eJournals Colloquia Germanica 55/3-4

Colloquia Germanica
cg
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
71
2023
553-4

Hubert Fichte and the Poetics of Syncretism

71
2023
André Fischer
cg553-40145
Introduction: Hubert Fichte and the Poetics of Syncretism 145 Introduction: Hubert Fichte and the Poetics of Syncretism André Fischer Washington University in St� Louis Hubert Fichte left behind a complex and multilayered oeuvre that still awaits broader scholarly reception. Despite his prolific output of novels, interviews, and ethnographic reports from the 1960s until his premature death in 1986, Fichte remains largely unknown in Anglo-American German Studies� This special issue seeks to change that fact by approaching Fichte’s oeuvre from various theoretical angles and by presenting Fichte as an author that speaks to contemporary debates about decolonization, racism, gender and sexual identity, as well as the role of literature as a medium to intervene into such pressing social issues� As the essays in this issue will demonstrate, Fichte achieves this multivocal textual form through a poetics of syncretism that manages to integrate epistemological, ethical, and even metaphysical concerns through a particular attention to the medium of spoken and written language� Born in 1935 as the son of a Jewish refugee, Fichte was a “half-Jew” according to Nazi legislation and grew up during the war in children’s evacuation programs before surviving the carpet bombings of his hometown Hamburg� After a career as a child actor, farmer, and shepherd, Fichte established himself as a writer at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin and the Gruppe 47 , where he read his debut novel Das Waisenhaus (1965)� His follow-up bestseller Die Palette (1968), of which he read excerpts at the famous Star-Club in Hamburg is often labeled as the beginning of German Popliteratur . As one of the first openly queer writers in Germany, Fichte wrote about the marginalized subcultures of gay bars and brothels and questioned the heteronormative culture of the Federal Republic� With his interviews with sex workers ( Interviews aus dem Palais d’Amour , 1972) and members of the gay leather scene ( Hans Eppendorfer. Der Ledermann spricht mit Hubert Fichte , 1977) Fichte established an ethnographic mode of writing that he would develop further in his interactions with religious syncretism� After the critical success of his novels, Fichte devoted himself to a project that sought to fuse a highly subjective self-exploration with ethnological research, which he conducted mainly in Africa and the Americas during the 1970s and 80s� Together with his partner and collaborator, the photographer Leonore Mau, 146 André Fischer Fichte published several volumes on African-American syncretism, before focusing entirely on his unfinished novel project Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit . In this multivolume text corpus, Fichte researched different belief systems, myths, rituals, and psychotherapeutical practices, which he echoed and juxtaposed in various textual forms, genres, voices, and themes in a utopian effort to “queer the world” (by the term Verschwulung der Welt he meant something like the cultivation of a more empathic society)� Although Fichte researchers have been active in Germany since the 1980s and generated a rich body of scholarship, his work receives little attention abroad� While Fichte’s intricate style and unusual thematic range may have kept him off the syllabi, the problems and contradictions arising from his “poetic anthropology” might be a reason for scholars to avoid him� The Western author’s white male gaze that fetishizes and sexualizes Black and Brown bodies, that exoticizes non-European cultures and subjects them to a universalizing research project, as well as the inherent continuities of colonialism in his work remain major obstacles for many readers, despite the sustained scrutiny these issues receive in Fichte’s work� More recently, the “colonial dialectic” of Fichte’s Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit has been subject to a large-scale and international exhibition organized by Diedrich Diederichsen and Anselm Franke� “Love and Ethnology” (2017-2020) aimed to reflect and discuss this colonial dialectic at some of the locations where Fichte sought to realize his fusion of ethnological research and self-reflexive writing, namely: Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador da Bahia, Santiago de Chile, Dakar, and New York� The actual list of Fichte’s transatlantic trajectory is of course much longer� What Diederichsen and Franke attempted and, at least in part, achieved, was to detach Fichte’s ethnological project from the context of national (German) literature and to work through its internal contradictions through a multivocal postcolonial critique. Despite their efforts to dissolve the discursive and institutional boundaries that limit a global engagement with Fichte’s deterritorializing poetics, the curators of “Love and Ethnology” could only sketch out a field that scholars and writers need to venture into� If, as various recent initiatives suggest, German Studies wants to leave “de[n] nationalkulturellen Stammtisch” (11) that Diedrichsen and Franke’s volume problematizes, then an engagement with Fichte’s work offers an opportunity to work towards more transnational, intercultural, and interdisciplinary forms of scholarship without abandoning the wealth of the field’s tradition of textual scholarship. Fichte’s preoccupation with Greek antiquity (Herodotus), Baroque theater (Lohenstein), or modern French literature (Proust) always fashioned itself as a revision, if not a rejection, of the (German) literary canon, while from Introduction: Hubert Fichte and the Poetics of Syncretism 147 the beginning he expressed his interest in ethnology as a form of self-experience� While traditional forms of classical myth reception are present in Fichte’s Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit , its predominant characteristic is a reflection of rituals in Western cultures through the study of religious (and other social) structures of African and Afro-diasporic cultures� Unable to ever escape the aporias of his project, Fichte worked through the colonial dialectic of his ambition to “queer and verbalize the world” ( Verschwulung / Verwörterung der Welt ) until his untimely death in 1986. The fragments of his work and the critical questions it raised, offers an opportunity to develop Fichte’s critique further. The essays in this issue will explore notions of ethnology, epistemology, myth and ritual, Baroque aesthetics, trance and theater, narrative voice and indexicality, queerness, theatricality, and AIDS, which are all crucial entry points for a broader debate about Hubert Fichte and the contemporary implications of his work� The opening article by André Fischer attempts to take Fichte’s epistemological intervention into ethnology seriously not just as a powerful critique of an academic discipline already in crisis, but as a, however fragmentary, model for a revision of the scientific method. The essay contends that behind its polemics, Fichte’s intervention offers wider implications for humanistic inquiry and epistemology when read in conjunction with the authors he praises (Herodotus), neglects (Vico), or attacks (Lévi-Strauss)� Fichte’s poetology draws from a rich and eclectic reservoir and adapts, appropriates, and distorts whichever terminology he finds useful to integrate. Stephan Kammer addresses in his essay Fichte’s conception of Baroque and contextualizes it within literary history as a distinct form of possibility ( Möglichkeitsform )� Instead of a literary period, Fichte’s Baroque, Kammer argues, is a transhistorical model of signification that simultaneously addresses representative and performative correlation between signs and things� Isabel von Holt expands on the theme of Baroque poetics in Fichte and analyzes his adaptation of Daniel Casper Lohenstein’s Agrippina as an aesthetic of regular irregularity. Baroque theater and ritual practices of Haitian vodou, von Holt demonstrates, represent suppressed layers of history that his poetic recovers as a critique of sexual conventions within Western modernity� The following two articles apply a media-theoretical approach to Fichte’s work� Christoph Schmitz centers the notion of indexicality as a means of disruption of narrative authority in Fichte’s 1968 novel Die Palette � The method to undermine the position of the narrator, Schmitz argues, is developed in the context of the novel and provides the foundation for Fichte’s later ethnographic writing technique. In Karin Krauthausen’s essay, Fichte himself assumes the role of a messenger in a transatlantic rewriting of history� Being sent by the priest- 148 André Fischer esses of the Casa das Minas in Brazil to deliver a sacred message to the court of Abomey in Benin, Fichte enacted a multilayered historiography of transatlantic religious culture� Krauthausen detects a “structural realism” in Fichte’s hybrid of documentary and anecdotal material that authenticates this history of Afro-diasporic religion without objectifying it� The final two articles focus on the epistemology and politics of sexuality in Fichte’s poetics� Stefan Breitrück expands on the epistemological potential of what Gert Mattenklott called Fichte’s erotology, namely the close relation of knowledge and sexuality, towards a concept of bi-orgasmology� As Breitrück shows in three distinct examples of Fichte’s autofictional sexual episodes, the sensations of gay, straight, and polyamorous sex provide an epistemological model for the programmatic sensitivity of Fichte’s ethnological project and his concept of syncretism� The special issue concludes with Richard Langston’s investigation of theatricality as a strategy to break out of the narrative conventions of the theater and confines of the spectacle. Fichte’s theatricality consists in his attempt to cover the world with signs and to overwrite the limitations imposed by mass media’s global signification. Against the very real existential limitation of AIDS and its media coverage, Fichte’s “wordification” and thereby “re-worlding” of the world provides, according to Langston’s reading of the Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit , a model for a generative politics towards a spiritual communism� Hubert Fichte is not your typical white Western outcast in search of adventure in the Global South� His work consistently faces the contradictions it cannot escape and thereby provides an important contribution for a much-needed “provincialization of Europe” and its dominant culture� Fichte’s canon is undoubtedly constructed from its remains: Herodotus, Sappho, Petronius, the Merseburg Charms, Camões, Lohenstein, Sade, Hölderlin, Platen, Proust, Dos Passos, Artaud, Döblin, Jahnn, Genet, Burroughs� However, his poetics of syncretism, of mixing and juxtaposing of what appears as discrepant or opposed may provide a model for scholars to move beyond the confines of “European culture” and to fragment our canonic catalogues� As relevant as a localization of Fichte’s work within the German literary public sphere of the postwar era remains - most recently demonstrated by Christa Karpenstein-Eßbach (2022) - the crucial task for scholars, especially those with a comparatist focus, will be to investigate Fichte’s texts and his poetics in relation to non-German and non-European artists, scholars, and writers� In other words, Fichte needs to be put in touch with his interlocutors, for example Zora Neale Hurston, Lydia Cabrera, Katherine Dunham, Glauber Rocha, Pierre Verger, Roger Bastide, Hector Hippolyte, Fernando Ortiz, Paul Gilroy, Maya Deren, Introduction: Hubert Fichte and the Poetics of Syncretism 149 Audre Lorde, or Wole Soyinka� This shift in focus has already begun as recent monographs by Roberto Strongman (2019) or Isabelle Leitloff (2022) attest. However tentatively, these studies indicate a new direction in Fichte scholarship in which the contradictions inherent in his work could be developed productively towards a multivocal transatlantic poetics of syncretism� The present special issue seeks to contribute to a broader discussion of Fichte’s work and to invite potential audiences to read and reread his books� Works Cited Diedrichsen, Diederich, and Anselm Franke, eds� Love and Ethnology. The Colonial Dialectic of Sensitivity (after Hubert Fichte). Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2019� Karpenstein-Eßbach, Christa� Das Gewicht der Welt und das Leben in der Literatur. Zum Werk Hubert Fichtes � Göttingen: Wallstein, 2022� Leitloff, Isabelle. Transatlantische Transformationsprozesse im “Black Atlantic.” Hubert Fichte und postkoloniale literarische Konzepte aus Brasilien und Kuba im Diskurs � Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2022� Strongman, Roberto� Queering Black Atlantic Religions. Transcorporeality in Candomblé, Santería, and Vodou � Durham: Duke UP, 2019�