The Spiritual Communism of Cruising: Theatricality and the Spectacle of AIDS in Hubert Fichte’s Roman Fleuve Richard Langston The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Abstract: If theater is defined by enclosed spaces where prescribed representations unfold onstage, then theatricality entails leaving the theater and its narratives behind in search of freedoms to be found in signifying the world anew� Whereas Hubert Fichte’s third novel - Detlev’s Imitations (1971) - features theater prominently in its stories, theatricality’s transgressions assume greater importance with his fourth, Treatise on Puberty (1974)� With The History of Sensitivity commenced that same year, theater and theatricality manifest themselves concretely in the closed spaces of love and fame, on the one hand, and anonymous gay sex, on the other� What love and fame cannot deliver are the sense of selfhood and sociability afforded by theatricality. This essay queries the fate of this tension in Fichte’s roman fleuve following the onset of the AIDS/ HIV in the early 1980s and the ensuing hysteria from its media coverage. Of particular concern is the affirmative place Fichte’s poetics reserves for death in the queer theatricality of cruising as well as how global efforts to visualize the epidemic destroy what Leo Bersani calls “ lived jouissance of dying�” Keywords: theater, theatricality, gay sex, death, AIDS, media If the interwar roman fleuve typically contained conservative narratives hostile to external forces like world war that resulted in the decline of the bourgeois status quo, then the decline central to Hubert Fichte’s later twentieth-century adaptation of the genre, The History of Sensitivity , centers largely on the end of public cruising for gay sex, which Leo Bersani once associated with the pleasures of sexual sociability (Hewitt 1111; Bersani 48). Nowhere is the decline of this gay sex more apparent than in the final volume in the main corpus of Fichte’s unfinished novel cycle. Published in 1994 eight years after Fichte’s own 288 Richard Langston untimely demise, Hamburg Hauptbahnhof: Register wastes no time announcing the time and place of this decline� “The misfortune,” chapter one begins, “was that Jacki was going through menopause when Hamburg’s central station was renovated” (Fichte, Hamburg 7)� 1 With the closure in 1985 of Central Station’s Wandelhalle, long known for its hustlers and tearooms, one of Jacki’s favorite cruising spots was suddenly no more (Rosenkranz 45, 68)� “Jacki walked up and down [the Wandelhalle] his whole life,” the narrator later explains, “and sometimes he frequented the tearoom with swinging doors located next to the international newsstand” (Fichte, Hamburg 23). Equally significant is Jacki’s admission that his body, too, had changed� By likening Jacki to a menopausal woman, the narrator implies that male hormonal changes have rendered him an “untainted Dirty Old Man” (13)� Like Fichte himself, Jacki becomes a middle-aged gay man whose sexual desires, virility and obsessions have waned so much that cruising at Hamburg’s Central Station has been reduced to merely “aimless walking” (13)� On both formal and substantive levels, Hamburg Hauptbahnhof is very much the register its secondary title claims to be� This register operates on multiple levels� For one, it indexes the passing of time and with it the confluence of unfortunate external and internal changes as they relate to the life of the cycle’s hero� On another, it catalogues what Robert Gillett rightly regards as Fichte’s “ideological programme set against […] Western heteropatriarchal hegemony” (Gillett 68)� And on yet another, it is a profound reckoning with death� 2 According to Bersani, what makes the gay sex that cruising gives rise to so remarkable is the impersonal nature of its intimacy� Not only do “[w]e leave our selves behind” in such fleeting moments of impersonal intimacy, he explains, but we also experience what he calls the “nonmasochistic jouissance ” of radical otherness (Bersani 61)� Thanks to the anonymity of gay cruising, all psychological and social differences are arrested and, as a result, otherness is not just “made concrete in the eroticized touching of a body without attributes” but sex also becomes a “ lived jouissance of dying” that “owes nothing to the death drive” (61)� For Jacki of Hamburg Hauptbahnhof , the thrill of this special kind of dying - Bersani calls it “metaphysical sociability” - gets eclipsed by the real threat of physical death, a turning point [ Wende ] that presages the end (61)� Taking stock of Jacki’s entire “post-war vita” in the form of keywords condensed into roughly two pages (Fichte, Hamburg 14—16), the narrator concludes neither with the hero’s old age nor what medical science today calls hypogonadism (16)� Instead, we learn that the specter of a new deadly virus - “Aids� / Look there! / The turning point� / The end�” - threatens to reduce Jacki’s life to the kind of hell depicted in Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (16)� “That’s no turning The Spiritual Communism of Cruising 289 point� / That’s menopause� / That’s not the end,” we read, not sure whether it’s Jacki or his narrator who is tormented by ambiguity and indecision (17)� What exactly is the turning point in Jacki’s life? Is the catalyst for this crossroads the train station’s renovation (out there in the world) or something that’s changed inside his body? When we learn that Jacki has inexplicable lesions on his body -“Jacki counted purple marks on his flanks and upper arms” - might not Central Station and menopause really be metonymic substitutions for a disease that resists language’s descriptive powers (11)? At the core of Jacki’s (and the narrator’s) conundrum lies a hallmark of early AIDS discourse, namely the vexed negotiation of borders between inside and outside as well as healthy and sick (Weingart 17)� No longer able to make such clear distinctions, Jacki feels himself banished from crossing the threshold that accompanies the rush from cruising� In the face of real death, lived dying becomes a thing of the past (22)� From Jacki’s initial untitled resume (chapter one) to the novel’s final two chapters on death and ghosts, the pall hanging over Hamburg Hauptbahnhof certainly invites comparisons with the nostalgia characteristic of the roman fleuve � In fact, existing scholarship confirms that such immediate impressions are not far removed from Fichte’s intentions to reroute the novel cycle beginning with volume seven, Explosion (1993), away from Jacki’s desire for the “gayification of the world” and the utopian sensitivity it promises and toward their opposites: insensitivity and failure (Fichte, Hamburg 15; Fuhse 52, 69). Should we, therefore, attribute The History of Sensitivity to the inherently conservative demands of a bourgeois genre? Or is the peril to West German gay sexual liberation posed by AIDS/ HIV beginning around 1983 the actual reason for the cycle’s downward turn, as others have suggested? 3 What if we choose neither? To steer clear of this harrowing strait between the Scylla of formal melancholy and Charybdis of defeatism and deliver thereby Fichte’s cycle to its rightful place in the pantheon of radical queer poetics, we must first take to heart José Esteban Muñoz’s claim that the utility of failure lies in the “generative politics” readers distill from it (173)� “Queer failure,” he underscores, can open up a “mode of virtuosity that helps the spectator exit from the […] lifeworld dominated by alienation” (173)� The historical conditions of failure do not, in other words, preclude the possibility of political readings of that failure, which may in turn serve as lessons for possible future action� There’s no denying that Fichte’s “private history” of gay sexuality ends in death, but his overarching poetic program - the “gayification of the world” as “world wordification” - provides the outlines for what will be established in the following pages as “queer theatricality” intent on resisting the globalizing regime of media representations, to which the early media spectacle of AIDS certainly belonged (Lindemann 309; Fichte, Homosexualität 410)� For 290 Richard Langston Fichte, queer theatricality - from the transgressive practices of cruising for sex to the author’s poetics of alterity - explodes the repressive spaces of containment and control, which reconstitute themselves at the end of Fichte’s life in the guise of the AIDS spectacle� Yet the freedoms associated with this theatricality are not without tension or conflict, for theatricality is never wholly divorced from the regulated regimes of theater where heteronormative representation resides� Indeed, theater is literally that enclosed space where Jacki’s mother tries to indoctrinate her son, which later reconstitutes itself in Fichte’s roman fleuve as love, on the one hand, and the institution of literature, on the other� As will be established over the course of this essay, the theatricality to be achieved by leaving the theater ends in death, yet in this demise lies the poetic conditions for a queer sociability that Georg Simmel once called a “spiritual communism” capable of withstanding not so much the virus as the withering effects of its spectacle� Picking up where Fichte’s debut novel The Orphanage (1964) left off, Detlev’s Imitations (1971) begins in the theater where Detlev begins discovering himself� Following their train ride back home from the Bavarian orphanage where the novel’s half-Jewish illegitimate child protagonist went into hiding, Detlev and his mother reunite in Hamburg with his maternal grandmother and grandfather, a card-carrying NSDAP party member� It’s early 1943, months before Operation Gomorrah annihilates the port city, and Detlev’s mother, still unemployed, yearns to catch her son up on the performing arts well beyond his reach during his time in the secluded Catholic home for orphans� “I want you to see an opera, and to hear the ‘Fifth,’ and a tragedy,” she insists, “we’ll see The Magic Flute , and The Bartered Bride by Smetana, and He Wants to Play a Joke by Nestroy in the Thalia Theater, and above all Iphigenia in Tauris by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe” (Fichte, Imitations 12)� Sure enough, mother and son take in a production of Goethe’s tragedy at Hamburg’s neo-Baroque Deutsches Schauspielhaus. Yet, as Hartmut Böhme keenly points out, “nothing is right about this peaceful idyll”; his mother’s identification with the play’s “reconciliation under the sign of humane ethics” eludes Detlev entirely (Böhme 344). Like the camouflage with which Organization Todt shrouded Hamburg to foil Allied bombers, Nazi-era theater involved rituals, Detlev quickly realizes, that purposefully “hide everything that’s a reminder of war” (Fichte, Imitations 1, 12)� Instead of indulging in the theater’s facade of propriety and denialism, however, he recognizes himself as an unwelcome interloper due to his absent Jewish father� Instead of identifying with manipulative Iphigenia, Germany’s woman of the hour we are told, he finds the matricidal Orest “the most impressive” of the play’s characters (14). And instead of reading the tragedy metaphorically as his mother does, Detlev weeps bitterly that the play’s parricide is a direct allusion to his mother’s true feelings for his father� By the end of the novel, Detlev’s high regard for “free theatre life” couldn’t be more different than his mother’s (239). Whereas she, like Hermann Goering before her, cherishes theater as a carefully policed enclosure where hegemonic illusions come to life, theater for Detlev always threatens to undo those very illusions (118)� This tension is painfully obvious when, for example, Detlev’s mother, after seeing an aspiring actor, Mr� Thiessen, tickle Detlev backstage, warns queer Detlev of grown homosexual men and the “forbidden” and “heavily punished” sex acts they do (143)� Theater for the mother is where heterosexual “love should be carried out in mutual harmony” (142)� For Detlev, it’s where homosexuals (like himself), otherwise barred from acts of humane reconciliation, can even play the role of Christ Child on stage (155)� Detlev’s perversion of theater’s dissimulations only intensifies with time. After declaring in Detlev’s Imitations that he, too, “want[s] to become an actor” (130), he practices Goethe’s tragedy with the very same Mr� Thiessen who tickles him. “I am Orethteth,” he intones with a queer lisp to his mother’s dismay (138)� “Why must my child play the matricide and read him in front of me,” she protests, recognizing herself the irony of her son’s role (139)� Whereas his mother’s own theatrical ambitions are demoted from being an extra at Hamburg’s Thalia Theater to a mere prompter at the Harburger Theater, Detlev’s career as a child actor takes off. After substituting for another child actor in Lessing’s Nathan the Wise , he declares “Now I’m stepping into the history of world theatre” (148)� What Detlev means exactly by Welttheater becomes increasingly clear later in Versuch über die Pubertät [“Treatise on Puberty”] (1974), in which the juxtaposition of the younger Detlev and his older liberated alter ego Jacki give way to a defiantly self-reflexive first-person narrator. Yet Versuch über die Pubertät is anything but a unification of past selves. “I, I say, would never write a book in the first-person singular,” the narrator declares early in chapter one (Fichte, Versuch 36)� Such a point of view, he adds, is too much like that of a totalizing omniscient panopticon� “Enlightened, unmagical and mendacious,” it only knows of itself and relegates everything to the past at the cost of the present (37)� In his reading of Plato’s deep mistrust of theater in The Republic , Samuel Weber reminds us that imitation so central to theatrical mimesis “destroys the self-identity of the ‘same’ and the fixity of values” (Weber 38). Not far removed from the doctrine of camouflage operative the night Detlev saw Iphigenia in Tauris , this destructive imitation, which Detlev initially learns from Goethe’s Orest, is taken to the extreme in Versuch über die Pubertät � 4 Rampant imitation in Fichte’s fourth novel allows the protagonist to multiply his single self into many selves, some of which he calls “embryonic,” “Catholic,” “theatrical,” “constructive,” “Low German,” “peeing,” and “phys ed” (Fichte, Versuch The Spiritual Communism of Cruising 291 292 Richard Langston 64—65)� Names for past times and places as well as (in some cases) homophallic desires, these selves emerge from a web of recognition and attendant gestures that beget a consciousness of and being in the world� “I identify with the world� The world is me,” he triumphantly declares (65)� The narrator’s transposition of unrestrained theatrical imitation into prose is quite literally a form of coming out into a world of sexual sociability, on the one hand, and coming to terms with that eroticism’s proximity to death, on the other� For Plato, who likened the shadow play of the subterranean cave to a prison house, the transgressive act of exiting the theater entails a painful ascent upward to the world of sunlight and truth� This leave-taking, Weber insists, exerts the subversive power of theatricality, insofar as it “forsakes the confines of the theatron and begins to wander” in an effort to substitute theater’s “prevailing rules of [visual] representation” with language’s powers of signification (Weber 37, x)� Far from laying claim to yet another self-regulating space like theater’s stage, theatricality is “relational and situational,” an interstitial state of alterity far more concerned with processes of “placing, framing, situating” than those of representation and narration so characteristic of actual theater (43, 315)� What is theatrical then about Versuch über die Pubertät itself is the relationality it weaves between different gay selves that emerges through the novel’s five chapters. Chapters one, three and five focus on the novel’s adolescent protagonist and his intimate relationships during his years of puberty, while chapters two and four disrupt this flow by inserting dialogues with two other gay men, one older and another younger, whose life stories have seemingly nothing to do with the novel’s protagonist� What the narrator’s pubescent recollections nevertheless do share with Rolf Schwab’s (in chapter two) and Hans Eppendorfer’s (from chapter four) testimonies are, first and foremost, a sustained focus on gay love, eroticism and sex� Born several years before World War I, Schwab looks back from the year 1972 on a life full of fleeting trysts in an era when Paragraph 175 deemed gay sex a crime� Conversely, Eppendorfer provides on the eve of Paragraph 175’s reform in September 1973 eyewitness accounts of sadomasochistic sex parties from Hamburg’s burgeoning underground leather scene� Historical bookends that frame the protagonist’s own coming out and his first teenage flings (in chapter one), his long-term love affair with the forty-year-old actor and director Alex Kraetschmar (in chapter three) and his life as a shepherd with the androgynous sixty-year-old French farmer Aimé Testanière (in chapter five), the novel’s five chapters are effectively a prelude to the epic plans for The History of Sensuality to “depict the history of homosexuality since 1900” (Lindemann 309)� Subtending this anecdotal history of gay sexual liberation is the enduring presence of death in each of the novel’s five chapters. Not long after the imagined autopsy of Pozzi in chapter one, the protagonist’s first queer teacher of ars erotica, we meet Gerd Werner, the protagonist’s peer who plays Henri to his François in Sartre’s play Men without Shadows (1946) staged at Hamburg’s British Cultural Center� Married with children, the slightly older Gerd strangles the narrator to death in the play� For the protagonist who secretly eroticizes Gerd, his murder on stage is profoundly erotic, “the only short time my beloved touches me” (Fichte, Versuch 75)� Death consumes chapter three as well, in which the protagonist’s next lover, Kraetschmar, attempts suicide but, because of the protagonist’s intervention, experiences a resurrection that prolongs his life by another ten years. And in the final chapter set in Provence, France, the protagonist reimagines his employer, Testanière, as the ancient Greek prophet Tiresias from Sophocles’ Antigone who performs a candomblé death ritual using a corpse that doubles as Pozzi’s: “Tiresias lays himself on the body and kisses it to release the god from the cadaver” (297)� 5 Scholarship has done much to mine how Fichte’s Versuch über die Pubertät ethnologically reimagines the insularity of gay puberty in postwar Hamburg as a series of secular rituals, for which the syncretic religions of Africa and Latin America - Yoruba, Ewe and Fon - serve as meaningful forerunners (see, e�g�, Böhme, Braun, and Simo)� By refracting a geographically circumscribed intergenerational ars erotica through anthropology, Fichte’s novel makes good on its protagonist’s aforementioned declaration that “the world is me” (Fichte, Versuch 65)� While this worldmaking subtending the theatricality of Fichte’s poetics undoubtedly serves the political goal of opposing homophobia - “Perhaps so-called perversions,” he once asked rhetorically, “are nothing other than secularized magic rituals? ” - why it also features death so prominently is not entirely self-evident (Zimmer 117)� Neither Schwab’s passing anti-Heideggerian insight - death’s absence ensures our very Dasein - nor the rehabilitated murderer Eppendorfer, who insists that the ecstasy of self-sacrifice sometimes present in S&M leather sex scenes is, in fact, an “engagement with life,” neatly map onto the protagonist’s own life experiences (Fichte, Versuch 136, 260)� He doesn’t avoid death, nor does he engage in extreme sex acts� Revealing is, however, his cryptic reply to the coroner whose autopsy begins and ends the novel: “I’m not interested in dead people the way tourists are, but rather I’m interested in the disintegration of the image that defines me” (284). Implied is nothing less than the profound importance of death for theatricality and furthermore their opposition to the economy of the image. The death inferred here is not equal to the end of a human life per se. If theatricality amplifies imitation such that the singular self becomes atomized, multiplied and relatable, then these resulting selves are the result of a process (otherwise known as signification) that renders all visual representation inop- The Spiritual Communism of Cruising 293 294 Richard Langston erative. Theatricality is, in effect, yet another form of lived dying - or “metaphysical sociability” - that Bersani associates with cruising� Fichte’s interviews with Hans Eppendorfer (aka Hans-Peter Reichelt) included in chapter four of Versuch über die Pubertät were just the beginning of an intense period around the middle of the seventies when the sexual rituals in Hamburg’s emergent gay leather scene consumed the author’s thinking and writing (Bandel)� “There was a Swede there,” Eppendorfer recounts in Versuch über die Pubertät , for example, “who was not just whipped and pissed on, not just fisted and beaten, he was simply maltreated according to all the rules of the game” (Fichte, Versuch 255)� Prior to the (re)publication in 1976 of his interviews with Eppendorfer, Der Ledermann spricht mit Hubert Fichte (not to mention the debut of its successful theatrical adaptation later that same year), Fichte completed in early 1975 the radio play “Der Blutige Mann,” which he informally called his “leather collage,” as well as an essay on the Marquis de Sade given the same title (Rosenkranz 267)� Already in 1974, the year he embarked on The History of Sensitivity , Fichte envisioned an eleventh volume in the novel cycle - “Victoria Park: Essai über Sade” - named after London’s treacherous cruising area, for which the collage and essay were to serve as essential pillars (Fuhse 57—60)� That this plan was never realized - the aforementioned principal parts were nevertheless included posthumously in the cycle’s paraleipomena - is arguably indicative of the subordinate role S&M sex plays in the life of the hero in Fichte’s roman fleuve � “By dealing with sadism and brutality,” Fichte explained in an interview from 1974, “my books express neither a private inclination nor any secret admiration” (Zimmer 121)� If Fichte’s own relationship to S&M was indeed superficial as some have argued, then cruising for sex in public is arguably far more important for Jacki’s theatricality than any other desire (Woltersdorff 186). 6 Whereas the cycle’s last volume Hamburg Hauptbahnhof: Register recounts the rapid decline of cruising, volume two heralds Jacki’s entry into this world of impersonal intimacy like no other� Gay cruising, Jack Parlett has argued, is a “profoundly optical phenomenon, a perceptual arena where acts of looking are intensified and eroticized” (Parlett 2)� Parlett goes on to add that aesthetic artifacts of cruising are, nevertheless, not restricted to visual media like photography and film. Literature, too, can stage complex acts of looking involving narrative, character and reader analogous to the optical geometry of actual cruising in public bathrooms, parks and train stations, for example. This queer ekphrasis is certainly operative in Fichte’s paean to cruising set in the years 1961 to 1963, Der kleine Hauptbahnhof, oder Lob des Strichs. Already in scene three of the novel, for example, readers are roped into an array of gazes that emerge as Jacki strolls at night through one of Hamburg’s public parks, the Wallanlage, long known for its public sex� As he passes the Museum for Hamburg History, Jacki sees a man appear from out of the bushes. With Jacki fixed in his sights, the older stranger pursues the twenty-one-year-old Jacki, while he, in turn, looks up to contemplate what is very likely Karl Opfermann’s frieze of larger-than-life nude male figures entitled “Tänzerriege” installed on the northwest façade of the DAG-Haus� The narrator then directs the reader’s attention at the rainwater running down each of the vertically stacked figures, from their “stumpy penises and well-wrought testicles” to “the head of the next lower […] body” and then finally onto Jacki (Fichte, Der kleine Hauptbahnhof 12)� Even though this initial cat-and-mouse chase fails to produce a hookup, the triangulation of looks involving narration, characters and reader certainly fall in line with a long tradition of queer poetics intent on conferring the erotically charged optics of cruising onto the reader� On the importance of looking, Jacki reminds himself early in the novel, “Always start with the eyes� / The eyes are most important - not the balls” (50)� Looking in Der kleine Hauptbahnhof is, however, not limited to the fleeting construction of such optical circuits of desire. Vision is also that finely honed faculty essential for self-preservation� From the outset of Fichte’s novel, readers glean that cruising in the early sixties is a risky proposition� If Hamburg’s undercover vice squad weren’t enough of a threat already, then allusions throughout the novel to blackmail, robbery, assault and even murder committed by men also cruising Hamburg’s tearooms, parks and gay bars make clear just how fraught with danger the search for anonymous sex was� On his protagonist’s heightened state of awareness when cruising, the narrator notes, for example, “Jacki learned to close his foreskin according to slight clues: a twitching hand, a whiff of deodorant […], the teeth revealed by a smile…” (47)� The visual desire vital to cruising is written atop an ability to read for danger� Even if cruising is an optically dominant phenomenon, we would nevertheless be rash to conclude already that the visual field is also paramount for Der kleine Hauptbahnhof . In fact, the novel announces on its very first page that its primary concern lies with theatricality’s signification. Where does the word “cruising” come from? What does its semantic field reveal about the nature of cruising? These are the implied questions the novel’s epigraph addresses: “The German for red-light district [ Strich ] doesn’t come from the word Strich for line, dash or stroke� Strich comes from wandering [ Streifen ], from tightrope walkers, tramps, bums and hookers” (7)� To this list of social types, Fichte’s novel adds men who cruise for sex� Attributed to Fichte’s close friend and supporter, the radio play producer Peter Michel Ladiges, the novel’s epigraph announces a significant sematic shift; contrary to common parlance that defines a red-light district (like Hamburg’s Reeperbahn) as a spatially constrained space where The Spiritual Communism of Cruising 295 296 Richard Langston antisocial types cavort, the types associated with a Strich are, in fact, wanderers who inhabit, in Simmel’s words, “an in-between condition between […] being settled, or […] the nomadic” (Simmel, Sociology 588)� Far from isolating individuals, the wandering life, Simmel argues, brings itinerate people together despite “the differences that exist otherwise” (590). Acknowledging this “spiritual communism,” as Simmel calls it, is the first step in the protagonist’s pursuit of a language and an attendant poetics attuned to his own lived experience (591)� “Jacki believed,” the narrator explains in scene two, there must be a language, smooth as sand, a text that neither elevates the everyday life and behaviors of farmers, lunatic wardens, roadmen and bums above and beyond themselves nor transforms them into long-familiar aliens and predictable shocks, but rather gently - […] touches and turns such that forms emerge for several hours like the flow in the mud flats. And then the ebb takes them back out to sea again. (Fichte, Der kleine Hauptbahnhof 10) That the novel’s aspiring writer and habitual cruiser Jacki always replies, “I’m a farmer” and a rambling shepherd at that, when later asked by tricks and literary editors alike about his profession underscores just how much this sought-after language must ultimately apply to his wandering life as well (15, 92)� Read alongside Ladiges’ semiotic lead, Jacki’s stated poetic ambitions strive to counteract the ostracization of society’s peripatetics by forging through language a sense of this spiritual communism� What writing shares with cruising then is the latter’s desire to place, frame and situate through language an otherwise illicit sociability with and among society’s so-called perverts� Take, for example, Jacki’s imagined conversation with other men out cruising: - My name is Heinz� - Heinz what? - Heinz� And yours? - Jacki� - My name is Peter� And yours? - Rudi� - Jürgen� - What about you? (51) Whereas Fichte’s earlier form of theatricality forged sociability out of the atomized self, the theatricality of cruising is imagined as a literal form of assembly� Seen from this vantage point, the novel’s three interwoven narrative strands - Jacki’s exploration of Hamburg’s cruising areas; his intimate relationship with Irma; and his admission into the exclusive literary salon Gruppe 47 - present discrete, mutually exclusive arenas that the novel must reconcile for any such gay sociability to materialize� 7 Arguably the most prominent, time-consuming, and transgressive of these three strands is Jacki’s cruising� Like the teenage first-person narrator of Versuch über die Pubertät who yearns to have sex with all the schoolboys - “in gym class, on the way to school, in the arcade and the music hall, in the bushes and at the cemetery” (Fichte, Versuch 68) - Jacki’s sexual appetite in Der kleine Hauptbahnhof is voracious� Promiscuity’s allure notwithstanding - he declares at one point “I want to sleep with all the men in the world” (Fichte, Der kleine Hauptbahnhof 212) - Jacki repeatedly finds himself in love. He meets his earliest lovers in the novel through platonic acquaintances. His first affair is with Wolf, the son of Jacki’s music teacher. He meets his second flame, Arne, through a common friend. Yet these early romances unfold alongside Jacki’s urge for “nocturnal perambulations” through Hamburg’s cruising hotspots (24)� Cruising isn’t a threat to these romances so much as his lovers’ emotional objections to Jacki’s standing relationship with Irma� The moment Arne becomes jealous of her, he disappears entirely from the novel� Without a steady man at his side, Jacki makes cruising public parks part of his daily routine. Unlike the queer ekphrasis that accompanies his walk through the Wallanlage from scene three, the cruising in scene twenty-two refrains from composing any such geometry of erotic looks� Instead, it deploys language to name otherwise nameless actors and their hidden exploits along with the unspoken rules of engagement that apply to the unstable heterotopic space of the public park where nocturnal cruising takes place. After offering a smattering of sounds, smells and sights from within the shadowy bushes, the narration reveals that many men come for the gossip as much as the thrills: “- ‘Oh, Horst! ’ - ‘It’s you, Kurt! ’ [They] talked about Aunt Heinz and Herbertina and Little Otto” (48)� Those frolicking in the bushes discreetly are dismayed by the clamor for only so long, for they, too, end up gossiping after their dalliances about other men’s penises, gay diva Zarah Leander or cruising acquaintances decorated with pet names (65)� While some engage in protracted dialogue, others (like Heinz A�) commit to memory familiar faces well enough to avoid a second encounter to preserve the illusion of obscurity (55)� And then there are the flakes who purposefully arrange follow-up assignations only then to be no-shows� “Jacki came to every rendezvous,” the narrator divulges, “even when he knew long ago […] that Heinz, Peter, Rudi, Jürgen won’t show” (56—57)� Even though skittish men opt to share only their first names with one another, cruising for sex is, despite its anonymity, a profoundly social albeit impersonal phenomenon, Jacki realizes, one that is necessarily unpredictable, precarious and mobile because of the risks involved� Arguably a form of Simmel’s spiritual communism, the comradery of cruising that Fichte’s poetic theatricality names is, however, not enough to sustain The Spiritual Communism of Cruising 297 298 Richard Langston Jacki’s many selves, for it repeatedly fails to yield the love he also craves� After picking up the African American nurse Charles on the streets of Hamburg in scene twenty-six, for example, Jacki meets his new heartthrob for a second romp only to question their combability on account of Charles’s exclusively emotional ambitions: “Sex … is not the most important thing of all,” he confesses, “I want someone to love� He should only love me” (80)� Stood up for their third date, Jacki catches Charles with another man� With his “soul and heart” broken, forlorn Jacki writes Charles to wish him “every bit of unhappiness, suffering and illness in his gay career” (84)� As Jacki’s commitment to Irma illustrates, love demands closed self-regulating spaces not unlike those of Gruppe 47� “With permanent residency comes family,” he muses in reference to Irma’s apartment on Elbchausee (170)� Just as the literary institution’s “éminences grises” police Jacki’s entry into their exclusive club, Jacki’s commitment to Irma regularly includes cooking, reading, sleeping and having sex together, exclusive activities disturbed when Jacki’s tricks - first “the dark angel with the purple-colored eyes” (200), then the Italian bum Francesco (209) and finally the Hungarian epileptic Bernd (212) - and sexually transmitted infections (syphilis) intrude on their intimacy (204—05)� It’s no coincidence therefore that Jacki picks up many of these men in the second half of the novel at tearooms at Hamburg’s Central Station and hustler bars in St� Georg, for hustlers, Jacki comes to realize, want nothing more than money for sex� Not only does the reader learn that “Money was immaterial to Jacki,” but that he also believes “Hustlers were reliable” compared to the emotionally unpredictable, cagey cruisers out for a romp in the bushes (95)� Nothing is better for inhibiting affective attachments than money, Simmel suggests, for money inserts a “mediating stage” between a person and the object of their desires� As a result, impersonal associations as well as individual autonomy emerge free of “restrictive commitments” like love (Simmel, “Money” 251, 244)� In the context of Jacki’s cruising, Simmel’s ideal of spiritual communism - the telos of Fichte’s queer theatricality - is feasible only by dint of a medium capable of mitigating the pull of and desire for the fixed neutralizing spaces of a theater associated with either Irma or Gruppe 47� In the end, no attempt to conjoin theatricality with theater proves successful� Proposed threesomes involving Jacki, a hustler and Irma are as fruitless as expecting accolades from “Marcel Reich-Ranicki and Walter Jens” for Jacki’s planned homoerotic “book in praise of men” (210, 212)� In the end, Der kleine Hauptbahnhof does affirm Jacki’s three desires - we read on the last page: “He wanted to be sociable� / He wanted to be a part of Gruppe 47� / He wanted to make a world photographer out of Irma�” (226) - while formally underscoring that this affirmation is itself pure theater. Theatricality is sustainable alongside theater so long as another medium (like money) ensures the former isn’t compromised by the latter� For this reason, the logic of theater’s “imposition of borders” is indispensable for the theatricality that thrives in Fichte’s roman fleuve (Weber 315)� Yet the resulting enclosed spaces in Der kleine Hauptbahnhof - the novel’s ninety-one scenes - are themselves fragmentary, riven spaces short on self-contained narrative while rich in queer signification. To this end, Fichte’s novel operates much like money does, insofar as it, too, “gives the possibility of obtaining at a single stroke […] whatever appears at all desirable” (Simmel, “Money” 251)� For all its many explicit references to cruising, Der kleine Hauptbahnhof is no less concerned with death than its forerunners or the conclusion to The History of Sensitivity , for that matter� It should come as no surprise that the specter of death is especially prevalent in the novel’s focus on Jacki’s cruising exploits� At one extreme, there are nearly fatal muggings and frightening rumors of gay men murdered while out cruising and, on the other, Jacki’s own desires to be raped and sacrificed by a gang of deadbeats. Beyond such literal forms of death is also that lived dying Bersani associates with anonymous sex, which Jacki has with strangers like the aforementioned Francesco, whom he lures back to the apartment that he shares with Irma� With regard to their intercourse, for example, the narrator notes not only that “They cried out together in a fraternal outpouring” but also that “There was something murderous about it” (Fichte, Der kleine Hauptbahnhof 210)� These manifestations of living death are, Weber argues, one of theatricality’s hallmarks� If theater is where “life and death” are deemed “mutually exclusive,” then the spectral spaces of theatricality insist they be “inseparable” (Weber 189)� This intertwinement and the metaphysical sociability it engenders disintegrate in Hamburg Hauptbahnhof � Recognition of this decline emerges most clearly when the novel declares outright that its very own medium, the book, has died� But why? Entitled “The World Is a Book,” chapter three begins by mourning the demise of the Spartacus International Gay Guide , an annually revised vade mecum founded in Britain in 1970 that ceased publication in 1985 thanks to the publisher’s financial improprieties. The Spartacus Guide was “[a] book that came from nothing,” the narrator notes, one that “built itself up gradually” to become an entire world in which gay travelers could find “[b]ars clubs hotels baths beaches outside cruising” / all over the world” (Fichte, Hamburg 31, 32, 43)� Jacki’s account of the book’s genesis is, however, conflicted. At first, he proposes the Guide to be a culmination of other more modest forerunners like Incognito and Eos founded in the sixties� He then suggests that the Guide originated with Herodotus, only then to suggest that the British publication really began when the aforementioned stranger from scene three in Der kleine Hauptbahnhof approached Jacki in Hamburg’s Wallanlage with a list of gay bars in 1961. If these conflicting attributions didn’t sow enough The Spiritual Communism of Cruising 299 300 Richard Langston doubt already, then the publication’s exclusionary address lays to rest the true nature of its corruption: addressed to the “elite of gay travelers,” “rich gays” and “members only,” the Spartacus Guide is, in reality, “just an appendage” of the West’s bourgeois “armies of insensitivity” (44, 45). In a final parting shot of sarcasm, the narrator equates the “we” in “we are the men of the world” - a world constituted by the Guide , no less - as nothing more than wannabe tyrants, “little Caligulas and Neros” (45)� Diametrically opposed to theatricality’s aversion to closed spaces and their attendant narratives, the Spartacus Guide enlists capitalism’s processes of accumulation to map the entire world for its prosumers: “Tell us new information about new places we should see” (46)� With an eye to the new world order of late capitalism in the latter half of the twentieth century, Weber contends that theatricality’s search for ways out of the confines of the theater serves as a particularly incisive foil for interrogating the ideologies of globalization. Unlike the world, the figure of the globe is a visible and self-contained Gestalt� “‘Globalization’,” he adds, “is a process by which the world of possibilities is at the same time totalized and restricted” (342)� In other words, the processes of globalization ensure that “there is no longer any alternative to the not so new world order of ‘late’ capitalism and to the relations of power and hierarchies of subjugation that this order entails” (342)� This renewed form of theater and the globalized world it engenders is, Weber underscores, especially prevalent in media: “television above all, but also to a large extent the print media” (343)� The Spartacus Guide is but one manifestation of this globalizing shift� We encounter it, in fact, already in chapter one of Hamburg Hauptbahnhof when we learn how Jacki is consumed by reports in German print media (“ Zeit , Welt , Spiegel , Stern , Konkret ”) about unspecified “circumstances and conditions” that first appeared in print overseas (Fichte, Hamburg 11). Without question a reference to the first German reports from late 1981 of what would become known globally by 1986 as HIV, Fichte’s engagement with the totalizing effects of mass media reaches its conclusion in Jacki’s dialogue with infectious diseases doctor Johannes Fischer in chapter eight by suggesting that “cancer and AIDS can appear as a mental illness” (Kruse 306; Fichte, Hamburg 278)� Chided by some for implying that “‘psycho-hygienic’ misconduct” could be twisted into “recriminations” of afflicted gay men, Jacki’s assertion doesn’t deny the viral etiology of HIV so much as announce the media’s disastrous transformation of AIDS into a spectacle with withering consequences for cruising and theatricality (Weingart 148—49)� Written concurrent to Hamburg Hauptbahnhof , Fichte’s diary entries attest, in this respect, to a sea change beginning in the summer of 1985: Europe’s cruising areas dry up, while attacks on gay bars increase in frequency; instead of unprotected intercourse, condoms and mutual masturbation become de rigueur; above all, fear and depression grip many, while others, like an interviewed pimp, throw all caution to the wind: “I want to fuck […] and if someone says I’ll die in two days, then I don’t care either” (Fichte, “Materialien” 77)� Jacki attributes this paradigm shift, above all, to the Hamburg-based newsweekly Der Spiegel , which allegedly equated AIDS with an iconic image of industrialized death� 8 At the close of Explosion , which Fichte completed while on his deathbed a year after finishing Hamburg Hauptbahnhof , readers learn, for example, “ Der Spiegel […] now wanted to concentrate Jacki in its internment camp” (Fichte, Explosion 846)� The historical allusion to Nazi concentration camps notwithstanding, of greater import is the desire to contain homosexuals much like the theater of yore once contained Detlev� Yet this internment is complicated by the fact that “gays were dying of their own super-plague […] / Barbed wire was no longer needed to corral them” (846)� Ironically, the homophobic wish in Der Spiegel to contain queer theatricality within the theater of the camp is for Jacki redundant, for the infected gay body has become a prison house unto itself� Any exodus from this death sentence in the form of cruising would only ensure the virus’s continued transmission� Referring to Fichte’s programmatic essay “My Friend Herodotus” from 1980, Stephan Kammer and Karin Krauthausen have convincingly argued that the author’s poetics emerged in response to a twentieth-century épistémè defined by the interaction of heterogenous sundry mediums that include not only technical apparatuses but also semiotic systems, various institutions, cultural practices and forms of knowledge� What constitutes a medium for Fichte, they add, is resolutely oppositional: “a medium is,” they explain, “everything that ‘covers the world with signs’: everything that makes the world and these signs accessible, manageable and, above all, transcribable” (12; cf. Fichte, “Mein Freund” 410). Covering the world with signs is as old as cave paintings, Fichte acknowledges himself, but this anthropological propensity has advanced both qualitatively and quantitatively within his own time, he argues, such that sprawling publications like The Spartacus Guide - “Over 5000 gay spots / in over 700 cities and towns / in over 100 countries” - or the Sunday edition of The New York Times - with its “2�2 million words” - supplant the world itself (Fichte, Hamburg 43; Fichte, “Mein Freund” 381)� Thanks to the glut of words and images, mass media have transformed the written world into a globe of images in which the power of theatrical signification to “create and distort the world anew with words” has become eclipsed (Fichte, “Mein Freund” 410). Confined within this new theater of the globe, “the individual,” Fichte insists, “is no longer able to gain mastery over the written image of the world” (382)� Despite these unfavorable conditions, Fichte’s poetic counterprogram strives to recalibrate signification’s relationship to the self and world such that the “wordification of the world” allows for “the word to say I to itself ” once again (413)� Far from settling for The Spiritual Communism of Cruising 301 302 Richard Langston the acquiescence that globalization imposes (according to Weber), this “saying I” involves the enunciation of not just one but multiple selves both past and present that commune in a highly fragmented world of fiction distinct from the confines of theater, be it the Deutsches Schauspielhaus of Hamburg or the theaters of domesticity and institutionalized literature (Weber 343)� Under pre-pandemic conditions, the freedoms that Fichte’s poetics of theatricality desire can never jettison theater’s spaces entirely� As such, mutually exclusive impulses like desire and love, writing and fame, death and life are sustained as irresolvable tensions by dint of an aesthetic of fragmentation and juxtaposition� With the dawn of the AIDS media spectacle, any and all lived experience of this inbetweenness collapses� What, nevertheless, remains in the form of Fichte’s roman fleuve is the political act of abandoning the theater’s normative rules of representation and storytelling, of forging illicit associations between I and we under the watchful eye of the state, and reworlding the world through language following its transformation into a global of images� This is the blueprint for a generative politics subtending Fichte’s theatricality� Notes 1 Unless otherwise noted, translations are those of the author� Because English-language phonetics account for the a-umlaut in Jäcki, the diacritic has been omitted� 2 In this respect, the following essay parts way with Clarke, who relies on Böhme to attribute the ubiquity of death in Fichte’s oeuvre to the legacies of National Socialism� See Clarke 132� 3 Spahr suggests, for example, that Fichte’s admission in 1981 to end The History of Sensitivity with The Black City changed no later than the middle of 1984 on account of the impact of the AIDS epidemic on gay subcultures (77)� On the presence of AIDS in the final years of Fichte’s writings, see Braun 277—304� For Fichte’s earlier position on The Black City , see Lindemann 309� On the mass hysteria triggered by the newsweekly Der Spiegel and its sensational “Deadly Plague: AIDS” headline, see Tümmers 55—73� 4 On Orest’s importance for Detlev’s imitations, see also Böhme 344� 5 Other than Testanière’s aborted marriage and his fleeting report about same-sex practices in Turkey and Japan, little is revealed regarding his intimate relationship with the novel’s protagonist (Fichte, Versuch 290)� On the details revealed later in Hotel Garni (1987), see Braun 90� 6 This is, of course, not to imply that Jacki is simply Fichte’s alter ego� If the transgressive act of theatricality does inform Detlev, Jacki and the first-person narrator (of Versuch über die Pubertät ), as this essay argues, then Böhme’s insistence on their shared status as “‘in-between beings’ on the ‘stage’ of the text” that are functionally related to the biographical experience of the author is very much how the sexual preferences of author and figures must be associated (13). Divining this function gets us closer to Bersani’s ruminations on sociability than Eppendorfer’s existential ones� 7 Referring to evidence gleaned from the first five of Fichte’s eight surviving plans for The History of Sensitivity , Fuhse notes that the author originally planned three narrative strands for Der kleine Hauptbahnhof � It is arguable that in addition to these three, the novel includes a fourth dedicated to Jacki’s relationship to his mother (Fuhse 36—37)� 8 On the visual depiction of HIV in early Der Spiegel reportage, see Hübner 218—19, 232—33� Works Cited Bandel, Jan-Frederik� “Hubert Fichte, Hans-Peter Reichelt und der ‘Ledermann’: Zur Genese eines literarischen Projekts�” Forum Homosexualität und Literatur 47 (2006): 25—47� Bersani, Leo� “Sociability and Cruising�” Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 2010� 45—62� Böhme, Hartmut� Hubert Fichte: Riten des Autors und Leben der Literatur � Stuttgart: J�B� Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1992� Braun, Peter� Eine Reise durch das Werk von Hubert Fichte � Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 2005� Clarke, David� “Jäcki und der Tod: Melancholie und Allegorie in Die Geschichte der Empfindsamkeit �” Hubert Fichte: Text und Kontexte � Ed� Jan-Frederik Bandel and Robert Gillett� Hamburg: Männerschwarm Verlag, 2007� 131—57� Fichte, Hubert� Detlev’s Imitations � Trans� Martin Chalmers� London: Serpent’s Tail, 1991� ---� Explosion: Roman der Ethnologie � Ed� Ronald Kay� Frankfurt am Main: S� Fischer Verlag, 1993� ---� Hamburg Hauptbahnhof: Register � Ed� Ronald Kay� Frankfurt am Main: S� Fischer Verlag, 1993� ---� Der Kleine Hauptbahnhof oder Lob des Strichs. 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