German Visual Culture

GERMAN VISUAL CULTURE VOLUME TWO How does the visual nature of spectacle inform the citizenry, destabilize the political, challenge aesthetic convention and celebrate cultural creativity? What are the limits – aesthetic, political, social, cultural, economic – of spectacle? How do we explain the inherently exclusionary, revolutionary, dehumanizing and utopian elements of spectacle?

In this book, authors from the ﬁ elds of cultural studies, cinema studies, history and art history examine the concept of spectacle in the German context across various media forms, historical periods and GERMAN institutional divides. Drawing on theoretical models of spectacle by Guy Debord, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Jonathan Crary JENNIFER L. CREECH O. AND THOMAS HAAKENSON SPECTACLE VISUAL and Michel Foucault, the contributors to this volume suggest that a decidedly German concept of spectacle can be gleaned from critical CULTURE interventions into exhibitions, architectural milestones, audiovisual materials and cinematic and photographic images emerging out of VOLUME TWO German culture from the Baroque to the contemporary.

Jennifer L. Creech is Associate Professor of German at the University SPECTACLE of Rochester. She has published on German, Austrian and post- uniﬁ cation cinema, is the author of Mothers, Comrades & Outcasts: East German Women’s Films 1965 and Beyond and has published essays in the Women in German Yearbook and Seminar.

Thomas O. Haakenson is Associate Provost at California College of the Arts (San Francisco / Oakland). He is co-editor of the series German ( Visual Culture and co-coordinator of the Visual Culture Network of the EDS

German Studies Association in the United States. He has published ) EDITORS widely, including essays in New German Critique, Cabinet, Rutgers Art Review, German Studies Review and the anthologies Legacies of JENNIFER L. Modernism and Memorialization in Germany since 1945. CREECH AND THOMAS O. ISBN 978-3-0343-1803-7 HAAKENSON www.peterlang.com GERMAN VISUAL CULTURE VOLUME TWO How does the visual nature of spectacle inform the citizenry, destabilize the political, challenge aesthetic convention and celebrate cultural creativity? What are the limits – aesthetic, political, social, cultural, economic – of spectacle? How do we explain the inherently exclusionary, revolutionary, dehumanizing and utopian elements of spectacle?

series editors Professor Deborah Ascher Barnstone (University of Technology, Sydney, Australia) Professor Thomas O. Haakenson (California College of the Arts, USA)

PETER LANG Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien SPECTACLE

EDITORS JENNIFER L. CREECH AND THOMAS O. HAAKENSON

PETER LANG Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche National- bibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Creech, Jennifer L., 1973- author. Spectacle / Creech, Jennifer L. ; Haakenson, Thomas O. pages cm. -- (German Visual Culture series ; 2) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-3-03-431803-7 (alk. paper) 1. Visual communication--Germany--History. 2. Visual communication--Germa- ny--History--20th century. I. Haakenson, Thomas O., 1972- author. II. Title. P93.5.C74 2015 302.2’2--dc23 2014030995

Cover image: Dmitri Vrubel, My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love. Graffiti art on the East Side Gallery, Berlin Wall, in the public domain. Photo by Edward Kruger, October 2012. Reproduced with permission. Cover design by MCAD DesignWorks at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. issn 2296-0805 isbn 978-3-0343-1803-7 (print) isbn 978-3-0353-0654-5 (eBook) © Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2015 Hochfeldstrasse 32, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland [email protected], www.peterlang.com, www.peterlang.net All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed. Printed in Germany Contents

List of Figures vii

Thomas O. Haakenson Introduction: What is “German Spectacle”? 1

Jacob M. Baum Opening a Window to the Devil: Religious Ritual as Baroque Spectacle in Early Modern Germany 13

Elizabeth Otto Bauhaus Spectacles, Bauhaus Specters 41

Brían Hanrahan Live on the Air, Live on the Ground: The “Chamberlin Flight” as Spectacular Event, June 1927 75

Paul Monty Paret Berlin in Light: Wilhelmine Monuments and Weimar Mass Culture 101

Sara Ann Sewell Spectacles in Everyday Life: The Disciplinary Function of Communist Culture in Weimar Germany 129

Nadine Rossol Spectacular Settings for Nazi Spectacles: Mass Theater in the Third Reich 157 vi

Jennifer L. Creech Gudrun is Not a Fighting Fuck Toy: Spectacle, Femininity and Terrorism in The Baader-Meinhof Complex and The Raspberry Reich 187

Deborah Ascher Barnstone Spectacular Architecture: Transparency in Postwar West German Parliaments 217

Heather Mathews Beyond the Global Spectacle: Documenta 13 and Multicultural Germany 243

Brechtje Beuker The Spectacle of Terrorism and the Threat of Theatricality 269

Notes on Contributors 297

Index 301 Figures

Jacob M. Baum – Opening a Window to the Devil: Religious Ritual as Baroque Spectacle in Early Modern Germany

1.1 Mass of St Gregory by Wolf Traut (1510). 18 1.2 Medieval altar. Photo courtesy of author. 19 1.3 Medieval altar. Photo courtesy of author. 20

Elizabeth Otto – Bauhaus Spectacles, Bauhaus Specters

2.1 Photographer unknown, Untitled (Seated man in Marcel Breuer armchair later titled T1 1a), n.d., c. 1923. Gelatin silver print. Collection of the Getty Research Institute. 46 2.2 Albert von Schrenck-Notzig, The Medium Eva C. with a Materialization on her Head and a Luminous Apparition Between her Hands, 1912. Gelatin silver print. Collection of the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene, Freiburg im Breisgau. 50 2.3 Paul Klee, Ghost of a Genius [Gespenst eines Genies], 1922. Oil transfer and watercolor on paper mounted on card. Collection National Galleries Scotland. 55 2.4 Paul Citroen, Spiritualist Séance, 1924. Watercolor and pen and ink on paper. Collection of the Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. 65 viii Figures

2.5 László Moholy-Nagy, Untitled [fgm 163], 1926. Photogram on developing paper mounted on cardboard. Collection of the Museum Folkwang, Essen. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. 70

Brían Hanrahan – Live on the Air, Live on the Ground: The “Chamberlin Flight” as Spectacular Event, June 1927

3.1 Front page of the 8-Uhr Abendblatt, June 4, 1927. 82

Paul Monty Paret – Berlin in Light: Wilhelmine Monuments and Weimar Mass Culture

4.1 Adolf Brütt, Friedrich III, 1903. Photo courtesy of the Nordsee Museum Husum. 102 4.2 Photographer unknown (Osram-Photodienst), from the series Berlin im Licht, 1928. Gelatin Silver Print. Photo courtesy of Berlinische Galerie, Fotographische Sammlung. 104 4.3 E. Marcuse, “Berlin im Licht,” cover of Zeitbilder. Beilage zur Vossischen Zeitung (Berlin), no. 42. October 14, 1928. Photo courtesy of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz. 110 4.4 Photographer unknown (Osram-Photodienst), from the series Berlin im Licht, 1928. Gelatin Silver Print. Photo courtesy of Berlinische Galerie, Fotographische Sammlung. 112 4.5 Artist unknown, “Berlin im Licht,” Die Rote Fahne (Berlin), October 14, 1928, p. 2. 115 Figures ix

4.6 Naum Gabo, “Vorschlag zur Lichtgestaltung des Platzes vor dem Brandenburger Tor Berlin,” 1928. From Bauhaus 2, no. 4 (1928). The Work of Naum Gabo © Nina & Graham Williams. Photo courtesy of the Bauhaus- Archiv Berlin. 118 4.7 Artist unknown (Schmitt), “Licht, dein Tod,” poster, c. 1944. Photo courtesy of the Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University. 127

Sara Ann Sewell – Spectacles in Everyday Life: The Disciplinary Function of Communist Culture in Weimar Germany

5.1 Agitprop Troupe “Kurve Links,” n.d. (c. 1932). Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der ehemaligen DDR im Bundesarchiv, Berlin (hereafter, SAPMO-BA), Bild Y 1-371/81. 130 5.2 Red Front Fighting League, August 1925. SAPMO-BA, Bild Y 1-55/00N. 137 5.3 Antifascist men, Berlin, May 1, 1931. SAPMO-BA, Bild Y 1-11838. 144 5.4 Electioneering in Hamburg, April 1932. SAPMO-BA, Bild Y 1-1586/7. 152

Nadine Rossol – Spectacular Settings for Nazi Spectacles: Mass Theater in the Third Reich

6.1 Dietrich Eckhart Open Air Theater, Berlin, 1939. Bundesarchiv Bild, 145, P019137. 170 x Figures

6.2 Loreley, Thingspiel site 1935/36, St Goarshausen. Courtesy of Stadtarchiv St Goarshausen. 174 6.3 Loreley, Thingspiel arena completed, St Goarshausen. Courtesy of Stadtarchiv St Goarshausen. 175 6.4 First European Youth Meeting in 1951, Loreley site, St Goarshausen. Bundesarchiv Bild, 145, 00010546. 183

Jennifer L. Creech – Gudrun is Not a Fighting Fuck Toy: Spectacle, Femininity and Terrorism in The Baader-Meinhof Complex and The Raspberry Reich

7.1 Ensslin reading Trotsky and debriefing a young male recruit. The Baader-Meinhof Complex, Dir. Uli Edel, Constantin Film Production, 2008. 201 7.2 The Baader-Meinhof Complex, Dir. Uli Edel, Constantin Film Production, 2008. 204 7.3 “Fuck me, for the Revolution!” The Raspberry Reich, dir. Bruce LaBruce, Jürgen Brüning Filmproduktion, 2004. 210 7.4 “Che.” The Raspberry Reich, dir. Bruce LaBruce, Jürgen Brüning Filmproduktion, 2004. 212 7.5 “The revolution is my boyfriend!”The Raspberry Reich, dir. Bruce LaBruce, Jürgen Brüning Filmproduktion, 2004. 214

Deborah Ascher Barnstone – Spectacular Architecture: Transparency in Postwar West German Parliaments

8.1 Spectators watching the first parliamentary session in Bonn, September 7, 1949. Bundesbildstelle, Berlin. 222 Figures xi

8.2 Inside the Schwippert plenary chamber looking through one of the large glass walls to the courtyard. Schwippert Archiv, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg. 226 8.3 The ntrye facade of the Behnisch Bundeshaus in Bonn. Behnisch & Partner. Photographer: Christian Kandzia. 229 8.4 Behnisch study of internal spatial transparency at the Bundeshaus. Behnisch & Partner. Photographer: Christian Kandzia. 233 8.5 Front elevation of the renovated Reichstag looking through to the plenary chamber. Foster & Partners. Photographer: Nigel Young. 240

Heather Mathews – Beyond the Global Spectacle: Documenta 13 and Multicultural Germany

9.1 Theaster Gates, installation view of 12 Ballads for the Huguenot House, 2012, courtesy Kavi Gupta, Chicago/Berlin. 255 9.2 Goshka Macuga, detail of Of what is, that it is, of what is not, that is not I, 2012, wool tapestry, 520 × 1740 cm, courtesy of the artist and Kate MacGarry, London. 257 9.3 Gunnar Richter, Dealing with the Era of National Socialism – A Regional Study of a Crime in the Final Phase of World War II. Methods of Researching, 1981/2012, slideshow with sound. Photo courtesy of the artist. 261 xii Figures

Brechtje Beuker – The Spectacle of Terrorism and the Threat of Theatricality

10.1 Gerhard Richter, September (2005). Copyright Galerie Richter. 278 10.2 Blurring spatial boundaries in Gotteskrieger (2005). Copyright Wilfried Böing Nachlass, Berlin. 287 Thomas O. Haakenson

Introduction: What is “German Spectacle”?

The present volume is the second in the German Visual Culture series, which seeks to highlight work on visual culture done within the broad and expanding field of German Studies. Many of the following essays were culled from a series of panels at the German Studies Association (GSA) conference in 2012, a panel devoted to a cross-disciplinary and intermedia examination of spectacle within German contexts. These presentations on “German spectacle” were not limited by geography nor to only those manifestations of spectacle within the historic or contemporary boundaries of the German nation state. Neither was the concept of “German spectacle” located exclusively in specific language or cultural communities, as in those communities who speak or identify with the German language. Finally, the presentations did not define themselves through a focus on a single medium of expression, such as photography, painting, or theater. Such a broad framing begs the question, what is “German spectacle”? The initial call for presentation proposals for the GSA panel and a subsequent call for contributions for this volume were purposefully and productively open, refusing to answer the question of “German spectacle” directly:

From battlefield pageantry to political posturing, from Schaufensterhypnose to cinematic subterfuge, “spectacle” has been and continues to be a concept with multiple points of reference, as well as a site of extreme negotiation and intervention, in German contexts. But what are the unique characteristics of spectacle in the “German context,” if such unique characteristics exist at all?

Taking the above call for submissions and the related openness of what precisely defines “German spectacle” as its points of departure, this volume seeks to map the concept of “spectacle” against the specific historical 2 Thomas O. Haakenson circumstances of Germany, its divided heritage, its language, and its border- crossing traditions. There have been a number of texts that have sought to examine the breadth of the concept of spectacle.1 Few if any published texts have sought to examine the concept of spectacle in a German context.2 To these ends, the collected essays presented here speak directly and indirectly to what makes German spectacle distinctly “German.” Yet German spectacle cannot be examined without acknowledging spectacle’s role in the influential work of Guy Debord. Writing in La Société du spectacle [The Society of the Spectacle] in 1967, Debord suggests the contours of what might be considered a decidedly national conception of “spectacle,” but one that owes its orientation to a decidedly Western philosophical framework. Debord notes that what he describes as “spectacle” is “heir to all the weakness of the project of Western philosophy, which was an attempt to understand activity by means of the categories of vision.”3 The ocularcentric nature of the epistemological ambitions to which Debord alludes finds itself embodied in the nation-state, as an outgrowth of the Enlightenment project within the Western philosophical tradition. Debord goes so far in his 1967 text as to suggest that the “social cleavage that the spectacle expresses is inseparable from the modern State, which, as the product of the social division of labor and the organ of class rule, is the general form of all social division.”4 The product of both a philosophical tradition focused on ocular availability and a social order emphasizing “enlightened” hierarchy, the specific spectacle – “the” spectacle – to which Debord turns our distracted attention is readily bound up with traditions, with culture, with a social existence inseparable from the nation-state within which it functions – and to which it functions to give legitimacy. Fast forward from 1967 to 1991. The cataclysmic, revolutionary events encapsulated in the deceptively simple phrase “the fall of the Berlin Wall”

1 See, for example, Jonathan Crary, “Spectacle, Attention and Counter-memory,” October 50 (Fall 1989): 97–107. 2 See, for a notable exception, Gayle Finney, ed., Visual Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany: Text as Spectacle (Indianapolis, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2006). 3 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (London: Zone Books, 1995): 17. 4 Debord 20. Introduction 3 became signposts, for some, of the triumph of Western democracy over Soviet-style communism. For others, however, the phrase signified a different type of victory. Debord was quick to explain the significance of this particular “fall” in spectacular terms. In the preface to the third French edition of La Société du spectacle, a preface dated 30 June 1992, he examines the end of East German communism not in strictly political terms but rather in broadly symbolic, spectacular ones. For Debord, “the fall of the Berlin Wall” becomes the epitome of the “spectacle striving toward modernization and unification,” toward what he also describes as the “ideology of capitalism” or the “dictatorial freedom of the market.” The emphasis on “ideology” by Debord is important. The society of the spectacle, a system of organizing the world as representation, has advanced to such an extent that democracy itself has become an empty signifier of freedom – but not freedom itself. For scholars of German Studies, “the fall of the Berlin Wall” provides another historical marker of Debord’s spectacle as spectacle manifests itself in various forms, and at various times, in German contexts. For Debord and his La Société du spectacle, “the fall of the Berlin Wall” is an historical signpost marking the triumph of spectacular modernization. If there is a distinctly “German” concept of spectacle that might be gleaned from Debord’s examination of the “the fall of the Berlin Wall,” it is as a signifier and a signpost. Spectacle acts as a signifier for Debord of capitalism’s historical development and its contemporary domination. Given both the historical and the contemporary dimensions of Debord’s theory of the spectacle, it should come as no surprise that German culture, beyond the historic and historically dynamic borders of the German nation-state, has a rich and complex engagement with spectacle. The term “Schauspiel,” for example, was originally identified with any public display. The concept took on the more specific meaning of a performance sometime in the late eighteenth century, a performance that has characteristics of both a tragedy and a comedy. The Schauspiel demonstrates an historically complex relationship to spectacle, a relationship in which display gave way to a story with a happy ending and in which the hero does not die. The German philosophical and theatrical engagement with “spectacle” cannot be contained by Debord’s framework, of course, nor by the “society of the spectacle” that he is at great pains to reveal. That “society” 4 Thomas O. Haakenson finds its cultural bedfellow in the so-called culture industry analyzed by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno in their 1947Dialektik der Aufklärung[Dialectic of Enlightenment], a text that also questions some of the West’s most radical political transformations. In Horkheimer and Adorno’s “culture industry thesis,” the Frankfurt school tandem provide abstract, kaleidoscopic ruminations about the role of capitalism and its impact on aesthetic sensibility and sense perception. Deep at the heart of the cultural industry thesis is a charged critique of modern capitalism and Western culture, a critique in many ways similar to Debord’s intervention. Horkheimer and Adorno challenge the supposedly enlightened citizens of Debord’s “society of the spectacle,” individuals who operate without awareness of the limitations placed upon the very possibility of authentic humanity, to recognize these limits as themselves the conditions of late capitalism. Horkheimer and Adorno suggest it is not society that is this “false consciousness” of Enlightenment-gone-wrong. Rather, the cultural productions that take the guise of leisure, of after-work release, insidiously support individual false consciousness and the related inability for collective action and social change. Whereas Horkheimer and Adorno’s cultural industry structures society, Debord’s spectacle replaces it. Debord’s manifesto-like treatise on capitalism’s creation of a false society as spectacle is in sharp contrast to Horkheimer and Adorno’s dialectical elucidation of the impact of cultural products on sensory relations and aesthetic sensibilities. The dialectical dimension of the “culture industry thesis” is further clarified in Adorno’s later writings. Among the most significant of these later texts are Adorno’sÄsthetische Theorie [Aesthetic Theory], culled from notes written between 1961 and 1969 but published posthumously in 1970, and his 1963 radio address for the International Radio University Program over the Hessian Broadcasting System, published as a German text in 1967 and later translated into English as “The Culture Industry Reconsidered.”5 Adorno develops further an important yet simple distinction made in the radio address in his Ästhetische Theorie, a distinction

5 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); and Theodor W. Adorno, “Culture Industry Introduction 5 first introduced in his and Horkheimer’s “culture industry thesis:” Adorno emphasizes that the “norm of visuality” renders impossible a critique of “visuality.” The simple phrase is pregnant with implications. The most effective capitalist cultural products prevent recipients from coming to grips with the manipulation on which these cultural products depend. Adorno’s intervention in that relation is to suggest that individual perceptual dissonance can produce at the level of the quotidian, with its accompanying “dogma of visuality,” an incommensurability between individual aesthetic experience and collective capitalist homogenization that remains irrecon- cilable. Andreas Huyssen, in his introduction to the English translation of Adorno’s radio address, a translation published in New German Critique in 1987, notes a complex parallel in Adorno’s elaboration, an elaboration that makes the conceptual solidarity between Debord and Adorno clear. Huyssen claims that Adorno relies on a strangely humanist understanding of individualism, one potentially opposed to Adorno’s supposedly Marxist leanings and at odds with Marx’s own ambiguous understanding of a kind of “anthropological” humanism.6 Adorno, much like Debord, seeks to constitute a new kind of humanity in the context of late twentieth-century spectacle, if not specifically for Germany than for humanity itself. Several of the authors in the following study on spectacle invoke Debord explicitly in their examinations of the social, aesthetic, political, and philosophical concept of “German spectacle.” I would suggest, however, that Adorno’s own elaboration of the culture industry thesis informs many of these essays implicitly. Whereas Debord’s theory of spectacle, even with his post-We nde reframing, offers little room for individual interventions into spectacular society, Adorno’s refinement of the culture industry thesis shows that this industry strains to keep itself hidden and, therefore, dialectically offers a critical vantage point through which another way might emerge. Read together, the essays in the present volume explore

Reconsidered,” trans. Anson G. Rabinbach, New German Critique 6 (Autumn 1975) 12–19. 6 Andreas Huyssen, “Introduction to Adorno,” New German Critique 6 (Autumn 1975) 3–11. 6 Thomas O. Haakenson this theoretical tension between Debord and Adorno, between spectacle as society and spectacle in society, in provocative and surprising ways. The volume has a loosely chronological focus, despite its emphasis on a conceptual as opposed to a linear-historical accounting. Many of the authors engage the work of Debord only to reinterpret that work in light of the German-specific spectacles on which they focus. In “Opening a Window to the Devil: Religious Ritual as Baroque Spectacle in Early Modern Germany,” for example, Jacob M. Baum suggests that Debord emphasizes the historically specific context of modern Western capitalist society, but a number of his insights have purchase in the more general analysis of spectacle. Baum takes what he describes as the ideological function of spectacle found in Debord’s text to examine a decidedly early modern German engagement with spectacle. Baum notes that German Lutherans, in contrast to their Reformed and Calvinist counterparts, tolerated and occasionally even re- appropriated some of the visual appeal of late medieval Catholic ritual. Baum’s essay introduces this narrative only to complicate it. He analyzes the problem of spectacle in early modern Lutheran religious practice and clarifies that official culture in places such as Nuremberg may have tolerated spectacle to a greater extent than Reformed or Calvinist territories. To these ends, Baum focuses on the 1563 case of Joachim Heller to draw attention to the need to interpret spectacle as a site of both inter- and intra-confessional conflict and negotiation. And Baum further suggests an important understanding of spectacle that transcends both the historical focus of his essay as well as visual focus on Debord’s intervention: before modern understandings of vision, the very act of seeing was both a physiological and cultural process. The volume jumps from Baum’s text, with its early modern focus on spectacle as a visual and also an embodied phenomenon, to four essays firmly situated after the formation of “Germany” as such. The collection transitions to the context of the newly established German nation-state, focusing in this geographic context on the radical political and visual cultural developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In her essay, “Bauhaus Spectacles, Bauhaus Specters,” Elizabeth Otto invokes Debord to suggest that spectacle “is both a harbinger and a mechanism of the total domination of capitalism’s commodity fetishism” and that the Introduction 7 resultant “technologies and media reduce citizens to hypnotized consumers whose communal bonds have been dissolved and whose critical faculties have atrophied completely.” Using Debord’s theory as a framing device, Otto suggests that the Bauhaus “sought to repurpose the tools of visual culture to awaken vision and other senses in order to reject the society of the spectacle’s mode of unilateral communication and to embrace community and dialogue among the many.” Focusing on the administrative and curricular changes at the Bauhaus in the 1920s, Otto provides an engrossing discussion of the alternative religious and potentially cultic practices of Bauhaus affiliates such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and László Moholy-Nagy. Citing the role of magic, magicians, and spirituality within the school, Otto introduces the idea of spiritual spectacle to suggest how the work of figures at the Bauhaus arose from and is representative of a distinctly German concept of spectacle. She suggests, given this reading of Bauhaus developments and activities, that spectacles were purely spiritual in nature. Taking aim at the same historical period, Brían Hanrahan examines the concept of spectacle with a focus on sight and sound in his “Live on the Air, Live on the Ground: The ‘Chamberlin Flight’ as Spectacular Event, June 1927.” Hanrahan includes in his approach references to the “carnivalesque” as distinct from “spectacle,” a distinction that provocatively juxtaposes Debord’s spectacle to that of another key figure in the history of the concept: Mikhail Bakhtin. Hanrahan investigates what he describes as two modes of “liveness” in the context of the trans-Atlantic flight of Clarence Chamberlin and Charles A. Levine. In distinguishing between these two modes, Hanrahan reveals how the “listener at home” is addressed in profoundly new, modern ways. He suggests that an imaginative cooperation is achieved in part through an acoustic repetitiveness, one that led to the flight’s being “inculcated in the domestic listening audience.” Keeping his sights on Weimar culture, Paul Monty Paret provides for the volume a key distinction between spectacle and monument in his chapter, “Berlin in Light: Wilhelmine Monuments as Weimar Mass Culture.” Paret cites Robert Musil’s essay “Monuments” to argue that the distinction between monument and spectacle is not an effective way to explain the Berlin in Light exhibition. To support his claims, Paret provides a robust focus on German energy concerns such as Osram as well as on official 8 Thomas O. Haakenson

German documents and published journals. In the background of Paret’s assessment, of course, are the changes at the Bauhaus, outlined in greater detail in Otto’s essay, that show a changed aesthetic focus in Germany from unique aesthetic objects in the early 1920s to mass manufacturing and sale of industrially produced wares by the latter half of the decade. Paret concludes with a key message only fully understandable in the context of German spectacle, a context that both recognizes the role of anti-modernist discourses during the years prior to the Weimar Republic and the increasingly prominent role visual culture began to play in German national identity: Berlin in Light is part of the city’s “self-conscious […] aspirations for visibility as a world capital.” It is difficult to read Paret’s conclusion without thinking of Debord’s assessment of the spectacular significance of “the fall of the Berlin Wall” over half a century later. In the volume’s final essay focusing on Weimar culture, Sara Ann Sewell analyzes discourses from the other side of the political-economic divide explored by Paret and Otto. Sewell examines in her “Spectacles in Everyday Life: The Disciplinary Function of Communist Culture in Weimar Germany” various forms of “communist spectacle” at the level of the quotidian. Her investigation situates communism as a counterpoint to Debord’s theory of spectacle, in which Sewell suggests spectacle is indistinguishable from capitalism. In contrast to Debord’s singular focus on capitalism, Sewell explores the use of photographs to document large-scale communist spectacles, photographs and spectacles used to educate party members. Sewell reveals how communists in Germany employed propaganda tactics often associated with National Socialism in an attempt to equate visual culture and German national identity for decidedly communist ends. Transitioning from the emerging mass influence and intense development of visual culture forms in the Weimar era to the establishment of Hitler’s Germany, Nadine Rossol presents the volume’s most direct demonstration of the National Socialists’ efforts to connect national identity and fascist politics through spectacle. Rossol notes in “Spectacular Settings for Nazi Spectacles: Mass Theater in the Third Reich” that even though the National Socialists did not invent the mass political rally, they did expand traditional ways of doing mass politics. To these ends, the essay provides an engaging case study on the successes and failures of mass political spectacle. Introduction 9

As a cultural and historical point of reference, Rossol briefly discusses Lorelei as a figure of visual seduction, a figure that speaks to a productive concept of spectacle. Yet Rossol also addresses at length the failure of the Thingspiel[mass theater] in Heidelberg. The essay suggests that the failure of the Thingspiel reveals that the entertainment function of Nazi party spectacles increasingly undermined the political usefulness of these forms of mass propaganda. In Rossol’s reading, German spectacle is a framework for understanding the history as well as the efficacy of spectacle, of a distinct type of spectacle that can only be understood properly in reference to the signposts of degeneracy and visual culture in relation to German national identity. The failure of the Nazi’s political spectacle is met with a postwar theory of feminist resistance to the spectacles of heterosexist patriarchy in Jennifer L. Creech’s “Gudrun is Not a Fighting Fuck Toy: Spectacle, Femininity and Terrorism in The Baader-Meinhof Complexand The Raspberry Reich.” Creech argues that films can be used to convey oppositional meaning to mainstream culture. What constitutes “mainstream” meaning in film is demonstrated through a reading of The Baader-Meinhof Complex, while an alternative representational strategy is discussed in relation to Raspberry Reich. Focusing her reading on the role of the meaning of spectacle in the public sphere, Creech suggests that filmic interventions can be used in the service of creating or building alternative social realities. Creech deploys the provocative term “fighting fuck toy” to signify both the to-be-looked-at- ness of the female filmic protagonist – the object of desire for the heterosexual male gaze – as well as the feminist resistance to patriarchy and the patriarchal gaze as represented in the two films she examines. Creech’s analysis demonstrates that German spectacle is also “history as spectacle,” and in focusing on issues of gender and sexuality, German spectacle can be employed as a subterfuge to normative sexual and gender paradigms. The last three essays in the volume seek to find continuity for the concept of German spectacle in the context of contemporary German culture. In her essay, “Spectacular Architecture: Transparency in Postwar West German Parliaments,” Deborah Ascher Barnstone develops the concept of “transparent architecture,” a concept culled from conversations within the field of architectural studies in particular, to suggest that “transparent 10 Thomas O. Haakenson government architecture […] creates the illusion of political participation.” To these ends, Barnstone provocatively asserts that in West Germany, the result of transparent architecture was a “spectacular form of government in which participation may be more illusion than fact.” In framing her argument, she steps forward, to the post-We nde era, to provide a comparative view using architectural signifiers of unified Germany, most notably the Reichstag, with Sir Norman Foster’s famously redesigned dome. Barnstone’s approach suggest that, despite the invocation of architectural transparency to demonstrate a kind of public participatory access, the West German government was not as participatory as one might think. Relatedly, the Reichstag in unified Germany provides something of a corrective to the illusion of West German participation, albeit a corrective with its own limitations. Clearly “political spectacle” in Barnstone’s analysis, unlike Rossol’s or Sewell’s, is not about flagrant display but about purposeful illusion. But Barnstone’s analysis reveals a similar need that Rossol’s and Sewell’s earlier historical foci also suggest: German spectacle, in its successes and its failures, can only be properly understood in historical context. Heather Mathews takes the architectural analysis in Barnstone’s essay outside, to documenta, the citywide exhibition in Kassel, Germany. In “Beyond the Global Spectacle: Documenta 13 and Multicultural Germany,” Mathews examines the “local context” as a way to understand documenta 13 in opposition to the critical reception of the exhibition event in the mainstream press. Mathews contrasts her approach to that of the press, which she suggests focused on the spectacular dimension of the event. To support her analysis, Mathews juxtaposes curatorial and artistic intent to audience and critical response. She invokes the now-frequent museum deployment of “mega-exhibitions” and “blockbusters” as cause and catalyst for the public’s and the press’s one-dimensional engagement with documenta 13. To suggest an alternative reading of exhibition-as-spectacle, Mathews uses the phrase “deflect the spectacular” and suggests that some work in the exhibition remained documentary, intimate, immediate. Clearly for Mathews, “German spectacle” has its limits, limits embodied most directly by the particular viewer in a particular time and place. In “The Spectacle of Terrorism and the Threat of Theatricality,” Brechtje Beuker concludes the volume by seeking to reconcile what she Introduction 11 describes as the separation of spectacle. Beuker outlines the case for “disrupting the spectacle of terrorism.” Beuker demonstrates that as a logical consequence of the increasing media sophistication of terrorist groups, hegemonic powers have to curtail the theatricality of terrorism in order to secure self-preservation. To these ends, she cites the work of Aida Hozic and the interconnections among terrorism, the theatrical, and the spectacular. Hozic suggests that “theatricality and spectacularity are similar to the extent that both can be used as forms of expression for symbolic political power, as indispensable elements of any political activity in search of popular support.” Beuker utilizes the relation of theatricality and spectacularity to make clear how theater itself can provide a platform for intervention. She introduces what she calls the “threat of theatricality,” a threat that cannot be abated fully by relegating it to the concept of momentary transgression. Much like Hanrahan’s work earlier in this volume, Beuker sees spectacle as similar to transgression, as productive rather than contained. In her essay, the violence of “German spectacle” has very real, productive potential, in both the realm of the personal and the realm of the political. In their wide-ranging, cogent analyses, the contributors to Spectacle demonstrate the complex, challenging ways in which “German spectacle” must be understood. The volume reveals that German spectacle knows many forms. The authors weave together complex object histories and critical aesthetic interventions to suggest that a decidedly German concept of “spectacle” can indeed be gleaned from particular exhibitions, architectural milestones, audiovisual interventions, and filmic and photographic images. To what ends “German spectacle” will be deployed – productively or destructively – in the twenty-first century and beyond it, though, the authors in this volume quite purposefully refuse to speculate.

Jacob M. Baum

Opening a Window to the Devil: Religious Ritual as Baroque Spectacle in Early Modern Germany

Was there a specifically “German” concept of spectacle in the early modern period? The primary challenge to answering this question is that modern theorists tend to view spectacle as a phenomenon of modernity.1 In these readings, analysis of spectacle assumes the modern nation-state as the normative mode of political organization, capitalist production as the normative economic mode, and modern (i.e. post-Enlightenment) science as the given epistemological starting point. In addition to these basic structural assumptions, a decidedly modernist understanding of subjectivity as an atomized, rational consumer-citizen underpins these analyses. Spectacle as the site of interaction between modern subjects and structures exhibits three basic characteristics: 1) the spectacle has a two-fold ideological function, simultaneously projecting the hierarchical representation of society envisioned by authorities while coercing and discouraging spectators from critical reflection on that representation; 2) the efficacy of spectacle in modernity is in part related to its massive scale and reproducibility, made possible by capitalist economies; 3) the subjective experience of spectacle is articulated in language derived from modern scientific discourse, and

1 For an extended engagement with these themes and issues, see the introduction to this volume. For some of the more important discussions of spectacle among modern theorists, see Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (New York: Social Studies Association, 1944); Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” trans. Harry Zohn, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (London: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1968) 214–18; Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson- Smith (New York: Zone, 1994). 14 Jacob M. Baum correspondingly conveys modern empiricist assumptions about the role of perception in this experience. In the early modern period, the structures and kind of subjectivity supporting modern theorists’ accounts of spectacle were either non- existent or nascent. How then are we to come to terms with spectacle in this period? Although most of his work focuses on spectacle in modern Western capitalist society, Guy Debord offers the beginnings of an answer. In a few brief passages, Debord suggests that before modern conditions prevailed, spectacles were above all the material realization of religious belief.2 Specifically, he refers to “Baroque spectacles” that articulated the new experience of religious and political fragmentation in society in the wake of the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. In the German- speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire, the Reformation dissolved the symbolic order of the Middle Ages: the unity of Christianity and the Empire no longer constituted part of the common religious and political imagination. Unity was replaced by principles of transformation and difference, which Debord claims were best exemplified in the theatrical and ritual performances of the Baroque.3 This chapter builds on the foundations laid by Debord’s suggestive comments on Baroque spectacle. We can locate this concept of spectacle in the history of religion unique to German-speaking lands. The essay argues that the Baroque conception of spectacle revolved around how people understood the visual effects of rituals on the bodies and souls of spectators. This paradigm was rooted in scientific and philosophical understandings of vision that posited a reciprocal, mutually affective relationship between perceiving subject and perceived object. Such understandings predate the Reformation and indeed played an important role in the ritual theory of the late medieval church. Yet the confessional divides wrought by the Reformation intensified focus on the power of rituals as spectacles. Baroque spectacle not only produced transformation and difference; it assumed a range of divergent political and religious identities as spectator-consumers.

2 Debord, chapter 1, thesis 20. 3 Debord, chapter 8, thesis 189. Opening a Window to the Devil 15

In the later sixteenth century, the visual appeal of religious ritual became an important site of conflict for both Catholics and Protestants. For German Lutherans in particular, the perception of a Catholic ritual resurgence raised fundamental concerns about the effects of ritual spectacle on the bodies and souls of spectators. We label this phenomenon the window hypothesis. Conflicts about ritual among German Lutherans in the later sixteenth century stemmed less from concerns over specific practices than from assumptions about the powerfully affective interactive process between the body-soul of the spectator and the material environment implied by moments of religious spectacle. This interactive process meant that physiological acts of viewing ritual performances always already had the potential to erode and transform Lutheran identity. As many Lutheran critics put it, the spectacle of ritual was dangerous because it could “open a window to the devil” in the souls of spectators. This essay examines the origins of the window hypothesis, and outlines the intensification of concern over religious spectacle in the wake of the Protestant Reformation in Germany. The window hypothesis originates at the conjunction of late medieval scientific discourse and religious practice. In scientific discourse, the senses were not understood to convey objective information to perceiving subjects, but rather represented a set of mutually affective relationships between subject and object. The object of perception was not passive, but actively imprinted itself on the perceiving subject both physiologically and psychologically, effecting real transformation. This was especially true of vision, traditionally ranked the most important among the five senses. The notion that visual perceptions possessed more affective power than other sensory modalities was widespread in ancient Greek philosophy, described most systematically by Aristotle. It was refined by early medieval Arabic philosophers such as Al-Kindi and Al-Hacen, and by the fifteenth century it was a basic component of the scientific understanding of vision across Europe.4

4 The literature on this topic is already vast, and continues to grow. For a selection, see David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University 16 Jacob M. Baum

The late medieval understanding of vision informed one of the central dimensions of late medieval piety: the use of images for devotional purposes. Devotional images could include a range of material objects, from sculpted or painted icons of saints to elaborate reliquaries designed to house various sacred objects. The church officially considered such images pedagogically useful for the largely illiterate lay population of late medieval Germany: images could represent narratives from scripture and provide a means for understanding and meditating on church doctrine. As Caroline Walker Bynum has recently shown, however, the very materiality of such objects became a locus of sacred power and devotion.5 The visible world signified the invisible, and one attained knowledge of the divine through sensual engagement with the natural world. Images therefore contained a form of sacred power or virtue, and were not merely passive, but rather reciprocated the gaze of the viewer, entering into an affective and affecting relationship with their viewer.6 In this diverse array of images, the Eucharist as an object of devotional gazing enjoyed the greatest popularity on the eve of the Reformation.7 By

of Chicago Press, 1981); A. Mark Smith, “Getting the Big Picture in Perspectivist Optics,” Isis 72.4 (1981): 568–89; Michael Camille, “Before the Gaze: The Internal Senses and the Late Medieval Practices of Seeing,” Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance, ed. R. Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 197–223; Suzannah Biernoff,Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages: Ocular Desires (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Katherine Tachau, “Seeing as Action and Passion in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,”The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, eds J. Hamburger et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006) 336–59; R.W. Scribner, Religion and Culture in Germany, 1400–1800 (Leiden: Brill, 2000) 85–145; Idem, “Popular Piety and Modes of Visual Perception in Late Medieval and Reformation Germany,” The Journal of Religious History15.4 (1989): 448–69. 5 Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone, 2011). 6 Scribner, “Popular Piety,” 448–69. 7 Ibid. See also: Adolph Franz, Die Messe im deutschen Mittelalter: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Liturgie und des religiösen Volkslebens (Freiburg: Herderische Verlagshandlung, 1902); Anton Mayer, “Die heilbringende Schau in Sitte und Kult,” Heilige Überlieferung: Ausschnitte aus der Geschichte des Mönchtums und des Opening a Window to the Devil 17 the fifteenth century, the practice of elevating the elements of the conse- crated bread and wine during the Mass for the congregation to view had spread throughout Europe, and become especially popular in the German world. The laity had little concern for the theology that underlay the ritual, and their engagement with the Eucharist was primarily a question of their physical experience of the Elevation.8 The act of seeing was the essence of the ritual because sacramental communion – that is communion in the form of eating the Eucharist Host – was an uncommon event for most people prior to the Reformation. Scholars have interpreted the rarity of sacramental communion as a reason for the historical emergence of “sacramental viewing,” or “ocular communion” as a substitute for the laity.9 The church cultivated the popularity of sacramental gazing through educational efforts intended to unify late medieval religious culture. Preachers actively extolled the various spiritual and corporeal benefits of the practice in sermons, claiming that sacramental gazing could protect the viewer against demonic assaults, disease, and even death.10 A visual campaign accompanied the preachers.11 The popular motif known as the Gregorsmesse [Mass of St Gregory] became widespread in the fifteenth century, particularly after the advent of printing technology allowed for the

heiligen Kultes. Festschrift für Ildefons Herwegen (Münster: Aschendorff, 1938) 234–62; Peter Browe, “Die Elevation in der Messe,” Jahrbuch für Liturgiewissenschaft9 (1929): 20–67; Idem, Die Verehrung der Eucharistie im Mittelalter (Munich: Huebner, 1933); Idem, Die häufige Kommunion im Mittelalter (Münster: Aschendorff, 1938); Josef Jungmann, Missarum sollemnia: Eine genetische Erklärung der römischen Messe, 2 vols. (Vienna: Verlag Herder, 1949 & 1952); Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 69–70. 8 Jungmann, Missarum sollemnia, vol. 1, 158–9. 9 Mayer, “Die heilbringende Schau;” Rubin, Corpus Christi, 63–5; Biernoff,Sight and Embodiment, 140–4. 10 Willi Massa, Die Eucharistiepredigt am Vorabend der Reformation: eine material- kerygmatische Untersuchung zum Glaubensverständnis von Altarssakrament und Messe am Beginn des 16. Jahrhunderts als Beitrag zur Geschichichte der Predigt (Steyl: Steyler Verlag, 1966) 118–31. 11 Charles Zika, “Hosts, Processions and Pilgrimages: Controlling the Sacred in Fifteenth-Century Germany,”Past & Present 118 (1988): 25–64. 18 Jacob M. Baum circulation of cheap woodcut illustrations. Images such as Wolf Traut’s 1510 Gregorsmesse commonly depict the ritual Elevation of the Host surrounded by onlookers devoutly kneeling and gazing (see Figure 1.1). In addition to the proliferation of Gregorsmesse images, the elaborate staging of the Elevation by means of carefully designed altars, candle-lighting, and choreographed gestures of priests, all suggest that this was a ritual moment of central importance in the later Middle Ages (for altars, see Figures 1.2 and 1.3).12

Figure 1.1 Mass of St Gregory by Wolf Traut (1510).

The adoration of the Eucharist and the wide range of devotional images in later medieval German religion attests to a common and widespread cultural “need to see,” to borrow the phrase from Hans Belting. The beliefs that divine reality was fully accessible in the visual domain, and that

12 Zika, 47–8; Rubin, Corpus Christi, 63–82. Opening a Window to the Devil 19

Figure 1.2 Medieval altar. Photo courtesy of author. images formed a reciprocal, affective bond with their viewers, reinforced the popularity of the ritual spectacles of the late medieval church.13 Prior to the Reformation, the spectacle of religious ritual articulated a common visual culture, and therefore performed unifying work. By the end of the fifteenth century, the power of the sacramental gaze had become a “defining ethnographic trait of late-medieval German religion.”14

13 Hans Belting, Das Bild und sein Publikum im Mittelalter: Form und Funktion früher Bildtafeln der Passion (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 1981) 126; Idem, “Die Reaktion der Kunst des 13. Jahrhunderts auf den Import der Reliquien und Ikonen,” Ornamenta Ecclesiae: Kunst und Künstler der Romanik: Katalog zur Ausstellung des Schnuetgen- Museums in der Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle, ed. Anton Legner, vol. 3 (Cologne: Schnütgen Museum, 1985) 173–83. 14 Scribner, Religion and Culture, 86. 20 Jacob M. Baum

Figure 1.3 Medieval altar. Photo courtesy of author. Opening a Window to the Devil 21

This common visual culture shattered with arrival of the Protestant Reformation. This was not, however, due to the abandonment of the traditional scientific understanding of vision. Indeed, the confessional divisions that emerged in the sixteenth century elevated the significance of vision. At mid-century, both Catholics and Protestants appealed to the visual in conflicts over church ritual: it constituted the basis of a Catholic liturgical resurgence, and produced new anxieties about the visual power of ritual practice among Lutheran Protestants. Post-Reformation – or “Baroque” – spectacle differentiated itself from its late medieval counterpart on one important issue. While Baroque spectacle implied the same assumptions about vision as a powerful affective bond between observer and observed, it no longer served the purposes of articulating a common cultural identity. Rather, in a context of multiple confessional identities, the interaction between spectators and spectacles meant that the very act of viewing a ritual always already had the potential to infiltrate the mind, psyche and soul, and to transform internally the viewer. Religious authorities in the sixteenth century were deeply concerned with maximizing their influence over people’s minds and bodies. Efforts to shape behavior and confessional identity either through regulation or elimination of various occasions for sin in everyday life, including taverns, spinning bees, and popular dances, were products of the newly intensified religiosity of the Reformation. Within the space of the church, the physicality of ritual practice had profound implications for the shaping of Protestant and Catholic identities alike, and was likewise intensely contested. From the perspective of the common people, this new age of hardening confessional lines and social disciplining was experienced in a fundamentally visceral fashion.15 Most people in society had little grasp

15 Ulrike Strasser, State of Virginity: Gender, Religion, and Politics in an Early Modern Catholic State (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007) 1–26, 173–8; Beat Kümin, “Sacred Church and Worldly Tavern: Reassessing an Early Modern Divide,” Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe, eds Andrew Spicer et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 17–38; Bodo Nischan, Lutherans and Calvinists in 22 Jacob M. Baum of the theological subtleties the educated elite found so significant, but ritual behavior continued to occupy the center of their symbolic universe.16 The ritual edifice of the church was therefore the primary means by which most people grasped religious difference. The physicality of church ritual was a matter of producing and consuming difference, and demarcating the boundaries of community. Given this context, it was a significant problem that the Protestant movement emerging around Martin Luther and the Reformation in Wittenberg (i.e. “Lutherans”) failed to develop a coherent policy on the use of devotional images in ritual practice. Unlike their Swiss Reformed and Calvinist counterparts, who adopted the policy of simply destroying church art and prohibiting the devotional use of images, the position adopted by Luther and his followers was much less straightforward. Images were left in the rather uncomfortable and ambiguous middle ground. Theologically speaking, images fell under the technical classification of adiaphora: matters that were neither good nor bad because they played no role in the central questions of faith and salvation.17 Though cautiously tolerant, the early Lutheran attitude towards images was not enthusiastic. Luther thus wrote “we are free to have them or not, but it would be much better if we did not have them at all. I am not partial to them.”18 This policy extended to all devotional uses of images, including the Elevation of the Eucharist host. As he wrote in a 1525 pamphlet, “We are obligated to do nothing at all for God, except believe and love. Now tell me, where has Christ forbidden us to elevate the sacrament or commanded us to elevate it? […] Christ does not forbid the elevation, but leaves it to free choice.”19 Philipp Melanchthon

the Age of Confessionalism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999); Bridget Heal, “‘Better Papist than Calvinist’: Art and Identity in Later Lutheran Germany,” German History 29.4 (2011): 584–609. 16 R.W. Scribner, Popular Culture and Popular Movements in the German Reformation (London: Hambledon Press, 1987). 17 Heal, “Better Papist than Calvinist,” 584–609; Joseph Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) 83–7. 18 Luther, Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, vol. 51 (St Louis: Fortress Press, 1959) 81. 19 Quoted in Nischan, Lutherans and Calvinists, 6–7. Opening a Window to the Devil 23 held the same position, which was adopted as the official policy of the emerging Lutheran church in the sixteenth century.20 The problem with this position was that, unlike its Reformed counterpart, it required individuals to interpret the relative benefits and dangers of ritual spectacle. Moreover, because the removal of imagery and ornamentation from Lutheran churches was nowhere near as thoroughgoing as their Reformed counterparts, Lutherans in the mid-sixteenth century confronted what one historian has called a “residue of sensuous cultic objects and processes” lingering from the pre-Reformation church.21 Which of these were now permissible or beneficial, and what was the relationship between “internal” faith and “external” practice? How was the Lutheran community distinct from other communities that employed similar practices, in particular the Catholics? The official Lutheran policy provided no sufficient answers to these questions, and thus generated considerable dissonance and conflict. Throughout the 1530s and 1540s, controversies over the Elevation frequently erupted across Lutheran territories. These conflicts centered on the issue of demarcating the boundary of the Lutheran religious community.22 In the churches of Nuremberg, the 1537 case of Achatius Parsberger sheds light on how the power of religious spectacle lay at the heart of such conflicts. Parsberger came into conflict with the city council when he began to preach against the Elevation. He claimed that the practice was leading to false and superstitious beliefs about the sacrament and the idolatrous worship of the visible object of the bread, which he explained to the city council was tantamount to worshipping the devil himself. These beliefs, he claimed, were widespread among the unlettered segments of society.23 The simple people, Parsberger claimed, were not quick enough to separate adora-

20 Heal, “Better Papist than Calvinist.” 21 Susan Karant-Nunn, Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany (New York: Routledge, 1997) 133. 22 Nischan, Lutherans and Calvinists, 1–26. 23 The documents relating to this case are collected in Andreas Osiander Gesamtausgabe, eds Gottfried Seebass and Gerhard Müller, vol. 6: Schriften und Briefe 1535 bis 1538 (Gütersloh: Gütersloh Verlagshaus, 1985) 434–81. 24 Jacob M. Baum tion of the divine from adoration of the sensible. The church of Rome had exploited this, emphasizing the power of the Elevation to confuse people, seduce them, and divert their attention away from the Word of scripture.24 As Parsberger explained, the central issue was the powerfully affective sensual relationship between beheld and beholder. Parsberger thus com- plained that he commonly overheard uneducated people enthusiastically describe their experience of the divinity in the Eucharist simply by stat- ing, “I have seen our Lord today.”25 Further, the Elevation continued to “give rise to manifold false thoughts and idolatry, namely that the simple people believe that if they see this sacrament, they will have no tooth or eye pain on that day, and more luck than usual, as well as others.”26 From here, Parsberger accused the Nuremberg church authorities of failing to prohibit the Elevation while simultaneously acknowledging the problems attendant upon this practice:

So too is such abuse contrary to our church ordinance, which thus proclaims: “that in several places, they have a special devotion for the sacrament, so that they look upon it, and one should for the sake of their fantasy keep the holiest sacrament in the old usage and make a spectacle of it. These people however have no true faith, because their devotion rests on disobedience, for Christ did not say: “come and see,” but rather: “take and eat.”27

In response to Parsberger’s accusations, the city’s leading religious authorities re-affirmed the teaching on the Elevation as adiaphoron: “with regard

24 Ibid, 466–8. 25 Ibid, 468: “… wie sy doch sagen dy ainfeltigen: “Ich hab heut unseren Herren gesehen.” 26 Ibid: “Und wachsen daraus andere manicherlay falsche gedenckhen und abgotterey, nemlich das dy ainfeltigen glauben, wann sy diß sacrament sehen, es thue in denselben tag khain zan oder aug we oder werden desselben tag dester mer gluckhs haben etc.” 27 Ibid: “so ist auch solicher mißprauch wider unser khirchenordnung, dy also lautt: “Das in ettlich dichten, sy haben ein besondere andacht darzue, so sy das sacrament ansehen, und man soll umb yeres gedichtz willen das allerheyligst sacrament ym alten misprauch behalten und ein schauspill daraus machen. Dyse aber haben khain rechten glauben, dyeweyll yer andacht auff ungehorsam steet, dann Christus hat nit gesprochen: Khumbt her und schauet, sonder: Nemet hin und esset. Das ist unser khirchenordnung.” Opening a Window to the Devil 25 to the Elevation, they all profess that it is a free thing, because it may be well maintained or abandoned without harm of advantage to conscience or the Word of God.”28 Although technically a matter of indifference, the city council declaimed that the visual could play a positive role so long as spectators were properly educated in the scriptures. Responding to Parsberger’s claim that the Elevation led to the idolatry or superstition of the pre-Reformation church, the city council argued that “the Holy Spirit in the Holy Scripture clearly attests to exactly the opposite, maintaining, as John in the first chapter of his letter speaks: ‘We have heard, seen with our eyes, and touched with our hands, the Word of life.’”29 Further, the city council decreed that denying the role of the visual wholesale would necessarily lead to a devolution of the church into the realm of unchristian groups precisely because the essential elements of Christianity were emi- nently visual: “we would not be able to keep the Gospel, nor baptism, nor the Lord’s Supper, nor Christ. It would all have to be done away with, as with what happened in Turkey [i.e. the Ottoman Muslims].”30 Ultimately, the city council commanded Parsberger to cease preaching on the Elevation. He appears to have obeyed this command, and was allowed to stay on as preacher in St Egidien’s.31 The Parsberger case provides an early example of how official Lutheran policy gave rise to what we have labeled the window hypothesis. Throughout his sermons and statements documented before the city council, Parsberger consistently engaged what he perceived to be the lingering visuality of late medieval religious culture, and the challenges it posed to the formation of

28 Ibid, 439: “der elevation halb bekennen sy all, das es ain frey ding sey; darumb es on schaden und nachtayl des gewissens und wort Gottes wol gehalten oder abgestellt werden mueg.” 29 Ibid, 463: “bezeuget der heilig Gaist in der heiligen schrifft in dem, das er klarlich das widerspill durchaus und aus helt, als Johannes in seiner epistle am 1. Cap. Spricht: ‘Wir haben gehort, mit unsern augen gesehen und mit undern henden betastet das wort des lebens’.” 30 Ibid, 458: “Wir wurden sonst weder euangelion noch tauff, noch abentmal, noch Christum konnen behalten. Es muste alles abgethon werden, wie in der Turckey geschehen ist.” 31 Ibid, 437. 26 Jacob M. Baum

Lutheran identity. Above all the Elevation was dangerous because as a spectacle it always already contained the power to shape the souls of spectators. The city council did not deny this component of Parsberger’s argument, but rather diverged on how it understood and evaluated the potential effects of ritual spectacle. Where Parsperger evaluated this potential in a negative light, the city council maintained that the visual could play a positive role, although they were careful to remain consistent with the position of Luther and Melanchthon by classifying the Elevation as technically adiaphoron. On both sides, the evaluation of spectacle’s potential effects revolved around questions of transformation and difference: Parsberger saw the potential for opening a window to idolatry, superstition, and Catholicism, while the city council understood the limited tolerance of spectacle as one of the lines demarcating Christendom from non-Christian groups. After the 1540s, conflicts over the window hypothesis intensified within Lutheran German communities. This intensification was due to two factors: 1) a resurgence in Catholicism that instrumentalized ritual spectacle as a means of returning the fragmented Holy Roman Empire to its pre-Reformation religious unity, and 2) a more systematic attempt on the part of Protestant intellectuals to apply the insights of traditional late medieval sensory theories to religious practice. Following the Catholic triumph in the Schmalkaldic Wars, the emperor Charles V convened in 1548 an imperial diet at Augsburg. The articles ratified during this Diet produced a controversial church ordinance that came to be known as the Augsburg Interim. Charles hoped to return all of Germany to the old faith by way of state-enforced uniformity in ritual practice. On matters of “internal” religion – i.e. faith, belief, etc – one was bound to their conscience, but physical practice was to be uniformly Catholic.32 The first article of the Interim thus stipulated that all the “old

32 Nathan Baruch Rein, “Faith and Empire: Conflicting Visions of Religion in a Late Reformation Controversy – The Augsburg Interim and its Opponents, 1548–50,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71.1 (2003): 45–74. Opening a Window to the Devil 27 ceremonies” of the church were to be retained or reinstituted where they had been abandoned.33 Although the Interim made the provision for freedom of conscience on “internal” matters of faith, its liturgical policy built on a tradition of thinking that affirmed the power of external practice to shape and transform the internal spiritual states of ritual participants. This tradition originated with late medieval sensory theories, but took on new significance in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. Beginning in the 1530s, Catholic con- troversialist writers responded to the Protestant arguments by developing their own defenses of traditional ritual based on the principle that religious spectacles produced an affective relationship with spectators. The humanist Georg Witzel (1501–73) provided the most systematic articulation of this position. Witzel composed an impressive body of liturgical histories of the church intended to refute Protestant positions on ritual and demonstrate the antiquity (and thereby authority) of the contemporary ritual practice of the Catholic church.34 In his most important work, the multi-volume Typus Ecclesiae [Form of the Church], Witzel provided a genealogy of contemporary practices such as the Elevation, Eucharistic adoration, and the use of devotional images.35 This genealogy, Witzel claimed, could be traced all the way back to the first century CE.36 What was at stake in Witzel’s liturgical histories? As he explained, the ultimate goal was to restore all of the ancient ceremonies of the Church so that it would “be seen as an image of wondrous beauty, in order that it may win [back] the heartfelt love of those who regard it.”37 Witzel was

33 “Interim Augustanum, 15 May 1548,” Documents Illustrative of the Continental Reformation, ed. B. J. Kidd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911) 358–62. 34 John Dolan, “Liturgical Reform Among the Irenicists,” Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies 2 (1971): 72–94; Idem, The Influence of Erasmus, Witzel and Cassander in the Church Ordinances and Reform Proposals of the United Duchees of Cleve during the Middle Decades of the 16th Century (Münster: Aschendorff, 1957) 31–74. 35 This work was printed many times in Mainz and Cologne in the 1540s and 1550s. The most complete edition appeared in 1559: Typus ecclesiae catholicae, 5 vols. (Cologne: Quentel & Calenius, 1559). 36 Witzel, Typus ecclesiae, vol. 1, C3r,-C4r L1 v, M1r-N1v. 37 Ibid, F1 v. 28 Jacob M. Baum careful to distinguish this from magic and superstition: the image of the church naturally affected the viewer physically and emotionally, and thereby could effect spiritual change. Witzel’s liturgical histories in many ways found their material counterpart in what Jeffrey Chipps-Smith has recently identified as the practice of “sensuous worship” employed by Jesuits as a pastoral and missionary tactic in the latter half of the sixteenth century. In Counter Reformation Germany, the Jesuits systematically built on late medieval theories of iconography, physiology, and memory to conceive of the church as a total work of art.38 Protestant intellectuals at this time also began to deal more systematically with the basic scientific premise that vision produced an affective relationship between viewing subject and viewed object. In the 1530s, Philipp Melanchthon began a systematic study of Aristotelian physiology and psychology complemented by a series of lectures in Wittenberg. The fruit of this process was the publication of his Commentarius de anima [Commentary on the Soul], first printed in 1540, and then revised and expanded in a second edition in 1552 under the title Liber de anima [Book on the Soul].39 Melanchthon advocated understanding Aristotelian physiology primarily for the purposes of reforming educational and religious practices. As he explained, “theologians are robbed of a great instrument if they do not know of the most learned disputations on the soul, the senses, the causes of appetites and feelings, cognition, and the will.”40 While he attempted to refine the Aristotelian model by integrating insights from other ancient authors, Melanchthon ultimately re-affirmed the basic notion

38 Jeffrey Chipps-Smith,Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation in Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 39 Sascha Salatowsky, De Anima: Die Rezeption der aristotelischen Psychologie im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Amsterdam: Grüner, 2006) 35–9; eds Günter Frank and Stefan Rhein, Melanchthon und die Naturwissenschaften seiner Zeit (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke, 1998). 40 Melanchthon, Corpus reformatorum, ed. Karl Gottlieb Bretschneider, vol. 11 (Halle: Schwetscke, 1843) 281: “Magno instrumento desitutus est Theologus, qui nescit illas eruditissimus disputations, de anima, de sensibus, de causis appetitionum et affec- tuum, de noticia, de voluntate.” Opening a Window to the Devil 29 that the act of sensing always implied an affective relationship between subject and object.41 “Thus when we apprehend an object,” Melanchthon explained, “and judge whether it is good or bad, then the affected spirits in cognition bring it to the heart, which, so to speak, is struck, beat and agitated, and either aspires to the object or flees it.”42 Given this history, it is not surprising to find that theInterim policy of re-introducing traditional church rituals generated a considerable degree of suspicion and anxiety among Lutherans. The party of Melanchthon was able to subordinate scientific understanding to political exigency, and accepted the Interim re-imposition of traditional rituals to end persecution of the Lutheran church. This move was far from desirable, and so Melanchthon sought out a theological solution, classifying all “outward” ritual practices theologically as adiaphora. The re-imposition of Catholic practice could thus be tolerated by a theological technicality.43 Many others, however, experienced the Interim as a deep-reaching break with implications for not only the ritual life of the church, but its very constitution. Particularly among more educated segments of society, people saw this break in the context of confessional struggle and martyrdom that accompanied the history of the true church from its very beginnings to the Last Judgment. By doing so, opponents of the Interim fell back on a notion of history bound up with apocalyptic imagery.44 Faced with the veritable ritual assault embodied by the Interim program, Lutherans in the post-Interim generation frequently interpreted their situation in apocalyptic terms.

41 Ibid, vol. 11, 114–16. 42 Ibid, vol. 13, 128: “Ergo cum apprehendimus obiectum, et iudicamus bonum aut malum esse, spiritus moti in agnitione, feriunt cor, quod quasi ictum et pulsatum, cietur, et aut expetit obiectum, aut fugit.” 43 Clyde L. Manschreck, “The Role of Melanchthon in the Adiaphora Controversy,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 48 (1957): 165–81. 44 Irene Dingel, “‘Der rechten lehr zuwider’: Die Beurteilung des Interims in ausgewählten theologischen Reaktionen,” Das Interim 1548/50: Herrschaftskrise und Glaubenskonflikt, ed. Luise Schütte-Schorn (Gütersloh: Gütersloh Verlagshaus, 2005) 292–311; Anja Moritz, Interim und Apokalypse: Die religiösen Vereinheitlichungsversuche Karls V im Spiegel der magdeburgischen Publizistik, 1548–1551/52 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011). 30 Jacob M. Baum

This historical narrative was an important means of dealing with the ritual concessions made by Melanchthon. Most notably, the Croatian- born Matthias Flacius (1520–75) and a circle of intellectuals in the city of Magdeburg violently rejected and opposed the position of Melanchthon and “adiaphorists” in a flourishing of printed works in the late 1540s and 1550s.45 This group often referred to themselves as “Gnesio-Lutherans” (authentic Lutherans), maintaining that they remained true to Martin Luther’s original vision for the church in contrast to the compromised “adiaphorist” party of Melanchthon. Somewhat ironically, given Flacius’ foreign origins, an important component of the Gnesio-Lutheran narrative was the association of adiaphorists with external religious, and sometimes ethnic, communities. As Georg Schmidt has shown, this often manifested rhetorically in the pamphlet literature in the form of a contrast between “German liberty” and “Spanish servitude.”46 This contrast moved beyond Martin Luther’s early arguments for freedom of conscience as a general Christian religious principle to represent it instead as a mark of uniquely German national character. While distinct from modern notions of national identity because it remained detached from any political entity analogous to the modern nation-state, the essentially “German” character of freedom of conscience nonetheless became an important, and deeply complicated, signifying strategy for many Lutherans in the early Baroque era.47 Turning to the question of ritual complicated the issue still further. Because external practices impinged on the mind and soul of spectators in a very real way, they could never be fully severed from matters of internal conscience. Practices were therefore associated with a whole range of imagined foreign identities, including Catholics, Jews, Turks, and so-called “heathens.” These associations were a means for Gnesio-Lutherans to draw clearer lines between the true community of God and its enemies. The

45 Thomas Kaufmann, Das Ende der Reformation: Magdeburgs “Herrgotts Kanzlei” 1548–1551/2 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003). 46 Georg Schmidt, “‘Teutsche Libertät’ oder ‘Hispanische Servitut’: Deutungsstrategien im Kampf um evangelischen Glauben und die Reichsverfassung (1546–1552),” Das Interim 1548/50, 166–92. 47 Ibid. Opening a Window to the Devil 31 pattern appears repeatedly in the statements of Gnesio-Lutherans in the second half of the sixteenth century. Flacius thus began the 1549 pamphlet, Against the Interim, by comparing the ritual measures introduced by the Interim to the “idolatry of the Jews” he had read about in the Scriptures.48 Deploying the biblical letters of Paul, he extended the argument against Jewish idolatry to both “papists” and “adiaphorists”,

as in Paul’s letters to the Galatians, Hebrews, and otherwise in several other places, according to which it has long been taught that all ceremonies and figures of the Old Testament were abolished, so that we receive Christ himself even more. So I would like to hear from the Papists and Interimists, on which grounds or appearances from Holy Scripture do they wish to introduce again into the church such outward ceremonies, sacrifices, and services, of which Popery was full.49

Similarly in the 1550 pamphlet A Christian Admonition to Resilience in the True Pure Religion of Jesus Christ, and in the Augsburg Confession, Flacius derided adiaphorists as Epicureans with confused senses, and compared them not only with Papists and Jews, but also Turks and “all the Godless, who scorn and deprecate us, our Gospel, and thus God’s name.”50 Variations on this theme became a structuring element of Gnesio-Lutheran thinking in the 1550s and 1560s.51

48 Flacius, Wider Das//INTERIM//Papistische Mess/Canonem///vnnd Meister Eissleuben////durch Christianum lau’-//terwar/zu dieser zeit nütz-//lich zu lesen (Magdeburg: Lotter, 1549) A2 r. 49 Ibid, A3r-v: “So nun/wie Paulus zun Galatern/vnnd Hebreern/vnnd sonst an andern oertern mehr/nach der lenge lehret/alle Ceremonien vnnd Figuren des alten Testaments auffgehabn/auff das wir deste mehr Christum selbst annemen/so wolt ich gerne/von den Papisten/vnnd Interimisten/aus der Heiligen schrifft hoeren/ mit welchem grund odder schein/sie solche eusserliche Ceremonien/Opffer/vnd Gottesdienst/welche des Babsthumbs voll gewesen/widder in die kirchen einfueren wollen.” 50 Flacius, Ein Christliche vermanung Matthie Flacij Jllyrici zur bestendigkeit/inn der waren reinen Religion Jhesu Christi/vnnd inn der Augspurgischen Confession (Magdeburg: Lotter, 1550) C2 r. 51 Jacob M. Baum, “Sensory Perception, Religious Ritual, and Reformation in Germany, 1428–1564,” diss, University of Illinois, 2013, 281–332. 32 Jacob M. Baum

Unfortunately, Gnesio-Lutherans were frustratingly imprecise about specifically which ritual practices they meant in their condemnations. This pattern at least in part can be traced back to Luther himself. In 1540, Luther composed a pamphlet titled A Writing of the Theologians at Wittenberg to the Preachers of Nuremberg on the Question of Unity between Evangelicals and Papists, which Flacius edited and re-published in 1549.52 Here Luther described the primary division between the Catholic and Lutheran churches arising from two chief issues: doctrine and the controversy over external ceremonies. In general, Luther avoided specific examples, instead offering a blanket condemnation of those ceremonies that he considered “spectacles” and “abuses.”53 When he did mention specifics, he provided examples such as blessings, vestments, fasting, or special prayers, but often ended these lists with expressions such as “and the like” or “et cetera.”54 At first glance, the lack of precision appears strange: if they were so threatening and so clearly identifiable with foreign communities, one might expect a higher degree of precision in identifying specific practices. What I claim here, however, is that specific material objects and practices were less significant than contemporary cultural assumptions about the sense of sight and religious spectacle. Lutheran arguments against adiaphora are only fully coherent if we take into account these assumptions. The primary danger of ritual adiaphora was the powerful affective relationship they established with the bodies of spectators. In the confessional age, physical acts of viewing ritual performances always already had the potential to erode and transform Lutheran identity. Anxieties about this transformative potential were reflected in the signifying strategies deployed by many Gnesio-Lutherans, contrasting the essentially “German” value of freedom of conscience with the oppressive ritual systems of foreign identities. These were all component parts of what we have labeled the window hypothesis.

52 Luther, Eine schrifft//der Theologen zu Wittenberg an die Prediger von Nürnberg// anno 1540 von der vereinigung der Euangelischen mit den Papisten (Magdeburg: Roedinger, 1549). 53 Ibid, A6v-A7r. 54 Ibid, A8r-A9r. Opening a Window to the Devil 33

The label underscores the medium of vision, and reflects the specific -lan guage used by Lutheran opponents of adiaphora. Flacius had frequent recourse to the window hypothesis in the immediate aftermath of theInterim . He first formulated the termMitteldingfenster in his 1549 pamphlet, Ein buch von waren vnd falschen Mitteldingen.55 Here and in other pamphlets from this period, Flacius argued that adiaphora transformed and falsified the Christian religion, and that their re- introduction into the church would “open the window to the Babylonian whore and her beastly consorts.”56 Elsewhere, Flacius claimed that adiaphora were “nothing other than a colored appearance, through which the papist Mass and all of Popery is re-established.”57 Borrowing from Luther the term “spectacle-Mass,” Flacius argued that the traditional Mass was clearly something “other than communion, and is against God’s Word, for one practices a Spectacle-mass, and makes an ape’s game of the sacrament.”58 Flacius supported his argument by providing a brief list of things which differentiated the “Spectacle Mass” from humble communion, including the use of vestments, the praying of the Divine Office, vigils, and the invocations of saints, among others.59 Far from matters of indifference, such things were deceptions of the Antichrist and the Devil, and always

55 Marina Miladinov, “Mittelding or Idolatry? Veneration of Saints in Matthias Flacius Illyricus (1520–1575),” Matija Vlačić Ilirik: Zbornik radova s Drugog međunarodnog znanstvenog skupa Matija Vlačić Ilirik, ed. Marina Miladinov (Labin: Grad Labin, 2008) 75–107. 56 Flacius, Klerliche Beweisung das alle die jenige///welche die schrifften widder das// Interim vnd Mittelding feil zuhaben … (Magdeburg: Roedinger, 1550) A2 r: “die fenster auffthun/vnd sich zu der Babilonischen hure vnd ihrem Thier gesellen.” 57 Ibid, D2 r: “Eben dasselbige zeigt an der Traum Philippi von den Fenstern/mit seiner ausslegung/das all jtzige hendel nichts ander sein; denn nur ein geferbter schein/ dadurch die Papistische Mess/vnnd das gantze Babstumb widder angerichtet werde.” 58 Flacius, Wider den ausszug//des Leipsischen Jnterims///oder das kleine Interim (Magdeburg: Roedinger, 1549) A4 v: “Darumb ist die Messe ein ander ding//denn die Communion, vnd ist widder Gottes wort/das mann also ein spectakelmess anrichtet/ vnd mit dem Sacrament affenspiel treibet.” 59 Ibid, B1r. 34 Jacob M. Baum led the soul into idolatry.60 Because of their affective power as spectacles, Flacius concluded, “one must not only prevent and do away with abuses, but rather also the ceremonies themselves in order that godless worship is not strengthened.”61 Although Gnesio-Lutheran discussions of adiaphora were somewhat inconsistent in the particular practices they singled out for disparagement, they all comprehended the problem as rooted in the visuality of ritual. This is apparent in the degree to which the sin of idolatry occupied discussions of adiaphora.62 As Stuart Clark has recently shown, post-Reformation religious debates about idolatry were fundamentally about vision, and therefore cannot be separated from their context in contemporary scientific discourse.63 Flacius, for example, was much more skeptical than his Melanchthonian counterparts that religious images would not lead the soul into idolatry because of his reading of scientific theories of vision. As he explained: “objects move the senses, [and] what one sees, to that he is disposed.”64 From his understanding of vision, Flacius reasoned that once images were removed from churches, they should not to be returned: “if one puts the removed images back to their places, they will cause the same abuse as before and many will practice their iniquity on account of them, as we often read in the Scripture.”65 Arguments about the idolatrous potential of adiaphora were grounded in contemporary notions of physiology and

60 Ibid, B2r. 61 Ein Christliche vermanung, C4 r: “Man muss nicht allein die missbreuche ver- hueten vnd abthun/Sondern auch die Ceremonien selbsts das nicht die Gottlosen Gottesdienst bekrefftiget werden.” 62 Miladinov, “Mittelding or Idolatry?” 63 Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) 161–203. 64 Ein Buch von waren vnd falschen Mitteldingen, K ij: “Denn wie man sagt/Obiecta mouent sensus, was man sihet/da wird man verstürtz auff.” 65 Sendbrieff einer Christlicher Person/welch emit auff dem Landtage zu Leiptzig bey den Handlungen gewesen/deshalben an einen guten Freundt geschrieben (1549) H iij: “Wenn man die abgethane bilder widerumb auffrichtet/so werden sie eben zu dem misbrauche komen wie zuuor/vnd werden viel leut nach jhnen hurerei treiben/ wie die Schrifft sehr oft meldet.” The pamphlet was published anonymously, but Opening a Window to the Devil 35 psychology. As Nikolaus von Ambsdorff, another leading Gnesio-Lutheran, explained, the re-introduction of the Catholic Mass and other traditional ceremonies into Lutheran services would transform and eventually destroy the church. Such practices, he argued, “have a great appearance and prestige, filling the ears and eyes, so that the heart is drawn to them, and catch the eye of the crowd, forgetting the sound of the Word, and paying it absolutely no heed.”66 From here, Ambsdorff believed the true church would quickly deteriorate into the idolatry and abominations of Papists and Jews.67 Moving beyond the leading pamphleteers, we find the window hypothesis at the center of ritual conflicts among Lutherans in the post-Interim generation. The 1563 trial of Joachim Heller provides an instructive example. At the time of his trial, Heller was professor of mathematics and official astronomer to the city of Nuremberg. As with Parsberger before him, Heller came under the intense scrutiny of authorities for his views on ritual practice. Yet unlike Parsberger, who was allowed to resume his post, Heller and his entire family were permanently banished from the city.68 The city council passed down this decision, condemning Heller as a “defiler of blood … [and] an anti-Christian spirit.”69 Why was Heller’s perspective so troubling to authorities? During the trial, the city council discovered

Miladinov convincingly argues that Flacius produced the text. See “Mittelding or Idolatry,” 90–1. 66 Ambsdorff,Horas canonicas in Klöstern und Stifften singen und gebotene Adiaphora halten, ist eben so wol Abgötterey, als die schentlichste Opffermesse(Jena: Rhebart, 1563) B2v: “Denn jre Ceremonien vnd Kirchen geprenge/haben ein grossen schein vnd ansehen/fuellen die Oren vnd Augen/damit sie die Hertzen an sich ziehen/das man mit hauffen drauff felt/das die Leut des Worts vergessen/vnd gar nicht achten.” 67 Ibid. 68 Bericht Joachim Hellers verhandlung belangend [1564]. The report is one among many compiled in a massive dossier on the trial of Heller, located in the Bayerische Staatsarchiv Nuremberg under the signature StAN, Rep. 15a, A-Akten, S.I.L. 182, nr. 2. Hereafter this file is referred to as “Dossier.” The first twenty-five items in the dossier were numbered by the city clerk; however, there are also several hundred pages of unnumbered letters, Fragstücke, pleas, testimonies, and inventories. None of the individual items in the dossier are paginated. 69 Ibid. 36 Jacob M. Baum that he was an ardent support of Flacius, and had criticized in public and in private the ritual life of the Lutheran church in Nuremberg, which had accepted the church ordinance of the Augsburg Interim in 1548. In addition to the eyewitness testimonies, letters, and opinions of the city’s leading theologians, an investigation of Heller’s personal library yielded four letters written by Flacius, three of which were addressed directly to Heller.70 Heller eventually admitted to distributing pamphlet literature in the city, and that he and other Gnesio-Lutherans had secretly lodged Flacius in their homes on several occasions.71 It therefore seems likely that Heller was part of a network of well-educated individuals actively engaged in subverting the religious orthodoxy of the city.72 As with other Gnesio-Lutherans, Heller’s criticisms cohered around what he perceived to be the inherent potential of ritual spectacles to pen- etrate and transform the minds and souls of spectators. The window hypothesis thus appeared as a structuring element in Heller’s arguments on ritual practice throughout the trial. Testifying on 19 May 1563, Michael Graf, a fellow citizen of Nuremberg who had invited Heller into his home on several occasions, claimed that Heller had stated he would never recognize “adiaphoristic corruptions” to the liturgy because doing so would lead into “error,” superstition, and the idolatry of “popery” [Bapsthumb].73 Heller’s most extensive discussion of adiaphora can be found in one of his letters to Bartholomäus Schöber, another citizen of Nuremberg and fellow

70 These letters are also unnumbered in the dossier. The fourth letter was a circular written jointly by Flacius and another Gnesio-Lutheran, Nicholas Gallus. This is also not numbered in the dossier. It is addressed to: “Reuerenda et Clarissimis viris D. Hieronymo Besoldo, Michaeli Bixlero, et Conrado Klingenbeckio concionato- ribus in ecclesia Normibergensi. D. Michael Rotingo et Joachimo Hellero artium et philosophice professoribus, dominus et amicis obseruandis.” 71 Heller confessed to this on March 17, 1563. See Dossier, Item 20: “Fragstuckh auf Joachim Heller, 15 March, 17 March, 24 March, 3 April, 28 April, 1563.” 72 Karl Schornbaum, “Die brandenburgisch-nürnbergische Norma doctrinae 1573,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 19 (1922): 161–93. 73 Dossier, Item 18. Opening a Window to the Devil 37

Gnesio-Lutheran.74 Heller commiserated with Schöber, describing their struggle in apocalyptic terms:

The books of Luther, a Holy Man of God, shall remain dear to us, so that we might protect and guard ourselves against the Antichrist and the Adiaphorists, [and] flee the abomination of the idolatrous Mass … one shall give witness to the writings of Luther and others against the impiety of adiaphora … adiaphorists are Anti-Christian, they teach against Christ and defend errors which Christ by his own Word expressly condemns.75

Although Heller clearly considered adiaphora quite dangerous, he too was rather imprecise about specifically which ritual practices should be included in this category. Michael Graf testified that Heller had once sharply con- demned the practice of the Elevation.76 Only on one other occasion did Heller mention a few more specifics, including “lights, altar decorations, vestments, [and] songs.” Nonetheless, this list ends with the catch-all “et cetera.”77 In Heller’s view, the affective visual relationship rituals established with their observers was more important than any one specific practice, because this relationship had the potential to shape the soul. In his letter to SchÖber, Heller formulated the window hypothesis by bringing together scripture and physiology. Quoting John 1:9, he contrasted adiaphoristic error, deception, and foolishness with the “true light which illuminated all people.” When in the face of adiaphora, true Christians “must look to the light and the truth alone, otherwise they themselves will be infiltrated

74 Dossier, “Joachim Heller an Bartholomäus Schober” (item not numbered in dossier). 75 Ibid: “Luthers dess Manns Gottes Bücher sollen vnns sonnderlich darumb lieb sein, das wir vnns wor dem Antichrist vnnd seinen Adiaphoristen hüten vnnd bevahren khummen, velliehe den greuel der Abgöttischen Mess … man schon der schrifften Lutheri vnnd anderen, so wider die Adiaphorica impietatem stehn Zeugkhnus gibt … Adiaphorististen sunndt Antichristisch, docent contra christum et defendunt errores, quas Christus ex eius verbum expresse damnat.” 76 Dossier, Item 1 [“Bericht und relation Joachim Hellers in Causa Sacramenti (15 Dec 1562)”]. 77 Dossier, Item 1. 38 Jacob M. Baum by idols.”78 Heller also considered the spectacle of the Mass an “abomination” because it encouraged the adoration of the Eucharist by appealing to human sight, which was vulnerable to delusion and corruption. He thus framed his argument with the biblical story of David gazing at the body of the bathing Bathsheba. The story, he claimed, provided a good example of the universal “bodily weakness” [leibs schwachait] for outward things. He correlated this with the “animalistic blindness, certainty, and impudence beating in the heart” which was so powerful that it even dominated the internal affections of David.79 Like his Gnesio-Lutheran counterparts, Heller’s understanding of the danger of adiaphora was grounded in contemporary scientific understandings of vision. Heller had attended the University of Wittenberg during the 1530s, while Melanchthon was delivering his lectures and composing his commentaries on the uses of Aristotelian physiology and psychology for religious purposes.80 Further, the inventory of his library taken during his trial confirms that Heller owned copies of both the original texts of Aristotle and Melanchthon’s commentary on them.81 It seems likely that this model of vision constituted an important part of his mental equip- ment. In his testimony, Heller stated that the “light of reason” of Islamic and ancient Greek philosophers had applicability in theology and religious piety.82 In this context, Heller’s rejection of adiaphora appears more intellectually consistent than the position taken by Melanchthon. While both men acknowledged that the physiological act of vision implied a mutually

78 Dossier, “Heller an Schöber”: “Einer ist allain die warhait, vnnd alle die derselben hengnus geben, sind desselben diener, vnnd mehr nicht, wir von Johanne geschriben steet Hon erat. Ut lux sed ut testimonium perliberet de lumine. Erat lux vera quae illu- minat omne hominum. Drumb gilts hie recht dieser nirens[?], vnnd gut vndterschied zuhalten, es sehet das liecht vnndt warhait, welche fuer sich selbs einig vnwandelbar bleibt, nit auf den zeugen, sonnder die Zeugen, sovil derselben immer sein, mues- sen allain auf den liecht vnnd der warhait besehen, oder do sie sich an stat desselben eindringen werdens Götzen.” 79 Ibid. 80 Baum, “Sensory Perception,” 297–8. 81 Dossier, “Reliqiuae Bibliothek Regiomontanae” (unnumbered item). 82 Dossier, Item 1. Opening a Window to the Devil 39 affective relationship between perceiving subject and perceived object, Melanchthon’s toleration of adiaphora was in effect premised on ignoring the potential danger that could result from this relationship in practice. Heller and Gnesio-Lutherans took the threat of adiaphora as spectacle seriously, and articulated a position that addressed what they perceived to be the practical implications of the re-imposition of traditional ritual into Lutheran services. The spectacle of such rituals had real power to shape and transform the internal religious identities of Lutherans, identities that had been carefully formed over the past several decades. This potential danger was simply too great to be ignored. As Heller cautioned, if “one opens the window to the devil even in the slightest degree, there he breaks through completely.”83 What was Baroque spectacle? Before the conditions of modernity prevailed, a distinct conception of spectacle emerged from the history of religion in early modern Germany. This concept revolved around how people understood the visual effects of rituals on the bodies and souls of spectators. In this regard, contemporary scientific discourse on the sense of sight could not be severed from understandings of religious practice. Pre-modern vision always implied a powerful mutually affective relationship between perceiving subject and perceived object. Sense data emitted from objects of perception penetrated the body the perceiving subject, and always had the potential to transform the mind and soul. This theory of vision informed the ritual practices of the late medieval church prior to the Reformation, and served a unifying function in the cultural imagination. The multi-confessional context ushered in by the Reformation shifted this paradigm: traditional understandings of the sense of sight persisted through the sixteenth century across confessional lines, but the significance assigned to the consumption of ritual spectacles was transformed. Baroque spectacle no longer served the purposes of articulating a common identity, but rather always assumed a multiplicity of political and religious identities

83 Dossier, Item 1: “wo man dem Teuffel nur ain klains gutzerlain aufthut, da bricht er von stundt an, ain ganntz fenster ein.” 40 Jacob M. Baum as spectators-consumers. In this context, anxiety arose over the effects of ritual practices on the bodies and souls of observers. For German Lutherans living in the mid-sixteenth century, we have labeled this anxiety the window hypothesis. After the 1540s, conflicts over the window hypothesis intensified within Lutheran German communities. This intensification stemmed from a concerted effort on the part of the Catholic church to use ritual as a way of coercing and re-establishing religious unity in the Holy Roman Empire, and a more systematic attempt on the part of Protestant intellectuals to come to terms with late medieval scientific discourse on the senses as it related to religious practice. Conflicts about ritual among Lutherans are only fully coherent if we take this context into account. These conflicts had less to do with specific practices than they did with how people evaluated the potentially affective relationship physical acts of viewing established between spectators and ritual spectacles. Among Lutherans, anxieties about the transformative effects this relationship would have on the minds and bodies of spectators are apparent in the notion that rituals could open a window to the devil and lead spectators back to the Catholic church, or into the sin of idolatry. Lutheran commentators often framed this as a threat to freedom of conscience, understood to be an essentially “German” value. Although not entirely analogous to modern sensibilities of national identity, this represented a fundamental shift away from the medieval worldview. Situated between the medieval and the modern, the Lutheran window hypothesis provides a case study in the dynamics of transformation and difference inherent in a distinctly Baroque form of spectacle. Elizabeth Otto

Bauhaus Spectacles, Bauhaus Specters

The “society of the spectacle” described in Guy Debord’s 1967 volume of the same name is one in which the dominant social relationships – including religion and all aspects of authentic “being” – that shaped life prior to the conditions of modern production have, through the ever- increasing domination of the economy over social life, been replaced with mere “appearing.”1 In short, according to Debord’s diagnosis, “in societies where modern conditions of production prevail” that which was previously “directly lived” has been reduced to mere representation.2 Debord critiques the fundamental assumptions of cultural progress: “the spectacle inherits all the weaknesses of the Western philosophical project which undertook to comprehend activity in terms of the categories of seeing: furthermore, it is based on the incessant spread of the precise technical rationality which grew out of this thought.”3 For Debord, this spectacularization of culture is both a harbinger and a mechanism of the total domination of capitalism’s commodity fetishism. Its attendant technologies and media reduce citizens to hypnotized consumers whose communal bonds have been dissolved and whose critical faculties have atrophied completely.4 Historians of art and visual culture most often locate the emergence of the society of the spectacle and the concurrent foreclosure on the

1 Portions of a much earlier version of this essay were published in “Image as Investigation: Sciences of the Otherworldly at the Bauhaus,” The Environmentalist 32.3 (Sept. 2012): 318–25. Thanks to Allison Morehead for useful suggestions and discussions. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are my own. 2 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle [1967] (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983) thesis 1. 3 Debord, Spectacle thesis 19. Emphasis original. 4 Debord, Spectacle theses 18, 25, and 33. 42 Elizabeth Otto avant-garde’s ability to fulfill its critical function in relation to Debord and his contemporaries’ postwar era.5 But Debord himself would later state specifically that this phenomenon had already come to the fore prior to the 1920s.6 Indeed, the 1910s and 1920s saw a sharp increase in the availability of consumer goods and visual mass media such as film, illustrated newspapers, and magazines, a fact which supports Debord’s assertion that the society of the spectacle was already a firm fixture prior to his own time. Indeed, in an edited volume such as this one – which unites a range of essays on spectacle in the German cultural context and which probes the question of what “German” spectacle might be, as Thomas O. Haakenson considers in this book’s introduction – it is essential to keep in mind that a critical awareness of spectacle’s intersection with the market economy was a common place in Germany of the early twentieth century. Weimar Cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer diagnosed and analyzed the problem of spectacle in his 1926 essay on the “cult of distraction.”7 We can see further evidence of interwar intellectuals’ preoccupation with this issue in Monty Paret’s essay for the present volume, “Berlin in Light: Wilhelmine Monuments and Weimar Mass Culture.” Paret quotes author Robert Musil’s 1927 observations on how drastically public visual culture had changed in only a few decades, so that the massive stone monuments built at the turn of the last century had been rendered invisible by the new, electrified, spectacular culture of advertising that dominated the capital city.

5 See particularly discussions of the “Neo-Avant-Garde” in Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant Garde [1972], trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); and Benjamin Buchloh, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), esp. xix–xxi and “Beuys: The Twilight of the Idol, Preliminary Notes for a Critique,” 41–64. 6 Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle [1988], trans. Malcolm Imrie (New York: Verso, 1998) 3–5. 7 Siegfried Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction: on Berlin’s Picture Palaces,” The Mass Ornament, ed. Thomas Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005) 323–8; first published as “Kult der Zerstreuung: Über die Berliner Lichtspielhäuser,” Frankfurter Zeitung, March 4, 1926, Feuilleton: 1–2. Bauhaus Spectacles, Bauhaus Specters 43

What is missing from Debord’s hindsight view of spectacle’s development from the 1910s onward is an engagement with experiments in visual culture that were intended to combat the nascent, as yet unnamed society of the spectacle by reinvigorating exactly those things that it sought to shut down: egalitarian and multi-directional communication, multi-sensory experience, critical thought, shared community, and the cultivation of connections between producer, object, and viewer. These other, more utopian strains of interwar culture included experimental religions, the post- World War I interest in reinventing culture, and the belief among many in avant-garde movements that the visual realm could be the source of such a reinvention by offering new conceptual models and ways of thinking, as well as mental space to reimagine life for the better. The Bauhaus, an interwar German art school and reform movement that would become one of the most influential institutions of modernism, might seem an unlikely place to look for strains of resistance to the society of the spectacle, since it has most often been remembered by historians as a key point of origin for minimalist, mass-produced design and a largely commercially driven association of art, craft, technology, and industrial production intent on ingratiating itself to market forces.8 Such histories neglect other elements of the Bauhaus experiment that were even more radical but which did not survive the subsequent National Socialist period intact. Missing these more creative and culturally radical aspects of the Bauhaus’s history means misunderstanding not only the Bauhaus movement but also the broader implications of what Bauhaus students and masters were attempting in their work. A different picture of the Bauhaus emerges through a re-examination that includes more than the few well-known names – after all, the Bauhaus

8 These associations are evident in the fact that the Bauhaus is a staple in teaching the history of architecture – even though architecture was not formally taught there until its final five years – and yet it is given short shrift in most art history survey texts. Even specialist books such as Frank Whitford’s well-researched and influential Bauhaus limit the discussion of the school’s achievements to having created the defining aesthetic of modern production and for having revolutionized art education. See Frank Whitford, Bauhaus (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1984) 7. 44 Elizabeth Otto had over 1,200 students and teachers pass through its doors – and which takes seriously the often utopian life experiments that were at the heart of the school.9 The spectacle seeks to lull what Debord calls “imprisoned modern society” into an unknowing sleep and to maintain its members in an uncritical state through the distraction of a laudatory monologue about itself.10 By contrast, the Bauhaus sought to repurpose the tools of visual culture to awaken vision and the other senses in order to reject the society of the spectacle’s mode of unilateral communication and to embrace community and dialogue among the many. Like the society of the spectacle, members of the Bauhaus were keenly interested in existing and emerging imaging technologies. However, they wanted to see how these technologies could yield new visions and thus new understandings of the modern era, and also of the natural and spiritual worlds. This essay examines how art and life at the Bauhaus not only served as research into ways to create better and simpler design for everyone, but how the Bauhaus also attempted to harness the visual to explore the spiritual and thus sought antidotes to the nascent society of the spectacle. To illuminate this aspect of the Bauhaus I will tap into its links to late nineteenth and early twentieth century religious and spiritual experimentation, an important part of the school’s philosophical and visual inheritance that has remained almost entirely absent from our understandings of the school. As I will show, aspects of Bauhaus production served as a kind of soft science to probe occult and mystical phenomena in serious, futuristic, and playful modes. The school is usually seen as having had two distinct periods, the years from 1919 to 1922, which were dominated by Expressionism, and the turn to Constructivism from 1922 onward. My examination will span this divide and proceed more or less chronologically. Architect Walter Gropius conceived of the Bauhaus during his service as an officer in the First World War and founded it early in 1919, within

9 For a breakdown of Bauhaus students by gender and year, see Adrian Sudhalter, “14 Years Bauhaus: A Chronicle,” Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity, eds Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009) 323–37. 10 Debord, Spectacle theses 21 and 24. Bauhaus Spectacles, Bauhaus Specters 45 months of Germany’s defeat. From the start, the Bauhaus was many things at once: a school which taught young people while healing them from the ravages of war and sheltering them from Germany’s ongoing revolution and its political and financial instability, an art movement that rejected old hierarchies between art and craft, and a think tank for design and modern living which brought together some of Europe’s most creative minds. The Bauhaus as a whole is usually interpreted through a few particular objects; thus it is associated with clean lines and practicality. However, when one considers the life experiments that took place at the school and the spiritual and philosophical approaches that animated that life, the Bauhaus comes into sharp focus as much more than a style or approach. In fact, it can best be described as a radical utopian community. The Bauhaus’s engagement with the spiritual through design is evident even in its most functional and perhaps even mundane objects, such as the chairs designed by Hungarian Bauhäusler Marcel Breuer. His Bauhaus chairs embody the school’s functionalism with their simple, rectilinear metal frames strung with strips of fabric upon which to suspend a human body.11 They were to be easy to manufacture, care for, and transport, and they would do all of this without obstructing views of the surrounding architecture. As art historian Frederic Schwartz tells us, such chairs were meant “to allow the free unfolding of modern life.”12 Breuer likewise suggested his chairs as indicators of human evolution. In 1926, he created a joking mock up for a film that would use chair design to document humanity’s progress. Its final image, marked with a date uncertain, includes no chair at all but rather shows a woman of seated upon an “elastic column of air.”13 One day, he suggests, we will free ourselves from objects entirely. Even as they appeared to embody simplicity, modernity, and mass reproducibility, these chairs also had a spiritual side, one revealed in an undated photograph of an early Breuer “slat chair” from 1923 (see Figure 2.1).

11 See Breuer’s 1925 Club Chair (B3) . 12 Frederick Schwartz, “Marcel Breuer: Club Chair,” Bergdall and Dickerman 228. 13 Marcel Breuer, “ein bauhaus-film: fünf jahre lang,” Bauhaus 1.1 (1926); reproduced in Bergdall and Dickerman 102. 46 Elizabeth Otto

Figure 2.1 Photographer unknown, Untitled (Seated man in Marcel Breuer armchair later titled T1 1a), n.d., c. 1923. Gelatin silver print. Collection of the Getty Research Institute. Bauhaus Spectacles, Bauhaus Specters 47

Strikingly, seated in this overtly modern chair is an incongruous figure, a ghostly man who barely materializes on the photograph’s surface. Surely his transparent form is there to show how the chair is both well-designed and comfortable without hiding it from view. Yet his presence is a direct contrast to the objectivity of Breuer’s design, and it evokes an uncanny response from the viewer. The practical and the mystical are uncomfortably close in this image which clearly belongs to the traditions of the Bauhaus but which can also be classified as a type of spirit photograph, a visual form that had been in widespread use since the later nineteenth century. Spirit photography was one of a number of powerful new visual technologies developed during the half century preceding the rise of the Bauhaus that revealed a seemingly ever-unfolding new visual world. These included media to inform and entertain, such as stereoscopic views, panoramas, photograms, and the cinema, as well as new technologies of scientific imaging. German scientists were part of a lively international community of intellectual exchange and scientific experimentation that resulted in such advances as Wilhelm Röntgen’s startling 1895 discovery of the x-ray’s ability to reveal the body’s interior.14 One of his earliest x-rays showed his wife Anna Ludwig’s hand as only skeletal bones with rings suspended loosely on one finger, a picture that supposedly caused her to cry out, “I have seen my death!” The fact that this image would become one of the period’s most reproduced attests to the broad public interest in the new visions offered by scientific technology.15 The turn of the century’s expanded range of visual tools for research, communication, and creativity created a climate wherein images offered new ways to apprehend the world and to understand the relationships among human existence, time, space, and even the border between life and death. Further, it contributed to a contemporaneous sense that visual representation, far from merely lulling an entertained public with its vapid spectacles, might give access to truths previously undreamt of.

14 Wilhelm Röntgen, “Über eine neue Art von Strahlen (Vorläufige Mitteilung),”Aus den Sitzungsberichten der Würzburger Physik.-medic Gesellschaft Würzburg (1895) 137–47. 15 Simone Natale, “A Cosmology of Invisible Fluids: Wireless, X-Rays, and Psychical Research around 1900,” Canadian Journal of Communication 36 (2011): 265. 48 Elizabeth Otto

During this period when emerging imaging technologies were dramatically expanding the visible world and capitalism’s commodity fetishism was rapidly coming to dominate the urban marketplace, many sought inspiration in an emerging spiritual world. Numerous experimental religions were founded in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and they quickly gained adherents. A number of these were mixtures inspired by Middle Eastern and Asian religions and philosophies, while others drew inspiration from discoveries in scientific fields to imagine new access to the spirit world. One of the most influential new religions was Spiritualism, a movement focused on the possibility of communicating with the dead, which arose in the mid-nineteenth century in the United States.16 The movement also spread throughout Europe, where it was known as Spiritism. From the 1860s through the middle of the twentieth century, there was a proliferation of séances in which many of the leading figures in science, art, culture, literature, and politics participated. The direct experience of spirit presence was central to Spiritism, and obtaining evidence to verify and disseminate reports of human-spirit contact was essential for the movement’s claims to credibility and its ability to grow. Evidence could manifest in ephemeral forms during the séance, such as table turning or “rapping,” spirit knockings that might yield direct communication through Morse Code.17 More famous, however, was the durable evidence of spirit photographs, which provided a way to document and investigate what seemed to be only the latest boundary pierced by vision: that between life and death. Photographs were and often still are believed to function as indexical, “as a mode of evidence that cannot be denied,” in the words of Tom Gunning. Because of this, photographs of spirits routinely served as indisputable proof of a spirit world that was beyond the range of human

16 See Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth- Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991, 2001); and Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth- Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 17 John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: The History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) 94–7. Bauhaus Spectacles, Bauhaus Specters 49 vision, but which had real and visible form nonetheless.18 The fugitive images in these photographs emerged like spirit pentimenti on the light- sensitive surface, authentic traces of the afterlife that allowed for the dissemination of irrefutable evidence of incredible events.19 For Spiritualists, these photographs of a real world that had been just out of view was analogous to the developments that were occurring in other scientific fields such as medicine, biology, astronomy, and in studies of fourth dimensionality.20 Historian Corinna Treitel has argued that Germany’s emergence into modernity was particularly fraught, in that it was later to industrialize than other European nations and was not fully constituted as a country until 1871. Because of this, Treitle argues, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Germans’ fears of rapid change were mediated by a particularly strong interest in the paranormal and in demonstrable aspects of the occult.21 The centrality of photography to the rigorous study of Spiritualism is evident in the work of the Munich-based, preeminent occult researcher Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, who sought dispassionately to analyze supernatural occurrences in laboratory environments, and who often used photography as a scientific tool to capture his experiments (see Figure 2.2). In this photograph of Schrenck-Notzing witnessing a séance, an

18 Gunning is discussing the photographed body in general; Tom Gunning, “Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives, and Early Cinema,” Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, eds Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) 19. 19 Pierre Apraxine and Sophie Schmit, “Photography and the Occult,” The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, eds Clément Chéroux and Andreas Fischer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005) 12–17; Louis Kaplan, “Where the Paranoid Meets the Paranormal: Speculations on Spirit Photography,” Art Journal 62.3 (2003): 18–29. 20 Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (1983) revised ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), and Henderson “Claude Bragdon, the Fourth Dimension, and Modern Art in Cultural Context,” Claude Bragdon and the Beautiful Necessity, eds Euginia Victoria Ellis and Andrea Reithmayer (Rochester: RIT Graphic Arts Press, 2010). 21 Corinna Treitel, A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2004) 24. 50 Elizabeth Otto

Figure 2.2 Albert von Schrenck-Notzig, The Medium Eva C. with a Materialization on her Head and a Luminous Apparition Between her Hands, 1912. Gelatin silver print. Collection of the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene, Freiburg im Breisgau. Bauhaus Spectacles, Bauhaus Specters 51 object materialized on the head of the medium known as Eva C. According to Schrenck-Notzing’s notes, the object bore a strong resemblance to her slippers, but both still appeared to be on her feet. Most impressively, this photograph also shows a powerful light apparition emerging between the medium’s hands, an aspect of the séance not described by Schrenck-Notzig and therefore one that was likely added by someone else in the darkroom.22 Dramatic images like this one have fascinated historical and contemporary viewers and thus have circulated the most widely. They provide alternative forms of spectacles which reveal a world beyond the here and now of consumption and distraction. Spirit traces also manifested in other, non-photographic but direct visual forms, and many of these pictures were published in periodicals such as the Leipzig-based theosophical and occult journal Sphinx, which began publication in 1886.23 Sphinx offered researchers and spiritual seek- ers new information on such phenomena as Gedankenübertragungen, or thought-transfer pictures, which were made when one person focused on an image and another mentally received and sketched a meaningful approximation of it. By contrast to what viewers perceived as photography’s infallible recording of the truth, the hand-made nature of the images resulting from Gedankenübertragungen was what made them authentic, since they attested to the individual subject having personally perceived and recreated the sent thoughts.24 Sphinx also published research into the manifestation of spirit figures in Kleksographien, inkblots made decades before Hermann Rorschach would utilize them in psychological testing.25

22 Chéroux and Fischer 194. 23 For more on Sphinx’s influence on modern art, see my collaborative essay with Allison Morehead, “Representation in the Age of Mediumistic Reproduction, from Symbolism to the Bauhaus,” The Symbolist Roots of Modernism, eds Michelle Facos and Thor Mednick (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015) 155–68. 24 One of several articles on Gedankenübertragungen was published in Sphinx’s first year. See Freiherrn Dr von Ravensburg, “Gedanken-Übertragung: ein Protokoll,” Sphinx: Monatsschrift für die geschichtliche und experimentale Begründung der übersinnlichen Weltanschauung 1 (June 1886) 383–5. 25 Dr Hübbe-Schleiden, “Kerners Kleksographien,” Sphinx: Monatsschrift für die geschichtliche und experimentale Begründung der übersinnlichen Weltanschauung 11 (Jan. 1891) 48–50. 52 Elizabeth Otto

Kleksographien provided a space for the spirit of one recently deceased to make him or her self visible, a direct index of an otherworldly presence. Unlike the thought-transfer pictures, which are mediumistic, the inkblots are direct visualizations of spirits and thus more akin to photographs. Both inkblots and photographs manifested with only minimal intervention from the human hand. However, as Sphinx authors explained, once a spirit emerged in a Kleksograph, researchers could then legitimately add a few lines or darken portions of the image to enhance the figure’s visibility. While they were certainly spectacular, as hand-made spirit images the Gedankenübertragungen and Kleksographien resisted the ideology of the society of the spectacle, since they privileged individual, transformational experience and manifested as one offs, even if they could be reproduced for dissemination. Spirit photography, thought-transfer pictures, and inkblots were some of the most influential methods of visual investigation into the otherworldly being conducted and discussed in Europe of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They attest to a sophisticated dialogue on the possibilities of seeing anew in the quickly changing modern world. In addition to the widespread popularity of these ideas, the visual nature of this discourse made it of particular interest for artists who were likewise reconsidering the nature and potential of visual representation at this time. Among these artists were many who would join the Bauhaus.26 A large number of Bauhaus students and masters of the school’s early years were drawn to new religions and mystical practices that profoundly

26 A few important early studies explore the spiritual at the early Bauhaus: Joseph Rykwert, “The Darker Side of the Bauhaus,”The Necessity of Artifice(New York: Rizzoli, 1982) 44–9, first published in Italian in 1970; Sixten Ringbom, “Transcending the Visible: The Generation of the Abstract Pioneers,” The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890–1985, ed. Maurice Tuchmann (Los Angeles: LACMA/New York: Abeville Press, 1986) 131–53; Rose-Carol Washton Long, “Expressionism, Abstraction, and the Search for Utopia in Germany,” The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 201–17; and Das frühe Bauhaus und Johannes Itten (Berlin: Bauhaus-Archiv, Bern: Kunstmuseum Berlin, and Weimar: Kunstsammlungen Weimar; and Ostfildern-Ruit bei Stuttgart: Dr Cantz’sche Druckerei, 1994). Bauhaus Spectacles, Bauhaus Specters 53 influenced the work they created. Even the Bauhaus’s original conception was drawn from religion; in the “1919 Program of the Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar,” Gropius likened the school’s union of the arts and crafts to a cathedral.27 Bauhaus teaching fostered the culture of utopian idea seeking that flourished within its walls.28 There was a remarkable depth to the various forms of spiritual experimentation of the Bauhaus and a surprising continuity to this aspect of the school over its fourteen-year existence. Two highly influential conduits of the spiritual were the Bauhaus masters Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. They were friends who had both been members of the Expressionist Blaue Reiter group in Munich prior to the war. Both artists’ active exploration of spiritual and religious themes predates their Bauhaus time, which began in 1921 for Klee and 1922 for Kandinsky. Klee’s quickly rising international stature as well as his complex and multilayered approach to both abstraction and the spiritual were surely essential factors in his appointment to the Bauhaus, a post he would hold until April of 1931. Inspired by folk, non-Western, and children’s art, Klee often used extremely simplified forms to gesture to the mystical and the otherworldly in both his imagery and the titles of his works. He was strongly influenced by Wilhelm Worringer’sAbstraction and Empathy of 1908, which argued that abstraction is the sign of a culture in a period of anxiety or intense spirituality, something both Worringer and Klee saw reflected in their own time.29 Through his eclectic approach to spirituality, Klee tapped into the traditions of German Romanticism and drew the attention of his contemporaries in other avant-garde movements. Klee’s

27 Walter Gropius, “Program of the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar” (1919), rpt. in The Bauhaus: Weimar Dessau Berlin Chicago, ed. Hans M. Wingler, trans. Wolfgang Jabs and Basil Gilbert (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1962) 31. 28 See Rainer Wick, “The Fundamentals of Bauhaus Pedagogy: Premises, Parallels, Trends,” Teaching at the Bauhaus (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2000) 56. 29 Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy [1908] trans. Michael Bullock (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1997), 46–8; Peter-Klaus Schuster, “The World as Fragment: Building Blocks of the Klee Universe,” The Klee Universe, eds Dieter Scholz and Christina Thomson (Berlin: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin/Hatje Cantz, 2008) 16. 54 Elizabeth Otto work was avidly discussed by the Zurich Dadaists already in 1915, and it was included in the first Surrealist exhibition in Paris in 1925.30 A number of specific occult motifs appear repeatedly in Klee’s work including, according to Osamu Okuda, “fortune telling, divining rods, oracles, astrology, witches, ghosts, demons, fairies, elves, and other figures of the world of magic.”31 Yet Klee was never a member of an organized religion, traditional or otherwise. In fact, his work appears even to directly mock his contemporaries’ occult experiments, as Okuda argues in the case of a sparse line drawing from 1928 that shows a jumble of modernist furni- ture as a caricature of table turning.32 Instead, the spiritual and the magical interested Klee generally, and conjuring served for him as a metaphor for the artist’s creative process.33 He spoke of “calling spirits” in order to make his work, an activity usually reserved for Spiritist séances. Klee also used spirits and ghosts as his subjects in a number of pictures from this period. Gespenst eines Genies [Ghost of a Genius] of 1922 (Figure 2.3) shows a lonely figure, at once both childlike and elderly, who has materialized on the page. Large, searching eyes were Klee’s most often remarked-upon features, and this is also the most noticeable element in the ghost’s face, which has clear elements of a self-portrait. This Klee’s large head dominates the picture with a face full of lines that suggest mystical markings; some of these elements are echoed at the figure’s throat. As the viewer’s eye descends, the body diminishes until it trails off in tiny feet barely rooted on a small patch of floor, the only concrete element of an otherwise-undefined setting. The figure’s clothing is ethereal and partially

30 Ann Temkin, “Klee and the Avant-Garde, 1912–1940,” Paul Klee, ed. Carolyn Lanchner (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1987) 14–29. 31 Osamu Okuda, “Klee und das Irrationale,” L’Europe des esprits: Die Magie des Unfassbaren von der Romantik bis zur Moderne, ed. Serge Fauchereau (Bern: Zentrum Paul Klee) 92. 32 Klee’s 1928 drawing is called was gehts mich an? Osamu Okuda, “Kunst als ‘Projection aus dem überdimensionalen Urgrund’: Über den Okkultismus bei Paul Klee,” Esoterik am Bauhaus: eine Revision der Moderne? ed. Christoph Wagner (Regensburg: Schnell und Steiner, 2009) 100–2. For more on table turning, see Denis Canguilhem, “Flammarion and Eusapia Palladino,” Chéroux and Fischer 235–48. 33 Okuda, “Klee und das Irrationale” 92, 95–6. Bauhaus Spectacles, Bauhaus Specters 55

Figure 2.3 Paul Klee, Ghost of a Genius [Gespenst eines Genies], 1922. Oil transfer and watercolor on paper mounted on card. Collection National Galleries Scotland. 56 Elizabeth Otto transparent, so that a scrawny body emerges from the layers. The genius’s head is cocked wistfully, as if mourning the fact that he is only a shadow of himself. This image is an oil-transfer drawing, so that the figure’s ghostly nature is paralleled by the medium in which it appears. To make the image, Klee placed a special type of paper over a piece of normal paper and drew on top. The final image then emerged on the unseen, second piece of paper as lines and smudges produced by the pressure of Klee’s pen and hands, but still at a distance once removed. After the picture was defined through the oil transfer, Klee added watercolor. Primarily a line drawing, this ghostly genius materialized through a process that involved more than the usual distance between the artist and the picture, and thus allowed for unexpected elements to appear. Okuda points out that a number of Klee’s pictures of figures he referred to as “ghosts” emerge from the darkness in a manner very similar to photographs of mediums that Schrenck-Notzing had published in his 1914 Materialisations-Phänomene [Phenomena of Materialization].34 Klee surely knew Schrenck-Notzing’s work, given his prominence in Munich and his connections to Klee’s teacher Franz von Stuck. Materialisations- Phänomene included numerous illustrations that could have inspired Klee’s ghost images, including a detail of Figure 2.2 showing only Eva C’s head and the slipper materialization, numerous photographs of mediums with bright ectoplasm emerging from their bodies, and other photographic pictures of posed individuals with ghost faces hovering on or near their heads.35 It is quite plausible these sensational photographs that circulated widely in Munich and well beyond served as inspirations for Klee’s various materializing ghostly figures.

34 Okuda, “Klee und das Irrationale” 98–9. In particular, Okuda is talking about a watercolor from 1923 titled Materialisierte Gespenster (Materialized Ghosts). 35 The nglishE translation of this book contains all of the German edition’s images and is available on Google Books: Albert Schrenck-Notzing, Phenomena of Materialization: A Contribution to the Investigation of Mediumistic Teleplastics, trans. E.E. Fournier d’Albe (London: Kegen Paul, Trench, Troubner & Co., 1920). The detail of this essay’s Figure 5 appears after p. 160 as Figure 86; it is one of 180 illustrations that were published as part of the original 1914 text. Bauhaus Spectacles, Bauhaus Specters 57

Prior to his time at the Bauhaus, Klee had already been associated by critics with the spiritual and even the occult, a reputation of which he unsuccessfully strove to rid himself.36 Bauhaus students spoke of him with reverence in part because of his seeming spiritual authenticity. Marianne Ahlfeld Heymann would later describe how, as a young student in the Textile Workshop where Klee was Master, she and the others “experienced an inner transformation” through Klee’s lectures. “The absoluteness … to which Klee opened our eyes had the initial effect of overwhelming and inhibiting us. Thus, suddenly transported into a world of perception for which we were not yet mentally equipped, we naturally felt shaky, or as if in a trance.”37 This perception of Klee as teaching from another, more spiritual realm inspired a caricature of him made in the late 1920s by art theorist and Bauhaus journal editor Ernst Kallaì. It shows a photograph of Klee’s head montaged onto a body that, seated in lotus position, levitates above the Dessau Bauhaus. Der Bauhausbuddha [The Bauhaus Buddha] is bookended by a pair of bobbed-haired female Bodhisattvas below who pray to him.38 Klee’s friend and fellow teacher Wasilly Kandinsky was already famous as the author of On the Spiritual in Art prior to coming to the Bauhaus. In Moscow Kandinsky had grown up knowing the work of his relative Victor Kandinsky, a pioneer of psychiatry and psychopathology and a trained medical doctor. After experiencing a psychotic break, Victor Kandinsky began to study his own range of unusual symptoms, detailed by historians Vladimir Lerner and Eliezer Witztum as “telepathy, reading and broadcasting thoughts, enforced speaking, and enforced motor movements.”39 In addition to exposing Wassily Kandinsky to psychopathology and the occult, Victor’s work helped Wassily to develop his ideas about synesthesia, or sensory transference. Through his subsequent reading of the work

36 Christine Hopfengart, “The Magician as Artist of Quotas: Paul Klee and His Rise as a Modernist Classic,” The Klee Universe 70. 37 Marianne Ahlfeld Heymann, “Erinnerungen an Paul Klee,” Und trotzdem überlebt (Konstanz: Hartung-Gorre Verlag, 1994) 78. 38 Original lost; reproduced in The Klee Universe 284. 39 Vladimir Lerner and Eliezer Witztum, “Images in Psychiatry: Victor Kandinsky, M.D., 1849–1889,” American Journal of Psychiatry 163.2 (February 2006): 209. 58 Elizabeth Otto of theosophists Rudolf Steiner and Franz Freudenberg, Kandinsky came to believe that synesthesia was a sign of being “spiritually unusually developed,” and he sought to cultivate it in himself and others.40 In 1896, Kandinsky gave up his legal and academic career in Russia and moved to Munich to become an artist. There he became integrated into the mystically influenced circles connected to the Munich Secession.41 He immersed himself in the emerging body of established research on the occult – Carl du Prel’s Studien aus dem Gebiete der Geheimwissenschaften, Alexander Aksakow’s Animuismus und Spiritismus, and issues of Sphinx – in preparation for writing On the Spiritual in Art, which would be published in 1911.42 In it, Kandinsky argued that the artist’s role was to help spiritually elevate others in society. The book quickly became extremely influential and circulated throughout Europe.43 Meanwhile Kandinsky, expelled from Germany as a Russian national with the outbreak of the First World War, returned to Russia and participated in the profound experiments in art and life brought on by the 1917 Soviet Revolution. Kandinsky took up his post at the Bauhaus in 1922 and would prove a source of continuity until its closure under pressure from the National Socialists in 1933. Above all, Kandinsky’s teaching at the Bauhaus explored the potential for abstraction to convey new forms of meaning. In 1913 Kandinsky had begun to paint abstractly; by the time he was at the Bauhaus, he had thoroughly considered what the open spaces of abstract pictures

40 The uotationq is from a Freudenberg text and was underlined by Kandinsky. Sixten Ringbom 132. 41 Heather Wolffram, The Stepchildren of Science: Psychical Research and Parapsychology in Germany, c. 1870–1939 (Amsterdam: Rodopi/The Wellcome Series in the History of Medicine) 115. 42 Treitel 108; Wassily Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art [1911], Complete Writings on Art, eds Kenneth Lindsay and Peter Vergo (New York: Da Capo Press, New York, 1994) 114–219. 43 In 1916 Kandinsky’s work was shown in the first exhibition at Zurich’s Galerie Dada. Later that year, his Klänge poems were read by Hugo Ball at the Cabaret Voltaire, and another poem is published in the group’s journal. See Clark V. Poling et al., “Chronology,” Kandinsky: Russian and Bauhaus Years (New York: Guggenheim, 1983) 350. Bauhaus Spectacles, Bauhaus Specters 59 could do. Kandinsky had realized “that objects harmed [his] pictures”; with this realization came “a terrifying abyss of all kinds of questions, a wealth of responsibilities stretched before me .… Most important of all: What is to replace the missing object? The danger of ornament revealed itself clearly to me ….”44 Kandinsky reports that the answer he found to these questions was to paint from forms that arose in his consciousness through emotion rather than logic. “Every form I ever used arrived ‘of its own accord,’ presenting itself fully fledged before my eyes, so that I had only to copy it, or else constituting itself actually in the course of work, often to my own surprise. Over the years I have now learned to control this formative power to a certain extent … to bridle the force operating within me, to guide it.”45 By the example of his writings, painting, and lessons, Kandinsky taught Bauhaus students that true artistic expression resulted from turning inward and tapping into the purity of ones thoughts and emotions. Further, he systematized his approach to abstraction through neurasthenic explanations – for example the sounds of various forms and colors – and passed these ideas on to his students.46 One of his Bauhaus students, the filmmaker, photographer, and designer Ré Soupault, would later remember the deep anticipation with which she and her fellow students awaited the arrival of the famous artist and theorist Kandinsky. Awestruck, she later wrote, “we could talk with him, ask him questions.”47 As was the case with Paul Klee, students experienced Kandinsky’s work, writing, and teaching as deeply authentic. Both Klee and Kandinsky continuously sought to create spiritualized abstractions

44 Kandinsky, “Reminiscences” [1913], Complete Writings on Art 370. 45 Kandinsky, “Reminiscences” 370. See also Ringbom 131–53. 46 Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane [1926], Complete Writings on Art 570 and 664. 47 Ré Soupault, Das Bauhaus: Die heroischen Jahre von Weimar, ed. Manfred Metzner, trans. Beate Thill (Heidelberg: Verlag das Wunderhorn, 2009) 35. See also Inge Herold, “Meta Erna Niemeyer: Studentin am Bauhaus Weimar 1921–1925,” Ré Soupault: Künstlerin im Zentrum der Avantgarde, eds Inge Herold, Ulrike Lorenz, and Manfried Metzner (Heidelberg: Verlag das Wunderhorn/Kunsthalle Manheim, 2011) 38. 60 Elizabeth Otto which offered an antidote to the material world of mere appearances. Klee and Kandinsky’s pictures served as visions that, in the context of the Bauhaus, promulgated the possibility of sight serving as a medium not of enslavement to spectacle, but of infinite forms of consciousness and freedom. During the Bauhaus’s early years, no other master compared in the scope of his influence – not even Kandinsky and Klee – to Johannes Itten, who, from 1919–1923, was in charge of the Preliminary Course [Vorkurs ]. Itten set the tone for the entire school since all students had to take and pass his class to prove that they had understood a set of fundamental principles before they were allowed to specialize in one of the workshops. He was also the leader of the most wide-spread engagement by Bauhaus members with the supernatural, Mazdaznan, a religion that was founded in the United States in 1890 and, like Spiritism, spread quickly to Europe. When Itten came to the Bauhaus as one of the very first masters in 1919, he brought approximately fourteen of his students from Vienna, all of whom were already converts.48 Thus from the very start Mazdaznan was at the heart of the Bauhaus and of its project to link the visual to the emerging authentic spiritual and in opposition to the spectacle. Mazdaznan’s founder and leader was Otto Hanisch, an immigrant to the U.S. who claimed to have grown up in Persia but likely came from Germany, and who changed his name to Otoman Zar Adusht Ha’nish. Mazdaznan was a distinct creation of its times. It united a smattering of ancient spiritual movements including Zoroastrianism, Ayurvedic medicine, tantric Hinduism, Christianity, and ancient Egyptian philosophy with theosophy and modern research in occult phenomena. The central practice of the religion was to strive towards light, which was associated with good and happiness. In addition, Mazdaznan stressed morality and personal responsibility; it emphasized a strict vegetarian diet, extended fasting, breathing exercises, hot baths, singing, smiling, creative movement,

48 Rykwert 47. Bauhaus Spectacles, Bauhaus Specters 61 and a training of the mind uniquely towards positive thoughts.49 According to Rainer Wick, in Mazdaznan, “the body is the ‘temple of the living god,’ so each individual needs to strive for harmonious balance.”50 For practitioners of Mazdaznan, oracles of the future could be deciphered from ancient texts written in cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphics but also from the “Open Book of Nature,” which included all observable natural phenomena including clouds, sunlight, wind, and water.51 In Europe, Mazdaznan had chapters in several cities including Leipzig, an easy train ride from Weimar, the location of the early Bauhaus. Mazdaznan’s main European center was in the northern Swiss town of Herrliberg. The religion had vociferous critics, including American muckraker Upton Sinclair, who, in his 1918 treatise against the immoralities of numerous religious movements, The Profits of Religion, listed Mazdaznan under the grouping, “The Church of the Quacks.”52 Paul Citroen became a student at the Bauhaus and an instant Mazdaznan convert in 1922, after his participation in Der Sturm and Berlin Dada. Citroen would later write of how Mazdaznan shaped the Bauhaus’s daily life, as the school’s canteen conformed to the religion’s diet. Citroen described practices such as the fasting required at regular intervals and for as long as three weeks, which transported its Bauhaus Mazdaznan adherents – many of whom were already malnourished in this ongoing period of shortage and financial crisis – into altered states. He wrote of:

the unique, unforgettable experience we had during and because of the fasting. The bodily changes and transformations gave rise to unexpected moods, opened unknown regions of feeling. I would never have thought it possible to attain such “transparency,” to become so receptive to otherwise hardly noticeable spiritual vibrations. In the end it was a pity to have to leave this exalted, almost unearthly state.53

49 Paul Citroen, “Mazdaznan at the Bauhaus,” Bauhaus and Bauhaus People, ed. Eckhart Neumann, trans. Richter E. Lorman (New York: A. Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1970) 44–50, 47. 50 Wick, Teaching at the Bauhaus 120. 51 Otoman ZA Hanish, “Reading Hieroglyphics,” Mazdaznan 17.1 (1918): 7–14. 52 Upton Sinclair, The Profits of Religion: An Essay in Economic Interpretation (Pasadena: self published, 1918) 250–2. 53 Citroen 50. 62 Elizabeth Otto

Mazdaznan also gave its practitioners a feeling that they could decipher the world around them and the people that they encountered as part of nature’s open book. Citroen notes, “when we shook someone’s hand we could tell more about him from the handshake, the dryness or dampness of his skin, and other signs than he would find comfortable. His vocal pitch, his complexion, his walk, every one of his involuntary gestures gave him away. We thought we could see through any person, because our method gave us an advantage over the unsuspecting.”54 In addition to this sense of omniscience, Mazdaznan made its members feel privileged because they would not, as Citroen put it, “like the others, collapse in the great chaos.”55 Numerous works produced during the early Bauhaus, when Itten was in charge of the Preliminary Course, show the influence of Mazdaznan’s theories of color, light, and spirituality. Drawings of specific Mazdaznan leaders, designs for utopian architecture or sculptural structures, and photographs of life at the school all evidence Bauhaus members’ connections to Mazdaznan and the belief that spiritual learning was an essential part of the school’s quest. Other forms of spiritual or metaphysical exploration at the Bauhaus were evident in the interest in such phenomena and techniques as mag- netism, prophesy, mysticism, and handwriting analysis. As Christoph Wagner and Linda Henderson have pointed out, Itten’s investigations did not adhere at all strictly to the Mazdaznan doctrine, even if members of the school generally grouped them under this name. His 1920 “Tempelherrenhaus Tagebuch” [House of the Knights Templar Diary] shows his engagement with astrology and the theosophical writings of Charles Webster Leadbeater and Annie Besant – both of whom were inspirations to Kandinsky as well – and with theories of the fourth dimension from Claude Bragdon’s 1913 Primer of Higher Space.56

54 Citroen 47. 55 Citroen 46. 56 Christoph Wagner, “Zwischen Lebensreform und Esoterik: Johannes Ittens Weg ans Bauhaus in Weimar,” Das Bauhaus und die Esoterik: Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, ed. Christoph Wagner (Hamm: Gustav-Lübecke-Museum, 2005) 12–15, 64–77. Henderson, “The Fourth Dimension and Modern Art” 80–1. Bauhaus Spectacles, Bauhaus Specters 63

Another, now little-know teacher at the Bauhaus, Gertrud Grunow, was in fact tremendously influential during the early years. Her ideas were very much in keeping with those of Itten, but she had developed her own system of teaching in what came to be called “Harmonisierungslehre,” har- monization lessons. It relied on experiences of sound, movement, color, and thought to create balance, harmony, and order to each individual student.57 Grunow’s influence would also prepare the way for Kandinsky, since she too saw the experience of crossing senses as fundamentally transformative, so that her teaching often included, for example, exercises in which students needed to perceive the living force of particular colors and translate these into movement. As Grunow explained in her 1923 essay, “The Creation of Living Form through Color, Form, and Sound,” published in the catalogue to the Bauhaus’s first major exhibition, this practice would allow for the discovery of the true forms of life and expression of each particular age.58 The eclecticism of the ideas and religions at the Bauhaus – particularly those grouped around Mazdaznan – appealed widely to the young students. It spoke to them in light of the horrors of the recent war, which all of them experienced in some way, many as soldiers or nurses. In addition, large numbers of the Bauhaus’s students had grown up connected to the outdoorsy Wandervogel reform and youth group movement and were still

57 Cornelius Steckner, “Die Musikpädagogin Gertrud Grunow als Meisterin der Formlehre am Weimarer Bauhaus: Designtheory und productkive Wahrnemungsgestalt,” Das frühe Bauhaus und Johannes Itten 200. Until recently Grunow was largely written out of Bauhaus history, but the minutes of the Weimar Bauhaus’s Masters’ Council help to trace her increasing importance during the early years. See Ute Ackermann and Volker Wahl, eds, Meisterratsprotokolle des Staatlichen Bauhauses Weimar 1919–1925 (Weimar: Verlag Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 2001). In 1922 they decided to list her name publicly as one of the Bauhaus instructors (160, 201); in the minutes from Oct. 22, 1923, she is simply included in a list with the other masters (316). Her reports on students are included in the minutes each semester (e.g. 167–9 and 226–7), and other faculty such as Paul Klee sought her advice on the abilities of newer students (303). 58 Gertrud Grunow, “The Creation of Living Form through Color, Form, and Sound,” Staatliches Bauhaus 1919–1923 (Weimar: Bauhaus Press, 1923) 20–3, rpt. in Wingler 69–71. 64 Elizabeth Otto seeking new answers to their society’s many problems. Wandervogel influence, Mazdaznan, and the other new forms of spirituality at the Bauhaus provided renewal and focus at the school during the ongoing crises of the early years of the Weimar Republic. Even after Itten’s departure in 1923 and Grunow’s the following year, an interest in the spiritual continued to fuel the Bauhaus. One image in particular exemplifies the layered traces of the influences of Mazdaznan and other mystical visual practices at the early Bauhaus: Citroen’s watercolor and pen and ink image from 1924, titled Spiritistische Séance [Spiritist Séance] (Figure 2.4). Like Bauhaus members’ multi-faceted mysticism, which now seems to prefigure the rise of New Age religions of more recent decades, Spiritist Séance is an amalgam of otherworldly meth- odologies. Glowing figures emerge from the darkness of an ink wash to suggest the enlightenment and transparency of Mazdaznan, the balance of light and darkness that was central to Grunow’s teachings, and the ghostly materializations of Paul Klee’s painting.59 This image is also Mazdaznanian in its layering of approaches to the spiritual, so that its media become mediumistic, and the artist channels several occult image-making processes at once. With a messiness uncharacteristic of Citroen, Spiritistische Séance taps into the imagery of both the thought-transfer pictures and inkblot spirits that had long been circulating in Germany’s Spiritist literature. The work also appears as if it may in part have been created by chance and through Mazdaznan’s open book, in which signs were to be found everywhere for the attentive reader of the world. Citroen first dripped watercolor and then ink; then, like researchers of the Kleksographien, he added ink and line to enhance the mystically produced image and discover the spirit presence within. Because of its limited pallet and ghostly figures, the Spiritistische Séance picture also evokes several forms of spirit photography, still the most powerful and persuasive form of contemporaneous Spiritist and occult research into the 1920s and which was widely practiced in popular and even academic

59 Grunow’s philosophy was published posthumously as Der Gleichgewichts Kreis: ein Bauhausdokument, ed. Achim Preiß (Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften, 2001). Bauhaus Spectacles, Bauhaus Specters 65

Figure 2.4 Paul Citroen, Spiritualist Séance, 1924. Watercolor and pen and ink on paper. Collection of the Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. 66 Elizabeth Otto contexts, including at the Sorbonne.60 Like the photograph of Schrenck- Notzing observing the medium Eva C. (see Figure 2.2), Spiritistische Scéance could document an interaction between a researcher and a medium, with a light apparition appearing between them. The indefinite character of the female figure’s face and upper body and the male figure’s arm could suggest a laying on of hands, or it might signify the presence of ectoplasm, a substance produced by spirit possession that emerged from a medium’s bodily orifices and often looked like cheesecloth.61 Another common type of spirit photograph relied upon various processes to add a ghostly figure – known to Spiritist researchers as an “extra” – who would usually appear to hover over a seated figure to show either a medium and a ghost that he or she had called, or to represent family members in the presence of a deceased loved one.62 This too is a possible interpretation of the Citroen image. While the rediscovery of spirituality was a serious matter for Bauhaus members such as Citroen, an often-missed but essential element of this and other Bauhaus images is humor, something that was clearly at work in some of Klee’s drawings and paintings. Citroen’s image evokes multiple currents of occult thought in a manner that may poke fun at these quickly passing fads and, for those in the Bauhaus context, use them to offer the simple yet transformative release of laughter. Spiritistische Scéance suggests numerous paths to enlightenment, but in the end, it is merely a low-tech image that shows two murky figures surrounded by darkness. Citroen studied with Klee, and like him drew on an eclectic mix of religions and philosophies. Yet Klee was a quiet critic of the dogmatic thinking adopted by many adherents of Mazdaznan.63 While Citroen immersed himself in

60 Françoise Parot, “Psychology Experiments: Spiritism at the Sorbonne,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 29 (1993): 22–8; Heather Wolffram,The Stepchildren of Science: Psychical Research and Parapsychology in Germany, c. 1870–1939 (Amsterdam: Wellcome series in the History of Medicine, Clio Medica, 2009) 11. 61 Martyn Jolly, “Ectoplasm,” in Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography (New York: Mark Batty Publisher, 2006) 64–85, 154–5. See also Chéroux and Fischer 184–5, 192–215, and 220–9. 62 For examples, see Clément Chéroux, “Ghost Dialectics: Spirit Photography in Entertainment and Belief ” and the images which follow, Chéroux and Fischer 44–71. 63 Okuda, “Klee und das Irrationale” 97–8. Bauhaus Spectacles, Bauhaus Specters 67 the religion for a period, by 1924 he clearly had a certain distance from it too, and these layers of belief and skepticism shine through the murky multidimensionality of Spiritistische Séance. This work is both a profound and layered meditation on the ongoing unfolding of multiple otherworldly possibilities newly revealed at the Bauhaus, and, at the same time, a picture which suggests its own opposite: the shabby charlatanism of upstart cults or tricks of the Spiritist trade that relied upon visions only partially revealed in darkness. Both readings, however, offer multiple modes with which to engage the spiritual and the authentic – even if that authenticity comes from a hearty laugh at occult swindlers – and thus to avoid the mindless “spectacularization” offered by commodity culture.

* During the course of 1922 and 1923, a number of fundamental changes swept the Bauhaus to alter it profoundly. These must be understood in relation to the broader cultural context of the early 1920s in which Expressionism – which had functioned as shorthand for anti-monarchical radicalism immediately after the First World War and was subsequently associated with the leftist November Revolution – had become passé.64 Meanwhile Constructivism, the emerging visual language of the new Soviet Union, offered a new set of tools to profoundly reconsider the role of the artist in society and the work that she would perform. At the same time, within the school, conflicts between Gropius and Itten over the Bauhaus’s direction and leadership grew and ultimately resulted in Itten’s departure early in 1923. In response to these external and internal forces, Gropius reconsidered the Bauhaus’s philosophical underpinnings. Rather than breaking down the boundaries between art and craft, the Bauhaus, he determined, should henceforth operate under the slogan “Art and Technology, A New Unity!”65 Thus the school turned towards Constructivism, which was seen by the Bauhaus masters to be embodied

64 Joan Weinstein, The End of Expressionism: Art and the November Revolution in Germany, 1918–19 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) 1–22. 65 Gropius used the slogan in 1923 in his draft speech text, “Breviary for Bauhaus Members,” (1924), Wingler 76. 68 Elizabeth Otto in the man they selected to replace Itten, László Moholy-Nagy.66 While the school’s name remained the same, what is considered “Bauhaus” prior to and after this shift is hardly recognizable as part of the same movement. In 1919, Gropius’s vision of the school was represented in a hand-hewn woodcut by Bauhaus Master Lyonel Feininger that showed a cathedral as “a crystal symbol of a new faith.”67 By 1925 the revolution was complete and made manifest in the clean lines and right angles of Gropius’s own Bauhaus Dessau Building. These shifts in the Bauhaus’s orientation would have an extremely strong effect on Bauhaus approaches to the spiritual. In place of the eclectic, Mazdaznan-centered spirituality, as Linda Henderson has pointed out, “Einstein, Relativity Theory, and the new model of ‘space time’” took hold as informing principals.68 This new Bauhaus was fascinated with hard science and technology, and many have imagined that it had no place for the spiritual.69 In fact, an examination of the work and writings of the students and teachers at the Bauhaus from 1923 on reveals clearly that this is not the case; instead technology itself is often posited as offering transformative experiences that might expand and renew vision and even society. Prior to coming to the Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy too was caught up in Europe’s transcendentalist spirituality. Rhapsodic musings on the life- giving properties of light appear frequently in his early writings, as Herbert Molderings has pointed out, and his wife and collaborator Lucia Moholy

66 From the first mention of Moholy-Nagy’s name in the Master’s Council, he is identified primarily as a “Constructivist.” See meeting of March 14, 1923, Meisterratsprotokolle 299. 67 Gropius, “Program” 31. 68 Henderson, “The Fourth Dimension and Modern Art” 81. 69 While the majority of the essays in Wagner’s Esoterik am Bauhaus focus on the Bauhaus’s early years, several of them move beyond this phase and greatly expand the field of inquiry. See Magdalena Droste, “‘Stirb und Werde’: Anmerkungen zur Vor- und Nachgeschichte von Oskar Schlemmers Triadischem Ballett” (73–86), Rolf Sachsse, “Mediumistische Fotografie am Bauhaus” (226–37), and Anja Baumhoff, “Verhaltenslehren der Kälte am Bauhaus? Implikationen moderner Diskursformen am Bauhaus Dessau am Beispiel der Geschichte von Alma Buscher” (238–54). Bauhaus Spectacles, Bauhaus Specters 69 had been an adherent of Mazdaznan prior to coming to the Bauhaus.70 In Moholy-Nagy’s encounters with Constructivism and Dada in Berlin during the early 1920s – he shared a studio with Kurt Schwitters during the winter of 1922–3, for example – and in his collaborations with Lucia Moholy, he came to embrace new techniques and technologies such as photomontage and photogram, the latter of which he referred to as “light compositions.”71 For Moholy-Nagy, these were much more than new kinds of pictures; they were technologies to unlock modern life. We can therefore be certain that the “Constructivist” engaged to take up his post as Master at the Bauhaus in April of 1923 was one who considered the spiritual as well as the practical and functional in his work and teaching. His interest in light would serve all of these purposes. Molderings asserts that “energy and light are the phenomena to which Moholy-Nagy returned again and again with an enthusiasm bordering on sheer obsession, both in his art itself and in his related aesthetic theories. Light for Moholy-Nagy, however, was not like oil paint and canvas for the painter, but much more; it was at once the theme and the medium, the subject and the substance, the content and the form.”72 At the Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy’s experiments with and teaching about light and photography made manifest the school’s new alignment with technology as a source of transformation. Once the Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1925, photogram would become Moholy-Nagy’s primary means of artistic expression.73 An untitled 1926 montaged photogram by Moholy-Nagy shows direct traces of the shadow of his face and his glasses on light-sensitive paper (Figure 2.5). The glasses are removed from his face and placed directly on the paper so that they are associated with his eyes but no longer functional for him; likewise they appear as lenses in conjunction with Moholy-Nagy’s “cameraless” photography, so that they are

70 Herbert Molderings, “Light Years of a Life: The Photogram in the Aesthetic of Lászlo Moholy-Nagy,” Moholy-Nagy: The Photograms, Catalogue Raisonné, eds Renate Heyne and Floris Neusüss (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009) 20. 71 Moholy-Nagy, “Light: A Medium of Plastic Expression,” Broom 4 (March 1923): 284; cited in Molderings 19. 72 Molderings 21. 73 Molderings 19. 70 Elizabeth Otto

Figure 2.5 László Moholy-Nagy, Untitled [fgm 163], 1926. Photogram on developing paper mounted on cardboard. Collection of the Museum Folkwang, Essen. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Bauhaus Spectacles, Bauhaus Specters 71 highlighted as objects rather than instruments.74 So direct is this process that the photogram is textured by oil or sweat from Moholy-Nagy’s face at the lower right. Moholy-Nagy has also made technical-artistic interventions by using circle stencils to mask parts of the light-sensitive paper and expose others, so that they form a structured realm of darkness out of which the face emerges. Although it is untitled, this photogram functions as a self portrait. It shows aspects of Moholy-Nagy’s visage indexed in a direct yet atypical photographic form – the shadow that it cast and the fluids that it secreted – and it displays the visual traces of a range of the ideas about representation that were emerging from the mind in this head, seeming direct manifestations of thought. In 1930, Moholy-Nagy’s ongoing work with light would culminate in the completion of his Lichtrequisit einer Eliktrischen Bühne [Light Prop for an Electrical Stage], a project that he had been developing since 1922.75 Not merely a mechanical sculpture that generated light experiences, the Light Prop was intended to create environments in individual rooms or on the stage.76 The same year that he completed it he filmed the machine in motion to create the abstract film “Lightplay: black white gray,” a film which, as Anne Hoormann points out, was Moholy-Nagy’s answer to the animated abstract films of Viking Eggeling and Hans Richter, both of whom he criticized for not using the direct, photographic, light-capturing capabilities of the medium of film.77 Parallel to his experiments with light and photo-based media at the Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy also continued to

74 Moholy uses the term as a caption to one of his photograms reproduced in Painting Photography Film [1925, 1927], trans. Lund Humphries Publishers (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969) 71. 75 Lucia Moholy, Moholy-Nagy Marginal Notes: Documentary Absurdities … (Krefeld: Richard Scherpe, 1972) 80–2; Alex Potts, “László Moholy-Nagy: Light Prop for an Electric Stage, 1930,” Bauhaus: Workshops for Modernity 274–7. 76 Hannah Weitemeier, Licht-Visionene: ein Experiment von Moholy-Nagy (Berlin: Bauhaus-Archiv, 1972). 77 Anne Hoormann, Lichtspiele: Zur Medienreflexion der Avantgarde in der Weimarer Republik (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2003) 193. 72 Elizabeth Otto paint as a way of exploring abstract color since light technologies were still too weak to serve as a proper medium.78 For Moholy-Nagy, photogram, photography, and film were most powerful when used to map direct traces of visual phenomena that could be seen and experienced. In this way, while his aims and ideas were different, he had much in common with the spirit photographers of his day. It would be a mistake to assert that the Bauhaus was an institution uniquely oriented towards experimental religions in various forms. On the contrary, from its inception through its closing in 1933, a consistent and always overt element of the Bauhaus was its largely aspirational connection to the commercial. This is evident in Gropius’s plan for the workshops to become self-sustaining by selling their products and designs, or in the 1925 reconception of the Weimar Bauhaus’s Printmaking Workshop into a Workshop for Typography and Advertising in Dessau, directed by former Bauhaus student Herbert Bayer. Moholy-Nagy worked in advertising and taught his students how to do the same. Clearly the relationships were porous between the Bauhaus and the budding society of the spectacle. And yet, the Bauhaus’s primary orientation was against the spectacle of mindless consumption and entertainment. The school’s members were clearly full of hope that they might find new ways of being producers in a rapidly changing society. Multiple works and projects that came out of the Bauhaus appear aimed at cultivating critical visual exploration and new understanding of the expanding modern world. At the conclusion of The Society of the Spectacle, Debord asserts that there will be no quick fixes to the problem; “the critique which goes beyond the spectacle must know how to wait.”79 His hope for “emancipation from the material bases of inverted truth” lies with neither isolated individuals nor the spectacle-doped crowd, but with the thinking collective, the proletarian Workers Council.80 As a utopian unit full of idealistic creative people that stood distinctly outside of

78 Moholy-Nagy to Frantisek Kalivoda, June 1934, ed. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy et al., László Moholy-Nagy (Berlin: Hartmann, 1969) 15. 79 Debord, Spectacle thesis 220. 80 Debord, Spectacle thesis 221. On the Workers Council, see also thesis 179. Bauhaus Spectacles, Bauhaus Specters 73 the mainstream and yet engaged with that mainstream by turns in critical and opportunistic manners, the Bauhaus was in some ways distinctly like Debord’s Workers Council. In fact, this is so much the case that in 1930 the Bauhaus’s third director, Mies van der Rohe, would see the school’s growing Communist radicalization as its most serious threat and dismiss any and all students who were members of Communist organizations. In “Production Reproduction,” a text now credited to both Lucia Moholy and Moholy-Nagy, the authors critique the very limited thinking of modern people. They give the example of the phonograph record to point out that our machines are most often used simply to copy that which already exists rather than to make something truly new, such as a record which could be manipulated like an instrument, a practice that would become common several decades later. Moholy and Moholy-Nagy write of the creative potential of production instead of copycat reproduction; “this is one of the reasons why new creative experiments are an enduring necessity. From this point of view the creations are valuable only when they produce new, previously unknown relationships.”81 These imagined “relationships” – in which creative acts might unlock fresh connections to spirituality, to life after death, or to other people – were at the heart of the Bauhaus project. For Debord, vision has been coopted by rationalized entertainment that mystifies and lulls its public into becoming drones to serve capitalism. By contrast, the Bauhaus offered images as agents of wonder and encouraged the creation of open-ended pictures, visual technologies to school critique. These “New Visions” were not intended to delude, but rather to yield original knowledge based in a collective connection. In this place, school, method, idea, spirit, and Weltanschauung known as the Bauhaus, one thing was certain: it would only be with new ways of seeing and thinking that the world – including the here and now and the hereafter – might be perceived in all of its complexity.

81 Moholy-Nagy [with Lucia Moholy], “Production Reproduction,” Painting Photography Film 30, and Rolf Sachsse, Lucia Moholy: Bauhaus Fotografin (Berlin: Museumspadagogischer Dienst/Bauhaus-Archiv, 1995) 72.

Brían Hanrahan

Live on the Air, Live on the Ground: The “Chamberlin Flight” as Spectacular Event, June 1927

Here is the apparatus! Climb in! — Bertolt Brecht, The Flight of the Lindberghs

Introduction

In spite of the word’s etymology, any narrow link between modern social “spectacle” and visuality is deeply problematic. This essay, in place of a narrowly visual conception of spectacle, focuses on the history of liveness, and specifically, on a crucial, coalescent moment in the history of broadcast liveness in Germany, taking place in the early summer of 1927.1 Seen

1 I do not in this essay deploy Guy Debord’s conception of “spectacle,” but it is worth noting that, within that theoretical paradigm, Debord saw the late 1920s as a key moment of coalescence. (For a somewhat different reading of Debord’s historical location of spectacle, see Elizabeth Otto’s essay on Bauhaus spectacle in this volume.) Jonathan Crary, reflecting on Debord’s periodization, singles out 1927 as a turning point in the emergence of modern media as a social force, mentioning synchronized sound film, the technical achievement of television and Nazi political propagandistic use of gramophone records sent through the mail. See Jonathan Crary, “Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory,” October 50 (1989): 96–107. For further cultural- and media-historical treatments of the second-half of the 1920s with a highly focused synchronic approach, see Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, 1926: Ein Jahr am Rand der Zeit (Frankfurt a.M.: Surhkamp, 2001) and also Stefan Andriopoulos and Bernhard 76 Brían Hanrahan in historical terms, “spectacle” might be taken to refer to the ideological functions – hegemonic, distractive or subject-constitutive – of mass culture in capitalist or state-capitalist modernity, or used more loosely to refer to the various forms and delivery methods of the entertainment and culture industries of the last two centuries. In neither case, however, can spectacular structures or effects be seen as strictly visual, whether we take spectacle to be a series or set of discrete events which draw and fascinate a public audience, or, more generally, as a pervasive mode of organized social experience. “Liveness” is a central concept – albeit an unstable one – in theories of media and performance, perhaps above all in theorizing the nature and impact of broadcast media.2 The concept is a complex one, not least since the apparent immediacy of liveness – including “live broadcasting” – is, of course, not immediate at all, but organized, in any given media-historical situation, through complex and never quite stable arrangements of technologies, protocols, institutions and aesthetic conventions. In some media, interpersonal communicational interactivity can be key to creating a “liveness” effect, as with shared gaming platforms; in others, the publicness of a shared public space-time is crucial, as with recent public viewings of major

J. Dotzler, eds, 1929: Beiträge zur Archaeologie der Medien (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2002). 2 The literature on liveness, both performative and mediated, is broad but diffuse. Key texts, addressing a variety of media, include: Mary Ann Doane, “Information, Crisis, Catastrophe,” New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, eds Hui Kyong Chun and Wendy and Thomas Keenan (London: Routledge, 2005) 251–64; Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London: Routledge, 1999); William Uricchio, “Technologies of Time,” Allegories of Communication: Intermedial Concerns from Cinema to the Digital, eds Jan Olsson and John Fullerton (Eastleigh: John Libbey, 2004) 123–38; Jane Feuer, “The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology,” Regarding Television: Critical Approaches – An Anthology, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (Los Angeles: American Film Institute, 1983) 12–22; Tara McPherson, “Reload: Liveness, Mobility and the Web,” The Visual Culture Reader, 2nd edn, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (New York: Routledge, 2002) 458–70; Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992) 1–24; Paddy Scannell, “Dailiness,” Radio, Television and Modern Life (London: Blackwell, 1996) 144–75. Live on the Air, Live on the Ground 77 sports events. The history of media, moreover, includes forgotten apparative arrangements which nonetheless mobilize effects we can recognize as live.3 In thinking of twentieth-century mass-broadcast media, we might name three particular effects associated with the phenomenon of liveness. First, the temporal effects of instantaneity and simultaneity, which, as discussed below, cannot be reduced to the simple characteristic of any particular media technology, but rather must be understood in terms of more general, long-term change in the experience of time, space and speed. Furthermore, liveness often has an effect or a connotation of corporeal investment on the part of the spectator, a certain palpability of presence, a facet explored, among others, by William Urrichio in his account of the paradoxical “liveness” of early cinema. Finally, there is a third connotation of the liveness of mass broadcast media. This is the notion ofpublicness : the sense, on the part of the spectator, of being granted access to an event in the public sphere, an event located in an absent elsewhere, but nonetheless placed within a common public horizon of time and space. Now almost entirely forgotten, the trans-Atlantic flight of Clarence Chamberlin and Charles A. Levine dominated the German public sphere in early June 1927.4 Amidst public excitement and widespread media coverage, some two weeks after Charles Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight and arrival in Paris, Chamberlin and Levine flew from New York to Germany, eventually landing on Tuesday, June 7, 1927 at Berlin’s Tempelhof airport before huge crowds, including an outside broadcast unit from the

3 We might here think of the history of late nineteenth century telephone broadcasting, or – to use an American example – the popular theatrical representation of ongoing baseball games, updated as the latest scores were telegraphed in. On both of these phenomena, see Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 4 I refer throughout to the “Chamberlin flight,” though there were two people on board. This corresponds to usage at the time, which tends to exclude Levine, who bankrolled and planned the project, then at the last moment revealed himself as passenger and untrained co-pilot. The semantic neatness and ideological valence of the “lone flyer” narrative, reinforced by the Lindbergh event two weeks previously, persisted into the vocabularies used to describe the second flight. 78 Brían Hanrahan

Berliner Funkstunde radio station, which transmitted the moment of the landing live on the air. A close examination of the Chamberlin flight and its broadcast specifies live radio broadcasting’s place within Weimar’s broader mass-cultural landscape, revealing the electric mass media on the cusp of their emergence into a media environment still dominated by the popular press.5 The event took place on a vast scale – an assemblage joining and arranging material objects – bodies and cities, airplanes and traffic – but also instigating a greatly intensified production of signals, representations and sounds and images. The events and the broadcast form a circuit containing two related modes of liveness: the arrival of the long-awaited plane drew urban crowds together in a mass spectacular event, an impromptu gathering of tens of thousands on the streets of Berlin and at Tempelhof airport. The flight, however, was also a broadcast live event, transmitted as it occurred for consumption by a mass audience at home. Specifically, radio coverage of the Chamberlin flight offered a structured incorporation of “breaking” updates into the daily schedule of German radio. Moreover, unlike Lindbergh’s arrival in Paris, they provided real-time location broadcasting of the event’s climax, with live spoken commentary against the backdrop of the auditory trace of events at the airport: a

5 There is no detailed study of broadcast coverage of the Chamberlin flight. Peter Fritzsche refers to the Chamberlin events in passing, locating them in the longer history of German “airmindedness” and urban crowds, but does not discuss the broadcast events. Peter Fritzsche, A Nation of Fliers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992) 137–51. The transmission is discussed briefly in Renate Schumacher, “Radio als Medium und Faktor des aktuellen Geschehens,” Programmgeschichte des Hörfunks in der Weimarer Republik, ed. Joachim-Felix Leonhard, vol. 1 (Munich: DTB, 1997) 423–621; Bernhard Siegert, “Ein höheres Walten des Wortes. Fussballreportagen im deutschen Radio 1923–1933,” Warum Fußball? Kulturwissenschaftliche Beschreibungen eines Sports, ed. Matías Martínez (Bielefeld: aisthesis, 2002) 125–44, here 131; Daniel Gethmann, Die Übertragung der Stimme: Vor- und Frühgeschichte des Sprechens im Radio (Zürich- Berlin: diaphanes, 2006) 119–20. These are brief accounts relying only on one or two documents and placing too much weight on the unreliable memoirs of Alfred Braun, the commentator of the airport broadcast. Live on the Air, Live on the Ground 79 moment of historical emergence, observable in the tiny shift between two adjacent and similar events. Although it is impossible to separate the two levels of the Chamberlin flight and landing – the events “themselves” were dependent on techniques and technologies of mediation, while the broadcast drew its affective force from its referentiality – my concern is primarily with the experience of the radio listener at home. A partial archaeology of the experience of this audience is possible – newspapers and media journals followed the plane’s progress, but also carried reports and reflections on the experience of the two simultaneous, interconnected audiences, one at the airport, the other listening at home. I want to show in particular how the location sound trace newly enabled by mobile broadcast technologies was integrated into the narrative and dramatic emplotment of a large-scale media event; to specify the place of emergent broadcast media – already a significant phenomenon, but not yet dominant – within part of a wider media system; and, finally to reconstruct something of the impact of new phenomena of liveness and acoustic presence, here inscribed in the testimony of contemporary listeners, at a moment when the experience of “live coverage” by a broadcast medium was neither familiar nor ubiquitous. After summarizing the events of the flight, arrival and broadcast, I look more closely at three aspects of the affective and experiential specificity of the home listening experience – first, I trace how, in the days leading up to the actual landing, the novel experience of extended, diffuse radio coverage of an ongoing event was inscribed in accounts by contemporary observers. Second, I show that location sound transmitted from the airport allowed for new effects of presence and authenticity. Finally, turning from the mediated sound of the masses heard at home to the production of that crowd noise at the airport, I discuss the interaction between the audience at the airport and the radio commentator in their midst, noting the apparative changes between the two separate crowd events at Tempelhof that week. A word on media-archaeological method is in order. Any analysis attending both to the sounds and to the particular sensory effects of early live radio in Germany must address a fundamental methodological problem. On a basic level, the reconstruction of this mode of broadcasting 80 Brían Hanrahan is dependent on written texts as a source for what was transmitted and what was heard, given the absence of radio recording in Germany before 1929. Moreover, serious research into popular listening habits was almost unknown: the vast majority of early testimonies to live location broadcasting are the work of professional critics or of broadcasters, who are at times reporting on their own work. A detailed media history of this time – as here attempted – must not only locate such accounts, but also correlate them both with technical details and with broader discursive formations. Contemporary texts must thus be read doubly, first as documents of technologies used, of sounds mediated and of events broadcast, but also, second, as a trace of the experience of the mobilized medium’s perceptual effects and spatio-temporal innovations. This trace is found in direct statements of radio listeners and broadcasters, but also, just as importantly, in the symbolic structures of their accounts, in the nuance of their descrip- tive detail and in their choice of intermedial reference. However, these methodological limitations can also be seen as an advantage, forcing us to consider – as contemporaries largely could not – the interrelation between media-aesthetic experience, discursive formations and technological innovations. The aesthetic experience – where “aesthetic” implies perception as well as form – of early live broadcasting was constituted in a complex constellation of sounds, technologies and forms, of discursive precondi- tions, modes of perception and rhetorical figures, in which the elements mutually influence and determine each other at a local and a general level. It is this combination and mutual determination that lent the Chamberlin events – live on the air and live on the ground – both their novelty and their force as a spectacular event.

The Flight and the Broadcast

The Chamberlin flight was only one of a wave of highly publicized adventure flights in the mid-1920s. The flight, its media representation and its audience reception are inseparable, above all, from Lindbergh’s flight Live on the Air, Live on the Ground 81 from New York to Paris, which landed at Le Bourget on May 21, 1927.6 At the most basic level, the two flights were direct competitors in the race for the Orteig prize, which offered $25,000 to any pilot to fly non- stop between New York and Paris in either direction. By the time the two men finally took off on Saturday, June 4, 1927, victory in that race had been won, leaving Chamberlin and Levine to salvage something by aiming for a new distance-flying record.7 Only after take-off, after speculation they might fly to Moscow, was Berlin confirmed as the destination (Figure 3.1).8 Chamberlin and Levine reached Germany late on Sunday, June 5, but ran out of fuel, crash-landing near the town of Eisleben. They were refueled by locals, but crashed again, and were rescued and brought to Cottbus early on the Monday morning. Meanwhile, in Berlin, reports of their expected arrival brought crowds of tens of thousands to Tempelhof on the evening of Sunday, June 5 (the following day was a holiday), some staying long into the night despite heavy rain and the aggressive tactics of 2,000 police deployed to control the airport and surrounding neighborhoods. The Cottbus stopover prompted a postponement of the final arrival in Berlin until Tuesday, when the American airmen finally appeared over the city, escorted by sixteen Lufthansa aircraft. After a twenty-five minute low-level flyover around city landmarks, waving to crowds below, Chamberlin and Levine landed to a tumultuous welcome, and were – carried shoulder-high

6 The peningo chapters of A. Scott Berg, Lindbergh (New York: Berkley, 1998) give a good account of the Lindbergh flight, with a sharp eye for media-historical detail. 7 Contract disputes led to a temporary injunction by a New York court, allowing Lindbergh the brief window of opportunity to win the race and thus achieve his extraordinary historical prominence. 8 Berlin was an obvious choice for Chamberlin and Levine. Lindbergh, despite speculation he might, had not visited Berlin, which was an untapped source of enthusiasm and money, just within range of Chamberlin’s Bellanca Whirlwind monoplane. The depth of the demand for long-distance flyers was demonstrated by the enthusiastic reception of Lindbergh’s arrival by plane – complete with celebratory flyovers and six-figure crowds – in Brussels and London in the days following his Paris landing. 82 Brían Hanrahan

Figure 3.1 Front page of the 8-Uhr Abendblatt, June 4, 1927. from the field. Every German newspaper carried news of the arrival on their front pages, with the popular press extending sensationalist coverage in detail.9 In the immediate aftermath, the airmen were officially received by

9 The flyers’ “true narrative” was serialized in the 8-Uhr Abendblatt, complete with front pages signed testimonial to its authenticity by the pilots. The story ran on into Live on the Air, Live on the Ground 83

President Hindenburg and the mayor of Berlin and awarded the freedom of the city; a street was named after their aircraft.10 While, as with Lindbergh’s flight, the press was the dominant medium by which the Chamberlin flight was mediated and represented, it was also covered live on German radio. Coverage of the flight involved more than one variety of radiophonic liveness: the final direct transmission from the airport was the culmination of days of breaking news reports and urgent updates, a pattern of real-time information transmission which inculcated a new kind of dramatic tension in its audience’s homes and bodies. The institutional decision to instigate this coverage was, as with much else to do with Chamberlin, a response to and in a sense already a reenactment of Lindbergh’s highly publicized landing. Criticized for ignoring Lindbergh’s flight,11 German radio authorities saw Chamberlin’s crossing as an opportunity to participate in a new kind of mediated drama of simultaneity, weaving medium and listeners into an ongoing, international spectacular event in real time. Pitched as a story of heroism and adventure, the Chamberlin flight could generate a sense of excitement and immediacy while not breaking the limitations of Weimar radio’s coverage of current affairs.12 The

the following week, picking up new threads of the story: Chamberlin’s telephone conversations with his mother in Kansas, the arrival of the airmen’s wives, their departure for more crowded airport receptions in Vienna, Prague and Paris. 10 The oadr running along the northern side of the airport, was named “Columbiastraße” for Chamberlin’s plane, the “Miss Columbia”; it is today known as the “Columbiadamm.” As with so much else in this context, the street-naming gesture was an imitation of Lindbergh’s reception in Paris – see anon, “Wenn Chamberlin kommt, wird man das auch in Berlin tun?” 8-Uhr Abendblatt, June 4, 1927: 4, which speculates on the renaming of a street after the pilot or plane. 11 On this critique, see [Kurt Weill], “Chamberlin auf deutschen Wellen,” Der Deutsche Rundfunk 5.25 (June 19, 1927): 1714–15, here 1714. 12 Ideological notions of heroic individualism were Brecht’s major objection to the cult of the flyer and its radio representations in his Flight of the Lindberghs (1929) and its accompanying radio theory. While clearly written in the aftermath of the spectacular coverage of these flights, neither Brecht’sLehrstück [teaching play] nor his observations on radio directly addresses the specificity of live coverage or the affective mobilization associated with it. For Brecht, a pre-revolutionary radio is both illegitimate and uninteresting before the utopian advent of communicative interactivity. 84 Brían Hanrahan state-approved monopoly news provider, Dradag, thus announced that, for the duration of the flight, it would supplement its normal daily service of five brief bulletins with unlimited updates of the plane’s progress.13 This first phase of coverage, in which (often misinformed) updates broke into the concerts and lectures that were the staple of early Weimar radio’s “normal service,” was followed by a second phase, beginning on Sunday night and continuing through Monday morning, when Berlin’s best-known radio personality, Alfred Braun, broadcast live from Tempelhof. A second transmission, also featuring Braun, broadcast from the airport for two hours on the Tuesday afternoon, culminating in the transmission of Chamberlin’s speech as he stepped from the aircraft. Though not planned as a national broadcast, the flight’s arrival was effectively the first event transmitted across the country as a whole, through a multi-region retransmission of the Berliner Funkstunde feed, which briefly unified the content of the most of the nine regional stations. The reach of this in practice should not be exaggerated: while the increase in the popularity of radio in its earliest years was exponential, in 1927 there were still fewer than a million radio subscribers, of a total population of over sixty million. Moreover, although the nine regional stations structurally divided up the whole nation, there were, in practice, substantial geographical gaps in the areas coverage actually reached. Nonetheless, in allowing listeners throughout the country to simultaneously listen to the unfolding events,

Bertolt Brecht, “Der Rundfunk als Kommunikationsapparat,” Gesammelte Werke in 20 Bänden, vol. 18 (1932; Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1967) 133–7. 13 On the normal Dradag (Drahtloser Dienst AG) service, see Konrad Dussel, Deutsche Rundfunkgeschichte, 2nd edn (Konstanz: UVK, 2004) 165. There was another, German precursor event to the ongoing, pre-landing coverage of the Chamberlin flight. In September 1924, an attempt was made to “track” the passage of the flight of the flight of ZeppelinL.Z. 126 across Germany, en route to America. Regional radio stations gave two-hourly updates relaying the progress of the airship. Some stations in regions directly under the flight path broadcast special programming to coincide with the Zeppelin’s presence overhead, the southwestern SÜRAG station greeting its launch from Friedrichshafen with in-studio speeches from the Württemberg state president and the head of the station, and the playing of patriotic hymns. On this coverage, see Schumacher, “Radio als Medium,” 470–1. Live on the Air, Live on the Ground 85 the events marked a significant step towards the creation of “Germany” as a single, simultaneous broadcast-mediated space.14 This vernacular modernism of the airwaves was by no means the norm in contemporary radio culture. Set alongside the extraordinary vitality and diversity of the Weimar popular press, Weimar radio in its early years was a relatively small-scale phenomenon, severely limited by its initial remit, the paternalistic provision of Kultur [high culture] and Volksbildung [education]. Moreover, Weimar-era radio was a deliberately “depoliticized” medium. Privately owned but state-controlled, it was conditioned by strict – albeit gradually loosening – legal codes of censorship and an acquies- cent, self-censoring institutional culture. While the medium offered any number of educational lectures and middlebrow concerts, the intellectual disputes, cultural upheavals and violent political tensions of the era found only faint echoes on the airwaves. As one contemporary observer put it, radio as medium seemed in danger of “ebbing away in deathly boredom.”15 Exceptions to this rather staid predictability were rare and limited: any flirtation with modernism – vernacular or otherwise – came in the form of consumerist, cynical or melancholy Neue Sachlichkeit, the few political views on the air emerged from within the spectrum of the Weimar coalition, and the limited opening to popular culture in the early 1930s was dominated by light popular music, including the hit songs of the new sound cinema.

14 This construction of a national media space foreshadowed Goebbels’ propagandist- spectacular use of radio, which deployed the new simultaneity of national radio space, particularly in the first half of 1933. Examples of such simultaneity in the first months of Nazi broadcasting include Goebbels’ live radio commentary on the book-burning in Berlin, as well broadcasts of Hitler’s 1933 election addresses for the second 1933 Reichstag election, also introduced and commentated on air by Goebbels. Once established in power, the National Socialists organized national radio events such as a live-broadcast swearing-in of 800,000 SA men on April 8, 1933, a coordinated national transmission of separate regional events. There was also a Tempelhof event: the airport was a focus for an all-day broadcast featuring celebrations of the first Day of Labor, on May 1, 1933. On the mediality of this propaganda, especially the SA event, see Wolfgang Hagen, Das Radio. Zur Geschichte und Theorie des Hörfunks – Deutschland/USA (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2005). 15 Werner Mahrholz, “Aktualität im Rundfunk,” Die Sendung 6.36 (1929): 586–7. 86 Brían Hanrahan

For most of the Weimar period, the main counter-model – or counter- impulse – to the idea of radio as a Kulturträger or Kulturfaktor [medium or agent of high culture] focused on the notion of actuality – perhaps the key term in 1920s radio discourse, a term closely related to a crucial medial topos, that of the “travelling” or “liberated” microphone, which moved outside the studio to make contact with an outside world of reality and modernity. In a radio context, “actuality” had manifold meanings and connotations, alluding to mediated simultaneity – today’s “liveness” – but also to mass culture, current affairs and fashion, as well as, more vaguely, to abstract ideas of contemporaneity and the Zeitgeist. Most specifically, it referred to the twin phenomena of presence that were among radio’s main media-aesthetic and experiential innovations. The first is temporal, the simultaneous experience of absent events in real time. Actuality, however – and in this way too it is a forerunner of the term “live” – beyond simple temporal simultaneity and is linked to notions of a kind of somatic and experiential intensity, a direct physical connection not only with listeners’ sense of hearing, but with their bodies and their nerves. This was inseparable from a second, more spatial effect, discussed in more detail below – the acoustic presence-effect deriving from the audibility of a materially detailed trace of a location outside the studio, providing an indispensable layer of indexicality underpinning the broadcast as acoustic Gestalt and communicational event. This coalescence of, on the one hand, temporal simultaneity and, on the other, the presence-effect lent by new modes of indexicality marks a new mode of broadcast spectacle – the phenomenon of live outside broadcasting. Although this mode of transmission had begun as early as 1924, the Chamberlin broadcast was the most important, ambitious and successful example yet of this “living radio” [lebendiger Rundfunk] or “actuality radio” [aktueller Rundfunk]. The early summer of 1927 witnessed an upsurge in “actuality” as a mode of broadcasting – these weeks saw the transmission of soccer games and horse racing, “Mikrophonwanderungen” [microphone tours] in the streets of Berlin, Frankfurt and Breslau, and broadcasts from Berlin’s famous Lunapark. Thus, as a “living radio” broadcast, the Chamberlin coverage exemplified the radiophonic creation of both a sense of the present, as a temporal structure, and a sense of presence, by virtue of new kinds of sonic indexicality and verisimilitude. More generally, the Live on the Air, Live on the Ground 87 flights of Lindbergh and Chamberlin, as large-scale cultural forms, framed and intensified phenomena of mediated simultaneity and dramatized the experience of spatial co-presence and global interconnection which had emerged in the previous fifty years.16 In short, they were aestheticizations and dramatizations of the “intensified sense of the present,” which the historian Stephen Kern has identified as the chief temporal-phenomenological innovation of the early twentieth century. As Kern remarks, the sense of the present “[…]was the most distinctively new [of all modern temporali- ties], thickened temporally with retentions and protentions of past and future and, most important, expanded spatially to create the vast shared experience of simultaneity. The present was no longer limited to one event in one place, sandwiched tightly between past and future and limited to local surroundings. In an age of intrusive electronic communication “now” became an extended interval of time that could, indeed must, include events around the world”.17 For both flights, newspapers and other media strained to accelerate to near-simultaneity.18 This acceleration can be traced in the multiple daily special press editions – often written in a breathless present tense – rushed for distribution among the very crowds they were reporting.19

16 For wide-ranging accounts of “simultaneity” in this period, both as mediated experience and as topos of the avant-garde, see Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993) and Dieter Daniels, Die Kunst als Sendung: Von der Telegrafie zum Internet(Munich: C.H. Beck, 2002). 17 Kern, 314. 18 The newspapers that dominated coverage of the Chamberlin flight were not simply media and paper. Not only did newspapers increasingly feature visual images; less obviously, they were themselves temporal media – by the mid-1920s, the press had to a degree absorbed other media and means of transportation into their production: the telegraph, the telephone, the railway, the motor car and now the radio. Reporters could send their stories faster, newspaper editions were physically delivered more quickly. At times, the press also served as telephone information point. On the day Lindbergh took off, theNew York Times took 600 telephone inquiries about the flight’s progress; on the day he landed, it answered 10,000. 19 TheBerliner Tageblatt reported how its special edition was distributed among the crowds at Tempelhof late on Sunday night: “… the special edition was torn from the hands of the delivery men. The cars, from which our representatives threw the papers 88 Brían Hanrahan

The desire for the intensified and reflexive experience of simultaneity performed in the Lindbergh and Chamberlin landings is embodied in the crowds gathering under electronic advertising signs waiting for news flashes (30,000 people waited in the Place de l’Opéra, awaiting news of Lindbergh),20 as well as in the race to instantly report sightings and landings. These flights transmuted traditional narratives of journey and homecoming into a new kind of drama of simultaneity, a staging of global interconnection in which urban masses could participate as self-nominated extras at the culminating moment of making-present: the appearance of the plane, when the simultaneous-but-separate finally meet in real time at an actual location. Radio’s addition of actual simultaneity for a home audience – the detail which differentiates Chamberlin from Lindbergh – was, in a sense, simply the culmination of these wider developments.

Diffuse Liveness: “[T]he hours themselves became uncanny”

While radio’s modes of liveness cannot be separated from long-term patterns of acceleration in communications and news coverage, there is nonetheless a new element in the Chamberlin broadcast – live listening at home to a public spectacle as it unfolded in real time on location. For the home radio audience, many of whom were reported to have stayed up all night waiting for news of the plane’s arrival, we can distinguish two kinds of reception. First, corresponding to the first phase of the live Chamberlin broadcast, before the arrival of the plane, there was a diffuse reception, a low-level engagement prompted by an irregular stream of sparse but urgent breaking news reports. In this phase, information and affect from an outside alter the

to the massed audience, could hardly move forward through the pressing crowds …” See anon, “Auf dem Tempelhofer Feld,” Berliner Tageblatt (June 7, 1927), 2. 20 For a cinematic representation of the scene, see Marcel L’Herbier’s 1928 film L’argent. Live on the Air, Live on the Ground 89 domestic environment and the physical experience of the listener palpably but relatively mildly, adding a new layer of altered spatio-temporality to the immediate here-and-now.21 In contemporary reports, this alteration is usually referred to in terms of “tension,” or Spannung, a key term in descriptions of early liveness. TheSpannung repeatedly invoked in accounts of this first phase of live listening derives from the narrative openness of the unfinished “story” of the flight, but also from a double structural tension peculiar to the apparatus of live broadcasting. The first tension is temporal: created in the difference between, first, the normal time of the radio schedule and, second, the extraordinary time which breaks through in the irruption of contingent events, but is in fact consistently present in the possibility that something might at any moment happen. This possibility changed the quality of time and the nature of listening, giving a sense of listening not only to something, but out for something and out into an absent elsewhere. This first, temporal tension intersects with a second, primarily spatial one: radio’s telescoping of the contingencies of an outside with the com- forts and normality of home. This polarity underlies contemporary reports’ reiterated reference to the detail of domesticity – armchairs, coffee cups and curtains – an evocation of normality and interior space that aligns with the temporal normality of scheduled programming. Contemporary reports inscribe this unfamiliar tension with a variety of discursive devices. Werner Menzel, a correspondent of the radio journal Funk, in an account of his marathon twenty-four hour listening session, suggestively repeats the humdrum contents of the schedule in formulations managing to suggest

21 Bernhard Siegert, in an orthodox Kittlerean reading, sees the experience of this phase of the Chamberlin broadcast less in terms of spectacle than of relations between civilian and military radio. For Siegert, radio is originally and essentially a military technology. Thus, he asserts that the listening experience in this phase of the broadcast has its ultimate significance in the replication, as civilian entertainment, of the activity of a military intelligence officer. Moreover, since Weimar radio remained “in principle a military-imperial information system,” Siegert traces the fascination and uncanniness of the listening experience – the listeners’ “Schauder des Erhabenen” [shudder of the sublime] – to the closeness of civilian reportage to the technology’s secret military uses, suggesting the “shudder” was a unconscious response to trespass- ing on military-imperial functions. See Siegert, 132, 129. 90 Brían Hanrahan both passivity and a sorely endured tension, evoking a peculiar combination of banality and externally charged tension, of absence and latent presence:

Quietly we drank our afternoon coffee to the music of the Steiner ensemble … Rarely have we endured, with such stamina and patience, afternoon concert followed by opera broadcast, followed by early concert, morning prayers and again an afternoon concert –with lectures on top of that – in order to be quickly and precisely informed of the success of the bold flight […].22

Other observers likewise strove for a vocabulary adequate to the new blend of strangeness and familiarity. One witness uses a figure of hallucina- tion, presented in a domesticated but nonetheless powerful form, suggesting the aircraft’s arrival might eventually be accompanied by its appearance, vision-like, “on the horizon of the ceiling.”23 The journalist Rudolf Olden underlines the relation of the individual listener’s unconscious with a technically mediated body politic, a mediated surface which affective streams might flow. The new national space encompasses both those in the crowd at the airport, waiting for “the buzzing of the propellers over [his] head […] and the motors’ explosions as a distant sound […]” and the listener at home, who “lonely in his sleep felt the anxiety of those at the Tempelhofer field”.24 The radio-listener is here troped as dreamer, asleep before the radio, absorbing streams of public affect transmitted from Tempelhof ’s central point of mediation.25

22 m [Werner Menzel], “Vierundzwanzig Stunden vor dem Lautsprecher: Chamberlins Ozeanflug im Rundfunk – Eine Nacht der Spannungen,”Funk 4.25 (June 17, 1927): 195. 23 “Half the night and nearly the whole day radio worked to keep the tension alive for the whole of Berlin. We experienced the most exciting moments in our own rooms. One was almost tempted to expect the appearance of the flyer on the horizon of the ceiling. But he never came.” anon, “Rundfunk von gestern und heute,” 8-Uhr Abendblatt, June 7, 1927, 1st extra edn. 24 Rudolf Olden, “Willkommen,” Berliner Tageblatt, June 7, 1927, 2nd edn: 1. 25 A similar figure of the listener absorbing affect in half-sleep is used by C. Hans: “Didn”t every listener feel some empathy for the … poor waiting people, who stood there in the cold and the rain at Tempelhof, while we sat in warm beds far, far away Live on the Air, Live on the Ground 91

Seeking to capture the affective-temporal specificity of his listening experience, Menzel repeatedly uses the word “uncanny,” noting the “unheimliche Stimmung” as the night wore on, as the “hours themselves became unheimlich […]”.26 The Freudian uncanny refers of course to a constitutive instability in the relation between home and outside, but also to an unclarity in the experience of the boundary between life and death. It is worth noting the way in which uncanny here does not refer, as often the case with discourses of very early sound technology, to disembodied voices or the ghostly presence of spirits.27 Rather, “uncanniness” here refers ultimately to the changed sensations within the body of the listener in his or her reconfigured experience of time and space. This is not to say that death plays no role. The possibility of fatality is among the fundamental thematic concerns of the Chamberlin flight; as Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht has shown, death, transcendence and contingency are inscribed into popular accounts of adventure flights in the mid-1920s.28 There is an affinity between, on the one hand, the sensation of outward-directed listening created in the constitutive tensions of early live listening and, on the other, the contingency of the flight’s events and the ever-present possibility of death for the fliers. The radical coalescence of home and outside, the interlacing of banal and extraordinary time, of safety and danger, is encapsulated in an anecdote published immediately after the Chamberlin events. In a letter prominently printed in one of the main radio journals, “H. Ameling” – a listener in the provinces outside Berlin – describes his domestic scene, peaceful but filled with “great tension” [größter Spannung]. Here, on a homemade radio set – requiring constant attention to maintain reception – he sits listening to reports of the flyers’ progress, when “[…] in the middle of my tinkering I

and in the pauses could go back to sleep again?” C. Hans, “Mit dem Mikrophon ins Leben,” Der Deutsche Rundfunk 5.30 (July 24, 1927): 2045. 26 m [Menzel], 195. 27 On this mode of uncanny radio, see Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 28 Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, esp. “Flugzeug,” 126–36. 92 Brían Hanrahan suddenly heard the buzzing of an aeroplane […]”.29 The sound from immediately outside, heralds reality bursting through its representational [mediated] frame, as Chamberlin’s plane performs an emergency landing in the field outside his window. Ameling rushes to the pilots’ aid; they communicate “in a fabulous mishmash of English and German” until the flyers are brought away. The public and the private, transmitted information and physical experience, the banal and the extraordinary, meet and combine in Ameling’s narration of his dramatic double reception.

Intense Liveness: “Experiencing the moment of the landing in all its detail”

Building on this structural opposition of home and outside, and of normal and extraordinary time, a second phase of coverage foregrounds an additional spatial-acoustic component in the live broadcast event; namely, the affective force and semiotic functioning of the new acoustic texture and spatiality of sound. This novel sound quality underpins and ushers in a second kind of reception, a more concentrated and intense involvement, in which the listener at times (literally) strains into the auditory representation of absent events, often physically leaning in towards the radio set, drawn not only by the narrative fascination of quickening events, but also – crucially – by the new palpability and plasticity of the acoustic trace, a product of the electro-acoustic revolution of the 1920s.30 By the coming of mass broadcast radio, sound reproduction was almost fifty years old. The dominant, pre-electric means of sound reproduction had

29 H. Ameling, “Are you Mister Chamberlin?” Funk 4.25 (June 17, 1927): 195–6, here 196. 30 On the physical posture of attentive listening called forth by live-event broadcasts, see Carsten Lenk, Die Erscheinung des Rundfunks: Einführung und Nutzung eines neuen Mediums, 1923–1932 (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1997) 226f., as well as the illustrations on 282–3. Live on the Air, Live on the Ground 93 remained largely unchanged from the invention of phonography in 1877 until the early 1920s: sonic vibration forced air through a large recording horn or down a speaking tube, physically tracing the impression of the sound as a groove in a soft substance. However, the range of sounds reproduced by this pre-electric, pre-microphonic apparatus was severely attenu- ated. This could reproduce loud and particularly resonant voices and some musical instruments, but only if placed within a very short distance from the recording horn; quiet voices or distant sounds, background sounds or ambient sound could not be reproduced. The low definition sound reproduced little detail, giving a very limited sense of the materiality of objects, their spatial constellation, or the qualities of the surrounding space. With the rapid shift to technologies of electro-acoustic reproduction in the early 1920s – a shift of which radio formed a key part – came a substantial change: not simply that the microphone could go to any location, but that at that location it could register and reproduce a trace of the detail and specificity of a material space. This combination of mobility and electro-acoustic sensitivity was something almost entirely new, offering the reproduction of a far greater variety of discrete sound events as well as enabling, tangibly but less easily describable, a sense of the indexical reproduction of a sound milieu, of a space and an event. As with other early location broadcasts, for many listeners to the Chamberlin broadcast, the most striking element within the audible form – foregrounded voice, atmospheric crackle, location spatial signature and ambient sound, the low hum of the receiver itself – was the noise of the masses, here literally domesticated by their acoustic mediation.31 “There is,” noted one listener, “nothing so exciting, so stirring as the roar and rush of a large crowd that fills the room coming through a loudspeaker. One hears fragments of conversation, shouted commands, Berliner wit and enthusiastic youth. Sounds in all kinds of voices and with every level of expectation”.32

31 On this phenomenon, see Brían Hanrahan, “The Mobilization of Weimar Radio: Traveling Microphone and Radio-Film,” Transfers: Journal of Mobility Studies 3.2 (2013): 2–23. 32 8-Uhr Abendblatt (June 8, 1927), 1st 3rd edn: 3. On the sound of the crowd, compare the incidental description of the transmission of a soccer crowd, in an article chiefly 94 Brían Hanrahan

The audibility of crowd, motors, speech fragments and unidentified noises, as well as the less identifiable but no less palpable factor of surrounding spatial timbre lent the broadcast a shifting hum of atmospheric semi-significance, something that was neither chaotic noise nor neatly codified sign and which contributed markedly to the live-location effect. This increased detail, clarity and spatiality of electro-acoustic sound underpinned the effects of liveness inculcated in the domestic listening audience. Sound definition’s contribution to this reality effect, however, was produced – in more than one sense – by technical and aesthetic choices on the part of the broadcaster, and by imaginative work on the part of the listener. The intersection of new technical capacities and imaginative co- participation can be seen in one of the most important accounts of the Chamberlin flight, written by Kurt Weill, then radio critic of the journal Der Deutsche Rundfunk, soon after, of course, the composer of the music for Brecht’s radio “learning play,” Der Lindberghflug. An acute observer of the new medium, Weill immediately noted the creation of a newly national medial space, but was additionally fascinated by the materiality and ambient quality of new sonic phenomena made possible by the deployment of the microphone outside the studio. He praises the technical clarity of the reproduction (“we have rarely heard transmissions of such clarity and plasticity,” he writes), and in a passage about the arrival of the plane live on air, he explicitly focuses on the tumult of the crowd, a relatively unformed scenographic element, suggesting this auditory experience to be as compelling as Chamberlin’s dramatic touch-down itself:

At first, the microphone was stationed so as to give a sense of the waiting crowd, which sounded like the “calm before the storm.” When the sound of the motors came closer in ever greater clarity, they went with the microphone towards the landing aeroplane. This way we could experience the moment of this landing in all details and Chamberlin’s first words on German soil were at the same time a greeting to the

devoted to the Chamberlin broadcast: “… The applause, the celebration, the eternal roar and clamor of the waving masses became a lovely acoustic scenery. We hope “living radio” always sounds like this …” anon, “Lebendiger Rundfunk,” Funk 4.25 (June 17, 1927): 197. Live on the Air, Live on the Ground 95

whole German radio community. But almost more impressive was the way in which the general tumult was heard through the microphone.33

Weill’s intensely attentive listening to a live elsewhere illustrates how acoustic receptiveness is called forth by new technical capacities, allowing, in turn, new combinations of the semantic and the somatic, of perception and narrative. In this passage, he recreates the microphone’s progress through a space rendered palpable by newly plastic sound, figuring the microphone as instrument of kinesthetic and haptic listening, and as identificatory point of audition, whose arrival at the point of narrative culmination marks the event’s triumphant climax, confirmed and completed by the pilot/hero taking the place of the announcer/narrator at the microphone. However, the very smoothness of Weill’s account is both deceptive and illustrative. No matter how well the broadcast technology functioned on the day, given the technical restrictions of the time, it seems unlikely that the acoustic transmission-representation of events could have been as ruptureless as he here makes out. While early microphones could be carried in the hand, the accompanying apparatus was a problem, and there were as yet no wireless microphones and no body-mounted versions. Cables for outdoor broadcasts were a maximum of about 60m long. At Alfred Braun’s Lunapark broadcast, later in June 1927, the live microphone had to be repeatedly plugged and unplugged into one of 12 separate connections around the park, situated on a circuit of 2 km of cable ringing the grounds, with the interruptions covered by switching to another sound feed, from a tent where a live band was playing. Even at a relatively orderly and pre- planned event such as the Lunapark broadcast, a phalanx of twenty security men was needed to push through the crowd.34 Weill’s report is thus, in a sense, a phenomenological semi-fiction, the product of a desire for coherent acoustic representation and a fascination

33 Ibid., 1714–15. 34 See St-r, “Die Technik der aktuellen Rundfunkreportage: Das wandernde Mikrophon im Lunapark,” Funk 4.28 (July 8, 1927): 219; Band, “Das Mikrophon im Lunapark,” Funk 4.30 (July 22, 1927): 237–8. 96 Brían Hanrahan with the indexical as much as it is an objective account of what was transmitted. Weill’s intense imaginative identification with the microphone might be read, paradoxically, as an erasure of the mediating technology, even, drawing on cinematic apparatus theory, as a kind of auditory equivalent of suturing in which the media subject is constituted through an act of identification with the central figures of a media representation.35 Or his listening might be read, in more cognitive terms, simply as a kind of active mental co-construction of the event. Whichever way it is read, the experience depends both on the idea of a mobile microphone and on the new “plasticity” of sound, which gave an incremental increase in mediated information which prompting an oscillation between a new audibility, in the striking new quality of the sound, and a new inaudibil- ity, as the “sound of the sound” retreated behind the compelling referent it enabled.

Producing the Sound of Crowds: The Microphone at the Airport

As a spectacular event, the Chamberlin flight was constituted by the participation of crowds, equally important on the airwaves – where, as noted above, the mediated acoustic representation relied on crowd noise as a vector of reality effects, due to its combination of identifiability and sonic

35 On the idea of an ideological, identificatory process of “suture” see Daniel Dayan, “The Tutor Code of Classical Cinema,”Film Theory and Criticism, eds Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) 179–91; and for a critique, William Rothman, “Against ‘The System of the Suture’,”Film Theory and Criticism, eds Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) 192–8. On point-of-view effects and spatial identification in film, see Edward Branigan,Point of View in Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Film (Berlin, New York: Mouton, 1984). Live on the Air, Live on the Ground 97 instability – and in the city and airport.36 In spatial terms, within the actual urban environment, both the Lindbergh and the Chamberlin arrivals staged a spectacle of crowds and traffic in, over and between city spaces, comparable to, but looser and more dynamic than the mass ornamentation described by Siegfried Kracauer.37 Kracauer’s well-known analysis suggests that the abstract, “mass ornamental” patterns of stadium-based displays of bodies serve as a metonymic illustration of how capitalist rationality subordinates the individual’s body and being to its larger totalizing structure, while leaving the working of the whole invisible to the individual. However, where Kracauer’s analysis concentrates on a formalized, framed-off spectacle, we can see in the crowd spectacle of the Chamberlin landing a more dynamic cultural form, perhaps more recognizable today, in which mass participation is not performed in regimented display, but voluntarily mobilized in and for a looser spectacular event, less autonomous from the everyday. An important part of the thrill of Lindbergh’s arrival, for example, was that it caused the largest traffic jams in peacetime European history, while the dramatic celebratory flyover over the city, a feature of both flights, theat- ricalized urban space in three dimensions. One observer, viewing Berlin on the Tuesday from the air, on board one of the escorting aircraft, also emphasized the way in which the event made palpable the mutually constitutive relation of city space and crowd, noting the gathering of crowds at key urban locations: “people on the Kreuzberg [hill], people on the roofs, on Alexanderplatz, Unter den Linden, around the Zoo station intersection”.38

36 At the level of the sign, the audience clearly knew it to be the sound of a crowd, and of the crowd at the event, but at the level of sonic detail, crowd noise is a relatively fluctuating and unstable factor. 37 Kracauer’s “mass ornament” essay was published in the Frankfurter Zeitung the following month, July 1927. Siegfried Kracauer, “Das Ornament der Masse,” Das Ornament der Masse (1927; Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2005) 50–63. 38 Gunther Pluschow, “Mit Chamberlin durch Berlins Sonnentor,” BZ am Mittag, June 7, 1927: 3. On the ground on the same day, another writer suggested that the texture of the urban environment seemed to be ineluctably pulled out of shape by the force of the event, noting how Unter den Linden appeared noticeably empty in the late afternoon, as if the tide had gone out, while those who remained in the city 98 Brían Hanrahan

In contemporary reports, the crowd’s mobilization and dynamic movement through urban space itself becomes the object of observation, with the masses’ presence both aestheticized – not least as the vector of a sense of danger and contingency – and, in Kracauerian fashion, made abstract:

The news [a false report of the plane’s impending arrival, around 3 p.m., Sunday, June 5] must have mobilized the whole of Berlin. Already at the Hallesches Tor one sees huge masses of people, storming onto the electric trams to Mariendorf. At each stop in the Berliner Straße … groups of humans are gathering, who get nervous and angry as, repeatedly, only full trams go by. The bridges over the building site at the subway are permanently filled with human masses. Cyclists, screaming children, dogs – all attempt to get through at the same time. The crowds are often frightening. Hopefully the bridges will withstand these masses.39

At the airport, radio arrives to be among this crowd, to transmit its auditory trace and incorporate it into its new kind of mediated event- representation.40 However, the medium did more than merely pick up and reproduce the noise of the scene; it was already an actor in creating the reality it transmitted. This is worth emphasizing, not simply to reiterate in general that media help shape and construct what they represent, that they are not neutral channels of transmission, but in order to examine the specific interaction of crowd and radio, reality and medium interact during the Chamberlin arrival. The Sunday night crowd at Tempelhof exhibits an unusual kind of agency. In accounts of the evening’s events, live audience

center rushed into the street to see the plane fly overhead, with traffic laws ignored. cb, “Man wartete Unter den Linden,” BZ am Mittag, June 7, 1927: 3. 39 anon, “Ganz Berlin strömt auf das Tempelhofer Feld,” 8-Uhr-Abendblatt, June 7, 1927, 3rd edn: 3. 40 Braun’s version suggests – falsely – that he spontaneously decided to broadcast the plane’s arrival. Braun rewrites the coverage of the event in terms of a journey of the microphone out of the studio and into the stream of urban events, with the microphone serving as both technical and iconic device. Alfred Braun, Achtung! Achtung! Hier ist Berlin: Aus der Geschichte des deutschen Rundfunks in Berlin, 1923–1932 (Berlin: Sender Freies Berlin, 1968) 61. Live on the Air, Live on the Ground 99 and radio, represented by the commentator Braun, engage in a kind of bantering dialog of shouts and gestures:

Alfred Braun himself appeared and received the first salvo: “Alfred, are you ready to talk?” came the sound from the terrace, the people laughed. Alfred beamed – at least we know now who is popular – and slowly, despite the cool night, spirits were warmed up. What do the people of Berlin want from their radio? “Alfred, don’t be so quiet, make music!” Music! Music! could be heard in all kinds of tones. For a long time only the commands of the police and the protestations of the badly treated had been audible, as well as the buzzing of the Lufthansa propeller. And Alfred made music. In the early morning he arranged for a real band with wind instruments and a real conductor and then there were just marches. From the Dessau march through the Fridericus to the imperial-Russian funeral march.41

The exchange marks a brief constellation of the electric mass media within the cultural landscape and the media environment of the mid-1920s. Braun and the radio medium are prominent enough to be recognizable, but not yet the dominant force they will become, either in cultural terms or in the local configuration of a public event. At the airport, and in a way audible in the acoustic trace heard at home, Braun and the radio are elements within the scene, but not, as yet, the dominant ones. The public, here embodied in the crowds assembled for an airplane that stubbornly refuses to arrive, speaks back to “its” radio. However, the technical set-up changed between Sunday night and the landing on Tuesday, altering the constellation of crowd and medium, and subtly changing the configuration of liveness in the medium’s favor. At this second crowd event at Tempelhof, Braun’s microphone channel was audible to those at home, but was also amplified on loudspeakers at the airport, giving his voice an unchallengeable centrality at the scene, incrementally increasing the centrality of the radio’s role, and shifting the audience’s role from participant towards that of acoustic prop.42

41 hk, “In der Kulisse des Ozeanflugs: Sprechchor Flughafen,”Berliner Tageblatt, June 8, 1927: 6. 42 On the “voice-noise feedback loop” established by the amplification of Braun’s voice at the airport, see Gethmann, 119–20. 100 Brían Hanrahan

The change in the apparative set-up on the two evenings serves to emphasize the variety of combinations of technology and performance that the Chamberlin events encompass, on the ground, in the air, and on the airwaves. The flight and broadcast, examined in detail, reveal a striking historical snapshot of rapid change in the combination of medium, perception and performance in the mid-to-late 1920s, indicating, not least, something of the pace of media-historical revolution in these years. They also highlight the way in which liveness and acoustic presence, both then and now, form part of a broader, historically specific construction of performance and mediation, technologies and institutions, perception and cultural form, reducible neither to a transcendent, pre-mediated presence, nor to the sum of their technological prerequisites. Paul Monty Paret

Berlin in Light: Wilhelmine Monuments and Weimar Mass Culture

“There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument,” the author and cultural critic Robert Musil observed in his 1927 essay “Monuments.”1 Addressing the failure of nineteenth-century commemorative sculpture within twentieth-century urban experience, Musil wrote that ordinary statues, while “no doubt erected to be seen … are impregnated with something that repels attention.”2 You sense them, he continued, “as you would a tree, as part of the street scenery … but you never look at them, and do not generally have the slightest notion of whom they are supposed to represent.”3 By satirically pointing out “how backward our monument art is in comparison to contemporary developments in advertising” and mocking statues that merely “stand around quietly, accepting occasional glances,” Musil registers the shifting attitudes toward public sculpture and the complex relationship of statuary to urban spectacle in 1920s Europe.4 In Berlin, the outdated, invisible monuments targeted by Musil might be exemplified by a sculpture like Adolf Brütt’s 1903 Kaiser Friederich III at the Platz vor dem Brandenburger Tor (Figure 4.1). Standing about twelve feet tall on top of a large base, the stately marble sculpture presents Friedrich III (whose reign in 1888 lasted only ninety-nine days) in full military uniform clutching his marshal’s baton in his right hand. On the

1 Robert Musil, “Monuments,” Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, trans. by Peter Wortsman (New York: Penguin, 1987) 61; first published as “Denkmale,”Nachlaß zu Lebzeiten (Zurich: Humanitas, 1936). 2 Ibid, 61. 3 Ibid, 62. 4 Ibid, 63. 102 Paul Monty Paret

Figure 4.1 Adolf Brütt, Friedrich III, 1903. Photo courtesy of the Nordsee Museum Husum. Berlin in Light 103 opposite side of the square stood a companion monument by the sculptor Fritz Gerth to Friedrich’s wife Kaiserin Victoria, shown in her corona- tion robe and crown. Together Brütt’s Friedrich III and Gerth’s Victoria marked an extension of the Siegesallee royal statuary project (1896–1901) of thirty-two sculpture groups tracing the history of the Hohenzollerns that ran through the center of Berlin’s Tiergarten and concluded with the 1903 addition of Brütt’s and Gerth’s figures just before the Brandenburg Gate.5 Each of these over life-sized white marble figures was framed by a low semi-circular wall supporting two additional portrait busts of associates or advisors. For Musil, such staid and contemplative monuments were increasingly at odds with “our age of noise and movement.”6 Even if one may have looked at them once, Musil remarked, the human “fickleness of desire” means that the very permanence and durability of these statues is now a liability that works against them.7 In stark contrast was the Osram Light Tower (Figure 4.2). This massive, temporary, electrified structure was erected on Berlin’s Grosser Stern, a large traffic island in the Tiergarten, as a centerpiece for the October 1928 Berlin in Light [Berlin im Licht] festival, a four-day public celebration of urban illumination and the new role of electric light in the metropolis. The intensely illuminated rectangular column, ringed by dark protruding lines, ends in a broad platform topped by an illuminated image of a flame. As if responding to Musil’s quip that the invisibility of monuments might be remedied by using “tried and true logos, like ‘Goethe’s Faust is the best!’” the Osram tower displays the festival name in neon letters along with the well-known marketing slogan “Light is Life” [Licht ist Leben] of the light- bulb manufacturer Osram, a lead sponsor of the festival whose name runs

5 On the Siegesallee, see Uta Lehnert, Der Kaiser und die Siegesallee: Réclame Royale (Berlin: Reimer Verlag, 1998). 6 Musil, 63. 7 Ibid, 63. As if to clarify his notion of monument’s invisibility, Musil adds, “One cannot say we did not notice them; one would have to say they ‘de-notice’ us, they elude our perceptive faculties: this is a downright vandalism inducing quality of theirs!” Ibid, 62. 104 Paul Monty Paret

Figure 4.2 Photographer unknown (Osram-Photodienst), from the series Berlin im Licht, 1928. Gelatin Silver Print. Photo courtesy of Berlinische Galerie, Fotographische Sammlung. Berlin in Light 105 across the tower’s base.8 Emphasizing the promotional messages on its glowing surface, the Osram Light Tower places advertising and commerce at the core of civic space. The stark contrasts between these monuments – Adolf Brütt’s Friedrich III and Gerth’s Victoria, on the one hand, and the futuristic Osram Light Tower, on the other – mark the rapidly changing paradigms of public sculpture and spectacle in Weimar Germany’s urban landscape. These radically different models of public monuments are distinguished not only by their material and technology, but also by their divergent historical references, permanent versus temporary status, and political versus commercial function. Moreover, these works construct very differently imagined spectators: Brütt’s and Gerth’s turn-of-the-century imperial monuments presume a contemplative bourgeois spectator perambulating around a didactic historical narrative of political stability and the cultural authority of the monarchy; by contrast, the glowing surfaces of the Osram Light Tower are directed toward the new urban masses, “addicted to distraction” as Siegfried Kracauer observed in 1926, who experience the city as a series of fleeting images and for whom the “stimulation of the senses succeed each other with such rapidity that there is no room left between them for even the slightest contemplation.”9 Each of these monuments – the Osram Light Tower and the statues of Friedrich III and Victoria, Brütt’s and Gerth’s statuary – turns out to be

8 Ibid, 63. 9 Siegfired Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction: on Berlin’s Picture Palaces,”The Mass Ornament, ed. Thomas Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995) 326; first published as “Kult der Zerstreuung: Über die Berlinier Lichtspielhhäuser,” Frankfurter Zeitung, March 4, 1926, Feuilliton: 1–2. Kracauer’s ideas on the “cult of distraction” and “the mass ornament” prefigure to an extent Guy Debord’s later Society of the Spectacle, yet for Kracauer popular forms of mass entertainment – as authentic forms of culture that correlated closely to the organization of labor and the economy – carried a redemptive possibility of “exposing disintegration rather than masking it” (328). On Kracauer and Debord see for instance Joan Ockman, “Between Ornament and Monument: Siegfried Kracauer and the Architectural implications of the Mass Ornament,” Thesis. Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Bauhaus-Universität Weimar 3 (2003): 74–91. 106 Paul Monty Paret directly or indirectly connected to the October 1928 Berlin in Light festival, an often cited but little analyzed celebration of commerce, technology and the increasingly central place of electric light in the visual experience of the metropolis.10 One of a number of public light festivals in European cities in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Berlin in Light has retained a noto- riety above the others, perhaps aided by a Kurt Weill song of the same name recorded for the occasion. As the event that produced the Osram Light Tower and that, as will be shown, also involved Brütt’s and Gerth’s royal statuary, the Berlin in Light festival provides a fascinating case study of the interaction and interdependence in Weimar visual culture of these two very different modes of public sculpture – electric advertisements and imperial monuments. For all of its futuristic thrust and rhetorical celebration of new forms of electric light and commerce, the Berlin in Light festival was heavily inflected by nostalgia and a profound uncertainty about the role of electric light, of technology, in modern culture. Addressing the rhetoric and reception of Berlin in Light as a spectacle of distraction, this essay begins by examining key structures and light projections commissioned for the festival (e.g. the Osram Light Tower), as well as texts, photographs and images made in relation or direct response to it. The second part of the essay focuses on a design for a public Light Creation by the constructivist sculptor Naum Gabo that was to cover over the royal sculptures of Friedrich III and Victoria. Initially commissioned for the festival but then rejected by its organizers, Gabo’s design underscores the precarious relationship between

10 On the rise of artificial light in modern culture see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Thomas Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Joachim Schlör, Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London 1840–1930, trans. Pierre Gottfried Imhof and Dafydd Rees Roberts (London: Reaktion, 1998); Chris Otter, The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); and Janet Ward, “History and Technology Forum: Weimar and Nazi Eyes,” History and Technology 26.2 (2010): 163–71. Berlin in Light 107 electric light and the city’s historic monuments, and ultimately suggests the ideological limits governing the festival. Berlin in Light in the end was as much about the city’s imperial monuments, like Brütt’s Friedrich III, as it was about Berlin’s newfound modernity and the gleam of the Osram Light Tower.

Berlin in Light

Organized by the city government in cooperation with a large working group of Berlin business associations, particularly the Association of Berlin Merchants and Industrialists [Verein Berliner Kaufleute und Industrieller], which provided much of the funding, Berlin in Light took place over four days and nights from October 13 to 16, 1928. The festival included parades of ornately decorated light-projecting vehicles, exhibitions and competitions of electric advertisements and illuminated window displays, promotional tie-ins by major department stores and consumer products, and, especially, the night-time illumination of plazas, buildings, storefronts and monuments throughout the city.11 To its advocates in the advertising industry, like Albert Reimann, the director of Berlin’s Reimann-Schule of applied art and design, “Berlin in Light was a good title. There in the light of its

11 Theorganizing committee included representatives of government, industry, retail business, and artist associations. Promotional tie-ins to the festival were advertised by the department stores Kaufhaus des Westens, Hermann Tietz, and N. Israels, and brand names like Josetti Juno cigarettes and Osram light bulbs. On the festival see Ulrika Poock-Feller, “Berliner Illuminationen,” Berlin: Kultur und Metropole in den zwanziger und seit den neunziger Jahren, eds Godela Weiss-Sussex and Ulrike Zitzlsperger (Munich: IUDICUM, 2007) 211–21; Ewa Gossart, “Berlin wird Weltstadt: Lichtreklame als Medium der urbanen Selbstinszenierung” and Thomas Friedrich, “Stadt, Nacht, Licht: Pioniere der nächltlichen Großstadtfotografie,” Berlin im Licht, ed. Franziska Nentwig (Berlin: Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin and G+H Verlag, 2008); and “Lichtführer durch Berlin!,” Osram Nachrichten (corporate newsletter) 10.20 (October 15, 1928). 108 Paul Monty Paret illumination, in the light of its advertising, in the light of its shop windows, in the light of its science and culture, stood Berlin. A metropolis of international significance.”12 As an act of civic boosterism the festival self- consciously signaled Berlin’s economic, cultural and political aspirations for visibility as a world capital. At the opening ceremony Berlin’s Lordmayor, Gustav Böß, declared, “I know Paris, London and New York are still above us. Soon we must and will have caught up with them!”13 Several recent scholars have addressed Berlin in Light in broad strokes to illustrate larger narratives of modernity and technology, and as an example of the ascendance of spectacle and simulacra in Weimar Germany. For instance, in her innovative book Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany Janet Ward considers Berlin in Light an example of the “cult of surface” that she argues characterizes the visual culture of Weimar Germany, and sums up the festival as “Germany’s ultimate interwar self-salvaging attempt through electric aggrandizement.”14 For Dietrich Neumann the festival exemplifies “Lichtarchitektur”; for Frances Guerin “the electrification of life, cinema and art;” for Peter Fritzsche “the most famous attempt to … represent the city as a series of sheer surface effects.”15 These emblematic uses of Berlin in Light have resulted too often in the glowing terms of festival’s own self-description – as a glittering, popular, celebration of light, commerce and mass entertainment – being accepted at almost face value. Additionally, there is considerable confusion about the festival’s organization, reception, and the specific objects and images connected to it. The festival, for instance, did not include “a Bauhaus light sculpture in front of the Brandenburg Gate,” as Ward suggests; nor was the

12 Albert Reimann, Die Reimann-Schule in Berlin (Berlin: Bruno Hessling, 1966) 64–5. 13 Quoted in the newpaper Berliner Tageblatt, October 14, 1928, Beiblatt: 5. 14 Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) 107. 15 Dietrich Neumann, Architecture of the Night: the illuminated building (Munich and New York: Prestel, 2002) 40–1; Frances Guerin, A Culture of Light: Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005) 6–7; Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1996) 165. Berlin in Light 109

Osram Light Tower “an adornment of the Siegessäule” or Victory Column, which in 1928 was still in its original position in Königsplatz, now Platz der Republik, not Grosser Stern where it was moved only in 1939.16 Indeed, within the cultural politics of Berlin in Light, it would have been incon- ceivable for a monument as historically and politically significant as the Siegessäule to have been covered and hidden by the shrill cladding of the Osram Light Tower. The organizing committee ofBerlin in Light in fact made sure that the festival would only reinforce, never diminish, the iconic status of Berlin’s historic monuments. The aesthetics and visual structure of theBerlin in Light festival involved a carefully calibrated relationship between past and present. Linking the self-assertive paternalism of Berlin’s nineteenth-century monuments to the visual language of Weimar consumer culture, Berlin in Light depended on the city’s established monuments and historic areas as the literal surfaces for its projections and as the substantive anchors of their rhetoric and meaning. An image from the Vossische Zeitung, one of Berlin’s leading papers, illustrates the extent to which Berlin in Light relied on the imperial city (Figure 4.3). Published on the cover of a special insert for the festival, the drawing imagines Berlin during the festival viewed from the air at night with some of the city’s major institutions and monuments – the Reichstag, the Siegessäule, the Brandenburg Gate and so on – all glowing under special lighting and the beams of hundreds of powerful searchlights installed throughout the city. Among the most noted uses of searchlights during the festival was the illumination of the winged figure of Victoria atop the Siegessäule that then stood in front of the Reichstag. Large spotlights illuminated only the crowning figure of Victory, not her supporting column, so that, as the Berliner Tageblatt reported, “one had the sensation she was flying

16 Wa rd , Weimar Surfaces, 107 and 109. The Siegessäule was moved to the Grosse Stern in 1938–9 as part of Albert Speer’s redesign of Berlin. The mistake is repeated in Peter Chametzky, “Global Art, National Values, Monumental Compromises,” The Massachusetts Review 50.1–2 (May 2009): 155–80. With the “Bauhaus light sculpture” Ward may be referring to Naum Gabo’s rejected proposal, discussed below, although Gabo was not a teacher or student at the school. 110 Paul Monty Paret

Figure 4.3 E. Marcuse, “Berlin im Licht,” cover of Zeitbilder. Beilage zur Vossischen Zeitung (Berlin), no. 42. October 14, 1928. Photo courtesy of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz. Berlin in Light 111 through the air.”17 Projected light was deployed in this way throughout the festival, not to transform, diminish or blot out the historic city, but rather to reinforce the iconic status of the Berlin’s most familiar and resonant monuments. Other objects of festival lighting – the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, the Rathaus tower, the Municipal Gasworks building – similarly called attention to the city’s political, civic, and religious institutions. It is sometimes suggested that the rise of advertising and consumer spectacle made the imperial city fade from view, but Berlin in Light gave a privileged position to these monuments and almost systematically rehearsed a patriotic allegiance to its past. Indeed, in a process related to that described by Peter Fritzsche about the role of newspapers a generation earlier, a festival like Berlin in Light helped map the city into a set of demarcated spaces to be viewed and experienced as a field of visual pleasure.18 By making the city’s monuments not just visible, but available for consumption as fleeting entertainment, the festival worked to integrate Berlin’s imperial monuments and political traditions with newer modes of advertising and commerce. Several sculptural installations created for the festival, however, suggest a more complicated attitude toward city’s statuary and nineteenth-century monument culture. One photograph from a series of images commissioned by Osram, for instance, presents a large electrified Osram advertising column towering over one of Berlin’s many neo-baroque statuary groups (Figure 4.4).19 The modernity of the Osram column in this image

17 “Berlins grosses Lichtfest,” Berliner Tageblatt, October 15, 1928, evening edition, Beiblatt: 3. 18 Fritzsche argues that the rise of newspapers and a mass culture press in the years around 1900 “remapped the metropolis as a field of visual pleasure [and] reworked the political face of the German capital: diluting difference into merely formal variation and habituating metropolitans to thrive in a world of strangers and to participate in the restless activity of commerce, while encouraging them to move about freely and haphazardly,” 133–4. 19 The pecifics sculpture is unidentified. For other images from this series see Janos Frecot and Jürgen Sembach, Berlin im Licht: Bilder der nächtlichen Stadt (Berlin: Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung, 2002); and Nentwig, 222–6. 112 Paul Monty Paret

Figure 4.4 Photographer unknown (Osram-Photodienst), from the series Berlin im Licht, 1928. Gelatin Silver Print. Photo courtesy of Berlinische Galerie, Fotographische Sammlung. Berlin in Light 113 is generated largely through its contrast with and supposed rejection of the classicizing sculpture group it towers over. Staging an almost violent confrontation between two different modes of public sculpture and civic space, this photograph presents the figurative sculpture group as an outmoded artifact, its twisting figures seeming to recoil and take cover from the blinding light and brutal modernity of the Osram column. Out of step with the new Berlin, these anachronistic classicizing figure suddenly find themselves in the glare of its consumerist spectacle. Even the Osram Light Tower (see Figure 4.2), for all of its shrill modernity and commercial advertising, is loaded with nostalgia and historical reference. This supposedly futuristic tower is not topped with a searchlight or other icon of modernity, but instead with the image of an old-fashioned flame. Rather than pointing forward, theOsram Light Tower, through its basic form, structure and symbols refers backward to Germany’s many Bismarck towers [Bismarcktürme]. Commemorating the nationalist legacy of Otto von Bismark and his achievement in unifying Germany, Bismarck towers (some 240 were built in total) proliferated across Germany and is territories in the two decades before the First World War.20 In spite of the shift in materials and rhetoric, the Osram Light Tower shares a basic formal affinity with the earlier Bismarck towers, often similarly topped by a flame, especially with the widely reproduced “Gotterdämmerung” design by Wilhelm Kreis, a massive pillar of fire that won the design competition of the German Student Association and served as the prototype for dozens of the Bismarck towers.21 As memorials to a dead leader and a triumphant but already distant past, the Bismarck towers expressed a conservative political nostalgia for

20 Thomas Nipperday, “Nationalidee und Nationaldenkmal in Deutschland im 20. Jahrhundert,” Historische Zeitschirft 206 (1968): 529ff; and Reinhard Alings, Monument und Nation: Das Bild vom Nationalstaat im Medium Denmal; zum Verhältnis von Nation und Staat im deutschen Kaiserreich 1871–1918 (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1996). 21 See Ekkehard Mai, “Vom Bismarckturm zum Ehrenmal: Denkmalformed bei Wilhelm Kreis,” Denkmal – Zeichen – Monument, eds Ekkehard Mai and Gisela Schimierber (Munich: Prestel, 1989) 50–7. 114 Paul Monty Paret

Bismarck’s national leadership and a latent anxiety about modernity and the future of Germany. Understood as a kind of modernized and commercialized Bismarck tower, the Osram Light Tower with its futuristic gleam becomes similarly inflected by an unexpected nostalgia that undermines the presumed optimism of the slogan “Light is Life.” It is worth noting that Musil had parenthetically exempted these Bismarck columns, “an exception to the rule,” from his general critique of monuments. For Musil, the strength of these popular Bismarck towers was that they each “block off an entire landscape” and exist within a series, thereby, he implied, successfully overcoming the alienation and fragmentation of modern experience that defeats most other monuments.22

“A victory of local intoxication”

Although a popular success – the Berliner Tageblatt reported “hundreds of thousands in the streets”23 – Berlin in Light was also roundly criticized and satirized, especially by the liberal and left wing press. The high-bourgeois journal Kunst und Künstler noted that what should have been “a magnificent experiment, a view into possible future developments, the fantasy image of a nocturnal metropolis,” offered instead only “a sad piece of cultural backwater.”24 As a celebration of all things local, Die Weltbühne explained, the festival’s parochial commercialism was “a harmless victory of local intoxication over larger points of view.”25 Nor did Berlin in Light’s politics of distraction go unnoticed by contemporary commentators. In advance of the festival, Die Welt am Abend

22 Musil, 62. 23 “Berlins grosses Lichtfest,” Berliner Tageblatt, October 14, 1928, Beiblatt: 3. 24 “Chronik,” Kunst und Künstler 27 (1928–29): 114. 25 Jörg Junker, “Bemerkungen: Berlin in Licht,” Die Weltbühne 24.43 (October 23, 1928): 646 (Reprint: Die Weltbühne [Königstein: Atheneum, 1978]). This review also mocked the nearly indiscriminate illumination of every possible dome and tower. Berlin in Light 115 called the plan for elaborate decorative lighting the “the most monstrous” [die ungeheuerlichste] idea the city had yet devised, given how many dark streets are still waiting for even a “miserable gas lamp” [ärmliche Gasfunzel].26 Seeing the results, the communist Die Rote Fahne went further, attacking the festival as capitalist spectacle and a calculated distraction from Berlin’s real social and economic ills. Reversing the official rhetoric of the festival, the newspaper published a drawing of a searchlight illuminating not the splendor of Berlin as a world metropolis, but rather the bleak poverty lurk- ing in its shadows (Figure 4.5).27 Here an archetypal proletarian mother

Figure 4.5 Artist unknown, “Berlin im Licht,” Die Rote Fahne (Berlin), October 14, 1928, p. 2.

26 “Berlin strahlt im Licht,” Die Welt am Abend, April 26, 1928, partially reprinted in Kunst-Metropole Berlin 1918–1933, eds Bärbel Schrader and Jürgen Schebera (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1987) 139–40. 27 Die Rote Fahne, October 14, 1928: 2. The reviewer, Fritz Köhler, lamented the enormous difficulty of bringing workers to the street to demonstrate in the “true light” of their economic interests and wrote: “Wenn ‘Treptow in Flammen’ steht, ist zehnmal 116 Paul Monty Paret stands grimly defiant, fists clenched, confronting the glare of the searchlight that seems physically to push back her frightened children. The composition of the mother and her children positioned against the searchlight is oddly analogous to outmoded sculpture group overwhelmed by Osram column in Figure 4.4. Just what aspects of Berlin’s modernity, the image demands, were being illuminated by the spectacle of Berlin in Light, and what was to remain in darkness?28 This question haunted not only the Berlin in Light festival, but also the larger discourse around electric light and the modern city. For years Osram had used the slogan “Light is Life” to promote the social and security benefits of the increased surveillance brought about by illuminating the city. At the same time there were new fears of the transformative and destructive effect electric light had on the experience of city space, particularly at night.29 Commenting on the new abundance of electric light, the filmmaker Hans Cürlis, for instance, wondered in 1928: “Of the old city, what remains at night? Nothing. The lighting rips open the ground-floor level of all the great thoroughfares … Light surges out of the buildings and breaks up the continuity of the street. Illuminated anarchy prevails.”30 The organizers ofBerlin in Light would have been well aware of these concerns, which have antecedents in the turn-of-century debates about urban advertising and belong to well-established anti-modernist and anti- urbanist discourses. Far from ignoring concerns about the effect of the electric light on the historic city, the Berlin in Light festival had the politically delicate task of helping to integrate electric light into the city – celebrating

mehr los als bei dem ganzen ‘Berlin im Licht.’” A shorter article in the same edition of the paper carried the title, “‘Berlin im Licht’ – aber wie viele Berliner im Dunkeln!?” 28 The eviewerr in Die Form also noted the failure of adding illumination to what were already the most illuminated streets of Berlin rather than the city’s darker areas. Die Form 3.12 (November 1, 1928): 358–9. 29 See especially Schlör, chapter three, “Night and Security.” 30 Hans Cürlis, “Night and the Modern City,” 1928, trans. Michael Loghridge, rpt. in Metropolis Berlin: 1880–1940, eds Iain Boyd Whyte and David Frisby (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012) 450. See also Hugo Häring, “Illuminated Advertisements and Architecture” (1928) in Whyte and Frisby, 453–4. Berlin in Light 117 its transformative potential, economic advantages, and visual pleasures – without either destroying the fabric of the city or revealing its less desirable characteristics (as suggested by the political cartoon in Die Rote Fahne). For all of its boisterous celebration of electric light, the Berlin in Light festival was tempered by an extreme caution and underlying anxiety that the technologies of modernity be perceived as preserving, rather than destroying, the old city.

Naum Gabo and the Limits of Berlin in Light

A window onto the limits of Berlin in Light is opened by the rejected proposal of the constructivist sculptor Naum Gabo, who was initially invited by the organizing committee to design a searchlight installation for the festival. Gabo’s experience suggests the extent to which the celebration of electric light needed to be deployed in the service of Berlin’s historical monuments and civic spaces. Although rejected by the committee and never built, a sketch of Gabo’s “Proposal for a light creation in the Square before the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin,” was published in the fall 1928 issue of the Bauhaus journal (Figure 4.6). Gabo’s schematic design for Berlin in Light shows six searchlights arranged on the edge of the semi-circular area throwing beams of light into the sky; the two central searchlights, mounted on large, elaborate geometrical bases, project broad shafts of light to the top of the sheet where they are met by two other beams angling in from either side; two additional, less elaborate searchlights throw light up along the left and right edges of the sketch.31

31 “Vorschlag zur Lichtgestaltung des Platzes vor dem Brandenburger Tor Berlin,” Bauhaus Zeitschrift für Gestaltung 2.4 (Fall 1928): 6. This drawing, now lost, is known only from its publication in the Bauhaus Zeitschrift and may have been confiscated by National Socialists from Bruno Taut. See Henning Bock and Ursula Prinz, eds, Naum Gabo – Skulpturen Gemälde Zeichnungen (Berlin: Nationalgalerie Berlin, 1971) 29. No other studies or plans for the project are known. Martin Hammer and Christina 118 Paul Monty Paret

Figure 4.6 Naum Gabo, “Vorschlag zur Lichtgestaltung des Platzes vor dem Brandenburger Tor Berlin,” 1928. From Bauhaus 2, no. 4 (1928). The Work of Naum Gabo © Nina & Graham Williams. Photo courtesy of the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.

As the caption indicates, this project was intended for the center of Berlin in the “Platz vor dem Brandenburger Tor,” which is the proper name for the semi-circular opening to the Tiergarten on the west side of the Brandenburg Gate, the opposite side from Pariser Platz. The view in the drawing would be from the Brandenburg Gate looking straight down the Charlottenburger Chaussee (today the Straße des 17. Juni), indicated by two perspectival lines and the series of receding curved marks representing streetlights. Not incidentally, the proposed site of Gabo’s installation on

Lodder suggest that the searchlights were supposed to move and also that Gabo’s plan called for only four searchlights, implying that the reproduced image repeats two of the searchlights from a different angle. Hammer and Lodder, Constructing Modernity: the Art and Career of Naum Gabo (New Haven: Yale, 2000) 170. See also Anne Hoormann, Lichtspiele. Zur Medienreflexion der Avantgarde in der Weimarer Republik (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2003) 267–8. Berlin in Light 119 the west side of the Brandenburg Gate is the precise location of the monuments to Friedrich III and Victoria by Brütt and Gerth referred to at the outset. It was the presence of these sculptures or, more specifically, Gabo’s disinterest in them, that likely scuttled his searchlight proposal. One of the innovators of Russian Constructivism, Gabo was well connected to avant-garde circles in Berlin, where he had been living since 1922.32 He was encouraged to participate in Berlin in Light by several influential friends hoping to push him toward more commercial opportunities. The critic Ernst Kállai, recently appointed as editor of the Bauhaus journal, where Gabo’s sketch for the searchlight projection would be published, contacted Gabo about the festival in May 1928 after seeing an announcement in the architectural journal Bauwelt.33 The previous year Kállai had written about Gabo in the Dutch journal i10 urging Gabo to forge ties with industry and architecture, and suggesting in particular the possibility of turning his abstract and autonomous sculptures into “urban light- columns.”34 Kallai lamented, however, that “as an idealist and probably also a romantic Gabo defended himself against such applications of his art,” a remark which accurately predicts Gabo’s approach to his commission for Berlin in Light. Gabo’s close friend, the architect and city planner Hugo Häring, was a member of the of the festival’s Art Committee [Kunstaussschuss] and, together with architect Hans Luckhardt, also on the committee, looked to find a role for Gabo in the festival. For Häring,Berlin in Light seemed to present an opportunity to mediate common ground between modern commercial and business interests on the one hand and avant-garde art on the other. Like Kállai, Häring hoped to pry Gabo loose from his prin- cipled, and essentially anti-capitalist, commitment to artistic autonomy and persuade him to participate directly in the industrial design of modernity.

32 Gabo came in Berlin in 1922 to assist with the organization of the First Russian Art Exhibition in Berlin 1923. On Gabo’s life and art see especially Hammer and Lodder. 33 Postcard to Gabo, May 7, 1928, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, Ernst Kállai Papers. On Gabo’s friendship with Kállai at this time see Hammer and Lodder, 165 and passim. 34 Ernst Kállai, “Der Plastiker Gabo,” i10 1.7 (Amsterdam, 1927): 245–50. (rpt. in Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1979). 120 Paul Monty Paret

“The time has come,” Häring urged Gabo, “to attempt to connect your work with industry,” and he expressed hope that light-fixture manufacturers and others might become interested in his work.35 In July 1928 Häring wrote enthusiastically to Gabo that he has just returned from a meeting of the committee, which had authorized 200 Marks for Gabo to design and propose a searchlight display, adding that he very much hoped a full commission of 2,000 Marks would be offered. “You know roughly what I would like,” Häring wrote, suggesting the two had likely already talked extensively about the role of art and illumination in the urban landscape.36 Häring also revealed, however, that the discussions among the festival’s art committee were contentious. He and Luckhardt were battling strong opposition from business and industry representatives demanding only the “usual light kiosks” and from the artists meekly circling around them in the hopes of commissions.37 Only through great effort was Häring able to convince the committee, at least for the time being, to support projects like Gabo’s that went “above and beyond the normal and usual.”38 What distinguishes Gabo’s searchlight proposal from the many installations actually built for the festival was that Gabo’s did not project onto or illuminate any particular monument or building. Quite the opposite, Gabo’s proposal called for covering over Brütt’s Friedrich III and Fritz Gerth’s companion figureVictoria . As Gabo later recalled, “There were statues of a king and queen and I wanted to cover them all with wooden structures. Of course, when the authorities found out that I wanted to cover the statues they said ‘no.’”39 The wooden structures Gabo refers to are indicated in the

35 Hugo Häring, letter to Naum Gabo, July 11, 1928, Naum Gabo Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 S. Frederick Starr and Kenneth Frampton, “Russian Art in Revolution and Emigration: An Interview -with Naum Gabo,” unpublished, p. 17, Naum Gabo Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Gabo similarly explained in a letter of March 1968 to the art historian Eberhard Steneberg: “Die zwei in der Mitte Berlin in Light 121 center of his drawing by the two larger geometricized half-dome bases on top of which searchlights are mounted. Gabo apparently paid little attention to the statues’ specificity – as if confirming Musil’s observations about such statues that “you sense them as you would a tree, as part of the street scenery […] but you never look at them, and do not generally have the slightest notion of whom they are supposed to represent” – but it is clear that these statues of a “king and queen” would have be Brütt’s Friedrich III and Gerth’s Victoria, both visible in period photographs sited on the edge of the Platz vor dem Brandenburg Tor in positions that line up closely with the two large searchlight bases in Gabo’s drawing. The rejection of Gabo’s searchlight proposal by the festival’s art committee is particularly interesting for what it suggests about the political limits of using electric light in relation to Berlin’s historic monuments. Other installations either illuminated the city’s historic monuments or set themselves up in relationship to older monuments, playing meaningfully and occasionally uncomfortably (as with the Osram column paired with the neo-baroque statuary group) off of these symbols of aesthetic and cultural tradition. Gabo had little interest in such gambits and determined, perhaps naively, to work with projected light technology purely for its formal and material qualities, pointing his searchlights into the sky as a utopian gesture of non-objective art. Instead of serving the aims of Berlin in Light by spectacularizing the city’s monuments and using projected light for the instrumental purpose of illuminating Friedrich III and Victoria, Gabo wanted to make these statues invisible, hiding them underneath the wooden bases on which his searchlights would stand. That Gabo’s design was rejected suggests the extent of reverence and authority still vested in Wilhelmine monuments. This was perhaps especially true during a celebration of modernity such as Berlin in Light. By

stehend Licht-constructionen sind gedacht um Königliche denkmäle herum zu bilden, Deshalb haben die Berliner Behörden nicht erlaubt den Project auszuführen […] Es war sehr traurig das die Behörden so patriotisch waren […],” qtd. in Steneberg letter to Matthias Schirren, Nov. 8, 1984. Baukunst Archiv of the Akademie der Künste. An alternate explanation that there were simply insufficient funds for Gabo to complete the project is suggested in Hoormann, 267–8. 122 Paul Monty Paret covering over rather than illuminating Brütt’s and Gerth’s sculpture and their lingering cultural and political authority, Gabo’s design did not conform to the expectations and unwritten rules of the festival to spectacularize the Wilhelmine monuments as Weimar mass culture. Gabo’s refusal to go along with the expectations and ideology of Berlin in Light was certainly deliberate. In January 1929, only a few months after the festival, Gabo wrote in his diary: “It is intolerable to live amidst the lies, stupidity and meanness of the capitalist world.”40 Gabo’s political attitude in Berlin in the 1920s, as Christina Lodder has argued, was “essentially pro-Soviet, although not uncritical.”41 Gabo’s deep skepticism toward capitalism’s commodity culture is also apparent in his 1928 polemical essay “Design?” “[Gestaltung?], published in the Bauhaus journal, where his searchlight proposal appears as the final illustration.42 Comparing four lighting technologies – an open oil lamp, a candle, a kerosene lamp, and an electric light bulb – Gabo notes that “with every new stage of construction, the object not only changes its essence but each time its whole design [Gestaltung] also automatically undergoes a complete transformation as well.43 Although the essay makes no explicit reference to his searchlight project illustrated on its final page, the implica- tion is clear: the searchlight project stands as the next constructive stage in the development of lighting devices and an exemplar of true design [Gestaltung] that reveals the possibilities for sculpture in modernity. By contrast, Gabo sharply critiques the lamps and lighting design of the Bauhaus as nothing more than superficial applications of a stylistic modernism that lack rigorous analysis of form, material, or technology. Between

40 Hammer and Lodder, 163. Gabo’s surviving diary begins only in 1929. 41 See Christina Lodder, “Naum Gabo as Soviet Émigré in Berlin,” Tate Papers 14 (2010) n.p. 42 Gabo, “Gestaltung?” Bauhaus Zeitschrift für Gestlatung 2.4 (Fall 1928): 2–6. Translated as “Design?” in Martin Hammer and Christina Lodder, eds and trans., Gabo on Gabo: Texts and Interviews (East Sussex: Artists. Bookworks, 2000) 52–9. On Gabo’s essay, see also John Lessard, “From Lamps to Enlightened Materialism: Naum Gabo and the Problem of Functionalist Design,” Modernism/Modernity 17.4 (2011): 779–98. 43 Gabo, “Design?” 55. Berlin in Light 123

Jugendstil lamps and Bauhaus lamps, Gabo asserts, “the essence remains unalterably the same. The substance of the object has not changed. It has only been clothed in different forms.”44 Although founded on expressionist principles, the Bauhaus by the mid-1920s had shifted its program toward the design of prototypes of everyday consumer objects intended for mass production. (See also Elizabeth Otto’s essay “Bauhaus Spectacles, Bauhaus Specters” in this volume.) When Hannes Meyer replaced Walter Gropius as director in early 1928, he brought a newly Marxist emphasis to questions of design at the school. Gabo’s essay “Design?” belongs to this internal critique of the Bauhaus initiated by Meyer. Indeed, his essay can be read as an attack on Bauhaus design as decorative spectacle – as participating in the fetishizing of commodities and sustaining, rather than transforming, the status quo. By focusing in particular on lighting technologies for this critique, Gabo underscores the sense of urgency about the growing presence of electric light in modern culture and the problematic relationship of art, technology, and the design of mass-produced commodities.

Electric Advertising and “the danger of aerial bombs”

Within the October 1928 Bauhaus journal Gabo’s searchlight design and his essay “Design?” appeared as part of a double-page spread that presents a remarkable constellation of images and texts by Gabo, Häring, and the Bauhaus students Franz Ehrlich and Heinz Loew, all linked by the common context of the Berlin in Light festival and each addressing the critical challenge of electric light in Weimar culture.45 On the page adjacent to Gabo’s searchlight design and his essay “Design?” is a photo-collage by the Bauhaus students Franz Ehrlich and Heinz Loew captioned: “studies for illuminated

44 Gabo, “Design?” 55. Gabo also delivered four lectures at the Bauhaus in early November, 1928. Hammer and Lodder, 165 45 Bauhaus Zeitschrift für Gestlatung. 2.4 (Fall 1928): 6–7. 124 Paul Monty Paret advertising: the square, the street the shop window as advertising theater” [werbetheater]. Presenting a mock urban landscape filled with illuminated signs, mechanical devices, advertising kiosks, and window displays, the work suggests the new commercial landscape being celebrated by Berlin in Light. Although unmentioned in the pages of Bauhaus, this collage was submitted to a juried competition of advertising displays that was part of the Berlin in Light festival, something indicated on both Loew’s and Ehrlich’s Bauhaus diplomas.46 It is noteworthy that the image comes from the Bauhaus sculpture workshop – die plastische Werkstatt – which by the late 1920s had come to embrace mass culture and advertising, rather than either statuary, monuments or the design of commodities, as the proper arena of sculptural investigation. Next to Gabo’s searchlight design in Bauhaus and just below the Loew and Ehrlich design, Hugo Häring’s essay, “Problems of Electric Advertisements” [Probleme um die Lichtreklame], articulates the anxiety about electric light and technology that underlies the Berlin in Light festival. Instead of a celebration of electric light, Häring presents a polemical screed about the destructive potential of electric advertising, a subject of several essays by Häring in the late 1920s. Raising the urgency about electric light in urban culture to a shrill pitch, in line with the comments of Hans Cürlis cited above, Häring declares that due to the dizzying variety of electric lights in the new urban environment, “[t]he space of the square in the sense of historic city architecture no longer exists. It is destroyed, completely dissolved.”47 As a destructive force, something that destroys city architecture, Häring includes electric light within a much deeper concern about the unstoppable advance of modern technology. “Electric advertising,” Häring writes, “advanc[es] on the same front as the demand for housing developments, as the telephone, radio and television, as long-distance power supplies, the danger of being gassed and aerial bombs.”48

46 Sammlungsarchiv Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau. Loew and Ehrlich would both work as studio assistants for Gabo in 1930 as Gabo prepared for an exhibition in Paris. 47 Hugo Häring, “Probleme um die Lichtreklame,” Bauhaus Zeitschrift für Gestaltung 2.4 (Fall 1928): 7. 48 Häring, “Probleme um die Lichtreklame,” 7. Berlin in Light 125

So much for the Berlin in Light festival’s promotion of electric light as splendor, security and commerce. “Light is Life,” the Osram Light Tower announces; yet Häring offers a very different narrative, reminding us that “Electric advertising advanc[es] on the same front as […] the danger of being gassed and aerial bombs.” The pessimism expressed in Häring’s essay about industrialization and modernization lies only just beneath the surface of the giddy boosterism of Berlin in Light. By associating technological progress, consumerism, and the threat of violence and death – particularly aerial bombardment – Häring points us toward the military origin of searchlights as a rapidly developing technology of surveillance in the first decades of the twentieth century.49 Developed in the second half of the nineteenth century for naval use, searchlights were used increasingly during the First World War for anti- aircraft defense. By the 1920s the role of military searchlights in defending against aerial attacks had entered the popular imagination in literature, cinema, and urban advertising. Ernst Jünger’s 1925 book Copse 125, for instance, includes remarkable passages leveraging the visual spectacle of searchlights to dramatic aesthetic effect. Describing the response to the sudden presence of “[a]n aviator, unseen in the darkness of the sky,” Jünger writes:

The searchlights’ trembling arms explore the dark vault. At last one fastens on the intruder and spits him like a small bright dragon-fly on its white shaft of light. Now the rest converge like the tentacles of a sea monster and put him to flight. […] But the aeroplane, dancing like a pretty butterfly among flame-throwers, makes a sudden bank that throws it almost vertically on one wing and disappears in the darkness of space.50

It has often been noted that festivals likeBerlin in Light helped provide models for the later use of military searchlights for performance and mass spectacle, such as Albert Speer’s Cathedral of Light, with its triumphal use

49 Bernard Koenigsmann, Scheinwerfer und Scheinwerfermaschinen (Berlin, 1919); Sven Lindquist, A History of Bombing (New York: New Press, 2001); Paul Virilio, War and Cinema. The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (New York: Verso, 1989). 50 Ernst Jünger, Copse 125, trans. Basil Creighton (New York: Howard Fertig, 1993) 9. 126 Paul Monty Paret of synchronized light projections.51 But taking our cue from Häring, we might look again at the anxiety and fear within the Berlin in Light festival. TheOsram Light Tower references not just the Bismarck towers from the past, with all of their cultural pessimism and nationalist nostalgia, but also offers premonitions of the future. Jumping ahead, we might link the Osram Light Tower to another of its Doppelgänger: a Second World War German home front poster with the slogan “Light, your death” [Licht dein Tod] (see Figure 4.7). A semantic inversion of the Osram “Light is Life” slogan, the poster shows a monstrous skeleton looming overhead spitting bombs onto illuminated houses below, a threat exhorting Germans to turn off their lights and darken their windows at night so as to not assist allied bombers in finding their targets. Häring’s polemic linking electric advertising to the “danger of being gassed and aerial bombs [sic]” also allows for a re-imagination of the Vossische Zeitung’s drawing of Berlin in Light seen from the air (see Figure 4.3). Rather than a celebratory image of the festival and the dazzling role electric light in urban culture, the drawing might become instead an image of Berlin under aerial attack. The searchlights no longer celebrate the splendor of Berlin, but desperately seek to illuminate the allied bomber flying overhead as the capital city burns below.

51 Willoughby Sharp, “Luminism and Kineticism” Minimal Art: An Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (1967; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) 324; Bock and Ursula Prinz, 29; Ward, Weimar Surfaces, 132–3; Chametzky, 157. Berlin in Light 127

Figure 4.7 Artist unknown (Schmitt), “Licht, dein Tod,” poster, c. 1944. Photo courtesy of the Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University.

Sara Ann Sewell

Spectacles in Everyday Life: The Disciplinary Function of Communist Culture in Weimar Germany

Introduction

During the Weimar Republic, the German Communist Party [Kommu nistische Partei Deutschlands, KPD] routinely held mammoth, highly orchestrated demonstrations that advanced a particular moral order and transformed public spaces. These demonstrations were indeed spectacles. Perhaps not by design but by circumstance, communists were foisted onto the public stage soon after the December 1918 founding of the KPD when Kurt Eisner, Minister President of the Munich Soviet Republic [Räterrepublik], was assassinated. As one of the first martyrs of German communism, Eisner was commemorated with extraordinary pomp. On 26 February 1919, socialists and communists of various political stripes held a mass funerary procession to honor their fallen comrade. Marching through the streets of Munich, mourners remembered Eisner in a regimented spectacle that included uniforms, red flags, and traditional funerary wreaths. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of mourners stood silently along the procession’s route. Integral to this spectacle was imagery that exalted the notion of personal sacrifice, for in its solemnity the cortège visually conveyed Eugene Leviné’s prediction that the defense of the Munich Soviet Republic would require “an honorable death […] We shall have to pay the bloody price either way for there can be no peaceful solution. But we must not die in vain.”1 The symbols showcased at Eisner’s funeral underscored communists’ commitment to revolutionary

1 Rosa Leviné-Meyer, Leviné: The Life of a Revolutionary (Farnborough: Saxon House, 1973) 98. 130 Sara Ann Sewell struggle, especially their glorification of human sacrifice. To this extent, the mourners were transformed into representations of the communist moral order, for their participation in the communist spectacle was a sign not only of their acceptance of a revolutionary Weltanschauung but also of their willingness to serve as representations of it in the communist spectacle. As the Eisner funeral demonstrated, the public spectacle was an essential element of the public profile of the communist movement from its very first days. But not all communist spectacles were as elaborate as Eisner’s funeral. A different vantage point to view the communist spectacle was from the everyday lives of the cadre, as the image of the Agitprop troupe Kurve Links, assembled in a working-class borough, demonstrates (see Figure 5.1). Posing for the camera, the uniformed members raise their fists in the universal communist salute. They appear solemn, yet unexcited. Their gesture seems routine. From the perspective of the camera, there appears to be no audience and no stage. On the contrary, the grey setting

Figure 5.1 Agitprop Troupe “Kurve Links”, n.d. (c. 1932). Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der ehemaligen DDR im Bundesarchiv, Berlin (hereafter, SAPMO-BA), Bild Y 1-371/81. Spectacles in Everyday Life 131 in a seemingly ordinary proletarian neighborhood is far removed from grand public theatre of the Eisner funeral. And yet their gesture echoes Leviné’s words: Communism requires struggle: “there can be no peaceful solution.” One’s eyes are immediately drawn to the two little girls in the center of the photograph. Following the cues from the adults, the girls raise their fists and assume serious demeanors. They are powerful props in this spectacle, visual representations of the communist moral order. But how did these girls come to take part in this spectacle? Why did they make the gesture of the raised fist for the camera? And why are they photographed performing communist rituals in such an unassuming setting? This chapter examines communist spectacles, large and small, to investigate the ways that the communist spectacle promoted a revolutionary ideology and mediated social relations. It especially considers the role of the cadre, exploring how members participated in the communist spectacle, how they learned their roles in this dramaturgy, and how performing ritualistic acts transformed them into representations of the communist moral order.

Discipline and Spectacle

A generation ago, historians widely concurred that the defining feature of the Weimar communism was its unswerving promotion of party discipline. In 1969 Hermann Weber argued that the KPD promoted a process of “Stalinization” that silenced dissent within the party: “Communists tried to think and behave in a militarily disciplined fashion in order to win their revolutionary ‘war.’ Decisions became commands; the party resembled an army; discipline became obedience, which comrades often voluntarily performed for the ‘cause.’”2 For Weber, the central outcomes of the KPD’s

2 Hermann Weber, Die Wandlung des deutschen Kommunismus. Die Stalinisierung der KPD in der Weimarer Republik, vol. 1 (Frankfurt a.M.: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1969) 11. 132 Sara Ann Sewell vituperative factional struggles of the early 1920s were a dictatorial bureaucracy that worked to ensure political fidelity and the creation of a loyal cadre that followed directives handed down from above.3 Influenced by “history from below” and its German variant Alltagsgeschichte, however, a number of historians subsequently challenged Weber’s interpretation of the KPD as a dictatorial, disciplined party.4 Klaus-Michael Mallmann summed up their key contention: “the interpretation of communism as a monolithic, one-dimensionally defined system […] misunderstands that members were primarily subjects who formed their politics on the ground […] ignoring instructions from above when they held them to be false.”5 The cadre, the newer historiography maintained, operated with considerable autonomy, and members routinely resisted leaders’ directives. Although this scholarship provided a vital corrective to interpretations that overemphasized the KPD’s totalitarian features, it downplayed the fact that the KPD did indeed cultivate a culture that extolled discipline. From the perspective of institutional politics, it is clear that party leaders sought loyalty, as Weber contends. But political unity was uneven, for members and sympathizers appropriated communist political practices in ways that made sense to them on the ground, which was not always consistent with

3 Weber’s scholarship influenced an entire generation of scholars who maintained that the KPD came to assume dictatorial control over its cadre. For example, see Siegfried Bahne, Die KPD und das Ende von Weimar. Das Scheitern einer Politik 1932–1935 (Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 1976); Horst Duhnke, Die KPD von 1933 bis 1945 (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1972); Freya Eisner, Das Verhältnis der KPD zu den Gewerkschaften in der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt a.M.: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1977); Ben Fowkes, Communism in Germany under the Weimar Republic (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1984). 4 For example, Conan Fischer, The German Communists and the Rise of Nazism (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1991); Anthony McElligott, Contested City: Municipal Politics and the Rise of Nazism in Altona, 1917–1937 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998); Eve Rosenhaft,Beating the Fascists? The German Communists and Political Violence, 1929–1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 5 Klaus-Michael Mallmann, Kommunisten in der Weimarer Republik. Sozialgeschichte einer revolutionären Bewegung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1996) 3. Spectacles in Everyday Life 133 party platforms. Nonetheless, the uniformity of the KPD’s visual profile was undeniable. When Weimar communism is examined through a cultural lens, the same rituals, symbols, and languages appeared and reappeared in the communist spectacle, and the performance of these ritualistic acts was decisive for both cultivating a regimented political community and promoting party discipline. To this extent, the KPD utilized cultural practices to teach members the correct political stance, and ample evidence exists to show that the cadre readily sported uniforms, marched in cadence, and sang on cue. Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle provides useful paradigm to consider the disciplinary features of communist political culture. According to Debord, the spectacle serves as a device of social control that propagates a particular moral order, alters participants’ consciousness, and mediates social relations.6 Key to the spectacle’s potency is its capacity to colonize social life to such an extent that individual self is lost. In lieu of authentic beings, representations come to dominate human existence and social relations. “Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation,” he contends.7 Debord’s proposition that the spectacle and its representations advance a moral order, effect human consciousness, and shape social relations was readily apparent in the communist spectacle. To be sure, participation in the communist spectacle transformed participants into representations of a revolutionary Weltanschauung, which altered participants’ political consciousness and decisively influenced social relations with both allies and foes. Framing Debord’s theory of the spectacle is capitalist production, which accordingly led to a commodity fetishism whereby commodities mediate social life. For Debord, the consumption of goods enables capitalist elites, both the owners of the means of production and state authorities, to wield power over the uncritical laboring masses. To this extent, the spectacle is a form of social control in modern capitalist society. The centrality of capitalist production and consumption to Debord’s theory,

6 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (1967; Detroit: Black & Red, 2010) 4. 7 Debord, 1. 134 Sara Ann Sewell however, overlooks the ways that non-capitalists, such as communists, also deployed the spectacle to propagate a moral order, to alter consciousness, and to influence social relations. KPD leaders called on members and sympathizers to partake in a set of ritualistic practices whereby participants became representations of a revolutionary, anti-capitalist ideology in the communist spectacle. This essay interrogates Debord’s theory of the spectacle, discussing how the spectacle’s capacity to transform consciousness and social relations was not limited to a capitalist economic system. Given that German communists, as well as their counterparts in the Soviet Union, widely deployed the spectacle to advance a moral order, to reshape the consciousness of participants, and to mediate social relations, it serves to reason that the spectacle’s capacity to transform human relationships has more to do with mass society in the modern age than capitalism per se. Indeed, in an era of mass politics, such as during the Weimar Republic, political parties representing a wide array of ideologies employed the spectacle to rally the public behind their political banners.

Representations of the Communist Moral Order

At the heart of the spectacle is the moral order that undergirds it. Scholars have long contended that ritualistic practices are critical for evangelizing and maintaining moral orders, especially those of nations.8 Civic processions, in particular, have shown themselves to be compelling ceremonies

8 There is a large body of scholarship that examines the ways that governments instituted symbolic practices to inspire national loyalty. Among the defining works in this field are Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); George Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses (New York: Fertig, 1975); Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Spectacles in Everyday Life 135 in the dissemination of moral orders.9 To this extent, ritualistic practices play essential roles in the formation, propagation, and acceptance of ideologies.10 For Debord, the spectacle serves to advance the capitalist moral order. The spectacle is capitalism incarnate; it is the embodiment of commodity fetishism whereby individuals’ consumption of goods reduces them to unwitting representations of capitalist ethics. An examination of the communist spectacle, however, demonstrates that the spectacle can be summoned to advance other moral orders. Thoroughly anti-capitalist, Weimar communism was committed to revolution, militancy, militarism, and discipline. Its uncompromising radicalism defined both the communist worldview and the communist spectacle. Nurturing a militant aesthetic, the communist spectacle functioned as a call to arms that united participants into a regimented political army. To be sure, the martial nature of communist culture served to enhance the disciplinary features of the movement, its ideology, and its political culture. Communists were not unique in this regard, as activists from Weimar’s entire political spectrum incorporated militant elements into their spectacles. The martial quality of political spectacles during the Weimar Republic

9 On the politics of parade rituals, see Hans Maier, “Political Religions and their Images: Soviet Communism, Italian Fascism and German National Socialism,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 7.3 (2006): 267–81, esp. 274; Mosse, Nationalization of the Masses, 100–26. Parades have also been used as expressions of resistance against the dominant political order. For example, see John Wilson and Karyn Stapleton, “Voices of Commemoration: The Discourse of Celebration and Confrontation in Northern Ireland,” Te xt 25.5 (2005): 633–64. 10 Scholars stress the importance of value formation and dissemination in ritual activity. See Jeffrey Books, Thank You Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) xvi; James von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, 1917–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Diane Yvonne Ghirardo, “Citta Fascista: Surveillance and Spectacle,” Journal of Contemporary History 31.2 (April 1996): 347–72, esp. 351; Barbara Myerhoff, “A Death in Due Time: Construction of Self and Culture in Ritual Drama,” Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle, ed. John J. MacAloon (Philadelphia: ISHI, 1984) 149–78; Karen Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2000). 136 Sara Ann Sewell underscored the incendiary potency of political culture, for the era marked an historical moment when symbolic practices wielded a potency that has rarely been witnessed in the historical record.11 From the far Left to the far Right, symbols spoke of new ideologies, new worlds, and new men. Of course, the fascist spectacle loomed large on the political horizon, particularly after 1929 when the onset of the Depression increasingly fueled radicalism. The Nazi Party especially cultivated a regimented militancy that was the hallmark of its spectacles.12 But what distinguished the Weimar Republic foremost from other epochs was the dramatic, often deadly, competition over political symbols. Weimar’s political spectacles were characterized by a war of symbols between activists who represented a wide range of ideologies. The inflammatory nature of Weimar’s political culture was consummately illustrated in the frequent violent struggles that occurred when political foes tried to seize and burn their enemies’ emblems, especially flags and banners.13 To this extent, Weimar’s political spectacles decisively mediated social relations. Essential to the communist spectacle were a host of symbols and rituals that were designed to disseminate communist politics and to integrate participants into the ideological fold, such as red flags, uniforms, singing, and fist-raising. These symbols and rituals served a dual purpose in the communist spectacle. On the one hand, they conveyed the movement’s ideological stance; their function was to proselytize. On the other hand, the rituals and symbols helped to transform participants into representations

11 Gottfried Korff, “Rote Fahnen und geballte Faust. Zur Symbolik der Arbeiterbewegung in der Weimarer Republik,” Transformation der Arbeiterkultur, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Volkskunde. Kommission “Arbeiterkultur.” Arbeitstagung 1985, ed. Peter Assion (Marburg: Jonas, 1986) 86–107, esp. 88. 12 For example, see Jay W. Baird, To Die for Germany: Heroes in the Nazi Pantheon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Gerhard Paul, Aufstand der Bilder: Die NS-Propaganda vor 1933 (Bonn: J.H.W. Dietz, 1990); Hans Ulrich Thamer, “Faszination und Manipulation. Die Nürnberger Reichsparteitage der NSDAP,” Das Fest, ed. Uwe Schultz (Munich: Beck, 1988) 354; Ulrich Herrmann and Ulrich Nassen, ed., Formative Ästhetik im Nationalsozialismus (Weinheim: Beltz, 1994). 13 Dirk Schumann, Politische Gewalt in der Weimarer Republik. Kampf um die Straße und Furcht vor den Bürgerkrieg (Essen: Klartext, 2001) 186–211. Spectacles in Everyday Life 137 of the communist moral order. To this extent, the communist spectacle disciplined participants, prompting them to perform on cue. In the communist spectacle, participants often became interchangeable props on the revolutionary stage, donning similar uniforms, singing in unison, and marching in lockstep. They became, as Debord posits, representations of the moral order. Among the most important symbols showcased at the communist spectacle were red flags and uniforms. Blood red banners with militant slogans and martial uniforms adorned with regimental affiliation dominated the visual landscape of the communist spectacle, which is seen in a photograph of a national meeting of the KPD’s paramilitary organization, the Red Front Fighting League [Rotfrontkämpferbund, RFB], in 1925 (see Figure 5.2). This photograph provides evidence of the pivotal function of symbols in the communist spectacle. Marching in disciplined formation amid a sea of red flags, these uniformed fighters embody communist virtue. By draping their bodies with RFB uniforms, carrying flags, and parading in unison, the marchers conveyed communists’ commitment to revolution, militancy,

Figure 5.2 Red Front Fighting League, August 1925. SAPMO-BA, Bild Y 1-55/00N. 138 Sara Ann Sewell militarism, and discipline. At the same time, this photograph offers an excellent snapshot of the spectacle’s capacity to transform participants into representations of the communist moral order, for the marchers’ homoge- neous determined carriages underscored the capacity of the communist spectacle to subordinate the self to the collective. What matters here was the collective representation of communism, which the marchers punctu- ated by sporting similar uniforms, carrying flags, and marching in unison. By contrast, individual participants are necessarily indistinct in the collective; they appear as interchangeable beings. The communist spectacle’s capacity to transform participants into representations of its moral order was perhaps best measured by the extent to which it convinced participants to mold their bodies into visual representations of communist politics. The body, as Judith Butler maintains, is a potent cultural sign.14 Western society has had a long history of casting the body as the site of public spectacle.15 Since the end of the nineteenth century, the German labor movement had sought to discipline bodies in its spectacles both to placate state authorities with ordered demonstrations and to cultivate a particular image of the working-class masses that reflected socialist ideology.16 During the Weimar Republic, KPD leaders similarly sought to discipline members’ bodies so that they conformed to the communist aesthetic. Reasoning that the communist spectacle required distinct physical archetypes to promote its moral order, they encouraged both women and men to assume particular body images that corresponded to communist feminine and masculine ideals. By donning specific clothing and sculpting their physical beings to conform to the communist corporeal aesthetic, participants in the communist spectacle fashioned their bodies into the very representation of communism.

14 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990) 60. 15 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1979) 7–8. 16 See Nadine Rossol, “Performing the Nation: Sports, Spectacles, and Aesthetics in Germany, 1926–1936,” Central European History (hereafter CEH) 43 (2010): 616–38. Spectacles in Everyday Life 139

Bodies draped in radical insignia were essential to the communist spectacle. In all of its ancillary organizations, the KPD promoted unitary regalia that members were encouraged to wear at party events, especially public demonstrations. Male uniforms, with their conspicuous military elements, especially nurtured a martial style that was the hallmark of the KPD’s public profile. The armbands, cross-belts, breeches, jackboots, and badges identifying regimental affiliation all contributed to the militant aesthetic of the communist spectacle.17 Although less martial than male uniforms, female uniforms similarly served to transform women into regimented representations of revolutionary virtue. The uniform of the Red Women and Girls’ League [Roter Frauen- und Mädchen Bund, RFMB], for instance, mirrored that of her male RFB comrade, with the substitution of a knee-length skirt for trousers.18 By wearing such uniforms, communist women adopted a militant aesthetic, transforming themselves into revolutionary soldiers on the communist stage. Communist uniforms, particularly when displayed in the collective, fueled the militancy of the spectacle, for uniforms induced participants to transform themselves into representations of a radical movement that revered both combative cultural practices and physical engagement.19 The communist uniform, in other words, intentionally stoked militancy. Sporting uniforms, participants in the communist spectacle were transformed not only into representations of the communist order, but more significantly, into warriors. Indeed, the uniform, especially when it was

17 On constructions of communist masculinity, see Sara Ann Sewell, “The Party Does Indeed Fight Like a Man: The Construction of a Masculine Ideal in the German Communist Party during the Weimar Republic,” Weimar Culture Revisited, ed. John Williams (New York: Palgrave, 2011) 161–82. 18 Hauptstadt Archiv Düsseldorf, Regierung Duss. 16988: Circular Letter from the National Leadership of the RFMB (Klara Zetkin, Helene Overlach) to the district leaders of the RFMB, Jan. 7, 1926; Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der ehemaligen DDR im Bundesarchiv, Berlin (SAPMO-BA), RY1/I 4/3/1: “Protokoll des 3. Reichskongresses des Roten Frauen- und Mädchen- Bundes vom 17. bis 9. August 1929 in Erfurt,” 1929. 19 See Eric Weitz, Creating German Communism 1890–1990: From Popular Protest to Socialist State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) 7. 140 Sara Ann Sewell showcased collectively, emboldened those who strutted around in the unified clothing. Uniforms inspired those who wore them to internalize the spectacle’s militancy to such as extent that they willing projected themselves as the image of a well-ordered battalion that was prepared for combat. To create the image of a revolutionary army, the communist spectacle required not only bodies draped in unitary clothing, but also specific body types that personified communist virtue. Communist bodies were to project modernity in their material being by being physically fit.20 Similar to other labor organizations, the KPD devoted considerable energy to the sporting movement as a way to build steeled, healthy bodies,21 and the KPD’s Red Sport served both as a recruitment organization and an organization that promoted physical fitness. Athletes’ bodies helped to bolster the martial elements of both communist culture and political action. The communist spectacle routinely showcased healthy bodies, for no major party gathering was complete without performances by athletes, such as gymnasts in pyramid formation, who demonstrated “the energy of the revolutionary proletariat,” as one party organ described.22 Uniformed male athletes, who marched as separate battalions in demonstrations, were especially critical

20 George Mosse argues that the physical appearance of the male body as a measure of masculinity distinguished modern masculinity from its predecessors, which emphasized aristocratic chivalry. Strong and healthy bodies were a defining feature of modern masculinity. George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York, Oxford University Press, 1996) in passim. 21 The portings movement had been an integral feature of German labor organization since the late nineteenth century. See Vernon L. Lidtke, The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) 59–69; Hans Joachim Teichler ed., Arbeiterkultur und Arbeitersport (Clausthal- Zellerfeld, 1985). On the KPD’s sport organizations, see W.L. Guttsmann, Worke rs’ Culture in Weimar Germany: Between Tradition and Commitment (New York: Berg, 1990) 146–52; Peter Friedemann, “Die Krise der Arbeitersportbewegung am Ende der Weimarer Republik” Arbeiterkultur zwischen Alltag und Politik, ed. Friedhlem Boll (Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1986) 229–40; Hartmann Wunderer, Arbeitervereine und Arbeiterparteien: Kultur- und Massenorganisationen in der Arbeiterbewegung 1890–1933 (Frankfurt a.M: Campus Verlag, 1980) 183–7. 22 “Proletarische Feierstunde RFB Abt. Mülheim,” Sozialitische Republik (hereafter SR), October 14, 1925. Spectacles in Everyday Life 141 to the communist spectacle.23 Displaying their protruding muscles, athletic bodies came to personify the male aesthetic in the communist spectacle. These masculine bodies were also charged with explicit political duties that necessitated physical fitness. For instance, uniformed Red Bicyclists were called on to distribute of party literature.24 Most importantly, male bodies had to be fit for revolutionary struggle. Athletic feminine bodies also served as important cultural signs in the communist spectacle. Healthy, young, emancipated, and modern, the ideal communist woman was a politicized, proletarian rendering of Weimar’s New Woman.25 Her healthiness was measured by slenderness and athleticism.26 She also was to be unadorned, highlighting the simple, modern feminine aesthetic in the communist spectacle. Another mainstay of the communist spectacle that helped to transform participants into representations of communism was collective singing, which added a powerful aural dimension to the pageantry to create a full sensory experience. The KPD developed a significant musical repertoire to articulate its worldview. Along with cries and slogans, communist songs employed a militant lexicon that cultivated a revolutionary consciousness.27

23 For example, see “Roter Kampfmai in Köln,” SR, May 2, 1932. 24 For example, see Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung, May 23, 1928; Technische Winke: Für die Agitation, March, 1932. 25 On the New Woman, see esp. Rüdiger Graf, “Anticipating the Future in the Present: ‘New Women’ and other Beings of the Future in Weimar Germany,” CEH, 42.4 (December 2009): 647–73; Atina Grossmann, “Girlkultur or a Thoroughly Rationalized Female: A New Woman in Weimar Germany?” Women and Culture and Politics: A Century of Change, eds Judith Friedlander, Blanche W. Cook, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986) 62–80; Grossmann, “Eine ‘neue Frau’ im Deutschland der Weimarer Republik?,” Fräulein vom Amt, ed. Helmut Gold and Annette Koch (Munich: Prestel, 1993) 136–61; Katharina Sykora ed., Die Neue Frau. Herausforderung für die Bildmedien der Zwanziger Jahre (Marburg: Jonas, 1993); Cornelie Usborne, “The New Woman and Generation Conflict: Perceptions of Young Women’s Sexual Mores in the Weimar Republic,” Generation in Conflict: Youth Revolts and Generation Formation in Germany 1770–1968, ed. Mark Roseman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 137–63. 26 Proletarische Feierstunde RFB Abt. Mülheim,” SR, Oct. 14, 1925. 27 Richard Bodek, “Communist Music in the Streets: Politics and Perceptions in Berlin at the End of the Weimar Republic,” Elections, Mass Politics, and Social 142 Sara Ann Sewell

By singing communist standards, the rank and file learned to speak in a common language, the language of revolution.28 And while these songs failed to offer a concrete plan for revolution, they did function as rituals of self-representation. Indeed, by singing communist standards, particularly in unison, the cadre transformed itself into the mouthpiece of a revolutionary ideology. The collective singing ofThe Internationale was a particularly powerful ritual that both represented the communist ideology and disciplined participants to become representations of it. Although the German labor movement had widely sung The Internationale before the First World War, after the War the song came to be associated closely with the KPD.29 An essential ingredient in all communist spectacles, the labor standard was especially powerful as a capstone to party meetings and demonstrations. The verve expressed through collective singing of it was on full display at the 1924 celebration of the Russian Revolution in Cologne. After a resound- ing rendition of The Internationale, participants departed the hall, singing militant songs. Belting “Up and chase away the tyrants so that their rule

Change in Modern Germany: New Perspectives, ed. Larry Eugene Jones and James Retallack (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 1992) 267–85, esp. 275. On the importance of language among communists in the Soviet Union, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism. Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 19. 28 Since the late nineteenth century, music had had an explicit political function in the cultural repertoire of the German working classes. See Lidtke, The Alternative Culture, 103. On the KPD’s use of music, see Werner Fuhr, Proletarische Musik in Deutschland 1928–1933 (Goppingen: A. Kümmerle, 1977); Guttsmann, Workers’ Culture in Weimar Germany 168–76. 29 The orking-classw anthem dates back to the months following the Paris Commune when the French poet and leading communard Eugène Pottier wrote the original text. In 1888 Pierre Degeyter composed the music, and by July that year, French labor activists adopted it as an expression of international working-class solidarity. On the history of The Internationale, see Maurice Dommanget, Eugène Pottier, membre de la Commune et chantre de L’Internationale (Paris: EDI, 1971) 114–50; Inge Lammel, Das Arbeiterlied (Leipzig: Philipp Reclam, 1970) 41; Erich Weinert, Eugène Pottier und seine Lieder (Berlin: Verlag Volk und Welt, 1951) 17–22. Spectacles in Everyday Life 143 collapses. Decorate our world of labor with the blood red flag,”30 attendees wound their way through Cologne’s working-class neighborhoods. In this incident, participants internalized the language of communism to become representatives of a revolutionary doctrine. Filling the working-class streets with lyrics that called for revolution and flowing blood, they boldly infused their neighborhoods with radical politics. Of particular interest was the way that participants transferred the communist spectacle from the official ceremonial stage to the streets. Transcending the scripted ritual and integrating it into their everyday spaces, the participants continued to serve as representations of the communist moral order well beyond the boundaries of the official ritual, thus underlining the spectacle’s capacity to shape participants’ consciousness. An equally potent ritual in the communist spectacle that served to discipline participants and transform them into representatives of communism was the gesture of the raised fist. No communist spectacle, large or small, was complete without raised fists, which usually accompanied songs and yells, especially “Red Front.” Although the origin of the raised fist is unknown, among German communists its genesis dated to the 1924 founding of the RFB.31 By 1925, the fist was an essential ingredient in the KPD’s visual repertoire,32 which helps to explain why it was the gesture of choice for the agitprop troupe Kurve Links, including the two little girls. The raised fist was a particularly militant ritual in the communist spectacle, for it publicly declared intransigent enmity to the Weimar political order. To be sure, the fist was the very embodiment of revolutionary militancy; it was a combative gesture that brought to the fore the deep ideological fissures within the Weimar polity.33 As such, communists’ use

30 Lyrics are reprinted in Gert Hagelweide, Das publizistische Erscheinungsbild des Menschen im kommunistischen Lied. Eine Untersuchung der Liedpublizistik der KPD (1919–1933) und der SED (1945–1960) (Bremen: Selbstverlag des Autors, 1968) 304. 31 Gottfried Korff, “From Brotherly Handshake to Militant Clenched Fist: On Political Metaphors for the Worker’s Hand,” International Labor and Working-Class History 42 (Fall 1992): 77–81. See also Korff, “Rote Fahnen und geballte Faust,” in passim. 32 Sherwin Simmons, “‘Hand to the Friend, Fist to the Foe’: The Struggle of Signs in the Weimar Republic,” Journal of Design History 13.4 (2000): 329–30. 33 Korff, “Rote Fahnen und geballte Faust,” 93. 144 Sara Ann Sewell of the fist contributed decisively to the mounting violence that characterized the street politics in the waning years of the Weimar Republic. By showcasing this belligerent ritual at the communist spectacle, members publicly rededicated themselves to revolutionary struggle in disciplined formation. A photograph of communist antifascist fighters on May Day 1931 illustrates of the function of the raised fist in the communist spectacle (see Figure 5.3). Parading in disciplined formation with raised fists, these uniformed men have transformed themselves into consummate representations of the communist moral order. Young, physically fit, determined, and disciplined, they appear as a band of brothers who are prepared to battle enemies at any moment. Their tightly clenched fists seem to strengthen their resolve and herald the physical struggle that is needed for revolution. They were the very personification of the communist spectacle and the moral order it represented.

Figure 5.3 Antifascist men, Berlin, May 1, 1931. SAPMO-BA, Bild Y 1-11838. Spectacles in Everyday Life 145

From Disciplining to Self-Disciplining

In the communist spectacle, symbols and rituals not only served to articulate the communist moral order and transform participants into representations of it; they also altered ways of seeing. Indeed, the function of the communist spectacle extended temporally beyond the moment of the spectacle itself, transforming participants’ consciousness in meaningful and enduring ways. For Debord, participation in the spectacle shapes consciousness to such an extent that spectators become passive representations of the moral order. The spectacle, accordingly, pervades social life with the power to “immobilize” the participant’s consciousness.34 Human agency is lost as the independent self is crushed under the weight of the spectacle. The communist spectacle certainly illustrated the spectacle’s capacity to discipline individuals so that they became subordinated to the collective. However, the communist spectacle also demonstrated that individuals were not mere representations devoid of agency. While Debord emphasizes the coercive elements of the spectacle whereby capitalist elites manipulate the masses, the communist spectacle showed that individuals could consciously and independently deploy the movement’s symbols and rituals as means of political self-expression. A more nuanced approach to the spectacle might consider both the process by which participants were transformed into representations and their motivations for taking part in the spectacle. Symbolic practices have the capacity to nurture a communal creed. As Mabel Berezin postulates, political culture cultivates “shared mental grids.”35 In other words, by repeatedly partaking in symbolic practices, a participant’s consciousness is altered, becoming more consonant with the views of other participants. With each repeated gesture, participants reaffirm their commitment to the moral order

34 Debord, 160. 35 Mabel Berezin, “Politics and Culture: A Less Fissured Terrain,” Annual Review of Sociology, 23 (1997): 361–83, esp. 368. See also Berezin’s Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Interwar Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). 146 Sara Ann Sewell that the spectacle invokes. Relying heavily upon a symbolic repertoire to integrate members and sympathizers into the ideological fold, the communist movement showcased its symbols and rituals at every demonstration, every party meeting, and every social event. Significantly, these gatherings called on participants to perform the symbolic practices repeatedly. To this extent, every communist event that featured symbolic practices was a spectacle with participants performing the ritualistic canon again and again. The compounding impact of the repeated performances of communist rituals and symbols profoundly influenced participants’ consciousness. By continuously performing rituals at the communist spectacle, participants learned the language of communism. Then, they internalized this semiotic repertoire to such a degree that they modified both their personal behavior to conform to the style of communism and their personal beliefs to adhere to political tenets that undergirded the communist spectacle. The effect of the cadre’s repeated deployment of the movement’s symbols and rituals was twofold. On the one hand, the cultural practices served to discipline the cadre, transforming them into representations of the communist moral order. On the other hand, the symbolic practices exerted critical power over members’ consciousness, redefining it so that the gestures themselves came to define the cadre’s range of political expression. Communist symbols and rituals, thus, fostered a self-disciplining process whereby participants consciously chose not only to become part of the communist spectacle, but also to deploy the cultural practices far beyond the perimeters of spectacle itself.36 The cadre utilized communist cultural practices as tools of self-expression; they employed them to address the

36 See Sara Ann Sewell, “Bolshevizing Communist Women: The Red Women and Girls’ League in Weimar Germany, CEH 45 (2012): 268–305. A handful of other scholars have examined the impact of self-disciplining rituals in the interwar international communist movement. See Tim Rees, “Deviation and Discipline: Anti- Trotskyism, Bolshevization and the Spanish Communist Party, 1924–34,” Historical Research 82.215 (Feb. 2009): 131–56; Randi Storch, “‘The Realities of the Situation’: Revolutionary Discipline and Everyday Political Life in Chicago’s Communist Party, 1928–1935,” Labor Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 1.3 (Fall 2004): 19–44. Spectacles in Everyday Life 147 challenges they faced in everyday life. Far removed from the orchestrated grand spectacle, members relied upon the symbolic language of the movement to articulate their own views. In other words, rank-and-file communists were not puppets of a coercive party brass, but political actors in their own right who integrated elements of the communist spectacle into the fabric of their everyday lives and spaces, consciously using the KPD’s symbolic repertoire to address the needs of everyday life. The cadre’s self-conscious deployment of communist rituals was evident during a 1931 police raid in a working-class neighborhood in Cologne when one resident responded to the police action by playing The Internationale on the piano. “From an open window in a ground floor apartment,The Internationale was played on a piano,” one resident reported. “The police, in a frenzy, responded by searching everywhere in the building.”37 This incident offers keen insight into the ways that communist political culture informed the consciousness and habits of the cadre. First, as an expression of defiance,The Internationale was the weapon of choice. The pianist relied on the communist standard, replete with militant connotation, to promote the communist moral order quite separate from the orchestrated mass spectacle. This act was neither arbitrary nor random; rather, the choice of the communist anthem as a voice of protest was likely the consequence of having performed the song numerous times at political functions. To this extent, the communist spectacle fundamentally shaped the pianist’s consciousness, teaching him or her that The Internationale was the consummate expression of opposition to the state and its agents. Second, the pianist’s use of a communist song to voice opposition highlighted the self- disciplining function of the spectacle. Namely, the act of playing the communist anthem outside the grand spectacle demonstrated that the pianist had internalized communist political culture to such a degree that it was woven into his or her own political lexicon. The symbolic language of the song thus served as a tool for producing a specific social order, as Pierre

37 Worker Correspondent 231, “Bauknechtterror gegen Jungarbeiter,” SR, March 30, 1931. 148 Sara Ann Sewell

Bourdieu theorizes.38 The performance of this cultural practice beyond the perimeters of the communist spectacle, in other words, indicated a self- disciplining process whereby the pianist had consciously opted to deploy a communist cultural practice as a means of self-expression. In the midst of a police action, the pianist deliberately chose to defy state authority with a bold gesture, perhaps even at great personal risk. Performing the communist anthem was a clear act of resistance, a challenge to state authority, and both the performer and the police understood the politics it represented. The archives of Weimar communism are replete with incidents of rank-and-file communists singing revolutionary standards at an array of venues. In 1929, for example, twenty-six RFB men, who had been arrested during a demonstration, opened their trial with a standing rendition of the anthem.39 Seizing the courtroom floor, a bastion of state authority, the men performed the song as an act of protest and an exhortation for a revolution. In another example, communist women gathered around a kitchen table for coffee and cake while singing “fighting” songs after a day of political activity.40 In this case, there was no mass spectacle, there was no police, there was no courtroom. There was only a small gathering of women, singing militant songs at a kitchen table in a working-class apartment. Such examples raise critical questions about how rank-and-file communists came to integrate the movement’s symbolic repertoire into their everyday lives. Was the singing of communist songs in a courtroom or at a kitchen table evidence of the coercive nature of the spectacle? Was it proof of the spectacle’s capacity to colonize participants’ consciousness to such an extent that the spectacle’s ethical framework pervaded daily life, even the intimate spaces of its participants? As these incidents underscored, the cadre internalized the politics and the semiotic vocabulary that they learned in the communist spectacle. Even though the meanings communists ascribed to such symbolic practices

38 Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthews Adamson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991) 190. 39 Die Internationale vor den Klassengericht,” Rote Fahne (hereafter,RF ), Jan. 28, 1930. 40 “Die Wacht im Osten,” Frauenwacht, June 1929. Spectacles in Everyday Life 149 undoubtedly varied, members’ incorporation the movement’s rituals and symbols into their everyday lives was a measure of the self-disciplining function of the communist spectacle. But this self-disciplining process did not transform rank-and-file communists into unwitting representations of KPD politics. On the contrary, the decision to perform communist cultural practices outside of the mass spectacle invariably connoted a process of deliberation. While it is clear that the historical context fixed parameters on political expression, the fact that ordinary communists performed communist symbolic practices quite apart from the mass spectacle suggests that they believed that the language of communism was a useful tool to address their personal concerns.

Transforming the Neighborhood

The cadre’s deliberate deployment of the communist spectacle was patently evident in working-class boroughs where communist political culture transformed both neighborhood spaces and social relations. Scholars have long argued that the spectacle and its ritualistic practices have the capacity to mediate social relations, especially facilitating elites’ control over the masses.41 According to Susan Davis, civic spectacles, such as parades, function as “public dramas of social relations.” Above all, spectacles designate social roles, bestowing some people with social gravitas, while simultaneously determining the range of social ideas.42 Debord similarly emphasizes the spectacle’s capacity to colonize social life and construct human relations. For Debord, capitalist production and consumption lie at the heart of the spectacle as well as the social relations it engenders. He theorizes that the

41 See especially Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 9. See also Joshua Hagen, “Parades, Public Space, and Propaganda: The Nazi Culture Parades in Munich,” Geografiska Annaler, Series B, Human Geography 90.4 (2008): 349–67, esp. 352. 42 Susan G. Davis, Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986) 6. 150 Sara Ann Sewell bourgeoisie created a commodity society that “needed to reconstruct the passivity” of the lower classes so that workers “no longer [experience] life as a passage toward self-realization.”43 Workers become robotic consumers, puppets of capitalists who overtake the consciousness of the compliant spectators so extensively that social life is reduced to consuming capitalist goods. The communist spectacle certainly demonstrated the capacity to influence social relations. At times, it could even reduce participants to passive consumers of communist politics and cultural practices. However, the ways that the communist spectacle mediated social relations varied significantly from Debord’s theory. As an ideology that stoked militancy, communism promoted social engagement, not passivity, and it was the spectacle’s emphasis on social action in the context of a volatile political climate that played the decisive role in mediating social relations among communists and sympathizers as well as between communists and their adversaries. The communist spectacle, therefore, did not necessarily serve as an exercise in social control, and it did not simply reflect macro power relations. Indeed, the communist spectacle, particularly when it was showcased in the working-class neighborhood, was itself an exercise in power, both expressing and creating power.44 Far removed from social elites, including the KPD brass, rank-and-file communists deployed the communist spectacle to mediate social relationships on their own turf. One of the main stages for the communist spectacle was the working- class borough. Analogous to supporters of the Social Democratic Party of Germany [Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD] and the Nazi Party,45 communists peppered neighborhood spaces, both public and private, with a barrage of political symbols, especially during election seasons

43 Debord, 144 and 160. 44 See also Avner Ben-Amos, Funerals, Politics, and Memory in Modern France, 1789–1996 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 262; Sallie A. Marston, “Public Rituals and Community Power: St Patrick’s Day Parades in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1841–74,” Political Geography Quarterly 8 (1989): 255–69, esp. 255. 45 Anthony McElligott, “Street Politics in Hamburg, 1932–3,” History Workshop 16 (Autumn 1980): 83–90, esp. 88–9. Spectacles in Everyday Life 151 and May Day celebrations. The communist spectacle, thus, provided participants with a symbolic language that they invoked well beyond the perimeters of the mass spectacle itself. One communist described the visual impact of the political culture in a working-class neighborhood: “We go through the working-class streets. From the asphalt, large letters shoot out at us: ‘Arm yourself for the red army review!’ The short street is swimming in red. One flag after another. Banners call everyone to the united front.”46 By hanging communist symbols from their apartment windows, communists converted their semi-private spaces into overt political forums that publicly promoted the communist moral order. In fact, they internalized the communist spectacle to such a degree that they marked their private refuges with provocative political symbols, even at great risk to themselves. The transfer of the communist spectacle to residential spaces transformed working-class neighborhoods into overt political forums. The photograph of Hamburg communists engaging in electioneering in April 1932 provides a snapshot of the communist spectacle in a working-class neighborhood (see Figure 5.4). Posing amid a sea of revolutionary emblems, which included banners and red flags hanging from residents’ apartments, these families boldly promoted the communist moral order. As representations in the communist spectacle, they lent support to the postulation that the spectacle has the capacity to transform consciousness. Indeed, by gathering in the collective and publicly declaring their commitment to revolutionary politics, they demonstrated the communist spectacle’s ability both to discipline participants and to nurture of process of self-disciplining. The photograph also provides an excellent perspective on the ways that the communist spectacle transformed everyday spaces. Communists’ incorporation of the spectacle into the ordinary spaces of the working-class neighborhood signaled an effort to carve out public terrain for revolutionary politics. Redefining spaces as communist ground, the cadre employed the spectacle to seize the neighborhood both symbolically and physically. A number of scholars emphasize the spectacle’s capacity to transfigure social spaces. Particularly mass spectacles with their elaborate decorations,

46 Worker Correspondent 371, “Kampfstimmung überall,” SR, Sept. 24, 1932. 152 Sara Ann Sewell

Figure 5.4 Electioneering in Hamburg, April 1932. SAPMO-BA, Bild Y 1-1586/7. Spectacles in Everyday Life 153 which include the performing spectators, transform spaces into terrains that are steeped in ideological meaning.47 To this extent, the landscape is not simply a backdrop for the spectacle. As Lily Kong and Brenda Yeoh contend, the space’s composition can “invade the private realm and invite visual consumption of inscribed meanings.”48 While mass spectacles certainly alter public spaces to intensify the experience of the spectacle, so too do more humble spectacles transfigure terrains in order to demarcate, politicize, and consecrate spaces. In fact, in many ways spectacles in everyday spaces can be even more critical to ideological transformation and struggle than grand spectacles. As Don Mitchell explains, subordinate groups seize public spaces to carve out territory for themselves, to raise their public profile, and to legitimate their moral order.49 In the process, they give new meanings to the ground they occupy. Weimar communists’ appropriation of neighborhood terrains for their spectacles marked an effort to seize territory to advance revolutionary politics. To this extent, the communist spectacle in the working-class neighborhoods contributed enormously to the politicization of daily life. Above all, it politically demarcated neighborhood spaces, drawing clear boundaries between allies and enemies. By imbuing neighborhood spaces with radical content through the communist spectacle, communists decisively affected social relations in the neighborhood. To be sure, the communist spectacle mediated relations among neighbors, uniting allies under a common banner and inflaming conflict with political foes. One of the central functions of the communist spectacle in the proletarian neighborhood was to forge a community under the red flag, and the communist spectacle was a key device in building neighborhood solidarity. Describing the impact of communist antifascist flags hanging from workers’ apartments in Cologne-South, one

47 Hagen, 350. 48 Lily Kong and Brenda S.A. Yeoh, “The Construction of National Identity through the Production of Ritual and Spectacle: An analysis of National Day Parades in Singapore,” Political Geography 16.3 (March 1997): 213–39, quotation on 230. 49 For example, see Hagen, 350; M. Busteed, “Parading the Green: Procession as Subaltern Resistance in Manchester in 1867,” Political Geography 24.8 (2005): 903–33. 154 Sara Ann Sewell communist explained how the spectacle helped to construct a revolutionary community.

Everyone sees how many there are in the fight against fascism. They feel stronger. They know that they are part of the masses and victory belongs to them […] Every red flag, every little red flag says: Here lives an antifascist, a revolutionary proletariat […]50

As this description of a working-class neighborhood highlights, the communist spectacle transformed its participants and their spaces into representations of the communist moral order in an effort to proselytize. Encouraging others to enlist in the antifascist army, communist flags served as a call to arms, influencing social relations by fostering a revolutionary community. The communist spectacle, in other words, helped to cultivate anesprit de corps or communitas, to use Victor Turner’s term.51 The communist symbols showcased throughout the neighborhood helped to forge a community that was committed to a set of common values.52 While the communist spectacle politicized neighbors and nurtured solidarity, it also affected relationships with political enemies. As a cultural sign, the communist spectacle was an exercise in political transparency. By partaking in the spectacle’s cultural practices, participants declared their political allegiances, making their politics more public, more transparent, and more antagonistic. Indeed, it was the public promotion of the communist moral order through the spectacle that decisively mediated social relationships. In the context of Weimar Germany with its fragile polity that accommodated radicalism at pivotal moments, the communist spectacle served to draw clear political boundaries, continuously stirring the ire of political adversaries. Above all, the display of communist symbols routinely ignited conflict in proletarian boroughs.

50 “Rote Fahnen heraus!” SR, July 28, 1932. 51 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982) 128. See also David I. Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988) 62. 52 A number of scholars assert that political rites serve to build political communities. See esp. Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) 129. Spectacles in Everyday Life 155

State authorities, as represented by the police, were especially alarmed by the communist spectacle in working-class boroughs, and the police frequently targeted people who displayed communist symbols from their apartments. For example, police stormed a working-class neighborhood in Cologne and destroyed communist propaganda during the November 1932 Reichstag election season. As one resident testified, “The police were upset especially with the flags and banners that were hanging from nearly every worker’s apartment […] They advanced with a leader and took […] the housewives’ brooms from the apartments and tore down these ‘state- threatening’ advertisements.”53 In another incident in 1931, a police officer stopped a group of communists who were singing in the street, on their way home from a demonstration. A police officer approached the group and allegedly yelled, “If you don’t shut your traps, you’re going to get it with a billy club.”54 As these examples illustrate, the transfer of the communist spectacle to quotidian terrains infused these spaces with inflammatory political expressions that radicalized neighborhoods. To this extent, the communist spectacle played a pivotal role in the politicization of daily life.

Conclusion

Spectacle was an essential ingredient of communist political culture during the Weimar Republic. Communists developed a militant symbolic repertoire to propagate their moral order. Gathered together in the spectacle, participants played key roles in the mass regimented dramaturgy, transforming themselves into visual representations of the communist moral order. They donned uniforms, marched in lockstep, and sang on cue, creating the image of a powerful, militant mass organization that was prepared for

53 Worker Correspondent 946, “Polizeijage auf Fahnen und Transparente,” SR, Nov. 10, 1932. 54 “Polizeiaktion in Köln-Höhenberg,” SR, July 15, 1931. 156 Sara Ann Sewell revolution. The cadre thus transfigured itself into the very representation of the communist spectacle and the moral order it promoted. To this extent, the communist spectacle served to discipline participants. The communist spectacle highlighted the ways that the KPD cultivated a culture that exalted discipline. Not only did the party’s political wing work avidly to achieve ideological conformity, but so too did its culture. In the communist spectacle, ritualistic acts served to build a community that was dedicated to revolutionary struggle. At the heart of the communist spectacle was a community whose members became increasingly wedded to communist values with each performance. With each gesture, the cadre appeared to fall into line. Indeed, rituals did more than any party platform to build the community. Thus, the communist spectacle was also an exercise in self-discipline. While members might have objected to various positions outlined in party programs, many participated in communist ritualistic practices, publicly demonstrating their fidelity to the movement and the moral order it represented. The communist spectacle, however, was not limited to the mass stage. To be sure, the communist spectacle colonized everyday life and everyday spaces, including literally the kitchen table. Performing the spectacle’s rituals in neighborhoods and even private settings, communists infused everyday life with the communist spectacle in an effort to disseminate a radical ideology. The transfer of this spectacle to everyday life was evidence of the self-disciplining quality of communist culture. Conforming to the style of communism and appropriating the symbolic language of communism, members internalized the communist spectacle to such an extent that they disciplined their spaces, their everyday routines, and even their bodies to serve the communist moral order. Nadine Rossol

Spectacular Settings for Nazi Spectacles: Mass Theater in the Third Reich

Introduction

Impressions of Nazi spectacles in their different shapes and forms – ranging from parades through German cities, Nuremberg Party Rallies to the opening ceremony of the 1936 Olympic Games – dominate our view of the Third Reich and have imprinted long-lasting images in our minds.1 While many of us lack personal experience of the Third Reich, we still think we know what Fascism looked like. This look, so it seems, was seductive, spectacular and all-embracing, staging the greatness of Hitler and the National Socialist State. Leni Riefenstahl’s films Triumph of the Will and Olympia on the 1934 Nazi party rally and on the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, respectively, certainly helped to create these visual impressions of Fascist aesthetics and of the staging of politics.2 Historians’ studies reminding us of the staging, rehearsal and manipulation that went into National Socialist

1 I have expanded some of the arguments of this piece in my study Performing the Nation in Interwar Germany. Sport, Spectacle and Political Symbolism 1926–36 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010). I would like to thank Werner Bonn from the city archive in St Goarshausen for providing me with material linked to the European youth meeting. 2 Similar images of mass events come to our mind when we think of Fascist Italy, but the ones on Nazi Germany, possibly due to their enormous presence in the media, seem to take precedent. 158 Nadine Rossol propaganda have not yet changed popular assumptions on its alleged per- fection and effectiveness.3 The terms Gesamtkunstwerk“ of political aesthetics” or “formative aesthetics” are often used to analyse festivities in the Third Reich, suggesting that the Nazis developed a specific style for their festivities with a deliberate focus on aesthetics, symbols, decoration, and festive set-up as part of their political culture.4 Walter Benjamin’s concept stressing the use of aesthetics in politics has become commonplace in interpretations of Nazi visual representation, especially with regards to festivities, celebrations and mass parades. Benjamin found that the combination of politics and aesthetics influenced political life and, in so doing, allowed the pursuit of total aims.5 Naturally, we can go well beyond the area of festivities and performance culture to apply these ideas to a number of different areas of political life. But my use of the term spectacle in this essay is linked to concepts of political

3 For a detailed analysis on the Nazi Party Rallies see Markus Urban, Die Konsensfabrik. Funktion und Wahrnehmung der NS-Reichsparteitage 1933–1941 (Göttingen: VR, 2007) and, as a shorter version, Markus Urban, “Die inszenierte Utopie. Zur Konstruktion von Gemeinschaft auf den Reichsparteitagen der NSDAP,” Volksgemeinschaft. Mythos, wirkungsmächtige soziale Verheißung oder soziale Realität im Dritten Reich, ed. Detlef Schmiechen-Ackermann (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2011) 135–57. David Welch suggests that historians have to be careful not to equate the considerable efforts put into Nazi propaganda with successful results. See “Nazi Propaganda and the Volksgemeinschaft: Constructing a People’s Community,” Journal of Contemporary History 39 (2004): 213–38. 4 Hans Ulrich Thamer, “Faszination und Manipulation. Die Nürnberger Reichs parteitage der NSDAP,” Das Fest, ed. U. Schultz (München: Beck, 1988) 354; eds Ulrich Herrmann and Ulrich Nassen, Formative Ästhetik im Nationalsozialismus (Weinheim: Beltz, 1994). 5 Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer 1936). For one of the first historical studies examining political aesthetics with a main focus on nationalism see George L. Mosse, The Nationalisation of the Masses. Political Symbolism and Mass Movement in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars to the Third Reich (New York: Howard Fertig, 1975). Spectacular Settings for Nazi Spectacles 159 theatre, the staging of mass plays and to political performance culture. The word spectacle is used to describe the staging of mass events that combine different theatrical art forms (e.g. choral singing, dance, mass choirs) and, in so doing, spoke to different senses. Despite the omnipresent images of Nazi party rallies, the more innovative and modern developments of National Socialist spectacles were the short-lived but much debated efforts to create a new mass theater (Thingspiel). Open-air venues for this new mass theater should ideally be embedded in impressive and breath taking natural scenery. Some Thingspiel open-air arenas were built in forests and on mountain tops to achieve this aim. However, we also find them created in cities. In the mid-1930s, the Thingspiel movement was brought to an end and open-air venues were swapped again for traditional indoor theater spaces. But rather than considering the Thingspiel mainly as an example of failed Nazi propaganda – a short-lived attempt to represent the alleged Volksgemeinschaft on stage – I examine it as a development linked to debates on reformed performance spaces, mass choreographies and the unity of different art forms. The Thingspiel movement combined modern staging ideas and staging techniques with romanticism, nationalism and the invention of Germanic traditions. A National Socialist Volksgemeinschaft should be created within these new plays and the innovative spatial structures of the open-air arenas, built to suggest that the boundaries between audience and participants could be dissolved, should help to strengthen a sense of community. My case study of the Thingspiel arena on the Loreley rock will reveal some of the reasons for the failure of the Nazi mass theater. Delays in the constructions of many smaller Thing arenas, as well as their use as venues for popular plays and entertainment undermined their usefulness for explicit political messages on stage that many wanted to see at the heart of these performances. The public perception of the Thingspielarenas’ lack of explicit connection to Nazi ideology quickly enabled them to be re-used as open- air stages after 1945. Because the most traditional way of staging National Socialist politics, the Nuremberg party rallies, remained the most consistent variation of the Nazi spectacle, the Thingspiel arenas were able to shake off their Nazi legacy fairly easily. 160 Nadine Rossol

Performance Culture and Nazi Party Rallies

By the mid-1930s the public had become well accustomed to the use of aesthetics in mass events staged by political organizations and by the state. Sara Ann Sewell’s piece in this volume reminds us of the importance of Communist parades that had an integrative and disciplinary function for their participants as well as the power to imprint a temporary political ideology upon local space.6 Taking up influences from the staging of political events, contemporary discourses on spectacles as part of performance culture in the Weimar years addressed the issues of community and the masses as well as questions of rhythm, inclusiveness and participation. Festivities moved from indoors to outdoors taking place in stadiums or on sports grounds. The impetus to change and reform the spatial dimensions of spectacles had largely come from theater directors, dancers, artists and choreographers, who felt that their productions could no longer be contained on the small stages of theater houses. Debates on the spatial aspect of performances were closely linked to demands that they should be inclusive and blur the static division between participants and spectators. Venues such as sport stadiums were believed to help in achieving this goal. So was the involvement of mass choirs, movement groups and amateurs in festive spectacles.7 Historians examining mass spectacles and festive staging have not confined their works to Germany. They found that a focus on mass

6 See Sara Ann Sewell’s essay “Spectacles in Everyday Life” in this volume. 7 See Nadine Rossol, Performing the Nation in Interwar Germany, Sport, Spectacle and Political Symbolism 1926–36 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010). For a greater focus on dance see Yvonne Hardt, Politische Körper. Ausdruckstanz, Choreographien des Protestes und die Arbeiterkulturbwegung in der Weimarer Republik (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2004) and Inge Baxmann, Mythos Gemeinschaft: Körper- und Tanzkulturen in der Moderne (Munich: Fink, 2000). A great study on the festive culture and the staging of festive plays of the working-class in the Weimar years is the book by Matthias Warstat, Theatrale Gemeinschaften. Zur Festkultur der Arbeiterbewegung 1918–1933 (Tübingen: Francke, 2005). Spectacular Settings for Nazi Spectacles 161 choreographies, well-trained bodies and disciplined participants characterized festive staging in democracies and dictatorships alike in the 1920s and 1930s, both in Europe and the USA. Similarities and reciprocal influences have been investigated for totalitarian regimes such as Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy which demonstrate that Italy served as a role mode when it came to the staging of festivities.8 Simonetta Falasca- Zamponi argues that aesthetic considerations were central to the construction of Italian fascism, including the shaping of the disciplined fascist man both as an individual and a part of an orderly crowd.9 For Soviet Russia, Malte Rolf and others have analysed festivities in detail, focusing on sports and body cult.10 But it was not just dictatorial regimes that influenced each other. Theater historian Erika Fischer-Lichte illustrates that mass spectacles of the interwar years can be interpreted as universal attempts to search for solutions when confronted with a sense of cultural and societal crisis. She suggests that mass plays in Europe and the USA were a form of political theater characterized by a combination of theatrical elements and political rituals that aimed at inclusion, community, and collective identity, regardless of the political form of state organization.11 While ideas of the Thingspiel

8 See Christoph Kühberger, Metaphern der Macht. Ein kultureller Vergleich der poli- tischen Feste im faschistischen Italien und im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland (Münster/Wien, 2006). See also Emilio Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity (Westport: Praeger, 2003). 9 Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle. The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). See also Mabel Berenzin, “The Festival State: celebration and commemoration in Fascist Italy,” Journal of Modern European History 1 (2006): 60–74. 10 Malte Rolf, Das sowjetische Massenfest (Hamburg: HIS Verlag, 2006); Malte Rolf, “Die schönen Körper des Kommunismus. Sportparaden in der Sowjetunion der dreißiger Jahre,” Sport zwischen Ost und West. Beiträge zur Sportgeschichte Osteuropas im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, eds Arie Malz, Stefan Rohdewald, Stefan Wiederkehr (Osnabrück: fibre, 2007) 309–25. 11 Erika Fischer-Lichte, “Massenspektakel der Zwischenkriegszeit als Krisensymptome und Krisenbewältigung,” Krisis! Krisenszenarien, Diagnosen, Diskursstrategien, eds Henning Grunwald and Manfred Pfister (München: Fink Wilhelm, 2007) 114–41, esp. 119. 162 Nadine Rossol movement can be linked to some of these earlier developments, the focus of research on Nazi political festivities most frequently concentrates on the Nazi Party Rallies.12 However, a concentration on the Thingspiel allows us to examine the benefits and limitations of a performance culture that was meant to create the National Socialist community anew with every play performed. The appeal of these mass spectacles, so its advocates, consisted of combining architecture, scenery, choral singing and mass scenes into a Gesamtkunstwerk that dissolved boundaries and united spectators and participants. Its limitations become obvious as well. The National Socialist mass theatre movement never lived up to its high expectations regarding the originality of the plays and its innovative spatial concepts. An increased focus on popular entertainment combined with foregrounding nationalism and romanticism meant that the new approaches of the Thingspiel movement did not outlive the mid-1930s. The difficulties of establishing an original mass theatre in Nazi Germany do not mean that the festive staging of politics failed in the Third Reich. Some historians have suggested that entertainment activities in Nazi Germany were deliberately diverting the public’s attention from the unpleasant sides of Nazi policy.13 Furthermore, mass events can include various activities – traditional political parades or festive plays – and both events can have varied effects on the viewer and the participant.14 The attempt to clearly differentiate between activities with a clear political aim or intention and those seemingly only entertaining is difficult, if we are to follow

12 For a more detailed examination see Rossol, Performing the Nation, 103–7. For a discussion focusing solely on Nazi party rallies see Markus Urban, Die Konsensfabrik; and Siegfried Zelnhefer, Die Reichsparteitage der NSDAP (1991; Nürnberg: Stadtarchiv Nürnberg, 2002). 13 Most prominently Peter Reichel, Der schöne Schein des Dritten Reiches (München: Hanser, 1991). 14 Hans Ulrich Thamer, “Faszination und Manipulation. Die Nürnberger Reichs parteitage der NSDAP,” Das Fest, ed. U. Schultz (München: Beck, 1988) 354; eds Ulrich Herrmann and Ulrich Nassen, Formative Ästhetik im Nationalsozialismus (Weinheim: Beltz, 1994). Spectacular Settings for Nazi Spectacles 163

Benjamin’s assertion that fascism meant the introduction of aesthetics into political life and, most importantly, the meshing of both. If we expand our definition of spectacle beyond what the advocates of the NaziThingspiel movement considered as successful spectacle, who took their reform ideas to festive performance culture as measuring stick, we can understand the importance of nationalism/romanticism, space and scenery as some of the key components of the spectacle. And if we apply Guy Debord’s ideas regarding the spectacle in capitalist society to other political ideologies, as Sara Ann Sewell has convincingly shown for the German Communists,15 it becomes clear that the spectacle’s aim of transforming its participants, promoting a particular word view and changing social relations16 also applied to the formulated aims for mass spectacles in Nazi Germany. Nazi Party Rallies were in line with the tradition of political assemblies and, although they were expanded in terms of scale, logistics and funds, the Nuremberg rallies maintained this character. Taking place in Nuremberg until 1938, the rallies provided a National Socialist interpretation of the urban space in which they were situated. By 1935, Nazi Party Rallies had become a “normal” part of the festive calendar in the Third Reich, although some Nazi leaders were loathe to think of them as “normal,” since they considered the party rallies to be monumental political occasions.17 The alleged watering down of the “sacred” character of the meetings progressed through the focus on popular entertainment festivities and is exemplified by the introduction of the “Day of Community” to the rallies program in 1937, wherein the main focus was on games and dances.18 The Strength through Joy organization also initiated popular festivities as part of at the party rallies. Fireworks, sports competitions, beer and Bratwurst, film performances and other popular entertainment activities complemented military parades and political assemblies in Nuremberg.19 Although filmic

15 See Sara Ann Sewell’s piece on the Communist representation in this volume. 16 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (London: Zone Books, 1995). 17 Urban, Die Konsensfabrik, 73. 18 Yvonne Karow, Deutsches Opfer. Kultische Selbstausloeschung auf den Reichsparteitagen der NSDAP (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997), 148. 19 Ibid, 65; Urban, Die Konsensfabrik, 65–8. 164 Nadine Rossol images of the rallies suggested otherwise, especially when we think again of Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, the event’s organization was dominated by rivalry and conflicts. To add to this difficulty, there were problems relating to the logistics, particularly for the areas of the traffic control and accommodation well until 1938. Furthermore, reports lamented that the parades were badly staged.20 To counteract the reproach that the party rallies in Nuremberg had turned into a popular propaganda show deprived of any political value, the announcement of political decisions was linked to them. In 1935 the Nuremberg Race Laws were proclaimed and a year later, in 1936, it was the economic four-year plan. Party rallies also possessed an international dimension as foreign representatives and journalists were invited to attend and to report back to their respective countries.21 But the move away from constant political mobilization started in June 1936 when Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels informed regional leaders that he wished the number of Nazi festivities to be decreased and better coordinated, for fear that the population would become indifferent to more important festive events.22 Consequently, the organization of leisure time activities with a less obvious political objective, a technique perfected during the Second World War with its emphasis on popular entertainment, became an important part of Nazi propaganda.23 This policy was also applied to the organization of the annually staged party rallies. From 1937 to 1938, the rallies witnessed an increased emphasis on popular entertainment with dances, sport competitions and other traditional activities of popular festivities.

20 Karow, Deutsches Opfer, 132–5. 21 Friedrich Kiessling, “Zur Einführung: Nationalsozialistische Außendarstellung und der fremde Blick. Die internationale Dimension der Reichsparteitage,” Bilder für die Welt. Die Reichsparteitage der NSDAP im Spiegel der ausländischen Presse, eds Friedrich Kiessling and Gregor Schöllgen (Köln: Boehlau, 2006) 1–23 (here 19). Generally for the coverage of the Nazi Party Rallies in Great Britain, France, the USA, Austria, Italy and the Soviet Union see Kiessling and Schöllgen, Bilder für die Welt. 22 Landesarchiv Berlin (LAB), A Pr Br Rep.042, 237Goebbels, letter to all Reich ministers and Gau leaders, July 7, 1936. 23 Stommer, “Da oben versinkt einem der Alltag …,” 172. Spectacular Settings for Nazi Spectacles 165

Based on this historian Siegfried Zelnhefer concludes that the staging of rallies on a grand scale had reached a dead end in 1938.24

TheThingspiel : A New Spectacle for New Times?

The Nazis’ attempt to create their own mass theater has long been interpreted as one of the rare failures of National Socialist propaganda. After all, the Thingspiel idea was rapidly abandoned after only a few years and, therefore, represented a rather short-lived experiment that created much attention at the time but was almost as quickly abandoned as it had been taken up.25 However, if one links the Thingspiel to previous debates on mass choreographies, festive plays and spatial reforms of performance space, it becomes clear that it was not especially short lived, but rather concluded a decade inspired by similar debates on public performance culture. What we might interpret as a typical example of Fascist festive mass staging, can be traced back to ideas that were tried out across the political spectrum. Furthermore, often left-wing playwrights and theatre directors pioneered their visions of a new people’s theatre in the 1910s and 1920s. Jörg Bochow illustrates this point by drawing our attention to the diverse background of people involved in the Thingspiel idea which ranged from expertise in expressionist staging concepts and modern dance in Weimar Germany to

24 Zelnhefer, Die Reichsparteitage der NSDAP in Nürnberg, 194 and 258. 25 This section is partly based on my more extended outline of the Thingspiel movement in Rossol, Performing the Nation, 108–10. Henning Eichberg and Robert A. Jones, “The Nazi Thingspiel,”New German Critique 11 (Spring 1977): 133–50, here 137; Rainer Stommer, Die inszenierte Volksgemeinschaft. Die Thing-Bewegung im Dritten Reich (Marburg: Jonas, 1985); Hannelore Wolf, Volksabstimmung auf der Bühne? Das Massentheater als Mittel politischer Agitation (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1985). For a good overview of Thingspiele, with a particular focus on the structure of the plays, see William Niven, “The birth of Nazi drama?” Theater under the Nazis, ed. John London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000) 54–95. 166 Nadine Rossol an interest in “Blood and Soil” romanticism.26 Henning Eichberg suggests that the mass choreographies and spectacles of the interwar years were heavily influenced by the political style of left-wing parties.27Erika Fischer- Lichte captures this combination of influences present in the Thingspiel movement when she writes: “It seems that at least Goebbels and, probably, others were aware of the continuity that linked the Thingspiel movement to [Max] Reinhardt’s new people’s theatre on the one side, and to [Erwin] Piscator’s political theatre on the other […].”28 However, in many ways the Thingspiel movement left a more lasting legacy when it came to the actual construction of theater arenas and open- air stages rather than to political ideas and ground-breaking plays. Unlike reformers in the 1920s, the supporters of the Thingspiel did not want to simply move their choreographies to sports stadiums or other open-air space, but rather planned massive open-air stages spread across Germany. Not all actually turned into reality as many open-air arenas were enthusiastically planned but never built. From 1933 to 1935/36 the Thingspiel movement was strongly supported – financially and ideologically – by the Nazi propaganda ministry. It attempted to link alleged Germanic traditions to National Socialist festive practices. Tracing the term “Thing” back to Germanic gatherings, the Nazis connected it to their own mass festivities. Combining political, theatrical, festive and sacred rituals, the new mass theater should visualise the people’s community of the Third Reich.29 In fact, it was not just the representation of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft but its creation throughout the course of the performed play that was meant to be at the core of the Thingspiel.30

26 Jörg Bochow, “Berliner Theater im Dritten Reich: Repräsentative Ästhetik oder/und ‘Bewahrer kultureller Werte?’ Linien und Brüche der Moderne im Berliner Theater der dreissiger Jahre,” Berliner Theater im 20. Jahrhundert, eds Erika Fischer-Lichte et al. (Berlin: B&S Siebenhaar, 1998) 147–69, here 152. 27 Eds H. Eichberg et al., Massenspiele (Stuttgart: Frommann Holzboog, 1977). 28 Erika Fischer-Lichte, Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual. Exploring Forms of Political Theatre (London: Routledge, 2005) 136. 29 Stommer, Die inszenierte Volksgemeinschaft, 12–13. 30 Fischer-Lichte, Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual, 141. Spectacular Settings for Nazi Spectacles 167

The Thingspiel movement was institutionalised in the Organisation of Open-air Plays and Community Theater (Reichsbund der deutschen Freilicht- und Volksschauspiele). In July 1933 Otto Laubiger, the head of the Reichsbund, stated: “Our German playwrights need to be aware that we want new plays that express the rhythm of our time; the choral play − expressing the longing of our people − will blossom at our new people’s stages […] don’t get me wrong, we also want the important historical developments to be presented on our stages but we are warning strongly against a flight into the past to avoid dealing with today’s fate and to avoid a confession to a Nazi state.”31 However, Otto Laubinger’s call for a new “Nazi playwright” was seemingly not as successful as he had hoped for. In late 1935, Joseph Goebbels lamented that his propaganda ministry had been swamped with poor-quality plays written by amateurs.32 Within only a few years the Thingspiel was supposed to have 400 places of performance creating one stage in every area or region. The intention behind this widespread development was to root these stages in the local fabric of National Socialist festive activities.33 In the end, only a fraction of the envisaged number of arena was actually built. The constructions of the sites were coordinated with the support of the Workers’ League (RAD).34 Hasty decisions and over-ambitious plans created a situation in which many communities celebrated the laying of the foundation stone for their local Thingspiel stages with nothing happening afterwards.35 While the selection of the first sixty-six Thingspiel arenas in 1934 reflected the attempt of an

31 Meinhold Lurz, ed., Die Heidelberger Thingstätte. Die Thingbewegung im Dritten Reich: Kunst als Mittel politischer Propaganda (Heidelberg: Schutzgemeinschaft Heiligenberg, 1975) 21. 32 “Keine Konjunktur für Festspiel-Kitsch. Eine Bekanntmachung des Reichspropagandaministers Dr Goebbels,” Berliner Börsen Zeitung, Nov. 11, 1935, BArch Berlin, NS 5 VI, 574, p. 38. 33 Ibid, 12–13. 34 Manfred Seifert, Kulturarbeit im Reichsarbeitsdienst. Theorie und Praxis national- sozialistischer Kulturpflege im Kontext historisch-politischer, organisatorischer und ideologischer Einflüsse (Münster: Waxmann, 1996) 298–308. 35 Stommer, Die inszenierte Volksgemeinschaft, 59. 168 Nadine Rossol even spread throughout Germany, the locations were also chosen due to their alleged historical importance and spectacular scenery.36 Different voices within theThingspiel movement had different ideas about the intended meaning and direction of the Nazi mass theater. One group in particular, many of whom had been part of theater reform movements or had been involved in previous mass plays, argued for the Thingspiel as being different to classical theater in creating a sense of community and relying on choral plays.37 The opposition envisioned the Thing movement as separate from art or theater and interpreted it as a cultic and political movement. This, they argued, had little or nothing to do with theater, but rather ought to serve an explicitly political and educational purpose.38 One of the most important Thingspiel arenas was situated in Heidelberg on its Heiligenberg. While the former Thing site can still be visited, its importance in the 1930s is difficult to recognise. TheHeiligenberg was a mountain which, apart from its scenic location, was claimed to have been a significant site of Germanic culture,39 although traces of Germanic heritage were never found there. In March 1934 the construction of the arena began and eventually finished in the summer of 1935. The open-air stage could accommodate 15,000 people.40 Heidelberg’s Thingspiel arena saw a number of festive plays staged there. From the mid–1930s onwards − mirroring the developments at other German stages − the plays performed in Heidelberg moved to more classical pieces.41 When the foundation stone for the Heidelberg open air stage was laid in 1934, speeches by Nazi officials praised the building as the embodiment of everything the Thingspiel movement represented. Heidelberg’s mayor Neinhaus stated in his speech on the occasion:

36 Ibid, 170–1. 37 M. Lurz, Die Heidelberger Thingstätte, 29. 38 Ibid, 29 (Berliner Börsen Zeitung, July 22, 1935). 39 For an overview of the planning, building and plays at the Heidelberg Thingspiel area see M. Lurz, ed., Die Heidelberger Thingstätte, 42–172; and Stommer, Die inszenierte Volksgemeinschaft, 103–14. 40 Lurz, 72–5. 41 Ibid, 85. Spectacular Settings for Nazi Spectacles 169

This arena stands for the new theater culture of the future that doesn’t know hierarchies, class struggles or societal divisions; the divisions between poets, participants and spectators don’t exist anymore. In the glow of National Socialist thinking we are united in one big, unique, political community […] built from the soil and stones of this mountain the arena of National Socialist education will be created.42

Fading popularity combined with fatigue of political mobilization, a lack of good quality plays, a greater interest in entertainment and the eventual withdrawal of financial and organizational support from Goebbels’ propaganda ministry meant the final blow for the Thingspiel movement in the mid-1930s. In May 1936 Goebbels limited the use of mass choirs to Nazi Party Rallies. Fearing that the festive cult of the Thingspiel could be coun- terproductive, he shifted attention back to traditional theater staging and banned the use of the word Thing.43 Interestingly, one of the best known and largest National Socialist mass stages, the Dietrich-Eckart-open air stage in Berlin (today the Waldbühne), had already undergone the transformation from an officialThingspiel stage to an open-air stage for festive plays. Built as part of the Olympic complex for the 1936 Berlin games, the stage was created for 20,500 spectators.44 The completion of the stage fell in a time during which the Thingspiel movement was no longer at its height, although a number of important Thing plays had been performed there. The stage was first used for the staging of Eberhard Wolfgang Möller’s Frankenburger Dice Game for its opening during the Olympic Games. Möller’s play was considered to be one of the few genuine Thing plays and was successfully performed on a number of open-air stages (see Figure 6.1).45 By the mid-1930s, the Thingspiel movement had lost its support. Wolfgang Braumüller, a supporter of the new mass theater, wrote disappoint- edly in 1935 that the Thingspiel had meant more than “Aufmarsch-Theater”

42 Ibid, 95. 43 Bochow, “Berliner Theater im Dritten Reich,” 152–3. 44 Ibid, 153. 45 Günther Rühe, “Die Thingspielbewegung,” Massenspiele, eds H. Eichberg et al., 189–97. 170 Nadine Rossol

Figure 6.1 Dietrich Eckhart Open Air Theater, Berlin, 1939. Bundesarchiv Bild, 145, P019137. Spectacular Settings for Nazi Spectacles 171 and had more to do with poetry and music than with marching.46 Furthermore, he feared that Thingspiele areas could turn into “a Sunday afternoon fun fair” and recognized that the main principle of the movement, namely to unite participants and spectators as a community within the context of the landscape, had sadly not been achieved.47 At the time when Braumüller was writing his farewell to the Thingspiel, traditional theater plays and traditional staging were being brought back to the stages. The picture-frame-stage outlived the innovative spatial concepts of open-air arenas that had aimed to blurr the boundaries between participants and spectators.48 But despite the return to traditional theater stages, small-scale open air festivities continued to exist and continued to be used. Local authorities tried to make use of the Thingspiel areas they already possessed for numerous cultural activities.49 This could include political assemblies, the staging of classical theater plays or ceremonies to celebrate the summer solstice (Sonnenwende). Frequently, all of these activities took place on the Thingspiel stages, although they had been originally designed for very specific performances.

TheThing Stage on the Loreley Rock: Visual Seduction and Popular Entertainment

The LoreleyThingspiel stage in the small town of St Goarshausen can serve as a local case study exemplifying a number of key aspects linked to the Nazis’ mass theater movement. In particular, I will focus on the beauty

46 Wolf Braumüller (Referent für Freilicht und Thingspiele in der Abt. Theater der NS Kulturgemeinde), Freilicht- und Thingspiele Rückschau und Forderungen (Berlin: no publisher given, 1935) 38. 47 Ibid, 37. 48 See Boguslaw Drewniack, Das Theater im NS Staat (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1983); John London, ed., Theater under the Nazis; and Eichberg, Massenspiele, 158. 49 Stommer, Die inszenierte Volksgemeinschaft, 147–64. 172 Nadine Rossol of the location of the Thing arena and the stress on entertainment rather than on political assemblies.50 The opening play on the Loreley rock in the summer of 1939 was actually not a genuine Thingplay, but rather Friedrich Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell. Further, as the arena was opened during a time in which the Thing movement was no longer officially supported, and even the word Thing was not used anymore. The Thingspiel site at the Loreley was officially called “festive site.”51 Despite enormous financial and logistical difficulties in the actual building phase, the location of the Loreley Thingspiel stage was exceptional and, therefore, in line with the initial concept of impressive and spectacular scenery for these mass stages. The Loreley rock at the Rhine, rising 132 meters, was the centre of numerous legends. Most famously it was presented as the home of Loreley. Heinrich Heine immortalised the beautiful young girl Loreley sitting on the rock and combing her golden hair. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the romantic image of the Rhine, well exploited by the tourist industry, had turned the river into a symbolic landscape peppered with castles, stories of golden treasure and popular legends.52 TheThingspiel stage on the Loreley rock presented a curious mixture of themes that were linked to this festive area, each of which contributed to the space’s spectacularity. Nationalism and romanticism were the most obvious ones linked to this Thingspiel site. While an original Thing play was actually never staged there as the stage had not been finished in time, its important location – based on the fact that the stage’s name and its view of the Rhine were widely recognizable and linked to German nationalism – made the Loreley arena an important festive stage in the area. Drawing on the beauty of the surrounding landscape, German nationalism and anti- French connotations could be easily linked to the Rhine. Consequently, the festive stage on the Loreley rock could be used for numerous causes as long as they presented a combination of nationalism and Germaness,

50 I have examined the Loreley stage with a slightly different approach in Rossol, Performing the Nation, 113–20. 51 Programm der Festspiel und Feierstätte Loreley, 1939, Archiv St Goarshausen, Abt. 6.09 no. 1.06. 52 See Susanne Kiewitz, Poetische Rheinlandschaft (Köln: Böhlau, 2004). Spectacular Settings for Nazi Spectacles 173

Rhine romanticism and tourism, as well as modernity and technology. The grandiose view from the festive area on the Rhine meant that this “visual seduction” already worked without having to provide much more input on the Rhine as one of Germany’s most important national symbols. At the end of April 1934, a festive celebration marked the laying of the foundation stone for the Thingspiel arena on the Loreley rock.53 Five years later, in the summer of 1939, the stage was inaugurated. The delay in completing the arena stage was party due to financial difficulties and party based on the difficult conditions the builders were faced with. The space for the open-air arena was created by blasting through 17,600 square meters of the Loerely rock.54 Most of the physical labour at the construction site of the Thingspiel stage was carried out by a section of the RAD conscripting unemployed workers.55 The hard work that was involved in building the arena stage becomes obvious in this image (see Figure 6.2). When the building of the Thingspiel stage was completed in spring 1939, the press praised the new arena. No newspaper article neglected to mention the scenic beauty of the location, the popular legends of the Loreley and the national importance of the “sacred” Rhine. The Neueste Zeitung called the Loreley Thingspiel stage “magic in stone within the German landscape.”56 Hermann Senf, the Frankfurt architect of the arena, stated that his architecture should not compete with the surrounding landscape but should be an integrated part within it. According to Senf, trees, hills and the view on the Rhine provided the frame into which his

53 Bronich (Chronik), Archiv St Gorshausen, Abt. 6.09, no. 1.01; Paul-Georg Custodis, “‘die Wellen verschlingen am Ende Schiffer und Kahn.’ Die Loreley in der NS-Zeit,” Die Loreley. Ein Fels im Rhein. Ein deutscher Traum, eds Mario Kramp and Matthias Schmandt (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern Verlag, 2004) 140. 54 Custodis, “die Wellen verschlingen am Ende Schiffer und Kahn,” 145. 55 Ibid, 145. 56 “Steinernes Wunderwerk in deutscher Landschaft,”Neueste Zeitung, May 18, 1939: n.p., Archiv St Goarshausen, Abt. 6.09, no. 1.05. 174 Nadine Rossol

Figure 6.2 Loreley, Thingspiel site 1935/36, St Goarshausen. Courtesy of Stadtarchiv St Goarshausen. arena had to fit without upsetting the well-known scenery of the Rhine panorama (Figure 6.3).57 The stress on the beauty of the landscape recurred in the newspaper articles praising the Loreley stage. But also the modern technology considered as essential for an open-air stage of this size was frequently praised.58 This reminds us of the combination of Rhine romanticism and nationalist connotations with ideas of innovative staging concepts and appropriate technological means.59 The image here captures these sentiments. A breath-taking view, probably one of the most impressive views

57 “Steinernes Wunderwerk in deutscher Landschaft;” “Besuch auf der neuen Loreley,” General Anzeiger, May 18, 1939: n.p.; Archiv St Goarshausen, Abt. 6.09, no. 1.05. 58 “Die große Festspielstätte des Gaues,” Volksblatt, June 7, 1939: n.p.; “Die Feierstätte des Gaues,” General Anzeiger, June 7, 1939: n.p.; “Besuch auf der neuen Loreley;” Archiv St Goarshausen, Abt. 6.09, no. 1.05. 59 “Steinernes Wunderwerk in deutscher Landschaft.” Spectacular Settings for Nazi Spectacles 175

Figure 6.3 Loreley, Thingspiel arena completed, St Goarshausen. Courtesy of Stadtarchiv St Goarshausen. on the Rhine, is presented to us. But this view is not the reward for a lone- some and exhausting hike up the rock (as romantic paintings would have depicted it), it was the core of a political festive space in which the political will to demonstrate to participants and viewers the greatness of the Nazi State and the community of its people was omnipresent. At the end of June 1939 − four years after its completion had been initially expected − the Loreley Thingspiel arena was inaugurated with a ceremony for the summer solstice followed, a few days later, by a festive performance of Friedrich Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell. While the ceremony for the summer solstice was mentioned by the press as the event to mark the completion of the festive area, the performance itself was described as first festiveplay there.60 Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels offered

60 Custodis, “die Wellen verschlingen am Ende Schiffer und Kahn,” 143; “Festspiel- und Feierstätte auf der Loreley,” Frankfurter Zeitung, July 7, 1939. 176 Nadine Rossol a National Socialist interpretation for it by claiming that Schiller would have been the poetic voice of the Nazi revolution.61 Regardless of these efforts, the fact remained that the LoreleyThing stage, constructed for the performances of genuine Nazi mass theater that should have illustrated the classless national people’s community, opened with one of the most traditional pieces of German theater. Before the play started, the deputy Gau leader Linder held a short festive speech to honour the occasion. It is remarkable (but fits with the abandoned interest in Thingspiele since the mid-1930s) that he mainly stressed the importance of German culture rather than the importance of the political festive spectacle. Linder concluded by praising the newly created Loreley-arena as “a bastion in the westwall of German culture.”62 Again, we find nationalist connotations and anti- French sentiments linked to the space. Clearly, the deputy Gau leader felt that the political framework in which the audience should place the play, needed to be clarified before the performance started to ensure that the “correct” messages were drawn from it. The play was staged by the artistic director of Frankfurt’s municipal theater Hans Meissner with a cast consisting of actors from his theater house in Frankfurt but also including members of the RAD and citizens of the town of St Goarshausen for mass scenes.63 At the end of the play, the actors re-entered the stage with the character of Wilhelm Tell in the middle and swore again the famous Rütli-oath. In Schiller’s original version these words were only spoken once. On the Loreley rock in June 1939, a choir repeated them and, according to the newspapers, the audience stood up and joined the oath.64 TheFrankfurter Zeitung connected this final scene of the play

61 Festspiel und Feierstätte Loreley: Joseph Goebbels, “Schiller und unsere Zeit,” 437–8, Archiv St Goarshausen, Abt. 6.09, no. 1.06. 62 “Bericht über die erste Freilichtaufführung des Wilhelm Tell auf der Feierstätte der Loreley,” Bilderbuch der Woche, July 1, 1939: 1, Archiv St Goarshausen, Abt. 6.09, no. 1.06. 63 “Bericht über die erste Freilichtaufführung des Wilhelm Tell auf der Feierstätte der Loreley,” 2. 64 “Bericht über die erste Freilichtaufführung des Wilhelm Tell auf der Feierstätte der Loreley,” 2; “Tell auf der Feierstätte,” Frankfurter Zeitung, June 27, 1939: n.p. Spectacular Settings for Nazi Spectacles 177 to the location of its performance and wrote: “The theatrical illusion was dissolved. Everyone should remember at this moment that one was at the banks of the Rhine. The performance turned into a proclamation.”65 The newspaper found that Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell fitted perfectly to the location as the play was considered as a fight for freedom of an united nation.66 Even the General Anzeiger, somewhat disappointed in the lack of original Nazi Thing plays, linked the arena to it surrounding by stressing the spatial importance of the stage overlooking the river Rhine.67 The summer of 1939 saw five performances of Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell at the Loreley. A ticket cost 1.00 RM per person and the Nazi organization Strength through Joy offered bus journeys to the area. The newspapers stressed that the transport to the Thingspiel stage worked well and that the high number of busses arriving there showed the enormous popularity of the play.68 It might have rather been the popularity of the area that attracted people. After the last performance, the Volksblatt wrote delightedly that 25,000 spectators had seen the five Tell-performances.69 However, approximately 5,000 spectators per performance in an arena that could accommodate more than 15,000 people was certainly not a successful outcome. Indeed, not everything went smoothly at the five Tell-performances carried out over the summer of 1939 on the Loreley rock and not everybody was convinced that the performance had made the most of its beautiful surroundings.70

65 “Tell auf der Feierstätte,” Frankfurter Zeitung, June 27, 1939: n.p., Archiv St Goarshausen, Abt. 6.09, no. 1.06. 66 Ibid. 67 “Heiligenberg-Loreley. Vom Sinn der Feierstätten,” General Anzeiger, June 14, 1939: n.p., Archiv St Goarshausen, Abt. 6.09, no. 1105. 68 “Gewitterstimmung über Wilhelm Tell,” General Anzeiger, July 11, 1939: n.p., Abt. 6.09, no. 1.05; “Loreley ist von allen Richtungen zu erreichen,” Volksblatt, June 18, 1939: n.p., Archiv St Goarshausen, Abt. 6.09, no. 1.06. 69 “25000 besuchten die Loreley-Festspiele,” Volksblatt 4 Aug. 1939: n.p., Archiv St Goarshausen, Abt. 6.09, no. 1.06. 70 “Tell auf der Loreley.” Neueste Zeitung, June 27, 1939: n.p., Archiv St Goarshausen, Abt. 6.09, no. 1.06. 178 Nadine Rossol

The fact that the Loreley open-air stage promoted popular entertainment by relying on established theater plays meant that it actually did not fulfil the hopes of any of the two trends within theThingspiel movement. It did not manage to continue the developments in innovative staging concepts and restructuring performance spaces or to create a sense of community through original Nazi plays. Nor did the Loreley stage turn into a site of festive cult as others had envisaged. While this might have disappointed those who had been genuinely interested in the new ideas embodied in the Thingspiel movement, these failings did not necessarily mean that a sense of national community was missing at the events. Unlike Thingspiel advocates, who had hoped that a Nazi community should be achieved through the unity of participants and spectators in the course of the play, participation in the National Socialist people’s community could also be achieved in other ways. When we interpret the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft as a community that encouraged and enabled individual participation,71 we can see how the Loreley stage mobilised large sections of the local population to participate in construction activities, accommodating visitors and even taking part in some scenes of the plays.

71 Michael Wildt suggests that the “Volksgemeinschaft” was envisaged and acted on from below and was not just a top down concept. See Michael Wildt, Volksgemeinschaft als Selbstermächtigung. Gewalt gegen Juden in der deutschen Provinz 1919–1939 (Hamburg: HIS Verlag, 2007). Recent edited collections have broadened the focus on the par- ticipative element of the “Volksgemeinschaft” without creating a consensus among historians regarding the usefulness of the term as an analytical tool. For an overview on the recent debates see Detlef Schmiechen-Ackermann’s introduction to his edited volume, Volksgemeinschaft: Mythos, wirkungsmächtige soziale Verheißung oder soziale Realität im Dritten Reich? (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2012) 15–36. Spectacular Settings for Nazi Spectacles 179

Thingspiel Stages Post-1945: The European Youth Meeting on the Loreley Rock in 1951

At the end of the Second World War in 1945, the fate of the Thingspiel arenas dotted across Germany varied. Some were abandoned (e.g. Heidelberg); others dismantled (e.g. Koblenz) and a few were re-used (e.g. Berlin). After the Americans had entered Koblenz, the Thingspiel stage located in front of the city’s electoral palace was levelled and filled with other postwar rub- ble.72 In contrast, the Berlin Waldbühne (the former Dietrich Eckart open air stage), one of the constructions erected around the Olympic stadium for the 1936 summer games, enjoyed an almost continuous and very varied use. While the stage is nowadays mainly known for open-air concerts, this particular use of the former Thingspiel arena only started in the early 1960s. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the open-air stage hosted boxing events as well as religious and political gatherings. One of the first postwar events at the Waldbühne was a youth meeting of both religious confessions in late October 1946.73 Unlike the stage in Koblenz, the Loreley arena was not destroyed when the Americans reached the area, but it was also not re-used as quickly as the Waldbühne. American soldiers raised the US flag on the Loreley rock to visually manifest their invasion in early March 1945.74 It was the European Youth Meeting on the Loreley rock, divided into five meetings from late July to early September 1951, which put the former National Socialist arena back on the map for the staging of big events. Pragmatic reasons for the

72 See the website . 73 See the website . The online Berlin chronicle of the Landesarchiv Berlin offers a great impression of the different events and gathering that happened at the Waldbühne from 1946 onwards. We also find gatherings with political connotations e.g. a mourning ceremony for the SPD politician Kurt Schumacher in 1952 or a gathering of Jehova’s witnesses – many from the zones occupied by the Soviets in 1950. 74 A photograph of this event, dated March 7, 1945, is published in P.G. Custodis, “die Wellen verschlingen am Ende Schiffer und Kahn,” 145. 180 Nadine Rossol choice of the site might have played their part. Six years after the end of the Second World War meant that there were not many open-air arenas or similar spaces available that could be used without major repairs. However, the fact that visitors and participants had to be transported on the top of a rock suggests that pragmatism and logistics were certainly not the primary reasons for staging an European youth meeting there. The spectacular space with its breathtaking views and its long tradition as romantic tourist destination outweighed its most recent history as Nazi Thingspiel site. Romanticism, so ingrained in the Rhine and its landscape, was utilised to serve as framework for the political messages of the youth meeting. The continuity in the visual impressions from the Loreley rock was complemented with a stress on romanticism and Western European integration. While the National Socialists saw the pairing of romanticism and nationalism encapsulated at the Loreley, speakers at the European youth meeting promoted the Rhine as long-established embodiment of Franco-German friendship; a river that connected rather than divided nations. Under the slogan “youth is building Europe,” young people, between 15 and 25 years of age, were invited to participate in various meetings and workshops initiated by the French cultural administration and further organized by the German Youth League (Bundesjugendring). At the end of the five meetings occuring over the course of six weeks, 35,000 young people had participated.75 The youth meeting at the Rhine was clearly staged in response to and in competition with similar events in the German Democratic Republic. In response, Ernst Busch published an overt critique of the European Youth Meeting at the Loreley rock: “Go home, Ami, go home/Leave alone the German stream/say goodbye to the father Rhine/

75 For example, French and American troops helped out with tents for the tent colony that was created for the young visitors. For a greater concentration and the political dimension of this event as part of European integration and youth policy as well as on its organization see Gerhard Brunn, “Das Europäische Jugendtreffen 1951 auf der Loreley und der gescheiterte Versuch einer europäischen Jugendbewegung,” Rückkehr in die Ferne. Die deutsche Jugend in der Nachkriegszeit und das Ausland, ed. J. Reulecke (Weinheim: Juventa Verlag, 1997) 81–101; and Jacqueline Plum, Französische Kulturpolitik in Deutschland 1945–1955 (Wiesbaden: DUV, 2007) 199–211. Spectacular Settings for Nazi Spectacles 181 don’t touch his little daughter/Loreley, as long as you sing/Germany will be.” Using nationalist sentiments to depict the Loreley as a symbol of German identity, Busch captures the East German fear of foreign (particularly Western) influences on Germany and her policies. These fears were not unfounded, as the speeches delivered at the Loreley event possessed strong anti-Communist connotations.76 In addition to being part of European politics in the context of the emerging Cold War, the Youth Meeting meant for the city of St Goarshausen the staging of a mass event which caused logistical problems linked to accommodation (eventually solved with tent colonies) as well as to food and water supplies that had to be brought up the rock.77 Mass gatherings on the Loerely inevitably involved and mobilised large sections of the local population; this aspect hardly changed from the 1930s to the 1950s. Also individual continuities can be traced. For example, in February 1951 Heinrich Senf, the architect of the Thingspiel arena on the Loerely, wrote to St Gorshausen’s mayor Kühn pointing out that he expected to be involved and listened to when decisions linked to the open-air stage were taken. After all, so the architect, the festive area was his work.78 His reminder was successful as Senf was involved in measures preparing the former Thingspiel stage and the rest of the festive area for the youth event.79 The fact that

76 See for example the speech given by the French High Commissioner Andre Francois- Poncet in Ulrich Pfeil, “Störmanöver aus dem Osten. Der Kalte Krieg betraf auch die Jugend,” Die politische Meinung 398 (Jan. 2003): 55–6. The German original reads: Go home, Ami, go home/Lass in Ruhe den deutschen Strom/say goodbye dem Vater Rhein/rühr nicht an sein Töchterlein/Loreley solang du singst/wird Deutschland sein. . 77 L. Nies, “Rückblick auf das Loreleytreffen der europäischen Jugend,” and “Begegnung europäischer Jugend auf der Loreley 20.7.–6.9.1951, Aus dem Nähkästchen der Loreley,” CAMP Erste Europäische Jugendzeitung, Archiv St Goarshausen, Abt. 6.09, no. 03. 78 H. Senf, letter to mayor Kühn, Feb. 1951, Archiv St Goarshausen. Cited in P.G. Custodis, Bau der Thingstätte auf der Loreley. Based on notes taken in autumn 2003 on these issues by P.G. Custodis who collected materials for his own work and then gave his notes to the archive. 79 Ibid, Letter C. Franzreb to H. Senf, May 25, 1951. 182 Nadine Rossol the arena was used again for the first time since the Nazi period seemed to have created little cause for comments and neither did the involvement of its former architect. Only the newspaper CAMP, created to report from the event, pointed out with a fine sense of humour that not everyone in the local area had yet accustomed to the fact that the Thingspiel arena was now called “open-air stage.” But, according to the newspaper, this did not matter too much as “it is more important what the roughly 10,000 young people from all European countries will talk about and debate up there.”80 Eventually, young people from twelve nations participated. The photograph, dating from August 18, 1951, shows the main assembly, at which speeches in French, English and German were delivered by French High Commissioner Andre Francois Poncet, the English deputy High Commissioner Dalton, the papal nuncio Aloysius Münch as well as by the head of the German Youth League (Bundesjugendring) Josef Rommerskirchen. In the name of the German parliament, its president Dr Ehlers stressed the importance of Europe’s youth for building a peaceful future. Greetings from representatives of the twelve participating nations followed the speeches and the ceremony ended with the singing of the song Wann wir schreiten Seit an Seite.81 The striking image reminds us of one taken exactly from the same angel when the Thingspiel arena had been completed in the late 1930s. In 1951, this extraordinary view on the Rhine was framed by flags of the participating nations and the European flag –a white letter E on a green flag. The visual seduction of the area due to its location becomes obvious here and was certainly used as an asset for the event. Once again, we find the merging of political messages and romantic connotations linked directly to the spatial surroundings and evoked to underline the political interpretation of the mass gathering. At the same time, we have to keep in mind that the political choreography of

80 “Begegnung europäischer Jugend auf der Loreley 20.7.–6.9.1951, Aus dem Nähkästchen der Loreley,” CAMP Erste Europäische Jugendzeitung. 81 Archiv St Goarshausen, Abt. 6.08, no. 03, “Wir wollen keinen eisernen Vorhang. Eröffnungskundgebung bei der Begegnung europäischer Jugend auf der Loreley” (newspaper unknown as this article is part of a collection of newspaper clippings) Aug. 1951. Spectacular Settings for Nazi Spectacles 183 the youth event (greeting, speeches, political symbols and a popular song at the end) was in line with tradition staging of political assemblies and, therefore, very different to what the Nazis had tried to create on the top of the Loreley rock (Figure 6.4).

Figure 6.4 First European Youth Meeting in 1951, Loreley site, St Goarshausen. Bundesarchiv Bild, 145, 00010546.

Taking into account that a big youth event when it was meant to promote European ideas should generate impressive images for newspapers and magazines, the choice for the location might not be surprising. Already the Nazis had recognised that the established images of Rhine romanticism, especially linked to the area between Cologne and Koblenz, could be easily drawn on and interpreted in line with their political ideas. For the National Socialists the Rhine was not just linked to natural beauty and popular legends but it was Germany’s so-called Schicksalsstrom reminding of conflicts with France and of territories beyond the German border the Nazis wanted to incorporate into the country. 184 Nadine Rossol

The European Youth meeting reversed this message by stressing the area’s potential for something very different. Representing the German government, Peter Altmeier, the ministerial president of Rhineland Palatinate, spoke at the main assembly and reminded his audience that the peoples on the Rhine were particularly capable of nurturing the European idea. He turned the Rhine into an international symbol rather than stressing its importance for individual nations.82 In so doing, he internationalised the narrative of the location and its impressive setting and turned it into a symbol beyond German nationalism. The fact that the former Thingspiel arena was even in the late 1930s mainly linked to popular entertainment (rather than political assemblies or Nazi play) combined with the merging of connotations linked to the Rhine in France and Germany might have been part of the reasons why the re-named open-air stage on the Loreley rock could so smoothly shake off its National Socialist history. After the event in 1951, the Loreley arena was used from 1952 to 1965 for the annually staged Loreley festive plays.

Conclusion

The Thingspiel movement – the “failed” Nazi mass theater – was actually the continuation of innovative ideas linked to performance space (from the indoors to outdoors), the blurring of boundaries between participants and spectators and the inclusion of amateurs into spectacles (often as mass choirs or even movement groups). However, many of these ideas did not live longer than the mid-1930s. While Nazi Party Rallies continued and slowly increased the focus on popular entertainment, the Thingspiel movement attempted finding a new theatrical form for the alleged people’s community. A number of combined factors brought the Thingspiel to its end. The lack of what was considered to be adequate political plays (as the stages were

82 Ibid. Spectacular Settings for Nazi Spectacles 185 initially not built to eventually stage Friedrich Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell) as well as the shift to light popular entertainment made the locations that had been planned for serious spiritual experiences superfluous. The realization that other mass mediums, such as radio and film, had the potential to be more effective in promoting Nazi ideas, creating a sense of community and clearly communicating who should be excluded from the Volksgemeinschaft probably also contributed to the end of the mass theater movement.83 Largely abandoned by the mid-1930s, the outbreak of the Second World War meant that the Thingspiel movement would not be revisited. After the end of the Second World War, politically mass staging was something the Federal Republic of Germany remained suspicious of. But the re-use of the spatial structures did not seem to pose too many problems. The appeal of open-air stages for popular entertainment as well as for mass assemblies was quickly recognised. Clearly, pragmatic reasons played their part in this process as well. The use of Berlin’s Waldbühne for mass assemblies and meetings after 1945 was certainly also due to the fact that it provided a useful assembly space within a city in which not many other spaces seemed suitable. And it might have exactly been the perceived failure of the political concepts linked to the Thingspiel arenas that made re-using these spaces after 1945 easier than for other Nazi constructions. Despite great buildings plans for Germany, the National Socialists put only a handful of their projects into reality. The most obvious ones being constructions at the Nuremberg party rally site, the ruins of the holiday resort Prora and the Thingspiel arenas built across the country. The fact that many open-air stages could be easily revitalised for open-air performances, rock and classical concerts or as in St Goarshausen for the European youth meeting demonstrates that the public linked these sites less to Nazi ideology and its architecture legacy. This process was helped by the fact that the impressive appeal of the beautiful landscape in which some of these former Nazi stages are located seems to be universal and not linked to political systems. The extraordinary view from the Loreley rock on the Rhine and on the surrounding area was as impressive in 1939 as it was in 1951.

83 E. Fischer-Lichte, Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual, 158. 186 Nadine Rossol

Nowadays, many are unaware of the history of Germany’s open-air stages. Berlin’s Waldbühne is regularly praised as one of the most beautiful concert arenas in Europe without references to its history. Karl Niessen who was since 1929 professor of theater studies at the University of Cologne and first introduced the termThing into the debates on new performance spaces, wrote to the architect of the Loreley arena Herman Senf in the mid-1950s: “You can be proud of an achievement [the construction of the arena, N.R.] that is valid well into the present.”84 While this statement also exemplifies the lack of any critical reflections of an academic and of an architect on a theater form that was, at least for a short time, an important part of Nazi cultural policy, Niessen had a point regarding the visual appeal of many former Thingspiel sites.

84 K. Niessen, “Sie können stolz auf eine Leistung sein, die bis in die Gegenwart gültig ist,” letter to H. Senf, Sept. 1955, Archiv St Goarshausen, cited in P.G. Custodis, Bau der Thingstätte auf der Loreley. Jennifer L. Creech

Gudrun is Not a Fighting Fuck Toy: Spectacle, Femininity and Terrorism in The Baader-Meinhof Complex and The Raspberry Reich

The spectacle presents itself […] as an instrument of unification[…] The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images […] The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance, which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance […] [It] is the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue. It is the self-portrait of power. — Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (3, 4, 12, 24)

Fuck me, for the Revolution! — Gudrun, The Raspberry Reich

In 1970, the Red Army Faction (RAF) entered the world stage as West Germany’s most infamous leftist terrorist group. As a more radical outgrowth of the student protest movement and the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition (APO), the RAF was informed by both Marxist-Leninist and Frankfurt School critiques of capitalism, liberal democracy, the military industrial complex and the mainstream media. Implementing Che Guevara’s concept of the “urban guerilla,” the RAF embodied a spectacular version of leftist insurgency through their self-stylized man- ifestos and through high-profile bank robberies, the abduction and murder of prominent German industrialists, the hijacking of airplanes, as well as through their dramatic suicides while incarcerated at Stammheim prison. 188 Jennifer L. Creech

Two recent German films deal in dramatically different ways with the spectacularity of the RAF’s terrorism: The Baader-Meinhof Complex (Dir. Uli Edel, 2008) and The Raspberry Reich (Dir. Bruce LaBruce, 2004). The Baader-Meinhof Complex provides an action-packed depiction of the RAF that employs spectacular historical-re-enactment to construct its narrative as historical and accurate. The group’s radicalization is presented as a result of the growing student unrest in Germany, in particular the murder of Benno Ohnesorg by police at a student protest. The founding members of the RAF – Gudrun Ensslin, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof – thus begin their insurgency. Ulrike Meinhof ’s radicalization is traced from her roots as a journalist and jilted wife of Konkret editor, Klaus Reiner Röhl, to her role as RAF’s primary theoretician. Ensslin and Baader are shown as the film’s Bonnie and Clyde: drawn together by their explosive sexual energy and their mutual belief in the inevitable necessity of violent revolution, they are the film’s dynamic historical protagonists and are increasingly at odds with Meinhof ’s primary intellectuality. Once the first generation of the RAF is incarcerated after numerous heists and several murders, the second generation takes over, abducting a prominent German industrialist in an attempt to ransom the release of the first generation. The film ends with the simultaneity of the first and second generations’ defeat: the second generation witnesses the failure of their internationally coordinated attempt to negotiate the release of the first generation from prison through the hijacking of a plane in Mogadishu, to which the first generation responds by committing suicide at Stammheim prison. The Raspberry Reich, on the other hand, imagines the RAF in its sixth generation in contemporary Germany as campy protagonists in gay art- house porn. In LaBruce’s film, Gudrun Ensslin is transformed into an over- bearing, glamorous and intellectually verbose dominatrix, who fanatically demands the complete obedience of her followers. Pointing to heteronor- mativity as the true site of revolution, Gudrun “fucks for the revolution,” takes her sex into the public sphere (into the elevator, onto the street), and demands that all those – those being men – devoted to the revolution practice the “homosexual intifada” as a means of resisting bourgeois ideology and trans-national capital. LaBruce uses formal techniques – the actors’ performativity, mise-en-scène, the interaction between text and image – to Gudrun is Not a Fighting Fuck Toy 189 emphasize the ubiquity of history as spectacle while simultaneously resisting the spectacularization of history through his film. In this chapter, I consider how these two films employ the female body in the service of, and in resistance to, spectacle in the post-unification period, during which a renewed interest in the history of German leftist terrorism resurfaces in popular culture. Edel’s and LaBruce’s films present viewers with radically different examples of femininity and terrorism. Beginning with an extended reading of The Baader-Meinhof Complex, I draw on Caroline Heldman’s notion of the “fighting fuck toy” (FFT) as a means to analyze the ways in which femininity and history are produced as spectacle. The FFT is, according to Heldman, “a hyper-sexualized female protagonist,” whose penchant for violence rivals that of the males in the text. While the fighting fuck toy appears empowered, her presence in the text is primarily to serve as an object of pleasure for the heterosexual male viewer. “In short, the FFT takes female agency,” weds it to normalized male violence, and “appropriates it for the male gaze”1 (Heldman). In constrast to Edel’s spectacularization of history through the female body, LaBruce offers spectators viewing pleasure grounded not in spectacle but in camp. Constructed as a gay art-house porno, The Raspberry Reich formally resists spectacle through the aesthetic mode of camp, simultaneously satisfying viewers’ libidinal economies while also enforcing the critical distance necessary to invigorate in the viewer a “protest against an unbearable reality.”2 According to Debord, spectacle is the visual discourse through which the dominant order envisions and, thus, narrates itself. It is a social relation between subjects that, through the proliferation of images, constructs the subject’s potential “social horizon of experience” by determining the

1 Caroline Heldman, “The Hunger Games, Hollywood and Fighting Fuck Toys,” Ms. blog, April 6, 2012; May 15, 2014 . 2 Alexander Kluge, “On Film and the Public Sphere,” New German Critique 24/25 (Autumn 1981/Winter 1982): 206–20; here 209. 190 Jennifer L. Creech limits of “how social experience is articulated and becomes relevant.”3 Thus, the subject’s ability to comprehend the present and its relation to the past as a totality is overdetermined by spectacle as a social relation. For Debord, spectacle is the “social organization of the paralysis of history and memory,” because it is divorced from experiences that are “really lived” by individuals, substituting instead a “history” of “pseudo-events that rush by in spectacular dramatizations” that are then “lived in illusion” by “those informed of them.”4 The social organization of subjectivity via the spectacular is borne out of what Debord calls irreversible time, or “the time of those who rule,” which, under capitalism, is the time of economic production and commodities, “the time of things.”5 For Debord, irreversible historical time is thus perceived by social subjects under capitalism as permanent and universal, the “end of history,” history as spectacle:

The main product […] is therefore history, but only in the form of the history of the abstract movement of things […] [a] reified history, with the permanence of a new immobility within history. [Thus] […] irreversible time is unified on a world scale. Universal history becomes a reality […] [b]ut this history, which is everywhere simultaneously the same, is still only the refusal within history of history itself […] Unified irreversible time is the time of the world market and, as a corollary, of the world spectacle […].6

The spectacle of “universal history,” constituted through the “global unification of the public sphere through electronic media and transnational networks of production and consumption,”7 constructs for its subjects a sense of arrival and permanence. This universal history does not narrate

3 Miriam Hansen, Foreword, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 85, Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) x. 4 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 1983) 158, 157, 155. Originally published as La société du spectacle (Paris: Editions Buchet-Chastel, 1967). 5 Debord, 131, 142. 6 Debord, 142, 143, 145. 7 Hansen, xii. Gudrun is Not a Fighting Fuck Toy 191 their Lebenszusammenhang [the context of living] under late capital and, instead, enforces the acceptance of what exists as irreversible and, subsequently, transhistorical. The public sphere theorized by Debord – what we might call a “pseudo- public sphere” constructed through spectacle – serves as the foil to the radically democratic, enlightened public sphere envisioned by twentieth- century theoreticians Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge. In contrast to spectacle – “the existing order’s [unilateral] uninterrupted discourse about itself ” – the public sphere that Negt and Kluge envision is “oppositional” to the bourgeois public sphere, “is changing and expanding, increasing the possibilities for a public articulation of experience […] a representative public sphere.”8 As such, Negt and Kluge’s oppositional public sphere [Gegenöffentlichkeit] directly resists the bourgeois public sphere theorized by Debord by creating a space for the representation of “the context of living” under late capital. ThisGegenöffentlichkeit is a representative public sphere that resists spectacle and universal history as irreversible, opening up a space for the production of resistant agentic subjectivities. In the 1960s, the concept of Gegenöffentlichkeit greatly influenced West German artists’ and intellectuals’ interrogation of recent German history as spectacle, relating the failure to establish a democratic public sphere in the aftermath of fascism with the spectacle of West German (and, to a certain extent, American) media, most specifically within the context of the continued popularity of traditional cinematic structures based in the UFA and classical Hollywood traditions.9 For these leftists, the public

8 Kluge, 211–12. 9 For an overview of West German filmmakers’ critiques of German film history and its relationship to the public sphere, see Heide Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany: Reconstructing National Identity after Hitler (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 85 (1972; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), originally published as Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung: Zur Organisationsanalyse von bürgerlicher und prole- tarischer Öffentlichkeit (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1972); and Eric Rentschler, West 192 Jennifer L. Creech sphere was “the factory of politics – its site of production […] the space in which politics [is] first made possible at all and communicable,” and film and media were considered crucial domains for establishing a democratic discourse wherein “the possibilities for a public articulation of experience”10 could emerge. In the 1970s, with the rise of the RAF, film’s potential as an oppositional public sphere took on a new urgency for West German filmmakers. They saw their works as an alternative to the West German status quo. The media’s hitherto “refusal to deal with reality […] [had] not succeeded in conveying to the individual citizen […] the basis of democratic ideas in such a way that a real democracy could have established itself […].”11 These directors saw in their film formal choices the possibility to construct an alternative public discourse that could “hold onto memory” – of fascism, of a still operative authoritarian legacy in the west. That alternative discourse necessarily involved formally challenging the spectator to engage his/her consciousness in the production of historical/narrative meaning. Formal resistance to generic structures, they believed, would push the spectator to reflect on narrative, and thus historical, “truth.” Reflective critique and distanced observation, they believed, would serve as the building blocks of an alternative public sphere, “the opposite of a pseudo public sphere”12 and in doing so, would offer the possibility of real social change through the production of oppositional consciousness.13 For the New German Cinema directors, that alternative cinematic discourse was influenced by avant-garde traditions in the cinema and the

German Filmmakers on Film: Visions and Voices (New York: Holms & Meier, 1988). For a more specific discussion of women’s contributions to these debates, see Julia Knight, Women and the New German Cinema (New York: Verso, 1992). 10 Kluge, 213, 211. 11 Rainer Werner Fassbinder, “The Third Generation,” The Anarchy of the Imagination: Interviews, Essays, Notes, trans. Krishna Winston (1984; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) 128–33; here 129. 12 Kluge, 212. 13 Alf Brustellin, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, Volker Schlöndorff and Bernhard Sinkel, “Germany in Autumn: What is the Film’s Bias?” Rentschler, West German Filmmakers on Film, 132–33; here 132. Gudrun is Not a Fighting Fuck Toy 193 theater (the Russian formalists, Brecht, Artaud), as well as by Hollywood and UFA, which dominated the screens of their postwar childhoods. Adapting and moving beyond these aesthetic traditions, the New German Cinema directors created films that offered viewers narrative pleasure, while also enforcing a critical distance that would enable the viewer “recourse to the spontaneous workings of the imaginative faculty […] [as a] protest against an unbearable reality.”14 These formal choices included an emphasis on montage as the “morphology of relations”15 in Kluge’s work; the simultaneously melodramatic and alienating combination of mise-en- scéne, cinematography, character development and sound, in Fassbinder’s films; the subjective personalization of public history through voice-over narration and autobiographical framing devices; and the manipulation of generic conventions.16 Particularly for the female directors of the New German Cinema, the question of cinematic codes and structures was an inherent aspect of the West German feminist movement beginning in the 1960s. For feminist filmmakers, various issues were at stake: creating a public space for the articulation of women’s (underrepresented) experiences; finding new ways of narrating private life; exploring and understanding female neuro- sis as a result of patriarchal structures; participating in forms of exchange in a public sphere dominated by men; as well as questioning the terms of feminist debates per se, including what is meant by “feminine genres,” “authenticity,” “collectivity” and “utopia.”17 These stakes, influenced by and influencing feminist theory and praxis on both sides of the Atlantic, reflected attempts to present an alternative to the spectacle of femininity in the Hollywood, UFA and New German Cinema traditions. Formal choices included the use of voice-over narration and autobiographical

14 Kluge, 209. 15 Kluge, 206. 16 Representative, though radically different, examples include the work of Harun Farocki, R.W. Fassbinder, Helke Sander, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, and Monika Treut. 17 See Jutta Brückner, “Women’s Films Are Searches for Traces,” Rentschler, West German Filmmakers on Film, 85–9; Helke Sander, “Feminism and Film,” Rentschler, West German Filmmakers on Film, 75–81; and Julia Knight. 194 Jennifer L. Creech framing devices, filming on location in domestic spaces, static cameras and long takes that lingered on women’s embodied experiences – menstruation and childbirth, for example – as well as the use of montage and split-screen techniques that emphasized the collective nature of filmmaking practices and the intertextuality of women’s creative production.18 Their political engagement was bound up with the desire to “find in the cinema a space to wish for our own images, our own experience of lost speech and lacking images, because increasingly we are made into images instead of having one of our own […].”19 The myriad concerns articulated by this generation of filmmakers – the relationship between spectacle and an oppositional public sphere, the inherently related political engagement with film form and national history, as well as a gender-inflected interrogation of the relationship between femininity, cinematic language and lived experience under capitalism – culminated during the active period of the RAF in numerous films that dealt specifically with femininity and terrorism. This includes its marginal handling in Helma Sanders-Brahms’ ReDuPers (1978), as well as its overt thematization in R.W. Fassbinder’s The Third Generation (1979), Volker Schlöndorff ’s film-adaptation of The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975), as well as Margarethe von Trotta’s The Second Awakening of Christina Klages (1978) and Marianne and Julianne (1981). These films, though diverse, approached the specificity of femininity and terrorism from nuanced perspectives. Fassbinder’s and Sander’s films deal dialectically with history, offering an overt critique of late capitalism and, especially in Sanders-Brahms’ case, feminist activism and collectivity, to construct critiques of West German culture that acknowledge the complexity and commensurability of female political agency and terrorism. Von Trotta’s and Schlöndorff ’s films, while more narratively accessible and politically moderate, also assert the preva- lence of a patriarchal discourse, situated within the larger context of western

18 Examples include Jutta Brückner’s Years of Hunger (1980); Helke Sander’s All-Round Reduced Personality (1978), The Subjective Factor (1981), Helma Sanders-Brahms’ Germany, Pale Mother (1980). For an extensive consideration of feminist contributions to the New German Cinema, see Julia Knight. 19 Brückner, 87. Gudrun is Not a Fighting Fuck Toy 195 capitalism, as an impetus both for female terrorist activity and for the continued policing of women’s bodies by a patriarchal state. In the post-Cold War period, however, German cinematic representations of terrorism have shown little interest in providing a thorough analysis of female leftist insurgency, and many of the recent films about the RAF – Todesspiel (Dir. Breloer, 1997), Black Box BRD (Dir. Veiel, 2001), Baader (Dir. Christoph Roth, 2002), Starbuck Holger Meins (Dir. Gerd Conradt, 2003) – exhibit a much keener interest in male terrorists. Further, in the post-New German Cinema period, a marked shift has occurred in which female terrorists have been primarily reduced to secondary agents of terrorist activity; secondary in terms of the narrative (e.g., they serve a supporting role in the service of a male protagonist), in terms of their representation onscreen (e.g. their bodies, rather than their politics, are foregrounded), or in terms of their terrorist engagement (e.g. their reasons for engaging in terrorist activity are a result of other primary concerns.) In this context, Edel’s and LaBruce’s films present viewers with radically different examples of femininity and terrorism. InThe Baader-Meinhof Complex, the containment and domestication of female terrorist activity functions in support of the film’s spectacular history of the RAF, revealing the film’s participation in what Eric Rentschler has termed the “German Cinema of Consensus.”20 The representation of Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin, in particular the marginalization of Meinhof ’s political and intellectual engagement and the oversexualization of Ensslin, serve to construct a spectacular history of the RAF. Formally, The Baader-Meinhof Complex makes use of iconic images of historical events – documentary footage, magazine covers and wanted posters of key moments in RAF history that established the mainstream German media’s “Monopol der Geschichtsschreibung,”21 as well as the re-staging of iconic images of “authentic” events – to construct a history of the RAF that reinforces the

20 Eric Rentschler, “From New German Cinema to the Post-Wall Cinema of Consensus,” Cinema and Nation, eds Mette Hjort/Scott Mackenzie (London: Routledge, 2000) 260–77; here 284. 21 Volker Schlöndorff,Licht, Schatten und Bewegung: Mein Leben und meine Filme (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2008) 223. 196 Jennifer L. Creech

“existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself.”22 Edel’s use of film form – his attempt to reproduce history through the seamless combination of iconic images, rapid editing and dramatic music – refuse the viewer a complex approach to narrative and thus, to history, that the New German Cinema demanded. Instead, the viewer is left with a “Polit-Porno” wherein his/her recognition of iconic medial images of the RAF reinforces the history we have always already known: history as spectacle; in this case, history as “purely spectacular rebellion.”23 The Baader-Meinhof Complex constructs its spectacular history of the RAF by appealing to the audience not through an individual character, but rather through the authenticity of the iconographic images. The iconography of the female terrorist in Edel’s film supports this spectacular history, giving Michael Althen’s term “Polit-Porno” more than just generic tones. It is the embodiment of the female terrorist in the mise-en-scéne and as a narrative device – as jilted wife or fighting fuck toy – that domesticates her and refuses the viewer a complex history in favor of a spectacular one. The Baader-Meinhof Complex superficially incorporates Meinhof ’s and Ensslin’s intellectual contributions to leftist critique at the time, offering instead a representation of the female terrorist that is primarily embodied and melodramatic. The film’s narrative trajectory presents us with the “end of history” in its assertion of a recognizable history of the RAF, which creates the illusion of a “true” history strongly anchored in always already “knowable” images. The film’s use of femininity as a framing device – the opening sequence begins with Meinhof and ends with Brigitte Mohnhaupt, a second generation female terrorist, asserting her “knowledge” of the “true” RAF – affirms that spectacular history, which is simultaneously anchored in the viewer’s “knowledge” of the incommensurability of femininity and revolutionary agency.24

22 Debord, 24. On the use of iconic imagery in the historical revision of the RAF in Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex, see Carrie Collenberg, “Moving Pictures in the Cinematic Reception of the RAF,” Terror and Form (Berlin: Rombach, 2011) 151–69. 23 Debord, 59. 24 In the morning after the Stammheim deaths, Mohnhaupt rebuts the assertion of her colleagues that Baader, Ensslin and Raspe were murdered, arguing that, “They Gudrun is Not a Fighting Fuck Toy 197

During the active period of the RAF, female terrorism was primarily constructed in mainstream political discourse as an ideological conun- drum. In her analysis of two Spiegel articles on the RAF from 1977, Bettina Becker argues that female insurgency, described variously as “irrational” and “obscene” or “lewd,” is presented as deviant behavior by overtly linking women’s involvement in radical opposition movements to discourses of psychosis, sexuality and violence.25 Women’s noncompliance with traditional gender roles becomes a point of focus in the dominant discourse of political insurgency, wherein the female terrorists are represented as having shifted from normative, primarily domestic roles to politically and sexually deviant behavior.26 This is particularly interesting in the case of Meinhof, who is presented in the Spiegel articles first as a passive, well-adjusted wife, posing with her husband in front of a suburban home. Wearing a suit and gloves, and standing behind her husband, Meinhof is described as “a publisher’s wife,” and no mention of her own intellectual and professional pursuits is made. This image of domestic femininity is then starkly contrasted to the mugshots of four female terrorists, in which the women are “harshly lit” with stark shadows and “unruly hair” that “furrow their features,” giving them a “savage appearance.”27 This dichotomization of normative and deviant gendered behavior is overtly linked, Becker argues, to the dichotomization of legitimate violence as exercised by what is represented as a masculine state and illegitimate violence as represented by female insurgency. In the New German Cinema, films about women’s (often violent) activism present female terrorism as a reasonable and legitimate

determined their own situation until the very end. That means that they did this, and not that it was done to them […] Meinhof, too. You never knew them. Stop seeing them as they never were.” These are the final words spoken in the film, suggesting that the film itself offers us the chance to “see them as they were,” verifying and solidifying the spectacular history it offers the viewer. 25 Bettina Becker, “Woman, Violence, Nation: Representations of Female Insurgency in Fiction and Public Discourse in the 1970s and 1980s,” Women in German Yearbook 16 (2000): 207–20; here 207. 26 Becker, 208. 27 Becker, 210. 198 Jennifer L. Creech extension of both second-wave feminism and the leftist response to a failed Vergangenheitsbewältigung [coming to terms with the (fascist) past] in the West. Thus, they actively contributed to an oppositional public sphere wherein horrors of the recent German past could be considered in the context of German rearmament and the American imperialist project in Vietnam. Having experienced the war as a young girl and having been raised by her mother’s good friend – a professor of Marxist thought and the intellectual voice of the anti-nuclear movement – Meinhof became one of the many important dissident voices in this Gegenöffentlichkeit. She established herself as the co-editor of Konkret, as a leading voice of the extra- parliamentary opposition, as an activist working to improve conditions for women and girls living in state institutions, and as a public intellectual of the far left. Meinhof ’s decision to take the step from theory to praxis, “vom Protest zum Widerstand,” was the result of an attempt to merge her feminist and materialist concerns:

One cannot engage in anti-authoritarian politics and simultaneously beat one’s children at home. Conversely, one also cannot not beat one’s children at home without engaging in anti-authoritarian politics; that is, one cannot eradicate the relationships of oppression within the family without fighting against and eradicating the oppressive relationships that exist outside of the family […].28

And yet, the representation of Meinhof in The Baader-Meinhof Complex is strikingly similar to that of the Spiegel articles that Becker critiques. The opening sequence introduces Meinhof not as a public intellectual, but rather as a bourgeois mother vacationing on the island of Sylt. The opening shot – a medium long shot of Meinhof ’s twins frolicking on the beach – is followed by Meinhof ’s gentle insistence that they get out. While Meinhof dries them off, their father (her then husband, Klaus Reiner Röhl), jokes with them about contemporary politics. In the next shot, Röhl’s domestic play is interrupted by a passing blonde whose question,

28 Ulrike Meinhof qtd. in Alois Prinz, Lieber wütend als traurig: Die Lebensgeschichte der Meinhof Meinhof (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2003) 201. Gudrun is Not a Fighting Fuck Toy 199

“How’s the revolution going?” serves as the basis for our understanding of Meinhof for the rest of the film. The camera cuts to a close up of Meinhof ’s face during the exchange between Röhl and the blonde: her face seems pained, she then takes off her sunglasses and her eyes reveal distrust, as the camera cuts from her face to a point-of-view shot of the blonde walking away. The camera then cuts back to a close up of Meinhof ’s face and we see her eyes move from the blonde back up to Röhl, revealing suspicion of a potential affair. That suspicion is then validated just a few sequences later, when we see Meinhof fleeing the house with the twins, suitcase in hand. As she drives away, a melancholic orchestral theme plays over a flashback to the party, in which we see Meinhof walk into a room where Röhl is furtively fucking the blonde up against the window during a publishing party at the Meinhof-Röhl house. The camera then cuts back to a medium close-up of Meinhof within the car, looking over her shoulder, near tears, as Röhl runs out of the house imploring her to wait. The film has, by this point, already presented Meinhof as an intellectual in the diegetic space; we watch as she reads aloud her Open Letter to Farah Diba, the wife of the Shah of Iran, during the aforementioned party. However, our dominant image of Meinhof is now that of the jilted wife. Edel’s choice, both to arrange these events as simultaneous and to present Röhl’s affair in such a way, is telling. Röhl’s love affair was actually common knowledge by the summer of 1967. In fact, a party originally organized for Meinhof ’s birthday and the celebration of the Röhl’s new home in Hamburg in the fall of 1967 turned into an engagement party for Röhl and his new bride. Yet, Meinhof did not move with the children to Berlin until the spring of 1968. Thus, Edel’s condensation of these events into a more melodramatic form – the dramatic revelation of Meinhof walking in on them followed by her hasty departure accompanied by a melodramatic score – encourages us to read Meinhof ’s behavior from this point as directly related to her primary narrative role as mother and jilted wife. In fact, it is Meinhof ’s personal loss as an object of desire that functions as an organizing principle for understanding her terrorist development over the course of the narrative. More specifically, we come to see Meinhof ’s increased radicalization as the direct result of her gendered failure: no longer Röhl’s object of desire, Meinhof throws herself into her activism at the same time 200 Jennifer L. Creech that her image becomes increasingly masculinized (through clothing, body posture, lack of makeup, etc.). Similar to our initial image of Meinhof, we first see Ensslin in a domestic setting: smoking a cigarette, impatiently balancing her baby on her shoulder, and disregarding her infant’s cries while she watches, with growing frustration, a television interview with Meinhof about state violence and the shooting of Benno Ohnesorg. As the baby’s cries threaten to overwhelm the diegetic sound, including the interview, Ensslin hands the baby off to her mother and spends the next few minutes arguing with her father about American imperialism and the Near East conflict. As the screams of her child crescendo, Ensslin yells that her father, a pastor, should tell his congregation to fight, rather than pray, for a better world. As she storms out of the room, her father looks at the man on the couch (whom we must assume is the baby’s father), and says, “You two should get married soon.” This scene of domestic discord serves to situate Ensslin, like Meinhof, as the dissatisfied domestic female. The film thus begins its narrative of female terrorism with an overt assertion that these women are somehow incapable of fulfilling their “natural” gender roles. The next time we see Ensslin on screen, she eagerly greets Baader at the door of a RAF apartment, where she and two others are preparing homemade bombs to set fire to a Frankfurt department store. Jumping up from the table, she runs to the door with an ecstatic smile. Throwing open the door, she exclaims, “hello baby!” to which Baader responds, “hey kitty cat!” grabbing her around the waist and pulling her in for an erotically charged kiss on the mouth. The spectacle of the female terrorist is thus established in the film’s narrative (through continuity editing) by overtly linking women’s sexually and politically deviant behavior. Meinhof ’s and Ensslin’s noncompliance with traditional gender roles becomes a framing device for the film’s spectacular history of the RAF. Overt connections between the erotic value of femininity, what Laura Mulvey has termed woman’s “to-be-looked-at-ness,” and women’s role as terrorists are reiterated throughout the film. Ensslin’s presence in the film is erotically charged to the point of excess: each flourish of revolutionary rhetoric is accomplished with an erotic gaze directed toward Andreas Baader or other male dissidents. Whenever she is not imprisoned or on trial, Gudrun is Not a Fighting Fuck Toy 201 e.g. in the scenes wherein she embodies the terrorist in praxis, we regularly see her in various states of undress, often topless if not completely nude. The most prescient example is the scene in which she “receives” a young male recruit whilst in the bathtub (see Figure 7.1).

Figure 7.1 Ensslin reading Trotsky and debriefing a young male recruit. The Baader-Meinhof Complex, Dir. Uli Edel, Constantin Film Production, 2008.

In this scene, Ensslin catches up on her revolutionary theory, Leon Trotsky’s On Lenin, and provocatively smokes a cigarette while listening to the young man’s story of his recent escape from a juvenile detention facil- ity. She is consistently framed in this sequence with her breasts displayed prominently above the bathwater. In the center of the screen, positioned at the top third and bottom third of the frame’s vertical axis, her heavily made up eyes and the “eyes” of her nipples, respectively, directly invite our gaze, looking (back) at us. Our eyes, meanwhile, frantically move from top to bottom third and back again, hoping to take in as much of them both as possible before the camera cuts again to her young male interlocutor. In this scene, Ensslin’s embodies the icon of the female terrorist as sexpot. As a spectacle “cut to the measure of desire,” her naked body, seductive posturing, and devilish smile elicit recognition and understanding as the 202 Jennifer L. Creech iconic image of the female terrorist, the “truth” of women’s political, and therefore sexual, insurgency.29 Ensslin’s oversexualized terrorism serves interestingly as the foil in the film for Meinhof ’s mousy intellectualism. The film creates a clear contrast between the “frigid” intellectual and the “hot” revolutionary, particularly in the scene of Meinhof ’s first visit to Ensslin in jail. Positioned on opposite sides of a table, Meinhof appears slightly hunched, clutching her notebook and looking at Ensslin from behind her glasses. Ensslin, on the other hand, sits up straight smoking a cigarette, one arm resting on the table, the other resting on the back of her chair. While Meinhof ’s eyes shift back and forth between Ensslin and her notebook, Ensslin’s blue eyes emit a provocative, fearless stare. She asserts that, “If they shoot our people […] then we’re going to shoot back. That’s the logical consequence,” to which Meinhof replies that she can’t be serious. With the same look she gave the young male recruit, Ensslin declares, “All over the world, armed comrades are fighting. We must show solidarity […] sacrifices must be made. Or do you think that your theoretical masturbation will change anything?” In overtly alluding to Meinhof ’s “theoretical masturbation,” Ensslin makes explicit what has already been implied since the film’s opening sequence: Meinhof ’s primary identity is that of non-erotic object; her ersatz for this failure of femininity is her preoccupation with “theory,” which the viewer is led to interpret as a form of “impotence” in contrast to Ensslin’s own revolutionary “virility.” Although Meinhof ’s own writings exhibit an intellectual struggle with the tension between theory and praxis, Edel’s film dispenses with such complexity. Reducing Meinhof ’s influential intellectual work of over ten years to a handful of quotes, Edel successfully constructs Meinhof as a “wanna-be” revolutionary, whose fear of armed resistance stems not from her pacifist leanings and religious background, nor from her belief in the radical potential of rational discourse to incite social change, but rather

29 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality, eds John Caughie and Annette Kuhn (New York: Routledge, 1992) 22–34; here 32–3. Gudrun is Not a Fighting Fuck Toy 203 from what can be construed as a failed femininity. Edel’s film differs from the Spiegel discourse in its acceptance of female insurgency, but it maintains the primacy of gender normativity in its understanding of Meinhof ’s shift from theory to praxis. Asserting the primacy of the erotically feminine, Edel’s film suggests that the true female revolutionary relinquishes all ties to the domestic except her sexuality, more specifically, her function as object of desire for the male revolutionary. Thus, the film presents a spectacle of the female terrorist in the form of two competing icons: a passive/rejected mother and an active/desired (and desiring) whore. These spectacular images reinvigorate a conservative discourse of female insurgency that urges the viewer toward recognition and acceptance of what exists through “purely spectacular rebellion.”30 Unlike the New German Cinema’s iconoclastic attempt to destroy Papas Kino and “the hegemonic medial representation of the RAF [by creating] new images and narratives,” Edel’s regurgitation of medial iconography creates a recognizable spectacular history that is “verified” by the female terrorist.31 While the Spiegel discourse aligns femininity with psychosis, Edel’s film asserts the essence of female insurgency strictly within a patriarchal discourse of female objectification. In the character of Ensslin (as well as in the female members of the second generation, most obviously Mohnhaupt)

30 Debord, 59. 31 Collenberg, 153. Nora Alter’s essay on Images of the World and the Inscription of War (Dir. Harun Farocki, 1988) offers readers a brilliant analysis of how thefemme fatale is inherent to the discourse of fear surrounding the female terrorist as something “im/perceptible,” and is simultaneously resisted through the non-spectacular aesthetics of the New German Cinema. She examines the anxiety about female terrorism through the computer enhancement of female faces into male faces by police. This, she argues, makes violent female insurgency knowable by translating her femininity into masculinity: “At once female and hostile, the ‘inappropriate/d other’ seems to be particularly dangerous when it surfaces not where one expects it, but where one does not … It is almost as if the police, in addition to visualizing various possible disguises, morphs the suspected female ‘terrorist’s’ face into a male’s in order to better identify it as the enemy other.” See Nora Alter, “The Political Im/perceptible in the Essay Film: Farocki’s Images of the World and the Inscription of War,” New German Critique 68 (1996): 165–92; here 182. 204 Jennifer L. Creech this objectification of the female revolutionary resembles what Caroline Heldman has termed the “fighting fuck toy” (FFT). As Heldman argues, while the fighting fuck toy appears empowered, her presence in the text is primarily to serve as an object of pleasure for the heterosexual male viewer. This containment of female insurgency through the image of the female fuck toy is most clearly depicted in the sequence of the Jordanian training camp. After witnessing the female RAF members, grim faced and dressed in fatigues, wielding automatic machine guns, the camera cuts to the group lounging in the sun on a rooftop at the training camp (see Figure 7.2).

Figure 7.2 The Baader-Meinhof Complex, Dir. Uli Edel, Constantin Film Production, 2008.

While the men sit around in their shorts, almost all of the women lounge nude. Baader asserts that “sexual revolution and anti-imperialism go hand in hand,” or more pointedly, “shooting and fucking are the same thing.” Yet, this assertion is, in this instance, only partially true, if we assume that sexual revolution also involves a feminist engagement with the male gaze, with women’s sexual objectification by men, and with the predominantly patriarchal structure of the RAF in particular. The opening framing of the scene with a lens mask in the shape of binoculars is the first indication Gudrun is Not a Fighting Fuck Toy 205 that the women are on display for a male viewer. Yet, it is not simply the Jordanian terrorists who revel in the gaze, but also the male viewer in the audience as well as the various male viewers among the RAF group itself. Given that sexism played a dominant role within the RAF group – Baader was known for calling the women cunts – the scene does not complicate, but rather complies with the objectification of the female terrorists within their own group. While the film does, in many respects, leave many questions unan- swered, the question of female terrorism is, to a certain extent, given a biography, a history that is still tied to the reactionary discourse of the Spiegel discourse of the 1970s. Meinhof ’s radicalization – her choice to join the underground, to train with the PLO, to arrange for her daughters to be turned over to a Palestinian orphanage, to become an urban guerilla – and her eventual psychological breakdown in solitary confinement and finally as the target of the group’s “self-critique” is certainly presented as the result of the traumatic break from thought to action, from theory to praxis. Yet, as Edel himself describes, The Baader-Meinhof Complex resists a complex, nuanced history in favor of one that is spectacular: “There are so many images from this time that have imprinted themselves on the collective memory. Now, one sees the film … andsuddenly one sees a picture that one recognizes. Suddenly, one has the feeling that the film delivers the images between the images that one already knows. It fills what one already has in one’s head with content, with connections.”32 Thus,The Baader- Meinhof Complex “demands in principle […] passive acceptance, which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance;” it participates in the “existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself.”33 “What one already has in one’s head” certainly includes news reports from the era, iconic images of Vietnam, the traumatic assassinations of King and Kennedy, Russian tanks in Prague, and May ’68 in Paris. But it also includes a reactionary image of the female

32 Uli Edel qtd. in Christina Gerhard, “The Baader Meinhof Complex,” Film Quarterly 63.2 (2009): 60–1; here 61, my emphasis. 33 Debord, 12, 24. 206 Jennifer L. Creech terrorist, whose shift from intellectual critique to acts of violence against the state is masked by a domesticating ideology of gender and sexuality. Within that discursive framework, the female terrorist’s progression “vom Protest zum Widerstand” is contained and reified either as a form of failed femininity, as a sexually overdetermined object of male desire, or as the hysterical feminist who starts a “bitches revolution” and then suffers under the patriarchal thumb of the dictator she helped to empower. The images of Meinhof and Ensslin evoked in Edel’s film begin with domestic disappointment and end with domestication through psychosis: their suicides become the pathological answer to their failed femininity.

Only the Enemy Fights According to the Rules of the Spectacle

Bruce LaBruce’s The Raspberry Reich, however, can be considered a return to, or better yet, a “rebooting,” of New German Cinema goals to the extent that both content and form resist the viewer’s reception of history as spectacle. LaBruce uses camp as an aesthetic mode to position the spectator critically, enabling resistance to the spectacle of history and femininity by creating a tension between performativity and political engagement. In “Notes on Camp,” Susan Sontag describes camp as “a sensibility,” a “certain mode of aestheticism,” whose “essence […] is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.”34 She locates camp in an object or person as the moment in which we “understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.”35 LaBruce follows Sontag’s assessment while also fully engaging the main problem of her reading: “To emphasize style is to slight content, or

34 Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 1964: 1, May 15, 2014 . 35 Sontag, 10. Gudrun is Not a Fighting Fuck Toy 207 to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content. It goes without saying that the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized – or at least apolitical.”36 For LaBruce, camp is an inherently political aesthetic mode: “it is, or was, by its very nature political, subversive, even revolutionary.” He uses the preterite “was” because much of what currently passes as “camp” is, he argues, actually “anti-camp”:

Examples would include the exaggerated and stylized streetwalker/stripper style coopted by many contemporary pop music celebrities […] a performative femininity by females filtered through drag queens that has transmogrified […] [and is] characterized by hyper-referentiality, extreme hyperbole, a crudely obvious, unnuanced female sexuality […] which, unhappily, is post-feminist to the point of misogyny: a capitulation to the male gaze and classic tropes of objectification to be found only in the worst nightmares of Laura Mulvey […] Obviously it’s not the form itself that is reactionary: strippers, street-smart drag queens, female porn stars and hookers have often evinced a radically exaggerated appearance that transcends and deflects patriarchal co-optation. The problem is its utter and complete normalization and de-contextualization away from subversive or transgressive, countercultural impulses in the service of capitalist exploitation, utterly heteronormative in practice and corporate in tone.37

For LaBruce, this “anti-camp” is most visible in the spectacle of femininity that results from the assimilation of gay (queer) culture into the dominant order.38 The answer to this problem, LaBruce argues, is the re-radicalization of camp by “harness[ing] its aesthetic and political potentialities in order to make it once more a tool of subversion and revolution. Camp itself should almost be defined as a kind of madness, a rip in the fabric of reality that we need to reclaim in order to defeat the truly inauthentic, cynical and deeply reactionary camp – or anti-camp – tendencies of the new world order.”39 These tendencies, according to LaBruce, are inherently

36 Sontag, 2, my emphasis. 37 Bruce LaBruce, “Notes on Camp/Anti-Camp,” Nat. Brut. 3 (April 2013), May 15, 2014 . 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 208 Jennifer L. Creech heteronormative and capitalist, tendencies that are most obvious in what LaBruce calls “Conservative Gay Camp,” a

reactionary impulse to attribute sexually “deviant” behaviour […] to a negative consequence of corrupt and oppressive systems, as opposed to instances of rebellion and revolt and a healthy acting out against such regimes. In other words, such “deviance” wouldn’t be necessary if only the system was liberalized and reformed to reflect a healthy, normalized, and assimilated homosexuality, one that is indistinguishable from the heterosexual status quo save only for its preference for same sex partners – in a word, “homonormativity.”40

The Raspberry Reichuses camp as a mode of resisting the commodification and neutralization of the revolutionary impulse that infused the RAF movement in its moment of origin. LaBruce achieves this by camping the commodification of revolution, by performing revolution in its most excessive form as consumption, by staging revolution as “deviant” sexuality, and by re-imagining the female revolutionary as the prime subject of historical and narrative agency. The film’s camping strategy emphasizes the commodification and subsequent political castration of the revolutionary potential of the 1960s and 1970s. The film’smise-en-scéne is littered with innumerable commodities that transform the RAF into a lifestyle – t-shirts, posters, and photos with images of RAF members or of the RAF symbol – as well as other commodities that have a referential relationship to the RAF – automatic weapons, wigs, sunglasses/costumes, radical literature, newspaper clippings, a typewriter, piles of money, cameras and the filming of hostages. The characters – Gudrun (the RAF leader and sole woman in the film, named in honor of Ensslin), Andreas, Holger and Che – are all direct references to founding RAF members and to the commodified revolutionary par excel- lence, Che Guevara. The narrative trajectory also follows what we “always, already know” about the RAF: that they thumb their noses at bourgeois norms, most specifically sexual norms; that they are prolific revolutionary rhetoricians; that they take rich hostages, make demands of and negotiate

40 Ibid. Gudrun is Not a Fighting Fuck Toy 209 with state power; and that they fetishize their weapons.41 As such, much of the film’s “content” is “spectacular,” in that it relies on the viewers’ pre- existing knowledge of RAF history as commodity. However, the film’s formal techniques and the character performances resist any “passive” consumption of these commodified objects by denatural- izing our relationship to them and revealing their “excess” not as actual revolution, but as what Debord calls “purely spectacular revolution.” LaBruce achieves this through the porn image, itself, which is queer both in terms of sexuality and also in terms of its aesthetic. The staging of non-simulated homosexual sex itself is “camped”: through the privileging of text, both aural and written, over image (the recurring use of revolutionary slogans shouted out by Gudrun, the overlaying of the image with long revolutionary quotes); and through the singularity of femininity in the film (Gudrun is not only the ringleader, but also the sole theoretician and historian in the group; she demands that the men submit to homosexuality). LaBruce’s political resistance to Sontag is most overt in his emphasis on Herbert Marcuse throughout the film. Marcuse’s queering of Marxist theory to emphasize the libidinal economy and his deconstruction of Freud’s transhistorical articulation of the “reality principle” is LaBruce’s answer to the supposedly “apolitical” content of camp. Through this emphasis on a queer understanding of revolution and a privileging of libido – in Gudrun’s words, “Join the homosexual intifada!” – LaBruce reveals how the potentially radical politics of the RAF have been emptied from the innumerable objects that populate the film, and how the popular discourse

41 The confluence of femininity, revolutionary fetish and commodity fetish is made most manifest in the “gun shopping sequence” at the beginning of the film, in which Gudrun is introduced as the film’s main protagonist. Dressed in a little black dress reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Dir. Blake Edwards, 1961) with a scarf and sunglasses, Gudrun is presented as the supreme example of feminine consumer. Using wipes, zooms and a jazzy soundtrack, LaBruce presents Gudrun as a femme fatale, who smells a bouquet (in close up), eats a raspberry with erotic abandon (in close up), blows kisses in the direction of the camera (in close up), and window shops with her lover for handguns. She even has a “Marilyn Monroe” moment, wherein we see her skirt blowing up above her knees, followed by another close up of her pulling a handgun out of her clutch. 210 Jennifer L. Creech of revolution can be reinvigorated through an overt engagement with the fetish and with the staging of theory as praxis. A perfect example of LaBruce’s engagement with the fetish occurs seven minutes into the film, as the camera cuts to Gudrun (Ensslin) and Holger (Meins) in bed, fucking. The scene is introduced with the intertitle “Daydreams of a Revolutionary” in black capital letters on a red background, presented with rapid editing and accompanied by the sound of machine-gun fire, a visual and aural trope that recurs throughout the film. The camera then cuts to a close up of Gudrun’s panting face, demanding that Holger fuck her for the revolution. Next, the camera reveals a medium long shot of the bed, where we see Holger’s skinny legs and socked feet poking out of an oversized duvet in garish yellow. While the “action” is our first focal point, our eyes are immediately drawn to the wall that serves as a background for the pornographic act. This is a result of the absurdity of the pornographic act’s presentation (Holger’s legs and the duvet present themselves as the opposite of sexy; the duvet obscures our vision of the act itself ) and the more than 25 posters that cover the wall (see Figure 7.3).

Figure 7.3 “Fuck me, for the Revolution!” The Raspberry Reich, dir. Bruce LaBruce, Jürgen Brüning Filmproduktion, 2004. Gudrun is Not a Fighting Fuck Toy 211

The posters represent the diversity and radical political potential of the 1960s and 1970s: the anti-Vietnam movement, the anti-nuclear movement, the environmental movement, the anti-apartheid movement, the Black Panther movement, as well as socialist and Marxist critiques of anti- imperialism and capitalism assert their agency both in image and in text form. The camera then cuts to close up shot-reverse-shots of Gudrun and Holger as she complains about the counter-revolutionary nature of having sex in a bed – “The bedroom is the last stronghold of the bourgeoisie!” – and Holger’s (bourgeois) response, “Gudrun! You know I have a bad back!” She then demands that he “fuck [her] up against the wall!” As he proceeds to fall in line, an extra-diegetic trip-hop soundtrack begins to play and we watch as they perform a very camped version of porn sex, with Gudrun bouncing up and down against Holger’s cock, and Holger looking overwhelmed and somewhat distraught. The scene is intercut with medium shots of Che in the next room, standing in his briefs and a Che Guevara t-shirt against a blown-up head- shot of Che Guevara that covers the entire wall. Fondling himself and felating a handgun throughout the scene, Che is presented via film formal techniques that emphasize his spectacularity as fetish. The scene begins with a close up of his one hand masturbating while his other hand pushes the gun erotically in and out of his briefs. This is followed by a medium shot of him rubbing his nipples with the barrel of the gun, and multiple close ups of him licking and sucking the barrel of the gun. Finally, we see a medium shot of him in a black ski mask presenting an automatic shotgun to a mirror image of himself with rapid, overlapping editing choreographed to the music, with the sound of Gudrun’s panting breath laid over the soundtrack (see Figure 7.4).42 In these two scenes, both the RAF and pornography are constructed as fetishized commodities through the camping of the mise-en-scène, the performance of the actors, the use of rapid editing and the kitschy soundtrack. LaBruce presents two eroticized objects – the RAF and the pornographic

42 Overlapping editing expands the film’s story time by taking some of the action at the end of one shot and repeating it at the beginning of the next shot. 212 Jennifer L. Creech

Figure 7.4 “Che.” The Raspberry Reich, dir. Bruce LaBruce, Jürgen Brüning Filmproduktion, 2004. act – but refuses viewers the opportunity to become cathected to either. He undermines our relationship to the image and the narrative action by artificially eroticizing the revolutionary commodity, and by interrupting the supposedly erotic coitus with humorous revolutionary rhetoric. The mode of camp distances us from both fetishized objects – the pornographic act and the RAF – leaving us to contemplate instead the meaning that has been emptied out of these objects, but which is still visible as text/image on the walls. The text/image reminds the viewer of the radical potential, “the context of living,” that history as spectacle obscures through commodification. In doing so, LaBruce distances us from the intended objects of desire (spectacle), asking us instead to contemplate the surplus object – radical theory/praxis, an alternative public sphere – represented in the posters. By camping “what we always already know” about the RAF, the film distances the viewer from iconic representations (history as spectacle), “ripping” the “fabric of reality” to reveal the complex discourse of revolution that once existed as political potential before its commodification. LaBruce most overtly politicizes his camp by staging revolution as “deviant” sexuality, and by re-imagining the female revolutionary as the Gudrun is Not a Fighting Fuck Toy 213 prime subject of historical and narrative agency. LaBruce’s Gudrun is a contemporary example of what Carrie Collenberg has asserted as the New German Cinema’s “iconoclastic” approach to RAF history. Quoting W.J.T. Mitchell, Collenberg defines “iconoclasm” as “a creative destruction, in which the secondary image of defacement or annihilation is created at the same moment that the ‘target’ image is attacked.”43 While LaBruce’s Gudrun is hypersexualized – much more so than Edel’s Gudrun, whose textual meaning is contained by a heteronormative discourse of femininity – her “deviant” sexuality resists co-optation and instead represents “revolt against [repressive, heteronormative, capitalist] regimes.”44 Gudrun fulfills the iconic image of leftist terrorism by ruling her cell with an iron fist, yet she is iconoclastic in that her authoritarian control is both queer and presented as the logical enactment of the radical theory she espouses. In asserting that the all-male members of her revolutionary cell become homosexuals, she overtly references Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse. Outlining Marcuse’s notion of “surplus repression,” Gudrun explains to Che and Holger that revolution can only be achieved by “liberating ourselves from dominant sexual practices,” from which it necessarily follows that “there will be no revolution without sexual revolution […] and there will be no sexual revolution without homosexual revolution.” LaBruce then positions Gudrun as the holder of the gaze, using a split screen to present the iconic image of Gudrun (left) with his own iconoclastic Gudrun (right), between which Che and Holger enact the homosexual intifada (Figure 7.5). LaBruce’s use of text as resistance to the spectacularity of the image invokes camp to undermine our identificatory relationship to the image and narrative action, and simultaneously forces us to engage with extensive textual references to leftist theory that also obscure our vision of the sexual act. By forcing the viewer to spend much of the filmreading and listening to these theoretical references, LaBruce refuses the viewer a spectacular history of the RAF and positions us to reflect critically on the complexity of leftist discourse and its potential to resist what Debord has termed

43 Collenberg, 153. 44 LaBruce. 214 Jennifer L. Creech

Figure 7.5 “The revolution is my boyfriend!”The Raspberry Reich, dir. Bruce LaBruce, Jürgen Brüning Filmproduktion, 2004.

“universal history.” Further, he directly resists Sontag’s insistence that camp empties its content of all political potential through a self-reflexive attention to film form. LaBruce uses intertitles and superimposes text on the screen not simply to thwart our reception of spectacular (pornographic) acts. Indeed, for much of the film, the text projected onto the screen overdeter- mines our understanding of the images. Following the split screen of Che and Holger enacting the homosexual intifada, the intertitle, “comrades care little for forms” introduces one such interlude, wherein Gudrun’s voice over lectures on the nature of form and content, supported by the written text scrolling over an image of her in blonde wig with sunglasses:

Only the enemy wants to fight on the terrain of roles, according to the rules of the spectacle. Remember: all roles alienate equally, but some are less despicable than others. The range of stereotyped behavior includes forms which barely conceal lived experience and its alienated demands. Temporary alliances are permissible with certain revolutionary images, to the extent that a glimmer of radicalism shines through the ideological screen, which they presuppose. Gudrun is Not a Fighting Fuck Toy 215

In this example, we see LaBruce’s combination of camp and overt political critique. Camp is present both in Gudrun’s excessively dramatic intonation; in the satirical acknowledgement that “all roles alienate equally, but some are more despicable than others,” poking fun at the authoritarianism that the RAF often tended toward; and in the excessive seriousness of her posturing. Yet, the camping of image and text does not negate the political critique in Gudrun’s assertion of the necessity to construct “temporary alliances with certain revolutionary images” that allow the possibility for a “glimmer of radicalism” to shine through the spectacle. Spectacle is the discourse of late capital, of empire. While we cannot eradicate the spectacle, we can work within it to create resistances. Camping the spectacular becomes a vehicle to reveal “barely conceal[ed] lived experience and its alienated forms,” to “rip […] the fabric of reality.”45 Gudrun, one could argue, is the singular “glimmer of radicalism” that shines through the text: she is the only woman, the only theoretician, and the only historical materialist within the diegesis. Over the course of the film, she lectures on moments in revolutionary history, including: the RAF’s abduction of Schleyer and the plane hijacking at Mogadishu; the nature of Meinhof, Baader, Ensslin and Raspe’s deaths at Stammheim; the Symbionese Liberation Army’s attempts at sexual liberation; the political coup d’etat of Iranaian Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh by the CIA, which restored the authoritarian Shah to power; and American coups in Guatemala, Indonesia, Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Afganistan and Colombia that crushed a growing revolutionary movement and instituted, in most cases, authoritarian governments aligned with American imperialism. LaBruce thus positions the female revolutionary as the bearer of historical knowledge and revolutionary potential. Although the revolution fails within the diegesis, Gudrun persists in her non-spectacular relationship to history. Walking down a busy street, past shop windows advertising “extreme savings!” Gudrun pushes her daughter, Ulrike, in a carriage and recounts the history of coalitions in West Germany and in post-unification Germany as historical moments wherein

45 LaBruce. 216 Jennifer L. Creech

“the ultimate failure of Western democracy” is proven: in forming grand coalitions, she argues, the left-wing parties give up their most revolutionary goals and 95% of the parliament is contained within the coalition, thus securing the status quo of a “supposedly” democratic system, which “still allows 95% of the wealth to remain in the hands of 10% of the country’s population!” As Holger looks mindlessly at the spectacle of shop windows, Gudrun continues to resist irreversible time as the “time of things,” offering instead a persistent dialectical engagement with spectacular history.

Conclusion

The Baader-Meinhof Complex constructs the female terrorist within a heteronormative discourse that presents what we always-already know about the RAF: female sexuality and leftist insurgency are two sides of the same “deviant” coin. Edel’s film uses femininity reified as “failed object of desire” and “fighting fuck toy” to support its spectacular history of the RAF. The Raspberry Reich, on the other hand, formally resists spectacle through the aesthetic mode of camp, constructing for the viewer a necessary critical distance that has the potential to become “protest against an unbearable reality.”46

46 Kluge, 209. Deborah Ascher Barnstone

Spectacular Architecture: Transparency in Postwar West German Parliaments

The spectacle cannot be understood as an abuse of the world of vision, as a product of the techniques of mass dissemination of images. It is, rather, a Weltanschauung, which has become actual, materially translated. It is a world vision which has become objectified. — Guy Debord1

No modern state has embraced the ethos of what Guy Debord famously dubbed the Society of the Spectacle as enthusiastically or completely as West Germany after the Second World War, where political spectacle presented in transparent, glass architecture became the ideal. Transparent architecture did two things: it made the workings of government visible while becoming a symbol of political spectacle. Or, to use Debord’s formulation, transparent architecture became the image of spectacle. In buildings designed and constructed for the federal government, political theater was architecturally revealed, framed and celebrated by combining material with spatial transparency. Architects coupled transparent exterior and interior walls with open spaces across the plan and sectional dimensions, thereby making buildings that permit visual access to political events from outside the building and through its adjacent spaces. Equally important, anything viewed through a transparent surface such as glass, appears to be projected onto the surface. Thus a space seen through glass flattens as if it is a two-dimensional image rather than three-dimensional location.

1 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 1983) 5. 218 Deborah Ascher Barnstone

Such images are valued because people believe that what they see they can control. Transparent government architecture therefore creates the illusion of political participation for the people although in truth, what is seen are visual mediations projected onto glass walls. Still, for West Germans who remembered the National Socialist government as an opaque, exclusionary, and elitist form of government, being able to view the political process seemed a way of ensuring public participation and scrutiny.2 Ironically, seeing is not the same as participating and by placing so much emphasis on vision West Germany created a spectacular form of government in which participation may be more illusion than fact. The English word, spectacle, has its roots in the Latin word spectare, “to look, to regard.” According to the dictionary, spectacle means, “anything presented to the sight or view, especially something of a striking or impressive kind,” which ties the noun to the adjective, spectacular, with its connotations of daring, excitement, and thrill. Thus, there are at least two key dimensions to spectacular political architecture: it is bound to modes of seeing and it is designed to entertain. Both of these aspects are evident in the three West German federal parliament projects: the first Bundeshaus completed by Hans Schwippert in 1949, Günter Behnisch’s design for the second Bundeshaus completed in 1992, and Lord Norman Foster’s renovation of the Reichstag completed in 1999. In his famous short book Society of the Spectacle from 1967 Guy Debord outlined what he believed were the characteristics of contemporary society, which he saw as constituted by, and dependent on, various forms of spectacle. For Debord, the spectacle was, “a social relation among people, mediated by images.”3 Thus images are important because they create the basis for society or, in Debord’s words, they form a “Weltanschaaung which has become actual, materially translated.”4 Stated otherwise, the spectacle is the way the world is organized and operates. Already in 1988 Debord

2 For a history of transparency in parliaments in West Germany see Deborah Ascher Barnstone, The Transparent State: Architecture and Politics in Postwar Germany (London: Routledge, 2005). 3 Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 3. 4 Op cit, 5. Spectacular Architecture 219 recognized that in the intervening 21 years spectacle had not receded from importance but rather extended its extent and reach.5 Indeed, it has continued to advance apace. Improvements in radio and television, the invention of the internet, advent of 24-hour news coverage, and rise of social media especially platforms like Facebook and Twitter, have made assuming the position of spectator easier and easier as the ways in which to observe human activity broaden. At the same time technological advances have improved the ability and speed with which people can capture and disseminate images although, in Debord’s opinion, such devices are not the true essence of the spectacle only outward manifestations of an ethos that privileges appearances. In such a world, vision is key since it is through sight that the image is perceived. Debord is by no means alone in his observation of the importance of vision to modernity: Foucault wrote about the pervasiveness of surveillance, Christian Metz posited a scopic regime of the modern, while cultural critics like Martin Jay and Jonathan Crary, have commented extensively on the importance of vision to modern art and society. Vision is tied to scientific inventions like the telescope and microscope that enhanced human vision and to the photographic and movie cameras that changed how reality was represented. Vision and the visual are also deeply embedded in Western language and its structures making the visual central to how the world is perceived and experienced. English is rife with visual metaphors tied to comprehending and controlling. For example, “I see” is a metaphor for “I understand,” “in my view” means “in my opinion,” “it looks like” denotes “it appears to be,” “in my sights” connotes “paying attention to.” Foucault’s analysis of the panopticon relies on the deeply ingrained belief in the relationship between seeing and controlling that lies at the root of metaphors like “in my sights.”6 The panopticon prison design placed the guards at the center of a radiating plan from which they could see into every cell. The arrangement of the guardroom was such, however, that guards

5 Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Malcom Imrie (New York: Verso, 1988). 6 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Trans. Alan Sheridan (NY: Vintage, 1995). 220 Deborah Ascher Barnstone could see out but prisoners could not see in so prisoners never knew for sure whether or not a guard was present. Because they were conditioned to behave when observed, the notion that someone might be watching was enough to guarantee good behaviour. Of course, the panopticon only functions when its occupants care about being observed. Still Foucault realized the ways in which surveillance operates in contemporary society at a time when mechanical and technological means of surveillance were on the rise. He could not, perhaps, have anticipated some contemporary forms of surveillance like the police security cameras recently installed in metropolitan centers around the world or traffic cameras triggered when a speeding car approaches. In architectural terms, transparent glass and open plan structures embody surveillance techniques by making as much space visible as possible. Belief in transparent architecture might be as much tied to the notion that, “seeing is believing,” however, as to the desire for control. As Anthony Vidler astutely points out, Debord’s criticism of architecture was not that it had become the epitome of the spectacle but that by participating in the society of the spectacle architecture had become banal.7 Because “capitalist production has unified space,” modern architecture and urbanism adopted cold, impersonal, totalizing schemes and bland aesthetics. Equally dangerous to architecture is the possibility that participating in the aesthetics of spectacle will cause architecture to become little more than consumer imagery a la Venturi and Scott Brown or mass media bravura as in Gehry’s Bilbao Museum. However in West Germany, and in unified Germany afterwards, parliamentary architectural design embraced spectacle without adopting commercialized aesthetics. On the contrary, the three parliamentary projects use spectacle to generate a sophisticated architecture where material and image converge in the service of larger social and political goals.8 The German projects support Terry Smith’s argument that Debord oversimplified his critique of spectacular culture;

7 Anthony Vidler, “Introduction,” Architecture between Spectacle and Use, ed. Anthony Vidler (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), x. 8 See Terry Smith, “Spectacle Architecture Before and After the Aftermath: Situating the Sydney Experience,” Architecture between Spectacle and Use, 3–23. Spectacular Architecture 221 transparency in Germany is a desirable image that is materialized with the see-through material, glass, and with open spatial planning.9 It combines social and political aspirations with an image making it a particularly meaningful symbol. Although intended as a Marxist critique of capitalist society and culture, Debord’s analysis is also an astute assessment of certain postwar conditions common to the West especially what he later termed, “the new techniques of government which accompanied this reign [of spectacle].”10 The “new techniques of government” in West Germany include the insti- tutionalization of openness and accessibility. In fact, the Basic Law, the federal constitution authored in 1948 and 1949, included certain guaran- tees of openness and public access that in their nature demanded a form of spectacular architecture. Article 42, Paragraph 1 mandates open (offen) public access to the workings of government.11 The obligation to make the workings of government physically accessible to the greater German public was one key aspect designed to guarantee an open society in which free speech, freedom of conscience, free press, tolerance and pluralism were all protected. Although the intention was to use openness in order to increase participation, access actually can encourage passive observation rather than active engagement. In any event, legislating for open government was a precursor to establishing a society of spectacle; the next necessary condition was to put in place the means to gain access. There are several categories of means: physical engagement, aural and visual access. Access is achieved through a series of measures too numerous to list in full but that include parliamentary sessions published in books for the public but also broadcast over radio, television, and the internet; a government maintained website which provides access to laws, minutes of meetings, and more; and government archives that are open to anyone. The German government also provides other services that open it to the public eye such as an overwhelming number of government publications, archival

9 Op cit. 10 Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, 2. 11 Ibid. 222 Deborah Ascher Barnstone materials and photographs free upon request. In other words, the German government provides endless means for observing its work. These means, in turn, transform the usual business of government into public spectacle because at the moment that an operation, no matter how insignificant, is performed under public scrutiny, it becomes spectacular. A famous photograph from the first day of parliament on September 7, 1949, shows people sitting and standing on bleachers outside the open windows of the new West German Bundeshaus in Bonn (see Figure 8.1). The men and women appear to be transfixed by what they are witnessing; two men were so eager to see and hear more clearly that they have clambered into the window frame where they stand partly inside and partly out. An iconic image of parliamentary proceedings as public spectacle, the photograph also advertised one of the hopes for the new West German government architecture: to be open and accessible to anyone and everyone. In other words,

Figure 8.1 Spectators watching the first parliamentary session in Bonn, September 7, 1949. Bundesbildstelle, Berlin. Spectacular Architecture 223 the photograph projected both the image of architecture as spectacle and the social and political goals on which such aesthetics was grounded. The building architect, Hans Schwippert, expressly designed the new plenary chamber to meet the demands for public spectacle. Schwippert used several different architectural means with which to capture views of the spectacle: plan and section organization, construction details, and material selection. Schwippert articulated his approach in a series of essays written for the German architecture magazine, Bauwelt and in a manifesto composed in 1951 called Glück und Glas [Happiness and Glass].12 Essentially Schwippert argued that transparent glass architecture was the most appropriate form for the new West German parliament because it gave physical and material form to West German political aspirations.13 By making architecture open to the public gaze, Schwippert believed, he was ensuring a better political process than the one that had existed between 1933 and 1945. Spectacle was desirable first and foremost because it seemed to put the political process out in the open where the public had a reasonable expectation of being informed. West Germans cited such openness as an antidote to the way government operated under the National Socialists. Hannes Meyer’s description of his design for the League of Nations project of several years before seems particularly prescient: “politics is a dark affair. Let’s see that we shed some light upon it.”14 Exposing the political process to light, making it visible, revealing it as a spectacle, was a recurring theme. “We love the other side […] light not darkness […].”15 wrote Schwippert of transparent architecture. And again, “We love the other side – openness, sensitivity, transparency, want light not darkness, want

12 For a translation see Barnstone, The Transparent State, 240–2. 13 Hans Schwippert, “Das Bonner Bundeshaus,” Neue Bauwelt, 1951, Heft 17. 14 Quoted in Heinrich Wefing. Parlementsarchitektur: Zur Selbsdarstellung der Demokratie in ihren Bauwerken. Eine Untersuchung am Beispiel des Bonner Bundestages. Berlin: C+Duncker & Humboldt, 1995, pp. 114–15. 15 Manifesto, from the Schwippert Archive, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremburg. 224 Deborah Ascher Barnstone freedom not frightened caution!”16 If the reference to National Socialism is subtle in these remarks, it is not in others. In Glück und Glas Schwippert wrote, “But what relates especially to the lightness that large glass panels and see-through walls give us, and what we fear and from what we are warned: only a sort of living creature cannot suffer these: the vermin.”17 The “vermin” Schwippert refers to are the corrupt politicians past and present. The religious overtones are obvious; good creatures are attracted to the light while evil ones are terrified of it. Equally, the good do not fear being observed while the evil wish to hide their actions. Schwippert’s contemporaries understood his intentions and praised the new parliament for being, “A building without deceptions or allegory […].”18 In other words, the Bundeshaus revealed itself and was open to scrutiny. Schwippert was direct about his goals for the project. “I wanted the German nation to observe parliamentary work,” he wrote in Neue Bauwelt.19 Schwippert actually wanted to promote more than visual access for the public, he hoped to use the parliament’s architecture to encourage dialog between the public and their representatives. He called the idea, the “House of Conversation,” a phrase Behnisch also used fifty years later.20 In his view, he had created a “house of openness, an architecture of encounters and discussions.”21 In other words, Schwippert wanted to stimulate meaningful contact rather than simply provide visual access. Perhaps he recognized the limitations of spectacle, or perhaps he had other motivations, he does not explain his intentions fully. He did include several features into the final design that promoted direct contact between public and representatives:

16 Hans Schwippert. “Glück und Glas,” Schwippert Archive, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremburg. 17 Op cit, 3. 18 “Das Bundeshaus in Bonn,” Westdeutsche Zeitung, 2 Jahrgang, Nr. 109, September 7, 1949, p. 5. 19 Hans Schwippert, “Das Bonner Bundeshaus,” Neue Bauwelt, 1951, Heft 17, 65. 20 “Bonn erlebte seinen grossen Tag,” Die Welt, Nr. 136, Sept. 8, 1949, p. 3. 21 Schwippert, Hans. “Das Bonner Bundeshaus,” Neue Bauwelt, 1951, Heft 17. Spectacular Architecture 225 large, floor-to-ceiling operable windows on either side of the plenary chamber that made observing from the courtyard outside the chamber possible; bleachers for public seating outside in the courtyard; and open, unob- structed public tribunes inside the plenary chamber. Schwippert’s project was an addition to and renovation of the existing 1930 Pedagogical Academy in Bonn by Martin Witte. Witte’s unassuming building was a simple, orthogonal composition of white stucco, rectilinear volumes typical of the Neues Bauen. Schwippert was commissioned to design a plenary chamber and renovate the existing structure to better suit the needs of the parliament. The plenary chamber was naturally the most important piece of the project. The plenary chamber was initially conceived as a perfect circle so as to render all the members of parliament and government equal and put them equidistant from one another to promote better dialog. The circular arrangement would also have made each Member of Parliament clearly visible to the others no matter where they were sitting. An early sketch shows the seating arrangement surrounded by what appear to be floor-to-ceiling glass walls. If executed, the parliament would have sat in a glass box, exposed to view on all four sides. In other studies of possible plan forms for the seating Schwippert drew places for public tribunes. Although not arranged in the round because they are placed in corners or against the enclosing walls, the seats are dispersed on all sides of the chamber to give the sense that the public could be everywhere. In the constructed version, there are only two transparent glass walls situated on either side of the chamber (see Figure 8.2). Schwippert had bleacher seating placed just outside the glass walls to augment the number of seats available to the public since there was limited public seating inside the chamber. The bleachers were used on opening day then apparently abandoned because of security concerns although interior visitor’s galleries that have no barrier between them and the chamber below continued to be used for decades. The galleries were more conventional except that they are only separated from the Members of Parliament spatially; there is no physical barrier between the galleries and the floor below. In theory, the public viewers could participate in the parliamentary session. In practice, of course, they were not permitted to comment only to observe. 226 Deborah Ascher Barnstone

Figure 8.2 Inside the Schwippert plenary chamber looking through one of the large glass walls to the courtyard. Schwippert Archiv, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg.

Schwippert hoped that, “this beginning has a light-filled house and a simple one, a contemporary house, and one that is open to the world.”22 In other words, he intended to create a place for political spectacle not only for West Germans but also for the world. In fact, the tribunes were designed to accommodate West German citizens and members of the media. The Picture Post, the official paper of the British military in Germany, described the Bundeshaus as, “the outward and visible token of a fresh start […] the visitor’s first impression is reassuring. Here, he feels, is a complete break with Nazi and traditional German architecture, a total rupture of the heavy brigade tradition.”23 The caption sits below a photograph of the plenary

22 Ibid. 23 Birch, Lionel. “Where do they go from Bonn?” The Picture Post, January 14, 1950, 12–41. Spectacular Architecture 227 chamber, looking simultaneously at the chancellor’s podium and out the transparent glass windows to the inner courtyard where the bleachers stood in 1949. ThePicture Post acknowledges the success of Schwippert’s symbolism with the photographs it chooses to publish but also with the captions underneath those photographs. The caption underneath another photograph featuring the transparent walls at the new Bundeshaus is equally telling, “What the men Without see of the men Within.” In this instance, the photograph is taken from the courtyard looking into the plenary chamber. On the viewer’s left is the Rhine River sparkling in the twilight; to the right is the illuminated plenary chamber, MPs visibly in attendance. The composition and lighting recall Romantic paintings from the nineteenth century with their dramatic contrasts between light and dark and views of the German landscape. The captions highlight the spectacular nature of Schwippert’s architecture and suggest that contemporaries fully understood this quality of the new parliament.24 The captions also point to the importance vision and seeing had to West Germans even if, as the journalist Fenno Jacobs acknowledges, there were deep-seated problems with the political structure. Jacobs also sounds wary, even sarcastic, about the building and its aspirations. “Behind you, the expellee camps and the rubbed-out cities; in front of you, the green lawns and the white walls of the Shangri-La Parliament House, Behind you, the heaviest agenda of the century; the great, sprawling agglomeration of economic, spiritual, and power problems-to-be-solved, that goes by the name of Germany. In front of you, the improvised political instrument called Bonn […].”25 It is unclear what aspect of the new parliament Jacobs found objectionable; it might be the heady optimism expressed by Schwippert or simply the contrast between the pristine aesthetics of Bonn and the realities of much of Germany in 1949. However cynical Jacobs may have been about the new Bundeshaus and its objectives, by the early 1960s other West Germans adopted and embellished Schwippert’s ideas. Perhaps most important was the famous

24 Op Cit, 15. 25 Op Cit, 13. 228 Deborah Ascher Barnstone jurist and MP Adolf Arndt who promoted the notion that state architecture should in some way communicate the traits of German democracy and reflect the constitutional structure of the state. Arndt delivered a famous speech, Demokratie als Bauherr (Democracy as Building Client), that was then published in Neue Bauwelt. But he also wrote other articles treating the question of state architecture aesthetics and made both public and parliamentary speeches on the subject. His central thesis was that the question was not an architectural or aesthetic one at all but a political one.26 He argued that, the parliament building should express “that it is for the totality of the country […] through its completion and in its expression, the building must express something about the way of democracy.”27 He was equally critical of Paul Wallot’s Reichstag in Berlin and Schwippert’s Bundeshaus for failing to communicate their function as House of Parliament. In other words, as Jacob Schiffer wrote in 1971, parliamentary architecture should “make the res publica manifest;” the architecture should somehow appear to be of and for the people. Arndt was convinced that see-through buildings were the proper solution. He wrote, “Openness demands a transparency, a see- through quality for parliamentary events.”28 In other words, parliamentary architecture must be transparent to the public view so that the citizens can watch the spectacle of government at work. Almost exactly 50 years after the Schwippert addition was completed, the renovated Bundeshaus opened in Bonn. Designed by Günter Behnisch and his associates, it replaced the Schwippert plenary hall with a new, modern structure whose aesthetic and ideological goals, however, were almost identical to its predecessor although the new building was far more dramatic and extreme in its realization (see Figure 8.3). Behnisch wrote about the task at hand, “Great works clearly belong to great power […]

26 Adolf Arndt, “Das zeitgerechte Parlamentsgebäude,” Neue Bauwelt, 1964, Heft 9, 247, Adolf Arndt, “Das Zeitgerechte Parlamentsgebäude,” Sonderdruck im Auftrage der Interparlamentarischen Arbeitsgemeinschaft (Bonn: June 1962), and Adolf Arndt, “Bauen fuer die Demokratie,” in Architektur und Demokratie. Ingeborg Flagge and Wolfgang Jean Stock (eds). Stuttgart: Gerd Hatje, 1992 and 1996, 52–65. 27 Arndt, Zeitgerechte Parlamentsgebäude, 4. 28 Op cit. Spectacular Architecture 229

Figure 8.3 The ntrye facade of the Behnisch Bundeshaus in Bonn. Behnisch & Partner. Photographer: Christian Kandzia. but such great architecture does not belong in our times or to our political order and not to us […].”29 His aspirations to design an unassuming rather than a monumental building derived from Behnisch’s extreme discomfort with power. “Different groups in society should participate in power. Power should be controlled […].”30 Behnisch and his collaborators appear to have embraced the complex demands attached to designing the new Bundeshaus; among Behnisch’s archival material are pages of documents related to the question of what aesthetic was appropriate for the project. Even more revealing, however, is the series of key excerpts the practice

29 Günter Behnisch, “Bauen in der Demokratie,” in Ingeborg Flagge and Wolfgang Jean Stock ed. Architektur und Demokratie (Stuttgart: Hatje, 1992) 75. 30 Op cit. 230 Deborah Ascher Barnstone assembled to explain the second phase in the design process.31 Writers cited include Adolf Arndt, Alexis de Toqueville, and Ingeborg Flagge, alongside pieces from the various competition briefs. From the excerpts it is possible to extrapolate Behnisch’s main concerns: how to represent democracy through architecture generally and how to depict West German democracy more specifically. Certain design values emerge as well, transparency, connection to the surrounding landscape and Rhine River, sensitivity to the topography, and an interest in ecologically sound planning. The mandates for the design evolved over the nearly 20-year long planning period. Adolf Arndt prescribed physical and spatial transparency to guarantee an open spectacle as a demand of public building already in 1960. By 1972, his ideas seem to have become mainstream. The 1972 brief for the competition to design a new parliament called for a building that would make, “the Bundestag and Bundesrat as central organs of our constitution visible and the principle of openness established in our Basic Law tangible.”32 Beyond the brief, Member of Parliament Peter Conradi articulated a series of goals for the new building, which included access that was controlled, not free and open to everyone and anyone. Transparency according to Conradi’s model can be understood as a goal for the media so that parliamentary meetings can be publicly broadcast; transparency does not mean that every German citizen can physically enter the parliament at will.33 Spectacle here was broadened to include witnessing the government at work live, in person, at the Bundeshaus as well as watching the proceedings on television live or pre-recorded. At the information session for the competition, one of the questions asked was whether transparency should make the buildings see-through and to what degree.34

31 Entwurf für die Parlamentsbauten Bonn,” Architekten Behnisch & Partner, Archiv Günter Behnisch, SAAI, Karlsruhe. 32 “Entwurf für die Parlamentsbauten Bonn,” Architekten Behnisch & Partner, Archiv Günter Behnisch, SAAI, Karlsruhe. 33 “Betrifft: Wettberwerb Bonn, Stichwort der Besprechung am 5. März 1973 im Stuttgarter Büro,” Architekten Behnisch & Partner, Archiv Günter Behnisch, SAAI, Karlsruhe. 34 Op cit. Spectacular Architecture 231

The government respondent refused to prescribe any aesthetic solution, however. TheBundestag and Bundesrat requested “contemporary design” for the building without specifying what, exactly, was meant preferring to leave the door open for artistic interpretation. Perhaps more revealing, however, were a series of discussions about the “self representation” of the state conducted by the Bundesministerium des Innern in 1971 and 1972. The sessions explicitly grappled with the question of architectural expression and symbolism. Several key points established the core principles with which Behnisch and Partner would work: self representation means that state architecture should express the basic values of the state and parliamentary architecture should be aesthetically distinct from other building types.35 Among the characteristics called out for the project were “political openness, pluralistic opinions, discussion, and transparency.” However, the competition brief keeps the exact aesthetic translation of these characteristics open. The importance of citizen participation in democracy is emphasized in the text, as is the possibility that the government quarter and its structures could be physically accessible to the public.36 But the document cites Arndt when it concludes that openness and transparency do not necessarily mean physical access for the broader public but rather appropriate access to government. By “appropriate” Arndt meant that the government had to institutionalize information networks and “possibilities for mass media, press, radio and television” to cover government activities as well as guarantee the publication and dissemination of records, meeting minutes, legislation, and so on. In this formulation, the materials documenting government provide the spectacle. In addition to the public discussions described above, Ingeborg Flagge wrote a brief on self-representation for the 1972 competition. In it, she grappled with the question of what West German identity was and how to represent such an identity in state architecture. Like the competition

35 “Beitrag zum Thema Selbstdarstellung,” April 30, 1971, Selbstdarstellung des demokratischen Staates in der baulichen Gestaltung der Bundeshaupstadt, Architekten Behnisch & Partner, Archiv Günter Behnisch, SAAI, Karlsruhe, 2–4. 36 . Op cit, 4 232 Deborah Ascher Barnstone description, she points to “the essentials of democracy” as key elements for any Bundeshaus design and writes, “self-representation here will largely refer to the embodiment of the democratic process […].”37 More specifically, she underscores the importance of “transparency and openness by decision- making.”38 Thus, Flagge emphasizes transparency as a key aesthetic condition of state architecture in West Germany because it symbolizes public access and participation and “man needs myths, images, and symbols.”39 Finally, “In contrast to dictatorship, in a democracy man is not an object but a subject of public power, and this is revealed through the difference in participation.”40 Public power is both guaranteed and safeguarded through mechanisms of observation and control for which transparency is a watch- word. Flagge even hopes the new parliament will be “spectacular” by which she means visually stimulating, unique and open to visual penetration.41 The project Behnisch and Partner eventually constructed was not the same as the design they submitted in 1972. The competition jury reached a stalemate and could not decide on a clear winner after the first round of submissions so they awarded first prizes to four designs. Behnisch and Partner eventually edged out the other architects and, in 1992, the new Bundeshaus opened. Behnisch and Partner replaced the Schwippert plenary chamber with a new building, added an office structure just to the side, a small guard station near the Rheinaue, and landscaped areas all around. The design embraces the notions of both spectacular and transparent architecture in a dramatic way in its built form but also in its representations. The orthographic drawings Behnisch and Partner use to publicize the project are minimal in the extreme; they do not conform to usual drawing conventions. The outer walls are drawn with one line only and there is no differentiation of line weight. The drawings therefore make the buildings seem transparent and without the usual architectural substance; they

37 Ingeborg Flagge, “Zum Thema Selbstdarstellung,” December 1972, Archiv Günter Behnisch, SAAI, Karlsruhe, 1. 38 Flagge, “Zum Thema Selbstdarstellung,” 2–4. 39 Op cit, 3. 40 . Op cit, 2 41 . Op cit, 4 Spectacular Architecture 233 are dematerialized on the page. The boundary between building interior and adjacent landscape is as faint as possible to obscure normal inside/ outside separations. The sections are similar. Floor plates and roofs seem to float with no clear support or edge between adjacent interior spaces or between inside and outside. The building design therefore is transparent in the extreme. Surviving conceptual sketches reinforce the importance accorded to transparency of all kinds. In one drawing entitled, “Blick in die Halle des Präsidialbereiches” (View into the Hall of the Presidential Area) the spatial development is layered and complex with multiple floors and spaces simultaneously visible (see Figure 8.4). The sketch is taken from one side of the plenary chamber but shows the Member’s seats on the interior of the chamber and trees in the landscape beyond. Other sketches, such as “Blick von Besucherebene” [View from the Visitor’s Level], emphasize the sectional transparency the architects were striving for. This drawing is taken from the edge of a balcony overlooking the main lobby. Both levels of the lobby are visible as are several staircases, walkways, and other balconies at the periphery. At several locations around the lobby groups of people observe the activity below them. It is unclear from the sketch whether they are all

Figure 8.4 Behnisch study of internal spatial transparency at the Bundeshaus. Behnisch & Partner. Photographer: Christian Kandzia. 234 Deborah Ascher Barnstone inside or outside the building but they are certainly taking advantage of the possibility to watch parliamentary events. In fact, most of the sketches feature groups of observers. The sketches are mostly simple line drawings that give the illusion of even greater transparency between foreground and background than rendered drawings would because mass and volume are not differentiated from the space around. Thus, the Behnisch design sketches demonstrate a desire to achieve the most transparent set of spaces possible in which spectacle can occur on many levels. In such a building, all activities would participate in the spectacle, not just the work in the plenary chamber, since it would be possible to see through multiple spaces. The realized building is even more spectacular in its spatial and material transparency than the plans and sketch studies suggest and far more transparent than Schwippert’s project was. The building complex is almost completely clad in transparent glass making it see-through when lit from inside but also transparent from certain vantage points no matter what the light conditions are. Even parts of the ceiling and roof construction are glass. The degree of transparency created by the almost colorless glass Behnisch used dissolved the exterior envelope to such a degree that the architects had to decorate surfaces with abstract figures, lines, dots, and text, in order to materialize the surfaces enough to prevent birds from colliding with the glass, or people from walking into the facades. The see-through properties of the building envelope do help establish a strong inside/outside connection throughout. There are a series of outdoor areas related to the interior like the restaurant courtyard, side yards, and entry plaza. Behnisch and Partner overlap architectural pieces to help dissolve the boundaries: the restaurant floor material extends past the façade to create an outdoor patio, a circular balcony protrudes into the airspace above the courtyard garden, roof planes project from the entry lobby over the forecourt, to name just a few examples. Elements in the surrounding landscape are visible from multiple vantage points in and around the plenary chamber; trees form the backdrop for one side of the room, the Rhine can be glimpsed from two corners. The sheer quantity of see-through material makes the building spectacular in the sense of amazing. Spatially, the main building housing the plenary chamber is extremely transparent. It consists of a series of interconnected and overlapping areas. Spectacular Architecture 235

The visitor enters through a bank of transparent glass doors, steps from the forecourt into a security space, then into the upper lobby. The building commission mandated the security vestibule, an unfortunate necessity in the twentieth century. Behnsich would have preferred to have no barriers to the public whatsoever. By making all sides of the enclosure see-through glass, he was able to preserve the illusion of openness if not the actuality. Once inside the lobby, the visitor can see across in every direction. Actual physical impediments to either the human body, or to views, are minimal although the reflectivity of the glass combined with the layers of building structure, handrails, and space make distant spaces visible but unclear. The building section allows programmatic connections through shared vertical space and visual connections. For instance, the visitor tribunes are suspended above the MP seating, separated in section but within the plenary chamber. The plenary chamber’s location at the center of the floor plan heightens its visibility. As Oliver Hamm wrote, “Openness, transparency, flowing transition from inside to outside space – realized. Politics will also occur in the future behind closed doors but at least the citizens can passively participate in the debates.”42 A plethora of small balconies that double as informal meeting places and observation decks are similarly suspended around the circulation area enclosing the plenary chamber. The many images publicized of the BehnishBundeshaus attest to its image value and the seductive power of the design. The three iconic photographs are the front façade, the stairs to the plenary chamber, and the chamber itself shot from above to show some of the seats, the chancellor’s and ministers’ seats, and the re-designed eagle. The front façade is totally transparent at night and largely opaque during the day. Still, if a visitor stands in front of the colorless glass, it is possible to see through the entry, the lobby, and into the plenary chamber. The sleek lines, dancing light sconces, and ultra-modern louvers conform to the competition brief by making a supremely contemporary looking front. The generous public plaza in front of the building is as much a part of the spectacle as

42 Oliver G. Hamm, “Am Ende eines langen. Steinigen Weges,” Bauwelt, 1992, Heft 41, 2341. 236 Deborah Ascher Barnstone the interior; from inside, it is possible to see everything happening outside. Writing for Bauwelt Oliver Hamm commented, “There are no areas that are secret or sealed off from citizens’ eyes.”43 In other words, the spectacle is open from every vantage point and in every space. The image of the main stair shows how that architectural element is part of the spectacle in the building. Besides its central spatial position, making the stair visible from almost any place, its grand scale renders the stair a site for performance. In fact, every press photograph of the stair shows people walking down observed by others standing on the adjacent balconies and in the lower lobby. The photograph of the plenary chamber itself is shot from above so that the circular shape of the MP seating is apparent. The plenary chamber is strangely empty with only a handful of MPs at work. On the far side of the chamber are visitors’ tribunes filled with observers. Beyond the tribunes is the transparent outer wall and green. The image therefore simlutaneously reinforces the importance of transparency and spectacle. The political spectacle at the Reichstag began long before the architect was selected with a series of public colloquia in which various experts on architectural history, design, the Reichstag, and German history debated what should be done with the building.44 Contentious issues included the question of the reconstruction of the historic dome over the building that had been destroyed during the Second World War and how to treat the remaining building fabric. Similar to the Bundeshaus competition, the brief for the Reichstag renovation ultimately mandated a “communicative” design and transparency.45 Peter Conradi said, “I believe that a parliament building must testify to openness, must be transparent, must not close itself, and should not raise itself over the people […].”46 By “communicative” design was meant a building that was open and welcoming to the public and that

43 Oliver G. Hamm, “Am Ende eines langen. Steinigen Weges,” Bauwelt, 1992, Heft 41, 2350. 44 Kolloquium Reichstag – Berlin, 14 Februar 1992 (Bonn: Bonner Universität, 1992) was the most widely published discussion. 45 Kolloquium Reichstag – Berlin, 14 Februar 1992 (Bonn: Bonner Universität, 1992), statements by Klaus von Beyme and Peter Conradi, 23 and 25. 46 Op cit, 25. Spectacular Architecture 237 encouraged engagement with the processes of government. In other words, the building needed to allow the public to experience its spectacle. Foster and Partners’ project for the renovation of the Berlin Reichstag continues many of the qualities common to both Schwippert’s and Behnisch’s earlier work although spectacle is far more internal than in Bonn because of the nature of the Reichstag’s outer shell. Foster and Partners approached the mandates by working with transparent glass surfaces, open plan and section. Because they had to wrangle with the constraints of an existing building fabric, however, the end result was quite different from the Bundeshaus in Bonn. The ability to watch the ongoing spectacle is almost exclusively an internal experience at the Reichstag because of the nature of the existing structure, which is solid stone. Transparency is only signaled on the building exterior with an enormous, floor-to-ceiling clear glass façade at the West Entrance and a clear glass cupola atop the roof. On the other hand, the enormous cupola renders the Reichstag building an urban spectacle; because the cupola is quite tall it makes the building perceptible from many vantage points across the city, especially when it is lit at night. Foster and Partners retained the basic outline of the old building in plan with some alterations. As at Bonn, the plenary chamber sits at the heart of the layout. In the original Wallot design, the plenary chamber was tiny; Foster and Partners expanded the chamber to more than double its size giving it far more significance spatially in relation to the surrounding rooms.47 They enclosed the chamber in transparent glass walls on all sides so that, as in Bonn, it is visible from multiple positions around the Reichstag. They also made parts of the ceiling above see-through so that members of the press can look in from above. Large, unimpeded public tribunes line two galleries above the members’ floor augmenting the places available for viewing. Furthermore, it is possible to glimpse the chamber from the rooftop where the cupola sits. If the society of the spectacle is, as Debord states in part, “social relation mediated by images” then the rooftop space under the cupola serves this function. Here, the public becomes socially

47 See Ascher Barnstone for the Wallot plans and the Foster plans, 193 and 194. 238 Deborah Ascher Barnstone engaged while they peer into the plenary chamber and look at the permanent exhibition of historic photographs. In addition to the transparency containing the plenary chamber the Foster team made transparent dividers between the more private parts of the building; transparent glass handrails; and a transparent glass elevator. Looking down a corridor it is possible to see the entire length from one end to the other. The same is true in section; the floors above and below are all visible. Two sketch perspectives made to study the use of transparent glass in the building demonstrate the nature of the spectacle at the Reichstag. The sketches are line drawings on white paper, a technique that heightens the sense of visual penetration possible in the spaces drawn. Each sketch shows the spatial layers Foster and Partners envisioned. One features the view to one of the courtyards from the rooftop; the other studies the same space looking across from a window on one floor to the space opposite. As Foster himself wrote, “We have gouged through the building from top to bottom, opening it up – especially the chamber – to natural light and views.”48 Not only will the parliamentarians be on view but every employee and visitor as he or she strolls through the building. The two sketches show the extent of visual penetration Foster and Partners imagined. Although the constructed project may not be quite as see-through, it is close. Even the cupola design is spectacular. The cupola has two ramps that wind their way up the sides then down again providing visitors with out- standing panoramic views of Berlin. In this case, the city becomes the spectacle. At the same time, however, the people moving up and down are visible to those standing on the roof below so that viewer and viewed enjoy dual status. Viewer is also being viewed; the spectacle operates on multiple levels. Foster used language similar to that of Schwippert and Behnisch when he described his goals for the Reichstag renovation: “In our rebuilding we wanted to banish any feeling that there were secret domains, or hives of bureaucracy. For security reasons, not every part of the Reichstag can be open to the public, but we have ensured that where possible it is transparent

48 Norman Foster, Rebuilding the Reichstag (New York: Overlook, 2000), 78. Spectacular Architecture 239 and its activities are on view. It is a building without secrets.”49 Here Foster emphasizes the dual goals of transforming the building into a transparent structure in order to make the events inside visible. But the Reichstag and Bundeshaus are sites of spectacle in another sense. As Foster articulates, “Almost from the beginning of its history the Reichstag has provided a popular focus – a world stage – for public events, from political demonstrations to pop concerts. The first competition scheme built upon that tradition, placing the building at the heart of a new public forum.”50 The competition proposal covered the old building and new additions in a gigantic transparent canopy then proposed a new, transparent glass plenary chamber be constructed in the center of the building. Its code name was, “TheReichstag as world stage” confirming the notion of parliament as site of public spectacle. This scheme placed the parliament in the public realm on constant view by making the roof a public viewing gallery in a far more daring way than was actually achieved. Although the realized project was far less radical it nevertheless recognized the spectacular nature of a modern parliament. “Political theater” is an idiom in English that has correlates in German namely, “politics as stage” and “political stage.”51 The English and German phrases are used to describe, state sponsored rituals such as royal corona- tions and weddings, military parades, and swearing in of judges, to name just a few, but also everyday theatricality in parliamentary debates, public disputes between the parties, and more. “Political theater” has assumed a negative connotation in recent years; it implies that the actions of politicians are made for public consumption and therefore have no intrinsic value. The idiom also suggests the connection between the workings of politics and theater; it accepts politics as a function of the society of the spectacle, something that is at least partly performed for public consumption. The iconic photographs of Foster’sReichstag are many but three emphasize the spectacular nature of the building (see Figure 8.5). The front

49 Norman Foster, Rebuilding the Reichstag (New York: Overlook, 2000), 86. 50 Op cit, 14. 51 The German would be “die politik als bühne” and “die politische bühne.” 240 Deborah Ascher Barnstone

Figure 8.5 Front elevation of the renovated Reichstag looking through to the plenary chamber. Foster & Partners. Photographer: Nigel Young. elevation showing the new cupola in all its glory appears on countless promotional materials for the city of Berlin such as guidebooks, maps, and histories. A quick Google search brings up several examples. Of course this Spectacular Architecture 241 image signals the importance of the dome as symbol. The second ubiquitous photograph is of the interior of the dome showing the inverted light cone and people ascending the ramps. This image celebrates the technological achievement of the new dome as well as its uniqueness in state architecture. It also implies the importance of public access to the building since the shots of the dome interior invariably are peopled. Finally, there is a photograph of the plenary chamber that is used again and again. It is quite similar to the best-known photographs of the chamber in Bonn. Similar to photographs of Bonn, the image is shot from above to show most of the seating for both MPs and the public with the eagle above the speakers’ podium. Unlike the typical photograph of Bonn, however, this one is packed with MPs and observers who fill the tribunes and spill over into the galleries. It is a clear depiction of politics as theater, and highly popular theater at that. Sadly, recent heightened security concerns have necessitated closing the rooftop area at theReichstag to open access and fencing off the main entrance so that the public can only get near the front door after passing through a freestanding security building that sits in the plaza in front of the Reichstag. These alterations to the entry ritual and building architecture render the glass façade and the cupola even more symbolic than before since public physical access is highly limited and controlled. Still, if Debord was correct, then actual physical proximity to the politicians is not a necessary condition for spectacle to play a key role in the design and function of the German parliament.

Heather Mathews

Beyond the Global Spectacle: Documenta 13 and Multicultural Germany

With its sweeping overview of contemporary artmaking, documenta is one of the most important, and most challenging, of the many large-scale exhibitions that fill the calendar of the international artworld. Since its inauguration in 1955, the exhibition has brought a global survey of modern and contemporary art to the provincial city of Kassel, Germany. Once every five years, the show takes over Kassel’s urban environment, filling buildings, parks and commercial spaces with artworks in all possible media. Originally, documenta was conceived as a means of reintroducing West Germans to avant-garde art after the purges of the National Socialists. The show’s founder, Arnold Bode, used the occasion of the National Garden Show to gather great examples of classical modernism and newer European art in a city which had been badly damaged in the war and which was close to the East German border.1 Thus Bode’sdocumentas (1955, 1959 and 1964) served to educate the art-viewing public, to integrate West German art into the canon of modernism and the contemporary artworld and also to pose a significant challenge to the artistic production and art politics of socialist East Germany.2 Since Bode’s tenure ended in the mid-1960s, the character of the exhibition has shifted with each subsequent incarnation, with a new curator chosen by the documenta council determining the show’s theme and artists. Curators commission works for the event, and they also frequently bring

1 See Harald Kimpel, documenta, Mythos und Wirklichkeit (Köln: Dumont, 1997). 2 See Walter Grasskamp, “‘Degenerate Art’ and Documenta I: Modernism Ostracized and Disarmed,” eds Irit Rogoff and Daniel J. Sherman, Museum Cultures (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994) 163–94. 244 Heather Mathews existing works of art together as historical or contextual support for their chosen theme. In documenta’s five decades, the focuses of the exhibition have reflected shifts in international artistic tendencies; most recently, the curators of the tenth, eleventh, and thirteenth shows have drawn attention not just to the artworks themselves, but also to their conditions of production and the global contexts in which they are made.3 Like the blockbusters, biennials and art fairs with which it shares characteristics, documenta belongs to the category of the mega-exhibition.4 These mammoth events, which may have hundreds of objects on display and involve hundreds of artists from around the world, show an ambitious scope and scale, and are as much cultural as commercial in nature. Blockbusters, the large-scale reviews of single artists or movements that began to appear especially in US museums in the 1970s, are strategically planned to bring in large audiences using few resources, for example, by drawing on the museum’s own collection. The biennial, the exhibition type which is closest to documenta, is a survey of contemporary art that recurs on a two-year cycle (or on a less frequent schedule, as in the case of documenta), with artists being selected by a curator or a curatorial team. The biennial may be internationally representative, as it is in Venice or São Paulo, or it may be focused on the production of a single region, as it is at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The art fair, which, like the biennial, has proliferated since the late 1990s, is also concerned with cataloging new tendencies in art; however, ArtBasel and similar ventures are explicitly commercial, providing a forum in which, for a fee, galleries vie

3 Catherine David, Okwui Enwezor and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev each published supporting documents as part of their exhibition projects. See Catherine David and Jean-Francois Chevreir, Documenta X: The Book (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 1997); Okwui Enwezor et al., Documenta II: The Catalogue(Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2002); Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Documenta 13: Catalog I/3, The Book of Books, Documenta 13: Catalog II/3, The Logbook, and Documenta 13: Catalog III/3, The Guidebook (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012). 4 While the term “mega-exhibition” appears frequently in coverage of art-world events, it has been most cogently defined and theorized by Okwui Enwezor. See Okwui Enwezor, “Mega-Exhibitions and the Antinomies of a Transitional Global Form,” The Biennial Reader, ed. Elena Filipovic et al. (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2004) 445. Beyond the Global Spectacle 245 for consumers’ attention and for the chance to establish or maintain their predominance over the market. Like all large-scale exhibitions, each documenta is ambitious, comprehensive and yet also constructed according to the subjective choices of its curator. The mega-exhibition strives to meet the desire of the audience: the blockbuster showcases greatest hits; the biennial discerns new international trends, styles and concepts; the art fair promotes these and establishes their commercial value.5 As Okwui Enwezor and others have noted, the growth of these types of exhibitions, with their massive scale, prominent participants and commercial draw, reveals a predilection for or even a dependency on the spectacular in the display and consumption of contemporary art. Enwezor characterizes “the proliferation of international and local biennials as models of the commodity culture of global capitalism and its great appeal to the diffusion of artistic practice, with little heuristic function and content, but rather as pure visuality in relation to mass culture.”6 The termspectacle is often applied to, and within, contemporary art in reference to artworks that are of a particularly large size or are especially theatrical.7 A recent example often cited in the criticism is Carsten Höller’s slide pieces, installed at the Tate Modern in 2006 and at the New Museum in New York in 2011. The enormous size of the installations and, especially, the physical and perceptual impact of the work on the spectators who rushed down them, led to a carnevalesque atmosphere far removed

5 See Chin-tao Wu, “Biennials and Art Fairs,” Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, Oxford University Press, Jan. 1, 2014 . 6 Enwezor, “Mega-Exhibitions and the Antinomies of a Transitional Global Form,” 445. 7 See for example Roberta Smith’s look back at 2011, “Substance and Spectacle,” The New York Times, Dec. 16, 2011; Jan. 1, 2014 . A cogent discussion of spectacle in contemporary art is Claire Bishop’s “Participation and Spectacle: Where Are We Now?” Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991–2001, ed. Nato Thompson (New York and Cambridge: Creative Time and MIT Press, 2012). 246 Heather Mathews from the traditional quiet of the gallery or museum space.8 Enwezor and other theorists have moved beyond the superficial recognition of art events like these as being “smash-hit consumer circuses, box-office sensations”9 to apply Guy Debord’s understanding of spectacle as an aspect of the culture of advanced capitalism, particularly in analyses of the large scale display of art.10 Within Debord’s framework, this type of spectacle is related to mass consumerism: it is mediated images without content. Debord asserts that “spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.”11 The unavoidable presence of spectacle in society is, in effect, the creation of a shadow world by the class in power. In Debord’s spectacle, appearance becomes completely separated from reality, and individual experience is supplanted by a seeming shared experience which is, in fact, entirely mediated.12 To assign a spectacular quality to the mega-exhibition, then, is to assert that these shows function to promote and reify the dominant version of reality imposed on society by the class in power. Documenta lacks the consumer character of a commercial art fair like Art Basel, which, with venues in Basel, Miami and Hong Kong, provides a physical structure for the international art market. But with hundreds of

8 After viewing Höller’s New Museum installation, critic Jerry Saltz accused artist and museum of shilling with “arty junk food.” See Jerry Saltz, “The Long Slide: Museums as Playgrounds,” New York Magazine, Dec. 4, 2011; Jan. 1, 2014 . For a more reserved take, see Gregory Volk, “Carsten Höller,” Art in America, Jan. 13, 2012; Jan. 1, 2014 . 9 Saltz. 10 A major recent contribution to the theorization of the spectacular in new art was the symposium Rethinking Spectacle at the Tate Modern in May 2007, which examined issues of large-scale museum exhibitions and marketability of contemporary art. See Rethinking Spectacle, Jan. 1, 2014 . 11 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1999) 12. 12 In section VIII, “Negation and Consumption in the Cultural Sphere,” Debord speaks specifically to problems of artistic representation, but in this essay my focus will remain on the broader theses he presents. Beyond the Global Spectacle 247 artists participating and hundreds of thousands of people attending, the consumption of the visual is front and center at documenta. And documenta, like any other mega-exhibition, can be subsumed by the spectacular. Such shows can be dominated by visual effect at the cost of delivering coherent meaning; a perceived emphasis on visual pleasure can detract from a clear theme or goal; a vast assortment of artworks, presented object after object, can leave the viewer with no opportunity for reflection. All of these can elicit exhaustion in the visitor, rather than sustained curiosity. And indeed, the common critique leveled at these enterprises is that, with its profusion of artworks and sheer spatial monumentality, the large-scale exhibition “subordinates art and its institutions to commercial and managerial priorities, producing a democratizing effect at the expense of a serious engagement with or even close attention to works of art.”13 At a mega-exhibition like documenta, the prioritizing of the object and its subsequent categorization, the apparent emphasis on numbers of objects and the catalogic inclusion of “important” artists may indeed detract from the individual works’ ability to communicate meaning in such a setting. This can be understood as an example of the spectacular in Debord’s sense, with individual artworks subsumed into an overarching narrative that is composed to preserve existing power relations and to widen the market for consumption of those images, thus preserving the spectacular system. Surrounded by the flood of images at a mega-exhibition, the viewer’s vision is limited, as is her response to what she views:

The spectator’s alienation from and submission to the contemplated object (which is the outcome of his unthinking activity) works like this: the more he contem- plates, the less he lives; the more readily he recognizes his own needs in the images of need proposed by the dominant system, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires. The spectacle’s externality with respect to the acting subject is demonstrated by the fact that the individual’s own gestures are no longer his own, but rather those of someone else who represents them to him. The spectator feels at home nowhere, for the spectacle is everywhere.14

13 Emma Barker, “Introduction,” Contemporary Cultures of Display, ed. Emma Barker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999) 19. 14 Debord, 23. 248 Heather Mathews

And yet there are strategies by which the large-scale exhibition can push back against the implications of the spectacular that are bound up in its sweeping scope. One such strategy is the inclusion of local and temporal specificity, that is, the incorporation of the details of the site in which the exhibition is staged, and the time in which it takes place, into the show itself. For all their international reach and mammoth ambitions, large art shows like documenta are embedded within their own contexts: in their unique moment in time, but also in their own institutional history, in the history of the host city, in the unique situations and predilections of their audiences.15 By virtue of the integration of the diverse international situations in which its artworks were made and to which they refer and, similarly, through references to its local context, documenta 13 was able to avoid the spectacular tendencies of the mega-exhibition. While the more than 200 artworks on display, and especially their distribution throughout the city, certainly could exhaust or overwhelm a visitor, documenta 13 was not designed to present foregone conclusions. Rather, the show provided numerous opportunities for the public to engage in a conversation about the state of the world and our lived experience in it. Many of documenta 13’s artists addressed global war and violence, cultural production and reception around the world, issues of class and power, and tensions around immigration and multiculturalism, in Germany and elsewhere. Those works which took Kassel or Germany as part of their inquiry provided especially clear interruptions of the seamless spectacular narrative that might otherwise prevail at a show of this size.

15 See Bruce W. Ferguson et al., “Mapping International Exhibitions,” The Manifesta Decade: Debates on Contemporary Art Exhibitions and Biennials in Post-Wall Europe, eds Barbara Vanderlinden and Elena Filipovic (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2006) 47. Beyond the Global Spectacle 249

The Migration Debate

It was, in particular, the artworks that had as their subjects war, racism, migration and their cultural implications that had the most potential disruptive value, especially for German viewers. In the eighteen months preceding the opening of documenta 13 in June 2012, German politics had been dominated by debates around cultural integration, the place of the country’s non-ethnically German population and the definition of German culture. Following that prolonged national discussion, documenta 13 offered an opportunity for public debate on German society’s conflicted relationship with its own cultural diversity; but while the German mainstream press acknowledged the show’s political potential, most reviewers refrained from an involved exploration of its implications. Overall, German press coverage of documenta 13 was a missed opportunity for public debate of the issues of globalization and culture so present in Germany at the time. Germany’s ongoing debate around the social, economic and cultural consequences of immigration and the concomitant question of cultural integration, the so-called Migrationsdebatte [migration debate], formed a peculiar backdrop for the 2012 documenta. The underlying issues were not new; indeed, the legacy and impact of Germany’s immigration and asylum policies has been a significant discussion point within German politics at least since the work agreement between Germany and Turkey ended in 1973. But in 2010, the tone of the discussion changed, becoming notable, in part, for the spread of anti-integration arguments outside of the conservative parties. This shift was embodied by the publication of former Bundesbank head and left-leaning Social Democrat Party member Thilo Sarrazin’s book Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab [Germany Abolishes Itself ], published in September 2010.16 In this volume, Sarrazin takes controversial positions regarding integration in Germany. Two of the most often quoted have to do with the “dumbing down” of German society through the growth of Turkish families and the assertion that Islam is incompatible

16 All translations are my own. 250 Heather Mathews with Western modernity. For Sarrazin, immigrants must be willing to become Germans, period: “Anyone who wants to remain a Turk or an Arab, and who also wants this status for his children, would be better off in his home country.”17 Sarrazin’s radical tone drew criticism from a broad spectrum of Germans, from his own party (the SPD), and from others, including CDU Chancellor Angela Merkel. But when things had settled a bit, echoes of his theses appeared elsewhere. In October of 2010, Chancellor Merkel told the crowd at the CDU/CSU’s Junge Union conference “The multicultural approach has failed, absolutely failed!” In the public response to her speech, Merkel’s subsequent remark that Islamic culture is a part of Germany went largely unnoticed.18 Bavarian Minister-President Horst Seehofer’s speech at the same conference reiterated the sentiment: “We, as the CDU, advocate for a German Leitkultur and against multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is dead.”19 Claiming that Germany is “not a nation of immigrants,”20 Seehofer was accused by critics of populism at worst and,

17 Given the character of Sarrazin’s argument, it is worth quoting at length: “Anyone who is here with a legal residency permit is welcome. But we expect you to learn the language, to support yourself with work, to desire and support the education of your children, to adapt yourselves to the customs and conventions of Germany, and that, with time, to become German – if not you yourselves, then at the very least, your children. If you’re of the Muslim faith, that’s fine, but you have the same rights and duties as heathen, Protestant or Catholic Germans. But we do not want any national minorities. Anyone who wants to remain a Turk or an Arab, and who also wants this status for his children, would be better off in his home country. And above all, anyone who is interested primarily in the benefits of the Geman social welfare system, he is absolutely unwelcome here.” Thilo Sarrazin, Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab, 2nd edn (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2010) 326. 18 “Merkel erklärt Multikulti für gescheitert,” Der Spiegel, Oct. 16, 2010. 19 Leitkultur can be translated as “predominant culture,” but in its contemporary usage it also has undertones of a cultural hegemony that is inaccessible to those who are not German. See Charles Hawley, “What’s a German? The Search for Identity Continues,” SpiegelOnline, May 9, 2006; Jan. 1, 2014 . 20 “Wulff soll sich von Seehofer distanzieren,” die Zeit, Oct. 18, 2010; Sept. 21, 2012 . Beyond the Global Spectacle 251 at best, an ignorance of the needs of a German industry dependent on an influx of qualified professionals from outside.21 In between the Sarrazin affair and the Junge Union speeches, Federal President Christoph Wulff spoke on the Third of October, the Day of German Unity, calling for a more cohesive German society. He faulted “multicultural illusions” for the lack of comprehensive integration of immigrants within German society.22 However, and likely in response to the furor around Sarrazin, Wulff asserted that Islam is, indeed, a part of contemporary Germany. These tense, very public moments fueled many smaller discussions across the German press because the debate involved government leaders, members of major political parties all of whom seemed to represent a shift in the tone. The sometimes sensational pitch of the migration debate and its apparent open hostility to immigrants and Germans of foreign background was given a troubling objective support by a nationwide study, released in October 2010, which revealed that German attitudes towards foreigners had taken a decidedly rightward turn.23 The Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation’s research showed that more than 30 per cent of Germans surveyed held that: “Foreigners come in order to take advantage of the welfare state” and “The large number of foreigners is dangerously changing Germany.”24 Of those surveyed, 55.4 per cent agreed with the statement, “Arabs make me uncomfortable.”25 In addition, the responses reflected an increasingly public acceptance of aspects of totalitarianism, such as preference for a single,

21 “Arbeitgeber warnen vor Einwanderungsstopp,” die Zeit, Oct. 12, 2010; Sept. 21, 2012 . 22 “20 Jahre Einheit: Rede von Wulff: ‘Zu große Unterschiede gefährden den Zusammenhalt’,” Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Oct. 3, 2010. 23 Oliver Decker et al., “Die Mitte in der Krise: rechtsextreme Einstellungen in Deutschland 2010,” 2010, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Berlin, Jan. 1, 2014 . 24 Decker et al., 141. 25 Ibid., 144. 252 Heather Mathews strong leader. The study authors concluded “that right-wing attitudes are represented in diverse segments of the public, and at a high rate.”26

Documenta 13, the Press and the Creation of Spectacle

The refrains of Sarrazin, Merkel, Seehofer and Wulff, together with the data gathered by Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung study, paint a picture of a society at odds with the foreign origins of parts of itself. As this complicated cultural and political debate was emerging, the planning for documenta 13 had begun in earnest. Curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, who had been selected in 2008 to be the exhibition’s artistic director, was visiting artists and sites around the world, commissioning and gathering work that would guarantee a strong international presence in Kassel. On its own, this international presence was not new. From its European- and US-focused beginnings in the 1950s, documenta has expanded in the last two decades to include, and indeed, to focus on, more global understandings of new art. Like the previous exhibitions, the thirteenth was a monumental event that incorporated over 150 artists from fifty-five countries, their work installed in thirty-six venues, with a record thirty works scattered through the Karslaue park.27 And, like those that had preceded it, documenta 13 was a confirmed blockbuster. Indeed, it easily surpassed the 750,000 visitors of the 2007 exhibition, counting 905,000 visitors during the 100 days of its run.28 The sweeping, exhaustive survey of art staged at documenta 13 was anchored through a conceptual framework explained by Christov-Bakargiev in an introductory statement:

26 Ibid. 27 documenta 13 information, April 13, 2012 Jan. 1, 2014 . 28 documenta 13 information, June 10, 2013 . Beyond the Global Spectacle 253

documenta 13 is located in an apparent simultaneity of places and times [… It] takes a spatial or, rather, “locational” turn, highlighting the significance of a physical place, but at the same time aiming for dislocation and for the creation of different and partial perspectives – an exploration of micro-histories on varying scales that link the local history and reality of a place with the world, and the worldly.29

To achieve this “simultaneity of places and times,” Christov-Bakargiev enlisted the help of more than 300 international curatorial collaborators, including artists, writers, activists and others.30 Events preceding the Kassel exhibition were hosted in Kabul, in Alexandria and Cairo and in Banff; later, on the ground in Kassel, numerous artworks and programming events drew connections to these remote sites. Through those artworks, several of which are discussed below, connections were drawn between the local and the global, allowing viewers in Kassel to create linkages between distinct histories and experiences. Rather than offering an objective cross section of current artmaking, the extensive sample provided by documenta 13 revealed that, faced with a common set of prompts, artists around the world responded with a similar spirit and with similar approaches to subject and form. Christov-Bakargiev’s project was clearly influenced by the approach taken by Okwui Enwezor in 2002 in the organization of documenta 11. Enwezor framed his exhibition explicitly within postcolonial discourse and in response to the phenomenon of globalization, while turning his focus away from the established centers of the international artworld to its margins.31 Christov-Bakargiev’s documenta likewise looked to the periphery. But her show was focused less on that periphery itself, and more on

29 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, “Introduction to dOCUMENTA (13): Artistic Director’s Statement,” Jan. 1, 2014 . 30 Alex Farquharson and Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, “Get Together – documenta,” Frieze 149 (Sept. 2012): 150–60. 31 “In postcoloniality we are incessantly offered counter-models through which the dis- placed – those placed on the margins of the enjoyment of full global participation – fashion new worlds by producing experimental cultures,” Okwui Enwezor, “Black Box,” in documenta XI exhibition catalog (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002) 46. 254 Heather Mathews the interconnectedness of a vast variety of “remote” places and times.32 While the Introduction states that the exhibition “is driven by a holistic and non-logocentric vision that is skeptical of the persisting belief in economic growth,” this central statement does not make any otherwise out- rightly critical or political claims. Indeed, Christov-Bakargiev repeatedly confounded observers, famously declaring, “I have no concept” at an early press event.33 Rather than embrace a specific agenda, the curator sought instead to create a sort of matrix of ideas, expressed in different ways, echo- ing across the exhibition. It is this rather loose approach to curatorial objectives that, along with the size and scale of the overall enterprise of documenta 13, could easily have trapped the viewer in a spectacular experience, overwhelmed by volume, novelty or effect. But instead, artists’ interpretation of Christov- Bakargiev’s emphasis on place and time, the local and the specific, resisted the spectacular character that so often characterizes the mega-exhibition. It is significant that, while the content of individual artworks communicated this emphasis on place and time, the artists often presented viewers with images that were insufficient to contain the content within them. Several strategies stand out: references to places far removed from one another; to events separated by long spans of time; to nearly ungrasp- able truths of the universe brought to a point by the application of science. The notion of the incompleteness of human knowledge and the recognition of the vast stretch of human experience underlay the exhibition as a whole; and yet in spite of the potentially abstract and vague nature of these ideas, many of the artworks were quite specific in the subject matter they used to address them, helping to prevent the exhibition from appearing as a single, spectacular story. One example of this direct engagement with content is the contribution of Theaster Gates who, together with a group of volunteers, occupied the nineteenth-century Huguenotten Haus

32 documenta 11 Archive, Jan. 10, 2012 ; documenta exhibition homepage, Jan. 10, 2012 . 33 Rachel Corbett, “Documenta 2012: Bombs Away,” Artnet, June 1, 2013 . Beyond the Global Spectacle 255 in a sprawling renovation that linked the Kassel project to another similar and concurrent project in Chicago (see Figure 9.1). For 12 Ballads for Huguenot House, Gates recorded musicians performing “ballads” in 6901 Dorchester, a building abandoned to urban decay in Chicago. He then used found materials from the Chicago site to patch and rebuild the Kassel site, interspersing the newly structured spaces with video and audio installations from the 6901 Dorchester event. Gates refers to his found materials as “indices,” points of reference to the Dorchester and to other project sites in Chicago; each index is used to stitch together a physical connection between the two communities in which the buildings were used, abandoned, and then reclaimed through the artwork. In describing the Kassel site, Gates stated that preserving the building, even the decay of the building, became important; “We wanted to try to keep as much of

Figure 9.1 Theaster Gates, installation view of 12 Ballads for the Huguenot House, 2012, courtesy Kavi Gupta, Chicago/Berlin. 256 Heather Mathews the beauty of the house, and maybe even some of the beauty of the decay of the house, present … All of the varying histories of hands touching the building became really important.”34 By using one building in the renovation of the other, Gates and his team created a geographic and temporal bridge between the two cities. The project speaks of separate, though related, pasts, but also of a cooperative present and future. A similar strategy that appeared to deflect the spectacular through specificity and distance was the enormous tapestry presented by Goshka Macuga, Of what is, that it is; of what is not, that is not, displayed in Kassel in the rotunda of documenta’s main building, the historic Fridericianum (see Figure 9.2). The digitally composed tapestry records a gathering staged by the artist during documenta 13 events in Kabul, to which she invited over 100 cultural figures, including artists, intellectuals and journalists, as well as representatives from foreign embassies and NGOs. She photographed that group with Kabul’s Queen’s Palace as a backdrop, capturing the participants in a variety of poses and with varying degrees of interest on their faces. In the work displayed in the Fridericianum, the subjects gaze out at the viewer who regards them, but other figures, who move past in the foreground, are unaware of or indifferent to the audience. The piece had a twin, hung in an architecturally similar space in the Queen’s Palace, a pendant showing a crowd of onlookers gathered in front of the Fridericianum in Kassel during Macuga’s receipt of the Arnold Bode prize in 2011.35 In this project, the artist confronted “her ability to respond to the context of the art institution and its role in mediating issues concerning a broader social context.”36

34 White Cube, Theaster Gates: 12 Ballads for Huguenot House, Jan. 1, 2014 . 35 Outset Contemporary Art, “Goshka Macuga, documenta (13), Kassel, 2012”, Jan. 1, 2014 . 36 Ibid. Beyond the Global Spectacle 257

Figure 9.2 Goshka Macuga, detail of Of what is, that it is, of what is not, that is not I, 2012, wool tapestry, 520 × 1740 cm, courtesy of the artist and Kate MacGarry, London.

For Debord, the spectacle is sustained, and is sustained by, a continuity of representation: “Wherever representation takes on an independent existence, the spectacle reestablishes its rule.”37 With its direct address of the audience and the inherent incompleteness of its installation, Macuga’s work resisted the spectacular at documenta 13. The figures that look out into the audience invite communication and thus draw attention to the visitors’ own acts of gazing and their scrutiny of the image. This communication between the image and the audience resists the spectacle’s illusion of a complete narrative or of a reality successfully mediated by the image. The interruption of the spectacle’s all-encompassing representation of reality is further enhanced by the piece’s division into two parts, installed thousands of miles apart. The separation of the two components of the artwork underscored the impossibility of a complete viewing: its geographic split meant that the work was never fully accessible to viewers, in either location. In contradiction of the spectacular tendencies of the mega-exhibition, the

37 Debord, 17. 258 Heather Mathews installation of Macuga’s work presents a fragmented, rather than a complete, image of the world. Importantly, the insurmountable distance that is at the heart of Macuga’s composition through its separate installations in Kassel and Kabul acts to bring closer together the places in which the two source photographs were made. Kassel, shaped so deeply by war and by rebuilding 60 years ago, might see itself in the processes taking place in Kabul. Macuga’s approach pushes back against what Debord called “irreversible time,” the time created by the class that holds power through the writing of history.38 Irreversible time is at the heart of the spectacle. In reaching across time and space, Of what is, that it is; of what is not, that is not I deflates what could otherwise be an empty exploitation of the novelty of the medium and its scale, and it draws connections between past and more recent wars and recoveries, suggesting a cyclical understanding of time rather than a history with an inevitable or already-determined outcome. Macuga’s project was only one of numerous pieces at documenta 13 in which Afghanistan was referenced, whether as subject, context, or both. For example, beyond the Fridericianum, a compact nineteenth-century building that once housed Kassel’s municipal tax office was transformed by Tacita Dean through her work, Fatigues, chalk-on-blackboard drawings of the Hindu Kush mountains, the source of the Kabul river.39 Meanwhile, in a nearby neighborhood, the Renaissance-era Elisabeth Hospital hosted eight artists who were either Afghan or of Afghan origin. Their work, which ranged from painting and photography to installation work and video, varied widely in style and subject matter, and it functioned almost as an

38 Debord, 96. In “Time and History,” Debord posits irreversible time as having dis- placed the “cyclical time” that existed prior to the writing of history and the division of society into classes. If irreversible time is a “dry, unexplained chronology,” (97) cyclical time is understood by Debord “not as something passing, but as something returning,” (93). 39 “Tacita Dean: Fatigues.” Marian Goodman Gallery, Feb. 1 –March 9, 2013; Oct. 20, 2013 . Beyond the Global Spectacle 259 autonomous exhibition within the larger format of documenta.40 Alongside the exhibition of these and other works in Kassel, the programming around documenta 13 also included seminars, workshops and installations (of which Macuga’s piece was part) in Kabul and in Bamiyan.41 Weaving back and forth between continents, documenta 13’s engagement with Afghanistan, its past and its present, was an indication not just of the organizers’ interest in global artmaking, but also of their commitment to drawing attention to the ongoing crisis in that country and the threat that crisis poses to Afghan artists, cultural production and cultural heritage. In addition, documenta 13’s strategy of decentralizing the exhibition through satellite programs, not just in Kabul but also in Banff and Cairo, challenged the viewer/participant to think beyond the megaexhibition’s typical presump- tion of authority, completeness, and immediacy. By fragmenting the show’s content, the organizers worked against a spectacular presentation of global art. And if, as Debord writes, “the spectacle serves as total justification for the conditions and aims of the existing system,” the fragmenting and distribution of the parts that might comprise the exhibition’s narrative also acted to destabilize the larger context in which we understand, in particular, cultural production in conflict zones.42 The perilous situation of creative producers, not only in Afghanistan, but also in other global crisis points, was a topic throughout the exhibition. One striking example was raw documentary footage of the protests in Egypt, filmed by Egyptian artist Ahmed Basiony. Basiony was killed by snipers shortly after recording the footage in the early days of the demonstrations at Tahrir Square in 2011. As one of his last works, the video is a sobering reminder of sacrifices made for the Arab Spring, and in the context of documenta 13, of the role played by artists in these revolutions. Because the video was exhibited on a laptop monitor at waist height, it never quite

40 “Afghanistan at the Documenta 13 Exhibition in Kassel, Germany,” Nafas, June 2010, Oct. 12, 2013. . 41 documenta 13, “Kabul – Bamiyan: Seminars and Lectures,” Oct. 20, 2014 .s 42 Debord, 13. 260 Heather Mathews had a chance to become too heroic or divorced from the life and ideas of the artist. Viewers were forced to stoop to watch the video, which made the process of seeing uncomfortable. The position of the laptop, the small size of its screen, and its unassuming installation in a corner of the exhibition’s primary space within the Museum Fridericianum, prevented a too contemplative or passive viewing. The first-person nature of the video and the explosive nature of the subject had the potential to become sensational (as coverage of the Arab Spring had become in the news media, for example). But through the relative discomfort evoked by its positioning, the video was able to retain its documentary qualities, remaining intimate and immediate, rather than becoming passively immersive and, thus, spectacular.43 These examples reflect the intent of Christov-Bakargiev and her collaborators to draw attention to artists’ awareness of and engagement with the social and political crises of the present. In a similar way, documenta 13 expressly invoked the troubled past of Kassel, and of Germany more broadly, through artworks that were process driven. These works were evocative rather than declarative, and they avoided the presentation of finished narratives or interpretations of the past. Like Macuga’s audience address and remote installation, these strategies could be seen as destabilizing Debord’s irreversible time.44 For example, a vitrine in the main room in the Fridericianum held documentary notes and sketches from Horst Hoheisel’s Inverted Fountain, a countermonument recalling the presence of National Socialism in Kassel. Displayed like archaeological evidence, these preparatory materials suggested the process by which the past is

43 Here I wish to draw on Walter Benjamin’s distinction between contemplative and distracted viewing. The installation of the piece seemed intended to coax the viewer into a distracted mode of viewing, and thus to encourage critical consideration of the artist’s work and its political nature. For Benjamin, contemplation before a painting leads to the viewer being “absorbed” by the artwork, whereas the distracted mode of viewing encouraged by film results in the viewer “absorbing” the artwork. The viewer, prevented from concentrating by the disjointed form of the film, is freed to be more detached and critical in her apprehension of the artwork. See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1978) 238–41. 44 Debord, 93–7. Beyond the Global Spectacle 261

Figure 9.3 Gunnar Richter, Dealing with the Era of National Socialism – A Regional Study of a Crime in the Final Phase of World War II. Methods of Researching, 1981/2012, slideshow with sound. Photo courtesy of the artist. understood, rather than presenting a completed interpretation of that past. Displaying plans and archival materials, Hoheisel’s vitrine resisted the authoritative narrative of irreversible time and instead cycled back in an ongoing act of remembering. A similar approach was used by Gunnar Richter in his installation documenting the history of the nearby Cloister at Breitenau (see Figure 9.3). The centuries-old structure was used in the 1930s and 1940s by the local National Socialist government first as a concentration camp, then as a work camp, and then, finally, as a staging ground for the mass execution of the inmates of the camp in 1945.45 Christov-Bakargiev was

45 Gedenkstätte Breitenau, “Die wechselvolle Geschichte des ehemaligen Benediktinerklosters Breitenau”, Jan. 1 2014 , and “Der Massenmord am Fuldaberg (30. März 1945),” Jan. 1, 2014 . 262 Heather Mathews interested in investigating the “history of Breitenau as a former and long- term site of imprisonment and marginalization, and the associated questions of discrimination, exclusion, persecution, and violence,” as well as in exploring how the present-day memorial sought to deal with the past.46 Invited by Christov-Bakargiev to share the history of the site with other documenta 13 artists, Richter, the director of the memorial at Breitenau, hosted nearly every visiting documenta artist at the site. Many were inspired to incorporate the story of the Cloister in the work they produced for documenta.47 As his own contribution to the exhibition, Richter constructed a small hut, much like a garden cottage, which was placed on the lawn of the Karlsaue. Inside, visitors could read documents pertaining to the history of the Cloister and they could view a slide show of archival images with a recorded lecture detailing the Cloister as a site of institutional violence under the National Socialists. Richter himself gave frequent interpretive lectures in the Karlsaue and even led viewers on a hike from central Kassel out to the Cloister itself. At the center of Richter’s project, then, was the process of encountering historical evidence and evaluating that evidence in its geographical context. Each viewer had the opportunity to engage in interpretation on her own, rather than being provided a fixed, prepared narrative to consume. At Kassel’s central train station, irreversible time was disrupted in a similar way by the atmospheric and disturbing presence of Susan Philipsz’s Composition for Strings. For this installation, Philipsz deconstructed Pavel Haas’s piece of the same name, recording the individual notes of the cello and viola parts separately and playing them through a series of speakers set out amongst the station’s furthest platforms. It was from these same gates that trains departed Kassel for distant concentration and extermination camps.48 Pavel Haas composed the piece while imprisoned at Terezin in 1943, shortly before he and most of the camp orchestra who debuted the

46 Gunnar Richter, “Die Geschichte Breitenaus und die Gedenkstätte als besonderer Bezugspunkt der dOCUMENTA (13),” Gedenkstättenrundbrief 172 (12/2013): 17. 47 Richter, 19–22. 48 Susan Philipsz, “Study for Strings,” (Berlin: Isabella Bortolozzi Gallery, 2012) Oct. 30, 2014 . Beyond the Global Spectacle 263 composition were transferred to Auschwitz and murdered. In Kassel, the disjointed notes of the piece filled the space in and around the train yard, creating an effect that was both unsettling and beautiful. Philipsz’ fragmentation of the composition called attention to the station’s neglected gates, bringing the audience back to a point outside of irreversible time. The absence of the rest of the parts of the piece, and of the orchestra that would have played it, shifted the listener to a consideration of the violence of those deportations and away from the illusory safety of the present and any presumed mastery of the past.49 A similar approach, a disruption of accepted narratives or habits of reception, was at work in the Spanish artist Dora García’s serial performance piece, Die Klau Mich Show [The Steal Me Show]. Staged as a series over a period of weeks, the show devoted one episode to Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the critical examination of Germany’s history. The show featured a talk- show style discussion between the historian Norbert Frei and the literary scholar Rudolf Kreis, with the participants debating the relevance of National Socialism, the Second World War, and the Holocaust to the contemporary German experience. Frei’s objectively based arguments against minimizing the effects of Germany’s past on its present dominated Kreis’s more poetic ruminations on his own youth between the wars. But it was the format, the process of discussion itself, that made García’s piece exemplary for the exhibition. Like Hoheisel, Richter and Philipsz, García highlights the ongoing need to confront and assess the past, rather than to allow it to recede into the realm of the forgotten. These works wove the legacy of German fascism into the show’s larger narrative of time, history and presence. For Debord, the spectacle is an all-encompassing viewed reality; “The spectacle, being the reigning social organization of a paralyzed history, of a paralyzed memory, of an abandonment of any history founded in historical time, is in effect a false consciousness of time.”50 Taken together, many of the artworks featured at documenta 13 offer an alternative to that false

49 Debord, 93. 50 Debord, 114. 264 Heather Mathews consciousness through a destabilization of time and space, thus resisting the spectacular tendencies of the mega-exhibition. These artworks avoided declarative statements in favor of process, speculation and questions, and they undermined Debord’s “irreversible time” for a looping backward to examine the past or multiple presents. The examples I have discussed above represent (in a variety of senses of the word) diverse cultural production from around the world, and they insist on the critical examination of war and of fascism. These approaches were prominent in Kassel. Presented as never settled, incomplete or fragmented, these works offered an alternative interpretation in the face of the spectacular characterization that documenta’s mega-exhibition format might otherwise encourage. It is with these examples and their representational strategies in mind that the discourse around documenta 13 in the German press should be examined, in particular against the backdrop of the concurrent debate around immigration, multiculturalism and cultural integration within Germany. Rather than succumbing to the totality of representation entailed in spectacle, much of documenta 13 resisted the spectacular; however, the reception of the exhibition focused on the spectacular aspects understood to be typical of events like documenta and indeed, like the mega-exhibition in general. While the discourse of the migration debate is not evoked outright in the reception of the exhibition, a wariness of a critical engagement with the artwork, organizers and participants suggests the reviewers’ hesitance to draw too many uncomfortable conclusions from the event. If documenta 13 was an example of spectacle in the contemporary artworld, it was so largely because of its interpretation in the press, rather than because of its actual character. Overall, the political implications of works like those above was lost on most commentators in the mainstream German press – or rather, when reviewers did note such content, they were reluctant to address directly the implications communicated by individual artworks or through the network of meanings created between works. Even when authors did address more critical artworks, most often they presented individual pieces as isolated, without linking them to the larger context formed by the exhibition as a whole. This is demonstrated in an early review inFocus , in which the author relates the story of the pastor Korbinian Aigner’s series of apple paintings, Beyond the Global Spectacle 265 which represent strains he developed in part while imprisoned by the Nazis. The paintings were installed in a small room, lining the walls from floor to ceiling in neat rows, creating a grid of tiny, intimate and delicately painted portraits of a remarkable variety of apples. Summing up his impressions of the installation, the reviewer writes, “Like a modern conceptual artist, he drew these apples again and again, over the course of 50 years – in Kassel, a gigantic room is full of them, leaving one with a surprisingly grand impression.”51 That “surprisingly grand impression” reduces Aigner’s work to an aesthetic experience, or to a conceptual exercise, and it avoids engaging in any meaningful way the fact of and reasons for his imprisonment, the context in which he was growing and then painting many of these apples. In limiting his comments to the overall visual qualities of the experience within the exhibition space, the reviewer transfers the spectacular effect of the installation to the work itself, instead of seeing the paintings as – for example – a record of many small acts of resistance against the German fascist state. Sapping the artwork of its potential content and its historical specificity, the reviewer also ignores the piece’s potential as a reminder of the impact of the National Socialist period on the present. Other reviewers employed sweeping statements that were entirely dislocated from the individual artworks they purported to describe or assess. Hanno Rauterberg’s review in die Zeit takes this broad approach, and in adopting this method the reviewer misses the roots of the themes he dismisses: “In the end, one could conclude that even violence, war, the Holocaust are somehow without cause, natural. When there are no longer clearly defined subjects, then there is also no longer anyone who bears responsibility.”52 Elsewhere, Rauterberg mentions the presence of “Cambodia, Syria, Afghanistan” but doesn’t actually discuss any of the relevant artworks; nor does he touch on the works that engage National

51 “Weltkunstausstellung in Kassel: Eine documenta zum Schauen, Staunen und Grübeln,” Focus Online, June 7, 2012; Sept. 21, 2012 . 52 Hanno Rauterberg, “Lost in Kassel,” die Zeit, June 7, 2012; Sept. 21, 2012 . 266 Heather Mathews

Socialism and fascism. Instead, the individual works he alludes to are dis- missed as sensational in their generality. There is a similar attitude in a commentary on the show in SpiegelOnline, in which Georg Diez writes, “It’s all about fear at this Documenta, it’s about crises and collapse and also about upheaval; it is about finding an orientation somewhere between the Occupy-style Communards and the contemporary moment, that is, contemporary art.”53 For this reviewer, the show was all spectacular effects: anxiety, crisis, collapse, and then, conversely, hope for a new start. But there are more specific conclusions that could be drawn from the evidence presented by documenta 13’s artists. The implications documenta 13 might have on the immediate context – Germany, Afghanistan and elsewhere in 2012 – were not part of the reception, and as a result, the show’s potential political content was rendered nearly ineffective by virtue of its interpretation in the press. While individual works within the exhibition helped to prevent an inevitable interpretation of the exhibition as a spectacle in Debord’s sense, or even in the colloquial sense of theatrical, entertaining contemporary art, the reception of documenta 13 in some of the larger, mainstream media outlets in Germany focused on the show as spectacle. These interpretations in the German press reduced the exhibition to a collection without a concept. This was, to a certain extent, a foregone conclusion, given Christov-Bakargiev’s initial denial of structure: her adamant declaration, “I have no concept,” is quoted again and again in the reception, often without any of the additional discussion that surrounded that statement of non-intent. And yet there were, as discussed above, individual examples at documenta 13 of works sought to challenge such a reading. Basiony’s video could be read as distinctly pro-democracy and anti-violence; others, like Macuga’s installation, questioned the impact of war and occupation on a Afghanistan’s cultural life; Richter’s Breitenau research project drew

53 Georg Diez, “Die Falle der Vernunft,” SpiegelOnline, June 8, 2012; Sept. 21, 2012 . Beyond the Global Spectacle 267 attention to the necessity of continued reexamination of Germany’s National Socialist history. In spite of these and other engaging artworks in Kassel, there were no strong voices calling out these specific objectives in the mainstream reception, and no one exploring the implications of these expressions in the context of Germany’s ongoing difficult relationship with immigration and “foreign” culture, of the growing problem of hostility towards foreigners and the increase of right-wing sentiments. Instead, the critical reception accepted the variety of styles and forms presented at documenta 13 on a spectacular level, viewing it as a complete story, impen- etrable and entertaining, but without a connection to individual experience. Immigration politics, cultural integration and the growth of rightwing attitudes continued to dominate headlines in the German press in the period directly leading up to documenta 13 and during the exhibition’s 100 days. First, in March 2012, a study commissioned by the Federal Ministry of the Interior created a sensation when it was leaked to the newspaper Bild Zeitung, which misrepresented major findings about the attitudes of young Muslims in Germany.54 A few months later, the anti-immigrant attitudes revealed by the Bild scandal were further highlighted by the Ebert Foundation in a follow-up to its 2010 study. Using data gathered in the summer of 2012, the Foundation’s researchers found that 16 per cent of East Germans had a rightwing worldview, with the trend moving upwards. The study cautioned that this was not, however, simply an eastern German phenomenon, but that socioeconomic factors throughout the country, as well as the separation of entire regions from federal and European development, seemed to exacerbate rightwing attitudes.55 Notably, then, the issues that had begun to surface during the migration debate of 2011 were

54 Roland Preuß, “Muslim-Studie ging doch vorab an Boulevard-Blatt,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, April 20, 2012; Jan. 1, 2014 . 55 Oliver Decker et al., Die Mitte im Umbruch: Rechtsextreme Einstellungen in Deutschland 2012 (Bonn: Verlag J.H.W. Dietz, 2012) 54–5. 268 Heather Mathews still present in the German press in 2012 during documenta 13’s run, and yet German reviewers of documenta 13 seemed largely content to stay out of the fray. The resulting analysis was a spectacular characterization of an exhibition that instead could have prompted a deep consideration of the relevance of the content and meaning of individual works to what was happening outside the confines of the exhibition. While documenta 13 turned the spectacular form of the mega-exhibition inside-out, within Germany, its observations, critiques and entreaties never made it into the dominant discourse. Brechtje Beuker

The Spectacle of Terrorism and the Threat of Theatricality

In the years following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, terrorism became a central topic in German theater productions. While this is hardly surprising given terrorism’s impact on everyday life in the early twenty- first century, it is remarkable that theater directors shared an interest in a particular approach to the topic. When one takes a look at Germany’s theatrical landscape of roughly the last decade, one will find that several of the most prominent theaters showcased productions in which terror and terrorism were at the center of not only the thematic content but also the aesthetic methods of the performance. In Gotteskrieger [Holy Warrior], which premiered at Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theater in May 2005, director Volker Hesse broke down the fourth wall and experimented with an “attack” on his spectators.1 With highly physical and palpable staging practices, he tried to convey an experience of terror and a sense of danger to his audience. Likewise, Johan Simons allowed his actors to mingle with the audience in his 2003 production of Heiner Müller’s Anatomie Titus Fall of Rome Ein Shakespearekommentar [Anatomy Titus Fall of Rome A Shakespeare Commentary].2 In doing so, he undercut the complacent position of the spectators, inviting them to question the modes of perception that underlie our engagement with violence. These two productions can serve as examples to illustrate what is at stake in the employment

1 Lutz Hübner, Gotteskrieger, dir. Volker Hesse, Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin, May 3, 2005. 2 Heiner Müller, Anatomie Titus Fall of Rome Ein Shakespearekommentar, dir. Johan Simons, Münchner Kammerspiele, Munich. Nov. 15, 2003. In what follows, I will use the abbreviated title Anatomie Titus. 270 Brechtje Beuker of a non-illusory aesthetic that foregrounds the experience of an event (in German das Ereignishafte) rather than the creation of a fictional world. They reveal an interest in theatricality as a medium that could potentially bring the operations of the spectacle to a halt. In our late capitalist society, Guy Debord has argued, spectacle emerges as the key principle of a world in which social relationships are mediated by images and commodities rule over all lived experience.3 In a culture dominated by simulation and simulacra, aesthetic methods that seek to enact shock and terror by emphasizing theater’s corporeal, material, and social setting seem to hold a promise of thwarting the consumption of terrorism as commodity. Such methods furthermore seem to promise the reclaim of lived experience, which in Debord’s theory appears as a precondition for a critical, self-determined engagement with one’s environment. A closer look at Gotteskrieger and Anatomie Titus reveals, however, that replacing the appearance of terror with the reality of a live, unmediated experience does not warrant the disruption of the spectacle of terrorism. Such a disruption occurs only when a performance empowers audience members to challenge existing narratives of terrorism and become active participants in the construction of the meaning of terrorism.

The Theatricality and the Spectacle of Terrorism

Whether it is considered within the context of art or real life, the relationship among terrorism, theatricality and spectacle is complex and not without ambiguities. In part, these ambiguities are due to a lack of clear definitions for all three terms. While it is impossible within the confines of the present analysis to discuss the difficulty of defining terrorism, it is necessary to clarify my use of the terms “theatricality” and “spectacle” and

3 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995). The Spectacle of Terrorism and the Threat of Theatricality 271 to contemplate the roles each of these terms play in the comprehension of terrorism as historical and sociopolitical reality. While “the theatrical” is usually associated with theater as both an art form and an institution, the term theatricality, although closely related, connotes a broader phenomenon. As Samuel Weber has argued, theatricality can be regarded as a medium in and of itself, unrestricted by the boundaries of the physical space of a theater. In fact, what is typical of theatricality is precisely the fact that it defies fixation and destabilizes the structures we utilize to construct identity. The theatrical operates at a thresh- old and emerges “where space and place can no longer be taken for granted or regarded as self-contained.”4 It comes into being and passes away at the same time, making it difficult to locate and situate. Similarly, a theatrical performance distinguishes itself from other forms of art such as a painting or literary text because of its transient, unstable, and alterable nature, which prevents it from ever culminating in a finished product or “work.” Interestingly, however, theater often tends to divert attention away from its own theatricality and attempts to contain it, something it accomplishes first and foremost through the construction of a unified dramatic plot and progression toward narrative closure. Nonetheless, what ultimately defines theatricality as a medium (and by extension theater as a form of art) is, in Weber’s view, “a problematic process of placing, framing, situating rather than […] a process of representation.”5 For this very reason, it is possible to attribute to theatricality a subversive force. After all, the mechanisms of transformation and displacement mobilized by theatricality pose a threat to our desire for and construction of self-identity and self-presence, both on the level of the individual and society as a whole. The perception of such a threat explains the suspicion that has been cast upon theater and theatrical events throughout the history of Western culture, most famously expressed by Plato in his rejection of theater (and poetry) as an instigator of harmful, uncontrollable passions

4 Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004) 300. Italics in the original. 5 Ibid., 315. 272 Brechtje Beuker that could cause psychic and social disorder. But whereas Plato builds his critique of theater on the premise that theater – however inadequately – imitates reality, other examples taken from the history of Western theater illustrate that the perceived danger inherent in theatrical events does not necessarily relate to the act of representation. As carnivals and the performances of medieval jesters remind us, the threat of theatricality often lies in its ability to alter rather than depict reality. For a moment, these festivals and acts turn established power structures and their systems of representation upside down and unleash the meaning of familiar signs.6 It is important to point out, though, that eventually the existing social order is thought to benefit from the temporary transgression since it offers an outlet for social tensions. But this does not diminish the threat of theatricality considering that there is always a chance that the subversive forces entice the public and take on a more permanent form. Based on this particular concept of theatricality, one can conceive of terrorism as possessing a theatrical quality – a line of thought that Weber and others indeed have pursued. First, terrorism eludes conventional spatial configurations because unlike the guerilla warfare it occasionally claims to be, it does not aim to conquer or protect territories. In its current appearance as increasingly global phenomenon terrorism demonstrates its resistance to being localized and situated all the more forcefully, not only because global terrorism traverses places but because it questions the notion of place from the outset. If one thing has become strikingly apparent in the post-9/11 “war on terror,” it is that there is no clearly identifiable

6 For a detailed discussion of the carnival’s ability to suspend existing hierarchies and moral and political values during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, see Mikhail Bakhtin’s study Rabelais and his World. Bakhtin argues here that carnivalesque festivities and other expressions of folk humor destabilized the social order and allowed for the emergence of what he calls a second life. This distinguished them from official ecclesiastical and political feasts, which served to sanction and reinforce the existing order. Bakhtin furthermore stresses that the erasure of the boundaries between actors and spectators sets carnivals apart from artistic spectacles. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). The Spectacle of Terrorism and the Threat of Theatricality 273 opponent in the form of a nation state or a delineable “axis of evil,” no recognizable hostile face, and no guarantee that violence originates from some other geographical environment than one’s own. Under these circumstances, the identification of a singular place and the division in a (safe) here and an (unsafe) elsewhere reveal themselves to be merely provisional. Second, as the considerations regarding place already indicate, terrorism intersects with the theatrical because it undermines the stability of the established order and breaches the establishment’s well-guarded image as frictionless, all-encompassing system. From the violence organized by the German Red Army Faction (RAF) and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) to the actions of Uruguay’s Tupamaros and the suicide bombings of Al-Qaida, terrorist acts seek to compel us to consider the possibility of a social, political, economic, and ideological system that is different from the ruling one. As a logical consequence, hegemonic powers have to curtail the theatricality of terrorism in order to secure their self-preservation. Their efforts at linking terrorist acts to a stable sense of space and clearly marked social and political hierarchies run counter to the borderline experiences evoked by the theatrical. In her insightful discussion of the interconnections between terrorism, the theatrical, and the spectacular, Aida Hozic explains how state and other dominant powers actively seek to subordinate terrorism’s disruptive and destabilizing theatricality under the stronghold of spectacle. In accordance with Debord’s theory of the “society of the spectacle,” Hozic does not merely think of spectacles in the common sense of brief, larger- than-life events that bring people together in amazement – although she includes this particular definition in her investigation as well. Instead, she uses the terms theatricality and spectacle primarily as sociopolitical categories and describes their functions in society as largely opposed. Whereas spectacles have traditionally been seen as institutionalized festivities that support the dominant order, theater plays a more ambivalent role due to its willingness to acknowledge cultural strife and focus on controversial issues. Hozic writes:

[T]heatricality and spectacularity are similar to the extent that both can be used as forms of expression for symbolic political power, as indispensable elements of any 274 Brechtje Beuker

political activity in search of popular support. However, they obviously diverge in the ways by which this support is acquired, as well as in the kind of support they manage to solicit. Spectacle increases the gap between the actor and the audience, between the empowered and the powerless. But, as a form which pleases the audience, it also reduces conflict and social tension. Theatrical action, on the other hand, questions everything, reopens hidden conflicts and taboos, and attempts to mobilise, not satisfy, the audience.7

Although Hozic’s analysis predates the violent attacks of September 11, 2001 and their geopolitical repercussions, the process of spectacularization she describes – i.e. the process of transforming an unsettling theatricality into a stabilizing spectacle – well reflects the cultural and political maneuvers with which Western government and military officials, corporate leaders, and main stream media responded to the Islamists’ contestation of the existing world order. Paradoxically, the terrorist attacks – while intended to disrupt the capitalist commodification that is at the heart of the “society of the spectacle” – in fact affirmed the pervasive power of the image and its swift appropriation by the established system. Since the scope and visibility of the violence made it impossible to deny the terrorist threat, Western forces responded by exploiting this threat. In the United States, the near endless circulation of photos and video footage of the destruction of the World Trade Center served to justify the call for strong political and military actions that, in turn, allowed the state to publicly perform its legitimacy and present itself as a spectacle of unwaver- ing strength. As part of this spectacularization, politicians utilized public speeches and memorial services as opportunities to showcase the validity and the resilience of the dominant system and to unify the public in its defense. The rhetoric during such events further reveals how state officials tried to subdue the theatricality of the terrorist attacks. The wish to reduce their disruptive and transformative energies led to a revival of the binary model of friend versus foe that seemed depleted after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. As George W. Bush’s repeated statement that “[y]ou’re either

7 Aida Hozic, “The Inverted World of Spectacle: Social and Political Responses to Terrorism.” Terrorism and Modern Drama, eds John Orr and Dragan Klaić (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990) 64–81; here 67–8. The Spectacle of Terrorism and the Threat of Theatricality 275 with us or against us in the fight against terror” exemplifies, reverting to an oversimplified dualism allowed those in power to present contemporary society’s state of affairs as static and self-evident rather than mutable and messy.8 By attaching specific names and faces such as Mohammed Atta, Osama bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein to the source of an otherwise elusive terrorist threat, the Bush administration readily fulfilled the public’s (unconscious) desire for a comprehensible narrative with identifiable enemies. At the same time, however, the terrorists were dehumanized and portrayed as monsters, making it easier for the dominant order to deny them a political voice and thus “suppress the [terrorists’] implicit offer of a different social order.”9 As a result of this demonization, a widespread discussion of possible connections between Western foreign policies and Islamic fundamentalism or of Jihad as an expression of a growing anti- globalization movement did not take place. Instead, remote detention sites such as Guantanamo Bay reinforced the impression of absolute antagonism and seemed to function as exemplary stages from which the spectacular drama of (Western) civilization’s fight for survival could be observed from a position of distant safety. Here, those suspected of involvement in terrorist activities were simultaneously excluded from society and symbolically put on display as the dominant order’s now powerless Other. Just as in the 1970s, when the German government tried to use the detainment of key members of the Red Army Faction in a specially designed unit of Stuttgart’s Stammheim prison as a demonstration of strength and restored order, the more recent separation of alleged Islamic extremists from the rest of society aimed at returning an imagined controlling gaze in the hands of the (Western) authorities and by extension the broader public. The US government’s efforts to spectacularize 9/11 and the “war on terror” did not remain unchallenged. One only needs to think of the demonstrations against the US invasion of Iraq, the protests against the detention practices at Guantanamo Bay, or the controversy around Bush’s highly

8 “President Welcomes President Chirac to White House,” The White House President George W. Bush Archives, The White House, November 6, 2001. Web. July 11, 2013. 9 Hozic, 73. 276 Brechtje Beuker staged proclamation about the supposed end of major combat operations in Iraq on May 1, 2003 to recognize the hitches in the machinery. Such expressions of criticism, too, remind us of the political implications of the theatricality and the spectacle of terrorism and of the constant oscillation between them.

Terrorism, Art, and the Problem of Passive Consumption

A few days after 9/11, German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen stirred up a controversy by referring to the violent acts as the greatest piece of art there had ever been.10 Although Stockhausen quickly apologized for his faux pas, claiming to have been quoted out of context, his words lingered in public discourse. While this can partially be explained by Stockhausen’s provocative use of a superlative, it also points at a more fundamental struggle to determine the relationship between terrorism and aesthetic representation. Many artists took note of the fact that the destructive acts of 9/11 demonstrated disquieting performative and aesthetic qualities. Those who were physically present near the location now known as Ground Zero have testified to the unexpected beauty of the debris stirred up by the falling Twin Towers. Likewise, much has been said about terrorism’s dependence on media representation and about the fact that the perpetrators of 9/11 had reckoned with the instant and incessant mediation of their actions that would guarantee them an audience of millions. Whether witnesses experienced the attacks at the site of the crimes or in front of their tele- visions, they found themselves in the role of spectator at a calculatingly staged event. As Slavoj Žižek has noted in Welcome to the Desert of the Real, the “element of truth” in Stockhausen’s controversial remark lies in

10 Stockhausen made the remark in an interview that took place in Hamburg on September 16, 2001, during which he discussed the role of Lucifer in his work. For a transcription of the interview, see Musiktexte 91 (2001): 67–77. The Spectacle of Terrorism and the Threat of Theatricality 277 the fact that the terrorists “did not do it primarily to provoke real material damage, but for the spectacular effect of it.”11 Žižek does not differentiate here between theatricality and spectacle, referring to the terrorist acts as “theatrical spectacle” instead.12 The term highlights how 9/11 blurred the boundaries between fiction and reality, literal and symbolic meaning, virtual and material worlds, and how they dissolved the distinction between images of violence and the violence of the image. The perception of 9/11 as spectacle has prompted German writers, painters, filmmakers, and theater directors to scrutinize the relationship or even complicity between violence and art. Many acknowledged that artistic representations of violence easily lend themselves to being visually exuberant, engendering awe, transcending the everyday, or satisfying hidden desires – all key characteristics of spectacle. If we add to this a widespread contempt for spectacle as an artifice that induces intellectual quiescence, it is perhaps not surprising that artists took an interest in probing the possibilities and limitations of their respective media for disrupting the spectacle of terrorism.13 Painter Gerhard Richter and author Kathrin Röggla, for example, are among those who searched for ways in which they could make terror and terrorism the object of artistic expression without contrib- uting to the circus of image production and consumption that surrounded the historical events. Out of an acute awareness that the spectacular is often employed to seduce and engulf the observer, they turned to aesthetic methods that would not demand the kind of immersion that renders the viewer or reader passive but that would call for a more distanced engagement with the portrayed violence. Although Richter depicts the explo- sion of the second airplane hitting the South Tower of the World Trade Center in his painting entitled September, he shuns the imposing effect of the iconic image by using a relatively small canvas and by obliterating the colorful fireball behind layers of grey paint.September offers only a vague

11 Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London: Verso, 2002) 11. 12 Ibid., 9. 13 For a discussion of the history of the negative attitude towards aesthetic spectacle see Jenny Sager, The Aesthetics of Spectacle in Early Modern Drama and Modern Cinema: Robert Greene’s Theatre of Attractions (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 278 Brechtje Beuker semblance of the moment of destruction. In its abstraction, it partially defamiliarizes what seems all too familiar and brings the experience of loss to the fore. The painting’s ambivalence invites the viewer to think critically about our culture’s horrid fascination with images of extreme violence as well as its inability to mourn (see Figure 10.1).

Röggla pursues a similar goal but goes even further in the disruption of the spectacle of terrorism in her book really ground zero.14 On the level of aesthetic form, the author best known for her prose texts, plays, and audio dramas combines a literary and a non-literary language. Careful to avoid overly dramatic descriptions and clichéd narratives of tragedy,

14 Kathrin Röggla, really ground zero: 11. september und folgendes (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 2001). The Spectacle of Terrorism and the Threat of Theatricality 279 she here offers her observations of post-9/11 New York in short columns written in a semi-documentary style. Moreover, she cleverly exposes the ideological operations that underlie terrorism’s spectacularization when she examines the rhetoric and the social behavior with which Americans reacted to the violence of 9/11, from excessive flag waving to politicians’ use of hollow but emotively effective chauvinist phrases known as jingoisms. The Stockhausen-controversy and the debates about terrorism as fiction and reality resonated in the field of theater as well. In December of 2002, Berlin’s Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz organized a two-week seminar in which artists and cultural critics discussed the intertwinement of politics and crime, terror(ism) and art. Based on the contributions for this seminar, filmmaker, theater director, and actionist Christoph Schlingensief created his theatrical production ATTA ATTA – die Kunst ist ausgebro- chen [ATTA ATTA – Art has broken out], which premiered on January 23, 2003. The production reflected the central questions of the preceding discussions: How do we define art and who has the authority to decide on such definitions? Does art have fixed borders that prohibit labeling events such as 9/11 as works of art? Is art autonomous and subjected to its own laws, thus surpassing common moral and legal laws? What, if anything, can we learn from the violent phantasies of the avant-garde in the age of televised terrorism and virtual warfare? In search of answers to these questions Schlingensief seeks to free art of the formal and social conventions that in his opinion curtail its potential as a powerful weapon in the shaping of social reality. By fusing high art and trashy entertainment, live performance and modern media, stage and auditorium, he invokes the unsettling, destabilizing force of theatricality that Mohammed Atta had unleashed with other means. Consisting of loosely connected scenes and without a clearly recognizable plot to guide audience members toward a rational understanding of the performance, ATTA ATTA largely operates on a sensory and affective level where a chain of associations is set in motion. Schlingensief revisits some of the artistic methods of the Vienna Actionists, an informal group of avant-garde painters and performance artists who in the 1960s provoked Austrian society with their destructive, bloody, and sexually transgressive performances. In their tradition, Schlingensief harasses fellow actors, threatens to kill a chicken, and overwhelms his spectators with 280 Brechtje Beuker loud noises, an abundance of visual stimuli, and occasionally (unwanted) physical contact. His shock tactics reinforce the threat of theatricality. Yet it would be premature to conclude that ATTA ATTA brings the spectacle of terrorism to a halt. While artists such as Richter and Röggla purposely adopt non-spectacular methods to facilitate a critical awareness of the complex connections among violence, spectacle, and sociopolitical reality, Schlingensief is more interested in the opposite approach. His emphasis on exuberance and an immediate experience of violence at times contributes to the emergence of an enjoyable, mesmerizing spectacle. Rather than taking on the role of critical outsider and moral authority, Schlingensief makes a point of acknowledging or even embracing the guilty pleasure that violent spectacles provide for both their makers and their audiences. ATTA ATTA’s unique duplicity of theatricality and spectacle, fear and enjoyment, intellectual frustration and voyeuristic satisfaction draws attention to some of the difficulties surrounding the trend in contemporary theater to explore the topic of terrorism through non-representational means. First, there is no predetermined set of conditions under which the strategy of enacting terror automatically results in the collective undermining rather than fostering of the process of consummation – aside from those rare cases perhaps in which the sense of danger becomes so over- powering that the communication between performers and spectators breaks off entirely. As Schlingensief ’s self-ironic concept demonstrates, violent productions that do not completely eradicate the artistic frame always run the risk of tailoring to the needs of a thrill-seeking society, in which case they function as spectacles that enable the release of tension without questioning what causes the tension in the first place. Second, the question arises how exactly we should assess the importance of critical thinking and distanced, dispassionate observation versus that of visceral and emotional participation for our understanding of the meaning of a performance as well as our ability to relate this meaning to the real world. Can the perception of real terror convey any truths regarding terrorism’s cultural conditions? These issues are not exclusive to theater productions made in the aftermath of 9/11 but are in fact at the center of a larger debate in the history of Western theater that continues to inform theoretical discussions today. For centuries, dramatists and theoreticians have struggled The Spectacle of Terrorism and the Threat of Theatricality 281 to determine the desired involvement of the spectator during a theatrical event. Some of the most influential impulses go back to the early decades of the twentieth century, when critics of theatrical mimesis took issue with the traditional role of the spectator whose immobility and passive gaze, they thought, would aid her seduction by a false reality and rob her of her power to act. Revolutionary thinkers such as Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud envisioned a theater that would ban the practice of passive viewing or, as Brecht liked to say, culinary consumption. Brecht developed his famous epic theater with the intention to compel spectators to take on the more active role of scientific observers and independent judges, convinced that an inquisitorial attitude toward the actions portrayed on stage would extend to the real world and encourage the powerless and dispossessed to reclaim their agency. For some time he even explored the idea of a theater without spectators but with role-playing participants. Quite contrary to Brecht’s insistence on the audience’s rational involvement, Artaud felt that it was precisely the emphasis on reasoning and order (including the one imposed by the classical drama) that had alienated modern man from the base elements of life. He therefore rejected a distant relationship between audience and performance and promoted a kind of irrational, experiential, and shocking theater that upset people’s sensual tranquility, triggered an instinctive response, and made spectators aware of man’s cruelty and the universe’s terrifying natural forces. Today, the legacy of Brechtian and Artaudian theories informs German and increasingly international debates over the efficacy of the so-called postdramatic theater, a genre that emerged in Germany in the 1970s but did not fully establish itself until the 1990s. Typical of the postdramatic genre is the belief that theater’s value lies in a communal, sensory, and corporeal experience that is not subordinated to the traditional dramatic categories of narrative plot and psychologically typified characters. With a clear debt to Artaud, priority is given to an intensified physical and emotional perception rather than a play’s predetermined message about our external world. This preference for (sometimes violent) aesthetic methods that foreground the social, material, and visceral nature of theater points at the desire to reclaim a reality and authenticity that is believed to have been lost in our post-industrial society. In a “society of the spectacle” in 282 Brechtje Beuker which capitalist commodification detaches people from lived experience and in which social interaction is dominated by appearances, the idea that theater brings together a community of people who participate in the same live, unmediated event seems appealing. Due to its ephemerality theater seems to hold a promise of providing a site where the mechanisms of commodification and alienation can be resisted and where societal issues such as terrorism can be examined in a non-consumptive way.15 However, there is little agreement among theater scholars and practitioners about the nature and scope of such an examination. With the growing popularity of postdramatic theater throughout Western Europe critical voices have become louder as well, questioning whether the primacy placed on theater’s material and affective dimension diminishes its ability to serve as a platform for reflection and political discussion. After Hans-Thies Lehmann – the author of the first comprehensive study of the postdramatic genre – had received criticism for leaving questions about the relationship between the postdramatic and the political largely untouched, he engaged in the ensuing debate over theater’s political impact in his book Das politische Schreiben. In it he argues that postdramatic theater neither derives its political potential from the treatment of topics pertaining to the realm of politics nor from an author’s or director’s moral commitment but rather from theater’s ability to interrupt familiar political discourse and unmask this discourse’s propensity to dramatize sociopolitical reality.16 When assessing theater’s power to thwart the spectacle of terrorism, we must also remind ourselves of Debord’s assertion that precisely the illusion of reality gives the society of the spectacle its strength. Just like the simulated sensations of extreme sports or reality TV, the trend among contemporary theater directors to experiment with non-mimetic forms of violence may very well be an expression of what Žižek calls the “passion for the Real,” i.e. contemporary society’s desperate pursuit of authenticity

15 For a discussion of the idea that live performance has the potential to subvert the culture industry because it escapes reproduction and circulation see for example Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London, New York: Routledge, 1993). 16 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Das politische Schreiben: Essays zu Theatertexten (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2002). The Spectacle of Terrorism and the Threat of Theatricality 283 that must, paradoxically, culminate in a theatrical spectacle – in this case, literally.17 We should be careful, therefore, not to be satisfied too quickly with the assumption that participation in an unfiltered, “real” experience disrupts the passive consumption of images and narratives of terrorism. In order to make a claim for a specific production’s critical potential it is necessary to examine if the performance operates within the parameters of theatricality as discussed above, i.e. as a medium that not only emerges from a fundamental physical presence but that mobilizes its audience members and compels them to reconsider existing principles and viewpoints. This mobilization does not have to coincide with the abandonment of the spectator’s position as onlooker, a strategy that has been tested many times by seating the audience on stage, choosing unconventional performance sites, or inviting audience members to directly participate. As the French philosopher Jacques Rancière has suggested, both the Artaudian and the Brechtian approach toward overcoming the distance between the spectator and a false appearance of reality are motivated by a questionable set of presuppositions, presuppositions he identifies as underlying Debord’s theory of the society of the spectacle as well. Rancière asks,

What makes it possible to pronounce the spectator seated in her place inactive, if not the previously posited radical opposition between the active and the passive? Why identify gaze and passivity, unless on the presupposition that to view means to take pleasure in images and appearances while ignoring the truth behind the image and the reality outside the theater? Why assimilate listening to passivity, unless through the prejudice that speech is the opposite of action? These oppositions – viewing/knowing, appearance/reality, activity/passivity – are quite different from logical oppositions between clearly defined terms. […] They are embodied allegories of inequality.18

17 Žižek uses the term “the Real” in accordance with Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Borrowing the phrase “passion for the Real” from the French philosopher Alain Badiou, he argues that our capitalist, dematerialized society’s wish to return to ‘the real thing’ in fact culminates in a search for the ultimate effect because the Real can only be integrated in social reality indirectly by means of fantasy and fiction. Žižek, 5–32. 18 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London, New York: Verso, 2009) 12. 284 Brechtje Beuker

In Rancière’s opinion, a critical theater must begin by challenging the opposition between viewing and acting and by accepting distance as a normal precondition of communication rather than an evil to overcome. The emancipation of the spectator requires that boundaries are blurred and existing roles and viewpoints destabilized in such a way that the audience’s confusion is not perceived as a fascinating spectacular effect but taken as an opportunity for each individual spectator to freely associate and dissociate, interpret and reinterpret as part of the construction rather than adoption of new knowledge. One of the benefits of Rancière’s rethinking of the notion of spectatorship lies in the room it opens up to pay equal attention to direct experience and distanced contemplation as potential contributors to the process of audience empowerment. Moments of sensory, emotional, and intellectual engagement can all serve as a first impulse to change or adjust one’s opinions and beliefs. Even though it is impossible, as Rancière admits, to predict the outcome of a spectator’s individual journey, I do believe it is possible to comment on potential building blocks that allow for an emancipatory theatricality to emerge. The following analysis of Gotteskrieger and Anatomie Titus therefore focuses on the multiple layers of the respective productions, from dramatic text to mise-en-scène and performance situation [Aufführungssituation], in order to determine how they compel the audience to question the hegemonic perspective constitutive of the spectacularization of terrorism and to consider (but not necessarily accept) terrorism’s implicit offer of a different social order.

Envisioning an Alternative Social Order: Gotteskrieger and Anatomie Titus Fall of Rome

Commissioned by Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theater, Gotteskrieger was written by Lutz Hübner, one of Germany’s most popular contemporary playwrights. The play premiered on May 3, 2005 as part of a larger series of discussions, performances and scenic readings around the topic of religious The Spectacle of Terrorism and the Threat of Theatricality 285 and political fundamentalism. By focusing on the issue of home-grown terrorism, Hübner intended to challenge the schematic and antagonistic portrayal of Muslims favored by mainstream media in the aftermath of 9/11. Gotteskrieger tells the story of Zac, a young German of Arabic descent, whose struggle to escape a dysfunctional family, disappointment over the lack of opportunities to start a professional career, and discontent with political affairs (in particular with social inequality and the perceived oppression of Arabic countries by Western forces) lead him on a path toward radical Islam and ultimately martyrdom as a suicide bomber. The play ends with a dreamlike vision of apocalyptic destruction. Despite Hübner’s self-proclaimed critical intentions, the dramatic plot only partially succeeds in undermining familiar antagonistic narratives. This is due in part to the somewhat meager dialogue developed in the text between minority and majority voices. When Hübner wrote Gotteskrieger, Germany had only recently witnessed a long and fierce public debate regarding the existence of a so-called Leitkultur [leading or core culture]. Whereas conservative politicians repeatedly proclaimed that all citizens should subscribe to the basic values of the Western “core culture,” their critics rejected the coercive nature, or even the very idea of such a concept in favor of a more pluralist notion of collective identity. For a play that questions terms such as “core culture” or the equally controversial “clash of cultures,” it is surprising that Hübner introduces Zac’s girlfriend Fanny as the sole representative of the German Leitkultur. Moreover, her character remains astonishingly bleak throughout the text and appears to serve primarily as a vehicle for the imaginations and misconceptions of Arabic identity as generated in German society by members of the cultural and ethnic majority. The scene in which Fanny compares her boyfriend to an Arabic stallion and tries to entice him with what she believes to be an Arabic dance is a clear example of well-known colonial fantasies in which racial or ethnic Others are associated with a “primitive” sexuality. At first sight, Hübner seems to debunk this kind of orientalist thinking by incor- porating Zac’s puzzled response to the stereotypical projections into the dialogue. Zac, who at this point does not even speak Arabic, does not identify with Fanny’s cultural imaginations, defines himself as German, and realizes very well that his girlfriend’s fascination with him stems from 286 Brechtje Beuker her wish to have “an Arabic toy.”19 And yet Gotteskrieger remains contra- dictory when it comes to challenging identity politics. Although the play includes moderate Islamic figures who insist on an understanding of Islam as a peaceful religion and who represent a modern, progressive lifestyle, all these characters have their home in European countries. The scenes that take place in Afghanistan, by contrast, only show extremists. When Zac arrives in a jihadist training camp, the European newcomer is met with admiring friendliness and perceived by others as the counterpart of a fellow recruit who “never made it out of his Pakistani cowshed” (28). Through this spatial structure, the play reminds us of a long line of “rescue-stories” in German literature and film, i.e. migration stories in which an ethnic Other is literally or figuratively saved by assimilation into the allegedly more enlightened German culture. Admittedly, the character of Zac does not fully support such a reading since he demonstrates that Western societies with their high unemployment rate and their racial or ethnic discrimination can be the cause of crisis rather than its solution. Nevertheless, as a reviewer for the Berliner Morgenpost put it: “Basically, Hübner’s play emanates from a decidedly “Western” perspective on the issues.”20 The platitudinous trope of backward Easterners in Afghan training camps and the absence of moderate Muslims outside the European realm leave room for the bias that remote Islamic countries are a breeding ground for violence and questionable moral behavior. In the end, though, it is the play’s very emphasis on a violent jihadist that facilitates the replication of the discourse of Islamic brutality and irrationality versus Western civilization. In this respect, director Volker Hesse’s decision to cast a blond, non-Arabic looking actor in the role of Zac was appropriate as this opened the play up for a more complex reading. Volker Hesse’s directorial approach to Hübner’s drama combined a conventional mimetic rendition with the kind of shock strategies made popular in the 1960s and 1970s, when they were used by, for example, the Vienna Actionists or the Living Theatre to undermine the social and

19 Lutz Hübner, Gotteskrieger (Cologne: TS. Hartmann & Stauffacher Verlag, 2005) 15. Future references to the play will be indicated in the text with the page number in parentheses. All translations from German sources in this chapter are my own. 20 Peter Hans Göpfert, “Fundamentalistische Pseudofolklore,” Berliner Morgenpost, May 6, 2005. Web. January 20, 2014. The Spectacle of Terrorism and the Threat of Theatricality 287 artistic status quo. The performance took place in a so-called black box, which remained empty throughout the evening with the exception of some props carried on and off the stage. Audience members were seated on a single row of benches lined up against all four walls of the theater, while the actors entered and exited from opposite corner doors. What initially appeared to be a rather simple set design turned out to be more sophisticated. This became clear when – approximately one-third into the performance – a wall panel opened up and a character emerged unexpect- edly from a backstage area. This device of walls and windows opening up and actors climbing over spectators repeated itself, accompanied by the increasingly intense sound of loud music and gun fire. The shock tactics culminated in the brusque intrusion of people’s private space. Not only were audience members addressed individually, making it difficult to maintain a position of mere observer, but more and more spectators were driven out of their seats and compelled to sit down on the floor until, in the final apocalyptic scene, the entire audience was tightly packed at the center of the performance area (see Figure 10.2).

Figure 10.2 Blurring spatial boundaries in Gotteskrieger (2005). Copyright Wilfried Böing Nachlass, Berlin. 288 Brechtje Beuker

On a semantic level, the developments in the mise-en-scène could be read as foreboding of the encroaching threat of the protagonist’s suicide bombing. Similarly, the maneuver whereby actors climbed into the theater from the street, thereby blurring the boundaries between inside and outside, artistic and public space, could be interpreted as a reference to terrorism’s defiance of the mechanism with which societies seek to contain violence, i.e. the attempt to localize it, to pinpoint the exact source of its origin or the site of its spectacle. But clearly Volker Hesse aimed at more than the activation of the hermeneutic process. His aesthetic method placed a strong emphasis on what Erika Fischer-Lichte has termed a performance’s order of presence (as opposed to its order of representation).21 While both orders operate simultaneously, they elicit different modes of perception. The order of presence refers to a performance’s ability to present persons, objects, and spheres in a new light. As they come into being, they catch the spectator’s attention on a sensory and affective rather than intellectual level. Thus, in addition to reading Hesse’s terrorizing tactics as signs that refer to some event or structure in the external world and trying to uncover their hidden meaning, spectators could believe the significance of enduring these tactics to stem from a deeper perception or a new and unexpected experience of dread, fear, alarm, and confusion. Hesse’s staging concept, although for the most part grounded in an understanding of theater as an illusionist medium, incorporates Artaudian techniques and supports the idea that through the unmediated, lived experience of terror a path toward a more profound understanding of terrorism could open up. The choice of palpable forms of aggression can perhaps also be explained with reference to Hübner’s screenplay, which addresses the commodification and political abuse of violent images. The jihadists who recruit Zac make use of a propagandistic video tape that shows a fast-paced compilation of violent acts against Muslims. Their repeated command to “Look!” and “Look at the injustice!” underscores the power of visual indoctrination (25–6). Through his palpable staging practices, Hesse seeks an antidote to the alleged falsity of the mediated image. He turns to theatrical corporeality

21 Erika Fischer-Lichte, Ästhetik des Performativen (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2004). The Spectacle of Terrorism and the Threat of Theatricality 289 to expose a certain truth about violence that defies captivation for propagandistic purposes. However, I am skeptical that the experience of aggression mobilized the audience to come to a new understanding of the topic of terrorism. First, by being cast in the role of terrorized victims instead of neutral observers, spectators become part of a narrative that frames terrorist acts in familiar and schematic ways. Their participation as victims hinders critical reflection on this narrative precisely because Western audience members are asked to self-identify as the target of Islamic radicals. In this way, Hesse’s production allowed spectators to settle into a position of ideological comfort. Second, from the Artaudian point of view that a physical, gestural language is especially suitable to raise awareness of life’s cruel, primordial forces, the shock tactics employed by Hesse in the final stage of the production appeared to be unsuccessful. On a narrative level, the last scene of the play alludes to the horror felt by witnesses of the Madrid train bombing that had occurred only a year before Gotteskrieger premiered. On an affective level, however, the scene produced little to no sense of terror. On the contrary, a critic of the Berliner Zeitung describes the audience’s response to Hesse’s final staging trick (i.e. ushering people onto the stage) as follows: “Some people elongate their tired heads toward the leading actor. Some stare at their neighbor’s shoelaces. Some appear numb and doze off.”22 She even goes as far as to compare the spectators crowding the stage with a docile herd of ruminants. Apparently, the physical and visceral activation of the audience did not have the kind of engaging effect necessary to initiate the transformation of thought. The destabilizing force that theatricality and terrorism have in common did not manifest itself here. The failure of the shock tactics in combination with a fairly conventional narrative framework that only partially encouraged audience members to re-examine familiar views on foreign fundamentalists and their “enlightened” victims caused terrorism’s implicit proposal for change to remain subdued.

22 Katja Oskamp, “Der Attentäter kommt auf Badelatschen,” Berliner Zeitung, May 7, 2005. Web. August 12, 2013. 290 Brechtje Beuker

Compared to the violent physicality employed by Hesse in Gotteskrieger, Johan Simons’ production of Heiner Müller’s Anatomie Titus Fall of Rome Ein Shakespearekommentar, which premiered at the Münchner Kammerspiele on November 15, 2003 was fairly tame, despite the fact that the play provides plenty of opportunities for horrific scenic action. Nevertheless, Anatomie Titus was well disposed to avert complacency. Because Müller’s fragmented text destructs the traditional dramatic plot, Anatomie Titus destabilizes the established expectations of the spectator from the outset and forces her into a more active role as co-producer of the meaning of the performance. Müller largely follows the plot of Shakespeare’s gruesome revenge-tragedy Titus Andronicus about the destruction of the ancient Roman house of the Andronici by the Goths. However, the author’s own commentary in the form of visionary epic fragments, extensive and impracticable stage directions, and inner thoughts repeatedly interrupts the flow of the dramatic action. In so far as it challenges common narrative patterns and logical comprehension, Anatomie Titus illustrates Müller’s increasingly fragmentary and multilayered poetics and is a good example of the postdramatic genre. The titleAnatomie Titus Fall of Rome carries a double meaning. “Anatomy” refers not only to the many body parts that are chopped off in the course of the plot, but also to the dissection of the plot itself. Contrary to dramatic theater’s tendency to remember violence’s victims by re-mem- bering them in whole characters and a unified story, the motto of Müller’s theater is “DISMEMBER REMEMBER.”23 Far more than a stylistic experiment, the disruption of the dramatic action is a manifestation of Müller’s method of bringing form and content in a dialectical relationship. It is directly related to Müller’s political and philosophical ideas, at the center of which lies the conviction that history, violence, and storytelling are inextricably intertwined. Rather than offering a “Shakespearecommentary” as promised by the subtitle, Müller aims with his play at offering a commentary

23 Heiner Müller, “Anatomie Titus Fall of Rome Ein Shakespearekommentar,” We rke, ed. Frank Hörnigk, vol. 5 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2002) 99–193; here 193. The original quote is in English and capitalized. The Spectacle of Terrorism and the Threat of Theatricality 291 on the relationship between these three phenomena. Furthermore, the play has been read as Müller’s vision of a potential revolution of the Third World against First World imperialism. The character of the Negro Aaron, vengeful slave of Rome’s new empress Tamora, embodies the attempt to write a counter-narrative to the dominant account of world history. In the aftermath of 9/11, Müller’s examination of the conflict between oppressors and oppressed made the play interesting to director Johan Simons, who furthermore responded to an event that had taken place on October 23, 2002. On that day, Chechen separatists invaded a Moscow theater, taking hundreds of hostages as part of an ongoing battle against Russian political control over Chechnya. Simons wondered if the terrorist attacks in the USA and Russia had disrupted longstanding presumptions of cultural superiority and made those who are marginalized as a result of such presumptions visible. A key question underlying his production was whether it is possible to examine hegemonic power and its mechanisms of exclusion from the perspective of the Other, i.e. from the perspective of those who are perceived by a community as deviating from the (political, cultural, and economic) norms based on which this community constructs its own identity.24 Acknowledging the impossibility and undesirability of speaking for the Other, Simons set out to deconstruct the dominant (Western) gaze as one that is intricately intertwined with images of violence. As a theater director, he was especially perceptive to the complex

24 The concept of “the Other” has a long and complex philosophical tradition that can be traced back to the work of G.W.F. Hegel, who uses his parable of Master and Slave to illustrate the notion that human subjects require the recognition of others in order to build up a self-image. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977). In the context of theories of culture, the concept of the Other has gained popularity since the advent of Poststructuralism and its emphasis on the ways in which Western culture has established power differences along the lines of gender, race, ethnicity, class etc. A famous example of how Western ideology has defined itself in relation to subjugated Others has been analyzed by Edward Said in his study Orientalism. Building on the thought of Michel Foucault, Said demonstrates how European (post)colonial history is inextricably connected to Western cultural projections of the Orient as being different from and inferior to the Occident. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). 292 Brechtje Beuker correlations among theater, terrorism, and spectacle that clearly stood out in the case of the Russian hostage drama. On the night of the attack, the Dubrovka Theater showed the musicalNord-Ost , a celebration of Russia’s exploratory expeditions and aviation history set against the backdrop of the Revolution and Second World War. By means of a story of enduring love and spectacular effects such as the lowering of a life-size bomber plane onto the stage, the production presented violence as an attractive commodity. To the public eye, the attack by the Chechen terrorists seemed to expose the performance’s violence as an ultimately harmless fake. Simons understood, however, that the assumption of an oppositional relationship between the illusion of the musical and the reality of the hostage drama was too simplis- tic. The attack by the Chechen separatists in fact corroborates what Žižek has argued with regard to the events of 9/11: rather than representing the intrusion of “the Real Thing” into the world of fiction, the terrorist acts urge us to recognize the element of fiction in “real” reality, i.e. they urge us to recognize the violent fantasies of a society that is unable to confront its internal destructive forces except by means of spectacles and hallucinations. In today’s world, Žižek claims, recent catastrophe movies coming out of Hollywood testify not only to global capitalism’s self-generated excess but to the desire to annihilate the prevailing system as a result of this excess. Along these lines, one can argue that the romanticized portrayal of violence in the musical Nord-Ost allows contemporary Russian society to integrate into daily reality what it finds hard to endure otherwise, namely that any system of power is threatened by its own outgrowth and that centuries- long Russian expansionism causes tensions and violent revolt even after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. In congruence with Müller’s concerns about the complicity of artistic media with an ideology of violence, Simons places the relationship of violence and theater at the center of his adaptation. Like Hesse, he challenges established expectations of theater-going by abolishing the distance between performers and audience members and by using the auditorium as well as the street as staging areas. On video screens, we see what appear to be live images of the Maximilianstraße, where some obscure figures (who later enter the auditorium in their role of invaders) linger in the vicinity of expensive cars. Because the images resemble those of security cameras, the The Spectacle of Terrorism and the Threat of Theatricality 293 audience is led to believe that it is watching “real” events and that crimes are about to happen. Simons’ staging concept furthermore foregrounds voyeurism and spectatorship through the set design, which mirrors the auditorium. The actors give their lines while seated in or moving between rows of theatrical chairs. As a result, the framing function of theater, i.e. the usually unconscious mechanism through which a performance confines violence and terror to an illusory elsewhere, can no longer be taken for granted. Simons robs Munich’s educated, bourgeois theatergoers of the opportunity to feel reassured of their own presumed humanism when they watch a critical play about inequality and cultural conflict. Instead, he confronts a Western audience with its own role in the spectacle of terrorism and with its tendency to look away when the Other arrives to claim her share, thereby “BRINGING THE FIRST WORLD HOME INTO NOTHINGNESS.”25 For Müller, it was important not to depict the Gothic terrorists and the black outsider Aaron as sympathetic revolutionaries whose cause justifies every means. The violent acts they commit are as appalling as those of the Romans. Simons’ visual uniformity underscores this idea. He plays with the trope of a theater that holds up a mirror to the world, only to expose that world as stagnant and stifled by the one-dimensionality of the established order’s perception. Just as the Romans in Müller’s play face the downfall of their empire due to their unbridled imperialism, the hegemony of Western post-industrial societies – Simons suggests – threatens to turn against itself. When alternative voices and perspectives cannot be accommodated on our (political, economic, and cultural) stage, an entire system is doomed to collapse. In Bert Neumann’s set design, this potential collapse is symbolized by the gradual yet sharp tilting of the entire set. The motion sets in when the Goths invade the city and when it comes to a stop, the stage has reached a nearly vertical position, requiring the actors who portray the Romans to cling to their seats for safety. Their subsequent balancing-act conjures up the image of a society hanging over an abyss, waiting for the moment it will meet its demise.

25 Ibid., 114. Capitalization in the original. 294 Brechtje Beuker

Whereas Hesse aimed for a real sensation of terror, Simons recognized the limitations of an aesthetic concept that relies on theater’s (corpo)reality for the purpose of a cultural critique. He acknowledged that theater cannot fully escape the power of the spectacle and that any strike at it must come from within the world of appearances. Consequently, he replicates familiar images of violence but drains them of their fascinating appeal. Rather than portraying acts of violence realistically, the actors either hint at them with simple gestures or evoke estrangement through exaggeration. In this way, they withhold from the audience the thrilling spectacle it expected to see on the stage. By refusing to accommodate the audience’s desire for such spectacles, Simons invites spectators to acknowledge the widespread obsession with images of crime and destruction as well as the commodification of this desire in today’s “society of the spectacle.” At the same time, the production casts doubt on the belief that live performance can function as a site of resistance to the powers of media domination. Consistent with the ideas of scholars such as Philip Auslander, who has warned against an uncritical embrace of the ontology of live performance by a society weary of the culture industry, Simons demonstrates that the construction of an oppositional relationship between live and mediated performances based on immutable differences fails to acknowledge the fusion of modern technology and live performance that is so typical of cultural life today.26 As the blending of stage action and video streaming in Anatomie Titus revealed, theatrical viewing habits are strongly influenced by the consumption of film, television, and surveillance footage. Likewise, theater as an institution is not immune to the operations of the marketplace, as became strikingly clear when Simons was invited to present his adaptation on the opening night of the annual “Berliner Theatertreffen.” Here, at Germany’s arguably most important theater festival, it was introduced and praised by representatives of the political and cultural establishment who conveniently chose

26 Auslander argues that “the concept of liveness describes a historical, rather than ontological, condition” so that the insistence on a binary opposition between live and mediated forms of art is reductive and misleading. Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 2nd edn (London, New York: Routledge, 2008) xii. The Spectacle of Terrorism and the Threat of Theatricality 295 to disregard Anatomie Titus’s focus on the role violence plays in the con- solidation of a dominant political and economic system. As a critic for the Berliner Zeitung reports: “[The production] served those VIPs right who wanted to exhibit themselves. If they would take Simons’ work seriously, they all would have been exposed and they would have displayed courage by letting themselves be called into question. The speakers, however, ignored this.”27 Other spectators, however, very well understood that the production’s portrayal of terrorism was intended as a swipe at self-indulgent visual pleasures and that the inclusion of Müller’s play in the glamorous opening gala was highly ironic.28 In this respect, Anatomie Titus can be understood as a performance that undermines the sense of satisfaction on which the success of the spectacle depends. Although the production’s vision of a self- negating monolithic system gives little opportunity to imagine an alternative social order, it also does not allow the spectator to settle into a position of ideological comfort. Anatomie Titus offers “no room for […] coziness of the heart.”29 Instead, it conjures the threat of theatricality precisely because the audience can find no pleasure in the act of self-recognition. More than any physical uneasiness, the mental discomfort this creates is crucial for rethinking the status quo. Each in their own way, Gotteskrieger and Anatomie Titus illustrate the challenges contemporary playwrights and directors face as they try to engage with present-day terrorism. To some extent, this reflects theater’s larger struggle to determine its essence and its value for responding to an increasingly mediated world. In view of the widespread dramatization of politics and the establishment’s desire to contain terrorism’s destabilizing force with the help of schematic representations, theater practitioners must use caution when framing the topic in a dramatic structure. As the analysis of Gotteskrieger has shown, it is unlikely that spectators are mobilized to

27 Ulrich Seidler, “Echtlinge im Saal. Nach vorn bitte zum Abmurksen: Das 41. Theatertreffen wurde eröffnet,”Berliner Zeitung, May 5, 2004: 29. 28 See Seidler as well as Hein Janssen, “Alles vertellen voor ik dood ben,” De Volkskrant, May 6, 2004. Web. December 27, 2013. 29 Peter Hans Göpfert, “Schulstunde,” Berliner Morgenpost, May 3, 2004. Web. December 27, 2013. 296 Brechtje Beuker

(re)negotiate the meaning of terrorism when offered conventional story- lines. At the same time, a theater that thinks it can arrest the affirmative operations of the spectacle by opposing the reality of theater to the falsity of simulated images not only fails to recognize the double nature of contemporary terrorism as a simultaneously real and virtual phenomenon. It also fails to recognize the insufficiency of immediate lived experience alone to the cognitive challenge of understanding more about the complex social and political conditions that produce terrorism. Only if a performance understands the threat of theatricality as a first and foremost intellectual threat – as was the case with Anatomie Titus – can it serve to undercut the ideologically motivated operations of terrorism’s spectacle and invigorate political debate. Notes on Contributors

Deborah Ascher Barnstone is professor of architecture at University of Technology, Sydney. She holds a PhD in architectural history from the TU, Delft; a Master of Architecture degree from Columbia University; and a BA cum laude degree from Barnard College. Her work interrogates the origins of classical modernism and explores the relationships between art, architecture and culture more broadly. Her first book, The Transparent State: Architecture and Politics in Postwar Germany (2005), examines the myth of transparency in West German politics and the state architecture designed to house the new democracy. She has published scholarly articles in Journal of Architectural Education, Journal of Design History, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Journal of Architecture and New German Critique. Jacob M. Baum is currently Assistant Professor at Texas Tech University specializing in the history of early modern Germany, with emphasis on the cultural and religious transformations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. His research and teaching interests include the history of daily life, the senses, witchcraft and demonology, and Jewish-Christian relations in the early modern period. He is currently preparing his book manuscript, Reformation of the Senses: A Historical Phenomenology of Religion in Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century Germany, which attempts to answer the question of how the early Protestant Reformation changed the sensual worship practices of the late medieval church. Brechtje Beuker earned her PhD in German from the University of Minnesota. After having served on the faculty at the University of Georgia and the University of California, Los Angeles, she is currently working at Inholland University of Applied Sciences. Her research interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century German and Austrian literature and visual media; theatre and performance studies; and the intersection of 298 Notes on Contributors aesthetics and violence. Publications include an article on Elfriede Jelinek and book chapters on Christoph Schlingensief and Hermann Broch. Jennifer L. Creech received her PhD in Germanic Studies from the University of Minnesota in 2006. She is Associate Professor of German in the Department of Modern Languages & Cultures, and Affiliate Faculty member in the Film & Media Studies Program and the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Women’s Studies, at the University of Rochester. Her research and teaching interests include late twentieth-century German literature, film and culture; cinema studies; Marxist and feminist theories. She has published and presented on East German, Austrian and post-unification cinema. She is the author of Mothers, Comrades & Outcasts: East German Women’s Films 1965 and Beyond (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming 2016). Thomas O. Haakenson is Associate Provost at California College of the Arts (CCA). He holds a doctoral degree in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society, along with minors in German and in the History of Science and Technology, from the University of Minnesota (2006). Haakenson is co-editor of the series German Visual Culture, co-coordinator of the Visual Culture Network of the German Studies Association, and Vice President of the Northern California Chapter of the Fulbright Association. He has published widely, including in New German Critique, Cabinet, Rutgers Art Review, German Studies Review and the anthologies Legacies of Modernism and Memorialization in Germany Since 1945. Brían Hanrahan is a film and media historian. His publications include articles on the history of the microphone, cinematic visualizations of the telephone network, and early sound montage. He has held positions at Princeton, Cornell and Deep Springs College. He lives in Mexico City. Heather Mathews is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art and Design at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. In addition to teaching on topics such as the representation of gender issues, memory, and globalization in modern and contemporary Notes on Contributors 299 art, Mathews oversees several campus galleries and is coordinator of the university’s art collection. Elizabeth Otto is Associate Professor in the Department of Art at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, where she also serves as the Executive Director of the Humanities Institute. She works on gender and emerging media cultures in early twentieth-century Europe. Author of Tempo, Tempo! The Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt (2007) and co-editor of The New Woman International: Photographic Representations from the 1870s through the 1960s (2011), Otto is currently at work on a book titled Haunted Bauhaus. Paul Monty Paret is Associate Professor of Art History and Associate Dean of the Honors College at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, where he writes and teaches on modern and contemporary art. His research concerns the Bauhaus, the relationship of sculpture to the visual and material culture of modernity, and issues of land use in contemporary art. Nadine Rossol is Lecturer in Modern European History in the History Department at the University of Essex and Fellow of the HEA. She has published extensively on festive state representation and political celebrations in Weimar and Nazi Germany. Her book Performing the Nation in Interwar Germany. Sport, Spectacle and Political Symbolism 1926–1926 was published in 2010. Sara Ann Sewell is Associate Professor of History at Virginia Wesleyan College in Norfolk, VA. Her research focuses on a the history of gender and culture in the German Communist Party in Weimar Germany.

Index

acoustic presence 7, 79, 86, 92–5, 99–100 and democracy 3, 187, 191–2, 216 actuality see liveness see also ideology; public sphere Adiaphora 22, 29, 32–9 Chamberlin, Clarence 77–8, 80–3 Adiaphorists 30–1, 36–7 Citroen, Paul 61–2, 64–7 Adorno, Theodor 4–6 see also Bauhaus see also capitalism; Debord, Guy; commodity fetishism 6–7, 41, 48, 133, visuality 209n architecture 9–10, 43n, 124, 162, 173, 185, communist spectacle 8, 129–31, 133–7, 217–18, 220–4, 226–30, 231–2, 145–50, 155–6 241 Constructivism 44, 67–9, 106, 117, 119, Augsburg Interim 26–7, 29, 31, 33, 35–6 122

Bakhtin, Mikhail 7, 272 Debord, Guy 2–8, 14, 41–4, 72–3, 75n, Bauhaus 6–8, 41–73, 108, 117–19, 105n, 133–5, 137, 145, 149–50, 163n, 122–4 187, 189–91, 203n, 205n, 209, 213, Baroque spectacle 6, 14, 21, 39–40 217–21, 237, 241, 246–7, 257–60, Behnisch, Günter 218, 224, 228–34, 263–4, 266, 270, 273, 282–3 237–8 The Society of the Spectacle 2–4, 13n, Benjamin, Walter 158, 163, 260n 41–4, 72, 105n, 133, 163n, 187, 190, “The Work of Art in the Age of 217–18, 219n, 221n, 237, 246n, Mechanical Reproduction” 13n, 270n, 273, 294 158n, 260n see also Krakauer, Siegfried; “society bodies 14–15, 21, 32, 39–40, 78, 83, 86, 97, of the spectacle” 137–41, 156, 161, 195 devotional images 16–18, 22, 24, 27 Braun, Alfred 84, 95, 98n, 99 Breuer, Marcel 45–7 Edel, Uli 188–9, 195–6, 199, 202–3, Brütt, Adolf 101–3, 105–7, 119–22 205–6, 213, 216 Eisner, Kurt 129–31 camp 188–9, 206–9, 211–16 see also German Communist Party capitalism 3–6, 8, 13–14, 41, 48, 73, 76, 97, Elevation of Eucharist 16–18, 22–7, 37–8 115, 119, 122, 133–5, 145, 149–50, see also Mass of St Gregory 163, 187, 190, 194–5, 207–8, 211, Ensslin, Gudrun 187–8, 195–6, 200–3, 213, 220–1, 245–6, 270, 274, 206, 208–11, 213–16 282–3, 292 Expressionism 44, 53, 67, 123, 165 302 Index fascist spectacle 8–9, 136, 157–86, 198, 150, 153, 156, 159–60, 163, 166, 185, 224, 260–4 188, 197, 206, 214, 228, 273, 279, see also Thingspiel; Gegenöffentlichkeit 289, 291–2, 295–6 feminism 9, 193–4, 198, 204, 206–7 Internationale, The 142, 147, 148n fighting fuck toy (FFT) 9, 187, 189, 196, irreversible time 190–1, 216, 258–9, 204, 216 261–4 Flacius, Matthias 30–4, 36 see also Debord, Guy, The Society of Foster, Sir Norman 10, 218, 237–40 the Spectacle see also Reichstag Itten, Johannes 60, 62–4, 67–8 freedom of conscience 27, 30, 40, 221 Kandinsky, Wassily 7, 53, 57–60, 62–3 Gabo, Naum 106–7, 117–24 Klee, Paul 7, 53–7, 59–60, 62–4, 66 see also Constructivism Kleksographien 51–2, 64 Gates, Theaster 254–6 Kluge, Alexander 189–91, 192n, 193, 216 Gegenöffentlichkeit [oppositional public Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands sphere] 191–2, 194, 198, 212 [KPD] see German Communist see also Kluge, Alexander; New Party German Cinema Kracauer, Siegfried 42, 97–8, 105n German Communist Party 129, 131–4, see also mass ornament 137–43, 147, 149–50, 156 Kurve Links 130–1, 143 German spectacle 1–2, 5–11 see also German Communist Party Gerth, Fritz 103, 105–6, 119–22 Goebbels, Joseph 85n, 164–5, 167, 169, LaBruce, Bruce 188–9, 195, 206–8, 175–6 209–15 Gregorsmesse see Mass of St Gregory Levine, Charles 7, 77, 81 Gropius, Walter 44–5, 53, 67–8, 72, 123 see also Chamberlin, Clarence Grunow, Gertrud 63–4 Lindbergh, Charles 77–8, 80–1, 83, see also Bauhaus 87–8, 94, 97 liveness 7, 75–9, 83, 86, 88–9, 92, 94, Häring, Hugo 119–20, 123–6 99–100, 294 Heller, Joachim 6, 35–9 see also acoustic presence Hesse, Volker, Gotteskrieger 269, 286–9, Loreley 159, 171–86 292, 294 Luther, Martin 22, 26, 30, 32–3, 37 history 9, 189–91, 193–7, 200, 203, 205–6, Lutheranism 6, 15, 21–3, 25–6, 29–40 209, 212–16, 258, 261–3, 290–1 “Gnesio-Lutheran” 30–2, 34–9 Hozic, Aida 11, 273–5 see also Protestant Reformation Hübner, Lutz, Gotteskrieger 269n, 284–6, 288 Macuga, Goshka 256–8 Marcuse, Herbert 209, 213 ideology 3, 6, 13, 52, 76–7, 83, 96, 107, mass culture 7, 42, 76, 78, 86, 101, 111, 122, 131, 134–6, 138, 142–3, 146, 122, 124, 245 Index 303 mass ornament 97, 105n public sphere 9, 77, 188, 190–4, 198, 212 see also Kracauer, Siegfried mass theater see Thingspiel Red Army Faction (RAF) 187–9, 192, Mass of St Gregory 17–18 194–8, 200, 203–5, 208–13, 215 Mazdaznan 60–4, 66, 68–9 Red Front Fighting League [Rotfront- mega-exhibition 10, 245, 247, 264, 268 kämpferbund, RFB] 137, 139, 143, Meinhof, Ulrike 188–9, 195–200, 202–3, 148 205–6, 215 Reichstag 10, 85, 109–11, 155, 218, 228, Melanchthon, Philipp 22–3, 26, 28–30, 236–41 34, 38–9 see also Foster, Sir Norman modernity 13, 39, 43, 49, 76, 86, 107–8, Richter, Gerhard 277–8 111–14, 116–17, 119, 121–2, 140, Richter, Gunnar 261–2 173, 219, 250 Romanticism 53, 159, 163, 166, 172–4, Moholy, Lucia 68, 73 180 Moholy-Nagy, László 7, 68–73 monuments 7–8, 42, 101–6, 109–14, Schlingensief, Christoph, ATTA 120–2, 260, 262 ATTA 279–80 see also Musil, Robert Schrenck-Notzing 49–51, 56 Müller, Heiner, Anatomie Titus Fall of Schwippert, Hans 223–8, 232, 234, 238 Rome Ein Shakespearekommen- see also architecture; Reichstag tar 269–70, 284, 290–1 seeing 6, 17, 41, 52, 73, 145, 197n, 218, Musil, Robert 7, 42, 101–3, 114, 121 219–20, 227, 260 see also vision nation-state 1–2, 13, 76, 134, 160–1, sight see vision 217–18, 223–5, 228, 231–2, 239, Simons, Johan, Anatomie Titus Fall of 273–5 Rome Ein Shakespearekommen- see also architecture; Schwippert, Hans tar 269–70, 290–6 New German Cinema 192–5, 197, 203, simultaneity 77, 83, 85–8, 253 206 see also liveness social relations 4, 41, 131, 133–4, 136, Osram Light Tower 103–7, 109, 111–14, 149–50, 153–4, 163, 187, 189–90, 116, 121, 125–6 218–19, 237–8, 246, 270 “society of the spectacle” 3–4, 7, 43–4, Parsberger, Achatius 23–6, 35 52, 72, 220, 239, 274, 281–3, 294 perception 4–5, 14–15, 39, 51, 57, 63, 80, see also Debord, Guy, The Society of 95, 100, 103, 190, 203, 219, 245, the Spectacle 271–2, 277, 280–1, 288, 293 Sphinx 51–2, 58 see also seeing; vision; window spirit photography 47–9, 52, 64–6 hypothesis Spiritism 48, 58, 60 Protestant Reformation 6, 14–17, 19, spiritualism 48–9, 65 (Fig. 2.4) 21–3, 25–9, 34, 39 see also Bauhaus; Spiritism 304 Index staging 18, 88, 133, 157–61, 165–6, 174–5, Thingspiel (“mass theater”) 9, 159, 161–3, 180, 185, 208–10, 269, 288–9, 165–71, 179, 184–6 292–3 see also Loreley see also terrorism; Thingspiel symbolism 3, 11, 14, 22, 80, 113, 121, 129, vision 2, 6–7, 14–16, 21, 28–9, 32–4, 133, 134n, 136–7, 145–9, 150–1, 38–9, 44, 47–9, 60, 67–8, 73, 154–6, 158, 172–3, 181, 183–4, 217, 210, 213, 217–19, 227, 247, 254 221, 227, 231–2, 241, 273–5, 277, visual culture 1, 6–9, 19–21, 41–3, 106, 293 108 visuality 5, 25, 34, 74, 245 terrorism 9–11, 188–9, 194–8, 200–3, 205–6, 269–84, 288–92, 295–6 Weill, Kurt 94–6 see also theatricality Wilhelm Tell 172, 175–7, 185 theatricality 10–11, 159, 161, 166, 184, 239, window hypothesis 15, 25–6, 32–3, 37 245, 270–77, 279–84 see also vision see also Hozic, Aida; terrorism Witzel, Georg 27–8 GERMAN VISUAL CULTURE

series editors Professor Deborah Ascher Barnstone (University of Technology, Sydney, Australia) Professor Thomas O. Haakenson (California College of the Arts, USA)

German Visual Culture offers an innovative approach to German Studies within the diverse and growing field of Visual Culture. The series invites scholarship by artists, designers, academics and curators across all media forms and time periods. It engages with traditional art historical methods as well as inventive interdisciplinary ones, recognizing the scholarly merits of both. Of particular interest are provocative perspectives on archival materials, original scholarship on emerging and established visual forms, and new readings of history through the lens of visual culture. The series offers a much-needed venue for expanding how we engage with the field of Visual Culture in general.

The series is the publishing project of the Visual Culture Network (VCN) for the German Studies Association in the United States. Proposals for revised dissertations, monographs and edited volumes from a wide range of compara tive, theoretical and methodological perspectives are welcome. Prospective authors are encouraged to submit proposals on any aspect of German Visual Culture, including projects that address such themes as new media, inter mediality, gender, identity, memory, nostalgia, spectacle, trauma, the double, East/West, dissent and fetishism. We publish in both English and German.

Vol. 1 Deborah Ascher Barnstone and Thomas O. Haakenson (eds) Representations of German Identity. 312 pages. 2013. isbn 978-3-0343-0841-0

Vol. 2 Jennifer L. Creech and Thomas O. Haakenson (eds) Spectacle. 313 pages. 2015. isbn 978-3-0343-1803-7