JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE P. 2
S. 2
EDITORIAL Johannes Odenthal
P. 2
S. 4
BEIRUT (YOU SAY, WE CALL IT ASPHALT )
P. 11
S. 26
ENGLISH EDITION
P. 16
S. 40
JUNGE AKADEMIE
MY AFTERNOON WITH SILVIA BOVENSCHEN
THE NEW MUSIC BEAST
Julia Baier
Mithatcan Öcal
P. 11 S. 28 Two short extracts from the works of Silvia Bovenschen, chosen by Ingo Schulze and Kathrin Röggla
Senthuran Varatharajah
FRIENDSHIP
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P. 18
S. 42
NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVE
FINDS: AN INTUITIVE CULTURE OF LISTENING Werner Grünzweig
P. 4
S. 6
DECOLONIALITY IN CIVIC EDUCATION
OMISSIONS P. 19 P. 12
S. 30
Thomas Krüger
P. 5
S. 10
CIVIL PREAMBLE TO THE ATTEMPT TO DE-IDEOLOGISE THE GENDER LANGUAGE DEBATE
WHAT ARE WE COMING TO
S. 44
NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVE
SOUND OF POETRY OF SOUND – ACOUSTIC LITERATURE FROM THE ARCHIVE OF THE ACADEMY AT POESIEFESTIVAL BERLIN Marc Matter
Kathrin Röggla and Manos Tsangaris
P. 13
Part 2 of the preparatory contributions for the Akademie der Künste workshop “What are we coming to”
JUNGE AKADEMIE
P. 20
GRAZ–BERLIN: QUICK NOTES ON A WRITING RESIDENCY IN BERLIN
HEINRICH MANN AND THE ACADEMY
Fiston Mwanza Mujila
Ariane Martin
P. 14
P. 22
P. 6
S. 14
S. 32 S. 46
CARTE BLANCHE
FROM THE BEGRIFFSSTUDIO – MONIKA RINCK P. 9
S. 19
S. 34
JUNGE AKADEMIE – FELLOWS
S. 50
SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
VALUES IN TIMES OF DIGITAL CHANGE Mathias Döpfner
UNDERGROUND + IMPROVISATION P. 9
S. 21
UNDERGROUND IN EASTERN EUROPE – UNDERGROUND TODAY? Angela Lammert P. 10
S. 24
NOTES ON THE UNDERGROUND IN THE WEST
APR 2018
Birgit Hein
S. 4
S. 2
EDITORIAL
BEIRUT (YOU SAY, WE CALL IT ASPHALT) Senthuran Varatharajah
The sixth edition of the Journal der Künste focuses on the topic of finding the right language – between text, sound, form, and content. A central project of the Akademie der Künste for the spring of 2019 is being shaped right now, in particular in an exchange between the writer Kathrin Röggla and the composer Manos Tsangaris. How might it be possible to reconnect the question of form with the intimate and the public, using all the tools available to artists of different genres? Where and how does artistic thinking and form influence social and political matters? This edition presents specific elements of the much wider area under study in the project to which artists such as Karin Sander, Mark Lammert, and Eran Schaerf are also contributing. [P. 5] How can the right language be found for the traumatic and living memories of young people who have had to flee the rubble and destruction of war to find temporary refuge in Germany? This is what drives the Academy’s storytelling partner project, in which refugees have been collaborating with writers in Germany for some months now on a total of twenty different stories. The text delivered by Senthuran Varatharajah opens the initial window to this language workshop. [P. 2, 3] The president of the Federal Agency for Civic Education, Thomas Krüger, explicitly states his position on the complete lack of dialogue about the colonial legacy of Germany and Europe as a whole. He thereby develops a dialogue to create a distance from one’s own certainties, and to reflect on one’s own knowledge as well as the role of education and culture. [P. 4] Writer Monika Rinck immerses herself in the many strata of language, revealing herself to the reader with her imaginary and political spaces “direct from the concept studio” in her Carte Blanche – the contribution made by an artist to the journal. [P. 6–8] In two essays, the experimental filmmaker Birgit Hein and the curator Angela Lammert use the “Underground and Improvisation” project as a starting point to discuss the importance of artistic languages beyond the official art ideology, not only in Eastern Europe, but also in institutions in the West. What constituted the underground during the Cold War? And what does the underground look like today? [P. 9–10] The photographer Julia Baier had the opportunity to record a meeting with the writer Silvia Bovenschen shortly before she passed away. The outcome is a small tribute to a woman who was both impressive and an icon of German literature. [P. 11] A working group from the Literature Section has prepared a paper on the topic of “gender-neutral language”. The result, however, is not meant to be a fixed framework but rather a stimulus to pursue a sustained, prudent debate on the matter. [P. 12]
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In this issue, we also devote ten pages to the JUNGE AKADEMIE, the Academy’s scholarship programme. A new crop of artists from every corner of the earth shall introduce themselves at the Spring Meeting. In a polemic account, the composer Mithatcan Öcal addresses the crisis that contemporary music language in Turkey is undergoing. Fiston Mwanza Mujila, writer and scholar from the class of 2017, talks of the vitality and synergies arising from the cohabitation and working relationships of the scholarship holders in Berlin. “Quick Notes” have emerged from his movement between Graz and Berlin. [P. 13–17]
Joseph Matthias Hauer stood for an intuitive culture of listening. His autograph scores from the estate of Hermann Scherchen are presented here as a major find by the director of the Music Archives, Werner Grünzweig.
Baba, It’s raining. Baba, do you remember the size of the sun? Baba, do you remember its position as it threw short shadows on our street? Baba, do you remember? Baba. I remember your voice when you called me. Baba. Did you see me? Baba, I was waiting for you behind our car. Baba, do you hear the rain as it falls on the windscreen, do you hear the steady drumming on the roof, Baba, do you hear it above us? Baba. Where are we? Baba, tell me what the mountains are called.
[P. 18]
Marc Matter recalls the publishing programme of Edition S Press, which has dedicated itself to experimental literature, beat poetry, and concrete poetry, a sample of which is being presented on the listening stations at the current poetry festival. [P. 19] And finally, Ariane Martin brings back into focus one of the most important Academy archives, namely that of Heinrich Mann. The example of Mann’s relationship to the Academy reveals an entire dimension of political thought and action for literature, showing how close the members of the Academy are today to the tradition of the Enlightenment in the 20th century. [P. 20–21] The Society of Friends has a closing word with a contribution from its member Mathias Döpfner, who reflects on issues facing the archive as well as the current art scene as it is perceived in the general media. How much has digitisation already changed our reality? [P. 22] Our member Mirosław Bałka provides a commentary on the situation in Europe! We asked him: how will things look in the future for Europe? Johannes Odenthal programme director of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin
Baba, the sky is low. Baba, can you touch it with your hands? Baba, bring it to me. Baba, I would like to break a body. Baba, can you see me in the rear-view mirror? Baba, I’m sitting behind you with eyes almost closed. Baba, did you know that this car would be black as the night, when you bought it with Ami last year? Baba, did you know that we would not be seen on this road, in its bends and on its potholes? Baba. We are this night. Baba. I know that you knew it. Baba, the full-beam is stuck in the fog. Baba, it is ahead of us. Baba. How much longer do we have to drive? Baba, look at me. Baba, I see you. Baba, I see you through the little slit between my eyelids. Baba, why don’t you say something? Baba, can you smell the hunger through our closed mouths, Baba, can you smell it? Baba, can you see something through the rain, the fields you told us about, a river that rises like fear, the mountains, the nameless mountains, stones, patience? Baba. Break my back. Baba, I want to make a phone call. Baba, I want to call Jedo and Tete. Baba, I want to hear their voices. Baba, I want them to be here. Baba. Why are they not here? Baba, why? Baba, why don’t you love Assad? Baba, I love, I love, I love – Baba. I see nothing. The smell of the road, its sound. This road smells different. It sounds different. You say, we call it asphalt.
I hear it through the window, through this gap that is as wide as a finger, I hear it under the tyres. I want to hold my hand against the wind, I want my hand to cut through the air like a dull knife, I want to see its impressions on this skin as it pulls at it, as it shapes it, as it leaves its trace behind. I want to see it. I fold my hands with wrongly interlocked fingers. The smell of the road. Its sound. You say, we call it asphalt, and I said it when you came with this car, the BMW, after work, our street, Damascus, this sun, its position, its size above us, voices, these voices from a window, from the shops, I hear them, I can see them, not what lies ahead of us, Baba, what lies ahead of us, in the fog, behind the fog, is it fog that lies ahead of us, Baba, are we driving through it, Baba, where are we driving to? Baba. Tell me. You’re so quiet, Baba. Baba. Where is your voice? Ami and Amti live on the left, Jedo and Tete on the right. Ami and Amti used to live on the left, Jedo and Tete on the right. Baba? Where do we live? Baba, where will we stay now? The smell of the road. Its sound. You put on a CD. I lay my head against the window, against the glass, and it is smoother and cooler than I imagined. I see the rain again, I hear it as it falls, I see the crack on the horizon, this broken, distant line, mountain peaks, these contours that stand out against the sky, they are black. My temple. It will leave an impression on the fogged pane, a circle, as big as a coin. I close my eyes. Baba, I don’t know if I told you about this sound that sounded empty, emptier than I had expected, it came, Baba, it came, it came, I don’t know where it came from. I was in school. It was on a Tuesday, I know that, as if it were yesterday, but it was not yesterday, it was not yesterday, as you stood by the window and I could see the shape of your back, this broken, distant line that begins at your shoulders and falls from there. Baba, where was the electricity? We were sitting in the living room. I had brought tea lights from the chest of drawers, where they were stacked on top of each other, four high, six to a row, in the second drawer, bottom left, where we always got light from when the power went out. It was the twelfth time, the twelfth time this week. The whole city was dark. I hadn’t counted, but you said it, this number, against the glass, which was smooth and maybe cool, that was all, Baba, that was all you said, Baba. I put a finger into the wax. It was white and warmer. A puddle. We were sitting in the living room, and I didn’t know yet that you would be nameless, on this evening, yesterday, yesterday, but it was not yesterday, Baba, it was not yesterday, as you stood by the window, this window, as nameless as a mountain, like a stone, like patience, you were as silent as them. But that was yesterday, Baba, it was another day, another morning, another evening, another night, it was yesterday, when we were sitting in the living room with Ami and Amti, with Jedo and Tete, it was yesterday when Mama couldn’t make any tea, but that was yesterday, was it yesterday, Baba? Baba. How much longer do we have to drive for?
Baba, how wide is a morning? Baba. When were you in Lebanon the last time? Baba, how long ago was it? Baba. The glass is cold. I feel it on my temple, the uneven road, this speed. How long ago yesterday was. Baba. How much further do we have to drive? Like two hands, like two palms that clap together, once, a loud sudden clap, that’s how it sounded, this sound, it came, I know, I do not know where it came from. It sounded like a loud clap or as if someone had dropped something, an empty body from a height. It sounded like this body. It sounded like a crane letting an empty container fall. It sounded like steel. I don’t know what an empty container would sound like, but it is this container that comes to mind, two hands, two palms, if I had to describe it, this noise, but I don’t have to describe it to you, Baba, you know it. You know it, you know this sound. You’ve heard it. Baba. I wanted to hide under the table. I didn’t know yet what it was. I didn’t know yet that bombs would sound like that, like two empty hands, like two palms clapping together, like a crane that lets an empty container fall from an undetermined height, like a cavity made of steel hitting asphalt, like something that has been let fall, the falling and this fall, like these falls, I didn’t know, up to this moment, but I knew I would know it, and I knew it. Baba, I know it. Baba. I don’t know whether I told you about it. Baba. Is Mama asleep? Baba. It’s raining. Baba. Was that Syria? Baba. The lights, as we approached. Baba. The lights, as we went. Baba. The gun barrel. Out of nothing. Baba. And there are things we can’t even say in the dark. I was waiting for you behind our car, Baba. Baba. Assad’s eyes were on me. Baba, they found me under the table. Baba. They looked different than yours. Baba. They are the same colour. Baba. I can see them in the rear-view mirror, but you, you don’t see me. I press my knee against your seat, but you, you don’t see me, Baba, you think I am asleep. Baba. I am sleeping. I would like to sleep until we have arrived, until we arrive, if we should arrive, Lebanon, you say, Beirut, you said. Baba. Did you say it? I heard these names in your voice, from your mouth, they came from this opening, they came from the two lines that you press together. Baba. I see you. Baba. Your mouth is a sun, it is as dark as the sun.
JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 06 – ENGLISH EDITION
Baba. I don’t remember. I don’t remember whether you spoke these names against the glass, but you did say them. You turn up the music. My headphones are in my left trouser pocket. The jogging pants are grey. Baba. The light. Damascus lies behind us. Behind us is our street, this sun, its position, its size, voices, these voices from windows, from shops, I hear them, I can see them, we have left them behind us. Ami and Amti live on the left, Jedo and Tete on the right. We lived in the middle. Baba. We have come through this night. We are coming through this night. My temple. Glass. You drove more slowly, you drove more slowly, as it drew nearer, as we drew nearer, you stopped. It was no petrol station. I saw mouths out of the window, they came out of nowhere, small openings, as big as a coin, as big as an eye, as dark as yours, as his, small black mouths, black suns, four men carried them on their shoulders, they were the same colour. Baba. I counted them. Baba. Drive. Baba. What are you waiting for? Baba. Why are you speaking so slowly, Baba, why so quietly? Baba. We are this night. Don’t forget that. If you say we will come back, then we will come back. I press my knees against the seat. The smell of the road. Its sound. Baba, in which direction are the clouds heading? Baba, how much longer do we have to drive? SENTHURAN VARATHARAJAH born in 1984, studied philosophy, protestant theology, and cultural science in Marburg, Berlin, and London. He lives in Berlin. In 2016 he published the novel Vor der Zunahme der Zeichen (Fischer Verlag). Varatharajah is one of the authors participating in the “Unsere Geschichten. Our Stories – Rewrite the Future” project at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, in which young refugees tell their stories, and the authors give these reports and fragments a literary form. Now, after intense encounters lasting over a year in twenty of these narrator-author partnerships, a considerable number of texts have been produced, of widely differing aesthetic character. Further information on the project is available at rewrite-thefuture.de
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S. 6
DECOLONIALITY IN CIVIC EDUCATION Thomas Krüger
The development of international law is closely interwoven with colonialism driven by Europe: with globalised exploitation, expropriation of land, and genocide. Moreover, the principles of international law have been formulated in such a way as to legitimise colonial crimes. The following is a contribution to the debate by Thomas Krüger, president of the Federal Agency for Civic Education Cultural and educational institutions in Germany still turn a blind eye to our country’s past role as a coloniser. And one cannot simply talk one’s way out of this issue with the argument that the Holocaust dominates the culture of memory here, and as it were seals up all other pasts. It is not acceptable that one infinite injustice should be invoked in order to dwarf another infinite injustice and render it invisible. We need spaces for public discussion that confront this fact and pave the way for institutional self-criticism. A comprehensive process of decolonisation for our entire society is long overdue, and it has a number of dimensions. If we talk about colonial or postcolonial injustice, then of necessity we must also talk about criminal prosecution. This is not just an important – if not, indeed, elementary – step towards material justice for the victims and their dependents. Criminal prosecution contributes to the stabilisation of post-conflict societies; it attempts to establish the truth, or at least to come close to it. The human rights lawyer Wolfgang Kaleck once fittingly described courts as potential “forums for protest”. The judicial process does not just dispense justice and punish injustice. Above all else, the proceedings create openness and draw attention. They are sites of negotiation for questions that restitution under criminal law by itself cannot answer – for example, when guilt and, above all, severe guilt can be regarded as atoned for. Or indeed, what justice is. It does not simply exist per se, and it cannot be ordered by decree. What a society feels to be “just” in a generally valid sense is always subject to processes of social negotiation. Whose crimes are tried in the first place, and whose are not; which victims’ suffering is made visible? In order to negotiate these questions and bring them to public consciousness in the first place, sites for discussion are needed. And in fact, what occurs in courtrooms is not just about criminal prosecution: rather, they create precisely these sites for discussion. In this respect they are related to the discussion spaces of civic education, about which, if you will forgive me, I would like to say a few words. Part of the role of the Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb) is to promote understanding of political matters, to anchor the
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democratic consciousness, and to boost willingness to participate in political action. Civic education can only do justice to this if it takes social negotiation processes into account. And it must go one stage further than this, by stimulating critical and self-critical engagement with hegemonic opinions – because we are not the public relations bureau of the power apparatus, but rather peacekeepers in controversial negotiation processes. We must ensure that discussion spaces are created, and opportunities for discourse are opened up. The concept for the event series “Colonial Repercussions / Koloniales Erbe”, at the Akademie der Künste, contains these words: “The European Enlightenment and thus the foundations of the Western community of values – the canon of knowledge, the institutions, the collections – are substantively and extensively founded on colonial ruling structures. At the same time, the Enlightenment’s claim of universal validity, which is still maintained to this day, has led to the continued hierarchisation of cultures. For this reason, a critique of its own certainties is essential for the continuation of the Enlightenment.” The bpb is an educational institution that communicates knowledge – and thus creates certainties. And it is precisely this fact that makes it a key locus of interpretation. We form part of the hegemonic structures and products of knowledge that have been functioning for decades; for decades we have been actively producing and reproducing in collaboration with them; and it is possible that we are still doing the same today. It is absolutely imperative that we are aware of this – indeed often, perhaps, that we become aware of it for the first time. Because, like every other strategy, knowledge is neither universal nor without its consequences. We must ask ourselves questions about cognitive justice. What is valid knowledge, why and where is it valid? Who defines knowledge? Who has access to (which) knowledge? Who profits from education policy at any given time? Which perspectives are recognised? If we ask ourselves precisely such questions in earnest, the ignorance of our blind spots comes into view as well: What do we not know? What do we not want to know? What perspectives are not recognised? And why? Up till now, civic education has allowed itself to be governed to a very large extent by target audience thinking, and therefore at one point or another has perhaps overlooked the fact that subjects are formed by their upbringing and their education. The postcolonial theoretician Gayatri Spivak has drawn attention to this condition, describing education – in the sense of both “upbringing” and “learning” – as the “the least possibly constrained rearrangement of desires”. Examination of what is being “rearranged” in subjects, and with what consequences, is just as indispensable as reflection on one’s own point of view. In this connection, Paul Mecheril, director of the Centre for Migration, Education, and Cultural Studies at the University of Oldenburg, describes education as a process of “allowing one to question oneself through knowledge”. He suggests that the aim of education should be “to place oneself in a relationship with the key problems of global inequality that are typical for an era”. This means that
civic education must not just be satisfied with conveying information on global, European, German, or local relationships. Instead, it must also motivate “individuals and social groups […] to engage with their more or less privileged status in the world, and become conscious of both their involvement in structures of global injustice and power, and their specific opportunities for action”. Or, to echo Spivak’s words: “Interrogating one’s own privileges remains an imperative.” Precisely for this reason, there is a need for a “solidarity among people unknown to one another”, as Mecheril expresses it. That means two things, which are closely interrelated. On the one hand it is a question of acquiring distance from oneself, in other words reflectively deferring one’s own material interests and those of one’s own identity – or, if you prefer, ignoring them. On the other hand, “solidarity” means recognising “others” as subjects and granting them subjectivity in the inclusive sense. Civic education will, therefore, actively share in the construction and deconstruction of identities by creating spaces for negotiation. Such processes constitute an important step in political subjectification – and ultimately in the emergence and definition of heterogeneous societies as well. It is necessary to promote concepts such as uncertainty, Utopia, diversity, or ambiguity, which are fundamental to the openness of democratic societies towards their future. Here both judicial negotiation and civic education, acting rather like “elective affinities”, can make their contribution. If we want to live diversity democratically, and pursue it as our goal, we must not only mediate the global inequalities resulting from past and present, but process them, fight them, and leave them behind us. This text was presented as a speech at the inaugural conference “(Post)-Colonial Injustice and Legal Interventions”, held on 26 and 27 January 2018 in cooperation with the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) as part of the event series “Colonial Repercussions / Koloniales Erbe”, jointly organised by the Akademie der Künste and the Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb). The project continues on 26 and 27 May 2018 with the platform discussion “Performances of No-thingness” (concept: Nana Adusei-Poku), which focuses on the cultural production of the black diaspora as a critique of hegemonic constructs of identity. Participants include Autumn Knight, Okwui Okpokwasili, Sorryyoufeeluncomfortable, and others. The concluding event, the symposium “Planetary Utopias – Hope, Desire, Imaginaries in a Post-Colonial World” on 23 and 24 June 2018, sketches the utopic potential of a postcolonial society (concept: Nikita Dhawan), speakers include Angela Davis, David Scott, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
S. 10
WHAT ARE WE COMING TO Part 2 of the preparatory contributions for the Akademie der Künste workshop “What are we coming to”
INTRODUCTION OF AN ELEPHANT WITHOUT WIKIPEDIA Kathrin Röggla Where have all the elephants suddenly come from? We don’t know, we just know they are currently appearing everywhere possible, like a disease, a threat, a bankruptcy, an inability, a contradiction, an instance of brutality, indeed, sometimes, it is even claimed that they are just a proverb that wants to point out a certain communicative failure, a fact we will later be able to deduce from novels and theatre productions. Apparently, we don’t dare to pose certain questions, even though we know better. Or simply cannot do so as a group. Perhaps one of us could do it, but together we cannot, which is pretty strange. What kind of a situation is it, when questions cannot be posed collectively in a society that is supposed to have no taboos, where public communication is endless? Is it a dynamic failure after all or does the impossibility of discussing a topic simply get stuck in one place? Should it be described as a political inability or rather a technical one, or do these somehow belong together? What is clear is that elephants proliferate, but always remain specific to a situation. How does this present itself formally? Is it social questionand-answer games; that is, the formats in which we communicate, for example interviews, WhatsApp chats, translations, transmissions, protocols, in which these evasive movements can be found? Who might be able to chart them and would this disruption of communication then be identifiable? Where does all this take place? Only in the primary social space or on the Net too? And what does this have to do with incredulity, as mentioned by the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy in “What Is to be Done?”, an incredulity that faces all answers today? Perhaps the two are interconnected. What’s more, the elephant is fat. Yes, you could say that. It is characterised by monstrosity. We avoid seeing something, no, stating it, even though it is almost pressing us against the wall, we move around it, even though the space around it hardly exists any more. Of course it is annoying that we have been made into a collective by inability of all things, into an involuntary participant, where we otherwise seek separation and counter-movements. But what can we do differently as artists in this situation, other than move around the edges, the forms of the elephant, sometimes slower, sometimes faster, sometimes more rhythmically, sometimes more impulsively, to explore its shape. Because without giving too much away: It is not always easy to resolve situations where this animal makes an appearance. Perhaps it is
not always good either to make him disappear. The rapidly growing elephant libraries of this world also begin to assume an increase in the phenomenon rather than a decrease. In Z., there is already an impressive collection of 14,357 books that discuss the elephants in the room, whether from the perspective of zoology, communication theory, social psychology, or theory on humour. An upcoming conference in B., under the direction of a team around Prof. Birkenhäuser and Prof. Gupta Devi, will attempt to make this unwilling creature speak, yes, to classify it, even though the official conference title is something very different and seems to revolve more around Middle East policy, what am I saying, migration policy. Independently of this, in F., an archaeological exploration is to begin of the contemporary elephant, who has to be dug up again and again, because he barely shows himself under the rubble of our avoidance movements, even though it is precisely this that reveals him. In this respect, the assessments currently diverge. At a counter-conference in B., on the other hand, the elephant’s skull is to be addressed, and also the question of whether this animal comes about somewhere – how it appears rather suddenly, some say, abruptly, although this is not correct. The elephant appears, which takes some time. Some ascribe him Asian or African roots in this regard, despite the fact that this is officially denied. It is clear to everyone that some conversation space will be burned until the right questions come up. But maybe we won’t reach this point anymore either. In this respect, if, as is claimed elsewhere, it is just postdemocracy that comes knocking when this animal appears, or postcolonialism in the guise of postdemocracy, and if our society is going through continual structural change, and this society is necessarily European, then this can only be responded to with an old quote from Heiner Müller: Europe is only to be conceived as an association of culprits. This guilt has, in our opinion, however, taken a turn today, or has gained new momentum, namely from the future. The elephant has become a creature of the future, and because of this it finds its greatest expression in retrogression, the “retrotopian”, as described by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. If there is an elephant in the room, he moves backwards, and so, for example, the members of the Bundestag are in the dark again as to how they should deal with the representatives of the right-wing AfD party they face every day. Simply say hello? Initial problems, sure, of course, but one can certainly ask how something can be described as a breakdown in communication, when in truth it is the rupturing of an era. How can I speak of question-and-answer games when it comes to political tensile forces, yes, crushing forces, when verbal violence is almost constantly in play? We know that the elephant in the room is bigger – so how can it have briefly come across to the office and then suddenly be gone again? What did all the discussions die of? Will this animal join up with others of his kind and take the formation of a new government over from the others? No, we don’t want to go that far!
COPPER THEFT Manos Tsangaris Every time I see the roof of the Academy studio on the Hanseatenweg, and the way it rises up out of the ground, I think of our Honorary President, Klaus Staeck, who once said that the Academy repeatedly suffers from copper theft. Stealthy copper thieves cut pieces from our roof covering in order to resell them. Copper is worth a lot of money. Coins, for example, can be minted from copper alloys. I propose introducing the Academy’s own copper coin, to be called a Staecki. A Staecki would be worth between 100 and 200 euros. But you could also exchange it for works of art. In this way, the Academy’s internal economy would flourish. It would flourish, and we could have dinner. The roof disappears; the sky’s our limit. Today, once again, I’ve made three and a half Staeckis profit. And our roof? I’ve heard it’s going to be covered with gold next. We could then make a Jeanine Meerapfel coin with it: the Meeräpfel. In my opinion, the copper thieves have taken us a step forward. MANOS TSANGARIS is a member of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Music Section. He has been director of the section since 2012.
KATHRIN RÖGGLA writer and vice president of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin
JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 06 – ENGLISH EDITION
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S. 14 CARTE BLANCHE
FROM THE BEGRIFFSSTUDIO – MONIKA RINCK 4164 the marksmanship of taxonomists 4165 cecitourism 4166 the natural fool of fortune
“I am even the natural fool of fortune. Use me well. You shall have ransom. Let me have surgeons. I am cut to th’ brains.” Says King Lear. 4168 narcissism, severally risked 4169 the dignity of moronitude What I see is the disempowerment of language as an analytical tool via its euphemistic usage, and the empowerment of language for the reduction of societal complexity in favour of some invented identities and their identityprogrammed evaluative praxis. How would poems need to be to counteract this? 4170 the riddle-me-ree of allegory and the secret-mongering of the conspirator 4171 the howl of the digital sheepdog 4172 als Nachtrab überstandner Qual One of many translations of Shakespeare’s line “in the rearward of a conquer’d woe”. Other versions: als Nachhut weichender Bedrängnis; im Geleit von Schmerz, der schon verwunden; im Nachzug überstandner Not; im späten Nachgang ueberwundnen Leids. (Wasserzeichen der Poesie) But Nachtrab! As if in the early morning, compact animals were to trot past on hooves, vanishing in the distance, and underfoot, very gently, the area were to throb, expanding again at last. 4173 fossilised coniference cones 4174 your lodge of lies 4175 overall environment: bag of laughs 4176 de-egotizing effect of landscape Subtitle of the chapter “Man and His Landscape” in Döblin’s treatise The Ego Over Nature (1927). “How does landscape relate to a person or groups of people who settle on it, live with it? Although, in terms of the usual linear notion of time, humans are a very old product of the earth and the earth would not be capable of creating humans now, it does exert an ongoing influence on them. […] Auxiliary spirits, transformational elements, constantly ooze forth, out of our food, in our dealings with animals, with trees, with the elements. […] The way the home landscape sucks at people. The ground wants to draw them into it like plants.” 4177 gymnastic inverted commas Petrified blisters, did you see them? And the brain storm? Over there? In that “bulb”, but bulb in inverted commas, gymnastic inverted
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commas as they’re also called, under the hand of the grammaticists. 4178 monstrous like dragging elephants 4181 the inevitable Narrentief The Narrentief descends over the place where real history and the history of drives meet, pioneers of post-rational politics get down off their ponies and rebuild matters of opinion into matters of fact, sequence joins the party, slightly late, to prevent everything from happening at once. Nonetheless: life’s not a paragraph / And death I think is no parenthesis. (e. e. cummings) 4182 storytelling as a re-education camp People should finally start telling stories again. No they shouldn’t.“In life, most people would regard it as futile to guess one’s future by figuring what would make an effective story and would smile at someone who imagines himself invulnerable on a given occasion because otherwise his life would make no sense, but in reading literature this way of thinking is often justified and typically used. For this reason, we sense the artifice of time in narrative literature.” (Gary Saul Morson: Narrative and Freedom, 1994) 4183 plunging into the ne’er-rehearsed 4184 colossal cockchafers gone berserk 4185 in the twilight of duplication that halves it 4186 the wasp’s nest of my will 4187 Gnuu Gnuu – that is the key answer, according to the poet Christine Lavant. But to what question? To this one: “Treacherously she asks: ‘Devil or priest? / Blindly I give the key answer: ‘Gnuu’ / and many are breathlessly nonplussed.” Yes, and many are breathlessly nonplussed. Some are still nonplussed today. (Lavant: Gedichte aus dem Nachlass) 4188 alienation by diligence 4189 slice of plastinated duck Unclear predispositions, before the invention of MRT, grunt the ducks. Sound the mort. A wandering hermit is weighed down by the caravan of solitude. Tram stops. Annunciator, announce what you can announce, all the rest leave out. Where have you hidden the needles? We’ve hidden the needle in the duck, in the doomsduck. 4191 reciprocal betexting 4192 The Imp of the Perverse 4193 the secret Humboldt niche in one’s spiritual household 4194 deducting the duck Your age, please, minus the duck. Twelve! Strange – deducting the duck, almost everyone’s not much older than twelve. 4195 dreich: dismal (adj.), the mind of a man of winter 4196 250 tons of dinosaur bones (not Dinslaken Formosa) 4197 unsummable fear 4198 inclusion in the extreme 4199 with an almost Stifterian heat 4200 a biological hamster panorama par excellence “As its dramatic climax, the presentation
concluded with a ‘Hamster Burrow with Twelve Young’. In a block of soil, underground passageways and a storeroom full of grain could be seen in cross-section, plus a large family of hamsters. […] A map of Europe showed the distribution of hamsters, sketches and prepared anatomical specimens drew attention to the peculiarities of the hamster’s cheek pouches, and a measuring cylinder filled with grains was presented as a hamster’s actual winter food stock. The fact that a hamster burrow is an especially good environment for particular insects was visualized by a collection of 53 species of beetle found in a single burrow. Finally, which natural enemies hamsters face was explained by the model of a dramatic scene in which a stoat kills a young hamster. The ensemble as a whole was a ‘biological’ hamster panorama par excellence.” (Susanne Köstering: Natur zum Anschauen. Das Naturkundemuseum des deutschen Kaiserreiches 1871–1914) 4201 selling banality with braggadocio 4202 fusion value and slimming phrase 4204 competitive patronage 4206 stoats in winter coats, group of foxes 4207 brown rat in defensive stance 4208 buzzard standing guard on the kerb 4209 hooded crows fighting over a bone 4210 bittern group (in the pipeline) 4211 pine marten slicing a wild goose 4214 a dispensable publication 4215 restricted release, hard mats 4216 brightened to the point of sheer earnest 4217 superficial obsessiveness 4218 hateful of nimble thinking 4220 the perfidious camisole of gluttony 4221 as if fermented with pebbles and flamencos 4222 flanc de colline à l’automne 4223 Fear’s Comet 4224 clear instructions for fyreworkes 4225 manky lassi “Excuse me, my wife’s still waiting for her goat’s milk mango lassi!” And hey presto, a couple who’ve not spoken for days are once more a team, sworn to combat the hostile environment of the wellness hotel. 4226 pillowsophy 4227 villainetting 4228 great crested grebe, the pigeon whisperer 4229 an inflation of accomplishment 4230 Wolfgang Amadeus Mobile 4231 writers from the cosy world 4232 a colony of insane ants 4233 endogenous tedium 4234 law of the unnameable something 4235 the Pope’s crumpled shoes 4236 parallelepiped plates of pyroxene porphyry On the radiator in the green staircase at Entrance 10 of the Natural History Museum, left there for the taking, a book with 68 illustrations in the text, 93 diagrams on 14 plates, and 10 illustrations on separate sheets in a folder: The Conservation of Stone.
4237 thawing people on the street
4283 with an extra skin of doggedness
4238 dilemma as a crepuscular animal
4284 an untragedizable hero
4239 the famous singer and thong-rider
4285 external contempt in this message
4240 low-maintenance front gardens, freshly
4286 depraved souls, slipped through cracks
ploughed 4241 the upwardly fecund rebellious soul 4242 twilight of the lambs 4243 in the oak forest of Streichelwurst 4244 racked by delusions and compatible with reality “‘The equivocation’ of life as both racked by delusions and compatible with reality, writes Foucault, ‘is endlessly reversible and cannot be resolved, ultimately, except by death itself.’” (Werner van Treeck: Dummheit. Eine unendliche Geschichte) 4245 a morosophos, i.e. Stulte sapiens 4246 taprooms as schools of rhetoric 4247 Dîner du Diplodocus 4248 the tea-light in transit 4249 cold reservoir of spring 4250 pre-Socratic takeaway 4252 a frozen mobile 4253 thinkers and threshers 4254 showroom of the soul 4255 to begentle 4256 the art of deluded prophesy 4257 German literature’s most passionate naked rock climber 4258 unimaginativism 4259 to throw on the rubbish heap of fulfilment 4260 official language: rabbit’s foot 4261 our partaking of the hilarity of a beloved small animal 4262 “Fog you too!” 4263 song of the meta-realism of garage sales 4264 the air plunging into the earth 4265 the character of the jostle 4266 drives with a passive thrust 4267 irreducible materiality of the void 4269 a perpetual holding back 4270 alliance of embers and elastics 4272 macramé doily, with added Hegel 4273 Cuvée de Greyhound Bus 4274 the confession box of overheating Will the installation of a confession box on a plinth lead to the use of singing bowls in the sauna? Will the secret instruction manual for the hydraulic foundation piles be revealed? Will the transmission be entrusted to butterflies? Will the army of unplugged singersongwriters obstruct the construction of the sluice? What do the white peacocks have to do with it? And who, meanwhile, is waiting for days in Hamm for a missed connection? 4275 the half-horse 4276 mimesis with a twist 4277 under pledge of secrecy, with dried-out flutes 4278 misconduct and skittishness 4279 Monsieur Salabre’s Automobile Polka 4280 a figure by the name of hate-to-be-contradicted 4281 festivals of misrule 4282 the limb-aggregating pre-creation of Empedocles
4287 the best messenger of a world
above that of nature 4290 profundification 4292 le Wocken-Ente 4293 the imperious tendency to imitate 4294 in the irrationalist discourse of transgression 4295 unkilling 4296 to hell on skis with Hans Castorp 4297 emptied by parking cars 4298 the female body’s celebrated waiter 4299 a village called Nakhichevan 4300 of the whole tender, venerable, old world 4302 stuffed with gratification, like firecrackers 4303 fossil imprints of lost suitcases 4305 a bearded ithyphallic satyr 4306 mood swung towards mournful grief 4307 mountain streams, their claws in cracks 4308 a bricked-up drama 4309 my career path, with equine gait 4313 this mixture of moth-eaten phantoms
and impatient youngsters On returning from travels: “This mixture of motheaten phantoms and impatient youngsters was our reward for long months of struggle and hardship; to them we unloaded our treasured recollections. A session of this sort was enough to sever us forever from such memories; as we talked on in the half-light we felt them dropping away from us, one by one, like pebbles down a well.” (Claude Lévi-Strauss: Tristes Tropiques, trans. John Russell) 4314 dog teeth engaging without friction 4315 narrative aquaplaning 4317 merging, exiting, and zipping manoeuvres 4318 hostile flows in the junction zone 4320 the heavy-backed shellfish that dwell in the sea 4321 like a phoenix from the ashtray 4322 Gone to Pieland “On one occasion they had brought home a high quality pie from ‘some superior delicatessen.’ The pie was set down on the kitchen table as they entered, but when suppertime arrived, there was no sign of it, and its disappearance was never solved. From then on, whenever something became mislaid, they would say it had probably ‘Gone to Pieland’.” (from Peter J. Reed’s foreword to Iris Murdoch’s novel A Fairly Honourable Defeat) 4323 sufficiently hidden by a small schnapps glass 4324 treasures in the glow of that dullard 4327 the minute that knows not how to pass “Looking towards the minute that knows not how to pass meant standing completely outside, far from linear goings-on, meant the protracted repair / of the mechanism of a clock hand.” (Sema Kaygusuz: Black Bile) 4329 Hôtel de l’univers 4330 in every mode of fury unfolding Plunged down the cataract of infinite questions,
JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 06 – ENGLISH EDITION
in every mode of fury unfolding, and finally, having reached the deep bottom, I screamed: Gnuhiu! 4332 the clamorous trumpets of the void 4333 grass monkey “It was about three o’clock in the morning, but in the summer, and already half light. Herr von Irmenhof’s five horses Famos, Grasaffe, Tournemento, Rosina, and Brabant – rose up in the stable.” (Kafka’s Diary, 27 March 1914) 4334 like on carnival floats in superior countries 4335 sprightly changes 4336 kept alive by traffic offenders 4337 Goethe’s Frightening Nature “Wrote nothing. Weltsch brings me books about Goethe that provoke in me a distracted excitement that can be put to no use. Plan for an essay, ‘Goethe’s Frightening Nature’, fear of the two hours’ walk which I have now begun to take in the evening.” (Kafka’s Diary, 31 January 1912) 4338 natives and foreigners of note 4340 a round of nervous people 4342 taunting fanfares 4343 with faun’s head and other paraphernalia 4344 the dreadful Rue de la Gaieté Strindberg gets up, walks, plagued by pangs of remorse, along the dreadful Rue de la Gaieté, where the contrived merriment of the crowd insults him, along the gloomy, silent Rue Delambre, hurries towards the Boulevard Montparnasse and throws himself into a chair outside the Brasserie des Lilas where, shortly thereafter, much to his displeasure, studentni parataxle with their kokotni. 4345 a companion of owls 4346 in the service of sophisticated hypocrisy 4347 de shark well goberned 4348 the brain of the forest Sparassis crispa, the cauliflower mushroom: brush off pine needles and soil, sauté in butter, dowse with vermouth, salt and pepper to taste, serve with poultry. 4349 Üşüdüğümüzün “One day the diffuse quickness of this tingling will end / One thing remains in long books: the memory of our great freezing.” Last two lines of the poem “Çok Üşümek” (“The Great Freeze”) by Turgut Uyar. 4350 a risible sensitivity of borders 4351 estival comminution 4352 between l’idole and Lidl 4353 hypersensitive goo Because preferential treatment of individuals leads to degradation, we will now begin boarding for our priority and Gold Card passengers. All other passengers please remain seated, and the hypersensitive goo in which everything is steeped rises up out of the marble and lays itself down, throwing one’s knee joints into a panic. 4355 concomitant sexual stimulation as a by-product “Certainly the release of the subject’s own affects must here be given first place, and the
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enjoyment resulting therefrom corresponds on the one hand to the relief produced by their free discharge, and on the other, very likely, to the concomitant sexual stimulation which, one may suppose, occurs as a by-product of every emotional excitation and supplies the subject with that feeling of a heightening of his psychic level which he so greatly prizes.” (Freud: “Psychopathic Characters on the Stage”) 4356 a beau on the cusp of the present tense Still just about feasible. But the ground he stands on seems to shake. Oh hip joint, oh loincloth, oh bittersweet providence. 4357 the charm of the incomprehensible invocation 4358 the hate-scorched words 4359 the broncho-saurus The transparent hypersensitive goo in which I didn’t find the aeroplane is now in my bronchia, sheathing the bronchial cell, the bronchosaurus. How was the light? Bright. And the floor was marble-smooth, hapitalistic, and hard. Flammable liquids everywhere: distillates, hard liquor, perfumes. And the caviar bar! The caviar bar on wheels! [Atatürk Airport] 4361 haunting as a case of mistaken identity 4362 spectral self-mistaking 4364 Hearts ope but in secretness “None in prose would fain confess; / Hearts ope but in secretness / Where Muses’ groves rise up to heaven.” No unrhymed confession? Secretly, with closed eyes, facing stinted censure and withheld praise, be quiet a little while. And keep your eyes shut. 4365 Veuve Clochard 4366 Rejoiceth, behaveth, exulteth 4367 an intense occult passion for zebras Writing from London on 16 August 1942, Iris Murdoch concluded a long letter to Marjorie Boulton, an expert on Esperanto, as follows: “I must go now. (I am going to the zoo this afternoon, chiefly to see the zebras – I have an intense occult passion for zebras.) Write when you feel inclined and let me know how life treats you.” 4368 colder more civilised sort of chaps 4369 s’accuse and s’excuse 4370 a charming ex-surrealist in the French Army 4371 horresco referens 4372 para-philosophical gossip only 4375 complexity devoid of interest or intention 4376 the elaboration of shadow as a medium 4377 the more fawning scribbles 4378 jittery wind with balloon-shaped handles Added to which: multiplication of the unsaid by omission of context. I can’t turn back a page or two to find out who might have been meant by this second person. In most cases this remains unsaid – but makes no odds. A jittery wind with balloon-shaped handles, and unclear agents of identification. Each time I turn the page I don’t know - - - - no longer know where I find myself. Abysmal switching, even if lexical meanings remain largely intact. Here comes the
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man with the potato peeler and cucumber - becomes - - palm tree. 4379 hijacked sleep 4380 abysmal switching 4381 sound of trolley bag versus sound of shaking the hairspray 4383 identification with unclear agents 4384 the violent fading of the dreams imposed on life 4385 through the expression in language of a good kind of tiredness “This becomes more than an illusion, however; it becomes full truth, because through the expression in language of a good kind of tiredness, the shadow of yearning and even of death continues to fall across the reconciliation. In the line “Warte nur, balde” the whole of life, with an enigmatic smile of sorrow, turns into the brief moment before one falls asleep. The note of peacefulness attests to the fact that peace cannot be achieved without the dream disintegrating.” (Adorno on Wandrers Nachtlied.) 4386 ignoring his Eckermannité The question, writes Blumenberg, is whether Goethe (dead, fossilised in the self-launched history of his own impact) “can be freed from the noose of what he was heard to say, while ignoring his Eckermannité. It is a mise-en-scène of his rigidification beyond rigor mortis.” 4387 ironizing a whimper that helplessly puts itself to the test 4388 to flail on every level 4389 the chemism of the freshly interpreted dream 4390 demon of the soul on composite elephant 4391 anarcho-mercantilism 4392 e sprit d’escalier “In the chapters brought together here, I try precisely that: to say something better that I have already said before – and a little more. The book is thus a kind of homage to the esprit d’escalier that afflicts us all with varying frequency. So much for my excuses.” (Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: The Inconstancy of the Indian Soul) 4393 pangs of piss 4394 t he blurred line between heady delirium and folksong 4395 a chain of ingenious, sometimes inversive paronomasias 4396 undercurrent of meaning 4397 sterner stuff 4398 Polish gendering according to Prof. Cotten “In these texts, Polish gendering is applied: all of the letters needed for all genders are added to the end of the word in a pleasing order, e.g. ‘dier Bundespräsidentni’.” (Ann Cotten: Fast Dumm. Essays von on the road. Edited by Manfred Rothenberger with the Institut für moderne Kunst Nürnberg. Fürth: starfruit publications, 2017.) 4400 Tropics of Croissant 4404 doing without knowingly wanting 4405 the conspiring background and the law of rest 4406 the railway of the young grammaticists
4407 the abodes of our thinking 4408 Discuss haulm poem
4409
4410 4411 4412 4414
Re. haulm poem, discuss end of identity. The haulms. This is what the haulm thinks. / This is what it doesn’t say. This remains / sadly this. Haulm identity must come to / an end. Haulm. Haulm. Haulm. Haulm. / All haulms are damned // well different. // And now: The women. negative idealization What is negative idealization? It’s this: If I accept you, I accept an ego-ideal that destroys me. (Better not.) the third susurration water-permeable rooms the me of perception play beyond identity-programmed evaluative praxis
Translated from the German by Nicholas Grindell MONIKA RINCK writer, member of the Akademie der Künste, Literature Section, since 2012
S. 19
UNDERGROUND + IMPROVISATION Two reflections on current exhibitions at the Akademie der Künste, “Free Music Production / FMP: The Living Music” and “Notes from the Underground – Alternative Art and Music in Eastern Europe 1968–1994”
S. 21
UNDERGROUND IN EASTERN EUROPE – UNDERGROUND TODAY? Angela Lammert
The underground has been understood and defined differently over the course of time and in the respective Eastern European countries. The term cannot be generalised in retrospect. Moreover: the title of the “Notes from the Underground” exhibition, a reference to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1864 novel Notes from Underground, is a paradox in its transfer to the period when Eastern Europe was behind the Iron Curtain. It is something productive that clearly demonstrates what exactly is to be described: the way in which distribution systems, interpretation models, grey areas, and formal characteristics work, which together determine the cultural field of countercultures (beyond common clichés) of the underground. Underground in Eastern Europe did not necessarily mean being anti-communist or even prison – but the risk of negative consequences was different, greater than was generally the case in the West. In the closing comments of a recent series on underground music in the Guardian, jazz, queer punk, and broken electronics from Eastern Europe to the United States are discussed less in terms of their political roots and increasingly in terms of commerce.1 “We play music as a way to understand ourselves and the world – we are not products!” The initial question is rather whether the underground still exists in music, when everything is visible online anywhere in the world? Would it not be called for here, especially now, to recall the system-critical dimension of the underground for the present? The English word “underground” stands for a noncommercial movement against established art and cultural life – a minority culture in society that establishes itself as a counter-current to the mainstream. The later integration often robs the underground – which here also means: over and over again – of its subversive content, reducing it to purely formal aesthetic elements,
or makes it an effective marketing slogan devoid of the original content. Existential impulses and commercialisation processes are interwoven. For instance, in the 19th century, Dostoevsky’s novel almost led to the ruin of his brother’s magazine, in which it was published. In 1991, the year after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the American director Gary Walkow made this novel, which develops a psychology of humiliation, into a film under the title Notes from Underground. Notes from the Underground is also the title of the third studio album by American rap-rock band Hollywood Undead, which was released in 2013 and went to number two on the Billboard charts within a week. Since 2010, this band has produced its own online radio programme – an alternative strategy that gained enormous listenerships in the Eastern European underground in previous decades. Another example is Eduard V. Limonov, who returned to Moscow in 1991 from his exile in Paris and New York, and is the model for French author Emmanuel Carrère’s 2011 novel Limonov. A former Russian dissident, writer, and politician, he became the co-founder of the National Bolshevik Party of Russia and was considered to be part of the radical right – as an “authoritarian troublemaker and protester”, a “nationalist (and pan-Slavic) egocentric with dictatorial airs”.2 At the same time, he became a dissident within the dissident scene. Real dissidence was also undesirable in the United States – according to Limonov’s resume. At times, representatives of the underground do not want to be associated with such a label – after all, it was about partnerships born of necessity. Friendships are the decisive basis, because the underground is just the other side of the government-mandated art policy coin. Within the current art scene, off-spaces or project rooms, private homes or the temporary use of alternative spaces play a role. Their precursors can also be found in the 19th century, particularly in France. One example is Gustave Courbet’s temporary exhibition building Du Réalisme, built in 1855 at great financial cost. Being rejected by the established art scene was part of the idea of modern, avant-garde artists and was not initially associated with the underground under totalitarian systems. Thus, productions by so-called high culture would also represent a kind of underground. The thematic fields of “Sound” and “Scores” were strikingly prominent at the documenta 14 exhibition and the Biennale in Venice in 2017. The exhibits ranged from the reconstruction of a historical synthesiser and scores by Katalin Ladik from former Yugoslavia, to the acoustic graffiti of frog voices by Ben Patterson, or In the Woods There Is A Bird..., a sound piece by Olaf Nicolai presented in Athens, to the artistic character of an electro-acoustic studio at the French pavilion in Venice that was created by the sculptor Xavier Veilhan together with Lionel Bovier and Christian Marclay, in which the audience could watch the musicians in their production processes. Is a phenomenon that was already virulent in the visual arts scene of the 1970s coming into view here as a potential innovative artistic articulation in the face of global conflicts? Is this a current reference to the topic of the underground?
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Nicolai’s sound piece is based on archived sound material from radio reports. Its source is the background noise of demonstrations, rioting, and rallies, which he uses to explore the relationship between sound and content and to generate a “soundtrack” of different moods. Coincidence? Looking back, Nicolai describes his artistic influences throughout the 1980s in East Germany: you did not seek to become close to autonomous culture, but rather to friends with similar interests and passions.3 You would find yourself in an art scene that was described as autonomous. Autonomous, he says, was a metaphor – we should speak of dependencies beyond the system, other social dynamics, and rather suspect exit mechanisms. In 2004 – fifteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall – East German-born poet Bert Papenfuß, who continues to explore and reflect on the relationship between language and sound today, wrote: “Freedom will not come, freedom must be taken.”4 It is a chapter in history that poses questions for today: nearly thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, what do the prerogatives of interpretation and the selfinscriptions into art history tell us? Does the new focus on history and artistic practice in Eastern Europe imply a further ghettoisation or does it open up the opportunity for necessary mediation of that which is insufficiently well known and even unknown? What in fact is the underground? When and by whom is it understood as such? How does it transfer itself into the present? Can one escape the roles of a partnership born of necessity? What is the relationship between border crossings and grey areas? Have dependencies, discontent, and niches simply shifted? What forms of defiance are to be newly remembered? “Anarchie ist machbar Frau Nachbar! [...] Aber nicht auf hoher See.” (“Anarchy is possible, Mrs Neighbour [...] But not on the high seas.”)5 1 Ben Beaumont-Thomas, “Underground music in 2017”, in the Guardian, 06/12/2017, https://www.theguardian.com/ music/2017/dec/06/from-bush-doof-to-clowncore-yourfavourite-underground-music-scenes 2 Bert Papenfuß, Ur-Rumbalotte. Opera Semiseria für Großes Besteck (Berlin, 2017), p. 89. 3 Olaf Nicolai, speaking in a short video “Der Konzeptkünstler Olaf Nicolai spricht von einer Abhängigkeit der autonomen Kunstszene vom damaligen gesamtgesellschaftlichen und politischen System”, shown online as part of Uta Grundmann, “Die Herausbildung der alternativen Kunstszene in der DDR” (Dossier Autonome Kunst in der DDR), see http://www.bpb.de/geschichte/deutsche-geschichte/ autonome-kunst-in-der-ddr/55785/die-herausbildungeiner-alternativen-kunstszene 4 Papenfuß, Ur-Rumbalotte, p. 302. 5 Papenfuß, “Graffito 1978 in Ottensee”, in Ur-Rumbalotte, p. 15.
ANGELA LAMMERT is a director of interdisciplinary special projects for the Visual Arts Section of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin and a lecturer at the Department of Art and Visual History at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
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S. 24
NOTES ON THE UNDERGROUND IN THE WEST Birgit Hein
When the term “underground film” emerged in the United States at the end of the 1950s, it referred to films that had not found any distribution system, because they had been produced outside of the commercial production system. It referred to works by filmmakers who had already separated completely from the structures of Hollywood cinema in the 1940s in order to make their own personal films on 16 mm, and who came together in the 1960s to form the New American Cinema movement. They wanted to expand the creative means of making films and break content and visual taboos, especially with regard to sexuality, which were subject to censorship from the powerful film industry. The first major freely erotic work of New American Cinema was the film Flaming Creatures (1962/63), in which American performance artist Jack Smith depicts a transvestite orgy. The film was banned and those who wanted to screen it were threatened with prison sentences. With Flaming Creatures, the myth of the underground, the forbidden, the sexual, began to grow, as the film gradually attracted more and more viewers despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that it was ripped to shreds by mainstream film critics. In Europe, the avant-garde and underground film movement first began in the mid-1960s under the influence of New American Cinema. Many of the filmmakers came from the visual arts to film, which they had discovered as a new visual medium. Because of this, it was closely connected to the development of art in the 1960s, although it was less associated with the aesthetics of the increasingly popular Pop Art than with the more radical anti-art of Fluxus. Under the influence of Fluxus, the Structural Film movement emerged almost simultaneously in Europe and the United States. It reduced film to its basic properties, such as material, light projection, time, and perception, in order to re-establish it as an artistic medium. “This new kind of film is to be understood as meaning far more than the term ‘underground’ in its current and original meaning. Its development outside of the commercial system is based primarily on the fact that it is about personal statements, similar to works of visual art, that claim utter freedom and can only be created with complete independence. What can be defined as a personal film includes an enormous diversity of film forms, for which no all-encompassing term has yet been found. All previous commonly used terms, such as avant-garde, experimental, underground, independent, or ‘the other cinema’ are inadequate.”1 At the beginning of 1968, XSCREEN was founded in Cologne by a group of filmmakers and film journalists. As one of the first organisations in Germany for
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subculture events, they brought international underground film to the cinema. This also included political documentaries, such as the anti-Vietnam films, which would have had no chance in the official cinemas. The unwavering disregard for sexual and political censorship delighted audiences, but soon led to conflict with the public prosecutor’s office. “Hardly any event in the recent cultural history of Cologne was more likely to cause uproar than the Underground Explosion event by the XSCREEN group (Cologne studio for independent film). This multimedia ‘environment’ took place in parallel to the second Cologne art market, held in the shell of Neumarkt U-Bahn station. Funded by the Head of the Culture Department, Kurt Hackenberg, the event became the target of an unprecedented police operation. The excessive measures by law enforcement together with the spontaneous resistance and protest forms that followed are a representative reflection of the social climate of that time, the interlinking of action and reaction patterns.”2 Toward the end of the 1970s, the avant-garde Formal and Structural Film movement drew to a close in the field of art. In the meantime, community and art house cinemas dedicated to disseminating historical and contemporary film culture had been established. In conjunction with punk, the Super 8 movement of a younger generation began around 1977, combining films with live music and performance. In hotspots like New York and West Berlin, a new international scene emerged in clubs, bars, and alternative centres. In the mid-1980s, underground film in the tradition of the 1960s experienced a revival in New York with the Super 8 films of the “Cinema of Transgression”, which focused on shock, provocation, and confrontation. It was no longer underground because of censorship but because of the still limited opportunities to show these films. When the transfer of Super 8 films via video to DVD became possible in the mid-1990s, they achieved international cult status. Underground has long been subculture. 1 Birgit Hein, Film im Underground (Berlin, 1971). 2 Enno Stahl, “Kulturkampf in Köln, die XSCREEN-AFFÄRE 1968”, in Zeitschrift für Landes- und Zeitgeschichte, vol. 22 (2007): p. 177–200. BIRGIT HEIN filmmaker and film scholar, is a member of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Visual Arts Section. She has been vice director of the section since 2012.
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MY AFTERNOON WITH SILVIA BOVENSCHEN Julia Baier
It was an ordinary Monday, and I was on my way to see Silvia Bovenschen. I was not yet aware that the meeting which followed was to acquire huge significance for me. As a photographer you become a specialist in fleeting encounters over the years. If you’re lucky, you can get very close to a stranger for a brief moment. Despite the lack of time, you try to forge a connection with your opposite number – and then taking the photographs often happens incidentally. It was just like that on this Monday, too. I find myself alongside Silvia Bovenschen’s unfolded sofa. Without any shyness, she immediately admits me into her private space, invites me to sit beside her. She doesn’t hide the cigarettes, remote controls, and pills than lie neatly arranged next to her. Smartly dressed from top to toe, she sits there with outstretched legs, astonishing me with her clarity. We launch into conversation at once. I tell her about my experiences during my student days as a care assistant for a woman suffering from multiple sclerosis, and we talk about the pitfalls of this disease. She tells me she has been living with MS for around fifty years. In passing, she mentions what a miracle it is that she is still alive, despite all the illnesses she has been through. I am struck by her bright, lively blue eyes and smoky voice – and the rogue who is always waiting to pop out from behind her (and whom I will rediscover later when reading her books). There is something impressive about this diminutive woman. It is obvious that, despite her medical history, she has never relinquished control over her life, has retained something very positive. We remember that I have come here to take photographs. She calls her carer. “How do I look? Is my collar in the right place? And my hair?” I like the way she asks the woman for advice – respectful and demanding. We take the pictures, both with and without a cigarette (“Who’s going to forbid me that now, when the end could come at any moment in any case!”) At some point we are joined by her life partner, Sarah Schumann. And a conversation between four women of different ages begins to unfold – about photography, music, and so on. I feel as though I am in a cultural salon, surrounded by Schumann’s wonderful figurative paintings on the walls. They are also very interested in my work; I tell them about my forthcoming tour of China accompanying the German Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra of Bremen, and about my books. Silvia orders one, and Sarah presses the money into my hand at once. I take my leave and depart. Almost two hours seem to have flown by. A couple of days later, before I fly off, I
quickly take the signed copy of the book to the post office. “They’ve just announced on 3sat that Silvia Bovenschen has died.” This news reached me a couple of days later in Shanghai. It was only two weeks ago that we met. When I get home from China, the telephone rings. It is Sarah Schumann. She has a task to discharge, she tells me: she must pass on to me Silvia’s comment that I am a great photographer. They had both looked at my book together – and she could only agree. I felt deep gratitude. Gratitude for all the fleeting and yet so intense encounters that my life as a photographer has granted me. And for the fact that I was permitted to be the last person to make a portrait of such a clever, likeable woman.
S. 28 Two short extracts from the works of Silvia Bovenschen, chosen by Ingo Schulze and Kathrin Röggla
FRIENDSHIP
Friendship is also a shape. It is anything but random. People in ancient history understood a lot about it. Aristotle spoke of something creative, artistic, in the context of friendship. Kierkegaard, however, tried to restrain the aesthetic moment in favour of an ethical The photographs originated in the context of an interview that obligation. All the same, tempering, acceleration, Silvia Bovenschen gave to taz shortly before she died. The inand dissociation have to be unintentionally and intuiterview was published on 28/10/2017. tively finely balanced. When serious people today talk about friendship, this friendship seems to presuppose JULIA BAIER lives and works in Berlin. She initially studied psychology a whole catalogue of extremely old-fashioned virtues and Romance languages, and later photography at the on the basis of unbridled support. Loyalty, generosity, University of the Arts Bremen. She has been working as truthfulness, faithfulness, respectability, tolerance – a freelance photographer since 1998. Her work has won numerous awards, been funded through scholarships, and but also discretion, respect, distance, independence, exhibited in many national and international exhibitions. tact, tastefulness (the catalogue goes on and on). ... She has published several photo books: Sento (2008), Water Matters (2013), and In Tune – Variations on an Orchestra When Montaigne dreamed, “that friendship has no (2015), all with Peperoni Books. manner of business or traffic with aught but itself”, when, on the other hand, the sceptical Gracián teaches us the art of “using our friends”, and when Schopenhauer even talks about friendship with animals as the only one which is free of pretence, these are not contradictions, but rotations of the great dance. Possibilities which intertwine, which do not constitute the mark of friendship in terms of absolutes, but in their reciprocal relativity ... friendship always has a story. This story is always one of probation. Friendship knows no moment of fulfilment projected at its end, no overall objective, no orgiastic climaxes, and no ecstatic sensations which seem to make time stand still, as happens in love. Your own, biographical time is reflected in the ageing of your friends.
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Extract from Silvia Bovenschen, “Vom Tanz der Gedanken und Gefühle”, in Schlimmer machen schlimmer lachen (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren, 1998).
OMISSIONS Someone once asked me if I thought I’d missed out on anything in my life. I was amazed that I couldn’t really think of much. I asked the same question to my friend S. Sch. She thought about it for a long time. I was waiting for a dramatic answer. Then she said: “I’ve never been on a motorbike.” I’ve thought of something else: I’ve never been able to whistle with two fingers. Silvia Bovenschen, Älter werden: Notizen (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2006).
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CIVIL PREAMBLE TO THE ATTEMPT TO DE-IDEOLOGISE THE GENDER LANGUAGE DEBATE The initiative to formulate a set of basic guidelines for “gender-neutral” language that would serve as recommendations for the Academy originated with the equal opportunities commissioners, and it was to be decided upon by Senate and Management. The Literature Section addressed the topic in its sectional meeting and formed a working group to present a framework paper to Senate. It was clear that this would not be an easy task, particularly in view of the heated debate. It is a contradiction in itself to persuade writers who are inclined towards linguistic pluralism, rather than predefined forms of expression, to accept such directives. The following paper, which was the outcome of several meetings, is intended rather as a stimulus to reflection, a road map, an appeal against solutions that are sometimes too superficial, in the hope that the Academy will continue to pursue a sustained, prudent debate on the matter. 1 Linguistic dealings between people should be based on respect, ideally on politeness. This includes respect for the most important human means of communication – language. 2 The German language can respond flexibly to new complexities and the need to avoid older linguistic patriarchalism. Its richness allows us not to discriminate against anyone, whether individuals or groups of people, in spoken or written language. Gender-neutral language also requires linguistic sensitivity. 3 Anyone who, beyond this, aims to change and standardise the language by introducing new word formations, participial constructions, and gender manipulations, claiming greater equality, is usually unaware of the new misunderstandings this will produce and the systematic impact individual changes have on the structure of the language. 4 Purely technical interventions in the language contradict its essentially inconsistent and often illogical nature. The personal approach provides a fair form of representation that cannot be portrayed in statutes. Communication has a personal, unpredictable factor – the idea that one can resolve a difficult situation once and for all using agreed linguistic conventions is an illusion. All attempts to exorcise the inherent ambiguity of language and to
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force it to become unambiguous by decree through the prescription of gender equitable differentiation lead to impoverishment. Any prescribed language is contrary to the spirit of linguistic freedom and bears characteristics of the bureaucratic. Even when bureaucracy asserts a right to stereotyped thinking, it cannot presume to impose its language rules on society. 5 Respect for the people is currently willingly confused with recognition of “identity”. Every human being has multiple identities (skin colour, gender, language, origin, education, religion, work, age, political orientation, etc.), some of which, fortunately, are variable. An identity that can be reduced to formulas does not exist. According to one of Philip Roth’s characters, identity starts where one stops asking. Identity-based thinking and identity-related attributions negate the diversity of the individual and lead to ideology and racism. They certainly cannot be used as a measure of language equity. Hacking up plural words in German with underscores, asterisks, or other internal symbols in a display of preemptive obedience, wishing not to hurt anyone, frequently occurs because the ideologisation of a single identity is preferred. The heterogeneous tendency that is part of every plural formation must be made clearer. The grammatical plural does not always bring forth a sum of equals either, but rather comprises different elements that no longer need to be mentioned individually and, having reached a certain number, can no longer be named. However, this must not hide the diversity of the elements that make up the plural. In view of the usual simplifications (Muslims, women, Germans), the problem is not to think of the plural as uniform, but rather as a quantity of difference. 6 The idea that unresolved social problems can be solved proactively by means of language standardisations is also a common illusion. Four examples: •
his society is unable to pay, provide pensions for, T or treat women the same as men; it often puts more energy into the cosmetic standardisation of language than the political fight against these injustices. • This society is unable to teach pupils adequate orthography and grammar; provide them with the basics of good German language teaching; or convey language sensitivity. At the same time, it requires absolute accuracy in the details of gender language. • Our immigration society is unable to adopt a law on immigration or naturalise foreigners in a sensible manner. Instead, immigrants are appropriated by the language police, which forces journalists to discriminate against the “Flüchtlinge” (refugees): as “Geflüchteter” (people who have fled from something). Anyone who has had to flee from war, murder, rape, or displacement is lumped together linguistically with those who are fleeing a storm, an appointment, or a dog.
• And a fourth example: Berlin is not able to provide efficient administration, but the most questionable linguistic rules are imposed on this administration. 7 We assume that most speakers do not intend to hurt their counterpart’s feelings. Linguistic sensitivity, a certain degree of care, and a willingness to learn can help to avoid thoughtless injury to the other. Any use of language remains subject to interpretation, and in a living language there is sufficient space for both precision and ambiguity. 8 • Anyone who believes they must not overlook the fact that grammatical gender is not always identical to biological gender must write out the words, for example job titles, and join them with the conjunction “and”. However, the example of the Statute of the Akademie der Künste shows how inflated a text becomes using this approach, leading to the suggestion that legally relevant texts introduce a fundamental note stating that the grammatical gender of such words always means and includes both biological genders. • Often, the answer to the question of who is specifically being referred to provides a linguistic guide, both for groups and for individuals. • Instead of following official recommendations or the often misleading proposals of Das Genderwörterbuch (“The Gender Dictionary”), we recommend exploiting the richness of the language with care. These pieces of advice seem to be better than the comfortable and bureaucratic asterisks, medial capitals, forward slashes, or underscores that cannot be spoken and should be avoided in the orthographic practices of the Akademie der Künste, as they are disrespectful of readers and undermine the feeling for language. 10/01/2018 The Literature Section’s Working Group on Gender and Language (Friedrich Christian Delius, Friedrich Dieckmann, Jörg Feßmann, Monika Rinck, Kathrin Röggla, Matthias Weichelt)
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Makutano or the place of every hope JUNGE AKADEMIE
GRAZ–BERLIN: QUICK NOTES ON A WRITING RESIDENCY IN BERLIN Fiston Mwanza Mujila
We’ve been inseparable since the moment we met. We can’t help it we’ve become like the fingers of a single hand. We meet up as often as our responsibilities allow, preferably at the weekend. On the agenda: ramblings on art and poetry, random chat, impromptu films, a walk through Berlin, a coffee or a juice at a pavement café … Yiran (Zhao), a composer by profession, and Benjamin (Stölzel) chose to take up their residencies at the same time as me. The former, who’s come from Linz, is staying, like me, in the Akademie der Künste on the Hansea tenweg; the latter, who lives in Munich, Bavaria, is staying in Kreuzberg, in another of the Academy’s ateliers. Inspiration and its demands We organise our days differently. Each of us has our own way of managing our time. I have to admit I admire Yiran. She can spend the whole day in her atelier when she’s composing or testing a sound installation. I often find myself daydreaming about her creative method. I tell myself that if I were a composer, I’d understand the mechanics of the whole business, then maybe I wouldn’t have to ask her questions, the same ones, about her work rhythm – rhythm isn’t quite the right term, tempo, I should say. By composition, I mean the act of producing a work, but also the creator’s state of mind, the setting, that sense of groping for something (with a pencil, in the case of the artist), that swift and sudden inspiration that releases the creator from a long block. My own creative practice, since I’ve been in Berlin, is the complete opposite of my colleague’s. At the moment I’m putting together a play. Every two minutes, I leave the apartment. It’s as though the characters in my play decided to quit the page and burst into my apartment, demanding I get them things to eat and drink. I should add: I eat a lot while I’m writing. Quite possibly, my characters join in the great nosh-up, too. But one thing I’m sure of, they live with me in the apartment, crowding me in … Hence my urgent need to go out, unlike Yiran, into the Englischer Garten, and stretch my legs, and those of my characters too. Two days ago, I had a long talk with her. She would like to use my voice as the basis for a “musical” piece. I’ve put that word in inverted commas, because her work, formally speaking, denotes transgression. Yiran has told me that this idea came from the PLENUM, when she heard me speaking my texts out loud. She listened to my poetry, and as she did so, I entered the mysteries of her imagined world.
Speaking of the activities at the PLENUM, I’m reminded at once of the Swahili term MAKUTANO. This word means meeting place, or more precisely, the place where men meet up with other men. And by extension, a place of knowledge and understanding, of sharing and respect, and above all, listening, because it is assumed that when someone expresses an opinion, the others wait, bide their time, and listen … In Africa the practice of MAKUTANO can be found in numerous ancestral societies. The PLENUM, in my humble opinion, is a variation of MAKUTANO. Since 2007, the Berlin Akademie der Künste has granted bursaries to young international artists, as part of the JUNGE AKADEMIE programme. Every year, two members of each section – there are six sections at the Academy, of which literature is one – propose two artists to their peers. In advance of the actual residency, the twelve artists chosen are invited to the PLENUM in Berlin, a sort of assembly which offers each of them the opportunity to present their work and their current projects. My candidacy was presented by Aleš Šteger, a member of the Academy’s Literature Section. A few years ago, Ales invited me to his poetry festival in Ptuj, Slovenia. He acts as my sponsor. But since the PLENUM I have been lucky enough to have, in addition to Ales, a second mentor: Thomas Lehr. He is based in Berlin and is also a member of the Academy. I have only just finished his most recent novel Sleeping Sun. Every artistic discipline should be a house with windows. The windows allow air to circulate from outside to inside, and vice versa, thus (re-)uniting private and public domains. … With this in mind, I am reminded of a sentence from Cicero that I learned as a child, where he says that all the disciplines connected with general culture have a common link and are in some sense related. The PLENUM was a wonderful way of drawing people out of the solitude that surrounds any act of creation. For me it provided a window onto the work of my colleagues at the JUNGE AKADEMIE. Through it I discovered the film work of Ines (Thomsen), who explores the themes of solitude, exile, and memory, and whose characters are so compelling that they stay in your head for months afterwards. Nikias (Chryssos) uses his camera to explore the evil within us. Using dark humour, lined with sarcasm, he turns his glacial gaze on the nature of man. Man (because it’s men he’s talking about) is also at the heart of the artistic practice of Akram (Assam), a young theatre director from Baghdad. The power of his work lies in his complete lack of interest in arousing sympathy or pity; instead he confronts the world with its own image. His work is a song, a long song of hope. Akram has a lot of common ground with Isabel (Zintl), an architect and lecturer from Stuttgart. Utopian in its hopes and dreams, the project “Vertical Open Space” advocates the domestication and appropriation of air space. Martin (Hakiel), an architect based in the German capital, studies, among other things, the mechanisms of power and historical forces in the erection of public buildings. Arturo (Dominguez Lugo), in whose themes I recognise concerns of my own, provides a stage
JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 06 – ENGLISH EDITION
for the naked body. Something approaching defenestration and the multiplication of the body is apparent in his work: body as merchandise, body as object, body as memory, body colonised, body enslaved, body dismembered … Deconstruction as a poetics of the possible is how I might describe the practice of Luci (Simon Medina), who stands at the crossroads of the arts, and consequently invokes logic, mathematics, language, and music. The music of Hakan Ulus, a Turkish-German composer, uses references to the Koran to create a spiritual dimension that guides his overall conception of art. In his view, all composers or creators are engaged in a spiritual quest, a conversation between the artist and “higher forces”. Through the PLENUM I was also able to discover the world of Dénes Krusovszky, a poet of my own generation. I will now devote a few more lines to Yiran and Benjamin, who I have met with regularly since my arrival in Berlin. Disembodied anatomy or the power of the word When I look at a sculpture by Benjamin – without analysing, I just wait for a work to speak to me, to awaken my consciousness, provoke me, stir something in my belly – two words, improbably and inexplicably linked, come to my mind: anatomy and language. In terms of language, I would say he is a “solar” poet. A poet of the dawn at the moment a tropical sun ( jua, in swahili) bursts upon it. His sculptures are words. His sculptures are an alphabet. His sculptures are a language. Each of them tells, speaks, spreads, or spells out (each case is different) stories, often bringing wave after wave of forgetfulness and dispossession. I’ll explain what I mean: the artist works, as far as I’ve seen, with “rescue” items which he’s found abandoned or damaged. The solar poet, poet of the dawn on which the tropical sun breaks, uses these items to construct a language (sometimes a convoluted one) to utter the world. Of anatomy I will say this: the sculptures are organised like bodies. They are bodies, or look like them, fragmented or mangled, which the solar poet botches and patches and puts together for the benefit of this world of ours. One thing I’m quite sure of: his sculptures maintain a latent conflict, or at the very least an equivalent dialogue with, the space in which they have their voice, and in each new place, like hope itself, they point the way to new Utopias – an aesthetic of emergence? Of voices and things, or the ritualisation of the poetics of signs Composer? At first I thought of Yiran as a composer, till the day I began to talk with her about what she did, to see and listen to her work, which explores (to excess) questions (though without claiming to produce adequate results), and breaks the boundaries of musical composition. She uses (and sometimes ab-uses) musical instruments; that is to say, she can draw other (unexpected) sounds from them, new possibilities; she creates new instruments out of different objects. In addition, her compositions involve silence, light, the visual arts, performance elements, and the media. yáo yè, which Yiran is working on at the moment, is a series
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of installations and/or performances using, among other things, suspended objects. The term yáo yè is a highly poetic Chinese word that means gently swinging; it describes the way things swing in the wind. Sound and light contribute to the (alternative) organisation of different possibilities for capturing the world. The body, a source of energy, plays a prominent role, and is rendered successively as something to be seen or something to be heard. This process of sacralisation and ritualisation leads to performances and installations in which space remains resistant to time and spatial organisation. As with Benjamin, this work cannot be fully grasped, it opens up a thousand new horizons, dreams, Utopias, prophesies, and hopes. The great thing about a residency in a pluri-disciplinary place is the way it encourages friendships and collaboration with other artists. Yiran now wants to work on a project with me. One day, perhaps, I’ll be proclaiming sound poems to Benjamin’s sculptures. Who knows?
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JUNGE AKADEMIE – FELLOWS STEFANIE HEIM Individual yet universal issues such as questions of identity in the context of cultural imprinting and the socio-cultural environment are the recurring focal points of my work. I approach these issues through the stylistic devices of either radio play or sound art. Hybrid auditory styles can arise through the use of original audio material.
Translated from the French by Helen Stevenson.
RAMY AL-ASHEQ
FISTON MWANZA MUJILA born in 1981 in Lubumbashi/Democratic Republic of Congo, Ramy Al-Asheq (*1989) is a Syrian-Palestinian lyricist, lives in Graz, where he was “Stadtschreiber” (city chronicler) writer, and journalist who has lived in Germany for three in 2009/10. He writes poetry, prose, and theatre plays and teaches African literature at the University of Graz. Tram 83 years. His first poetry collection مالحألا ىلع ا ًريس (Zsolnay, 2016) is his first novel and has already won (“Walking on Dreams”) was published in Jordan in 2014. numerous awards, including the House of World Cultures This was followed by his stories “( تمأ مل ذمSince I Didn’t International Literary Prize in 2017. He was also a JUNGE AKADEMIE fellow in 2017. Die”) in the autumn of 2016 and another poetry collec-
tion in the spring of 2017: “( رفسلا بايت سبالIn My Travel Outfit”). At the end of 2017, Al-Asheq founded the bilingual cultural magazine FANN. He is a co-founder of the Arabic-German Berlin Literature Festival, which took place for the first time in February 2018 and is set to become a permanent fixture. As a curator for the Literaturhaus Berlin he will soon oversee a series called “My Favourite Kitab”, in which authors are asked to present their favourite books. Monika Rinck, writer, member of the Akademie der Künste since 2012
THE DOGS OF MEMORY We knew the hole that was in the back of the head would try to swallow up whatever we threw behind us like a vacuum cleaner to return it to us in the form of dogs that bite us and bark eat the flesh of our joy play with the bones of songs and give birth to sad puppies spread out dancing between the convolutions of the present pissing in every corner of the head and leaving their signature behind: here passed the dogs of memory Translated by Levi Thompson
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MIRKAN DENIZ Mirkan Deniz was born in Istanbul in 1990 and now lives in Vienna and Zurich. The starting point for her work is political events in Kurdistan. Using a conceptual art form, she calls these moments from history to mind and asks where and how they took place and how they relate to our context. The official donation to Switzerland of a replica of the table on which the Lausanne treaties were signed in 1923 was initiated by her, but was rejected by both the President of the Grand Council of the Canton of Vaud and Federal Councillor Didier Burkhalter in his capacity as Department Head of the EDA on the grounds that it was not a Swiss affair. Wulf Herzogenrath, art historian and curator, director of the Visual Arts Section
For some time now, I have been occupied with the 1923 Peace Treaty of Lausanne, and more currently with the premises associated with the treaty negotiations, including the Chevalier Suite at Hotel Château d’Ouchy, which was a conference hall at that time. In the performance, the room is seen as a witness to the events that happened back then and is set in scene. Thematically, I refer to my work Masa, where I performed a number of public actions using a replica of the table on which the treaty was signed. With the Peace Treaty of Lausanne, Kurdistan was divided into four parts and Kurds and Armenians were disenfranchised.
MARINA POLEUKHINA We’re sitting on the train – a spoon clinks against a glass, a fellow passenger is holding a book, people and objects are continuously passing by, clouds move at their own speed. This space brings all these things together, although they exist in their own timeframe. A gesture contains the intention of sound, instability, and the sound itself. The musical instrument here is very complex, full of details and parameters. It could be the light which shines out from under the paper or a cymbal dancing on the floor. There is no disconnect. Sound is like a word which invites people to listen in a certain way. But perception is action – and it is possible to listen with your whole body. A performer plays bass guitar and at some point picks up two metal tubes, puts them to his ears and begins to spin his whole body round in a circle. He himself becomes part of the audience. When does an improvisation become a painting? The dividing line is too narrow to be drawn – possibly it only exists as a thought. What makes sound and where is it contained? Every one of my artistic endeavours is devoted to exploring this area – this very specific, tiny area – and is dedicated to the plays that arise from this research.
CYLIXE Supervenience is a serial online story told in diary form; a blog from the perspective of a woman who has travelled almost 100 years into the past due to unexplained circumstances – and now appears to be trapped in Berlin in 2018. She investigates the causes of her fantastic journey and searches in particular for a way to return to her own time – our future. Through her blog, readers learn more about the time the author comes from, a progressive future that is no Utopia, but is certainly characterised by technical, social, and political progress. Comparisons between a possible future and a complex present raise questions as to potential courses of action.
SUSANN MARIA HEMPEL VATER, SIEHST DU NICHT, DASS ICH VERBRENNE (FATHER, CAN’T YOU SEE I’M BURNING) is a cinematic farewell party; it is celebrated by almost a dozen unemployed and disabled people from my home town, Greiz. In this “shrinking city” in East Thuringia, the remaining inhabitants often give the impression of having no other choice: crippled by illness or poverty, “The Remainers” don’t even leave the town when they’ve had enough of it. Sometimes they remember that there is another way out and jump off the world’s highest brick bridge. It’s right by the town exit.
Dear Danny, Dear Mom, I am very sad. I get very afraid and haven’t managed anything. I wanted it to go away and didn’t manage it. Now I am broken. This is no life for me anymore. My heart goes too quickly. I think I am falling. I panic a lot. My husband broke me. I keep getting thinner. I fall over at work. When you are so broken it travels along your nerves; your body does that. I left my husband because he breaks me. I am full only of fears. K.
ALEXANDER KHUBEEV Among the concepts I work on in my music there are three that are most important: creating new techniques of playing instruments, working on a connection between music and different media (like light or video), and working with the physiological aspect of perception. In any of my compositions I work on at least one of these components. It is especially important such aspects are not just used as an effect: they do not simply reinforce some
“main” musical idea but become an essential part of drama and structure.
performers, as well as a six-week exhibition with a subsequent publication. (www.ismellpainter.com)
ADISA BAŠIĆ
KLEOPATRA MARKOU
I got to know a certain Adisa Bašić during a one-month stay in Sarajevo in 2012. I discovered, almost in passing, that she is a writer and that she had received the Grand Prize for Literature from Eastern and Southeastern Europe, awarded by Bank Austria Literaris, in Austria that year. The volume Werbespot für meine Heimat (“Advertisement for My Homeland”) was published in German by the Austrian Wieser Verlag in 2012. The bitter simmering of the title references a self-confident sarcasm. Born in Yugoslavia at the end of the seventies, the poet grew up before her time during the hostile conflict of seemingly irreconcilable nationalisms. She writes without shame, in an unbridled, direct, and European Muslim way, which fascinates me.
GRIPS would like to have engaged Kleopatra Markou for a production, but unfortunately this was impossible as she is based in Athens. Kleopatra is a highly talented, versatile actress: extremely intelligent, thoughtful, inquisitive, and deeply committed politically, she is one of the most sought-after actors on the Athens independent scene. It’s always rewarding to have a discussion with her, to talk nonsense, or to celebrate – and it’s a pleasure too.
Kathrin Schmidt, writer and social psychologist, member of the Akademie der Künste since 2015
REVENGE From the cycle “Das Volk spricht” (“The People Speak”) Preface “The cycle Das Volk spricht consists of statements articulated by people who have survived various forms of torture […] The author has only borrowed, detached, and given their statements a heading.” Revenge I know who murdered my wife and my son and my daughter. I know that one of them has returned. He has a bakery. But I make sure I never buy anything from him.
Volker Ludwig, dramatist and theatre director, member of the Akademie der Künste since 2010
How can we eliminate the “distance” between the actor and the audience? How can I give a global dimension to a theatrical play and translate its content into something universal and therefore political, through my self-exposure and even through sharing a personal story or experience? How can the actor on stage use a transcendental physical and mental experience to create an “empty space” so that the unseen can be revealed and the audience can witness and take part in this collective experience? My recent project, “Get To Know Kassandra”, was invited to BLOOM UP – RODEO Theater Festival in Munich. It is a collaborative work created and performed by myself and three artists from different countries and disciplines (director, dancer/performer, set/costume designer), and evolves around the question “Who is Kassandra in our times?” As a follow-up to my research and in an open cooperation framework, I want to explore Antigone’s archetype with the aim of creating a performance that will approach the concept of love and sacrifice in Europe today. In connection with my staying at the Academy, I am interested in having an open and interactive dialogue with Antigone’s myth in Berlin, through my personal experiences in the city and through gathering material and stories of people living there.
MITHATCAN ÖCAL Mithatcan Öcal’s text on the role of New Music in Turkey is to be found on the next pages.
MARTINA WEGENER to stomach A preoccupation with the problem: stomach. It often makes noises, well, mine does at least, and sometimes digests things differently to the way you would expect. I moved to a foreign town for two months, occupied myself with abalones, the gastrointestinal microbiome, commensal relationships; wore a belt bag, watched the comedian Loriot and The Godfather and swallowed highly active intestinal symbionts in various experiments on myself. A CD acoustically similar to the digestive process was created, in cooperation with various
JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 06 – ENGLISH EDITION
YORGOS LOIZOS Yorgos Loizos’s work with the University of Greenwich’s Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research Laboratory (AVATAR) explores the spatial and time-based relations between architecture, photography, technology, and the human body. He explores experimental practices in architecture to analyse and comment upon our social and technological environments through a hybrid of analogue and digital media, progressing from drawings and objects towards installation pieces, further developing his creative practice into architecture. Ian Ritchie, architect and city planner, has been a member of the Akademie der Künste since 2013.
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I am researching the relationships between 21st-century digital architecture and analogue photography of the human body since the 19th century. I have identified and developed a series of research methods that touch the grounds of Surrealism and the choreography of chance, and the precedents of photography and cinema. Alongside this I have examined the invention of photography and the spaces required to simulate light and dark environments to record the human body. In parallel to such architectural and photographic precedents, I am continually intrigued by the design of relevant cinematic stage sets, miniature model making, in-camera visual effects, and practical sets. My ongoing studio-based work includes a series of three-dimensional objects entitled photographic darkroom probes. These objects work as 1:1 pieces that are inhabited by 1:6 scaled objects that I consider as complex domestic ecologies: a staircase, revolving doors, a rear window, a hallway, a bathtub, the attic, and the basement. Each of the darkroom probes studies a particular architectural element and together they become experimental tools to design a house.
AMBRA VIVIANI
ALICIA HERNANZ Alicia Hernanz’s international academic and professional experience has convinced her that only a multidisciplinary, collaborative approach will allow architects to realise their vital role in addressing real-world issues. The problem of housing refugees worldwide is a case in point. A passionate belief in the transforming power of architecture leads Alicia to hope that as her research develops it will involve specific projects of practical use in mitigating the world’s migration crisis. Ian Ritchie, architect and city planner, has been a member of the Akademie der Künste since 2013.
As long as the design of refugee camps is based on short-term survival, it will be impossible for those living there to access basic needs, let alone work or develop an existence. Therefore, the temporary cities that I will be working on will need to facilitate aspects such as the provision of healthcare, education, jobs, cash, and protection against violence. But also technical aspects such as construction, sustainability, and infrastructure deployment and reversibility. What type of settlement is most sustainable from a physical, social, and economic point of view? What would be the implications of proposing, for example, a vertical settlement integrated into a consolidated urban area? Would this be more sustainable in terms of infrastructure, materials, and social integration? The study of ephemeral arrangements to host scientific research bases, festivals, pop-up villages for the extraction of natural resources, and so on can teach us a lot about planning and design, flow management, deployment of infrastructure, cultural identity, appropriation of space, and elasticity in urban conditions. Through the study of these and other points I plan to contribute to the design and planning of refugee settlements as
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efficient and sustainable cities instead of temporary camps of subsistence. This will hopefully allow the status of refugees to be rethought, and trigger ephemeral lodgings to be seen as places of opportunity rather than problems.
LYNN MUSIOL
S. 40 JUNGE AKADEMIE
THE NEW MUSIC BEAST Mithatcan Öcal
IN DIESEM MODELLARTIGEN DENKEN (“In This Model-like Thinking”) [A space that has never written itself free of your word] Ppx boards the freighter, a renunciation. Says: Can’t believe it, the word dissolves [casts into a form only that which was contested as an attitude], constantly amiss [tempo.rality!] & the Nautilus lost to the right next to the rotation [but the sky rarely broke on a morning, Ppx!] as he lay back in retreat. Close [a model made of air, which removed its corners and folded them on those who remained here [in front as though they were proving the multitude to themselves] and were carried away softly] a world that pushes the beautiful by here [the procedural, the sensual, the queer], like a wall, that pulls and stratifies X [the enigmatic, biographical] before a void [yes, here only the rough grows in your hand, a white, cementing edge, that smears and blots so much, a real mess there, horizontally relocated], Ppx. What it does then, not to see past back then. How a room keeps up, with its corners filed off. Where it stands then, metastable, Ppx.
Mithatcan Öcal, a fellow in the Music Section, describes the crisis of a Turkish arts scene caught between European, global, and national heteronomy. His critical reflections on rootlessness and naked loneliness investigate the opportunities for artistic productivity in respect to social responsibility. Johannes Odenthal Amongst the concepts to which countries with a weak economic and/or class structure attach importance, art was and is in one of the lowest positions. After the end of the Ottoman Empire, attempts were made in Turkey to solve the problem of lack of identity and also lack of direction – as is today widespread in the so-called “third world,” not only in the arts, but in practically all fields which are based on reality – with ideologies of modernisation and “westernisation” which various governments tried to import from Europe. As with all ideologies that are imposed upon people and are incompatible with the structure of society, this remained futile (it was not to be expected that such an attempt would prove effective). The aesthetic concept of identity provided by the state for artists has remained virtually unchanged since the foundation of the republic at the beginning of the 1920s. Instead of initiating the necessary measures to establish its own identity, Turkey – which for some unknown reason had not been modernised – continued to work on instilling the notion of a “nationalistic enlightenment” in the country’s people. Artists who have a critical attitude to nationalism and “nationalistic art” were and are discriminated against and commissions are withheld. All doors were and are closed to them, they were, if you will, consigned to ruin. Uneducated, elitist, and, at the same time, politically adolescent art manipulators (including those who at least offer a glimmer of hope) today play a leading role in music institutions. With initiatives and programmes such as “Grants for composers”, “Performance opportunities”, “Financial means for young talent”, these institutions, vestiges of a bygone, official ideology, ascribed undeserved importance to the aesthetic of the Turkish Five,1 loosely based on the idea that this or that piece fulfils the requirements of being liked and may be composed. Such an aesthetic, which dates back to the beginning of the 20th century and once forced composers to censor their works, is far removed from the reality of today’s society. And yet promising developments in the last ten years at an institutional level must yet again give way to the old system. Teachers of composition encourage their students in this spirit and even talented composers are forced to supply their works
with this “aesthetic of official ideology”. Let us assume you have decided to become a composer. You are still young and would like to have your music heard without ingratiating yourself to anyone. In Turkey your only option today (with which you can also earn money) is to take part in competitions. And to be taken on by the jury in the annual composition competitions you are expected to adopt the Ziya Gökalp formula for “harmonising” folk music and European music.2 Let us take a look at two paragraphs from the conditions of participation in this year’s composers’ competition at the highly regarded Turkish state Süreyya Opera:3 3. Composers are expected to produce their own works that draw associations and inspiration from traditional musical sensibility [this means European classical music in Turkey, MÖ], and reflect the concept of makam music or consist of arrangements. 4. Technical understanding; harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic qualities; and orchestration and musical quality are taken into account when judging the works. It can quickly be seen that capital and funding, which historically promoted the development of music in Turkey, were always on the side of “the aesthetic of the official ideology”. In light of these aesthetic constraints, opportunities for a composer to produce a piece of work within the system are severely restricted. Artists rightly find the prevailing artistic aesthetics in their country artificial and extremely traditional. They see themselves faced with the danger of once again disappearing into the shadows of identities which represent neither a structurally nor a historically developed reality for them, because these identities are founded in aesthetic ideals which were imported from countries where art is based on a sounder historical foundation. Imported systems of thought, which here in Turkey are then based on correspondingly weak foundations, which people believe are beneficial in developing our own identity, lead to the unnoticed glorification of imported “thinking” or “systems.” Ultimately they lead to a situation where the artist who is unsuccessful in developing his own identity is assimilated into the adapted, or rather copied, system. In a situation like this, the artist no longer knows what is right and wrong, what is “beautiful” and what is “bad”, and clings to a strengthening “power” – while simultaneously believing his thoughts and conscience are free. Thus he is then convinced that he has achieved something great, but in reality he has just become a slave to the affirmation authorities of other countries. It would be wrong to believe that mentors in countries which support us, or these countries themselves, do not allow “foreign” artists any freedom. However, the freedom granted can only be experienced in one sphere, which is prescribed by them and is therefore limited. In addition, every country has its own truths in relation to “high culture”. A foreign artist who presumes to create his own truth outside of this receives no guarantee that he won’t be left in the lurch – as has already happened in his own country. At present, numerous artists are going abroad due to various difficulties in their own countries. Others succumb to the system and do what is required of them. In Turkey, where the figure of the “independent artist” is
becoming an endangered species, the large number of ignored composers has motivated many of us to adhere to our work rather than “anyone else”, to leave the academies, to self-educate ourselves, and to retreat to an “ivory tower”. In this way we have witnessed numerous young composers from Turkey being awarded prestigious prizes in other countries over the last few years. I am delighted about the individual successes of my colleagues and contemporaries. But the situation as I have experienced it and can gauge to some extent – regardless of who supports us and how much and what success we have – is this: success does not overcome the loneliness (owed to the position between two extremes) and our problem of “lack of identity”. It is apparent that we have no direction or history from whose roots we could benefit. It may sound banal to still be talking about an identity problem in a world where the regional has practically disappeared and at the same time everything has become globalised and individualised. As far as information and material is concerned, we live in an internationalised era, but if you consider the requirements of art and its aesthetics as well as socio-political differences, it’s clear how strong the influence of the regional still is. As much as we may delight in individual successes in countries with solid historical and economic bases, the problem of having no specific direction or school and therefore also no concept of “good and proper” can plunge every artist into crisis. In a world where “knowledge” has extended beyond the boundaries of the planets, the boundaries of the “truths of high culture” cannot be drawn along clear lines for a composer in crisis. However, the aforementioned problems provide an answer as to what type of aesthetic or structural problems I am grappling with. Although I have found no solution for myself, I can make a proposal for the structure and function of art. It simply portrays my wishful thinking and has so far not been implemented. In my opinion – and in that of my colleagues in our composers’ collective founded two years ago4 – art should draw its strength from the solidarity of colleagues who share similar concerns; aesthetic ideas should not be overshadowed by individual egos. Art should be free and independent of any type of hierarchical mechanism, independent of academies and systems, free from the bourgeoisie and the monopoly of the art police. Through diverse disciplines and concepts, art should be in a position to analyse and challenge current concerns among the population as well as the painful side effects of social development. Art should openly explore what is “good and proper”. In so doing, it must honestly recognise where the concept and execution (idea and creation) touch upon the “good and proper” and must not deny the indisputable power of the neglected “craftsmanship”. Finally I would like to raise a few more points originating from the clearly visible aspects of the reality in Turkey: in the land where we grew up, which “defines” us and constitutes a specific geography which we can describe as “purgatory”, which is not structurally linked to a centre, which lies neither in the East nor the West and is not strengthened from any side, in which the entire cultural capital is without roots or is located on slippery terrain (or at least purports to be) – in this land the art
JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 06 – ENGLISH EDITION
of composing is a juxtaposition of phenomenons for which not one significant example can be found in the history of art. The initiative lies with the individual alone. An individual initiative of this type takes place outside central trends, as has been the case in the past, and is not even similar to groups of “non categorisable” artists or other organisational forms. Here there is an incompatible way of life, which may rest on the structural functions of reality or history (like a wild plant which sprouts next to a big tree) “but should not be there.” Is it possible to take all these negatives, this rootlessness, this naked loneliness, this orphan existence, and change them into productive energy? How great is the probability that quirky beings which like to make a noise, which are happy when they hear peculiar sounds synthesised by computer programs, can make themselves heard in the current world of music? For thirty years, all the information in relation to classical music in this country has been obtained through photocopies. The relevant theoretical and critical texts have not been translated into Turkish. It is not possible to purchase musical scores by Peters, Ricordi, or Schott (and they are just as unlikely to be found in libraries). But the whole body of literature is available in certain places in the form of photocopies or illegally acquired PDF files. By joining forces our composers throw themselves upon this information that has been acquired by whatever means and devour it. Accordingly, New Music here is a freely experienced sphere, independent of institutions and markets. Here you can see “primitive New Music beasts”, which mindlessly leap at sounds and new forms of expressions with wild voracity. Will the state of torment caused by this desperation open new doors? In any event, my colleagues and I are a consequence of this development. What is done here, what happens here, is a way of life which is described in street jargon as “piracy”. So, my esteemed friends, Thank God we have written the “Book of Piracy” here. 1 The Turkish Five is a name used internationally to describe the first professional composers of classical European music in the early years of the Turkish Republic (Ahmet Adnan Saygun, Ulvi Cemal Erkin, Cemal Reşit Rey, Hasan Ferit Alnar, Necil Kazım Akses). 2 An analysis of the works of the composers who have “made their mark” from the past to the present makes it apparent that the aesthetic of the official ideology is dictated by a definition of “national music”, as espoused by Ziya Gökalp in Türkçülüğün Esasları (“The Principles of Turkism”) in 1923, and composers write their pieces in accordance with the “aesthetic rules” specified therein. According to this definition “our national music arises from the fusion of our country’s folk music with European music. Folk music has given us countless melodies. If we collect and ‘harmonise’ them in the manner of European music, we get music which is both national and European.” 3 See http://www.sureyyabesteyarismasi.kadikoy.bel.tr/ assets/besteyarismasartname.pdf 4 The Istanbul Composers’ Collective was founded by six composers and improvisers – Onur Dülger, Emre Dündar, Şükret Gökay, Mehmet Ali Uzunselvi, Mithatcan Öcal, and Uğurcan Öztekin – as a free, independent organisation for New Music.
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S. 42 NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVE
FINDS: AN INTUITIVE CULTURE OF LISTENING Werner Grünzweig
He was not just the “discoverer” of twelve-tone music, but also a precursor of minimal music: Josef Matthias Hauer, born in 1883 in Wiener Neustadt, on the southern edge of the Vienna Basin, was in contact with important artists of his time (such as the sculptor Fritz Wotruba and the philosopher Ferdinand Ebner). He was a model for literary figures (for Hermann Bahr, Otto Stoessl, Franz Werfel) more often than his competitors were, and yet remained suspicious to the musical establishment. “Despite many imitators” he was “still the only true expert in and aficionado of twelve-tone music”, as he stamped on his scores in a superior manner, thus clearly attacking the spiritus rector of the Second Viennese School, Arnold Schoenberg. Twelve-tone music was “the music, the art of all arts, the science of all sciences,” he added in handwriting at the end of the orchestral score for Zwölftonmusik op. 82, in order to dispel any doubts as to the significance of his discovery of the eternal laws of “melos” and of the “tropes”. However, the representatives of the Schoenberg School insisted on the prevailing aesthetics of expression, deriding the eccentric outsider, who in old age looked like a Chinese wise man, with his striking horn-rimmed glasses, moustache, goatee, and sunken cheeks. And they have managed to largely exclude Hauer from the discussion on music of the 20th century to the present day. According to their concept of music, Hauer is impossible to understand. Only the fact that in 1921 Melos magazine, published by the conductor Hermann Scherchen, not only published some of Hauer’s theoretical texts but also a musical supplement to his Präludium für Celesta of the same year, which Alban Berg immediately examined on twelve-tone fields, gave them pause for thought. Hauer wanted to serve an intuitive culture of listening and united Far Eastern, theosophical, and anthroposophic elements in his musical views. While Schoenberg strove to achieve a perfect polyphony with “twelve tones which are related only with one another” in his method of composition, by which he hoped to “assure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years”, Hauer turned against the idealistic music culture of the West, which he associated with the notions of looking, understanding, and comparing. At the end of the score for his Zwölftonmusik für neun Soloinstrumente op. 73 from 1937, Hauer wrote in his accurate, primary school teacher handwriting: “The musically mathematical, the intuitive, must assume the highest rank in the spiritual
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life of people, because it lives in closest contact with truth and reality, with ‘spiritual reality’, and leads to the all-seeing summit of human knowledge, to the big world experience, while the verbally conceptual, the realm of ideas, degenerates too easily, becomes biased, and leads to gossip and lies: into polemics, dialectics, sophistry; philosophy, anthroposophy, theosophy; theology, ideology, pneumatology; phenomenalism, spiritism, occultism.” Hauer was only to give his compositions opus numbers for a short while longer. In the last two decades of his life, he wrote more than one thousand “twelve-tone games” without individual titles: examples of a music largely freed of compositional intention, which in turn was realized by others only at a much later stage. Hauer himself claimed that he only wrote a single work in his entire life. Several autograph scores by Hauer are to be found in the estate of the conductor Hermann Scherchen at the Music Archives of the Akademie der Künste. It is significant that Scherchen, who was always on the search for the new and unusual in art, and in his later years even promoted electronic music and jazz, also acknowledged artists who had not always been consistent with his own artistic convictions. Scherchen maintained personal contact with Hauer and not only included some of his works in the programme of his Ars Viva publishing house, but also conducted his music, as evidenced by the handwritten entries in the autograph of op. 73. It is understandable that he mainly added indications of dynamics (of volume progression), which was precisely the area in which Hauer’s music was perceived to have the most shortcomings in the ear of the listener, and was intentionally not clarified by the composer himself in order to avoid any individual expression. In general, performance indications, which were often used to excess by the Schoenberg School, did not appear to hold any relevance for Hauer’s music. The instruction “perform according to melos” at the beginning of a composition seems to have been completely sufficient for his music.
The image: Final chord from Josef Matthias Hauer’s Zwölftonmusik op. 82 (from 1939), with a remark by the composer. The autograph was in the possession of the conductor Hermann Scherchen and is now kept as part of his estate at the Music Archives of the Akademie der Künste. Hauer described himself as the “discoverer” and not the “inventor” of twelve-tone music, meaning that this music did not represent an individual act of creation, but that it reflected the laws inherent in any creation, which he simply made audible. The twelve-tone games were also probably the inspiration for Hermann Hesse’s novel Das Glasperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game), published in 1943, in which the author characterises artistic endeavour as “a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture”. “For like every great idea it [the glass bead game] has no real beginning; rather, conceptually, it has been there”.
The stamp Hauer placed under his signature from 1939 was supposed to document his polemical distance from Schoenberg’s method of “composition with twelve tones relating only to one another”, after he and Schoenberg had even considered a joint book on the topic in the 1920s.
WERNER GRÜNZWEIG is a musicologist and director of the Music Archives of the Akademie der Künste.
S. 44 NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVE
SOUND OF POETRY OF SOUND ACOUSTIC LITERATURE FROM THE ARCHIVE OF THE ACADEMY AT POESIEFESTIVAL BERLIN Marc Matter
There will be a selection from the publishing programme of Edition S Press on offer at two listening stations at this year’s poetry festival in the Akademie der Künste. Edition S Press focused, primarily in the seventies, on concrete poetry alongside experimental literature and beat poetry. In doing so, the publishing house was exploring new territory, as the works appeared as audio tapes and cassettes.
Acoustic literature is a genre which can be found in its nascent form in Dada, Futurism, and expressionist poetry. These approaches were developed further in the late twentieth century, in that the acoustic form of language was examined in many different ways. More and more works of a specific type were being created where their being published in book form constituted merely an interim solution. This necessitated the invention of a new form of publishing. So performances, readings, poetic live appearances or electro-acoustic poetry produced in the studio were then recorded using the suddenly more affordable tape recorders and published as audio cassettes or records. The idea of “founding a publishing house which would publish and sell these works in the form, the acoustic form, they were conceived for” occurred back then “magically as if all by itself” to three young people, namely the grammar school teacher Nikolaus Einhorn, the artist Axel Knipschild, and the German studies student Angela Köhler (today Koehler).1 This was the motivation that drove the S Press acoustic publishing company. There were indeed similar ventures on an international level, mostly set up by artists themselves as publishing projects, yet this was something of a pioneering work in the German-speaking world. The publications, which numbered over eighty, held true to the basic principle that those selected should be as international as possible, and the recordings as authentic as possible. This meant that the authors were to be as intimately involved with production as possible. S Press set out by paying homage to the early works of Dadaism and expressionism when it published works by Raoul Hausmann and Otto Nebel. The latter lived in Bern at that time, the city he had fled to during the Nazi regime. In late 1969, the young publishers paid him a visit (with a tape recorder amongst their luggage) to make some recordings for the first two issues. Then a little later they travelled to Raoul Hausmann in Limoges,
who provided them with an audio tape bearing audio poems he had recorded himself in the years 1918 to 1946, and which had been committed to tape by Henri Chopin a few years earlier. Three further titles on compact cassettes resulted from this, and other single titles published on reel tape in a boxed set. Since the whole publishing concept was to carry out “the most comprehensive documentation of acoustic literature and its precursors”, this was to mark just the beginning. In 1972 Angela Koehler’s brother, Michael Köhler, joined the publishing house by virtue of his contact with John Cage, who was in Berlin that summer for the performance of his newly created conceptual text collage, Mureau. To create this, Cage had processed the diary entries of Henry David Thoreau using music, sounds, and silence chosen at random to produce a chiming spoken composition. The day after the performance, he recorded them once more in spoken form onto a tape recorder for S Press. Research on Charles Olson took Michael Köhler to the US two years later, where he travelled extensively with his tape recorder and made recordings of poets at public readings or even at home. “The authors […] told us they would rather give readings in an informal setting, such as in their flat or another quiet place, rather than in a studio. They said the unusual situation in the studio had an oppressive effect on their readings.” A new genre of performing recitations was developing in the US at that time, one which experimented with free rhythms and embraced vernacular quotes and sayings, as well as integrating performance and musical elements. The following recordings thus appeared in quick succession in the S Press line-up: Beat Poetry by Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, John Giorno, and Anne Waldman; and Language Poets such as Larry Eigner and Robert Creeley, not forgetting Clark Coolidge, Michael McClure, or Ted Joans with his Jazz Poems. Readings from German speakers included those by Friederike Mayröcker, Matthyas Jenny, or Konrad Bayer, who read from their own material. Ernst Jandl’s 13 Radiophone Texte, on the other hand, were produced by the BBC in London using electronic sound effects. Concrete poetry also found its way into the programme, in the form of Konstellationen by Eugen Gomringer, for example, or Helmut Heissenbüttel’s collection Texte. The spoken piece Arbeiten, by co-founder of the S Press Nikolaus Einhorn, just consists of the title word being spoken differently by various voices. Whereas Der krimgotische Fächer. Lieder und Balladen by Oskar Pastior is conceived as being within a type of poetic private realm, where the charm lies in the recitation of the author himself. Unusual titles recorded include the poetic texts of grammar school pupils from Class 7, which appeared with the title Gedichte sind gemalte Fensterscheiben (“Poems are painted window panes”), as well as the published speech of Clyde Bellecourt, co-founder of the American Indian Movement, To Understand What We Are Fighting For. The idea behind looking at indigenous North American culture, for which recordings of “Indian poetry” were also in the pipeline, was to trace right back to the source when works were passed on orally, as was the case before the technological era and Gutenberg had even lived.
JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 06 – ENGLISH EDITION
Compared to the copy runs of classic publishers like Hausmann and Nebel with their international stars like Patti Smith or John Cage, publishing on tape actually turned out to be an economic advantage for S Press, with their small-scale runs of a few hundred. The very nature of audio tape made it significantly superior to vinyl records, since recordings were possible any time, any place. It also lends itself as an instrument of poetry, as spoken material can be processed further, cut up and re-arranged; the play-back speed can be altered, the sound quality distorted by filtering or several recordings copied on top of one another. “The authors’ imaginations were excited by all these possibilities, and they revelled in experimenting, which led to a completely new type of literary form: acoustic literature put straight onto tape and which cannot be described on a music score.” S Press published such electro-acoustic spoken artworks by, amongst others, the French poètes sonores Henri Chopin, François Dufrêne, and Bernard Heidsieck, for whom creative use of new media such as the Magnetophon had already become a firm element of contemporary poetic work. Yet the sales channels were certainly few and far between, which is why the works were distributed by low-paid but enthusiastic volunteers over the poetry scene network. The cassettes did find their way to a public audience though, as they were presented on an international level at art and book markets, at public events and festivals, played on the radio, or discussed in daily newspapers and periodicals. S Press also benefited from the fact that state-owned radio stations actively promoted the development of acoustic literature and the “new radio drama”. Gerhard Rühm’s works commissioned for radio broadcasting were published by S Press, as were radio works by Bazon Brock and Schuldt. Given their wide range covering the most varied modes of recordings of acoustic literature, the publications of S Press acoustic publishing house represent even today a quite unique source. Michael Köhler continued to manage the publishing house right up to his death in 2005. His bequest, which also contains numerous audio documents, is held in the Literature Archives of Akademie der Künste. 1 All quotes are taken from a typescript on Edition S Press entitled HINHÖREN (“listening closely”), presumably written by Michael Köhler in 1975. It is part of his estate preserved in the Akademie der Künste Archive. (KöhlerMichael 322).
MARC MATTER media artist and author of acoustic texts, is head of Music and Text Studies at the Institut für Musik und Medien, Robert Schumann Hochschule Düsseldorf. The nineteenth poesiefestival berlin will take place from 24 to 31 May 2018, bearing the motto Werte Vers Kunst, and will be held at the Haus für Poesie in cooperation with the Akademie der Künste. International poets are invited to come along, question values through poetic art, and bring their poetry to the stage. Particular emphasis will be placed on concrete, visual, and sound poetry.
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S. 46
HEINRICH MANN AND THE ACADEMY Ariane Martin
The novelist Heinrich Mann was a great advocate of the Weimar Republic. As a member of the Akademie der Künste and chairman of the Writing and Poetry Section, he also vehemently campaigned for democracy, human rights, and artistic freedom. His manifold discussion papers can be found in the recently published Essays und Publizistik (“Essays and Journalism”), the fourth volume of the Complete Critical Edition of his works, which was launched at the Academy. They exemplify a remit which the Akademie der Künste still assigns itself today: “To represent the case for art in society.”
The last president of the Department of Poetry of the Prussian Academy of Arts (colloquially known as the “Poets’ Academy”) during the Weimar Republic was a man called Heinrich Mann (1871–1950). His bequest, or at least the greatest part of it, can be found today in the Akademie der Künste Literature Archives. 1 Heinrich Mann was elected president of the Section for Poetic Arts – as it was still known then – at an extraordinary general meeting on 27 January 1931. The vote had been preceded by fierce disputes about the political orien tation of the section and ideological conflicts about the role of the writer. As a result of this, the previous president, Walter von Molo, had resigned his post in the autumn of 1930, but at the beginning of 1931 three members with leanings towards “völkisch” [racial] ideas also left the Academy, and those with democratic sentiments were now in the majority. On 8 October 1931, Mann was re-elected president for the period up to 30 September 1934. As is well known, this term of office was drastically cut short on account of the political situation. On 30 January 1933, the National Socialists came to power and Adolf Hitler was proclaimed chancellor. These events marked the end of the Republic and the democratic orientation of its institutions, including the Akademie der Künste and its department responsible for literature. The last meeting under Mann’s director ship took place on 5 January 1933. “6 o’clock, Academy”, he noted in his appointments diary under this date. His enforced expulsion from the Academy (together with that of Käthe Kollwitz) followed on 15 February 1933. A few weeks earlier, Max von Schillings had become overall president of the Academy; the pretext for the expulsion was provided by the revival of the “Urgent appeal!” poster campaign from the year before the Reichstag vote, 1932, jointly signed by Heinrich Mann, Käthe Kollwitz, Albert Einstein, and other artists and intellectuals. This appeal had warned of the “annihilation of all personal and political freedom in Germany”, pleaded for “a joining of forces between the Social Democratic and Communist parties” in the election campaign, and called for
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action: “Let us make sure that inertia in our nature and cowardice in our hearts do not allow us to sink into barbarism!” Six days later, Mann went into exile – “Gone travelling”, nothing more, is written in his appointments diary for 21 February 1933. Famous for taking the Wilhelminian mentality to task in his novel Der Untertan (“The Loyal Subject”), and dedicated to the cause of Franco-German understanding and the European idea in the 1920s, Heinrich Mann was known to his contemporaries as a committed republican. For example, in an interview with Emil Ludwig that appeared on 18 June 1927 (and which was reprinted on 29 June in Weltbühne, edited by Kurt Tucholsky), the French weekly magazine Les Nouvelles littéraires writes of him: “Il a écrit pour la République dans un temps où c’était encore dangereux” (“He wrote for the Republic at a time when this was still dangerous”). As president of the Prussian “Poets’ Academy”, he was tireless in his efforts for those writers supporting democracy in the last years of the Weimar Republic and yet, at the same time, was a representative of one of its institutions. Whenever the topic of “Heinrich Mann and the Academy” is considered, it is predominantly this latter period that is given attention, hardly ever his first five years as a rank-and-file member. But he campaigned for, and in the name of, the Section for Poetic Arts with great vigour right from the beginning, in order to act for democratic principles and constitutional legality, for human rights and humanity. It is therefore worth casting a glance at the beginnings of his membership and its first few years. On the afternoon of 30 October 1926, Heinrich Mann – then on a lecture trip in Vienna – sent a telegram to Max Liebermann, president of the Prussian Academy of Arts: “gratefully accept vote which does me great honour stop be assured herr president of my heartfelt esteem = heinrich mann.” The constituent assembly of the Section for Poetic Arts had taken place in Berlin three days earlier. By a decree of the Prussian Ministry for Science, Art, and National Education issued on 19 March 1926, it had been incorporated into the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, an institution with rich traditions. The founder members nominated by Carl Heinrich Becker, the education minister, on 7 May 1926 – Ludwig Fulda, Thomas Mann, and Hermann Stehr – were entrusted with the task of expanding the new section by means of elections. On 27 October 1926, at constituent assembly no. 24, they voted in additional members, including Mann, who at the time was still living in Munich. The request from Max Liebermann for Mann to accept his election to this body was read out in the hall of the Vienna Musikverein by Ernst Lothar on 30 October 1926, and the news was immediately announced that Mann “replied in the affirmative” (in the words of the formula with which numerous newspapers reported the event). The election of Heinrich Mann to the newly constituted Section for Poetic Arts created a major stir in the press. Often, his name made the headlines: the heading “Heinrich Mann and the Poets’ Academy” appeared in the Münchner Neuesten Nachrichten on 3 November 1926, while “Heinrich Mann now Member of Poets’ Academy” appeared in the Hamburger Anzeiger on the same day, and the Prager Presse the day before. But besides
recognition, right from the start there was massive hostility: “Even Heinrich Mann is Member of Poets’ Academy” ran the headline over the notice in the Völkischer Beobachter of 1–3 November 1926, which concluded with the observation that Mann was “one of Germany’s greatest pornographers, a stocky Jew”. Defamations such as this dramatically illustrate the fact that it was not just towards the end of the Weimar Republic that National Socialism became a dangerous threat to the first democratic state on German soil. As a whole, the many press notices bear witness to the level of public attention that was focused on the prominent political writer. Even before the actual inaugural meeting took place with the election of Wilhelm von Scholz as president on 18 November 1926, and the section officially began its work, a manifesto was published on 15 November 1926 with the title “The Poets Warn the Reichstag”.2 This sought to prevent the “Law for the Protection of Youth from Trashy and Filthy Writing” from being passed, a censorship law against which Mann campaigned in a whole series of articles (in vain – it came into force on 18 December 1926). As the member of a section supported by the Prussian Academy, a state institution, he devoted a great deal of energy to the struggle against censorship. He threw himself into the task. In his handwritten curriculum vitae for the form providing his “Staff Details for the Archive of the Akademie der Künste”, he had declared that he pursued the “conviction that literature is conditioned by contemporary history and has a duty to share the struggles of the world around it”. Heinrich Mann took the new institution very seriously. In a document of 6 December 1926, he offered President Wilhelm von Scholz some suggestions on the kind of tasks the section should administer, and listed as his first point: “If this ‘trash and filth law’ is brought down in the Reichsrat, as we hope, we should not allow this danger to rest and then come back again”. This document should be regarded as a kind of manifesto. With it, Mann had “drafted a plan of action”, as he described it at the meeting on 26 October 1927. The importance he attached to intellectual freedom can be seen from his “Warning Regarding the Censorship Law: An Appeal from the Poets’ Academy” in the Berliner Tageblatt on 16 March 1927, directed against a threatened additional legislative measure. The section members had approved the appeal and endorsed its publication. This was not the case with every position statement Mann drew up for the section. His report on the restrictive sexual legislation in the criminal law draft of 1927, “§ 300: Report to the Working Committee of the Section for Poetic Arts of the Prussian Academy of Arts”, was not approved by his section colleagues (he published it in 1929 in his collection Sieben Jahre. Chronik der Gedanken und Vorgänge (“Seven Years: Chronicle of Thoughts and Procedures”). The protest he drafted at the beginning of 1928 against the censorship case of Johannes R. Becher, who was the subject of high treason proceedings as the result of a novel, remained unpublished during his lifetime because it also went too far for his section colleagues (it was first printed in Volume 4 of the publication Essays und Publizistik). However, his polemic essay “Dichtkunst und Politik. Bericht an die Preußische Akademie der
Künste, Sektion für Dichtkunst” (“Poetic Art and Politics: Report to the Prussian Academy of Arts, Section for Poetic Arts”) was printed. This was about the relationship between intellect and power already reflected upon in Imperial times, an idea which is here given the form of a kind of declaration of basic principles regarding the meaning and purpose of the Section for Poetic Arts. It appeared in the Jahrbuch der Sektion für Dichtkunst 1929 (and previously in the Neue Rundschau magazine). After some historical remarks in the first part, and a fictive actual address to the education minister in the second, the finale of the third part of this essay, which is completely focused on the present, conceals a robust statement of position on the Becher case, without actually naming him. If we pick a day at random from Mann’s appointment diary for 1929, then it becomes clear what a strong impact the Academy had on the writer’s everyday life, even before he became section president. For example, on 28 October (Monday) he noted: “Akad. 11 a.m. Wass. on Hofm. Election meeting.” The meeting of the Section for Poetic Arts was scheduled for 11 a.m. on 28 October 1929 in the Akademie der Künste. Mann’s signature on the attendance list proves that he took part, as do the minutes. There was a discussion of the attacks on President Walter von Molo that had taken place in the course of the affair surrounding his image advertising for a newspaper, after which the president was re-elected. A number of other topics were also discussed, including issues relating to the length of protection under copyright law (Mann “advise[d] us to formulate a new appeal, illustrated with examples”) and, not least, the naming of the section (Mann suggested “literary art”). However, although he noted the continuation of the meeting in the afternoon, with the external members of the section, he stayed away. Oskar Loerke, the secretary of the section, who also wrote the minutes, noted in his diary on 28 October 1929: “Heated general meeting at Academy, with a painful vote. Molo re-elected. Another meeting in afternoon.” 3 Mann’s cryptic note between the two entries relating to the Academy meeting can be decoded as: “Wassermann on Hoffmansthal”. In the evening, he attended the memorial service for Hugo von Hoffmannsthal at 4 Pariser Platz, organised by the Section for Poetic Arts of the Akademie der Künste, where Jakob Wassermann gave the memorial speech. Mann’s presence was noted in the press. The dispute over the naming of the section – whether it should be the antiquated Dichtung (Poetry), the more neutral Dichtkunst (Poetic Arts), or Literatur, a term integrating modern diction – reflects in nuce the ideological controversies mentioned at the beginning. In 1931 Heinrich Mann, in his articles “Pariser Platz 4” and “Section for Poetic Arts” (14 and 15 February respectively, in the Frankfurter Zeitung and Vossische Zeitung) immediately set out his position, as newly elected president, on this heated controversy between opponents and proponents of the Weimar Republic over the self-image of the Section for Poetic Arts. It is well known that he was amongst the determining proponents. The fact also needs to be underscored, however, that the Akademie der Künste was decisively influenced by him.
1 The quotations cited here come from the Heinrich Mann Archive in the Literature Archives and the Historical Archives of the Prussian Academy of Arts. 2 The texts that Heinrich Mann wrote (and signed) for or about the Section for Poetic Arts can all be read with commentaries in the following volumes of the complete critical edition Essays und Publizistik (“Essays and Publicity”), edited by Wolfgang Klein, Anne Flierl, and Volker Riedel and published by Aisthesis (Bielefeld): Vol. 4: 1926–1929 (ed. Ariane Martin, 2018); Vol. 5: 1930–February 1933 (ed. Volker Riedel, 2009); Vol. 6: February 1933–1935 (ed. Wolfgang Klein, 2009). 3 Oskar Loerke, Tagebücher 1903–1939 (“The Diaries 1903–1939”), ed. Hermann Kasack (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), p. 208. ARIANE MARTIN is professor of Modern German Literary History at the University of Mainz, co-editor of the Heinrich Mann-Jahrbuch, and president of the Heinrich Mann Society.
JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 06 – ENGLISH EDITION
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S. 50 SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
VALUES IN TIMES OF DIGITAL CHANGE Mathias Döpfner
Donald Trump reacts on Twitter. He prefers the platform to the professional channels of a president. To the press corps. To his spokesperson. To the journalists who make up the press corps. And even to the possibility of offering an exclusive interview to any newspaper, any TV station in the world, and of being listened to immediately. All the other American presidents communicated in these classic ways. This decision that Trump took by himself is less a question of character than one might believe. It’s rather a question of options. With the exception of Barack Obama, none of his predecessors actually had access to Twitter. The platform wasn’t developed until 2006, and it took a good few years until it matured from a toy for nerds to a practical communication tool. By using Twitter, Donald Trump doesn’t necessarily reach more people than his predecessors managed to. The remarkable thing about his decision is quite the opposite, namely that he doesn’t reach any fewer. According to the standards we set the world just a few years ago, Twitter would have been the Toyota Corolla of communication. Sturdy, built for mass consumption. But with no special skills. Not a tool for a president. But the market has changed. A Porsche for everyone: the democratisation of the ability to broadcast. Twitter in the White House is just one example of the profound changes which we are currently living through, of the nature of these changes and their ramifications. And the fact that the president communicates via the same channel available to labourers or students is actually what (left-wing) dreams are made of. The fact that it has come true is first and foremost a capitalist achievement. Never before in the history of humanity has communication been so affordable and efficient at the same time. The potential reach of every message is infinite. The viral effect resulting from mass dissemination of a message on the Net can only augment that. But quite often it’s messages from people who never thought for a moment that of all things their Facebook post, Snapchat video, or Tweet would go round the world. The ramifications of these developments are hard to fathom. The last time culture and society experienced such rapid and profound change was after the discovery of blood pressure or the invention of the wheel. Fundamental values are collapsing like clay huts during an earthquake. Here are a few examples: For future generations the inferiority of a copy compared to the original will be difficult to comprehend. Humanity had become accustomed over centuries to the loss of quality between the original and the copy.
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But the copy of a music file on a hard drive is just as good as the original. New forms or close relatives of the copy, such as streaming, pose the question as to what a copy or original actually is. There is in neither the copyright nor philosophical sense a conclusive answer to this. According to media theory, the distinction between sender and recipient had been unambiguous and obvious since the invention of the letter. Yet “user generated content” has conflated these roles into one. The majority of users of social platforms such as Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter constitute both things: sender and recipient. Blockchain combines anonymity, encryption, and security. Its first great achievement is establishing a purely digital currency without a central authority such as a central bank. Hardly anybody would have thought that possible just a few years ago. And that’s probably just the beginning of what Blockchain is about to achieve. Even the boundary between the present and the future is becoming blurred as the first forms of artificial intelligence can show us an excerpt from the future in our present, thanks to continually improving diagnostic technology. This patient will with 99 percent certainty become ill with cancer; this person will commit a terror act, and this one a burglary. Our relationship with the past is changing at the same time too, as the reduced cost of data storage means we can store our thoughts, routes, emotions, photos, and spoken and video files in positional files (GPS), and even in the chip in our car. Here too, neither the state as legislator and proprietor of the power monopoly nor people themselves are ready for it. Unanswered questions far outnumber in terms of substance those answers we have managed to force out of technological development. Does that sound a bit like fear? Like concern? Well, yes, that too. All the more since it has become evident in the last few years that the development itself is neutral, namely good nor bad. Which means it can be applied to the good and the bad. Five years ago, the voice of the people on Twitter may have taught many a leader the meaning of fear. But today the social networks are the medium of those same autocrats, who mould public opinion with their arson of deceitful tricks, disseminate untruths, and conceal their disgraceful deeds. Certainties which had hitherto brought stability to the market have in the meantime been lost in the turmoil. The low cost of data storage and the resulting deluge of media content covering the globe has inadvertently caused willingness to pay for news to reach a historical low point. Effects of this nature ultimately pose a threat to democracy. The fact that we are experiencing a renaissance of populism coming from the left and right wings is not just encouraged by the new media, but moreover made possible by it. In the face of digital change it is up to us all to preserve that for which the heroes of the past have again and again fought: our values. Individual freedom, democracy, equality before the law, human rights, unity, the (American) right to strive for your own happiness and, primarily as a lesson of German history, a decisive “never again” to dictatorship and persecution of minorities. The Internet demonstrated in the early years of digitisation
that it can bring about a positive change. Knowledge and education as well as wealth and prosperity have never before been so widespread as today. If we succeed in setting off on the right course, then the digital era can be so much more beautiful and peaceful than in all the years of past history.
MATHIAS DÖPFNER chairperson of Axel Springer SE, is a member of the Society of Friends of the Akademie der Künste.
COLOPHON Journal der Künste, Edition 6, English Supplement, April 2018 Print run: 2,000 Journal der Künste is published four times a year and is available at all Academy locations. Members of the Akademie der Künste are sent a copy. © Akademie der Künste 2018 © for the texts with the authors © for the artworks with the artists Responsible for the contents Werner Heegewaldt Johannes Odenthal (V.i.S.d.P.) Kathrin Röggla Editorial team Martin Hager Marie Altenhofen Anneka Metzger Translations (if not otherwise noted) Laura Noonan, Sprachwerkstatt Berlin Toptranslation GmbH Copy-editing Joy Beecroft Design Heimann + Schwantes, Berlin www.heimannundschwantes.de Printing Druckerei Conrad GmbH, Berlin If you would like a single edition or a subscription, please contact info@adk.de. ISSN (Print) 2510-5221 The views offered in this journal reflect the opinions of the individual authors and do not necessarily represent the opinion of the Akademie der Künste. Akademie der Künste Pariser Platz 4 10117 Berlin T 030 200 57-1000 info@adk.de, www.adk.de akademiederkuenste
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