construction is avoided completely. The photographer, instead, focuses solely on the Pioneers: “Sicher werden auch Sie den Wunsch verspüren, daß Sie ein kleines Souvenir an den Aufenthalt der Pioniere in Ingolstadt mitnehmen” (183). He elides any mention of his fellow citizens as objects or agents, which makes sense when viewed through a Bourdieusian lens: The photographer’s goal here is to activate the reflexive drive inherent in the photographic ritual. Since the impulse to document the group must arise within the group itself, he will best accomplish this by avoiding any further mention of his own community. The repeated mention of the first person pronoun “uns” falls away, leaving behind only the focus on “Sie,” the soldiers. The Pioneers, as the dialog suggests, become the sole focus for good reason: by intimating and then circumventing the Pioneers’ obligation to Ingolstadt, the photographer triggers the reflexive behavior. This focus, though, is indeterminate, simultaneously engaging the group as a whole and each individual Pioneer. Every “Sie” that the photographer utters 88 Martin P. Sheehan here functions ambivalently as a direct address to the group (second person, plural, formal) and to each individual group member (second person, singular, formal). In intimating the Pioneers’ “Wunsch” for a memento, the photographer again evokes the reflexive nature of the photographic process. Not only would the photograph be a gift that the group gives itself, it would be a gift that each individual Pioneer gives to the other Pioneers. The external social pressure the photographer applies here is too great to ignore, which explains on one level why the Pioneers yield. While he might hail the group collectively when he arrives, his subsequent pitch can simultaneously address each individual Pioneer. The pitch then begins to depersonalize the Pioneers. Although he could easily pitch the souvenir to the group as a reminder “an Ihren Aufenthalt in Ingolstadt,” the photographer instead distances the group from itself with the construction “an den Aufenthalt der Pioniere in Ingolstadt” (emphasis added, 183). This construction allows the Pioneers to view the photo opportunity more objectively. Instead of the portrait being proposed directly to the Pioneers, this phrasing suggests the Pioneers are some distant group. The more formal, impersonal construction looks past the personal resistance that the Pioneers have expressed. “An den Aufenthalt der Pioniere in Ingolstadt” offers a distant vantage point: there is no talk of you, your, us, our, or even “here.” The wording presents the image as a souvenir of someone’s stay somewhere, not “your stay here.” When viewed in this manner, the ritual aspect of the current photograph becomes paradoxically clearer: given that a group of Pioneers are leaving a place after having built a community a bridge, it is normal to expect that the group take a memorial photograph. Depersonalizing the terms of the portrait counter intuitively increases the personal desire. By avoiding a reflexive construction here, the photographer paradoxically makes a stronger case for the portrait’s reflexive motivation. The photograph, he makes clear, is not something that the city will give to the Pioneers - that would imply a reciprocal transaction that connotes an amicable acceptance that in turn would cement a connection. Likewise, the portrait is not something the group gives or awards itself - both positive and constructive ways to frame the photographic ritual. The souvenir is instead presented as an extraction, a final bit of plunder taken along - as the verb “mitnehmen” denotes - as they leave Ingolstadt behind. Speaking to the group’s shared desire to leave, the verb “mitnehmen” itself implies movement, an immanent departure with a token, in this case less a memento than a trophy. Instead of receiving a memento from the community, the Pioneers will withdraw it and withdraw with it; in this manner, the photographer conceals, redefines, and presents the ritual’s nature. A constant shift of agency marks this phase. As their active, vocal mockery suggests, the soldiers oppose the group portrait; rhetoric and reason alone can- The Reflex: Group Photography and Ritual in Pioniere in Ingolstadt 89 not convince them. The only way, it seems, the portrait can be made is if the photographer can continue to transform them into an unthinking mass, a group governed by reflex instead of reason. Multiple elements of the photographer’s dialog blur the lines between agencies, making it unclear who is in control and who is being controlled: FOTOGRAF. So, stellen Sie sich auf, meine Herren, Sie gruppieren sich zwanglos, die großen Herren nach hinten - Pioniere stellen sich auf. Die hinteren stehen, die mittleren knien, die vorderen liegen, damit ich alle ins Bild bringe, damit jeder Charakterkopf draufkommt. Schauen Sie nicht in den Apparat. Er knipst. (183) The dialog here separates the Pioneers from themselves, as nearly everything the photographer says seems designed to split their conscious and unconscious mind so that they will submit. It is within this composition phase that we observe the reflexive nature of photographic practice and the tension between external and internal agency at the root of photography. First, the photographer moves between obvious imperative and implied indicative moods as well as between the second person and third person. While his first line in this phase is a clear imperative - “So, stellen Sie sich auf, meine Herren” - he delivers the rest of his directions as veiled commands that carry the semantic intent of an imperative while lacking the mood’s grammatical structure. His direct address and command are followed by a phrase (“Sie gruppieren sich zwanglos”) that functions indistinctly as a command and a description. He is both telling the Pioneers what to do and telling them what they are doing in the same way a hypnotist might control an entranced subject through suggestion. In narrating the Pioneers’ actions, the photographer simultaneously dictates these actions so that no one knows where the photographer’s agency ends and the Pioneers’ begins. In this manner, the repeated use of “Sie” also blurs a line. Previously while delivering his patter, the photographer used “Sie” to address the Pioneers collectively and individually, thereby activating the reflexive ritual so that the group members would award the group with a portrait. Here, in phase 2 of the ritual, “Sie” takes on a third denotation: the third person plural. When the pronoun is heard and not read, “Sie” in the phrase “Sie gruppieren sich zwanglos” can also become “sie,” further transforming this indirect imperative into an observation from a removed observer. This would speak to the further and more complete dissolution of the conscious and unconscious minds of the Pioneers. In this ambiguous movement from second person to third person, the Pioneers become even more disassociated from their thinking minds. This trend continues as the 90 Martin P. Sheehan next phrase completely abandons the simultaneously second person and third person “Sie”/ ”sie” for a fully impersonal subject instead: “die großen Herren nach hinten” (183). It is as if they are already watching or recalling the actions that lead to the portrait being taken. To be sure, there are other ways to explain this trend in the scene. This verbal phenomenon could be an attempt to avoid stylistic repetition. Alternatively, in organizing the portrait through indirect commands, the photographer could simply be adopting a more polite tone during this social transaction. While this could be true, multiple imperatives would suggest that the Pioneers are being forced into having their picture taken. Too many commands might make the Pioneers lash out, thereby scuttling the portrait. Thus, by avoiding direct commands, the photographer entices the Pioneers to comply; he draws attention away from himself and makes it appear as if the Pioneers themselves are fully in control, as if they are coming together “zwanglos” (183). This necessarily implies that there are reasons why they would not or should not comply. Coupled with this movement away from direct commands, the photographer’s agency is further minimized and obscured here. In continuing his line of indirect, alternative commands, the photographer guides the Pioneers as they compose their picture: “Die hinteren stehen, die mittleren knien, die vorderen liegen” (183). This string of indirect commands then leads to an explanation, “damit ich alle ins Bild bringe,” that the photographer quickly rephrases as “damit jeder Charakterkopf draufkommt” (183). This restatement downplays the photographer’s role. The Pioneers alone are optimizing the image while the camera’s operator appears to be only a bystander to the ritual. The soldiers, it would seem, are creating the image for themselves. Thus, the photographer’s single use and immediate correction of “ich” here is significant. Since his arrival, the character has avoided the first-person singular pronoun. To be sure, his pitch did feature “uns,” however even that usage was tied directly to the Pioneers; he was stressing how great the Pioneers were for building the bridge for the citizens of Ingolstadt. “Uns” in this latter occurrence remains an indirect object in the transaction, located firmly in the background; that is, until the camera shutter opens. Immediately after the stage direction “er knipst,” the photographer asserts his individual identity and agency. Not only is the first word he utters “ich,” each of the three phrases he says begin with the first person singular pronoun: “Ich bitte um Angabe der werten Adressen, ich kassiere sofort, ich entwickle noch heut” (183) Before they submit themselves to the photographic ritual, the photographer continues to convince the Pioneers by describing the group photograph as an indeterminate object, something that is simultaneously quotidian yet magical, concrete yet metaphysical: “Das Bild beschwert Sie nicht, es findet in jeder The Reflex: Group Photography and Ritual in Pioniere in Ingolstadt 91 Brieftasche Platz und es kostet fast gar nichts, in der Gruppe pro Mann nur drei Mark. Sie können das Bild hervorholen in jedem freien Augenblick” (183). Continuing the pattern of ambiguity, “jeder” denotes here either “every” or “each” - there is room for the image in each wallet or in every wallet. “Jed-” refers to every individual Pioneer together with the others in the group or each individual Pioneer for himself. The photographer thus creates a web of possession that is more intimate than expected. While Bourdieu notes that recipients often place their group photographs in albums that are stored within the intimate sphere of the home, the Pioneers will carry their portrait around with them. When placed in wallets, these images accompany the Pioneers in the public sphere. This portrait, it seems, is not one to be stashed at home, brought out only to display or recall highpoints of social integration. The group photograph should become a facet of each Pioneer’s public identity, just as the other photographs in their wallet - of family, friends etc. - might define each Pioneer’s public identity. Again, “jed-” is used to collapse and expand the network of possession. In explaining how the soldiers might take out and look at the image “jedem freien Augenblick,” the photographer is also creating a timeless cycle of analysis and recollection (183). Whereas Bourdieu asserts that group photographs are usually only displayed or viewed when individuals want to demonstrate or recall the highpoints of social interaction, the photographer here suggests that the Pioneers will be able to (and will want) to view their portrait during each and every free moment. The Pioneers, as suggested, can view the photo during single free moments and during every free moment. This web of possession will be eternal, inescapable. Though perhaps intended to suggest the comfort even the most fleeting of glances at the portrait might provide, this assertion has pessimistic undertones. While never fully articulated, the Pioneers nevertheless seem to suspect the consequences of carrying, owning, and analyzing their Ingolstadt portrait. If the Pioneers are meant to view the image during each and every free moment, they will never be able to leave Ingolstadt behind. They will be forever connected to the city even though they are so eager to move on. Thus, it makes sense that when the photographer suggests that the Pioneers will be able to take out their portrait and admire it “in jedem freien Augenblick - ,” Münsterer interrupts with a curt “Denkste - ” (183). By denoting individual nodes and larger arrays of these nodes, the use of “jed-” creates inescapable networks of shared possession and time, and the cynical, disconnected Pioneers justifiably push back against these networks. Because this strategy of stressing how the photograph will connect the Pioneers to Ingolstadt has no traction with his potential clients, the photographer evokes the Pioneers’ other social connections: “Sie können es Ihren diversen 92 Martin P. Sheehan Bräuten und Ihren treusorgenden Eltern zeigen” (183). This part of the pitch should be rejected most vehemently. If the Pioneers were to share this image that connects them to Ingolstadt, they would risk also sharing what they have done in (and done to) the community - the physical assaults, the carousing, in short, all the socially destructive exploits they have enjoyed. The photograph represents a threatening trace of the Pioneers’ time in Ingolstadt and all their transgressions. As such, it functions also as an index of their immorality and would have the power to destroy their social and familial connections, not build them up from the Pioneers’ perspective. Why, then, do the Pioneers yield? The answer consists of equal parts ambiguity and reflexivity: After the photographer makes his case that the image can be shown to brides and parents - the most repulsive part of the photographer’s pitch from the Pioneers’ perspective, the Pioneer Rosskopf replies “Das nehmen wir auch noch mit, Mann. Das lassen wir uns nicht entgehen” (183). Viewed from one angle, Rosskopf’s statements represent a final, ironic dismissal in keeping with Münsterer’s previous “Denkste” (182). It is difficult to read Rosskopf’s remark here as anything but sarcastic. After all, as the scene opens, it is Rosskopf who notes with nihilism how cyclic the life of a Pioneer is: “Eine Stadt is wie die andere. Die Feldwebel sind überall gleich” (180). As one of the most disillusioned Pioneers, he would be the least likely member to push for the group portrait. Yet, viewed from a different perspective, it is precisely because he is disillusioned that he might honestly support the photograph if for destructive reasons. As the scene opens, it is Rosskopf who observes how, between arriving in and leaving behind a new town, the Pioneers always find new “Mädchen” - the only joy the Pioneers can experience since they have no hope of improving their rank; he reminds his fellow soldiers “Ein Gemeiner bleibt ein Gemeiner, und ein Offizier bleibt Trumpf” (181). There is no way to break this cycle; there is no escape. If any Pioneer is equipped to disrupt this loop, though, it is Rosskopf. He exhibits the most agency of all the Pioneers in scene 12, if only to ruffle others. When he sees a chance to embarrass the other Pioneers to address his envy, he proves keen to exploit outsiders. When Berta arrives asking after Korl when the scene opens, Rosskopf alerts Korl of her presence, thereby bringing the two together, only to literally spotlight the couple later as they get intimate in bushes: ROSSKOPF schadenfroh: Scheinwerfer nach links. Berta und Korl kommen durch den Busch ins Licht. Die Pioniere johlen und pfeifen. KORL. Nehmt euer kindisches Licht weg, verdammt. ROSSKOPF. Was willst du, es ist bloß der Neid. MÜNSTERER. Ach wo, das machen doch wir jeden Tag. (182) The Reflex: Group Photography and Ritual in Pioniere in Ingolstadt 93 This action, its attendant stage direction of “schadenfroh,” and the admission of envy reveal what motivates Rosskopf in the comedy, especially why he pushes for the group portrait: given his confession of jealousy, his latent Schadenfreude, and his existential ennui, Rosskopf is inclined to humiliate the members of his collective at the expense of his connection with them. He acts out to satisfy his essential envy and to excite himself. As his drunken dialog with a fellow soldier in scene 11 suggests, Rosskopf seeks out opportunities to break from or inject joy into his Sisyphean existence. “Jeder Zivilist hat es besser als ich,” he growls, as he and Münsterer roll a barrel that they have stolen back to camp, even though, as Rosskopf admits, disillusioned, “Die Kaserne hängt mir zum Hals heraus” (172). The only way that he can tolerate his soldier’s life is to lash out against his regiment and how they regiment his existence: ROSSKOPF. […] Ich verlange meine per—sönliche Freiheit. MÜNSTERER. Du verlangst deine persönliche Freiheit. ROSSKOPF. Ich will meinen Spaß haben, verdammt, jetzt werde ich wild. (172) “Persönliche Freiheit,” it must be noted, is an abstract concept that, for Rosskopf, means the ability to act against rules, norms, and expectations in the pursuit of “Spaß.” He longs to become “wild” to cast off the rules that determine and limit his actions if only momentarily. More important, while these episodes of “Spaß” might not seem amusing or humorous in the moment, their comic effect will become clear after the fact - a point that Rosskopf must clarify after he asks whether Münsterer wants to join in: ROSSKOPF. […] machst du mit bei einem Spaß? MÜNSTERER. Dann will ich auch lachen. ROSSKOPF. Du wirst lachen. Du wirst vielleicht nicht gleich lachen, später im Bett wirst du lachen. (172) As suggested, the “Spaß” that is to come certainly lacks humor in the moment. Rosskopf coaxes Fabian, the first passerby he sees, into his barrel, only to terrorize their trapped victim by kicking, rolling, and buffeting the barrel. Rosskopf is happy just to torment his victim and thereby immediately vent his frustrations. For Rosskopf, the group portrait offers another chance for “Spaß” albeit with a delayed payoff. As in previous scenes, the soldier is looking for accomplices to share in a joke, though unlike the dialog quoted above, he decides to conscript others instead of proposing they participate. Instead of asking his fellow soldiers “macht ihr mit? ,” he informs them “ihr macht mit,” or as he says in the portrait sequence “Das nehmen wir auch noch mit” (183). Only Rosskopf is aware of the plan for deferred “Spaß” that he has set in motion. 94 Martin P. Sheehan In this manner, we see why Rosskopf urges his collective to pose for the photographer. Even though the text lacks a clear indication, we can imagine Rosskopf relishing the imminent fallout that the portraits will unleash on the group. The photographs will be a way to exert his “persönliche Freiheit” on the other Pioneers, unwitting victims of a protracted prank. With its ability to call attention to the group’s actions, identity, and connections, the camera and the fixed image it produces represent a permanent spotlight thrown on the Pioneers. They might not understand the joke as they pose, but after the photographs arrive and the Pioneers follow the photographer’s advice of showing the portrait to their “diversen Bräuten” and “treusorgenden Eltern,” Rosskopf will have his “Spaß.” No matter what the impending reaction will eventually be, it will not be positive, which means that Rosskopf’s joke will have succeeded eventually. He seems aware that when discussing the image and analyzing it surrounded by intimate family members, the Pioneers will recall and perhaps reveal their transgressions - their drowned Feldwebel, their carousing, in short, all the behavior that Rosskopf might label “wild.” Of course, others might come across the portrait later, investigate its origin, and then seek out the justice denied Ingolstadt at the time. If the Pioneers fail to admit their culpability and iniquities directly, the image can serve as an indirect witness of their crimes for future viewers. To be sure, a photograph is not always an immediate witness. As history shows, it might take more than half a century for photographic evidence of past crimes and criminals to come to light. In 2007, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum received an unexpected donation - a scrapbook containing photographs taken in 1944 in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. 5 Believed to belong to Karl Höcker, an SS officer featured in many of the images, the album’s 114 photographs display Nazi officials of the camp at work and at play. Some images capture members of the SS lined up at attention for a ceremony while others show the SS hierarchy (including notorious figures like Rudolf Höss and Josef Mengele) being led in a “sing-along” by an accordion player at a nature retreat. As Daniel Magilow rightly argues, the Höcker Album is unsettling “because the violence that was being perpetrated beyond the frames contrasts so starkly with the banalities we see inside them” (Makela 270). It seems unnerving to see images of history’s worst criminals as they smile, laugh, and sing. Though not documented in the album, the cruelty and brutality that one associates with Auschwitz-Birkenau accompanies the scrapbook’s images if only invisibly. Now that their barbarity has come to light, viewing images of the perpetrators as they are taking a break from their crimes is all the more disturbing. Most disturbing of all, though, remains the motivations behind the album. The historian Elissa Mailänder has explored how group portraits of soldiers that The Reflex: Group Photography and Ritual in Pioniere in Ingolstadt 95 feature, imply, or obscure acts of violence are created to serve as trophies - commemorations, or even celebrations, of unspeakable crimes against humanity. The informal portraits of SS officials assembled together in their uniforms document and commemorate the group - their unity, their masculinity, and their assumed superiority. Although Mailänder’s arguments center on the highly disturbing image of “fifteen young German soldiers standing in a semicircle, carousing and laughing as one of their comrades emulates a sex act with an unidentified woman who may or may not be dead,” her conclusions are as connected to the Höcker Album as they are to Pioniere in Ingolstadt (489). Similar in principle - but not in scope - to those of the Holocaust, the crimes committed against Ingolstadt remain outside the frame of the Pioneer’s group portrait, yet in a way, those crimes are also present. The portraits in the Höcker album and those of the Pioneers document how the soldiers perceive themselves in relation to the local population, as well as how they have dominated the local population. This lopsided power dynamic at the expense of others is what the soldiers want to subconsciously memorialize. The images were taken so that the memories of the group could be represented, revisited, and perhaps shared over the years. Yet, in securing a visual memory of their time in the small Bavarian city, the Pioneers are also securing a visual memory of their culpability, something Rosskopf and the photographer seem to know very well. As a stock character, the photographer represents a common social type. He appears as a familiar accessory, so quotidian and flat that he barely registers as character, which makes his role in the drama both easy to overlook and all the more imperative to understand. At times, he seems like the least remarkable character: though it would have been simple to supply him with a name to use to individualize him, the photographer lacks one. While this lack of specificity might seem to flatten his character, without a name he represents interests beyond his own. The photographer becomes a figure of social documentation. With his camera he creates the community’s collective memory; his images represent individual nodes on a shared time continuum. His photographs, when later reflected upon, accrete and connect to form the community’s history. Thus, the photographer is uniquely qualified to restore the Ingolstadt community, a goal that the group portraits will eventually achieve. After their arrival in scene one, the myriad problems that the Pioneers create for the Ingolstadt community and for its individual citizens seem as obvious to see as they are impossible to resolve. Multiple acts of physical assault, intimidation, deception, philandering, and coerced prostitution perpetrated by the Pioneers have destabilized the community and have left it no clear way to repair itself. The photographer is not driven by the pursuit of profits for his nameless studio. In his enterprise, his objective is clearly not financial gain, given the discount he 96 Martin P. Sheehan offers to entice the Pioneers; he is more interested in having the Pioneers sit for his camera. By capturing the soldiers, the bridge they have built, and the community that they have destroyed within a single frame, he captures evidence. While the Pioneers sing their marching song, perhaps believing that they are finally leaving the damage that they caused behind them, the wheels of justice have already been set in motion by two characters, Rosskopf and the photographer. It is a coincidence, though, that Rosskopf’s desire to prank the platoon is aligned with and the photographer’s drive to restore the social balance by linking the Pioneers with his community. Neither could succeed without the other. Without the photographer, Rosskopf could not vent his existential frustration. Without Rosskopf, the photographer’s pitch would have fallen flat, as it would have been impossible for him to convince the Pioneers’ to submit themselves to the camera. As Bourdieu observes, a group photograph is a reward a collective bestows upon itself. Absent Rosskopf, the group portrait would not have happened, since no individual member of the group would have pushed for the picture. As an agent of social justice, the photographer seeks to restore a balance that the Pioneers have upset. With concerns larger than mere financial gain, the nameless figure connects the soldiers with the community that they have damaged. Their group photograph records their presence eternally, and after the photographer prints and distributes the image, the Pioneers will carry their Ingolstadt portrait with them. Just as the bridge connects geographic locations that would otherwise be separate, the photo links two temporal locations and two groups of people. No matter when the portrait reaches the Pioneers, no matter when the Pioneers reach for the portrait, the image will transport them back to the place and time when the photograph was made. In so doing, the image chains the Pioneers to the community that they victimized, and, by carrying the photo around with them, the Pioneers also carry around the guilt. In this manner, just as the bridge becomes “ein dauerndes Andenken” of the Pioneers’ impact on the town, so too will their group portrait serve as “ein dauerndes Andenken” (184). Similarly, the portrait serves Rosskopf’s purpose precisely because it will exist as a perpetual reminder. By connecting the soldiers with the community that they have destabilized through their actions, the photo is guaranteed to remain an eternally potent threat to the Pioneers. Like the photographer suggests, the Pioneers could share their Ingolstadt portraits with their closest family members - their parents and their brides. Those who purchased the portrait will fall victim to its intended purpose at some point in the future: the photo is primed to explode any number of familial or nuptial connections when shared with others. The group photograph becomes a time bomb and the delayed explosion The Reflex: Group Photography and Ritual in Pioniere in Ingolstadt 97 - which Rosskopf would consider his intended “Spaß” - is the only chance for a happy end. In this way, the group photograph becomes what Helmut Arntzen would call the “notwendig[e] Lösung” to the “menschlichen Konflikten” precipitated by the Pioneers (18). For the Ingolstadt community to affirm, normalize, and stabilize itself, it must connect itself eternally with the soldiers through the photographic document of their stay. The damage the group has done to Ingolstadt cannot be undone; there is no way to reverse exploitation, abuse, or manipulation. By eternally connecting the soldiers with the community that they have damaged, the nameless photographer becomes an unlikely agent of social justice. It is only by documenting their presence that the emotional, sexual, and physical conflicts unleashed by the Pioneers can be processed, even if those conflicts are not represented directly within the frame. Much like images of the Höcker album, the group portrait in Ingolstadt records who was present without directly capturing their crimes. The citizens of Ingolstadt can only hope that a fuller understanding can be reached and past crimes can be punished at some point in the future. The crimes against them cannot be undone, but the photograph makes future justice a possibility. For some communities, delayed justice is the only hope they have for justice and some kind of happy end. Notes 1 Critics tend to avoid engaging with this work as a comedy. Instead, Fleißer’s works are lumped together as Volksstücke, tragicomedies (if that label can exist) written “vom Volk, für das Volk und über das Volk” (Schmitz 9). According to Andrea Bartl, dramatists like Zuckmayer, Horvath, Kroetz, and Fleißer “visieren mit ihren Stücken in Bezug auf Stil, dramatis personae und Handlung ein regional bestimmbares, kleinbürgerliches bzw. Proletarisches Publikum an” (212). Bartl’s investigation into German dramatic comedy stumbles slightly when attempting to explain how Volksstücke like Pioniere in Ingolstadt exhibit the spirit of Harlequin, a comic figure of the commedia dell’arte tradition that serves as the red thread throughout her diachronic analysis of the genre. Within the Volksstück, Bartl argues, Harlequin continues to play an “ebenso unterhaltende wie kritisch-entlarvende Funktion,” though instead being manifested on the stage, the Harlequin spirit is present only as a “Produkt der praktischen Theaterarbeit” (212). Because it relies too heavily on authorial intention to explain Harlequin’s “presence,” Bartl’s argument of Volkstücke as comedies is too nebulous to be convincing. In claiming that “Brecht, Kroetz, Fassbinder und Jelinek schreiben nicht nur für die Bühne, sondern ‘auf der Bühne,’” Bartl is forced to locate Harlequin’s 98 Martin P. Sheehan spirit within the playwright, which I argue is a dodgy proposition because it does not engage a comedic text as a text (212). 2 The only study to explore photography in Fleißer’s comedy is Ann Blackler Young’s excellent dissertation. In a chapter dedicated to Fleißer’s play, Young argues that the photography sequences parody “traditional notions of gender, love, and family” by evoking and then undercutting the tableaux most often seen in bürgerlichen Trauerspielen (182). Within this earlier dramatic tradition, Young asserts (with the help of Peter Szondi), that the visual constellation of characters on stage presents “a final image of hope,” a realistic portrait that communicates a “feeling of permanence and stability” (185). By employing scenes of realistic, photographic production across the work’s three versions, Young argues that Fleißer, by contrast, seeks to “expose everything behind [the photographs]” and to “[destroy] illusions behind male-female relationships” (194). In discussing the 1968 version of the play - our current concern - Young could more rigorously support her claims about how this later version seeks to move past male-female relationships to a broader social basis. For example, when discussing the soldiers’ group portrait, Young claims that by “not allowing women to appear in such a final picture, Fleißer is thus showing in the clearest manner possible society’s suppression of the other - in this case the woman” (217). This conclusion assumes that non-military personnel would be included in a portrait of a platoon. 3 For an overview of the Brecht-Fleißer relationship, see Ley and Töteberg. A more specific overview of Brecht’s influence on Pioniere in Ingolstadt, see McGowan, Marieluise Fleißer 51-53. 4 Hoffmeister offers a comparative analysis of dialog and action variations between the 1929 and 1968 versions of Pioniere in Ingolstadt. Adopting a discourse analysis approach, her study “attempts to analyze what happens when characters talk to one another an how they form judgments, signal intentions, make decisions, and take course of action of the basis of verbal exchanges” (3). While Hoffmeister’s work offers many valuable insights into how “two people of the opposite sex come to terms on how each will behave with respect to the other” within Pioniere in Ingolstadt, her investigation is limited only to these negotiations between the sexes (42). The negotiation between the photographer and the soldiers, unfortunately, falls beyond the scope of Hoffmeister’s study. My linguistic analysis seeks to offer similarly valuable insights, though it does not employ Hoffmeister’s rigorously analytic approach. 5 Available at www.ushmm.org/ collections/ the-museums-collections/ collec tions-highlights/ auschwitz-ssalbum/ album. The Reflex: Group Photography and Ritual in Pioniere in Ingolstadt 99 Works Cited Arnold, Heinz Ludwig, ed. Marieluise Fleisser. Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 1979. Arntzen, Helmut.-Die ernste Komödie: Das deutsche Lustspiel von Lessing bis Kleist� Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1968. Bartl, Andrea.-Die deutsche Komödie: Metamorphosen des Harlekin. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2009� Bourdieu, Pierre.-Photography: A Middle-Brow Art. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. Colvin, Sarah.-Women and German Drama: Playwrights and Their Texts, 1860-1945� Rochester: Camden House, 2003. Fleißer, Marieluise.-Gesammelte Werke. Vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972. Hoffmeister, Donna L.-The Theater of Confinement: Language and Survival in the Milieu Plays of Marieluise Fleisser and Franz Xaver Kroetz. Columbia: Camden House, 1983. Ley, Ralph. “Liberation from Brecht: A Marieluise Fleisser in Her Own Right.” Modern Language Studies 16.1 (1986): 41-50. Mailänder, Elissa. “Making Sense of a Rape Photograph: Sexual Violence as Social Performance on the Eastern Front, 1939-1944.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 26.3 (2017): 489-520. Makela, Maria. “Forum: Visual Studies - the Art Historians’ View.”-German Quarterly 92.2 (2019): 246-282. McGowan, Moray.-“Kette und Schuß: zur Dramatik der Marieluise Fleißer.” Arnold 11-34. McGowan, Moray.-Marieluise Fleißer. Munich: Beck, 1987. Schmitz, Thomas.-Das Volksstück. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1990. Töteberg, Michael. “Abhängigkeit und Förderung: Marieluise Fleißers Beziehungen zu Bertolt Brecht.” Arnold 74-87. Vromen, Suzanne. “Class Attitudes and Ambiguous Aesthetic Claims.”-Contemporary Sociology 21.2 (1992): 157-158. Young, Ann B.-Photography and the Photographer in Carl Sternheim’s Die Kassette, Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg, and Marieluise Fleisser’s Pioniere in Ingolstadt. Diss. Ohio State University, 1995. Reviews Ela Gezen: Brecht, Turkish Theater, and Turkish German Literature: Reception, Adaptation, and Innovation after 1960. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2018. 159 pp. $ 85.00. E-book $24.99. An expert on both Turkish and German culture, Ela Gezen’s study provides new perspectives on German and Turkish literature, especially theater. Instead of presenting a stereotypical narrative of collaboration between the “liberal West” and the “unrelenting East,” Turkish and German cultural contexts are considered jointly. Brecht’s plays and their performances figure prominently in Gezen’s discussion because they were watched by international theatergoers in Turkey as well as in the two Germanys, the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic. For Turkish theater professionals, Brecht’s didactic approach was a way to a more political approach to theatrical performance, a way to connect with audiences without giving up elements of Turkish theater. Gezen’s book explores the discourse of Turkish theater practitioners from both East and West Germany, especially in connection with Bertolt Brecht’s drama theories. One example includes the attendance of Turkish theater ensembles at a student theater festival in the West (Erlangen) in 1954, followed by a visit to stage rehearsals of the Berliner Ensemble in the East (East Berlin), engaging with and reflecting on both Germanys’ theater practices. Gezen’s introductory chapter provides an overview of international Brecht conferences - where Brecht’s theories were introduced and discussed - attended by Turkish theater practitioners. Special attention is given to the actress and author Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and Aras Ören, also an actor and one of the most popular Turkish writers in Germany, first winner of the Adalbert von Chamisso Prize in 1985 for immigrants who write in German. Specifically, Gezen discusses didactic realism and literary presentation of alienated labor in Ören’s Berlin Trilogy, consisting of the epic poem Was will Niyazi in der Naunynstraße- (What’s Niyazi doing on Naunynstraße? ) (1973), one of the first major texts about the Berlin district Kreuzberg and its Turkish population; Der kurze Traum aus Kagithane- (The Brief Dream from Kagithane) (1974); and Die Fremde ist auch ein Haus-(A Foreign Place is a House, Too) (1980).- In addition to delineating a positive Turkish Brecht reception, Gezen identifies a trend against Brecht’s ideas. To this end, she includes a detailed report 102 Martin P. Sheehan on the “Brecht Incident” that rocked Istanbul in 1964, when a performance of Brecht’s Der gute Mensch von Sezuan (The Good Person of Szechwan) in Istanbul was interrupted by conservative, anti-communist reactionaries, which lead to a temporary ban on Brecht’s plays. Gezen then retraces the interactions and connectedness between the Turkish and German theater of the mid-twentieth century. Chapter One presents theatrical practices and dialectic approaches in Brecht’s works and the debates about them in Turkey. Chapters Two and Three describe Özdamar’s and Ören’s careers in Germany and include an analysis of one of their plays. Even with contemporary discussion about these writers’ works as German literature, they are often considered outsiders. Gezen’s study focuses on Turkish-German theater artists, German and Turkish journals, and theater festivals in Erlangen and Istanbul. It was in this climate, as Gezen shows, that both Özdamar and Ören had their first encounters with Brecht and German theater, mediated through the theater practitioner Vasif Öngören, a frequent guest at the Berliner Ensemble in the 1960s. He founded the first Turkish theater in Ankara which played most Brecht plays, the ‘Collective-Theater.’ Both German and Turkish theaters were adopting more modernist theories in the mid-twentieth century when Turkish authors were both publishing and performing. Ören was part of the Berlin political scene - Gezen points to his key role in-an anti‐fascist union of progressive artists allied with class struggle, “Die rote Nelke,” and at the publishing house ‘Rotbuch Verlag.’ He performed in the Brecht play Die Ausnahme und die Regel (The Eception and the Rule) in 1962 in Germany and in Turkey. Özdamar was engaged in productions at the Berlin Volksbühne and the Schauspielhaus Bochum. In Chapter Two, in her discussion of didactic realism, Gezen profiles the various players around Özdamar, such as the actor and director Manfred Karge, the director of the Berliner Ensemble Manfred Wekwerth, and the photographer and dramaturge Benno Besson - all of them undoubtedly influenced by Brecht, but also thinkers and theater makers in their own right. Gezen includes an interesting section on the “Lehrstück,” Brechts theory of the teaching/ learning play. Ören began using Brecht’s theory of a teaching play to conceive a play using his own characters from the Berlin Trilogy� Gezen’s study demonstrates that the theater is a particularly productive lens through which to view Turkish-German (cultural) interchange. The convergence between “Brecht’s and Ören’s realist aesthetics” (67), the active use of Brecht’s formal techniques by Turkish authors, disrupts the passive, unquestioning absorption of a narrative as it supports critical analyses of the narrative material. Gezen’s innovative perspective on the “Turkish” in “Turkish-German,” her analysis of “past practices and their relationship to the present” (108), Reviews 103 provides the reader with a new and comprehensive picture of Ören, Özdamar, and others in Turkish-German artist communities. Her notes, bibliography, list of archival documents, and index are very helpful with further inquiry, and photos of actors and performances add interesting visuals of theaters and their artists. Webster University St. Louis Paula Hanssen Verzeichnis der Autorinnen und Autoren Prof. Martin Sheehan Department of Foreign Languages Tennessee Tech University Box 5061 Cookeville, TN 38505-0001 USA msheehan@tntech.edu- Prof. Jakob Norberg Department of German Studies Duke University 116H Old Chemistry Box 90256, Durham, NC 27708 USA jakob.norberg@duke.edu- Dr. Damianos Grammatikopoulos c/ o German, Russian, and East European Languages and Literatures Rutgers University Academic Building 15 Seminary Pl. West Wing, 4th Floor New Brunswick, NJ 08901 USA damian.gramm@gmail.com- Marie-Luise Goldmann, M.Phil. Department of German New York University 19 University Place, 3 rd floor New York, NY 10003 USA mlg530@nyu.edu- Prof. Paula Hanssen Webster University Browning Hall, ISB 411 St. Louis, MO USA hanssen@webster.edu Prof. Edward Potter Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures Mississippi State University 1006 Lee Hall Mississippi State, MS 39762 USA epotter@cmll.msstate.edu Die heutige Geldwirtschaft entwickelte sich lange vor der modernen Ökonomie im späteren Mittelalter. Welche Folgen für das Zusammenleben ergaben sich durch diese umwälzende Entwicklung? Wie veränderte sich die soziale und kulturelle Ordnung durch ein sich immer weiter ausdifferenzierendes Finanzsystem? In der Literatur wurde über Geld in einer Weise nachgedacht, die von der Wissenschaft bisher nicht einmal ansatzweise überblickt wird. In diesem Band legen Forscherinnen und Forscher aus drei Ländern erstmals eine kommentierte Anthologie europäischer Texte aus dem 11.-16. Jahrhundert vor. Die Münze erscheint hier nicht nur als bloßes Zahlungsmittel und Hintergrundmotiv, sondern wird zum zentralen Thema und Handlungsträger. Dem Pfennig wird eine Allmacht zugeschrieben, die ein brennendes moralisches Problem darstellt: Das zeigt sich in Klagen über die Geldsucht unter Klerikern ebenso wie in fingierten Liebesbriefen, mit denen ein Schul- Hier bestellen: service@hirzel.de leiter ausgenommen wurde, in Dialogen mit Münzen, in ‚heiligen‘ Texten vom Kapital oder in Gedichten über den Zusammenhang von Geld und Liebe. aus dem inhalt Du Denier et de la Brebis | De dan Denier | Reinmar von Zweter: Zwei Sangspruchstrophen | Winner and Waster | Jörg Zobel: Zeitklage | Nummus-Katechismus | Theodericus von St. Trond: De fratre suo Nummo | Hermann Damen: Der Pfennig als Ehrenräuber | Geldevangelien | Balthasar Wenck: Pfenniglied | Georg von und zu Helmstorff: Zwei Lieder | Esbatement vant gelt | Unibos | Des Wucherers Paternoster | Der wucherische Wechsler | Hans Folz: Der jüdische Wucher | Kaiser Karls Recht | Boppe: Kein Geld, kein Held | Cecco Angiolieri: Zehn Sonette über Geld | Jean Froissart: Dit dou Florin | Geoffrey Chaucer: Complaint to his Purse | Ps.-Frauenlob: Falsche Liebe | Göttinger Liebesbriefe Nathanael Busch / Robert Fajen (Hg.) allmächtig und unfassbar Geld in der Literatur des Mittelalters relectiones - band 9 2021. XXIV, 368 Seiten € 26,90 978-3-7776-2748-9 kartoniert 978-3-7776-2938-4 e-book ISSN 0010-1338 Marie-Luise Goldmann: The Novella’s Everyday Peril: Reflections on Genre in Jeremias Gotthelf ’s Die schwarze Spinne Damianos Grammatikopoulos: Zwischen Schrift und Film: Franz Kafkas und Michael Hanekes Das Schloß Jakob Norberg: After the Collective: Judith Schalansky on Post-Socialist Patterns of Thought Edward Potter: National Identity and Gender: Reading Johanna Franul von Weissenthurn’s Herrmann (1817) alongside Johann Elias Schlegel’s Herrmann (1743) Martin P. Sheehan: The Reflex: Group Photography and Ritual in Pioniere in Ingolstadt narr.digital