Zurich Open Repository and Archive University of Zurich Main Library Strickhofstrasse 39 CH-8057 Zurich www.zora.uzh.ch Year: 2019 Necroperformance. Cultural Reconstructions of the War Body Sajewska, Dorota Abstract: Searching for traces of memory in precarious bodies inflicted with the violence of war, Necroper- formance implores us to acknowledge the fragility of life as it actively reinforces an attitude of respect for the right to live. Sajewska constructs here an alternative culture archive, conjuring it from compoundly- mediatized historical remnants—bodies, documents, artworks, and cultural writings—that demand to be recognized in non-canonical reflection on our past. Her chief objective is to understand the social impact of remains and their place in culture, and by examining the body and corporality in artistic practices, social and cultural performances, she strives to identify both the fragmentariness of memory and the discontinuity of history, and finally, to reinstate the body’s (or its documental remains’) historical and political dimension. Posted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of Zurich ZORA URL: https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-186916 Monograph Published Version Originally published at: Sajewska, Dorota (2019). Necroperformance. Cultural Reconstructions of the War Body. Zurich: Di- aphanes. Necroperformance Dorota Sajewska Necroperformance Cultural Reconstructions of the War Body Translated from the Polish by Simon Wloch DIAPHANES Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute THINK ART Series of the Institute for Critical Theory (ith)— Zurich University of the Arts and the Centre for Arts and Cultural Theory (ZKK)—University of Zurich. Publication financed under the program of the Polish Minister of Science and Higher Education under the name National Program for the Development of Humanities in 2018-2020, project 21H 18 0074 86, amount 88.000 PLN. © by Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute, Warsaw 2016 © for this edition by DIAPHANES, Zurich 2019 Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute, Warsaw 2019 All rights reserved ISBN 978-3-0358-0191-0 Cover image: Bertolt Brecht, Augsburg 1917, Photo by Friedrich Fohrer Layout: 2edit, Zurich Printed in Germany www.diaphanes.com Table of Contents 7 The Postmortal Life of the Body—A Prologue 45 The Cultural Reconstruction of Theatre 45 The Modernization Front 54 The Myth of Theatre’s Ephemerality 69 Body-Memory, Body-Archive 88 Living Leftovers of History 111 An Archive of the Great War 111 The Soldier’s Experience 128 Montage Strategies and Reconstruction Practices in Media Images of Violence 156 The Great War as a Source of Political Theatre 167 Theatre as an Alternative Cultural Archive 199 Polish Angels of History 199 Theatre Angels 215 Women in Disguise 239 War Antiheroes 258 Afterimages of the Revolutionary Body 273 Phantom Bodies 273 The Invisible Front of the Great War 286 The Psychosexuality of the Soldier 304 The Proletarianization of the Female Body 318 Social Documentary Dramaturgy 343 The Return of Odysseus the Soldier 343 The Anthropomorphic Remnant 378 Performance Archive 413 Theory as Remains—An Epilog 420 Performativity of Performance 423 Performance and Documentation 427 The Performative Necros as a Remnant 431 The Necropolitical Performance 433 The Re-Materialization of Matter 435 The Positivity of Remains 437 The Archive as a Site of Necroperformance 441 Art as a Necro-Archive 445 Acknowledgments 449 List of Illustrations 453 Index The Postmortal Life of the Body—A Prologue A light-blue cardboard box blanketed in thick layers of dust sat in the depository of the Archiwum Akt Nowych (Archive of New Records) in Warsaw. The crossed-out handwriting on the box sug- gested it had once held the contents of a postal package. Inside it now were eighteen navy-blue school notebooks, dated from May 1913 to October 1918, eleven of them from 1913 and seven from the period of the Great War. The last notebook contained notes on the classification of plants and minerals, with refer- ences to German botanical and mineralogical literature from the late 19th century, while the seventeen notebooks preceding it comprised an amateur herbarium. Glued to each of the 370 pages was a dried plant specimen, labeled with its German and Latin names, its origin, and the date of collection or acquisition. Some specimens were accompanied by an extensive description of the plant’s appearance—its physical characteristics, color, and even fragrance—along with information on the individual who had supplied it. The means by which the dried plants had been preserved suggested that the person compiling the her- barium either had little experience or did the job hurriedly: the specimens (generally rootless) were entirely coated with glue and thus inflicted with varying degrees of damage. Often, only fragments of plants were included—single blossoms, leaves, or twigs—making their identification difficult or outright impos- sible. Yet the dried fragments were supplemented with illus- trations of the missing parts, drawn in pencil, ink, or colored crayon. Likewise, the strikethroughs and corrections visible on numerous pages attest to aspirations of accuracy on the part of the herbarium’s author—none other than Rosa Luxemburg.1 1 See Hanna Werblan-Jakubiec and Jakub Dolatowski, “Komentarz do ziel- nika Róży Luxemburg,” in Rosa Luxemburg, Zielnik [Herbarium] (Warsaw: Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, 2009), p. 9. 7 The Postmortal Life of the Body Fig. 1: The cover of Rosa Luxemburg’s herbarium, notebook No. 13. 8 A Prologue The origin of the botanical artifact must already have been clear in the 1970s when this extraordinary document of the life of the Polish-German socialist arrived at the Consulate General of the Polish People’s Republic in New York and entered the Central Archive of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party. The cardboard box into which the herbarium notebooks had been packed was addressed to the Consul Gen- eral, identified as “Mr. A. Janowski.” In the top left corner was the stamp of the initial sender, the Czas Publishing Company, a Polish American publishing house operating out of Brooklyn from 1925 to 1975. Having been returned to Polish hands, the herbarium languished unstudied for many years, with subse- quent authorship inquiries made only in 2009, when the staff of the Archive of New Records were doing an inventory of the holdings of the former Central Archive of the Polish Left.2 The shoebox-like parcel of notebooks filled with crumbling dried plants did not appear to possess significant political value, especially since it had belonged to an activist whose views were not held in particularly high esteem. The negative reputation clinging to Luxemburg regarding her political convictions had already taken shape within the international communist movement prior to World War II and spread into Poland in the 2 The herbarium of Rosa Luxemburg was officially handed over to the Archives of New Records on April 1, 1990 along with the entirety of the collections of the Central Archive of the Polish Left, pursuant to an accord dated March 31, 1990, signed by the director of Poland’s National Archives, Marian Wojciechowski; the director of the Archive of New Records, Bohdan Kroll; the deputy chair of the board of the Social Democracy Party of the Republic of Poland, Tomasz Nałęcz; and the director of the Central Archive of the Polish Left, Stanisław Seklecki. Prior to this, the herbarium had resided in the Central Archive of the Polish Left (functioning from 1948–57 as the archive of the Party History Department of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party; from 1957–71 under the name Party History Company of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party; and from 1971–90 as the Central Archive of the Central Commit- tee of the Polish United Workers’ Party). 9 The Postmortal Life of the Body 1930s,3 never to be revised after the war and remaining in place as the official stance of the victorious party against Luxemburg. And while the “chief pillars” of the “flawed system of Luxem- burgism” were believed to be its “theory of the spontaneity of mass movements and the theory of accumulation of capital, imperialism, and the crash of capitalism,”4 the dismay with which Luxemburg had been regarded ever since the late 1920s was connected above all to her criticism of the Bolshevik model of unipartisan organizations.5 Yet the problem Polish critics had with the doctrines es poused by Luxemburg stem from activities that predate the 1920s outcry against her criticism of the Bolsheviks. Born in 1871 into an assimilated Jewish family in Zamość, Poland, Lux- emburg spent her childhood and adolescence in Warsaw, later studying in Zurich, Geneva, and Paris. She left Warsaw by 1889 to join the international socialist movement, living primarily in Berlin for more than 20 years until her murder in 1919, ordered by the SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany) government. On January 15, 1919, Rosa Luxemburg and fellow revolutionary leader Karl Liebknecht were arrested in Wilmersdorf, and after two days of interrogation brutally murdered by the Freikorps, a proto-Nazi militia deriving from the defeated German military. Luxemburg, who was totally involved in German politics, had returned to Poland only once, to take an active part in the 1905 Revolution in the Kingdom of Poland. She believed the mass strike to be a particularly beneficial form of political and economic resistance. Nonetheless, she believed nationalistic sentiments to be a relic of feudal, precapitalist Poland. The views 3 Polish criticism of Rosa Luxemburg can be traced back to the writings of Jerzy Ryng (Heryng), author of Luksemburgizm w kwestii polskiej (Moscow: Wydawnictwo Partyjne, 1933). 4 Jan Dziewulski, Wokół poglądów ekonomicznych Róży Luksemburg (Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza, 1972), p. 10. 5 See Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, trans. Bertram Wolfe (New York: Workers Age Publishers, 1940). 10 A Prologue Fig.