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70th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen

1 –

6 May 2024

Even the art of dance is powerless to improve them.

Heinrich Heine, Atta Troll. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Caput VII.

70th International Short Film Festival

Oberhausen

Theodor W. Adorno Resignation

We older representatives of what the name Frankfurt School has come to designate have recently and eagerly been accused of resignation. We had indeed developed elements of a critical theory of society, the accusation runs, but we were not ready to draw the practical consequences from it. And so, we neither provided actionist programs nor did we even support actions by those who felt inspired by critical theory. I will not address the question of whether that can be demanded from theoretical thinkers, who are relatively sensitive and by no means shockproof instruments. The purpose that has fallen to them in a society based on the division of labor may be questionable; they themselves may be deformed by it. But they are also formed by it; of course, they could not by sheer will abolish what they have become. I do not want to deny the element of subjective weakness that clings to the narrowed focus on theory. I think the objective side is more important. The objection, effortlessly rattled off, runs along these lines: the person who at this hour doubts the possibility of radical change in society and who therefore neither participates in spectacular, violent actions nor recommends them has resigned. What he has in mind he thinks cannot be realized; actually he doesn’t even want to realize it. By leaving the conditions untouched, he condones them without admitting it.

Distance from praxis is disreputable to everyone. Whoever doesn’t want to really knuckle down and get his hands dirty, is suspect, as though the aversion were not legitimate and only distorted by privilege. The distrust of whoever distrusts praxis extends from those on the opposite side who repeat the old slogan “enough talking already” all the

way to the objective spirit of advertising that propagates the image – they call it a “guiding image” – of the active, practical person, be he an industrial leader or an athlete. One should join in. Whoever only thinks, removes himself, is considered weak, cowardly, virtually a traitor. The hostile cliché of the intellectual works its way deeply into that oppositional group, without them having noticed it, and who in turn are slandered as “intellectuals.”

Thinking actionists answer: among the things to be changed include precisely the present conditions of the separation of theory and praxis. Praxis is needed, they say, precisely in order to do away with the domination by practical people and the practical ideal. But then this is quickly transformed into a prohibition on thinking. A minimum is sufficient to turn the resistance to repression repressively against those who, as little as they wish to glorify their individual being, nonetheless do not renounce what they have become. The much invoked unity of theory and praxis has the tendency of slipping into the predominance of praxis. Many movements defame theory itself as a form of oppression, as though praxis were not much more directly related to oppression. In Marx the doctrine of this unity was inspired by the real possibility of action, which even at that time was not actualized.1 Today what is emerging is more the direct contrary. One clings to action for the sake of the impossibility of action. Admittedly, already in Marx there lies concealed a wound. He may have presented the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach so authoritatively because he knew he wasn’t entirely sure about it. In his youth he had demanded the “ruthless criticism of everything existing.”2 Now he was mocking criticism. But his famous witticism

against the young Hegelians, the phrase “critical critique,” was a dud, went up in smoke as nothing but a tautology.3 The forced primacy of praxis irrationally stopped the critique that Marx himself practiced. In Russia and in the orthodoxy of other countries the malicious derision of critical critique became an instrument so that the existing conditions could establish themselves so terrifyingly. The only thing praxis still meant was: increased production of the means of production; critique was not tolerated anymore except for the criticism that people were not yet working hard enough. So easily does the subordination of theory to praxis invert into service rendered to renewed oppression.

The repressive intolerance to the thought that is not immediately accompanied by instructions for action is founded on anxiety. Untrammeled thought and the posture that will not let it be bargained away must be feared because of what one deeply knows but cannot openly admit: that the thought is right. An age-old bourgeois mechanism with which the eighteenth century enlightenment thinkers were quite familiar operates once again, but unchanged: the suffering caused by a negative situation – this time by obstructed reality – becomes rage leveled at the person who expresses it. Thought, enlightenment conscious of itself, threatens to disenchant the pseudo-reality within which actionism moves, in the words of Habermas.4 The actionism is tolerated only because it is considered pseudo-reality. Pseudo-reality is conjoined with, as its subjective attitude, pseudo-activity: action that overdoes and aggravates itself for the sake of its own publicity*, without admitting to itself to what extent it serves as a substitute satisfaction, elevating itself into an end in itself. People locked in desperately

want to get out. In such situations one doesn’t think anymore, or does so only under fictive premises. Within absolutized praxis only reaction is possible and therefore false. Only thinking could find an exit, and moreover a thinking whose results are not stipulated, as is so often the case in discussions in which it is already settled who should be right, discussions that therefore do not advance the cause but rather inevitably degenerate into tactics. If the doors are barricaded, then thought more than ever should not stop short. It should analyze the reasons and subsequently draw the conclusions. It is up to thought not to accept the situation as final. The situation can be changed, if at all, by undiminished insight. The leap into praxis does not cure thought of resignation as long as it is paid for with the secret knowledge that that really isn’t the right way to go.

Pseudo-activity is generally the attempt to rescue enclaves of immediacy in the midst of a thoroughly mediated and rigidified society. Such attempts are rationalized by saying that the small change is one step in the long path toward the transformation of the whole. The disastrous model of pseudo-activity is the “do-it-yourself”* [Mach es selber]: activities that do what has long been done better by the means of industrial production only in order to inspire in the unfree individuals, paralyzed in their spontaneity, the assurance that everything depends on them. The nonsense of do-it-yourself in the production of material goods, even in the carrying out of many repairs, is patently obvious. Admittedly the nonsense is not total. With the reduction of so-called services* [Dienstleistungen], sometimes measures carried out by the private person that are superfluous considering the available technology nonetheless fulfill

a quasi-rational purpose. The do-it-yourself approach in politics is not completely of the same caliber. The society that impenetrably confronts people is nonetheless these very people. The trust in the limited action of small groups recalls the spontaneity that withers beneath the encrusted totality and without which this totality cannot become something different. The administered world has the tendency to strangle all spontaneity, or at least to channel it into pseudo-activities. At least this does not function as smoothly as the agents of the administered world would hope. However, spontaneity should not be absolutized, just as little as it should be split off from the objective situation or idolized the way the administered world itself is. Otherwise the axe in the house that never saves the carpenter will smash in the nearest door, and the riot squad will be at the ready.5 Even political undertakings can sink into pseudo-activities, into theater. It is no coincidence that the ideals of immediate action, even the propaganda of the act, have been resurrected after the willing integration of formerly progressive organizations that now in all countries of the earth are developing the characteristic traits of what they once opposed. Yet this does not invalidate the critique of anarchism. Its return is that of a ghost. The impatience with theory that manifests itself in its return does not advance thought beyond itself. By forgetting thought, the impatience falls back below it.

This is made easier for the individual by his capitulation to the collective with which he identifies himself. He is spared from recognizing his powerlessness; the few become the many in their own eyes. This act, not unwavering thought, is resignative. No transparent relationship obtains

between the interests of the ego and the collective it surrenders itself to. The ego must abolish itself so that it may be blessed with the grace of being chosen by the collective. Tacitly a hardly Kantian categorical imperative has erected itself: you must sign. The sense of a new security is purchased with the sacrifice of autonomous thinking. The consolation that thinking improves in the context of collective action is deceptive: thinking, as a mere instrument of activist actions, atrophies like all instrumental reason. At this time no higher form of society is concretely visible: for that reason whatever acts as though it were in easy reach has something regressive about it. But according to Freud, whoever regresses has not reached his instinctual aim. Objectively regression is renunciation, even when it thinks itself the opposite and innocently propagates the pleasure principle.6

By contrast the uncompromisingly critical thinker, who neither signs over his consciousness nor lets himself be terrorized into action, is in truth the one who does not give in. Thinking is not the intellectual reproduction of what already exists anyway. As long as it doesn’t break off, thinking has a secure hold on possibility. Its insatiable aspect, its aversion to being quickly and easily satisfied, refuses the foolish wisdom of resignation. The utopian moment in thinking is stronger the less it – this too a form of relapse – objectifies itself into a utopia and hence sabotages its realization. Open thinking points beyond itself. For its part a comportment, a form of praxis, it is more akin to transformative praxis than a comportment that is compliant for the sake of praxis. Prior to all particular content, thinking is actually the force of resistance, from which it has been

alienated only with great effort. Such an emphatic concept of thinking admittedly is not secured, not by the existing conditions, nor by ends yet to be achieved, nor by any kind of battalions. Whatever has once been thought can be suppressed, forgotten, can vanish. But it cannot be denied that something of it survives. For thinking has the element of the universal. What once was thought cogently must be thought elsewhere, by others: this confidence accompanies even the most solitary and powerless thought. Whoever thinks is not enraged in all his critique: thinking has sublimated the rage. Because the thinking person does not need to inflict rage upon himself, he does not wish to inflict it on others. The happiness that dawns in the eye of the thinking person is the happiness of humanity. The universal tendency of oppression is opposed to thought as such. Thought is happiness, even where it defines unhappiness: by enunciating it. By this alone happiness reaches into the universal unhappiness. Whoever does not let it atrophy has not resigned.

Translator’s Notes

1 Radio version: “In Marx the doctrine of the unity of theory and praxis was inspired by the possibility of action, which even at that time was not actualized but yet was felt to exist.”

2 Allusion to Marx’s letter to Arnold Ruge, part of the public correspondence between them and Bakunin and Feuerbach, published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (1844): “If we have no business with the construction of the future or with organizing it for all time there can still be no doubt about the task confronting us at present: I mean the ruthless critique of everything existing, ruthless in that it will shrink neither from its own discoveries nor from conflict with the powers that be” (Marx, Early Writings, trans. R. Livingstone and G. Benton [London: Penguin Books, 1992], p. 207).

3 Cf. the first joint publication by Marx and Engels, a satirical polemic against Bruno Bauer and the Young Hegelians: Die Heilige Familie, oder

Kritik der kritischen Kritik (1845); in English: The Holy Family: A Critique of Critical Criticism, in vol. 4 of The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ed. Y. Dakhina and T. Chikileva (New York: International Publishers, 1975).

4 Cf. Jürgen Habermas, „Die Scheinrevolution und ihre Kinder: Sechs Thesen über Taktik, Ziele, und Situationsanalysen der oppositionellen Jugend,“ Frankfurter Rundschau, June 5, 1968, p. 8. In English, cf. Habermas, Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics, trans. Jeremy Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971).

5 Cf. act 3, scene 1, of Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell (1804): A man with eyesight clear and sense alert, Who trusts in God and his own supple strength, Will find some way to slip the noose of danger. Mountain-born was never scared of mountains. (Having finished his work he puts the tools away.)

There now! That gate should serve another twelvemonth. An axe in the house will save a joiner’s labor. (Reaches for his hat.)

(Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller, Wilhelm Tell, trans. and ed. William F. Mainland [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972], pp. 64-65 [ll. 1508-1513]).

6 “Instinctual aim” [Triebziel] in Freud refers to the activity a sexual drive tends toward in order to release an inner biological or psychological tension. Whereas Freud developed the idea in terms of various stages of infant sexuality closely bound to specific organic sources of instinctual aims in Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (1905), in the later Triebe und Triebschicksale (1915) he considers more sublimated cases in which the aim can be modified through the influence of object-choice, anaclisis, substitution by the instincts of self-preservation, etc. In Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse Freud came to see regression [Regression] as operative when the libido reverts to an earlier stage in the child’s psychosexual development or, as presumably Adorno here implies, to a more primitive, less differentiated form of psychosexual organization, which Freud also often called “fixation.”

A relatively constant concept in Freud’s economical model of the psyche, the “pleasure principle” [Lustprinzip] denotes the strategy of directing psychological activities toward the goal of obtaining pleasure and avoiding its opposite. Several problems arise, such as the pleasure afforded

from maintaining a constant tension of psychic energy (the “constancy principle”) versus the tendency toward a complete dissipation of energy (the “death drive”) and that of the complicity between the pleasure principle and the reality principle for the sake of guaranteeing satisfactions at the expense of the pleasure principle’s fundamental (utopian) role in fantasy, dream, and wish-fulfillment, to which Adorno apparently is referring. Cf. Freud, Jenseits des Lustprinzips (1920); in English: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hoghart Press, 1973), 18: pp. 7-64.

(Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models. Interventions and Catchwords. Translated and with a Preface by Henry W. Pickford; New York: Columbia University Press, 1998; pp. 289-293. All rights: Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin.)

Magnus Klaue Object flight or: something about art

It is curators, moderators, communication designers and public relations experts, as well as professional copywriters trained in the humanities and cultural studies, that benefit most from the disintegration of the aesthetic concept of the work of art today, which is not to be confused with what Theodor W. Adorno described as the “fraying” of works of art. Adorno used this very term to describe the immanent dissolution of the appearance of autonomy originating from the artwork’s autonomy. The illusory character of the bourgeois ideal of the autonomous subject — committed only to its inherent entelechy and thereby offering an example of a social being that can unite with other, similarly constituted, free and equal individuals — emerges all the more clearly in the process of bourgeois socialisation as the economically mediated social context becomes independent of the individual. Aesthetically, this process is reflected in the increased integration of what is foreign to and distant from the work of art, which enters into the immanent context of artworks as heterogeneous materials: collage, montage and installation are the best-known forms in the modernist era attempting to assert this growing significance of the heterogeneous and at the same time heteronomous, the projection of what is distant from the subject into the subject, but without relinquishing the primacy of the work of art and its own principles.

In postmodernism, and especially in recent activist art, which is one of its major manifestations, the process of “fraying” is, to a certain extent, being replaced by its opposite, although it bears a confusing resemblance to the phenomenon described by Adorno. Instead of dissociating of their own accord, following their own claim to autonomy,

through alienation to the heteronomous, the works of art are being hijacked, occupied, talked over and maltreated by discourses, political practices and forms of consciousness external to them until they can no longer speak out of themselves. In his 1989 book “Real Presences”, literary scholar George Steiner described this postmodern reversal of the principle of fraying as a proliferation of “secondary” and “parasitic” texts, which is killing off the experience of the primary text, the work of art, that is, as well as art criticism. This is because, as Steiner states in reference to early Romantic art philosophy, as a cogent and coherent text, it is always a primary, not a secondary text. For Steiner, art criticism means “creative responsibility” towards the work of art, which can only manifest itself in the form of a new work corresponding to the one being interpreted. In contrast to art criticism, “secondary texts” feed off the works they explain, interpret and discuss, without giving anything back to them, let alone becoming works in their own right due to the evidence of their interpretation. They do not “account” for the work, as Steiner puts it, because they refuse to experience its objectivity. However, as they withdraw from the experience of the object, they also cut off any adequate experience of subjectivity gained from the object: the contradictory tension between object and subject is neutralised, and what remains are disparate “discourses” existing side by side, which are only externally related to what they are about, but not truly engaged with it.

What in the academic discourse is called “context” and “contextualisation” emerges only when the antagonistic relationship between the subject and the object that resists it has been severed. The most important providers of this

discourse of contextualisation, as mentioned above, are curators, copywriters, and moderators. Their task is nothing other than to coordinate and facilitate a collective escape from the objects, and thereby to ensure that no one will ever really respond to the works of art, that no one will render their experience of those works to the works themselves, by means of spontaneous and autonomous self-expression. Precautiously, works of art must be permanently talked about before they can even be perceived. This can be observed most drastically in the field of fine art, where the texts in the increasingly heavy exhibition catalogues have long since taken up more space than the reproductions of the works they deal with. But the syndrome is omnipresent also in other arts: there is hardly a concert of New Music where the accompanying booklet does not address potential listeners like listening apprentices, who would not even be able to perceive what they are hearing without the accompanying listening instructions; writers — like now even Elfriede Jelinek — ornament their own works with prefaces and epilogues by academics specialising in their work, who explain it the way the writers want it to be understood; film festivals and exhibitions no longer offer a framework providing an unregimented experience of the heterogeneous and revealing connections that would otherwise not be recognisable. Rather, they set out ideological-political guidelines and perceptual imperatives the audience has to adhere to (or stay away from). Instead of the works of art being opened up by the way they are presented, they are almost stifled by a frame that ought to give them some air to breathe, as it were. Instead of the presentation and interpretation of works of art forming the

threshold that enables access to them without replacing them, curators and festival organisers build a wall around them, and it is this wall that the audience is supposed to engage with instead of the works of art.

This wall of text that actually prevents any experience is now called “contextualisation”. A context is something other than a Zusammenhang (correlation), it’s almost the opposite. The (historical, biographical, social) Zusammenhang of a work of art is revealed by the work itself: they have entered into it, or have an immanent effect on it, but they can only be found within it, not anywhere outside of it. Contexts, on the other hand, are by definition external to the work: the work can therefore be placed in them or removed from them, and, depending on ideological preference, one context can be replaced by another. Contextualisation means to avoid the object itself, and anyone asking the artist or the interpreter for contextualisation is actually asking to be led somewhere else, away from the work of art: preferably to their own or someone else’s, or at any rate to a preconceived and equally reproducible opinion. Steiner rejects such manipulative events in the realm of art, in which audience and artist join together to form a community, by characterising the relationship between artwork and art viewer as one of hospitality. Not only must the viewer receive the work of art like a guest, he is also a guest in this very work himself, like a kindly welcomed stranger. Indeed, even the artist and his work are in a relationship of hospitality to one other: they engage with each other without ever knowing everything about each other, and they are well aware that they will only spend a limited amount of time together. The viewer’s attention to the work

of art corresponds to the host’s attention to the guest, to whom he wants to do justice in every nuance, but also to the attention of the guest, who must first gradually discover what kind of person his host is.

The agencies of secondary discourse Steiner vigorously opposes — the representatives of the always precarious but notoriously free professions, who all do something with art without making art — are in this sense inhibitors of hospitality who — like bumbling professional tourist guides — spoil any enjoyment of the place they are visiting instead of giving them the opportunity to explore it on their own initiative, following their own impulses, curiosity and experience, and on paths of their own choosing.

Christoph Hesse Once upon a time: 1962

“We declare our claim to create the new German feature film.” This was the quite immodest sound of the Oberhausen Manifesto of 1962. One easily gets the impression that the text is already 62 years old: not only because there is not a single woman among the 26 filmmakers who signed it. The brittle diction sounds disconcerting, the tersely formulated claim all the more presumptuous. The context, as one would say today, encompassed not only the international cinema of the time — the New Waves that, driven by a “politique des auteurs”, were already reaching across the Atlantic to Latin America and soon across the Pacific to Hollywood — but also the history of the avant-garde. Significantly, the manifestos of Surrealism are better known today than Breton’s and Aragon’s novels, and not even without good reason, as they can easily exist as literature themselves. The Oberhausen Manifesto, on the other hand, is decidedly unpoetic; it is just as uninterested in social problems as it is in the ultimate questions of humanity. It talks about nothing but its own profession and not even explicitly about art. Alexander Kluge had not been trained in liturgical music for nothing. The key of the day was major, not minor: “The old film is dead. We believe in the new one.” Voilà.

Alain Resnais and François Truffaut, who were looked up to in awe by young filmmakers in this country, signed a different declaration in Paris in 1960. This document, which has gone down in history as the “Manifesto of 121”, had nothing to do with film and art at all, contrary to what the impressive list of signatories might suggest. The “Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie”, signed by artists, writers, philosophers and intellectuals

of all stripes, at least half of whose names are still known around the world today, was a call to refuse military service, but above all an eloquent denunciation of French colonialism, the last great battle of which was raging in Algeria back then. The effects of the war were also felt in France, not only in the recruitment of young men for the army, but also in the repression of all those who sympathised with the Algerian independence movement and opposed the claims of the Fifth Republic on this issue. The declaration was immediately banned, a number of signatories were dismissed from public service and some were even charged.

The Oberhauseners, whose names hardly anyone knew at the time, didn’t get that much attention. For the time being, they had to make do with the malice of the established film industry. History was made elsewhere. Barely three weeks after the publication of their manifesto, the Algerian War came to an end with the Évian Accords; a referendum agreed in the treaties sealed the country’s independence a few months later. Whether the “121” promoted this process will never be known. After all, in October 1961, a year after their sensational intervention, a Paris protest march was dispersed by the police, killing 200 Algerians living in France and subsequently taking several thousand out of the country. Of the signatories of the Oberhausen Manifesto, it can at least be said today that some of them did fulfil their claim to “create the new German feature film.”

A manifesto is a programme, a declaration of intent presented in a more or less revolutionary manner. The misleadingly named “Manifesto of 121”, on the other hand, is a petition, an informal note of protest. For comparison, listen to the probably most famous manifesto in history, namely that

of the Communist Party of 1848: “It is high time,” Marx and Engels declare right at the outset, “that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself.” This is not the sound of indignation, and certainly not that of supplicants. This is how people speak out who have something to announce to the whole world, whether it wants to hear it or not. A manifesto is grandiloquent and presumptuous, provocatively self-confident and apodictic. No government would put up with anything like that, which is why none are addressed. A manifesto, in Breton’s infamous words, is “firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.”

When artists have something to say today, they usually talk about shots they haven’t even heard. Also, they talk very little about art and instead a lot about themselves, namely about artists and the social responsibility they have to bear, if not about Kulturschaffende (this pithy German word has been around ever since an “Aufruf der Kulturschaffenden”, a cultural workers’ appeal, if you like, appeared in the Nazi party’s newspaper Völkischer Beobachter on 18 August 1934, in which artists solemnly declared their relevance, or as it was called at the time: pledged allegiance to the Führer). Art ought no longer be art at all but much more than that, and quite different from the useless kind of work as which Adorno described it. The avant-garde once miserably failed in its endeavour to dissolve art into real life, partly because its works were still far too artistic in their flaunted shabbiness and therefore not up to the task of really shabby life. What remained was the intention to

deprive art of the privilege of its peculiar aesthetic. In place of the unresponsive work of art comes the committed artist who speaks all the more, at best about his work, to which he adds instructions on how it should be “read”, otherwise about the wickedness of the world, which he probably suspects his art will not make any better, and therefore he takes himself all the more seriously. He sees himself not only as an “interpreter” of his art — a shoe box, for example, requires an inscription stating that it is a politically updated depiction of Kafka’s “Castle” — but also as an artist in a particularly social understanding of his vocation, i.e. not as an unrecognised genius — those days are over — but as the, preferably choral, voice of the wretched of the earth.

One hundred years after the first Surrealist manifesto, art can report that it has finally achieved its promised abolition: it has dissolved into culture, or whatever may still be called culture apart from husbandry, and politics, which, if you believe Hannah Arendt, has less to do with truth than with power and lies anyway. Artists are in their true element today when they churn out their curatorial leaflets without any artistic installation at all, by issuing clammy explanations in which even the meanest popular prejudice is played up as an extremely endangered outsider opinion.

P.S. One of the signatories of the “Manifesto of 121” was Claude Lanzmann, who was still a journalist and not a filmmaker at the time. In 1962, he was a guest at the Algerian independence celebrations. “The whole of revolutionary Africa was gathered there,” he recalls. Ben Bella, the first president of Algeria, was very kind to him and even called him “my brother”. Just a few weeks later, the same Ben Bel-

la announced that he would send a hundred thousand men to the Middle East to “liberate” Palestine. — Lanzmann: “That

was the final straw for me. I

had

believed that you could be

in favour of Algerian independence and the existence of the state of Israel at the same time. I was wrong.”

Christoph Hesse Bohemia 2.0:

The artist as activist

“Qu’est-ce que ça peut te faire?” asks Nana (Anna Karina) again and again at the beginning of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Vivre sa vie” (1962): What’s it to you? She would have been better off asking the philosopher Brice Parain, who approaches her later in the film in a café. For “the intellectual is someone who cares about things that don’t concern him”. Sartre gratefully seized on this accusation to define the role of intellectuals in a society in which they were seemingly responsible for nothing and therefore took care of things that no one else was responsible for. They presumed to question the responsibilities of others based on their specialised knowledge and to disregard economic and political constraints “in the name of a global conception of man and society”, as Sartre’s “Plea for the Intellectuals” puts it.

The “hostile cliché of the intellectual”, which was certainly even more hostile in Germany than in France, is also described in the “Dialectic of Enlightenment” by Horkheimer and Adorno. The intellectual “appears to enjoy in thought what the others deny themselves and is spared the sweat of toil and bodily strength.” By affording themselves a luxury of social independence that they often cannot even afford materially, they end up in an awkward neighbourhood: “The banker and the intellectual, money and mind, the exponents of circulation, are the disowned wishful image of those mutilated by power, an image which power uses to perpetuate itself.” In contrast to the banker, however, who historically preceded capital and still embodies it today in his finished “fetish form” (Marx), not to mention his “systemic relevance”, the intellectual remained a phenomenon of the 20th century, at the beginning of which he first appeared as such — and at the end of which, it seems, he

gradually disappeared again, together with the social criticism personified in him; and it was he who embodied this concept which in itself already seems rather dusty. Today, the intellectual exists only as a sociological category, and whether this includes engineers, doctors or even bankers in addition to proper intellectuals is a matter for sociologists to decide, who appear to have been become bleak specialists themselves.

The disappearance of intellectuals is by no means something to be regretted, nor is there any need to glorify their miraculous and important role in retrospect. Who would wish for the return of a Günter Grass spilling his “last drop of ink”? After all, the intellectuals did not only appear on the scene as the bad conscience of the wrong society, but also, with a clear conscience, as the apologists for any mean business they thought was right. No autocrat or terrorist, as long as he was pursuing a noble goal, ever had to complain about a lack of support from intellectuals. The now almost forgotten Julien Benda accused intellectuals of treason as early as 1927 because they were concerned with political interests rather than with truth and integrity. Remarkably, though, the title of his book “La trahison des clercs” refers to clerics or scriveners. And there are clearly more of these people today than ever before. But they can no longer be accused of treason, since they reject the claim to truth from the outset, with the shrewd argument that it is really all about power.

The “clercs” of these days, whether artists or academics, recommend themselves as activists and not as intellectuals. In this, at least, they demonstrate historical intuition; in the GDR, you could even receive a medal as an “out-

standing young activist”. The invariably young activist is pretty much the opposite of the independent intellectual, of whom Adorno said that “unswerving isolation” is “the only form in which he can vouchsafe a measure of solidarity.” The social manifestation of the activist is the flock: not birds, but fish in water, as Mao already knew. However, the stronger the current that carries them, the greater their need to swim along backwards and pretend they are pedalling upstream, undaunted by death.

Incidentally, Adorno did not even know the word “activist”. In his criticism of the students who were soon protesting against him, too, he spoke of “thinking actionists” in order to remind them that, however much they might rail against a theory supposedly far removed from practice, they themselves were labelled intellectuals. This contradiction, at least, has finally been resolved. Along with the intellectual, the hostile stereotype disappeared as well. Activists may not have learnt anything useful either, but by virtue of their very name they are completely to the taste of society which gladly approves of their activities. The main thing is that they do something, they get involved, they are active and therefore somehow relevant. So everyone from the health insurance company to the employment agency can sing along.

Before the intellectuals took to the stage, the Bohemians were already playing behind the scenes: reckless gamblers and good-for-nothings par excellence, whose close affinity with the so-called lumpenproletariat was so wonderfully described by Marx as their contemporary and Benjamin as their historian. The fascination of the former, however, was surpassed by the contempt he had for these up-

starts dressed up as pariahs. He recognised them as the avant-garde of the counter-revolution. One of them was Louis Bonaparte, the future Emperor Napoleon III, who, as “a Bohemian, a princely lumpenproletarian, had the advantage over a rascally bourgeois in that he could conduct a dirty struggle.” At first glance, today’s activists have little in common with the conspiratorial secret societies of that era: what they are up to, they do unabashedly in public. Political freedoms and technical possibilities no longer offer any reason to remain hidden. But the better they know how to conduct a dirty struggle: to boycott, to denounce, to sanction. And all this in the mode of persecuting innocence. And, of course, in the guise of art & culture. The butcher plays the liverwurst, the attacker the notoriously offended person who believes he has been “silenced” because he can’t form a proper thought and certainly can’t tell a lie without believing it.

“There is hardly anyone who does not at least present themselves as an ‘artist and activist’,” Claudius Seidl recently wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: “hardly anyone who does not nevertheless claim the protected space of art for themselves.” Artist activists of the Bohemia 2.0 differ from real activists, such as the American civil rights movement of the 1960s, not least in that they only give commands from the mound of their well-groomed art, or in Adorno’s words, they are “playing conductor like children by selling tickets leading nowhere.” But they are not as harmless as their performances might suggest. They are making the most vicious resentment intellectually acceptable. Their anger is not so much directed against the injustice of the world, of which they know at most two points of

the compass — namely the West, which is actually hell, and a “global South” stylised as a place of longing — as against those who have not yet completely given up the spirit of the independent intellectual of old.

Christoph Hesse / Magnus Klaue Please do not open: Plea

for postal secrecy

The heyday of the open letter, it seems, has come to a close. It belongs to a past in which some such letters did not constitute an insult to those who received them unsolicited. This kind of letter requires not only an author who can write it, but also a public that it concerns, even though it is not directly addressed. An open letter is something other than just a wilful violation of postal secrecy, and something other than a missive: neither the Apostle Paul nor Martin Luther ever wrote an open letter. This form of communication only flourished in political circumstances brought about by the French Revolution. The open letter is genuinely bourgeois literature, and this may also explain why its glory days are over — which, incidentally, it never had in Germany.

German history does not have a “J’accuse” to offer. But this is not only because the conventions of this language lack the courtly formulas of deference that Émile Zola added to his letter to the President of the Third Republic, which appeared in the daily newspaper L’Aurore on 13 January 1898. “Veuillez agréer, monsieur le Président, l’assurance de mon profond respect.” Thus he approached the head of state with his complaint about the shameful treatment of the officer Alfred Dreyfus, who had been falsely accused and convicted of treason. The impact of this letter was so powerful that, as Hannah Arendt wrote, “at a time when the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ were still unknown, a whole nation had been nicking its brains trying to determine whether ‘secret Rome’ or ‘secret Judah’ held the reins of world politics.” And in France of all places. However great the horror may have been, the so-called Dreyfus Affair, which only Zola’s open letter turned into a matter that divided the “indivisible nation”, also proves the existence

of a political public that was irritable to such an extent, and that is to say responsive, in the first place.

The first open letter ever published in Germany was the outcome of a petit malheur, or as a friend of the author put it: an “unforgivable carelessness”, which only led to Georg Herwegh’s letter to King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia “falling into the hands of the public”. An insider in the matter had passed it on, and so the letter, which should never have been published, appeared in the Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung on 24 December 1842. “Forbidden books actually fly through the air, and what people want to read, they read despite all prohibitions,” the poet explained to the king. And he confessed quite openly: “I am a republican by necessity of my nature and perhaps already a citizen of a republic at this very moment. Without condemning myself to perpetual hypocrisy, I can no longer live in states where censorship has ceased to be a truth ...” Unexpectedly, his complaint about press censorship, which he wanted to present to “Your Majesty” in the audacious hope of a little liberal concession, was now in the press, albeit only for a short time, because the newspaper in question was promptly banned and Herwegh himself was expelled from the country, where he said he could no longer live anyway. What he told the king was unheard of, but the open letter was a mishap, opened in the wrong place and immediately closed again by the highest authority; an aberration whose political effect was limited to the fate of the author and the organ, which he himself had not even made use of.

A letter that was at least as courageous was denied the publicity that the author in this case much desired. However, as there was no longer any prospect of it being pub-

lished in a German newspaper, the poet Armin T. Wegner sent his letter directly to Adolf Hitler’s Chancellery in Munich, where it arrived on 23 April 1933. “Herr Reichskanzler! It is not about the fate of the Jews alone — it is about the fate of Germany!” he warned. In 1933, nobody could have imagined what would happen to the Jews. “The Jews have survived other dangers,” Wegner assured, “but the dishonour that Germany will suffer as a result will not be forgotten for a long time!” By protecting those he persecuted, Hitler would also be upholding the “dignity of the German people,” but such magnanimous patriotism was not his cup of tea. Wegner was arrested a few months later, and on his release from the concentration camp at the end of the year he went into exile. He was only able to realise his original plan of publishing the letter in Germany after the capitulation of the Third Reich. Meanwhile, the once intended warning had become a memorial, the testimony of political resistance was now merely a historical document.

The German scholar Reinhard Nickisch reports on these two cases from German literary history in an essay published thirty years ago with the beautiful title “Writers on the wrong track”. The question mark he added can now be safely omitted. Even talking about writers sounds presumptuous when we are only talking about signatories. These days — since October last year, that is — open letters are mainly written by people who express the little they have to say all the more frequently in a way that could only harm even a just cause. What happened to Herwegh and Wegner was tragic. What the letters circulating today bring about is not even funny — but kind of ridiculous, indeed, since the complaint of those speaking up is not that they are not be-

ing heard, but that they are not allowed to raise their voices. We, who speak the most at every available opportunity, are condemned to silence. And far and wide there is not a king or chancellor or even a policeman who would at least pay enough attention to their ostentatiously loud silence for them to complain about it in their next letter. They have no ban to fear, but too much competition only; after all, not even a newspaper editorial office needs to be convinced of the urgency of their concerns. Fortunately, most of these letters disappear as quickly as they appear.

One of the last open letters reflecting the crucial contradiction between publicity and privacy, subjective expression and public communication with regard to aesthetic form, was probably Theodor W. Adorno’s response to a polemic launched by Rolf Hochhuth, which appeared under the title “The Redemption of Man” in a commemorative publication for Georg Lukács’s 80th birthday in 1965. In his article, Hochhuth had taken Adorno’s much-quoted aphorism from “Minima Moralia” that “With many people, it is already an exercise in shamelessness when they say I”, as an opportunity to accuse Adorno of snobbish inhumanity and contempt for the masses. Adorno responded with an essay published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 16 June 1967 under the title “An Open Letter to Rolf Hochhuth”, which was later reprinted unchanged in the fourth volume of his “Notes on Literature”. The memorial time resonating in this open letter thus spanned more than 15 years — the “Minima Moralia” were published in 1951 and included texts written in American exile — and the time that elapsed between Adorno’s original dictum, Hochhuth’s response and Adorno’s reply is absolutely incomparable to the excite-

ment in which events, statements and responses follow one another in the 21st century. Right at the beginning, Adorno expressly stated that Hochhuth is “continuing indirectly the debate of many years ago between Lukács and myself.” That was a controversy about the concept of literary realism and its formal articulations. While Hochhuth, in his polemic against Adorno, basically bolstered up his own concept of documentary theatre and its aesthetic realism, Adorno correctly understood that Hochhuth was really going for the idea of a Zeitkern (core of time) of any realistic aesthetics. Just as Beckett’s plays, according to Adorno’s remarks in “Trying to Understand Endgame”, in their absurd, hermetic moments achieve an anti-realist realism that is mindful of the caesura of Auschwitz, the ahistorical realism of documentary theatre, for Adorno, objectively made itself an accomplice to the denial of that historical experience. “The absurdity of reality,” Adorno concludes in his open letter to Hochhuth, “forces us to a form that shatters the realistic façade.” In view of the impenetrability of the façade of social reality, the pseudo-realism of documentary theatre feigns an apparent vividness to its audience: “Personalization is ubiquitous, its aim being to ascribe anonymous linkages that can no longer be grasped by those who are not adept with theory … to living human beings, thus preserving a measure of spontaneous experience.”

According to Adorno, the advocate of the truly universal — and thus of the people who are by no means identical to the masses they form — is not the one who disparages snobbery, aestheticism and aesthetic specialisation, as Hochhuth presented himself in his polemic against Adorno’s supposedly elitist inhumanity, but rather the individ-

ual whom Hochhuth denounced as a snob: “Do you really not hear how much the abuse of the snob who thinks himself better provides encouragement to the kind of Volksgemeinschaft in every country that would like to attack the deviant — who presumably still corresponds most closely to your idea of the individual … [that] expresses directly what social ideology conceals and excuses?” The voice most likely to express the universal that is marginalised and excluded from social reality, is therefore necessarily inaccessible. It defies instant communication and is not heard by those to whom it is addressed, or only momentarily. This historically necessary contradiction between the public and the individual, the universal and the particular, made the open letter come into bloom as a genre in its own right in the 19th century, and it is neither coincidence nor an act of caprice that Adorno reverted to an open letter; it rather testifies to his awareness of aesthetic form that he chose exactly this form to make clear what separates him from Hochhuth. Here, perhaps for the last time, the aesthetic form is appropriate to its subject, from which it cannot be detached. The subsequent history of the open letter since the late 20th century merely attests to the poor elimination of the contradiction between public and private that previously characterised its genre.

What today’s “digital public sphere” is all about, a sphere in which this poor elimination can be witnessed most palpably, will perhaps only be recognised in a kind of historical rear-view mirror in fifty years’ time. At all events, the petitions and declarations that are passed off as such, and which now haunt the virtual world in large numbers, have nothing in common with the open letters of the past two

centuries. They no longer even have an author, or at best authors, but above all signatories, and their mere form no longer recognises the contradiction that exists between the individual speaking out and the many individuals to whom he is addressing himself. But it was this contradiction from which the genre of the open letter once gained its vitality. In contrast, the postmodern pastoral letter, written and signed by the flock itself, serves more than any other purpose, and often exclusively, to provide feedback. It is supposed to be followed by others: a kind of group therapy with a snowball effect. Instead of a writer, it’s the collective ideological superstructure speaking out loud: Enough with ...! Yes, with what actually? Nobody expects a letter to achieve its stated aim; even those who write or sign it are not that naive. But the letters are always good for propagandistic self-intoxication, however embarrassing each single one may be. The lie takes no offence at bad style. It only needs to be said often enough with a comfort draped as dismay, then it can no longer be dismissed.

The shorter the range of their words, the higher and further the target they overshoot. Most people are already unfamiliar with their immediate surroundings, how much less so with the South Sandwich Islands. But where otherwise a person’s own lack of knowledge might impose a certain restraint, notoriously creative people prefer to speak out where they can come up with intellectual transfers, which they propund with utter conviction, a conviction, though, that has long since worn off. “Here I stand, I can do no other.” And that’s probably even true: they can do no other.

Translated by Christoph Hesse

Joseph Vogl Populism*

The complex media operations of opinion brokers are designed to create phobias of mediation. The political character of such technical-social infrastructures can be recognised in four aspects: firstly, in the phantasm of direct access to the addresses of political power, which thus manifests itself in exclusive private relationships and demands participation through acclamation – everyone is addressed and heard at the same time; secondly, in an informalisation of the transfer and exercise of political power, which is realised in the truncation of mediating bodies and in particular lends the formal character of representative institutions the stigma of being false or falsified, be it elections or parliaments, ‘elites’ or the press; thirdly, through the activation of unspecific social ensembles and entities such as communities, humantity, people, us, coming together or meaningful groups, which do not merge into any representative form and at best make themselves felt through a conspicuous eventfulness in their collective movements and impulses. This is a “metapolitical fiction” (Hans Kelsen1) of indefinite and diffuse community forces, which can be activated and concentrated by different collective identities; through the procedures of algorithmic tribalisation, the variants of a supposedly “authentic will of the people” or various “political peoples [Völkchen]”2 also find their address and their place. Fourthly and finally, the associated modes of reaction and rapid communication have a ballistic character, so to speak; they are about targeting, direction finding, addressing and hitting – in other words, about the perfection of a communicative strike skill that, with the use of news bullets or hashtag formations, probably has a model in the procedures of military enemy recognition: “Boom. I press

it, and within two seconds, we have breaking news.”3 Populism in this structural sense could therefore be understood as a structure of communication strategies that provide the basis for the formation of particular collectives, link the claim to authentic communication with the hope of executive power, favour authoritarian forms of empowerment and are logistically oriented towards the identification of clearly profiled target objects. Platforms and social media promise nothing less than an immediatisation of political participation and action.

Joseph Vogl, Kapital und Ressentiment. Eine kurze Theorie der Gegenwart, München: Verlag C.H. Beck, 2023, pp. 175-176.

1 Quoted from Müller, Jan-Werner: What is populism? An essay, Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2016, p. 58.

2 Ibid, pp. 56-57.

3 According to the remark of the last US president, quoted in: Hubert Wetzel, Mobilisierung per App, in: Süddeutsche Zeitung, 28.05.2020, p. 7 – Calls for the installation of frictions, delays and interruptions in network communication therefore seem extremely plausible; see Forum on Information & Democracy, Report on Infodemics, November 2020 (https://informationdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/ForumID_Report-on-infodemics_101120.pdf), pp. 76-77.

International German North RhineWestphalia

Children’s Youth Music videos

International German RhineWestphalia Children’s and Youth Film videos

Theme SP

Until 1977, the so-called Sports Film Festival took place every two years in Oberhausen – in 1968, 1970, 1973, 1975 and 1977. The »International Film and Television Festival« showed and awarded prizes to international sports films of all kinds. The event was independent, but closely linked to the Short Film Festival. The Sportfilmtage programmes presented films that became legendary and others largely forgotten today by Jacques Doillon, Werner Herzog, Elem Klimov, Marcel Łoziński and Michael Pfleghaar. Numerous award winners and other film copies have been collected in the Festival Archive. Now, for the first time, Oberhausen is presenting a selection of films in five programmes, curated by Cologne-based media scholar, publicist and director Dietrich Leder. A total of around 25 films will be shown in the cinema, with selected works screened in advance on the Channel. The programme is complemented by a selection of educational films with which the »Media Institute of the Federal States of Germany« FWU (Institute for Film and Image in Science and Education), founded in 1950, introduced sport and physical education into educational work. Under the title »Physical Education«, Tobias Hering and Peter Hoffmann present a selection of films from the 1930s to the 1950s, inviting a comparative look at images of sport and the body during and after the Nazi era. »Sport in the Ruhr Region in Film Documents« takes us even further back into the past: Paul Hofmann is showing works from the holdings of the Kinemathek in the Ruhr region, the oldest of which date back to 1925.

Davorin Mox Mäkelä

Abraham Ravett

Abraham Ravett John Torres Davorin Marc Mäkelä

Conference Longing for freedom from contradiction. Culture and the public sphere 1 1 May

In recent years, confrontations with sexism, racism and other forms of misanthropy have led to a discussion and critical examination of the programmes and attitudes of cultural institutions. The parliamentary successes of the AfD in particular have also led to demands being placed on cultural institutions to engage in political debates. In the meantime, however, these demands seem to have fallen into a trap. The term »cancel culture«, originally introduced by right-wing actors, is being used more and more frequently. Where events are postponed or cancelled due to political considerations, accusations of censorship lurk. Calls for boycotts and protests arise against collaboration with people or institutions because of their positioning. This causes uncertainty for everyone involved. Where collective organisation and scandalisation are increasingly used to exert pressure on individuals and institutions, the idea of criticism threatens to turn into conformism. Based on a campaign against the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, supporters, opponents and observers of this and similar campaigns discuss the question: Does the greatest danger for critical discussions about how to deal with political issues within the cultural sector come from the cultural sector itself?

Podiums/Workshop Why festivals?

Culture and the public 2

2–5 May

Film festivals are a universalist project that was associated with the hope of overcoming social particularisation and political division through cultural understanding and artistic progress - through something that concerns everyone. This project has clearly fallen into crisis. With the transformation of film culture and cinema in the last two decades due to the establishment of the internet as a mass medium and the digitalisation and economisation of all areas of life, but also due to the intensification of social distribution struggles, film festivals are simultaneously confronted with numerous new tasks and challenges. The cinema as a venue for film festivals and public discourse has been pushed to the sidelines of society. Identity politics and culturalisation, the translation of political and economic conflicts into standards of lifestyle and world view in the field of culture, are social challenges that have recently affected film festivals in particular in terms of their self-image and mission. At the same time, the economic conditions for film festivals are deteriorating rapidly in the wake of the great pandemic and armed conflicts. Under these changing conditions, the question arises as to what remains of the original self-image of film festivals and whether and how film festivals can continue to fulfil their mission.

Seminar Leon Kahane

Artist and author. Born in Berlin in 1985, he first trained as a photographer and then studied fine art at the Berlin University of the Arts. Central points of reference in his video works, photographs and installations are themes such as migration and identity and the examination of majorities and minorities in a globalised society. He is often interested in the cultural and artistic representation of political developments in the recent past. Time and again, he draws attention to events and institutions in which the contradictions inherent in history are expressed. They reflect historical, political and economic, but also biographical aspects, which he takes up and processes in his works. Above all, the socio-cultural localisation of current political discourses and dynamics is of central importance to his artistic approach, which represents a form of cultural criticism. Most recently, his works were on display at the Kunsthalle Wien and at the 6th Moscow Biennale. In 2015 he won the Future of Europe Art Prize and in 2016 the ars viva Prize. His work is represented by Galerie Nagel Draxler.

Expanded

Carolin

Overlooked Films NRW Lab

Distributors

Wolfgang

Carolin Schmitz NRW Person: re-selected

Films Wolfgang J. Ruf Distributors

Timetable

Accreditation until 25 April

Channel

The Kurzfilmtage Channel sees itself as an extension of the festival into the digital space. The structural change of the festival, which was initiated in 2020 with the pandemic-related shift of the festival to the Internet, continues with the year-round digital offering of the Kurzfilmtage Channel. However, the Channel is not just an addition, but also encompasses new ways of working at the festival. Dialogue offerings and cinematic forms meet in the digital space. The Channel is open in form, open to new formats and technical solutions. It contains films and conversations, bits & pieces – what comes to mind, current topics on new digital formats, the politicisation of culture, sport, etc.

This Is Short

The streaming portal This Is Short, curated by six European film festivals, is active throughout the year. Where possible, films are available for streaming without regional restrictions and in the original version with English subtitles (plus subtitles in other languages if available). After a free trial period of two weeks, a monthly subscription costs 4.99 euros and an annual subscription only 49.99 euros. This Is Short is a project of the European Short Film Network (ESFN). The network currently has six members: Vienna Shorts (AT), International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (DE), Go Short (NL), Short Waves (PL), IndieLisboa (PT) and the Uppsala Kortfilmfestival (SE). The portal is a non-profit project to promote European short films.

Main supporter

Project supporters and sponsors

Thanks to: Christoph Hesse, Magnus Klaue, Stella Leder, Henry W. Pickford, Michael Schwarz and Verlag

C.H. Beck (Munich), Columbia University Press (New York), Suhrkamp Verlag (Berlin)

Editor and responsible according to the press law: Lars Henrik Gass, Oberhausen

Design and typesetting: Daniel Behrens/Public, Hamburg

Printing and binding: Brochmann, Essen

International Short Film Festival

Oberhausen gGmbH

Grillostr. 34

46045 Oberhausen Germany

T +49 (0)208 825-2652

info@kurzfilmtage.de

www.kurzfilmtage.de

March 2024

If there is a rational moment in this riot fuelled by ressentiment, it is that it points to the irrationality of the whole. Alexandra Schauer, Man without a World. Eine Soziologie spätmoderner Vergesellschaftung, Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2023, p. 469.

Internationale Kurzfilmtage

Oberhausen gGmbH

Grillostr. 34

46045 Oberhausen Germany