Messenger Service: Hubert Fichte Writes History Karin Krauthausen Humboldt-University Berlin Abstract: Following his early death, Hubert Fichte’s publication project Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit (The History of Sensitivity) remained a fragment� The reader of the posthumous edition is not only confronted with a variety of genres (novel, glosses, paralipomena), but also with a programmatic heterogeneity, as well as with multiple correspondences between the different parts of the project. Connecting the various volumes is the theme of Empfindlichkeit (sensibility, sensitivity), whose anthropologically oriented project traces a path across the three continents Europe, America, and Africa, both historically and in the present� This paper asks what kind of historiography the various writing formats give rise to� Points of reference are Fichte’s narratives about the Casa das Minas, a temple of African-American religions in Brazil, and the assignment given to him by the priestesses of the temple to travel as a messenger to Abomey in West Africa� By examining this messenger service from multiple perspectives, Fichte’s conceptions of reality and History should be addressed in relation to four essential aspects: the engagement for the transmission of a foreign message (the assignment), the scholarly documentation of the history of a religious institution (Fichte’s Das Haus der Mina in S-o Luiz de Maranh-o ), the fictional narration with references to a historical setting (Fichte’s Explosion ), and the consideration of anecdotal transmission as a complementary ‘counter-history’ (Fichte’s “Afrika” in Psyche )� Keywords: African-American religion, anthropology, Das Haus der Mina in S-o Luiz de Maranh-o , Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit , Hubert Fichte, ethnology, Explosion , history, historiography, anecdote, messenger, transmission Acknowledgement: Karin Krauthausen acknowledges the support of the Cluster of Excellence ‘Matters of Activity: Image Space Material’ funded by 240 Karin Krauthausen the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy: EXC 2025-390648296� When, on December 10, 1984, Hubert Fichte arrived with Leonore Mau in the People’s Republic of Benin, this was the beginning of the last of many trips the two took together to the African continent� During this winter, they would travel for almost three months to Senegal, Benin, and Burkina Faso� As was their habit, they brought along complementary recording equipment: a camera for Mau, and pen and paper, as well as presumably a typewriter, for Fichte� The writer would continue his research on traditional African psychiatry and its reception by the European-influenced psychiatry of the Centre Hospitalier de Fann in Senegal, while the photographer would interpret this theme with her camera. In order to finance this trip, however, they depended on fees for illustrations, reports, radio features, radio plays, and the like (Gillett 58—63)� For this particular journey, which took place at the end of 1984 and the beginning of 1985, besides commissions from West German public media (principally the radio divisions of SWF, NDR, BR, SDR, WDR, and HR), they received an assignment from a further client (at least for Benin), but one that did not offer monetary compensation: instrumental in initiating Fichte and Mau’s trip to Africa were the vodunsi Maria Celeste Santos and Deni Prata Jardim, who with Amelia Vieira Pinto acted as the heads (though not m-es (mothers), since they had not undergone the necessary second initiation in the boat of tobossi) of the African-American Casa das Minas (House of Mines), a temple in S-o Luís, Maranh-o, in Brazil, whose tradition has its roots in West African religions� For with this trip Fichte was fulfilling a commitment that had its origins in the ethnological research he had undertaken in the Casa das Minas in 1981 and 1982, when, along with the Brazilian ethnologist Sergio Ferretti, he had conducted a series of interviews with the priestesses there as part of a project to document the temple’s syncretic, bicontinental tradition for a publication� The faithful of the temple are descendants of Africans brought to South America as slaves, and they practice a religious system that originated in West Africa and was able to survive in South America despite persecution during colonial rule and the spread of Christianity� According to legend, the Casa das Minas, with its orientation to the vodun (god) Zomadonu, can be traced back to Agotime, a slave caught in Mahi country who was valued for her religious and medical knowledge in the royal court of the Kingdom of Dahomey (now Benin)� Agotime was one of the wives of King Aglongo and the mother of the later king Ghezo (1818-58) but was sold to slave traders by King Adandozan of Dahomey and forced to travel to Bahia, where she once again acted as a priestess and healer Messenger Service: Hubert Fichte Writes History 241 (Obichere 11; Fichte, Haus der Mina 63—72 and 73—76)� Fichte’s ethnographic studies would give rise to the volume Das Haus der Mina in S-o Luiz de Maranh-o: Materialien zum Studium des religiösen Verhaltens (The House of Mina in S-o Luiz de Maranh-o: Materials for the Study of Religious Behavior), published posthumously as part of his multivolume literary project Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit (The History of Sensitivity)� When in December 1984 Fichte’s Brazilian interlocutors made him their messenger and sent him to Africa, then in a way they were correcting a fundamental asymmetry in the research situation, which Fichte describes as a “Situation der Entmündigung und Ausbeutung von Informanten” (“situation of disempowerment and exploitation of informants”) (Fichte, Haus der Mina 19)� The ethnologist is enlisted by his “informants,” who commission him to deliver a message to King Langanfin on the Bay of Benin. In short, Fichte settles a debt that he has incurred as a result of his inquiry into and his writing down of an arcane knowledge (the knowledge of the Casa das Minas)� This debt is also the result of the close link between ethnological research and colonialism in the nineteenth and at least the first half of the twentieth century. The fatal entanglement of scholarly research and violence goes beyond individuals and is part of the structures that Fichte writes against with his literature, without, however, being able to extricate himself from them� This situation is discussed explicitly at the beginning of Das Haus der Mina in S-o Luiz de Maranh-o : Der Frager in S-o Luiz de Maranh-o, in einer nachkolonialen, neokolonialistischen Gesellschaft, ist immer auch die Herrschaft, die nach einem Vergehen, einem Vergessen fragt und die sich fragend, wie Ödipus, selbst entlarvt. 1 (Fichte, Haus der Mina 17) Against this background, the transformation of the researcher and writer into a messenger can be neither a purely private nor a purely secular act - in the sense, for instance, that Fichte would render a friendly service to the Casa das Minas or would offer a return favor, negotiated in advance, for the interviews. The underlying power structures precisely cannot be resolved by means of personal or impersonal forms of equality or equalizing, such as can occasionally be found in a friendship between individuals or in a deal between business partners. In this concrete case, moreover, the difference between religion and scholarly research also becomes significant, a difference that Fichte cannot and does not want to overcome� While his research gives him access to the hermetic knowledge of the Casa das Minas, he is not and does not want to be an initiated member of the temple� In order to be able to act as a legitimate representative of the Casa das Minas, however, and in this role also as a mediator between the continents (South America and Africa) and across times, Fichte must be authorized by symbols� To this end, the heads of the Casa das Minas give him 242 Karin Krauthausen a necklace of colored beads with a ‘speaking’ (since ritually significant) color arrangement, one that can be deciphered by initiates� In addition, he takes along a tape cassette with a recording of traditional songs of the temple, and thus songs that were brought to South America by believers abducted from Africa as slaves� The reaction of the royal court of Abomey in West Africa is recorded in Fichte’s notes on this December trip, which are included in the volume Psyche of Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit � Here, the validity of this color and music code is shown, which, despite the temporal and geographical distance, could still be ‘read’ by the princes: Ich höre die zarten Stimmen der Mystikerinnen, drüben in der Sklaverei, vom Tonband� Die drallen Prinzen singen in die Töne der Greisinnen hinein� Sie nicken� […] Ich entblöße meinen Hals und zeige die Kette vor, die mich als Boten des Tempels am Amazonas ausweist� Der Hofstaat beugt sich über die Kette� Sie identifizieren die königlichen Perlen. 2 (Fichte, Psyche 321 — 2) The religiously skeptical Fichte assumes the role of an envoy of the religious community of the Casa das Minas, and thereby a foreign identity, in order to be recognizable in Africa and to be able to deliver the message� Furthermore, as Dona Deni’s messenger, the ethnologist is able to step back from his own epistemological and literary interests to become himself the medium of a transmission and the functionary of an assignment� For the program of the trip to West Africa was decided by the vodunsi in S-o Luís: Fichte should travel to the royal court of Abomey to obtain exclusive information from the priestesses there about the initiation ceremony for the vodun Zomadonu, the rite for the vodun of the kings of Dahomey, who according to legend came to Brazil having left Africa with the enslaved and abducted Agotime� In Brazil this ceremony was only performed in the Casa das Minas (Verger 189—90), which gave this temple its special distinction� The transmission of knowledge about this elaborate ceremony was interrupted, however, by the sudden death of M-e Andrezas� And because she was no longer able to pass on her knowledge about the ceremony, the temple’s survival was threatened� Yet the priestesses at the court of Abomey in West Africa - and thus the source of this religion -still knew how to perform the ceremony and were thus able to pass on this knowledge to the vodunsi in Brazil, in order to secure the survival of the co-original religious tradition on the distant continent of South America� While the addressee of this knowledge would normally have been Dona Deni from the Casa das Minas, Dona Deni was Messenger Service: Hubert Fichte Writes History 243 already too frail for the long journey and her knowledge of French (let alone of African languages) was too rudimentary to communicate with the princes at the royal court in Abomey. It was finally due to this situation that Fichte - who was neither an initiate nor a believer - was able to become the ‘bearer of hope,’ who would thus make possible the necessary transmission of religious techniques and prevent the temple’s demise� This unusual historical constellation provided Fichte with a double opportunity: if his messenger service was successful, he would, on the one hand, make history in a veritable way and, on the other hand, as the protagonist and - through the subsequent writing down - the author of such a veritable history, he would succeed in bringing his aesthetic program of a “strukturalen Realismus” (“structural realism”) (Fichte, Alte Welt 242; see also Kammer and Krauthausen 18—25) closer to a factual writing of a history oriented to History and present� The hypothesis formulated by literary criticism that Fichte’s novels (in Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit as well as in the early novels) conceive the function of the author as that of a “chronicler of our history” (Teichert 189), and thus align the genre of novel with that of “history books” (184), would to some extent be over-affirmed by such a coincidence of the writing of history and the making of history � Moreover, one of Fichte’s central poetic procedures, which aims not to describe reality in a traditional realistic manner but to highlight “the text itself as a historical process” (Weinberg, Akut 22), takes on a new concrete meaning in the messenger service, because in this instance it is the historical constellation that founds the writing� It is this multiple relation of Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit to history that will be discussed in the following� In Fichte’s publication project Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit , ‘ Geschichte ’ (‘history’) is named first, but not without a certain ambiguity. Overall, the novels of this series recount the lives of two fictional protagonists, the bisexual writer and ethnologist Jäcki and his life partner, the photographer Irma, over several decades, whereby equal importance is given to private, scholarly, artistic, and historical or local aspects� More concretely, the novels describe the successes and failures of Jäcki and Irma’s joint research in Africa and the two Americas and Jäcki’s personal and artistic development� Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit brings together a multitude of aesthetic, epistemological, and socially critical reflections, which are nevertheless always conveyed from the perspective of the central protagonist, and thus through the latter’s sensibility� In this respect, the history given to be read in the novels is the history of the lives and the development of two fictional protagonists, but it also refers repeatedly via the different encounters and the events described in the books to real events and real people (including the life of the author Fichte)� These are Entwicklungsromane with a 244 Karin Krauthausen realistic impetus - which is to say a literature “referring in intricate detail to a knowledge of the world and to nonfictional concepts” (Bandel, Nachwörter 206) - which seems to have autobiographical or ‘autofictional’ connections with the lives of Mau and Fichte, but via an account that, on the one hand, “frequently operates with unresolved abbreviations and allusions” (Bandel, Nachwörter 206) and, on the other hand, relies on an emotionally and intellectually involved and therefore unreliable focalizer ( Jäcki)� In this respect, the novels of Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit are primarily perfectly formed narrative prose� Nevertheless, in his poetological statements, the author claims to realize in his writing an element opposed to the arbitrary, singular, and fictional, namely a general and well-founded validity that he calls the “anthropological dimension”: Die Art meines Arbeitens geht dahin, daß - da es mir um eine anthropologische Dimension auch in den Romanen geht, es ging mir immer um Realität, wie sie wirklich gewesen war, […] - die dargestellten Situationen mit den von mir erlebten Situationen identisch sind� Das heißt aber keineswegs, daß ich mich in meinen Romanen nur für mich selbst interessierte� Ich habe wie wenige Schriftsteller vorgefundenes, provoziertes Material, Lebensläufe zu erstellen, nachzustellen versucht� Ich habe ganze Schichten von Kultur, die auf den ersten Blick nichts miteinander zu tun haben, in meine Literatur hineingezogen - wie die afroamerikanischen Religionen, wie die afrikanische Psychiatrie -, also glaube ich nicht, daß man mir einschränkend den Vorwurf machen kann, ich interessierte mich nur für mich selbst� […] Meine Arbeitsmethode neigt dazu, sehr genau bestimmte Details, psychische, soziologische, soziale, ethologische Details aus einem Leben zu transkribieren, und deshalb rekurriere ich natürlich oft auf eigenes Material; weil mir dies am besten bekannt ist, nicht aus einer psychischen Notwendigkeit, sondern aus einer poetologischen Notwendigkeit heraus� 3 (Fichte interviewed in Wischenbart 68) Accordingly, Fichte’s poetology aims, via the depiction of events, at a knowledge of reality - “Realität, wie sie wirklich gewesen war” (“reality as it had really been”)� This applies not only to the novels but probably even more to the texts that are included in Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit as “glosses” ( Glossen ) and “paralipomena” ( Paralipomena ), which contain Fichte’s research and diary-like notes, and thus the ‘material’ of the novels� The glosses volumes in particular are per se nonfictional material that nevertheless appears highly perspectivized and annotated, leading to a hybridization or to an “interpenetration of a rhetoric of fiction and a rhetoric of fact” (Bandel, Nachwörter 191)� The history negotiated in the novels of Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit is in sum - that is, in the context of all volumes of the series - arguably more than the biography of a specific individual, whether the latter is connoted fictionally, autobiographically, or autofictionally. Based on the model of Jäcki/ Fichte and Messenger Service: Hubert Fichte Writes History 245 in a consistently form-conscious manner, the publication series formulates the synopsis of an individual in a physical and psychical relationality to the world but aims (also) at the representation of a historical subject� In this respect, Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit does indeed refer to the history of a sensitivity (in the second half of the twentieth century), whereby the exemplary and model-forming individual Jäcki/ Fichte is approximately situated as a white German researcher and artist, but not normalized as an everyman - that becomes clear in particular through the many allusions to Jäcki’s (and Fichte’s) bisexuality and the recollections of his persecution (as a half-Jewish child in National Socialist Germany and as a homosexual in the German Federal Republic until 1969/ 1994)� In this respect, it can be said that the volumes of Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit aim at a realism that combines the nonconceptual descriptiveness of literature with the reliability of the writing of history� To this end, three formats are chosen in the final, posthumously published version of the publication project: novels, glosses, and paralipomena, which in each case make possible different modes of the writing of history and histories. This includes a book with a documentary and epistemic approach such as Das Haus der Mina , which is based on interviews with the temple’s vodunsi Dona Deni and Dona Maria Celeste. Fichte’s ambition for this ethnological study is stated at the beginning; and in view of the difficulties involved in communicating arcane rites and the impending end of the temple, this can only be about the eliciting and writing of a conditional history: Ethnologie handelt Riten ab, die begangen werden� Der folgende Text handelt Riten ab, die nicht mehr begangen werden� Ein langwieriges Fixieren von Fragmenten und Sinterungen� Es ist die Archäologie einer Religion und einer Mentalität; Archäologie - das Sprechen von dem, was zu Anfang vielleicht einmal war� 4 (Fichte, Haus der Mina 5) A ritual, religious knowledge that is not passed on, and thus transmitted qua living practice and intra-institutional filiation to the future m-es of the house (and consequently to the vodunsi), is lost, and this loss will at least change, and possibly destroy, the institution� With his history of the Casa das Minas, the ethnologist Fichte is hence faced with an epistemological problem, which he addresses grammatically and poetologically in the above citation by including the uncertainty of the factual in his approach - “was […] vielleicht einmal war” (“what […] perhaps once was”) - and reflecting on oral communication - “das Sprechen” (“speaking”) - and thus on a medium used by both the ethnologist in his interviews and by the vodunsi in their own tradition� Both aspects are taken into account in his study, which assumes an unusual form for the discipline of ethnology� On the one hand, Fichte undermines the usual asymmetry between 246 Karin Krauthausen a scholarly metadiscourse and the oral citations of the informants embedded in it and, on the other hand, integrates the history of his research into the account of the history of the Casa das Minas� In the following I will briefly discuss both representational strategies, since both are crucial to the way in which Fichte writes history in a scholarly-factual format� The materials gathered in the study Das Haus der Mina are the conversations with the heads of the house, and Fichte reproduces their statements in detail without filtering them through his own theoretical reflections. Although Fichte does insert chapter numbers, headings, and subheadings to sort the statements of Dona Deni and Dona Maria Celeste according to different criteria (such as ethnological procedure; a biographical history of Dona Deni; a history of the founder Agotime, of the house, the function of drums, of the gods, of the layout of the house and garden, the life cycle and cycle of the year, festivals, the songs of the house), within the chapters the text consists almost exclusively of a collage of the direct speech (annotated and translated into German by Fichte) of the protagonists: the vodunsi and, in particular, Dona Deni, who goes by the religious name of Silver Garden (Silbergarten). This is quite remarkable, since the speech of the priestesses in this way becomes dominant in the book - which is to say that their statements are not simply inserted into the ethnologist’s argumentation in the form of evidential citation� While this does not redress the imbalance of scholarly inquiry, the voices of the interviewees are at least no longer entirely straightjacketed by the writing of the Occidental human sciences� For instance, the contradictions or omissions in the vodunsi’s explanations are still discernible in the published study, and the conditional horizon of the elicited history of the Casa das Minas is always kept present� Fichte’s procedure thus ultimately sabotages what Michel de Certeau has called the ‘ethnological form,’ which for de Certeau can be considered as a symptom of modernity� In his book L’invention du quotidien: Arts de faire , published in 1980, de Certeau investigates the relation between orality and writing and shows that, since the seventeenth century, their distinction has become an essential criterion and assumed a “mythical value” (de Certeau 133)� As a result, the cult of writing has reorganized all areas of knowledge -particularly the emerging sciences - according to the principle of a productive reason, into which the oral enters only as a domesticated citation� This rationality of writing is based, then, on the hypostasizing and devaluing of a prior speaking: the speech of the so-called savage or mad, or the speech of the unconscious� Ethnology stands not alone but paradigmatically for this appropriation of oral speech by a writing-based reason insofar as it is defined by the recording of the speech of others. Accordingly, de Certeau designates every procedure that purports to appropriate qua writing an oral that is unconscious of itself as an “‘ethnological’ form ” (de Certeau 64)� Messenger Service: Hubert Fichte Writes History 247 Fichte’s text, however, not only avoids the relativization of the speech of his interlocutors (the vodunsi); it also points to what is non-self-evident in this speech, and thus to the impetus behind it: the questioner. While Fichte himself is not heard in the corresponding chapters, he remains perceptible in the text as a blind spot, as can be seen in the following passage from the chapter “Die Götter” (The Gods): Deni: Die Vodun essen, trinken, schlafen nicht� Es gibt ungebildete und zivilisierte� Einige jagen gern Furcht ein� Das ist ein solcher Schock, daß die Gläubigen dann ins Krankenhaus müssen� Ich kann mich ihnen nicht vergleichen� Sie wissen viel mehr� Die Vodun richten sich nicht nach der Blutsverwandtschaft� Die Tochter trägt keinen Vodun aus derselben Familie wie die Mutter� Der Vodun lebt nicht zu unserer Verführung� Die Vodun sind nicht unsere Angestellten� Wir können sie keinen Prüfungen unterwerfen, keiner Wasserprobe, keiner Feuerprobe� Wir können die Vodun bitten, daß sie einer Verfolgung Einhalt gebieten, daß sie eine Krankheit heilen� Die Vodun sagen, daß sie aus Afrika kamen� 5 (Fichte, Haus der Mina 159) Because the questions are left out, the lining up of Dona Deni’s statements assumes the form of a monolog in the grammatical first person singular (which sometimes speaks for a collective of believers), but one that is clearly elicited and in parts choreographed� 6 Thus, the various statements in the transcription are clearly linked to the speaking vodunsi, but the flow of speech is disturbed by an unknown element: the questioner and the compiler of the answers, who appears only indirectly� As a result, the direct speech of the vodunsi closely resembles the speech of a literary character, and, despite the grammatical evidence, the text is reminiscent of the ambivalent constellation of narration and speaking characteristic of the so-called free indirect speech of the novel (see Schäfer 204; Krauthausen 186). In this sense, one could say that it is Fichte’s poetological treatment of the empirical material that responds to the asymmetry of the ethnological situation - by not concealing this but by mentioning it in the preface and subtly undermining it in the subsequent text. 248 Karin Krauthausen This critique of the ‘ethnological form’ is also supported by another of Fichte’s procedures: the ethnologist includes the history of his research - that is, the concrete development - in the account of the research, and in this way draws attention to some of the conditions of its production, primarily the gradual and recurring character of the conversations� For this, Fichte chooses a structure that he describes as an “Anordnung von Größen” (“arrangement of variables”) (Fichte, Haus der Mina 19) in a coordinate system with two axes: on the horizontal axis (running through the book), the material gathered from the conversations is arranged to some extent side by side in chapters of equal value - that is the synchronic level. Within each individual chapter, however, the sequence of spoken remarks (on a single page and from page to page), thus the vertical axis, renders the temporal sequence of research - that corresponds to a diachronic level� Fichte calls this treatment of the ethnographic material “Strukturen-Schreiben” (“structural writing” or “a writing of structures”) (Fichte, Haus der Mina 19) - whereby he alludes to the structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, while also counteracting the latter with his own writing procedure� Rather than being systematically oriented - that is, geared toward the recognition and representation of ‘formal’ (or, in Levi-Strauss’s terms, universal and mathematizable) structures - Fichte’s study is empirical, historical, and self-reflective. Just as this is implemented by Fichte in his writing along a coordinate system, the aim is not to fix history, but quite the opposite: “Die einzelnen Punkte werden dynamisch aufgewiesen” (“The individual points are presented dynamically”) (Fichte Haus der Mina 19)� This dynamization is gained through the poetological treatment of the elicited material, since the questioning and compiling Fichte (i�e�, an empirical, situative, and subjective factor) is included mostly not as a speaking ‘I’ (except in the chapters “Vorwort” (Preface) and “Annäherung” (Approach)), but as the impetus behind the speech of others. To that effect, Fichte writes about his procedure: “Poetisch fixiere ich Zeitpunkte und bringe sie durch eigene Erfahrung erneut zur Bewegung” (“Poetically, I fix points in time, and set them in motion again through my own experience”) (Fichte, Haus der Mina 19). This can be seen concretely in the book in the way that the inquiry into the history of the Casa das Minas is dynamized through the particular form of representation (i�e�, through the unusual combination of formal arrangement and the narrative composition of direct speech), as well as perspectivized and, as research itself, historicized� In Das Haus der Mina Fichte realizes the writing of history as a Strukturen-Schreiben and thereby undermines the central opposition between ahistorical, formal structure and contingent History that characterizes Lévi-Strauss’s ethnological method in Les structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949) (Kammer and Krauthausen 52—70)� In this way, Fichte aligns in a new way ethnology with literary procedures (a narration that switches between Messenger Service: Hubert Fichte Writes History 249 first and third person), but without abandoning the formal understanding of structure� Regarding Fichte’s Das Haus der Mina , the literary scholar Manfred Weinberg has noted aptly (albeit with a concept of structure that differs from that of French structuralism): “The object of research is named here as both a structural and a historical phenomenon” (Weinberg, Akut 22)� Research of this kind, which is expanded both in its objects and in its procedures, poses a major challenge to scholarship, and this in turn has hindered the recognition of Fichte’s published studies on the Casa das Minas� Research results need to create links to disciplines; and in order to be effective and to be considered as consolidated knowledge, they need to be taken up and developed further in these disciplines� From this point of view, Fichte’s ethnological research is itself a messenger service: the history of the Casa das Minas not only has to be researched; the results also have to be published in the right media and formats, and in this way transmitted to the collective of scholars to be taken up and passed on by these� Fichte is of course aware of this: Ethnologischer Bericht geht von dem aus, was bestimmte Personen zu einem gewissen Zeitpunkt über eine - meistens von ihnen selbst definierte - Realität durch Informanten erfahren und glauben, übermitteln zu sollen� 7 (Fichte, Haus der Mina 18) With their anthropology-oriented field research in the laboratory of the biochemist Roger Guillemin, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar have shown that scientific facts are not simply found, but are first constructed as such through writing processes, social interactions, and the “accumulation of credibility” of the actors involved (Latour and Woolgar 197). In this sense, scientific knowledge is essentially based on the production and transfer of representations (visualizations and verbalizations), as these open up diverse operative possibilities and allow the formation of syntheses - precisely, “drawing things together” (Latour, “Drawing”)� At the same time, the transition from empirical phenomena to representation is not a problem for the realism of the sciences insofar as facticity does not depend on the treated objects themselves or on an individual scientist, and thus does not refer per se to an origin but is secured by “circulating references” and the hypothetical option of retracing these reference chains (Latour, Pandora’s Hope 24—79)� Das Haus der Mina can only be recognized as scholarly research when the referential representations are taken up and developed further by ethnologists� This has not yet happened, and the book is still principally known to literary scholars. What Fichte is able to do in this volume, however, is to address qua ‘genre’ and ‘procedure’ the reliability of History and the scientificity of ethnology� By assigning this study to Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit (i�e�, to a literary project), he invokes a horizon that allows multiple transitions between scholarly 250 Karin Krauthausen research, historiography, and narration - of which this volume is exemplary� If one wants to define this work poetologically, then it would have to be classified as a double historiography (synchronic and diachronic, formal-structural and historical) and, in sum, as ‘factual literature�’ Fichte takes up this double historiography again in his last novel, Explosion , written between September and November 1985� Fichte was still correcting this novel while he was lying in hospital, finally preparing it for publication - as far as he was still able before his death on March 8, 1986 - as part of Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit (see Kay; Spahr). The narration features the alternation typical for Fichte’s novels between paragraphs in direct speech (in the grammatical first person singular) and the narrative form of free indirect speech (in the grammatical third person, but with interpolated exclamations and other subjective utterances referring to the first person singular). The free indirect speech focuses throughout on the personal sensibility of the main protagonist Jäcki, and a significant part is concerned with Jäcki’s hopes and disappointments regarding his decades of ethnological research on and in the syncretic temples of Brazil - the course of this research largely determines the course of action� In this sense, the subtitle, Roman der Ethnologie (Novel of Ethnology), was precisely chosen, since this volume of Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit can indeed be read as a literary inventory on the rites of ethnology and the sensibilities of ethnologists� Because the last part of the novel describes Jäcki’s research in the Casa das Minas (and here too one finds interviews that appear in exactly the same way in Das Haus der Mina ), the Roman der Ethnologie and the Materialien zum Studium des religiösen Verhaltens can be understood as complementary writing formats with explicit thematic intersections� Whereas Fichte transforms his ethnological study into a work on transmission and - qua Strukturen-Schreiben - into a double historiography, in the Roman der Ethnologie he makes his interest in anthropology the essential “dimension” (Fichte interviewed in Wischenbart 68) and the central theme of the novel� As he explained in an interview with Rüdiger Wischenbart, his aim in this novel was not only to mimetically “reconstruct found, elicited material, life stories,” but quite fundamentally “to construct” these (Wischenbart 68; for the whole quote see endnote 3). With the help of literary techniques such as Fichte’s particular use of free indirect speech, and with the insertion of the ethnological interviews from Das Haus der Mina , and thus a genre-foreign type of text, the epistemology and epistemo-practice of ethnology is made experienceable in Explosion as a historically specific yet symptomatic interaction between people� The novel evokes and analyzes the science of ethnology as an exemplary anthropological situation, each modeled differently and spelled out in its various aspects through plot development. In Messenger Service: Hubert Fichte Writes History 251 the novel, ethnological research on African-American religions is expanded to the question of what constitutes human beings as sensual, intellectual, and social beings, but also how these beings change as a result of new experiences� Empfindlichkeit (sensibility, sensitivity) is presented in Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit as a changeable anthropological category that shows up in both the intimate (sexuality) and the supersensible (religion and magic), as well as in the human sciences� The issues around scholarly research in the novel are not only addressed in relation to Jäcki’s research, but first of all through the competition Jäcki feels toward the ethnologist Pierre Verger� Pierri (as he is often called in the novel) is a world-renowned researcher and taken from life: in the 1930s Verger worked as a photographer for magazines and for the Musée de l’Homme in Paris; from 1946 he lived mostly in Salvador in Brazil, where he befriended the ethnologist Roger Bastide, and in 1948 turned to the study of African-American religions� He was initiated into the Shango religion in Bahia and subsequently made regular visits to West Africa (including Benin, formerly the Kingdom of Dahomey), where he was initiated further and given the name Fátúmbí� Verger is famous for his research on the African roots of African-American religions� He has shown, among other things, that the vodun of S-o Luís (i�e�, the gods of the priestesses of the Casa das Minas) originated in West Africa and were brought to Brazil (where the religion was syncretically transformed) by West Africans sold as slaves (see Verger)� Jäcki is fascinated by the originality of this research, but he also identifies with Verger’s dual identity as artist (photographer) and researcher, while criticizing his third identity: that of a Shango initiate, that is, a vodunsi� In Explosion Jäcki understands Verger’s ethnological research as a contribution to the surpassing of bicontinentality: - Ja, das krönt schon ein Forscherleben, wenn man nicht nur zwei Haltungen miteinander verheiratet, die Unterdrückungsmimik des wissenschaftlichen Weltbildes und die kataleptische Starre des magischen[,] sondern auch zwei Kontinente wieder vermählt, Afrika und Südamerika� - So als schiebe der trockene Pierri auf dem Planeten die beiden pimmelförmigen Landmassen wieder ineinander� Dann gehören S-o Luiz, Bahia und Rio ja genau in die Ecke von Togo, Dahomey und Benin� 8 (Fichte, Explosion 154) The affective coloring of Jäcki’s reflections is clearly recognizable. The irony and hyperbole reflect his ambivalent feelings for Verger. While Jäcki seeks a proximity to Verger, he nevertheless distances himself from any prioritization of an African origin in relation to the syncretic African-American religions� Jäcki (like Fichte) appreciates every kind of syncretism, that is, every phenomenon 252 Karin Krauthausen formed from different forms of belief and life, and thus hybrid, and he appreciates the ‘bi-,’ which he understands not as a division but as a questioning of the logic of the one: Bi In Othmarschen über den Candomblé schreiben� Über Irma an Mario denken� Bikontinentalität� Eins ganz? Das konnte Jäcki nicht� Die Reinheit fand Jäcki furchtbar� Die Reinheit gibt es nicht� 9 (Fichte, Explosion 336) “Bi-” stands for “duality” (“Zwieheit”) and the “between” (Weinberg, “Struktur und Funktion des ‘Zwischen’” 173—84), which undermines the violence of normalization by setting categorial distinctions and entrenched logics of identity in motion again - which it does on different levels, ranging from the level of individual sexual orientation to that of social orders. Verger’s multiple affiliations, however, no longer contain a subversive element of this kind, since, according to Jäcki, they merely serve to increase privilege and power: Er [Pierri] trat ja nicht nur im Musée de l’Homme als Hexenmeister auf und im Apó Afonja als Professor des CNRS[,] in jedem Umkreis mit einem doppelten Satz von Privilegien ausgestattet, er war auch beengt verkrüppelt in jeder seiner Welten, bei Vicente hatte er die Schächtungswunden zu zählen, die Früchte neben dem geopferten Dackel mit dem Schmeil-Fitschen zu bestimmen, und im Musée de l’Homme durfte er wohl nicht die Einweihungsgeheimnisse von Menininha de Gantois aufs Band sprechen� Dies doppelt Beschnittene ließ eine Faszination vor dem Papst und seiner Arbeit gar nicht aufkommen� Pierri ließ seine Kameras verstauben� Das empfand Jäcki als einen Verrat des Franzosen an sich selbst� 10 (Fichte, Explosion 166—67) Verger’s multiple roles as priest and ethnologist (as well as artist) precisely do not lead to a bridging that could cancel intraand interinstitutional hierarchies� And nor are postand neocolonial asymmetries of power abolished in this way; rather, they give the Frenchman new advantages� And yet Verger is not the real target of Jäcki’s polemical critique of ethnology. Jäcki’s invectives are also the expression of his own disappointed hopes for a transformation of ethnology� And mixed in with this is repeatedly his bitterness regarding his own insufficiencies in this area of research� Indeed, over long stretches, the novel deals with Messenger Service: Hubert Fichte Writes History 253 the obstacles Jäcki faces, such as when he searches for the secret plants used for the ritual of the ‘breaking of consciousness�’ The loss of the old consciousness is the condition for the emergence of the new dual identity of the vodunsi, which is imposed by the vodun� However, when at the end of the novel Jäcki travels back to Europe and considers “[w]as hatte er nun als Ethnologe in den Händen” (“[w]hat as an ethnologist did he now have in his hands”) (Fichte, Explosion 834), he finds that although he has learned the three most important plant names, this is not enough to understand the breaking of consciousness: Wußte er, wie die Gehirnwäsche existiert� Wie der Mensch verändert wurde? Wie der Neue Mensch entstand? 11 (Fichte, Explosion 835) Jäcki is the most important protagonist in Explosion because he functions as the internal focalizer of the narration - however, not as a sovereign or reliable narrator but as an actor caught up in the circumstances� Thus, at no point does the Roman der Ethnologie characterize and criticize ethnology from a meta-position; rather, it sketches the reality of the researchers through the intrigues of the plot and in the “juxtaposition and contrasting of different statements” (Weinberg, Akut 21)� Added to this novel reality, however, are elements that through names and unattributed citations are linked to an extratextual historical reality and, within Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit , to Fichte’s factual literature� The latter occurs, since Explosion includes interviews that Fichte conducted in the Casa das Minas and published in Das Haus der Mina � And the former is achieved via, among other things, the protagonist Pierri, whose depiction, although not documentary in style (but rather perspectivized through Jäcki’s sensibility), still remains clearly related to the historical actor Verger and his work, thus opening up intersections to an attested history of ethnology. Consequently, the fictional Jäcki is not only placed in relation to the fictional character Pierri, but also to the historically attested Verger. Such procedures are specific to Fichte’s literary realism; in the case of the novel Explosion , one can speak of a grafting of factual formats and historical figures onto or into a fictional genre. Within Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit , this hybridization of the novel then also affects the volume Das Haus der Mina , which is committed to historical reality: factual literature and realistic novel become intertwined� If one wants to apply the constellation described above to the question of the writing of history, then it is true that Explosion (the Roman der Ethnologie ) is committed, via the abovementioned intersections, to real history (History), but explicitly from the field of literature. The writing of history is thus invoked in the form of scholarly research, but also given a particular shape through the narration of history and histories� In poetological terms, the Strukturen-Sch- 254 Karin Krauthausen reiben found in Das Haus der Mina connects with the program of a “structural realism” formulated by Fichte in 1967 (Fichte, Alte Welt 242)� The advantage of a writing configured in this way is that it can demand precision from literature without thereby being subordinated to scholarly conventions - and even less is it the case of an author stepping into the metaor power-position of one who must speak in the name of truth� For as harsh as Jäcki’s judgements regarding Verger and ethnology may be, Jäcki remains the protagonist in a novel, where he is repeatedly relativized as a subject of enunciation� Ultimately, Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit works toward a poetology of history by invoking and subverting (through the interrelation of glosses, novels, and paralipomena) the differences between the narration of a history and the writing of history: one/ many history/ ies and History do not coincide, and yet belong together� When Jäcki finally leaves Brazil to fly back to Europe, he has the manuscript with his research on the Casa das Minas in his luggage� In Explosion the protagonist’s final verdict on his many years of research is given in free indirect speech, that is, through Jäcki’s sensibility but with the distance of the grammatical third person: Jäcki hatte eine neue Ethnologie erfunden� Mit Lydia zusammen erfunden und mit Pierri dem Papst und der Päpstin der schwarzen Studien zweier, dreier, vierer Kontinente� Wer bietet mehr� Jäcki beschloss nicht viel Aufhebens davon zu machen� Er wollte seine Studien über das Haus der Mina nicht einmal mehr veröffentlichen. 12 (Fichte, Explosion 848) If Jäcki sees himself as part of a tradition that includes Lydia Cabrera and Pierre Verger, then his ambition for his research becomes clear: to work like the two famous researchers on the renewal of ethnology. He believes he has fulfilled this ambition with his studies (whereas Fichte’s reflections at the beginning of Das Haus der Mina are much more cautious and formulated as questions). What Jäcki also proudly brings back to Europe is a necklace that proves his status as a legitimate emissary - as a “Sohn” (“son”) - of the Casa das Minas: “Eine hübsche Kette, mit Perlen vom Königshof in Abomey” (“A pretty necklace with beads from the royal court in Abomey”) (Fichte, Explosion 848)� These remarks at the end of Explosion create intertextual connections to other volumes of Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit , including the glosses volume Psyche , particularly the section “Afrika” (Fichte, Psyche 279—510; here 299—339), which recounts Fichte’s trip to the court in Abomey; here, the researcher hopes to fulfil the promise he made to the heads of the Casa das Minas to deliver their message to Messenger Service: Hubert Fichte Writes History 255 the king� The glosses add another important form to the various modes of the writing of history that Fichte develops in Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit : counter-history� This will be discussed in more detail below� Fichte’s category of Glossen (glosses) already establishes a personal polemical tone, since in twentieth-century Germany, this genre denoted pointed and occasionally satirical commentary in journalistic media (in English, commentary)� This often-brief format can deal with a range of issues (mainly current events), and in doing so relies on subjective opinion and its emphasis, if not exaggeration� In addition, however, the term also refers to older, philological traditions, such as the medieval gloss, a brief elucidatory text placed either between the lines or in the margins of the main body of a text� In Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit , the glosses volumes should chiefly function as “eine Art des kommentierten Tagebuchs, des verwandelten, des fragwürdig gewordenen Tagebuchs” (“a form of annotated diary, a diary that has metamorphosed and become questionable”) (Fichte interviewed in 1981; qtd. in Lindemann 3), and thus provide a consciously ambiguous form for highly heterogenous source material, material that consists primarily of Fichte’s impressions from his travels� The entries are often dated and frequently mention encounters with historical figures as well as political events. However, this is counteracted by the subjective coloring of the entries and by remarks on the author’s sexual experiences� In the glosses everything - even the author himself - is subjected to an ironic, concise style, one that occasionally verges on caricature� Fichte’s early death has meant that the glosses volumes have not been worked through to the same degree; nevertheless, they are still able to contribute to the programmatic hybrid character of Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit , and thus to the deliberate integration of different types of text as well as the transition between fictional and factual types of rhetoric and genres (see Bandel, “Genese und Edition” 22—23)� The relation of the glosses to the novels in the series can be compared to the medieval function of the gloss as elucidation, whereby in the medieval gloss this takes place between the lines or in the margins, whereas in Fichte’s case the authority of the glosses volumes remains undecidable, which is to say that any absolute claim is avoided - therein lies their “questionable” character, which Fichte speaks of in his interview with Gesa Lindemann� The continent Africa, or what Fichte calls the “älteste Welt” (“oldest world”) (Lindemann 316) - toward which Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit basically converges after the journeys within Europe (the old world) and to the two Americas (the new world) - becomes a subject principally in the novel Der Platz der Gehenkten (set in Marrakesh) and in the glosses volume Psyche (see Krauthausen 169—72)� The notes on Fichte’s journey to Benin and the royal court of Abomey are found in Psyche , where they are dated December 10, 1984, to Feb- 256 Karin Krauthausen ruary 28, 1985 (Fichte, Psyche 299—339). The reception by King Langanfin and the court princes takes place on - of all days - Christmas Eve, but reflections on the journey and the royal court find their way into the notes earlier and are taken up again several times after the actual date� Fichte’s journey and the assignment that takes him there bridge the time stretching back to the abduction of Agotime (probably in the early eighteenth century) and the distance between the two continents� The information about the initiation ceremony for Zomadonu, which he has been asked to request in Abomey, would to some extent reconnect the African-American tradition of the Casa das Minas with its origins, and in this way save it� In this respect, the role played by the messenger Fichte is one of major importance� Unlike Verger, however, Fichte is not an initiate of the faith, and he formulates this contradiction between technical and religious authorization as follows: Es ist ein Wahnsinn, wenn man sich als Bundesdeutscher von einem Tempel am Amazonas nach Afrika schicken läßt, nach Benin, an den Königshof von Abomey, um den vergessenen Ritus der Königin Agotime und ihres Gottes Zomadonu zu suchen� 13 (Fichte, Psyche 300) The messenger retains a distance to his role and to the institution he visits� His account of events repeatedly turns into caricature - for instance, in his descriptions of the princes at the royal court, which focus on external appearances, to which he gives a heightened expression by means of contrasts (the “delicate old women” versus the “strapping princes”) and exaggerations� Fichte’s polemic is not aimed at individuals, however, but at the royal court, that is, at a hierarchical form of government and a non-egalitarian social form with its own history of violence: Am Hof des Palastes von Abomey hören die Prinzen die Lieder aus S-o Luíz de Maranh-o in Brasilien� Ich höre die Stimmen der alten Verbannten� Ich sehe die gewaltigen Leiber der Prinzen� […] Ich denke an die Foltern des Königs� An die zerrissenen After, die geschlachteten Nebenfrauen� Ich höre die zarten Stimmen der Mystikerinnen, drüben in der Sklaverei, vom Tonband� Die drallen Prinzen singen in die Töne der Greisinnen hinein� Sie nicken� 14 (Fichte, Psyche 321) While Fichte’s formulations are neither objective nor neutral (and certainly not respectful), they are always recognizable as subjective associations and assess- Messenger Service: Hubert Fichte Writes History 257 ments� Whereas Das Haus der Mina frequently strives for a cautious distance to the object of study and formulates theses and syntheses rather doubtfully, the glosses volume escalates and exposes the individual point of view and evaluation - for instance, when Fichte alleges that the princes are “greedy” based on their visible prosperity: Ich stelle mir die heiligen schwarzen Hindinnen vor, am Amazonas, für die Afrika das Paradies ist, Zomadonu der Heiland, und ich sehe auf die gierigen Prinzen mit ihren dicken Hoden, Bizeps, Backenknochen und ihrer Tirelire, Kasse mit Schlüssel� 15 (Fichte, Psyche 322) These disparaging remarks follow the princes’ dismissive response to the request of the vodunsi of the Casa das Minas and are an expression of Fichte’s emotional reaction to the justification for their refusal: while the ceremony for Zomadonu is still known to a priestess in the court, it is no longer performed due to the expenditure of time (the ceremony takes more than a year) and money. Here, the glosses volume quotes the direct speech of the princes: “- Es ist zu teuer” (“- It is too expensive”) (Fichte, Psyche 322)� Fichte’s invectives are a reaction to this monetary justification, and they are also an expression of the disappointment that with this decision the religious tradition at the court of Abomey will also come to an end� Accordingly, the source of African-American religions is threatened by the same fate as the syncretic manifestation in the Casa das Minas, which had nevertheless survived centuries of oppression: “- Wenn die Priesterinnen nicht die Einweihung für Zomadonu lernen, verödet der Tempel” (“- If the priestesses do not learn the initiation for Zomadonu, the temple decays”) (Fichte, Psyche 322)� It is this ‘decay,’ seemingly stated with indifference by the princes at the royal court in Abomey, that motivates the polemics in Fichte’s description� Fichte expresses the distance of the princes to their religious practice in a single word: Die Prinzen sagen: Initiation� 16 (Fichte, Psyche 322) The word used by the princes is a technical term from ethnology, and in Fichte’s “Afrika” it appears only here as a citation of the speech of the princes, and as such marks a break with tradition, one that has already taken place and continues to take place� Many pages later, after he has returned from the royal court, Fichte writes again about the reception, now expressing his criticism with a little more composure: “Es ist ein später, dekadenter, raffinierter Königshof ” (“It is a late, decadent, refined royal court”) (Fichte, Psyche 330). In these subsequent reflections, he also suggests in a small scene a possible reason for this ‘decay’ of tradition: the King of Abomey answers the vodunsi in Brazil with a letter that he 258 Karin Krauthausen writes “in der klaren mädchenhaften Schrift eines französischen Oberschülers” (“in the clear girlish handwriting of a French high school student”) (Fichte, Psyche 330). This unmistakably invokes an effect of the French colonial education system in Africa, connoting it negatively through the characterization of the handwriting (“girlish”) and of the king (“high school student”)� Nevertheless, the verve that Fichte puts into his polemic shows that what is at issue here is also his own disappointment: because the messenger of the Casa das Minas has not been able to save the temple, the writer and ethnologist will not be able to make history but will have to limit himself to writing and narrating history� So, when Fichte records this history in the glosses, and in doing so clearly overstates it, what kind of historiography is he engaging in? The discussions of private and intimate details, the use of defamatory language, and the status of the volumes as a publication from the Nachlass (posthumous publication) fundamentally shifts the glosses into the realm of ‘anecdotal historiography,’ and this applies paradigmatically to the episode concerned with Fichte’s messenger service� Anecdote can be understood as a “minima historia” (Zill 33), that is, as a minor form of historiography, which can nevertheless also give the impression of an ‘illegitimate’ historiography when, as in Fichte’s case, it polemically confronts - in order to comment on and correct - official History. Indeed, Fichte himself invokes the notion of anecdote, primarily in an essay on the literature of Jean Genet: Das Wort Anekdote kommt von Anekdidomi, Anekdoton und heißt: die unveröffentlichte, die nicht bekanntgewordene Schrift, das Unverheiratete - auf ein Kürzel gebracht: Klatsch� Prokop hat sie in Verruf gebracht, Grimmelshausen, Kleist, Brecht haben sie gerechtfertigt; Wilhelm Schäfer unterwarf sie einer nationalsozialistischen deutschen Geschichtsauffassung. Der Anekdote haftet etwas an von Herodot und Lisette Mullère� 17 (Fichte, “Anmerkungen zu Jean Genet” 313) The notion of anecdote can be applied both to official, grand history - for which the world history of Herodotus from the fifth century BCE is representative - and to journalistic satire in 1960s West Germany� Referring to the latter is Fichte’s mention of the name Lisètte Mullère, a pseudonym of the journalist and translator Georg Heinrich Balthasar Seidel, who used it for his satirical columns on current events� The original German name Lieschen Müller, to which Seidel was probably alluding referred to an everywoman and her dreams of social advancement (such as in Helmut Käutner’s 1961 film Der Traum von Lieschen Müller )� In addition, an even older tradition links the name Lieschen to a kind Messenger Service: Hubert Fichte Writes History 259 of humorous game of masks (as in Prinz Lieschen by Heinrich Moritz Heydrich, 1861, but which can also be traced back to the eighteenth century)� In “Afrika” Fichte is probably aiming at the journalistic satirical tradition as the horizon of anecdote, but there are other narratives in his glosses that take on the character of farce. As a relative of anecdote, Fichte also mentions gossip, that is, an unofficial, unverified, and mostly unverifiable communication comprised of subjective assessments� But in “Afrika” Fichte is primarily interested in the undecidability that distinguishes this kind of talk: “Klatsch ist falsch und wahr” (“Gossip is false and true”) (Fichte, Psyche 507)� Although the truth content usually cannot be determined, gossip cannot be clearly characterized as a lie either - gossip is characterized by its own referentiality, and this is the case even when it is integrated into a more literary form, as in Fichte’s glosses volumes� This characteristic of gossip has been noted by Jan-Frederik Bandel, who argues that consumers of gossip do not necessarily have to believe what is said, but they do “assume that the talk is of real people” (Bandel, Nachwörter 66)� Anecdote thus encompasses diverse modes of utterance that refer to reality in ambivalent but fundamental ways� Anecdotal narration is subjective and exaggerated, as well as occasionally entertaining, but without per se being classifiable as fiction. For Fichte’s glosses, this minor form of historiography is a way to concisely represent individually experienced and contradictory realities, and this can be seen in particular in the account of his messenger service at the royal court in Abomey� In the text “Afrika,” it is precisely the lack of balance in the account that can be read as evidence of the self-relativization of the narrator who sets out his experience - what is described in the glosses appears “questionable” (Lindemann 3), and this corresponds to Fichte’s strategy with the format of the published diary� In his essay on Genet, Fichte notes further that the task of anecdote is to give the biographical and individual as well as, generally, the illegitimate a place in the recognized general� According to Fichte, the “Wissenschaften vom Menschen” (“sciences of man”) fulfil this task only to a limited degree, since, while they have recourse to the intimate detail, they forget to deploy the medium of transmission (language) in all its possibilities - as literature is able to do, which nevertheless rejects the biographical: Das Biographische, der Psychologismus, Beschreibungsliteratur sind Schriftstellern der Nachkriegszeit verdächtig - in Frankreich ebenso wie in der Bundesrepublik und in Österreich. […] Zur selben Zeit geschieht durch die Popularisierung der Werke Freuds in den Wissenschaften vom Menschen das Umgekehrte: 260 Karin Krauthausen Von “Traumdeutung” und Psychoanalyse ausgehend wird jedes unveröffentlichte Detail hervorgezogen und gleichgültig für wichtig genommen� Existentialismus, Strukturalismus, Anti-Psychiatrie, Ethnopsychologie, poetische Anthropologie überziehen mit zähem Film die Realität, die sie zu analysieren vorgeben� 18 (Fichte, “Anmerkungen zu Jean Genet” 314) Hence, for Fichte, the documentary and the anecdotal are closely related, and in Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit he gives space to both in various forms of hybrid� Connected with this is the ambition to give the individual a place in the general, and thus to refer grand history back to the individual and his or her subjectivity - and vice versa� The name of Procopius, which Fichte also mentions in his discussion of anecdote, stands for just such an ambition to include the singular and unauthorized in historiography� In 550 CE Procopius wrote the official eulogies to the wars of Justinian I, but also an “arcane counter-history” (Zill 39), which has come down to us as Historia Arcana or Anekdota � This was only published posthumously, and for good reason, as it sets out a subjective and polemical counter-history to official history, and in doing so is unsparing in its stylistic exaggerations and in its invectives against the emperor� Procopius’s historiography of the imperial period published in his lifetime and his posthumously published Anekdota cannot be brought together in a synthesis; and indeed neither account can be assigned entirely to the poles of truth or falsehood, which is why historians to this day tend to draw on both sources� Anecdotal historiography cannot be denied factual reference, as the historian Rüdiger Zill points out: “Unlike the related form of fable, it is not least concerned with the real, even if this may be invented” (Zill 36)� This realism of the potentially invented applies also to the anecdotal narration in Fichte’s glosses, which as a whole establish a kind of counter-history� This unfolds its provocative effect not only in relation to contemporaries, that is, in reality (as shown by the reactions to the publication of the glosses volume Alte Welt ), but also within Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit , insofar as this creates connections to the other genres (novel, paralipomena) and texts of the series, but not necessarily in order to establish coherence� The inter-referentiality within the series affirms the realism of Fichte’s writing, but it dynamizes the referentiality of the textual elements� The writing of history (scholarship), the writing of a history (biography), and the narration of histories (novel, glosses) complement one another without forming a unified whole. But what position remains in this literature for the author? Fichte formulates a possible response in “Afrika�” Here, the ethnologist and writer is avowedly the messenger - and indeed “der doppelte Bote” (“the double messenger”) (Fichte, Psyche 330), since he must take the letter of the king back to the heads of the Messenger Service: Hubert Fichte Writes History 261 Casa das Minas in Brazil� As a messenger, Fichte overcomes the distance between the continents and the centuries, which he simultaneously recalls through his messenger service� By means of linguistic naming, Fichte links this messenger service also with writing - “Ich bin der Bote, aggelos, mit zwei Gamma“ (“I am the messenger, aggelos, with two gammas”) (Fichte, Psyche 330) - since the two ‘ γ ’s belong to the spelling of the ancient Greek ἄγγελος (aggelos), which differs from their pronunciation (‘ng’)� The word ἄγγελος stands for the messenger and, in the Greek version of the Bible, for the angel that mediates between God and man (by delivering God’s word - for instance, the angel Gabriel in the Annunciation)� Hence, ἄγγελος (messenger, envoy, angel) refers to a function, the directed and reliable transmission, and it is with this that the ‘I’ of the glosses identifies himself. But this places the function of the written notes (the text “Afrika” itself) in the horizon of a faithful transmission� This is true, on the one hand, because the writing ‘I’ of the text is traveling on behalf of the vodunsi Dona Deni and Dona Maria Celeste as the symbolically indexed - and thus the “declared” or “equipped,” but not the initiated or even begotten - “son” of the Casa das Minas (“Die greisen Priesterinnen am Amazonas haben mich zu ihrem Sohn erklärt und mit einer Kette und einem Empfehlungsschreiben an den Hof von Abomey ausgerüstet” (“The aged priestesses by the Amazon have declared me their son and equipped me with a necklace and a letter of recommendation to the court of Abomey”) (Fichte, Psyche 300)), who forms a link between the African-American and the African religion, and in doing so also brings in Europe en passant via his own person� It is true, on the other hand, because the emphasis on the “two gammas” of the written word ἄγγελος draws attention to the symbol γ (gamma), which in telecommunications engineering represents the measure of the difference between theoretical and achievable channel capacity (signal-to-noise ratio)� Hence, the Greek letter to which Fichte refers seemingly in passing designates the relation between ideal and empirical transmission, and thus introduces the question of the quality of the transmission into the text “Afrika,” thereby invoking this question for the text too: How reliable is Fichte’s text in relation to history? This cannot be answered unequivocally with the text alone: Fichte the messenger is traveling at the instigation of others, and in this framework is considered as an authorized speaker (for the Casa das Minas); but the glosses make use of the anecdotal, and thus appear as unofficial and unauthorized accounts� Yet the writing about the messenger service is still linked to the authorization by the Casa das Minas, which supports the referentiality of the narration� The authentication of the messenger and the delivery of the message also affect the status of the text that emerges via this messenger service: they activate its transmission function� Fichte’s desire to make history (to prevent the demise of the temple) fails, but leads to the writing of history, which in the 262 Karin Krauthausen glosses takes on the form of anecdote, and thus narrates a minima historia or counter-history, which addresses but does not objectify reality� The topos of the messenger in “Afrika” indicates that the narration of the messenger/ writer also remains subject to an external party, which saves it from the label of fiction, but at the price of limiting the sovereignty of authorship� The empirical and material saturation of Fichte’s anecdotal writing is secured via a chain of authorizations that is symbolically grounded: (1) the heads of the Casa das Minas authorize Fichte as representative and messenger, (2) the authorized Fichte can now authorize the message delivered to the king in Abomey, (3) the king recognizes the authorizations and responds to them with a transmission assignment of his own to the messenger, (4) the double messenger service authenticates the referentiality of written/ narrated history� This set of links depends on reliability not originality� Translated by Benjamin Carter Notes 1 “The questioner in S-o Luiz de Maranh-o, in a postcolonial, neocolonialist society, is always also the ruling order that asks about a wrongdoing, a forgetting, and that in the process of questioning, like Oedipus, exposes itself.” 2 “On the tape I hear the delicate voices of the mystic women, over there in slavery� / The strapping princes sing into the tones of the old women� They nod. / […] / I bare my neck and show the necklace that identifies me as a messenger of the temple by the Amazon� / The court bends over the necklace� / They identify the royal beads�” 3 “The nature of my work is such that - since in the novels too I am concerned with an anthropological dimension, I was always concerned with reality as it had really been, […] - the depicted situations are identical with the situations I experienced myself� But that does not mean that in my novels I have only been interested in myself� Like few writers, I have tried to construct, to reconstruct found, elicited material, life stories� In my literature I have drawn on whole layers of culture that at first sight have nothing to do with one another, like African-American religions, like African psychiatry� So I don’t think that I can be accused in a restrictive way of only being interested in myself� […] With my way of working, I tend to transcribe certain details very precisely, psychic, sociological, social, ethological details from a life, and so I often have recourse to my own material - because that is what I know best, not out of psychological but out of poetological necessity�” Messenger Service: Hubert Fichte Writes History 263 4 “Ethnology deals with rites that are observed� / The following text deals with rites that are no longer observed� / A lengthy setting down of fragments and sinters. / It is the archeology of a religion and a mentality; archeology: speaking about what perhaps once was at the outset�” 5 “Deni: / The vodun do not eat, drink, sleep� / There are the uneducated and civilized� / Some like to instill fear� / That is such a shock that the faithful then / have to go to hospital� / I cannot compare myself to them� / They know much more� / The vodun do not follow blood relations� / The daughter does not carry a vodun from the / same family as the mother� / The vodun does not live to tempt us� / The vodun are not our servants� / We cannot subject them to tests, to a water test, / a fire test. / We can ask the vodun to put an end to a / persecution, to cure a disease� / The vodun say that they came from Africa�” 6 Miriam Seifert-Waibel has presented a precise analysis of Fichte’s Das Haus der Mina in S-o Luiz de Maranh-o and of its relation to Explosion. Roman der Ethnologie � In her understanding, however, the interviews are to be read as monologues that leave the questioner completely out of the picture (see Seifert-Waibel 110--11)� In my understanding it is precisely at the seams of the collaged quotations that the questioner (Fichte) remains recognizable as the impetus of the priestesses’ speech - but recognizable as an uncanny presence� 7 “An ethnological report takes as its starting point what certain people at a certain time learn from informants and believe that they should transmit about a reality that they usually define themselves.” 8 “- Yes, that already crowns the life of a researcher when one not only marries together two approaches, the repressive attitude of the scientific worldview and the cataleptic rigidity of the magical, but also remarries two continents: Africa and South America� / - Just as if the dry Pierri on the planet would insert the two cock-shaped landmasses back into each other� / Then S-o Luiz, Bahia, and Rio would correspond exactly to the wedge formed by Togo, Dahomey, and Benin�” 9 “Bi / writing about the Candomblé in Othmarschen� / Thinking about Mario through Irma� / Bicontinentality� / One, whole? / Jäcki could not do it� / Jäcki considered purity terrible� / Purity does not exist�” 10 “Indeed, he [Pierri] not only appeared at the Musée de l’Homme as a sorcerer, and in Apó Afonja as a professor at CNRS, equipped in every circle with a double set of privileges, he was also constrictively crippled in all of his worlds, at Vicente he had to count the slaughter wounds, to determine fruits next to the sacrificed dachshund with the Schmeil-Fitschen, and at the Musée de l’Homme he was probably not allowed to speak the initiation 264 Karin Krauthausen secrets of Menininha de Gantois on tape� / This doubly circumcised one did not even allow a fascination before the Pope and his work� / Pierri let his cameras gather dust� / For Jäcki, this was a self-betrayal of the Frenchman�” 11 “Did he know how brainwashing exists� / How the man was changed? / How the New Man came into being? ” 12 “Jäcki had invented a new ethnology� / Invented together with Lydia and with Pierri, / the two popes of Black studies of two, three, four continents� / Who offers more. / Jäcki decided not to make a fuss about it. / He no longer even wanted his studies on the House of Mina to be published�” 13 “It is madness to be sent as a German from a temple by the Amazon to Africa, to Benin, to the royal court of Abomey, to search for the forgotten rite of Queen Agotime and her god Zomadonu�” 14 “At the court of the Palace of Abomey, the princes listen to the songs from S-o Luíz de Maranh-o in Brazil� / I hear the voices of old exiles� / I see the powerful bodies of the princes� / […] / I think of the torture of the kings� / Of the torn anuses, the slaughtered concubines� / On the tape I hear the delicate voices of the mystic women, over there in slavery� / The strapping princes sing into the tones of the old women� / They nod�” 15 “I think of the holy black hinds by the Amazon, for whom Africa is paradise, Zomadonu the savior, and I look at the greedy princes with their fat testicles, biceps, cheekbones, and tirelire, their money box with key�” 16 “The princes say: / initiation�” 17 “The word anecdote comes from anekdidomi, anekdoton and means the unpublished, the writing that has not become known, the unmarried - in short: / gossip� / Procopius brought it into disrepute, Grimmelshausen, Kleist, Brecht justified it; Wilhelm Schäfer subjected it to a National Socialist German conception of history� / The anecdote has something of Herodotus and Lisètte Mullère about it�” 18 “The biographical, psychologism, descriptive literature are suspicious to the writers of the post-war period - in West Germany and Austria, but also in France� / […] / In the sciences of man during the same period, with the popularization of Freud’s works, the opposite was the case: / Beginning with the ‘interpretation of dreams’ and psychoanalysis, every unpublished detail has been pulled out and indifferently taken for important. Existentialism, structuralism, anti-psychiatry, ethnopsychology, poetic anthropology cover with a tough film the reality they pretend to analyze.” Messenger Service: Hubert Fichte Writes History 265 Works Cited Bandel, Jan-Frederik. “‘Ich möchte sie eigentlich nicht veröffentlichen’: Zur Genese und Edition von Hubert Fichtes Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit � Einleitung�” Tage des Lesens: Hubert Fichtes Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit � Ed� Jan-Frederik Bandel� Aachen: Rimbaud Verlag, 2006� 7—26� ---� Nachwörter: Zum poetischen Verfahren Hubert Fichtes � Aachen: Rimbaud Verlag, 2008� Certeau, Michel de� The Practice of Everyday Life � Berkeley: U of California P, 1988� Fichte, Hubert� “Der Autor und sein Double: Anmerkungen zu Jean Genet�” Homosexualität und Literatur 2. Polemiken � Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit. Paralipomena 1 � Ed� Torsten Teichert� Frankfurt am Main: S� Fischer, 1988� 310—48� ---� Das Haus der Mina in S-o Luiz de Maranh-o: Materialien zum Studium des religiösen Verhaltens zusammen mit Sergio Ferretti � Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit. Paralipomena 2 � Ed� Ronald Kay� Frankfurt am Main: S� Fischer, 1989� ---� “Afrika�” Psyche. Glossen � Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit (no volume number)� Ed� Ronald Kay� Frankfurt am Main: S� Fischer, 1990� 279—510� ---� Psyche. Glossen � Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit (no volume number)� Ed� Ronald Kay� Frankfurt am Main: S� Fischer, 1990� ---� Alte Welt. Glossen � Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit. Vol� V� Ed� Wolfgang Wangenheim and Ronald Kay� Frankfurt am Main: S� Fischer, 1992� ---� Explosion. Roman der Ethnologie � Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit. Vol� VI� Ed� Ronald Kay� Frankfurt am Main: S� Fischer, 1993� Gillett, Robert� Hubert Fichte: Eine kritische Auswahlbibliographie � Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 2007� Kammer, Stephan, and Karin Krauthausen� “Für einen strukturalen Realismus� Einleitung�” Make it real: Für einen strukturalen Realismus � Ed� Stephan Kammer and Karin Krauthausen� Zurich and Berlin: Diaphanes, 2020� 7—79� Kay, Ronald� “Editorische Notiz�” Hubert Fichte� Explosion: Roman der Ethnologie � Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit. Vol� VI� Ed� Ronald Kay� Frankfurt am Main: S� Fischer, 1993� 851—54� Krauthausen, Karin� “Fiktionen der Rede: Fichtes Annäherung an Afrika�” Hubert Fichtes Medien � Ed� Stephan Kammer and Karin Krauthausen� Zurich and Berlin: Diaphanes, 2014� 163—88� Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar� Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts � Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986� Latour, Bruno� “Drawing Things Together�” Representations in Scientific Practice � Ed� Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar� Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990� 19—68� ---� Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies � Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 2000� Lindemann, Gesa� “In Grazie das Mörderische verwandeln: Ein Gespräch mit Hubert Fichte zu seinem roman fleuve Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit �” Sprache im technischen Zeitalter 104 (1987): 308—17� 266 Karin Krauthausen Obichere, Boniface I� “Women and Slavery in the Kingdom of Dahomey�” Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer 65/ 238, 1er trimestre (1978): 5—20� Schäfer, Armin� “Von Satz zu Satz� Stil und Schreibweise in Hubert Fichtes poetischer Anthropologie�” Ethno/ Graphie. Reiseformen des Wissens Ed� Peter Braun and Manfred Weinberg� Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2002� 201—11� Seifert-Waibel, Miriam� “Ein Bild, aus tausend widersprüchlichen Fitzeln”: Die Rolle der Collage in Hubert Fichtes Explosion und Das Haus der Mina in S-o Luiz de Maranh-o . Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2005� Spahr, Roland� “Eine Ästhetik des Fließens: Zum Abschluss der Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit �” Tage des Lesens: Hubert Fichtes Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit. Ed� Jan-Frederik Bandel� Aachen: Rimbaud Verlag, 2006� 73—99� Teichert, Torsten� “Herzschlag aussen”: Die poetische Konstruktion des Fremden und des Eigenen im Werk von Hubert Fichte � Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1987� Verger, Pierre� Dieux d’Afrique: Culte des Orishas et Voudouns à l'ancienne Côte des Esclaves en Afrique et à Bahia, la Baie de Tous les Saints au Brésil � Paris: Paul Hartmann, 1954� Weinberg, Manfred� Akut. Geschichte. Struktur: Hubert Fichtes Suche nach der verlorenen Sprache einer poetischen Welterfahrung � Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 1993� ---. “‘Die stupende und bisher noch wenig reflektierte Idee von Bikontinentalität und Bisexualität der afroamerikanischen Kultur’: Zu Struktur und Funktion des ‘Zwischen’ bei Hubert Fichte�” Medium und Maske: Die Literatur Hubert Fichtes zwischen den Kulturen � Ed� Hartmut Böhme and Nikolaus Tilling� Stuttgart: J�B� Metzler, 1995� 171—98� Wischenbart, Rüdiger� “‘Ich schreibe, was mir die Wahrheit zu sein scheint’: Ein Gespräch mit Hubert Fichte�” Text + Kritik 72 (1981): 67—85� Zill, Rüdiger� “Minima historia: Die Anekdote als philosophische Form�” Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte VIII/ 3 (2014): 33—40�